by Ron Carlson
First of all, I’m not going to give you any theory, because I don’t have any. And I don’t want any. Where did it come from? I don’t care. I’ve been here in Cooper all my life and it might have come from over in Mercy or even Griggs. It kind of looked like something from Griggs. I don’t care. It was a UFO. It might have come from Korea; try to tell me that’s on this earth. And why did it come? Please. I’m going to give you the day, the whole day, and—really—nothing but the day.
First thing: Sarah calls. She says we received a card from Derec; that’s our son, same name. He works for a textbook publisher in Palo Alto, California, and he’s a painter. Paints pictures. Well, it’s a little news, because we haven’t seen him in five years, and we don’t get that much mail. Every time I drive by Cooper Regional I think about him, though. Even then when he was in high school refusing to play football, he said he couldn’t wait to get out of here, Cooper, and go to California. Which he did. I feel bad about it, and I miss him, but I figure it this way: at least somebody got what he wanted.
Sarah says that Derec is going to have a show. Well. I don’t know what that is, and she explains that it is a show of his paintings and it is good news. She wants to go. She is excited on the telephone. I tell her great, but there’s a radio call coming in, I’ll talk to her later, and I hang up. I thought: I want to go, too.
I want to go and hold down my stool at The World and drink my gallon of coffee, but Arvella the dispatcher says it’s something from Nemo out at Earth Adventure, a bear attack or something. So I lock up and I drive out to Earth Adventure.
On the way out I’m thinking about Derec and his show, and I’m kind of blue thinking about what he ever thinks of his old man. Did you ever do that, wonder what your grown kids think of you? The times you tried, the times you didn’t try. No matter who you are, I think, you still want your boy to be like you. Derec is like me, with his ears, and he’s got the build, but the rest … I don’t know.
Old Earth Adventure is about on its last legs. If you didn’t know where you were going, I doubt you could find the place. The two terrific signs Nemo put up before Harold, Whitney, and I worked for him are all peeled to hell, and a Chinese elm has taken the best one, the one with the dinosaur peeking over at the boatload of people. You can still see the profile of the dinosaur poking up above the sign, but you can’t read a word through the bushes.
It turned out not to be a bear attack. I knew it wouldn’t be. Nemo’s bear, Alex, hasn’t been awake for about two years. It turned out to be Monty, the old cougar, who must be forty now and who’s lost most of his hair and teeth and whose skin sags off his bones like it was somebody else’s suit; Monty had fallen out of a tree and broke his hind leg on the hood of some tourist’s Ford. By the time I arrived, Monty had already dragged himself into the women’s restroom and he was growling in the corner like an old man getting ready for his last spit. His poor old rheumy eyes were full of tears. Hell, I’d known him from a kitten when they found him west of Mercy at the Ringenburgs’, crying in the barn being harassed by a dozen swallows. I’d fed that cat a lot of corndogs the summer I was seventeen and worked the boats.
So I kept guard by the women’s room door, so nobody would get a surprise, while we waited for Doctor Werner to come out from town. The guy from the Ford was arguing, or trying to argue, with Nemo about the damage and the scare and the hazard, and all Nemo would do was point at me and say, “There’s the sheriff.” But the guy wasn’t coming near me or the shack where Monty was dying. Finally he left and the vet pulled up in his black van. I stayed with him while he drugged the big old cat. Then Werner and Nemo had a little talk outside while I watched Monty’s tongue loll farther and farther out of his mouth. Just above him in the stall, somebody had carved “Kill All Men” in uneven printing.
When the two men came back they had decided that this was it for Monty, and Werner said he’d haul him off. But Nemo said no, said to put him to sleep right there in the women’s room, so Werner did. Monty, who was already asleep, didn’t even quiver.
Then Nemo and Werner argued about money for a while, Nemo trying to give the doc a twenty and the doctor not even looking Nemo in the face, saying, “No way, Nemo, not this time. No charge.” They pushed that twenty back and forth twenty times like two men in a restaurant, and finally the vet climbed in his van and headed out.
