Between Men Page 8

  They wound up at the visitors’ center.

  Frankie stood on scales that told him what his weight would be on Mars, Venus, and Saturn. He peered into a Mercury capsule (his sister’s predicted setting for the butt-fuck). He wandered around the Red-stones and Atlases and Titans in the Rocket Garden—all things he’d done before—while Clark trailed glumly alongside him, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses and his hands tucked into his pockets.

  “It’s like a literal changing of the guard,” Clark said as Frankie tore open a package of astronaut ice cream. “The old boys knew me on sight. I had the run of the place.”

  “Want some?” Frankie asked, holding out what looked like a pink block of Styrofoam.

  Clark winced and shook his head no. “Sorry we didn’t get in there deep. I feel like I should make it up to you somehow.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Frankie said again.

  “No, seriously. You have any interest in getting a bite to eat tomorrow night?”

  Frankie felt his heart race. The artificial ice cream softened on his tongue. “Yeah.”

  “You could come out to the house, and we could go from there to this great restaurant I know called Pounders. It’s a fun place.”

  “Your—your house?”

  “In Cocoa. You drive, don’t you?”

  Frankie nodded. “I got my license this year. You know, I called your house before I called your office. A woman answered.”

  Clark nodded and smiled and took off his aviators. “That was Pepper.”

  “Who’s Pepper?”

  “You’ll love Pepper. She’s top of the line.”

  Karen’s hair was caked in mayonnaise and wrapped in a cap fashioned out of cellophane and Scotch tape. She leaned sideways across the backseat of her Datsun and filled a trash bag with beer cans and Burger King wrappers and empty cigarette packs, then tied the bag shut and pushed it out into the driveway. “Can it.”

  Frankie carried the bag to one of the garbage cans alongside the house. When he got back to the driveway, she was sitting behind the wheel with Armor All and a roll of paper towels. “Why’d you offer to help me, anyway?” she asked.

  “No reason,” Frankie lied.

  “Uh-huh. And where’s the ass-tronaut taking you to dinner?”

  “Some place called Pounders.”

  “Ha! I’ve heard about that place. Billy Myers goes there and times it so that he takes a big dump right in the middle of the meal. He really sticks it to them, that way.”

  Frankie didn’t know what she was talking about and tried to vaporize the image from his mind. He picked up the paper towel roll from the seat and tore one off for her. She spritzed the dash. “Does Mom know about your old-man lover?”

  “He’s not old. He’s probably around thirty-five.”

  “And you’re sixteen.”

  “Almost seventeen. And he’s not chasing me. If anything, I’m chasing him.”

  “Even sicker. Have you taken it up the butt yet? With anyone, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “You better stick a cucumber up there or something. He’s got his sights set on your Hershey Highway, mark my words, and you’re going to need to be ready.”

  “Clark’s not like that.”

  “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it butt-fucks like a duck.”

  Frankie tore off another paper towel and handed it to her. “It’s fun, helping you,” he said.

  “For you, maybe.”

  “Can I borrow your car?”

  She sat back on the seat and glared at him. Thin rivers of mayonnaise ran down her temples. “I knew you wanted something. Do you have any idea what a hassle it is to maintain a car? I bust my ass in that restaurant five nights a week to keep this piece of junk going. I’m an adult now, you know. I’ve got responsibilities and a livelihood to consider.”

  “OK,” Frankie said. “But I have to get to Clark’s house in Cocoa. Can I borrow it—just this once?”

  She narrowed her eyes, still glaring. “Hold out your arms.” He did, and she spritzed them both, elbow to wrist, with Armor All. “No,” she said, turning back to the dash.

  His mother was in her pod, but the door was open, so he stuck his head in. She was on her knees in front of her closet, surrounded by shoes.

  “Are you going anywhere tonight?” he asked.

  She started, then returned her attention to the shoes. “I hope not.”

  “Can I borrow your car?”

  “What for?”

  “Clark’s taking me to dinner, but I have to get to his house first.”

  “Do I know Clark?”

