by Brian Hodge
He lingered in the rocket ship, at the doorway after checking his clothes and looked out, hoping she’d still come so he wouldn’t have to search for her. He had slept poorly the night before, and while it was dark he had released the hatch and sat with his feet dangling out of the opening. Just sat there watching the sunrise, as bright as red-orange trumpet flowers opening in the morning air.
The air smelled rich with oxygen and the trees around him were bright green and the mountains in the distance shimmered a blue-violet capped with white snow. He thought going to the mountains might be nice. It was cold up in the mountains and the air might be thin, still he might be able to breathe better, think better. The beauty might be enough to soothe his itch.
But he decided he had a better chance of coming home if he went into town, and even that was not smart.
He went anyway. He went back to the store where he first saw her.
Sally hid behind a stack of hardware when she heard him enter the store.
He looked about, didn’t see her. It was a large store. She knew he was looking for her. The store, an old Wal-Mart, had mostly been looted, but there were still tools lying about, and any one of them might make a good weapon.
He didn’t pick one up. Maybe he didn’t want to look aggressive. Still she couldn’t be sure it was safe to be his friend. Could humans be friends now? Was she human? Could anyone be trusted after the Revolution? She crept backwards, trying to reach a back room.
“I’m just lonely,” he said out loud and that surprised her. “I’ve seen you in your underwear, and you’ve seen me in less than that. We kind of know each other.” He laughed. “We should at least be friends.”
And then she stood, at the back, just behind a door. But the door had not pulled back far enough. It had swollen and would only go so far, and he could see her right elbow poking out.
“Look. I don’t have a weapon. I know where you are. I don’t want to hurt you. Wouldn’t you like someone to talk to some more, Sally?”
He stood still, waiting.
She did not move.
He said, “I have more fresh food. I could share it. I have some cocoa powder, too. I have a nice safe place to stay in the Rockets. I don’t want to hurt you.”
The elbow moved.
An arm appeared. Sally waved. “Hi, Jim.”
“Hi,” he said.
They embraced. She shivered in his heat.
He took her not to the Rockets, but to the ridge. He wanted her to see the stone faces staring up into the stars that night they finally satisfied their hunger.
The faces watched them make a fire. They ate and they mated like the animals in the jungle. He felt almost safe in her arms. Then he became frightened. Towards the chill of dawn he slipped from her sleeping form, gently disengaging her arms from his waist and pulling his blue blankie over her to keep her warm. Little One took his place. Sally moaned in her dreams but didn’t awaken. He crept to the Rocket where he hid things, where he felt truly safe. He fell asleep, curled around his ratty backpack, The Jungle Book on his bare chest.
Morning came. Jim rubbed his eyes as he heard something rustling. The hatch he had not been able to secure had betrayed him. She had found a way inside.
Sally stood over him with her Glock 19.
“I should kill you now, but I won’t.”
Jim tried to snatch the gun. She drew back. Little One growled.
“Go away!” Jim said.
“I intend to do just that.”
“Go!” he said.
“Well, I am. But do you want to go with me?” Her large eyes blinked away tears.
Jim shook his head, confused. “This is my Rocket. You leave, now!”
“Jim, please—don’t you understand? I’m taking this spaceship. I know how to activate it and I’m going home. The second I saw it, I remembered everything I’m supposed to do. Maybe my mother told me or something or somebody else. All I know is I’ve got to get out of here, now! I’m leaving this awful place. It’s programmed to take us home.”
“Us? Home?”
“We don’t belong here, you know. We never did. We just got stuck here, that’s what Mother said before she died.”
“No.”
“Yes. Now you must decide. You can either get out of this Rocket or I’ll kill you and throw you out and let what’s left of the damn humans eat you for dinner.”
Jim pulled out his pocket knife.
Sally pointed her gun.
Little One whimpered behind her.
Sally put one hand on a dull panel that burst into violet and orange hues that pulsated and hummed. “L21—00-systems go,” she whispered.
