by Nick LeGrand.
Trevor is small like his body refuses to grow, like the air isn’t right for him. This world presses on him. He strains when he walks. I’ve asked him before if he hurts, but Trevor won’t say. “Up there everything floats,” he says and points at an airplane uncoiling ribbons of steam across the sky, but I know he means much farther than that. He’s talking about space, because he’s always talking about space. Won’t shut up about it, actually. “Up there you don’t need legs.” His are twisted like old roots, knees pointed in opposite directions. Dad used to say Trevor didn’t know if he was walking to New York or California.
Meteorites are all over the place in Lamont if you know what to look for. Trevor’s always got a pocketful. He brings them to school and lines them up on the front of his desk in neat rows. He could tell you how long it would take to fly to the moon and back but he still couldn’t climb the damn rope in gym class if you gave him a million years. I showed one of Trevor’s meteorites to Dad once. He took one look and spit a brown stream between his boots. Fool’s gold. Valleys are lousy with it. His spit was always brown from chewing cigars, his fingernails yellow wax.
The closet under the stairs still smells like cigar smoke. Sometimes it follows me around the house and I have to open all the windows just to breathe. His coat hasn’t hung in there for over a year. Trevor says there’s no air up there, above the birds and the planes. Above the clouds. Why he’d want to go to such a place, I don’t understand, but when he comes around with one eye swelled shut, maybe I do. The bruise is the same color as a chicken heart. Mom throws the hearts out, says we’re not that desperate yet. I snuck one out of the trash once, stuck sewing needles in it for some voodoo ritual. I was twelve, and I don’t know what I was wishing for. Whatever magic came out of that little heart, I never felt it.
Around here the ground is soft and gives easily. When it rains the earth turns to mud for weeks and sucks at your shoes. The garage has been sinking for years, and the basement floods so often it’s not good for anything except putting up soup cans that’ll be forgotten and poisoned with rust before we ever eat them. Mom moves the rest of dad’s clothes down there in July, two days before the parade where little kids ride trikes down Main Street, red and white streamers bleeding from their handlebars while grownups cheer and wave. At the end they each get a little flag attached to a pencil and a bag of candy. Stashed in the bottom drawer of my desk are four miniature flags along with two meteorites that used to shine when I held them up to the light but have recently gone dull.
One overcast afternoon I creep down into the basement, the wooden stairs soft underfoot from constant moisture. The cinderblock walls sweat in the dark, and the smell is like falling down a well. This place was here long before they ever built the house, just waiting for someone to hollow it out. His clothes are there on their hangers. Furry white mold sprouts from the collar of his jacket, the buttonholes of his shirts. The cigar smoke is gone, overtaken by a smell of pond scum that leaves a film on my skin. She won’t throw them out, and I tell myself I won’t go down there again.
It’s fall and Trevor’s hands are so bad now he can’t grip a baseball. His thumbs bulge like something is trying to push free. He rubs dirt between his fingers and the knuckles groan. I think how he would fit right in down in the basement, in the dark and the wet. He has no control over his body. We’re down in the hollow that separates our two houses. Sunlight never fully reaches here. Confused moss grows on all sides of the trees in thick green beards. Trevor’s on his knees beside the little nameless creek that pumps black water from a cut in the nearby hillside. This time of year it’s overflowing its banks more often than not. The wet soil is easier for him to dig, yielding in rich dark clots that come apart in his gnarled fingers.
“What do you think they’ll look like?” Trevor says. His pants are soaked but he doesn’t seem to mind.
“Who?”
“The Martians.”
“You’ve got as much a chance of seeing a Martian as you’ve got of seeing a damn ghost.”
“My mom saw a ghost once. Lady in a frilly red dress sitting on the back of a train. She waved and everything.”
“How do you know it was a ghost and not a real lady?”
Trevor grins. “I asked that too. Mom said she could read the train’s identification tag right through the lady’s chest. Like half of her was there and the other half wasn’t.”
“Half your mom’s brain isn’t there.”