  “You haven’t met him. He’s the astronaut I told you about. The one who I was with yesterday at the space center.”

  “It seems like you’re spending an awful lot of time with this Clark. He’s not a bad influence, is he?”

  Frankie shook his head.

  “Well.” She picked up two brown shoes and studied them, discovered they didn’t match, and dropped them onto the beige carpet. “Be back by eleven, and replace any gas you use.”

  He turned on his black lights, put Duran Duran on his record player, and rubbed himself some more over the picture he’d made with Clark’s head. The paper, by now, was streaked and rippled, though he was careful to steer clear of Clark’s face.

  In the late afternoon he sat on the kitchen counter and called Diana.

  “There’s this Pepper person,” he told her. “I asked about her, and Clark said she was ‘top of the line.’ You think it could be his daughter?”

  “Did she sound like a grown-up?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Could be his wife.”

  “My sister still thinks he’s trying to have sex with me. Maybe he’s gay and it’s some big secret.”

  “They might be swingers,” Diana mused. “Or he might be bi. There are people like that, you know. Maybe I should be bi. It would double my chances, now that I think about it. Did I tell you I ate an entire package of Fig Newtons for lunch?”

  “I think he at least likes me,” Frankie said.

  “There are even people who are into fat people. They only want to get naked with grotesquely fat human beings. I should find out if they have a club and join it.”

  “You’re not fat. You just have a bad self-image.”

  “Well, if I am fat, I hate myself, and if I’m not, it means not even the people in those clubs will want me.”

  “I wonder what I’m going to wear,” Frankie said.

  He changed T-shirts three times, settling on a pink one with David Bowie on the front. Dusk was just starting in when he backed his mother’s Oldsmobile out of the driveway and drove through town, over the bridge, and into Cocoa.

  Clark’s house was on River Road, across from the island. The yard needed mowing and the paint on the shutters was flaking off, but it was a nice, two-story house with a front porch and windows that looked out over the Indian River. Frankie parked next to the Trans Am, checked his hair in the rearview mirror, then walked up the steps of the front porch and rang the bell.

  The door opened a few moments later and a woman stood next to it, eyeing him. She wore jeans and a sleeveless white shirt that buttoned up the front. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was pretty and young looking—though not young enough to be Clark’s daughter, Frankie concluded.

  “You must be Frankie,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I’m Pepper. Come in.” He stepped past her as she turned and hollered up the staircase, “Clark! Frankie’s here!”

  Clark’s voice called from above, “Can you come up here for a second, Pep?”

  “Make yourself at home,” she told Frankie, then bounded up the stairs.

  Frankie stood in the foyer listening to the muffled sound of their voices. Then he wandered into the living room. There was a long, lipstick-red sofa with round white pillows at either end. A black lacquered coffee table on which sat a Sears catalogue, a copy of House and G
arden, and a glass ashtray. A treadmill in one corner. Nothing about the room indicated that an ex-astronaut lived there—until Frankie reached the bookcase. There were no books, but every shelf was crammed full of framed photos, nearly all of them pictures of Clark in his NASA days: smiling alongside a trio of crew-cutted men in the launch room; dressed in an orange jumpsuit and waving on a tarmac; sitting inside some sort of simulator and staring at a panel of gauges with a stern look of concentration on his face. In one photo, he was shaking John Glenn’s hand. “For Clark,” the inscription read, “—with high hopes!” and underneath it, Glenn’s signature.

  He moved on to the kitchen. There were beer bottles in the sink and dirty dishes stacked beside it. Evans Realty magnets on the refrigerator. Over the toaster, a large picture frame holding patches from each of the Apollo missions, and over the coffeemaker, Clark’s framed NASA ID badge.

  In the dining room, Frankie found Clark’s official astronaut portrait. Standing before a wedge of moon, Clark wore a spacesuit and was looking not at the camera but slightly above and past it, his helmet under one arm, his eyes filled with glitter and promise. He looked god-like to Frankie, who suddenly realized he had a hard-on.

