A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 13

  The following Tuesday afternoon, an hour after school let out, I was standing up on Devil’s Table, admiring the view with the other members of Father MacGill’s team. For the first time since our preliminary survey of the territory, all the team members were present, driven to the summit in Patty Milano’s Chevy Suburban. It was Patty’s day off, which was why we had the pleasure of her talky, down-to-earth company; but I considered Father MacGill’s summoning all the rest of us a promising sign, and I suspected that after a perfunctory sweep he was going to suggest that, in view of the complete absence of results, it might be time to cut the patrols back to every other day, or even to eliminate them altogether.

  Patty had turned the wheel over to Lu as soon as she’d picked us up, so she could devote herself entirely to doting on Albert. Despite the winter sunshine it was very cold up on the plateau, and Patty had pulled Albert’s blue ski cap down to his eyebrows. Parnell, Margaret Quitclaim, and Father MacGill, looking awkward in the pressed jeans and down parka he’d adopted for this secular outing, made up the rest of the squadron. Parnell, in his usual hunting jacket and baggy army surplus pants, had Margaret gallantly on his arm, which appeared to compensate him somewhat for the constraints imposed on his normal mode of expression by the presence of Father MacGill. Except for Patty, who was exhorting Albert to marvel at the vast panorama, nobody said much.

  Father MacGill turned away from the vista to scan back over the gentle rise of Devil’s Table. “Let’s just spread out in a line and work our way across,” he said. “That way, if there’s anything to see up here, we shouldn’t miss it. Let’s give it a good shot. Don’t fall in any fissures,” he added jocularly.

  “Just take it slow,” grumbled Parnell. “My knees are like a couple of f. . . of rusty hinges. I can’t travel off road any more like you young studs.” Margaret Quitclaim smiled.

  We fanned out into a line with about 10 yards between us and started plowing slowly through the sage. Despite the cold and the wind, I thought it was a fine afternoon to be strolling in the sunshine in a beautiful place with people I liked. We walked slowly through the thickening afternoon light, as usual not really knowing what we were looking for. By now probably none of us cared very much. I could hear Patty murmuring something to Albert as she cradled his head with one hand, and Parnell sighing and cursing under his breath while Margaret turned her head this way and that to take the fresh breeze on alternate cheeks. Lu was at my end of the line, and Father MacGill, upright and serious, at the other. We saw nothing but gray-green sage mixed with the deeper green rabbit brush, the tops of the clusters all at chest height. The bushes were evenly spaced due to their antipathy for each other. Between them the gray volcanic sand was dimpled faintly by the wind and laced with the reddish filaments of dormant wildflowers waiting for May.

  After a hundred yards or so Parnell and Margaret, in the center of the line, halted, Parnell looking down while Margaret tilted her head as though listening. The rest of us closed in to join them at the lip of the fissure. Near the surface it was clearly an erosional form: we could see where running water had chewed and undercut chunks out of the rim, as if it were a riverbank. But the floor of the narrow trench sloped downward, cut into solid rock in a winding trace toward the north. It deepened rapidly, and the low-angle afternoon light revealed only faintly the ghostly patches of white clinging to the walls. These were mineral deposits, part of the evidence the geologists liked to cite that the fissures had been born under water. The bottom of the trench, dozens of feet below us, was nearly lost in the gloom.

  We spread out again into our line and kept walking, on either side of the narrow split. The air was getting chillier as the sun lowered toward the mountains. Patty suddenly stopped whispering to Albert and sang out, “Look at this!” We all converged on her and stopped, looking around. “Don’t you see it?” she said. The rest of us looked at each other.

  “No,” said Father MacGill. “What are you looking at?” Patty was staring keenly out over the tops of the sage.

  “You’re all too tall!” she exclaimed. “Squat down a little bit.” We all lowered ourselves slightly and followed her gaze over the sage, except for Parnell, who only continued his muttering. From the lower angle it was quite clear: the long light delineated a faint but distinct pattern in the tops of the sage clusters ahead of us, a circular region about 30 feet across in which all the clumps seemed to have been clipped at the same height, a few inches below their neighbors outside the magic circle.

  “What is it?” Margaret asked, impatient to hear the news.

  “It’s like one of those crop circles,” said Lu. The rest of us examined the pattern for a minute, then walked forward slowly, a little reluctant to cross the boundary of the phenomenon. Only Patty stayed behind, with a perhaps exaggerated concern for Albert’s safety. From inside the ring the effect was almost invisible, and there was nothing to be seen on the ground – no marks, no bits of cut-off sage, no footprints of human or animal or alien, no indication of what might have caused the odd leveling. If anything, I thought, there was a suspicious absence of the dimpling we’d seen on the rest of the desert floor.

  “How wonderful!” Margaret exclaimed.

  “Simon, look at these leaves for me, will you? I can’t see shit in this light.” Parnell was apparently surprised enough to have forgotten Father MacGill’s presence. I peered closely at the nearest cluster of sage. Nearly all the stems were untouched; but any that had stuck up above the magic height, roughly four feet, had been neatly sheared off.

