Mysterious Skin (9 page)

We rode toward Carey. I wanted to write a schedule on the park bathroom walls, to “fill the johns in on their new merchandise,” as I’d told Wendy. I’d already been thinking about what fifty dollars a week could bring—more drugs for Wendy and me, a new pair of high-tops, even a real tree this coming Christmas in place of the artificial one Mom kept in our neighbor’s cellar.

I stuck a pair of Charlie’s wax lips over my own. When we stopped at the tracks for an oncoming train, Wendy leaned toward me and kissed them.

In the pitch black, the park was downright creepy. I propped my bike against a tree, and Wendy let hers fall to the ground. We pussyfooted toward the men’s bathroom. It was unlocked, and she switched on the light.

In magenta crayon, I drew an erupting volcano, then wrote: “Saturday afternoons, from 2 until 3. Ready to please.” That sounded stupid, so I x’ed out the last three
words and wrote “Young and willing.” Under it, in green, I scribbled a dollar sign. In less than twenty-four hours, I thought, I’ve become a hustler.

“Let’s head home,” Wendy said, “before frostbite sets in.”

I stopped her. “Wait. I want to show you something.” I unzipped. Wendy looked at me as if I were crazy. I pointed to my dick, to the bruises from that afternoon, already purple from the teeth marks Charlie left on my skin. “Look what the guy did to me,” I said. “No brains whatsoever in the blow job department.”

“Put that back in your pants, exhibitionist.” She stomped out, lecturing. “From now on, don’t let anyone do that to you. Your prick is not a candy cane. Next time somebody might chomp the whole thing off. You should start carrying Mace or a switchblade. At least charge them extra if they do that to you.”

“I didn’t realize it was hurting until it was over.” I bit a chunk from the wax lips and handed the rest to her. “Here. An early Merry Christmas.” The cold knifed my skin. I zipped back up.

We biked another half mile west. Our bodies hurtled through the dark. My eyes teared up, blurring the city lights that zoomed past us in stark, rhinestoney streams. After a while, the wind numbed me completely. I wiggled my fingers, barely feeling the gloves. I thought of the twenty-dollar bill in my wallet.

We sped past the entrance road to the Riviera Drive-In Theater. It had been closed since summer, but a feeble light still illuminated the marquee. Random letters were stuck there, and someone had rearranged them to spell
HES COMING SOON
. Wendy and I abandoned our bikes. We climbed the fence and walked forward, through the labyrinth of speaker poles. The projection booth’s paint was chipping. Ahead of
us, the rectangular drive-in screen resembled a gigantic white envelope. It obliterated part of the sky, the open door to an empty world.

We stopped in the lot’s center. It was nearly midnight. The silence snuck up on us. I listened carefully for a siren, a dog’s bark, or a car horn, but I heard nothing. I remember thinking, It should be snowing now, and then, as if I’d punched a button marked
MIRACLES
, the sky lit up, speckled with thousands of moving flakes.

I felt I had to speak to prove this was happening. “It’s snowing.”

I took Wendy’s hand. Snowflakes clung to our coats. “I wish they were showing a movie right now,” she whispered. “A film about our lives, everything that’s happened so far. And we would be the only ones standing here, just you and me.”

With her free hand, she unhooked a speaker from its pole. She twiddled the dials and lifted it to her ear. “Listen. I hear something. It’s the voice of God.” She laughed, and I leaned to where she held the speaker, the side of my head brushing against its chilly ridges. The snow began tumbling faster in sharp diagonal darts. I closed my eyes and listened. Wendy gripped my fingers tighter. After a while, I heard a whispering from deep within the speaker. It could have been something as explainable as Wendy playing a joke, or our gloves bristling together, or the wind that gusted the flakes around us. But I wanted the noise to be something else. “Yes,” I told her, “I hear him.” The rest of the world had frozen, and Wendy and I were all that remained. I brushed snow from her face. “I hear him.”

Summer 1991

The summer air seemed ready to burst into flame. I finished mowing the grass and stretched in the rubber-ribbed lawn chair. Ten feet away, my mother stood with her head tilted, her sunglasses reflecting two white specks of sun, and aimed her gun at a pyramid of 7-UP bottles.
Bang-bang-bang.
Only a green shard remained from the top bottle, but her other shots had missed. “I’ll flunk my accuracy test tomorrow,” she said.

“Keep practicing,” I said. I was dressed in sandals and shorts, my bare knees smudged with grass stains. I sipped orange juice through a straw. I had basted my chest with suntan oil that smelled like toasted coconut.

The newspaper and mail had arrived early that morning: a telephone bill, a postcard from Deborah showing Haight Street under a tie-dyed sky, and a membership notice from the National Rifle Association for my mother. The other letters came from colleges in Indiana, Arizona, and a Kansas Christian school called Bethany that had no doubt gotten my name from some church function I’d participated in years ago. “Congratulations Christian Graduate,” the envelope said. I dumped the letters on the grass unread. I’d already decided to stay close to home for two years and attend the community college in Hutchinson.

