A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 18

  We all arrived at almost the same moment, as though we’d been summoned, atop the cold and desolate plateau of Devil’s Table. I, in fact, had been summoned, by my wife, who was patrolling that afternoon with Albert, Father MacGill, and her cell phone. I was grading papers at school when she called.

  “I think you should come up here,” she said, as soon as I answered. I could hear the wind behind her, like someone scraping the cell phone with callused knuckles. “There are weird things going on.” She didn’t explain, but the nervousness in her voice made me throw on my warmest coat and head out without delay.

  A few minutes later I pulled up in a cloud of dust at the summit. I had no trouble finding them, as there were already several pickup trucks and SUVs parked alongside the dirt road, pulled over as far as possible into the sagebrush. Lu’s call explained my presence, but it didn’t explain why Matt was also there with Margaret Quitclaim on his arm, and the Cowboys, on horseback with shotguns cradled casually in the crooks of their elbows, and Patty Milano, already dandling Albert, along with about a dozen members of other patrols who’d never before ventured onto Devil’s Table. Tadich Grant, dressed in a puffy down jacket and for some reason carrying his black doctor bag, was mildly observing this unexpected convocation. Even Myrtle Bench was there, with downcast eyes and hands jammed into the pockets of her pea jacket and the wind prettily whipping her banner of hair. Even more astonishing, as we all stood there looking at each other Javier Shivwits pulled up in his Oldsmobile. He got out and stood rather tentatively next to Tadich Grant. At the open collar of his long black coat, a white shirt and tie were visible. A ramp of late sunlight was laid down just across the tops of the mountains, accentuating cheekbones, noses, wrinkles, and folds and giving us all a pale and cadaverous look. Certainly we were all cold. There was a light but relentless and sharp-edged wind, and the temperature was dropping toward the freezing point. Elongated black clouds with scalloped gold edges cruised very slowly away from the sun. The winter darkness was rapidly gathering, although a gibbous moon, already high in the east, threw a cold gaze over the desert. As we stood there shivering, a distant rumbling began to grow, gradually intensifying until we could identify it as the reassuring thunder of Dale Twombly’s Harley. The sound crescendoed as his headlight flashed over our huddled masses, then ended abruptly as he stopped the bike, set the kickstand, and crunched over the sand to join us, all encased in black leather.

  Nobody quite knew what to say about the apparently spontaneous gathering, and for a few moments the only sounds were the restless stamping and puffing of the Cowboys’ horses and the hiss of the wind. Finally Matt spoke up.

  “Did you call all these people?” he asked Lu. She shook her head. “Just Simon,” she said.

  “I got an e-mail. Didn’t you send that out?” It was so unusual to hear Myrtle Bench’s voice that for a moment I didn’t know who was speaking. She was looking at Matt. “No,” he said. “But I guess somebody did.” Before we could pursue this line of questioning, Father MacGill abruptly held up his right hand a few inches from his ear. Even without his signal we all heard it quite clearly: a silvery tinkling sound, as of tiny bells. Don Swayzee snorted, or maybe it was his horse. “Space fairies, right Matawan?” he said.

  A lurid glow now lit the zone where the sun had disappeared behind the mountains, but the desert floor had gone dark. We all swept our flashlights nervously over the tops of the sage. The faint ringing continued.

  Father MacGill said, “We’ve been hearing that for about half an hour. We walked around looking, but it seems to keep moving.”

  “Someone’s just messing with us,” said Harold Clare.

  “Maybe not, maybe not,” said Matt, trying to take charge. “Some of us have heard this before.” He glanced at me. “It’s pretty clearly coming from the north. We’ve got a lot of people now. Let’s form a line and make a sweep in that direction. If nothing else, we’ll be driving whatever’s doing it ahead of us. Sooner or later we should catch up with it, or at least flush something, or someone, out.”

  I think we were all a little excited at the thought that we might finally be about to see something real, after the weeks of cold and fruitless patrolling and inconclusive “observations”. We spread out at intervals of about 10 feet and started weaving slowly through the sage, sweeping our flashlight beams back and forth. The Cowboys, with their horses and shotguns, anchored the two ends of the line. I had Lu on my left and Patty and Albert on my right. “Mind the fissures,” called Father MacGill.

