Chapter 8
At 3:30 Matt was waiting for me at the front entrance in his cherry red 4-wheel drive pickup. A few ranch kids were boarding the school bus that would creep along the dusty roads depositing them at their widely dispersed mailboxes out in the wasteland; otherwise the place was already deserted. It didn’t take long for Mildred High’s couple of hundred kids to clear off in the afternoons. I made Matt wait while I went to check on Lu. She already had the basketballers running drills, their yells and the squeaks of their sneakers echoing off the concrete walls of the gym. She gave me a distracted peck on the cheek and waved toward Albert, who was propped up on a folding chair in his backpack, jerking all four limbs spasmodically in imitation of the basketball players. “Can you keep him this afternoon?” I asked her. “Matt wants to drag me up to Devil’s Table to look for extraterrestrials.” She clucked in annoyance, but nodded. I noticed that Arnold Barns was missing. Arnold had rolled his ankle in a game just before winter break, landing on someone’s foot on one of those rare occasions when he’d forgotten himself enough to jump for a rebound, so he hadn’t been practicing with the team.
“His ankle’s still sore,” Lu told me. “Maybe. You never really know about Arnold. AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE RUNNING THE FLOOR?” she yelled at one of the kids, who she thought was smiling too much. “WELL THEN, RUN THE DAMN FLOOR!” She was sensitive about her position as a woman coaching a boy’s team, and sometimes took a harder line than she needed to, I thought. Her teams won games, however. I slunk away.
The highway arrowed southward, eschewing the sensuous curves of the West Rapid River, which followed at a more leisurely pace to our left. I got my usual lift from the long afternoon light that sparked the riffles of the river and lit up the sage in a poignant green gold. What appeared to be the same cumulus I’d seen at lunch were stacked up above the Ash Mountains, only now their color was richer and older. I’m just a country boy from Brooklyn, and I have to admit that once I got over the initial anxiety of solitude and space I began to love this place, with its huge sky and its distances and clean horizons unmarked by humanity. I’ve even thanked Lu once or twice for dragging me out here from the city. She doesn’t seem very surprised by my change of heart. For someone like her, who likes to hike out into the desert and collect wildflowers when she’s not making cheese sandwiches at the PetroMall, it’s paradise.
Matt, too, was in a fine mood as he barreled down the highway jabbering about the Christmas Eve lights. “The thing that intrigues me,” he said, “is that there are still absolutely no reports from urban areas.”
“So what does that suggest,” I asked him, “other than that nobody in the city ever looks up? Or if they did, they’d think it was just a jet landing.”
Matt slowed the truck and wheeled into the two ruts that wound their way up the glacial moraine to Parnell’s house, which was perched at the top of the ridge, surrounded by old aspens, and had a stunning view out over the desert. “Keep talking, Houba. I don’t think you’re going to be able to reason this one away. There’s too much evidence piling up.” Nothing I’d heard struck me as being solid evidence of much of anything, not to mention that I knew at least one major piece of evidence was baloney. But I kept my mouth shut.
When we arrived Parnell was hiking painfully toward the house from his rundown outbuilding, carrying a large green circuit board in each hand. He turned to watch as we pulled up and stepped down from the truck, dramatically engulfed by the dust of our arrival. Two enormous black canines insulted us in thunderous voices from a safe distance, their efforts to appear menacing undercut by wagging tails.
Parnell had begun to shed muscle mass in the last couple of years, which had made all his clothes appear wrinkled and baggy. He was wearing faded jeans and a stained shooting jacket, its ammunition pockets stuffed, I knew, with dog treats. On his feet were work boots with their steel toes whimsically painted a bright yellow, and on his head a black beret pulled down low over his thick glasses, so that all I could see of his face was the lower rim of his spectacles and a white beard.
“All right, what are you hoarding now? ” Matt said, approaching the old man with a slight swagger. Matt, who had been intimidated by Parnell’s manic energy and assaultive pedagogy in earlier times when they were teaching together, had adopted a somewhat patronizing air toward him after he’d left the school, removed to his hilltop, and begun to shrink. It was like seeing Moby Dick on a pension, he had once told me: Parnell still carried a kind of shimmer of danger around him, but you knew at least he wasn’t going to be taking anyone down to the dark ribcage of the world with him any more.
