Eating Memories (5 page)

Larry eyes were closing. “Right.” Then he gave Sweet Tooth one big squeeze. “You take it, kid. You get us home, okay?”

“Get you home,” Sweet Tooth told him. He got up. Jean got up with him. Larry looked real small in his seat. And real sleepy.

“I know you will,” Larry said.

They left Larry sitting there and went back to the bridge. Martingale looked upset. “Get Dunaway in here.”

“Dunaway’s dead,” Jean told him.

“Real sick,” Sweet Tooth said.

“And Goldblum?” Martingale ignored Sweet Tooth. He always did.

“His leg’s broken. I gave him some painkillers. He’s resting now.”

“You mean I’m left to pilot this ship with a planetologist and an idiot savant?” Martingale’s voice got bigger and bigger until he shouted out the last part of what he said.

“Idiot,” Sweet Tooth whispered. He wasn’t feeling happy anymore,

“Shut up, Martingale, Don’t call him that.” Jean reached out to touch Sweet Tooth on the shoulder, but it didn’t take the pain away.

“What should I call him, huh?”

“A recombinant. That’s what he’s called. A recombinant. Or you can call him by his name.”

“He doesn’t have a name. He has a number,”

“You know what I mean.”

Martingale looked at his console a long time. “Okay,” he said after a while, “Sweet Tooth, Where’s home now?”

Sweet Tooth shuffled his feet for a minute. Martingale made him feel like he wanted to run away.

“Come on, goddamn it! This is what you’re here, for! Where’s home?” Martingale’s eyes came up from the console and met Sweet Tooth’s. There was a sort of burning thing in them, like the burning thing that whipped between Jupiter and Io.

Sweet Tooth pointed. Home wasn’t going away any more, but it was real small. Smaller than he’d ever felt it.

Martingale moved a lever. The ship did a thing like Sweet Tooth’s body did when it was cold. It started to move, but it wasn’t moving right. Home was under the floor now.

“No, no, Bill,” Sweet Tooth said. He jumped up and down a little. The ship moving made him excited, but moving the way it was moving made him nervous.

Martingale stopped the ship again. He put his hands over his face.

“Home’s far, Jean,” Sweet Tooth told her, feeling real bad about everything, about Larry, about Dunaway, about how Martingale and Jean were looking upset.

“How far?” Martingale asked.

Sweet Tooth spread his arms apart wide, so wide he felt the stretch in his chest “Far,” he told him.

“Okay,” Martingale’s eyes went right through his head to the back of his brain. “Point to home now.”

He pointed. Martingale moved the ship, but he moved it wrong, Home came up off the floor: but it was way to the left again.

Martingale moved the ship a lot of times, bur he never could keep it right. Sweet Tooth got tired of pointing and sat down and tried to sleep. Jean woke him up.

“Keep pointing, Sweet Tooth. You have to keep pointing out home to Martingale. You want to get home, don’t you?” Jean’s voice sounded like she was mad at him, so Sweet Tooth sat up and pointed again. Home was just at the edge of the floor to the front, and Martingale was going to it, but over it, too.

“I’m losing power. We’ll never make it back this way,” Martingale said.

“How long before meltdown?” Jean had walked over to where Martingale sat, leaving Sweet Tooth alone. She leaned over Martingale. Her body was like a dance.

Martingale scrubbed his face up and down. “Five hours before we go critical. Get him in the navigation bowl.”

Jean stood up quick. Her back was straight. Her face was white.

“You do it. You tell him. You’re his idol. Queen of the hive, He’d do any goddamned thing for you. If he’s got any metal on him, get it off. In fact, get his clothes off, too. Tell him to fix our position. Override the computer. The steam’s playing hell with it.”

“No,” Jean said. Sweet Tooth had to sit up to hear her, her voice was so soft.

“You’ll lose all of us, then,” Martingale said. “Larry and you and me, and him, too. You’ll lose him, anyway.” He took his hands away from the console and set them in his lap, the way Sweet Tooth did when he didn’t want to do something. Only Martingale looked sad.

“It’s your fault,” Jean said.

Sweet Tooth thought she might be talking to him and it made him feel hurt. Then Martingale said, “I know.”

“Everything’s your fault.”

“I know. Does that-make it better?”

“I’m going to report you for this, Martingale. You’ll get your license taken away.”

“Big deal, Jean. Big goddamned deal.”

“You should get in there. You should get in there and set the controls. It was your fault. No one else should have to die for you.” Jean was sniffling the way Sweet Tooth did when he had a cold.