  We hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred feet when the crackling of what sounded like shooting broke out behind us. As we swung around to look, a line of red fire, hissing and spitting sparks, streaked across a few feet above our heads from right to left, followed almost immediately by another traveling from left to right. In short order the whole desert around and above us was criss-crossed with multicolored rocketings and flarings, punctuated with the snapping of what now sounded more like firecrackers and the dull thumps of larger explosions. We stood frozen, watching with our mouths open, ducking reflexively whenever something flew especially close over our heads. In the flickering light I caught a glimpse of Don Swayzee’s horse rearing dramatically at the west end of the line. Forming a background to the explosions we now heard what seemed to be the deep groans and slurred, incomprehensible complaints of giants issuing from the ground all around us. To add to the cacophony, men’s voices all up and down our line were yelling and women were screaming. I could hear Albert laughing joyfully.

  All this motion and commotion continued for at least a minute and then abruptly stopped, except for a couple of residual excited cries from the audience. With a faint hiss, a yellow sparking trail climbed almost vertically into the darkness to the east of us. It disappeared briefly at its peak, then blossomed into a single intensely bright star that hung almost motionless high above, shaming the weak moonlight and draping with a stark white light the desert floor, the pall of fumes produced by all the explosions, our anxious upturned faces, and the ragged trailing scarf left by its own ascent.

  The magical tinkling had ceased along with the bombardment, and for a moment there was absolute silence. Even the wind seemed to have stopped, although I noticed that the white flare (for that is what it was, as I, the Vietnam-era veteran, well knew) was drifting rapidly eastward on its little parachute. In the silence the two matched blonde heads of the Italian tourists suddenly poked up out of the sage, about 50 yards to my right and peered cautiously around at the enchanted scene. We all stared upward, like a flock of turkeys in a rainstorm.

  “There!” I heard Don Swayzee’s shout, and almost immediately afterward the discharge of a shotgun. I turned to look. Don was focused not on the Italians but on something off to our left, at which he’d apparently loosed the shotgun blast.

  “Jesus Christ, Don!” I yelled, totally forgetting the presence of Father MacGill, not to mention Lu. “Don’t DO that! You don’t know who else is out here.” I thought I knew who else was out there, crawling around the sage under the spooky light of the flare, and my teacherly instincts had kicked in.

  Don Swayzee ignored me and spurred his steed forward, now swinging a lasso purposefully around his head. I watched him work up to a gallop before he let fly at something only he could see. The lasso settled delicately as a butterfly on a clump of sage and, as the loop tightened, yanked Don abruptly off his horse. There was a painful thud and the yelp of compressed air being explosively expelled from lungs. The horse, freed of its burden, cantered happily off to the west, then veered northward to avoid the orange flame of a small blaze that had apparently been ignited by one of the pyrotechnic devices.

  In the gradually dimming light of the flare I could see Harold Clare guiding his own horse toward the site of Don Swayzee’s mishap. But Father MacGill and Lu and I were closer, and we got there first. Surprisingly, however, someone was already crouched over Don’s recumbent form when we arrived. We gathered aroun
d and bent down to see how the fallen cowpoke was faring. I shone my flashlight on the early arrival. It was Arnold Barns. He was dressed entirely in an Operation Iraqi Freedom camouflage ensemble, right down to regulation sand-colored combat boots. On his head was a sage-green skicap, and his face was blackened, commando-style. He was patting Don Swayzee’s leathery cheeks ineffectually with one hand while with the other he pushed sporadically on Don’s chest, as if trying to restart his heart. The flare flickered and died above, leaving us with only the thin beams of the moon and our flashlights.

  “Is he all right?” I asked, as the rest of the patrol gradually arrived and gathered around us.

  “I think he’s out cold,” said Arnold, who seemed a little less sure of himself than usual. “He hit pretty hard.”

  “What the hell was he shooting at?” Harold Clare, still on his horse, spoke from the darkness above us.

  Arnold said, “I guess he was shooting at me. In fact, I think he hit me.”

  “Are you all right?” said Matt, who now had arrived and was shining his flashlight, a little disappointedly I thought, on Arnold’s face.

  Arnold shielded his eyes with a hand. “I think so. A couple of pellets. No bleeding.”

  Father MacGill voiced the questions that were in all our minds. “What are you doing out here, Arnold? Did somebody call you, or did you get the same e-mail as the rest of us? Why are you dressed like that? And why didn’t you let us know you were here? You could have been hurt.”

  Arnold didn’t answer any of the questions. “Shouldn’t we do something about Mr. Swayzee?” he said. But Don Swayzee had in fact awakened from his slumber with a curse. He sat up and moaned in a very unmanly way, before noticing that he was surrounded by curious faces.

  “What the hell’re you all looking at? Did you catch the little bastard?” he said.

  “If you’re referring to Arnold,” I replied, “I think he caught himself. We found him trying to give you CPR.”