“Oh, you know, Matt.” Parnell was smiling faintly. He had a soft spot for Matt, whom he regarded as a kindred, if paler, spirit and his only hope for the project of keeping Mildred High School permanently tilted. “I thought I’d salvage some of the transistors off these things. I’m trying to set up an alarm system that’ll tell me when the mail gets here. With my damn knees I don’t want to have to make the hike down there more than I have to. But you don’t want to hear about that,” he said, turning toward the house. “Come in and sit down while I complete my preparations.”
We went in and sat in the dim living room while Parnell lurched around from the study to the kitchen to the back porch, performing mysterious chores with a resigned deliberation. “I’m so goddamn slow now,” he said, “I feel like a melting glacier. You gentlemen will have to pardon the delay.”
Parnell’s friends had all started worrying about him once he’d retired, a couple of years after I arrived in Mildred. His wife of nearly 50 years had died suddenly a few months later, leaving him alone in the old house with no one to mediate between his quirks and the outside world or check his lust for the useless technological artifacts with which he crammed his basement. The decor of the house was frozen like a stopped clock in the state it had been in when Millie died. A weaver, a painter, a seamstress, and a mover and shaker in the attenuated arts scene of Tuff County, Millie had kept the place in a constant state of flux. Tapestries, paintings, and exotic plants had appeared and disappeared on a monthly basis, complementing frequent repaintings of the walls both inside and outside, arrivals and departures of vintage furniture, and window treatments in perpetual rotation. Hers was a sunny, breezy habitat constantly evolving above Parnell’s dense and brooding basement in the same way the biosphere flits above the more slowly churning bowels of the planet. But the pictures hadn’t been changed for years now, and their frames were slightly tilted; Millie’s lush plants had all turned to withered stalks, and the tapestries and curtains were faded. After her death Parnell had hired a tiny, smiling immigrant lady from Arnold Barns’s neighborhood, with whom he communicated only in sign language, to vacuum and dust and clean the bathrooms periodically, so the place wasn’t dirty. But the basement squalor had begun to ooze into the upper regions of the house like a sort of decomposing technoplasm. A dusty tickertape machine shared the coffee table with unaligned stacks of magazines, floppy disks, half-empty coffee mugs, and open boxes of shotgun shells. Disemboweled electronic appliances crouched in the corners of the room, lifting gnarly, supplicating wires toward the ceiling. The couch on which Parnell took his afternoon naps bore the deep depressions of his still massive body, and a white afghan Millie had knitted was rumpled carelessly on the leather cushions.
After a few minutes of what appeared to be aimless puttering, Parnell pronounced himself ready. Matt summoned the two dogs into the back of the pickup, and Parnell hoisted himself, cursing, into the passenger seat. “Somebody should put me out of my misery,” he said, not bothering to fasten his seatbelt. I, as the smallest of the group, had to squeeze myself into one of the inadequate little jumpseats in back.
Matt steered us down Parnell’s winding dirt road and out onto the highway, with the dogs sliding and scrabbling happily in the back. The winter sun was already low, and the serrated shadow of the mountains stretched far out onto the desert. Matt turned off on another dirt t
rack that led into the sage. About a half mile from the highway we splashed across the wide but shallow West Rapid and started up the long slope toward Devil’s Table. Already in the evening shadow of the mountains, the clear, dark water of the river frolicked over a bed of smooth pebbles, unaware that its destination was nothing more exciting than the silent and dead Random Lake, some 50 miles farther out in the desert, where it would briefly be employed in floating the showy powerboats of would-be heavy rollers from towns like Burly and Hathwell, before evaporating and blowing away into Nevada.
Matt seemed to have some destination in mind, as he turned or forged straight ahead without hesitation at the nameless dusty junctions we encountered. “What are we looking for?” I yelled, over the rumbling of extra-wide tires.
“I’m not sure,” he yelled back. “If we’re lucky, we might find that circle the physicist lady mentioned, where the thing landed. Several people have also seen lights moving around out here the last few nights, in different places. We just want to stay open to anything a little out of the ordinary. Tracks, or disturbances in the vegetation, whatever.”