“I can’t,” Martingale said, and he still didn’t look at Jean. He looked at the console as if it were telling him something he didn’t want to hear. “I don’t know where home is.”

After a while Jean came over and told Sweet Tooth to take his clothes off. “It’ll be hot in there,” she said. She let him keep his shorts. “You get in there and you set the controls as quick as you can, okay? Quick like a bunny.” Her eyes looked away from him. “Then you get out. Understand?”

He nodded his head up and down. He didn’t smile because Jean was real serious.

Before she opened the door, she said to him again, “Quick like a bunny, Sweet Tooth. Don’t stay in there long.”

He felt funny standing there with his feet bare on the floor and his shirt and pants off. He put his hands over his chest so that Jean couldn’t see him. His body was ugly, all fat and pink; not like Martingale who had big muscles.

She opened the door. He ran inside. Sweet Tooth turned around in time to hear the sound the door made when it locked him in the hot room.

“Sweet Tooth?” Martingale said through the intercom.

The floor wasn’t bright, but it was burning, He could feel it. He was running in place real fast, faster than he had ever gone. “Hot, hot, hot,” he said, touching the intercom button.

“I know,” Martingale told him. “”Set the controls and get out.”

“Door locked!” Sweet Tooth wailed. “Jean locked the door!”

“I know . . .”

There was a sound and then Jean was speaking to him. “Sweetie? Sweetie? Sit down in the chair and set the controls for home. Put the console on MANUAL.”

Sweet Tooth didn’t want to hear what Jean was saying. The triglas was all covered over with fog. The floor hurt him so bad he thought that maybe he could fly to get away from it. He pumped his hands fast and then faster, but it didn’t work. His feet shouted with the burning, so he sat down. The seat stuck to his legs. “Hot! Hot! Hot!” he screamed. He went to the door and banged on it until his palms got red and blistered.

“Sweetie?”

Sweet Tooth could tell Jean was crying. She was crying a lot. She was crying so hard he could hardly understand her.

“Sweetie, please. We have to get home.”

“Hot! Hot!” Sweet Tooth said.

“Do you love me, Sweetie?”

“YES!” But his voice didn’t sound like he loved her.

“Do you love Larry?”

“YES!” He coughed. The air was wet the way it was at the ocean.

“If you love us, sweetheart, then set the controls. We can let you out then, understand?”

He ran quick, quick, quick, to the console. He could feel home a little nearer, but still far away.

“Hurry.” Jean said.

He hurried. Like a bunny. Touching the MANUAL button was like touching the end of a cigarette. “Hurt, hurt,” he said. His voice was miserable.

“Please, Sweet Tooth,” Jean said. “Don’t you know I love you?”

He knew. He knew because Jean had taken him to the roller coaster out on the beach. From up at the top he could see for miles and the sea had been blue and gray and green. The roller coaster went up real slow and came down fast; but while it was up on the hill, just before it started to go down, it would always stop for just a minute so that you could think about what was coming. You had time for your heart to go up into your throat and you had time for your hands to sweat on the bar. Then the car would start down like thunder.

Sweet Tooth put his hand on the lever and held it until he felt home like a bright knife right in the center of his forehead. He held it there so long he heard the computer say MANUAL OVERRIDE MANUAL OVERRIDE.

When he took His hand off, some of his skin stayed behind.

“Get out!” Jean said,

Sweet Tooth ran. Jean opened the door for him and pulled him inside. Martingale closed the door with a bang behind him. The floor was cool, so Sweet Tooth lay down on it. He held his wrist tight as if he could keep the burning from moving up.

“Look at his feet,” Jean said in a tight rubber-band voice. “Oh, God, Look at his feet.”

“Let’s get him in the showers,” Martingale said.

Martingale had to pick him up because Sweet Tooth didn’t want to get up ever again. He carried Sweet Tooth to the bathroom, threw him in the stall and turned the cold water on. “Stay down for a minute, damn it,” Martingale said.

“Jean!” he shouted. “Get the medkit, will ya? Jesus, he’s burned all over!”

Sweet Tooth started shivering. Martingale told him to turn over. He did, even though it hurt on that side, too. He was afraid not to. There was something real serious about Martingale’s face.

Jean came in and Sweet Tooth tried to hide himself because his shorts were all wet and he could see himself through them. He curled up in a ball near the side of the shower.

Jean bent down towards him, She was saying, “Oh God. Oh God” so much that it seemed more like singing than prayer.

Martingale shut off the water. Jean sprayed some stuff on his hands and legs, Sweet Tooth was shaking so much that his body went bump against the floor.