My mother reloaded and aimed again. The bullets missed, missed, and missed, whizzing down the hill on the house’s north side. She gingerly placed her .38 on the grass. Watching my usually serious mother at target practice made me want to laugh. I wondered what the town’s busybodies thought, whether avenues of women were standing on their porches, squinting toward our house. Maybe a write-up would appear in the weekly paper, something like “Shots Heard on North Side of Town.” Since my father and Deborah had left, I reasoned that Little River regarded my mother and I as weirdos: the forever solemn, gun-toting divorcee and her acned, bookworm son.

My mother rubbed the gun against her thigh, slipping it into an imaginary holster. “Get dressed,” she said. “It’s time to go food shopping, and I need the company.” In the month since I’d finished high school, this had become our Saturday routine: a trek to Hutchinson to buy the week’s groceries, then stop for chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl ice cream cones on the way home. We were both free for the day—me from my occasional lawn-mowing jobs, and my mother from the prison.

Inside, I bounded the stairs to my room. I kicked aside paperbacks, plucked a shirt from a pile of clothes, and slipped it over my oily shoulders. Downstairs, I grabbed the newspaper and followed my mother out the door.

The heat rose in visible waves from the highway. My mother drove forward. She flipped a switch, and cool air filled the Toyota’s front seat. I withdrew my mother’s country-western cassette from the car stereo slot, retired it to the glove compartment, and replaced it with a tape by Kraftwerk. My mother protested but began tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. The band’s robotic voices droned lyrics about romancing a machine. I “sang” along, then unrolled
the
Hutchinson News
and scanned the headlines:
COMMISSIONER INDICTED ON RAPE CHARGE; FLOOD WARNING FOR RENO COUNTY
.

Neither story interested me, so I turned the page. What I saw took a few seconds to register. The individual letters
U
and
F
and
O
were stamped across the top of the paper. On the page’s left side, someone had penciled an amateurish drawing of a spaceship.

I’d seen similar drawings in hundreds of books, but I never expected an everyday newspaper to run a story about UFOs. “Listen to this,” I said to my mother. I announced the headline. “NBC to Broadcast Local Woman’s Extraterrestrial Story.”

The car swarmed with a gunpowder smell that emanated from my mother’s skin. She looked at the newspaper in my lap and nodded, pressing me to read on.

I skimmed the article’s first half. “This woman from Inman,” I said. “She doesn’t live that far away. Her name’s Avalyn Friesen. This says she’s been abducted by aliens at various times during her life. It all came out under hypnosis. Some TV show is doing a special on alien visitations this coming Friday night, and she’s among the people they’re featuring.”

I believed the woman’s story, and my mother knew it. She and I had discussed UFOs countless times. Before my parents split up, these discussions had acted as a bond: my father hadn’t accompanied us when we witnessed the UFO hovering over our watermelon field, so talking about the incident was our way of shutting him out. My mother knew I still read magazines and books, still watched TV shows about unexplained spacecraft and close encounters.

“I feel sorry for her,” I said. “People in her town will think she’s a freak.” I stared at the thumb-size picture of
Avalyn. She had chubby, rouged cheeks and a closemouthed smile that looked like a tiny bow tie. She wore oversize, rhinestone-framed glasses. She resembled a widow, struggling against the pull of tears. She didn’t seem the sort who’d fabricate an outlandish story for attention.

According to the caption, Avalyn had drawn the UFO herself. She shaped it like a gray football with legs and antennas. I could remember the spectacle of
our
UFO as if I’d sighted it only yesterday. During the first week of school after that summer, I had drawn a similar spacecraft on poster board, its lights shooting beams of energy in blue crayon. I was in third grade then. I remember standing for show-and-tell, displaying my handmade poster, and relating my UFO sighting to my classmates. They had laughed until I fell back into my seat. On my walk home from school that day, a group of kids wrenched the poster from me. They stomped and spat on the drawing until all that remained were tattered bits in a puddle of mud.

The grocery was located two blocks from the Cosmosphere. When we got to the store, I usually loitered in the parking lot, squinting at the Cosmosphere’s marquee to check for any upcoming shows or special announcements. But now I’d found something more important, more
real
than the shows I watched from month to month on that domed screen.

I followed my mother through the store’s aisles, carrying the newspaper in front of my face, sidestepping other shoppers. I kept staring at Avalyn’s photo. For years I’d wanted to actually meet someone who confessed to an alien encounter. I didn’t know anyone beyond my mother and sister who claimed to have even seen a UFO; now, twenty miles from my own home, a woman had been abducted and taken aboard a ship from some other world. Even through the
photograph’s grainy ink, I could tell she knew something remarkable, something ethereal and profound. Beauty resided in that knowledge. I wanted it. Perhaps Avalyn Friesen was in Hutchinson at this moment, maybe even shopping at this very store. Carts wheeled past me, and I looked up from the photo for any scrap of resemblance. While my mother bagged radishes and cucumbers, I noticed the profile of a woman weighing zucchini: similar nose, same hair pulled into a bun. I moved to stare into her face. The woman turned away. It wasn’t Avalyn.

