Page 19 of Bent Heavens

Doug shrugged. “I guess. Restocking from the New Year’s blitz.”

Lee gazed at the ceiling, as if he could see the sky, as well as things up there that might need scaring off with explosions. Doug took the opportunity to glance at Liv, and the sharp cunning of his look almost made her sob in gratitude. He gave her a quick nod; he was going for it.

“So, what are you making?”

Lee looked back down, blinked, and then, in a moment Liv knew she’d never forget, a warmth lit up his eyes, and he grinned like he used to whenever he saw Liv and Doug, then lifted a hand nicked with cuts and beckoned them closer, as in years past he’d done to show off costume designs or set blueprints. They crowded close, the sharp resin of sawn wood shooting up their nostrils, the blunt tang of fresh metal giving them headaches. Liv was so close to her father that their arms were touching. She had to force herself not to latch on like a little girl.

It was as if he hadn’t realized how eager he was to share his activities. He introduced the machines like a crowd of new friends—lathe, grinder, drill, welder, table saw—and then ripped the sheets from the concealed objects and jabbered about his creations like they were model trains instead of deadly monsters of metal. He’d always been happiest, Liv recalled, when he was working.

They were traps, Lee said, to catch the skinners when they came back, which they would, though don’t be scared—even though skinners were foxy, no way they’d get past six different kinds of traps. Liv was struck speechless by the long, lubricated teeth of Amputator and the sanded fulcrum and lever of Hangman’s Noose. Back then, the other four traps were in fledgling stages, but already she could sense their menace.

She didn’t have to feign interest; she only had to tamp down her dread. Her dad had made no positive progress since Oliver! He’d spiraled further into obsession. Doug, she thought, was laying it on too thick with his wows and questions, until an uneasy realization settled over her. Doug wasn’t faking. He really thought this stuff was amazing. Later, she’d almost believe she’d seen him crumple his Monk Block Corn Maze plans right there in favor of this wilder infatuation.

Doug lowered his voice and asked the question that took the most courage to ask.

“What did they do to you up there?”

Aggie had shielded Liv from Lee’s detailed chronicle, and until that instant Liv had found it belittling. Not now. She couldn’t handle knowing, she abruptly knew it, and she mumbled some excuse before bolting from the dim, crowded space into the atomic-blast light of a winter’s day. Her father’s confessional tones chased her until she made it to the front yard, where she watched her exhalations turn into unidentified flying objects.

Doug ambled up twenty minutes later, his silence saying everything Liv needed to know about her dad’s suffering. Doug was a blurter by trade; his sudden sensitivity to her feelings riled her.

“You don’t actually believe him, do you?” she demanded.

Doug picked up his bike, leaving a shadow version of it imprinted in the snow. Liv felt like a shadow version of herself, paper-thin next to a friend newly heavied by her father’s report. Doug slung his leg over the crossbar and gave her a maddeningly gentle look.

“How come you’re so sure it’s not true?” he asked.

How naive could you be? Still, she felt reproached, and by the April thaw, all six traps were built, installed, and benefitting from Lee’s regular improvements, which he made with a paranoid exactitude that he took pains to ingrain in them—now that he’d begun to talk to Liv and Doug, he wouldn’t stop. Put the prevailing wind at the trap’s back, Liv. Use existing terrain as cover, Doug. Let’s catch some critters and taxidermy their feet, then run them over the area so it looks natural. Doug repeated each tip softly; Lee took notes in Resurrection Update; Liv wondered how any of this could possibly end well.

It couldn’t: Lee next shifted to weaponry. He explained that it was impossible to know how many skinners would be sent to reclaim him. The craft he’d been taken aboard had carried maybe a dozen, but there could be other ships, even a mothership. Doug, eager to capitalize on his knowledge of explodables, suggested grenades, maybe dynamite, but Lee nixed them. Skinners would smell the gunpowder. Like the traps, the weapons had to be built from raw elements.

