Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

She looked at it, closed her eyes, and rested her palms against the sink.

“Ben,” she said.

It didn’t move at all.

“What are we going to do about him?” she said.

I looked at the figure in the tree.

“Carl?” I called.

No answer.

“I don’t think it’s Carl,” I said.

Lanny shook her head and turned away. The child in the tree had not moved.

“Carl?” I called out. “Come on in the house.”

It sat very still.

“Carl,” I said louder.

It was a still, dark statue.

Out front in the street a clamor clapped up. The members of the Road Hog Club, quick shadows in the deepening dark, rode in a furious circle, slapping their mouths with their hands and whooping like movie Indians.

I cut the light to see through the bay-window glass. They broke and curved out of sight. I didn’t see Carl. Out back, a soft scrabbling and clatter. When I looked, the tree was empty.

We stood, not saying anything, looking out at the tree.

Slowly, sounds came back to our ringing ears. The gurgle of the boiling potatoes in the pot. The quiet hum of the refrigerator motor. The flutter and quiet hiss of the stove eye’s blue flame. Lanny reached over and turned it off. The flame snuffed out with a little popping sound. She turned off the oven and I heard the jets chuff once, then the metal crackling and ticking. I could hardly see her face in the darkness.

She said, “You don’t even know your own son,” and walked out through the dining room.

I heard the front screen door open and shut. I heard her lift her voice out in the street.

“ Carl? ” she called.

I was thinking about the time I stole in on Carl asleep and watched him until he seemed some child I didn’t know, some beautiful foundling.

And the nights I lay awake beside Lanny like someone moving through dark space at high speed.

“ Carl,” she called. “Carl?”

Moving away, growing fainter, her calling like a birdsong you know by heart but never knew which bird sang it. I stood very still and listened, as if to memorize her voice, fix it in my memory. But she’d gone too far down the street by then. And there were actual birds, outside the window in the yard, singing in the onset of evening.

THE ROAD TO THE COAST WAS A LONG, STEAMY CORRIDOR of leaves. Narrow bridges over brush-choked creeks. Our father drove, the windows down, wind whipping his thick black hair. Our mother’s hair, abundant and auburn and long and wavy, she’d tried to tame beneath a pretty blue scarf. He wore a pair of black Ray-Bans. She wore prescription shades with the swept and pointed ends of the day. He whistled crooner songs and smoked Winstons, and early as it was, no one really talked.

This was before things changed, before Hurricane Camille, the casinos.

My older brother, Hal, slept sitting up, his mouth open as if he were singing silently in a dream. My younger brother, Ray, had been left with our grandmother, too young for this trip, too much trouble most of the time. He was two, and the youngest of three, and his sharp, hawkish eyes constantly sought their prey, which was inattention, which he would rip to shreds with tantrums, devour in small bloody satisfying chunks of punishment and mollification. I was so very glad that he was not along.

By noon we smelled the brine-and-fish stink of the bays. The land flattened into hazy vista, so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Downtown Gulfport steamed an old Floridian vapor from cracked sidewalks. Filigreed railings, shaded storefronts, not a soul out, everyone and everything stalled in the heat, distilling. The beach highway stretched out to the east, white and hot in the sun. Our tires made slapping sounds on the melting tar dividers and the wind in the car windows was warm and salty. We passed old beach mansions with green shutters, hundred-year-old oaks in the yards. A scattering of cheap redbrick motels, slatboard restaurants, bait shops. The beach, to our right, was flat and white and the lank brown surf lapped at the sand.

The Alamo Plaza Motel Court’s white stucco fort facade stood flanked by low regular motel rooms around a concrete courtyard. The swimming pool lay oddly naked and exposed in the middle of the motel’s broad front lawn, one low diving board jutting over the deep end like a pirates’ plank.

We stopped in the breezeway beside the office and went inside where the floor was cool Mexican tile, lush green plants in large clay pots in the corners, and a color television on which we could watch, late afternoons and evenings after supper before bedtime, programs unavailable back home. I have a vivid memory of watching a Tarzan movie there in which Tarzan, standing in the crook of a large tree, is shot right between the eyes by a safari hunter’s rifle, and he doesn’t even flinch. Is it possible this is a true memory, not invented or stretched? Would even Hollywood in the thirties — for this was an old movie even then — have Tarzan being shot directly in the forehead with a high-power rifle, the bloody spot at the point of entry jumping out on his skin, and him not even blinking his eyes? I was, I am, as incredulous as the safari men on the jungle trail below, holding their high-power rifles and gaping at this jungle god, who just stared coolly back at them with the bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

WE RENTED A BUNGALOW in the rear of the Plaza. In the mornings we went to the beach, joining hands to cross the white concrete path of U.S. 98, the beach highway, to the concrete steps that led down to the beach on the Sound. It was not an exhilarating beach, as Gulf beaches go, its white sand dredged from beyond the barrier islands twenty miles out to cover the naturally muddy shore, where the natural flora included exposed roots of cypress and mangrove. Huge tarpon, an almost prehistoric-looking fish, cruised here between the river and the sea.

Our father, my brother, and I waded far out into the Sound, where the water was still just knee-deep to a six-year-old. We turned and waved to our mother, who sat on the white sand on a beach towel, the pale blue scarf on her head, the cat-eyed sunglasses perched on her nose. She did not swim, and though one reason we came to Biloxi instead of the more beautiful beaches in Gulf Shores or Pensacola was the cheaper prices at motels, the other reason was her fear of the water. She felt safer sitting on the edge of the Sound, which was more like a lake, than she did near the crashing waves of the Gulf. The year before, standing near her beach towel in the sand at Gulf Shores, Alabama, as if it were her sole tentative anchor to the dry world, she had seen a young man drown trying to save his little boy from a rip current. She’d watched as the rescue squad dragged the man’s body onto the beach. A year later, and for many years after that, the terror she felt still welled up in her with a regularity as steady as the ticking minute hand on the clock, and with that same regularity she forced it back down, into her gut, where it fought with her frequent doses of Paragoric.

I can still remember her in the swimming pool, at the country club they’d struggled to join, before the hard times forced us to drop out. She would step into the shallow water with a look on her face that now I understand as terror but which then I took for simple cautiousness and uncertainty. A slim hand out as if to steady herself from some unknown that could unsteady the whole deal. A cream-colored bathing cap covered her dark curls, as if she were going to plunge in with the boldness of an Olympic diver, though her pointed, blue-framed sunglasses still rested on her slim nose. And before the water reached above her waistline she would bend her knees and, holding her head up on her neck as far as she could stretch it, push herself gently forward and dog-paddle around the shallow end, her toes bumping the bottom and pushing her forward every few little strokes. Knowing her now, I’m astonished she had the courage to get into the pool, with others there who might see her and laugh at the fact that she couldn’t really swim. All those club people, who might laugh and think what a country girl she was — Did you see that? Can’t even swim! And my admiration for her swells in some proportion to my sense of her loss in the intervening years.