I waited for my mother to finish, then stepped out the sliding glass doors. A plane of heat replaced the store’s cool air. I knelt before the newspaper machines—Hutchinson, Kansas City, Wichita. No headlines about Avalyn, but I guessed that a story might be lurking somewhere within those pages. I took a chance on Wichita. I plugged two quarters into the machine, pulled out two papers instead of one, and returned to the Toyota.

On page C-12, in the “People and Places” section, I found it. The story in the Wichita
Eagle-Beacon
mirrored the one I’d read in the
News
, complete with the innocuous spacecraft drawing. But this piece contained specific additions. Avalyn had drawn one of her abductors. The alien was short with droopy arms and an enormous, hairless head shaped like a lightbulb. It had tiny pinpricks for a nose. Its ears were question marks. Its mouth thinned to a slit, a mere line scissored into its face. But the wildest aspect of Avalyn’s alien was its eyes. She had blackened them in, huge almond-shaped pools embedded in its face. The drawing was crude, almost childlike. I tried to imagine coming face-to-face with this being, this thing that had touched Avalyn’s skin.

Beneath the pair of columns was something else the
first article had omitted. A psychologist who specialized in treating alien abductees had provided a list of signs and signals that indicated possible interaction with aliens.

Item number one, regarding the stolen time, reminded me of the night I woke in the crawl space. Sometimes, even now, serious concentration could bring back the air of that
room, the smell of my nose’s bewildering blood. Ren Bloomfield had mentioned nosebleeds in item number three. And I remembered times in my life when the dark had petrified me, times I’d felt paranoid, times I’d had strange dreams. Finally, the list’s last item was an understatement in my case. Ever since the day I’d seen my UFO, I’d been fascinated, searching everywhere for scraps about extraterrestrial life.
Chances are you’re not alone,
the article said. The urge to speak to Avalyn overwhelmed me. I wanted to discover all the knowledge she’d been unwillingly given.

My mother tapped on the passenger’s side window. I jerked my head from the article and saw her standing in the parking lot. A chubby kid stood beside her in an ink-smudged apron, his arms laden with grocery sacks. “Open the trunk,” my mother yelled. I folded the paper in my lap and pulled the latch.

“Let’s get ice cream,” she said as I started the car. When I didn’t answer, she stared at me. I pointed to the newspaper on the dashboard, and she picked it up.

“Oh, her again,” she said. She began the article, her finger guiding from word to word, and while she read I coasted through the Snow Palace drive-thru and ordered the regular.

I steered home with one hand; held the ice cream cone with the other. My mother polished off the article. “So,” she said, “I guess we’ll be spending Friday night in front of the TV.” A half-brown, half-white ice cream smear covered her upper lip.

During the week, I searched the papers for updates on Avalyn. I watched TV for commercials about the upcoming UFO special. Before bed, I read books from my bookcase’s top shelf. Some were yellowed large-print paperbacks my
mother had bought from book fairs or kids’ mail-order clubs when I was younger. Their covers showed drawings of lanternlike spaceships, more cartoon than reality. Some included blurry black-and-white photographs of objects that resembled Frisbees, hubcaps, beanies, and, in one case, a newfangled telephone. The stories in these books only concerned UFO sightings; none told details of alien encounters. It was as if the abductions were something intimate and secret, relegated only to books geared toward adults.

On that hot Friday afternoon, my mother suggested we go fishing—something we hadn’t done since my father lived with us. “An angling excursion,” she called it, and I agreed. I brought along a skimpy paperback,
Searching the Skies.
Its final sentence made a poor attempt at scaring preteen readers: “Will you or your family be the next to make contact with a craft from another world?” I lobbed the book into the backseat. “Stupid,” I said.

My mother steered onto a sandy, tree-framed road that led to a field of grazing cattle. A family named the Erwins owned the land. Years before, Mr. Erwin had told my father he could fish in the pond whenever he wanted. My mother wasn’t certain the welcome still extended to her, more than three years after the divorce. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. “You and me, hauled into jail for trespassing.”

We sidled through weeds, carrying our poles toward a pond shaped like a mirror-image Oklahoma. Fish bones and plastic six-pack rings littered the bank. Wind winnowed through maples and oaks that circled the water’s edge, the sound like distant applause. It served as percussion for the bawling cows in the distance. I mooed back at them. My mother sighed and plucked a bass lure from the tackle box. It was the same box that Deborah and I had bought my father for Christmas years ago, the same he had abandoned.
She held the lure toward the sunlight. It looked like a beetle coated with purple feathers, and my mother squinted at it as if it might suddenly spring to life. “There’s nothing like the taste of grilled widemouth bass,” she said. Crescents of sweat had already formed on her blouse.

“I predict there will be no widemouth bass in this pond,” I told her. “Perch, catfish, carp maybe”—I guided a wriggling night crawler onto my hook—“but no bass.”

I cast my line. I breathed in, and the confectionery air filled my nose. Kansas always smells great when summer has kicked into gear—damp, almost flowery, as if an exotic tea is brewing in each cloud. My mother and I sat on buckets of white plastic, the buckets we hoped would carry loads of fat fish by the day’s close. She chewed gum that smelled like apples. When I asked her for a piece, she tongued her fingers and wiped on her jeans. She bit her own gum wad in half, rolled it into a green ball, and dropped it into my open mouth.