A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (34 page)

After splashdown came the personal how-de-do from the White House, then the medical, the debriefing, the first call to Betty, the first
night
again with Betty … and the fame. In the throbbing cities he’d always distrusted – smug Washington, cynical New York, nutsy San Francisco – Spike Tiggler was big; in North Carolina he was huge. Tickertape was upended on his head like bowls of spaghetti; his right hand discovered the fatigue of congratulation; he was kissed, hugged, pawed, slapped, punched. Small boys would dig in his vest pocket and shamelessly beg for moondust. Most of all, people just wanted to be
with
him, beside him for a few minutes, breathe in the air that he was breathing out, wonder at the man from outer space who was also the man from the neighboring county. It was after some months of fevered coast-to-coast coddling that the North Carolina state legislature, proud of its boy and a little jealous that he seemed to have somehow become a general property of the nation, announced that they were striking a medal to be awarded at a special ceremony. What more appropriate place, everyone agreed, than at Kitty Hawk, on the flat land beneath the flat sky?

Appropriate words were pronounced that afternoon, yet Spike could only half apprehend them; Betty had on a new outfit with even a hat and needed reassurance that she was looking
terrific, which she was, but she didn’t get it. A large gold medal, with the Kitty Hawk on one side and the Apollo capsule on the other, was hung around his neck; Spike’s hand was battered several dozen more times; and all the while, as he gave out the polite smile and the inclination of the head, he was thinking about that moment on the drive, the moment that told him.

It had been cordial, not to say flattering, in the back of the Governor’s limousine, and Betty had been looking so good he thought he should tell her only was shy of doing so in front of the Governor and his wife. There was the usual conversation about gravity and moon-hopping and earth-rise and tell me, what about going to the bathroom, when suddenly, just as they were nearing Kitty Hawk, he saw the Ark by the side of the road. A huge, beached ark, high at both ends, with slatted wooden sides. The Governor followed Spike’s head indulgently as it panned through 180 degrees, then answered his question without it being put. ‘Some kinda church,’ said the Governor. ‘They stuck it up not long back. Probably got a load of animals in it.’ He laughed, and Betty joined in carefully.

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Spike all of a sudden.

‘Couldn’t get to be Governor of North Carolina without,’ came the good-humored reply.

‘No, do you believe in
God
,’ Tiggler repeated, with a directness that could easily be misread for something they didn’t need.

‘Honey,’ said Betty quietly.

‘I sure do think we’re nearly there,’ said the Governor’s wife, straightening a box-pleat with a white-gloved hand.

In their hotel room that evening, Betty was at first inclined to be conciliatory. It must be a strain, she thought, however dandy it might be. I wouldn’t like to get up on platforms and tell everyone for the fiftieth time what it was like and how proud it made me feel, even if it did make me feel proud and I did want to talk about it for the fiftieth time. So she mothered him a little and asked if he was feeling tired, and tried to get him to spit out any excuse as to why not once, not once
in the whole damn day
, had
he mentioned her outfit, and didn’t he know how uncertain she was whether primrose yellow was really her color. But this failed to work, and so Betty, who could never get to sleep unless things were out in the open, asked him if he wanted a drink and why had he gone all funny on them just before the ceremony, and if he wanted her frank opinion the soonest way to foul up the future career they’d both agreed on was for him to start asking State Governors whether or not they believed in God, for Christ’s sake. Who did he think he was?

‘My life has changed,’ said Spike.

‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ Betty was normally suspicious and couldn’t help noticing how many letters a famous man is liable to receive from women who didn’t know him, from the Mary-Beths and all the potential Mary-Beths of the world.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You come back to where you started from. I went 240,000 miles to see the moon – and it was the earth that was really worth looking at.’

‘You
do
need a drink.’ She paused, half-way across the room to the frigobar, but he hadn’t spoken, or moved, or gestured. ‘Heck, I need a drink.’ She sat down beside her husband with a sour mash and waited.

‘When I was a kid my Pa took me to Kitty Hawk. I was twelve, thirteen. It made me into an aviator. That’s all I wanted to do from that day.’

