Maybe I got a little of Papa’s caution. Maybe that was the difference in how my life went. I don’t know. But there’s only so much you can do to control your fate. Look at Mama. She never went near the boats and she ended up drowning. That was in the great hurricane of 1899. I was eighteen and she was barely twice that. I can see now how young she was, looking back. The water came in and we went up in the attic and Mama looked down and her Singer sewing machine was just disappearing under the water and something took her. She only said a few words, like ‘My Singer,’ and she went on down, I guess to try to drag it up the stairs. Though of course that was impossible. It was a big thing bolted to its own table with wrought-iron legs. Papa was over in the other side of the attic and by the time he came across and down the stairs to follow her, she’d disappeared.
After that, Maidie got married and I’d help around the house. I’d go out with the women of Kitty Hawk and we’d make and mend the nets. I’d tend our garden. Some young men of the town courted me. But something wasn’t right. I’d go out when I could on my own, to walk. The dunes above Kitty Hawk Bay had growths of all kinds of trees, trying to make a go of it. Cedar and oak and sassafras and locust and sycamore and persimmon. And in the damp places between the dunes there were gums and cypresses and some old, fat-trunked pines. But there was such wind. All the time. The sands would roll in and blow the trees down and cover them over in big, crescent dunes. Whaleheads, we’d call them.
The day I’m thinking of was in December of 1903. I was in a bad mood. Some young man or other was pressing me to get serious. Papa was pressing me to listen to the young man. I just walked off that morning. It was the middle of the week and the wind was fierce, coming in from the north. For the better part of the year the wind blew from a little west of south, but in the winter it came straight down from the north pole, which nobody’d ever been to, at that time. I could’ve gone off and just hid in the trees, like I usually did. But sometimes you feel like going ahead and making things worse. A little bit of homeopathy. And if it didn’t work like that as a cure, then at least you could wallow in things and feel sorry for yourself.
So I struck off to the south, toward the Kill Devil Hills. Things down there would be about as gloomy as I could make them. I even passed a place where the winds had laid bare a cemetery. There were bones of dead people scattered all about, as cheap and naked as fish bones. I don’t know if that made me think of my mother. I can’t remember now, all these years later. It should have. And if it did, maybe I was reminded how your life wasn’t really your own. Which would be an answer of sorts to the question that has always blown around and around in my head: Why did my life go on as it did?
Anyway, I kept walking, and after about four miles, I got tired and I lay down in some beach heather on the westward slope of a little hill. I’d come up to it from the Albemarle side and I could hear the ocean crashing in the distance, though I hadn’t seen it yet. It seemed very far away from where I lay, and I may have dozed for a little while.
And then I awoke to a remarkable sound. I sat up straight and quick. It was a metallic rumble, full of pops and sputters. I knew it was an engine of some sort. I’d been to the mainland the year before and seen a couple of the new motorcars, which I loved. But this sound was coming from over the peak of the hill and I figured it wouldn’t be there for long. I scrambled to the top and I stood up, and there it was. At first I didn’t understand what it would do. It was laid out on a long track and for a moment I thought it must be a strange sort of railroad engine.
But it had wings. Sweet Jesus in heaven, it had wings. I could not name the parts at the time or recognize the things of the earth that they were made of, but I was taking them in like the features of the face of the man you’d just fallen in love with at first sight: the two great braced main wings, the twin horizontal elevators in front, the twin vertical rudders behind, all made of ash and spruce and muslin, and those engines, also at the rear, crying out to me, the two pusher propellers spinning into invisibility. And at that precise moment no human being had yet ever made a powered flight into the air and I saw the man lying prone in the center of the great lower wing and instantly I wished to be there in his place. Already, I wanted this act for myself. I stood there with the wind pounding at me, the same wind that was even then gathering beneath these wings, ready to lift them, I stood there and my dress was billowing and whipping around my legs and my hair had come undone and was unfurled from my head like a wind sock and I watched this wonderful thing that I loved instantly as it moved along its track gathering speed and my heart beat wildly and then this thing made of trees and cloth lifted up. It flew.
