Okay, back to my secondary feature story. There was always the cornfield mystery. There had been another UFO incident, as the local daily called it, the previous evening near the home of a family about a mile from Mr. Jameson’s farm. With three incidents fairly close together in time as reported by the daily, there was starting to be a bit of community buzz about the whole thing. People’s feelings ran the gamut from intrigued to fearful to skeptical. I weighed in on the skeptics’ side, but did find it intriguing that Derek had called me bemoaning the fact that we weren’t there to see anything.
I got up, walked over and told Bill, the publisher, that I was thinking of doing the story. He said he was worried about the scarcity of facts and that had me, too, wishing Derek and I had been there. Were there enough facts to make for a good story? Even though facts are my business, it was my experience that facts were obvious but not always interesting or uplifting. I usually saw it as my job to make them that way in, of course, as accurate a fashion as possible.
As far as interviewing people about UFOs, I was skeptical about anything extra-terrestrial related and pretty dismissive, truth be told. However, it occurred to me I also had been pretty dismissive about mistletoe, until Fergie and I kissed under it. And although I would say I dearly loved science fiction, I would confess, if pressed, that it was mostly the fiction part I loved. The thought of an actual close encounter made the small hairs on my neck stand on end. I realized I needed to interview someone to see if it was a viable story. Should I wait and take Derek? No. I needed to be brave. But he would love it. I’m a big girl and mother-to-be, I told myself as I collected contact information for the people who lived next to Jameson and called them to set up an interview.
They felt privileged to have seen it, the mother told me when I called. I’d intended to make it a brief phone call, but when she said about her family, and I quote, “Their minds’ eyes still carried the image of the shimmering green cigar-shaped craft” that had touched down behind their house, I knew I’d better stay on the line. It was funny that it happened there, she said, because her family had so frequently sat at the kitchen table looking out into the dark, wondering if their cornfield might be a tantalizing “touchdown point” for visitors from another planet. Just last night, just before it came, that was what was so weird. They’d joked that once having seen it, they’d worry about calls from some national tabloid and would have to try to dodge reporters who might magnify accounts of the simple beauty their family had seen just briefly.
The woman said I could come out, but I had to promise no sensationalism, which I did. I left around three o’clock for Sweet’s Corners, the quaint name for the half-farm, half-suburban area where the family lived. The ride to their house took about half an hour. In that time, try as I would to focus on the questions I knew were necessary for the public’s information, all that came to mind were questions designed to substantiate my personal belief that we are alone, at least in this galaxy. Maybe these people made this up. Maybe they were “Trekkies” seeking intergalactic fame or religious zealots finding the almighty in a cigar-shaped green light on a dark humid evening. Some kind of extremism or exaggeration had to be involved here or I would never again feel secure riding on a lonely road in the dark in the country. Thank you, Steven Spielberg, for that scene with Richard Dreyfuss and the railroad crossing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
On the way, I listened to the radio station with all weather because the hypnotic drone of the computerized voices always was mildly soothing. I parked in front of the house and sat there for a few minutes massaging Rudy and getting my bearings. Then I walked up the sidewalk to the front door and rang the bell.
The house was contemporary with cedar siding and tall narrow windows in the front. Although there were houses to the right and left in the suburban development, there was only cornfield behind it. A tall slender woman with straight long brownish-blond hair and granny glasses answered the door and invited me in.
“I’m Suzanne Smythe,” she said, shaking my hand firmly and pointed me toward a table in front of sliding glass doors leading to a patio.
“We were sitting right here last night when we saw it,” she said as we sat down at the table. A man and a teenaged boy joined us.
“This is my husband, Bernie, and this is Will,” she said. The husband winked. The boy, who looked to be about thirteen, grinned.
The afternoon sun was streaming through the windows where the night before otherworldly light might have glistened. There were no curtains anywhere in their modern home and they had covered the windows with plants. Beans, nuts, seeds and pasta filled glass jars with cork tops on every available countertop and there were tie-died placemats on the thick butcher block table.
Sixties people, I thought. Like my mother but a little younger. I smiled to myself as I sat down, reminding myself to avoid pre-conceived notions.
I didn’t even get to ask an opening question.
“Last night was a night that started out like any other,” Suzanne began. She had seen it first. They had been eating dinner and with her soup spoon halfway to her mouth, she said she had stopped and leaned forward to get her eyes closer to what she didn’t think she was seeing. I scribbled that down for a possible quote. Then I angled my head to try to see how thick the lenses were on her wire-rimmed glasses.
“I remembered saying ‘Honey, look at that green light in the cornfield.’ I was so intrigued that I dumped my spoon of soup back into the bowl, uneaten.”
Bernie Smythe leaned back from the table so far that the two front legs of his chair left the ground. He pulled a crumb from his reddish mustache and stroked his beard. He’d left work to meet with us, so he had a shirt and a tie on with khakis and sandals.
“I didn’t have this facial hair before last night,” he said, his brown eyes big with wonder.
