Stories Index

Adult Secrets

Batavia, New York
1957

My best friend Maxi spends the night at my house. I make him take the bed with the Dale Evans bedspread, where my little sister usually sleeps. I take the Roy Rogers bed and give him a hard time, calling him “Dale” in a girly sort of voice and ask if he can ride side-saddle. He slams me across the face with a stuffed bear. I jump into his bed and pummel him with a Mister Rabbit hand-puppet, a genuine likeness with a hard button-nose. It raises welts on Maxi’s head so he pounds me some more and we make so much racket that it wakes my sister up, and she starts crying which starts my Mom yelling which starts my Dad yelling.
            The whole thing reminds me of a movie we saw in science class. There’s this room with about a million mousetraps loaded with Ping-Pong balls, and everything is pretty quiet until some scientist-type tosses a Ping-Pong ball right into the center and soon there are balls bouncing all over the place. He explains that we are witnessing a chain reaction and that’s how an atomic bomb works, and if we’re not careful the Russians will drop one on us and everyone in the world will bounce around just like those Ping-Pong balls and burn up, except there is no scientist here, only my Dad and he is fed up and pissed off.
            “Quit shittin’ around,” he yells up the stairs, using his trademark phrase. “We have company down here.” He scares the b’Jesus out of Maxi, although I don’t know why since his old man can out-yell mine on any given day.
            “What company?”
            “The Kaplans from down the street,” I whisper.
            “They’re weird,” he says. “Remember their dog, what’s its name…”
            “Electric or something?”
            “No, idiot…”
            “Who’s an idiot? You’re a…”
            “Shut up a minute… No, wait… It’s Elektra.”
            “No it isn’t.”
            “Yes, yes it was. Ma-member?” He always says ‘remember’ wrong on purpose and in a goofy voice, like that cartoon dog, Manfred the Wonder Dog on Tom Terrific.
            “Oh, yeah. It is Elektra.”
            “Told you!” He reminds me of the time Elektra chased us both up a tree. We spit on the ridiculous creature and pelted it with chestnuts before the old lady,  Mrs. Kaplan’s mom I think, called it inside. 
            “What kind of name is Elektra anyway,” I ask Maxi, but he simply shrugs, turns over and pretends to go to sleep.
            “Hey wake up,” I say, shaking him. He grunts and simply lies there like a dead slug. “Come on, quite faking, I got a secret. A big one.”
            He bolts up, “Oh yeah, what secret,” he says.
            “You won’t tell…”
            “It’s a secret, ain’t it?”
            “Yeah but…”
            “Come on, what’s the big deal”
            I scan the room quickly just in case my folks or their goofy company snuck in the room, then blurt out, “I got caught in a transformer at my grandparent’s house and blew out all the power.”
            Maxi looks at me like I just barfed all over myself. He laughs and says, “Sure you did.”
            “No Maxi, I did. The whole town. It was like… I turned into a bolt of electricity.”
            “Right.”
            “Two days ago. Remember when the power went out?”
            “That was you? Right…” He snickers, rolls over and pretends to go asleep again, mumbling, “blew the power out… sure.”
            I sit there for a moment, staring in the dark and say quietly, “But it happened, it really did happen. I don’t know how…” And I don’t, but I do know something’s wrong. Out of place in a way I can’t explain like that silly I dream I had when I was a little kid. The same dream I still can’t get out of my head and makes my stomach turn over whenever I see a spider.
            I lay back down and try to go to sleep and just forget the whole thing. We lay quietly for some time before Maxi pops up and says, “Well I got a secret too.”
            “Oh yeah, I’ll bet.”
            “You wish. Listen, you want to see something neat?”
            “No,” I soot back, still pissed that he didn’t believe how I took out all the power in Batavia.”
            “They’re alive!”
            “Go to sleep.”
            “No, really.  I found them in my basement.”
            I suspect this may cause more trouble with my dad, but I ask anyway, “Found what in your basement?”
            “You can’t tell anyone. Promise?  It’s a secret.”
            “Okay, okay I promise.”
            “It’s a secret!”
            “I said okay, now come on.”
            Maxi surveys the room, as if he were looking for Russian spies. Moving with an exaggerated slowness, he produces a small jar from his overnight bag. We huddle over a dim night light and study the contents.