The Rocket thrummed louder, a high-pitched keening. The long-dead Rocket had come to life, a silver bullet primed to erupt into the heavens.
“You’ve got to get out if you’re staying. You’ve got to decide. You’re either in or you’re out.”
Jim got to his knees and dropped his knife. He couldn’t hurt her. “But this is my home. It’s not yours.”
“Why can’t it be mine, too? Why can’t we just share it?”
“You’re stealing my safe place, my home—” Jim tried to knock the gun out of her hand and she hit him. He grabbed her wrist.
“How dare you?” she said. “Who are you?”
They struggled for possession of the gun.
She kicked him where it hurt the most. He let go, groaning. He had kissed her. He had—loved her? Love. What did that word mean? Hell, what if she wasn’t even human? Was she a lost wanderer? A gypsy? An alien monster?
“I’m sorry. Oh, Jim, did I hurt you?” The gun slid down to the smooth reflective surface and they saw their own scared faces. She kicked the gun and the knife out of the hatch. Their reflections shimmered.
“Yes, you did—but I hurt you first, didn’t I?” Then he understood. If Sally was a lost wanderer, maybe he was too.
“I don’t want to be alone. I just want to go home.”
The hatch slid into place. The strangers stared at each other while the dog licked Jim’s hand.
“But where is home? Where are we going?”
Sally didn’t know.
He didn’t either.
Maybe it was better that way.
At least they could be alone together.
And as far as home went, they’d figure that one out when they got there.
Sally reached for Jim’s hand, the one free of dog slobber. A half-smile touched her lips. Jim sighed as his fingers curled around hers. Maybe they were already there.
Home.
The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance
Looking back on it, I wouldn’t have thought something as strange as all this, full of the real coincidence of life, would have begun with a bad circus, but that’s how it started, at least for me.
My luck had gone from bad to worse, then over the lip of worse, and into whatever lower level it can descend into. My job at the aluminum chair plant had played out and no rich relatives had died and left me any money. Fact was, I don’t think the Cooks, least any that are kin to me, have any money, outside of a few quarters to put in a jukebox come Saturday night, maybe a few bucks to waste on something like pretzels and beer.
Me, I didn’t even have money for beer or jukeboxes. I was collecting a little money on unemployment, and I was out beating the bushes for a job, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of work in Mud Creek. I couldn’t even get on at the feed store carrying out bags of fertilizer and seed. All the sixteen-year-olds had that job.
It looked like I was going to have to move out of Mud Creek to find work, and though the idea of that didn’t hurt my feelings any, there was Jasmine, my teenage daughter, and she still had a year of high school to finish before she went off to Nacogdoches to start her degree in anthropology at Stephen F. Austin State University, and I planned to follow her over there and find a place of my own where we could be near, and improve our relationship, which overall was all right to
begin with. I just wanted more time with her.
Right then Jasmine lived with her mother, and her mother doesn’t care a damn for me. She wanted to marry a guy that was going to be a high roller, and believe me, I wanted to be a high roller, but what she got was a guy who each time at the mark throws craps. No matter what I do, it turns to shit. Last break I felt I’d had in life was when I was ten and fell down and cracked my ankle. Well, maybe there was one good break after all. One that wasn’t a bone. Jasmine. She’s smart and pretty and ambitious and the love of my life.
But my marital problems and life’s woes are not what this is about. I was saying about the circus.
It was mid-June, and I’d tried a couple places, looking for work, and hadn’t gotten any, and I’d gone over to the employment office to talk to the people there and embarrass myself about not finding any work yet. They told me they didn’t have anything for me either, but they didn’t look embarrassed at all. When it’s you and the employment office, better known as the unemployment office, feeling embarrassed is a one-way street and you’re the one driving on it. They seem almost proud to tell you how many unemployment checks you got left, so it can kind of hang over your head like an anvil or something.
