Melted Medals

The wrinkles on my grandfather’s speckled forearm rippled as the furry neon sphere left the center of his palm. Against the great blinking mural of glittering cosmic dust and distant shining speckles, the ball became a planet, its white stripes reflecting the starlight as it sailed past the marbled red planet and its silver moon. It eclipsed a faraway orange star—the Sun, Grandpa called it. 

“You mean a sun?” I once asked him. But he kept on insisting that it was the Sun. To him anyway. “Quit askin’ so much,” he said. 

Finally, the tennis ball disappeared over the horizon of our asteroid. I turned and waited a few seconds…it circled back, and having traveled the circumference of our asteroid, it landed in my open palm. I threw it the opposite direction and it circled around once more, landing softly in Grandpa’s hand. 

“How far away’s it?” I asked him. 

“Is what?” 

“Y’know—Earth. Where we’re from.” 

“Far.” The slouching man ran a thumb through the belt loop of his blue cowboy jeans and tilted his furrowed visage upwards. “Can’t see it from here.” 

“Papaw?”

“Hm?” 

“Why’re we here?” 

“Don’t you believe in God, boy?” He raised an eyebrow. 

“No, here. On this asteroid. You said there’s folks on Earth, even some rich folks on Mars.” I jogged forward, crossing the horizon and trotting around the asteroid until I returned to the starting point. “A fella can run all the way around and be done in fifteen seconds. It’s always light on this side and dark on the other—I wish I’d know why we’re here, like two giants on a tiny half-moon cookie floatin’ in space.” 

The tennis ball fell from Grandpa’s hand and bounced, arousing a wisp of dust before rolling to a stop in the center of a small crater. Grandpa sat down in a red striped lawn chair. The chair made a screeching noise as he pulled it forward—the inventors probably didn’t plan for a lawn of iron ore and aluminum. 

“How many times we gonna have this conversation?” He asked. 

“I know.” I flicked a pebble towards the cosmos and it left the gravitational pull of the asteroid, bobbling as it skipped along the surface of the universe. 

“Jump too high and that’ll be you,” Grandpa chuckled, “It’s getting late.”

Back on Earth, with Pa, we used to have waffles every Saturday for breakfast. Big heaping ones, with sheets of snowy sugar and syrup and glazed strawberries. I remember my father one evening, loading gadgets and little metal scraps into a big cardboard box. Lastly, he set the waffle machine on the top, all the while talking, staring, gesturing at the uniformed man in our doorway. Waffles with powdered sugar and fruit vanished from Saturday mornings after that.

Chips and metal. Grandpa said that’s what they were after.

“Can’t win a war without metal. And I guess not without them computer chips they got in them fancy devices either,” he told me a couple years later on the asteroid. That was the first time I asked him about things. “He’s fighting wars, your Pa.” 

“Right now?”

“Been doin’ it for a looong time.” He pulled on the word, squeezed it, as if it irritated him. “Who they’re fighting, I don’t know. Soon as it got serious, though, your old man sent us both up here. Safer.”

“Ain’t we ever goin’ back?” 

“Hope so. Why don’t you ask your Papa when he visits? It’s almost the first of the month.” He walked away and opened our delivery shaft. Its shelves were lined with little articles, shaving cream and canned tomatoes, soap and those Western magazines that old men like my Grandpa love to read and secretly admire. 

“I don’t know for sure,” said my father the next day, looking down at the beeping timer on his wristwatch, “But soon. Well, it looks like it’s time for me to go.” 

“Can’t you play a little longer?” I’d ask. 

He smiled and shook his calloused fingers through my brown hair. “Go play some catch with your Papaw,” he said. 

“We do, on afternoons when you’re not here,” said my Grandpa. 

My father opened his mouth for a moment. He grinned and winked at the two of us before climbing back into the little red-white-and-blue pod which lifted away into the stars and disappeared, a meteor seeking a lost sun. 

That night was no different than a thousand others after. Grandpa and I would stroll over to our wee cabin on the dark side of the asteroid, lie down on our beds, and peer into the blackness, holding our breaths as we waited for the distant woosh that cut through the cold silence of the universe, the faint tremor that tickled our backs and made the asteroid shiver as if it wasn’t already a frozen space-rock. We would feel the cool air turn hot and watch the eternal shadow blanketing our cabin flourish into a gleaming white as the iron ore reflected the flames of Pa’s rocket through our window. 

“That’s him,” Grandpa would say. 

We listened for the rocket’s door hissing open before walking back over to the other side of the asteroid, so it would seem like Pa had just woken us up, and not that we had been lying there, waiting, smiling in the cool darkness as we felt the rawness and brawn of the rocket. We approached him together. “He’s opening the door now. You can hear his boots on the steps…he’s walking past the lavatory, past the storage shed…

We stepped into the bright side of the asteroid, blinded for a moment in our pajamas. I held my right hand over my eyes. Across the rock face, approaching quickly, closer and closer, firmly—footsteps. We grinned in the cool starlight, Grandpa and I, as we saw the neon green tennis ball bouncing up and down from the rugged hands of my father. 

