Hero could smell the asphalt baking even before she got outside. She couldn’t wait to get into the car, crank the AC and the radio, get out on the freeway. She’d pick the noisiest radio station she could find, turn up the sound till the car rattled.
But at first she didn’t even see her car, and it wasn’t that big a parking lot. She considered the idea that the car had been towed, but then she realized it had merely been hidden from view—dwarfed by a large minivan that had pulled into the space beside hers. Stick-figure representations of the family who drove it were plastered to the van’s side: Mom, Dad, dog, and three little girls. What purpose, Hero mused, did these representations serve? Was it a way for the family to recognize themselves? Or their vehicle, perhaps? Amid a parking lot potentially full of identical vehicles? Or was it an attempt to communicate something?
And if so, what?
To whom?
She took another few steps. Her own car was, of course, just where she’d left it. Beside it, standing between the driver’s door and the van that had concealed the car, was the bride. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and was shoving her wedding dress into the van’s back seat. As Hero approached, she looked up; flashed a polite grin.
“Sorry.”
She gave the van door a tug and it slid shut automatically. Then she turned, in order to make her way around to the driver’s side of the van—but Hero was standing squarely in her way.
“Excuse me,” the bride said.
Hero didn’t budge.
Undaunted, the bride continued to smile. She glanced quickly over her shoulder to see if there was another way out—but there was not. The van’s nose had been driven right up to the wall of the Paradise Valley Senior Center and behind her there was just a windowless facade. The bride’s expression shifted from embarrassed confusion to vague alarm.
“Excuse me,” she said again, and took a step toward Hero. Still, Hero didn’t budge. The bride glanced around once more, her eyes, by now, a little wild. Their two figures—facing one another—reflected back at them strangely from the darkly tinted window of the bride’s vehicle on one side of them and the darkly tinted window of Hero’s on the other.
Once more, the bride took a step toward Hero—this time more assertively—but instead of moving aside, Hero took a step toward the bride so that the two would have collided if the bride had not immediately withdrawn.
“They believe you, you know,” Hero said.
The bride shook her head, confused.
“Every week,” Hero said. “They believe you. They think it’s the real thing.”
At last the bride seemed to understand what Hero was referring to. It irritated Hero that it took her so long. The bride blinked several times, slowly, then she opened her mouth—seemed about to reply. Before she could do so, however, Hero stepped aside. The bride shut her mouth firmly and hurried past. Hero watched her as she went around to the driver’s side of the van, got in, and—without glancing in Hero’s direction—backed up the van and drove away.
Hero got into her car, too, and started the engine. She pressed her hands so tightly to the wheel that it wasn’t until she’d left the parking lot and merged into the main traffic flow on the freeway that she noticed they were shaking. She’d taken one hand off the wheel in order to fiddle with the air conditioner—though it was already on max and as cool as it could go—and that was when she realized. It was funny. If she’d kept both hands pressed on the wheel the entire drive, exerting just enough pressure on them until the feeling passed, maybe she never would have known they were shaking.
Had she lost her mind? What had she been thinking? Terrorizing a college student! Making a total fool of herself in the Paradise Valley parking lot! What else was she capable of? She imagined swerving into the car next to her, or slamming the brake and bringing the whole line of traffic behind her to a sudden stop. It would take next to nothing; she could almost feel the possibility of it—another moment shuddering beneath or beside the one she was actually inhabiting. What invisible element, she wondered, separated this moment from any other, or from the next…?
She pictured Zoe reporting the story on the six o’clock news: “A single-vehicle accident today involving a forty-seven-year-old white woman disrupted traffic temporarily…” With the same calm insistence with which she reported the Dow Jones industrial average. “There is no known cause for the accident. The victim’s name has not yet been released.”
Hero shook her head to clear it, then put on her blinker to pass a white Jeep ahead of her; New Mexico plates. When she lifted her hand to flick on her blinker she found that her hand was still shaking.
