A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 14

  Father MacGill must have rushed home to the rectory and posted his team’s sighting immediately, because Matt called, practically jumping up and down, almost before we’d finished tucking Mervyn into his bed of pain.

  “Well, yes, there’s definitely some kind of strange crop ring or whatever in the sagebrush up on Devil’s Table,” I told him, trying to sound casual. “It’s almost invisible, but it’s there all right. You’re only going to see it when the sun is at just the right angle. I think Patty had it right, though: someone’s been out there with a weed whacker or something.”

  “Of course, Simon. I’m glad you were there,” he said, drooling irony. “And did you hear anything?”

  “Maybe,” I reluctantly admitted. “Possibly that kind of tinkling sound we heard when we were out with Parnell and the dogs. It was very very faint, if it was there at all. And the wind was blowing. And Albert was doing his baby thing.”

  “But you heard it!” he crowed. “Was it a kind of meteor noise?”

  “Matt!” I was too horrified by his euphoria to be annoyed by his sarcasm. “You gotta chill, man. You’re going to get yourself in so deep you’ll never get out. I’m telling you, someone’s playing games with us. With you, particularly.”

  “Come on Simon,” he said, “there’s too much smoke here for there not to be a fire of some kind. Anyway, I’ve got to call some other people now.” He hung up.

  “Can’t you just wait and find out what’s going to happen?” Lu asked me, once we were in bed. “Why do you have to fight everything so hard?” I felt as though I’d kicked over a bucket of gasoline that was now streaming along toward a smoldering cigarette butt, like in a bad movie. But how could I tell her that? I was imprisoned by my own folly. She was silent for a long time, but I knew she was praying, and not asleep.

  “What are you asking for tonight?” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  “Patience,” she laughed, not even flaring up at my tone. There are times when I wish she were less virtuous. “Patience for you, to deal with what you prefer to think is a mass psychosis. And patience for me, to deal with you.”

  The high school kids, who like me seemed to be more interested in the way their adults were behaving than in any actual supernatural phenomenon, were all agog the next day. Of course, by the time I saw the major incendiaries, like Arnold Barns and Brad Pentane, Matt had already had a chance to pump them up in his AP Bio class.

  “Whattya think, Mr. Houba? You were there, I heard. You saw the whole thing! You still think those things were meteors?” Brad Pentane’s baseball cap was angled steeply to one side, signaling extreme agitation. Arnold watched me silently.

  “The most likely explanation is still some meatball out there with a pair of hedge clippers,” I told Brad. “That’s the problem with this website thing: everybody sees everyone else’s postings. The soil is all plowed for anyone to plant any kind of crazy seeds they want to. They can tailor the whole thing to fit everyone else’s paranoia. And then when you read what somebody else saw, you can end up rewriting your own memories to fit.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors,” said Brad, sensing my annoyance and closing in for the kill. “What about that sound you heard, that little Tinkerbell noise?” Everybody laughed, and even Arnold smiled.

  “That’s the only thing that’s difficult to explain, as far as I’m concerned,” I admitted. “But first of all, it was really faint, and I’m not even sure I heard it. And then, you think extraterrestrials sound like Tinkerbell?”

  “Who said extraterrestrials?” said Brad.

  “Tinkling FBI agents then?” I said, counterattacking.

  “Hypotheses non fingo,” he intoned. I mentally cursed Madame Malesherbes, who must already have talked about this in her Latin class, too. “I just think there’s something happening here. Can’t you admit that, at least?”

  “Yeah, there’s something happening here, all right. What it is aint exactly clear.” Arnold stirred, but everyone else just continued to stare at me, waiting for the punch line. I put them back to work, but it was hard to focus them on comparing the different models of state legislatures.

  I can’t claim that Arnold Barns didn’t give me fair warning of the growths that were sprouting in his fertile brain. As the class neared its end, he spoke up from the back of the room, where he’d been propping his head up with the heel of his hand and gazing at the floor during my entire exposition. I’d made the mistake of asking if there were any questions.

  “You’re a hip dude, Mr. Houba,” he said. “I was wondering if you had any suggestions for our senior prank.”

