Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  And you know, it’s always been an uncomfortable thing for me, his love of Buicks. All these years I’d rather be riding around in just about any kind of car except a Buick. But what could I say? There’s no way for a wife to even begin to explain a crazy thing like that to her husband. It was just a feeling. Whenever it’s come time to trade our car in—about every two or three years, Arthur loves to trade in a car with no more than forty thousand miles on it for a new one—when it’s come time, I’ve always tried to suggest this car or that instead. But it’s his thing, you know. It’s something he’s done all his life, always Buicks, which I guess he got from his father. When better automobiles are built, Buick will build them, Arthur has always said to me. And what could I say to that? “Please don’t, I’ve got this unexplainable aversion to every car you’ve ever bought”?

  But sitting here now, I suddenly remember. Pretty clearly, though it’s been a long time. Is that a bad sign? Am I about to die or something? Or is it just senility? Whichever, there’s this one thing that comes back to me. A 1929 model Buick. My mama was going to leave my papa and she and her boyfriend and I, we all of us got in the boyfriend’s 1929 Buick roadster to drive to Reno for her to get the divorce. They lifted me into the rumble seat—I was, what, five years old, I guess—and we took off from in front of the Hotel Senator in Sacramento, where my mama and I were staying temporarily, and she wrapped me up in the chenille spread she got off the hotel bed. It was a morning in the middle of October and the weather was pretty nice. It wasn’t very cold out. I was swaddled up and I know I didn’t like her boyfriend, exactly, but I didn’t hate him, even though I knew what was going on here.

  It was my mama I loved the most, she was with me all the time and I was aware even then that I didn’t see my papa very often, though I think that was from him trying to make money and not from running around with other women. Over the years, as an adult, when I thought about what happened between my mother and father, I always came to that conclusion. And Mama said this was okay, what was happening, and though of course I wanted things to be settled and normal, in the way any child wants her family to be, as long as I was with her and she was saying it was okay, I wasn’t as unhappy about the breakup as you might expect.

  He was my father’s business partner. They were stock brokers together in their own little firm in San Francisco, where we lived. And they were both of them the same kinds of damn fools as the rest of the country through the twenties, playing a high-stakes game and thinking you never had to fold your hand and walk away. Though listen to me. I love to gamble. Maybe not love it. I get something I need out of gambling and I keep doing it. But at least I know how much I’m ready to lose, and when I lose it, I know how to find my way to the door.

  But none of this about the situation is new to me. I had plenty of time growing up and being an adult to think out the issues and all of how things went in my family, how my mama divorced my papa and she went on to a life of, more or less, chaos after that. I’m getting off what it is that just came to me. What’s new in my recollection is the drive to Reno, and that Buick. He had a Buick and I was wrapped in a bedspread and my mama and her boyfriend were in front of me, the backs of their heads, in the roadster’s main seat and I was in the rumble seat and they paid me no attention at all. She snuggled up to him and he put his arm around her and it was like I wasn’t there at all. It was just me and the Buick.

  And that was fine. It was a wonderful car. I can see that. My mama’s boyfriend had paid maybe fifteen hundred dollars for it, which was enough to support two families for a whole year back then. And I think the seat was leather and it was more comfortable than our couch at home. And I could hear the Buick’s motor. Most of the cars in the street made a terrible racket, sputtering and burbling and coughing away. But this Buick purred. Even idling at a corner while my mama and her boyfriend waited too long having a kiss and somebody behind us would honk his horn and yell. Even then, the Buick was making this low, smooth sound, right underneath me, it felt like, and all the other stuff didn’t concern me. The Buick was holding me tight and talking to me low and sweet and then it carried me away, fast, making the wind blow in my hair.