She clicked on the radio, hit the scan button, then looked at the time. It was 2:37; not even rush hour. Maybe there was an accident up ahead. She felt guilty for having imagined causing one only a moment before.
Mostly the scan caught stations during commercial break. Once in a while, a riff of pop country or a top-forty countdown broke through. And now there was the white Jeep—she was somehow behind it again. Talk radio. A Jesus station. More talk radio…Didn’t anyone, Hero wondered, make noise anymore?
The white Jeep slowed, then stopped entirely. Behind it, Hero hit the brakes and came to a halt just as a commercial for a new auto supply store slid into a strain of stilted gospel. A few people, including the driver of the Jeep—a woman of roughly Hero’s own age—got out of their cars. They peered up the freeway, attempting to see what the trouble was up ahead. They conversed together on the side of the road, or else stood by themselves speaking urgently into their cell phones.
Hero should probably call Quinn, tell him she’d be late. Her phone was lying in the console, within easy reach, but she didn’t pick it up. She clicked off the car engine instead, disrupting an Emergency Alert test-tone mid-screech. Then she took her hands off the wheel and watched them tremble.
FOR THE MOST PART, everyone who’d actually seen it agreed that something had happened. Just what exactly was more difficult to say. At first, the reporters had come in droves, but then, just as quickly as they came, they went, and after the official report was printed in the Silver City Tribune, only the lunatics continued to talk about what had happened that night. Only a few weeks later, nearly everyone seemed to agree that nothing unusual had happened, or was ever likely to happen, in our little town.
But I remember. At one time it was very, very real. And it was headed toward us. Everyone who saw it stopped whatever it was they were doing and piled into their cars, just like Fernie and me. There was a great big line of us, our taillights streaming, heading together out of town. Out past the last gas station and Fulton Wash. It wasn’t a decision we made; it was more like an instinct. Like the way that your head turns without even meaning or wanting it to toward a highway accident as you’re driving past.
Out past town, the land gets hard and flat and there’s no mesquite even. It’s just dirt out there, some scrubby creosote, and nothing, not even a rock, for twenty-five miles till the flattop range. It’s true, the mountains look closer than that. It looks like you could just walk out and be at the base of them in something less than an hour. It’s funny how the eyes can play tricks on you: that the first known thing on the horizon, whatever it is and no matter the distance, seems close. But at night, there aren’t any mountains near or far and darkness is the closest thing. Interrupted only by stars—which, with nothing to compete with out there, are no longer points of light, like in town, but sort of leak out into the rest of the sky—you get this feeling that darkness is just a problem of distance, too. That if you could just see a little farther, it wouldn’t be darkness at all.
* * *
—
Fernie and I had been sitting out back of my mother’s place. It was just after dark, and Fernie had come by driving Marty’s car, a beat-up Impala with the left window blown. We were smoking cigarettes, leaned up against one another, and Fernie was saying something about how nuts it was that you wouldn’t know something and then once y
ou did you wondered how you never knew it before.
We were all set to get married that summer—had been engaged by then almost three years, ever since we were sixteen. Living at our parents’ places, she at hers, me at mine, and trying to scrape up enough money to leave town. She had learned a new word just that morning, she said, and seen it three times since. She asked me if I knew the word. I don’t remember now what it was, but whatever it was I was thinking seriously on it. It was one of those words that you thought at first you knew for sure, but then the more you thought about it the more you realized you didn’t know what it meant. I was just realizing this, and Fernie was just in the middle of saying, “I guarantee you, now that I’ve said it, you’ll see this word all over the place, I guarantee it”—when we saw the lights. At first, it was just this hazy glow on the horizon, but then it got brighter and took on more of a definite shape. Fernie said, what the hell, and we both sat up and looked at each other and then back at the sky. Then the light sort of flattened out, and spread itself toward us. It was almost as if—it’s weird to say it, even now—it was looking for us. There was a moment when it came so close that we actually ducked. Both of us. And closed our eyes, so we missed it: the actual moment when whatever it was passed right over our heads. I really can’t say what would have happened if we hadn’t have ducked. If the thing would have hit us or not. If it really was that close, I mean, or that bright, or that real. All I can say is that it felt that way, and that—when we saw it coming—we had no choice but to duck. It was our bodies that made the decision, not our minds. If it had been up to us, we would have continued to stare up at the sky, at that great big ball of light heading toward us, wondering what in the hell it was, what was happening to us. Even if it killed us. We would have just sat there, gaping, with our mouths half-open, like fools. That’s the way the mind works, don’t ask me why.
