Six Point Buck

We took grandpa’s 55 Chevy to the highway and thirty six miles up the road where they said the spaceships had been. I knew every mile marker, gas station, billboard and farmhouse along the way. Only the dead animals changed. Deer became raccoons became opossums. The last billboard was wooden, paid for by Ohio Right for Life. It was a giant uterus with a baby in it sucking its little thumb. It said, “Abortion is Murder.” It made my stomach hurt. Once there, it was no small task getting the car in the middle of the cornfield. We had to drive slowly up an access lane that had two deeply worn ruts potted with mud puddles. Insects scattered like shrapnel as we drove through. I looked out across the rows of July corn that were high as an elephant’s eye. The sun set through them. That is what they say good corn should like this time of year. The corn stalks scraped the side of the car but dad drove slowly so not to scratch the paint. So rather than fingers on a chalkboard, they made a gentle sifting sound. We had been there five or six times. Usually, we parked dad’s Prius on the road and walked back. Dad would walk around on those crop circles and sigh melancholically, longingly, his arms spread out and his palms up as though he could feel something in the air. He would invariably look up as though he could actually see something, but there was nothing but clouds above us. Whatever had allegedly made the circle was gone. Long gone. The first time we came was six years ago when I was nine. In those six years my brother died, and my mother left us to chase a dream of being an actress. She was on the backside of thirty but still clinging to an Audrey Hepburn view of herself—or someone dead and glamorous. I turned on the TV now and then to see if I could spot her as an extra in a TV show or a commercial where I reasoned she might get a start. I thought I had seen her once in a movie standing in line at a gas station with a six pack of beer in her hands. But the camera closed in on Liam Neeson and she was gone, all over again. We didn’t even get a postcard.

Dad looks at the sky like I looked at the TV. After a while I stopped looking for her but dad never stopped. “This is it,” he said. “They are coming tonight and we have to be here.” I was happy I packed sandwiches and Cokes. After the first few times, I adapted.

It was hot, humid, a dark night with no moon. The clouds were illuminated by an occasional burst of lightening which seemed to make dad giddy. “That is their sign,” he said. “This is it, Izzy!” He held my hand and smiled at me. He parted my hair away from my face and I could tell he was remembering me as a baby, or a young child. I was cute then. I wasn’t anymore. When I was a younger everything was perfect so he looked at me sometimes and I knew he was looking back in time through my face. How long would I keep flattering him by coming? I didn’t know. What would he do when I went to college? Or got married? I thought of running away to California to be an actress. There was a role for me out there in something these days. I practiced in front of the mirror with a pillow up my shirt. I was Juno, I was Rita Hayworth, I was Dorothy Gale from Ohio. And maybe in some bit part I would come across my mother, who also had a bit part in the same film. And while Brad Pitt was doing something dramatic before us in camera view, we would be having a conversation in the blur of the background that was six years coming. Or maybe seven or eight by then.

“Why are we here, dad?” I asked weakly. I asked that question every time we came. I didn’t have the heart to tell him they weren’t coming. We had never taken the Chevy before. We parked it in the middle of the largest of the three crop circles and he left the rabbit’s foot dangle in the ignition. “It isn’t real, Izzy,” my grandpa told me. “Do you know of a purple rabbit missing a foot? Nothing is real.”

“Because, Izzy. They are coming. And they are going to take us with them.”

The rain began to pour. Fat drops bombarded the windshield and cascaded down the glass making everything blurry. He turned on the wipers. The radio glowed on his face and he adjusted the dial past Don Maclean, past Moby, past Taylor Swift, past Whiz Kalifa and Catholic radio. He went all the way until he got to the scream of what seemed to be nothing. It sounded like an ensnared rabbit for a moment. He turned up the volume and I covered my ears. He had never done this before. He always turned off the radio. “Dad!” I complained.

“Listen,” he pleaded holding out his hand. And then there was a sound, a beep followed by a sequence of beeps. Then something that sounded like a fax machine, or the old dial-up internet at my grandpa’s house. Then there was a series of clicks, like the sound a hunter would make in his mouth when he is trying to lure a deer in heat. “That’s them!” he cried. “This is it, Izzy!”

The rain lessened and dad got out of the car and stood on the hood. He wasn’t very large and the car was built like a tank and barely moved as he mounted. He stood there with his hands up to the heavens like an Incan priest ready to sacrifice the offering. He was mad. But the noises continued through the radio frequency and seemed to become even clearer. And though I was a skeptic, I began to believe in the possibility that he was on to something. All the newspaper clippings on the basement walls, all the late night TV, the trips to Roswell, the arguments—my dad may know what he was talking about after all. It seemed to me that even the most ardent skeptic couldn’t deny that this was some kind of code. My little brother was just like him. At seven years old, they acted the same and they were both excitable and peaceful people. I smiled remembering them making foil hats together at the kitchen table. But that memory, like every other, was sadly replaced by the last memories which were in a hospital, the sound of a respirator and of the pastor’s penny loafers as he walked down the hall.

