The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Aw, I don’t believe you have,” she said, in a happy singsongy way. At least she was dressed for a tramp through the woods, in denim jeans and mannish boots with no heels to them, but wearing the same face-paint and fool hat, and in a red sweater that fit as close as her dress had. “But I’m not walking with you, either,” she went on. “I’m walking alone, just behind you. You can’t even see me, without turning your head. We’re both walking alone, together.”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “Are we near where it landed?” she asked.

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “You haven’t had one of your picnics lately, have you?”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “You ought to have another one.”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “I’m writing a story,” she said, “about Close Encounters. You know, the new movie? With Richard Dreyfuss? He was in The Goodbye Girl, and Jaws, about the shark? Did you see those? Do you go to any movies?” Some critter we had spooked, maybe a turkey, went thrashing off through the brush, and I heard her catch her breath. “I bet you saw Deliverance,” she said.

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “My editor thought it’d be interesting to talk to people who really have, you know, claimed their own close encounters, to have met people from outer space. Contactees, that’s the word, right? You were one of the first contactees, weren’t you, Mr. Nelson? When was it, 1956?”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “Aw, come on, Mr. Nelson. Don’t be so mean. They all talked to me out in California. Mr. Bethurum talked to me.”

  I bet he did, I thought. Truman Bethurum always was a plumb fool for a skirt.

  “I talked to Mr. Fry, and to Mr. King, and Mr. Owens. I talked to Mr. Angelucci.”

  Orfeo Angelucci, I thought, now there was one of the world’s original liars, as bad as Adamski. “Those names don’t mean nothing to me,” I said.

  “They told similar stories to yours, in the fifties and sixties. Meeting the Space Brothers, and being taken up, and shown wonders, and coming back to the Earth, with wisdom and all.”

  “If you talked to all them folks,” I said, “you ought to be brim full of wisdom yourself. Full of something. Why you need to hound an old man through the woods?”

  “You’re different,” she said. “You know lots of things the others don’t.”

  “Lots of things, uh-huh. Like what?”

  “You know how to hunt bees, don’t you?”

  I snorted. “Hunt bees. You won’t never need to hunt no bees, Miss Press. Priss. You can buy your honey at the A and the P. Hell, if you don’t feel like going to the store, you could just ask, and some damn fool would bring it to you for free on a silver tray.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said.

  “That warn’t no compliment,” I said. “That was a clear-eyed statement of danger, like a sign saying, ‘Bridge out,’ or a label saying, ‘Poison.’ Write what you please, Miss Priss, but don’t expect me to give you none of the words. You know all the words you need already.”

  “But you used to be so open about your experiences, Mr. Nelson. I’ve read that to anyone who found their way here off the highway, you’d tell about the alien Bob Solomon, and how that beam from the saucer cured your lumbago, and all that good pasture land on Mars. Why, you had all those three-day picnics, right here on your farm, for anyone who wanted to come talk about the Space Brothers. You’d even hand out little Baggies with samples of hair from your four-hundred-pound Venusian dog.”

  I stopped and whirled on her, and she hopped back a step, nearly fell down. “He warn’t never no four hundred pounds,” I said. “You reporters sure do believe some stretchers. You must swallow whole eggs for practice like a snake. I’ll have you know, Miss Priss, that Bo just barely tipped three hundred and eighty-five pounds at his heaviest, and that was on the truck scales behind the Union 76 in June 1960, the day he ate all the sileage, and Clay Rector, who ran all their inspections back then, told me those scales would register the difference if you took the Rand McNally atlas out of the cab, so that figure ain’t no guesswork.” When I paused for breath, I kinda shook myself, turned away from her gaping face, and walked on. “From that day,” I said, “I put old Bo on a science diet, one I got from the Extension, and I measured his rations, and I hitched him ever day to a sledge of felled trees and boulders and such, because dogs, you know, they’re happier with a little exercise, and he settled down to around, oh, three-ten, three-twenty, and got downright frisky again. He’d romp around and change direction and jerk that sledge around, and that’s why those three boulders are a-sitting in the middle of yonder pasture today, right where he slung them out of the sledge. Four hundred pounds, my foot. You don’t know much, if that’s what you know, and that’s a fact.”

