Between Men Page 7

  “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 ar
e 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.