Sheriff Coombs was a cool guy too, especially for a cop. He was there when I got back from the school, sitting on our couch drinking a big glass of orange juice Lita had given him. She whispered to me as I was passing that she hadn’t said much of anything to the Sheriff—he’d just arrived.
“So what’s the story, Billy?”
“No story, Jerry,” says I, sitting in my favorite rocker. “We just lost two weeks of our lives, that’s all.”
“And you don’t remember a thing about your boat blowing up?”
“Nope. I’ve been reading about it this morning though. Seems that the FFs murdered us.”
“That’s what the papers mostly say,” says Jerry.
“Did you think it was them?” I ask.
“I didn’t know what to think,” he says. “Just as I don’t know what to think now. Something smelled fishy then, something smells fishy now.”
Ah, I’d forgotten that Sheriff Coombs had a brain.
“Smells fishy to me too, Jerry. Makes no sense whatsoever.”
“Not to me anyway.”
“Do you think the Feds will keep after us even though we were dead for a while?” I ask.
“You were never dead,” says Jerry. “Just missing. Now you’re found. I think you two had a court date last week, so you’d better get in touch with your lawyer.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard since I sleep with her every night.”
“No one’s going to believe you don’t remember a thing,” says Jerry.
“I don’t either,” says I.
Jerry looked at me long and hard. He knew I must be hiding something, but he hadn’t had time yet to figure out any of the things it might be. He liked me, and I don’t think if I told him the truth he’d betray me, but it wasn’t an option I wanted to test.
“Your death was a local police matter, Billy,” he says finally, “so I guess your returning to life is too. I’ll have to make a formal report. Probably ask you to make a statement about your disappearance. Any problem with that?”
“’Course not, Jerry.”
“I guess I got one more question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did you take your family out for an overnight the day the boat ended up being blown apart?”
The question worried me at first, and then I got a brainstorm. I get one every decade or so and I never know where they come from.
“Come to think of it,” I say after a long pause. “Louie told me to go out there so he could meet me.”
“I see.”
“And he never showed up.”
“You think he had you… blown up?”
I went into a brooding silence.
“I can’t believe Louie would do that.”
Sheriff Coombs stands up.
“A lot of unanswered questions, Billy,” he says.
“Anything you need just let me know. You’re a friend.”
“Yeah, a friend,” he says. “Not sure how close a friend.”
Close enough so that we both knew that I knew a lot more than I was telling, and that he knew a lot more than I dared think about.
But Lita, Lucas, Jimmy, and I were together once more and we were home. Our normal lives could begin again.
Yeah.
Right.
FORTY
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 300–305)
I’ve got news for you, my fellow Americans: it’s no fun being rich and famous. Lita and I had gotten Louie to return us to our home in Greenport, but not even superhuman Louie could return us to our previous lives. We’d been famous before, but it would have been a pretty brief fame if we hadn’t been abducted by aliens and had two full weeks of our lives erased from our memories. Being with Louie on the TV show on Halloween night seemed to have given us our fifteen minutes of fame, but being resurrected from the dead after being abducted by aliens for two weeks—that represented at least a decade of fame.
Americans had been lusting for almost a hundred years for genuine proof of alien abductions, and now they had it. Who could be more trustworthy than Billy Morton and his two cute boys. Americans were a little suspicious of Lita because she was so smart and educated and some sort of agitator, but me and the boys were genuine uneducated Americans: the salt of the earth. Who could doubt our truthfulness?
Anyone who knew us is who. I was known all over the North Fork of Long Island as one of the biggest bullshitters of all time, but when it came to my saying we went to bed on the boat and woke up two weeks later in our beds at home, not a single one of my friends had the slightest doubt that I was telling the truth. Except maybe Sheriff Coombs.
The reason, of course, was that it was such a dull lie, hardly worthy of the Billy Morton they knew and loved. If I were making up what happened after the boat explosion I would have come up with a really interesting whopper.
For example, that the explosion had killed us all, and we’d gone to heaven. Saint Peter had at first rejected me for being the big liar I am, but Jimmy had pleaded that if Dad was going to the Other Place, Jimmy wanted to go with him, so St. Pete relented and let us in. We were there for two weeks meeting old friends and dozens of famous people from all of human history. I was a bit surprised to see that Hugh Hefner made it, Elvis of course, and even George the Worst Bush. Guess Jesus can save people after all.
I had a long talk with Ronald Reagan, who is a lot duller than I thought. At the end of two weeks, some other angel comes up and tells us there’s been a Divine Glitch and Divine Rewrite and we’re headed back to Earth again. But since two weeks have passed, they’ll have to send us back on December 22nd rather than on the day we died. And the angel tells us to tell people that we’d blanked out about what had happened and that the Lord would forgive that sin of lying because it was the result of the Lord’s Divine Glitch.
I got so enthusiastic about some of the lies I was coming up with that I asked Louie if we couldn’t please change our story about not remembering a thing to one of my creative stories. But he said no.