  I was warmed up by the walk and the spreading day and my own strong talk, and I set a smart pace, but she loped along beside me, writing in her notebook with a silver pen that flashed as it caught the sun. “I stand corrected,” she said. “So what happened? Why’d you stop the picnics, and start running visitors off with a shotgun, and quit answering your mail?”

  “You can see your own self what happened,” I said. “Woman, I got old. You’ll see what it’s like, when you get there. All the people who believed in me died, and then the ones who humored me died, and now even the ones who feel obligated to sort of tolerate me are starting to go. Bo died, and Teddy, that was my Earth-born dog, he died, and them government boys went to the Moon and said they didn’t see no mining operations or colony domes or big Space Brother dogs, or nothing else old Buck had seen up there. And in place of my story, what story did they come up with? I ask you. Dust and rocks and craters as far as you can see, and when you walk as far as that, there’s another sight of dust and rocks and craters, and so on all around till you’re back where you started, and that’s it, boys, wash your hands, that’s the Moon done. Excepting for some spots where the dust is so deep a body trying to land would just be swallowed up, sink to the bottom, and at the bottom find what? Praise Jesus, more dust, just what we needed. They didn’t see nothing that anybody would care about going to see. No floating cars, no lakes of diamonds, no topless Moon gals, just dumb dull nothing. Hell, they might as well a been in Arkansas. You at least can cast a line there, catch you a bream. Besides, my lumbago come back,” I said, easing myself down into the rocker, because we was back on my front porch by then. “It always comes back, my doctor says. Doctors plural, I should say. I’m on the third one now. The first two died on me. That’s something, ain’t it? For a man to outlive two of his own doctors?”

  Her pen kept a-scratching as she wrote. She said, “Maybe Bob Solomon’s light beam is still doing you some good, even after all this time.”

  “Least it didn’t do me no harm. From what all they say now about the space people, I’m lucky old Bob didn’t jam a post-hole digger up my ass and send me home with the screaming meemies and three hours of my life missing. That’s the only aliens anybody cares about nowadays, big-eyed boogers with long cold fingers in your drawers. Doctors from space. Well, if they want to take three hours of my life, they’re welcome to my last trip to the urologist. I reckon it was right at three hours, and I wish them joy of it.”

  “Not so,” she said. “What about Star Wars? It’s already made more money than any other movie ever made, more than Gone with the Wind, more than The Sound of Music. That shows people are still interested in space, and in friendly aliens. And this new Richard Dreyfuss movie I was telling you about is based on actual UFO case files. Dr. Hynek helped with it. That’ll spark more interest in past visits to Earth.”

  “I been to ever doctor in the country, seems like,” I told her, “but I don’t recall ever seeing Dr. Hynek.”

  “How about Dr. Rutledge?”

  “Is he the toenail man?”

  She swatted me with her notebook. “Now you’re just being a pain,” she said. “Dr. Harley Rutledge, the scientist, the physicist
. Over at Southeast Missouri State. That’s no piece from here. He’s been doing serious UFO research for years, right here in the Ozarks. You really ought to know him. He’s been documenting the spooklights. Like the one at Hornet, near Neosho?”

  “I’ve heard tell of that light,” I told her, “but I didn’t know no scientist cared about it.”

  “See?” she said, almost a squeal, like she’d opened a present, like she’d proved something. “A lot has happened since you went home and locked the door. More people care about UFOs and flying saucers and aliens today than they did in the 1950s, even. You should have you another picnic.”

  Once I got started talking, I found her right easy to be with, and it was pleasant a-sitting in the sun talking friendly with a pretty gal, or with anyone. It’s true, I’d been powerful lonesome, and I had missed those picnics, all those different types of folks on the farm who wouldn’t have been brought together no other way, in no other place, by nobody else. I was prideful of them. But I was beginning to notice something funny. To begin with, Miss Priss, whose real name I’d forgot by now, had acted like someone citified and paper-educated and standoffish. Now, the longer she sat on my porch a-jawing with me, the more easeful she got, and the more country she sounded, as if she’d lived in the hollow her whole life. It sorta put me off. Was this how Mike Wallace did it on 60 Minutes, pretending to be just regular folks, until you forgot yourself, and were found out?

  “Where’d you say you were from?” I asked.

