Orphan Pirates of the Spanish Main (3 page)

I stare at the postcard now. It's the sand painting on the garage floor. She took a bunch of photos of it with a camera mounted on the garage ceiling before the big fight with Ollie. I'm trying to imagine how and why it's now, impossibly, a postcard in my hands. “How come I didn't get one?”

“Cause you stepped into the sand painting, and I didn't. That's why you've healed, and I haven't. I did some research. That's what they're for. Healing. Mom was trying to heal us. That's why I've lost my sense of smell.”

I don't see the last connection, but I let it pass. He's actually taking something unusual Mom and Dad did seriously, for once, instead of seeing it as further evidence they were crazy. I don't ask why, if I'm all healed—whatever he thinks that means—he needs me to tag along on this foolish journey, because I already know. He would feel too ridiculous otherwise. I'm the one who supposedly believes in this wacky alien shit. I'm the one who should be getting spooky postcards in the mail, not him. He needs his little brother along to boost his confidence that he hasn't totally lost his mind. Late-onset schizophrenia is just one of many judgments out there for an old man who starts talking crazy, but you can always tell your little brother, right? He won't rat you out.

*   *   *

I tell Katyana Ollie wants me to go out to the abyss with him, and she immediately says I should because he's my brother, “and how many things has he ever asked you to do for him?” Katyana's big on family loyalty. But then I get to the part about the postcard, and she stops me. “Let me see it.”

She looks it over front and back, shaking her head. I think she might cry. “I have to go with you,” she says.

“You've seen this before?”

“It's one of Daddy's alien artifacts. Look at the handwriting.”

“I did. It's my mom's.”

“Not the message. Your brother's address. It's Daddy's handwriting.”

I'd completely missed it. The mailing address is even a different color ink. The lettering, tiny, precise printing. I've seen it before myself. It's Dr. Deetermeyer's, Katyana's father, who first introduced me to the idea of my parents' alien origins. He's been missing for almost a year after a nervous breakdown, or whatever it's called now. Katyana was pretty upset when he wasn't around for Dylan's birth. He's done it before, taken off for parts unknown, only to turn up months later, sometimes with a new identity, a position at some new university. Katyana's the only one left to go looking for him. He's as wacky as a bag of cats, but he's a fucking genius at the same time. It can be hard to suss out the borderline.

“You're saying
he
sent this card?”

“You don't think it's from your dead mother, do you?”

“But what about the message? It's her handwriting.”

She shrugs. “Then she wrote it when she was alive.”

“I thought you believed in magical stuff.”

“That doesn't mean I believe in ghosts who mail postcards with Forever stamps.”

Her dad would have had Ollie's address. He kept a huge database of all of us born to alien parents—who are essentially aliens ourselves—which explains a lot about the course of my life. He's tried to interview as many of us as possible. This may have been his attempt to pique Ollie's interest, so he would agree to such an interview. Deetermeyer wouldn't send it to me for fear of Katyana finding him and revealing him to whatever institution he's bamboozled into funding his research for his definitive work on aliens among us. As a genius without real degrees, his references are all aliens like me.

I would rather believe in aliens than ghosts. Katyana's beliefs don't matter: He's still her father. She has to go find him regardless. No one else will. Her much older sister has washed her hands, she says. This from one who claims Jesus is the answer no matter the question. Katyana's relieved to finally have a clue to her father's whereabouts and a little pissed off to have to pursue it at the same time. She has a baby to take care of, for Christ's sake. Katyana is nothing if not adaptable, however.

She smiles. “A big trip. Maybe that's exactly what we need. We haven't been anywhere since before Dylan was born.”

“What about Dylan?” I ask. “We can't just leave him.”

“Of course not. He can experience the train.”

“Train? Who said anything about a train?”

“Don't you think it would be fun? More comfortable with Dylan and all. We can treat your brother. He's really low. He's much nicer than you said. You'll have time to bond, you know? See the country? Daddy's not going anywhere in the middle of the semester, and neither is the abyss.” Even though ours is an unconventional marriage of convenience, scarcely a marriage at all, there's one thing you should know. I will do anything on Earth she asks. I adore her.

