 
Hibbard 161

A Burned-Over District

Charles Hibbard

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Charles B. Hibbard

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Chapter 1

It may have been a coincidence that the whole thing got started at the annual Christmas Eve basketball game, Mildred High School vs. Ten Spot. The game has become quite a town tradition. It's preceded by a chicken supper, the chickens being barbecued, special sauce recipe, outside in the early winter dark on the freezing apron of the fire station by our very businesslike volunteer firefighters and then rushed in foil roaster trays to the school cafeteria, where they meet their potato salad and where most of the population of the two towns gathers to gossip, laugh, and eat. The game starts after the supper, at about 8, and when it's over the kids shower and get dressed up and everybody goes off to Christmas Eve services, including the town's two Jews, one Wiccan, several closet atheists and agnostics, and the gorgeous and very private Myrtle Bench, who's rumored, in the absence of any solid information, to be both an atheist and a socialist. But the Christmas Eve service is mainly a social event, and only a few disapproving cranks worry that its flavor is too tolerant and inclusive.

This particular Christmas Eve, though, there was some tension in the air, as though the town were sensing the forward pressure of unusual events. The volunteer firemen were too exuberant with the charcoal, so that some of the chickens got blackened, which produced a bit of un-Christmasy grumbling in the cafeteria. There was also a little bad blood between the opposing teams, for the usual teenage reasons – hormones, male identity issues – and even between their parents, due to a long-simmering conflict over duck-hunting territories.

Mildred High, impeccably coached by my very competent wife, Lu, won the game easily, as usual. The Ten Spot players got frustrated, and there was some shoving and trash-talking on the floor, which moved outside after the kids showered and got into their church duds. Lu, by that time occupied with our baby, Albert, was not in a position to assert much control over her players, so Principal Shivwits and I were attempting to insert our weak, out-of-shape bodies between scuffling pairs of massive ranchers' boys, all of us slipping and sliding on the snow-encrusted asphalt of the parking lot, when the lights appeared over the western mountains.

It was after 10 o'clock, the darkness was nearly total, there was no moon, and the mountains were merely a slightly deeper blackness against the sky. You could pick out the jagged line of peaks only because the vast desert canopy of stars suddenly ended there. I'm trying to be very accurate and objective.

Our attention was drawn upward from the roiling basketball players and pudgy authority figures who were trying valiantly to break the thing up to the two very bright lights that suddenly appeared slightly above the sawtooth rim of the mountains, one an ethereal translucent green, the other purest white. (Some observers claim the lights did not, in fact, appear suddenly; that they actually "grew" into being from the darkness, or even arrived, trailing pointed wakes of light or clouds of glory, like cartoon superheroes. I did not see either of those effects. I merely looked up and the lights were there.) The two lights moved very slowly downward, then appeared to hover, gradually separating and growing brighter. They were much brighter than any star or planet or airplane running lights I've ever seen, but it was their very deliberate motion that surprised us all; the way they first lowered themselves and then paused, almost as though they were observing our little Christmas Eve dustup. Parnell, who had emerged reluctantly from retirement funk to attend his 30th chicken supper, later used the word "piloted" to describe their motions. But Parnell has built a career and a lifestyle on what he calls stirring up shit. The fight ended abruptly, as everybody stopped to watch. Suddenly the lights were above us (again, no one was quite sure how they got there so fast), moving eastward at a supernatural speed and leaving distinct trails of light, or scintillations that could be romantically described as stardust. They hovered briefly again to the east of us, over the deeper darkness of Devil's Table, then gradually lowered themselves toward the top of that broad plateau and winked out. (Later, some of the onlookers would claim they heard a hissing or ripping noise as the lights passed over us, and also the distant thump of an impact on Devil's Table as the lights disappeared. I did not hear either of those things. Or I don't think I did.)

We all looked at each other. "What do you think that was?" Javier Shivwits asked me. Matt Matawan said, "It looked like they landed up on Devil's Table." A few people, including me, laughed. The fistfight was over, so we all went off to church.

Chapter 2

It's not an easy thing for a man to have a wife who's a better basketball player than he is. I'd like to think my 3-point shot is more dependable than Lu's, and maybe I'm a better ball handler, but only because I'm closer to the ground. Outside those two areas, though, every comparison is strongly in her favor. She's taller than I am, just as fast, a creative passer, runs the court better, and has a deadly jumper from anywhere inside 15 feet, along with a couple of devastating spin moves in the low post. She makes up for the supposed female lack of upper body strength with her long arms and a great pair of hands. She's also an infinitely smarter player than I am, with marvelous court vision and an almost magical intuition for what's going to happen next, which in turn allows her to make things go the way she wants them to. Plus she's 15 years younger than I am.

I met her on a basketball court in San Francisco, in fact, and fell in love with her the first time I guarded her, or rather failed to guard her. Partly it was the authority and grace of her game, but also I discovered that the old defensive admonition to "put a body on him" acquired a whole new dimension when him was a her, even a her as long and lean as Lu. At that time, though, Lu was the girlfriend of Kermit the Bus Driver, who had introduced her to our regular Sunday morning game. I admired her hopelessly for a year of Sundays – among other superiorities, Kermit the Bus Driver was a much better player than I am – before Kermit decided to move to Seattle, where bus driver health benefits were better, and Lu declined to accompany him. I never asked why. She continued to attend the Sunday morning games, and, to my surprise, our basketball friendship blossomed into something more. I was particularly attracted to her level-headedness and businesslike approach to life, which I thought complemented my own rather scattershot methods. I'm still not sure what attracted her to me – possibly she's got a thing for body hair, or maybe she thought she needed a little more cynicism and weirdness in her life. Or maybe it was just that she was beginning to sense that she wasn't a girl any more, she wanted babies, and I was the only male in sight who seemed interested enough to make the required commitment. I recently saw somewhere that women can read, in the faces of men, which ones will make devoted fathers. I'm not saying that's what Lu read in my face, however.

Though she'd survived in San Francisco for years, Lu was never really happy in the city. Her father had been a Pennsylvania coal miner. While he spent most of his life hacking out a poor living in the gloomy cities a couple of thousand feet under the ground, his family lived in a small town on the surface, where his three kids grew up roaming the deceptively picturesque hills in the sunshine far above his head. Lu had a deep need for open skies and clean air, doubtless acquired by watching her blackened and weary old man emerge from the narrow tunnels every evening to receive, in summer at least, his brief ration of daylight. Alone among her siblings she'd made it to college, and later migrated to San Francisco, looking for excitement. There she'd found Kermit the Bus Driver and later me. But San Francisco, though it certainly wasn't Newark, was too gray and dirty and had too many buildings for her taste. She regularly dragged me with her on long backpacking trips to the mountains, ignoring my city-boy grumblings. On one or two occasions we camped not far from the little mountain town of Mildred. A couple of years went by, and one day Lu, browsing the Internet, saw a listing for a social studies teacher at Mildred High School.

By the time we moved to Mildred, about four years ago, some fault lines were opening in our marriage. For one thing, despite our move to what Lu considered prime child-rearing country, the babies did not immediately arrive. By then Lu was in her late 30s and getting seriously worried. As for me, after a year or two of marriage the level-headedness I had originally admired in her had begun to look more like a rather boring predictability. By that time, in fact, about the only place she could ever surprise me was on the basketball court. Except of course for the sudden outbreak of her Christianity, which struck like a sort of eruptive skin condition, causing her to welcome Jesus into her life, into our lives that is, become very active in Mildred's small but spunky Presbyterian congregation, sometimes pray out loud at embarrassing moments, devotedly visit the lame, blind, halt, and sick, and give away large portions of our small income to various deserving causes and sometimes to less deserving (in my opinion) individuals. Accompanying and perhaps not unconnected to her sudden religious fervor was what I considered an unrealistic increase in procreative pressure – the sort of stress that can have unpredictable effects on the performance and behavior of a man in his mid-50s.

The affair of the basketball team stretched things to near the snapping point. Though Lu had taught math in San Francisco, there had been no job for her when we'd moved to Mildred, and time had soon begun to lie heavy on her hands. She'd been able to land a part-time job on the morning shift of the PetroMall, a combination gas station, convenience store, and gourmet deli that sat at Mildred's only real intersection, between the main highway and one not so main. In the summer she folded and reshelved sweatshirts there and made sandwiches for busloads of German tourists. In the winter there wasn't a lot to do other than chat with the deli manager, Antonio, and the other guys who manned the counter. But that left her free through all the long afternoons. I don't know what she did with her time. There was the church, of course, and I know she hung out a lot with Janet Blythe and the glamorous Myrtle Bench, both of whom taught at the high school and so were sometimes free in the late afternoons. As far as I could tell, though, all they did was gab and drink too much coffee.

In any case, I was too busy to pay much attention. When I moved from the urban educational jungle to Mildred High School, my contract, along with teaching history, economics, psychology, and study skills, had included coaching boys' basketball. I also had volleyball in the spring, but nobody was very interested in that. Basketball, however, was taken quite seriously out there in the desert. Lu stood it for one season, watching my spirited but anarchic team rushing fruitlessly up and down the floor, before she brushed me aside and offered herself to Javier Shivwits, as basketball coach, that is. Javier Shivwits, although his main focus was on turning Mildred High School into an academic training ground for Ivy League colleges, was by no means blind to the role of athletics in fashioning the well-rounded high school transcript, and he accepted her offer immediately, trying to soften his betrayal by pointing out that at least that part of my paycheck wouldn't be leaving the family.

In a way I wasn't unhappy that Lu had found a project. On the other hand, it was more than a little humiliating to be replaced by her, especially when the team, which had played like a pack of psychotic greyhounds for me, immediately began to win. Not to mention that our positions had now been switched 180°. She was busy in the afternoons, while I found myself wandering the windy winter streets of Mildred without much to do. Of course, for a teacher there's always grading; and sometimes, indeed, I would take my stack of papers to Stirling's and sit there sighing with my green pen and a cup of coffee, getting the gossip from Patty Milano when she didn't have too many customers to deal with. But I didn't really like going straight from the classroom to my homework. More to the point, now that Lu was busy all afternoon, her friend Janet Blythe, Mildred High School's Visual and Performing Arts teacher, was free. Sudden surplus of free time; mid-50s; unforeseen termination of athletic career, in which replaced by wife; performance anxieties occasioned by advancing age and failure to impregnate wife; declining interest in wife's too-familiar, ingenuous body; unforeseen proximity to attractive Visual and Performing Arts teacher with dance training. You may connect the dots.