There would come an age, not too many years later, when there would be women who flew airplanes. I had the heart of any of them. I had the yearning. But I left the Kill Devil Hills that afternoon in December in 1903 with a desperate desire and no hope of ever fulfilling it. None. I was who I was. I cried out to myself some few words of this desire and I went down the steps and into the water and I was overwhelmed. I married the next year. I made a home for my husband who chose not to fish but to become a lumberman instead and he took us to Virginia and gave me three fine babies who became three fine sons who went off to do what they wished with their lives. But in the dark nights, with my husband sleeping beside me and the wind blowing the trees outside, I was unfaithful to him, again and again. I lay down with a great wing and there was the sound of its engine inside me and its propellers pressed me forward and into the sky.
Minnie’s voice disappears now from inside me. It flies off into one of those dark nights of hers, fifty years ago or more. But still remaining is the first night that Minnie Butterworth was on a spaceship and I found her awake and wandering our corridors. I arranged for her to speak to me then. I made the wind to blow for her and made her feel lifted up, and these words flowed out of her mouth and into me like a Big Gulp, like a Mondo Thirst Quencher.
But I knew that Minnie thirsted still.
So I said to her, “You are on a spaceship now.”
“I figured,” she said. “I was listening for your engines, but I couldn’t hear them.”
“They make no audible sound,” I said. “We are near to your home, though many miles above. Would you like to take us somewhere else?”
I could hear Minnie’s breath catch in her chest. But she narrowed her eyes at me, a gesture that even in that early stage of my research I understood to betoken suspicion.
I stood and took her by the arm, very gently, and I walked her from the interview room, down the corridor, and into the command center. I placed her in the first commander chair and I sat in the second. Even the nearly obsolete model of our basic vessel that we flew in mid-century could easily have been commanded by one, but, fortunately, there were still two places, mostly for wormhole navigation.
I moved my hand over the panels and the great screen before Minnie Butterworth flashed into a vast image of her home planet as seen from our ventral eye. It was at this moment that Minnie let herself understand and believe what it was that I offered. Instantly her eyes filled with tears.
I make a connection now, late in my present night, alone before my New and Improved panels. I have always felt a tender thing for the quickness of the tears of my wife Edna Bradshaw. I realize that this trait in her has inevitably stirred—in the deep, singing part of me, the wordless true part of me—a memory of Minnie Butterworth on the night that she flew.
Minnie said to me in a faint voice, “Is it possible?”
I replied, “The World is Your Oyster. This is the New Thrill in Travel Planning.” And I passed my hand over the navigation panel before Minnie and it came alive. I lifted her hand and laid it palm-to-palm against mine. Her breath caught again, and I folded my eight fingers around her and let her take in the beat of my heart, to reassure her. I said, “You need only move your hand above this light.”
And she took her hand and she moved it and she saw her planet slide easily under her and she laughed and
she wept and she flew. She flew around her planet many times that night and out into the darkness, out past her moon and around and back again. Minnie Butterworth flew farther and faster than anyone had ever flown in the history of her species and I sit now quaking in the dark at the thought of her and I feel that I am close to understanding something. Close. But farther away at the same moment. And the voice of Edna Bradshaw is near me.
“Darling spaceman,” she says. “Come to bed.”
4
I still cannot sleep. So Edna forgoes sleep herself. She sits reading beside me in the bed, radiant in her Antique-Pink Bare-Essential Babydoll with the Eye-Catching Uplift of Underwire Cups and the Adorable Enticement of Cleavage Ribbon Ties. Her book has a woman showing much the same great swath of her chest, as she is bent back by a man with a three-corner hat and a black eye-patch. Our bed is Awash with Swashbuckling Passion, but the suckers on the tips of my fingers are clamped tight from my sleeplessness.