“Couldn’t that just be teenagers looking for a place to get laid?” I asked him.
“Simon! How could you,” said Parnell. I looked out through the tiny rear window. The truck bounced and swayed, its motion producing in the corner of my eye an odd sliding impression, as if the clumps of sage, motionless when I looked at them, were furtively shifting after we’d passed by.
We reached the broad, nearly level summit of Devil’s Table and continued for another minute or two before Matt pulled up abruptly into one of the innumerable little tracks that set off purposefully into the desert, only to fade out after a few tens of yards. “Let’s stop here and look around,” he said, shutting off the engine and reaching under the seat to pull out a supersized black flashlight, the kind that doubles as carjacking protection. We got out and stood, with Parnell cursing and bending forward a little at the hips. The dogs peered over the edge of the truck and whined, anxious to be let out. “Shut up, you foolish beasts,” Parnell said.
It occurred to me that I didn’t really care what we were looking for out here. I always enjoyed just being at the center of this big silence, flawed though it was by the tinnitus I’d acquired in the New York subway system – a faint constant ringing as of gnat-sized bells in my ears. The total absence of motion always struck me: the black sawtooth of the mountains to the west, the sagebrush sloping gently downward and away to the south and east and then back up, and beyond that smoothness the slight roughness of more distant mountains crouching at the far edge of the earth. Nothing changed but the light. Below the evening oranges and pinks to the east a shallow blue-gray curve was gradually lifting above the horizon. It was the earth’s shadow on the atmosphere, Matt the scientist had once told me – a piece of information that had increased my sense of being perched on the arching back of a huge, ancient animal that could hardly be bothered even to notice the busy scratchings of humanity on its skin. Parnell, now that he’d stopped cursing about his aching knees, was staring at the sky and the mountains with his lips pursed up in a sort of pout. I wondered if people who had lived in this kind of country all their lives saw it in anything like the same terms I did. It wasn’t clear what Parnell was thinking, but I was sure he wasn’t looking for traces of alien activity. I fancied his thoughts might be not dissimilar to mine, or at least to what mine would be once my prostate started seriously misbehaving.
Seeing nothing but the motionless desert, we got eventually back in the truck and crept to a few more dusty junctions, getting out briefly at each to search in vain for we knew not what.
“You better come up with something pretty soon, Matawan,” said Parnell. “My knees can’t take this constant pole-vaulting in and out of the truck.”
Matt just smiled. “If it’s there, it’s there. You can’t push these things.” But he perked up at what would have to be our final stop. The sun had dropped behind the hills, although the sky was still light. It was suddenly quite cold.
“Do you see movement out there?” Matt asked. He was scanning the sagebrush a couple of hundred yards east of us. I looked. It did seem that in the tops of the vegetation there was a sort of refusal to stay put, as though it were slightly out of focus. I looked up at the sky, then back down, turning my head in a different direction, and it seemed to me that the movement continued. It was probably a hangover from all that jouncing on the pitted and bouldered road, or maybe just a trick of the light.
“My eyes are still rolling around from your driving,” I said. “Otherwise I don’t see anything. Just a nice desert evening.”
“Something’s funny,” he said. “Listen.”
“I don’t see anything,” said Parnell. “I don’t hear anything either, but my ears are so bad at this point I wouldn’t notice if a 747 came through right on the deck. You hear anything, Simon?”
I listened, but all I could hear was the ringing of my tinnitus, foregrounded by the desert silence.
The dogs did not agree with us, however. They had started whining and bucking in the back of the truck. One of them even managed to hoist its big black carcass over the edge and leap to the ground. It hit the desert floor running, making for the point Matt had been staring at. Matt ran to the rear of the truck and opened the tailgate to let the less athletic canine out. It immediately took off after its companion, followed by Matt himself. The dogs were below the level of the sage and invisible, but Parnell and I could follow their progress by their growling and by watching Matt’s speeding upper body. Curious in spite of myself, I took off after them at a trot. Parnell limped along behind me, cursing.
I caught up with Matt about a hundred yards out, where he’d stopped, looking after the vanished dogs.
