Ballantine Price

Everyone in Port Severn knew Ballantine Price: they all knew who he was and where he came from, and, after the initial shock of seeing him the first couple times, most accepted him as part of our small community and paid him little special attention.

For the first year he was with us, usually the only problems we had came during the summer, when drunken nosey tourists would badger him thinking he was the village idiot and someone to made sport of.

"Say, chum. Where you from?" the more forward of them would ask, smiling back at the group assembling, grabbing him by the arm, and then quickly letting go when the felt something alien in their grasp. " Saaay, where you from?" they would say after that, backing up shocked and looking around for someone else to grab Ballantine’s arm too. (One of us from town would always manage to get involved then, leading the tourist away with one arm around his Hawaiian shirt, promising another local secret around just the corner.)

So that’s how we protected our extraterrestrial in Port Severn- that and the long grey rain slicker and matching fedora we bought from Corrigan’s Hardware and made Ballantine wear whenever he went out in public. He was especially proud of the slicker; we’d watched Casablanca one night and he wanted to look like Bogart. I’ve had months now to sit and think about what happened to the town and Ballantine, months sitting in front of my TV set that I’m afraid to shut off, but with everyone else gone, it’s hard to know whose fault what happened really was.

Still, facts are facts, and I know it started with both of us walking down Johnson Avenue at noon on July first, the second year after he crash landed on Crow Lake. It was one of those days- one of those days meaning it was so hot the air was like an itchy wool on my arms and back. Ballantine, of course, was wearing his fedora and slicker, looking down at the sidewalk out of habit when someone he didn’t know passed, then quickly up at the shops and restaurants after they’d walked by.

"Good afternoon, " he’d said to Gladys Fincher, the wife of the town barber, tipping his fedora’s rim slightly with a blue thumb and forefinger.

"Good afternoon, Ballantine," she’d said, cupping a fat hand over her brow and nodding slowly, " Hot again, don’t you think?"

I think more of the same tomorrow," he said in his gurgling, underwater voice that took the most getting used to.

"It’s good for the tourists, though," Gladys said, looking around for some.

"Yes, I suppose that’s true enough," and he’d stopped on the sidewalk facing her even though I warned him about stopping anywhere downtown- not everyone shared the barber’s wife’s good manners. But Ballantine loved to kibitz with the townsfolk; he strived and flourished with their acceptance, and was crushed when they were occasionally cruel. He loved being one of them so much- that’s what makes the way things wound up so unfair.

" Well, Ballantine," Gladys had said, dropping her hand from her brow so she was squinting in the sun, " I’m off to the barber shop to take Jeremy for lunch."

"Well, then,"he’d said, " you have a nice day." And he turned to watch her walk away, basking in his flawless performance as a model Port Severner, and I half turned to look at him, and we both missed Jed Corrigan stumble out onto the sidewalk from the dark insides of the Queen’s Hotel.

Ballantine started to turn just as Jed flashed by me and the two collided with an accidental thud that knocked Jed’s wind out momentarily and Ballantine’s fedora off his head. Ballantine looked down at the hat and then at me, shocked that someone he hadn’t seen had bumped him- His third eye was especially wide in the middle of his forehead. But, Ballantine was a gentleman: he apologized to Jed and stooped to pick his hat up off the sidewalk.

"Excuse me, Mr Corrigan…I’m sorry if I bumped into you," he said putting his fedora back on and starting to brush Jed off.

"Stop that," Jed had said, and right then I could tell he’d been drinking more than usual at the Queen’s by the way he tried to steady himself, planting his feet apart like he’d been expecting trouble. " Why don’t you get lost, boy?" he slurred, dusting off the sleeves of his lumberjack shirt like it was a formal black dinner jacket, stumbling two steps backward, and glaring at Ballantine with red slits.

"Get your hands of me boy," he’d said, letting the last word roll off his tongue and relishing the venom in it.

It was the tone of Jed’s voice that confused Ballantine; he’d never heard anything said in hatred before and he looked at me imploringly, the skin around his silver eyes crinkling in a three part frown, then to Jed, and finally down to the sidewalk in a gesture of submission.

" Wassamatter boy? Cat got your tongue?" Jed said, sensing his advantage but stumbling sideways and putting his arm on the green post box for support. "C’mon boy, tell us where you’re from."

I could see Ballantine smile and raise his head : that tease was familiar to him; it was the kind of good-natured taunt he got from the town’s children.

"I’m from another planet," he’d said and smiled, showing his pointed teeth.

"Another planet?" Jed stumbled toward Ballantine and away from the box: "Another planet?"

His voice had become menacing. "I don’t believe it for a second," he’d said, although he knew it was true. "C’mon pansy boy," Jed said and he pushed Ballantine in the chest. Ballantine took a step backward and Jed fell on the sidewalk, sitting with one leg crossed over the other.

