Alien Town

Ashley Hand

Ashley Hand is a service academy graduate and spent her career as a military officer deploying around the world. She is now an MFA candidate at Cornell. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Carve, Blue Mesa Review, and other magazines.

Your mother lived in Texas in an oil boom town and you didn’t want to drive all that way to see her when you got home from Afghanistan, so we put a finger on the map between Albuquerque and Midland and landed on Roswell. We loaded into the car on a Friday afternoon, and I fell asleep with a styrofoam cup of gas station coffee in my hand. It was the kind where you had to peel back the tab on the lid and lock it into a half-moon groove. I woke when my grip slacked on the cup and I dropped it in my lap. The lid popped off and there was coffee all over my pants. They were white pants, tight, smooching my thighs. The night before, you’d gone soft and hadn’t been able to come. I was trying to be crisp for you, with my french tucked pullover and neatly trimmed cuticles, trying to declare this a new day. I cried out in surprise, and you swerved onto the shoulder of the road and said what the fuck and I said I’m sorry I’m sorry as I used a blanket to try and wipe up the mess. The blanket was wool and it didn’t absorb and I wound up having to scoot my butt along the seat to soak up the coffee.

—

We rode in silence for a long stretch of miles. I said what lovely weather for a drive, and I put my sunglasses on against the dead blond light so you couldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I rolled down my window to feel the whoosh of highway air and inhale the asphalt, wet from a recent rain. You said it smelled of cow shit and fracking and you had a headache from the sun. I rolled up my window. There were liver spots on my corneas when I closed my eyes. The leather seats were warm on my thighs.

It was a new car. You’d bought it just the day before. I hadn’t wanted to start a fight, point out that there was nothing wrong with the old one, your Jeep, or that you should have consulted me, that maybe your deployment cash should go to something else, but you pulled up in the Subaru and before I said anything, you told me the Jeep just wouldn’t get clean. No matter how many times you detailed it, you kept finding long red strands of my hair webbed in the carpet or cats-cradled in the cup holders, and you wanted to be in a car that was fresh and new and smelled of leather.

We arrived in Roswell and checked into a Motel 6. The TV was on, playing Lord of the Rings. The colors were off, the pixels tinted grey and green. The curtains were drawn shut against the light. We set our luggage down. You opened the slider and lit up a smoke. I went into the bathroom and turned on the tap and sat on the closed toilet lid and shut my eyes. I told myself to breathe. Then I got up and changed my pants. I washed my face. I scrubbed and scrubbed with the bar of soap until the lye and tallow made my pores feel taut, my skin stretched tight over my cheeks.

Your mother was due to arrive in the next hour, so we drove into the city, past concrete buildings that looked like bomb shelters. The streets had no sidewalks. There were weeds growing up through the cracks in the gutters. A UFO convention was happening the next weekend, and businesses were already setting up for the flood of tourists. Plastic alien heads were tethered to marquees that said in block letters WELCOME TO ALIEN TOWN. Green foil alien balloons floated on strings. It felt like a Cold War-era space race town that had sprouted up out of a dry lake bed. Homeless shorebirds pecked along the roadways. I’d read about Roswell, about nuclear testing, sonic booms under the ground. I could imagine the genesis of the earth here, and its demise, the dirt red as Mars, plateaus of space rock and moonstone and uncut glass. I watched a balloon disappear into the deep, lost, ageless-blue sky.

We waited for your mother at Buffalo Wild Wings. There was a row of flat screens flashing above the bar. You ordered us Topo Chicos with Jameson. Your mother came a while later, after we’d watched a bantamweight rerun. She hugged you and touched your stubbled face and said my my so rugged. She was wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants. She asked if you’d brought your uniform, the clean one, the one with the burgundy beret and pomade-slicked parachute boots. She wanted to take a picture with you so she could post it to Facebook and show the world her handsome son, returned from war. You said no, you hadn’t brought it, and she said it was okay and she hugged me and said what a strange wonderful little town we got to explore together and she was so happy.

We sat across from her in a booth. You ordered a burger and another whiskey water, and listened to her chatter about the drive. You mm-hmm’d and kept your eyes tuned to the screens and responded to questions with one-sentence answers. Your mother kept asking for baskets of tortilla chips and nacho sauce. She said how much she loved that nacho sauce. She ordered a margarita as big as her face and then another. The more sloshed she got, the more she talked, and I could feel your leg start to tick faster under the table when she asked you if there had been any danger, and then in the next breath backtracked and said wait no, don’t tell me. Lie to me if you have to.

We stayed in the booth drinking until it got dark, and then it seemed like we ought to do something else. We walked around town. There were bright green Lime scooters parked in front of an alien novelty store. We got onto the scooters and we rode through the streets, past fortune-telling shops and tire stores and gas stations. There wasn’t a bike lane, but it was late and the city had quieted down. Your mother was having a ball. She was laughing, throwing her head back as we cruised along. You told her to slow down. She wasn’t paying attention to the red lights. You had to grab her arm and tell her to stop. You said, you’re drunk, and she said, so are you and she went ahead anyway. The streets were bumpy, pitted. She spilled her scooter in a crater in the crosswalk and scraped her arm against the pavement. Her purse had fallen into the road. You yelled at her. You yanked her upright and shook her.

I looked away. I picked up her purse, the lipstick that had spilled out, a scrunchie, spare change. Receipts were scattered across the pavement and I tried to tamp them down under my feet before they fluttered away.