“Whatever it was is long gone by now,” he said. He knelt down and examined the ground closely with the flashlight. It was certainly covered with small depressions of some kind, but the gritty nature of the volcanic sands made it impossible to tell anything about them other than their size. They could have been the tracks of horses, large dogs, small barefoot humans, or three-legged alien pod-people. Or just some wind-inspired dimpling of the desert pavement.
“The goddamn dogs,” said Parnell, who’d finally caught up with us. “Damn things’ve got feet the size of cowflaps. You’re not going to find anything in that mess.” He whistled for them, and after a few seconds we heard the thundering of heavy paws approaching. The two giant black figures burst from the scrub and began prancing around us, shaking sage debris out of their shaggy fur. They lay down when Parnell ordered them to, grinning and loose-tongued, their front paws smugly crossed.
“Look at these. They’re a lot smaller.” Matt was still studying the sand.
“Yup. Coyote,” said Parnell. “That’s why they got all cranked up. Or maybe even a bunny rabbit.”
“Maybe,” said Matt. He stood up. “There was something funny happening along the top of the sage. Some kind of shimmering. Didn’t you see it?”
“Shit, Matt, I told you I can’t see anything. I get that shimmering every time I read the newspaper. You got to remember who you’re dealing with here. I’m going to be paying for this little expedition for weeks. I should bill you two for my Vicodin.”
Matt was looking closely at some sage leaves. Then he directed the light outward along the tops of the clusters, which all grew to almost exactly the same height, as if by some sagebrush community compact. It seemed to me I did detect a very slight shimmering, or crawling effect, along the path of the light, but if I’d been out there on my own I’d have thought nothing of it – just some quirk of the human optical apparatus. How could we be sure now, with Matt practically willing us to see something strange?
He turned off the flashlight. The darkness leapt forward, then retreated slowly as our eyes adjusted. “Look at that,” he said. I strained my eyes into the darkness. A pale luminosity seemed to be sketching the tops of the sage clumps. In a few places it thi
ckened and broadened into faint, pulsing spherical shapes. Or maybe it did. I turned to look in a different direction, and saw the same thing. It was an interesting effect. There was also a new sound, a very faint silvery tinkling. I was hoping Matt wouldn’t mention that, since I couldn’t really be sure it wasn’t just the usual ringing in my ears. I mentally cursed him for putting me in a susceptible state. “You hear it?” he said. “It’s like little bells.” As we watched, barely breathing through our mouths, the glow gradually faded, along with the cloudy shapes, and the tinkling died out, or moved away.
We watched and listened for a while longer, but the blackness was now complete, except for the faint remaining glow in the sky, and the only sound was the panting and whining of the dogs at our feet. A cold breeze lifted briefly around us and then died out. Without saying a word, Matt switched the light back on and strode through the sagebrush back toward the truck. Parnell and I followed him, moving more carefully without the light. I was glad he hadn’t decided we needed to pursue whatever it was out into the desert.
He was waiting at the tailgate when we reached the road. “Come on you featherbrains, get back in there,” Parnell told the dogs. They jumped in, and Matt closed up the tailgate.
“What do you think now, Houba?” he said.
“Well, it was something interesting, wasn’t it,” I reluctantly admitted.
“Yeah, I guess it was,” he agreed, with a sarcastic glance. “Did you see it, Parnell?”
Parnell sighed. “I can never tell any more what’s real and what’s just my own bloody synapses firing.”
I said, “The light, I don’t know. It could have been just something our eyes were doing. The flashlight or whatever. But there did seem to be some kind of sound.” I was trying to be open-minded about the whole thing.
“I can still hear it,” Matt said. But the dogs were huffing and puffing, and who knows what our brains are doing now, I thought. We were listening so hard. For me, the fluffy lights and the silvery tinkling were already evaporating. I wouldn’t have testified to them in any court.
Matt started the truck, backed us out onto the road, turned around, and started at a leisurely pace back the way we’d come. “I’m going to call a town meeting about this,” he said. “Enough of this freelancing – we need to have an organized response. The website is a good start, but we’ve got to get people watching regularly and reporting what they see. And hear.”
