MOON HELMET by Bonnie Nadzam
On her sixteenth birthday Mildred Game is given her father’s 1957 orange Ford pickup. It comes with rules. First, a black-marker boundary he draws around Crater County on a Colorado map. The marker squeaks as he draws. “You stay,” he says, “right inside the circumference of this circle. Don’t get your gas at the 7-Eleven on the end of Jefferson Street. Don’t let other kids at the Science Academy sit in it. Or stand near it. And don’t park in dangerous places. Don’t park near that old gum factory. I hear they’re going to wreck the place. Trajectories of that sort of wreckage?” He shakes his head. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Flying bricks,” Mrs. Game says from the dining room table where she is gluing coupons into a giant glossy mosaic. “Look out.”
Crater County is changing. So much growth and everybody everywhere worried about some great catastrophe. Eating their ice cream and glancing up at the sky. Putting their groceries into their cars and checking the horizon. Watching the news, warning each other.
Mildred takes the map from her father, and slips the truck key into her pocket.
“Going for an extra careful joyride?” he asks.
She shrugs. “I have homework.”
“That’s my girl,” her father says. “Going to be the first Game in space. First Game on the moon, right? First Game on Mars!”
Alone in her room, she sits at her desk with her ruler and protractor out, working on physics: complicated problems about the edge of the universe, planets beyond Pluto, The Event Horizon. When she hears the others pass outside her window–laughing and tossing their Frisbees up into the air as they walk–she stands to watch them pass.
It is very beautiful, the way they bump into and circle each other, running and leaping to catch their flat glittering Frisbees. Moving in a tangle of black jeans and curly ponytails, bright windbreakers and white white teeth, making perfect arcs in the air with their fingertips. Laughing, calling each other’s names, throwing back their heads in the late afternoon light. Jason Thackery puts his ball cap over Annie Dee’s shining hair. Mildred loves watching and it hurts, watching. Over the years, she has come to understand two things: First, the beauty of their movement depends on somebody standing still to watch them pass. Second: she will be their witness. It has always been this way.
The next day Mildred is parked outside The Space Burger, watching Jason Thackery and Annie Dee at a window seat, watching Annie twirl her long shining brown hair, watching Jason flip a toothpick in his mouth, end over end, making tiny sharp wooden circles in the air, when the man whom Mildred has always privately called Moon Helmet comes to the driver side window of her orange truck. She jumps in her seat.
“It’s perfect,” he says. His great metal helmet shining in the feeble white light. He nods at the young people inside the yellow windows of The Space Burger. “Isn’t it?” The mirrored film of the eye and mouth shields in his helmet wink in the cool sunlight. Mildred sits back in her seat and catches her breath.
She’s seen him around town for as long as she can remember. He’s always worn the helmet, smooth, and silver. Two big pill-shaped mirrors of the glass eye shield, through which he sees, and for the mouth, through which he talks. It kind of makes sense to Mildred. It’s a dangerous world, everyone says. So you might want a helmet.
“You don’t ever go in there, do you?” Moon Helmet says, nodding his great metal head toward the little diner, all lit up from the inside.
Mildred turns from him to The Space Burger window. Other kids are crowding in the tables around Jason and Annie. In the truck, her eyelids flutter. What would she do? Walk in and sit down? And what? Order something? Like what? She turns to Moon Helmet, and shakes her head. “Never.”
The sunlight glances across the eye and mouth shields as he leans forward and folds his hands behind his back, looking into the cab. “You need a crescent wrench in a truck like that.”
Mildred stares. “Crescent wrench?”
“If you’re changing the oil, and want to take the oil pan plug out without getting your hands dirty, you might want one.” She can tell by the movement of his chest that he is taking a deep breath. In a moment he lifts his right hand, and holds it still in the air in a frozen wave goodbye. She watches him cross the parking lot in his helmet, his denim jacket and giant, wide, cracking cowboy boots. He disappears behind the mud-colored post office, and even with the radio on as she drives home, the cab filled with cool light, spring wind and piano music, the truck feels suddenly empty.
That night in her bedroom she goes through the entire Crater phonebook, seventy pages, with the straight edge of her protractor. One line at a time. She knows his real name, and thereby finds his house. It takes her two hours and burns her neck and shoulders. Burns her eyes. He lives at the corner of Lincoln and Adams. About six blocks from her own. It’s a small house, flat and low to the ground, made of dark brick and thick milky stripes of white mortar. There is no lawn but dry, mustard-colored dirt. A twisted, lifeless cottonwood in the center of the yard. It’s the only tree on the street, the only height that rivals the telephone poles and electrical wires pulled thin and taut across the blue sky. When she walks past it, she thinks she can see the huge figure of him hulking inside the front window, watching her look. But she can’t be sure.