So, I thanked them like I meant it and went home, and believe me, that’s no treat.
Home is a little apartment about the size of a washroom at a Fina Station, only not as nice and without the air-conditioning. The window looks out over Main Street, and when a car drives by the window shakes, which is one of the reasons I leave it open most of the time. That and the fact I can hope for some sort of breeze to stir the dead, hot air around. The place is over a used bookstore called MARTHA’S BOOKS, and Martha is an all right lady if you like them mean. She’s grumpy, about five hundred years old, weighs two-fifty when she’s at her wrestling weight, wears men’s clothing and has a bad leg and a faint black mustache to match the black wool ski cap she wears summer or winter, on account of her head is as bald as a river stone. I figure the cap is a funny sort of vanity, considering she doesn’t do anything to get rid of that mustache. Still, she always does her nails in pink polish and she smokes those long feminine cigarettes that some women like, maybe thinking if the weeds look elegant enough they won’t give them cancer.
Another thing about Martha, is with that bad leg she has a limp, and she helps that along with a golf putter she uses as a cane, putter-side up for a handle. See her coming down the street, which isn’t often, you got to think there’s not much you could add to make her any more gaudy, unless it’s an assful of bright tail feathers and maybe some guys to follow her playing percussion instruments.
I liked to go down to Martha’s from time to time and browse the books, and if I had a little spare change, I’d try to actually buy something now and then, or get something for Jasmine. I was especially fond of detective books, and Jasmine, bless her little heart, liked Harlequin romances. She’d read them four or five a weekend when she wasn’t dating boys, and since she was dating quite regularly now, she’d cut back mostly to one or two Harlequins a weekend. Still, that was too many. I kept hoping she’d outgrow it. The romance novels and the dates. I was scared to death she’d fall in love with some cowboy with a cheek full of snuff and end up ironing Western shirts and wiping baby asses before she was old enough to vote.
Anyway, after I didn’t find any jobs and nobody died and left me any money, I went home and brooded, then went downstairs to Martha’s to look for a book.
Jasmine had made out a list of the titles she was looking to collect, and I took the list with me just in case I came across something she needed. I thought if I did, I might buy it and get her a detective book too, or something like that, give it to her with the romance and maybe she’d read it. I’d done that several times, and so far, to the best of my knowledge, she hadn’t read any of the non-romance novels. The others might as well have been used to level a vibrating refrigerator, but I kept on trying.
The stairs went down from my place and out into the street, and at the bottom, to the left of them, was Martha’s. The store was in front and she lived in back. During business hours in the summer the door was always open since Martha wouldn’t have put air conditioning in there if half the store had been a meat locker hung with prize beef. She was too cheap for that. She liked her mustache sweat-beaded, her bald head pink beneath her cap. The place smelled of books and faintly of boiled cabbage, or maybe that was some soured clothing somewhere. The two smells have always seemed a lot alike to me. It’s the only place I know hotter and filthier than my apartment, but it does have the books. Lots of them.
I went in, and there on the wall was a flyer for a circus at three o’clock that day. Martha had this old post board just inside the door, and she’d let people pin up flyers if they wanted, and sometimes she’d leave them there a whole day before she tore them down and wrote out the day’s receipts on the back of them with a stubby, tongue-licked pencil. I think that’s the only reason she had the post board and let people put up flyers, so she’d have scratch paper.
The flyer was for a circus called THE JIM DANDY THREE RING CIRCUS, and that should have clued me, but it didn’t. Truth is, I’ve never liked circuses. They depress me. Something about the animals and the people who work there strike me as desperate, as if they’re living on the edge of a cliff and the cliff is about to break off. But I saw this flyer and I thought of Jasmine.
When she was little she loved circuses. Her mother and I used to take her, and I remembered the whole thing rather fondly. Jasmine would laugh so hard at the clowns you had to tell her to shut up, and she’d put her hands over her eyes and peek through her fingers at the wild animal acts.