“Hiya, Mason,” he said as he saw us, “Evenin’, Pops. I wake y’all up?” 

“It’s alright,” my Grandpa said. He pulled an unused ivory lawn chair out of the shed and unfolded it on our iron ore lawn so that it and our two chairs formed a semicircle facing the marbled red planet and its shiny silver moon. 

When Pa stooped down to hug me, I buried my nostrils on the shoulder of his uniform. I rolled the white fabric between my fingers; I smelled the green scent of grass, an earthy and sweet aroma, and the smell of wood, a vast and unexplored scent; I could smell a sapphire sky and chattering crowds and soft, soggy soil that spread in all directions to distant coastlines and unexplored lands. I smelled Earth and I saw Earth and I heard it and tasted it too. 

That night we sat in our lawn chairs and ate a supper of roasted lamb and broccoli which the cabin made for us. We sat and my father tossed the tennis ball forward, gliding, until it wrapped around the asteroid and returned back into my hands or my Grandpa’s. And for some reason there was something different, better, about tossing that tennis ball, because Pa was there. 

“You sure as hell can’t do this on Earth,” he chuckled. He flipped through a Western magazine and told me how life on Earth was in 1984 when he was my age. 

I stared at his white uniform and wondered what the war was like. I imagined a war with armies of uniformed men, men like my father, holding long wooden rifles with great steel bayonets on their end, like the ones in the books I had read. I wondered if that was what they really were like. “There ain’t much to do up here—” I sighed, “ —or down here. Don’t even know which it is.” 

“I tell you what, its enough for us and our cabin yonder on the dark side. And the shed too,” said Grandpa. He didn’t look at Pa. 

“He’s right, you know,” said Pa. “Let’s go see that leaky sink you were talking about.” 

We went.

Once, I tried to fix the sink. 

“Hold up.” My Grandpa stood in the doorway. “You know how?”

“I was gonna ask you,” I said. 

“We’ll wait for your Pa to come and teach you,” he said, taking the toolbox from my hands and placing it back on the shelf. 

So the sink leaked, for two weeks and five days. Pa fixed it when he visited at the top of the month. 

“Next time,” he said with a wink when I asked him if he could show me, “Can’t stay for long.” He glanced at his little beeping wristwatch. And then, in what felt like an instant, he was gone, away in the rocket. 

Like the sink, Grandpa left the window of our cabin dusty, our delivery shaft crooked, the oxygen generator rusted. It was all saved up for my father’s visit, like a catalogue of presents for him to open. When he received them, I would watch him repairing and tweaking, and Grandpa with a hand on his back, smiling. Before long though, the wristwatch would beep, and Pa would look up, working a little faster, walking more quickly, then—woosh. Gone. 

But tonight was a good night, a night where Pa didn’t seem like he was in a hurry, the first night, a good a night as any. 

“Can you show me?” I asked. 

“Fine,” said Pa. 

Grandpa smiled. 

I held in my hands an arsenal of foreign metal trinkets as my father dug in the toolbox like a squirrel trying to find something, his chiseled face down to the floor, the yellowish lightbulb staring down at his back. Once he found everything, the two of us went and stood over the sink. 

“Here,” he pointed. And I inserted the black O-ring into the ribcage of the sink’s exposed skeleton with a silver screwdriver like the surgeons that I had read about. Like magic, a final teardrop fell from the faucet—and it was still; the basin stopped leaking altogether as the last drop swirled down the drain and left a reflective trail like a tiny glass comet in a white marble galaxy. 

When all the cabin windows had been dusted in the places Grandpa and I could not reach, the delivery shaft hammered back into a straightened position, and the oxygen generator polished and reset, my father dropped into the lawn chair and removed his boots. They were bumpy brown leather, well oiled and polished to a brilliant shine at the toe. Grandpa disappeared into the cabin to resume his sleep. He never saw Pa for too long. He said it would sting a little worse when he blasted off again. 

“Hope hurts,” he told me. 

“It’s ostrich,” Pa once said. He loved to talk about his boots, and I loved to listen, to cowboy boots and animals leathers and places, because I hated talking about how things were on the asteroid. 

And so I asked him, “How’s it like down there?” like I always did. 

And he talked, like he always did, about worms, and dirt, and the cerulean sky, and about other skies which you could wade into, called oceans and ponds, that little black insects gathered upon and skittered across, laying their eggs and swarming together before a finch would swoop down into the crowd and snag a few in her beak. He told me about how you could stay in one place and the day would turn into night by itself, the giant Sun plunging into the horizon and then—hours later, reappearing from its dive and illuminating a new morning. The stars would drift from left to right, he said, because the Earth spun, unlike asteroids, which sat and sat and looked in one direction forever. He talked about small things, like the moths drawn to the plasma illuminators in the streets, captivated, beating their furry wings and flying in elegant loops, forever, until they twitched and died from the heat of their electric sun, beautiful, and tragic; and how the grass would grow, how he liked to cut it himself instead of telling the AI to do it for him, because of the crisp smell, and the feeling when the cool shower water hit his face. And then he talked about big things, like the wars. 