‘I know, honey.’ She took his hand.

‘I joined the Navy. I was a good aviator. I transferred to Pax River. I volunteered for Project Mercury. I didn’t get accepted at first but I kept on and they accepted me in the end. I was listed for Project Apollo. I did all the training. I landed on the moon.’

‘I know, honey.’

‘ … and there … 
there
,’ he went on, squeezing Betty’s hand as he prepared to tell her for the first time, ‘God told me to find Noah’s Ark.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’d just thrown the football. I’d just thrown the football and
found it and kicked it into a little crater and was wondering if I was out of range of the camera and if they’d call a foul if they spotted it, when God speaks to me.
Find Noah’s Ark
.’ He looked across at his wife. ‘It was like, here you are a grown man and you make it to the moon and what do you want to do? Throw footballs. Time to start putting away childish things, that’s what God was telling me.’

‘How you sure it was God, honey?’

Spike ignored the question. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I know I’m not hallucinating, I know I’ve heard what I’ve heard, but I don’t tell. Maybe I’m not quite sure, maybe I want to forget it. And what happens? The very day I go back to Kitty Hawk, where it all started all those years ago, the very day I go back I see the God-damn Ark.
Don’t forget what I said –
that’s His message, isn’t it? Loud and clear. That’s what it means.
Go ahead and get your medal, but don’t forget what I said.’

Betty took a sip of her whisky. ‘So what you gonna do, Spike?’ Normally, when discussing his career, she said
we
rather than
you
; this time he was out on his own.

‘I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet.’

The NASA psychiatrist that Betty consulted had a good line in nodding, as if to suggest that she’d have to tell him something far more outrageous before he’d throw down his pen and admit the fellow was minus some buttons, crazier than a bedbug. He nodded, and said how he and his colleagues had been anticipating a few
adjustment problems
, after all someone who went to the moon and looked back at the earth must be a bit like the first guy who ever stood on his head and took in the view from that direction, which might affect your
behavioral pattern
, and what with the stress of the flight and the enormous publicity attending the missions, it wasn’t altogether surprising that one or two
reality shifts
might have taken place, but there was no reason to believe that their effects might be either serious or long-lasting.

‘You’re not answering my question.’

‘What is your question?’ The psychiatrist was not aware that she’d asked one.

‘Is my husband – I don’t know what technical term you might use, doctor – is my husband a fruitcake?’

There was a lot more nodding, this time in a horizontal rather than vertical plane, and examples of
perceptual disorientation
were given, and Spike’s records were examined, on every one of which he had firmly written
Baptist
, and it seemed to Betty that the psychiatrist would have been more surprised if Spike
hadn’t
heard God speak to him on the moon’s surface, and when she asked him ‘But was Spike hallucinating?’ he merely replied, ‘What do you think?’ which didn’t seem to Betty to advance the conversation, indeed it was almost as if
she
was the crazy one for doubting her husband. One result of the meeting was that Betty went away feeling she had betrayed her husband rather than helped him; and the other was that when, three months later, Spike put in for release from the space program there wasn’t much serious opposition to his request as long as the whole thing was handled low-profile, because what was clear from the psychiatrist’s report was that Spike was
minus some buttons
, crazier than a bedbug, a fifty-carat fruitcake, and that he probably believed after close personal inspection that the moon was made of green cheese. So there was a move to a desk job in general media promotions, then a Navy transfer back to trainers, but within a year of hopping around in the gray ash Spike Tiggler was back in civvies and Betty was wondering what happened when you fell off the box car of the gravy train.

