INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (3 page)

MY FATHER AND THE MARTIAN MOON MAIDS

JAMES VAN PELT

ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

When I was six, Dad showed me the UFO detector he’d built in his closet.

“UFOs generate powerful magnetic fields,” he said. Hanging from the inside wall, out of sight, he’d suspended a four-foot long, slender metal rod. It swung freely from a pivot at the top, and at the other end, a small magnet quivered between two electrical contacts. He gave the rod a light touch, moving the magnet against a contact. A buzzer, mounted beside the device, hummed abruptly. I covered my ears.

“When a UFO moves within range, the magnet will complete the circuit and alert me.”

I looked at the simple arrangement and loved my father even more. My dad knew that UFOs existed and that they might visit us at any time.

He looked at me seriously. “Don’t mention this to anyone.”

I imagined he thought one of our neighbors might be an alien, or that there could be an alien agent in my first grade class. Later, when I’d begun to question if he was right about anything, I decided it was because he thought people might think he was crazy.

He did become crazy, fifty years later, surrendering to Alzheimer’s in the assisted living center.

He’d been there almost six months when I made one of my periodic visits. I wished I could see him more often, but I lived on the other side of the state. The knowledge that my sisters lived in town and dropped in almost daily made me feel only a little better.

“The clowns handed out candy,” Dad said, “at the parade.”

He slumped back in his chair, a bit of today’s lunch clinging to his shirt.

“What parade, Dad?” In the hallway, a nurse walked by, her heels clicking against the tile.

“They played music,” he said, looking at me and then away, like he suddenly wasn’t sure.

My sister, sitting next to him on the bed, shrugged her shoulders.

He scratched behind his ear, something he’d been doing more and more over the last year. “Yesterday, maybe the day before.”

Or it could have been eighty years ago, when he was six.

“We went on a plane ride after, a green biplane.” He laughed to himself. “The biplane aces became barnstormers.”

“Sure, Dad,” I said. “Do you want more applesauce?”

“I wore goggles.” He made circles with his thumb and finger on each hand and held them over his eyes, peering at me. “My house was so small.”

•••

Dad took me to see
The Blue Max
when I was twelve. Most of the time we watched science fiction or horror movies on television. When I was younger, he’d let me stay up for the 10:30 start of SciFiFlix on Friday night or Creature Features on Saturday. Great films when you’re eight or nine:
The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Dracula, The Mummy,
and the Godzilla films. It seemed like we could always find Godzilla.

Every once in a while, a true special occasion, we’d go to the drive-in or a ‘sit down’ theater.

I loved science fiction, but I found romance in WWI planes.

Dad’s arm pressed against mine on the chair’s plush armrest. He held an open box of Milkduds loosely in his fingers. I could smell them on his breath as he chewed silently. Popcorn smells too, and spilled pop. The soles of my shoes snapped free from the stickiness when I moved.

On the screen, a biplane waggled its wings. A cloud wisp passed beneath its wheels. Below, so far that details vanished, the ground turned into big squares, like patchwork.

I lived movies. When the plane turned, I leaned with it, thinking about the model planes hanging from my bedroom’s ceiling. I didn’t have this biplane, the one on the screen. It was German, maybe the Albatros D, a squat, efficient speed demon the Germans introduced at the end of the war. I had Fokker biplanes, some Nieuports and Sopwith Camels, but not this one.

My glasses became goggles. Gloves covered my hands. Against the wind, I checked my guns’ trigger again. Somewhere, there were British fighters, but for now I flew alone, the engine’s roar pillowing me.

Clouds swallow the sky for a second, surrendering the world to whiteness. Water drops stream from the wires and struts, then I am out again, into the clear. All air. All clouds. All sky, open and mine. Clouds like white islands float around, and I weave between them, the enemy forgotten.

I glimpse him, then lose him, a red flash against the blue. My heart pounds. I’ve been reading WWI aviation history for months. The knights of the sky. I have my heroes, Rickenbacker, Bishop, McCudden, Fonck. I lie on my bed, hands laced behind my head, studying my model planes. Sometimes I turn off the lights and sweep my flashlight across them like a lonely search light. I think about their canvas and wood construction, and how they caught fire in the air, tumbling toward the ground. Tracers cutting curved paths. Anti-aircraft explosions. The smell of oil and gas.

And always, above it all, beyond the heroes and ground’s pitiful limitations, flies von Richthofen. I dream von Richtofen, and labor for days assembling his complicated plane, trying to keep the wings even, to not smudge his beautiful red craft with glue, to hang him in a place of honor in the room.

I see it again, a red plane that vanishes behind a cloud. Could it be? Is it possible? I will the plane to fly around the cloud, and it turns as I command. Where is it? Did I see it? My heart thumps hard. I grip the velvet colored armrest, leaning forward.

Was he there?

Then, above me, clear as an angel and more holy, the red triplane flies against the blue sky.

“The Red Baron!” I gasp, loud enough that people sitting in front of me turn to look. Someone in the theater laughs, but I don’t care. It’s the Red Baron.

Dad’s hand is on my arm, pressing gently down. I think, was I too loud? Is he warning me to be quiet?

But he’s not looking at me. He’s leaning forward too, watching the screen.

The Red Baron looks over the cockpit’s edge, spots us. His fingers touch his leather-flight helmet.

He salutes us, the Red Baron, and then he banks away, impossibly aloft in his beautiful killing machine.