  Adjusting himself in his jeans, he turned away from the portrait and spotted a clear glass bell jar nearly a foot high on the middle of a sideboard. Inside the jar was a pedestal, and on top of the pedestal was a jagged gray rock no bigger than a golf ball.

  “Bud!”

  Frankie jumped and spun around. Clark and Pepper were standing at the entrance to the dining room, smiling at him. “Hi,” he said, folding his hands in front of his crotch.

  “You and I are becoming a habit. And good news: Pepper approves.”

  Pepper squeezed Clark’s elbow and ruffled a hand through his hair.

  Clark pointed toward the bell jar. “You know what that is?”

  “A rock?”

  “That’s a bona fide moon rock. Buzz Aldrin gave it to me.”

  Frankie turned and looked at the rock again, this time with a new sense of appreciation.

  “He won’t even let me touch it,” Pepper said.

  “I let you hold it once,” Clark reminded her. “How about you, bud? Want to hold it?”

  “Yeah,” Frankie said. “I-I’d like to.”

  Clark stepped around the table and lifted the bell jar and set it aside. Then, delicately, he picked up the rock and placed it on Frankie’s palm. Frankie imagined it humming against his skin, charged with some sort of space energy that would give him special powers here on Earth; though, in truth, it only felt like a rock.

  He extended his hand toward Clark and said, “Thanks for letting me hold it.”

  “I’d say ‘anytime,’ but it probably won’t happen again,” Clark said, returning the rock to its pedestal and covering it.

  “He loves that rock more than he loves me,” Pepper said.

  “Not true. I love food more than I love you.” Clark brought his hands together and rubbed his palms. “Who’s hungry?”

  Pounders was one town over, in Rockledge. Just inside the door, a hostess stood next to a large scale with a digital readout. Her T-shirt had a cartoon pig on it, smiling, his mouth smeared with barbecue sauce. She welcomed them and invited Pepper to weigh in first. Pepper stepped onto the scale.

  “One-eighteen and twenty-four ounces,” the hostess said. She asked Pepper’s name, then wrote it and her weight on a card with a red Sharpie.

  “One-seventy-one and six ounces,” she announced when Clark stood on the scale, and, “One-oh-nine on the dot,” when it was Frankie’s turn.

  “Lighter than me.” Pepper feigned jealousy.

  “Nobody’s hiding lead in their pockets, I hope,” the hostess said.

  “Not us,” Clark told her. “We’re tried and true.”

  She smiled, opened her hand to the dining room, and said, “Pig out!”

  They chose a table, sat down, and ordered drinks (iced tea for Pepper and Frankie, bourbon and water for Clark), and then immediately got up again and stood in a buffet line. There was barbecue, fried chicken, fried cod, meat loaf, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, collards, green beans, rolls, and four different kinds of dessert, including an enormous pan of banana pudding that had a rubbery crust and was half gone and sliding forward like a continental shelf. “Want to compete?” Clark asked Frankie as they filled their plates.

  Frankie still didn’t get it. “How?”

  “We weigh in again at the end of the meal. They charge by the ounce. Whoever gains the most wins.”

  “I don’t eat much,” Frankie said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Pepper said, reaching for the banana pudding spoon. “I’m going to win.”

  Clark drank four bourbons with water. Both he and Pepper went back for seconds before Frankie was halfway through his plateful of food. He’d taken too much because he’d wanted to try everything on the buffet, but he realized it didn’t matter because if it didn’t go into his body, it was free. “This restaurant makes the most sense of any around,” Clark said, chewing. “Eating out should be like buying a shirt. You go into a store and try on a few shirts, but you only pay for the one you actually take away in a bag.”

  Frankie sipped from a straw sunk into an iced-tea cup so wide, he had to use two hands to lift it. He was beginning to doubt his sister’s assumption that Clark was gay. As for Diana’s speculation, he could only guess. Pepper smiled whenever he caught her eye. He smiled back, but felt uncomfortable. “Are you two married?” he asked.

  She waved her left hand and showed Frankie her wedding band. “Seven years.”

  He noticed the matching band on Clark’s finger. “Do you . . . have kids?”

