Pretend I’m Here
Patrick Ryan
Clark Evans finished the talk on his NASA experience with a description of the g-forces created in a Darmotech centrifuge. He held one of his large hands open and upturned in front of him, as if displaying a crystal ball, and then moved the hand in a circle that increased in speed as he described the sensation, until Frankie, staring from the front row, felt nearly hypnotized.
The ancient librarian who was moderating the event asked if anyone had a question for their guest. Frankie, sixteen, raised his hand. There were five people in the audience, scattered over a flock of folding chairs four times that number. The librarian and Clark Evans sat on slightly nicer chairs at the front of the library’s map room. She looked past Frankie and pointed a wavering finger at an old man wearing a sun visor.
“Did you find being on the moon made you want to throw up?”
“Well, as I was saying—” Evans began.
“Because Conrad or Bean—one of those guys from Apollo 12 or 14—said in an interview that the low gravity made him want to throw up, and I was wondering what would happen if an astronaut threw up in his suit.”
“I imagine it would be quite a mess,” Evans said.
“But it didn’t happen to you?”
“Not to me, no. As I was saying a while back, I was lined up for three different missions, but they didn’t come through. NASA politics and whatnot. But I can tell you from knowing a whole lot of guys who went up there that walking around on the moon is like nothing on this planet, that’s for sure.” He smiled at Frankie as he said this.
“Any other questions?” the librarian asked.
Frankie raised his hand, but the old man spoke up again:
“Are you saying there’s no system in place whatsoever for when an astronaut throws up?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Evans said, and the old man, appalled, glanced at the other audience members.
The librarian cleared her throat and said in a trembling but authoritative voice, “Let’s have another question.”
She pointed to a woman four chairs away, who said, “God made the Earth for man to live on it, not leave it.”
“How about this young man,” Evans said, nodding toward Frankie. “You’ve got a question, don’t you, bud?”
His face, Frankie thought, was a mix between Steven Carrington’s and Steve Austin’s. He had Han Solo’s shaggy brown hair. Captain Starbuck’s alluring gaze. It was a face Frankie saw every week on the back of the local TV guide in the ad Evans took out for his real estate business, which featured the slogan, “I’ll circle the Earth to meet your needs!” Frankie straightened up in his chair and asked, “Can you comment on Gordon Cooper’s UFO sighting and the photos he took during his Mercury orbit?”
“That’s a great question,” Evans said. “And, you know, I actually have an interesting story about that event . . . but it’s a little long to tell right now.” He turned to the librarian. “We’re about out of time, aren’t we?”
She confirmed this. Evans stood and dug his wallet out of his blazer, and from it he removed a small stack of business cards. He stepped forward and passed them out to each member of the audience, reminding them that he wasn’t just a retired astronaut but a Realtor, and encouraging them to call if they were ever buying or selling a home in the area. There was a small clatter of applause.
Frankie was unlocking his bicycle from the rack in front of the library when he heard a voice say, “I hope you didn’t think I was dodging your question, bud.” He looked up and saw the astronaut standing several feet away, holding his car keys. Evans had on a pair of aviator sunglasses and he was smiling, showing white teeth.
“That’s OK,” Frankie said.
“I would like to tell you that story sometime. These public events are hell, and it’s nice to run into someone who has a genuine interest in the space program.”
“I’m interested in what Cooper took a picture of.”
Evans held out his hand. “Clark Evans,” he said.
“Frankie Kerrigan.” Frankie’s hand was swallowed in the grip. His skinny arm snapped like a rubber hose.
“You live on the island?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good for you. No need to sir me, by the way. You have any desire to be an astronaut?”
“Not for the government.”
“Well, there aren’t too many independent astronaut companies out there, though if there were, I’m sure they’d be better run than NASA.”
“Do you think our ancestors were aliens?”
“Ha ha,” Evans said. “I haven’t given it much thought. How old are you, bud?”
“Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”
“How about that. Well, listen, you still have the card I gave you?”
Frankie nodded and pulled it out of the back pocket of his jeans.
“That number on the front is my office,” Evans said, taking the card from Frankie’s hand. He turned it over and clicked a ballpoint pen and began to write. “But this is my home number. Why don’t you give me a call sometime, and maybe we can get together and talk about . . . space.” He handed the card back to Frankie. “Ever been inside the V.A.B.?”
“Not inside it, no.”
“We could tour the facility. Would you like that?”
“Sure.”
“Give me a call and we’ll see what we can work out.”
“Thanks, Mr. Evans.”
“It’s Clark,” the astronaut said. He pulled his sunglasses down an inch and gazed at Frankie for a moment. Then, spinning his key ring around his index finger as if it were a six-shooter, he walked across the parking lot to a midnight blue Trans Am. He glanced back once before getting in, pulled out of the parking lot, and was gone.