  The senior prank was a tradition by which the graduating class each year left a little parting gift of rebellion – whimsical, good natured or ill-tempered, often creative, sometimes merely stupid – to the school and especially to the junior class. A wide range of emotions about the high school experience could be expressed in this way. One year a phony weekly bulletin, sending up in hilarious fashion all the teachers, administrators, and regulations of Mildred High School, had been substituted for the real one and had actually been handed out to their homerooms by some unsuspecting teachers who hadn’t bothered to read it in advance. The next year all the picnic tables from the courtyard were piled in a pyramid on the school roof. We had to call in Chuck at the Sinclair station with his cherry-picker to help us get them down. In a darker, though perhaps accidental mode, as I’ve already mentioned, some person or persons in the graduating class burned down the school the year before I arrived. The presence of Arnold Barns in this year’s class had inspired a great deal of anxious discussion among teachers and administrators, as it was widely feared that sometime during the second semester the school would be overtaken by an event of truly diabolical creativity.

  I was confident that Arnold had absolutely no interest in anything I might suggest for a senior prank, and that his question, like the heavy breathing of an anonymous telephone caller, was intended only to spur my horrid imaginings, without giving anything away. Nevertheless, I pretended to take him seriously, hoping that he might reveal some hint of his plans.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Arnold,” I said, “that anything a teacher could imagine wouldn’t be much of a prank. The whole point is for you guys to come up with something out of your own fevered imaginations.” The rest of the class was, for once, listening intently.

  “Are you encouraging us to do a senior prank, Mr. Houba?” asked Bonnie Battle, her braces gleaming. “In the senior meeting they told us there would be severe penalties. They said people might not even be allowed to graduate.”

  Even though Arnold’s “hip dude” remark had of course been sarcastic, I thought I did have something of a reputation for being sympathetic to the kids. Naturally I wanted to encourage that perception, without actually allying myself with the students against the teachers. It was something of a tightrope act, but I felt up to the challenge.

  I said, “There’s a big difference between burning down the school and, say, introducing a goat into the principal’s office in the middle of the night or writing a phony bulletin. I’m not in favor of vandalism. If you’re going to do something, make it creative and funny, that’s my advice. I don’t think they’re going to do anything serious to you if it’s really just a prank, rather than something destructive. On the other hand, if you really want to make an impression, you might have to be willing to suck up a little punishment. Take responsibility for your actions.” I was pleased with my answer, and was enjoying the feeling that we were talking as adults, that I was leveling with them.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of psychological vandalism,” said Arnold.

  “You want to give us a definition?” I said, I think without flinching.

  “Nothing serious. Just something to bend people’s minds a little bit.”

  “Can I assume you’ve already started working on this?” I asked, shrewdly.

  “Nah
, just turning a few things over in my mind. Seems like the town’s in such an uproar over the Christmas Eve lights, nobody’s going to notice anything we do, anyway.” He smiled innocently.

  “We’ve still got four months,” mused Brad Pentane. Everybody groaned at that thought, as the bell rang.

  “How’s the ankle, Arnold?” I asked him on his way out of the classroom. “My wife tells me you haven’t made it to practice lately. The team’s struggling without your intimidating presence in the low post, and here the county tournament’s coming up.”

  “Still a little tender,” he said, limping ostentatiously as he left the room. But was it the right ankle or the left that he’d rolled? I couldn’t remember. I watched him and Brad shuffle away down the hall, waddling pigeon-toed with hands on their belts to keep their low-crotch pants from slipping off onto the floor. They looked at each other once without speaking. I was very suspicious.

  When I arrived at the teachers’ lounge with my lunch, Madame Malesherbes was holding forth in her thick accent, embellishing the extraterrestrial theory for a receptive audience consisting of Matt Matawan, Myrtle Bench, and Dale Twombly. Matt was munching complacently on the first of his two giant sandwiches, obviously pleased that someone else was herding his chickens for him, and even the glorious Myrtle Bench had an unaccustomed sparkle in her eye as she listened, nibbling on a celery stalk.

  “Ah, Simon. So you were there last night. Tell us what you really saw. We want the first-hand report,” said Madame Malesherbes, tucking her lank, mouse-brown hair behind one ear and staring at me through her heavy lenses.

  To let the drama build, I popped the lid on my Tupperware of leftover chickpea curry, stuck it in the microwave, and punched in two minutes of cooking time before answering. “In the final, ominously slanting rays of the sun, I saw a slight depression in the top of the sagebrush, circular in shape and about 30 feet, that’s 10 meters, in diameter, where the stems had apparently all been clipped off at the same height, roughly four feet, 1.3 meters, above the ground. The stems appeared to have been sheared off by a sharp tool. My guess would be a pair of hedge clippers.”

