The Complete X-Ray Rider

I | The Sound of Trouble

I | The Sound of TroubleHE IS SITTING at the dining room table before a long, low window, building plastic model kits with his brother, when he first hears it—a rumbling and a snarling, coming up the road, coming closer to their house. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a ghostly white blur, a car, swoop into the driveway. Its headlights dazzle his vision as it draws closer to the window. He watches their beams move across the schematics spread over the table—lighting up the U.S.S. Enterprise’s saucer section, still attached to its mold, setting the ship’s cigar-shaped secondary hull on fire, key- lighting its long, tubular warp nacelles. The beams sets the tap water to shimmer in a little porcelain bowl, where strips of red and gold decals float. They glint off the edge of an orange-white tube of Testors glue. Then they’re gone.

He looks out the window, nimbuses of light still imprinted on his eyes. In their place sits the car, headlamps cooling, fading to black, plumes of exhaust rising. It is long and low and Astronaut white. Its driver’s door swings open, as he has seen the hatch of the Apollo spacecraft swing open after splashdown. His father emerges, dressed in his baggy white paint clothes: his hair is greased back, his face tanned; he is wearing aviator glasses—an astronaut returned to earth.

The Kid doesn’t say anything, just watches as his dad’s paint truck swings into the drive behind the car. Out climbs Fast Eddy, also still in his paint clothes. He is smoking a cigarette and carrying a can of Olympia beer. “The man is 40 going on 60,” his mother once described him on the phone, “but is our star employee.” His father says Fast Eddy can double-coat the interior of a medium- sized home in less than a work day, all by himself.

“Hey, Eddy!” shouts his brother. He gets up and hurries out, the screen door banging behind him.

The Kid follows, gluey fingertips sticking to the schematics, causing them to swish from the table, spilling the model’s pieces. There is a click as the bathroom door is unlatched. He pauses at the screen, looking over his shoulder.

His mother stands bolt upright, looking beyond him at the car. She is buttoning her blouse with one hand, holding a small mirror in the other. Her face has been tanned over the summer, her dark-blonde hair bleached gold; still she seems blanched, her expression blank. She reminds him of the astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bowman, after passing through the Star Gate—paralyzed, transformed. A man his mother described as having just seen it all, “the beginning, the end, everything.”

She sets the mirror down and steadies herself against the table. Her expression softens. She doesn’t quite shine, as would be typical, but something replaces the mask; something in the eyes only, something akin to her true self—something warm, blush, living.

“Go on ahead,” she says. “I’ll pick that up.”

And she smiles—sweetly, wanly.

THE BOYS RACE out to the car amidst a September sunset—the Kid, now six, and his brother, now nine.

They circle the car in opposite directions as it idles in the pre-twilight, the brother laughing, hollering out, the Kid tentative, silent, speculative.

“S-S!” shouts the brother, “It’s an S-S!”

“Sheldon Spitzer, how about that?” says Fast Eddy.

“Right,” chuckles the brother. “Try Super Sport.”

The Kid completes his circuit, stares at the black-accented grill and the chromed ‘S-S’ indicia centered there. He can’t yet read but recognizes the shapes. S-S. As in U.S.S. As in not just car. As in Enterprise.

His father opens the passenger’s side door, gestures to him like Bob Barker on The Price is Right. “...a brand-new car!”

A big teenager who lives next door lopes across the field, arms swinging. “Just about,” he drawls. Everyone calls him B.B.—because his name is ‘Billy,’ and because he walks like Bigfoot. “1968—five years old. Nice El Camino.”

“El Camino,” repeats the Kid. He steps close and stares in at the cab: at the chromed shifter and radio and the futuristic speedometer and council clock; at the single black bench seat and the flesh-colored carpeting—which rises, in the middle of the floor, to meet the shifter’s rubber baffling. He hardly notices his brother opening the driver’s door and slipping behind the wheel. He hardly notices anything but the carpeted floor and the sumptuous mound, which together form a hammock, almost, beneath the dashboard’s black, enveloping shelter.

“Where the heck is everyone going to sit?” says his brother, rocking the wheel, pretending to drive. The dome light causes a queer play of shadows over his face, teasing out features the Kid, the very mirror of their father, does not possess.

“Oh, I’ll just ride in the back,” drawls B.B.

“There’s plenty of room for everyone,” says his father. “You’re not that big yet.”

“I will be,” says the brother. He pulls a handle under the dash, pops the hood.

The Kid doesn’t say anything, only peers through the rear window at the payload bay, which takes the place of back seats.

His father has purchased a white 1968 El Camino with a black vinyl roof and matching decals, but he sees a spaceship, an aerodynamic domicile: a rocket with twin-domed hood scoops and louvered ports and long, pin-striped rear quarter panels, like warp nacelles, which through an alchemy known to Federation engineers and certain boys and girls can fold space, can warp time.

They huddle around the engine compartment—Fast Eddy, father, Sheldon and B.B.—as he peers between, glimpses something black and chrome and complicated before his brother blocks the view—purposely, it seems. He keeps trying to see as Fast Eddy talks like he paints, fast.

“It’s not the cylinders themselves that move, see. It’s the pistons. Each cylinder has a spark plug, which causes compressed gas to combust and re-combust—bang-bang-bang, like that. The sparks are timed so that they push the pistons down and drive the crankshaft...”

“How many cylinders?” asks the brother.

