Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“Indeed,” Crews said. He poured me a slug of the bourbon into one of the Dixie Cups he’d brought with him.

We had a pretty good time. Crews had a finger-snapping little shuffle dance he did. He sang “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” I did Tom Waits grumbling through “Long Way Home.” We kept slugging the whiskey. I walked over to the window, unzipped, and lobbed a stream down eleven stories through the neon light of old downtown. Crews ran over and stuck his dirty old Security cap under me, rasping out a laugh, and said, “Man, you gon’ get us both arrested.” I went ahead and emptied into his cap. He became sober-looking, thoughtful, then shook the cap out and put it back on his head, doubling over into that raspy laugh again.

“Hot damn,” I said. “Are you crazy?”

“I’m not crazy, man,” he said. “I’m just drunk.”

Then he got thoughtful again, uncorked the bottle, and dropped the cork to the floor. He nodded at the wedding band I still wore on my finger.

“You’re a married man,” he said. “Where’s your wife?”

“My wife’s dead. If it’s any your business.”

He cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling. I thought maybe he really was nuts.

“Your wife ain’t dead,” he finally said. “I know your wife, seen her up here with you many a time. I saw her yesterday, hanging out with some strange-looking dudes down at the Triangle, eating some of them Chik-Steaks.”

I felt myself flush, and my mouth flooded with saliva like I was going to throw up. I went over to the window again and spat.

“Just get out,” I said.

There was a half inch of bourbon left in the bottle. Crews drank it down and then walked to the door. He stopped, turned around.

“ My wife,” he said, “has been dead for nine years. Heart attack. Only forty-seven years old.” I looked at him, and he looked back at me as if he’d never had a drop to drink in his life, and calm. “I don’t need to manufacture no grief,” he said then, and walked out.

I felt pretty rotten then. How to say it, except straight-up. My wife wasn’t actually deceased.

She was an oddly pious woman I’d married because, I suppose, we were both studying public relations at the same school, took almost all the same classes, and just didn’t really know anyone else. We were shy and awkward and it was just easier to be around someone as painfully self-conscious as yourself.

She was pious, but I always thought there was another side to her trying to get out somehow. In bed she cussed like a Marine and got crazy, which was fine, but she’d cry about it afterward, and she might even ask God to forgive her, lying there in the bed naked next to me. It was like she’d been possessed and then left behind in her pale, timid shame.

She was on her scooter one day, making a quick trip to the post office, when she hit a slick spot, went down, and banged her head pretty hard on the pavement. She’d left her helmet at the office. When she woke up four days later, she was a different person. She was not the woman I had married. That would have been all right with me, to tell the truth. I’d been having some serious second thoughts. But it wasn’t all right with her.

She said I was a nice man but kind of boring. She said she was thinking of moving in with Majestic 12.

I said, “Who’s that?”

“Well, they’re artists. Painters,” she said, leaning her head to one side and sticking a finger in her ear. The finger in the ear was a peculiar habit she’d picked up since the accident. As if she were listening to something inside there, receiving signals about what she should do or say next.

She took the finger out of her ear.

“They live in this big Victorian house up on the ridge south of town, by that old radio tower. It’s kind of like a commune. I mean, you don’t have your own room or anything, you just sleep where you want to, with whoever you want to, or by yourself, it’s up to you. You know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“I mean ,” she said, holding her arms out and shaking her fingers like they were wet, “none of this bullshit.”

She put the one finger back into her ear and wandered off into her studio, which was empty because she’d taken all of her old paintings, of puppies, quaint storefronts, and still-lifes of fruits and flowers, to the dump.

And she moved in with Majestic 12. They smoked a lot of dope, painted with oils, were obsessed with alien visitation and abduction, and rode Harley-Davidsons. After weeks of trying to coax her home with letters, phone calls, knocking on the door to the big Victorian and being turned away by one Majestic 12 or another, I gave up. I didn’t even have the heart to file for a divorce. I just kind of pretended to myself that she’d died.

And that’s the way I’ve left it.

AFTER CREWS LEFT I drove to Midway, an all-night bootleg joint, bought a bottle of sour mash, and hit the streets. I was working some things out of my head, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw a group of teenage girls walking home from the bowling alley, and whistled and yowled at them from my car. I took a pellet pistol that for some reason I had in the glove compartment and shot out a couple of streetlights in a new subdivision north of town. I’d never smoked but I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes from a convenience store and chain-smoked them as I drove around, coughing and slugging the whiskey. I got out into the country and saw a big vegetable garden, with tall corn and bean vines strung on poles, glowing in the moonlight beside a house, and I steered the car into the driveway and across the yard and mowed down the whole little crop and got back to the road and hauled ass. Then I felt so bad about that little garden that, for the rest of the night, I just drove around and drank the whiskey, trying to forget.

At four a.m. I was so crocked I didn’t know where I was and got lost. I’d had nearly a whole bottle of whiskey and all my reckoning finally collapsed. I ended up in front of my house somehow, jamming the spare key into the lock, the pellet pistol hanging from my other hand. I completely forgot about the enormous woman I had rented to, forgot she was living there at the time.

I was still on automatic, moving through the living room with my free hand outstretched in the dark, my eyes nearly swollen shut with booze, sleepwalking toward the bed fully clothed. But I’d fallen just halfway to where the mattress should have been when I hit something soft but firm, bounced off onto the floor, and rolled over onto my back, dazed — only to see this massive shape blot out the moonlight coming through the bedroom window. She screamed, a high-pitched one for such a large woman. Then I screamed, too, to let her know she was not the only hysterical person in the house, and plinked off a pellet at her before I could think about it.

She paused, then screamed again, and didn’t stop until she had pulled a giant Navaronnean handgun from the bed-table drawer and fired off a deafening round. I dove for the hallway just as she fired again, taking off a hunk of doorjamb above my shoulder. She screamed again and I heard some thing wrench and then a kind of twanging. I lay tense for a moment, then turned around to see her broad behind framing the area where the lower half of the bedroom window had been. She’d tried to dive out through the screen.

I ran around to the back door but when I stuck my head out she fired at me from her hanging position. The bullet popped into the asbestos siding of my next-door neighbor’s house.

“Miss Duke!” I shouted. “It’s Conroy, your landlord. Don’t shoot.”

“Conroy! Oh, God.”

I peeked around the doorjamb and saw that her arms were hanging limp, and she was kind of bouncing, her arms jiggling around, the big gun still clutched in one hand.