  “Oh for GOT’S sake, Simon!” Madame Malesherbes exploded. “Why MUST you put the meanest, most cramped interpretation on everything?” Matt smiled happily at me. “We already have several reports of inexplicable events in the desert, including two you have seen yourself, and an eye witness to the landing of an object clearly not of human origin. Plus we have wiretapping and obvious government agents poking around our boring little town, pretending to be tourists who speak only Italian. And you talk of hedge clippers! And what about that strange ringing sound that both you and Matt have heard?”

  “You mean the Tinkerbell noise?” I said, removing my curry from the microwave. “I’m not even sure I heard that. I’ve got a touch of tinnitus, you know. I know Matt thinks he heard it once. Parnell was with me both times, and he didn’t hear anything.”

  “Parnell is a sweet man,” said Madame Malesherbes, “but he’s as deaf as a pole.”

  “So you’re buying the extraterrestrial theory?” I asked her. “You do know there’s never been a verified case of an extraterrestrial sighting, unless you count meteors, of course. But suddenly here they are, in Mildred of all places. Doesn’t it seem just a little unlikely to you, and doesn’t the evidence seem just a little flimsy?” I was trying very hard to keep an even strain, not raise my voice and so on.

  “There’s no use in arguing with you,” said Madame Malesherbes, shaking her head and returning to her paté. “Your mind is closed.”

  “Are you guys all on board with this?” I looked around at the others. Dale was picking grains of salt off the tabletop with his prosthesis.

  “Well, I’d say it’s kinda hard to ignore that lady’s eyewitness report,” he drawled. Although I didn’t really look at her, I felt Myrtle Bench’s searing gaze on me, probably for the first time in our acquaintance. It was an unnerving experience.

  “That’s the WEAKEST part of the whole thing,” I said, beginning to lose control. “Anybody can post any kind of crap they want on the Internet! Nobody knows this so-called particle physicist! Matt has even suggested she may have disguised herself to avoid reprisals from her employer. So why couldn’t it be Javier Shivwits disguising himself and making up the entire story? Or what about you, Dale. You’re a creative writer! It could be Matt, for god’s sake, he’s the one who seems to have the most invested in this thing. Why do you so want to believe all this?”

  “It could even be Simon himself, for that matter,” said Matt, starting complacently on his melon chunks.

  “You just destroy your own case with such insinuations, Simon,” said Madame Malesherbes. “I don’t understand how you can suggest such things about Matt. His integrity is unquestioned.”

  “That’s not the point! The point is, you don’t know anything about that posting. It could be some 8-year-old hacker in Uzbekhistan, just yanking our chains. It could be me.” I was treading perilously close to a confession, but I was desperate to shove at least one burr of doubt under their saddles. Madame Malesherbes just shook her head sadly. Dale Twombly seized a toothpick with his prosthesis and began removing imaginary particles of his lunch from between his teeth. Myrtle Bench rose abruptly and walked to the refrigerator to stash her lunchbox, which was covered with a riot of dancing algebraic symbols. All of us, even Madame Malesherbes, followed her with our gaze as she walked to the door and went out, closing it silently behind her. She had the kind of beauty that would only have been marred by any kind of makeup, and barely managed to keep a semblance of humanity by wearing nothing but baggy jeans and shlumpy sweatshirts in school. Even so, I wondered how the kids in her class managed to focus on quadratic equations with Myrtle radiating in front of them at the blackboard.

  Matt was wiping melon juice off his hands. “You’re being left behind, Simon,” he said. “And if I may say so, you’re also being rather patronizing about other people’s sincerely held beliefs. It’s something I’ve noticed about you before. Your problem is that you’ve elevated skepticism itself to the level of a religious faith, and you’re trying to impose your nihilism on everybody else. But you’ll never make nothingness into the stuff of the universe.”

  “Nothing will come of nothing,” said Dale, snapping the toothpick between his titanium finger and thumb and casually flicking it into the distant trash can. He and Madame Malesherbes rose and followed Myrtle Bench out of the room.

  Matt was well into his second chocolate chip macadamia nut cookie before I finally nerved myself to do the right thing.

  “Look. Matt,” I said. “I’m your anonymous particle physicist. I made it all up, man. Your whole structure is standing on a couple of rotten toothpicks.”

  “I know you did, Simon,” he answered calmly. “How long did you think you could keep that a secret? My nerds had you nailed almost before you hit the Send button.” He munched his cookie in thoughtful silence. “That wasn’t a very friendly act,” he finally said.