Nemo stood there with his twenty still in his hand in the middle of the dirt road and said he was pretty close to it this time. If he lost any more animals, Earth Adventure would have to close. You couldn’t charge people four bucks a car to drive along a half mile dirt road to see one bear sleeping in a way that showed his worn out old ass, a plastic tiger Nemo had gotten from the Exxon station in Clinton, six peacocks, and four hundred geese. “It was different with a mountain lion,” he said. “Monty was something.”
Old Nemo. I told him not to worry, he still had the underground canal trips, but that wasn’t too good either, since the boats—the same boats I worked—are in pretty bad condition. One sank last summer out from under a family from Mercy. It was lucky for Nemo the boat went down just outside the tunnel, where the water is only a foot deep, or he’d have had genuine legal action.
So I stood there with old Nemo, looking around at Earth Adventure crumbling in the weeds. I could see it clearly: the closed sign across his gate next summer. After a while, he thumbed his overall strap and went to get an old canvas mail bag and started filling it with the round white rocks that he uses to line the paths.
“Can I help you, Nemo?” I said, and he opened the bag.
“Right here,” is all he said.
So I lifted Monty, who must have weighed ninety pounds, and Nemo helped guide him into the bag. He cinched the tie and started dragging the bag toward the canal. When we got there, he wanted to put it in one of the boats, and by the time I’d helped him do that, I was committed. He climbed in the bow of the old peeling boat and there was that seat in the stern. I found one paddle in the weeds and took my place. The boat was so weathered and shot I couldn’t tell which one it had been; it could have been mine once.
When I was seventeen, we came out here—Whitney, Harold, and I—and Nemo hired us piecework. We each had a boat and we got seventy-five cents a tour. In those days Nemo had a little dock strung with Christmas lights, and summer nights it was great. There was a popcorn stand right there too, so people could feed the ducks, all those mallards tame as barnducks in the bright water. We’d tear the tickets and Whitney would feed them to the ducks whenever he ran out of other bad jokes.
I’d get five people in my boat, and I’d pole off. “These are the natural wonders of Cooper,” I’d say as we entered the cave. “They were formed a million million years ago. They have found albino perch in these waters and there may still be creatures as yet undiscovered beneath us. The legend is that a trip through this wonder makes you five years younger or five years older depending on how you’ve treated your mother and father. Please keep your hands inside the boat.”
Now Nemo perched on his seat, his knees together, as I steered us out into the cool dark of the cavern. I hadn’t been in here for years. I used to have to come down and chase teenagers out and break up their beer parties, but it wasn’t too hard, because I knew my way around. There in the quiet dark with Nemo, I could almost hear Harold doing his romantic version of the tour for his boat. It was like singing. Or Whitney kidding with the passengers, laughing and telling off-color jokes, “Keep your hands inside the boat, not there, buddy. Lady, keep your hands to yourself; just because it is dark there is no need to turn into an aborigine.” The passengers in his boats would laugh and call back and ahead and go “Wooo-woooo!” And at the other end, Whitney always got the tips.
For me it was a job. I was saving for a car that turned out to be a used 1939 Buick. For Harold, it was romantic, each little trip got him a little. He believed it; he even painted a name on his boat: The Santa Maria. For Whitney, it was fun.
And then later, after I me
t Sarah, we all used to stay around almost every night, make a tour or two. Stop in the middle, bump around in the boats. It smelled nice then, like sand and willows, before the water treatment plant went in and raised the temperature. The five of us would take a boat in. Whitney and a date, Sarah and I, and Harold. Whitney would start on his spiel about how no virgin had ever emerged from these caverns, and he would let Sarah and me off midway on the limestone ledge, and then he’d take Harold to the far end where Harold would sit with his guitar and just play and play. Sometimes he’d sing, “Stormy Weather” or “Pennies From Heaven.” Sarah and I would eat the popcorn and talk about high school or the families who came to Earth Adventure. We could hear Whitney hauling around in the boat, saying, “Come on; come on,” to some girl from Mercy, a waitress, or somebody he’d picked up that night. He and I were clearly different that way. I never touched a girl casually in my life, not to this day. Whitney never touched them any other way. And I guess, Harold never touched one at all. I don’t know. Anyway, they were great nights.
