Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“Shit! Son of a bitch. Goddamn you son of a bitch!” and so on for a good five or ten minutes, as he slammed things around the dressing room, lit a Marlboro, and smoked it in that way he had, sucking the life from it, his long scrawny neck flaring ten-dons, the bony Adam’s apple bobbing. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead where he’d jammed it against the soap tray. He stopped pacing and glared at me. One eye twitched at the little drop of blood leaking into it from his brow. He took off one of his tennis shoes and hurled it through the high window of the dressing room. It crashed through, sending glass shards out into the grass beside the pool apron. He stood there, his breath heaving in and out. He stomped over to one of the toilets and threw his cigarette into it and banged out through the dressing room door.

I sat there on the shower floor, entirely unfazed by Sparrow’s tantrum. You could not have shaken me from what I was feeling, not with the strength of a hundred men. That was when, pretty much, I knew that I had to have Olivia Coltrane. I was just about dying for her, right then.

SHE WAS SLIM, TALLISH, with a thick clump of short black hair that framed her small, delicate face, black bangs against her milky forehead. She was pale and pretty, if not conventionally so. Her teeth were a little too big for her mouth, so she may not have been smiling so often as she appeared to’ve been. She was a little nearsighted, but vain about wearing her glasses, so the crinkling around her eyes may have been more of a squint than the mirth you might have taken it for. You wouldn’t have put her in a magazine to model clothes or makeup. But you might have put her in an ad for some other product, say a snappy new red convertible, because she had a wholesome natural beauty in her, hard to say just what it was except maybe happiness. I think it was that sense of her natural happiness, really, that attracted me to her. I was never a very happy or contented person, and people like Olivia tended to ignite in me a secret, almost feverish desire to absorb whatever it was that made them so different from me. So at ease with the world and themselves in it.

She had a way of looking at me, straight-on, and seemed incapable of the usual emotional evasion, as if she had nothing to fear. It didn’t bother me in the least that she wasn’t the smartest girl around. She struggled in English, was competent in math. If you drew her as partner in biology lab, you would surely do most if not all of the work. She was a little bit lazy. She tended to spend her spare time reading ridiculous magazine articles like big spreads on the lavish lifestyle and strange marital relations of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis. But I really didn’t care. Most people thought me a little dim, too. I was ridiculously earnest and deliberate. I wasn’t the handsomest boy she could have dated, either, but I had a kind of appealing, homely kindness in my features, or so people would note from time to time, in one awkward way or another.

Soon after we’d started going out, I took every cent I had in my savings account at Citzens Bank and bought the ten-year-old VW bus, took the back seat out, padded the floor with old blankets and a flannel-lined sleeping bag, and began my serious courting of Olivia. I took her out as many nights as her parents would allow, and on Saturdays and Sundays, too. I started picking her up after church, in the bus, and either taking her on a picnic or over to Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. We did this every other week, alternating with her family’s Sunday dinners at her maiden aunt’s house, which I didn’t attend. I wasn’t exactly ever invited. Olivia enjoyed the picnics, and she loved the dinners at our house. My mom was an old country girl and a fantastic cook, whereas the Coltranes’ fare reflected Mr. Coltrane’s salt-free diet and the family’s general lack of interest in food.

She liked my folks, too, and kidded my little brother about his long, pretty hair and his dreamy, calflike brown eyes. She called him “Beautiful.” “Hey, Beautiful,” she’d say, and he’d frown and leave the room, but soon he’d be back in, grinning, and we knew he loved it. Once he slipped up to her and said, “Hey, Beautiful, to you,” and blushed so deeply I thought he might burst into tears of embarrassment. We all burst out laughing instead, and it saved him. Olivia spent the whole Sunday dinner in the chair next to him, her slim left arm over his shoulder while they ate. It almost seemed she loved him so much because he was still such a boy, and part of her still wanted to just be a girl, with crushes on beautiful boys. She would pet him, then look up at me with an expression of earnest if simulated heartbreak, as if she wanted to possess him somehow, possess his innocence and strange beauty.

When I picked her up at the church on Sundays, morning service over and all the Baptist folk standing out on the lawn feeling good about the world and their lives, it was dismaying to see the vague pall of anxiety that seemed to settle over them when they saw me pull up in the old VW bus, and on some of the faces you could see it was a type of anger or disgust. And Olivia, in her yellow or powder-blue Sunday dress and white shoes, throwing her hand up in a wave, saying good-bye to her family over a shoulder, running on her toes out to meet me and climb up into the bus, me and my jeans and T-shirt and long hair — you’d think they were standing in the yards of their beloved homes watching some heartless foreclosure agent auction them away. It was always a rotten feeling, just barely made bearable by the vision of Olivia, how pretty and fresh she always looked, and I was always glad to round the corner, away from all those disapproving Christian eyes. The only thing I’d ever liked about church was the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary, with the human-looking animals and the people in colorful robes, and their pale, luminescent faces, yearning.

She was a good Baptist girl, but she wasn’t a prude, and she liked to drink a beer here and there, and go to parties, and she generally liked my rowdy crowd. She was a virgin, though, and determined to stay one until she married. After a few months, I’d just about given up on that, and then one night on the way home she told me to pull over somewhere, anywhere, and I did, and everything changed. I’m not sure what had changed for her. She was a nice girl, but nice girls liked fooling around, too, once they were able to arrange the justification for it in their minds.

AND THEN IT WAS like we’d turned on the power and couldn’t find the switch to turn it back off. We started doing it everywhere. Out in the VW bus in the parking lot during study hall. On the visitors’ side of the stadium, beneath the bleachers, during lunch period. Sometimes, at night, we’d just pull the bus over to the side of the road, traffic swerving past, people hooting and honking. We did have a favorite private spot, for a while, a little cubbyhole of a niche in the brush along a sparsely populated street on the north end of town. You could pull in there and it was like the brush closed up behind you, it was that inconspicuous. We’d pull in there and take our time, like real lovers, then collapse to either side of one another, giving our bodies time to stop humming.

We didn’t realize that people living in a new subdivision one block over had noticed our lights pulling in there night after night, shutting off, clicking on again, pulling out. Maybe they thought we were burglars working a plan. Maybe they just didn’t like the idea of young, careless couples fornicating, rocking the vehicle, practically in their new backyards. At any rate, one night as I leaned on an elbow admiring her pale, slim, spraddled legs, a flashlight shone its beam directly into my naked lap. A man’s voice said, “Looks like we missed the action,” and another one said, “Get dressed and step out of the love machine, son.” I could make out the uniform and the badge, the heavy gun belt, the gun, even in the darkness.