I'm going back over this history in order to explain why Lu felt it desirable, even a year after the end of my modest adventure, to accompany me on my weekly visits to Hathwell, California, where Janet Blythe had recently gone into hospice care. We were scheduled to take a festive dinner down there on Christmas Day, in fact, the day after the appearance of the strange lights in the night sky over Mildred. Lu didn't officially know what had gone on between her friend and me, but she knew it involved physical attraction, and in keeping with her very literal worldview she was uncomfortable at the thought of the two of us alone together in a room with a bed, even a hospital bed.

You might think she wouldn't be very anxious to visit this particular person; but if you're a real Christian, what better opportunity to practice the Christian virtues of forgiveness and charity than to visit your husband's terminally ill suspected ex-mistress on her bed of pain? There might even have been a certain satisfaction in visiting the ex-mistress with your husband's squalling, drooling baby son slung over your shoulder. But knowing how seriously Lu took her moral precepts, I doubt that she would have allowed herself that particular pleasure.

On that Christmas morning Lu and I lay in bed late, huddling together in somewhat wary companionship and watching the room gradually fill with the gray light of the late sunrise. Both of us like to sleep with the window wide open, which can make it hard to get out of a warm bed on winter mornings, and this morning there was no hurry anyway. Plus we were reluctant to disturb Mervyn, our decrepit old cat, who had recently taken to sleeping between us again, now that various of his organs had begun to shut down. Albert, too, was sleeping in, exhausted by all the excitement and his unusually late bedtime.

"Father MacGill seems to be taking those heavenly lights a little more seriously than I would have expected. He's usually more hip than that." I was provoking her, of course, knowing it was a mistake but unable to resist. The Reverend had spent a few minutes at the midnight service in an impromptu speculation on the possible spiritual significance of such celestial fireworks. I knew Lu had also been excited by the lights, appearing as they had on Christmas Eve. It was the kind of sign that she would be unwilling to accept as accidental. I could feel the friendly double-bed atmosphere leaking away as I explained why I was sure the lights had been nothing more than a couple of meteors, or fragments of a single meteor, and wondered out loud why someone as rational and level-headed as Father MacGill could let himself go off on a supernatural excursion over them. As I've already mentioned, Lu's religious trip is a bit of a sore point between us; but I'm not sure why I feel this need to crush her upbeat spiritual imaginings under my secular hobnails at every opportunity. I attribute some of my insistence to a distaste for the current resurgence of religious formulations that involve the bombing, beheading, cleansing, segregating, enforced pregnancy, or even just marginalizing of people who don't share them. Although Lu herself is the kind of person who, if she finds an ant in the bathroom, carries it outside on a square of toilet paper to start a new life somewhere else. Mainly, though, I just find it annoying that so many people, including my own wife, seem to prefer convoluted heavenly interventionist scenarios for everyday events that are either completely random or have simple, natural explanations. My sober reasoning never sways Lu in the least, however. It only annoys her, and our marriage would undoubtedly be healthier if I could just quit trying to bore holes in her faith. But I only occasionally exercise that kind of restraint.

"Well, maybe," was all she would concede, getting out of bed probably sooner than she would have wanted to and rearranging the blankets over Mervyn. She slipped her bathrobe on hastily in the icy air and padded away to get Albert up.

While Lu was at church for the second time in 12 hours, Albert and I battled over his breakfast. He sat in the highchair, still in his loungewear, and gestured spasmodically with the spoon I'd given him to practice with, like a vigorous but erratic symphony conductor. He didn't like his pureed apricots that morning, for some reason, and he kept staring at me pointedly, then kicking his polar fleece legs and banging the heels of his pudgy hands on the tray of the highchair. Watching him, I wondered, not for the first time, where he'd come from – how something as alert and focused as Albert could have emerged from the void on the other side of conception. The genetic answer was simple enough: He looked like Lu, fortunately, and even his brown eyes, nominally inherited from me, had more than a touch of her superior directness. But the mere tracing back of the biological coding seemed wholly inadequate to explain the conundrum of his arrival. There's somebody new in there, I thought, staring into his eyes, the eyes of a puzzled but shrewd and determined little animal. A quick learner. I wasn't sure he belonged to the same species as his parents.

"Resistance is futile," I told him. "You will be assimilated. That is, you will become human, like it or not." He yelped and tried to fling the spoon across the kitchen but released at the wrong time, causing it to slam vertically into the floor.

When Lu got back, we packed up the moveable feast in the cooler and a lot of shopping bags, then loaded it all into our rickety Honda Civic, along with Albert and all his bodily necessities. We left Mervyn curled in the cave I'd constructed for him out of his old fake-fleece-lined bed, with a blanket for a roof and a heating pad on the floor. We didn't like to leave him alone all day, because we had to turn his heating pad off, fearing that it would burn him up and the house down while we were gone. I'd created the cave because it was hard for him to haul himself up onto the bed. His rickety old frame didn't generate much heat any more, which is probably why he now preferred to sleep between us, deep under the blankets, despite the risk of being crushed by rolling bodies and the carbon dioxide concentrations that must have risen to frightening levels as the night wore on.

I could never take the southern route into or out of Mildred without remembering the first time I'd driven it, by now almost 10 years ago. It was on one of our earlier camping trips, and we'd spent a few days traveling from one National Forest campground to another, each with its eccentric superintending couple planted for the summer in lawnchairs in front of their RV under the giant Ponderosas, with an American flag displayed on the awning. Even for an ex-Brooklynite it was all pleasant enough, hiking up to remote mountain lakes for skinny dips during the hot days and making avid love in our double sleeping bag in the intense stillness of the cold June nights. But for some reason the unspectacular strip of two-lane asphalt that carried us into Mildred one afternoon triggered something special in what Lu even then, before her Reawakening, would have called my soul. We had rolled down out of the forested hills onto the flat valley floor, which was dotted with smug black cows, each with its ominous yellow ear tag, and carpeted with the sort of unearthly green that makes you appreciate why cows like grass. We coursed along the highway toward the little town that huddled miles away against the dark western hills. Clouds of blackbirds, which in San Francisco would have been lining the phone wires like grumpy commuters at a bus stop or panhandling the Safeway parking lot, continually sparked up out of the watery ditches on both sides of the road and settled down again behind us like cooling black flakes. We could hear the chatter of that noisy crowd even over the highway wind. And there was the glitter of sunshine on the trembling sequins of aspen leaves, the huge sky and sweeping wind, the corral of mountain slopes that encircled the vast valley floor criss-crossed by thousands of hurrying birds – the spring busy-ness of the place.

And the clouds. In San Francisco we saw a lot of what the meteorologists are pleased to call stratus – featureless gray ceilings of cloud that as far as I'm concerned are really nothing more than a kind of high fog, stretching to the ends of the earth in all directions. In the Eastern Sierra the clouds are a whole other topography, endlessly changing, growing and withering, evolving on a swifter time scale than the stodgier earthly version they embellish. They've got their own ranges of crouching foothills, distant aloof ridges and mysterious canyons, and mountains that glide over the desert dragging gray cassocks of rain and snow. But with clouds you can watch the tectonic processes operate, instead of having to take the geologists' word for it – whole geographies, sequences of landscapes erected and leveled in an afternoon. I was smitten.

Today's clouds were fair-weather clumps that hove up in flocks over the western mountains and rode out over Nevada like hurrying pedestrians, throwing sharp-edged shadows on the smooth desert floor. We drove up over the rim of mountains and then wound our way down the other side, admiring the sweep of the enormous desert valley that lay to the east of Mildred's cozy little bowl. Albert rode quietly in the baby seat. He had briefly vented his rage at being stuck in the back and then gone to sleep. We continued southward, with the wall of mountains on our right sharp and clear in the morning sun, but becoming progressively hazier ahead of us, so that at the limits of our vision they were merely flat bluish silhouettes. On our left the desert spread in long, gray-green slopes, rising 10 miles away to low hills and a set of black volcanic slagheaps. Other, bigger ranges brooded out there, low on the horizon, behind the mystery of great distance.

"Was there a sermon this morning?" I asked Lu. It seemed to me that in my childhood church-going days the minister had sometimes cut us (and presumably himself) a break on Christmas and either eliminated the sermon or made it a short, optimistic one. But no, Lu told me, a bit smugly I thought, there had been a rather long one this morning. Father MacGill must have stayed up all night writing it, inspired by the celestial lights. If there were two lights instead of the one from the Biblical story, he'd told the congregation, and if they'd reprised the trip to the east in only a few seconds, instead of however many weeks or months it must have taken the Three Wise Men to follow the original on their camels, perhaps that was in keeping with the faster pace of modern life and the need for extreme measures to capture the attention of a world habituated to streaming movies, Google, X-rated video games, and computerized special effects. Father MacGill was too hip to try to draw any direct parallels with Gospel events. The lights might or might not have portended anything special, but at the very least they provided a useful reminder that God still had plenty of tricks up His sleeves, which gave us room for hope that it wasn't too late, that humanity might yet be deflected from its evil ways, ample evidence of which could be seen in the newspapers, even on this Christmas morning. Even in the parking lot of Mildred High School on Christmas Eve, he'd added disapprovingly.

"What did people say?" I asked her.

"They seemed interested. At least everybody was talking about it in the coffee room."

"I'm really pretty sure they were meteors," I said, trying to take a soft line.

But Lu had been fortified by Father MacGill's refusal to dismiss the lights as some mundane natural phenomenon. "I know you say that. But what about the way they moved so slowly and hovered? Meteors don't do that, as far as I know. And it did even look like they might have landed up on Devil's Table. Matt Matawan was already headed out there after church to see if he could find anything. I think he thinks they were alien spaceships." She laughed a little bit, but not too hard.