In the morning she asks her father about the man.
“That man?” He looks over the top of his newspaper. “Stay away from that man.”
“Something awful happened to that man,” Mrs. Game calls out from the laundry room where she is oil painting deboned chicken.
Mr. Game looks up, surprised. “How do you know that?” he calls out.
“He writes poetry,” she says. “I’ve seen him do it.”
Mildred used to see him at Galaxy Park on the benches, watching the kids swing from the jungle gyms and monkey bars. This was when the Games still took walks. When Mildred’s parents held hands on the smooth wide sidewalks of Main Street, and her mom wore a giant red sun hat that looked like Saturn sliced sideways across the middle and set on her thick dark hair. Now everywhere Mildred’s parents go, they use the Pontiacs, one silver, one white. They drive out to the neat spread of stores where everything’s rising flat-roofed and mud-colored straight up out of the ground.
“What they ought to do,” Mr. Game says from behind the community news page, “is put in a Home Depot when they tear down that old gum factory. Something all these people in the new developments can really use. You know? Something practical.”
The next Saturday, Mildred watches from her truck as the others file out of the wide silver doors of the Twenty-Four Screen Cineplex. Jason Thackery’s hand in Annie Dee’s back pocket, her arm around his back.
“Found you.” Moon Helmet walks up to the driver’s side window. He has a silver crescent wrench in his hand. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not going to reach into your truck.” He stoops to the ground, sets the wrench on the yellow dirt. “Are you eighteen?”
Mildred shakes her head, staring dumbly at the wrench beside his giant boots.
“Well,” he reaches into the inside pocket of his denim jacket, and pulls out a small glass bottle of brown whiskey, “you’re old enough anyway.” He puts it on the ground beside the wrench, and straightens. “That’s only for emergencies.”
Mildred blinks.
“You’ll need it,” he says, “if you drive out of town and the fuel pump goes out and you have to wait for help.”
“Fuel pump?”
“It’s a delicate mechanism in a truck like yours.”
“Oh.”
“Like to break down pretty frequently. I’m an expert in these matters.” He turns sideways, and they both face the others lined up in the flood lights as they wait for ice cream in their bright sweaters, blue jeans and ball caps. Moon Helmet puts his hands into his jacket pockets and Mildred looks up at him in the runny moonlight. His ratty sweater, his denim jacket, his big belly. Behind him the steel lamps in the parking lot hunch, their long necks reaching out into the last ragged streaks of daylight. The wind comes through the window and smells of cold water and thawing earth.
“Cold tonight,” Moon Helmet says. He shrugs his shoulders and shakes his fists in the pockets of his jacket. He turns away, and walks off around the hedge beside which she is parked. After a moment she steps out of the truck, and picks up the wrench, cold and heavy in her hand. She slides it and the glass bottle beneath the passenger seat, and drives home along the dark ribbon of highway in the cold spring night.
Helpful is the word Moon Helmet uses to describe all he brings to Mildred for her truck: a helpful stainless steel Thermos, a helpful mess kit with two mugs and two little pans that all fit together like a puzzle, a helpful blue-backed notebook, a refillable pen, a gallon of water. “I’ve been watching the people in this town,” he says, “and I’ve been watching you. You’re going to need all of this. Right?” She nods, so he reaches into the truck with the water gallon, and places it on the passenger seat.
All through March, he finds her around town at various times of the day. She is always alone in her truck watching the other kids across a wide span of something: a parking lot, a cold brown lake, a baseball field. On the last day of the month he’s at The Crater County Science Academy, standing beside her truck, when Mildred comes out.
“Millie,” he says. No one calls her Millie. He hands her a small silver pillow wrapped in cellophane. In red block letters it says: RESCUE BLANKET. “This is Space Age stuff,” he says.
Mildred takes it in her hand. “For emergencies?”
“For emergencies.”
Students file out behind her and slow their steps when they see Mildred and the man. Reflected in his helmet, Mildred sees the figures of Jason Thackery and Annie Dee. She sees the school building, all the teenagers stepping with their books into the bright afternoon, the girls’ ponytails blowing sideways in the wind, everyone shielding their eyes and peering and forming a sort of hemisphere around them.
He grins at her and opens the door of the truck and gets in. She walks around to the driver’s side, and climbs in beside him.