Weapons, Lee lectured, historically instilled fear in enemies on sight, as seen in the illustrated Encyclopedia of Arms he’d checked out from the library. Gold leaf, inlaid silver, and intricate reliefs were far outside his artisan ability; even getting components to be symmetrical was difficult. Yet it was this crudeness that instilled his armaments with a berserker’s gap-toothed, punch-drunk intimidation. Within five weeks of bruising workdays, Lee fashioned over twenty weapons, all benighted with names to further gird them with power.

Everyone had a favorite. The weapon Lee slid into his belt before checking the traps was called Lizardpoint, a twenty-inch, fishhook-shaped fighting pick with origins in turn-of-the-century Ghana. The wooden shaft was wrapped in hyena hide (it had cost Lee a small fortune), save for the crocodile-skin grip. Doug’s choice was Maquahuitl, an Aztec club that looked like an oar studded along both edges with thirteen stone blades. Doug’s dumbbell exercises had made him strong enough to wield it, though his shortness made swinging it a tottering, top-heavy effort. Liv, against better judgment, was enchanted by a thrusting weapon favored by late-eighteenth-century Indian rogues, made from two antelope horns bolted together, both tips tapering to steel blades. Lee had dubbed it Mist for how the horns’ ripples looked like mist settling over an imagined Indian horizon.

The shed became known as the Armory. Ever at the ready was a host of other amateur reproductions, each of which hung on a wall within a chalk outline. When space ran out, Lee dangled them from the ceiling on chains.

It was under a red-and-white sky of sunset and snow that Lee paused over his sharpening of the handle of a Russian poleax and gazed at Liv and Doug, snowflakes making his unshaven scruff cottony. Both Liv and Doug audibly caught their breaths, somehow aware of the magnitude and power of the moment.

“If anything ever happens to me,” he said, “and you two have to deal with this on your own, you have everything you need. The traps, the weapons. You know what to do.”

They nodded, so eagerly that snow scattered from their winter hats. They would do whatever he asked, and as soon as possible, so that this anything he suggested might happen to him would never, ever happen. Liv may not have believed in her dad’s story as Doug did, but she believed in her dad, his goodness.

Liv squirreled updates on her father for her mother, concocting positive spins. Both Liv and Aggie agreed Doug’s influence had been a godsend; when he wasn’t coughing or vomiting, Lee was talking, smiling, interacting. But the sight of her husband, daughter, and daughter’s friend in the backyard cavorting with lethal weapons appeared to be too much for Aggie. She began to turn away from Liv’s reports, jabbering about the night job she was about to start at the steakhouse, won’t that be fun?

She started the job on Lee’s forty-ninth birthday. Before she left, the three of them sat around the table staring at a cake no one except John wanted. What do you give a forty-nine-year-old alien abductee who appeared to be dying? Aggie had chosen a seventy-dollar, waterproof, scratch-resistant, oil-filled compass with adjustable wristband. Her husband had disappeared for four days once; if it happened again, maybe the compass would help him get back.

Lee, however, seemed to take the compass as proof that Aggie believed him—at last, she believed him! He busted open like a dropped pumpkin, exploding with tears. With a bony arm, he reached blindly for Aggie, and she let herself be pulled in. Liv, watching this, felt ill—hers was the unhealthiest family alive. Then her dad reached for her, too, and instantly she revised her thoughts. How unhealthy could a family be that laughed, that sobbed, that embraced like this?

“This’ll help me get those skinners,” Lee wept. “I love you both so much.”

10.

Liv’s fingers were all over the place, drained of dexterity as if they’d been severed. Three apps, clownlike in their jolly, trivial purposes, popped open before her sweaty digits managed to hit the Contacts app. It leaped to her Recents, but Doug wasn’t there—damn her for letting Doug slide off the edge of her world. Her finger hit Favorites, but Doug wasn’t there, either. Had she deleted him from the list? Doug, who’d answered his phone every time in life it had mattered? She scrolled and found his name, those comforting four letters.

Of course he answered right away.

Of course he knew something was wrong.