I thought about the two lights, one green, one white, lowering themselves slowly toward the dark plateau of Devil's Table. Matt Matawan was my fellow teacher, the math and science guy, so it wasn't too surprising that he'd be out there on the desert looking for physical evidence. But he was also a strong churchman, and one of those scientists who believe that everything, including science, is properly – in fact, inevitably – directed to the service of the Almighty. What he'd really want to find out there would be physical evidence of some kind of miracle, whether of the science fiction or the spiritual variety – that's what would make him happy. I'm not saying miracles can't happen. It's just that I've never heard about one that I didn't think somebody had just dreamed up, out of their own wishful thinking, or that couldn't be explained by normal physical processes. People are always looking for signs and patterns, and so they read anything they want into the natural phenomena. The grieving figure of the Virgin Mary formed from a random drip of chocolate. Come on. I've noticed, while sitting on the can, that practically every tile on our bathroom floor seems to have some kind of face on it – animal, human, demon – formed by the random splatters of ceramic glaze. One of them even appears to be a bearded individual who I could probably identify as Jesus if I wanted to, except that he's wearing a cowboy hat. I suppose Jesus can wear any kind of hat he wants, but why would he choose our bathroom floor as a place to manifest himself? I have to admit that I accept the scientific explanation of meteors without ever having actually ridden one of them in from outer space and had it vaporize under me in the upper atmosphere. But that scenario just seems to fit comfortably within the boundaries of everyday experience. Why invent a miracle to explain a traffic accident or a successful trip to the grocery store?

My view of the universe is not dry as dust, and it's OK with me if there are a few things we can't explain. Lu's slant, I knew, would be more like Father MacGill's: she'd prefer to interpret the lights as a sign from God. For that reason, she probably hoped Matt wouldn't find anything out on the desert except maybe a silvery effulgence emanating from the tangy sage leaves and a thread of incense in the air. I let it drop. I was certain the excitement would die down in a couple of days.

Hathwell is an odd little town, drowsing at the foot of the mountains about halfway between the two more prosperous metropolises of Bone Ore and Fetlock. In gold mining days the town was a lively place, a rude county seat sweating with avarice and sin, but it had fallen on hard times when the gold veins played out. The county offices had moved to Fetlock, which in the 20th century had grown into the main staging area for backpackers, hunters, and fishermen in the summer and fall and skiers in the winter. Hathwell's stately 19th-century county building had stood empty for many years before going through successive incarnations as a millionaire's hunting lodge, a Congregationalist church, a real estate office, and finally the hospice that now occupies it. It's a rather pleasant place, despite its current melancholy function, with high-ceilinged rooms and wood paneling and tall windows of wavy glass looking out onto grassy lawns and huge century-old trees.

Janet was taking her daily exercise, shuffling down a long hallway in her slippers next to the rolling intravenous hanger, as if it were a skinny walking companion, but she got back into bed as soon as we showed up. At that point the hospice was still allowing her to wear her own nightgowns, rather than those immodest backless hospital things, but I think she was a little shy of being seen anyway, even by me, or especially by me.

She'd lost a lot of weight, which made her dark, steady eyes look even bigger, but her skin still had the supernatural smoothness that had lured me in a couple of years ago, when we'd first met by the groaning copy machine of Mildred High School. Her hair was growing back, but now it was ash blonde and curly, instead of dark and straight and thick. I doubted there would be time for it to grow long again.

It hadn't occurred to me when we were putting the Christmas dinner together, but now all the stuff we unpacked from the cooler and our two or three shopping bags seemed like an affront. The look in Janet's eyes as she watched us laying out this spread was unreadable, but her gaze certainly held no interest in food. That left us in the uncomfortable position of tucking away this huge meal in front of a starving person, almost as though we were flaunting our healthy appetites. She accepted a glass of cranberry juice and took a couple of sips to make us feel better. While we ate, sitting uneasily in the hospice's straight-backed visitor chairs and trying not to appear to be enjoying the food too much, she occupied herself by dandling Albert and cooing at him, holding him under the armpits and jouncing him up and down, to his great joy. I wondered if she'd ever thought about having kids. She was an interesting and attractive woman, but somehow she'd never been able to fashion a long-term relationship. Notwithstanding our physical intimacy, Janet had always been completely opaque to me. After what, if it wasn't lovemaking I thought was at least pretty good sex, she would lie on her back as though paralyzed, staring unhappily at the ceiling, speechless and unresponsive, while I stroked her stomach hopelessly, trying to intuit how I'd failed her. Her focus now on Albert, I thought, was stronger than it had ever been on me, no matter what physical transports she'd been treating me to. She lifted him with her hands under his fat biceps, asked him questions, smiled into his little Lu-replica of a face. He smiled back. I watched her slim hands, feeling a kind of guilty repugnance now that her smooth, elegant body, with which my own had once exchanged such intense sensations, had traveled to this very different place – the zone of needles and tubes, perpetual nausea, exhaustion, emaciation, enemas, and even less enjoyable "procedures".

To soothe my own discomfort, I told her about Mildred's heavenly lights.

"Do you really think something landed out there?" she asked me. "Aliens infiltrating Mildred." She laughed, but I could see she was intrigued by the idea.

"Meteors" I said. "It's the simplest explanation. Occam's Razor."

"But maybe not the best one," she said. Lu was watching our interaction curiously. She mentioned Father MacGill's sermon about the lights, and Janet latched right onto it.

"Why not?" she said. "Occam's Razor my ass. You logical positivists are a lame bunch. You don't want to leave us anything but greasy nuts and bolts." She smiled at the drooling Albert again. I reminded her that I was a history teacher, a romantic humanities person, and that Mildred's main rational science type, Matt Matawan, was probably out on the desert at this moment in his all-terrain vehicle, sifting the volcanic sands for Martian scat. Looking into her steady gaze, I wanted to deny the boring image she was forcing on me, to tell her what an enigma I thought she was, for example, a riddle that was only deepened by the trip she was now embarked on. But I didn't want Lu to think I knew Janet well enough for her to be an enigma.

"Matt Matawan just wants to be department head," Janet said. "He likes being the center of attention." That didn't seem reasonable to me. The Mildred Science Department consisted of Matt himself, teaching physics and chemistry, and Tucker Wing, who taught the bio classes plus Driver's Ed, and coached the two-member fencing team. It wasn't much of a power base.

"He seemed quite sincere. And excited," Lu said.

"He's always excited. It's the excitement that matters to him, not what's actually going on. But that doesn't mean he's wrong in this case."

Janet's harsh judgment on Matt Matawan surprised me a little. I was even a little jealous that he'd entered her consciousness enough for her to have an opinion. Although she'd been somewhat invigorated by this conversation, we could see that she was fading. She handed Albert over to me and sank back onto her pillow with her eyes closed. So we packed up our baby and our guilty repast and took our leave, making as many hopeful comments as we could about small things in the very near future: that the night wouldn't be too cold, that she would sleep well, that it would be sunny again tomorrow. She nodded, and even smiled when Lu took her hand and asked if she could say a prayer. She continued smiling, with her eyes closed, while Lu prayed and I stood by uncomfortably. It was the only acknowledgement anyone made that Janet's situation was out of the ordinary.

We drove north without saying much. The mountains had already blocked the setting sun, casting a deep shadow over the road, but out to the east the desert was still glowing. Two converging contrails cut across the black mass of the mountains, and the low sun threw their long shadows onto a higher layer of feathery cirrus.

I've never spent a night in a hospital, unless you count the couple I spent on a cot next to my mother's bed after her cancer surgery, and I was finding it difficult to imagine what Janet was experiencing physically. I was sure she was lying on her back in the hospital bed with her eyes closed, just as she had after my most strenuous erotic ministrations, but with pleasure now replaced by pain in her nerve endings. The connection between those two very different physical states puzzled me. It seemed odd that they could both be part of the same lifetime; and yet, mulling over what I knew about Janet, I thought I could sense the subterranean flow that bound them together

It was almost dark in the tall pines by the time we started up the winding road toward the pass, cruising very slowly. Unlike most of the natives, who generally drive like maniacs in their rush to cross the vast distances between points of human interest in this part of the world, I prefer to keep my personal tally of crushed animal bodies as low as possible.

Chapter 3

Barclay "Matt" Matawan showed up at our house unannounced the day after Christmas, in a state of high excitement. I was swabbing Albert's private parts with baby oil and thinking vaguely about writing a couple of final exams. Around Christmas and New Year's there's a small spike in tourist activity in Mildred, which is otherwise extremely quiet in the winter due to the closure of the passes that connect us to the western population centers. Lu wasn't home. She likes to take advantage of my various breaks to earn a few bucks taking extra shifts at the PetroMall.

Matt is, or was, probably my closest pal at the high school, setting aside my intimate but equivocal friendship with Janet Blythe. As I've already mentioned, he's the science teacher, everything from physics to biology, a very energetic and creative guy, who likes to break down the walls of the classroom, metaphorically of course, and take his kids outside as often as possible. I'll look out my window in the middle of an uninspired lecture about diminishing marginal returns or the Tennis Court Oath and see Matt's tall, powerful figure, invariably topped by the sort of battered slouch hat once favored by William Tecumseh Sherman, marching his biology students off to the town's sewage pond to take chemical samples and look for migrating birds, or orchestrating the slingshot launch of water balloons with himself, to the kids' joy, as the target.

Standing or walking next to Matt I feel like a child and find it hard not to act like one, too, in the sense that I have to resist an impulse to defer to him, both physically and intellectually. He's got the tall person's self-assurance, which can sometimes shade into an assumption of superiority, at least in my short, hairy imagination. His sheer physical bulk is coupled with a tremendous vitality that recognizes no obstacles. He sees what he wants to do and goes after it without hesitation, which makes him the anti-Simon Houba. The bastard also knows basically everything – of course in his chosen scientific fields, but he also reads everything from the Mildred Voice to the London Financial Times, evidently while simultaneously watching C-Span, e-mailing his Congressional representatives, writing pretty decent bucolic poetry, and rebuilding the engine of his 4-wheel drive pickup, on which he roars around the countryside after school and all through the summers, stopping at the ranchers' spreads to help them repair their fences or straighten out their wives' knitting problems. In addition to which, as I believe I mentioned, he's a devout churchman, who has no doubt whatsoever that all the exuberant phenomena of this world that he studies so avidly are under the direct control of a divine and benevolent Providence. It's hard not to get swept overboard by the combers of Matt's enthusiasm, which can be very potent when coupled with his superior erudition. So I attacked with my meteor theory before he could open his mouth. He sighed.

"Simon," he said, a little sadly. "You were there. You saw those lights hanging out there over the desert and then landing up on Devil's Table. Try to expand your thinking for once, examine a wider range of possibilities. The brightness, the hovering, the sudden accelerations and decelerations. It's hard to encompass all that in a meteor model."