Technically, they never pass Truck Rule Number One. They never do leave the county. They pass her house, they pass the library, they pass the silver-mirrored office building where her father works, they pass the hollowed-out gum factory and Moon Helmet points to the small and wild bats darting above it. The truck windows are down, and the cold spring wind blows in and around them and through Mildred’s hair. She wonders what color his hair is. What color his eyes are. The wind blows. The truck rocks.
He gives directions, she drives. By four-thirty the light stretches long the shadows of the truck and fences and telephone poles on the brown grass, feathered with new green. They drive out through the little town of Dust. At a stop sign, a girl in a blue coat, her yellow hair blowing back off her head, takes her mother’s hand and points at them. Soon Mildred and Moon Helmet are way up in the high flat desert, cool pale dirt dotted with white boulders and sage. The sky is clear. They pass the landfill and the spring wind carries the smell of trash–thick, liquid and rotting–into the truck. Moon Helmet leans over and says, “Take a big breath of that Millie. Nobody in Crater even knows it’s here.”
The road is rough. They hear all the things he gave Mildred clanging beneath the passenger seat: the whiskey, the shovel, the notebook, the pliers, the wrench. Helpful tools for the impending crisis. She imagines it. There might be tidal waves. A wall of sea water reaching over California, Nevada, Utah, churning and roaring with foam, fish, rocks, houses, telephone poles, Jason and Annie locked in an embrace, her father–hands on his hips–watching for her. Her mother staring across the vast dry desert from the top of the wave, a ragged paintbrush in her fist.
The road stops. The white till and gray-green sage stop. It is the brink of the day itself. Outside the wind is great. Moon Helmet goes to the edge of the cliff, looks out. He’s tall. His denim jacket old and faded, his leather boots cracked and stained. Down there, two hundred feet down, is a huge empty saucer in the rock and sand, hundreds of feet wide. There are bottle caps and shards of glass and trash glittering in the dry yellow dirt. Dust blowing around and above it. The edges are serrated like a pie crust. There’s a tire down there. Sage and bleached trash in the desert wind.
“This is the Crater,” Mildred says, realizing. “It used to be a lake.”
He stands just beside her and her heart beats in her throat. He looks up at the sky, his helmet lifted into the wind. There’s the moon, its paper face rising white against the afternoon sky. Mildred looks up at it, too. “It’s leaving us,” he says. “Did you know? Some inches every year, retreating.”
If the moon went away. Mildred thinks it over. What about the tides? What about all of the things that need the tides? Like the sea? Like blood? What about the silhouettes of dark fir trees up against its white face, their branches feathered, and black? What about long shadows of fence posts on the sidewalk, late at night? What about owls, hunting? What about werewolves, witches, lovers–all that?
He takes her shoulders and turns her, so they’re facing each other. “You’re not a scientist,” he says. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What am I?”
He puts a finger to her lips. “All in good time.”
“Oh no,” she says, her hands up in the air. “The time.”
She’s almost twenty minutes late.
“No more wandering,” her father says. He stabs at his pork chop. “It isn’t safe for a girl alone.” He shakes his head, stares at Mildred, points at her with his fork. “What if there was a blackout? A dirty bomb? Or something nuclear? Besides that, you have homework. You have to prepare for the future. Someday you’re going to have to make some practical contribution to this community, Mildred.”
Her mother stares, looking out the window. The light is changing. The tree branches are black against the dark blue sky.
“Straight home from school,” her father goes on, lifting his glass of milk. “No movies. No Space Burger. No hanging out with friends.”
In her room, Mildred opens the shade, slides up the storm window, and looks out. There is the round silver moon in the sky, and by its light, something hanging from the mirror on her truck. She throws her legs over the sill, one at a time, and runs to the truck to lift it. His jacket. She slips her arms inside.
Her body feels strange inside of it. Newly familiar. His arms were in these same sleeves. His shoulders. She pulls the jacket close across her chest and walks, her heart beating in her throat, her face warm, her arms aware of his arms, her chest aware of his chest. She walks across the barren dirt lawns of the neighbors’ flat houses, straight to the corner of Lincoln and Adams.
“It’s a perfect fit,” he says. He stands in the doorway of his low dark house, a heavy red book in his hand. The cuffs of his faded denim jacket hang six inches from Mildred’s fingertips. The shoulder seams at her elbows. The bottom hem at her knees.
The light from the street lamps moves across his helmet in flashes as he moves. Her cheeks burn. They stand still. Behind her, a car passes. “Isn’t this strange,” he finally says, and he steps toward her and bends into her and just when she thinks their faces will crash, he takes the doorknob and pulls the door shut behind her.
No associating with Moon Helmet in his house after midnight. It wasn’t even a rule. He sits down in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Come sit, Mill,” he says. She sits cross-legged beside him. She can’t look at him. She can’t look away. He smells like the day: soap and wind and trash. She looks down at the floor, at the square flowers in the beige linoleum.