Looking out into the headlights’ narrow tunnel, and with the steady rumble of the wheels over the rocky road, I found that I already couldn’t believe any of it. Matt had just worked me up into a state of hypersensitivity to match his own. Parnell was silent, staring straight ahead. I looked at his profile, wondering if he was thinking about anything but the ache in his knees. “Your opinion, Mr. Parnell?” I said.
“I think the human animal is a stupendous creation,” he said. “But whoever invented the goddamn knee joint should be drawn and quartered.”
We rolled through the shallow black river again, very slowly, and then on to the highway, where Matt floored it and started unreeling his plans for meetings, e-mails, websites, databases, flyers, and town criers. I was watching the side of the road ahead for eyes gleaming in the headlights and cringing at the thought of what would happen to any jackrabbit or coyote that strayed into our path.
“Why are you getting so hot about all this?” I yelled to Matt, hoping he’d slow down if I started an argument. “What’d we really see out there? Maybe an odd effect of the light. And maybe we heard something.”
“Houba, what the hell is wrong with you? You were there. You saw and heard the same things I did. There’s absolutely no doubt there’s something going on that’s outside our normal experience. I’m damn well going to find out what it is!”
“Is your normal experience inadequate in some way?” I said stubbornly. “Why don’t you take a trip to Madagascar or something? Why do you have to make this into something supernatural, or alien, or whatever?”
“Why are you so unwilling to entertain any possibilities that haven’t entered your pitiful tunnel vision before? What are you afraid of? This could be the biggest event of our lifetimes, and all you can think about is lunch.”
“Dinner,” said Parnell. “And Motrin.” Matt braked abruptly as the headlights illuminated a solitary figure limping along the shoulder of the highway with his hands in his pockets. It was Arnold Barns, walking home, rather late I thought. I squeezed out from behind Parnell and climbed in the back of the truck with the dogs, to keep Arnold company. He slumped in one corner, nonchalantly chewing his gum, but I could tell he was glad to get a ride the rest of the way. Mildred, despite its perch on the edge of the desert, is well over a mile up, and the winter nights are nippy.
“What are you doing out here so long after school? And how’s the ankle?” I yelled over the roar of the highway wind. I always tried to be as cool and hip as possible with Arnold, partly because I feared the awkward meat cleaver of his wit, which he hadn’t quite learned to control, but also because I admired his brain, sympathized with his plight, and genuinely would have liked to help him out a little bit. I too had been a high school misfit – in my case a poetry lover who was cut from the basketball team every year – and I’d hoped that would give us a point of contact. But I’d found him a difficult person to get close to, even as basketball coach, before I got eased out by my wife.
“The ankle’s OK,” he said. “A little sore.” I was sure I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him on that topic, so I switched to the Christmas Eve lights.
“What do you really think?” I asked him, man to man.
“Meteors,” he said, “most likely. But why spoil it for everyone? They’re having a great time running around looking for Martians and the CIA.”
“What about your star shit theory?”
He was silent for a few seconds. “Well, what’s a meteor?” he finally asked. “You ever seen one? They look like rocky little cosmic turds, so why not? Anyway, I like the symbolism. Where there’s shit there’s life. And vice-versa.” He turned around to pound on the cab window, motioning Matt to stop.
He wouldn’t let us drive him up the hill to the junky trailer park. “There’s no place to turn around up there,” he told us, and we pretended to agree. We didn’t really want to see his habitat any more than he wanted us to see it. What would we have said to him, before turning around to drive back down to our warm, orderly lives?
As we continued toward Parnell’s place I wondered why Arnold had ignored my question about his after-school activities. Maybe he’d just been hanging out at Stirling’s, eating strawberry-rhubarb pie with Brad Pentane, who was attracted to Arnold’s smoky flame like a naive blond moth. For a slacker, though, Arnold carried around an unusual aura of ceaseless mental activity, even when in repose. His offhand dismissal of the whole controversy had immediately sparked my suspicions. In fact, I was secretly hoping that the town’s ferment would inspire him to some interesting activity.
The dogs started barking excitedly as we bounced up the hill toward the house. “Why the hell do they have to bark when they get home?” Parnell said. “They’re supposed to bark when somebody else comes up the road, or when they sense criminal activity. Or aliens.” Matt’s jaw tightened, but he maintained a stubborn silence. He wheeled around under the aspens at the head of the drive so Parnell could get out close to his front door.
