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by K.M. Nelson
Dad bought me my first alcoholic beverage at a bar outside of Mitchell, South Dakota. "You won't like it much," he said as he handed the beer over to my two small hands that wrapped around it carefully, as though I was holding a baby's bottle. I was six years old.
But Dad didn't like it much when I liked the beer, a lot, and asked for another. He said no, at first, but as I begged and he downed a couple more and we sat on barstools together and the pretty bartender flirted with him and smiled at me, crooning words like, "That's so cuuute," Dad broke down and bought me another. And that's the story of how I first got drunk.
Later that night, when we drove back to the campsite where Mom pretended to sleep in the tent, I walked into a tree, fell down, and somehow busted open my lip on a rock. The tent's zippered door zoomed open the moment I started crying, followed by Mom wearing a white tee-shirt with the arms cut off and an old pair of Dad's boxer shorts, from when he used to wear underpants. She had a flashlight in her hands and the second the light hit my face I stopped crying. I couldn't see her features with the light in my eyes, but I knew that she was mad and I knew that she knew everything.
"Did you see any flying saucers?" I asked, trying to change the subject, the situation. Dad just stood behind me, frozen and wondering what would happen next.
Without a word Mom scooped me up and drove me to the hospital in Mitchell. If she was mad at me, she didn't show it. "Think about trains," she kept saying, over and over. I really liked trains when I was young.
I had to get a couple of stitches and the whole ordeal went by quick enough. But we didn't go back to the campsite that night, where Dad was. What he was doing I had no idea, but I knew better than to ask Mom about anything. She rented a motel room, a room with two beds, and she tried to cheer me up.
"You get a bed tonight," she said, "remember when you had a bed? What a luxury!" I smiled and tried to look grateful, but I missed being outside and I was afraid that Dad would be eaten by bears or other wild animals, being all alone in a tent. Somehow I believed that if you weren't alone, nothing could harm you. But on your own, you were like bait.
I woke up with a sore back. We checked out of the room, but not before Mom gave me a long and thorough bath. "Don't know when you'll be able to get this clean again," she said. I remember thinking the expression on her face was funny, not quite right. So I'd try to smile, to make her feel better; my phony grins only made her look worse, more sad, more out of place in this room with pictures screwed into the walls and cups sealed in plastic.
When we drove back to the campsite, Dad had packed up the tent and everything else and was sitting on the ground smoking a cigarette. Mom didn't say anything to him when we pulled up. I waited for her to turn off the engine, get out of the car, and scream at him, bang her fists into him because he had put her only child in danger. But she didn't turn off the engine or get out of the car or do any of those other things. Instead she reached into the glove compartment and pulled out an old pair of cheap sunglasses with white plastic frames. Looking back at Dad, who remained smoking on the ground, she asked, "Did you see anything?" He shook his head no. Mom then let out the briefest, quietest sigh of relief I have ever heard from anyone. "Good. Get in the back." And he did.
No one said anything for several hours. We stopped at a truckstop in Wyoming, where Mom parked the car, took off the cheap shades and put them back in the glove compartment. She looked at us and said, "Special treat today. Restaurant food. On Dad."
I never heard Mom yell at Dad about the night outside Mitchell. In fact, over dinner, everything was back to normal, and normal with us was kind of great, for a while anyway. But on that night and day in South Dakota and Wyoming, I learned who was really in control. And so did my father.
"Jason, you have no choice. You are coming with us. We have to leave now."
He wasn't my father. Not my real father. Mom had met him somewhere along her journey, the journey that became our journey, somewhere between the Children of the Inner Power Source and chasing Uova-7, the escaped extra-terrestrial she was obsessed with finding and knowing.
"I want to stay here!" I screamed, my arms stretched out and pressed with all my might against the door frame. We had lived in Nebraska for three months and eleven days. The abandoned farmhouse was the only semi-permanent home I remembered. Before that, before I had an actual room to myself for that brief period of time that felt like three years and eleven months instead, I only knew the life of a nomad: a night on someone's couch here, a night in a tent there, another night in a moving vehicle, moving toward something I didn't fully understand and certainly didn't believe in.
Dad grabbed me from where I stubbornly stood and I started screaming and crying, trying to get free. My small arms hit various parts of him-his nose, his ears, the back of his neck. It wasn't until I was in the car and saw the old man and the shotgun that I realized everything Dad told me was true.
"We don't want to leave either," Mom tried to reason with me as Dad threw the last of our few possessions into the trunk. "The house belongs to that old man, and he doesn't like us."
"Why not?" I spat, pouting and frowning and eyeing the senior citizen suspiciously.
My mother sighed, grabbed her pack of Camels from the dashboard, and lit up. "We're freaks, that's why."
When I could no longer bear to look at the man who was forcing us off his unused property, my gaze fell to the floor, where one of my toy traincars was temporarily derailed. I could understand trains-I knew trains, I'd seen trains. But the people from outer space, the people my mother called "visitors" and "my family from the stars"-I had little faith.
"The Children of the Inner Power Source was not a cult!" my mother screamed. "And even if it had been, so what?! Every group or organization or religion or collection of individuals united by a guiding philosophy or belief or what have you could be seen as or called a cult. It's not a dirty word!"
"It's a four letter word," Dad said. "And I don't care what you call it, it was a cult, a religious cult with an unstable leader. And we're not going anywhere near anyone associated with it."
