The Mutual UFO Network Page 7

  The night Irene packed her duffle for her trip to Hawaii, she suddenly turned from her dresser and threw her arms around Belle’s neck. Belle stood there, surprised, afraid to return the hug, knowing that if she did, she would never want to let go. “Do you have enough undergarments?” she finally said, cringing at the prim sound of the words.

  One day, not long after Naomi’s accusation, a letter came from Irene, along with a cassette recording she had made of the humpback whales. When Belle played the tape and heard the whales’ calls, she felt something collapse inside her, some notion she had manufactured that it didn’t matter a stitch to her what Naomi claimed. What was the word of a child to her, who had managed without Miss Naomi Silver and would do so again?

  When Belle listened to the whales’ urgent calls, she knew she was a fraud. In their groans and trills, and their bellows that rose to screams—what Irene, in her letter, called the “ascending phrases”—Belle heard her own need, and she nearly wept. She thought of all the nights she had stood at her door saying, “Naomi, Naomi.” She imagined the first sailors to hear the whales’ calls and how the cries must have pierced them to the quick, made the pitch and sway of their ship—this world at sea they had come to trust—seem foreign and perilous.

  “The bellows are called bells,” Irene wrote. “Like when a deer bays. He bells. Sort of a trumpeting sound.”

  The association of the sounds with her name stunned her, and it seemed then as if the whales were calling her, “Belle, Belle, Belle.”

  She imagined Irene and her boyfriend on the boat they had rented, their underwater microphones dropped over the side, their headphones in place as they listened to the swell of the ocean and then the whales’ cries. Eavesdroppers, they were, listening to pleas and shrieks and whimpers, stealing this ancient and intimate language not meant for human ears.

  Sometimes, Irene went on to say, the whales swam up onto the shore and stranded themselves on dry land. The theory was that they navigated by using the geomagnetic field of the Earth, and when that field fluctuated, as it often did, they continued to follow a field of constant strength, a geomagnetic contour, no matter where it threatened to lead them. Often, a beached whale, when towed back to the sea, would again swim to the shore, convinced it was moving in the right direction.

  Belle’s husband had been a geologist for an oil company, and he had explained to her the plates of the Earth’s crust and mantle and how they drifted at various speeds and in different directions. At one time, there had been a single supercontinent, Pangaea, before massive blocks of the Earth’s surface separated. Some converged again; some slid past one another. The world of the here and now was only a fleeting manifestation of a grander reality. The land beneath their feet had started somewhere else. Perhaps two hundred million years ago the North Texas plains had been part of what was now Africa. Even as they spoke, he told her, they were drifting westward at one to three centimeters per year. “In the big picture,” he said, “we’re all moving.”

  Now she thought of the whales and their calls going out through the oceans of a drifting Earth. Most of their songs, Irene said, were audible to other whales nearly twenty miles away, and some of the low-frequency moans and snores could range over a hundred miles. Belle thought of Naomi and how she was only three houses away, but still the distance seemed too great for either one of them to close.

  That night, and for several nights thereafter, her husband came to her in her dreams. Always, he was young. His black hair gleamed, and his broad chest flared up from his narrow waist. And in these dreams, she, too, was young. They were back in their old house in Dallas, not far from the airport, Love Field. When jets took off, teacups rattled in the china cabinet, picture frames tilted on the walls, the trapdoor to the attic rose and fell and banged against its frame as if spirits were tromping across the ceiling joists. “It’s like someone just walked across my grave,” she used to say to her husband, her hand at her throat. “Oh, don’t complain,” he would tell her, with a wink. “How can we go wrong when we live so close to Love?” It became a dear joke between them. “We’re in the Love Field,” they teased. “Oh, baby. We’ve landed in Love.”

  Now she lived in a neighborhood surrounded by pasture fields where longhorn cattle grazed and the blue sky stretched off to the horizon. Some evenings, she walked to the farthest reach of the subdivision and saw the land the way it had been before people had come to claim it: scrub trees and clay soil cracking from drought and grass turning to tinder—dry and burnt—under the blazing sun. How vast Texas must have seemed to the first settlers. So much room, a person could disappear if he wanted to, and perhaps no one would ever know.

