The Complete X-Ray Rider

III | Last Kid on the Moon-1

III | Last Kid on the MoonHE IS STANDING outside Broadway Elementary, looking for the El Camino.

His first month at school has confirmed what his mother already suspected—he has a talent for artistic expression; but there are signs he will struggle with reading and with arithmetic. His teachers seem to adore him, although he gleefully disregards many of their directives, painting outside the lines whenever it suits him and inserting fanciful creatures and space vessels into what are supposed to be realistic reproductions of his life in Spokane circa 1972. He gets on well with his classmates and even shows signs of becoming ‘popular,’ but only after a catastrophe on the first day when, in a state of terror at his father’s departure, he approached the blackboard, and—in an attempt to master his surroundings—drew a massive illustration of the U.S.S. Enterprise, which evoked not applause but derisive guffaws, and prompted one student, Keith, to shout, “It doesn’t even exist anymore! The show’s been cancelled!”

Nor does he take the bus, the size and noise of which horrifies him, but instead seeks out his father’s El Camino, which stands out, stark white amongst brightly colored Volkswagens and wood-paneled station wagons, like his own colorless hair amongst his peers, and attracts the attention of everyone already aboard the bus, their faces and hands pressed against the glass.

Because the lot directly adjacent to the school is crowded with buses, the parents must park along the opposite side of the street, where they idle until openings present themselves. But when the Kid sees his mother in the passenger seat of the car—unusual since her daycare clients don’t often pick up their children until shortly before dinnertime—he runs directly toward them, oblivious to the oncoming traffic. His father taps the horn once, curtly—but the Kid is already there, climbing into his mother’s open door and over her lap—causing the newspapers spread there to crumple—into the center of the seat.

“How’d it go?” asks his mother.

He shrugs. “We saw a movie about kangaroos. They have a pouch, built right into their stomach.”

“To carry their pups in,” says his mother.

“But they can still run and jump really fast. What’s that?” He points at the ball of cotton taped over her wrist.

“Mom had a boo-boo,” she says.

“What kind?”

She smoothes the paper and lifts it up, covering her face completely. “Now showing, Starlight Drive-in Theater: Five Million Years...” The engine rumbles as they pull onto the road; she does not finish the sentence.

“Mom,” he says.

“We have to pick up your brother,” she says, lowering the paper, and winks.

THE MOVIE SHOWING at the Starlight Theater is Hammer Films’ Five Million Years to Earth, which begins with workers discovering the fossilized remains of prehistoric humans while digging a subway tunnel beneath the streets of London. The workers call in scientists, who promptly begin excavating the remains until they, too, make a startling discovery: There is something else buried down there. Something unnatural. Something constructed, and tapered, like a bomb.

The scientists call in the military, who expand the excavation until they expose the nose-cone of what they presume to be an unexploded V-2 rocket. As they continue to clear away the mud and cake, however, everyone realizes it is no such thing—that it is, in fact, something not of this earth. This proves out when they discover a handful of dead aliens in a walled-off compartment, a compartment full of hex comb, like an enormous beehive. The aliens look like huge bees, or locusts, and bleed green slime when autopsied. Imprinted upon the Kid’s mind is a scene via flashback of thousands of these things marching beneath a red-brown sky—“Walking, bouncing, leaping!”—swarming across a desert waste on some apocalyptic errand of destruction.

The main character, Professor Quartermass, concludes that the object is an ancient Martian spaceship; nor is it inert, he postulates, but alive, and brooding over some inscrutable end. It has clearly been influencing the citizens of Hobb’s End for some time, as there are newspaper accounts of sporadic outbursts of murder and mayhem going back decades. In fact, he says, it has wanted them to come and unbury it for a long time. And now that it has been unburied, it is waking up. Growing powerful again.

Five Million Years to Earth ends with the ship’s evil influence extending throughout London, causing widespread rioting and chaos, setting the ground to trembling and to roll like water. At the c****x there appears a gigantic, ghostly apparition of light, one of the bug beings magnified a thousand-fold, which looms over the city like a god. Which glares back at Quartermass, at the Kid, at his mother and father and brother, at the entire parking lot, as if from the center of time and space.

“I was here when they had that earthquake,” says his father, during a shot of the ground rolling like water. “The whole car went like this...” He gestures palm down, as though his hand were a boat on the waves.

OCTOBER ROLLS INTO November, which roles into December. They continue to ride in a variety of vehicles—sometimes his dad's work truck, with its ladder racks and door signs and floor strewn with fast-food containers, other times the Ford wagon—but the Camino quickly becomes his favorite, even after it has grown too cold outside to ride in back. It becomes his favorite because it is a toy in the truest sense. There is almost nothing utilitarian about it, not even its smooth, shallow payload, which has only been used to ferry him and his brother on joyrides and for drive-in movie seating. His favorite, too, because even now, after it has grown too cold to ride outside, rather than being banished to a cool, stale, airless backseat—as in the wagon—or the crotch of the work truck, where the long gear handle constantly intrudes, he and his brother can sit right between their parents—a perfect fit—and be afforded the same view. And because it is so alive.

There is never any doubt as to whether the Camino is running. When Dad turns the key its engine leaps up with a rumble. It is moody, too, head-down and all-business on the highway, restless and chatty on side streets, wistful on winding passes, full of hearty laughter coming back down.

When the night is long and they are in the Camino— the interior of which is incredibly spacious for a car without backseats—he dozes in the warmth of his mother’s lap; or, as his mother tends to sit with her feet tucked beneath her, on the floor—with his head against the carpeted hump that contours around the transmission. If he nods off it is to the hum of the engine and the drone of the radials—steady, absolute—the blow of the heater, his mother’s laughter.

Sometimes he rolls onto his back in order to watch streetlights or the tops of the power poles as they pass, but often he just watches his mother, who always seems to be gazing wistfully out the window, or chatting at his dad, or laughing heartily with her head thrown back, like Lucille Ball. Often he imagines the engine as the street lights play over her face. Again and again the blue sparks flash, the compressed gas explodes, and the pistons drop, turning the crankshaft.

One morning while he is peeking between the door and the jamb of his parents’ bedroom—looking in on his mother, who is sitting at the end of the bed, wrapping Christmas presents while cradling the telephone receiver against her shoulder—he hears her say, “I’m not going to be a prisoner to a possibility. It wasn’t malignant.”

The sound jumps out at him. Malignant. There is something course and ragged about it, like throat. Some of her other words have a similar affect—lobular carcinoma—in situ—invasive breast cancer. They make it difficult for him to concentrate on what she is wrapping—which he is convinced, by the size of the box and its coloring, is an Aurora plastic model kit: Godzilla, maybe; or King Kong, or Rodan. “It means there’s an increased risk,” she says. “It just needs to be watched. See? Thanks to the left we know what the right is doing.” She laughs. “I’ll listen, I’ll listen!”

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