Scott Heim: Mysterious Skin

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.