  “Mars,” she told me. Then she laughed. “Don’t get excited,” she said. “It’s a town in Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh. I’m based out of Chicago, though.” She cocked her head, pulled a frown, stuck out her bottom lip. “You didn’t look at my card,” she said. “I pushed it under your door yesterday, when you were being so all-fired rude.”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said, which warn’t quite a lie because I hadn’t bothered to pick it up off the floor this morning, either. In fact, I’d plumb forgot to look for it.

  “You ought to come out to Clearwater Lake tonight. Dr. Rutledge and his students will be set up all night, ready for whatever. He said I’m welcome. That means you’re welcome, too. See? You have friends in high places. They’ll be set up at the overlook, off the highway. Do you know it?”

  “I know it,” I told her.

  “Can you drive at night? You need me to come get you?” She blinked and chewed her lip, like a thought had just struck. “That might be difficult,” she said.

  “Don’t exercise yourself,” I told her. “I reckon I still can drive as good as I ever did, and my pickup still gets the job done, too. Not that I aim to drive all that ways, just to look at the sky. I can do that right here on my porch.”

  “Yes,” she said, “alone. But there’s something to be said for looking up in groups, wouldn’t you agree?”

  When I didn’t say nothing, she stuck her writing-pad back in her pocketbook and stood up, dusting her butt with both hands. You’d think I never swept the porch. “I appreciate the interview, Mr. Nelson.”

  “Warn’t no interview,” I told her. “We was just talking, is all.”

  “I appreciate the talking, then,” she said. She set off across the yard, toward the gap in the rhododendron bushes that marked the start of the driveway. “I hope you can make it tonight, Mr. Nelson. I hope you don’t miss the show.”

  I watched her sashay off around the bush, and I heard her boots crunching the gravel for a few steps, and then she was gone, footsteps and all. I went back in the house, latched the screen door and locked the wood, and took one last look through the front curtains, to make sure. Some folks, I had heard, remembered only long afterward they’d been kidnapped by spacemen, a “retrieved memory” they called it, like finding a ball on the roof in the fall that went up there in the spring. Those folks needed a doctor to jog them, but this reporter had jogged me. All that happy talk had loosened something inside me, and things I hadn’t thought about in years were welling up like a flash flood, like a sickness. If I was going to be memory-sick, I wanted powerfully to do it alone, as if alone was something new and urgent, and not what I did ever day.

  I closed the junk-room door behind me as I yanked the light on. The swaying bulb on its chain rocked the shadows back and forth as I dragged from beneath a shelf a crate of cheap splinter wood, so big it could have held two men if they was dead. Once I drove my pickup to the plant to pick up a bulk of dog food straight off the dock, cheaper that way, and this was one of the crates it come in. It still had that faint high smell. As it slid, one corner snagged and ripped the carpet, laid open the orange shag to show the knotty pine beneath. The shag was threadbare, but why bother now buying a twenty-year rug? Three tackle boxes rattled and jiggled on top of the crate, two yawning open and one rusted shut, and I set all three onto the floor. I lifted the lid of the crate, pushed aside the top layer, a fuzzy blue blanket, and started lifting things out one at a time. I just glanced at some, spent more time with others. I warn’t looking for anything in particular, just wanting to touch them and weigh them in my hands, and stack the memories up all around, in a back room under a bare bulb.

  A crimpled flier with a dry mud footprint across it and a torn place up top, like someone yanked it off a staple on a bulletin board or a telephone pole:

  SPACECRAFT

  CONVENTION

  Hear speakers who have contacted our Space Brothers

  PICNIC

  Lots of music—Astronomical telescope, see the craters on the Moon, etc.

  Public invited—Spread the word

  Admission—50¢ and $1.00 donation

  Children under school age free

  FREE CAMPING

  Bring your own tent, house car or camping outfit, folding chairs, sleeping bags, etc.

  CAFETERIA on the grounds—fried chicken, sandwiches, coffee, cold drinks, etc.

  Conventions held every year on the last Saturday, Sunday and Monday of the month of June

  at

  BUCK’S MOUNTAIN VIEW RANCH

  Buck Nelson, Route 1

  Mountain View, Missouri

  A headline from a local paper: “Spacecraft Picnic at Buck’s Ranch Attracts 2000 People.”