Still standing next to his bike, Frankie looked down at the business card. He read the phone number and turned the card over. Beneath the name of Evans’s real estate business were the words, bolded and italicized, I’ll circle the Earth to meet your needs!
He’d begun thinking of his house as a network of pods where they all lived separately. His sister Karen’s pod was off-limits and silent when she wasn’t there, off-limits and noisy with heavy metal music when she was. His brother Joe’s pod—formerly occupied by their older brother Matt, who’d moved away after high school—was a dark hovel Frankie rarely glimpsed; it smelled of musk and sneakers, and the only sound that ever came out of it was the faint but frequent squeaking of bedsprings. Frankie’s pod (his alone now that Joe had moved across the hall) was lined entirely with tinfoil and had a cockpit at one end, fashioned out of his desk, a mounted pair of handlebars, and three dead television sets. And at the opposite end of the house was his mother’s pod, where nothing ever seemed to happen but where she sometimes spent whole days off from work with the door closed.
They’d taken to foraging for their dinners, crossing paths in the kitchen like competing scavengers. Joe, his chin speckled with a fresh outcrop of zits, was leaning against the counter eating pickles from a jar when Frankie walked in. “Do we have any Wheat Thins?” Frankie asked.
“No idea.”
Frankie got a soda out of the refrigerator and popped the tab. He started rummaging through the cabinets. “How are classes?”
“Awful. The worst.”
“Is college hard?”
“It isn’t really college. It’s community college. It’s more like high school, only all your friends have cleared out of town.”
Frankie found a box of Wheat Thins behind the cereal and took it down from the cabinet. Before he could eat any, Karen walked in wearing her steak house uniform and grabbed the box out of his hand.
She said, “Evening, losers.”
“You look like a winner in that outfit, for sure,” Joe said.
“Bite it.” She ate the crackers as she stared into the refrigerator.
“I met an astronaut today,” Frankie told them.
“Did this happen on planet Earth?” Karen asked.
“It was at the library. He gave a talk on NASA.”
“Has he been to the moon?”
“No.”
“Gone up in the shuttle?”
“No. He never really got to go on a mission. NASA politics and whatnot.”
“There must be something wrong with him,” Karen said. “Why else would he be hanging around a library talking about stuff he never did?”
“He gave me his phone number. He’s going to take me on a tour of the space center.”
“Lucky you.” Karen finished what was left of the crackers, took the last pickle out of Joe’s hand, and ate it. Then she took the jar and drank a swallow of pickle juice.
“That’s disgusting,” Joe told her.
She wiped her mouth with her hand and gave him back the jar. “So when are the gay astronaut and gay you having this gay date?”
“He’s not gay,” Frankie said, hoping he was.
“Sounds pretty gay to me. He’ll probably try to butt-fuck you in a Mercury capsule.”
Joe poured the rest of the pickle juice into the sink. When he’d retreated to the back of the house and Karen had left for work, Frankie sat down on the couch and looked at Clark Evans’s picture on the back of the TV guide. The picture was a head shot, no bigger than a postage stamp. Clark was delivering the same smile he had that afternoon, and his slogan was printed below his face. Frankie was staring at the picture when his mother’s door opened and she stepped into the living room. Her hair was combed and she was dressed in her robe and a pair of slippers, but she looked disoriented, as if she might have been sleepwalking. “Where is everyone?” she asked.
“Karen’s at work. Joe’s in his pod,” Frankie said.
“In his what?”
He held up the TV guide. “I met this guy today. Clark Evans. He used to be an astronaut and he wants to take me on a tour of NASA.”
“Is he polite?”
“He seems to be.”
She walked into the kitchen. “Well, let’s hope he has common sense. And make sure they give you a hard hat if he takes you anywhere where they’re building something.” He heard her clacking dishes around. When she reappeared, she was holding a bowl of cereal. “And don’t let him speed.” She carried the bowl back to her pod.
In his own pod, liquid purple from the black lights reflecting off the tinfoil, Frankie sat at his desk and extracted Clark Evans’s head from the TV guide with an X-acto knife. He used his glue stick to anchor the head to a blank sheet of drawing paper, then took his time sketching a naked body beneath it: standing, arms folded, dick pointing up to the sky. I’ll circle the Earth, he thought, rubbing himself, to meet your needs.
At school the following Monday, Frankie met his friend Diana in the commons during lunch. She was eating an egg salad sandwich and had a cookie and a lemonade next to her on the concrete bench. “Don’t even look at me,” she told him. “I’m Godzilla.”
“No, you’re not,” Frankie said, sitting down next to her and unwrapping his own sandwich. “You look skinny.”
“I’m a monster of grotesque proportions. How’s life?”
