Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

Sometimes it’s all I think about: the times I spent with him. It’s as if he and I were all that mattered. My best dreams feature him, no one else, the two of us suspended in his sugary-smelling rooms, alone, as if God had positioned a beam on central Kansas, and Coach and I had stepped haphazardly into its light.

Summers, my father raised watermelons. By September, they matured into ripeness, the salmon pink of their flesh deepening to vermilion. Before the morning’s temperature moved above eighty, my father tramped between the vines, knife in hand, and carried watermelons to the house. Our family ate so much of the fruit, our veins might have contained a concoction of blood and melon juice.

Little River lies nestled one mile off Highway 56, and every autumn my father set up a fruit stand to attract the profusion of cars that drove to and from the yearly Kansas State Fair, held twenty miles away in Hutchinson. He appointed Deborah and me to oversee the truckload of melons. “You sell the goods, you make the money,” he’d say.

One summer-two years after the summer of our UFO-my father decided we could sell unchaperoned. On the fair’s opening morning, he parked the pickup in the gravel shoulder where the Little River road met the highway. He lifted himself into the cab and repositioned the melons, scattering the common, striped kind among the black diamond and pint-sized sugar baby varieties. He handed us an old Roi-Tan cigar box in which one-and five-dollar bills were peppered with handfuls of change. He gave us the thumbs-up and turned to walk home.

Deborah and I perched at the end of the truck bed, watermelons bubbling around us in a pell-mell sea. I felt important, like a merchant opening shop. While she weighed each fruit on a rusty scale, I multiplied the number of pounds by six cents and Magic Markered the price on each rind.

Our first customers coasted toward us: an elderly couple and their three grandchildren. The red frames on the woman’s sunglasses matched the color of her smudged lipstick. She seemed frazzled and desperate. “We’re spending loads of money on all those silly games and rides at the fair,” she explained, “so we might as well spend even more on your melons. Better for the little ones than cotton candy or funnel cake.” She tested a fat one’s ripeness by thumping her fingernail against it. Then she scratched its rind and checked the color. Deborah rolled her eyes. Our father had shown us the secret of telling if a melon was ready: a thin, curly filament wormed where the melon met the vine; when that turned brown, the fruit was ripe. We didn’t relay our secret to the woman. We let her thump until she made her choice. Deborah weighed it. “Harold, give them two smackers,” the woman said, and her husband paid us.

All summer, the sun had lightened my hair, and Deborah’s had bleached to the color of chaff. By noon that day, my hair had dried out, and my skin was tingling. I knew I’d be sunburned by evening. “We forgot suntan lotion,” I told Deborah.

She pressed her thumb against my shoulder. It left a white impression for half a second before the pink returned. “You’ll look like a lobster,” she said. I remembered the previous summer, when we had taken a trip to Kanopolis Reservoir and I had fallen asleep on the beach. Sunburns made me nauseated. If I got sick, my father wouldn’t let me sell the next day.

Deborah’s best friend, Breeze Campbell, bicycled to the highway and joined us. She hadn’t brought suntan lotion, either. She suggested we eat. I found a knife behind the seat in my father’s cobwebby pickup, the same knife he’d used to sever the turtle’s head, two years before. I chose a watermelon, strummed the gauze of sand from its surface, and aimed for its “ 1.25” price. Stab. The melon split in jagged halves, and we dug our fingers into the meat to gobble it up.

I was always shy around Deborah’s friends, but as we ate I grew bolder. I stood beside the pickup, stuffing fistfuls into my mouth, making certain they were watching me. I didn’t swallow. Instead, I punched both my swollen cheeks simultaneously, juice and seeds exploding from my mouth across the pavement. Breeze laughed. She hopped from her seat on the scale and joined me, repeating my actions.

The three of us waited for cars to speed by, then “vomited” watermelons across the highway. After a while I got carried away. I selected melons from the pickup bed, lifting them above my head and dropping them. They burst on the asphalt, echoing identical splotch sounds across the fields. In minutes chunks of pink meat, scraps of rind, and slimy seeds littered a stretch of Highway 56. Flies hovered around the mess as if it were an animal’s carcass.

Deborah stopped laughing. I turned and saw my father. He had showered, dressed, and slicked back his hair, undoubtedly planning to drive into Hutchinson for softball games. The sun shone off the oil in his hair. He pressed both palms against the sides of his shorts, the fingers splayed out stiff and trembling. Breeze cleared her throat and began walking her bicycle up the road.

I could never predict my father’s reactions. He would comfort my mother one minute; slam the door in her face the next. On that day, my father didn’t hit me. He looked toward the east, then the west, for cars. The horizons were clear. He stepped toward the debris and began tossing pink clots of melon into the ditch. When he came to a piece of rind, he held it up and examined the price Deborah had written. “Dollar eighty-five,” he said. He pitched another mess of pink. He found another rind: “Two fifty. A big one, Brian.”

When my father had finished, only a stain remained on the highway asphalt, a burst of juice shaped like a star with countless points. He shuffled to the pickup and leaned against its side. I watched his hands. A fly landed on the left one, wriggling its spindly legs. He shooed it away and knocked a knuckle on the Roi-Tan box. “I’ll be back around seven tonight.” He smiled at Deborah, his eyes blinking mechanically. “Your brother owes me twelve dollars and forty cents.”

In the two years following the night my mother, Deborah, and I saw the UFO, I became obsessed with watching the skies. I began stretching on the roof on summer nights. I went there alone; Deborah had grown exhausted with playing board games, but I didn’t mind. I memorized the moon’s phases and various constellations, and searched through binoculars for any hint of abnormal light.

I scanned newspapers for flying saucer stories, and on occasion I’d discover some brief bit about eerie lights over a city or a curiously shaped craft pursuing an airplane. I fantasized myself as the world’s first adolescent UFO researcher, clandestinely funded by the U.S. government to jet between countries, gleaning information. I borrowed books from the library; examined their sketches and rare spacecraft photographs.

Halloween approached. I’d wanted to dress as a spaceman, but my father balked at the costume’s expense. “My paycheck will not be spent on this foolish holiday.” I had to settle for the cheaper Satan. At October’s close, I dressed in cranberry-red sweatpants, suspenders, and rubber galoshes. “I feel dumb,” I told my mother.

Back then, Deborah and I attended church weekly. For Halloween, we had helped decorate an abandoned house three miles from town. Our Youth Ministry was sponsoring a Haunted Mansion to amuse kids after they’d finished that night’s candy grabbing. My Satan getup made me feel gutsy for once-the kids that picked on me at school wouldn’t recognize me, I thought-and I anticipated lurching from a dark corner to scare them.

I remember beginning the night in Little River Lutheran Church. Deborah and I searched for candles, and as I tiptoed past the pews, my tail bobbed behind me. I lumbered forward as devillike as possible, rehearsing for the night ahead. The stained-glass windows shimmered their faint blues and golds, and I kept imagining the hand of God would slide aside the steepled roof to pluck away my mask.