I took off my shoes and got out of the car in the rain and probably squealed in my enthusiasm. I couldn’t say that I did because it isn’t something I realize I do, it’s reflexive, just as it is to cover my face with my hands when I am excited. It had never rained before when we waited, and we had never taken grandpa’s Chevy, and we had never heard anything on the radio. Grandpa died last year of cancer, but it would always be his Chevy, so said my dad. He had left the change in the ashtray and all of grandpa’s things as they were—even the purple rabbit’s foot on the keychain. I stood up on the hood with my dad and my ninety pounds in addition to his one fifty didn’t make the slightest difference. Dad smiled at me and I reached out and held his hand and we both looked up at the whirling sky. This mad man was the only connection I had to this world. I had no other known living relative. He was my thread to the universe.

I asked, “Why did we take grandpa’s Chevy?” The wind picked up. The clouds rolled. And there was thunder that seemed to shake us as though we were in God’s hand.

“As an offering. They like classic cars!” he shouted over the howl of the wind. “They take things all the time that people don’t know about. Last week a lion disappeared from the Kansas City Zoo. The cage was locked! He was in an open-air enclosure. A month ago a tractor was taken from Des Moines! A few months before that, some patio furniture and a gas grill was stolen from a Sears in Peoria! And those are just the things we know about! So I figure, if we are standing on a mint condition 55 Chevy in the middle of a place they use as a landing port, we have a darn good chance of being taken, too.”

“But why? Why do we want to go there?”

He looked at me blankly for a moment as though he didn’t understand the question. I had asked him before and the answer was always the same. It was as though he had memorized the script. Like mom may be memorizing a script somewhere in an L.A. hotel. The wind calmed as I finished my question, then picked up as though furious at me for asking my dad, yet again, the question. “We want to go to an intelligent world. Where all people are treated fairly. Where people are intelligent and good or they are not allowed to live or breed like rats. Where they don’t hate or discriminate. Where they love children and babies and innocent life is protected. Where they can cure illnesses and no one betrays anyone. Where they care more for their environment than money or industry. Where hard work is valued. Where they are not ignorant and don’t spend their life playing games. Where they don’t take drugs or pills, or pollute their own bodies with filth. Where they don’t slaughter animals or allow things to be that they wouldn’t if they saw it. Where they have it in their being to help each other and not steal, not cheat, not lie, nor curse. Where they share their wealth and their lives are based on equality and freedom—true equality and freedom. Where their corporations don’t own their politicians or half the world. Where there are no box stores or chain restaurants. Where a bottle of pills doesn’t cost 10,000 dollars and people don’t die because they can’t afford them. Where there is no famine, or hate, or loneliness, or pain. Where the only war is the war on stupidity. Where there is no God or Satan. That is why we want to go there.”

He was rain soaked. His face was sorrowful. I hadn’t before noticed the wrinkles and creases in his face. It was like the moon. This time he had made his appeal half to me and half to the dark sky above us, loud enough for all to hear if they were listening. When he concluded he looked up at the rain as though a portal may open, as though he had said some magic words, or a ship may suddenly appear like a hummingbird at a feeder, and zap us up, surfing skyward on the 55 Chevy. But once more, there was nothing. My distraught father exhaled, defeated again. The radio went silent. The sky calmed but then there was a rustling sound from the corn. Dad looked down excited by the prospect that there was someone out there. Perhaps, in his mind, he thought it was one of them, sent to Earth to educate us, to board with us. He would give them my brother’s room which was filled with space junk. There was telescope by the window. Planets dangling off the ceiling. My brother would have loved it if he knew an alien slept in his bed. But then the rustling stopped and the thing emerged modestly from the corn. It stood there and stared at us for a long moment.

“Look!” I said, though he was already looking. “A six point buck!”

Dad said nothing at first. Nothing at all. The deer said nothing. Nothing at all. He must have thought we were crazy standing there on the hood of a 55 Chevy. Wearing foil hats. I think I left that part out. We were both wearing foil hats. Dad took his off, ran his hand through his hair, smiled at the deer and stepped down off the car. He reached up to help me down and I took his hand. “Let’s go,” he said peacefully.

“Already?” I asked. We usually stayed out much longer. Past two or three in the morning on nothing but blankets.

“Yes, Izzy. That’s their sign. They’re not coming.”

“What? The deer?”

“Yes. A six point buck.”

I jumped down into his arms and he smiled holding me there for a moment before relinquishing me to the earth. We would go back on the next new moon or when there was some eclipse or some solar flare. Some calculation he would make in the basement computing frequency with a long list of probability factors. There are things that never get old. There are things that you miss and you remember when they are gone and things you do not. I remember jumping down like this off a carousel at the zoo, into his arms, when my mom and brother were there behind us. My brother was still a baby, on a white horse, held by my mom who was looking at herself in the carousel mirror. I was on back of a candy-apple red six point buck with gold horns and elaborate tattoos. Carousel rides don’t last long enough. Neither does childhood. We backed out slowly. I hadn’t noticed as we drove in that the Right to Life billboard was gone. It had been replaced by a giant metal billboard for McDonald’s with a greasy triple cheeseburger, fries and these words illuminated by a ten thousand watt lightbulb: “I’m Lovin’ It!”

I nearly forgot the trademark: ™.