“I met an astronaut this weekend at the public library.”
“Only you.”
“His name is Clark Evans. He gave me his phone number and wants to show me the space center.”
“Haven’t you seen it already? I thought your dad used to work there.”
“My dad wasn’t anybody important there. Clark said he wants to show me behind-the-scenes stuff. Top secret stuff. Though my sister says he’s trying to get into my pants.”
Diana stared down at her half-eaten sandwich as if she didn’t have the energy to lift it. Then she lifted it and took a bite. “He probably is,” she said. “It’s probably going to turn into some steamy Mrs. Robinson affair. He’s not old and gross, is he?”
“No. He’s pretty gorgeous.”
A boy walking past the bench stopped short and looked at Frankie. “Are you talking about me?”
“Definitely not,” Diana said.
“I was talking about someone else,” Frankie said.
“Faggot,” the boy declared, and walked on.
Frankie turned back to Diana. “Do you really think he could be interested in me—like that?”
“Lust rules the world,” she said. “It doesn’t rule my world, but it rules everyone else’s. And you’re a good-looking guy, though you’re kind of an oddball. You’re not going to show him your bedroom, are you?”
“Why?”
“He’ll feel like he’s at work.”
“He’s not an astronaut anymore; he sells real estate.”
“And he’s hot?”
Frankie nodded.
Diana ate the last bite of her sandwich and let out a long sigh. “I really am going to be the last living virgin on the island.”
That afternoon, at the pay phone in C-wing, he got up his nerve and dialed the number on the back of the business card.
A woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”
He hung up.
A few minutes later, he dialed the business number.
“Evans Realty.”
“Hi. Is this—is this Clark?”
“Speaking.”
“It’s Frankie. The guy you met at the library last weekend?”
“Bud! I thought maybe you’d be too shy to call. I’m glad you did.”
“Me, too.”
“You still interested in that tour we talked about?”
“Yeah. And I’d like to hear your story about that Gordon Cooper photo.”
“Aces,” Clark said, and told him to be in front of the JC Penney’s at noon on Saturday.
They sailed up Courtenay Parkway in the Trans Am toward the north end of the island. The buildings thinned out and the land on either side of the road turned green and feral. Clark played the radio and told Frankie the story of how Apollo 12 was struck by lightning—possibly twice—not long after takeoff. “The rocket generated its own electrical field on the way up. Those boys weren’t even sure what had happened, at first; they just knew some of the circuitry had gone haywire. Lucky they weren’t blown out of the sky.”
“Which missions were you supposed to go on?”
“Well, that depends on who you believe. Supposedly, there was a rotation system in place, but it seemed like something was always mucking it up. Made me wonder if the system meant anything, since they could change it around whenever they wanted. I had a chance on Apollo 18 and again on 19, but both of those got canceled. Then I got wind of a rumor that I was lined up for 20, but that was canceled, too, because they needed the Saturn for Skylab. Did you know when Skylab came down, pieces of it killed three cows in Australia?”
“Why didn’t they just transfer you to the Skylab team?”
“I wish I knew. Look at those bad boys.” Clark slowed the car down and pointed out Frankie’s window. Just off the side of the road, three alligators sat, half submerged in a low bank of water. “They’re all over the place up here. I saw one get run over by a little sports car one day, and it just kept walking.” He mashed the gas pedal. Frankie felt his back press into the bucket seat.
They passed the turnoff for the visitors’ center and traveled deeper into the compound. Nothing changed about the immediate surroundings; the marshland was the same as what they’d been driving through on the last stretch of parkway. But in the distance loomed the Vehicle Assembly Building: a massive structure slotted with a pair of narrow garage doors tall enough to allow a standing Saturn rocket to exit, once it was completed. “See that American flag painted on the side?” Clark said, pointing. “You could drive a bus up one of those stripes, they’re so wide.”
Frankie knew this from having taken the bus tour that skirted the facility. He asked if they were going to be able to get onto the roof of the building.
“Mayhap,” Clark said. “It’s so tall, I was standing up there one day and looked down at a helicopter flying by.”
Long before they reached the V.A.B., the road was blocked by a guardrail and a man sitting in a booth. Clark brought the Trans Am to a stop and rolled down his window. “How’s it going, chief?” he asked the guard.
“Can I help you?”
“Is Larry around?”
“I don’t know any Larry.”
“Oh. Well, I’m Clark Evans. If you’d raise that bar, I’d like to show my friend here the inside of the rocket hut.”
“Do you have your ID?”
“Absolutely.” Clark dug his wallet out of his back pocket and displayed his driver’s license.
“I meant your NASA ID.”
“Oh. That’s at home. In fact, it’s framed and hanging in my kitchen. I used to be one of the Apollo boys, but I’ve moved on to other pastures.”
