A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (11 page)

NOW, REMEMBER
, this is the day of the phenomenon. I went back to the jail and filed the report and by then it was lunchtime. I went over to The World and had the liver and onions for an hour. All that reminiscing had me hungry.

It was Monday, like I said, and so I knew they’d have a workout at the high school. I parked across the tennis court with the radio on in case Arvella came up with something, and watched practice. Well, here it was only the second week of school, still summer really, so I knew no one would be breaking his back, but still, I was disappointed when one of the coaches blew the whistle and the practice fell apart and the kids sauntered off toward the gym. I had been dreaming a little, but I still didn’t see anything that was going to beat Griggs. For a minute I thought of the sheriff going over to the two coaches and giving them a word to the wise. But: nope.

It made me a little sad, sitting there in the car after the field had emptied. Football. As great as it was for Whitney and me, football was one of the first things Derec and I argued about. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to play, but after I saw that he really didn’t want to, I let it go. I didn’t care if he played or didn’t; it wasn’t worth fighting over. But I don’t think he ever understood that. I think to the day he left Cooper he thought I was disappointed. As a man, sometimes, I find there are some things I can do nothing about. The words just won’t line up in my mouth.

I went down to The World for my evening coffee until it was dark and then I got the call from Arvella, the only other call that day. Somebody was injured out to the Passion Play Center. I have a call or two out there every summer. Somebody gets a snakebite behind the stage or a flat settles on somebody’s foot as they’re shifting scenery in the dark. But this time I was a little worried because Arvella said, as she was signing off, that she thought it was Harold Kissel. And Harold is now pushing three hundred pounds and if he missed a step out of his trailer or fell off the apron, it would be serious.

I’ve been told that every community has a Harold Kissel, my old friend. I doubt it. He’d moved to Cooper with his mother when we were in tenth grade and for two years everybody thought he was from New York, and he didn’t tip his hand about it either. His manners were amazing. I mean it was amazing that he had any, because I guess, none of the rest of us did. But he had a hat, a dark derby sort of hat and he’d tip it, and he’d hold doors for about everybody, and the things he’d do with his napkin even in The World were worth watching. It’s funny, but he never took much guff for any of it, everybody just kind of knew him: eccentric. That’s why I liked him and why he was the only friend I had who wasn’t on the football team.

He wasn’t allowed to go to Korea either, which was a relief for just about everybody in town, because by that time, the year after we graduated, everybody liked Harold in their own way. While I was gone, he started and became director of the Cooper Players and was just known for that. He was the theater. Sarah wrote me about the productions. She helped sew costumes, even the curtain for the stage at the old Episcopal Church.

When I came back from Korea, which is a cold place mostly, Sarah and I were married in the Lutheran Church, and Harold was one of the ushers along with Whitney who was also best man. The first year I was a deputy, Harold’s mother died, and he went away. Sarah was real worried. She and Whitney’s wife, Dorothy, had been in two plays by then. They kind of starred in
Arsenic and Old Lace
as the aunts. You should have seen Sarah as an old lady. I told her right then that I’d love her my whole life, because even with white hair and big gray lines all over her face, she was too pretty to stand. Oh, and they were also in
Julius Caesar
after that. They were two Roman soldiers, which was pretty goofy in my opinion, but it was okay, because about nine people total saw that deal. So when Harold’s mother passed away, Sarah was worried. There was a lot of talk. The Playhouse, as they were calling the church, had added a lot to Cooper, especially in the winter, and people said it would be a shame to lose it.

Where he went for four years, nobody knows. I know that, because he never told me. Some say he finally went to New York and there was a rumor about his going to France or Africa. No clues. When he came back, he had the beginnings of the fat and he looked worn. Hell, we all do. He had a meeting of the old Cooper Players and announced that what this town needed was “a passion play.”

That was thirty years ago. The passion play has become the biggest thing about Cooper really. People say, “Have you been over to the Cooper Passion Play?” It’s a real institution. Every summer thousands of people see Harold play the life of Christ, and I’ve seen it quite a few times myself. The local joke is that whenever anybody says Jesus H. Christ, the H. stands for Harold.