I hadn't really thought much about how I could back up the meteor idea, and probably wouldn't have gotten very far if I had thought about it, given my fundamental ignorance of science, but I was annoyed by his confident air. "Why do you insist on creating this wild-ass theory, when there's a perfectly good natural one?" I asked him. "You're the scientist. Aren't you supposed to be looking for the simplest explanation?"

"Why do you always settle on the narrowest, most pedestrian interpretation of the data? Anyway, it depends on what you mean by simple. Sometimes the simplest explanation is outside the box. In science you have to follow the evidence, of course, but you've also got to be willing to bust out of the old paradigms. Sometimes they just hold you down, prevent you from seeing the obvious. Now, the same phenomenon was apparently seen for tens of miles north and south of here. We may be dealing with multiple manifestations, Simon. Those lights were seen by dozens of people right here in Mildred, and my friend Richard in Fetlock saw something very similar at exactly the same time. Exactly the same time. Also moving due west-east, as far as he could tell. I've got e-mails out to people all up and down the Sierra front, calling for descriptions of what they saw. Those lights were definitely seen as far north as Reno, although I don't know the details yet."

"Doesn't that just argue for their happening way up high, or something? Far from the surface?" I said. As I've mentioned, my science background is not strong.

He shook his head. "I don't know if you've been watching the news, but the really spooky thing is, those lights weren't seen anywhere west of the mountains. They came from the west, and if they were meteors, people on the coast should have seen them. That means we've got a localized phenomenon."

"Cloud cover?" I suggested. "There's lots of clouds in San Francisco."

My stubbornness was beginning to irritate him. "Those were no meteors. They were way too erratic, way too bright, way too close. Some people even heard them, for God's sake! Everything about them was wrong for meteors. We're dealing with something unusual here, Simon. Open up your mind. We need to follow up on it."

Although this argument could only have led to my defeat and probable humiliation, I was foolishly prepared to continue it. Luckily, Mervyn poked his head out of his cave and produced the squeak that now passed for a meow with him. I extracted him carefully and carried him to the litter box, where he stood for a long time on quivering hind legs, gently twitching his tail, before finally squatting. The two of us stood watching him as he finished peeing, crouched for a minute or two meditating, and then simply settled down onto the litter. I picked him up and dusted the sand off his feet and stomach, then placed him back at the entrance to the cave, which he gratefully reentered.

"You ought to let that cat go," said Matt. "He's done his time on this mortal coil; it's time for him to meet his Maker. He can't be very happy like that." Such a realist, this guy who was trying to convince me that visitors from the cosmos were prowling the desert a couple of miles from where we stood.

"I'm keeping an eye on him," I said. "I don't think he's really miserable. The problem is, you don't really know what they're thinking."

"Simon, he's not thinking anything. He's a cat, for God's sake. A dying cat. You think he likes it that you have to carry him back and forth to the litter box? What kind of quality of life are we talking here? What about his feline dignity? You'll be doing him a favor." Matt, I thought, had the biologist's mechanistic attitude toward living organisms, other than human ones, that is. Or maybe it was just the confidence of the very religious, who are so eagerly anticipating their afterlife that the chaos and waste of earthly existence don't have much significance for them. Personally, regardless of the logic, I find it difficult to snuff out even a cockroach's scuttering little flame. Isn't there a tiny consciousness in there? I don't like to put my foot on that.

To change the subject, I suggested that we go over to Stirling's for some coffee. It was still winter break, and we could expect to find a nice cross section of Mildred over there in the afternoon. "We can take the pulse of the town," I told him. "Find out what the consensus is." The truth is, I was getting uneasy about the little grove of exotic plants that was springing up around this unusual but by no means inexplicable event. Lu, with her hyper-Christian thing, didn't really surprise me too much. But we also had the normally pragmatic Father MacGill writing sermons about the lights, and now the putative scientist Matt Matawan rapidly working his way out on an intellectual limb. Of course, Matt is an enthusiast. He periodically gets these bugs up his ass and has to pursue something for a while. I think it's a consequence of his oversupply of energy, which can have both good and bad results. For example, he read somewhere that all the drugs people are taking these days – antibiotics, steroids, hormones, painkillers, vitamins, tranquilizers, stimulants, anti-depressants, birth control pills, erection enhancers, herbal remedies, and god knows what else – were creating some strange chemical synergies during the processing of human waste, and that some of the despised byproducts might have not only toxic properties but also valuable medical applications. After that, he spent all his afternoons for a couple of months prowling through the reeds down by the Mildred sewage pond and taking water samples, which he sent out for spectrographic analysis at a chemistry lab in Reno. I think he had hopes of a discovery that would not only be of great benefit to humankind, but would also make him rich and get him on TV. The results however were, to paraphrase the lab reports: same old shit. Matt was disappointed but not defeated, and I still see him poking around down there occasionally, wearing his binoculars for camouflage – he's content to be a bit eccentric, but he's not wholly unconcerned about his reputation.

We bundled Albert up and packed him into his carrier, turned off Mervyn's heating pad, and headed out into the cold afternoon. There was a strong wind blowing, as is usual in these parts, and the sunlight was pure but already melancholy with the prospect of the early winter sunset.

Don Swayzee and Harold Clare were the only customers in Stirling's when Matt and Albert and I burst in, slamming the door behind us against the cold wind. The two gaunt, mustachioed cowpokes were sitting over at the far end of the low three-sided lunch counter with their weather-beaten faces and cowboy hats turned toward each other, in deep conversation. Patty Marino was standing next to them in her waitress whites with one hand on the counter and the other on her hip, listening. I wasn't very surprised by this tableau. In fact it replicated exactly what I had seen the very first time I stepped into Stirling's, a rank greenhorn, except that the light had been different then, it being 6:30 on a summer morning, and everyone in the scene except Albert was now 10 years older.

Lu and I had stopped for breakfast at the only open restaurant in town before heading off to the mountain trails. It was one of our first visits to these mountains, and I still held deeply romantic ideas about them and the people who carved out their difficult and routinely heroic existence among them. On that occasion I made Lu sit down with me at the lunch counter, a discreet few stools away from Don and Harold, hoping to hear some snatches of raw range lore, unfiltered by script writers. What we heard, as we tucked into our scrambled eggs and hash browns, was an argument about aqueous chlorine chemistry and the relative merits of the different types of swimming pool cleaner, all conducted in a drawling dialect that would have met Hollywood's highest standards.

As I recall the conversation, the core of Don and Harold's differences lay in whether it was wiser to use some kind of automatic rover to rake off leaves and other debris or whether only a manual skimmer could really do the job properly. For his reliance on the labor-saving rover, Don was labeled a pussy by Harold, despite Patty's presence. Don responded by calling Harold some kind of prissy tightass perfectionist and stated in no uncertain terms that the rover worked perfectly and had saved him from having to clearcut all the aspens that shaded his house but had a nasty habit of dropping their leaves all over his pool in the fall, and even during windy times in the summer. As the argument began to heat up they wisely veered off into something they could agree on – namely, trashing that fool Dave Bacco, who despite his gorgeous wife (how the hell DID he land her, anyway?) and three perfect kids (I later met Dave's family, and they all lived up to their billing) was irredeemable no matter what the hell kind of cleaner he used because he had an above-ground pool. Patty Milano listened silently to all this analysis without stirring or taking her hand off her hip, without even blinking, in fact. I couldn't decide whether she was awed by their erudition in this arcane area or was just trying to store away the information for application to her own pool-hygiene worries. Years later I discovered that she had actually been memorizing everything they said, so she could repeat it to her friends and to other visitors, word for word and mannerism for mannerism. Thus began the de-romanticization of modern cowboy life in my mind.

Stirling's got its start way back in the '50s, when Jim Stirling wearied of the outdoor rigors of ranching and decided to open a restaurant, guessing that he could make a reasonable living feeding the few intrepid drivers who wound their way over the pass from the Central Valley, only to find themselves staring out at the howling desert to the east and wondering where they could get a drink of water and enough gas to make it back to civilization.

Jim put up a single-story building on the main drag, right across from the post office, and created a restaurant in his own image: wholesome, unadorned, straightforward, cheap. Jim and the kids waited tables, while his wife, Mercy, did all the cooking at first, becoming locally famous for her big country breakfasts with an emphasis on eggs, pancakes, hashbrowns, and plenty of nitrites, although it was also possible to get oatmeal or even an English muffin if you were willing to brook the embarrassment. Lunch and dinner were meat and potatoes meals, served with canned vegetables and salads heavy on iceberg lettuce. Jim also installed two gas pumps out in front, thereby ensuring himself a steady flow of customers.

The place thrived in the summer, but in winter things could be dreadfully slow. Jim would cut back to skeleton hours during the cold months, sometimes even doing all the cooking and serving himself. But because for at least 10 years there was no other option, a clientele of idling, coffee-sipping ranch hands, bored housewives and mothers, and high school kids looking for a milkshake and a hangout dependably filled up the single room in the pale light of the short winter afternoons, laughing, gossiping, and glossing the trickle of news from the outside world. Families would come in on Saturday evening for supper or after church for Sunday dinner; and eventually Jim attracted another type of customer by getting his liquor license and putting in a bar in a long, narrow room that he tacked onto the rear of the dining room and kept romantically dim.

When Jim started, there wasn't much to Mildred except the main street, which was really just a wider section of highway, with its gas station, rustic motel, post office, and general store selling everything from food to sacks of concrete, and back off the main drag a couple of rows of quiet, unpretentious houses under the aspens. Stirling's thus quickly became something of a social center for the town and, partly because of its central location, never quite lost that character, despite the rapid increase in highway traffic in the 1960s and the appearance of competition, including a Travelodge, a rival family restaurant, and eventually even a couple of gourmet dining establishments outside the town, where you could find the LA crowd who turned up their noses at meatloaf and mashed potatoes sipping expensive wine and picking over their mixed greens.

