Boys Life

Elementary, so I suppose that’s how he got his affinity for reading. Johnny ate encyclopedias like any other kid might eat Red Hots or Lemonheads. He had a nose like a Cherokee hatchet and a small scar warped his right eyebrow where his cousin Philbo had hit him with a stick when we were all playing soldiers back in 1960. Johnny Wilson endured schoolyard taunts about being a “squawboy,” or having “nigger blood,” and he’d been born with a clubfoot to boot, which only doubled the abuse directed at him. He was a stoic before I knew the meaning of the word.
    The movie meandered to its conclusion like a jungle river to the sea. Tarzan defeated the evil elephant poachers, returned the Star of Solomon to its tribe, and swung into the sunset. The Three Stooges short subject came on, in which Moe wrenched out Larry’s hair by the handfuls and Curly sat in a bathtub full of lobsters. We all had a grand old time.
    And then, without fanfare, the second feature began.
    It was in black and white, which caused immediate groans from the audience. Everybody knew that color was real life. The title came up on the screen: Invaders from Mars. The movie looked old, like it had been made in the fifties. “I’m goin’ for popcorn,” Ben announced. “Anybody want anythin’?” We said no, and he negotiated the raucous aisle alone.
    The credits ended, and the story started.
    Ben returned with his bucket of buttered popcorn in time to see what the young hero saw through his telescope, aimed at the stormy night sky: a flying saucer, descending into a sand hill behind his house. Usually the Saturday-afternoon crowd hollered and laughed at the screen when there was no fighting going on, but this time the stark sight of that ominous saucer coming down silenced the house.
    I believe that for the next hour and a half the concession stand did no business, though there were kids leaving their seats and running for a view of daylight. The boy in the movie couldn’t make anybody believe he’d seen a flying saucer come down, and he watched through his telescope as a policeman was sucked down into a vortex of sand as if by a grotesque, otherworldly vacuum cleaner. Then the policeman came to visit the house and assure the boy that no, of course no flying saucer had landed. Nobody else had seen this flying saucer land, had they? But the policeman acted… funny. Like he was a robot, his eyes dead in a pasty face. The boy had noticed a weird X-shaped wound on the back of the policeman’s neck. The policeman, a jolly gent before his walk to the sand hill, did not smile. He was changed.
    The X-shaped wound began to show up on the backs of other necks. No one believed the boy, who tried to make his parents understand there was a nest of Martians in the earth behind his house. Then his parents went out to see for themselves.
    Ben had forgotten about the bucket of popcorn in his lap. Johnny sat with his knees pulled up to his chest. I couldn’t seem to draw a breath.
    Oh, you are such a silly boy, the grim, unsmiling parents told him when they returned from their walk. There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Everything is fine. Come with us, let us go up to where you say you saw this saucer descend. Let us show you what a silly, silly boy you are.
    “Don’t go,” Ben whispered. “Don’t go don’t go!” I heard his fingernails scrape against the armrests.
    The boy ran. Away from home, away from the unsmiling strangers. Everywhere he looked, he saw the X-shaped wound. The chief of police had one on the back of his neck. People the boy had always known were suddenly changed, and they wanted to hold him until his parents could come pick him up. Silly, silly boy, they said. Martians in the ground, about to take over the world. Who would ever believe a story like that?
    At the end of this horror, the army got down in a honeycomb of tunnels the Martians had burrowed in the ground. The Martians had a machine down there that cut into the back of your neck and turned you into one of them. The leader of the Martians, a head with tentacles in a glass bowl, looked like something that had backed up out of a septic tank. The boy and the army fought against the Martians, who shambled through the tunnels as if fighting the weight of gravity. At the collision of Martian machines and army tanks, with the earth hanging in the balance…
    …the boy awakened.
    A dream, his father said. His mother smiled at him. A dream. Nothing to fear. Go to sleep,