“You don’t work for NASA?”
“Not anymore,” Clark said, lifting an index finger to clarify the distinction.
“Then I can’t let you beyond this point.”
“Sure you can.”
“It’s not going to happen,” the guard said.
“Just be a nice guy and raise the rail, would you? We’re not Russian spies. I told you, I’m Clark Evans.”
“Sir, turn your vehicle around and head south. The Visitors’ Information Center is on the right, at the overpass.”
“I know that.” Clark peered though the windshield at the V.A.B. “Thanks for your time,” he finally said, and put the car in reverse.
“It’s no big deal,” Frankie told him.
“Guy’s on a power trip.”
“But for me it’s, you know, more exciting to get to know you than to see the inside of the V.A.B.”
Clark smiled at him. “Exciting, huh? You like excitement, I’ll bet. Got a little bit of the wild streak in you?”
Frankie shrugged, then nodded his head yes.
“Let’s get wild.”
He took an abrupt right before they reached the overpass and told Frankie they were on a service road that connected to the shuttle runway. “What would be really wild is if we could get out on the runway and open this puppy up,” he said, gunning the engine. “We’ll probably just have to settle for a little look-see, though.”
But before long they encountered another guard post. Clark’s exchange with the guard was much the same as the one he’d just had. Again, he thanked the guard for his time. Again, he told Frankie the man was on a power trip.
He made a third attempt to get them off the beaten track by steering them onto a road clearly marked with large white signs that read “NO ADMITTANCE” and “ABSOLUTELY NO VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT ADVANCE CLEARANCE.” This time there was no guard post but a rack of metal teeth laid across the road—collapsible but presently locked in a raised position that would shred tires. Clark spotted them just in time and the Trans Am screeched to a halt.
They wound up at the visitors’ center.
Frankie stood on scales that told him what his weight would be on Mars, Venus, and Saturn. He peered into a Mercury capsule (his sister’s predicted setting for the butt-fuck). He wandered around the Red-stones and Atlases and Titans in the Rocket Garden—all things he’d done before—while Clark trailed glumly alongside him, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses and his hands tucked into his pockets.
“It’s like a literal changing of the guard,” Clark said as Frankie tore open a package of astronaut ice cream. “The old boys knew me on sight. I had the run of the place.”
“Want some?” Frankie asked, holding out what looked like a pink block of Styrofoam.
Clark winced and shook his head no. “Sorry we didn’t get in there deep. I feel like I should make it up to you somehow.”
“It’s no big deal,” Frankie said again.
“No, seriously. You have any interest in getting a bite to eat tomorrow night?”
Frankie felt his heart race. The artificial ice cream softened on his tongue. “Yeah.”
“You could come out to the house, and we could go from there to this great restaurant I know called Pounders. It’s a fun place.”
“Your—your house?”
“In Cocoa. You drive, don’t you?”
Frankie nodded. “I got my license this year. You know, I called your house before I called your office. A woman answered.”
Clark nodded and smiled and took off his aviators. “That was Pepper.”
“Who’s Pepper?”
“You’ll love Pepper. She’s top of the line.”
Karen’s hair was caked in mayonnaise and wrapped in a cap fashioned out of cellophane and Scotch tape. She leaned sideways across the backseat of her Datsun and filled a trash bag with beer cans and Burger King wrappers and empty cigarette packs, then tied the bag shut and pushed it out into the driveway. “Can it.”
Frankie carried the bag to one of the garbage cans alongside the house. When he got back to the driveway, she was sitting behind the wheel with Armor All and a roll of paper towels. “Why’d you offer to help me, anyway?” she asked.
“No reason,” Frankie lied.
“Uh-huh. And where’s the ass-tronaut taking you to dinner?”
“Some place called Pounders.”
“Ha! I’ve heard about that place. Billy Myers goes there and times it so that he takes a big dump right in the middle of the meal. He really sticks it to them, that way.”
Frankie didn’t know what she was talking about and tried to vaporize the image from his mind. He picked up the paper towel roll from the seat and tore one off for her. She spritzed the dash. “Does Mom know about your old-man lover?”
“He’s not old. He’s probably around thirty-five.”
“And you’re sixteen.”
“Almost seventeen. And he’s not chasing me. If anything, I’m chasing him.”
“Even sicker. Have you taken it up the butt yet? With anyone, I mean?”
“No.”
“You better stick a cucumber up there or something. He’s got his sights set on your Hershey Highway, mark my words, and you’re going to need to be ready.”
“Clark’s not like that.”
“If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it butt-fucks like a duck.”
Frankie tore off another paper towel and handed it to her. “It’s fun, helping you,” he said.