  One afternoon, though the heat was almost more than she could bear, she went for a walk so she could pass the Silvers’ house in hopes of seeing Naomi playing in the yard.

  And there she was. She was sitting on the grass, her head bowed as she tried to lace up her sneaker. She was having a hard time of it. Her hair had fallen over her face, and she was poking the shoelace at the eyelet with no success. Finally, she let the lace drop from her hand. Her shoulders wobbled, and Belle knew she was trying hard not to cry.

  Then Naomi looked up, and Belle saw the gauze patch over her left eye, held in place with strips of tape stuck to her forehead and cheekbone. At first, Belle could hardly bear the sight of Naomi, stymied, when she had always breezed through the world. Then Belle felt a stronger part of her drift toward Naomi’s need. She was, after all the crazy stunts, a child who needed someone now to help her.

  “That old shoelace is being a pill, isn’t it?” Belle said.

  Naomi nodded her head, and her bottom lip quivered. She picked up the shoelace again and held it out, inviting Belle to take it.

  “Slip off your shoe, sweetie,” Belle told her, “and I’ll lace it for you. If I try to kneel down, I may never get back up.”

  Naomi kicked off her shoe, picked it up by the lace, and brought it to Belle. “I would have asked my mom to help me,” Naomi said, her voice hushed the way it had been when she came to Belle’s house to play the piano. “But she’s busy with Yellow Baby. She’s always busy with Yellow Baby. I could just disappear, and she wouldn’t even know.”

  “Oh, she’d miss you.” Belle threaded the shoelace through the eyelet. She thought of Irene so far away in Hawaii. “Just like I’ve missed you.”

  “Me?” said Naomi, and Belle could see that her surprise was genuine. She had never known how much Belle loved her.

  “I don’t know why you lied, sweetie. You know I didn’t hit you.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Naomi said.

  “Will you tell your parents that? Tell them the truth? It was those rubber bands that caused all the trouble.”

  Naomi bit down on her lip. “I want to,” she said, “but I can’t. Then they’d know how wicked I am.”

  Just then, Mrs. Silver came out of the house with Marie in her arms. “Naomi,” she said, “your father wants you to come inside now.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Naomi said. Then she snatched her shoe from Belle’s hand and dashed across the lawn.

  Mrs. Silver owned a candy store. Belle had seen her commercials on television. In them, Mrs. Silver, a lanky woman whose teeth were too big, wore a tutu and tights and a pair of gauzy fairy wings. She carried a magic wand with a glittery star on its end. “At the Sugar Plum Cottage,” she always said at the end of the commercials, “where being sweet to you is our business.”

  Belle walked across the lawn so she could get a closer look at the baby. “So this is the one,” she said, letting her voice fall into the singsong rhythm she recalled other women using when they had admired her own baby. “This is the little sweetheart.”

  “This is Marie,” said Mrs. Silver. She matched Belle’s tone, an inflection just like the ones she used in her commercials.

  Belle peered down at the baby, who was, as Naomi had claimed, fussy. She was crying, her eyes clamped shut, her mouth open wide, her chubby fists waving in t
he air. “You’re trying to tell us something, aren’t you, little Marie?” Belle said. She was well aware that she was trying to curry Mrs. Silver’s favor so she could broach the subject of Naomi and her lie. “We just can’t understand what you’re saying. No, we can’t.”

  Marie was, in all honesty, sorely featured. Her head was too big, her eyes set too close together. Even without the yellow tinge to her skin, she was not, though Belle would never have said this to Mrs. Silver, a looker.

  “She’s…jaundiced,” Mrs. Silver said, and the way she hesitated between the two words made it clear to Belle that she knew as well as anyone with two good eyes that her baby was far from handsome.