Ollie bridles at first. The train? (He hates Amtrak on principle.) But Katyana puts Dylan in his arms and pretty soon Uncle Ollie—Katyana calls him Ollie, and he makes not a whimper—is completely onboard.

*   *   *

That still leaves the dogs. What to do about them. Boarding costs a lot of money. They come out weird, like you would expect intelligent social animals to be after being locked up in a cage for too damn long. Katyana suggests we ask Bill, a retired Unitarian minister and fellow child of aliens, to look after them. We both know him from the dog park. I say retired, but actually they practically forced him out after most of his sermons dwelt on aliens for nearly a year. There was some sort of settlement to make him go away, and he bought a condo a couple of blocks from the church. We're on his balcony having coffee. This is where he sits on Sunday mornings and watches his flock pass by, imagining them feeling guilty for silencing the truth and banishing the messenger. That Unitarian guilt can be some nasty stuff. It comes at you from all directions, and no ritual can resolve it. His pug Clyde's in my lap. I'm rubbing his belly, and he's wiggling and snorting.

Bill's glad to take care of Myrna and Avatar but is eager to discuss other matters. We haven't had a chance to talk since Katyana and I got married.

“What's it like?” he asks.

“Wonderful,” I say.

“I can imagine. She is so fucking hot.”

It's obvious we're not talking about the same thing. “She is that, but we're not fucking.”

“You're kidding. Why not?”

“For starters, I can't.”

“What do you mean you can't?”

“Can't. Dick no work. Since the prostate surgery. The surgeon says it should, but it don't.”

“What about drugs?”

“Read the possible side effects sometime. I can verify those and more, but what they didn't do was stiffen my dick. I was seeing blue and turning red. I felt like a cartoon character. All for an increased risk of heart attack. One's enough for me, thanks. Trust me. There's worse things than a limp dick.”

“I had no idea.”

“It doesn't come up in casual conversation. Besides, it makes people uncomfortable.”

Bill pauses to think about this, about how he does indeed feel uncomfortable. “So I don't understand. Why did you marry her? You figure you've married so many times, what's one more?”

“I married her for the same reason I have always married. I love her.”

“Why on Earth did she marry you?”

“She wanted Dylan to have a father. I claimed paternity. Dylan's legally my son. By marrying we seal the deal legally for him, even if we divorce later.”

“You're nuts. Why would you do a thing like that for her? You hardly know her. She's crazy on top of that.”

“And you're not? C'mon Bill. We connected. She saved my life. I was headed for the abyss, and she turned me around. It's a small thing, to make their lives easier. They'll have a place to live and a tidy sum when I'm gone.”

“You make it sound like it's next week.”

“It's always next week, next minute. You have to live now. You can't wait around until you're a better person to do the right thing. Katyana told me you used to hit on her. Would you fuck her if you could?”

His eyes grow huge at the thought. “In a heartbeat.”

“But you wouldn't take her in, marry her, help raise her kid?”

He makes a face. Am I nuts? “Who's the real father?”

“A rock star who denies paternity, her ex, who would put up a stink if she pressed it. He doesn't want to complicate his assets and piss off his current girlfriend with a son. I have very simple assets and no girlfriends, and I rather like having a son.”

“You change diapers?”

“Of course.”

“God, I hated that.” Bill and his thirty-something son are what he calls “estranged.” He always makes it sound like the grinding wheels of fate have yielded this sad result, symbolized by the middle finger his son raised to him in ninth grade, calling him a hypocrite and his church “stupid.” Sounds more like adolescence and a pompous dad to me, but I've never had a son. It was in his quest to understand his failed relationship with his son, as he calls it, that Bill first discovered his alien origins.

So the son never heard the sermons that got his dad bounced from the pulpit. I wonder what son would think of father now, a sad faraway look in his eye that might be for his son, for his flock, or it might be the blanket loss of dementia, though Bill seems sharp enough to me. Just a little nuts. The view from the pulpit must get to you after a while. I'm reminded of Myrna perched on an ottoman in the back room of the house watching her chaotic flock of squirrels. It's her favorite thing to do. How crazy is that?