“For you, maybe.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
She sat back on the seat and glared at him. Thin rivers of mayonnaise ran down her temples. “I knew you wanted something. Do you have any idea what a hassle it is to maintain a car? I bust my ass in that restaurant five nights a week to keep this piece of junk going. I’m an adult now, you know. I’ve got responsibilities and a livelihood to consider.”
“OK,” Frankie said. “But I have to get to Clark’s house in Cocoa. Can I borrow it—just this once?”
She narrowed her eyes, still glaring. “Hold out your arms.” He did, and she spritzed them both, elbow to wrist, with Armor All. “No,” she said, turning back to the dash.
His mother was in her pod, but the door was open, so he stuck his head in. She was on her knees in front of her closet, surrounded by shoes.
“Are you going anywhere tonight?” he asked.
She started, then returned her attention to the shoes. “I hope not.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
“What for?”
“Clark’s taking me to dinner, but I have to get to his house first.”
“Do I know Clark?”
“You haven’t met him. He’s the astronaut I told you about. The one who I was with yesterday at the space center.”
“It seems like you’re spending an awful lot of time with this Clark. He’s not a bad influence, is he?”
Frankie shook his head.
“Well.” She picked up two brown shoes and studied them, discovered they didn’t match, and dropped them onto the beige carpet. “Be back by eleven, and replace any gas you use.”
He turned on his black lights, put Duran Duran on his record player, and rubbed himself some more over the picture he’d made with Clark’s head. The paper, by now, was streaked and rippled, though he was careful to steer clear of Clark’s face.
In the late afternoon he sat on the kitchen counter and called Diana.
“There’s this Pepper person,” he told her. “I asked about her, and Clark said she was ‘top of the line.’ You think it could be his daughter?”
“Did she sound like a grown-up?”
“Pretty much.”
“Could be his wife.”
“My sister still thinks he’s trying to have sex with me. Maybe he’s gay and it’s some big secret.”
“They might be swingers,” Diana mused. “Or he might be bi. There are people like that, you know. Maybe I should be bi. It would double my chances, now that I think about it. Did I tell you I ate an entire package of Fig Newtons for lunch?”
“I think he at least likes me,” Frankie said.
“There are even people who are into fat people. They only want to get naked with grotesquely fat human beings. I should find out if they have a club and join it.”
“You’re not fat. You just have a bad self-image.”
“Well, if I am fat, I hate myself, and if I’m not, it means not even the people in those clubs will want me.”
“I wonder what I’m going to wear,” Frankie said.
He changed T-shirts three times, settling on a pink one with David Bowie on the front. Dusk was just starting in when he backed his mother’s Oldsmobile out of the driveway and drove through town, over the bridge, and into Cocoa.
Clark’s house was on River Road, across from the island. The yard needed mowing and the paint on the shutters was flaking off, but it was a nice, two-story house with a front porch and windows that looked out over the Indian River. Frankie parked next to the Trans Am, checked his hair in the rearview mirror, then walked up the steps of the front porch and rang the bell.
The door opened a few moments later and a woman stood next to it, eyeing him. She wore jeans and a sleeveless white shirt that buttoned up the front. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was pretty and young looking—though not young enough to be Clark’s daughter, Frankie concluded.
“You must be Frankie,” she said.
He nodded.
“I’m Pepper. Come in.” He stepped past her as she turned and hollered up the staircase, “Clark! Frankie’s here!”
Clark’s voice called from above, “Can you come up here for a second, Pep?”
“Make yourself at home,” she told Frankie, then bounded up the stairs.
Frankie stood in the foyer listening to the muffled sound of their voices. Then he wandered into the living room. There was a long, lipstick-red sofa with round white pillows at either end. A black lacquered coffee table on which sat a Sears catalogue, a copy of House and Garden, and a glass ashtray. A treadmill in one corner. Nothing about the room indicated that an ex-astronaut lived there—until Frankie reached the bookcase. There were no books, but every shelf was crammed full of framed photos, nearly all of them pictures of Clark in his NASA days: smiling alongside a trio of crew-cutted men in the launch room; dressed in an orange jumpsuit and waving on a tarmac; sitting inside some sort of simulator and staring at a panel of gauges with a stern look of concentration on his face. In one photo, he was shaking John Glenn’s hand. “For Clark,” the inscription read, “—with high hopes!” and underneath it, Glenn’s signature.
He moved on to the kitchen. There were beer bottles in the sink and dirty dishes stacked beside it. Evans Realty magnets on the refrigerator. Over the toaster, a large picture frame holding patches from each of the Apollo missions, and over the coffeemaker, Clark’s framed NASA ID badge.
In the dining room, Frankie found Clark’s official astronaut portrait. Standing before a wedge of moon, Clark wore a spacesuit and was looking not at the camera but slightly above and past it, his helmet under one arm, his eyes filled with glitter and promise. He looked god-like to Frankie, who suddenly realized he had a hard-on.