  “I don’t need no goddamn CPR!” Don scrambled angrily to his feet, then sat down again abruptly. “Where’s my shotgun? Where the hell’s the horse? There’s bound to be some more of them out here. He couldn’t have touched off all that shit by himself.” Father MacGill cleared his throat. Suddenly reminded of the possible presence of other beings in the vicinity, we all held our breath and listened. From our left came a faint silvery tinkling as of tiny bells.

  “I can still hear it,” said Father MacGill.

  “The bells aren’t mine. I don’t know who’s doing that,” said Arnold.

  “Bullshit!” said Don Swayzee.

  “Meaning all the other stuff was yours, I take it.” Again the tone of mild disappointment in Matt’s voice.

  “I did see the Italian tourists out here when the flare went off,” I suggested.

  “I saw them too,” said the thrillingly husky voice of Myrtle Bench.

  Tadich Grant detached himself from the crowd and moved forward. “Where did you get hit, Arnold?” he said. “We better take a look.” Arnold, relieved by the change of subject, held his arm in the beam of the doctor’s flashlight. There was a small red lump with a dark core on the back of his hand, and another on his cheek, but, as he’d told us, no bleeding.

  “Where the hell are your friends,” said Harold Clare. “Like Don says, you couldn’t have fired off all that stuff by yourself.”

  Arnold was silent for a moment, as though he were trying to decide whether denials would serve. Finally he said, “No friends. I had it all set up so I could touch it off with this thing.” He dragged a TV remote control out of one of the baggy pockets of his camouflage pants.

  “What about all the groaning and yowling?” said Matt. “That wasn’t your partners in crime?”

  “There’s boomboxes down in a couple of the fissures. I’ll show you, if you want. It was just a joke.” There was some angry muttering from the assembled patrol members. “We oughtta kick his ass,” somebody grumbled.

  “He’s just a kid,” said Patty Marino.

  “And nobody really got hurt,” Lu added.

  Don Swayzee got to his feet a little painfully. “Speak for yourself, goddamn it,” he said, and began shining his flashlight around, looking for his shotgun. “Anyway, this isn’t over. I can still hear those damn bells. Not to mention those two wops are still out there somewhere.” He was right. The silvery tinkling was still audible, and the Italian tourists had not joined our group. Meanwhile, a few dozen yards to our left the glow of fire was growing, inflated by the wind. A distant siren could already be heard from the direction of Mildred, as the volunteer firefighters mobilized.

  Don Swayzee had located his shotgun in the embrace of a sage clump. He lifted it out, broke open the breech, and aimed his flashlight down the barrel, then snapped it shut. “All right, let’s see your setup,” he said. “I don’t believe your story that you did it all alone. There must have been 50 Roman candles, or whatever the hell they were, coming from all different directions, plus firecrackers and those other noises, and the flare.”

  Arnold led us silently a few yards through the sage clumps, and then directed his own flashlight toward the ground, where we saw a cluster of launching tubes the diameter of large candles. There were scorch marks on the surrounding sand, which was also thoroughly churned up with tracks.

  “Lotta footprints, Arnold,” I said.

  “I had to do a lot of setting up,” he replied, without looking at me. Don Swayzee and Harold Clare spat simultaneously. “I don’t see any electrical system,” said Don. Arnold was silent.

  “Cut him a break. He’s not going to rat on his pals,” I said. But Don Swayzee’s ego had been bruised by his failed rope trick and he wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Where’s the damn fissure,” he said. Arnold led us a few more yards through the moonlight to the slanting entrance of a particularly narrow fissure. He silently showed us what appeared to be a small solar cell hanging on a branch of rabbit brush. Wires ran from it down into the fissure. Arnold aimed the remote at the solar cell and pressed the button. Deep groans and mutterings began to issue from the darkness below.

  “His science teacher should be proud,” I shouted over the noise, glancing at Matt, who was glumly silent.

  “Shut that shit off!” yelled Don Swayzee, and added in the silence that followed, “So that part of his story’s true, at least.” He aimed his flashlight down along the sloping bottom of the fissure. “Those are your tracks?”

  “The bells are coming from down in there,” said Father MacGill, suddenly, and we all realized that he was right. The sound still wasn’t very loud, but it was clearly coming from somewhere deep in the fissure, and seemed to have acquired a slight reverberation, like an echo off bathroom tiles. I had noticed something else in the beam of Don’s flashlight, but I was still trying to interpret it. There was a confusion of boot tracks around the entrance to the fissure, and only one clear set of prints leading out of it – presumably the result of Arnold’s final departure. But there was another set of tracks leading down into the slot, superimposed in places on the checkered pattern of boot soles.