“All right, men. I’m keeping my powder dry. I’ll send up a flare when I make contact with the enemy.” He went to the back of the truck and released the dogs, who immediately ran baying into the darkness. I squeezed out of the back seat and climbed into the front. In the peripheral glow of the headlights we watched Parnell limp toward the house and climb the stone steps, using his huge hands on his thighs for extra lift, then push the door open. He paused in the doorway, bracing himself on the jamb with both hands, then launched himself into the dark interior and vanished. Matt and I waited a few seconds in silence, unt
il a faint, inadequate glow appeared from inside. Then he put the truck in gear and eased it into motion, heading back down the drive.
I had moments of feeling somewhat smug, as we drove back toward town, that Parnell had seemed to be taking much the same attitude as I was toward Matt’s alien lights and nocturnal effulgences. But I also kept seeing the vision of his broad, slumped back disappearing painfully into the black interior of the empty house, and I had to admit that, much as I wanted his support, Parnell wasn’t on anybody’s side in this, and probably didn’t even recognize that there were sides to be on. He was on his own trip, moving deliberately away from anything as ephemeral as UFOs or tinkling bells on the desert; away from deserts in fact, and from towns, dogs, and diners, especially from controversy of all kinds, even from human attachments. If I’d been living alone in that haunted house of his, I’d probably have turned on every light in the place. But that one feeble beam seemed to be enough for Parnell. I wondered if he even went to bed any more, or just flopped on the couch and pulled Millie’s afghan over him. Achilles in retirement, I thought. What happens when the gods proffer the glory bargain but then yank it back, like a major league changeup, leaving you falling all over yourself, an old man? I knew that Parnell had been, in addition to a wild-ass science teacher, a paratrooper, gun-runner, part-time commando, undercover cop, and demolition-derby driver. He’d done everything he could to guarantee himself a glorious flameout at an early age, and yet here he was, rattling into extinction like any other tattered old windowshade. It didn’t seem right.
“He’s really fading,” I said to Matt, trying to get onto a subject we wouldn’t have to clash over.
“Why the hell are you being such an asshole about this, Simon?” he burst out. “I generally give your take on things a lot of weight, but this time you’re just digging yourself a bomb shelter and pulling the dirt over your head. Everybody in the damn town, hell, in the whole Eastern Sierra, knows there’s something happening here, even if they don’t know what yet. And then there’s Simon Houba, Dr. No.”
“Come on, man,” I protested, getting heated up in spite of myself. “It’s the rest of you who are going off the deep end, imagining aliens, bogeymen, whatever. You’ve taken that one thing, those lights, which I admit were a little unusual, and blown it up into the war of the worlds. Who’s the asshole?” He didn’t answer, and I tried to speak in a more conciliatory tone.
“Why is everybody focusing on this thing, which has absolutely no solid evidence behind it? There’s much more serious and mysterious stuff going on all around us all the time that you’re all ignoring. The way Parnell’s fading out, for example. And Janet Blythe. No one seems very exercised about that.” I thought it best not to mention Mervyn.
“Well I know you have a special interest in her,” he said, as we rounded the curve south of Mildred and slowed for the local streets.
“She’s dying,” I said, filing away the implication in his tone for later processing. “I think Lu and I are the only people who’ve even visited her, for god’s sake.”
“I’ve been down there a couple of times. Or once anyway,” he said, having the decency to sound defensive. “I’ve just been really busy with this stuff.”
“Yeah, you and everybody else. Your anonymous cowgirl physicist. Meanwhile, there are real people around, with real problems.”
He turned left off Main Street, and then right onto my block. “I’m disappointed in you, Simon,” he said. “Your thinking has hardened in an unbecoming manner.” He stopped in front of our dark house to let me out. “I’m going to call a town meeting. I hope you’ll at least be there to hear what the rest of the town thinks, and to be involved in the planning for the next step. You don’t want to hunker down and isolate yourself in an untenable position.” He drove off without waiting for my answer.
A Burned-Over District Page 8