Adjusting himself in his jeans, he turned away from the portrait and spotted a clear glass bell jar nearly a foot high on the middle of a sideboard. Inside the jar was a pedestal, and on top of the pedestal was a jagged gray rock no bigger than a golf ball.
“Bud!”
Frankie jumped and spun around. Clark and Pepper were standing at the entrance to the dining room, smiling at him. “Hi,” he said, folding his hands in front of his crotch.
“You and I are becoming a habit. And good news: Pepper approves.”
Pepper squeezed Clark’s elbow and ruffled a hand through his hair.
Clark pointed toward the bell jar. “You know what that is?”
“A rock?”
“That’s a bona fide moon rock. Buzz Aldrin gave it to me.”
Frankie turned and looked at the rock again, this time with a new sense of appreciation.
“He won’t even let me touch it,” Pepper said.
“I let you hold it once,” Clark reminded her. “How about you, bud? Want to hold it?”
“Yeah,” Frankie said. “I-I’d like to.”
Clark stepped around the table and lifted the bell jar and set it aside. Then, delicately, he picked up the rock and placed it on Frankie’s palm. Frankie imagined it humming against his skin, charged with some sort of space energy that would give him special powers here on Earth; though, in truth, it only felt like a rock.
He extended his hand toward Clark and said, “Thanks for letting me hold it.”
“I’d say ‘anytime,’ but it probably won’t happen again,” Clark said, returning the rock to its pedestal and covering it.
“He loves that rock more than he loves me,” Pepper said.
“Not true. I love food more than I love you.” Clark brought his hands together and rubbed his palms. “Who’s hungry?”
Pounders was one town over, in Rockledge. Just inside the door, a hostess stood next to a large scale with a digital readout. Her T-shirt had a cartoon pig on it, smiling, his mouth smeared with barbecue sauce. She welcomed them and invited Pepper to weigh in first. Pepper stepped onto the scale.
“One-eighteen and twenty-four ounces,” the hostess said. She asked Pepper’s name, then wrote it and her weight on a card with a red Sharpie.
“One-seventy-one and six ounces,” she announced when Clark stood on the scale, and, “One-oh-nine on the dot,” when it was Frankie’s turn.
“Lighter than me.” Pepper feigned jealousy.
“Nobody’s hiding lead in their pockets, I hope,” the hostess said.
“Not us,” Clark told her. “We’re tried and true.”
She smiled, opened her hand to the dining room, and said, “Pig out!”
They chose a table, sat down, and ordered drinks (iced tea for Pepper and Frankie, bourbon and water for Clark), and then immediately got up again and stood in a buffet line. There was barbecue, fried chicken, fried cod, meat loaf, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, collards, green beans, rolls, and four different kinds of dessert, including an enormous pan of banana pudding that had a rubbery crust and was half gone and sliding forward like a continental shelf. “Want to compete?” Clark asked Frankie as they filled their plates.
Frankie still didn’t get it. “How?”
“We weigh in again at the end of the meal. They charge by the ounce. Whoever gains the most wins.”
“I don’t eat much,” Frankie said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Pepper said, reaching for the banana pudding spoon. “I’m going to win.”
Clark drank four bourbons with water. Both he and Pepper went back for seconds before Frankie was halfway through his plateful of food. He’d taken too much because he’d wanted to try everything on the buffet, but he realized it didn’t matter because if it didn’t go into his body, it was free. “This restaurant makes the most sense of any around,” Clark said, chewing. “Eating out should be like buying a shirt. You go into a store and try on a few shirts, but you only pay for the one you actually take away in a bag.”
Frankie sipped from a straw sunk into an iced-tea cup so wide, he had to use two hands to lift it. He was beginning to doubt his sister’s assumption that Clark was gay. As for Diana’s speculation, he could only guess. Pepper smiled whenever he caught her eye. He smiled back, but felt uncomfortable. “Are you two married?” he asked.
She waved her left hand and showed Frankie her wedding band. “Seven years.”
He noticed the matching band on Clark’s finger. “Do you . . . have kids?”
This, for some reason, made Clark laugh, and Pepper reached over and lightly slapped his arm. “No,” she said.
“Not traditionally,” Clark said. He grinned and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He downed the last of his bourbon, and then pushed back from the table and lit a cigarette. “Frankie here wants to go into space, but he doesn’t want to do it through NASA.”
“You want to be a cosmonaut?” Pepper asked.
“No. I’d like to have my own spaceship, though.” He remembered that Clark still hadn’t told him his Gordon Cooper story. He asked him now if he would tell it.
“You’re not going to ask me again if we descended from aliens, are you?”
“No. But I’d like to hear about the sighting.”