By the time Lu and I moved to Mildred, about four years ago, the big stir was the opening, just west of the town, of the PetroMall, which immediately siphoned off most of the traffic of shiny SUVs rolling down out of the mountains before it got into Mildred proper. The PetroMall wasn't just a gas station, although it had a dozen shiny new pumps with credit card swipes, placed under roofs to shade them from the fierce desert sun. It was a vast, barn-like structure with rustically exposed beams, rows of shelves of tourist goodies to cater to the hunters, fishermen, and backpackers, and a deli that featured such un-gas-station-like items as goat-cheese-stuffed dates and roasted mustard-glazed barramundi, along with the usual ham and cheese sandwiches shrouded in saran wrap. The PetroMall kept upbeat, current music thumping at all times, and hired the young – local teenagers, mainly smooth blonde college girls. Lu, by now a mother in her late 30s, was accorded the deference due to old age in that crowd. Stirling's tables, in contrast, were served with casual competence by veteran middle-aged ladies whose belly buttons were not on display.

The town had of course taken on some sophistication by that time. It had several motels, a couple more restaurants with simple menus very similar to Stirling's, a trailer park where campers could buy a shower, and a few stores selling postcards, ice cream sandwiches, Southwest Indian jewelry, and beaded leather jackets. Jim and Mercy had long since retired and then died. The restaurant had been sold to another local family, whose sole accommodation to their modernizing clientele had been the addition to the menu of a veggie burger. But Stirling's reputation for simple and plentiful food, especially breakfasts, kept it going during the competitive summer months; and once the pass was closed by snow, the place came into its own again as the town center. The tourist stores and the other restaurants closed for the winter, the college kids disappeared, and the PetroMall was just a little too far outside town to get the foot traffic on which Stirling's thrived. Besides which if, like me, you wanted the real inside story on what was happening in Mildred, Stirling's portly, matronly servers had it all, along with a real interest in any babies you might bring in.

Patty glanced our way as Matt and I came in and brightened when she saw Albert slung on my back. She'd sent her own two boys off to UC Davis years ago, but she loved babies and was a particular admirer of Albert's, partly because she loved Lu, whose unadorned mind I suppose had clicked with her own no-nonsense intellect from the very first day they'd met. "There's my baby," she crowed, picking him off my back like a bur and cuddling him joyfully in her massive arms. Albert stared up at her in pleased astonishment, as though he'd fallen into a snowdrift.

The two cowboys wouldn't necessarily have been my first choice for a conversation that afternoon, or any afternoon. I knew that if I lived in Mildred in a camper shell on a high-clearance 4-wheel-drive pickup truck with a 10-gallon hat sutured to my head for 50 years they'd still regard me as a faintly ridiculous egghead city slicker. I had never forgotten how they'd sliced our LA-raised sheriff Dave Bacco into jerky during that first conversation I'd eavesdropped on. On the other hand, I was also pretty confident that they'd dismissed me as being for the most part not worth the trouble to trash. There were far more consequential targets in town than little Simon Houba, including Matt Matawan, so I figured I was probably fairly safe from their tongues, which were like two Bowie knives stropping each other.

The odd thing was that, although the townsfolk feared and secretly enjoyed their talent for personal dissection, the Cowboys themselves were not taken very seriously. Despite the hats and boots they affected, neither of them had been near anything you could call a cow for many years. Don, it was true, had grown up on his daddy's ranch down south of Fetlock; but as soon as the old man had fallen off his last bronc Don had sold the whole place out to some developer and bought a little spread out on the flats east of Devil's Table. He had a comfortable old ranch house, surrounded by an acre or two of the clattering aspens whose lives had been spared by his roving pool cleaner, the immaculate pool itself, a satellite dish, and a high-riding pickup that he kept very dusty, but no cows, although he did have a couple of horses that he liked to ride around to impress the kind of tourist I had once been. And he was impressive – a fine rider, tall and straight in the saddle, mustachioed, and impassive under his white hat, always accompanied, it seemed to me, by a faint jingle of spurs, although that might have been my romantic imagination, which had cooled over the years but hadn't entirely flickered out.

Harold's cowpunching credentials were even more suspect than Don's. He no longer even lived on a ranch, being instead the proprietor of the Purple Valley Lodge in town, which provided him not only a nice and not very strenuous living but also the opportunity to spend warm summer evenings frolicking in the motel pool with bikini-clad teenage tourists under the pretext of operating his manual leaf skimmer. He was also a secret wildflower enthusiast, although he always carried his Remington 700 on his collecting expeditions, in case anybody asked him what he was doing.

Matt ordered coffee and one of Stirling's giant blueberry muffins, and Patty reluctantly handed Albert off to me while she poured the coffee and tonged the muffin out of the plastic display case. Matt gazed at it with a pleased expression and broke a piece off its golden spillover rim before he even took a sip of his coffee. I knew how he felt about Stirling's muffins. Across the top they were about 15 centimeters in diameter, as Matt the scientist would have put it, and almost equally deep, satisfyingly dense with moist dairy products, and studded with juicy blueberries. You could make an entire meal on one of them, and Lu and I had occasionally done so back in the days when we were camping out in the mountains and trying to travel cheap. I settled for coffee myself. With his bulk, his physical activity level, and his 10-year advantage in age, Matt could get away with something like the muffin, whereas I had lately become sensitive about the stubborn, jiggling croissant that was spreading around my own belt line.

Before Patty could grab Albert away from me again, the front door opened and a giggle of high school girls, a couple of whom I recognized from my American Democracy class, burst in. Patty went off to take their order.

Don Swayzee started right in on Matt. "I heard you were up on Devil's Table looking for landing pads or three-legged thong underwear or something, Matawan. Find anything?" Like me, Matt was a city boy, who even after 20 years in the desert occasionally let slip one of his wiry Chicago vowels, but his size and self-assurance, along with his knack for repairing machinery, had earned him at least a provisional entry in Don's cowboy catalog.

"Yeah, I've been taking a look," mumbled Matt around the muffin. "There's some interesting hints up there. Nothing real definite, though."

"Like what? You found some alien stool or something? Little green turds?" Harold Clare pulled his hat down on his forehead and stuck a Marlboro in his mouth but didn't light it, smoking being forbidden in California restaurants.

"Oh, little . . . disturbances," said Matt. "Possible signs of scorching."

"Meteors," I said, hoping for support from the cranky Cowboys. Matt blew out a couple of contemptuous muffin crumbs.

"Come on, Simon. We've already been through this. I found scorch marks on Devil's Table, two different spots, on a straight line, due west-east."

Don Swayzee squinted at me, shaking his head irritably. I reached deep into my own high school geometry to offer "But don't two points define a straight line? And anyway, wouldn't meteors travel in a straight line too?"

"Exactly west-east, Simon," Matt started. "What are the chances. . .," but Don Swayzee burst in before he could lay out his reasoning.

"If those things were meteors, I'm goddamn Hillary Rodham Clinton," he said. Patty, who had returned to retrieve Albert after serving the teenagers, said "Shhh!", nodding significantly at Albert and jouncing him up and down to distract him.

"Don't worry," I told her, "his English isn't that good yet."

"Not that I'm saying Matawan is right," Don went on, ignoring Patty's reproving look. "He might be a little closer than you are, Houba, but he's still a long mile or two from the truth."

"At this point, we just don't know," Matt said, pretending to be reasonable. "We need to take a systematic approach to this. I'm going to set up a website, act as a clearinghouse for information on sightings, theories, whatever. People can file their reports by e-mail. I'll put it all in a database, and we can have the computer look for patterns."

"Database my ass," said Don, his own unlit cigarette waggling angrily between his lips. "It aint necessary to go as far as Mars to figure this one out. Washington'll do."

"Washington?" I said. The Cowboys' obsessions were well known, but I was enjoying hearing them trash Matt, even though I knew I was lower in the cowboy hierarchy than he was, so I prompted them anyway. But Don and Harold merely tightened their lips and shook their heads, pushed their hats back on their foreheads, and stared into their white coffee mugs.

"What do you think, Albert," cooed Patty. "Is it the CIA or the FBI? Or maybe the BLM. They're launching tree-huggers all the way from Washington DC to land right out here in our desert. That's what those lights were – environmentalists vaporizing in the upper atmosphere." I smiled at her complicitly. Patty had long graying blond hair, which during working hours was swept back along one side of her head and fastened with a plastic clip in fake tortoiseshell. She made a face at Albert, who was perched on her massive bosom like a pebble on a glacier. He laughed enthusiastically and kicked his snowsuited legs. "Or maybe it was just a couple of boring old meteors, like your daddy says." She sighed. "What does Lu think?"

"You know what she thinks," I said. "They're a sign from Heaven. We haven't been going to church enough or something."

"You don't take her very seriously," said Patty, jouncing Albert a little more.

"There's no need for signs from the heavens, neither," said Don, tugging his hat forward again. "There's plenty of signs we need to be paying attention to right here on this planet." The high schoolers were signaling to Patty from their booth. She handed Albert over and went off to tend to them.

"So you think it's something the government's doing?" I said. Matt, I noticed, was keeping uncharacteristically quiet, working thoughtfully on the last few fragments of the muffin.

Harold removed his filter cigarette slowly and picked a nonexistent flake of tobacco off his lower lip. "Don't think there's much doubt about that," he said. "The only thing you can't be sure of is just what the hell it is they're doing. We don't know one one-thousandth of what goes on down there in Washington. All we know is they're always busy. If they aren't working on tying up more of our land, then they're regulating our gas mileage or building a suspension bridge over to some desert island. And that's not even to mention all the secret projects they've got going, that we don't even know about."

"They like to run a lot of that shit out here, cause they think there's nobody around, or anybody who is is either too country to notice anything or crazy enough like your pal Matawan to think it's diplomats from Uranus," said Don. "Or they're like you, Houba. Yup, meteors. Look at them pretty lights! Then they go back to their knitting or landscaping their compost heaps. Meteors that hang up there like streetlights, speed up and slow down, change direction, etcetera." He turned his head to spit on the floor, but held off because Patty was behind the counter cutting pieces of strawberry-rhubarb pie for the high school kids.

"Well, what do you think they were?"

"How the hell would we know? That's the point, isn't it? Sometimes I even think they give us a little look at something now and then just to remind us we don't know shit." Don's well-traveled Stetson was tilted back again.

"But what do you think?" I was curious about what they imagined might be going on. "What would make lights like that?"

"I'm sure there's a hundred things they're working on that could do it, man," said Harold. "Use your imagination." I didn't want to admit that was exactly what I couldn't do. They were making me feel embarrassed about my naivete and lack of creativity.