My eyes must have grown just as big. I jotted down his quote. Then he began laughing.
“Just kidding,” he chuckled.
I crossed it out.
“Really, I was buttering my bread and I saw kind of a flash of light so I looked out,” he said. “The door faces the cornfield and doesn’t have curtains or shades because the cornfield keeps us far away from our nearest backyard neighbor. No human is ever close enough to see in here.”
He remembered he’d asked their son if that could have been one of his friends on an all-terrain vehicle.
Will wore his clothes much too big in the style of most kids his age. He had unruly shoulder-length blond hair and hazel eyes, a cross between Mom’s and Dad’s maybe. Now he jumped into the conversation.
“I was about to drink my chocolate milk when I saw the light. I got up to get closer and kind of slammed my glass down on the table. The milk splashed on the wall and the floor. Any other time my parents would have yelled,” he said, “but this time they didn’t even notice.”
He continued, “It looked like a—I don’t know—like something different. It was green.”
Then they had looked at each other with a kind of awe, they agreed. I noted that you can feel awe and imagine it, but using words to clarify awe sometimes just doesn’t do it justice.
Then they heard the doorbell. They all had jumped at the unexpected sound, and they’d gone to answer it together. I visualized them moving together in a human clump, touching each other for reassurance. As if an alien really might ring the doorbell, if it wanted to get in their house.
It was only some kid selling Milky Way candy bars for Little League.
Hmmmm. Thinking of Mr. Jameson’s experience, I was getting a little excited. In my best calm, detached reporter tone I asked if anyone had bought one. Will said he’d reached in his pocket and found a dollar he didn’t know he’d had. He had given it to the kid for the candy bar.
“With the strange object in the field behind the house, why did you leave the kitchen at that moment?” I asked.
Bernie said they’d been wondering that, too.
“We tiptoed back into th
e kitchen and peered out the patio door,” he continued. “The green shape was still hovering, up and down in an undulating motion, leaving traces of light low when it went high.”
Then, before they could think or say any more or decide what to do, it was gone.
Logic dictated that now I had to ask the who-what-where-when-why of the incident. The “who” was obviously either a moot point or an unanswerable question. I skipped it. The “when” I already knew.
“What did it do?” I asked.
“It hovered in the darkness until the fire department scared them away,” said Suzanne. I wrote the word “them” in my margin so I could get back to it.
She said as they watched the craft swooping around in low concentric circles, they thought it was beginning to make some siren-like sounds. Will had then realized that the sounds were police cars converging from all around like police cars do on television at a drug bust. But by the time the authorities arrived, it was already gone.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
“It vaporized as though it were hit with a high energy molecular degenerator,” Will said. I thought I could like this kid.
“It took off hugging the ground and headed east,” said Bernie.
“Straight up,” said Suzanne.
It went away, I scribbled.
That seemed to be about it for the facts when Will said, “Do you think we called it, Mom? You know, by using our thoughts? You know how we always joke around about UFOs using our cornfield?”
Suzanne smiled, rather serenely I thought for a person with newly acquired UFO insight, and shrugged.
Instinct told me it wasn’t a newspaper thing to ask, but I needed to know. “Were you changed by it? Do any of you feel any different?”
They looked at each other.
“Come on out here,” Bernie said and opened the sliding glass door for me.
We walked out into the cornfield. On the way Bernie told me he worked in real estate and could more or less make his own hours; that‘s how he could be with us today.
“My wife bakes,” he said.
“For a job, or for your family?” I asked.
Suzanne was walking ahead of us, holding up the skirt on her batik sundress. She turned around and smiled. “Both,” she said. “You get to sample a molasses cookie when we go back to the house.”
Rudy kicked with pleasure.
The corn was still standing and I was half expecting to disappear as the baseball players had in that Kevin Costner baseball movie with the mystic realism and the voices, but we kept plodding along.
“Bet you thought you were going to disappear, huh?” Will said, grinning as he and I brought up the rear. I did like this kid.
“Were you scared last night?” I asked.
“Nah. My friends and I know a lot about space and stuff. We’ve seen Star Wars, and Star Trek and E.T.” I couldn’t have made up something better for this kid to say, I decided as I jotted madly.
“So did you notice anything else odd around that time?”
He stopped for a minute, like he couldn’t walk and think at the same time.
“Yeah. I guess I can tell you,” he said slowly. “Yeah, one thing was weird. No one sells Milky Ways for Little League here in Bridgefield. We always sell M & M’s. Every year. All the time. And we always sell them right before the season starts in the spring, not in the summer or fall. “
About 50 yards from the house, we all stopped.
“This is about where it would have been, we figure,” said Bernie.
I looked up in the sky, just because it seemed the right thing to do. Then I looked at them and they were looking up, too, I thought, probably because I had.
For the first time, Rudy did a complete somersault. I imagined a synchronized swimming kind of move. I rubbed my stomach and she settled down.