“Was it a war?” she finally asks. “Are you disfigured?” He takes a breath. Closes his eyes.
“Sort of,” he says.
“My mother says you were hurt.”
“She’s right.”
“In my head I’ve been calling you Moon Helmet.”
He looks out the window above his kitchen sink, lets his breath out. “Do you understand, Mill, that no one else sees a helmet?”
She holds her own hands to still them. He stands and opens a cabinet beside the sink, sets a jelly jar on the counter. No drinking whiskey after midnight in the house of Moon Helmet. He pops the bottle and pours into the jelly jar half an inch–just enough to cover the bottom of the glass. He sits down in the middle of the kitchen floor, beside her, and hands her the jelly jar.
Mildred looks at the glass. “Is this an emergency?” It burns her tongue.
He pours another, just the same, and puts it in her hand. “One more,” he says. “Good measure.” She drinks it. Clears her throat.
He stands up. “Come,” he says, placing the jar back on the counter. He takes her by the hand and pulls her through the house and back door.
Outside, he lies down on his back in the dust, points to the dirt beside him, where she lays her body flat. “Close your eyes,” he tells her.
She does. She hears her own breath roaring. The blood in her ears.
“Hear that?” he asks. He takes her hand. “That’s your helmet,” he says. “Now. Look. You’ll see something. Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what you see.”
A minute passes. Two. “A tree,” she finally says. “I see a tree.”
“Oh, Mill,” he says. His voice cracks. “Yes. You do. You see a tree.”
“It’s a pine tree,” she says.
“How did you know? Oh, Mill, you can see it. You really can. And the man and the woman. Do you see the man and the woman?”
Mildred Game concentrates. “They’re in a rowboat,” she tries.
“Sure they are,” he says, whispering now. “That’s us. That’s you and me,” he says. His turns on his side and moves his hand onto her hip.
The following morning at breakfast Mildred tries to keep her head up.
Her father snaps the newspaper page before him. “We are not missing this,” he says, and shakes the paper. He looks across the table at his wife. “Town meeting next month–that old gum factory.”
Mrs. Game stirs her cold oatmeal. “Maybe they’ll put in a new grocery store,” she says, staring into the gray cereal. “Maybe they’ll buy one of my pieces. Hang it in the light.”
“What,” Mr. Game snorts. “The chicken? The coupons?” He stands and scrapes his chair back over the linoleum. His wife, too, stands and walks rigidly to the kitchen sink with her breakfast bowl.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Mildred says to no one. “I wish they’d leave it up.”
Mildred visits Moon Helmet every night the rest of March and all of April. Every night she rises from bed and takes his jacket, lifts the screen and slips out into the night. And every night, they lay flat in the dirt, side by side in his backyard, and he talks her through the images in their helmets. Still and flat on his back, he takes her on tours through Crater and shows her things she’s never noticed, things that, he says, no one else in Crater ever sees: a thousand shards of broken green glass in a rain puddle outside The Space Burger; an eagle’s nest on a street lamp outside The Science Academy; the thin clouds tangled like gauze in bare tree branches; the soft film of yellow dust on her brown leather shoes; the rivering cracks in old sidewalks; liquid notes of birds at dawn and again at twilight; shadows of new leaves on the streets. Sometimes what catches in Mildred’s heart are the words he strings together, even more than the things themselves.
“Where did you learn,” she whispers one night, from the cold dirt where she lay, “those kinds of words? How to talk that way?”
He puts a hand to his metal helmet. “It’s what your mother said.” He turns in his heavy helmet to face her. “You’re too young, I think, to understand.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“I know.”
“Can you explain it another way?”
“Yes,” he says, and puts his gloved hand on her flat belly, and her heart races. “But not tonight.”
She trips through school and chores on two or three hours of sleep, everything a half dream. She is so tired, and so awake: to the phases of the moon, to the changing season, to her own strange face. Every time she looks at Moon Helmet, she sees her own reflection in his eye shield, fragments of her own helmet winking in the light. When she sees him during the day, on Main Street or near The Science Academy when she is rushing home, she makes round eyes with her thumbs and index fingers and holds them up to her face to let him know: I see you. I see the little house. I see the man and the woman, and I see the boat. I see the trees. I see everything nobody else sees. He puts his hand to his helmet, nods from behind the crowds of people with shopping bags lined up behind and within the rushing traffic of Main Street as it is widened from four to six lanes.