  “What’s that about?” I said, shining my own light on the tracks. The footprints overlapping Arnold’s boot tracks seemed very large. Others in the group turned their flashlights on the ramp of sand that led down into the fissure. The footprints were indeed very large and, I have to say, not human-looking. For one thing, they were sort of leaf-shaped, with only four toes, or lobes, instead of five. The weight of the object, or person, that made them had been enough to compact the sand and create nice, clear prints. The tip of each lobe was rounded, but had a clawlike extension that ended in a sharp point. They were clearly joke monster prints; cartoon prints.

  “Arnold?” I said.

  He responded immediately but, I thought, unconvincingly. “No, man, I don’t know what that is.”

  “Aren’t you in deep enough already, kid?” said Harold Clare.

  “Arnold,” said Javier Shivwits
in his principal’s voice, “your actions so far have nearly led to a very serious incident. At least two people have already been injured, luckily not badly. It’s a sign of maturity that we know when to admit our mistakes and accept the consequences.”

  We all waited for Arnold’s answer. The sound of tiny bells continued sporadically, a muffled but magical tinkling in the still, cold air. Its source seemed to be moving deeper into the earth.

  “I’m telling you, Mr. Shivwits, I had nothing to do with those footprints, or tracks, whatever they are. Or the bells. I already told you about the rest of it.”

  “Hell, he’s not going to say anything. Maybe he’s even telling the truth. There’s an easy way to find out. You don’t need to be an aboriginal tracker to know that whoever made those dinosaur tracks is still down in there.” Don Swayzee levered another shell into the chamber of his shotgun with a clash of finely machined metal. “Let’s go down and smoke ‘em out. Harold, you care to join me?”

  Harold directed his flashlight thoughtfully into the narrow slot of the fissure. In its beam we could follow the strange tracks for at least 30 feet between the nearly vertical walls, before the gloom finally closed around them.

  “Appears to me there isn’t really room for the two of us to operate down there,” he said. “I believe the best thing for me to do is to stay up here, in case someone gets past you.”

  Harold was scared, I realized, and his fear communicated itself to the rest of us, or at least to me. There was something about the stillness, the faint ringing from the fissure, the phony-looking monster tracks, the way the darkness closed in down there and became total, that was spooking me. It was a classic 1950s B-movie set, I thought, all in cheap black and white due to the weakness of the moonlight. And then there was the circle of pale, nervous faces, the menacing desolation all around, the two friends daring each other to take the plunge into the unknown, only half believing there could be anything down there other than another guilty teenager in a pair of big rubber feet. While the movie audience, of course, KNEW. The only thing missing was, say, a single sinuous, menacing thread of violin music. The tinkling of the invisible bells filled that need quite nicely. For one of maybe two or three times in my life, I could feel the hair actually crawling on the back of my neck in tribute to the power of my own imagination.

  “Well, hell,” said Don. He aligned the thick black cylinder of his flashlight with the shotgun barrel and gripped the two of them in his left hand, so that he could illuminate his path and still keep a finger on the trigger.

  “Arnold?” I said again, more urgently. Arnold shook his head. I tried Don next. “You know damn well it’s just one of our kids down there, playing games. And you’re going down there with a loaded shotgun,” I told him.

  “We don’t know WHAT’s down there,” said Don. He spat on one of the footprints. “I’m not one of Matawan’s apostles, but I’m not going down there without protection.”

  “Fine. Then don’t go down there. Let’s just wait. They have to come out eventually. We can post a guard.”

  Don Swayzee shook his head again and spat on the ground. “Are you gonna freeze your ass out here all night waiting for them?”

  “Matt?” I looked over at him for support, my fellow teacher, but his face told me it wouldn’t be forthcoming. In fact, I realized, he was the problem. It was his doing that all of us, including Arnold and his invisible accomplices, were here. And beyond even getting us all out in the middle of the desert on a freezing February night, he’d half convinced everyone, even me, that those oversized chicken tracks had been made by something unearthly. This moment should have meant the dashing of all his hopes; but I could see that to him it was their culmination. Nothing was going to change his mind.

  Behind us the fire in the sage suddenly reared up on its hind legs and began to crackle, and even to throw a red glow onto our nervous faces. The wind was blowing it rapidly in our direction. The sound of sirens grew louder.

  “What the hell are we waiting for?” said Don Swayzee. He pointed the flashlight down into the dark of the fissure and started walking, slowly. We all watched as first his legs, then his upper body, and finally his moonlit white cowboy hat sank below the rim.

