The Star and the Rockets

Another pause. Maybe the driver’s thinking it over. Joe eyes him, trying to pretend he’s not doing it. The fellow’s funny-looking, which is putting it mildly. Joe wonders if he is a guy. He’s sure not very big--he’s got the seat shoved all the way forward. His face is smooth as a girl’s, maybe even smoother. But he’s got on a white shirt, a jacket with lapels, sunglasses even though it’s nighttime, and a fedora with no hair--no hair at all--sticking out from under it. Joe sees there are two more in the car with him, one in front and one in back. They both look and dress like the fellow behind the wheel, poor bastards.

This pause lasts so long, Joe gets ready to try his half-assed Spanish again. Before he can, the driver says, “Regular, please. Less lead goes into the air that way.”

“Huh?” Joe says. Then he remembers ethyl is short for tetraethyl lead. It’s what they put in gas to make it knock less.

“Less lead,” the driver repeats. “Less air pollution.” He reaches out the window to point at the Texaco sign. His hand is tiny. It’s as smooth as his face. And it has only three fingers to go with the thumb. It doesn’t look as if he’s lost one in an accident or during the war. It looks as if he was born that way. He goes on, “You are a man of the star. You have the emblem. You have the song. You should understand such things.”

Was Joe singing the jingle loud enough for the guy to hear him? He doesn’t think so, especially since the Olds’s window was closed then. He’s not a hundred percent sure, though, so he doesn’t push it.

To hide his unease--that voice still seems to form in the middle of his head--he tries to turn it into a joke: “I’m not just a man of the star, Mac.” He also points to the Texaco sign. “I’m a man of the Rockets.”

The guy behind the wheel takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are enormous. They reflect light like a cat’s. Human eyes don’t do that. When they meet Joe’s, he tries to look away, but finds he can’t. They peer into him, as if through a window. He knows he should be scared, but he isn’t.

“A man of the star, and of the Rockets!” the little guy says. His eyes get bigger yet. Joe hasn’t believed they could. “Why, so you are! What a pleasant coincidence! In this vehicle, so are we.”

His two buddies wriggle and twitch as if he’s just come out with something way funnier than any Milton Berle one-liner. “What are you doing to me?” Joe hears his own voice as if from very far away--certainly from farther away than the driver’s. That should be impossible. But unlikely isn’t the same thing, a thought he’s had not long before. He tries again: “What are you going to do to me?”

One more pause from inside the Oldsmobile. It’s as if the driver has to translate even the simplest English into something he can understand. Martian? Joe wonders. His feet want to run, but they can’t. He’s frozen where he stands, even more than he would be by a wicked curveball.

“I am buying five gallons of regular from you,” the driver eventually answers. “That is what I am doing to you. And you are a man of the star, and of the Rockets. It is only right that you should be far-traveled in your trade, and so you shall be. And no, since you are curious, we do not speak Martian.” His friends wriggle and twitch again. He adds, “We are from farther away than that ourselves.”

What’s farther away than Mars? That thought fills Joe’s mind as the driver puts his sunglasses back on. The second he does, most of what they’ve been talking about falls right out of Joe’s mind. He finds himself staring up at the stars, the way he was before he went in to watch Milton Berle. Boy, they look a long way off tonight! He wonders why--but not for long.

“Five gallons of regular, you said, sir?” he asks the little bald guy behind the wheel.

“That’s right,” the driver answers after a hesitation Joe should find odd but somehow doesn’t. It’s almost as if he’s used to it.

He pumps the gas. It comes to a dollar thirty-five. The little guy gives him a ten-spot. He has to go inside to make change: he knows he’s only got six bucks in his own wallet. He’s just coming out when the Rocket 88 drives off. “Hey, wait!” Joe yells, money clenched in his big, beefy fist. “You forgot your . . .” His voice trails off. The car isn’t coming back. He gets a tip every once in a while, but he’s never got one like this before.

Shaking his head, he goes back in to finish watching his TV show. Uncle Miltie is spoofing The Shadow, which still runs on the radio. “I am Lamont Creampuff!” he intones. “I have the power to crowd men’s minds!” He shoves, uselessly, at two enormous actors who are crowding him. With a pathetic shrug, he goes, “Well, sometimes.”

Joe should be falling out of the chair laughing. He knows he should. For some reason he can’t fathom, though, he doesn’t find the sketch funny.

* * *