400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “Maddy,” said Jeff's mother, hurrying over to her.

  Jeff looked back at the TV, imagining the moon hanging far out in space, a tiny man standing practically barefoot on its surface. It was sharp and impossibly clear, but it was all black and white.

  “Hey,” said Jeff’s dad, crossing to Maddy. "What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, hiding her face. “Reruns. That’s all he’s been saying all morning. They already walked. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

  Jeff got goose bumps. Reruns?

  The adults went into the guest bedroom, leaving him alone.

  Reruns, like The Honeymooners?

  He forgot the TV until, by itself, the picture changed from the moon to a bottle of Ivory Liquid, then to acres of cars, a bullfight. He twisted the knob but with no effect. A dozen pictures flew past. There went the moon!

  Eddie laughed. Spinning, Jeff saw him punching buttons on the remote-control box.

  “Stop it!”

  Jeff flung himself at Eddie, and they both landed on the floor, pummeling each other. Excited by their cries, Mab worked open the screen door and rushed in. Jeff curled into a ball and kicked out, knocking Eddie across the room but letting the dog closer. She leapt all over him while Eddie made his escape. Jeff struggled up and ran out, Mab behind.

  He chased Eddie once around the house, then the heat overwhelmed all of them. They stood panting and sweating in the front yard.

  “You kick like a girl,” Eddie said.

  “Shut up.”

  Jeff opened the door and went inside. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows he saw a huge silhouette rising against the TV. It was Uncle Lou, his hands full of shiny brown ribbon. The camera lay on the floor, its back wide open.

  “Unc—”

  Lou dropped the exposed film, taking a step toward Jeff.

  “I heard Mab in here,” Lou said.

  “But she went out with us.”

  Behind a smile, Uncle Lou looked murderous. His huge hands reached for Jeff.

  The other adults came out of the guest room.

  “Oh, no,” said Jeff's dad. “What happened here?”

  “Mab got into the camera,” Lou said. “The boys were roughhousing.” They all looked at Jeff. Eddie stayed outside.

  “Crap,” said his dad, gathering the ruined film in his arms.

  Jeff looked for the moon on TV, but all he saw was President Nixon on the telephone. The adults kept a funereal silence while Nixon congratulated the astronauts.

  “No one cares about you,” Jeff said to the President. “We want the moon. Dad . . . Dad, is it true that it's a rerun?”

  “They walked late last night, yes.”

  Eddie spoke through the screen door. “The TV Guide says there’s a scary movie on. I saw part of it once. It's about this boy who finds out his parents are Martians.”

  “The one with the sandpit?” Jeff asked.

  “There are men on the moon and you want to watch monster movies?” said their dad.

  Jeff shrugged, feeling guilty, but Eddie came in, and together they hunted for the remote-control box. Their dad sighed and said he would go get more film and beer. Jeff nodded at Eddie, who changed the channel. Aside from the moon, a few commercials were showing; there was no sign of the creepy movie. They waited for a Cal Worthington ad to end. Uncle Lou sat in his deep armchair. Jeff watched him from the corner of his eye. Uncle Lou had ruined the film, like he tried to ruin everything. Bad reception, Aunt Maddy in tears, reruns. It looked like a plot to ruin the moon shot.

  “Mars is where I'm going when I grow up,” Jeff said defiantly.

  Lou laughed. “First you want the moon, then Mars. When will you give up?”

  “Never.”

  Lou's smile faded. “That's tough,” he said, and grinned again, but this time it was like a pat on the head, as if Jeff were a baby.

  “Oh, I'll do all right,” said Jeff.

  The commercial ended, and more moon appeared.

  “I can’t find it,” Eddie said. “I'm going out to play with Mab.”

  Jeff saw an astronaut . . . two? It was hard to tell. They were moving around an object that seemed an illusion of the bad reception, another ghost or double shadow. He made out black-and-white stars and stripes.

  “There we go again,” Lou said under his breath. “Do it first. Jeff, you know why that other Apollo burned up on the launchpad?”

  He shook his head, wary.

