Mysterious Skin (2 page)

Deborah nudged me and rolled her eyes. She started to say something, but my father poked his head into our backseat window. “Tomorrow night, your mother will make turtle steaks.”

I skipped upstairs early that night, because I feared what might happen. I busied myself by scrubbing an old toothbrush over a lemon-colored urine stain on last night’s bedsheet. As I was pulling pajamas from my dresser, my father tapped his usual one-two-three on my bedroom door, just as I’d expected. “Brian,” he said, “I need help in the backyard.”

I rewadded the pj’s into the drawer and followed my father. He was dressed in jeans and tennis shoes. He clutched a knife, which glinted under the back porch light. He walked to the car, lifted the trunk, and hoisted the gunnysack into the air, the shape inside writhing and quivering against the burlap.

Earlier that spring, my father had demonstrated the proper way to gut catfish and bass. Now I would learn more. He dumped the hissing turtle onto the grass. “Step on its back,” he said. I obeyed. I lifted my head and stared at my room’s windows. Up there, I could see the blemished pattern of my ceiling’s tiles, part of the wallpaper, and a frantic moth, its powdery wings beating against the globe of my bedroom light.

“Hold it down,” my father said. “Put more pressure on it.” I looked to the grass. The turtle’s head stretched forward. My foot’s weight forced it from its shell. My father gripped the knife in his fist, its blade inching toward the neck’s craggy skin. The turtle couldn’t move. For some reason, I hadn’t minded when he’d filleted the fish, but now my strength fizzled. “Step down harder, Brian.” The knife slid across the neck, and I saw a sliver of my face reflected in the blade. A gush of blood washed over it. “Dammit, stomp harder.” The turtle was still snapping, its head nearly severed. My father sawed farther into its flesh. I couldn’t stand. My body weakened, and my foot lifted from the shell.

With the sudden release of pressure, the turtle’s blood splashed the toe of my sneaker and my father’s jeans. Its jaw closed over the meat of my father’s hand, its sharp edge razoring his skin. He yelled. He made one last cut, collected the head in his wounded hand, and stared at me. At that moment, the face wasn’t precisely his. It resembled colorless taffy someone had stretched, then bunched back together. He dropped the turtle’s head, and it bounced twice on the grass.

My father lifted his arm. I knew he was going to hit me. Before I felt his hand, I passed out, crumpling like a dropped puppet.

I awoke minutes later, sprawled in a living room chair. My father stood over me, smiling, offering me chocolate milk in my favorite cup, the one with a map of Niagara Falls that my parents had saved from their honeymoon. When I finished, my father took the cup from me. “You’re better now,” he said. “Nothing’s the matter with
my
boy.” He thumbed a brown trickle of milk from my chin.

The following day my mother cooked turtle steaks. On my plate, the cut of meat resembled a gray island, floating in its river of gravy. “Mmmm,” my father said, savoring his
first bite. “Brian helped carve these babies,” he announced to my mother and Deborah.

The softball complex in Hutchinson sponsored a world-class men’s slow-pitch tournament that summer, and my father didn’t miss a moment. On Saturday, he finished the remainder of the leftover turtle in the form of a gristly stew my mother had filled with pearl onions and baby carrots. “Sunday school tomorrow morning,” he told Deborah and me. He chugged away in his pickup.

My mother sprayed air freshener to immolate the kitchen’s meaty smell. “There now, he’s all gone.” While she sliced potatoes, Deborah and I changed into our pajamas. I turned on the TV.

By the time we finished dinner, that night’s comedies and news had ended. A late movie began on channel ten. The plot involved a teenage boy who hid behind a house’s walls to spy on the typical American family who lived there. I kept dozing off, secure within the huge fur throw pillow, waking to catch fragments of the movie.

I opened my eyes. Deborah was smacking the side of the TV with her fist. “Haven’t even had the thing a year,” my mother said, “and it already needs repair.” Staticky fuzz displayed itself across the screen, leaking blue beams through the room. The sound was fine—“Let’s get out of here,” a character screamed—but the picture was faulty.

A car honked from outside. “Someone’s pulling in the driveway,” my mother said. “His ball games must have ended early.”

She opened the door, and a man stepped into the house. He looked about twenty-five. He wore cowboy boots and a threadbare, sleeveless gray sweatshirt. A pinch of snuff bulged behind his bottom lip, and he periodically spit into a plastic cup. “Christ, Margaret,” he said to my mother.
“You’ve got to see this thing I’ve been following, all the way from the outskirts of Hutchinson.”