“Just cause you haven’t seen them, Martin, doesn’t mean it’s not real. You’ve never seen a penguin but that doesn’t stop them from existing.”
Everyone calls me Marty except Trevor. Gets right under my skin and he knows it, but today it makes my teeth ache in my skull. His hands piss me off, because he never complains about them. “Seen a penguin in a book,” I say and my tone chases the smile right off his face, which makes me feel worse. I shouldn’t give him such a hard time and I know it. I get down on my knees beside him and work my fingertips into the cold soil, picture them as roots burrowing, wiggle around until I come up against something hard. Just the broken off top of a beer bottle. We haven’t found a meteorite in weeks.
“Maybe that’s it,” I say.
“What’s it?”
“The Martians. Maybe they’ll look like penguins. Or they could look just like us. Could be waving flags in the Fourth of July parade and we’d never know the difference.”
He’s quiet for a minute and I know he’s thinking. Then he’s back in his hole, the dirt plugging his nails and filling the trenches of his diseased knuckles. He won’t stop until he finds one of his rocks, and I won’t leave him down here alone. By now my knees are soaked through with cold water. I push my hands into the ground again, picture something reaching up for us from below.
#
It’s the middle of the night and I’ve left the window open. All the warm air’s emptied out, sucked away by the night, and the cold breathed back in. My bedroom feels hollow. For a brief instant I imagine coming awake at the bottom of the creek, stars dappling the surface of the frigid, dark water that flows across my body. There’re flashlights down the road. They move ghostly through the thin trees in the field below our house, moving slowly north towards Blueberry Hill. Two days ago it rained, and I know the ground will be sucking their feet. Those trees are the only ones left that haven’t blown down. I wonder how deep their roots must go.
Mom’s asleep in front of the TV, her face alternately blue and then yellow as a plane taxis onto a tropical island somewhere dry and saturated with color. As usual she’s got the sound off. There’s a radio beside her on the table turned way down low. The voices straining out of its speakers are the murmur of a barely heard argument on the other side of a wall. The way she keeps it low like that all the time gives me the willies. She listens like it’s talking just for her.
The flashlights are gone up the hill by the time I get my boots on, but Trevor is waiting for me. Moonlight streams around him, falls right through him. The tracks he’s left in the mud point to New York and California. He’s smiling even as the ground grabs at his feet.
“Did you see?”
“They went up Blueberry Hill. A whole line of them. Same as when Stephen Crane got lost last summer, only I didn’t hear any dogs. Who do you think it is this time?”
“Martians,” Trevor says, and he’s smiling. His eyes are small and clever in their sockets, and his nose pinches up as someone who’s just realized he’s stepped in dog doo. I can’t look at his legs without hurting, but he never bitches about it. “We’ve got to hurry,” he says.
Our lights chase across the ground making ghosts out of gobs of mist that stand between the trees. In my hurry I’ve forgotten a coat. My skin pimples to attention in the chilly air. It has no business being so damn cold this time of year but here it is. Trevor’s got on his winter hat with the yellow pompom on top. It jiggles happily as he strains up Blueberry Hill. His free hand opens and closes like a hungry mouth. I know his pockets will be loaded with the fool’s gold. Meteorites. Broken pieces from above. Making him heavy. Weighing him down. Mom told me not to pity because pity can be worse than hate, but I do and then I think of dad’s coat turning white in the dark and my stomach knots and my hand opens and closes on the night.
There haven’t been blueberries for as long as I can remember, maybe not ever, but brambles coat this hill like a net, tearing at my ankles. Higher up, the ground is all sharpened shale. My hands are bleeding by the time we near the top. Breath chugs in and out of Trevor in reams of smoke. He sounds like a sick animal, and when the moon shows between clouds, his thin hair is dewed with sweat. I’ve never noticed how huge his head is. He can’t help any of it.
I’m thinking how the blood on my palms could be anything in the dark, crushed blueberries maybe, and how whoever named this stupid hill got it so wrong, and the sky ignites, a brilliant white flash that momentarily turns Trevor to a pasty white golem above me. Startled, I look up just in time to see a burning ember tearing towards Mr. Rold’s cow fields to the north, the night sky momentarily fluttering apart like the edges of a cut before snapping back into solid black.