  My word. I loved that Buick, didn’t I. This doesn’t explain a thing. The Buick carried me into a quiet, green world, meadows and folds of land and fields filled with low growing things, vegetables I knew, but I could name nothing, no vegetable, no tree, no fold or lift of land, I had no words at that age to name anything. Except the jagged edge of mountains before me—I knew those were the High Sierras—my mother’s boyfriend had told me this name before we began—and we rose to them and the Buick whispered to me, reassured me, carried me up and into a forest and we rose gradually, for miles and miles, and the road began to twist and turn and I was okay with all of this. I saw, once, among the trunks of the trees, the dappled flank of a deer and, briefly, its dark eyes. I was something like happy.

  But it was getting cold. The sun was there, free and clear in the sky, and yet, even as it seemed to get brighter as we climbed, it gave off less and less heat. I wondered at this. I began to tremble with the cold. I hunched into the seat, pulled the bedspread tighter around me, but it was a thin thing, I realized, there was so much of it wrapped around me that you’d think it would make anyone warm, but it was very thin and as pitiful as the sun. I looked at my mother and her boyfriend and they were snuggled close and they did not seem to notice the cold at all. And the Buick was carrying me and whispering still and I wanted it to warm me, as well, but it could not.

  Then we were over the top and we began to descend and suddenly the world changed. It was all rock and dust and scrawny things growing and patches of grass that hunkered low and looked like the scum between the tiles in our bathroom. And I was trembling and the road was sharply angled and I could look down for what seemed like miles, down these long folds of barren rock, and I felt like there was something gripping me by the shoulders and wanting to pluck me from the seat and throw me down this mountain and I pressed myself down, tried to make myself as heavy as a boulder, and I asked the Buick to please not let me go. And it didn’t. The Buick held me and it held to the road and it wound us down the mountain and the air was growing warmer and I was listening carefully again to the Buick’s voice and I was okay.

  And then there was a catch in the voice. The engine coughed and stammered and coughed again and my mama’s boyfriend cursed and I suddenly was aware of the road and it was angled sharply down and there was a great dome of rock off one way and a sharp drop the other way and the road was narrow and the Buick shuddered a little and I said to it, softly, No. Please. But the engine fell quiet and the brakes whined and the boyfriend cursed some more and my mama was making little gasping sounds and I didn’t care about those two at all, not at all, I spread my hands out from under the bedspread and I laid them flat on the Buick’s leather seat and I prayed for the car to come back to life, to carry me on to a place where I’d be safe and everything would be okay forever.

  But we rolled through a curve and then another and my mama was saying her boyfriend’s name over and over and he was telling her to shut up and then there was a little bit of a gravelly shoulder to the road at a curve coming up and it was very narrow and there was a sharp edge beyond it and then a big break in things, a leap, the next thing out that you could see was about a mile away, and you could feel the boyfriend stomp on the brakes, put everything he could into them, and we swerved onto the shoulder and there was a great spitting of gravel beneath us and my mama screamed and then we stopped.

  They didn’t say a thing for a while in the front, though you could hear them breathing hard. They were sitting apart, my mama and her boyfriend, and looking opposite ways. Me, I sat listening to the Buick. It was making a little ticking sound. Then it stopped even that. I was sitting in the center of the rumble seat and I pulled the bedspread from around me and crept to the right, keeping my face low at first, smelling the leather of the Buick’s upholstery, thinking, What a phony
you are, what a phony, what good is it that you smell nice. And then I was ready and I lifted my head up and I looked out, and there was only a great and wide chasm before me, gray and rocky and deep, and this was what all the holding and the carrying and the sweet low whispering was about. Just to bring me to the edge of the rest of my life and fall silent.

  Funny. I don’t remember much of anything else from that trip. Things sort of stop there on the mountain. Obviously somebody came along and we made it to Reno. I do know the divorce didn’t happen that fall. That much I’ve been told. We were supposed to live in a hotel there for three months to establish residency, but it got cut short. Somewhere in the first week or two the stock market crashed and my father and his partner, my mama’s boyfriend, were both ruined. So were Mama and me, in a certain way. So was pretty much everybody.

  Now that explains it, I guess, about Buicks. To me at least. To a sympathetic googly-eyed alien, I guess. But it would never do for Arthur. He’d never understand. I’m just happy he knows when to fold a losing hand and find his way to the door. We both do. That makes for an okay marriage, it seems to me.