Clark winced. “You know, not that I got to see it myself, but my theory is that being out in all that space does something to people’s heads. Certain kinds of people, that is.”
“What do you mean?”
“It can make them a little ...” Clark seesawed the hand holding the cigarette, serpentining the smoke.
“But what’s the story?”
“The story is, there is no story. Cooper saw ice, or something like ice, coming off the back of his ship. From what I heard, the boys in Ground Control rolled their eyes big-time over that one. Same thing with Scott Carpenter.”
“Carpenter photographed a saucer,” Frankie said. “I read about it in a book, and saw the picture.”
“He photographed a tracking balloon. He said it was a saucer.”
“He believed it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s my point. Certain kinds of people . . . who get an inflated sense of their own importance . . . get blasted up there and then get a little . . . I don’t know . . . light-headed. They start seeing things. It’s ridiculous.”
“Clark’s a little bitter,” Pepper said around her last spoonful of pudding.
“I’m not bitter. I’m realistic.”
Frankie said, “I read that NASA officials told reporters not to ask questions about that stuff.”
“Exactly. Because it was embarrassing. Glenn started it on his Mercury orbit with his report of voodoo fairy lights zipping around his head, and a bunch of those other boys jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them couldn’t go up there without thinking they saw some alien . . . whatever. It’s nonsense.”
Frankie thought of the photograph of Clark shaking John Glenn’s hand, and Glenn’s inscription. Then he thought of Clark’s portrait, in the spacesuit—maybe the only time he’d ever worn one.
“Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin?” Clark continued. “You know what they were looking at when they cried ‘UFO’? Their own jettisoned trash bags. If that had been me, and reporters had been allowed to question me about it, I’d be ashamed to show my face. ‘I saw a UFO! I saw a UFO!’ Please.”
“Aldrin gave you the moon rock,” Frankie said.
“Yeah. Well.” Clark stubbed out his cigarette in a plastic ashtray. “Even a loony can give a nice present.”
They weighed themselves again before leaving (Pepper had gained the most weight, and won), and Clark paid the bill. On the drive back to Cocoa, in the backseat of the Trans Am, Frankie decided he was still attracted to Clark but no longer liked him. There was something mean about him. As for his opinions on the UFO sightings, he was just . . . wrong. In their driveway, Frankie thanked them both for dinner and said good-night, but instead of shaking the hand he held out, Clark said, “Whoa, bud, what’s the hurry? Don’t you want to come inside?”
“What for?”
Pepper smiled at him, but for the first time she didn’t hold her gaze; she looked down at the driveway and adjusted the purse hanging from her shoulder.
Clark looked out over the river and shrugged. “Wild times. A little excitement.”
Maybe Karen was right. Or Diana. Or both of them. Frankie looked at Clark in the moonlight. His solid shoulders. His treadmill-tended waist. The shaggy brown hair falling over his forehead.
“Come on in,” Clark said, nodding toward the house.
He sat in the living room on the sofa and accepted the beer Pepper offered him. He’d never drunk alcohol before, but stepping over the threshold into the house for the second time felt like crossing a border into another country, where a whole new set of rules and customs existed. The beer tasted awful, but he drank it, while Pepper sat next to him and talked about the kindergarteners she taught and Clark drank his own beer and smoked in an armchair across from them. Clark’s mood had changed. He stared at Frankie as if he might not even want him there. But when he’d taken the last swig of his beer, he nodded toward him and said, “Why don’t you chug that thing and the three of us go upstairs?”
Frankie walked up the staircase between them. Expect nothing, he told himself, even as he became aroused. This is a tour of the house. He’s a Realtor, after all. Maybe they’re selling the place. But Pepper led them into the master bedroom, where she turned around and smiled and said to him, “If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s OK. You just tell us. But I thought I’d take off my clothes now.”
Frankie felt Clark’s hand rest on his shoulder. “Are you selling your house?”
“God, no,” Clark said. “We love it here.”
“Do you mind if I take off my clothes?” Pepper asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to take off yours?” She asked it in a polite way that really did seem to leave the matter open.
“OK,” Frankie said.
“How about you, Clark?”
“Why not,” Clark said, releasing Frankie’s shoulder. He began to unbutton his shirt.
They slowly got naked without speaking. Frankie’s hard-on was sticking straight up and flat against his belly as he stood in the middle of the room, wondering what would happen next. He liked Pepper’s body—but as a scientific wonder: the movement of her breasts as she bent to pull back the bedspread; the patch of hair, indented, in the absence of a dick. He looked over at Clark, who had pulled down his briefs and whose dick was half as long as the balls that sagged beneath it. Clark walked over to a leather chair in a corner of the room and sat down.
“You look nice,” Pepper told Frankie. “Do you want to lie down here with me?”
“What about Clark?” Frankie asked.