When Nemo and I passed the ledge, he lifted his hand and looked ahead. There was one rock column and then we could see the end, the rough triangle of light that opened on the river.
“This is good right here,” he said.
He started to stand, but I motioned him down, and I got up and took hold of the bag. I set it carefully on the gunwale and looked at Nemo. All I could see against the light was his silhouette, and it didn’t move. 1 waited. He didn’t say anything, so I set the bag out and let the water take it.
NOW, remember, this is the day of the phenomenon. I went back to the jail and filed the report and by then it was lunchtime. I went over to The World and had the liver and onions for an hour. All that reminiscing had me hungry.
It was Monday, like I said, and so I knew they’d have a workout at the high school. I parked across the tennis court with the radio on in case Arvella came up with something, and watched practice. Well, here it was only the second week of school, still summer really, so I knew no one would be breaking his back, but still, I was disappointed when one of the coaches blew the whistle and the practice fell apart and the kids sauntered off toward the gym. I had been dreaming a little, but I still didn’t see anything that was going to beat Griggs. For a minute I thought of the sheriff going over to the two coaches and giving them a word to the wise. But: nope.
It made me a little sad, sitting there in the car after the field had emptied. Football. As great as it was for Whitney and me, football was one of the first things Derec and I argued about. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to play, but after I saw that he really didn’t want to, I let it go. I didn’t care if he played or didn’t; it wasn’t worth fighting over. But I don’t think he ever understood that. I think to the day he left Cooper he thought I was disappointed. As a man, sometimes, I find there are some things I can do nothing about. The words just won’t line up in my mouth.
I went down to The World for my evening coffee until it was dark and then I got the call from Arvella, the only other call that day. Somebody was injured out to the Passion Play Center. I have a call or two out there every summer. Somebody gets a snakebite behind the stage or a flat settles on somebody’s foot as they’re shifting scenery in the dark. But this time I was a little worried because Arvella said, as she was signing off, that she thought it was Harold Kissel. And Harold is now pushing three hundred pounds and if he missed a step out of his trailer or fell off the apron, it would be serious.
I’ve been told that every community has a Harold Kissel, my old friend. I doubt it. He’d moved to Cooper with his mother when we were in tenth grade and for two years everybody thought he was from New York, and he didn’t tip his hand about it either. His manners were amazing. I mean it was amazing that he had any, because I guess, none of the rest of us did. But he had a hat, a dark derby sort of hat and he’d tip it, and he’d hold doors for about everybody, and the things he’d do with his napkin even in The World were worth watching. It’s funny, but he never took much guff for any of it, everybody just kind of knew him: eccentric. That’s why I liked him and why he was the only friend I had who wasn’t on the football team.
He wasn’t allowed to go to Korea either, which was a relief for just about everybody in town, because by that time, the year after we graduated, everybody liked Harold in their own way. While I was gone, he started and became director of the Cooper Players and was just known for that. He was the theater. Sarah wrote me about the productions. She helped sew costumes, even the curtain for the stage at the old Episcopal Church.
When I came back from Korea, which is a cold place mostly, Sarah and I were married in the Lutheran Church, and Harold was one of the ushers along with Whitney who was also best man. The first year I was a deputy, Harold’s mother died, and he went away. Sarah was real worried. She and Whitney’s wife, Dorothy, had been in two plays by then. They kind of starred in Arsenic and Old Lace as the aunts. You should have seen Sarah as an old lady. I told her right then that I’d love her my whole life, because even with white hair and big gray lines all over her face, she was too pretty to stand. Oh, and they were also in Julius Caesar after that. They were two Roman soldiers, which was pretty goofy in my opinion, but it was okay, because about nine people total saw that deal. So when Harold’s mother passed away, Sarah was worried. There was a lot of talk. The Playhouse, as they were calling the church, had added a lot to Cooper, especially in the winter, and people said it would be a shame to lose it.