“This is weird,” Bernie said. He shivered. “That shiver. It’s happening again. When we came out to this spot early this morning and looked back at the house we all got a strange feeling, like tingling. In fact, right now my right arm is tingling just like it did earlier.”
“My left arm is tingling,” said Suzanne.
“It’s my right,” said the boy.
I dutifully noted their comments. Then they each held out the stated arm and touched hands. I had read enough science fiction to make me back up a little and wait for a zap of energy or something, but they were all smiling and squeezing each other’s hands and it never came.
“Why did you just do that?”
“It felt like we should,” they all said simultaneously, then looked at each other and grinned again. It was eerie.
“We’ve been talking about this all night and all day,” said Suzanne. “You have to understand that we may be of the generation that will make first contact.”
I noted she did not say “with creatures from outer space.” She flipped her hair behind her, made it into a ponytail, pushed up her granny glasses and waited a minute before she continued.
“Maybe some alien consciousness has placed welcoming thoughts in our psyches through an entertainment medium that reaches a large audience. Maybe via satellite. Perhaps last night was the advance guard paving the way for a true first contact.” She smiled and put her arm around her husband. “We’re glad we saw it.”
“I can’t say I feel this first contact thing as strongly as my wife does,” Bernie said, “but I sure can’t deny that I get an unusual feeling on this spot. Not a bad feeling. A pleasant one. But it is unusual.”
“Could you please extend your hands again?” I asked.
They did. I added mine and waited for the tingling. I didn’t feel anything.
“Feel it?” Will asked.
“No. Did you?”
“Not that time. Let’s try again, Mom,” he whispered. “Just us.”
They reached for each other once more and he grinned. “It’s back,” he said.
I saw really nothing of interest as I poked around the area. No flattened or burned spot. No message written in cornstalks crushed by the weight of a spacecraft. None of the factual proof that a reporter might use to write copy. Just a family with a shared experience. That’s probably unique these days. I knew I wouldn’t include the tingling in my facts even though it probably belonged there. If there were extra-terrestrials, and I wasn’t yet fully entertaining the notion, I wouldn’t intend for this family to be the laughing stock of the suburb and forever be labeled “eccentric.” One gentle touchdown in a cornfield owned by a sympathetic earth family unit didn’t deserve that.
We went back to the kitchen and I rushed through a few more obligatory questions. The father indeed sold real estate, the mother was a part-time math teacher at the local high school and part-time baker, and the son was in middle school and loved sports and going to movies. Were they going to see a doctor about the tingling in their arms? No, they agreed; it would be awkward to explain. They wouldn’t go unless they started tingling in other locations as well, Bernie said, laughed and tilted back on his chair again. Would they do anything differently with their house? Put curtains on the back door? Get a dog? No, things would pretty much stay the same. They just didn’t want any humans looking in their back window, Bernie cracked and we all laughed. Would they be watching more closely from now on? You bet, they all said at the same time and with the same emphasis, then laughed for the same length of time. Eerie again.
I sat in my car for a while munching on Suzanne’s scrumptious molasses cookie and scribbling more notes. The way they talked and how they looked when they talked about this made it all sound perfectly plausible. But if I wrote what I had just seen and what they had told me in straight reportorial fashion, it would sound to the local readers and my publisher like I made it up. Then again, I could make up information that sounded more real than this.
On the drive back, I decided several things. One was to use carefully selected facts to write a more palatable story for the front page. Two, I was going to anonymously call the national
UFO hotline to make sure someone legit came and talked with these people. Three, I was coming back that evening the same time as the previous sighting had occurred to check out the area for myself because I’m a curious enough person, and damn it, if there was really tingling to be felt, I wanted to feel it, too.
Chapter Sixteen
Don’t Eat the Candy
Back at the office and already feeling crabby and tired, I was met by brown, orange and yellow construction paper leaves everywhere. Boss was on a decorating kick and had ordered Felicia to create construction paper leaves and tape them around the office. Better Felicia than me. At seven months pregnant, I had gained around 30 pounds and felt as big as a barn. It was hard to get around and hard to sit and sleeping wasn’t easy, either. I couldn’t imagine balancing on a stool to tape a red leaf to the archway.
I already was in a bad mood when I noticed my answering machine light blinking. I pushed the button and headed toward the coffee pot.
“Just got back from a shoot in the Galapagos Islands,” said Fergie’s voice. He sounded excited. “I’m in New York for a few days, then off to Finland. They love my work. I’ll be in your area for a day or so, then off again. Call me.” He left an 800 number.
I turned toward the coffee again and Derek’s voice on the machine called me back.
“Rita, how are you and Rudy? Bill said you went to Sweet’s Corners, for a story this time. I’m curious. Ring me and we’ll talk.”
I turned toward the coffee again, and this time made it to the counter before Boss blew in.
“Things are heating up, politics, new school budget, end of baseball season,” she said.
“That’s not yet. October is the World Series, remember?” I said.
What a Kiss Can Do Page 14
