Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  The house didn’t look ol’ now. In fact, the house and everything around it looked sparklingly brand-new and full of possibilities to Benji.

  He’d driven himself, CR, and Zeeko home from the quarry in CR’s truck. (The three of them lived on the same street; Ellie, who lived across town, drove home by herself.) The drive back had been silent. After the quarry, there wasn’t much to say.

  Walking up the flagstone path to his porch, Benji was a little surprised to see that Papaw’s bedroom light upstairs was turned off. Benji was out well past his (ludicrous) eleven p.m. curfew. He’d expected Papaw to be waiting up, eager to hand out a few choice words.

  Apparently, he thought, with a private joy buzzing in his head as he unlocked the door, this is my lucky night.

  There was nothing in the foyer but the dark and the familiar Papaw-smells of shoe polish and chewing tobacco. Benji noticed a hot-pink line of light glowing under the door to Papaw’s den down the hall. Voices, whispering musical voices, came from inside. Jukebox, he thought.

  He quietly kicked off his shoes, then started down the hallway, one hand on the wall to steady himself. He passed the coatrack, the gun cabinet, and a picture of his dad in an army uniform, sitting in front of an American flag. Then he eased open the door and peeked inside the den.

  Papaw sat in his recliner, his head tilted to one side. The light and the music radiated from his old jukebox in the corner; air bubbles floated upward through the water in the jukebox’s neon piping, throwing quavers of light around the room. People always said Benji looked like Papaw, even though there really wasn’t any resemblance at all. More than anything, Papaw looked like a seventy-something version of Richard Nixon, to the extent that Benji had once seen pictures of the former president in his first-grade history book and asked his teacher why nobody had told him his grandpa had been the leader of the free world. Papaw looked a little younger than his years now, in the jukebox glow.

  Benji didn’t recognize the song that was playing, but the bit he heard before the record ended was pretty good (if admittedly generic). “Put us three young men together, hey, and what are our jobs?” sang a guy’s voice. “To move your soul with rock ’n’ roll! We’re the Atomic Bobs!”

  Benji thought about waking Papaw, who sometimes complained about a bad back whenever he fell asleep in his chair. But Papaw seemed okay there, his breathing steady and deep. Benji was intimately familiar with the sounds of Papaw’s sleeping breaths, which had whispered through the vents between their bedrooms for as long as he could remember. Those breaths were calming in a way an awakened Papaw never was. Sometimes they’d carry Benji, tidelike, to sleep.

  Benji noticed a light on in the kitchen, farther down the hall. Papaw had left a handwritten note on their small, worn kitchen table. He did that a lot. Notes were pretty much their major form of communication. Text messages, Benji thought, from the pre-smartphone century.

  The note read,

  BENJAMIN—

  WE’LL TALK A LOT TMRW. GET SOME SLEEP.

  —SHERIFF R. LIGHTMAN (PAPAW)

  But Benji didn’t think he was going to get much sleep at all.

  Quoth the Internet Oracle (Wikipedia):

  A flying saucer is a type of supposed flying craft with a saucer-shaped body. The term was coined in 1947, shortly after the first reported sighting. Saucer sightings were once very common, to such an extent that “flying saucer” was a synonym for UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) through the early 1960s . . .

  But after the early 1960s, Benji read on, saucer sightings inexplicably ended. UFOs were still reported, but the new sightings were literally and figuratively edgier and darker: jet-black, triangular crafts that inspired feelings of dread, which somehow made him doubt that they were real.

  ’Cause I didn’t feel that way when I saw the saucer. Why didn’t I, though? He didn’t know. He didn’t even quite understand the overpowering impulse to keep it, nor what he wanted to do with it. Maybe, if he would just learn more about saucers . . .

  On his secondhand Dell laptop, he went to YouTube next, and found these old black-and-white newsreels about saucers. Somebody had remixed them with old doo-wop songs about aliens. Benji had always endured doo-wop (an early variety of rock ’n’ roll where people’s voices not only sang the melody but also sometimes added nonsense words like “shoop-shee-doo-wop” that mimicked instrument sounds), since it was one of the only kinds of music Papaw ever listened to. But Benji found himself really sort of liking it now. The melodies were simple, but damn, were they catchy. Also, there wasn’t any Auto-Tune, so the singers sounded like humans instead of cyborgs.