"Pansy!Pansy! Pansy!" Jed yelled and someone from a small gathering crowd sniggered. Jed took the muffled laughter the wrong way, it had been directed at him, but he looked around smiling, encouraged by what he thought was their approval.

"Pansy," he yelled again and grabbed Ballantine by the hem of the slicker, and by the way Ballantine stiffened, we all knew something was about to happen and everyone gasped.

There was a sound next- like the quick snap when you turn your television off- and Jed melted into the sidewalk. Melted is exactly what he did- I know, I saw it.

You might think I’m lying, or I was hallucinating, or I’m just wrong- you might think that someone from another planet would make you disappear, or drag you up to their ship in a beam of light, but not melt, but that’s exactly what happened. He just folded in on himself and collapsed, just like the inflated punching clown I’d had as a kid that my cousin cut open with a knife.

Only Jed’s crumpled lumberjack shirt, ripped jeans, and dirty work boots were left and I don’t know what upset me more, seeing someone melt or watching another drunk from the Queen’s Hotel steal his boots- the man just picked them up tentatively by the calf’s and tiptoed away holding the boots away from his body.

Of course, with all that excitement, I’d forgotten all about my alien roommate and I looked over at Ballantine Price.

"Oh my God," he said from deep in his rib less chest, " Look what I did to that poor man." It’s obvious to me now that someone else heard him say that too, someone who wasn’t as sold on extraterrestrial townsfolk as Mary Fincher seemed to be.

It was a week before Halloween when Ballantine’s spacecraft crash-landed in Crow Lake. My cottage is on Gibson’s Point, on the east shore, and it was the zipping sound of his failing engine- like a parka being done up quickly- that got me to my bay window just before sunrise. I stood looking out into the black, but saw nothing.

Then, he crashed.

I heard a loud crack; it rattled the cutlery in my kitchen drawers, and I looked around for lightning, but none came. A vibration started under my feet next; it grew until I felt my leg bones shaking and I was knocked off my feet- I heard a wave of water thunder against the window like a spilt dump truck load of pebbles and I knew it was from the lake; there was no spitting at first like rain.

I got up from the floor, put my hands on the window ledge, and looked out. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard my old row boat banging against the dock (There’s always something making noise up north at night- especially when you live alone with only your paints, canvases and television to keep you company, so I figured a freak storm had passed over Crow Lake, and, seeing no damage to the window or my floor I went back to bed.)

The next morning the birds had returned and I went about business as usual:I showered, got dressed, and started for the front door to run into Port Severn for paints, brushes, and some remedies for a cold I felt coming on; I was tying my shoes by the door when I heard the wood creak on the front deck.

I opened the door and there was Ballantine Price.

"What’s in season?" I asked with a smile, thinking one of the locals thought he could scare me with a preview of his costume. "Flying saucers or aliens?"

"Oh shit," Ballantine warbled stomping a webbed foot on the deck, "How’d you know?" When he moved forward and the awning blocked the sun, I saw all three of his eyes looking at me wide-eyed, wondering what I was going to do next, and I realized this season of aliens in Port was going on beyond October 31.

"Come in," I said, holding the door wide. Years of painting the townsfolk and nature had made my art stagnant; against any judgement-good or bad- I ‘d seen Ballantine as an opportunity to put my name on the map.

Now, of course, the only subjects I have to paint are from memory.

" I don’t know what happened," Ballantine said to me the night after the melting; he was sitting by my bay window, looking out on the lake that had claimed his spacecraft. "Sure, I can read minds. But being able to change the physical properties of atoms," he shook his head so his oversized ears flapped like an elephant’s, " I just don’t know about that." He got up and walked around the cottage, putting his hands on toasters and desk lamps and grimacing, trying to melt something else. He desperately wanted to learn how to undo what he’d done to Jed.

"The only thing that makes sense," he said, " is that something happened to me after the crash." His tone trailed away wistfully, and he was standing at the window looking out over the lake again. I watched his shoulders slump as he exhaled and turned around to face me.

"I need to go back out there," he said, flicking his head slightly back to the window. " I need to find the crash site again. Something happened to me there; it’s the only thing that makes any sense."

For the next two days, we decided Ballantine would stay at my cottage and lay low. At the end of the second day, I decided to go to town and test the waters.

I noticed people staring at me after I’d passed them in only a few minutes: I caught glimpses of their heads turning to follow me from the corner of my eye. What made me sure I was getting special attention was the way Brevit Kemper, the pharmacist, treated me in his crowded store.

I’d gone in to buy some cough syrup they keep at the back, on the shelves that border the pharmacist’s counter- I was looking over the red liquids in their clear bottles when I felt someone looming over me.