He’s real good in all the parts where he’s among the children and disciples. He knows how to walk and he’s got great hand movements, but the part which everyone remembers, the part which has been told across the counter in The World ten thousand times is when the music starts and the lights go out. The last thing you see is Mary Magdalene and the others on their knees weeping and praying and then the darkness in the amphitheater, just the sky with all our stars, sometimes the moon on a little cloud cruise, and the music real low and sad along with the sound effects of some hammering.

Then, Harold climbs those stairs behind the cross and steps out and places his arms on the crossbars, his head hung down at the perfect angle, and pow! the spotlight puts everybody’s eyes out with the white circle of Jesus on the cross: you can feel the chilly waves of goose bumps cross over the whole audience. Even his bald spot jumps at you in the scene like a halo. I remember listening to his voice in the Earth Adventure Caverns as he sang, “Stormy Weather,” and I know he’s just a man with the God-given ability to give others the chills.

The cross had come down while Harold was setting his arms up on the crossbar. The cross was old and Harold was heavy. The old timber leaned over and ripped out of the stage like a tree in a storm. They said it sounded like a bomb. Harold had hit the stage hard and there was blood and make-up blood everywhere. He wasn’t moving. The cross had clobbered Bonnie Belcher who was playing Mary Magdalene and a high school girl from Mercy, but they were both okay, just lots of blood. They hadn’t moved a thing. Feely told me they were afraid they would break his back. So, I had it all right there. I thought this is what happens: Whitney is gone, dead to me, and now Harold is killed.

I knelt over him, but I couldn’t feel a pulse and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. In that loincloth he looked like a great big dead kid, a two-year-old. By this time I was crying, or tears were just coming, I don’t know. And I didn’t care. I had to get Feely and Jerry—who plays Judas—to help me lift the cross off Harold and we dragged it back and dropped it off the rear of the stage. Then I heard this noise. Clapping. Out there in the dark, about half the audience still waited to see what was going to happen to Jesus now. It must have looked pretty strange to see the sheriff bending over him. And it was strange for me too; I couldn’t see the people at all.

I was scared. We wrestled Harold into the ambulance and he never made a noise, not a gurgle or a groan. Then Jerry shut the doors and Boyce drove away. Jerry turned to me and said, “You better say something, Derec. The people aren’t leaving.” There I was out there in the dark talking to Judas in his nightgown, Jerry Beemer, who is going to be the assistant manager at the Dairy Creme in Griggs all his goddamned life, and he is instructing me as to what I had better do. And what really made me boil, on top of being sick and scared, was that I knew he was right. I went back up onto the stage in the lights and stood in front of the blood stain and said, “He’s going to be all right, folks. You can go home now. And be careful driving. Those of you parked to the side can slip back to 21 through Gilmers’ place, even though it is the entrance.”

It was real quiet for a second, but then I heard the shuffling, and the families sorted themselves out and went off in the dark.

ON THE WAY
home I didn’t want to see another thing. I didn’t want to see the UFO. I’d seen enough for one day already. I just wanted to see Sarah. It was after one in the morning and I just wanted to see her. She’d be asleep, which was good because I didn’t want to go over anything again. I try not to tell her any of what goes on with my work; it’s all either ridiculous or hideous—who wants to hear that? If she asks me about something, I try to wait and let it pass. I can wait.

There’s a lot inside a man that never gets out; I don’t understand that or pretend to understand it, but if women ever knew that those waits, those times that I stir my coffee, twenty times right, twenty times left, were just full, full of the way a day crams my heart full, if women knew how much was in a man, they’d never let up. But there’s nothing I can do about it. The worse something is, the deeper I keep it. That’s the law.

If Sarah won’t let it go, if she gets on me, I have a simple strategy: I turn and ask when she’s going to have that rummage sale and get rid of some of the junk in the garage and the basement. That’ll start her. She’s a woman who has saved everything she’s ever had in her hand. I won’t go into it, but she has a box of egg cartons once touched by her Uncle Elias and they remind her of him. Actually, they do me too.

Anyway, I don’t tell her all the ugly details of being sheriff. And I especially didn’t want to tell her about Harold and how he fell and killed himself. All I want to do is see her there sleeping and to crawl into the bed by her.

