Drink for the Thirst to Come (43 page)

Some Stages
was written because my writers group, Twilight Tales, decided to hold a benefit on the second anniversary of the loss of Space Shuttle
Columbia
. The goal was to honor not only
Columbia
’s but all astronauts, cosmonauts, and dreamers who died trying to kick our monkey asses out of the cradle and into the real world, the universe. Twilight Tales regulars Jody Lynn Nye, Richard Chwedyk, a few others, and I were asked to read something personally meaningful at the event. It was a good evening. We heard a few first voyage pieces by Heinlein and others. Money was raised for the families of the
Columbia
crew and we spent time together over drinks and good tales.

Jody and I wrote original tales. Her story was excellent and, as you might expect, featured a space-faring pussycat.

Mine was the story you just read.

DeAngelo is younger than I, but we both planned for ours to be the first feet on the moon. I was in 7th grade on the evening of October 4th, 1957. I’d been to my eye doctor and came home bespectacled, a four-eyed flight-school wash-out to-be and learned that the Soviet Union had beaten us to space. Like DeAngelo, I felt my country had been cheated out of its proper place in history. That night, like DeAngelo, I decided, hot damn, I’m going to fix that.

There was no cat.

“Reinhart” and I stayed friends throughout grade school and junior high and fell out much later over Carol Devine and because he remained a gearhead and I…?

Well, I’d fallen in love with distance.

“Reinhart” and I planned many trips to the moon, the planets. Then we became convinced that dinosaur bones lay just beneath the surface in the cemetery near our homes. Who needed to mount expeditions to the Gobi Desert or anywhere? We had Charles Evans Cemetery. We sifted through tons of damp soil gravediggers had conveniently put aside for us. We found suspicious things, things that may have been… who knew what? We found meteors, which were most probably bits of slag from the Carpenter Steel plant not too far from there. We found curious markings on sheets of shale. I was convinced Neanderthals had lived in our town and had sketched saber tooth tigers and wooly mammoths on those slabs of yellow shale. Better yet, perhaps those shadow blots were… Well, maybe, perhaps, might have been… Could they be accidental “photographs” made by a marvelous coincidence of ancient lightning and the magical chemistry in the soils of Reading, Pennsylvania!

Eventually, “Reinhart” explained the fissiparous nature of shale and how intrusions of impurities into… Well, something. And that was that and…

And maybe I never forgave his explanations and maybe Carol Devine wasn’t to blame. I recognized, finally, that we’d taken separate paths to our personal stars. See? He wanted to know. He wanted accuracy about rocks, bones, and rockets. I wanted the rock I held in my hand to have had ghosts within.

What I said about falling in love with distance. That’s not quite right. I had fallen in love not with the stars but with the space between stars. The moon? It was great. Other planets? Wonderful. But like many travelers, I fell in love with the going to rather than the being there. Science and its handmaiden, engineering, were about smoothing it out, turning a voyage to the moon into a trip to the grocery store.

Wrong. Obviously wrong. A lot of people hung their soft and fragile asses out there. Quite a few had to die to earn us our first trip off-planet.

I didn’t lose interest, not exactly. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, I was living in London, not serving in DaNang. My across-the-hall neighbor, a producer for the BBC, and I sat on the edges of our seats. I thrilled to Armstrong and Aldrin’s descent and touchdown. Then… “Tranquility Base here.” Ahh! He nicknamed God’s place! No longer part of a distant planet, where the Eagle landed was now a Base. Humans are there. Americans. I waited for the first words on the surface. There they were.
Small step. Giant leap.
Good but rehearsed. Nice sentiment. His next words were about soil compressibility. Important, things Reinhart would have drooled over. The dream was concluded. Reinhart had beaten me to the moon and Carol Divine.

It also occurred to me that night in London, that all the books on that first voyage had now been written. There’d be no more
First Men in the Moon
,
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
,
Rocketship Galileo
. Our first voyage was now history. And it was, well... kind of dull.

Apollo 13
changed that for a bit, but the dream was over. We beat the Russians and, cripes, what a lousy reason to make history.

Understand. I am not saying I was disappointed that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins’s flight hadn’t been a disaster, but the DeAngelo in me really wished that something had been lurking in the space between here and there, something no one had counted on, something the Reinharts hadn’t factored in.

When I thought to write a story to commemorate the loss of the crews of
Columbia
,
Challenger
, or
Apollo 1
, the dead of
Soyuz
and other losses along our way, what I really wanted to memorialize was the dream that took us to the edge. Too many of us are left, still looking toward the horizon or into the shadows.

Back to Buzz Aldrin. He’d been scheduled for a bookstore appearance. At the last minute, I was the only one with both car and time enough to get and deliver him. When I got to O’Hare, he was walking down the onramp, bag in hand, about to hitch a ride. I gathered him. “Fine thing,” I said, “you can send a man to the moon but you can’t pick him up from the airport.” He laughed. He did that easily for a man who’d almost been left by his hosts to find his own way. I had an hour or so of gridlocked privacy with the second man on the moon, the man who had in fact uttered the very first words on the moon. Look it up: “Contact Light. Okay, engine stop.” Significant here is that in that hour, I met a guy who was earthy, human, bright—this is the guy who taught NASA orbital mechanics, the guy who suggested using water submersion for zero gravity training—this was the ultimate Reinhart. And I found that he had as deep—if not a deeper—capacity for dreaming than DeAngelo.

Well, Buzz wasn’t the first on the moon either.

REAL GHOSTS:
THE BOY’S ROOM

For me,
The Boy’s Room
is the most disturbing story in this collection. It is also one that was rejected for publication, turned down not by distant editors but by one I considered (and still do) to be a friend.