Then Fernie said, again, what the hell, and I shook my head and we turned and looked behind us where, in the distance, we could still see the light. It didn’t retreat as quickly as it came. It sort of lingered in the sky, and where before it had spread itself out in a single plane, now it seemed to be pressed into the shape of a ball, hovering just above Lucky’s Tavern at the far edge of town.
A siren wailed. Then another. Fernie and I looked at each other, then headed back to the house.
My mother was inside. She was sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper open. Doing a puzzle, I guess, or scanning the swap column for something we didn’t need. She didn’t appear to have noticed anything.
“We’re going out,” I said. I tried to make my voice sound light, but it came out high instead. I had this feeling in my throat like something was pressing on it from the inside and if I didn’t get moving fast, I was going to explode. But my mother still did not appear to notice anything, and I wonder if, after all, there was nothing unusual in how I sounded. If that was instead the way I always sounded on nights, otherwise just like that one, when Fernie and I got it into our heads to go out together and just drive around.
My mother said only, “All right. Be careful.” Without even really looking up, and just in the way that she always said it.
So Fernie and I got into Marty’s Impala and headed out toward Lucky’s. There were plenty of cars on the road by the time we got out there, and everyone was shouting out the window, “Do you see that? What the hell—?” and beeping their horns at cars that were going too slow because they had their heads hung out the windows, watching the sky. From time to time, a police car or a fire truck screamed past and all the cars pulled off the road and waited for them to go by. It must have taken us the better part of an hour to drive what otherwise would have taken no more than twenty minutes. By the time we got to Lucky’s a dozen or so cars were already pulled off the side of the road. The desert is as hard and dry out there as a parking lot, and one after another, cars pulled off the road behind us and everyone piled out and just stood there, or sat on their hoods, and looked up at the great big ball of light, which hovered almost directly above us in the sky. It’s sort of funny looking back to remember the lines of police and fire vehicles, and how the cops and the firemen when they got out there had nothing to do but what all the rest of us were doing. Once in a while you could hear the static buzz of a radio, but for a long time there was nothing to report. Fernie and I sat beside one another, perched on the hood of Marty’s Impala. From a distance, we saw the Honey twins who were in our same graduating class. Glenn raised his hand in a wave, which Fernie and I returned. For some reason we didn’t feel like talking to them, or anyone. Everyone knew everyone else, but people kept to themselves or stood in little groups of two or three, and were mostly silent. We were waiting for something. What, we didn’t know—but there was a sort of shared respect for whatever it was, this thing that was happening that we could have in no way anticipated and didn’t understand.
Then, slowly—so slowly at first we were not even sure if it was happening—the ball began to descend. Someone pointed and shouted and then there was a sort of murmur of confusion as people tried to decide if anything had happened, or if it was going to, and what they should do if it did. When it became clear that the object had, in fact, moved, and was heading slowly toward us, the policemen grabbed their loudspeakers and told everyone, “Back up, back up!”—but no one moved. The ball, though descending, still seemed far enough away that even our bodies remained riveted, and after a while the cops stopped speaking through the megaphones and we all watched, together, in perfect silence, as the strange ball of light made its first contact with Earth.