Tile spray made the hurt go away so Jean wrapped him in a blanket. He walked funny out to the bridge because he couldn’t feel his body. They had him sit in a chair. Jean gave him butterscotch pudding and he ate it with his left hand.

She ran her fingers through his hair. It was still wet. “You’re a hero. Do you know what that is?”

He shook his head. He couldn’t answer because his cheeks were full of butterscotch pudding.

“It means you were very, very brave.”

That made him feel good. When he was finished with the butterscotch, she gave him a chocolate. That made him feel even better, but it made him feel funny, too, Jean always said sweets weren’t good for him. He ate the pudding, keeping one eye on Jean, expecting she would tell him not to eat so much. She didn’t. Chocolate was his favorite pudding, except for butterscotch. When he was finished with that, she gave him a lemon pudding. He ate about three bites before falling asleep.

When he woke up his stomach felt funny. Larry was sleeping in a chair on the bridge.

“Sick,” Sweet Tooth said, putting his hand on his belly.

When Jean looked at him he threw up all over the blanket and the chair. He thought she would yell at him for eating so much, but she didn’t. She brought him another blanket. His shorts were dry, but his body was wet. He was shaking a little,

A few minutes later he got sick at the other end, and his shorts weren’t dry any more. Martingale took him to the bathroom and put him in the shower again.

“Sick,” Sweet Tooth told him in a tiny voice. He wanted to make himself real small because he was ashamed he had gotten sick in his shorts.

Martingale didn’t say anything to him. He didn’t say anything not even when Sweet Tooth got sick In the shower, this time with both ends at once.

Sweet Tooth’s belly squeezed together and hurt him bad. When he was sick again, the sick part was red.

After a while Martingale turned off the shower and wrapped him in another blanket. He put his arm under Sweet Tooth’s arm and helped him. Sweet Tooth couldn’t walk very well because his body was dancing by itself the way it did when he had the flu.

“Sick,” he said when they sat him down. Larry was awake and was looking at him funny. Jean was looking at the wall. They should put him outside, but nobody looked like they would. He should put himself outside, but he didn’t think his legs would move that far. Jean shouldn’t have let him eat all that pudding.

Jean took a deep breath, a long one, and sat up. Her body was beautiful the way it moved in the air. “I hope you’re satisfied,” she told Martingale. Her voice sounded sad the way wind does through empty bottles.

Martingale didn’t answer. Larry didn’t say anything, either. After a while Sweet Tooth slept. Home was a big, loud searchlight in his face.

Author’s Note:
I had begun the process to apply for Brazilian citizenship when my ex-husband took a ninety-degree turn in his career, returning to the U.S. for a degree in psychology. Well, he obtained his dream, but dreams are expensive. Writing, for example, cost me the last of my youth and a host of friends. His Ph.D. cost him Brazil.

When we returned, I grieved as I would have for a loved one who had died. I cried for three days straight; could barely eat for two weeks. Years later, given the opportunity to revisit the country, I found that emotionally I could not. I think the old adage is true: You can’t go back.

All things are subject to change, but to this day Brazil remains pristine and unspoiled in my mind, the way it was in July of 1974. The power and purity of that memory is why the alien in this story was content not to return home.

By the way, this idea was born from a single visual image: An elderly man was standing Tiptoe in a house, cutting down from the ceiling a large cocoon. I knew the image carried with it a great deal of sadness. The story emerged by asking myself the simple question, “Why?”

I don’t care what anybody says, he was a good neighbor. He moved in next door the summer that Acme Feed and Grain burnt down. He moved in kinda quiet-like with just a van coming up to his place. None of his people helped him.

Maxie made him a cake like he was just any of the new neighbors we’ve had in the last forty years. I got real irritated at that, partly because I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with him.

“A cake?” I asked her like I had never seen one in my life, “You’re making him a cake? Don’t you know who he is?”

“Reckon I seen him once or twice in the papers. Might have seen him on TV talking before the UN.” When Maxie decided to let something I said roll off her, she could be varnished rock.

“Well, how do you know he can eat chocolate cake?” I asked her, real sarcastic.

“How do you know he cain’t?”

And that was that. She had stuck them toothpicks all up to the top of that cake and wrapped wax paper around it
like she always done to keep the midgies out of the icing. She picked up the plate, and with me trotting behind her like a spring lamb, we walked the half mile or so of pasture over to his place.

When I think of him, I remember him sitting on that damned ratty lawn chair of his, a drink teetering beside him on the grass, with that look on his face he’d sometimes get like he could see real far, past where I could look. Recollecting about it now, I’m always in that picture, too, sitting in that idiot overstuffed chair he’d got in some flea market, a beer in my hand. I was used to him by then.