“I’ll be in this chair,” Clark said.
Frankie started to walk toward him.
“No, no,” Pepper said. “Come lie down with me.”
“But—” Frankie began.
“Go on, bud,” Clark said. He put his hand on his dick and started tugging.
Frankie turned and looked at Pepper. She’d climbed onto the bed and was stretched out flat on her back, with her hand extended toward him. “It’s OK,” she said. “This is what we do. Clark likes to watch.”
“Pretend I’m not here,” Clark said.
Frankie felt a little dizzy—from the beer, maybe. “I can’t . . . touch you?”
“Not if I’m not here,” Clark said.
“But you are here.”
“I’m not here. You’re doing this, just you and her, and I’m not even in the room.”
“It’s going to feel so horny to have you lying here with me,” Pepper said.
Frankie’s feet felt glued to the carpet. He glanced down and saw his hard-on begin to flag.
“Get up on that bed,” Clark ordered.
After several long moments of what was starting to feel to Frankie like a standoff, Pepper pushed up onto her elbows and looked at him and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Frankie lied.
“Do you not want to do this?”
“It’s just that . . . I thought ...”
Pepper made a little sound as the air left her lungs. “I think I get it,” she said. “You don’t swing but one way, do you?”
“Right,” Frankie said, relieved.
“And that’s not my way, is it?”
“Not really, no.”
Clark peered at the two of them. “What are you two talking about?”
“He doesn’t swing my way, Clark.”
“Sure he does.”
“I like boys,” Frankie said. “Guys, I mean. Men.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Pepper folded her arms over her breasts and said, “Jesus, Clark, can’t you do anything right?”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Clark asked. His hand had stopped pulling and his fingers had opened; his dick looked like a newborn hamster sleeping on his palm.
“You’re such a screwup,” Pepper snapped. She got out of bed and grabbed her panties and shirt from the floor. “I don’t know why I expect any different.”
“It’s not my fault if he’s gay,” Clark said.
Pepper pulled on her panties and sat back down on the bed, buttoning her shirt. “Sweetheart,” she told Frankie, “you swing any way you want. That’s just fine. I’m really sorry about the misunderstanding.” She cut her eyes over to her husband again and said again, “Jesus, Clark.”
“I’m supposed to be a mind reader now? If he’s a closet case, that’s his problem.”
“I’m not . . . in the closet,” Frankie said.
“Well, you could have told me that.”
“He doesn’t have to tell you,” Pepper said. “You could . . . intuit. You know? You could learn for once in your life how to gauge people. Maybe you’d get somewhere.” She turned to Frankie. “Get dressed, sweetheart. And please don’t tell anyone about this.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘get somewhere’?” Clark asked.
“In your marriage,” Pepper told him. “In your life.”
“I’m somewhere,” Clark protested.
“No, you’re not. You’re not even here, remember?” She rolled her eyes.
Clark shifted his gaze from Pepper to Frankie and just stared at him for a moment, as if trying to make sense of him. “Guess it’s time for you to go, bud,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to—”
Clark cut him off: “No big deal.”
“Well, I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Clark all but snapped. “It’s just time for you to go. The evening’s over.”
Frankie gathered his clothes from the floor and carried them out to the hall. He dressed there, listening as Pepper chastised Clark some more and Clark told her to shut up. She didn’t, and they continued to argue as Frankie descended the stairs.
On his way out of the house, he paused in the dining room.
“There’s no end to the sickness and depravity of the human spirit,” Diana said upon hearing the story before lunch the following Monday, on the bench in the commons. “Maybe that’s the good news.”
“I guess,” Frankie said.
“I wonder if people like that would go for a chubby girl like me.”
“He’s not nice. She is, but not him. You think he’ll come after me?” He had his backpack open on the ground between his sneakers and was holding the moon rock, turning it in his hands.
Diana gazed at the rock. “Did you ever give him your phone number?”
“No.”
“Does he know where you live?”
“No.”
“I’ll bet it’s fake. Aldrin probably thought Evans was a big loser and had a laugh with his buddies, handing over a chunk of concrete. Anyway, you’re a minor and they tried to have sex with you. And they gave you alcohol. You could go public and expose them as extreme and dangerous molesters.”
“I don’t feel molested.”
“I know, but it means you get to keep the rock.”
Frankie brought the rock up to his nose and sniffed it. It smelled like gunpowder. He held the rock an inch from his eye and peered at its knobby surface.
“He actually told you to pretend he wasn’t there?”
“That’s what he said. ‘Pretend I’m not here.’”
“I’ll probably be telling somebody that, one day.”
Frankie thought about it. “I’ll probably be telling them the opposite.”
“Sickness,” Diana said. “Depravity.” She gazed out over the commons and sighed. “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”
