A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 19

  Janet Blythe had been dead for only a few minutes when Lu and Albert and I arrived for our weekly visit. Based on what I’d seen on my previous trip, it was a question whether the cancer or the increasingly frequent squirts of morphine from the red bottle had finally done her in. I hoped it had been the latter.

  She lay on her back with her head turned slightly away from us, the sheet pulled up and tucked neatly under her arms, looking not very different than she had when I’d last seen her, as though she were just resting between two widely separated breaths. The drapes were partly open, and a neat parallelogram of February sunlight lay on the foot of the bed. The room was very quiet. No one had been with her when she died, the nurse had admitted, and I wondered whether Janet had felt abandoned, or had been grateful for her solitude, or simply unconscious. Her face wore the guileless lines of sleep and her expression now was actually less disturbing to me than the mournful one she’d always worn after our handful of guilty embraces in her breezy bedroom. She’d been somewhere else then, and she was somewhere else now. I was depressed by how little I knew about either state. She’d cruised through my sky as silently and mysteriously as a single cloud on a clear day, foiling all my efforts (which had been largely symbolic, I have to admit) to slow her down or even fix her contours in my mind.

  I wondered what Lu was thinking, as she stared down at the body of the woman I’d betrayed her with. She was silent, and I assumed she was praying. But she suddenly turned and handed Albert to me, then leaned over Janet and kissed her very deliberately and firmly. I watched, fascinated, as Janet’s lips, still soft and probably still warm, gave slightly under the pressure of my wife’s wider, more businesslike mouth. She straightened up and stood looking down for another moment, then took Albert back from me and left the room. I stayed for a minute to touch the palm of Janet’s hand, a little surprised that her fingers didn’t close even slightly in response. In her body’s total stillness I could almost find evidence for Patty Milano’s Snake Theory of death. It was easier to imagine something, someone, sloughing off that weary dwelling than to think the tenant had simply evaporated.

  On the way back to Mildred, only Albert had much to say, which was unexpected because he had never spoken before. As we passed contemplatively through the humming streets of Fetlock, he said, quite distinctly, “thumb”, referring, I supposed, to that which he sometimes enjoyed sucking.

  Lu and I looked at each other with a wild surmise. “He said ‘thumb’,” I said.

  “No, it was ‘dumb’.”

  “No it wasn’t. Why would he say ‘dumb’?”

  “Why would he say ‘thumb’? Why would he say anything? It’s his first word, he can say what he wants.” She turned to watch him. “Would you repeat that, please,” she requested, but the thumb was back in Albert’s mouth. In the rearview mirror, I could see him looking back at her with an expression of calm self-assurance.

  He seemed satisfied with that one pronouncement, and said nothing else that evening. After we’d put him down, and I’d sung “Beautiful Ohio” for him, Lu flung the window open and then crawled gratefully into bed beside me in the cold bedroom. I’d been lying across her spot, warming it up for her. I wanted to ask her about the kiss, of course, which seemed well outside her usual suite of behaviors. Puzzling over the scene, it seemed to me that someone new had briefly occupied my wife’s body and then vanished, leaving behind only a slightly altered aura, like a vaguely disturbing new hairdo.

  I said, “The rumor around school is that Dale Twombly and Myrtle Bench have got a thing going.”

  “No shit,” she said sarcastically, sliding over to put her long flank next to mine. I had my arms crossed on my chest and my icy hands in my armpits. There was a lot of speculation around town about what other special attachments Dale might have for his prosthesis that could have induced Myrtle to superimpose her glowing, deathless contours on his sloppy, paunchy ones.

  “You knew that?” I said. Lu didn’t bother to answer, just pressed closer along my side. “Well, Matt’s certainly going to be disappointed. Along with every other male at Mildred High School.”

  “Not every one, I hope,” she said. “Anyway, that’s good. Maybe something positive will come out of all this craziness.”