  And the era the songs came from just seemed so much friendlier and simple. The lyrics had this wonderstruck feeling, too, like I AM IN LOVE AND THIS IS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENT IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY. They didn’t try to overexplain their feelings, and that was good, because that was how love actually was: You realize you love someone, and you only understand why later on.

  Heart first, brain second.

  It was kind of like magic that way. Benji understood why people wanted to know how tricks were done, but he knew from experience that when you try to dissect something amazing, you never find what you’re looking for.

  Still eager for more information, he clicked onward.

  Which led to clips of 1950s sci-fi movies. In the movies, the cardboard saucers wobbled on fishing lines, police were always oblivious and inept (Benji did not mind this at all), and teenagers were the Only Ones Who Can Save Civilization as We Know It. He spent more than an hour watching the clips. They weren’t precisely educational programming, but he liked how all the younger characters seemed supremely sure of themselves, how they were so certain that they were the ones destined to rescue the world. It reminded Benji of this period in elementary school when he’d been obsessed with self-improvement experiments: trying to teach himself piano or speed-reading or baseball grips or computer chess, all in the vague (and vaguely embarrassing) hope that he’d one day discover he was a prodigy at something. There was a central flaw to the self-improvement projects, though: He never felt like he had a “self” to be improved. He suspected sometimes that he’d been out sick the day everyone received their manual for how to be a person.

  He thought again about the moment he’d pulled the trigger. Why had he done it?

  Because I felt like I was meant to, said something warm opening in his chest.

  And maybe he was. As a little kid, he had always assumed something miraculous would happen to him. He’d get superpowers, maybe, or a letter from Hogwarts, or he’d spend summer break getting really buff and come in on the first day of school wearing only swimming trunks, and maybe he’d flex a couple of times in front of the class and borrow the teacher’s hairbrush to comb his mustache. Something subtle like that.

  His assumption of magic was the reason he’d walked into the House all those years ago. In his mind, he built the summer between elementary school and middle school into an enchanted slice of time. If he could just do something amazing, something cool, he could make the memory of his former unamazing, uncool self vanish. When Shaun Spinney told him that if he spent two minutes in the House, Benji could join Spinney’s middle school frat (Good Lord, Benji thought, how did I even believe that existed?), he jumped at the chance. And something had happened in the House that had changed his and his friends’ lives, of course. It just hadn’t been what he’d planned, and it was something he’d spent a long time trying to forget.

  Whatever was going to happen now with the saucer, Benji felt (or at least hoped) he had some central role to play. Things like magic and Ellie gave him joy, but he’d never really known what his purpose in life was supposed to be.

  So, saucers aside, that was why the old movies were awesome: Everyone had a role and a quest, and you knew that if they just lived up to each moment, things would turn out basically okay. In more ways than one, everything was black and white.

  5

  Two loud knocks on his
door awoke Benji. He startled, and blinked gummily. His room was still dark.

  “Benjamin, it’s that time,” Papaw said softly, and opened the door. Light from the hallway crashed in.

  Benji blocked the light with a hand and squinted. The red blinking display of his alarm clock read 4:49. “Time for what, sir?”

  Even in his semiblindness, Benji sensed his grandfather’s reaction: It was like the literal air in the room sharpened, turning brittle on the edges. Papaw grew quiet, but Benji was fluent in Papaw’s silences: Somehow, Benji had just disappointed him. This was not a rare phenomenon, but Benji normally at least knew what he’d done.

  So he was surprised when Papaw spoke with a smile pasted onto his soft voice. “Stay up too late, did’ja? Rockin’ around the clock, weren’t ya?” In fact, Benji did feel like he’d been asleep for seven entire seconds. He’d wrenched himself from the internet around three thirty, then lain in bed and dreamed. Mostly with his eyes open.