But that first time I seen him, I remember thinking that he was taller and bluer than I’d expected. I knew they were blue, but I always pictured them blue like a blue tick hound, where they’re kind of grey with a blue cast to them. Or blue like a blue roan horse. He wasn’t blue like that. He was the color of a plover’s egg or a real clear spring sky. That’s how he was blue. Let me tell you, you don’t get no idea over television. None at all.

He was so blue and so tall and skinny that I didn’t see how touched he must have been. It was a lot later before I thought of that. He stood there in the door and sort of looked down at that damned cake for a long time and didn’t say nothing. He just looked. And then them skinny hands of his came out and grabbed the edges of the plate, careful not to put his hands against Maxie’s, not ’cause he was fearful of touching her, but because, he told me later, he didn’t want to scare her away. His face lit up like a Christmas tree with a smile a mile wide and he said, “Chocolate,” in that oboe voice of his. He was a pure demon for chocolate.

He liked all of Maxie’s cakes. My favorite was the applesauce with the sour-cream icing, and he liked that one, too. But from then on whenever she made the chocolate, I knowed it was half for him.

He’d come over every once in a while, and you’d have to watch for him real good, cause he wouldn’t hallo the house like another neighbor might have done. He’d just stand in the yard in the rain or the sun till we noticed him. Sometimes I’d come in from the bam and there he’d be, and I’d get to wondering how long he’d been waiting. Much as we told him to come to the door and knock, he never done it. I figured he might have been too shy, and he thought sometimes we might not want him there. Once I told him it bothered me. I pictured us over to town and him standing in the yard for hours. It didn’t make me feel any better when he told me he looked for our car.

“Car might be in the shop,” I told him.

He looked at me with that odd, settled expression and said, “Then I will not wait. I will go home.”

“But you might want for something, and I’m here. Should come up and knock so you know for sure.”

“I can’t do that, no matter how much you wish it. For us it is a sin, bothering people. It’s greater than the sin of stealing.”

“You got any religious pamphlets I can give them magazine salesmen when they come by?” I asked.

“No,” he said real serious before he realized I was joshing. Then he laughed right along with me.

It was only when he said stuff like that that I remembered how different we were. Things would go on just fine, and I’d be thinking of him just as human as anybody else, then he’d say something like that and I’d remember. Like I said, when I got used to that blue, I didn’t see it no more.

Had a thing for vodka and Dr. Pepper, only he’d always add sugar and one of them bottled red cherries just for the pretty. Had a sweet tooth, that one. Kept Oreo cookies in a glass jar in his kitchen. Kept some pretzels in a glass jar and beer in the fridge, too, but that was for me, case I’d come calling.

We’d go out to his yard or on his porch if it was raining, and he’d bring out the Oreo jar and set it by him and the pretzel jar and set it by me. He’d make one of them vodka drinks for himself and reach in his refrigerator and bring me out a beer. He was real thoughtful that way.

Everyone’s house always smells a little strange, mostly from what’s cooked there. His smelled stranger than most, but it didn’t smell particularly bad, There was a hint of oregano in it, and something sugary, too. Once, when he was real drunk, he told me my house smelled of fresh baked bread and cookies. Said he just liked standing in my kitchen watching Maxie at the stove. Said it made him feel good, not like he was home, but good all the same.

I asked him why he didn’t go back, since he was retired and all. What I didn’t get into was why in the world he put up with the little sidelong stares he got in town. Couldn’t go to the hardware store without causing some kind of quiet commotion. People seen him coming and they just stopped in their tracks.

He said I wouldn’t understand, but he couldn’t go back because he loved home so bad.

“I want to remember the way it was in here,” he told me, tapping one of them long bony fingers against his skull. “To me, my trip only lasted three years, but more went by on my planet. What I miss is a home that existed over one hundred years ago, not the planet that is there now. When I knew I had to go,” he said as he stretched his legs against the tom plastic mesh of the lawn chair, “I started to memorize things I knew I would miss. When I got here, I mourned for a long time. I would remember those mind photographs I had taken of things and sometimes I would become lost in them. Then, in about five years, I adapted. I love home, still; but I love it as I would someone who is now dead. Home is dead for me, Billy. I’ve buried it.”

He might have killed it in his mind, but his heart never forgot. That long stare at night was to one particular light in the sky.

“Why didn’t you retire up there to New York where all your other people are staying?” I asked. I was expecting to hear that he didn’t like the city; that it was too smelly and crowded for him, but he didn’t say none of that.

