Spaceman

Victoria discovered Spaceman in the pond that first summer after Dick died.

She was sitting on the end of the dock next to the stone frog that looked out over the water.

Victoria's image floated on the still surface of the pond. The face was less like the watercolor it had been when she was growing up. More like a collage now. Gray-tinged hair clasped back into a sturdy wigwam. The nose a carpenter's triangle. Lips the final beginnings of a rent in an old, well-used garment of denim.

Her body was less a composition of soft arcs now, more an angular silhouette. Like that of a proud street vendor with twin baskets suspended from her shoulders.

Focusing past her double, Victoria saw two metallic stubs extending upward from the bottom. Had someone dumped junk in her pond?

She reached out and tried to pull the thing up, almost falling in with the effort. It was too heavy to move.

The Toyota didn't have anything for attaching a rope so she brought the old Ford truck down close to the shoreline, across from the dock. She retrieved the rope from the shed and tied one end to the hitch on the front of the Ford. The other end she hauled over to the dock and dropped a loop of it over the bulky boot-like part of the thing below.

On shore, she backed the truck slowly, watching as the silvery thing slid up onto the grass. It was human in shape – legs, a pair of arms, a head of some sort – but rigid as though cast in metal.

Victoria set the brake on the Ford and went to look. Even though the sun was almost down, every part of the body shined. Each wrist and palm was wrapped in a a gold material. Five finger-like appendages poked out at the ends.

Carefully, she cleared away the greenish-brown tangle of vegetation and pond muck that covered the head. It was large and glassy like a dark, crystal globe. The inside suggested a deep, unending void. Two gray-brown eyes – they were unmoving but eerily open, like they could see her – lay just under the surface. The right one betrayed a subtle reddish tinge, as did the projection that resembled a nose. It was bulbous, suggestive of swelling. Bumps on the sides of the head resembled ears, each with a pocket of fine cilia that Victoria took to be some kind of sensory material.

A large opening beneath the nose wrapped half-way around the thing's head. Like Frog's mouth.

The metalicl body relaxed. Then it moved. Looked around. Victoria jumped back, watching it roll over and pull itself up onto its big boot-like feet.

“Spaceman,” Victoria said, watching carefully in case he attacked. “How did you get stuck in my pond? Upside down.”

“Pressure regulation not working right,” Spaceman responded, rubbing the eyes as though he were coming out of a deep sleep. “Problem with lines to the main pump too.”

He smelled strongly of pond scum, but she was used to that. “Come on up to the house.” She pointed up the hill to the little frame house with its dormer in the roof at the front. “I'll fix you a hamburger. Then we can talk.”

Victoria found a package of ground beef in the freezer from when Dick was still alive. Spaceman ate almost two pounds of it fried. On buns. With American cheese.

Watching him eat, she thought about what she'd do in the coming days. During the getting-to-know-each-other phase.

He talked little that first night, going to sleep early in the first floor bedroom on the single narrow bed whose twin she'd hauled away herself in the Ford. Victoria normally slept there but tonight she climbed the stairs to the ten by twelve bedroom up in the dormer.

She hadn't been in that dormer room – much less slept there – in years. Victoria couldn't remember the last the time the covers had been turned down. The room still smelled as it had long ago when she let her clothes pile up – full of the odors of her body, the pond and the fields – before her mother would call for her to haul them down for the laundry.

At bedtime, Mama would come up and tell her a quick story, kiss her on the forehead and whisper, “Sleep tight sweetheart.” Mama always smelled of dime store perfume and hamburger grease.

Daddy stayed down in the basement mostly, shining his Japanese swords and U.S. Army bayonets. Or he'd have one of the rifles out of its case, oiling it, running a rag sensuously along its length, the smell of protective oil filling the air. He'd never handled a military weapon in any war but he could spend hours admiring the precision machining, the perfect straightness.

Daddy would touch her head sometimes and say, “How's my little darlin'?”

Then he might not say a word to her for weeks.

Spaceman snored loudly in the first floor bedroom.

Daddy died young. In his fifties. Victoria married Dick right after that. He moved into the house with her and Mama. It was the three of them for several years. Then Mama started to hurt everywhere. Then she started forgetting things to a point where they had to put her into the home.

One day – after three years of Victoria visiting Mama every other day in the home – the nurse called to tell her that Mama was out of her pain. No more being lost; no more being frightened because she didn't know where she was.

The worn out mattress groaned below as Spaceman adjusted his position on the old bed.

She and Dick lived all of their married life together in the little house above the pond. Dick did pretty much the same thing everyday, eating a breakfast of eggs, two bacon, two slices of white bread toast with butter. He went to work, came home and then into the basement to hold the old Indian spears and arrows and rattles that he collected. He leafed through catalogs for buying and selling the artifacts. Sometimes he'd come upstairs and watch the ten o'clock news before going to sleep on one of the twin beds in the first floor bedroom. The beds were so old. Victoria wanted to get rid of them both – get one of those “kings” – but Dick refused.