" I seee you’ve decided to come down from your retreat," Brevit boomed, adjusting his monocle with a thumb and forefinger and leaning toward the counter to study me like some unusual zoo specimen. "I’m sorry," he said, smiling broadly and putting his two fat hands on his side of the counter, " We don’t sell tonics to make people whole again. Drunks aren’t like Sea Monkeys, you know, just add water to the sidewalk and poof! Back they come again!"

I stood there looking at the syrups and not wanting to look at Brevit; I grabbed the nearest bottle on the shelf and pretended to read the label. I was hoping to hear his deep, throaty laugh; I was hoping he was just teasing me, that everyone would’ve seen or heard that Jed Corrigan really had it coming, that everyone would realize Port Severn was better off with Ballantine around and Jed gone.

But Brevit didn’t laugh and when I couldn’t take the silence anymore, I looked up at him, still with the bottle in my hands, like I might have a question. He still had both hands on the counter, palms down, and he was leaning forward looking out over the store like the captain of a ship making sure all his crew was ready for battle.

"Get him," he yelled from over the counter and I turned and saw the other shoppers staring at me. " Get him… hee’s hiding that thing …Grab him now!"

(Looking back, I realize that was the last time I saw some familiar faces; It wasn’t the way I would have planned a goodbye, a farewell to people I’d known for years, but still, who really ever gets to plans those things? Besides, the way the townsfolk scowled at me in the drugstore, I knew they thought of me as Port Severn’s version of Dr. Frankenstein, and I had a clear path to the front door, so I took off running.)

I was running down Johnson Avenue, right toward the spot where Ballantine and Jed had their fatal clash, hoping to get to my car, which was parked just past the Queen’s Hotel, before the growing crowd behind me caught up.

I’d passed the Queen’s, ready to take the corner to the lot behind, when Gladys Fincher came around from the other side.

I stopped. She stopped. I held my breath, waiting to see what she would do, and hoping I could still count on her as an ally- I was wrong.

"Get him," she screeched when she saw me," He’s the one who hiding that thing-that alien." She threw her hands up in the air with terror and them dropped them to her mouth so the flesh on her arms jiggled.

I ran around her, jumping into my car and locking the doors before starting the ignition with shaky hands.

Ballantine, I thought squinting with concentration, if you can read my mind now, get out. Go to the middle of the lake. Take the boat, Ballantine. They won’t be able to get you in the middle of the lake. And I raced down Johnson Avenue, out of town, and toward Gibson’s Point.

And they followed.

It was a mighty caravan, a real circus..and right in front was Gladys Fincher, sitting on the ski racks of a mini van with out of province plates, one fat hand holding on to the side of the rack and the other holding a megaphone she used to start the boat races on Crow Lake; she went to speak into it, but her blue canvas dress caught a gust of wind and blew straight up like a wind jamb on a tractor trailer, and she had to use the megaphone to hold it down. When the van started to climb the hill leaving Johnson Avenue, she had the wind blocked and she turned around to address the local and tourist cars and pickup trucks following her and me to Gibson’s point:

"Yes, sir," she said and the megaphone made her voice tinny and loud, like an announcer trying to sell used cars on a cheap AM radio. "Its gonna be the biggest of all the local suprises, a real treat, right up there on Gibson’s point. – A real, live, Alien! The biggest thing you’ll here or anywhere else!" I could tell her pitch was really a sham; that she was trying to cover up the lynch mob’s intentions for the tourists, who had tagged along.

When I reached the top of the hill, I looked in my rear view mirror again. I couldn’t see the convoy or the mini van for two or three seconds, just a cloud of dust the vehicles were making rising above the hill – I can still see it when I close my eyes today and it still looks like brown smoke to me, as if Port Severn had suddenly caught fire or been bombed and was burning to the ground.

Get out, Get out to the lake! I screamed in my head to him as I pulled into the driveway: My feet pounded over the deck and I burst through the front door and headed straight for the bay window- I stood looking down at the place on Crow Lake he’d been staring at the night before.

And there he was.

It was quite a peaceful picture really- it would have made a nice painting if the situation hadn’t been so critical and I still like to imagine it while I walk down these deserted streets. It’s all the company I have left.

Ballantine had taken the row boat from the dock and was rowing toward the middle of Crow Lake; at first I had to follow the sounds of the oars dipping and dragging through the water and the grinding of the rusty oar mounts on the sides of the boat as he pulled them back for another stroke. At first, I could only see the reflection of the rising sun reflecting off the lake: it fanned out from the top of a rough triangle at the far shore, spreading out to a wide end at my side of the lake with the light shimmering dirty orange and white like tinsel in the middle of the water. My eyes adjusted and then I saw Ballantine. Actually, I only saw his silhouette facing me in the boat; he had his head down looking at his knees and I could make out the peak of his fedora when he leaned back to pull the oars around for another stroke.