  We were all crazy; I knew it. But there was just enough of a weevil of doubt in my world view, and all of ours, I suppose, that I could almost convince myself he was doing the right thing. Or rather, I couldn’t quite convince myself that he wasn’t. And so we let him keep going. In a few seconds he was beyond the reach of our flashlights. The glow of his own light, reflected off the sheer walls, persisted for a few more seconds; then that too vanished, though we could still hear the cautious crunching of his boots, deep in the trench. The tinkling of bells had stopped, or maybe it was masked by the deep, continuous inhalation of the approaching fire. Lu took the sleeping Albert back from Patty Milano. I put my arm around her shoulder. We all listened.

  From far below us and a good distance to the north we heard Don’s voice, faintly. “All right, come on now,” it said. “Get your ass out here.” There was a long pause, then “Jesus Christ!”, with the second word of the brief prayer truncated by a muffled shotgun blast. Then an indescribable squalling that ended with a snap, like a tree limb breaking off. Another long silence. A series of low moans began, and continued.

  “Don?” several of us yelled down into the hole, but there was no answer. “Don? Are you all right?” The moaning had modulated into a thin keening that rose and fell like the voice of a child imitating a siren. I looked at Matt, and found him staring at me. Father MacGill was moving his lips in some kind of prayer. Lu watched him, pulling Albert close to her chest. I knew she was praying silently, too.

  Above us a couple of fluffy clouds were ghosting silently past the pale moon, one on each side, trimmed with silver light. Or was the moon gliding past them? I felt a little dizzy, and had to look away. No one spoke. They were all watching me, for some reason. “Shouldn’t we go get him?” I said to Matt, or anyone. But Matt KNEW. Nothing was going to get him down there to look for Don Swayzee. “Matt. He’s probably shot himself somehow. Come on.” But neither Matt nor anyone else moved. They were all still watching me, even Lu. I got the drift, all right. I was the champion of the meteor theory, the only one of all of us who had stubbornly resisted the idea of extraterrestrial visitors, so they were fingering me to go down and find out what had happened. But I didn’t want to. In my mind there was no scary image of an alien, dripping toxic saliva, with bloody chunks of Don Swayzee’s body lodged between its fangs. But there was something, all right, slithering across my limbic system – a primal dread of the dark and the cold and the converging walls, the subterranean-ness of that trench, its eternal past and endless future, and the sudden silence of the tiny bells, which was somehow more menacing than their silvery ringing. The problem was, I also knew that Don Swayzee, whom I didn’t even really like, was lying down there wailing, or at least somebody was wailing and clearly needed attention. The keening seemed human, but it was hard to connect with the haughty spirit of Don Swayzee. The conflict in my mind was fantastic. I felt myself being almost physically torn in opposite directions, as if by one of those medieval devices designed to educate heretics. Where’s the bloody Cosmic Hand when you need it, I was thinking.

  The fire, no longer just an interesting backdrop, had now become a problem we couldn’t ignore. Smoke was swirling around us and the long curving wall of orange flame was only a few yards away, close enough for us to feel its hot glare and threatening to engulf our little group. It was too late for us to circle around it. We could see the lights of the approaching fire trucks, along with the rotating red beacon of Dave Bacco’s sheriff car, but they weren’t going to arrive in time to be of any use to us. The angry light of the fire drew the darkness in closer, until all I could see was the ring of anxious faces.

  I took Lu by the hand and led her a few yards down into the fissure, until the walls were several of feet above the tops of our heads. The res
t of the group crowded in after us. We huddled there while the fire roared up to the lip of the slot, vaulted effortlessly over it, briefly sucking a cold wind up from the depths, and then swept off to the east toward the deploying fire trucks. It was suddenly quiet again, quiet enough to hear the distant shouts of the fire fighters and the rollercoaster wails still issuing from deep in the fissure.

  Father MacGill came to my rescue. “Well, we’re down here, Simon,” he said. “We might as well go on in and take a look.” I nodded, relieved to have someone make the decision for me. Without looking at the others or giving ourselves time for second thoughts, we aimed our flashlights down the sandy slope and started in, following the tracks of Don Swayzee’s cowboy boots, and those other tracks.

  “Do you want the gun?” Harold Clare called after us, but we kept walking without answering. I was surprised to find that the slot wasn’t as narrow as it seemed from above, that we were able to walk shoulder to shoulder after all. As the rock walls rose above our heads on both sides, I found myself remembering, with the stab of sadness I’d gotten used to in the last couple of days, Mervyn’s great flying adventure off the Brooklyn balcony. On that occasion I’d rushed downstairs without daring to look over the edge first, dreading what I would find on the pavement far below. Now I was hoping that, like Mervyn, Don Swayzee had somehow managed to land on his feet, without too much damage. Ahead of us, in the darkness beyond the reach of our puny flashlight beams, the high, thin cries continued.