On weekends, they sometimes played cards with Grace and Jack. The get-togethers were mainly Victoria's idea, the one thing Dick would agree to since it meant he didn't have to go out anywhere . The evening would start at seven-thirty sharp. As Dick required. They folded up the card table at eleven.

Grace and Jack were out here from the city. They were different: going to the diner a lot, having drinks at Lennie's Late Night. They always wondered how Victoria could stand living with Dick.

Victoria and Dick never had kids, of course – Dick's sperm count was too low to say he even had one. And Dick didn't like animals, even though he worked in a feed store where he filled orders for farmers and dog breeders. He refused to have pets in, or anywhere near, the house.

Dick dropped dead one day over on highway BB at a spot near nothing at all. On the other side of town like he'd been heading home. Heart failure. No signs of anything more. Bobby – the husband of a woman who worked at the feed store – had been stopped there too. The two men had some kind of discussion on the shoulder of the road. When Bobby left – he swore up and down to the police – Dick was OK. In his rear view mirror he'd seen Dick getting into his car and he looked just fine.

Spaceman gave out a massive grunt below.

Victoria got up and took the bun out of her hair, looking at herself in the dresser mirror. Tomorrow she'd get some of that rinse. She'd make the gray a little less... gray.

Margie the convenience store clerk asked, “Hey, are you eating for two? I ain't never seen you buy all that before!”

Victoria referred to her as, “That Old Whore.” The same thing she'd called her in high school. Then and now, too much mascara. These days, an overdose of rouge that failed to hide her years. Nonetheless, the bouffant-clerk could swing her hips in the most seductive way each time she ran an item over the scanner.

Quite appropriate that Margie worked at the KwickieMart!

Victoria's arms were filled: four two-pound packs of hamburg, three bags of chips, five loaves of white bread. She set that load down on the counter and went back for the stack with the pre-packaged lunch meat – mostly bologna – and canned stuff. Then the pile that contained the box of hair coloring. “Please ring up three thirty-packs too, Margie.” She pointed to the stacks of beer cases by the door. “I'll come back for them once I get all this into the truck.”

Victoria's big cabinets – empty and cold-looking for months – brimmed with cans and jars and boxes. The refrigerator light sparkled on thirty of those brown bottles of beer lying on their sides on the bottom shelf. Cellophane packaging on the ground meat gleamed.

In the first floor bedroom, Spaceman lie on the new king size bed which had been delivered just the day before. “Main brain is giving me this headache,” he complained. “I can't take NSAIDs. I'll have an ulcer in the energy tank,” he warned her. “No aspirin. No ibuprofen.”

Victoria made a run to the drugstore in town to buy acetaminophen. When she got home she brought Spaceman two of tablets and a bottle of beer.

Victoria introduced Spaceman to Grace and Jack the day they ran into them at the Wal-Mart. Spaceman had needed some eyedrops. His right visual sensor was scratchy and he kept having to open and close it to try to see OK. He also needed one of those plastic boxes with compartments labeled with the days of the week. That was for the pills he needed to cope with his pressurization and main pump issues.

When she called Grace later, Victoria first said she was dating Spaceman. Then she intimated that maybe she was more involved than that.

The two couples arranged to get together on Friday night to play cards. They got along well, playing until well past midnight. Near the end of the evening, Spaceman got up from the little folding table, patting himself on the belly. “One more time Jocko?”

Jack didn't look up from his card dealing. He held up the empty beer bottle. “You know it, Spaceman. By the way do you bowl?”

Spaceman said he could roll a hook that would make Dick Weber look pathetic. “Even with the carpal tunnel,” he bragged, holding up one gold-wrapped hand, then the other.

Right there in the living room, he took his bowling stance. “Seven-ten split,” he announced. Four steps. He rolled an imaginary bowling ball, waited, watching its flight down the lane, and threw his hands in the air. “Yes!” he shouted, turning for a high five from Jack, grabbing the empties from the table and heading into the kitchen.

Grace put a hand to her mouth so Spaceman couldn't hear. “You finally got a live one, Vicky!”

Spaceman returned with two beers, a diet cola for Victoria and a vodka over ice for Grace. As he sat down, he nuzzled Victoria's cheek with the smoked-glass face of his helmet-head.

Grace watched Victoria and Spaceman over her cards. “Vicky. do you still have all of Dick's old Indian paraphernalia down in the basement? Gawd. And what about your father's old army junk? That still down there?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I saw an ad on the bulletin board at Weaver's. A guy says he's willing to pay big bucks for stuff like that.” Grace snuffed out a Raleigh in the Coke ashtray at her elbow. “You should take a look.”

Victoria fingered one of the greasy potato chips from the wood-look bowl on her side of the table. She felt one of Spaceman's big metallic boots trying to play footsie under the table.

“You're right. It's time to get rid of that stuff.”

Over the next few weeks, Jack introduced Spaceman to the guys. They watched football and Nascar at Victoria's place. She made hamburgers and saw to it that they had plenty of beer and chips.

Spaceman joined the guys' bowling team.