They were fighting again. We had been driving for a week, sleeping in the car. We all needed showers. I had fallen asleep after we entered California and had to surrender all of our fruit at the border. The closer we got to San Francisco, the more they fought. Mom had friends there, old friends who were still in with the Children of the Inner Power Source. Dad was an atheist and wanted nothing to do with anything rooted in religion, California-style or otherwise.
"Maybe I'll just drive past San Francisco, keep on truckin', how would you like that?" he screamed.
"Oh my God, look!"
Their fighting stopped and Dad slammed on the brakes. The car shook and careened all over the road which was luckily deserted. Dad pulled over to the shoulder and before he had completely stopped the car, Mom was already outside, standing in the ditch, pointing at the sky.
"I saw one! I saw one of Uova-7's ships!"
Dad jumped out and stood by her. "How do you know it was one of Uova-7's? Could you see any markings? What did you see?"
Mom was smiling, truly beaming. I ran to her side and looked into space, toward where she had pointed. She picked me up and swung me around. She was laughing, happy like I hadn't seen her in weeks.
"Did you see Uova-7? Did you?"
I didn't want to disappoint her. I lied and said I saw the spaceship. This only made her happier, and she held me tight and her laughter turned to tears of happiness.
Behind her I saw Dad. He had not seen anything either. I could smell the doubt and skepticism on him. Her sighting was joyless for him and he knew I was lying. So I looked away, concentrated on Mom, who had happiness to spare.
Mom and I lived off that moment for days. After all, we had seen Uova-7's spaceship! After that I became quieter, started playing more with my trains.
This was the story behind Uova-7: Mom first learned about him when we were staying in a commune populated by hippie/vegetarian/communist/UFO fanatics in Amana, Iowa. Uova-7 was supposedly a visitor from another planet. Which planet was unknown. Somewhere in Uova-7's journeys, he was captured by the U.S. government, a villain I would be taught was the biggest and baddest of them all, especially as far as extra-terrestrials were concerned. But as Uova-7 lore goes, he escaped with the aid of "nonconformists" not unlike the ones we were staying with in Iowa. And now Uova-7-forever on the run from the feds-spent his time building makeshift spaceships that he tried to blast off and navigate back to his home planet. But with low-end space technology and raw materials on earth being what they were, Uova-7 never could get very far. His goal was to break out of the earth's atmosphere. And my mother's goal was to find him because she truly believed she was meant to break out of that atmosphere with him.
Dad and I were just along for the ride, he because he loved her and me because the ride was all I knew.
We were staying in the guest room of some old kook outside of Reno. Mom believed that we were close, that Uova-7 was near and that we would be meeting him and leaving with him at any time. But whether or not Dad would be with us was suddenly another story.
"You don't have to call him 'Dad,' you know," she said to me in a whisper as he and our host watched TV in the other room.
"I know," I said. "It just seems right to call him that, 'cause he's . . ."
"What?" she asked.
"He's the closest thing I've got." I was aware of what I was doing-I was trying to make her feel guilty for the life I was beginning to question. My eighth birthday was fast approaching and I had never been in a school, ever. I had never known other kids outside of the scary ones I'd met at the Children of the Inner Power Source compound. I feared I was like them now, stunted and made strange by the lives of our guardians. I was beginning to wonder if my Mom was "all there."
"Jason," she said, her whisper getting harsher, "once we meet up with Uova-7, you will call him 'Dad.' Okay? Won't that be neat?"
I didn't think it was neat at all because I didn't believe it. Laughter came from the living room, laughter from the man I still called Dad.
"Can I go watch TV?" I asked.
Mom smiled, and answered with more whispers. "Sure, go watch TV. It'll probably be your last chance. Uova-7 is coming for us."
I woke up one morning and Mom wasn't there. Neither was Dad. The man whose house we were staying in, the place outside Reno, told me to sit still and be quiet. He fed me Apple Jacks and cold toast and asked me if I liked coffee. I told him no, even though I'd never had it. I ate my cereal while he stood by the sink and stared at me like I was the crazy one. In retrospect, he probably just didn't have much experience with children; to him, I really was from another planet.
Dad walked in about five minutes later. When he looked at me, sitting at a stranger's kitchen table having breakfast, he tried to smile but I could tell he just couldn't. Something had happened, I could feel it. She was gone.
"Where's Mom?" I asked.
Dad didn't say anything. He swallowed hard and looked like he was going to cry. I thought of a song I'd heard, a lyric: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
"Family reunion," said the man by the sink. Dad and I both turned to him, startled because for a few seconds we had forgotten all about him. "She's gone to a family reunion. And she's not coming back." I never ate breakfast again after that. Eventually I started having coffee in the morning, and later added cigarettes.
"I used to lead a pretty interesting life," I told Sharon, if that was her real name -- you can never tell when you meet a woman in a bar. "I used to be a nomad."
"Shut up," she said, slinging back another shot.
"No," I said, "It's true. Up until I was a little past eight years old."
She just stared at me for a few seconds, one eyebrow raised and the empty shot glass still in her right hand. Then she started laughing. That's when I knew I had almost said too much again. I was searching for someone to believe my story just like my mother was. Whether or not that story was ultimately true and whether or not the person who heard it actually, truly bought it was unimportant. I just needed to hear the words.
"So, funny guy," she said. "What do you do for a living?"
I signaled to the bartender for another beer before answering. "I work for the railroad," I said. "And I love it."