Edna Bradshaw is a very good wife. Her eyelids droop from her own weariness but she has turned aside my sincere urgings to retire ahead of me. It would take only a wave of my hand—there is energy field enough in it, even this late—to encourage a roll of words from Edna. I feel a little guilty, having heard Minnie Butterworth tonight, not to become part of Edna’s voice, at least briefly. Of course, I never felt for Minnie the way I do for Edna Bradshaw, not as a husband for a wife. But still, the voice is an intimate thing. Such an intimate thing, really. And I did secretly break one of our prime operational directives for Minnie Butterworth. I let her keep her memory of us when I returned her to the surface of her planet. She promised to hold our secret close and I knew I could trust her and I wanted her always to know what she had done. She came to me as she was about to go and she gave me a kiss on the cheek—the first such, I believe, that any of us had ever received from this species.
Ah. Listen to me. I say “species” and this word that rationally and precisely denotes the concept to which I was referring suddenly sounds, in my deepest part, stridently out of tune. I become, with simply the use of that word, a creature of ghastly aloofness, a Monster from Outer Space. My hands go up and grind at my face now.
“What is it, Desi?” Edna’s voice sings softly into my mind.
I do love this woman.
And it happens again. As soon as I categorize Edna Bradshaw with that word, I have a terrible feeling inside me. Yes, she is, of course, a woman. I do love this woman. But to use the word sucks the warmth out of her, stacks her, naked and pink and wrapped Freezer Fresh Every Time on a shelf, with all the other women of this world.
I say, “Would you know my hands if I came up from behind and put them on your knockers?”
“Of course,” she says. “You’ve got eight fingers on each hand.”
“No,” I say. “I ask something more than that. If I had only five fingers on each hand. Would you know me by my touch? If I came up and put my hands on you and squeezed?”
“I’m sure I would, Desi honey. I know every little thing about you.”
I am happy beyond reason for that, though I realize there are still unanswered questions regarding this process. But I have gone quite floppy-fingered.
I am Edna Bradshaw’s husband, officially, by the customs of my home planet, and I am Edna Bradshaw’s Spaceman Lover, by the customs of her former colleagues at Mary Lou’s Southern Belle Beauty Nook in Bovary, Alabama. My hands are ready to initiate the actions that are most commonly associated with intimacy on this planet, given either role. But my cute-enough-to-eat Edna seems very tired and I choose instead to place her nearer to her dreams and, as intimacy is understood on my planet, even closer to me. Though on my planet we do not use the prophylactic of words with our voices. Be Safe, Be Sorry. I wave my hand and she sighs and drifts and I bring forth her voice to put inside me. I suggest a direction, gently, though this is not always effective: “Tell me about the sadness you feel at the pride in your sausage.”
Edna looks about and then finds my eyes and the sounds begin, my own mouth moving in synchronicity. The party went so well, don’t you think? At least until the gun went off. It’s not easy to cook for strangers, especially when they could be from all sorts of places other than Alabama. Sausage. Oh my. So much depends on sausage. You take a one-pound roll of sausage and there are so many things to consider. Spicy or mild, for instance, though if there’s strangers with foreign tastes, you should always err on the conservative side. You choose the mild sausage, and if you’re making it into sausage balls, Kraft American cheese. If they want a sharp cheese, then you can let them find that somewhere else along the table, if it’s big enough, or for their next meal. If all they’ve got is what you’re giving them and all you can give them is one thing, then better safe than sorry when it comes to spice.
You need a good biscuit mix, and that’s a choice right there, though I’m partial to Bisquick. And when you put all that together, you’ve got to have the stomach of a brain surgeon, I tell you. You can only do it with your hands. You try to make sausage and dry biscuit mix and grated cheese blend together—blend, you understand—it’s like getting your daddy and your worthless ex-husband and your best friend at the hairdresser to lie down together naked in the town square of a Sunday afternoon. You got nothing to do but put your hands in it and they end up coated with grease.