  “We were in a big hurry,” Lou said. His eyes looked like Maddy’s, but the tears were held in place, and that made all the difference. “Such a hurry that we didn't make room for a fire extinguisher. We pushed to get on the moon by 1970 for no good reason. Kennedy’s promise. That ship's a piece of second-rate junk because we won't take the time to build something good, something safe. It's a game to get your mind off the real problem—the war.”

  Jeff said nothing. Mab barked, and in the back room Aunt Maddy’s voice sounded high and choked. He watched the screen, the flag, the astronauts. A junk ship? He thought he was going to cry. Uncle Lou was trying to make him cry. Well, he wouldn't.

  He wished he could find that science-fiction movie with the sandpit and the buried spaceship. Fakey Hollywood fright, all eerie music and costumes, would be comforting by comparison to Uncle Lou.

  * * *

  “You drank too much RC,” said Jeff’s mother. “I'll bring you a Turns.”

  Jeff and Eddie lay in a strange bed in the guest room. Jeff was sure he would not be able to sleep because it was still early. He thought he heard Laugh-In in the living room.

  When his mother returned with a pill, she asked, “Did you like the moon landing?”

  Eddie said yes. Jeff said, “It was okay.”

  “Go to sleep now. We’ll get you up in a few hours, we’re not staying all night.”

  She closed them into the dark, and Jeff became instantly dizzy. The ceiling spun like a horseless carousel. He touched sleep and bounced back, as if from a black trampoline. The voices in the living room were soft until the TV went off and silence amplified them. Eddie turned over and jabbed Jeff's ankle with a toenail. He stifled a complaint when he saw that his brother was asleep.

  “Eddie?” he whispered.

  No answer. Eddie's breathing deepened, a sure sign of sleep, though he never slept so easily at home. Maybe there had been something in the burgers Uncle Lou had bought. But he was wide awake.

  He had a theory.

  Uncle Lou was not human.

  He got out of bed, pulled on his pants, and went to the window, which was open to let cool air circulate. The screen was fixed by a rusty hook, and he had to be careful not to wake Eddie as he slipped the latch. He went over the sill into the backyard.

  “Oh, no.”

  Mab was waiting, but she made no sound. He patted her big head, then crept to the nearest corner of the house. Mab followed him with apparent interest.

  “I wonder if you know,” he whispered, playing with her ears. “Is Uncle Lou a bad alien? Has he got a spaceship somewhere and some weird machine to mess up the TV? He wouldn't put alien stuff in his bedroom. I think it must be in the garage.”

  The screen door slammed and Jeff heard footsteps going to the sidewalk. Uncle Lou came into view and walked into the garage. A light came on inside . . . a faint, red light that showed through a tiny window.

  “That must be his laboratory,” he said.

  He climbed onto a section of picket fence that ran below the window and peered into the garage. The glass was covered by a sheet of brittle red plastic, but he could see Uncle Lou. There was a workbench covered with tools at the rear of the garage; an old car with its hood raised took up most of the space. Lou pulled a huge box down from a shaky shelf and dropped it on the floor. He took out a few sheets of newspaper and stared into the box.

  The fence swayed under Jeff's weight as he leaned closer, trying to see what was in the box. Uncle Lou reached in and took out a magazine. Its edges crumbled into dus
t, little flakes drifting over the car. The cover showed a rocket ship, a silver needle flashing through the blackness of interstellar space. Amazing Stories.

  He searched his uncle’s face and saw tears in the bleak red light, the tears Lou had held back earlier. Embarrassed, he tried to jump down from the fence, but his cuff caught and he fell on the grass. Mab barked and he pushed her away. Rolling over, he looked for stars, but the night was hazy. The only lights in the sky were roving spotlights and the usual glow from downtown. The moon was nowhere to be seen.

  “Jeff? Hey, Jeff, is that you?” It was Uncle Lou, coming closer. He hopped the fence and walked over to Jeff. Mab whined. He knelt in the grass.

  “Jeff, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

  “You didn't,” Jeff said, finding himself angry but wishing he were not.

  “I wanted to go to the moon and Mars once, did I ever tell you that?”