It was Spike’s announcement that he had booked the Moondust Diner in Wadesville for the first of his fund-raising get-togethers that moved Betty to wonder if the most painless thing wouldn’t be to close
The Joy of Cooking
and head for an early divorce. Spike had done nothing for nearly a year except go out one day and buy a Bible. Then he’d go missing in the course of the evening, and she’d find him on the back porch, the Scripture open on his knees and his eyes turned upward to the stars. Her friends were exhaustingly sympathetic: after all it must be tough coming back from
up there
and having to readjust to the daily grind. It was clear to Betty that the fame of Touchdown Tiggler could run for quite a few years without
having to put any more gas in the tank, and it was equally clear she could count on support – since fame followed by crack-up was not just American, but almost downright patriotic – but even so she felt cheated. All those years of doing what was right by Spike’s career, of being shunted around the country, never quite having a proper home, waiting, hoping for the big payout … and then, when it comes, when those big round dollars come cascading out of the machine, what does Spike do? Instead of holding out his hat and catching them, he hits the back porch and looks at the stars. Meet my husband, he’s the one with the Bible on his knees and the torn pants and the funny look in his eye. No, he didn’t get himself attacked, he just jumped off the box car of the gravy train.

When Betty asked Spike what he’d like her to wear for his first public meeting at the Moondust Diner, there was some sarcasm in her voice; and when Spike replied that he’d always been fond of that primrose-yellow outfit she’d bought for when he got his medal at Kitty Hawk, she heard once again within her a voice which certainly didn’t belong to the Almighty whispering the word
divorce
. But the strange thing was, he seemed to mean it, and twice, once before they departed, and again as they turned off the interstate, he commented on how fine she was looking. This was a new development she couldn’t help noticing in him. Nowadays he always meant what he said, and just said what he meant, nothing more. He seemed to have left the fun, the teasing, the daredevilry up in that crater along with his football (that was a dumb stunt, come to think of it, and should have set some bells ringing earlier than it did). Spike had gotten serious; he’d gotten dull. He still said he loved her, which Betty believed, though she sometimes wondered if that was enough for a girl. But he’d lost his pizzazz. If this was putting away childish things, then childish things, according to Betty, had a lot to be said for them.

The Moondust Diner was full that April evening of 1975 when Spike Tiggler launched his first appeal for funds. Most of the town was there, plus a couple of newspapermen and a photographer. Betty feared the worst. She imagined headlines
like ‘GOD SPOKE TO ME’ CLAIMS GROUNDED ASTRONAUT and WADESVILLE MAN MINUS SOME BUTTONS. She sat nervously beside her husband as the local minister welcomed him back to the community where he had grown up. There was clapping; Spike gently took her hand and didn’t release it until he was on his feet and about to speak.

‘It’s nice to be back,’ said Spike, and looked around the room, giving hi-there inclinations of the head to those he recognized. ‘You know, only the other day, I was sitting on my back porch looking up at the stars and thinking about the kid I used to be, all those years ago in Wadesville. I must have been fifteen, sixteen or so, and I guess I was a bit of a handful, and old Jessie Wade, God rest her, I expect many of you recall Jessie, she said to me, “Young man, you run along screaming and shouting like that, one of these days you’ll just take off” – and I reckon old Jessie Wade knew a thing or two because many years later that’s just what I did, though sadly she didn’t live to see her prophecy fulfilled, God rest her soul.’

Betty could not have been more surprised. He was doing a number. He was doing a goddam number on them. He didn’t use to talk with much fondness about Wadesville; she’d never even heard the story about old Jessie Wade before; yet here he was, remembering it all, playing up to the folks back home. He told them a heap of stories about his childhood, and then some more about being an astronaut, which after all was what they’d mostly come for, but the message behind it all was that without these folks old Spike wouldn’t have got farther than Fayetteville, that it was
these folks
who’d really put him up there on the moon, not those clever guys with wires coming out of their ears at Mission Control. Just as surprising to Betty was that he did this part of his address with all the old fun and teasing she thought had gone out of him. And then he came to the bit about every man’s life being a process of escape and return, escape and return like the waters in the Pasquotank River (which was when Jeff Clayton thought it wasn’t like that on the way to the World Golf Hall of Fame at Pinehurst); and explained how you always came back to the things and places
you’d started from. Like he’d left Wadesville years before, and now he was back; like he’d been a regular attender at the Church of the Holy Water all through his childhood, had later strayed from the path of the Lord, but had now returned to it – which was news, though hardly unexpected news, to Betty.