Patty rejoined us, leaving the teenagers laughing and talking in loud voices and eating their pie in one of the booths over by the windows. I noticed that they were discussing the lights, too, if you could call all that jabbering a discussion. I wondered if their speculations were any more or less vague and crazy than the Cowboys'. Patty said, "I liked Father MacGill's sermon on Christmas Day. He didn't try to tell us what they were, but we should just pay attention to the things the Lord sends our way, and think about how they might apply to our lives."

"I didn't try to tell you what they were," said Harold. "Did I tell you what they were, Houba?"

"Well, you said the government. . ."

"Exactly. You might as well say God. We know about as much about what they're doing. When they want us to move, we got to move. In the meantime they do what they want. If they want to spin our country heads around with a few lights in the sky, what the HELL are we gonna do about it?" He pointed at Patty with his cigarette fingers. "You can take my word for it, something'll come of this. I'm not saying what, but by God when it happens we won't understand that either! That's the way they do things."

This pronouncement made my transplanted country head spin around all right. I was interested in Harold's parallel between God and the government, which seemed to imply a surprisingly deep distrust of the former. And also his invocation of sequences of events that were subject to the iron laws of cause and effect and at the same time entirely incomprehensible to us.

"What about Dale Twombly?" I threw in, just to keep things stirred up.

Matt blew out another contemptuous burst of air, this time without crumbs. "You mean UFOny? Those guys are ridiculous, with their glowing frisbees. They wish they could make something as convincing as those lights were."

Don Swayzee drawled "You might have a point there, Houba. I know your pal Dave Bacco put his patrol car in the ditch last month when they flew one of those things over him. On the other hand, I think Twombly's got a lot on his mind right now. Rumor has it that him and Myrtle Bench have been seen walking hand in hand out by the hot springs." This last was actually quite a shocker, for all kinds of reasons, and we were all quiet for a moment, trying to imagine it.

The Cowboys, feeling that Matt and Patty and I were dissing their theories about the lights, pointedly began comparing the capabilities of their satellite dishes, knowing perfectly well that Lu and I didn't have one. Patty was more than willing to talk, but more customers had begun to filter in, stamping their feet and wiping the mist off their glasses, so she was too busy.

I packed up Albert, who had fallen asleep as soon as Patty had abandoned him, and put my own coat on. Matt got up, too, saying to the Cowboys, "I'll send you the URL for the website. We don't have to agree about what it was out there, but I'd still like to get your observations, along with everybody else's. Then maybe we can get a handle on what's really going on."

"Oh sure, Matawan," said Harold Clare, pushing his hat back again. "We'll let you know if we see anything with tentacles."

We headed for the door, listening to snippets of conversations, all of them about the lights. At the high schoolers' booth we stopped to chat with the kids who were in our classes. "Flying saucers!" they told us happily. "Did you see the way they hung up there, and then suddenly went whizzing away? Meteors couldn't act like that." They seemed very pleased and excited with the idea of alien visitors. "Will they let us out of school if the aliens land?" Cynthia Zubrowski asked me, and everybody laughed. According to my count it was now: Aliens at least 10, Government 2 (both Cowboys), God 2, or maybe 3, if you counted Father MacGill's temporizing sermon and Patty Marino. Dale Twombly and UFOny didn't seem to have much of a following. Meteors – that is, the rational explanation by natural phenomena – had only me for an advocate. But I was less interested in the variety of explanations than in the fact that everyone except me wanted to vote for some deus ex machina.

On the way home, we took the path along the sewage pond in the poignant solsticial light. The mountains were cut out of deep blue sky to our left and the desert lay silently out to the right, with Devil's Table looming over it, looking very close in the glassy air.

Matt stopped at the sewage pond and began rummaging around in his backpack, pulling out sampling bottles. "I'll just do a little sampling, since we're here," he said. "I'll send you the URL for the website. I want you to post what you saw on Christmas Eve, and then you can add anything else that happens. Plus add your meteor theory, if you want to. That way everybody can stay up on the latest developments."

"Shouldn't you keep everybody separate?" I asked him. "The way they do with partners in crime, so they can't all get their stories in line?"

He brushed off my suggestion. "It's not the same thing. By reading other people's stuff, they may remember details they'd forgotten. Every crumb of information could be important here. Even from people who are pushing your meteor idea, if there is anyone else. Anyway, Simon, they're not criminals."

"The kids all think it was flying saucers," I said.

Matt squatted down and submerged an open sample bottle among the reeds, letting it fill slowly with the limpid pond water.

"I'm going to post the URL in my classes when school starts again," he said. "I hope you'll do the same. Kids see things we don't – their minds aren't all shut down by experience."

"Do you wash your hands after you do that?" I asked him, nodding at the sample bottle.

"You know this water is drinkable, don't you, after it's been through the plant," he said. I was tempted to ask him to drink the sample he had just collected, but I don't like to push too hard on people's belief systems.

Chapter 4

After poking around in the bizarre world of Matt's fantasies, it was a relief to return to the routine of my little family's life. By the time I'd finished writing one of my finals, Lu had given Albert his bath and suited him up for bed. He lay in his crib with blankets up to his chin and his brow unwrinkled by any worries. Lu had turned off all the lights except for the little nightlight in the shape of a glowing angel, and Albert waited quietly in the dim radiance, staring up at us without blinking. He yawned, but resisted closing his eyes. I wondered what kind of memories he was compiling.

"Sing something for him. I'll give Mervyn his water shot," Lu said, heading for our bedroom. I sang "Dark Brown Is the River," remembering my mother singing it to me while sitting on the edge of a bathtub. Albert gave me his undivided attention while I serenaded him, but then closed his eyes, suggesting politely that it was time for me to leave. I turned on the radio thingy, so we'd be able to hear him during the night, and tiptoed out.

In our bedroom Lu had Mervyn in place on his yellow towel on the bed, but she was having trouble getting the Ringer's solution into him. He was crouched tensely, refusing to lower his butt all the way to the towel and twitching just the tip of his tail, while Lu probed, clucking sympathetically, for a spot around his shoulder blades that might be free of scar tissue. His old skin was so thin and dry by now that it practically crackled when she pinched it into a furry ridge, trying to create some space underneath for the fluid. There had been times when one of us had accidentally poked all the way through both layers, so that the liquid came oozing out the other side and beaded uselessly on his fur.

Mervyn had been for practical purposes a perfect cat. He was a handsome devil, warm gray with pristine white socks and a white cravat to which he devoted a lot of cleaning time. I'd had him since he was a kitten small enough to hold on the palm of one hand, having found him one morning mysteriously on a fluffy rampage in the hallway of my Brooklyn apartment building. When Lu arrived in my life a few years later, she was, if anything, more taken with him than I was. Mervyn, on the other hand, though generally satisfied with his comfortable existence, was frustrated by our refusal to allow him out into the cat-deadly streets, even though by that time we'd moved to laid-back San Francisco. In what was the only serious mistake of his life, he did manage one escape from the apartment, an ill-conceived leap off our little balcony while chasing a fat fly. He landed on a spike of the wrought iron fence three stories below, impaling one of his legs. The hateful darkness failed to claim him on that occasion, however, and I later concluded, in fact, that if it hadn't been for the fence he wouldn't have been hurt at all, and might actually have achieved his heart's desire of spending at least one day in freedom.

Except for that one misstep, and once we'd relieved him of his testicles, he was a delight: elegantly beautiful and effortlessly confident, affectionate, athletic, intellectual, and always covered his shit. He invented superball games for us to play with him and provided body-warming services at night, after first circling the bed two or three times to find the right spot. Even his rare faux paws were carried off with aplomb, such as the time he inadvertently rolled off the kitchen cabinet on which he was lolling and plunged like a county fair low-water man into a meatloaf pan that was soaking on the sink. Placidly licking the meaty water off his coat, he almost succeeded in making it seem like a deliberate performance.

I was therefore deeply shocked to realize one day, a couple of years ago, that Mervyn was beginning to fail physically. There were a few humiliating falls in the act of trying to reach surfaces, like the forbidden dining room table, that had previously been easy for him. This creature, who had never before needed exercise other than the occasional luxurious fore-and-aft stretch to stay in perfect condition, was actually getting creaky. He began to spend an inordinate amount of time sleeping, even for a cat. He no longer met us at the door when we came home. We would find him sleeping at the foot of the bed and realize that he hadn't heard us come in. He would awaken with a start when we greeted him loudly and would look in the wrong direction – his eyes were going too. Their pupils developed a milky blue veil, in contrast to their original bottomless black. He began to wander around the house late at night, yowling disconsolately, and his comfortable bourgeois padding melted away, so that I could feel the jagged hogback ridge of his backbone when I stroked him.

I was well into my fifties at the time, and the decline of the deathless entity we knew as Mervyn opened up what was a new line of thought for me. Although I "knew," of course, that everybody dies, I had always maintained the unconscious belief that people get old and wear out because of certain kinds of physical and mental sin: overeating or eating the wrong things, smoking, too much alcohol or chocolate, failure to exercise regularly, the slow mental sedimentation that accompanies too much time in front of the TV, and, above all, acceptance of the inevitability of aging. That belief became less and less tenable as I watched our vice-less feline lily of the field sink into old age; and it suddenly occurred to me that I was on the same road, and might even die at some point. Not that I had ever been able, or wanted, to jump up on the dining room table. Like Mervyn, though, I had never been seriously ill, and my body, short and hairy like his, had been a dependable if not highly esthetic instrument. But Mervyn's troubles called attention, by analogy, to my own accumulating infirmities: varicose veins, tendinitis in both elbows, aching knees, whining digestive tract, encroaching deafness in one ear, and pains that dropped in and departed for no apparent reason.

I responded at first by refusing to admit that Mervyn's condition led inexorably to only one conclusion. We took him to the vet in Fetlock ($500) and returned home with bags of Ringer's solution and lots of green hypodermic needles, which we had to use every day to inject 50 milliliters or so of Ringer's solution under the slackening skin over his shoulders. He tolerated this nightly ritual patiently, with only a light flickering of the tip of his tail, and it did succeed in stabilizing his kidney readings. Nevertheless, he continued to lose weight, though not as rapidly, and the trend was clearly downward.