This isn’t what I’m trying to say, exactly. I am—well, let’s face it—a little over forty years old, and I still don’t know what happens when I start talking. Do you think I actually want to have a picture in my head of my own flesh-and-blood daddy and my gone-to-seed ex-husband and Ida Mae Pickett, who is the dearest girl in Bovary but maybe also the largest, lying buck naked in the grass under the statue of the South’s Defenders? These are thoughts no human being should ought to have. But don’t I also know that all three of them aren’t near as hurtful to me there in the grass than if they’re still talking to me in my head like they can do? Isn’t that why when we tell things, they get bigger than life, all bent out of shape? So you can look at them and not have to take them so real?
How many mornings of my life was it just a frying pan and my daddy sitting in his undershirt with his chest hairs sticking out and his sausage patties frying there in front of me. Grease is grease. And so is sausage. Nothing bizarre about that. And my daddy talking in a long unstoppable sizzle of words about how I was too fat and too lazy and too much like my dead mama and too liberal in my thinking and did I get the brand of sausage without the monosodium glutamate this time, he wasn’t having anything Chinese in his morning sausage, he was an American and proud of it. My daddy was a difficult man, but he wasn’t ignorant. He knew how to read a label on a package and figure out what it meant. As far as I was concerned, if a thing was Chinese and made the flavor better—even of your country sausage—then it was okay. Even Tennessee Pride has that MSG in it, and they’re still proud.
And if I just said to Daddy, “This is pure sausage, nothing but,” he’d never know the difference anyway, from the taste, except it’d be good, and that’s what he wanted. So sometimes I’d feed him the un-American sausage, making sure to throw out the label so he couldn’t read it. To tell the truth, I’d rather lie to my daddy than disappoint him in the matter of his sausage. All his life long, he’d eat his breakfast one way. He’d cut the center right out of one of his patties and put it on the side and then eat all his eggs and his grits and his toast and all the other sausage, mixing them up together, wolfing them down, but he’d save that center bite for last. And it all came down to that. I couldn’t help myself caring, being who I am. And it’s been that way all my life. For a few years, my caring so bad about a thing like that shifted from my daddy to my husband. But he run away to Mobile in pursuit of I don’t know what-all and I went back and lived with Daddy for a spell, till he got tired of me in general and he bought me and Eddie our mobile home out on the edge of town. Still, he done that on the condition that weekday mornings I’d continue to make his breakfast before
I went in to work. Pretty much till my spaceman lover come into my life, I’d sit at the kitchen table where I grew up and wait till there was nothing left on my daddy’s plate but that last bite of sausage and he’d slow way down and then at last he’d spear it with his fork and lift it up, like he was a Catholic, which he wasn’t, far from it, but if he was, he would’ve crossed himself right then, before putting it on his tongue, it was that important to him.
And the sad thing was, till I flew off into outer space for the first time, it was that important for me, too. My daddy’d taken everything else away, to feel good about. You know what I mean? I heard all those words he said. I knew I didn’t have much to take pride in. Except that bite of sausage.
Weary now, and sad again, we stop speaking, my wife Edna Bradshaw and I. I am. I am apart. I wish to place my sixteen fingertips upon her. But her eyes droop shut, and I take her in my hands but I help her to slide down, her body sinking beneath the covers as if this were the sea and she were a pirate ship full of treasure.
5
I wonder sometimes about dreams. There is often music in my head as I sleep, the humming of my blood and my marrow, but there are no sights, no people visiting, no dramas. For the creatures of this planet, there is never any rest. The world they try to leave behind will not let go. It pursues them into the darkest places and unfolds its tent and strings its lights and It’s Another Opening of Another Show. Bigtime Thrills and Spills. I listen to these creatures speak of their dreams and I want very badly to bring them peace, to put my hands on all of them and let them sleep, truly sleep, and take their rest. After Edna’s night voice was Made Fresh from Pork, Ham, and Pork Loin and Spiced Just Right, she must have begun to dream of sausage, as well. And it was a Sausage Dream of great persuasiveness, for in spite of the memories of her father, she wakes after her sleep with the idea of making breakfast for all of our visitors.
Mr. Spaceman Page 4