Where he went for four years, nobody knows. I know that, because he never told me. Some say he finally went to New York and there was a rumor about his going to France or Africa. No clues. When he came back, he had the beginnings of the fat and he looked worn. Hell, we all do. He had a meeting of the old Cooper Players and announced that what this town needed was “a passion play.”
That was thirty years ago. The passion play has become the biggest thing about Cooper really. People say, “Have you been over to the Cooper Passion Play?” It’s a real institution. Every summer thousands of people see Harold play the life of Christ, and I’ve seen it quite a few times myself. The local joke is that whenever anybody says Jesus H. Christ, the H. stands for Harold.
He’s real good in all the parts where he’s among the children and disciples. He knows how to walk and he’s got great hand movements, but the part which everyone remembers, the part which has been told across the counter in The World ten thousand times is when the music starts and the lights go out. The last thing you see is Mary Magdalene and the others on their knees weeping and praying and then the darkness in the amphitheater, just the sky with all our stars, sometimes the moon on a little cloud cruise, and the music real low and sad along with the sound effects of some hammering.
Then, Harold climbs those stairs behind the cross and steps out and places his arms on the crossbars, his head hung down at the perfect angle, and pow! the spotlight puts everybody’s eyes out with the white circle of Jesus on the cross: you can feel the chilly waves of goose bumps cross over the whole audience. Even his bald spot jumps at you in the scene like a halo. I remember listening to his voice in the Earth Adventure Caverns as he sang, “Stormy Weather,” and I know he’s just a man with the God-given ability to give others the chills.
The cross had come down while Harold was setting his arms up on the crossbar. The cross was old and Harold was heavy. The old timber leaned over and ripped out of the stage like a tree in a storm. They said it sounded like a bomb. Harold had hit the stage hard and there was blood and make-up blood everywhere. He wasn’t moving. The cross had clobbered Bonnie Belcher who was playing Mary Magdalene and a high school girl from Mercy, but they were both okay, just lots of blood. They hadn’t moved a thing. Feely told me they were afraid they would break his back. So, I had it all right there. I thought this is what happens: Whitney is gone, dead to me, and now Harold is killed.
I knelt over him, but I couldn’t feel a pulse and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing
. In that loincloth he looked like a great big dead kid, a two-year-old. By this time I was crying, or tears were just coming, I don’t know. And I didn’t care. I had to get Feely and Jerry—who plays Judas—to help me lift the cross off Harold and we dragged it back and dropped it off the rear of the stage. Then I heard this noise. Clapping. Out there in the dark, about half the audience still waited to see what was going to happen to Jesus now. It must have looked pretty strange to see the sheriff bending over him. And it was strange for me too; I couldn’t see the people at all.
I was scared. We wrestled Harold into the ambulance and he never made a noise, not a gurgle or a groan. Then Jerry shut the doors and Boyce drove away. Jerry turned to me and said, “You better say something, Derec. The people aren’t leaving.” There I was out there in the dark talking to Judas in his nightgown, Jerry Beemer, who is going to be the assistant manager at the Dairy Creme in Griggs all his goddamned life, and he is instructing me as to what I had better do. And what really made me boil, on top of being sick and scared, was that I knew he was right. I went back up onto the stage in the lights and stood in front of the blood stain and said, “He’s going to be all right, folks. You can go home now. And be careful driving. Those of you parked to the side can slip back to 21 through Gilmers’ place, even though it is the entrance.”
It was real quiet for a second, but then I heard the shuffling, and the families sorted themselves out and went off in the dark.
ON the way home I didn’t want to see another thing. I didn’t want to see the UFO. I’d seen enough for one day already. I just wanted to see Sarah. It was after one in the morning and I just wanted to see her. She’d be asleep, which was good because I didn’t want to go over anything again. I try not to tell her any of what goes on with my work; it’s all either ridiculous or hideous—who wants to hear that? If she asks me about something, I try to wait and let it pass. I can wait.