  At her mention of the recent excitement I had to resist the temptation to look over my shoulder. For the last week it had been impossible to fill up with gas or order a stack of buckwheat cakes at Stirling’s without being accosted by a camera crew from CNN or Fox. The media weren’t exactly laughing at Mildred any more, but they were finding the lack of solid stories about the Devil’s Table happenings deeply frustrating. Like the matter of Sherlock Holmes’s dog that failed to bark, the only thing anyone knew for sure was that Don Swayzee had one fewer legs than when he’d stalked down into the fissure that night. The reporters were everywhere, some of them quite high profile, along with various brands of state and Federal law enforcement agents, the Homeland Security folks, Forest Service rangers, Fish and Wildlife operatives, BLM bureaucrats, hulking BATFers in lustrous black windbreakers, bespectacled space scientists, a revolving swarm of UFO hunters, and, for unknown reasons, a couple of IRS lawyers. The reporters were all over us; even Albert had been interviewed at one point and appeared briefly on network TV, although I’d tried to explain to the interviewer that he’d slept through most of the excitement. Human interest, I suppose. Arnold Barns, stubbornly maintaining his pretense of having acted alone, had been suspended from school for two weeks but would be allowed to graduate. In the interim he was employed in helping his mother change linens at the Travelodge. Due to the relentless media spotlight, though, he wasn’t being of much help to her. Harold Clare had taken up pretty much permanent residence at Stirling’s, holding forth on the events of that night, while Patty Milano hovered nearby, eavesdropping and keeping his coffee mug topped off.

  Once he’d regained consciousness, Don Swayzee himself was a media natural, due to his free-range charm and salty elocution, although some clever editing of his remarks had been necessary. “One thing’s for shit sure,” he’d announced from his hospital bed in Fetlock, “what I saw down there was no goddamn FBI agent.” Don had by no means dropped his campaign against government interference in the internal affairs of Tuff County – in fact, the influx of agents and bureaucrats, not to mention the mysterious evaporation of the Italian tourists, had only served to cement his convictions in that area – but it seemed that his encounter with the unknown down in the dark trench had broadened his conspiratorial horizons, making him aware that other, more enigmatic forces might be at work as well. Still, his failure to provide a detailed description of what had caused him to discharge his shotgun had left many of the townspeople with the suspicion that in fact Don had managed somehow to blow his own leg off. Father MacGill and I had tourniqueted him and carried him out so the volunteer firemen could haul him off to the hospital in Fetlock. After that, in the absence of heavy artillery, no one else had wanted to venture down into the fissure until the morning sun was well over the yardarm. But a few pellets of birdshot had indeed been found embedded in the upper regions of Don’s calf, just above the cowboy boot, when Sheriff Bacco had cautiously retrieved it the next day.

  Don himself firmly maintained that he’d been attacked by something large, and in particular something with large teeth. But his descriptions were vague and unstable, at some times sounding like standard movie monsters, at others like dream manifestations of his own malice, perhaps the product of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Could his shaky recollections, on the far side of his brutal dismasting, really be trusted? There was also the possibility that he was simply lying, to cover up an embarrassing Second Amendment mishap. No one knew.

  Pressed by the media to take a position, the doctors had stated, though not without some hedging, that Don’s wound was not really consistent with the damage to be expected from a shotgun blast. For one thing, the leg had been too neatly removed. The wound had als
o yielded some interesting and unfamiliar bacteria, which luckily had surrendered meekly to earthly antibiotics. Beyond those pronouncements the doctors would not go.

  Backing up Don Swayzee’s story were the tracks down in the fissure. The next day, Sheriff Bacco and the State Police, all armed with assault weapons, had followed the big chicken prints gingerly back into the fissure for a good 200 yards before they ended, where the fissure itself ended. At that point the walls climbed vertically above them for at least 50 feet. Examination of the desert floor above the terminus of the fissure yielded no suspicious traces. The whole area was now surrounded with yellow police tape chattering in the wind, while a couple of space biologists took measurements and made careful casts of the tracks in colorful quick-hardening plastic.