Back then, things were pretty good, and I think her mother even liked me, and truth to tell, I thought I was a pretty good guy myself. I thought I had the world by the tail. It took me a few years to realize the closest I was to having the world by the tail was being a dingleberry on one of its ass hairs. These days, I felt like the most worthless sonofabitch that had ever squatted to shit over a pair of shoes. I guess it isn’t hip or politically correct, but to me, a man without a job is like a man without balls.
Thinking about my problems also added to me wanting to go to the circus. Not only would I get a chance to be with Jasmine, it would help me get my mind off my troubles.
I got out my wallet and opened it and saw a few sad bills in there, but it looked to me that I had enough for the circus, and maybe I could even spring for dinner afterwards, if Jasmine was in the mood for a hot dog and a soda pop. She wanted anything more than that, she had to buy me dinner, and I’d let her, since the money came from her mother, my darling ex-wife, Connie—may she grow like an onion with her head in the ground.
Mommy Dearest didn’t seem to be shy of the bucks these days on account of she was letting old Gerald the Oil Man drop his drill down her oil shaft on a nightly basis.
Not that I’m bitter about it or anything. Him banging my ex-wife and being built like Tarzan and not losing any of his hair at the age of forty didn’t bother me a bit.
I put my wallet away and turned and saw Martha behind the counter looking at me. She twisted on the stool and said, “Got a job yet?”
I just love a small town. You fart and everyone looks in your direction and starts fanning.
“No, not yet,” I said.
“You looking for some kind of a career?”
“I’m looking for work.”
“Any kind of work?”
“Right now, yes. You got something for me?”
“Naw. Can’t pay my rent as it is.”
“You’re just curious, then?”
“Yeah. You want to go to that circus?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Is this a trick question too?”
“Guy put up the flyer gave me a couple tickets for letting him have the space on the board there. I’d give them to you for stacking some books. I don’t really want to do it.”
“Stack the books or give me the
tickets?”
“Neither one. But you stack them Harlequins for me, I’ll give you the tickets.”
I looked at my wrist where my watch used to be before I pawned it. “You got the time?”
She looked at her watch. “Two o’clock.”
“I like the deal,” I said, “but the circus starts at three and I wanted to take my daughter.”
Martha shook out one of her delicate little cigarettes and lit it, studied me. It made me feel funny. Like I was a shit smear on a laboratory slide. Most I’d ever talked to her before was when I asked where the new detective novels were and she grumped around and finally told me, as if it was a secret she’d rather have kept.
“Tell you what,” Martha said, “I’ll give you the tickets now, and you come back tomorrow morning and put up the books for me.”
“That’s nice of you,” I said.
“Not really. I know where you live, and you don’t come put up my romance novels tomorrow, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
I looked for a smile, but I didn’t see any.
“That’s one way to do business,” I said.
“The only way. Here.” She opened a drawer and pulled out the tickets and I went over and took them. “By the way, what’s your name, boy? See you in here all the time, but don’t know your name.”
Boy? Was she talking to me?
“Plebin Cook,” I said. “And I’ve always assumed you’re Martha.”
“Martha ain’t much of a name, but it beats Plebin. Plebin’s awful. I was named that I’d get it changed. Call yourself most anything and it’d be better than Plebin.”
“I’ll tell my poor, old, gray-haired mother what you said.”
“You must have been an accident and that’s why she named you that. You got an older brother or sister?”
“A brother.”
“How much older?”
Earning these tickets was getting to be painful. “Sixteen years.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jim.”
“There you are. You were an accident. Jim’s a normal name. Her naming you Plebin is unconscious revenge. I read about stuff like that in one of those psychology books came in. Called KNOW WHY THINGS HAPPEN TO YOU. You ought to read it. Thing it’d tell you is to get your name changed to something normal. Right name will give you a whole nuther outlook about yourself.”