It was 1:20
A.M.
I was driving home and I was a tired man.

Now get ready. At 13 and 30, where I turn for home, there at Chernewski’s Tip-a-Mug, I saw the UFO. It sat down in the road right in front of me. Actually, I heard it as I slowed for the four way. There was a clanking—awful—like a pocket knife in the drier. I mean a real painful sound, some machine about to die, and then:
whomp!
The whole contraption dropped onto Route 30, hard as a wet bale.

At first I thought a combine had turned over; I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t see it too well. It just sat there clanking and hissing. I could also hear it spitting oil on the pavement; honest to god, this UFO was a wreck. I stood out of the car. I could see all the terrible plumbing caging several gray oil drums and rusty boxes, and lots of little ladders, some missing rungs. The wiring ran along the outside of the heavy ductwork, taped there by somebody in a hurry.

Then the smell hit me. It had been burning oil and something else, something like rubber or plastic. The fumes were thick, billowing off one side just like the train wreck over at Mercy when the asphalt truck got creamed last winter.

I was going to go up to the thing to see if anybody was hurt, but the way it was settling, jumping around like a winged duck, and banging, I was afraid it would all give way and fall right on me.

Besides, about then I saw the alien. A door slammed open right then, falling out like the gate on the back of a pickup. And I stood there in the dark while the alien climbed down.

Now the alien, the alien. The alien looked a lot like my boy, Derec. To me, the alien looked like my son. It was a kid about twenty-three years old wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt with the words
JOHN LENNON
on the front. He wore greasy green surgical pants and tennis shoes. No socks. He jumped onto Route 30 and walked past me this close and looked in the backseat of the car. Then he folded his hands like this, across his chest like he was confused. Then he looked in again and put his hands on top of the car like this, like he was waiting to be frisked or just thinking it all over. I don’t know what he’d expected to be in the car, but it wasn’t there. Then I found out. He looked at me, and this is going to sound like a weirdo, like some airbrain who likes these encounters, but he looked in that moment just like Derec. He said to me, “Where’s Harold?”

Well, I was a little surprised by that. I didn’t know what to say. And I didn’t have to say anything. He skipped past me again, walking just like Derec, bouncing a little in those tennis shoes, and he climbed back up in that crazy rig. He had to slam that tailgate hatch or whatever it was four times to get it to stay closed, and the last time I heard glass break and sprinkle onto Route 30.

I stepped back, watching all the time. The UFO cranked itself up into a frenzy, the hissing made me squint. He had it revved up and shaking, just a raw sound for three or four minutes, more than any engine I know could take. Then it jumped, and that’s the right word:
jumped,
ten feet straight up, and it came down again hard, really shaking, and then it jumped and hovered up over Route 30. As it climbed up a little ways, I could see a small propeller on the under carriage—and the oil was dripping onto that and it sprayed me a good one going by. After I couldn’t see the UFO anymore or hear it, thank God, or smell it, all I could hear were the crickets and the buzzing of Chernewski’s Tip-a-Mug neon sign with that silly cocktail glass tipped and fizzing the three green bubbles, and all there was left on the road was the worst oil spill you’d want to see. I went over to it and it was oil all right, dirty oil that hadn’t been changed in five or six thousand miles of hard driving, and I found all these pieces of glass. Looks like some kind of Mason jar. And I found this one bolt. It’s left-handed. The oil stain is still out there—over both lanes, for you to see for yourselves. You can’t miss it: four or five gallons—at least.

That was the UFO.

I WAS A
boy in this town. And now I am a man in this town. A lot of things happen some days. Somebody’ll die and there’ll be a mattress in the backyard. Some kid driving a hard hangover and an asphalt truck won’t see a train and there’ll be smoke clear to Griggs. And some days nothing happens. The flies won’t move five inches down the counter in The World. Some days things happen, and some days nothing does, but at the end of each I have to lie down. I lie by Sarah, the collector of treasures, in our bed which is surrounded by rooms full of the little things of our lives. She still has the ticket stubs from the game with Mercy, our first date, and they too sleep in some little box in some drawer in our house. I lie by Sarah in my place on earth, and slowly—it takes hours—I empty for the earth and turn to prepare me for the next thing, another day.