  I have ceased being Viola Stackhouse. Before me, her eyes close for a moment as she decompresses from her memory. Then she looks at me and says, “Did I offend you?”

  “Of course not,” I say.

  “Didn’t I just call you a googly-eyed alien?” she says.

  “Ah yes,” I say. “But a sympathetic googly-eyed alien.”

  “Didn’t I scream a lot, too? At the little party you and your wife threw for us?”

  “You were afraid for Arthur.”

  “This is all new,” she says. “I never saw this coming.”

  “Not even in the High Sierras,” I say.

  She smiles at this. “You’re not offended? At how I’ve been acting?”

  “No.”

  “My mama had quite a few boyfriends over the years. I’d not call one of them sympathetic.”

  “Or googly-eyed,” I say.

  “Maybe one or two of them was that, toward the end.” Viola Stackhouse laughs.

  Then her laugh breaks off and I know she is sitting on the edge of the great and wide chasm of what her life has been and I take her hands in mine and I touch her with my fingertips and I give her the beating of my heart.

  “Oh my,” she says.

  “Prepare for sleep now,” I whisper, trying to make my voice as deep and smooth as a Buick.

  And I take her back to her place and I help her lie down and I wish very badly to have a chenille spread to wrap her in, but there is only so much that I can do, and perhaps it is all right, for she is already asleep.

  It has been a long night. But my time is short. And I am a late-night gambler juiced on the thrill of the game. I have pulled the handle on the slot machine over and over and now I have a red white and blue eagle in the left-hand window and the other windows are still tumbling and I wait for the second eagle to fall into place. I need a big win and I need it soon. Then I have an idea I should have had before: speak to the mated pairs one after the other. So I awaken Arthur and he is sitting before me now. I am Viola’s husband. I am Arthur Stackhouse. I saw some pretty bad things in the war. I’m talking about the real war. The good war. But I basically came out of it with a free mind. It helped that we all knew it was for a righteous cause, which included our own families’ welfare. It really did. You knew in your bones that every wife and child in America, every mailbox and apple tree, was at stake. And it helped, too, somehow, to know you were in for the duration. None of this twelve-months-and-you’re-gone stuff, which I figure made it even worse for the boys in that other war, the dirty one, a couple of decades later. If you go to war and it’s not for anything you can see as important, no matter how much rhetoric they throw at you, and if you’re going to be out of the action in one year, win or lose, then it just has to make a big difference in your being able to deal with it. You never quite get safely into that place inside you that will let you kill and be killed.

  Now, I don’t know any of that about the Vietnam War and the boys who went there, except as a bystander. That’s just how I figured it was, from what I read and saw on TV. But what I’m really trying to talk about here is myself, how I could go through what I did in France and Germany and then come back and put it out of my mind better than you might expect. My generation, after you got home, you never talked about it to anybody, and you held on tight to all the things you loved that you knew would’ve been seriously harmed if you hadn’t done what you did, and that helped make the bad stuff quiet down and eventually go away. So I was all right. For a few years.

  Then all of a sudden I wasn’t all right. And I never have been since. And damned if it didn’t come about in peacetime on a hotel roof with a drink in my hand. Till a few years ago, when Louisiana floated those casinos in Lake Charles, my wife and I would go to Las Vegas twice a year. We did it every year since we were married, which was right after the war, in 1946. And there was a time in the early fifties when the government was doing all that testing of hydrogen bombs out in the desert. It wasn’t very many miles away from Vegas, where the testing grounds were, and for a while the casinos made a big promotion of it.

