The Visitors

by Jack Alcott

conclusion

“I’m in the backyard,” I heard Jimmy yell after I’d been pounding on the front door for a couple of minutes. I went around the house and found him sprawled in a lawn chair on his deck, which was littered with empty Smirnoff bottles and crumpled Utica Club cans. He was wearing a pair of raggedy cut-off jeans and a T-shirt that was streaked with aqua-colored paint and smudges of gray clay or cement. He didn’t bother to sit up in the chair when he saw me.

“Have a drink, old buddy,” he said, waving a vodka bottle at me. “Salud.” Then he took a swallow.

“No thanks, Jimmy. How you doing? You all right?”

“Aw, who knows, who freakin’ cares?”

I sat down on a bench built into the deck across from him. He watched me and took another drink.

“I see you’ve been working,” I said, indicating his T-shirt. “More waves?”

“Oceans of ’em, they just keep coming. I wish they’d wash everything away — but they don’t.” He gestured toward his artificial pond.

Sure enough, there were several of his blue-green cement waves marching through the grass around the pond. Most were a foot or two tall, but one rose up about three feet, the height of a tombstone. Except for its size, the big breaker was typical of his wave sculptures. Fat at its base, it tapered gracefully upward and then crested in a fury of sea foam waiting forever to plunge on a beach that wasn’t there.

I liked the wave; I appreciated its power and sinuous beauty. I also realized that it was large enough to entomb a body part; maybe an entire body. Candice was only about a hundred pounds soaking wet.

I must have stared at the wave for too long, because when I looked back at Jimmy, there was a split-second gleam of recognition in his eye, as though he’d read my mind. Then his face flushed and he leapt out of his chair, stumbling as his intoxicated brain tried to keep him upright.

“You think I killed her, too, don’ t you?” he accused. “You bastard. I thought you were my friend.”

He ran headlong into his garden shed next to the deck, and I heard him banging around in there among the shovels and tools. When he reappeared, he had a formidable-looking sledgehammer in his hands and he came right at me. While I didn’t know if he’d murdered Candice, at that moment I was sure he was going to kill me.

I ran back a few steps, prepared to put some more distance between us if I had to. In his present condition, I didn’t think I’d have any trouble outrunning him. Instead of pouncing on me and trying to bash my skull in, however, he stopped in front of the big wave and started swinging.

Blue-gray chunks went flying in every direction as he battered his creation to pieces. I didn’t try to stop him — that would have been too dangerous. Again and again he raised the hammer and brought it down with all the force he could muster, reducing the sculpture to gravel and dust in minutes.

“See,” he said, standing back from the ruin and wiping the sweat from his face with a forearm as he panted from exertion. “No body inside. Nobody. Nothing. I didn’t kill her, get it? I DID NOT KILL HER,” he shouted. Then he flung the hammer down, stormed up his deck stairs and back into the house.

Call me a coward; call me a lousy friend — I didn’t think it was a good time to follow him inside and console him.

* * *

I tried calling Jimmy over the next few days, but the answering machine always came on after two rings. I left him messages, basically telling him to give me a call if I could help, that I was worried about him.

I stopped over the Grays’ one night during the week, and Peter told me he’d been trying to reach Jimmy, too, but that he’d hung up on him. We decided to go over to his house together that Saturday to check on him. It went unspoken, but we were both thinking there was strength in numbers, especially if Jimmy went psycho.

As it happened, there was no need for concern; Candice came back that Friday. She just waltzed back through the door and into Jimmy’s arms.

I remember the day because physicist Richard Feynman was on TV talking about the inept management culture at NASA that led to the Challenger disaster when Jimmy called on the phone. Feynman was explaining the O-ring failure, and the billowing explosion was up on the screen, spewing fiery streamers into the Atlantic below.

“She came back,” Jimmy shouted over the line. “I’m so relieved, man. I couldn’t live without her.”

He was a somewhat incoherent, but I heard him say Candice was more beautiful than ever, as lovely as when they’d first married. He said that when she walked into the house, he just fell down at her feet and wept. That part got to me; I felt sorry for him — he seemed so needy and pathetic and unmanned. And I was angry at her for that reason, for doing that to my friend; yet I understood him. She was his goddess, forever and always. They were star-crossed and that was the end of it; there was nothing anyone could do or say to change that.

I was glad for Jimmy, but found the entire episode absolutely baffling; who knew life could be so bizarre? We’re all learning every day, I guess.

Candice and Jimmy soon found their rhythm again, their married rut if you want to be jaundiced about it, and returned to their old, comfortable ways. From then on, Jimmy always referred to her disappearance as her mid-life crisis come early, and kidded that he couldn’t wait for the real one to arrive in about ten years. Everything sort of went back to normal after that, whatever “normal” means. Jimmy sculpted even larger, more dynamic waves that still wait to crash on invisible shores; and Candice was just as zany as ever.

One thing continues to puzzle me, though. That same Friday evening that Candice found her way home and back into Jimmy’s heart, swarms of pyramid-shaped UFOs were spotted all over the northeast. The Air Force scrambled jets out of Newburgh, but none of them caught up with the purported spaceships. Then the mysterious objects vanished and we were all left searching the skies for answers that never came, just like in real life.

But what nobody ever adequately explained, as far as I’m concerned, was the change in Candice’s eyes. Where they were once a glittering, mocking blue, they were now a deep, oceanic green. When I asked Jimmy one night during a poker game at their house why she wore her green contacts all the time, he smirked as though the joke was on me.

“What do you mean?” he said, glancing down at his cards. “Those are her eyes. They’ve always been green.”