The Dream Life of Astronauts (3 page)

“Then you write one,” I said.

“Oh, don't be such a sourpuss. I was only kidding.”

“You ought to try it,” Robbie said. “It might free your mind up, you know? I'll start playing, and you jump in whenever the spirit moves you.”

“The spirit's not going to move me. I don't have a creative bone in my body.”

“The ukulele says different,” Robbie said, strumming.

“Ukuleles can't talk.”

“Just close your eyes and say one true thing about yourself. The first true thing that comes to your mind. That'll be the first line of the song.”

She had her legs folded beneath her. With her hands resting flat on her knees, she closed her eyes.

Robbie kept strumming, slow and steady. “Deep breath,” he said.

She breathed in; her shoulders lifted and fell. I thought for a second she was going to smile, but a tremor set into her lips, and when she opened her eyes again, they were glazed with dampness. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “What do you want to hear? That I'd like to buy the world a goddamn Coke?”

“If that's what's in your head.”

“What's in my head,” she said, suddenly getting to her feet, “is that I have a million errands to run. Will you all bring in the dishes and the blanket? I really need to get going.” Without waiting for us to answer, she tugged on her blouse, straightening it, and marched back into the house.

“So much for that,” Robbie said. “Want to go a movie and then test-drive some cars? I need wheels, man.”

We walked to the movie theater connected to the mall. He wanted to see something called
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,
but I begged him to see
Death Wish.
“Too violent,” he said. “Your parents would kill me.”

“They won't care,” I said. “They won't even know.”

“What if they ask us how we spent our afternoon? You don't want to have to lie, do you?”

They wouldn't ask, I told him. They
never
asked. But he wouldn't give in, so we compromised—a word that, as far as I could tell, meant not getting to do what you wanted to do—and saw
Chinatown
instead. I had a hard time following it. But I liked the part where the private detective had a glove compartment full of watches and put one under a tire so he could tell what time somebody's car was moved, and I liked how he had to wear a bandage on his nose after the rat-faced guy sliced him with the knife. I was still trying to piece the story together when we walked to the used-car lot across the street from the mall.

“Corvette,” Robbie said. “Too rich for my blood, but that's a nice-looking ride.”

“So the lady who got shot at the end was crazy?”

“She wasn't crazy; she was just upset all the time.”

“And that old man was her father?”

“Yeah. A real creep, too.”

“And the guy at the beginning who was crying a lot—he beat up his wife?”

“We probably should have seen something else,” Robbie said. “A comedy or something.”

“Hey, there!” A salesman had come out of the office and was waving hello as he walked toward us.

I followed the two of them around the lot, still thinking about the movie. The salesman showed Robbie one car after another. They talked prices and gas mileage and down payments. “You got something on the low, low end?” Robbie finally asked. “A clunker you want to get rid of?” The salesman pulled a folded handkerchief out of his back pocket, dragged it across his forehead, and walked us over to a '65 Mustang the color of a beet. There were dime-sized spots where the paint was missing. The front and back bumpers were speckled with rust. “This one's talking to me,” Robbie said.

We took it for a test drive. The salesman got behind the wheel first, Robbie took the passenger seat, and I sat in the back. I was wearing shorts and my legs stuck to the vinyl.

“You folks local?” the salesman asked.

“He is,” Robbie said. “I might just be passing through.”

This was news to me; I'd thought Robbie was here to stay.

“It's a beautiful place,” the salesman said. “Some folks are in a panic about the Apollo program shutting down, but I think the island's got plenty to offer. You can't beat the weather.”

Also news to me—sort of like hearing Robbie say our house was nicely decorated. You wouldn't know you were on an island unless you looked at a map, and as for the weather, it was either hot, or less hot.

“Feel that?” the salesman asked, bringing us to a stop at a red light. “New brake pads on her. New dust caps and bleed valves too. Let me find a place to pull off and you can see how she handles.”

He drove another block and turned in to the parking lot of a motel that was chalk white, but decorated with sherbet-colored panels along its second-floor railing. They both got out while I stayed in the back, and as Robbie was rounding the front of the car, he came to a dead stop for a moment. Then he resumed walking and climbed in behind the wheel.