  “Oh, that’ll go away,” Belle said. “What we need now is to get this sweetheart to stop crying.”

  And then Belle started to sing. She sang “Mairzy Doats,” and the cadence of the song seemed to catch Marie’s ear. She toned down her squall to an occasional whimper. “Maybe if I held her,” Belle said.

  She reached for Marie, and Mrs. Silver took a perceptible step back. There was an awkward moment, then, when Mrs. Silver tried to cover over the fact that she had just snubbed Belle. “Babies,” she said, and her voice trembled with a phony laugh. “They’re such a handful. I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

  Belle wanted to feel sorry for Mrs. Silver because she was a nervous woman, not such an eye-catcher herself, who owned a candy store and dressed in a fairy princess costume to make herself feel pretty. Now she had a baby with jaundice and, beyond that, a face that people would remember for the wrong reasons. Belle wanted to offer her sympathy, but she couldn’t manage it. Instead, she felt a rage start to rise in her because she knew that, when Mrs. Silver had stepped back from her, she had been announcing that she thought Belle dangerous, a crazy old woman who had nearly blinded Naomi. Let her hold the baby? Not on her life.

  That evening, Belle wrote her message in the baby card, underlining the word BEAUTIFUL five times, satisfied with the irony. She had just dropped the card into the mailbox on the corner when she heard a siren’s rising keen.

  It was dusk, and she saw red light swell and pulse on the trees and houses as an ambulance turned down the street. She waited to see where it would stop.

  Naomi’s house. Naomi, Belle thought. Something’s happened to Naomi.

  But it wasn’t Naomi at all. It was the baby, Marie. She had fallen into the pool. The word spread up and down the street. The pool. The baby. Marie. It was all anyone knew.

  It was nearly dark by the time the paramedics brought her out to the ambulance. As they came hurrying through the Silvers’ front yard, Belle saw, just for a moment, the baby’s tiny hand, as the man carrying her slipped through the gaslight’s glow.

  Then Mr. Silver came running, barefoot in his swimming trunks. Mrs. Silver and Naomi dashed out of the house. They all got into the back of the ambulance, and its siren shrieked again as it sped away.

  For a moment, Belle stood with her neighbors in the middle of the street, looking at the Silvers’ house. They had left the front door open, and she could see the lights burning inside and the slow turn of a ceiling fan.

  “I suppose someone should go down there and shut the door,” a man said. “And turn off the lights.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Belle.

  “Oh, I can do it,” the man told her.

  “No.” She stepped forward. “Please.”

  In the Silvers’ house, she went from room to room switching off the lights, letting darkness follow her. Upstairs, in Naomi’s room, she noticed that a window was open. The screen had been popped out and was leaning against the wall. She felt the warm night air, smelled the chlorine in the backyard swimming pool. Her hand moved over the light switch, and then the pool lights cast the reflection of the water into the room. It spread over Belle and across the wall behind her. The blue tint of the shuddering light, rising and falling with the gentle motion of the water, caught her by surprise—how delicate it was, how wispy, like threads of smoke lacing the air.

  She went to the window to close it. She looked down on the pool and saw a bright orange raft, the kind someone could inflate and float on, turned upside down. It was spinning in a lazy circle as if it had a slow air leak. As it swung around, she caught a glimpse of something settled on the pool’s bottom, a dark shape, mysterious in the dim glow from the underwater lights. Then she smelled the scent of raspberries, and, in an instant, she remembered the sunblock Naomi always wore, and she imagined that what she saw on the bottom of the pool was a bowling ball. She pictured Naomi standing at the window, struggling with the ball’s weight, balancing it on the sill, and then shoving it out into the air. Perhaps Mr. Silver had been on the float with Marie. He would have looked up just as Naomi yelled. Perhaps she screamed, “Look out below.” Then the ball came crashing down into the water, and Mr. Silver, trying to shield Marie, let her slip from his hands, while Naomi looked on, stunned by what she saw.