“You’re tanked,” my mother said. She spun to face Deborah and me. The TV began whispering and buzzing, and the screen cast shadows over our four faces. Its blue reflected in the man’s eyes, something familiar in its color. “Kids,” my mother said, “this is Philip Hayes. He works with me at the prison.”

“Brian,” he said. “Deborah.” He knew our names, which surprised me. His hands shook, and the booze on his breath saturated the air of the room. “Come outside.” He was speaking to all of us now.

I put my glasses back on, then grabbed my sneakers by the laces and stepped into them. Philip Hayes hustled outside, and we followed him out. The night grew curiously quiet, lacking the regular sonata of crickets and cicadas. The silence made me edgy. Deborah and I passed Philip’s Ford pickup, which sat like a dinosaur in our driveway, its humongous wheels jacked up. He had left its door open. “This way,” he said. “Around to the north of the house.”

He led us to the hillside, the side that faced away from Little River toward the field where my father raised watermelons. “Look there.” He pointed to the sky, but the three of us had already seen it: hovering in the night air above our field, a group of soft blue lights.

I stepped forward. My mother gripped my shoulder. “What is it?” she asked. Philip shook his head.

I made out the form of a plane or spaceship. It issued a low hum, like the barely audible drone of machines. It looked like two shallow silver bowls, welded mouth-to-mouth into an oval shape. Lights circled the ship’s middle, and they radiated cones of blue. A small rectangular hatchway protruded from the oval’s bottom. It shot forth a brighter, almost white spotlight that meandered across the
field below and illuminated rows of plants. The spotlight lingered, then retraced its paths, as if searching for some sign of life among the melons. The ship moved through the sky as leisurely as a cloud in a breeze. We stood at the north face of the house, not speaking. When I looked at Deborah, the silvery blue glowed against her face. It gave my own skin a bluish tone that sparkled on the toes of my sneakers, where a crust of turtle blood remained.

“While I was driving out of Hutchinson I saw it flying around,” Philip said. He wiped his palm on his sweatshirt and spit snuff onto the grass. “It was going faster then. That white beam kept searching over a field of cattle. I followed it and followed it, and it went right over the sign that says
LITTLE RIVER: FIVE MILES
. I thought I’d better show this to someone so they won’t think I’m nuts.”

“It’s one of those UFOs,” my mother said. The blue lights seemed to intensify, and the humming got louder. My mother lifted her hand from my shoulder and shaded her eyes.

The spaceship began to move farther away, beyond our field, past the town’s edge. Its spotlight crowned the tops of trees, giving a white corona to the oak and cottonwood leaves. We craned our necks toward the heavens as we stood on the hill, the two-story house behind us like a portrait’s massive frame. I wondered how we looked to whoever or whatever manned the ship. Maybe the ship’s inhabitants thought we were a family: Deborah and I were the kids who shared our mother’s blond hair; this tall, dark-haired Philip Hayes was our father.

Soon the line of trees blocked the UFO. Its glare remained briefly, then disappeared. “Christ,” Philip said. Spit. “I almost thought I was crazy.”

“I wonder if anyone else saw it,” Deborah said. She still watched the treetops, as if the ship would suddenly come zooming back.

We trudged toward the house, Philip following. As we entered the living room, the television gradually sizzled to life, its picture becoming clear again. In the movie, a policeman drew his gun and blasted the criminal teenager in the chest. An ambulance’s wail blended into tinkling, plaintive piano music. “I’ll make coffee,” my mother told Philip. “He should be back soon.” At first I wasn’t certain who she meant. I fell onto the fur pillow, and Deborah sat on the floor.

Philip Hayes joined my mother in the kitchen. I heard her open the cabinet, the silverware drawer, the refrigerator. “What do you think—” I started.

“Shhh,” Deborah said. In the television’s glow, her eyes resembled the jewels of blue lights that orbited the spaceship.
Blue,
I thought.

The screen displayed the movie’s closing credits. I lazed back into the softness of the pillow and closed my eyes. As I drifted toward sleep my mind focused on two things, a pair of the summer’s images I’d never forget. I saw the cramped room of the crawl space, directly below where Deborah and I were sitting. And then, equal in power and mystery, I saw the UFO, still out there somewhere, levitating the earth.