“They’re here,” Trevor says, and I think he means the flashlight folks. There’s a little group of them gathered at the top milling around. I recognize Mr. and Mrs. Lawson from up the road. Mr. Lawson’s got a lawn chair in one hand and a worn rope leash in the other. Maisy, their old Tick Hound whom I always assumed was mute, is at the other end of the leash whining and panting like it’s a hundred degrees out and not the middle of October. She squats and releases a thin stream of urine onto the toe of Mr. Lawson’s boot, but he’s too busy with the chair to notice, and besides Mrs. Lawson’s got him by the collar and keeps screeching “did you see, huh? Did you see it, Benny?” Sarah from homeroom is here too with an older boy I assume is her brother. Everyone calls her spooky because she’s got two different color eyes and likes to chew the ends of her hair. In the dark though, she looks like anyone else.
Another ember tumbles across the sky and everyone shuts up at once, all except Maisy who starts to howl, her frightened yips carrying down the side of the hill and into the flat below. Three more flashes follow in quick succession, illuminating the top of Blueberry Hill in sickly yellow. The clouds have all vanished as if ripped away on cue and the whole yawning expanse of space presses down dizzyingly close. Lights are moving between the stars. I want to ask Sarah if she sees them too, but my throat’s gone gummy.
“Come on!” Trevor doesn’t wait to see if I’ll follow.
There’re no trees on the ridgeline. The wind rises fast and cold, breaking over the top of the hill like waves. Maisy is still raising holy hell. The sounds chases us along the ridge to a cleared area of open ground.
“Those lights—” I start.
“Meteor shower,” Trevor pants. “Perfect cover for the Martians’ arrival.” He reaches into his pockets, and I already know what’s coming next. All those years of digging wet dirt, back aching, his hands slowly turning to stone, and never once complaining because he had a plan all along. Fistfuls of false gold, no longer dull, but glowing hot as if with some internal light. “This is how they’ll know how to find us. I wasn’t sure how much I’d need. I just hope it’s enough.” He looks at me and his excitement slips. “You brought yours, right?”
“I didn’t know.” For some reason I’m frantic with the thought of my own rocks sitting lifeless in the bottom of my desk while the sky burns, swept up into Trevor’s delusion. “I could run back and get them.”
He shakes his head. “No time, Martin.”
Now the lights are not only above, but all around us. Maisy’s howling is drowned in a new noise, a microwave hum that sounds like whispering, and all I can think of is Mom’s radio turned way down low. Above our heads the sky is tearing itself apart. Meteors are supposed to burn up in the atmosphere, and yet I can hear the flat thumps of them impacting wet ground. Trevor looks momentarily stricken. His face contorts, one final cruel rictus after what the disease has wrought upon his hands and his legs.
“Here.” Trevor hands me a small lump. “I don’t know if it’ll be enough.”
The whispers rise, bleed from the ground like black water pumped straight up from the heart of the Earth. Someone screams, and somehow I know it’s Sarah. I turn to look back towards the top of Blueberry Hill. Trevor’s calling my name, saying something about the lights, and then there’s a POP! like the skin of an overfilled balloon tearing, giving way, and I’m flat on my back. Meteors no longer fall but dance in lazy loops among the stars. Dimly, I’m aware that I’m not cold anymore. Warm summer air wafts in from somewhere, only instead of cut grass and chlorine, it smells like rotted meat.
Then, just as quickly as it began, everything stops. The stars are once more inert, bolted in their settings. A cool breeze knocks down the muggy air. That awful stench of death lingers for another minute, and then it too fades. Heart hammering, I sit up, feel around for my flashlight in the dark, relieved when my fingers close over cool metal, more relieved when it turns on.
“Trevor, you alright?”
There’s no answer. I shine my light around, but my friend is gone. No, not fully gone. Trevor’s shoes sit empty a few yards away still caked in mud. One points down the hill towards Mr. Rold’s fields, the other aims wishfully towards home.