“I am retired,” he said instead. “I would not be welcome in their community. It was expected that I would return home. I embarrass them.”

It was spring when some of his people came to visit. Maxie and me seen them drive up the road. Two humans, important ones by the looks of them three-piece suits, stayed around the car. The two others went on inside. They stayed a long time and I almost expected to see him leave with them, but he didn’t. He stayed put.

“Friends come to see you,” I said as I took a long pull of my can of Schlitz.

“Yes,” he said, He wasn’t real conversational that evening. We sat there for a while, him looking down into that drink of his instead of up to the sky. Moths tapped against the porch light.

I slapped at my arm. “Wet spring.”

“Yes.”

“Lots of skeeters.”

He didn’t say nothing.

“Skeeters don’t bother you, do they?”

“They don’t want me to stay here,” he said all of a sudden, and I knowed he wasn’t talking about skeeters.

It was my turn to look at him. I could see a lot of reason in what he’d said, but I still didn’t like it much.

“You staying anyways?” I asked.

“Yes, Billy. I’m staying anyway, but not for the reason you think.”

I recall it was a real dark night and real clear. Off to the east, down by the creek, I could hear the Harrlesons’ coon dog baying, A little breeze kicked up and rattled the leaves in the pecan trees near the porch.

“I’m dying,” he said.

I was looking at him when he said that. About then I couldn’t look at him no more.

“Not that I’m sick,” he explained, “but because I won’t change any more, I’m tired of changing. Of course being tired has very little to do with it. I’ve had a lot of lives. A great many lives. The people who came to see me?”

He expected some answer, so I said, “Yeah?”

“They don’t understand because they’re so much younger. They believe I’m being dramatic.” He chuckled a little at that. “But they pointed out that, if I do die, my soul would become stuck here, so far from home. They say I would spend eternity among strangers. What do you think?”

The question shocked me, but I answered anyway, “I always figured your God’s same as ours. Never thought about it much, but I don’t see that it’s any problem, dying here or dying there, Dead’s dead.”

“Yes, Billy, I think so, too. Dead’s dead. Tell me, if they’re right, if I don’t die, but change instead, will I frighten you?”

That question sort of raised the hair on the back of my neck. I should have said more, but I just told him no, I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I couldn’t imagine him scaring me. I couldn’t imagine that.

“You’re a good man, Billy,” he said.

Of the three of us, it was Maxie who went first. I recollect I come out of the barn one winter afternoon and seen her. There was about an inch of snow on the ground, and I wondered what the hell she was doing and if she wasn’t blamed cold lying there. When I come running up to her side, I seen she was cold. Cold as ice. I just sat back on my haunches and looked at her. It took me a while to realize she was dead.

Now it’s a funny thing, but I always figured I’d go first. So I guess in the little parcel of time I stood in the door of the barn and the while I sat on my haunches feeling the snow steal the heat out of my legs, I couldn’t believe she was dead just cause I didn’t have no reference point for it.

He made me mad cause he didn’t go by the funeral home. Didn’t go to the service, neither. And when everybody in town come by the house for pound cake and potato salad, I expected to see him there, but he never showed.

I buried Maxie in the family plot on our land right next to Mama and Daddy. From the back door you can see down to the wrought-iron fencing under the oak. It was better. Made me feel less lonely, ’cause I could still see her grave from the kitchen. The kitchen was the one place she belonged.

Damned if the day after the funeral I didn’t look down there and see him kneeling by her marble angel in the sleet. I was feeling pretty punky about then, so I didn’t go down there to talk to him. Didn’t feel like talking to nobody. Come back in the kitchen about two hours later to make me some coffee and seen he was gone.

I visited her the next day. Damn if he hadn’t made her a chocolate cake Sleet’d gotten to it, and a few of the braver ants were having a field day. I left it. A week or so later it was pretty well gone.

I took the plate back to him.

“Washed it for you,” I said when he opened the door.

He looked down at me with them silvery eyes of his and took the plate without word one,

“Appreciate it,” I told him,

“It’s nothing,” he said, Then he added, “It is a custom of ours to leave with the dead the one thing that symbolized them.”

I sort of looked at the plate where he was holding it in them blue hands. “Thank you,” I said. Then I said, “I think you caught her. I think you caught her good. Seemed like she loved to bake cause she knowed people liked it. She wasn’t nothing grand. I know that. But she was a good, solid woman. Somebody you could count on.”

“Someone to count on,” he said thoughtfully, I’m not sure, but that may well be a grand thing. Are you going to be all right?”