Look, Boy

Short fiction.

Headlights in a field by Matt MacGillivray

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Tobacco and peaches roused me from sleep. My grandfather, blush-faced statue of paunch and sweat, pressed shoes into my hands.

Come on, he said.

My grandfather was an unserious man. His honeycombed throat, the instrument of a thousand peacetime army stories, betrayed a love of filterless smokes. Before bed he told me one about his platoon and how they stole a huge plastic donut from the rooftop of a coffee shop. The owner had refused their demands for extra sugar. That donut now sleeps in a swamp in nearby Orange, Massachusetts.

My grandfather said nothing as he wheezed all five-foot-five-inches he possessed to the floor and tied my laces. In three years he would die in a VA hospital outside Boston and my parents would refuse my requests to visit.

In the kitchen, my grandfather palmed me a wad of old cornflakes. His idea of a twilight breakfast. My hands were too small and the flakes rattled on the linoleum. A bad dream lingered on my skin. It began about a dog and a place called death, but then a deep thrum cut the Earth and I watched from above as it wept an ocean and drowned everyone I'd ever loved or hated. I was ten years old and my head could not hold big or dangerous ideas.

We rode in his ringworm-rust Suburban beneath a bowl of powdered glass to a farm on the other side of town. Land of yellow fields and scrubby woods, secondary growth divided by centry-old barbed wire and unlit roads. My grandfather told me we'd attend the day's first church service. I had only seen a cross three times in my life before that night and I was terrified of Jesus Christ.

The Suburban shuddered as asphalt turned to grass. The right-side headlight traced a wide ditch.

Like God swung down with a saber, my grandfather said.

A pickup truck lay ahead. A lantern glowed dull on its hood. Two men raised their hands to block the Suburban's glare.

A crater bloomed beside the pickup. At its center lay a metal craft, cylindrical, no bigger than a cradle. A being, fair-haired, blue-skinned, eyes blank and full of stars, curled dead at the feet of the men.

No, I said.

My fear sprinted to the Suburban but my grandfather seized my neck.

Look, he said.

Don't touch it, one of the men said.

No, I said.

Look, boy, my grandfather said. Then he said, Everything is different now.

The man who told me not to touch the being said Zack, my grandfather's name, my name, our name, and told him not to scare me. Said he should tell us an army story. Make us laugh.

I'm out of stories, my grandfather said. He sounded tired.

I'm going to church today, he said.

The other man asked, What do you wanna do?

The first man rubbed his nose like he was swatting away a sneeze. Then he said, Bury it.

The other man asked my grandfather, Why'd you bring the boy?

He needs to know.

People bring problems, said the first man. Bury it, forget it. Say a prayer.

Why pray?

Death demands prayer, said the first man.

On Earth, I said.

Something gathered heat inside me. I began to understand. Then I said, As it is in heaven.

Yes, said the first man.

My grandfather touched my back and I stopped praying.

The first man scared me. His eyes were small, dark, unsettled things, a body projecting strength, a body fully aware of how terrifyingly unalone it was. I avoided looking at him as they dug a new hole, a grave for the craft and the being.

I gazed at the second man. He was the shortest of the three. I once watched him mow my grandfather's lawn and then argue over the money he'd been paid. Not enough, not enough. I said those words at dinner that night, and when I did, my grandfather laughed and plopped a whole chicken on my plate and handed me my fork.

I was still afraid as they wrapped the being in a sheet of blue tarpaulin and tucked it inside the craft. I heard my grandfather mutter an Our Father. This is death, I thought, the confused collision of known and unknown, true horror found in that undecipherable gap. I won't tell anyone about this, I promised myself. I wished I'd never learned about death, or learned that one day I, too, will be wrapped and buried, or learned that grandfathers will take their grandsons to church each Sunday and tell them we come here to remember how it isn't just us, how we're not the only ones who God decided should live and die and be remembered.