A few months before the episode of the Christmas Eve heavenly lights, we noticed a strange reddish cast to his pupils, and within a few days he was quite blind. With this event, according to the vet ($1,000) probably due to high blood pressure, doubt seemed to enter Mervyn's own mind for the first time. He now paced slowly around the house with his head lowered, sniffing and feeling for obstacles with his long white whiskers, and began limiting himself to a single sleeping spot, a nest of old polar fleece that Lu prepared for him in one of her closets. No more stretching out on a horizontal thigh or spending the night on Lu's soft hip; he seemed to be disturbed by open spaces and the movements of a bed or a body under him and to need the security of a ceiling close above his head. He was able to use his nose to find the litter box (Lu and I could do that, too), which had always been located only a few feet from the closet anyway, and his food, which we moved out of the kitchen and into the same room. Otherwise, he made only brief excursions to the back room where I graded papers, announcing his presence with a pathetic peep, before pacing cautiously back to his polar fleece den.

"Ghost cat," I'd say to him, lifting him out of the polar fleece and putting him on the bed, where I could gaze into his boarded-up eyes and ask him "Where are you, dude? Is there anybody still in there?" As he had slowed down physically the foggy frontier between the feline sleeping and waking states had grown even more indistinct. Now, with his vision, his hearing, and his physical mobility gone, I wondered whether for him there was any discernible boundary at all; or was "reality" – the pressure on his bladder, the grit of litter under his feet, the ache of his arthritic joints, the slippery texture of pureed turkey on his tongue, a human hand bumping along his unpadded vertebrae – merely a more restless stage in his dreaming? I taunted him mercilessly about his weakness, his skinniness, his laziness, his crappy fur, thinking uncomfortably about my own thinning hair and sagging pecs. I invented abusive knicknames: Bones, Blinky, Skimbleshanks. But my heart actually ached for the poor old guy, trapped alone in his dark waiting room and shut off from all the light and sound he'd once enjoyed along with the rest of us.

"You're being morbid," Lu told me. She didn't want to discuss it with me, but I was sure she believed in some kind of cat heaven, for which Mervyn was merely undergoing his shriving, and she had no doubt of a happy issue to all this indignity and discomfort. She left the metaphysical speculations about his spiritual condition to me and focused in her pragmatic way on his physical comfort and on preventing his waste products from overwhelming the house. Thus the polar fleece nest, the daily gentle combings, her tireless efforts to tempt him with new flavors of food or with a rotation of his old favorites, the Ringer's shots, and the careful repositionings of bowls and box in which she was perpetually trying to close in on their optimum locations, from the perspective of a blind cat. We'd had to cover the floor of Mervyn's room with newspaper, because although he always adhered to the letter of the law by climbing wearily into the litter box when he had to pee, his butt would often be left hanging over the edge; and his increasing dehydration had resulted in constipation and made bowel movements a time-consuming trial to him. His marble-like turds, with the texture of desiccated modeling clay, might thus be encountered nearly anywhere in the house, especially in the dark of night when Lu or I would get up in our bare feet to visit our own litter box. Lu's morning ritual, while I showered and shaved, involved neatly rolling up and disposing of any wet newspapers plus touring the house with a strip of toilet paper to pick up the above-mentioned coprolites, which could then be deposited in the toilet. After all the pickup was done, she would put out a selection of two or three different flavors of food, all carefully mixed with water to give them the mushy texture dictated by Mervyn's crumbling fangs, so that he could begin preparing the next day's output.

One dark winter morning a couple of weeks before Christmas, just before the alarm was due to go off, I felt a familiar but long-absent tugging on the bedspread, and craned my neck to find a patch of deeper gray creeping slowly across the bumpy terrain of our legs. Mervyn had returned to the bed. From then on he slept between us, under the covers. Perhaps it was loneliness or only the cold that had driven him out of the closet; but whatever the dim feline mentation involved, we were happy to have him back, and immediately moved all his equipment into the bedroom. He could get down to go to the box easily enough; but when he was done he'd hover by the bed and call briefly, as if ringing for the elevator, upon which signal one of us would hoist him back to his warm spot between us. When we weren't in the bed, he seemed to feel cold even under the blankets, so I used his old fluffy bed to build the little cave, roofed with a blanket and floored with a heating pad, close to the box and bowls. There he would lounge hour after hour, occasionally turning end for end, and emerging only to hit the litter box or reject Lu's latest menu offering. He seemed reasonably comfortable, but I thought I could read on his face the pained expression of someone who was expecting bad news.

I pondered the mystery of Mervyn's slow descent into non-being with gloomy fascination. What was he thinking about it all, or was he thinking anything? The unknowability of animals' minds is part of what fascinates us about them, along with their athleticism and fur; but a dying animal is an even profounder enigma. I ran my hand over his tattered coat, feeling the sawtooth of his vertebrae and the twin peaks of his emergent hipbones, hoping for his faint purr and wondering how long we should try to keep him alive.

Accompanied by these gloomy musings, I now got onto the bed with Lu and held Mervyn, scratching under his chin, until she found an acceptable spot for the needle. He winced and tried to walk away as the first cold drops dripped under his skin. "We really have to start thinking about putting him down," Lu said.

Of course I'd already been thinking about it. But I said "He's doing all right for now. I don't think he's really uncomfortable, do you? He doesn't like this, but otherwise he's OK, he just lies on his heating pad. It doesn't seem so bad."

"We don't know what he's feeling, obviously. But he can't be very happy, without his sight or his hearing. Doesn't it bother you that he's so isolated? It's painful just watching him get to the box."

"He hasn't lost his appetite," I countered. We watched as the fluid level crept down past the marks on the plastic bag.

"No," she admitted, "he's still got that. But I really don't think we're doing him any favors by keeping him going this way. What kind of life is it?"

"What do you think he'd say if he could talk?" I said. "I'll bet he wouldn't agree to have us pull the plug."

"Well of course, we're all programmed to try to keep living. But in the wild, something would already have killed him by now, or he would have starved to death."

"You could say the same thing about Albert," I pointed out.

"But Albert's not in pain! He's on the way up. He's got a whole life ahead of him. What's ahead for Mervyn? Just more needles and more trips to the vet, and probably more pain, and then he's going to die anyway. Don't we have a responsibility to save him from some of that nastiness at least?"

She shut off the flow of water and carefully extracted the needle. Mervyn lurched forward and then stopped, uncertain of his whereabouts. Lu shoved the saucer with a little dollop of pureed turkey baby food under his nose. He crouched in slow motion and somberly licked at it.

"You're the religious person," I said. I was annoyed that she was prodding me into this moral chute, even though I knew I'd find myself in it eventually anyway. "Doesn't it make you kind of uncomfortable to be playing God?"

"You're the one who's playing God. God would have let him move on a long time ago."

So we had these irreconcilable beliefs. I only knew it was bad enough that Mervyn was blind and deaf and dying; but that I had to be the one to pull the trigger, to boot him off the merry-go-round and out of my own life, seemed a bit thick. Look at him, I thought. He'd finished with his turkey and proceeded to the edge of the bed. Putting his front feet cautiously over the edge, he braced himself and finally dropped to the floor, almost falling down in the process. But he'd made it. He wasn't done yet. I kept hoping he would just go to sleep and not wake up. I'd suggested it to him many times. I didn't want to be the one to send him on his way, although he seemed increasingly ready to travel. Now he nosed out the entrance to his heated den, crept in, and lay down, with only his tail sticking out. Waiting.

When we were ready, I tucked him into the bed with the covers over everything but his ears. We lay on our backs staring up at the dark ceiling. "There's too much death around here these days," I told Lu, trying to dissolve our little squabble. "Mervyn the ghost cat, and now Janet down there in that room in Hathwell. Even Parnell's starting to lose it." I didn't mention that Mervyn's fate was bothering me more than that of my human friends, I suppose because I didn't have to make any decisions for them. I kept trying to visualize myself treacherously stroking my unsuspecting pal while the vet injected him with whatever vile poison they use, but I couldn't do it.

Lu sighed. "I know," she said. "It's sad. But we've had a lot of good years with him. And it's a completely natural thing. I'm sure he doesn't see it the same way we do. To him, it's not sad, it's just part of his life. He's just living, waiting for whatever comes next, the way he always has. We should learn from that."

She reached carefully over Mervyn to put a hand on my stomach. "You have a tendency to focus on the down side. There's Albert too, you know. Why don't you focus on him? He's on the way up."

"Yeah, but this just reminds me that it's all the same thing. Mervyn's going into that void, whatever it is, and Albert's just coming out of it. But it's still the same void, and we get this little flicker of daylight in between."

I knew I was just whining now. Lu was silent. She doesn't agree with me about the void, of course, but she doesn't like to argue about it, either, knowing that nobody's opinion is going to get changed. As I've already mentioned, Lu is a very practical person. Her mind moves from A to B without intermediate stops or digressions. Her imagination, for example, is not equal to the task of conjuring up images of me rolling around in bed with one of her friends. So it was with mild relief, knowing my secret was still safe, that I felt her hand moving lower on my stomach. I'm sorry to report, though, that there was also a tiny grain of contempt for her cluelessness.

After a while, I picked up the nearly limp Mervyn and carefully rearranged him on my other side, then rolled toward Lu. I pushed my face against her side, smelling her skin, and ran my hand along one smooth thigh.

It was a measure of Mervyn's deterioration, I thought, that he no longer budged, no matter what was going on in the bed. In the past he would have stomped off in disgust the minute the blankets started moving around. This time he stayed, and eventually we all got to sleep, but not before I'd spent some time on my back, ala Janet Blythe, mulling things over. Lu was already asleep, with her damp and loosened flank pressed comfortably against mine. It's a mistake, I thought, to reject lust as merely a base impulse. The simplicity and directness of skin sliding on skin can be a kind of shorthand for everything about love that's too complicated for us to sort out. Lu seemed to have an instinctive grasp of this elementary fact. On the other hand, no matter how exciting the chemical stampede, there's always the silence after the parade has moved on, and what's left is a sort of veil of emotional dust hanging in the air. Is there any meaning to it, or are all our diversions just delaying tactics, deployed in the hope that if we can drag our heels long enough someone, or something, will rescue us? And where did that leave Mervyn, who never even had such thoughts? He was there beside me, so still that I couldn't even tell he was breathing. But I knew his useless ears were erect and his blind eyes wide open, as though he were waiting for messages.

Chapter 5

Mildred's only book club met every other Friday, and we had agreed to get together even though it was still Christmas break. It was one of those obnoxious years when New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, which meant that school started the morning after, and everyone who had traveled for the holidays was already back in town, except of course for Janet Blythe, who was on a more extensive trip.