  “You wanted to be an astronaut?”

  Lou nodded.

  “I saw you reading those magazines.”

  “I used to read a lot of that stuff, especially in Nam. I needed it to escape. I hadn't known anything could be like that place. The things I expected and the things I saw there were different, you know? I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “No, the moon.”

  Beyond Lou's head, a spotlight had fixed on a portion of the smog cover and was becoming brighter.

  “You didn’t, Uncle Lou. It wasn’t you. It was the TV.”

  He stopped, his breath gone, and stared in awe at the sky. The spot of light was the moon, shining through the smog: now brown, now the yellow of old paper, now white.

  “Look!” he said.

  Lou sat back and looked up, smiling. The smog started in on the moon, billowing over her face, softening her edges. Jeff looked away before she vanished.

  “Here, Jeff, let me help you up. I want to show you something.”

  Uncle Lou not only pulled him to his feet, he lifted him over the picket fence and steered him into the garage ahead of Mab, with a firm hand on his shoulder. Jeff looked around at the stark-lit room where everything—stacks of newspaper, tools, jars of nails, even the windshield of the broken-down car—was covered with a layer of dust. Lou moved him off to one side and reached into the shadows beneath the high cabinet. “Have I ever shown you this?” he asked.

  When he turned around, he held an ungainly wooden tripod together with a long gray cylinder.

  “A telescope!” Jeff said, and as he took a step toward it, Lou aimed the neglected barrel and blew a cloud of dust into his eye.

  * * *

  “Sea of Tranquillity” copyright 1985 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, February 1985.

  MUZAK FOR TORSO MURDERS

  Donny gets to work with the quick-setting cement; it will probably have hardened before most of the blood has congealed in the chest’s cavities. The brass lion’s feet on the antique bathtub gleam from his attentive polishing, as does the porcelain interior, scoured so many times with Bon Ami that the scratch marks of steel-wool pads appear in places. Shiny black plastic-wrapped parcels almost fill the basin.

  Whistle while you work, he thinks, but the cement is so heavy that he hasn’t any breath to spare for frivolities. This is the part of his work that he likes less every time: messy cement, sweaty grunting labor, disgusting slopping sounds as the viscous mixture oozes over the plastic bundles and fills the tub to brimming. There it sits like his mother’s oatmeal, untouched by any spoon. He can hear her in the kitchen while he works in the garage, her radio perpetually tuned to an easy-listening station while you-know-what bubbles in a cauldron on the stove and her knife chops, chops, chops along with a thousand strings. He prefers Bernard Herrmann—the score from Psycho—but she never lets him play his albums while she’s in the house. “Too disturbing,” she says. If only she knew how much her Muzak disturbs him.

  "Donny, are you almost done in there? Your dinner’s ready.”

  “Be right there,” he calls.

  “Hands clean this time?”

  “I’ll use Boraxo, honest.” Under his breath he allows himself a brief curse: “Christmas.”

  Of course, nothing ever goes right when he hurries, and thanks to his mother he tips the wheelbarrow in which he’d mixed the cement, and the muck drips over his oxfords. His new shoes! Another pair for the furnace, another sweaty chore. It’s only a movie, he tells himself, to make himself relax. Sometimes Mom makes his life unbearable. True, she feeds him, provides a home, sews his clothes, and buys him most (though not all) of the things he wants. The videocassette player, for instance, was her idea, but he’d had to purchase TCM secretly with his own allowance. Despite all she does for him, her regimen is at times too much for a son to endure. Hot meals at the same hour every day, always accompanied by oatmeal (“Just to fill you up, dear!”), and regular vegetable snacks in between. She doesn’t believe in dessert. It’s no wonder that he’s had to develop outlets for his energy, secret pastimes, forbidden games.

  As he scrubs his hands with gritty powder, he feels the ever present thrill of potential discovery. He doesn’t fear the police, but if Mother ever finds out what goes on beneath her roof, well, he could get in real trouble—

  "Donny, it’s getting cold!”

  —but that is all part of the fun. Sometimes he wishes he could tell her; she is, after all, his only possible confidante. She might approve. On the other hand . . .