  Father MacGill and I, of course, had been questioned intensively, first by officials at all levels of government and later by representatives of every major media outlet in the country. The Reverend, having been properly focused on stopping Don Swayzee’s bleeding and extricating him from the fissure without delay, had seen nothing. I claimed to have seen... something... vanishing around the next bend in the rocky walls. Something pale and shapeless, cloudlike. Perhaps it had been vagrant smoke from the fire above, or the reflection of my flashlight off one of the deposits of white calcite that decorated the walls, or just a playful firing of my own jumpy retinal cells in the spooky dark. Or some kind of nightmare vexed into uneasy existence by the combined imaginings of the entire population of Mildred. Between Don’s moans, it seemed to me I had heard a faint, retreating tinkle of fairy bells. Father MacGill, however, had heard nothing. Some of the reporters hinted on national TV that I was lying. No one knew.

  I felt some sympathy for the media folks, propelled by their lust for a juicy story into the cluttered mental landscape of Mildred. They’d lived through a long, disappointing progression, from their initial unalloyed amusement at our hillbilly hijinks, through amused doubt, to dubious belief, to feeding frenzy, to intense frustration, and finally back to amusement, or perhaps bemusement would be a better word, now salted with a slightly embittered sarcasm. But their failure to pin the story down had only sharpened their thirst for interviews, photos, video clips of fluttering yellow police tape and the lethargic corridors of Fetlock Mountain Medical Center, along with heavily accented rustic analysis. It was all annoyingly inconclusive. Something interesting seemed to have happened, but what, exactly, was it? No one knew.

  And in Mildred at least, increasingly no one seemed to care. The townsfolk had reacted to the ambiguous denouement with a combination of enthusiasm and relief. Naturally they were pleased by all the media attention, by the invasion of well tailored bodies and smoothly made up faces from LA and San Francisco, and they enjoyed being interviewed and seeing themselves and their friends on the news. More importantly, though, with every interview and video clip the puzzling events of the last few weeks lost another measure of whatever reality they may once have had and settled more firmly into the character of a TV event, of the sort that could be safely defined by a couple of 30-second spots, book-ended with SUV commercials. Most of the town’s residents, who had perhaps never been completely comfortable with the idea of actual alien visitors, found this evolution deeply reassuring. In school, rather than the nature of the being that Don Swayzee had or had not met up on Devil’s Table, the kids were far more interested in talking about the celebrity newscasters who were rooming at the Travelodge. Arnold Barns’s notoriety, already at a high point, was further elevated by his having changed the sheets of a certain high-profile anchorwoman. The conversations at Stirling’s were now all about who’d looked the best on the 6 o’clock news the night before. The possibility that there was actually something up there seemed to have robbed the town’s speculative frenzy of all its fuel, like the backfire the firefighters had set on Devil’s Table to contain Arnold Barns’s unintended blaze. Everyone had abruptly turned their attention to the flood of reporters and bureaucrats as though the episode of collective insanity had never happened, leaving only Don’s enigmatic lower leg in its freezer bag and a few dozen acres of burned-over sage as reminders. Was there something out there? No one knew, and nearly everyone seemed to prefer not to think about it.

  Parnell, due to his untimely injury, had missed all the excitement, and in his frustration insisted on dragging me up to Devil’s Table a couple of days later to view the devastation. By now he’d fully recovered from whatever mishap had driven him to his couch, and I was happy to see that, revitalized by all the media attention, he seemed to have regained some of his normal headlong energy. He’d picked me up after school and driven up to Devil’s Table as though chased by demons, with Margaret Quitclaim in the passenger seat of the truck and the two dogs skating desperately in the back.

  “Is there something out there, Simon?” he asked me grumpily, as we stood at the rim of “our” fissure, surveying the broad, curving blackened area surrounding it. “Should we be afraid?”

  “Don’t be such a crank, Evan,” said Margaret, aiming her blind gaze at the sun. “Look at the clouds!” The rolling fair-weather clouds hurried over us toward Nevada, throwing out curling tendrils of white and reeling them back in like the scarves of dancers. On either side of us the panting black dogs sat in the black ash, with their heads thrown back and casual tongues lolling. What could I say? The yellow police tape crackled in the wind.

  To Lu I said, in the darkness of our bedroom, “I’m not sure the joyous rumor of the impending Twombly-Bench nuptials can really cancel out Don Swayzee’s missing cowboy boot.”