Spring sets in and everything turns warm and green. Mildred puts her ruler and protractor way back in her underwear drawer. Her father asks her how things are going at the Academy, if they haven’t let up on homework lately.
“I never see you working on physics or calculus anymore. Finals already over?”
“Yes,” she lies. “We took them all early this year, so we can move ahead into next year.”
“Smart,” he says. “Smart.”
One afternoon her mother comes to her room, stands in the doorway. “There was something,” she says. She looks up at the ceiling of Mildred’s bedroom, watches the half-broken ceiling fan stutter in circles, then looks out the window. “There was something I was supposed to tell you.” Mildred waits. Her mother bites the insides of her cheeks. Shrugs, then puts her hand to her chin and wanders away.
On the night of the town meeting, Mildred and Moon Helmet meet outside the chain-link fence around the gum factory. He climbs into the passenger seat of her truck. Across the street is the city hall, lit up and surrounded by cars and full of people. Her parents are in there.
“The beautiful ruined red bricks,” Moon Helmet says, turning from the civic building back to the gum factory. “Soon to be ravaged. Soon to be wrecked.”
“They must have quit making gum forever ago,” she says.
He reaches across the cab and encircles her waist with his arm. “Bubble gum,” he says, looking out into the street, “gone.”
The next day Mildred’s mother finds the protractor in her daughter’s underwear drawer and glues it to the middle of her coupon mosaic.
“But it’s a zenith,” she says when her husband sees it there and suggests they return it to Mildred. “A sign of the times!”
He looks at his wife, shakes his head. “A protractor?”
On the evening of the Demolition Fair, Mr. and Mrs. Game leave Mildred at home with strict orders and stacks of new textbooks they ordered in the mail.
“Your mother is collecting the bricks,” Mr. Game says.
“For my masterpiece,” she says.
“We won’t be out long. Stay in your room. Check out the navy book–it’s about space stations,” he tells Mildred, widening his eyes as though he were interested in the topic.
Moon Helmet walks over in the twilight, and honks the horn of her truck, parked out in the street. She climbs through the window so Moon Helmet can see her do it.
“That was wonderful to watch,” he says.
“I knew you’d like that.”
“Mind if I drive?”
She hands him the keys.
He steers the truck toward the fireworks and the huge colored circle of a ferris wheel in town. There’s music and fried food on sticks and everyone is out. It smells like summer. Like sugar and sweat and fat. He turns up the old winding cracked road to the top of the butte where they can watch the wreck from above.
“It’s fitting,” he says, putting the truck in park, “that you and I would have our own special view.” He turns to her, and taps her sternum with his finger. “You’re like me, Mildred.”
She looks down at her chest, where he touched, and her heart beats high in her throat.
There is one wrecking ball attached to a high yellow crane down there, and the first concussion comes a moment after Moon Helmet takes Mildred’s hands in his own. She feels it in her chest and in her temples. It rocks the truck. Dust rises everywhere in a yellow cloud and, as it settles, they can see the wrecking ball has punched a hole in the bricks of the gum factory wall. They watch through the windshield, leaning forward on the dashboard.
“It’s going to take a while to wreck all that,” Mildred says. She looks past Moon Helmet, out over the town. She can see how flat it all is, how small, the glittering dish like a cluster of stars spiraling thinly into the surrounding Colorado dust. She loves it. All the people in it. Her parents down there. Jason Thackery and Annie Dee. She wants to sweep it all up into her hand, gather the little city and its dirt and bricks and bodies, gather it all against her chest and press it against her beating bones. She wants to run down there. Or jump. Anything but up here on this butte. Anything but up here in this truck.
The wrecking ball strikes again. Moon Helmet leans toward Mildred, pulling her closer.
“I thought,” she says, her voice thin and shaking, “I thought you wanted to watch.”
He doesn’t answer. The truck shakes. The windshield rattles so the treetops outside of it warp and shake and straighten in a shudder.
“Come,” he tells her. “Here. Closer.” The gear shift presses into the side of her thigh, then her hip, then her feet are against the driver side door. “Yes,” he whispers hoarsely, “like that.” He puts his hand on the button of her blue jeans and she shuts her eyes, tight.
It takes no time for night to fall. It is as if the sky folds right up, right above them, right above the cab of the truck, and suddenly it is dark and there is only the crashing wrecking ball and the fireworks from the fair below and Moon Helmet above her saying, “Okay? Okay?” And she, eyes closed, sees the helmet on his head from inside the helmet now fastened securely upon her own, and she breathes, and she nods, and the air is heavy and potent and wet until everything breaks.
Bonnie Nadzam’s stories have appeared in Iron Horse Review, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, and The Adirondack Review.