  “I know. But I really didn’t think you’d fall for it. I was just hoping to instill a little caution.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he went on, ignoring my lame defense. “I don’t need that any more. There’s so much other evidence at this point. Better evidence.” He crumpled up his plastic bag and tossed it in the trash can as he stood up to leave. “I’ve even had the thought that you were being Used, Simon.” I almost gagged on his capital U. “You kept the whole thing rolling until harder evidence could be turned up,” he continued. “I should probably thank you for that, but in view of your obstructionist efforts, I won’t.” He started for the door. “More revelations are going to come. All we have to do is keep the faith.” He walked out, leaving me morosely contemplating my chickpeas.

  Things were even worse at Stirling’s, to which I attempted to escape with my grading after school. The booths were jammed with jabbering kids, and there were even plenty of adults there who should have had something bette
r to do. The Cowboys were at the counter, of course, with their squints and their unlit cigarettes, which arced back and forth from their mouths to behind their ears as they pumped up each other’s outrage, and Patty Milano was standing over them listening with her hand on her hip any time there was a lull in the serving duties. It was obvious I wasn’t going to get any grading done in this tumult, so I went over and joined them.

  “How the hell can you hold a conversation in this place?” I yelled at them, as Patty plopped the white coffee mug down in front of me.

  “Hell, Houba, this is about the only place in town any more where you CAN have a safe conversation,” said Don Swayzee. He looked ostentatiously over his shoulder. “Unless those two damn Italians are around. Lately I can’t take a crap without one of those guys popping his head around the bathroom door to see what I’m up to. Or both of them.”

  “You still think someone’s tapping your phone?” I asked him. “I heard your calls had all cleared up, even the cell phone.”

  “That just means the fools finally got their act together,” said Don. “There’s no question about it. Phone, e-mail, snail mail, the whole thing. There’s SUVs that don’t belong to anyone in this town driving the road past my house at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes they stop out there and sit for half an hour. I can see them taking notes.”

  “But why you? What are you guys doing that anybody’d be interested in? You’re just patrolling the desert, like everyone else in town.”

  “They know damn well we’re onto them,” Harold chipped in. “We’re the only ones in this town who seem to understand what’s going on. Of course they’re going to keep an eye on us! They aren’t finding out anything, but the whole thing’s having a chilling effect.”

  “But, all you’re onto is that they’re watching you. And you say they’re watching you because you’re onto them. Seems like you guys have got your own little waltz going.”

  Don Swayzee took the cigarette out of his mouth and tucked it behind his ear under the brim of his hat. “Houba, sometimes I think you’re too damn dumb to live. You and most of the rest of this town are out beating the desert for two-headed ETs, and meanwhile this country’s got its very own Hydrant. Two of its heads are in Mildred right now, pretending to be Italians. They’re the ones we should be worrying about. Them and the other million or so in Washington.”

  “Patty?” I said. She’d been standing listening to this with her hand on her hip and her lips slightly parted.

  “Well, there is a lot going on, Simon,” she said slowly, unconsciously mimicking Don Swayzee’s drawl. “I’m not sure these boys are right about the DC connection, but I’ve got to believe there’s something out there. I saw the same things you did up on the Table.”

  “You’re going over to the dark side? What about Frank?” I asked hopefully. “I notice he didn’t sign up for patrolling.”

  “Frank isn’t going to do anything until the Super Bowl’s over. I think his main worry right now is that aliens’ll fire some kind of death ray at the Astrodome and mess up the halftime show.”

  “While we’re on the topic, Houba,” said Don Swayzee, “I don’t suppose it occurred to you to wonder why your pal Matawan assigned me and Harold to patrol the area along the river, over there where there’s nothing but mud and a bunch of old truck tires hanging from tree branches. All the action is up on Devil’s Table, but he’s doing a damn good job of keeping us at a distance and making things real easy for those two weasel wops. You wonder about that at all?”

  “You think Matt’s secretly working for the government?” I asked him. “He’s the main promoter of the extraterrestrial theory.”

  “Yup. He goes on about that all right. The way he’s got everyone looking for aliens in their sock drawers, no one would ever dream he might be working the other side of the street.” He pushed his hat back and stared at me with a sarcastic twist to his mustache.

  That was a completely new idea to me, and I didn’t know what to say to it, so I took a look around the place instead of answering. Everyone in sight, even the high school kids, seemed to be in some kind of earnest conversation, and as far as I could tell most of them were about the lights, the strange doings on Devil’s Table, the Cowboys’ wiretapping, signs from the heavens. I certainly didn’t hear the word “meteor” even once, not even dismissively. The noise was deafening. I finished up my coffee, said my goodbyes, and fled.