#
For three weeks Trevor’s desk has sat empty. I bring the meteorites that he and I dug, line them up in front of my books. Sometimes I hold them up to the sun at recess, turning them this way and that. While Mom’s away at the grocery store one afternoon, I creep halfway down the basement stairs. Water covers the first step, the smell like the wet inside of some foul giant’s mouth. Our house is slowly drowning. I hold a flashlight under each of Trevor’s rocks in turn, but they all stubbornly refuse to glow. Whatever magic came out of them that night it’s all gone, and nothing I do can change it.
Snow falls outside in fat clumps that will melt by morning. When the wind gusts, flakes slap against the window and the glass rattles in its frame. I hear the television the minute I step out of my room. She’s got it cranked up, and it speaks in serious tones that echo through the house. Something important has happened. She’s leaned forward in her seat with her hands on her knees, totally dialed in in a way I haven’t seen in months.
“That neighbor boy,” she says without taking her eyes off the screen. “I guess it looks like they found him.”
On the television is a picture of the woods behind Mr. Rold’s farm. I recognize the train tracks that run right up along the edge of the trees where Trevor and I use to lay out pennies the same way mom would dry apple slices on the windowsill. I’ve still got a bunch of the flattened copper in a shoebox somewhere.
“Is he…” but I can’t say it. I keep picturing his empty shoes. I already know the answer, but before she can respond the screen fills with a cat up on two legs who begins to dance while fish-flavored treats rain down around him.
“Isn’t that just the strangest thing?” my mom says, as we watch the tabby gyrate for his dinner. She’s so thin I can count the tendons in her neck. “Three weeks out in those woods in the cold. What did he eat?”
#
Every day after school I go by Trevor’s house. His mom is pink as a newborn baby, and her hair is falling out in the front. She wraps herself in a housecoat that is so threadbare you can see right through it in places, see the warty freckles on her chest. She tells me Trevor needs his rest. They’ve all had a big scare. She promises she’ll tell him I stopped by before closing the door in my face.
Then one Friday I’m late to school. Mom is still stoned on last night’s sleeping pills and can’t keep her eyes open long enough to drive, so I have to walk the three miles into town. When I come through the classroom door, Trevor is sitting in his seat as if the last month and a half never happened. His desk is bare and he keep his hands folded in his lap while Mr. Henry stumbles through a lesson on the concept of light speed. The light we see from stars is actually billions of years old. Some of those stars could have already died and we would have no way of knowing. Trevor doesn’t raise his hand once. He doesn’t move at all.
In the hallway afterward, I have to step right in front of him to get his attention. For a second it’s like he doesn’t recognize me, then his expression clears.
“Hey Marty.”
“That’s it? Jesus, you were gone for weeks! Disappeared right off the top of that hill. I thought you got vaporized by lightning. I mean, you were just—” I open my hands, show him my empty palms.
“I guess I must have scared you, huh?”
“Scared, shit. What happened to you up there?”
He thinks for a second, and then a smile breaks slowly across his face, only it’s not quite right. My stomach squeezes in on itself, and all I can think of is Maisy pissing all over Mr. Lawson’s feet. Trevor’s face, it’s the same way he looked right before reality hiccupped and took him away.
“Was it Martians?”
Trevor blinks at me. He tugs his lips with his fingers, covers his teeth back up. “No such thing. Just like you said.”
“Hold on, what about this?” I reach into my pocket, take out one of his meteorites. It’s gone the dusky color of coal. You could polish it for a hundred hours and it wouldn’t shine. I thrust it towards him and he takes it reluctantly, bounces it a couple times in his hand. The knuckles on his thumb are perfectly proportioned. They move easily.
“Fool’s gold, Marty. You knew that all along though, didn’t you?”
He tosses the lump back to me and then he’s walking away, footsteps ringing down the empty hall, and his feet are both pointing straight as if they’ve always been that way. The way Trevor walks, it looks like it doesn’t hurt a bit.