As a result of my dull lie, all my friends, except for Sheriff Coombs, thought I really didn’t remember a thing. With me being uncreative, the media took over for me and began to produce the biggest load of… far-fetched nonsense since the last time I really got rolling.
The media didn’t actually learn of our resurrection until three days after we’d returned and a few papers and commentators thought it was noteworthy that we were resurrected almost on Christmas Day. First confirmed resurrection in more than two thousand years and it occurs at Christmas! But after a couple of days people began to notice that the Mortons never went to church except to see their friends get married or buried, and Mr. Morton (me) had a reputation as being untruthful and had a criminal record back in the sixties for which he had never repented. The media dropped the Christmas resurrection angle within two days.
One Republican candidate for president declared in one of their endless debates that we were abducted so that the FFs could go into our brains and remove all the info we knew about FFs so we could never tell it to the authorities. He suggested we might want to be loyal to the FFs, but might not be able to endure “enhanced interrogation”.
Another candidate declared that one of his investigators had concluded that we were taken to the Ickie universe and put in a circus where for two weeks crowds of FFs came to toss us bananas and laugh and point. He argued that it was another example of the cruelty of the aliens.
The New York Post had an op-ed piece claiming we’d been taken to a laboratory on a secret part of Plum Island where our bodies were totally gutted and FF computer parts and programs were inserted into all sorts of bodily places. We were now essentially robots totally under the control of the aliens. It was claimed that we now shit data sheets rather than poop.
You couldn’t turn on a cable TV channel or even a nightly network newscast without some candidate or some expert with an AA degree from a community college throwing out some new explanation.
; And of course fame meant uncontrollable media lust: they offered us huge amounts of money if we’d just agree to burp on TV. But we didn’t need their money any more—Louie had set us up for life with more money than I could store in our whole freezer.
And the government was not actively prosecuting us, probably because they thought they were using us as bait to trap Louie. So two weeks after we’d resurrected ourselves in our Greenport home we felt we were again leading a sweet normal life.
Almost. I managed to go back to work at APE and found that I’d barely been missed. It was all my secretary’s fault. Althea Riggs was a big black woman—weighed close to a hundred-eighty pounds—and had as oversized a mind and heart as she did a body. She hadn’t trusted me at first—actually a very healthy instinct—but when she saw behind my rough uncouth exterior an inner being equally rough and uncouth, she’d grown to like me. She’d been a big help when me and Louie and Molière had drawn up a profit-sharing arrangement for everyone who worked in the company. And also with our putting in a by-law that the board of trustees of the company had to have at least fifty percent women and fifty percent employees earning less than a hundred grand a year. And when I was dead for two weeks she took over for me and stood up to Harry Barnes and the other capitalists like the good union person she was. And made me feel redundant when I went back to work.
Trouble is, I realized, normal life is never normal. It’s always filled with strange things happening that are in some way normal but still weird. Louie-Twoie had adopted us and, as he became a large part of our kids’ lives, Lucas and Jimmy began to change. Whereas when we first got back the boys seemed to be comfortably part of our family, now their focus seemed to be… elsewhere—with LT actually. I used to think that the boys listened to me as if I were God, but after LT had been around for two or three weeks, it seemed they listened to me like I was a deodorant commercial.
We first got a sniff of the change when Lita got a phone call from the school. They wondered if Jimmy and Lucas were sick. They’d missed the previous two days of school.
Well, I got nothing against skipping school. My old high school ordered a major celebration every time I actually showed up. But Jimmy and Lucas were sort of nerds about studying and doing well in school—mostly the evil influence of Lita, who’d been a straight-A student since she’d finished teething. As far as I knew, neither of the boys had missed a day of school except when one of them was dying or dead.
So the night after we got the phone call from the school Lita and I called the boys into my study—the living room—for a serious discussion of Responsibility. Louie-Twoie was there too. LT alternated between being a chipmunk with a bushy tail and a six-inch-long two-by-four that did slow somersaults. I think Lita and I had gotten so used to LT’s being continually improvising and never sitting still that we barely noticed him.
“We understand you didn’t go to school yesterday or today,” Lita began. She’s the scholar and lecturer of our family, I’m the sit-down comic (I never stand these days if there’s a chair within a mile and a half). “Can you tell us why you didn’t go to school?”
Lucas and Jimmy exchanged a single long glance. They were sitting side by side on the couch. Lita was standing—that’s what all authorities like to do—while I was in my rocking chair.
“We didn’t feel like it,” says Lucas.
Now think about that, folks. “We didn’t feel like it”: if that isn’t one of the most revolutionary statements known to mankind, I don’t know what is. Jimmy then followed it up with an even more revolutionary statement: “We wanted to have some fun,” he says.
“Tell me, Sgt. Peters, why didn’t you join that attack on the fortified hill?” asks authority. “I didn’t feel like it,” says Sgt. Peters.
“Tell me, Miss Welles, why did you and Miss Peoples suddenly disappear and take the afternoon off?” asks authority. “We wanted to have some fun,” says Miss Welles.
If human beings started using those two sentences on a regular basis, civilization as we know it would collapse.
I wondered how Lita would handle these insurrectionary statements.