“You'll like the way she handles, I think,” the salesman said. “Decent pickup. You might want to drive around the parking lot a little, first, just to get a feel for her.”

“Nah, I'm good,” Robbie said. He rolled the car forward, tugged the wheel as far as it would go, and U-turned us out of the lot with enough speed to make the muffler bounce off the asphalt.

“Whoa,” the salesman said. “Easy, there.”

Something was eating at me as we drove back to the car lot. It was like I was half-remembering a thought without even knowing what that half was. Some part of the movie we'd just seen, I assumed, because I still didn't understand what it was about. There was the kid on the horse in the dry riverbed. The guy who looked like a math teacher who drowned.

“Not today,” Robbie told the salesman as we stood next to the car. “Soon, though. I've got a girl back in California who's holding some money for me. If I can get her to wire it over, we can do business.”

“I've got tell you,” the salesman said, “somebody was giving this baby serious consideration just yesterday. They might be back this afternoon.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Robbie said. “Do what you have to do.”

During the walk home, he explained to me how car salesmen worked, how there was always somebody about to buy the car you were interested in, and how the previous owner was always a little old lady who only drove to church on Sundays. My thoughts were ricocheting around inside my head, and I felt an antsiness in my stomach that bordered on panic, all because I couldn't decide what I wanted to ask. The salesman hadn't said anything about a little old lady. What did water rights have to do with the woman getting shot through the eye at the end? And what the hell were water rights? Up ahead, something small and furry waddled from one side of the road to the other.

“Jeez!” Robbie said. “Did you see the size of that rat?”

“It wasn't a rat,” I said. “It was a possum.” And then it came to me: the colored panels on the second-floor railing, the name of the motel. “Was that the ping-pong Dad was talking about, that time?”

Robbie cleared his throat. “Say what?”

“The place where we turned around. The Ping Pong Motel.” I could see the name spelled out across the sign. It was a building I'd ridden past so many times that it usually vanished into the background.

“Aw—no,” Robbie said. “Heck, no. I think your dad was talking about
real
ping-pong. Like, with an actual ball and paddles? I think he was just jealous that your mom might have been out, you know, having fun while he was stuck at the office. I wouldn't even mention it, okay?”

I nodded.

“Okay?” he asked again.

“Yeah,” I said, “I got it.” But I was smarter than that. I could spot a clue for what it was, follow the evidence, and figure things out. Where there was smoke, there was fire, and where there was an argument between your parents about ping-pong, and a place called the Ping Pong Motel nearby, well, that mystery was at least partially solved. My mother had gone to that motel, and my father had spotted her there. She'd gone to meet friends, maybe have drinks. Whatever the reason, she'd gone there without my father, and it had made him angry. It didn't explain what had happened with her teacher and the croquet mallet, but in all likelihood there was a line connecting one thing to the other. You didn't have to be Columbo to figure that much out.

R
obbie had been with us for almost a month when he went out alone one morning and came back with the Mustang. The sticker was still in the window as he drove me and my mother down to Mathers Bridge for fried shrimp and ice cream. We were sitting at one of the picnic tables and I was done eating and was staring at the river, wanting a ship to come by so I could see the swing bridge turn, when I spotted a dark shape on the surface of the water, close to the shore. A dead body, I thought. Or a shark. I asked if I could go look and my mother waved me away with her cigarette, telling me to be careful.

Not a dead body, I saw as I got closer to the water, and not a shark, either. Manatees—three of them. Then four. Then five. Moving around so quietly, they didn't make a sound except for an occasional whoosh from their air holes. The two big ones gnawed on the low shrubs growing along the bank. The smaller ones—probably no bigger than me—swam around them, nudged them, barrel-rolled against their sides. They were a family, I thought. Out for lunch, just like us. I watched them until they swam around a bend and out of sight; then I walked back to the picnic table.

My mother was crying over her ice cream. “Do you know what it's like?” she was saying. “I can't breathe. Literally, Robbie, when I'm around him sometimes, I feel the air being sucked out of me.”