  So in 1953 my wife and I were at one of the hotels. The Sahara maybe. Or the Sands. I don’t remember which one. But there was a rooftop party to watch a nuclear blast. We both had already lost what we’d budgeted ourselves to lose and we had another twenty-four hours in Vegas and this seemed like something interesting. So we went up and they had Miss Atomic there, who they’d chose in a beauty pageant that morning, and she was walking around in a swimsuit and high heels and she had an atomic hairdo, which was big and puffed up on the top of her head like a mushroom cloud, and they were serving something they called atomic cocktails, which I remember very clearly. It was vodka and brandy and champagne and sherry, the strangest mix of things, but it was pretty good and getting better with every sip I took.

  Then it was time and they had one of those tuxedoed emcees from down in the floor showrooms and he was doing like an introduction. It was dusk, I think. That’s how I remember it. There was still a little light from the sun that had just disappeared but it was getting dark and this guy is going, Now ladies and gentlemen, playing the Sahara for one night only, the Hydrogen Bomb, let’s give him a big Vegas welcome with a round of applause. And then the emcee looks at his watch and starts counting backward from ten and people are applauding and I take a sip of my atomic cocktail and Viola is standing beside me and I’m looking out to the northwest, where the sky is still showing some light.

  Then it happened. I wasn’t prepared at all. You read about this bomb in the newspapers and it’s supposed to have killed all those people in a couple of Japanese towns and so forth, and you see a newsreel in the movies and you watch the mushroom cloud and you think, This is some kind of bomb. Something like that. But all you’re doing is just that, thinking. Like thinking about war if you’ve never been there. You just don’t know jack shit. All of a sudden there’s this crown of light out there. You know it’s sixty, seventy miles away, but all of a sudden it’s there, this spray of white light, but it doesn’t register as white as all, if you’re used to thinking of whiteness as a clean thing. This is white like you’ve been wrong all your life about what death is. It’s not like closing your eyes and everything is black and that’s the way it stays forever. Suddenly you know death is white, and here it is and it doesn’t feel far away at all. It’s right here in your face, touching your eyes, which don’t close when you die but they look straight into this ghastly whiteness.

  And then it fades a little, it pulls back, but something else is there in its place. And damn, you can see it. Even from here. It’s tiny from this distance, if you step back and look around you, if you can drag your eyes away and look up at the night sky, but you can’t do that. You have to see what’s there, and it’s a thing rising up where that whiteness was just a moment ago. And more than the worst of battle, more than the smel
l of cordite or burnt flesh, more than the sound of men’s voices blabbering in pain, more than the sight of torn limbs and gaping chests, that instant of light and that distant plume of smoke and the mindless smattering of applause on a hotel rooftop and the taste of champagne and sherry told me there was nothing but pain and then nothingness waiting for me in my life. I was thirty years old and I’d been through a terrible war but it wasn’t until that evening I realized what the end of life was all about.

  And my wife put her hand on my arm and maybe she knew something terrible was happening inside me and maybe she didn’t. But I never said a word about this to her. I kept my battle face on and I sipped my drink and she and I went downstairs and I think I broke our rule that night. I think I lost another hundred dollars or so that we didn’t budget, and I knew I’d lose it. There was no way I’d win a penny that night. But I went through the motions. And I guess that did me some good, in a way. I went on through the motions of my life and here I am. And I never did say a thing about this to Viola. She wouldn’t understand. Or she would. Either way, we’d lose.

  What’s wrong with this species? Its individuals seem to be profoundly ignorant of those even closest to them. Damn it, Arthur, speak to Viola. Viola, speak to Arthur. Share the things that are inside you. You are inferior beings. This is all I can think with Arthur Stackhouse dozing exhausted before me. I let him sit like that in the interview chair for a while.

  But I am ashamed at these thoughts. Perhaps it is my own weariness that has rendered me immobile and cranky. After all, I have myself repeatedly castigated the inadequacy of words in the conduct of life on this planet. The silence between Arthur and Viola is based on their own recognition of the same thing. Is that not sensible on their part?

  And perhaps there is even more betokened by this irritability that has come upon me. How can I be critical of this species when a sterling example of my own species, namely myself, Desi the Spaceman, a creature who is not even limited biologically by words, is, in fact, ignorant of himself. Is that not a far greater fault than the one I am finding in others?