  “Hey, let’s get our rears in gears, Benjamin.” Papaw walked to the bed, already wearing his work shoes, polished bright and sharp as gavels on the floorboards. His hand came out, hovered a moment, and then awkwardly patted Benji’s foot through the quilt. “That carnival ain’t gonna open its own self.”

  The Homecoming Week Carnival. Of course.

  After Papaw left, Benji toppled back onto his pillow, his pulse slamming behind his eyes so his ceiling’s glow-stars winked like the sky’s real ones. The Homecoming Week Carnival! Spared from Papaw’s wrath by the Lightmans’ one and only tradition! Huzzah, random sentimentality!

  Benji whispered the simple truth: “Wow, do I not want to go, though.”

  Traditions are gravity, Papaw liked to say. They kept you connected to something bigger than yourself. So making an excuse to avoid going to the carnival would wipe away Papaw’s good spirits. Just as important, it would activate the astounding mental machinery that allowed Benji’s sheriff grandfather to apparently X-ray his brain. Which was not number one on the list of things you want when you’re deciding what to do with a downed spaceship.

  Maybe Ellie and CR and Zeeko can come by the carnival. The thought adrenalized him. He got up and thumbed a quick group text:

  Morning! Going to set up the carnival.

  Not much else going on in my life.

  Pretty bored, TBH.

  U?

  Then a smiley emoji, lifting its sunglasses to wink.

  After he pressed Send and got dressed (wearing an older, beat-up winter coat, because these carnival mornings were often messy), he felt like someone had synthesized the buzz of every Christmas morning ever and mainlined it into his brain cells. He still had no clue what to do about the saucer. But in a way, that was part of the joy. The future was an utter enigma, and for the first time Benji could remember, the unfathomableness didn’t frighten him.

  Papaw stood at the front door buttoning his navy policeman overcoat. “’S’actually not too cold this mornin’,” he said, just above a whisper. Always soft-voiced on these mornings. “Why they scheduled homecoming so late this year, I’ll never understand. Typical government screw-u—” He stopped short of his rant, though. And then promptly went into another: “Why’re you wearin’ that coat, Benjamin? You make it look like we can’t afford—” Stopped again. As if in apology, he said, “How about breakfast on the go, bud?” and handed Benji a brown bag turning translucent from the greasy sandwiches inside. Benji caught the smell of Robert Lightman’s Breakfast Special (Papaw’s accent made it “Brake-fist Spay-shul”), made only once a year: a jumble of eggs and green peppers and bacon. Benji was surprised to feel a thin dart of nostalgia pierce his chest.

  “Sounds good, sir,” he replied.

  “And tastes even better.” Papaw winked.

  He opened the door and stepped into the night-colored morning.

  There had been a time when Benji loved going to the fairgrounds with Papaw, helping the carnival workers fit their attractions into assigned places, like pieces of a wonderful puzzle. That era had come to a close the year Benji had discovered (with a combination of embarrassment and pride) the first sprigs of dark hair in his armpits. Truth be told, he had stopped loving these mornings when he realized he did not love them so much as the idea of them, the way the imagining and dreaming of them made him feel.

  They felt like church.

  The gentle quality of predawn sound and light helped form that sense of sacred space, though that wasn’t the most important element. Silence was common in the Lightman household, after all. But the particular silence on these mornings had once seemed to take on the shape of a door, a door that was shut and locked between Benji and his grandpa every other day of the year. Keep your eyes open, wide open, Benji, and Papaw will share something precious with you. And so Benji would stay still and expectant, feeling something that was precisely like pain but wasn’t pain expand against his ribs. The un-pain, Benji supposed, was a feeling of connection to Papaw, which was the closest he and Papaw could ever come to simply loving each other. It was a feeling that a candle was about to be lit, and if Benji just listened and looked close enough, he would be able to truly see Papaw, to know Papaw, to not have the feeling that he slightly misunderstood everything Sheriff Robert Lightman was trying to say.