Our new neighbors were losers. They loved spying on us. After sunset, a woman loitered in the street with binoculars. Two men sometimes idled their car along the curb or in the driveway, shining headlights into our living room. Mom and I tolerated it at first. We had just moved across Hutchinson, the fourth time in as many years, to a house on Monroe Street.

One night, less than a week after we’d settled, we heard a honk from outside. Mom upped the TV’s volume and drew the blind on the bay window. High beams illuminated her from head to belly like spotlights on a go-go dancer.

“It’s that El Camino again,” she said. “Only assholes drive those. Well, I’ll give them what they want.” She began stripping. Her clothes piled on the floor like a miniature tepee. Shorts, blouse, pink underwear. When she finished, she pranced and discoed through the rooms, a dance I’d grown accustomed to. Her skin shone, as white and solid as frozen milk. She resembled a living version of the Venus statue I’d seen in Hutchinson’s Carey Park, minus the scratches and misspelled graffiti.

She blew the spies a kiss, then shook her fist. “Screw you.” We both giggled. The car sped away, and she dressed.

Later, I curled beside her on the makeshift couch we’d
constructed with red throw pillows. She ran her hand through my hair like a warm brush. We switched channels until we found a horror film. Mom finished her bottle and turned the volume down; we listened to the thunder in the distance. The portable fan blew a few hairs loose from her scarf, and they tumbled across her shoulders. She fell asleep first.

I was almost nine years old, and the new house was half-mine, half-hers. The summer of ’81 was just beginning. She snored, her breath heavy and velour against my ear. The movie ended, and a picture flashed on the television: a test-pattern drawing of an angry Cherokee in headdress, numbers and symbols floating above him. Mom stirred in her half-sleep. Her bottom lip grazed my eye. “I’m dreaming about my Neil,” she whispered.

During that first week in June, thunderstorms ripped through central Kansas. Podunk towns flooded, dried up, reflooded. One evening, the father-son weatherman team on channel twelve interrupted Mom’s favorite sitcom to identify where tornadoes had been spotted. Hutchinson’s warning sirens started screaming, and Mom and I rushed next door to take shelter in our new neighbor lady’s fruit cellar. A single light bulb dangled on a cord from the ceiling. Peaches and tomatoes floated in Mason jars like the unborn puppies I’d seen in the science lab at school. “This place smells like a fucking sewer,” I said. Mom nodded, but Mrs. Something-or-Other appeared as if she’d swallowed chili peppers.

The storm passed. We puddle jumped home. Mom telephoned her current boyfriend, Alfred. He chugged over to pick her up, and they left me in front of the TV. “No work tomorrow, so we’re going barhopping,” she said. She jabbed my ribs. “Be back in half past a monkey’s ass.”

An hour later, another branch of the same storm revis
ited Hutchinson. The sirens echoed through the street. The top corner of the TV screen displayed a sketchy funnel and the word
WARNING.
“Three’s Company”’s innuendoed dialogue was replaced by a newsman’s monotone. “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Reno County. Take shelter immediately. Keep clear of windows. If you are in a vehicle, pull to the side of the road, get out, and lie facedown in the ditch…” I’d heard it all before, but for the first time I didn’t have Mom to guide me.

I considered running next door again, then decided on Mom’s room. Through the window’s glass, nuggets of hail mixed with the spattering rain. Car headlights blurred into narrow white trails. The wind almost drowned the siren’s noise. I crawled beneath Mom’s bed and cupped my palms over my ears. It was dark under there, but I found a lacy negligee and a stack of magazines I hadn’t previously seen. Sandwiched between the
House and Gardens
and
Cosmos
was a ragged copy of
Playgirl.

I’d riffled through porno magazines at school—a kid used to sneak them from his dad’s closet and dole them out at recess. We would draw beards and eye patches on the naked women, then fold them into paper submarines and 747s. But the
Playgirl
was different; I didn’t want to deface these models. All of them were males. I slid myself from under the bed, pulled the chain on the lamp, and returned to my hiding place. I skimmed the pages. Sullen-looking men lounged on plush sofas, beside swimming pools, amid a barn’s scattered hay.

I focused on “Edward Cunningham”’s series of pictures: he nibbled a strawberry, poured champagne, relaxed in a Jacuzzi, toweled off. He had tanned skin, feathered hair, and, like almost all the other men, a mustache. Edward’s was the shade of my “goldenrod” crayon in the Crayola box. The camera had caught the gleamy water beads on his
shoulder and the trail of hair below his belly button. I slipped a hand into my Fruit-of-the-Looms.