  “Whattya think, Al?” Patty was saying, in her singsong baby voice, jouncing Albert up and down, “Whattya think? Was it ET, or just the Feds with their top secret weed whackers? I don’t know, Simon,” she added, with uncharacteristic sarcasm, “doesn’t look exactly like a meteor trail.”

  “Well, this would seem to lend some credence to our anonymous physicist’s story,” said Father MacGill. As he spoke, the last sliver of the sun dropped below the mountains, and with the severing of its long rays the sheared circle immediately vanished.

  “Personally,” I said, “I’m amazed that somebody would go to this much trouble.”

  “You think it’s just a prank?” Father MacGill asked.

  “Well, isn’t it exactly what you’d expect if you’d read that posting on the website? It seems a little too perfect to be true. And shouldn’t it at least have gotten a little more ragged in the last couple of weeks since she reported it?”

  “But do you really think someone would come all the way out here and do all this just to fool us?” Lu protested. “We might not even have seen it! And they would have had to clean everything up, too, not just cut it. That would have been a lot of work. There’s not a sign of anything on the ground.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’s too clean. What would just cut off the tops of all the sage and not leave any other sign? And also stop it from growing.” Everybody looked at the ground again, but it was now too dark to see much. It was also much colder.

  “Well, it’s quite marvelous, however it happened,” enthused Margaret. “Whoever did it has a sort of alien sensibility, don’t you think, even if he’s human. And everything you’ve said could be used to argue just the opposite, Simon.” She quoted me, but with a marveling tone that totally reversed my meaning: “What would just cut all the tops off the sage and not leave any sign? And stop it from growing, too!”

  “I think we’d better start back,” said Father MacGill. “We’re not going to see any more tonight. How are we going to find this place again?” We all looked around, trying to fix the spot in our minds. It was between two of the fissures, but there was a whole complex of fissures up here, and I had my doubts that we’d be able to find our way back to these two, let alone to this exact spot, given how subtle the effect had been. I doubted that it would show up at all except in the early morning and late evening. I was impressed by the sophistication of the effort. No trampling or hacking of vegetation for t
hese guys. As Lu had pointed out, how could they even assume anyone would find it? And where were their tracks? Still, there was no doubt in my mind that the circle had been created by human beings. There were certainly a lot of tracks around it now, I realized. In our surprise we’d neglected to follow good forensic practice.

  Father MacGill led the way back toward the Suburban. Nobody spoke except Patty, who kept murmuring “Albert, Albert,” in her baby voice. “Little green men, Albert. Little green bureaucrats.” Father MacGill suddenly stopped and held up his hand. “Do you hear that?” he said. Patty stopped murmuring, and we all halted obediently to listen. There was the breath of the cold wind, like a light hand barely rumpling the coarse fur of the desert. But behind that was something else. Or maybe there was something else: a thin, silvery tinkling, just on the border of nothingness. We all stood with our mouths open, listening. “You hear it?” asked Father MacGill again. Albert began to coo insistently, annoyed that Patty had stopped talking to him, and the fairy sound, if it existed at all, was lost in his vocalizations.

  We gave up and started walking again. The desert was rapidly refunding its meager collection of daytime warmth to the black sky, and it was a relief to bundle back into the Suburban.

  Parnell was uncharacteristically silent. “Could you hear anything?” I asked him, as we bounced along the dirt road back toward the highway.

  “Not really. But I keep telling you my ears aren’t worth much any more.”

  “But you saw the crop circle, or whatever it was.”

  “Yeah.” He took off his baseball cap and rubbed his bristly hair with one giant hand. “That could just be somebody jerking off with a hedge clipper. Pardon my Swahili, Reverend. But maybe not. Maybe I’m about to learn something new, even in my advanced state of decay.” He settled the hat carefully back on his head, pulling the brim down low over his eyes. “I’m not sure what the hell it could mean to me, anyway. If Cleopatra landed out there in the goddamn Goodyear blimp I’d still have to clean out my damn basement before I’m overwhelmed by dementia. If I haven’t already been.”

  “Guess I better wear my collar next time,” said Father MacGill, with an uneasy chuckle. “I’m going to post this on the website, unless somebody else wants to do it. And somebody should probably call Matt and give him a detailed description. Whatever caused that circle, he’ll want to know about it. And the weird tinkling noise. That was very strange.”

  “Yeah, he’ll be all over it,” I said. So near, and yet so far, I was thinking. Some fool had poked through the crust of boredom that had been gradually thickening over the whole misbegotten project, and now it was all going to start bubbling up again. “I’ll give him a call,” I said. Thinking I might at least be able to plant a few cautionary sprouts among the wild weeds of his enthusiasm.

  “Isn’t it wonderful? The absolute inexhaustibility of the phenomena the world has to show us!” said Margaret, smiling contentedly in the glow of her personal darkness. She punched Parnell happily on the shoulder. He grunted, while the Suburban bounced and lurched over the rutted road.