  It didn’t happen this year? Benji would think, because all he ever experienced was the ever-present feeling of not knowing how to please Papaw, or even if Papaw wanted him to try. That’s . . . well, that’s okay. Just keep that feeling inside you, Benji, like fireflies in a jar. Maybe next year will be the year.

  He stopped believing that, of course. He grew up.

  And so here was the insanity of it all:

  Even now, something about walking with Papaw in this certain slant of predawn light (strong enough to see their shadows, black shapes moving over the lawn kissed silver by the snow) hooked Benji momentarily back into the inescapable gravity of nostalgia. He closed his eyes, exhaling as he opened the door to Papaw’s police cruiser, breathing out his un-pain.

  As the engine growled to life, old rock ’n’ roll blared over the car speakers. Papaw grimaced and turned off the broadcast.

  “I kinda like the quiet of a mornin’. Makes things prettier, ain’t that so?” It wasn’t a request for an answer (Papaw’s questions never were); it was a pause to let you nod in agreement. “I think we’re gonna have a good day, Benjamin. As we always do.” Papaw, who loved to say he found liars for a living, was the tradition’s great pretender.

  The county fairgrounds lay on a few acres of hillside just past the east end of Bedford Falls. To get there, you took these lunar county roads and drove through infinite miles of untended cornfields and granite refineries disintegrating where they stood. Once upon a time, they’d both been the lifeblood and treasure of Bedford Falls, but that was before (according to Papaw) globalization and NAFTA and a historic streak of incompetent presidencies ground their bootheels on the little places of the world. At some point, Papaw would say, people in this country decided they’d rather pay less for their goodies than earn a wage decent enough to buy ’em. Mary and Joseph above! Going through the fields was usually depressing as all hell, like a trip in a semifunctional time machine that would let you glimpse—but not reenter—A Time Many Years Ago When (Trust Us on This, Young People) Everything Was Better.

  Now, Benji caught his reflection in the window smiling as the cornfields flowed by. He was looking at the sky instead.

  By the time Papaw parked the cruiser in the gravel lot in front of the fairgrounds, a dozen big-rig trucks sat idling at the front gate. Their payload was a portable joyland: all the disassembled segments of roller coasters and games and carousels. Daytime would come and make them look cheap, but they were gorgeous in the fine rose of dawn.

  As Benji and Papaw got out of the cruiser, a man who resembled a mustachioed oval hopped out of the lead big rig. “Young fella, how are you this blessed mornin’?” Papaw smiled, extending his hand. “As for me, I’m better than I
deserve. Sheriff Robert Lightman; glad to meet’cha.” His voice was warm, like they were old friends (in fact, they’d never met; the carnival staff was a rotating cast of characters).

  Papaw actually waited for the guy to answer.

  The man ignored the offered handshake. “Tell the truth, we’d be a lot better if you weren’t half an hour late,” he said. Benji winced from his hot breath. The man held up a “hold on a second” finger, turned his head away, and spat a loogie in the gravel. Classy, Benji thought.

  “Am I that late?” Papaw replied, sounding slightly horrified. “I’m sure sorry for that. Where abouts y’all drive in from?”

  Of course, Papaw had never been late to anything, and was not late now. (Either way, it wouldn’t really matter: The carnival wouldn’t actually open until the homecoming game later that week.) The mistake belonged to Mr. Mustache, who smelled like he gargled beer. Mr. Mustache wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any of Papaw’s arctic stares or silences, though, because he wasn’t talking with “Papaw”: He was meeting Sheriff Robert Lightman, Bedford Falls’s folksy, charming, “hey hey your begonias sure look fine” lawman. Seeing other people connect with this version of Papaw had always made Benji feel jealous, and weirdly inadequate. There was still the slightest sting of that now. But mostly, after last night, nothing could have bothered him less.

  His attention snapped back when Papaw clapped Mr. Mustache on the shoulder and said, “Well, of all the places y’all take yer wonderful carnival, I’m sure you’ll find Bedford Falls the friendliest. Now, let’s get this gate open for ya.” The man grunted and got back into his truck.