Part 7 (1/2)

”What kind of a gun was it you said you used on the victim?” he asked, standing.

”I'm not sure, exactly,” realizing I might better have kept the revolver if I wanted to convince anyone of what I'd done.

That they found no traces of blood in the gra.s.s strengthened my case about Franklin's origins, I felt. Perhaps he didn't bleed because his kind didn't have actual blood running in their veins. And yet I could have sworn I saw his face erupt in a gus.h.i.+ng geyser of red when my bullet hit its point-blank mark. On the other hand, I reasoned, maybe theirs is thinner and evaporates like so much mist under a hot sun.

What happened next confounds me to this day. They brought in divers, yet again, and this time even dragged the pond with a special boat they commissioned for the job, having taken me into custody for my own protection, as they put it. And what did they come up with? Nothing. No body, no revolver-just the usual jettisoned tires, an old boot, a porcelain dolly missing its head, fis.h.i.+ng tackle, and part of a rusted nineteenth-century thres.h.i.+ng machine. My court-a.s.signed lawyer got me freed in no time, but not before the tabloid papers had a field day with me. I still have some of the newspaper clippings. Murdered Martian Missing in Grover's Mill. Boy, 16, Claims Revenge for Dad's Death at Martian Hands. War of the Words in Jersey Missing Mars Man Case.

Mollie and I were kept apart by my grandmother, who now had taken a much harder line toward me, especially after the discovery of the bullet casing which, although it proved nothing to the authorities, she understood as very d.a.m.ning. Citing me as a troubled child, abnormally disturbed after my parents' deaths, a juvenile delinquent and high school dropout, an unruly young man given to thoughts of violence, potentially psychotic and a danger to her and society, she moved to have me committed to a state hospital for evaluation. I voluntarily agreed to this because, for one, it got me away from her and, second, made it possible for Mollie to visit me, as the facility was a relatively short bus ride away. Third, though I didn't talk with anyone about it, I felt safer sleeping in an inst.i.tution designed to keep some people in and other people out, than I ever did back home in my bedroom, knowing that Franklin had somehow managed to escape my attempt to rid the world of him.

When half a year after Franklin's vanis.h.i.+ng a large amount of money was discovered missing from my grandmother's bank account, it was clear I couldn't have taken it since I was essentially under observation day and night. The authorities traced a money transfer to a temporary account in Greece. I heard that an international dragnet of cops pursued the thief, but the trail was as cold as the far side of the moon. Mollie, whom I married while still in the hospital once we were both of legal age, tried to use Franklin's larceny to prove to me that I was mostly right, that Franklin was evil, a con man, the opposite of honest, direct, frank-but also that he was not some alien.

”Martians don't need money,” she a.s.sured me, with a wistful smile.

I nodded my head in agreement, hoping to mollify Mollie, knowing it was her fondest wish that I might come to my senses and sanity based on this information. Whatever I thought I had done the night of my sixteenth birthday, I had not done-this is what the few who cared about me wanted me to understand. The time had come for me to seek a discharge and take my place once more in society. So I renounced as delusional any lingering thoughts I had about Franklin-believe it or not, I never knew his last name; did he even have one?-though I held privately to the hypothesis that he was probably spirited out of the pond in a rescuing s.p.a.cecraft rather than somehow disappearing that afternoon with numbers to Iris's savings account, having had enough of us both.

When she died of cancer, not long after my release, Grandmother Iris willed the old house to me, there being no one else left to give it to. In her final years, I think she might have seen the light about who Franklin really was. Oh, I don't necessarily mean that she ever embraced my theory, which I cling to even now in judicious silence but sure as a spore clings to a moldy loaf of bread. Yet the fact that they never did find his body after so many days of dredging, so many man-hours of frogmen searching Grover's Mill Pond's muddy bed, surely must have left her uneasy. I would like to think that if he didn't really die from the gunshot wounds that night, and if he didn't drown when I swam his leaden body out into the pond as far as I could before I submerged him, filling his mouth and nostrils with the water meant to weigh him down like liquid concrete, if he did happen to best death a second time, then Iris might have been paid a visit by Franklin. An after-midnight visit to her bedroom, not unlike the one I experienced that time.

And if she did, and he came floating into the scene of her helpless troubled slumber, inhaling, hovering, I'd like to think that maybe she felt a panic of second thoughts about this beast she allowed into our family house off Cranbury Road. I would like to think that if in naked terror in her bed, she reached to her bedside lamp and turned on the light, she might have seen him undisguised, monstrous and gloating, for what he was.

BROKEN GLa.s.s.

BY GERALD STERN.

Mickle Street (Camden) Broken bottles brought him to Mickle Street

and pieces of gla.s.s embedded in the mud

to Whitman's wooden house across the street from

the Church of the Most Unhappy Redeemer for when

it was too quiet he broke another bottle

and he collected his gla.s.s in a paper bag

and when he was verloren he cut himself

though just as like he cut himself on a wall

while doing an exercise to stretch the tendons

so he could get rid of the numb and burning feeling,

or sometimes he sat on a hydrant and once on a bench

with drooping slats so when the slats gave his back

also gave and feeling came back to his foot

as it came back to Whitman when he sat

on the orange rush seats or rocked in his chair between

the visits and loved the hollyhocks that grew

in the cracks and for a nickel the whole republic

would turn to broken gla.s.s as Oscar insisted.