Robert Butler: Mr. Spaceman

And so I find myself standing beside the door of the bus that bears its LUCK upon its face and my time has run out and my LUCK has, too, I am afraid, and my wife Edna Bradshaw is at my side and the twelve who will remember me — these dear twelve — are ready to return. I shake each hand that passes before me, wishing to give at least a beat or two of my heart. But it is difficult. My hands are stiff. My fingertips are puckered. And I am missing important things, I realize. I have fallen out of the moment, in violation of one thing I think I can say I have learned from this planet, but there is nothing to do about it because even the process of thinking about what I am missing makes me miss even more of those things, and I have only fragments: Digger’s mouth sets hard, Misty’s eyes fill with tears, I am speaking words to them and they are passing on into the warm good-bye of my wife Edna Bradshaw and I do not catch what they are saying, I am forgetting their faces already as they may forget me, too, even without my help, and “… luck …” comes in Trey’s voice and he is passing on and I am wishing luck to him in return, I think, but I can hear my own heart now, thumping in my head, I am aflame with fear and Mary’s hand is moist and her eyes are moist and she is gone and Lucky says something about eagles and his eyes also are filling and I am working myself up even more and Arthur is here and gone and now Viola’s face looms into mine and she speaks of knowing when to fold your hand and there are more of these tears, these baffling tears, Viola’s eyes are full, and now they are overflowing, and things suddenly slow down. My hearing clarifies. Viola has moved on and my wife is saying, “Viola, honey, I wish I could give you a phone number or something.”

“Me too,” Viola says. “You beam me up anytime you want some help shopping.”

The two women laugh and Jared is shaking my hand. I turn to him. “This is all so out-there,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say.

He moves along to the warm murmuring of my wife and I expect to find Citrus next but it is Hank grasping my forearm with his free hand as we shake. “Drive safely,” I say. “But not until your wheels touch the highway.”

“You be safe, too,” he says, and he steps to Edna.

Claudia, Hudson, and Citrus are the only ones remaining outside the bus and they are all hanging back, shifting their feet and trying, I think, to be the last one to say good-bye.

“There is no time to hesitate,” I say to them, and Claudia shoots the other two a little disgusted glance and comes forward.

“Good-bye, Desi,” she says. “Thanks for answering at least one of the big questions.”

“You are not alone,” I say.

Claudia smiles. “Neither are you,” she says.

“Wait,” I cry, suddenly remembering the glint of metal in the Hall of Objects. “I still have your pistol.”

“Keep it,” she says. “That’s one small step for woman.”

Claudia lowers her face abruptly, I believe to hide the tears, and she moves on.

I turn and I find Hudson turning, too, and we are both failing to see Citrus. Hudson shakes his head. “She’s trouble, man.”

“I am sure she will show up when you get on the bus.”

Hudson nods and extends his hand and I shake it. “Look,” he says. “Your orders don’t require you to maximize the risk, do they?”

“No,” I say. “I do not read them that way.”

“Then don’t. Find yourself a nice quiet place.”

“But it cannot be quiet. This impression I make will have to last.”

Hudson shrugs and he softly claps me on the shoulder. “Then try to take care of your skinny ass, you hear?”

“Meeting you was money from home,” I say.

Hudson is briefly confused by this but then he smiles.

He steps away, toward my wife Edna Bradshaw, and she says to him, “You sure you don’t want me to wrap up a piece of the sweet potato pie for you?”

And as Hudson begins politely to decline this offer, Citrus’s voice whispers close to my ear, “I will not deny you thrice. Not even once.”

“Good,” I say and she is very near, turned the same way I am, as if she is hiding behind me.

“Remember,” Citrus says, “He did not climb down from the cross. He saved others, Himself he could not save.”

“I am a friendly guy,” I say.

“New York,” she says.

“A regular Joe,” I say.

“Times Square. It’s your Calvary.”

“What is this?” my wife Edna Bradshaw says. “You cute little thing, still wearing that stuff on your lips makes them look like they’re about to fall off from the barn rot, you come on over here and say good-bye to your friend Edna and make a promise to let me do you a makeover someday.”

Edna has dragged Citrus by the hand toward her, but Citrus jerks free and lurches back toward me.