The story was written for an anthology called
Spooks
. Ghost tales. Simple, yes, but there I was, bitten in the ass by my avoidance of tropes. Cripes, the world will not end if I write a vampire story featuring the toothy undead, or a zombie story with shuffling corpses.

Tycelia and I had just married, our fortunes newly merged. She was going through pictures, telling stories of life in Mississippi. She mentioned a part of an old home-place the family called “the boy’s room.” The place was a separate shack behind her grandmother’s main house where some boys of a boy-heavy family of brothers, step-brothers, and half-brothers could sleep. There are photographs. The name tweaked my fancy and I melded the pictures and her stories with some of recollections of sleepovers at cousins’ places during my own summer holidays in eastern Pennsylvania.

What makes this story so disturbing to me? The ghost is not that of the boy, Rafe, or of the old conjure woman; it isn’t the spirit of anyone dead in the common sense of the word at the time of the girl’s experience. The ghost of the tale is Melissa, her life attending her from her own empty future of missed opportunities.

With age, that strikes bone. At 60, a lot of looking-back accompanies forward-peering hope. These years I catch echoes, glimpse earlier iterations of Larry; I see him in his hopes and wishes. He knows deeply that such and such a thing will—no: must—absolutely must happen.

And I know now, of course, it did not and so dearly wish I could reach back, advise, nudge, speak to that life that is still alive in me.

As said, my friend did not buy this story. As said, the story still makes me shiver.

BECAUSE I HAD TO:
LITTLE GIRL DOWN THE WAY

This is a ghost story. It posits the not very original notion that heaven and hell are the same place, depending on who you are. It’s also about love in some form or another. It was written quickly, in a passion, fast as I could type it. Here’s how it came to be.

I write for a living and I write because I want or have to. For a living, I write for the City of Chicago. When I write fiction, I write because a notion has popped into my head and I think it’s pretty neat.

Sometimes, though, I write out of passion. Some scream. I write. Anger, fear, sorrow, hatred. The pieces that come from these screams are frequently harsh, brutal, nasty. I call them my “Vile Tales” after a comment I once made to a friend about a story of mine called “Catching.”

She called it “erotic.”

“It’s not erotic,” I said. “It’s just vile.”

There are a lot of these. Typically, they begin with a person in crisis and often end in mayhem, blood and pain.

“Little Girl Down the Way” is one of these Vile things; it comes from sorrow and anger. Here’s where the anger came from.

I live on the Northside of Chicago. Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, is three blocks to the north. Lake Michigan is three blocks east. During the season, my neighborhood, Wrigleyville, becomes… Remember in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, when Jimmy Stewart wishes he’d never been born, his guardian angel shows him a world without his influence? Potterville! That’s my neighborhood: sports bars, frat-rats and bunnies. In winter it’s just a place where the overcompensated come to hoot and puke out the butt ends of youth.

In the decade before the housing bubble busted, Wrigleyville was undergoing a facelift. People with far too much money and far too little imagination wanted to move here. They came because this had been a place they prowled when young, a place to get drunk, to get laid, to piss unchecked in alleys.

When they came back to live, they looked up and said, “We can’t have this...!”

They are not the source of my passion.

A malignancy came with yuppie infestation: 19
^th
-century frame houses were dissolving; overnight, cheaply-built, enormously pricey faux-brick condos arose in their place, a form of urban cancer that both destroys our collective memory and offers us a glimpse of mid-21
^st
-century slums-to-be.

But this isn’t from where my passion that formed this tale comes either…

One afternoon, late in the 20
^th
century, I was driving up the alley. I passed a muddy pond where a house and garage had been the day before. The site was surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. On hand was the usual cast: police, paramedics, plain-clothes bureaucrats, photographers, rubberneckers. The demolishers had uncovered the bones of a small body at the end of the walkway from the old house to the alley. The corpse was the body of what was presumed to be a 2-3-year-old girl. Apparently, she had been there for many years. Decades.

The old, sad tale went to the papers and disappeared.

Three years later, the story oozed back into the news. Chicago homicide had not given up on the little girl; they had done their job of speaking for the dead, a yeoman task when you consider that the victim the murder-police had to speak for in this case was about 50 years into her measure of eternity. The story returned as a page 5 news item: on her deathbed, a woman in Nebraska confessed to having killed her child in Chicago, in this place, now gone, in the late 1950s. The details were scant but moving by the bareness of their bones.

The woman had been identified and been found in hospital dying of congestive heart failure. When questioned, she confessed to having given birth to the girl in the late 1940s and had kept her a secret from the world. Reasons? No reasons. Or if there had been a reason, it probably derived from some unrecognizable form of love. See, when the mother became pregnant again, she kept the little girl locked in the basement to keep her new child from… From what, remains unknown. Love, of some unimaginable species.

While the remains found just down the way from my apartment seemed to have been those of a 3-year-old, the girl had actually survived to about 7 years then was murdered by the mother, maybe in a rage, maybe not, and, having confessed, the woman died.

The son that had been that mother’s second child, now in middle-age, was surprised to learn that he had had a sister and had shared that house in Chicago until he was 3 or 4 years old. Then he and his mother had packed and moved by night.

The view from our second floor porch looks down that alley. The little girl’s former burial site is less than 100 feet from my back gate. I wasn’t living in Chicago when the crime took place. I was just a kid then, a reasonably well-adjusted, all-too-coddled kid growing up happy, and not, in Reading, Pennsylvania. I don’t know what I was doing when the 20-pound 7-year-old became a corpse. But in my trailing years I shared a back alley with the little girl and that view from my window, down the way, and the changing shape of the neighborhood has always made me feel connected. We were neighbors, I guess. I grew up in a small town and people close to each other are neighbors, damn it.