•••

Mom died four days after she checked into the physical therapy center, a separate facility where she was supposed to recover from the back surgery. We had arranged for Dad to be in the room with her during her rehab. He couldn’t really take care of himself, and whenever Mom was out of the room, he would become anxious and start looking for her. She couldn’t even go to the bathroom without him being outside the door, calling for her. She was eighty-four, weak from previous illnesses, and she’d never responded well to anesthetics. After two days on a ventilator, we agreed with the doctors that there was no hope, so they disconnected her. Thirty-five minutes later she passed on. Dad sat in a chair by her bed, holding her hand, but he wasn’t focused. I’m not sure that he knew what was happening. I hoped he didn’t.

We moved Dad to the assisted care center that week. He went straight from the physical therapy facility to the care center without going back to the house. We reasoned that going home would be too hard on him. He wouldn’t want to leave, and he couldn’t stay.

Within the month, my sisters began cleaning the house, clearing it out, and making it ready for sale. Since I lived almost three hundred miles away, they did all the work. They’d call me to talk about where furniture was going, to ask me what I wanted to keep.

•••

Cinderella City, the Denver area’s first shopping mall, opened when I was in junior high. It sported a fountain in its central plaza, a huge spray reaching toward the ceiling, falling short, then falling back in a misty clatter.

Dad walked beside me the weekend of the grand opening, taking in the stores, smelling meats and spices grilled in the food court, working our way through the crowds. He was forty, dark-haired, confident.

Girls, hired by the mall, in matching costumes of red blouses and short, silver skirts, reflective as mirrors, mixed with the crowd, handing out promotional flyers from some of the businesses. They’d all dyed their hair an unlikely blue. Background music filled the air.

“They’re moon maids,” Dad said.

“What?” I said. Lately I’d begun to find girls interesting in a way I never had. One stopped before us, handed Dad a green flyer for Penney’s.

“Twenty percent off just this weekend,” she said, all smiles and long, tanned legs. She looked at me, and I could feel the blush. She winked with a beautiful brown eye, and, astonished, I watched as she turned away to hand the next shopper an advertisement.

Dad laughed. “See, I told you, a moon maid.”

Embarrassed, I shrugged. “She’s not so special.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” He dropped the Penney’s flyer in a trash can. “She’s a
Martian
moon maid, a much rarer creature. There are women, who are wonderful just as they are, moon maids, and then Martian moon maids. You are lucky to see one, and if you play your cards right, you might even talk to one and become her friend. They’re like unicorns: you have to be worthy and noble. Martian moon maids have standards, after all.”

“So, what is Mom?”

We turned into another broad walkway lined with stores. The color scheme changed from the light pastels we’d been walking through to darker, richer hues, and incense smells replaced the grilled meat.

“Your mom is the Martian moon maid queen, son.” He spotted a cart between two stores. “Come on. I’ll buy you a pretzel. Have you ever had one with mustard?”

I shook my head doubtfully. A pretzel with mustard?

I’ve never had a pretzel that good since. And, as far as I can tell, that was the only time he talked to me about women.

That was my sex talk from Dad.

•••

I wandered through the transformed home. Some of the furniture had gone to the care center with Dad. Books sat in boxes in the middle of the floor. Kitchen cupboards were bare, the refrigerator empty. Their bed was gone, so their room seemed strangely large, but I could smell them in it: Dad’s Chapstick and cologne. Mom’s lotions. And the oddly old smell that people leave when they’ve grown too old to take care of hygiene like they used to.

I opened Dad’s nightstand drawer. He’d built sections into it so the items were neatly organized – fingernail clipper, pencils, television remote, cough drops – all partitioned. In the back cubby, he’d put a pocket notebook. Inside were the dates for rotating the bed’s mattress that showed if he’d simply flipped it over, or also swapped the foot for the head. An entry for every four months since he’d bought the mattress in 2005. The book showed the life of the previous mattresses too, and he’d created spaces for flipping the mattress for the next eight years, with places to put a check mark when he’d made the rotation.

Dad loved keeping records. In the glove compartment of the car was a notebook with every gas and oil change (complete with mileage on that tank of gas) from when he’d bought the car. I found books for cars he’d owned back to 1946 in his desk. In his workshop, he kept records for paintbrushes: purchase date, projects completed, color of paint. Next to his golf clubs he kept a tally of every game he’d played: course yardage, total score, total putts. Taped to the wall beside his flying saucer detector in the closet, I found a list of dates. I guessed they were for when he changed the battery.

When I was eight, Dad took me into his office to show me a chart he’d made. It noted bank deposits from the day I was born and continuing until I was twenty-one, more than twice my current lifetime in the future. “See, here,” he said. “Your freshman year of college will be completely paid for. Your sophomore year we’ll pay eighty percent, and junior year fifty percent. You’ll need to start saving money now to pay the missing percent and your senior year. We will give you a weekly allowance.” He brought out another chart. “If you save fifty percent each week, and then get a job during the summer once you turn twelve, you will have college paid for.”

I was eight. All I could think about was the fifty percent of that allowance I could spend. In two months I might be able to buy a model plane.

•••

Dad exercised on his own most of his adult life. He had a copy of the Canadian Air Force’s exercise manual, and started his day with pushups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and stretches. He liked to walk; for years and years he walked to church. Although Mom gained weight, Dad stayed slim. Age reshaped him, though, loosening the skin, redistributing weight. I have a black and white picture of him lying on a boat dock at an Indiana lake when he was twenty. He was built like a bantam boxer.