I understood then. That when you started tipping back whiskey in the early afternoons, it was your way of trying to saturate your organs with antiseptic, to sterilize yourself with a clear hard rinse, to get clean from what had happened. Everyone knew about Emmett. It was all over the base. They had a parade for him in New Mexico the same day he was buried in Arlington. They waved banners and fired rifles. You didn’t go. No one asked about you, the field medic. You who’d had your bare callused hands in the scoop of his open chest. You posted up with a half rack in the garage and you blasted music and you built me a bookcase from poplar wood, eight feet tall by eight feet wide. I knew to leave you alone to run the saws and grind the belt sander, to look away when you struggled to move the beast inside.

—

I’ve tried a million times in a million ways to explain why I stayed with you for so long — but there’s this. The time we were driving back north from a weekend of outdoor salt and mud baths in Truth or Consequences. The sky had turned cobalt in the twilight and the trees were black outlines in the distance. Brake lights from a car in front of us, then the yelp of an animal. The car slowed, then continued on. You pulled into the gravel on the shoulder. There was a collarless dog just outside the beam of our headlights trying to drag itself off the road. Its back legs didn’t work. You got out and you scooped up the dog and loaded it into the Jeep. The dog was letting out slow whining breaths. You said, maybe we should just finish him, and I said please Mac, and I climbed over the seats as you drove and held the pup in my arms. His brindle coat was wet with blood. We took him all the way back to Albuquerque, to an emergency vet clinic. They opened the hatch and saw the dog curled in my arms, his tongue lolling to the side, and said there was nothing they could do. They could put him to sleep. They warned me that he could have any number of diseases. They said he could have rabies. I looked at you and you nodded and closed the liftgate and we drove home. You stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, your medical supplies spread out around you, stuffing QuickClot gauze into the bleeding cavities under the light of the kitchen table. I brought you the IFAK I’d been issued, but it only had Neosporin, bandaids, a tourniquet, a nasopharyngeal airway kit. You looked up a YouTube video of how to perform CPR on an animal. You pumped his chest to no avail. Then you wrapped him in a towel and we drove out to the mesas and you dug a hole and buried the dog in a shallow grave at the base of a juniper tree as the sun was bursting forth over the scrubland.

—

The only time you spoke of it was right after it happened. You FaceTimed me from a cot in the medical tent. Fluorescent lights hung from chains over your head. Your bearded jaw. I hadn’t heard your voice break like that, before or since. You said, I just wanted to see your face. You said, by the time we got him to the hospital, I think he was already gone. I think the doctors knew it. I think they kept working on him for me.

—

It was much later that I moved to New York, after things had fallen apart between us. I started dating different men just to get a grasp of the city. It eluded me when I was on my own. I couldn’t figure out where the pulse was. I couldn’t figure out what there was to do. The city came alive on dates. I liked being taken out for plates of spaghetti and cups of red wine at little restaurants with white plastic table cloths and wooden benches, getting drunk in the soft halo of the votive candles, fingers sticky with baklava. I liked being taken back to swanky pre war walk-ups with lemon trees on the balconies, seduced with whispers and whiskey, then waking alone in the taxicab yellow light of spring after my date had already rushed off to Wall Street. I’d gather the bedsheets under my armpits like a wedding gown and let the skirt trail in my wake as I walked the creaking lengths of their vaulted apartments, pretending I was a widow, listening to the sounds of the city below me. I’d use the Old Spice deodorant in the medicine cabinet and clean my ears with Q-tips dipped in peroxide. From the windows, I could invariably see smog and power lines, billboards of women with mouths drawn on outside the lip line. I imagined that if I lived inside these types of lives for good, I’d have rooftop meals on blankets while the salt breeze rolled in off the Atlantic and I’d smoke the stubs of cigarettes left over in terra cotta flower pots, balanced between carmine shellac fingernails, and it would be an entirely separate life and no one would know who I’d been before with you and I could forget it altogether.

—

Sometimes when other men are fucking me, I close my eyes and think of you. I daydream of big New Mexico skies. Of pink plastic flamingos and low lawn chairs, backyard swimming pools and orange trees and neon motor inn signs, the skyline a highway, shimmering in the heat like the scales of a sea bass. Of our vacations to California, dinners at tennis clubs, tonic water and vodka and hamburgers, ice cream on Balboa Island and watching the buckets on the ferris wheel rock in the breeze like hanging baby cradles, you tucking a gardenia in my hair and calling me a firebrand. I dream of miles of sand, of the times we were happy after we met in Iraq, before I’d gotten out of the military, before anyone you cared about had died, and we had canteens on our hips and helmets like two halves of a hollowed-out melon on our heads, straps dangling by our chins. Working the late shift, waking as the sun was going down, midnight meals in the chow hall, sending you out on missions into the bowels of the desert, and when you came back and debriefed, washed the blood from your hands, we’d have fried french toast sticks for dinner and take our malaria tablets before bed at eight a.m. and sleep on cots in an open basketball court like refugees from a hurricane and we’d have lunatic dreams from the pills, feverish dreams, dreams of cage-diving with sharks at our shins, our skin melting off while we slept naked on the bare desert floor under a hot broad sun, gun barrels in our mouths, buzzards overhead, a mirage of mountains molting in the distance, a burning paradise.

Issue 10.2