“It’s very dangerous,” he said, as if I didn’t know already. “A man can turn a corner and find himself talkin’ to God if he don’t pay attention.”

“Ain’t we ever goin’ back?” I asked.

His eyes looked in my direction but they were blank, lost in thought. 

“Mason,” he said, as he stood up and paced, a finger dragging along the linen fabric on the lawn chair, “promise me you’ll wait.”

“Huh?”

“We can’t go back yet.”

I blinked. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but when you’re here you got a whole lot of time, time to wait, and time to think. But right now, out there, you’ll want to be here, because there ain’t never much time when you’re on Earth, and you can’t wait or think for long. There’s a million ways to die. And it eats you up alive before you know it.” 

“It eats you up out here also,” I said. 

He didn’t hear me. “Honor and duty. Them’s the only two things keeping me down there right now.” I stared at his uniform and noticed for the first time the brightness of the medals on his breast. Fickle things, I thought to myself, but they made his chest seem a little bigger and his shoulders a little wider. “We’re winning,” he said. “Really, we are. We’re the greatest nation in the world.” 

“Okay,” I said. I paused. “What if you die?”

“Then I do. But then at least Captain John Weaver died with honor for the United States of America, Mason Weaver, and his old man Dean Weaver.” 

“It’d be better to be alive without any honor,” I said. 

“Perhaps.” He looked at me. 

And then the sound was here again, in an instant, hitting me in the back of the head like a tennis ball, except I had forgotten I had thrown it until it looped back around and dinked me where I wasn’t looking. Pa looked down at the beeping wristwatch. 

“See, what’d I tell you?” He chuckled. “Duty calls.” He slid on his ostrich leather boots, wiped the iron dust off his pant legs, and began to walk towards the rocket. 

“Wait-” I tugged on the sleeve of his uniform. “Why don’t you ever call?”

“Can’t. Enemy’s got real advanced technology. They’d see where the signal was comin’ from. And where it was going.”

“I’d be okay with that risk,” I said.

“If I called, that’d mean that things settled down. I wouldn’t be busy anymore and I wouldn’t be serving the country any longer. It’d mean that the war was over,” he said. “See you in a month.” 

And then the asteroid began to tremble, the cool air turning hot, a great beam of light illuminating the rock face as the handsome red-white-and-blue rocket ship lifted from our asteroid and soared upwards, faster and faster, with a mighty roar, into the cosmos beyond, like a gleaming bullet. From the small circular window on its side, I saw Pa’s silhouette. He saluted me with two fingers—and then he was gone. 

The asteroid became still and a cold silence laid upon the dull iron ore beneath the three striped lawn chairs. The marbled red planet and its silver moon shone brightly against the midnight backdrop of the universe. 

The next morning, after Pa had left, I talked to Grandpa, and he told me how things were. 

“He’s dead,” he said. “He might as well be, except for an evening every month. When he’s here, he’s a ghost. It’s ain’t him at all.” 

“But he’s alive,” I said, “even if it’s only for an evening.” 

“It’s like a dream. But the longer you dream, the more it hurts when you wake up. So most days I just forget. I’d rather not hope—it’s a dangerous thing. I don’t think I’d be able to go back to Earth if he got shot up or blown to pieces or poisoned. I wouldn’t want anything to do with Earth.” 

“I guess you’re right,” I said. 

The next month two men wearing the same uniform my father wore stepped out of the same rocket he flew. Grandpa took one look at the American flag in their arms and his eyes hardened. 

“There ain’t anything you can tell me that I don’t already know.” He walked back over to the dark side and shut the cabin door. I watched as they set the flag on the iron ore and aluminum lawn with an ornate brown chest. The two men drew a salute. Silently, they climbed back into the rocket and left. 

We didn’t cry. 

It wasn’t a gunshot from a sniper on a faraway rooftop, and it wasn’t poison, and it wasn’t an explosion that killed him either. He had crashed his rocket into the side of the Earth. It was an accident. But he was dead, and his honor too. In the wooden chest were three soot laden medals. They were melted at the edges and the ribbons had been burned away. 

The next morning a new message came. The war was over. Inside contained two rocket tickets to Earth, bright red. 

Grandpa took them and put them on the shelf in the shed. We stayed on the asteroid that day, until lunchtime. We played catch on the rock face and read Western magazines like we always had. And then at night, a third red-white-and-blue rocket landed on the frail asteroid. We climbed inside and blasted away, like two meteorites chasing a forgotten sun. 

A thousand miles behind the rocket, a single water droplet fell from the abandoned faucet as it began to leak again.