“Please,” she says. And she stands before me, not sure herself what she is to do. “Father,” she whispers. Then, “Master.” She closes her eyes and a dark thing comes over her and she opens her eyes and she slides up against me and she kisses me on the cheek.

I see my destiny. Millions of eyes are upon me. I descend and the eyes grow wide and the bodies surge and the hands clutch.

“You go on, get aboard now,” Edna is saying.

The press and heat of Citrus is gone from me now.

I look and she is going up into the bus and Hank is standing there in the doorway, turning aside to let Citrus pass, but he is looking at me.

Then there is only Hank in the doorway and he squares around. “Mr. Desi,” he says.

The crowd is still in my head. A million voices — two million — rise in fear and then in rage and I am aflame, A Flame with Such a Burning Desire. For what? For what?

Hank says, “You should appear in New Orleans. They might understand there.”

“The Big Easy,” I say.

“It’s just down the highway.”

“Let the Good Times Roll,” I say.

“I’m sure they’ve got a big party tonight,” he says. “Plenty of media.”

“Thank you for the suggestion.”

“ I’d be comfortable there,” Hanks says, and he winks and he nods and he disappears into the dimness of the bus and the door closes.

Then a hand and arm of my wife Edna Bradshaw comes in through my arm and she is beside me and holding on tight and we cross the great floor of the Reception Hall together. We turn at the door and a panel is there, which I open, and faces are pressed against the windows all along this side of the bus. Our friends are looking at us and waving and Edna and I wave in return. Then I touch the panel and the Reception Hall is filled with a bright light and the floor beneath the bus slides open and the bus descends, the hands still waving, the bus sinks down till the faces dip beneath the level of the floor and then the waving fingertips are gone and the roof of the bus and the floor slides and it seals itself shut and the light vanishes and there is a sudden jagged clutch of fear inside me, as if my friends have just gone down with a great ship to a watery grave. But I know their wheels will soon be spinning on Interstate 10. They will be chasing their luck once more. And so will I.

When a girl from Bovary, Alabama, finds herself married to a bona fide spaceman and she goes away to far galaxies and tries to be a good wife out there in outer space, in spite of all her life up to then she being afraid of change and taking a chance and going too far from home — and let’s face it, when I say “girl” I don’t mean “girl,” I mean a forty-something woman who prior to this extraordinary thing happening to her had a life of what they call, in the hairdressing parlors of Bovary, “dignified simplicity” or sometimes “simple Southern grace” or sometimes just “lost hopes and blown chances”—I can admit all that now, being forty-plus and having a life like that — so when such a woman like me finds herself alone in an invisible spacecraft sitting in a field of witch grass out behind the place where her motor home once sat, the very place where her spaceman husband parked this very craft on the night he came a-courting her after having met her in the parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter, like God Himself had wanted us to meet — when she finds herself sitting there and she’s all alone in an alien vessel except for her yellow cat Eddie purring on her lap and she doesn’t know whether her dear sweet spaceman husband is being ripped to pieces by an angry Earth mob even at that very moment, and she being under directions from him to wait for two hours after midnight, New York City Time, and if she doesn’t get his radio message by that time she is to push a certain button and step out of this machine and try to resume her life in her former hometown and try not to read the newspapers for a few days because under those circumstances the news was certainly going to be bad about what had happened to her husband, and when a woman like that — who’s me, of course — even has a way to make a record of her voice while she waits, which her husband has showed her as he is saying good-bye and putting her in this spacecraft and is giving her a kiss in that sweet lipless way of his — though being lipless isn’t a way, exactly, it’s more like a condition, which just goes to show how much I love him because the touch of his spaceman mouth is about as happy a thing for me as I could ever imagine and I pray that I will have a chance to be that happy again — but he gave me a kiss and he showed me what to do and here I sit, and in a situation like this, even with the chance to talk — and I don’t think there’s a tape or anything in this thing to run out, I can go on as long as I want — but when a woman — even a woman like me — finds herself in a situation like this, she is pretty much left at a loss for words, which is what I am right now. Except to say that when the door was closing and I was looking at my spaceman husband maybe for the last time ever, he began to do something I have never seen him do.