I was opening my car door and he was still standing out there and I called out to him, “Are you lost?”
His head turns my way and I still can’t see him much at all except as a hat and a coat.
“Did you forget where you parked your car?” I say, and then right away I realize there isn’t but about four cars total in the parking lot at that hour. So I put the bag with my things on the seat and I come around the back of the car and go a few steps toward him. I feel bad. So I call to him, kind of loud because I’m still pretty far away from him and also because I already have a feeling he might be a foreigner. I say, “I wasn’t meaning to be snippy, because that’s something that happens to me a lot and I can look just like you look sometimes, I’m sure, standing in the lot wondering where I am, exactly.”
While I’m saying all this I’m moving kind of slow in his direction. He isn’t saying anything back and he isn’t moving. But already I’m noticing that his belt is cinched very tight, like he’s got maybe an eighteen-inch waist. And as I get near, he sort of pulls his hat down to hide his face, but already I’m starting to think he’s a spaceman.
I stop. I haven’t seen a spaceman before except in the newspaper and I take another quick look around, just in case I missed something, like there might be four cars and a flying saucer. But there’s nothing unusual. Then I think, Oh my, there’s one place I haven’t looked, and so I lift my eyes, very slow because this is something I don’t want to see all the sudden, and finally I’m staring into the sky. It’s a dark night and there are a bunch of stars up there and I get goose bumps because I’m pretty sure that this man standing just a few feet away is from somewhere out there. But at least there’s no spaceship as big as the Wal-Mart hanging over my head with lights blinking and transporter beams ready to shine down on me. It’s only stars.
So I bring my eyes down — just about as slow — to look at this man. He’s still there. And in the shadow of his hat brim, with the orangey light of the parking lot all around, I can see these eyes looking at me now and they are each of them about as big as Eddie’s whole head and shaped kind of like Eddie’s eyes.
“Are you a spaceman?” I just say this right out.
“Yes, m’am,” he says and his courtesy puts me at ease right away. Americans are courteous, my daddy says, not like your Eastern liberal New York taxi drivers.
“They haven’t gone and abandoned you, have they, your friends or whoever?” I say.
“No, m’am,” he says and his voice is kind of high-pitched and he has this accent, but it’s more in the tone of the voice than how he says his words, like he’s talking with a mouth full of grits or something.
“You looked kind of lost, is all.”
“I am waiting,” he says.
“That’s nice. They’ll be along soon, probably,” I say, and I feel my feet starting to slide back in the direction of the car. There’s only so far that courtesy can go in calming you down. The return of the spaceship is something I figure I can do without.
Then he says, “I am waiting for you, Edna Bradshaw.”
“Oh. Good. Sure, honey. That’s me. I’m Edna. Yes. Waiting for me.” I’m starting to babble and I’m hearing myself like I was hovering in the air over me and I’m wanting my feet to go even faster but they seem to have stopped altogether. I wonder if it’s because of some tractor beam or something. Then I wonder if they have tractor-beam pulling contests in outer space that they show on TV back in these other solar systems. I figure I’m starting to get hysterical, thinking things like that in a situation like this, but there’s not much I can do about it.
He seems to know I’m struggling. He takes a tiny little step forward and his hand goes up to his hat, like he’s going to take it off and hold it in front of him as he talks to me, another courtesy that even my daddy would appreciate. But his hand stops. I think he’s not ready to show me his whole spaceman head. He knows it would just make things worse. His hand is bad enough, hanging there over his hat. It’s got little round pads at the end of the fingers, like a gecko, and I don’t stop to count them, but at first glance there just seems to be too many of them.
His hand comes back down. “I do not hurt you, Edna Bradshaw. I am a friendly guy.”
“Good,” I say. “Good. I figured that was so when I first saw you. Of course, you can just figure somebody around here is going to be friendly. That’s a good thing about Bovary, Alabama — that’s where you are, you know, though you probably do know that, though maybe not. Do you know that?”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. I’m rattling on again, and it’s true I’m a little bit scared and that’s why, but it’s also true that I’m suddenly very sad about sounding like this to him, I’m getting some perspective on myself through his big old eyes, and I’m sad I’m making a bad impression because I want him to like me. He’s sweet, really. Very courteous. Kind of boyish. And he’s been waiting for me.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I have been translating. You speak many words, Edna Bradshaw. Yes, I know the name of this place.”
“I’m sorry. I just do that sometimes, talk a lot. Like when I get scared, which I am a little bit right now. And call me Edna.”
“Please,” he says, “I am calling you Edna already. And in conclusion, you have no reason to be afraid.”
“I mean call me just Edna. You don’t have to say Bradshaw every time, though my granddaddy would do that with people. He was a fountain pen salesman and he would say to people, I’m William D. Bradshaw. Call me William D. Bradshaw. And he meant it. He wanted you to say the whole name every time. But you can just call me Edna.”
So the spaceman takes a step forward and my heart starts to pound something fierce, and it’s not from fright, I realize, though it’s some of that. “Edna,” he says. “You are still afraid.”
“Telling you about my granddaddy, you mean? How that’s not really the point here? Well, yes, I guess so. Sometimes, if he knew you for awhile, he’d let you call him W. D. Bradshaw.”
Now his hand comes up and it clutches the hat and the hat comes off and there he stands in the orange lights of the parking lot at three in the morning in my little old hometown and he doesn’t have a hair on his head, though I’ve always liked bald men and I’ve read they’re bald because they have so much male hormone in them, which makes them the best lovers, which would make this spaceman quite a guy, I think, and his head is pointy, kind of, and his cheeks are sunken and his cheekbones are real clear and I’m thinking already I’d like to bake some cookies for him or something, just last week I got a prize-winning recipe, off a can of cooking spray, that looks like it’d put flesh on a fencepost. And, of course, there are these big eyes of his and he blinks once, real slow, and I think it’s because he’s got a strong feeling in him, and he says, “Edna, my name is hard for you to say.”
And I think of Desi right away, and I try it on him, and his mouth, which hasn’t got anything that look like lips exactly, moves up at the edges and he makes this pretty smile.
“I have heard that name,” he says. “Call me Desi. And I am waiting for you, Edna, because I study this planet and I hear you speak many words to your friends and to your subspecies companion and I detect some bright-colored aura around you and I want to meet you.”
“That’s good,” I say, and I can feel a blush starting in my chest, where it always starts, and it’s spreading up my throat and into my cheeks.