            “What are they?” I ask.
            “I don’t know what they are. I just found them.”
            I can barely make out several wriggling shapes. “Found them? Where?”
            “Like I said, in my basement. There’s this door in the floor…”
            I miss the rest of Maxi’s explanation, mesmerized by his discovery in a jar. Inside, three kaleidoscope-colored creatures resembling slugs or snails, crawl all over each other. They have a hard insect-like shell and wings folded around their bodies like a praying mantis.  Funny thing is, they don’t have a face, no eyes, but large gaping mouths lined with rows of human-like teeth on top of a long stalk of a neck. Eyes or none, they seem to look right through me.
            I back away and Maxi says, “They’re okay, really — don’t bite or anything.” He carefully opens the lid.
            “What are you doing?” I ask. “Are you crazy? Don’t let those things out.” Too late, for as soon as the lid is ajar, the creatures crawl to the top, extend their wings, and take flight in my bedroom.
            Maxi’s flying creatures bounce from wall to wall, leaving solid vapor trails of red, yellow and gold, and a sticky residue where they land. Maxi jumps around and claps his hands in excitement as we try to catch them, but they pass through our hands like vapor. Together we leap from bed to bed in a pointless exercise of recapturing his freaky pets.
            Maxi says, “Let’s pretend that they’re super-intelligent alien beings.”
            “Yeah, and they can’t communicate…”
            “They read minds…”
            We sit quietly on the Dale Evan’s bed and close our eyes as Maxi’s space creatures whiz around us, trying to contact them mentally.
            “Getting anything?” I ask Maxi.
            “Nothing. No, wait, I think, I think... Yes. I’m getting something.”
            “What?” I ask, “What do they say?” “
            “They want to show us where their planet is. That’s right, they need to get outside so they can fly back to their home planet.”
            “What planet is that?” I ask.
            Maxi concentrates then mumbles something unintelligible, “Can’t be pronounced in English,” he says.
            We hop off the bed and run to the window overlooking my back yard. I pull apart the drapes and lift the stubborn window carefully and quietly. It groans in self-defense, but finally yields to our small hands. Leaning out into the cool, moonlight night we are surprised to see my parents and the Kaplan’s playing on my swing-set.
            “What are your folks doing?” asks Maxi in a nervous whisper.
            “I dunno,” I say, squinting hard into the darkness. “Some kind of game?”
            We completely forget Maxi’s space pets and concentrate on my parents and their company. My Dad and Mr. Kaplan are both stripped to the waist. Their faces are painted in jagged streaks of black and yellow. The women are wearing outrageous costumes and enormous masks. The whole scene reminds me of the Good Friday service at church.
            Maxi elbows me and says, “Maybe it’s some kind of religion or something.”
            “I don’t know what it is, “ I confess, “but I don’t think we should be watching.” I start backing away, but Maxi insists that they must be practicing some secret ceremony.
            “I saw my folks do the same thing once, sort of,” he tells me with great authority.
            “No you didn’t…”
            “Did too. Hey, look at that!”
            My Dad ascends the ladder of the slide with Mr. Kaplan close behind. He is carrying something on his back. At this distance I can’t tell, but it looks like some kind of monkey. When he reaches the top step, my Dad begins chanting in a language that sounds more like coughing than talking. He pulls the monkey from his back and holds the limp creature aloft while Mr. Kaplan echoes the chant and incenses, and my Mom and Mrs. Kaplan lay face-down at the foot of the ladder. At the peak of the ceremony, the men throw the monkey high into the air where it suddenly sparks to life. Just then, our space pets find the window and streak out into the night leaving glowing trails behind them. They circle the party in my back yard before taking flight into the night. Maxi, my parents, the Kaplans, and I all stare into the heavens as their trails fade into the distance and disappear.
            “Holy shit!” Maxi squeals. “What was that all about?”
            I yank Maxi from the window, slam it shut and draw the curtains before the grown-ups know we’ve been watching.
            “Hey, what’s going on,” Maxi says. “I want to see what happens next.” Outside I hear the harsh squealing of a monkey and primitive voices yelling in that coughing language again.
            “No you don’t,” I tell him.