“Edward” made me forget the storm. When I finished, I realized the sirens had ended. I carefully replaced the magazine exactly as I’d found it. Had the lower corner been dog-eared five minutes earlier? I tiptoed back to bed. Mom and Alfred returned at 3
A.M
., and I held my breath, waiting, until certain they’d fallen asleep.

Alfred announced over a plate of sunny-side-ups that a cyclone had touched down three miles from Monroe Street. He drove Mom and me to view the minor damage. The storm had hit hardest in Yoder, a tiny Amish community we sometimes visited to buy sourdough bread or cinnamon rolls. Bearded farmers drove their horse-and-buggies on roads strewn with litter. Mom pointed first to a dead collie sprawled in a ditch, then to a shingle that had speared through a telephone pole. Tree limbs had avalanched onto a block’s worth of roofs. “Boring,” I said.

We headed back into Hutchinson. “Last night an A-bomb could have hit and I wouldn’t have known it,” Mom said. She swigged her can of Olympia and pressed it against my forearm.

Alfred stopped at Quik-Trip for another six-pack, then beelined across town to the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce. He had told Mom how Little League might help keep me out of her hair for the summer months. They escorted me inside. A circle of rowdy kids lingered under a giant American flag, waiting to scribble their names on lists for the summer’s baseball teams.

I leaned across a table lined with clipboards. On each page, two columns were labeled
NAME
and
AGE
. I had to choose from the Junior Division’s twenty-two different teams. “Pick the one that’ll win you the trophy,” Mom told
me. She was shitfaced drunk. A puny kid, his ear sprouting the wire from a hearing aid, pointed at her short pink skirt. If I’d been alone with him, I would have crushed the hearing device in my fist.

I chose the Hutchinson Pizza Palace Panthers. One, because their uniforms were snazzy—a crudely drawn cat leaping from a blue and white pepperoni pie. Two, because I thought the sponsors might treat the team to free pizzas after games. “Your coach’s name is Mr. Heider,” the balding man behind the sign-up booth said. “He’s only been coaching a year, but he’s got an enviable record already.”

The man handed me a folded baseball jersey and matching pants. The number ninety-nine was emblazoned on the jersey’s back. “I have to drag that old Polaroid from the closet,” Mom said. She knelt, nearly falling at the feet of the circle of kids, and focused a make-believe camera. “Smile, baby.”

Practice started one week later at a teeny baseball diamond even dwarves would feel stifled on. The fence behind home plate displayed tatters and gouges. The infield’s mud hadn’t yet dried, and a musky odor of rain choked the air. Horseflies buzzed around my head.

Coach Heider lined us up. He wore a white T-shirt, blue sweatpants, an A’s cap. I noticed the bushy sand-colored mustache that curled at his lips’ corners. I’d been thumbing through Mom’s
Playgirl
almost daily, and I’d started to daydream those mustached and bearded cowboys, lifeguards, and construction workers clutching me, their whiskers scratching my face.

I had told Mom I wanted to look tough, so she had darted to the local Salvation Army store and United Methodist Thrift for wristbands and a used pair of rubber cleats. She also bought the black sunblock most major lea
guers smeared below their eyes. I wore the bands, the cleats, and the sunblock to that first practice. My teammates watched me as if I might unsheathe a knife.

Coach squinted at the new troupe of Panthers, searching for defects. His gaze paused on me. Desire sledgehammered my body, a sensation I still wasn’t sure I had a name for. If I saw Coach now, say across a crowded bar, that feeling would translate to something like “I want to fuck him.” Back then, I wasn’t sure what to do with my emotion. It felt like a gift I had to open in front of a crowd.

He told us to announce our names. We obeyed, and he repeated them, scribbling in a score book. “Bailey, Thieszen, McCormick, Varney…” He spoke with a German accent. “Lackey, Ensminger…” When he rolled his
r
’s on “Porter,” my teammates silently mouthed the same name. I was younger than most of them, which made me want to try harder. I wanted to impress Coach Heider.

The players hit ten baseballs each. Coach stood at the pitcher’s mound, poised like one of the gilded figures I’d noticed on trophies in the Chamber of Commerce hall. He cocked back his arm and pitched. Most kids hit ground balls that barely left the infield or, worse yet, struck out. I’d never seen many of them before, but I could tell they were poor excuses for players. Coach must have mirrored my feelings. “Come on.” Disgust cracked his voice. “Concentrate, watch the ball, swing like you mean it.”