  This, for some reason, made Clark laugh, and Pepper reached over and lightly slapped his arm. “No,” she said.

  “Not traditionally,” Clark said. He grinned and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He downed the last of his bourbon, and then pushed back from the table and lit a cigarette. “Frankie here wants to go into space, but he doesn’t want to do it through NASA.”

  “You want to be a cosmonaut?” Pepper asked.

  “No. I’d like to have my own spaceship, though.” He remembered that Clark still hadn’t told him his Gordon Cooper story. He asked him now if he would tell it.

  “You’re not going to ask me again if we descended from aliens, are you?”

  “No. But I’d like to hear about the sighting.”

  Clark winced. “You know, not that I got to see it myself, but my theory is that being out in all that space does something to people’s heads. Certain kinds of people, that is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It can make them a little ...” Clark seesawed the hand holding the cigarette, serpentining the smoke.

  “But what’s the story?”

  “The story is, there is no story. Cooper saw ice, or something like ice, coming off the back of his ship. From what I heard, the boys in Ground Control rolled their eyes big-time over that one. Same thing with Scott Carpenter.”

  “Carpenter photographed a saucer,” Frankie said. “I read about it in a book, and saw the picture.”

  “He photographed a tracking balloon. He said it was a saucer.”

  “He believed it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s my point. Certain kinds of people . . . who get an inflated sense of their own importance . . . get blasted up there and then get a little . . . I don’t know . . . light-headed. They start seeing things. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Clark’s a little bitter,” Pepper said around her last spoonful of pudding.

  “I’m not bitter. I’m realistic.”

  Frankie said, “I read that NASA officials told reporters not to ask questions about that stuff.”

  “Exactly. Because it was embarrassing. Glenn started it on his Mercury orbit with his report of voodoo fairy lights zipping around his head, and a bunch of those other boys jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them couldn’t go up there without thinking the
y saw some alien . . . whatever. It’s nonsense.”

  Frankie thought of the photograph of Clark shaking John Glenn’s hand, and Glenn’s inscription. Then he thought of Clark’s portrait, in the spacesuit—maybe the only time he’d ever worn one.

  “Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin?” Clark continued. “You know what they were looking at when they cried ‘UFO’? Their own jettisoned trash bags. If that had been me, and reporters had been allowed to question me about it, I’d be ashamed to show my face. ‘I saw a UFO! I saw a UFO!’ Please.”

  “Aldrin gave you the moon rock,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah. Well.” Clark stubbed out his cigarette in a plastic ashtray. “Even a loony can give a nice present.”

  They weighed themselves again before leaving (Pepper had gained the most weight, and won), and Clark paid the bill. On the drive back to Cocoa, in the backseat of the Trans Am, Frankie decided he was still attracted to Clark but no longer liked him. There was something mean about him. As for his opinions on the UFO sightings, he was just . . . wrong. In their driveway, Frankie thanked them both for dinner and said good-night, but instead of shaking the hand he held out, Clark said, “Whoa, bud, what’s the hurry? Don’t you want to come inside?”

  “What for?”

  Pepper smiled at him, but for the first time she didn’t hold her gaze; she looked down at the driveway and adjusted the purse hanging from her shoulder.

  Clark looked out over the river and shrugged. “Wild times. A little excitement.”

  Maybe Karen was right. Or Diana. Or both of them. Frankie looked at Clark in the moonlight. His solid shoulders. His treadmill-tended waist. The shaggy brown hair falling over his forehead.

  “Come on in,” Clark said, nodding toward the house.

  He sat in the living room on the sofa and accepted the beer Pepper offered him. He’d never drunk alcohol before, but stepping over the threshold into the house for the second time felt like crossing a border into another country, where a whole new set of rules and customs existed. The beer tasted awful, but he drank it, while Pepper sat next to him and talked about the kindergarteners she taught and Clark drank his own beer and smoked in an armchair across from them. Clark’s mood had changed. He stared at Frankie as if he might not even want him there. But when he’d taken the last swig of his beer, he nodded toward him and said, “Why don’t you chug that thing and the three of us go upstairs?”