“Why didn’t you tell us this yesterday when you pretended to come back from school?” Lita asks in her soft, terrifying, prosecutorial voice.
Both boys looked down at the rug. Nothing there but a furry centipede.
“We should have,” says Lucas. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Me too,” says Jimmy.
“What did you do yesterday?” asks the prosecutor.
“We took a long walk along Orient Beach,” says Lucas.
“Found a baby octopus!” says Jimmy.
“It was a big starfish,” says Lucas.
“What else did you do?” soft voice, mind of steel.
Lucas seemed to have to think about it.
“We broke into a summer cottage and ate a can of ravioli,” he finally says, eyes on the centipede.
“You broke into a summer cottage and stole a can of ravioli,” says the prosecutor, in her mind debating between misdemeanor and felony charges.
“It was fun!” says Jimmy.
Revolution! If crimes are “fun,” then the center will not hold!
“And today we took the bus to Riverhead, and pretended we were orphans and asked people for money because we hadn’t eaten a thing in two days,” says Lucas, who seemed to want to get all their crimes out at once to avoid serial prosecution over several days.
“We got enough dollars to buy ice cream and cookies and still pay for the bus back to Greenport!” says Jimmy. The kid has no sense of morality. A chip off the male block.
“You cadged money off people under false pretenses,” says the prosecutor, probably knowing exactly under what statute this was a crime.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” says Lucas.
Amoral Jimmy doesn’t say a word.
“And did LT aid and abet you in these escapades?” Lita asks. If she’d been asking as a prosecutor she’d have referred to “crimes” instead of “escapades,” but she was beginning to soften back into Mom.
“It was his idea!” says Jimmy, proud of LT.
“LT,” says Lita. “What do you have to say for yourself?” ’Course he hadn’t said a coherent word since he’d been born so the question was a bit rhetorical.
Louie-Twoie assumed the shape of a soccer ball and sat motionless on the rug.
“Urf… iggle… susorra… immypoosis,” he says.
Lita and me stared at him blankly.
“He says he’s sorry,” says Jimmy. “He wanted us to have more fun.”
Lita kept her prosecutor face in place. With difficulty.
“Life is not always about having fun,” she says.
“Issaillysootbe,” says Louie-Twoie.
“He says it should be,” says Lucas.
Lita looked even more stern.
“Maybe for FFs,” she said. “Not for humans.”
“Issailllysootbe,” says LT again.
Lita hesitated a long moment and then walked over to the couch and gave both Lucas and Jimmy gentle kisses on the top of their heads.
“Please don’t skip school again,” she says, still standing close to them.
Silence.
Even I had expected them both to say “Okay, Mom,” but neither said a word.
“Is that understood?” asks Mom.
“School isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” says Lucas. Heresy.
“I want you to promise me you won’t skip school again,” says Mom.
Silence.
“I promise never to skip school again without telling you,” says Lucas.
Wow. In this household this is major rebellion. If we had a dungeon, Lucas would be in it within five seconds.
Mom moved away from her two boys and stood next to me and my rocker.
“I hope you won’t skip school again,” she says softly.
“Okay!” says Jimmy, and he jumps off the couch and begins chasing LT, now a big-eared, no-eyed rabbi
t, out of the room.
Lucas slowly stands up, hesitates, and then goes up and buries his head in his mother’s chest and throws his arms around her in a big hug.
You gotta love kids.
ITEM IN THE NEWS
ATTORNEY GENERAL INVESTIGATING DECLINING XMAS SALES
From Robert Dolt at The Wall Street Journal.
Jan. 12th. New York City
After the Commerce Department reported that sales at major retail outlets for the Xmas shopping season showed a sharp decrease from the previous year, the attorney general called upon the Justice Department to investigate.
“With the nation still enmeshed in its patriotic war against Muslim terrorists throughout the world,” he said, “it is clearly the duty of every American to do his bit for the war effort by supporting our economy and shopping.”
He indicated that the people’s failure to do their duty over those Xmas weeks needed to be investigated. The AG suggested that it was possible that terrorists had infiltrated major retail outlets and sabotaged their promotional activities. It was also possible that such terrorists had been hacking into computers and blocking internet spam from reaching millions of intended recipients. Low-paid postal workers may also have been infiltrated by mid-Eastern moles leading to them dumping thousands of sales catalogs destined for the mailboxes of upstanding Americans eager to do their duty. He suggested that it was possible that ISIS and Al-Qaeda operatives in the US were now eschewing “big scene” terrorist activities for small-scale operations that undermine our economy in just as malicious a manner as demolishing the Twin Towers or shooting up a luxury hotel. And the suffering of Americans, although spread more widely, would be equally great. Corporations, their sales and profits down, would have to cut jobs, bonuses and dividends, and ship more jobs overseas. America’s rich, the backbone of our nation, would get richer at a slower pace, with untold psychological suffering.
The AG has ordered the NSA to access the banking, credit card, and online shopping information of all Americans. He seems determined that by next Xmas we will be able to determine who is and who is not doing their best during Xmas shopping season.