My turn. I gritted my teeth and tried to form a synthesis of a few major league idols. I.e., I’d seen the Reds’ Joe Morgan twitching his right arm before taking a swing, pistoning his elbow as if pumping blood into his biceps. I mimicked the gesture. Coach Heider grinned. His first pitch lobbed toward me, and I smacked a line drive to left field.

After practice, Coach shepherded us into the dugout and began a pep talk from the center of our huddle. He summa
rized his initial reactions. I might as well brag. It appeared I’d be the team’s star player. My fielding was as topnotch as my hitting, so Coach positioned me shortstop. “And McCormick, I think we’ll bat you cleanup. We need the home runs.” He said the word as if it had three syllables. When he leaned over to pat my shoulder, I noticed a cluster of moles like spatters of chocolate on his neck.

A man walked toward the team carrying an expensive-looking camera. Coach lined us in two rows beside the dugout, and I got the privilege of standing in back, next to him. “This is for our records,” the photographer said. “Say cheese. No, say yogurt.” The numbskulls on the team laughed, and he snapped the picture.

“Refreshments served,” Coach said. The fifteen Panthers fractured the posed configuration and rushed toward his station wagon, most running faster than they had all day. Coach opened the back door to a cooler filled with cans of flavored sodas. I fished around its icy pond and came up with a peach Nehi.

The parents began arriving after the two hours had finished. Mom drove Alfred’s pickup to the ball diamond. She had started a job at an IGA grocery store on Thirtieth Street, and she’d bought an extra house key for me. She strung it onto a thin silver chain and slipped it over my neck. “Now, let me meet that coach of yours.”

Coach jogged toward us. He held a baseball in one palm. He took off his cap and brushed it over the sweat on his forehead. His hair was blond and thinning.

“Mr. Heider, I’m Neil’s mother.” They shook hands. “I have a full-time job and don’t know that many other moms. I was wondering if there might be a system where another Little League mom could drive my son home after games. We live on Monroe Street.”

“No problem,” Coach said. He looked down at me, then
scrutinized Mom, as if decoding her eyes’ primal secrets. “I do this sort of thing all the time.” He pointed toward his car. “That’s what station wagons are for. Any time Neil needs a ride, he’s got it.”

I imagined sitting in the front seat, his leg brushing mine as his foot touched the accelerator. “That’s some ballplayer you’ve got,” Coach Heider told Mom.

“He’s mine, and I love him.” She held my hand as if it were money.

Coach lobbed me the baseball. “Here’s the one you nearly whacked over the fence.” A grass stain on its leather resembled a screaming face. “It’s yours to keep, your trophy.” He touched his thumb to the black line of sunblock on my cheek. He glanced at his thumb, winked at me, then looked back to Mom.

The arms of our backyard’s apricot tree drooped with wormy fruit. Three swings and a slippery slide stood under the tree. I never used them. The poles were striped pink and grayish white like candy canes, and 6411 North Monroe’s previous tenants had painted clown faces on the plastic swing seats. Sparrow shit peppered the slide. Years later, Mom would ask a neighbor to tear the whole set down, and I’d realize I never did slide or swing on the thing.

As it turned out, Mom got more use from the set than me. The night of that first practice, I heard her and Alfred. His voice kept slurring things like “Jesus Priest” and “Christ above.” After a while, I figured out his words weren’t coming from Mom’s bedroom but were creeping into my open window from the backyard.

I knuckled the crust from my eyes, crawled from bed, and peered out. The violet bug light crystallized everything in its somber, rheumy glow. Something that looked like a bat whirled figure eights above the tree. An empty bottle of
Beefeater gin sat beside Mom’s portable eight-track tape player in the grass beside the porch. I could hear Freddy Fender’s voice crooning the melody of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”

Alfred slumped in the center swing’s seat. Mom hovered over him. His shirt was pulled to his neck; his pants, to his ankles. Her hands bustled in his lap. Alfred’s cowboy hat had fallen off, and hair curled from his head in wisps, as lacy as the silk that covers an ear of corn. His body swayed back and forth, lazy and gin-seduced. His bare feet smashed apricots into the lawn. “Christ,” he said again, drawing out the vowel in unison with the eight-track tune’s schmaltzy crescendo.