  “It’s pretty horrible,” she agreed. “Although I heard Dale has already been down to the hospital to discuss the prosthetic options with him. With Dale on the case, Don’ll probably start a new career as a soccer player or something.”

  “Well, better a leg than a head. The real loss in all this is Matt. He’s totally flying up his own fundament now with all this stuff. He’s so ‘the coordinator of Mildred’s search for extraterrestrials’ at this point that he can’t tell the difference between what actually happened and what he just saw on CBS.”

  “You’re too hard on him,” she said. “Matt’s always had a lot of extra energy. He just needs a project, and this is a good one for him. It combines science, religion, and fantasy. And it gets him on TV. He’ll calm down after awhile.”

  “He should turn in his scientist’s license,” I said. “He’s lost all respect for the difference between evidence and speculation.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But what about you, then? Don’t you have to change your position just a little bit? The fact is, you did see something down there, didn’t you? So wasn’t he basically right after all?”

  “I may have seen something. But I have no idea what it was, or even whether it was there at all. And who says it had anything to do with the Christmas Eve lights? Everything else that happened up there was apparently Arnold Barns’s doing.”

  “He never confessed to the crop circle thing, or the tinkling noise. What about that? Anyway, Don saw something too,” she pointed out. “And something certainly took his leg off, that we know for sure. I don’t think he just shot himself, do you? And what about those footprints? They just end in there, as if something had gone in and just... dematerialized.” She paused, to savor the word. “Don’t you at least have to admit there’s probably more to this than just a couple of meteors?”

  I suppose I could have pointed out that there were ways of explaining the sudden disappearance of the footprints, although they did require the assumption of some coyote-ish trickery. I didn’t, though, and in fact I was wondering myself if the real explanation might not be something both simpler and more outlandish. Don’s freelancing leg also wasn’t easy to explain in my scheme of things, since I didn’t really think he was enough of a clod to have shot it off himself. “So why aren’t we all freaking out?” I said, to distract her. “There’s maybe something running or flying around out there that can lop off a cowboy’
s leg with one bite, and all we do is just dig into our apple pie at Stirling’s.”

  “But what are we going to do?” she asked. “If it is an extraterrestrial, it’s obviously got much more advanced technology than ours. So there’s not much we can do but wait and see what it’s going to do. Personally, I don’t think it’s very aggressive anyway, whatever it is, if it’s anything. It never did anything until it was attacked, except tinkle its little bells. Arnold probably frightened the poor thing half to death with all his fireworks and his groaning noises. And then Don Swayzee shows up with his shotgun. What would you do? I probably would have bitten his leg off myself. Or maybe his head.”

  “The poor thing?” I said. It seemed to me she was taking the whole Christian love and charity bit a little too far. In fact, Lu was altogether less ruffled than I would have expected by this whole weird train of events. I glanced over at her vague profile in the dark. The bed was very warm now, and I was enjoying the companionable contact of my short, hairy leg with her longer, smoother, basketball player’s limb, even through the layers of nightwear. I was tired, and almost content to let the darkness swirl down over my eyes for the night. But I couldn’t quite switch off the little current of dissonance that had begun flowing when Lu had kissed my ex-mistress goodbye.

  “I hadn’t realized you and Janet were so close,” I said casually. I thought I detected a slight tension in her leg at the change of subject.

  “Oh. . . Janet and I probably knew each other a lot better than you realized,” she finally said. “We had a lot of afternoons, you know, before I took over the basketball team. And you weren’t paying much attention.” I thought about that. After a moment, she began tugging at my forearm until my arms uncrossed and she could get hold of my hand, which was finally warm. Our hands lay quietly together in Mervyn’s empty spot, and I had a brief vision of our missing friend arrowing out into space with extended front paws, like Supercat, toward a cluster of spinning galaxies. I knew that, whatever Lu did know, she’d decided to forgive me. My own position was more ambiguous: I didn’t even know if there was anything to forgive, although I had my suspicions. But the room was very dark, and I could only see the outlines of things, by not looking directly at them: the rectangle of the window, the dresser, the pale cloud of my wife’s face. She was staring at me in the darkness, her eyes reflecting a faint radiance from an unknown source.

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