  Or maybe that wasn’t how it had happened at all. Maybe, Belle thought, she simply needed to believe that Naomi had finally astonished herself, had wandered so far from the world she had found it again, had found her mother, her father, Marie, even herself, had felt the weight of their living.

  One evening, not long after the funeral, Mrs. Silver came to Belle’s house, the baby card in her hand. “You saw something in her, didn’t you?” she said. “That day when she was crying and you sang to her. You saw something pretty in her.”

  Standing there with Mrs. Silver, the door open just a crack, Belle thought of her own son, and her husband, and Irene, and even Naomi, who would be a different girl now that she knew loss, who would more than likely remember Belle in the years to come, if she remembered her at all, as the old woman about whom she had lied the summer her baby sister drowned. Belle imagined all of them standing together on the drifting Earth, all of them lifting up their voices, sending out their cries.

  “Such a racket,” she had always said when the jets had taken off from Love Field and risen with a scream over their house.

  Her husband had made the same joke every time, yet she never tired of it. “What can we do?” he had said with a shrug of his shoulders. “So little us. So much Love.”

  She thought of the joke again as she opened her door wider. “Yes, I saw it,” she said to Mrs. Silver. “Your Marie was a beautiful child.”

  THE LAST CIVILIZED HOUSE

  ANCIL

  HE FOUND THE TRACKS IN THE SNOW ONE EVENING SHORTLY AFTER New Year’s, when he went out to the burn barrel with the trash. The temperature was fifteen, according to the old Prairie Farms thermometer tacked to the doorframe, and the wind was out of the north. It blew in over the empty field that stretched back to the railroad trestle and stung his eyes. He hunched his shoulders, drawing the upturned collar of his barn coat toward his ears. He looked down at the ground—they’d had snow cover since mid-December—and that’s when he saw the tracks, where none had been that morning when he’d come out to fill the bird feeders.

  The tracks came around the corner of the house and ran in a straight line to the back steps. Ancil knew they weren’t his, which he could distinguish by the Cat’s Paw heel prints. This set had been made by someone wearing Red Wing boots. Ancil figured it was a man for the tracks were long and wide, the wavy soles of the boots and the Red Wing logo pressed deep into the snow.

  “What in the world?” Ancil said to himself.

  He lived with his wife, Lucy, on the edge of town, just before the pavement turned to gravel and ran out into the country. Theirs was the last civilized house, he always told people when giving them directions. The last house before the wilderness. The last chance for comfort before crossing the border into lands unknown. The last chance to save yourself, he said with a wink and a laugh. Now he wanted to know who in the world had been snooping around in broad daylight, and, more to the point, why?

  The prints came up onto the back stoop. Had the man stood there and tried to look in through the glass in th
e door, the glass that Lucy kept covered with curtains? Whoever he was, he’d hopped down from the stoop on the side where the double kitchen windows ran along the back wall—the prints were deeper there—and walked around the house, stopping at every window, from bedroom to living room to dining room. To think that someone had looked into the house that afternoon while he and Lucy had been doing their trading in town struck a nerve. It kept gnawing at Ancil as he tracked the prints out to the sidewalk and then into the street, where they disappeared, as if the man had stepped into a car and driven away.

  Ancil stood at the side of the street and looked back at his house—such an ordinary house, a wood-frame house with aluminum awnings over the windows and the front stoop—and he tried to imagine that he was this man, up to no good. What would he see if he were to peep through the windows?

  The next thing he knew he was standing at the front window looking in. Nothing he saw seemed remarkable to him at all. The fireplace of red brick, generations of family Bibles stacked on the mantle along with the Christmas garland Lucy had yet to take down. The wedding ring quilt on its rack in the corner. The big round braided rug on the hardwood floor, the two reclining chairs where Ancil and Lucy sat most nights watching some nonsense on TV. Lucy’s knitting spilling out of her sewing basket on the floor by her chair. The doily on the back of his, dingy from where his hair oil had stained it. Just the marks and signs of all their years together. Nothing much of value that anyone would want to steal. Nothing much of interest.