  An old Life magazine in a see-through envelope, Marilyn Monroe all puckered up to the plastic. April 7, 1952. The headline: “There Is A Case For Interplanetary Saucers.” I slid out the magazine and flipped through the article. I read: “These objects cannot be explained by present science as natural phenomena—but solely as artificial devices created and operated by a high intelligence.”

  A Baggie of three or four dog hairs, with a sticker showing the outline of a flying saucer and the words HAIR FROM BUCK’S ALIEN DOG “BO.”

  Teddy hadn’t minded, when I took the scissors to him to get the burrs off, and to snip a little extra for the Bo trade. Bo was months dead by then, but the folks demanded something. Some of my neighbors I do believe would have pulled down my house and barn a-looking for him, if they thought there was a body to be had. Some people won’t believe in nothing that ain’t a corpse, and I couldn’t bear letting the science men get at him with their saws and jars, to jibble him up. Just the thought put me in mind of that old song:

  The old horse died with the whooping cough

  The old cow died in the fork of the branch

  The buzzards had them a public dance.

  No, sir. No public dance this time. I hid Bo’s body in a shallow cave, and I nearabouts crawled in after him, cause it liked to have killed me, too, even with the tractor’s front arms to lift him and push him and drop him. Then I walled him up so good with scree and stones lying around that even I warn’t sure anymore where it was, along that long rock face.

  I didn’t let on that he was gone, neither. Already people were getting shirty about me not showing him off like a circus mule, bringing him out where people could gawk at him and poke him and ride him. I told them he was vicious around strangers, and that was a bald lie. He was a sweet old thi
ng for his size, knocking me down with his licking tongue, and what was I but a stranger, at the beginning? We was all strangers. Those Baggies of Teddy hair was a bald lie, too, and so was some of the other parts I told through the years, when my story sort of got away from itself, or when I couldn’t exactly remember what had happened in between this and that, so I had to fill in, the same way I filled the chinks between the rocks I stacked between me and Bo, to keep out the buzzards, hoping it’d be strong enough to last forever.

  But a story ain’t like a wall. The more stuff you add onto a wall, spackle and timber and flat stones, the harder it is to push down. The more stuff you add to a story through the years, the weaker it gets. Add a piece here and add a piece there, and in time you can’t remember your own self how the pieces was supposed to fit together, and every piece is a chance for some fool to ask more questions, and confuse you more, and poke another hole or two, to make you wedge in something else, and there is no end to it. So finally you just don’t want to tell no part of the story no more, except to yourself, because yourself is the only one who really believes in it. In some of it, anyway. The other folks, the ones who just want to laugh, to make fun, you run off or cuss out or turn your back on, until no one much asks anymore, or remembers, or cares. You’re just that tetched old dirt farmer off of Route One, withered and sick and sitting on the floor of his junk room and crying, snot hanging from his nose, sneezing in the dust.

  It warn’t all a lie, though.

  No, sir. Not by a long shot.

  And that was the worst thing.

  Because the reporters always came, ever year at the end of June, and so did the duck hunters who saw something funny in the sky above the blind one frosty morning and was looking for it ever since, and the retired military fellas who talked about “protocols” and “incident reports” and “security breaches,” and the powdery old ladies who said they’d walked around the rosebush one afternoon and found themselves on the rings of Saturn, and the beatniks from the college, and the tourists with their Polaroids and short pants, and the women selling funnel cakes and glow-in-the-dark space Frisbees, and the younguns with the waving antennas on their heads, and the neighbors who just wanted to snoop around and see whether old Buck had finally let the place go to rack and ruin, or whether he was holding it together for one more year, they all showed up on time, just like the mockingbirds. But the one person who never came, not one damn time since the year of our Lord nineteen and fifty-six, was the alien Bob Solomon himself. The whole point of the damn picnics, the Man of the Hour, had never showed his face. And that was the real reason I give up on the picnics, turned sour on the whole flying-saucer industry, and kept close to the willows ever since. It warn’t my damn lumbago or the Mothman or Barney and Betty Hill and their Romper Room boogeymen, or those dull dumb rocks hauled back from the Moon and thrown in my face like coal in a Christmas stocking. It was Bob Solomon, who said he’d come back, stay in touch, continue to shine down his blue-white healing light, because he loved the Earth people, because he loved me, and who done none of them things.