* * *
—
I had my heart set on marrying Fernie since the very first day I saw her, at the beginning of seventh grade. She and Marty had just moved from California and Marty had started Desert Trophy, a taxidermy business in the old labour hall off the highway. Sometimes, around town, I say to people who know: “Never dreamed, when I asked her to marry me, I’d get stuck with Marty instead.” I say it as if it’s a joke. The way Fernie would have said it, I imagine, if the same thing had happened to her. Sometimes that’s the only way to treat things. It makes the people around you more comfortable. They think to themselves: good thing he can laugh about it, at least; good thing he’s not taking it too hard.
After Fernie was gone—just a few months had passed, six months at most: we were still looking—my number came up. Just like that, it turned up in the first draft lottery of ’69. If Fernie had still been around we might have gone to Canada. We’d talked about it, anyway, but just in the way that you talk about a thing that will probably never happen—or at least you figure it won’t. It’s nice—a strange sort of comfort—to think that things would have been different if Fernie had still been around, but I wonder sometimes if it would have made much difference in the end, or if I would’ve come, in any case, to the same conclusion: it was just easier to go to the war.
* * *
—
We had nothing to do the rest of that summer after Fernie disappeared, Marty and me, except wait around for someone to phone us—Fernie, or somebody to tell us about Fernie. But they never did. I started helping Marty out around the shop, more or less to pass the time, and before long I had learned pretty much everything there was to know about stuffing dead birds and polishing antlers and sewing on glass eyes.
It’s good work. And genuinely scientific. A lot of people don’t know that. Or this: that if Charles Darwin hadn’t been a taxidermist as well as a scientist, the ship he sailed on to the Galapagos—where he made all his famous discoveries—never would have taken him onboard. Who knows? If Darwin hadn’t known how to slit open a dead bird then sew it up again, we still might think that we were moulded from clay, or fell out of the sky.
* * *
—
Later, I got a chance to look at the scatter plot of the December draft numbers; the birthdays ran along the vertical axis to the right and the lottery numbers ran horizontal, underneath. All of us, all the guys th
at got called up, were blue dots, kind of like stars scattered every which way across a blank sky. Some people complained at the time, and afterward. They said the lottery wasn’t fair—how they did it, you know. It wasn’t random enough. Too many November and December guys got called, they said—because of the way their numbers didn’t get mixed in properly, so were still just sitting there, right on top. But when I looked at the scatter plot—all those blue dots floating every which way—it looked pretty random to me. Also, my own birthday is in June, right in the middle of the year. At least from my perspective, you can’t really get any fairer than that.
I was the first person in my family to join the service since my great-great-grandfather had fought, and been killed, in the Battle of Antietam, during the Civil War. My father was born with a hole in his heart, which kept him out of the service back in ’42. He went to college instead, then came home and worked at the bank and resented every minute of it.
My mother would say, you ought to be grateful, but my father would have gladly turned in every one of his days spent in our small town for a single hour in the service—just enough time to get himself blown up in exactly the way my mother warned him he should be grateful he had not. Sometimes I wondered, if my father had not had a hole in his heart and had instead gone to the war, if he would have been as glad as he thought he would have been, or if, more probably, he would have resented getting killed just as much as he resented not getting killed. Some people are just like that.
Anyway, by the summer of 1967, my father was dead and not from any hole in his heart. He had been killed in a car accident, driving home from work one day—a distance of six miles. My mother hardly spoke or left the house after that, except to go to bingo or to church.
In a way, now that I think about it, it was because of my father—how much he regretted not getting himself killed in the Second World War—that I didn’t sign up right away to fight in Vietnam, like nearly everyone else I knew. I didn’t want to want anything that my father wanted—but then I didn’t want what he didn’t want either. So where did that leave me? More than anything else, though, it just didn’t seem to make much sense to me, going all the way over to the other side of the world when there were girls like Fernie to marry back home. If my father had still been around, I wonder if he would have given me hell for not joining, and I wonder if that would have made me more likely to join, or less. But my father never mentioned it, even when he still could have. As far as he was concerned, there was only one war, and that was the one in which he should have got himself killed.
Tiger, Tiger Page 5