“You two need to work this out,” Robbie said. “And not when you're liquored up. That's no good for anybody.”

“Please,” she said. “If I couldn't have a drink in the evenings, I'd go out of my head.” As she touched a finger to the corner of one eye, she caught sight of me. “Hi, honey! Did you have fun?”

A few days later, there was another uproar. My father came home from work early, answered the phone in the kitchen when it rang, and said in a loud voice, “No, she's out. Can I take a message?” A few seconds later, he was all but shouting. “No message, huh? You don't even have the guts to tell me your name? Don't ever call here again, you son of a bitch!” He slammed the phone back into its wall cradle. Then he picked it up again and slammed it down three more times.

Robbie looked at me from across the living room and said, “Let's get out of here for a while.”

We drove to the mall and saw the
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
movie. When it was over, he asked me if I was up for another one, and I said sure, but only if it was
Death Wish.
He relented.

It was dark by the time we got home, and long past dinnertime. I didn't care about missing dinner, because I was stuffed with popcorn and Twizzlers, but I wondered if we were going to be in trouble because we'd just disappeared—no note, nothing said to my parents. When we came in through the front door, the lights were off and there was only the television illuminating the living room. My mother was sitting at the dining room table, staring down into her lap. A glass was in front of her. “Hey, sis,” Robbie said, but she didn't respond, didn't even look up. “Sis?” He walked over to the table and tapped her shoulder, then said, “Aw, Judy. Aw, jeez.” He told me to get a towel from the bathroom.

She'd peed, right there in the chair. The lower half of her skirt and pantyhose were soaked, and the chair cushion was wet underneath her. When we tried to shift her over so we could wipe up around her, she made a couple of sounds, but they weren't really words. My father came out of the back of the house, saw what was going on, and said, “For chrissake.” He told me to go to my room, but I wanted to help and kept pushing the towel under her as Robbie tilted her to one side.

“Maybe we should call somebody,” he said.

“Like who?” my father asked.

“An ambulance?”

“No. She needs to sleep, is all. If she wakes up in the hospital, I'll never hear the end of it. Help me get her to the tub.”

“I don't think she should take a bath right now, Phil. She's barely conscious.”

“I don't want her to take a bath; I want her to sleep in the fucking tub until she's done pissing herself.” He glanced at me, realizing I was still there, and winced. “Please, Sam, go to your room.”

The house was dead quiet for the rest of the night, like Paul Kersey's apartment after his wife had been murdered. I tried to read, but couldn't concentrate. I thought one of them might come check on me, but no one did. More than anything, I wanted to go back out to the living room so I could watch television, but I knew it was probably best to stay out of sight for a while. Eventually, I drifted off.

When I woke up, sometime in the middle of the night, I was lying on my side facing the wall, and an arm was draped over my neck. I started and wiggled myself around, half-expecting to see my mother, or even Robbie, for whatever reason. But it was my father—lying on top of the covers, still dressed in the shirt and trousers he'd worn to work. Sound asleep, gently snoring. It took a few moments to get my mind around the strangeness of his being there. I wanted to nudge him, get him to shift over a few inches so I could have a little more room. But I didn't want him to wake up.

T
he next Thursday, just as
The Streets of San Francisco
was about to start, the programming was interrupted so that the president could come on and talk about Watergate. My father was in the recliner. I'd given Robbie the big red hand chair and was on the couch next to my mother. She hadn't left the house since the night she'd messed herself. She hadn't put on outside clothes, either, but had stayed in her housecoat and matching slippers. The president's speech dragged on, and the camera kept moving in closer and closer, until the knot of his necktie was cut off by the bottom of the screen. He'd never been a quitter, he said, and then, a few minutes later, he told us he was quitting. But he continued to talk, and talk. Finally, he said he would leave each and every American with a prayer, and I felt like groaning, but the prayer was mercifully short. “May God's grace be with you,” he said, “in all the days ahead.” The screen went black. Please, I thought, let it be over. Not just the speech, but the entire whatever it had been that had eaten up so many shows.