  "Look at your nails,” she says as he raises the first forkful of salad to his lips. Red dressing splatters the tablecloth.

  “I thought you said you washed up. What is that?”

  He examines his thumbnail and discovers a traitorous crescent of dark red film clotted up to the quick. He swallows the leaf of romaine and quickly digs under his nail with a tine of the fork. The deposit comes away in a rubbery lump.

  “It’s only Russian dressing,” he lies. “Dried stuff from the mouth of the jar, when I twisted the cap off—”

  "Don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

  He nods and stabs a tomato, takes another bite. Too late, he remembers the blob on the end of the fork. He’s a cannibal now, how about that?

  “Have you decided what to do about a job?”

  He nods, wishing she would turn down the radio. “Send in the Clowns” is playing again. Sure, send them into the garage and he’d take care of them: pull off their noses, shave their frizzy wigs, paint their mouths red with their own—

  “I thought that woman from the agency called you.”

  He shrugs and gives the ineluctable bowl of oatmeal a stir. As usual, it’s much too sweet.

  “She just wanted to find out my birthday,” he says. “I forgot to put it on the form.”

  “Well, wasn’t that nice of her? Maybe they’ll throw you a party.”

  “Maybe.” He smiles to himself. She believes anything he tells her. The agency lady had called to ask if he wanted to work in a mail room downtown, and of course he’d said he couldn’t go that far because Mother was ill and he had to be able to get home quickly to fix her lunch and put her on the toilet—and by the time he’d gotten that far, the lady had said, "I’m sorry, but all of our jobs are in the financial district. Maybe you should try an agency out in your neighborhood. Perhaps one specializing in manual labor.”

  Ugh! That was when he’d hung up. But it was fine with him; now they should leave him alone. He doesn’t like the thought of risking himself at a job anyway. He had almost come undone at the agency interview, and that was nothing.

  They’d given him forms on which to answer a great many personal questions. He had raced through them, neatly slashing the sections concerning work history. Then he had come to the tricky part: essay questions.

  “What would you do in this situation? Your superior comes into your office complaining that you scheduled her for two crucial meetings at the same time. ”

  His neck itched with sweat; the of
fice air-conditioning chilled him. He felt as if he had swallowed a mouthful of monosodium glutamate: throbbing spine, burning cheeks, torpid muscles.

  He scrawled: “Apologize.”

  “Your supervisor makes a mistake on a memorandum and you are blamed for the error. What would you do?"

  Is it a man or a woman? he thought, as the fluorescent lights began to strobe. He carefully penciled: “Explain to my supervisor’s supervisor.”

  From somewhere in the walls or acoustic-tile ceiling of the office, sweet voices sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” as though it were a hymn. So sincere, so saccharine.

  “For the third time in a week, a mail-room employee delivers your mail to the wrong address. You call him into your office and he claims that your handwriting is illegible and he cannot read the destination. What do you do?"

  The Bacharach tune drove pins into his brain. Three times this week, he thought. God, that Muzak!

  “I ask him if he has seen the view from my window, and while he is looking away I hit him on the head with a marble ashtray. Then I lock the door. I take the saws out of my briefcase, spread plastic on the floor, and cut him up as quickly as I can, even working into my lunch hour to get the job done. I wrap the pieces separately in the plastic, cover them in brown butcher paper, type out address labels, and drop them in the mail.”

  An advertisement for secluded retirement homes rescued him from committing this response to the agency files. He crumpled the form, staggered to the desk with hands dripping, and asked if he could have another. The secretary had stared at him as if he were an ape from the zoo: he felt enormous and ungainly, surrounded by polite clerks. “I made a mistake,” he said.

  The second form took hours to complete because he worked only during commercial breaks in the Muzak.

  And why had he gone to all that trouble in the first place? Because Mother had insisted. She had money, plenty of money, but she said a job would do him good. He had gone thirty-five years without a job; he saw no reason to start now. Besides, he had his own work to pursue. Sometimes it paid in cash, but the true rewards were hardly monetary.

  “More oatmeal, Donny?”