The doorbell rang- I was suddenly embarrassed out of my trance- and it rang again. The second time the finger on the front deck pushed it and held it so it sounded like an alarm to me as I walked across to open the door, as if the doorbell itself was both angry and afraid of the people outside my home.

I opened the door and the crowd burst into my cottage, bowling me over and then pulling me up roughly, hands tightening around my arms and legs. They passed me high in the air from up stretched palm to up stretched palm and I could only stare at the stucco ceiling as I moved along. They put me down upright on the deck and there, standing outside silhouetted by the sun, was Brevit Kemper.

"Leeave him herrre" he said articulating each word slowly, relishing his moment of high drama like the Nazi commandant from a black and white war movie. I could see Ballantine rowing over his shoulder; he’d become a soundless speck, almost at the middle of the lake, with only the oars moving like used wooden match sticks identifying him. Then, Brevit caught my eye looking over his shoulder and he turned out to look at Crow Lake and spun back to face me.

He took one step toward me out from the silhouette and I could see his eyelids had pulled back exposing the tops of the whites of his eyes and his lips were clamped tight with rage:

" I want him," he said pointing back over his shoulder, " he’s the one we have to stop." I heard the mob’s boots pounding on the stairs heading for the dock and I felt them pushing by me from behind, but I didn’t take my eyes off the pharmacist; he’d curled his other hand into a fist and brought it slowly up by his stomach. Brevit brought the hand he’d used to point to the lake quickly up to my throat and used the other to uppercut cut me under my chin before I had time to react. I saw the white-confetti-flashbulb lights I’d seen when I fallen off my bike when I was eight, and my knees started to give out. Just before I blacked out, I thought I heard a zipping noise, like the sky was a winter coat being opened quickly by the hand of God, and I passed out.

I woke up hours later in bed and everything was quiet; I didn’t move when the memory of what had happened came back to me at first and then I turned the television on in my bedroom, wondering what the news had made of earlier that night. Then, the doorbell rang tentatively, as if the person outside on my deck in the dark was unsure what would happen when he pushed it, and I got up and walked to the door, hearing only my quick breathing and bare feet sticking on the hardwood like scotch tape. I turned the porch light on before I opened the door.

"He did it," Jed Corrigan said and the light was shining on the top of his head so his face was blacked out, but I recognized the voice and the checkered black and red fabric of his lumberjack shirt. "He fixed his ship and put me back, " he said his voice trailed away with wonder and admiration. We both stood there- him with his legs shoulder width apart, his hands resting comfortably in the pockets of his shirt, and, suddenly, he turned his head sideways, cocking an ear up into the night.

"Oh My god," he said, pulling his hands out and turning toward Port Severn. "Something’s gone wrong." And before I could do anything, before I could even close my slack jaw, he was gone, running for a second in the light with the black flies and moths buzzing around his head, and then disappearing into the night, the dark grabbing him away like a thick, black blanket that had been waiting to fold over him.

Then, I heard it too.

It was a pop, a snap from the other side of the hill, down in town. Then, another one; the noise of popcorn catching on a skillet, like kernels bursting through the foil wrap. Then it grew-speeding along madly, shaking my deck from the earth underneath until I had to sit down under the porch light’s crescent to keep from falling over. And when it slowed, I could the individual noises again, and I could see the last people left in Port Severn in my mind- I imagined their last second of horror before they folded in on themselves and disappeared into mounds of clothing with only a snap like a television turning off to mark their deaths.

The next day, I started to bury their clothes all along the hill leading up to Gibson’s Point- I even found Jed Corrigan’s lumberjack shirt in front of the Queen’s Hotel and Brevit Kemper’s monocle in his drugstore on top of the counter with the cough syrups. There are no markers, but I can put a name to each shallow grave; I even buried Gladys Fincher’s canvas dress closest to the top of the hill, the very last place I aw her.

Of course the days are lonely and long now; the best I can do is remember things aren’t totally hopeless, not as long as I remember to call Ballantine every night with my thoughts while standing in front of my bay window looking out at the black water. I like to tell him to hurry back and make everything right as a soon as he gets out this way again, and I fall asleep most nights now hoping to hear a zipping noise make its way across my roof and out to Crow Lake; I worry I might miss him if he comes back in his spaceship though, what with the television on in my cottage all the time. Still, I don’t dare turn it off- I really don’t think I could stand the popping noise they make when you turn them off, not ever again.

Robert Starr was educated at Ryerson's School of Journalism in Toronto in the mid- eighties. After a brief career in the field, he decided to leave and work in non related jobs, writing at night. You can read more of his work at his website 'Buddhist Cat Naps' at hometown.aol.com/starrshdr/myhomepage/writing.html

E-mail: StarrShdr@aol.com

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