Victoria looked at the bill for the guitar. This one was seven-hundred dollars. The last one was over a thousand. “Classics,” Spaceman called them. Most of the money from the sale of Dick's and Daddy's hoards had gone into buying a Buddy Holly Gibson electric, a Chet Atkins Gretch, a Carl Perkins big- body acoustic and a half dozen other noteworthy models. Spaceman hung them carefully on the walls. The basement also sported a big easy chair and a second refrigerator.

Spaceman didn't know how to play a note but he spent many hours down there polishing the guitars, holding them up and sighting down the neck to marvel at how straight and true they were. Under the display lights Dick had installed years before, the guitars looked like stringed jewels.

A couple of bowling shirts hung on hangers on a gas pipe down there too, along with a dressy button-up one. It had a crazy pattern of reds and blues, no buttons for about twelve inches below the neck.

Spaceman called out to Victoria from the bathroom. “Jesus H. Christ, it hurts like f__ing hell!”

She rushed to the door and asked what was going on. Spaceman said he couldn't go. His head hurt like hell. Fever. “It's so f__ing blocked up, it's like peeing f___ing glass!”

Victoria, hand on the bathroom doorknob, called in. “What can I do? Do you want me to take you to the emergency room?”

“God! Yes,” he screamed.

He held his crotch unit and moaned, cursing all the way to Regional Hospital thirty miles away. He kept saying that he knew that this was the end. Rapid oxidation. Transport fluid blockage. Two attendants wheeled him into the emergency room. Victoria filled out paperwork saying that she'd be responsible for all the charges.

After about an hour's wait, the young doctor – they all look like kids these days – came out to tell her the patient had merely passed a space rock. Quite common with spacemen. He'd still have that broken glass feeling for a while but by morning he should be able to empty his bladder compartment normally. “Everything clears up and it's like it never happened,” he assured her.

“Tuesday,” Spaceman announced to Victoria, who pored over bills at the kitchen table. “Bowling night.” He had a new bowling shirt on. “Lennie's Late Night” printed on the back. The bag with his ball – stuffed fuller than she'd ever seen – was at his side.

“I thought Wednesday night was bowling night?”

“They started a new league,” he said and headed out the door. She heard the Toyota disappear down the road to town.

About 12:30, Victoria called Grace who took almost thirty seconds to answer. She was half-asleep. “Have you seen Spaceman tonight? Bowling? Is he with Jack?”

Grace paused before answering. “No, honey, Jack's been in bed since ten. I thought Wednesday was league night?”

Victoria said nothing for a minute, muttered goodbye but forgot to apologize for waking Grace.

She dressed and drove into town in the Ford truck, finding the the Pick-A-Spare bowling alley empty except for the cleanup crew. No sign of Spaceman. Outside on the parking lot, she could see the dozen or so beer signs in the high windows of Lennie's across the highway. She walked over and tried to see in but the windows were too high up – by design, no doubt.

As she opened the door, a blast of cigarette smoke and country-swing music smacked her in the face. A shiny multi-faceted ball on the ceiling sent motes of light in a dizzying circle around the otherwise darkened interior.

As Victoria's eyes adjusted, she could see Spaceman dancing in his low cut red and white shirt, gyrating wildly side to side, pressing his crotch unit into Margie's out-thrust backside. A bunch of drunk-on-their-asses cowboys and truck drivers circled around, laughing, clapping. They shouted “Go, Spaceman!”

Victoria prepared the picnic basket, letting Spaceman know it was filled with bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches and chips – Spaceman's second favorite after burgers and chips. She already had a cooler down on the dock. Mostly beer, some sodas.

At first, he didn't want to go – so close to the water – but she suggested they could talk there about how she might get the money to buy that vintage 1967 Strat. The one with the humbucking pickups. The one he said was “to-die-for.”

Once on the dock, Victoria took Spaceman's wrapped glove-hand and coaxed him to the end. “Stay here,” she said in a voice suggesting romance. “Let me grab a couple cold ones.”

She stepped back near the cooler, extended her arms, fingers up, and lunged at Spaceman's back, going high for the shoulders. She almost followed him into the water but caught herself just at the edge.

He didn't utter a word as he went in head first, going directly to the bottom,

Now, he was much like when she had found him – rigid, upside-down. The soles of his boots faced upward, almost like little stands waiting for some piece of artwork to sit upon them. They were just out of arm's reach.

Victoria retrieved the dingy from the boat house and managed to haul the stone frog into it with her. She hoisted the statue onto the edge of the boat, then, after a couple of attempts, onto the soles of Spaceman's boots just below the surface.

Back on the dock, Victoria sat on the drink cooler and bit into a BLT. Took a sip of diet root beer. She reached into a pocket and found clips, a scrunchee, and pulled her hair back into a smart bun.

Frog looked lovely sitting on his new perch. Happily – endlessly – thrusting out his tongue in pursuit of snacks of his own.

Victoria thought that the two of them would be happy there now. In the midst of the sunlight sparkling on the water. In the quiet of end-of-Summer days. Then Fall creeping up. As silent, vast and dark as outer space.