“Eight,” says his father.

“Hah!” cries B.B. “Explains that!”

“Explains what?”

“The sound of trouble when you pulled in,” says B.B.

The Kid is on the pavement, crawling between their legs. He figures if he can’t see it from above he’ll see it from below.

Fast Eddy says: “Huh? No, that’s not the sound of trouble. That’s glass packs. The sound of trouble is when something goes wrong.”

The Kid is on his back now. He is reaching up into the purring, whirring compartment, intending to pull himself farther under, when his father grabs him by both ankles, yanks him out.

“Aye, aye, aye!” he shouts. He pulls him to his feet, draws him away from the others. “You don’t ever reach into machinery like that. Not ever, Buddy!”

He looks at his father numbly, feeling foolish beyond words. He knows that Sheldon and Fast Eddy and B.B. are looking at him also, but does not return their gaze.

His father massages his shoulders and points him toward the field, to where his Styrachosaurus model sits like an ornament on the old Ford wagon. “Someone’s going to make off with that,” he says.

He focuses on it, squinting in the setting sun. His father gives him a nudge. He runs after his model.

GRASSHOPPERS SCATTER, ticking and whirring, as he moves through the field. He picks the model up off the hood of the wagon—one of its legs falls off, tumbling into the grass, which is knee-high, golden. He picks it up and examines it. The breeze tosses his hair. He looks past the green, pebble-textured model part—at the old Ford station wagon. Although he rode in it only yesterday, the light- brown car looks as though it has been here forever, merged with the grass and weeds—as though it were already receding from him, from the family. He looks at the new car, at his father and brother and B.B. and Fast Eddy. He opens the driver’s door of the wagon, watching them, and sits in the doorframe.

He tries to fit the Styrachosaur’s leg back onto its body, but discovers that the little plastic knob that holds it in place is broken. The breeze blows and ruffles the grass. He looks at their new house, which is painted white with black accents, like his father’s new car—thinks of his mother holding her hand-mirror. He does not know why he should think of this just now, or why the thought should bother him. His earlier notion of folding space and warping time seems suddenly threatening. There is something beneath the idea, something he can divine but not apprehend, a hidden layer.

His brother shouts, “Can I rev it? Can I rev it just once?”

“Hold on, Buddy,” says their father. “Mary Lee! Let’s go for a ride!”

The Kid fidgets. He waits for her to come out, feeling suddenly queasy, feeling as though she might in fact not come out—the fear is so alien that it seems to rise up in him like bile.

She emerges at last, wearing her fuzzy coat and carrying coats for his brother and himself: new coats, fresh as the paint on the new car, and the new house, and his father’s job-sites—all the schools and grocery stores across Spokane his parents have bid on and won. “The boys have school tomorrow,” she says, adding, “Where’s the Kid?”

She looks around for him, spies him through the weeds. “What are you doing out there? Come join the party.”

He wonders why he can’t stop shaking. Why his stomach bucks and twists; why he’s convinced the earth might suddenly fall away, the sun and moon blink out, the clouds roil black.

“Okay! Give her a rev!” shouts his father. The car’s engine revs and roars.

The Kid leaps to his feet, startled. Something happens—it seems to him the universe itself just ignites and rolls over, right there, under his shoes. He falls down instantly, quaking and dry-heaving.

The car’s engine roars and roars. “That’s enough!” barks his father. Fast Eddy laughs.

The Kid coughs and spits and wipes his mouth. He is shaking uncontrollably. He peers through the grass and weeds, sees his mother hurrying toward him, her tanned face and blonde hair appearing gray in the waning sunlight. He gets up suddenly and runs toward her, his own blonde hair flying.

She has hardly finished stooping when he collides against her breast. “I—I was afraid—Bowman—how you said—I don’t—I don’t want....” He bursts into tears, presses into her coat.

She rocks him back and forth, patting his back. “There, there, Sweetie. Now, now.”

He doesn’t know what to say—what it is that he truly even feels. Something has brushed him, has bruised him.

“Something awful,” he says.

“Shhh,” she says. “There is nothing awful.” She runs her hands over his hair, kisses his forehead. They remain that way for several minutes, saying nothing. At last she turns him away gently. “There’s only that, see?”

She points to the setting sun, to the clouds shot through with red and gold.

He stares at them, sniffling. Suddenly everything seems perfect again—safe, spacious, mild. The air is cool, and fragrant with his mother’s hairspray. He senses that she alone is interested in him; not his father, certainly not his brother—not his Sunday school teachers or the girls across the street. After awhile he says, “What if it goes out? What if—God turns it off?”

She plucks at his hair, straightens it out. “He turns it off every night. And what happens every morning?”

He swipes at his eyes, sniffs.

She retakes his shoulders gently in her hands, turns him back to face her. “What happens every morning?”

“He turns it back on again.”

She smiles. “Which means it never really went out.”

He stares at her as she releases his shoulders—slowly, delicately, as though she was balancing him on a wire. “My favorite Martian,” she says. She tries to smooth his cowlicks, “Sensitive antennae and all.” She laughs. “I don’t know how we’ll get through sometimes.”

The Kid smiles, a bit awkwardly, then turns to look at the sun—sees the station wagon silhouetted against it. “It looks lonely out there,” he says.

“It’s just a car, Sweetie. It can’t feel lonely.” She places a hand on his shoulder, steering him away. “Besides, we have a new one now.”