  Lu was already making dinner by the time I got home, it being church night. I grabbed Albert out of his pen and went on line immediately to get the latest insanity. Father MacGill’s posting had unleashed the whirlwind once again. The number of entries was growing exponentially, as everybody weighed in with their attempts to outdo everyone else. A few sobersides like Dave Bracco were still trying to maintain a semblance of objectivity, but even Dave was merely trying to evaluate the evidence in order to decide which of the crazy theories to adopt. Everyone else was plain freaking out. The regular patrols had already yielded two or three more spaceship sightings, somewhat less detailed than the “particle physicist’s”, although no one else claimed to have seen one land, or actual alien organisms stalking across the desert sands on spindly mile-high legs. The Cowboys were now trying to persuade the townspeople to take up arms against the Federal bureaucratic infiltration before it had time to consolidate. Strange lights, ringings, rumblings, groanings, earth movements, hoarse inhuman breathing, tracks, unidentifiable fecal deposits, and even one intact sloughed reptilian skin, which from the description sounded more like weathered packing material, had all been reported in feverish prose. Plus Matt was hinting that he knew the identity of the mysterious particle physicist, although of course in order to protect her he couldn’t reveal what he knew. Meanwhile Father MacGill, speaking for at least part of the religious faction, had posted the draft of what appeared to be another sermon, in which he continued to reserve judgment on the actual physical causes of all these observations but boldly burst the shell of his rationality, stating more firmly than ever that, whatever their cause, they represented a clear message from the Almighty to humanity, and specifically the branch of humanity that dwelt in Mildred, to assess their misguided, materialistic existence and bring it into line with the Lord’s commandments.

  I noticed that Lu seemed deeply preoccupied as she dragged her wooden spoon mournfully through the thickening polenta, and I knew she’d read the Reverend’s admonitions and was taking them to heart. At the dinner table she said grace with deeper meaning and fervor than I could ever remember coming from her, and even Albert in his highchair seemed to be waving his arms around, slinging turkey puree, and vocalizing with extraordinary seriousness. Watching them, I had a sense of the whole town, including my own little family and evidently a large part of the Eastern Sierra, swirling in a frenzy of highly organized and rational activity whose object, like Captain Ahab’s, was quite mad. All I could do was paddle helplessly in the maelstrom, which was partly of my own making.

  I was able to reestablish some perspective while administering Mervyn’s nightly meds, after Lu went off to pray with her support group. As the spinning of the world around him accelerated dizzily, Mervyn’s own activities were gradually diminishing to almost zero, as in the blind and peaceful eye of a hurricane. He lay quietly hour after hour in his heated boudoir, arising only occasionally on shaky pins to walk more slowly than I would have thought possible to the nearby litterbox, there to devote several minutes out of his small remaining store of time in contemplating urination, then carrying it out, and finally stepping deliberately back out of the box or, more often, simply lying down in it, waiting for some god to lift him out and return him to his cave. Performing that service, I could feel that his muscles had lost all their elasticity. He was entirely passive during the water shot, which must have seemed to him like a sort of unavoidable evening thundershower but was at least always followed by a spoonful of the same pureed turkey that Albert enjoyed eating and throwing.

  I found Mervy
n’s calm soothing, although it also depressed me. How odd, I thought, that this surf of crazy speculation could be thundering all around him without leaving the slightest impression on the soft sand of his patience. Looking deeply into his reddish pupils and searching for clues to his mental state, I couldn’t help thinking of Janet, withering away in her hospice bed in Hathwell, alternately dozing and gazing up at the ceiling as each day’s light expanded and shrank, accompanied only by the whisper of the ventilation and the visits of the nurses with their eyedroppers of red morphine solution. She was another still point – breathing, but otherwise motionless, silently clinging to her final perch. In earlier days, I thought, she would have been pleased by Mildred’s collective insanity. She might even have been my ally, someone who could have helped me savor the craziness without being engulfed by it, or by opposition to it. For me, probably the best parts of our afternoon sessions, once we’d gotten the sex out of the way, had been listening to her spirited analysis of the town’s social hailstorms, cold fronts, sunshine, and frequent prolonged periods of drizzle. No tempest like this had ever come along before, and I would have loved to hear her take on it. The gaze she’d turned on me during my last visit, though, had made me realize that at this point I was only marginally more interesting to her than the ceiling; that in fact my aimless talk and fidgeting were probably an annoyance, distracting her from the more interesting dreams the morphine was staging in her mind. It was painful to think of her lying there winding down, as it was to watch Mervyn on his heating pad. Still, there was a kind of relief in turning from the three-ring circus Mildred had become to such routine but concrete matters as impending death.