Clyde, sensing Bill's need, rolls over in my lap, plops down on the floor, and leaps onto Bill's knees like a flying ham. Bill cradles him in his arms. Clyde gazes at him in bug-eyed adoration, snorting sweet nothings, and Bill tells him what a good boy he is.

I rise, bid farewell. “I'll bring the dogs by in the morning. Our train leaves at ten.”

*   *   *

I'm in the berth above, Katyana and Dylan sleep below. The ceiling is close, the stars beyond. We're rocketing through the night inside the pleasant roar of the train. I lied to Bill in a way, made it sound like nothing: Impotence. Trouble is, desire persists. Can even grow. Like a cancer. Another unwelcome manifestation of overenthusiastic life.

I've just spent the day traveling with my beautiful wife and child who look at me as if they don't know we're all pretending to be a happy family who love one another. She cradled my white-whiskered face in her hands before I ascended to my berth and said, “Thank you for being such a sweet, sweet man,” and kissed me softly, lovingly, on the lips.

She had no intention to render me sleepless, to break my heart. Sweet means patient mostly, not being a self-centered asshole. It's amazing how many men find this difficult. This is no easy journey we've undertaken, and I'm not talking about the train. Sweet's easy. I can do it in my sleep, but dreaming of sweet Katyana, I can't sleep. Longing with no relief. Not a problem I had foreseen, not a bad problem for a man my age to suffer from. I could just not care anymore, like the surgeon said would happen eventually, inevitably. Not that I put much stock in what the surgeon says these days.

I roll out of bed and head for the snack bar, where I find the conductor at one end doing his paperwork, and Ollie in the middle checking his messages. The concession is shut down and dark.

I sit down across from him. “I couldn't sleep.”

“Me neither,” he says. “I heard from Camille. She says House stinks worse than ever, and he's acting out with me not there. He chewed up her flip-flop.”

“I'm impressed. I didn't think he still had it in him from what you told me.” House is an eleven-year-old basset-Doberman mix with chronic odor problems, a constant source of Ollie's distress, one of many tributaries. Ollie's always got distress. He stocks up at Costco, clips coupons. I take it as a good sign Camille's looking after the dogs. She must still love him. I don't remember the other dogs or their troubled stories, but you can bet they're a handful.

“The vet wants to give him antibiotics, says the skin issues might point to an underlying infection. He looks like shit. Coat's dull and patchy. He scratches himself all the time. I tried tea-tree oil. Nothing.”

“Aloe?”

“Haven't tried that. You think that might help?”

“Make him feel better anyway.”

“What do you think about the antibiotics? This vet. She's new. Girl right out of school. I don't trust doctors.”

“Me either. But I'm alive because I have three mini Slinkies in my heart: Doctors have their moments. My old lab Alice had something like what you're describing, and antibiotics cleared it up when nothing else would. You don't really think that's a postcard from Mom, do you?”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think she had postcards made of the sand painting, and Katyana's father, Simon Deetermeyer, got ahold of them.” I've explained to him about Deetermeyer's theories before, but he wasn't ready to listen then. Now that we're on a train in the middle of the night on the way to the abyss, what else is he going to do?

Ollie's skeptical. It's a lot to swallow, to accept that your parents were aliens who had taken on human form, as Deetermeyer believed our parents to be. “So her father's insane? I thought you said you believed him.”

“I do. Not everything. Just the parts I like. Sort of the way Mom approached religion: Sweet Jesus, no Hell, lots of forgiveness and mercy.”

“Mom was crazy too.”

“That never kept her from being right, Ollie. Like the message on that card. Dad needed us.”

“No he didn't. I think he preferred his life out on the road. You know he cheated on her, right?”

Did he think I was deaf? When they fought, old betrayals came up. We never lived anyplace large enough for me not to hear. When Ollie was in the military, and I was in high school, they plumbed Precambrian layers Ollie probably didn't know about before Dad started traveling, while he was still in advertising, about the time I was born. While the adult children of alien beings tend toward serial monogamy, the alien parents like mine typically mated for life in a marriage riddled with infidelities, noisy fights and noisy sex, and lots of mercy and forgiveness.