Scott Heim: Mysterious Skin

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 revisited 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.