We met at Dale Twombly's house this time. Dale lived on a shaded corner two streets away from the main drag, far enough that the roar of the endless caravan of semis through the town was muted by a few intervening rows of trees and hedges. The house had been built back in the early '50s as a motel in the old style, consisting of four small, detached guest cabins, with a fifth for the office, the whole thing forming an L-shaped ensemble extending in two directions from the corner. Dale had blown into town from Elko, Nevada, on his Harley around the turn of the millennium, purchased the rundown old place, and proceeded to combine the five cabins into a single elongated but spacious house. His bedroom was at one end and a guest suite at the other, with living room, dining room, and kitchen in between. He'd added a sort of tower to the new roof over his bedroom, accessed by a spiral staircase, and to that sanctuary he would retire to grade the hundreds of compositions to which the English teacher falls prey. The tower also had a nice widow's walk, which caught plenty of morning sun and from which you could gaze eastward over the tranquil valley sprinkled with distant cows like raisins on a green salad.

None of this would have been particularly remarkable in the self-reliant milieu of Mildred if not for the fact that Dale Twombly had only one flesh and blood arm. He was revered by the kids at the high school, partly because of his prosthetic replacement, which was made of some gleaming, advanced titanium alloy and terminated in a devilishly complex gripping apparatus, but mainly because he had lost the original arm, not to mention the structural integrity of his ribs, in a spectacular motorcycle crash while leaping over a row of a dozen or so junked cars at a Nevada county fair.

The devastating Myrtle Bench was already seated on Dale's couch, gripping the stem of a glass of red wine and leaning forward shyly with her forearms resting on her blue-jeaned thighs when Lu and Albert and I arrived. "Hi," she whispered. Book club meetings always featured a potluck dinner, and tradition dictated that Dale, as tonight's host, should provide the main entree. Leaving Lu and Albert to try to get something out of Myrtle, I took our contribution of pasta and white bean soup out to the kitchen, which occupied the whole of one of the original cabins and was equipped with all the latest in culinary technology. Dale was putting the finishing touches on his homemade butternut squash ravioli, crimping the edges of the delectable little pillows with a fluted pastry wheel attachment that snapped directly onto the end of his prosthetic arm. His graying ponytail was tucked out of the way inside the collar of his turtleneck. Without pausing in his fluting, he nodded toward an open bottle of chianti and said "Have you posted your observations on the website yet?"

"Et tu, Brute?" I said, putting the soup kettle down on the counter and pouring myself a glass of the wine. "Matt sent me the URL, but I haven't looked at it yet. You're not going with his alien invasion trip, are you?" I was trying to be cool, but I was shocked that Matt had already managed to soften even such a hard head as Dale Twombly's.

"To be honest, Simon, I don't know. Those lights were pretty damn weird. What's your take on them?"

"Meteors." I tilted his glass of chianti to his lips like a surgical nurse so he wouldn't have to break his crimping rhythm.

He nodded appreciatively, but said, "No way, dude. I've seen plenty of shooting stars, and none of them ever did anything like that."

"Well, it might be a little hard to explain the way they moved," I admitted, "but it still seems a lot more likely than tourists from Andromeda."

"I'd call it about 50-50." Dale added the last of the ravioli to their companions in a stainless steel bowl and then took another sip of wine before turning to lift the lid and glance into the enormous caldron of water that was steaming on his commercial-size stove. "You want to be rational, of course, but I always try to ask myself if I'm just taking the easy way out, letting myself be boxed in by conventional thinking. In other words, is there another way to look at this?" He leaned back against the counter sipping the wine, his comfortable paunch straining at a not entirely fresh black turtleneck.

Well, Dale is a Wiccan, I thought cynically, resigning myself to the loss of another potential ally. I supposed that meant he was bound to be more open to unorthodox explanations. In any case his position in this controversy, as founder and guiding light of UFOny, was highly equivocal. I could have brought that up, but I restrained myself. We went out to join the ladies.

Lu and Myrtle had their heads together whispering about something when Dale and I arrived in the living room. Of course, Myrtle always whispered – if it hadn't been for her riveting appearance, I would have worried about her ability to function in a high school classroom – but Lu is not generally a whisperer, and the two of them glanced at me a little guiltily as I walked in. I'm freaking out, I thought. Even Albert was staring at me with exaggerated innocence.

The party soon swelled further with the arrival of Margaret Quitclaim, on the arm of Don Swayzee. Harold Clare was right behind them, ducking languidly to clear the doorframe, although he was only five feet four.

"Who's here?" asked Margaret, stripping a puffy down jacket off her narrow frame and dropping it imperiously into Don Swayzee's waiting hands. She stared at a corner of the ceiling and nodded as Harold Clare listed the attendees, not overlooking Albert. As a consequence of a severe infection contracted while traveling up one of the tributaries of the Blue Nile in a pirogue, Margaret was legally blind. This stroke of fate had not dampened her enthusiasm for life, although she had retired from her position as a professor of classics at Cal State Chico once it became clear that she would no longer be able to read for more than a few minutes at a time, large print, at close range, and under an intense light. She had subsequently moved to Mildred to live near her son, who ran a small business extracting healing elixirs from various spiny desert plants and shipping them to the credulous natural food communities on the coast.

Harold helped her find a spot on Dale's couch while I got her a glass of the chianti. "And where's Matt?" she said.

"I guess he's busy updating his alien-spotting network," said Don Swayzee.

"Good for him!" An energetic person herself, Margaret applauded any kind of human activity and frowned only on passivity. The book club had been one of her first projects, as soon as she'd taken the sleepy measure of Mildred, and she continued to dominate it, to all the members' satisfaction, with her spark and erudition. She'd first bullied us into trying Proust, on a 10-pages-per-day program, and it had required all of her iron will, along with the best culinary efforts of the entire group, to keep the rest of us engaged for more than a year, especially the Cowboys. I suspected they'd stayed with it only in order to get their bi-weekly dose of Myrtle Bench. It was on their behalf that Margaret had relented and pushed the somewhat more hard-driving Iliad for our next selection. The rest of us had surrendered meekly.

While we tucked away the various food offerings at Dale's long table, the talk was not about Homer but about the Christmas Eve lights, and the town's reaction to them. Margaret listened patiently as the various camps argued their points of view, but then forcefully advanced the position that what the lights actually were was of little importance, even if it could be determined. What mattered was their mythical and folkloric significance and their role in arousing Mildred from its habitual sleepwalk and redirecting the focus of the town's inhabitants from mere material concerns to the great mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Is there more to life and the universe than surface phenomena? Is there an Agency that watches over our little lives, even if it's only the Central Intelligence Agency, as Don and Harold maintained? Cleverly connecting the discussion to the Iliad, she invoked the interventions of the gods in Homer, speaking with her usual enthusiasm, as though she were leading a bayonet charge. I wondered how strongly her inability to actually see the lights had influenced her metaphysical approach to their significance.

"What bothers me is that we don't seem to have advanced that far since Homer," I protested mildly, glancing at Lu. "We're still looking for supernatural explanations for anything we don't understand."

Margaret shook her head. "Advanced? That's a pretty loaded word. Who says the Greeks were wrong? There are certainly lots of things that science can't explain, especially all the twists and turns that people's lives take. The Greeks assumed it was the gods poking their deathless fingers into things. Nowadays we assume there's a natural explanation for everything. But maybe there isn't." Lu stuck out her tongue at me.

Margaret, to her credit, was also a good listener, with a real interest in other people's opinions. She quietly explored the contents of her dinner plate with discreet dabs of her index finger and ate sparingly while the rest of the party disputed. I watched her turning her head this way and that as the arguments criss-crossed the table, but kept my mouth shut. If the meteor theory was too pedestrian for the likes of Dale Twombly and even Lu, what would Margaret make of it? I didn't think I wanted to find out. Her sightless gaze had a disconcerting directness due to the curious transparency of her left pupil, which seemed to lead deep into her skull. Whenever she looked my way, I couldn't help wondering just how blind she really was.

The choice of the Iliad had indeed been an inspired one, as nearly everyone had found its relentless action and brimming similes a welcome change of pace from Proust's meandering and braided streams of clauses. The Cowboys, in particular, had resonated to all the spearing, slashing, marauding, chariot-driving, and solid old-fashioned killing. My own enthusiasm, although not my interest, was less marked, partly because of my squeamishness, previously mentioned, around the subject of death and partly because our study of the epic coincided with Mervyn's rapid decline and Janet Blythe's move into hospice. While those two melancholy progressions loomed ever larger in my world view, Margaret was driving us once a week through all the Homerian carnage: eyeballs bouncing like hailstones in the dust, brains exploding through ears and noses, entrails slithering out onto the earth that feeds us all, armless trunks rolling around like logs in clashing bronze bark, countless nipples skewered and tongues severed by gleaming bronze, slippery red-black livers flashing in the Dardan sun. And always, the hateful darkness swirling across yet another pair of eyes. "Isn't it wonderful?" Margaret would gloat, drawing our attention to a spear thrust through somebody's buttocks to pierce his hapless bladder, and we all had to laugh at her zest for this mayhem. "Homer's audiences must have enjoyed all this violence, because he treats it all so lovingly. Apparently some things never change."

But for me those images echoed unhappily as Janet lost her beautiful hair to chemotherapy and the hateful red curtain dropped over Mervyn's eyes. For me, every scurrying dry leaf and evaporating cloud, every weathered old stump, for god's sake, had become a reminder of Time the Merciless Destroyer, and the sight of a scrub jay carrying off its bloody headless lunch turned me philosophical and even emotional. I found myself taking an unhealthy interest in the details of the corpses that littered the highway around Mildred, the smashed hawks with their fanned-out tail feathers waving ignominiously in the wash of passing cars, crushed ground squirrels, half-flayed deer. Occasionally I would even feel a strange compulsion to pull over and walk back to try to unravel the anatomy of some particularly scrambled victim, with visions of gutted Trojan warriors dancing in my head. I'm not a crybaby, but I've always had trouble with the idea of any serious breach of my personal corporal boundaries. It's not so much the pain, which is really unimaginable anyway, as the disassembly that bothers me. I'm the guy you'll find standing for long minutes in a bookstore, reading about the effects of World War I artillery bombardments on human flesh, or histories of torture, creepily fascinated by the descriptions of flaying, disemboweling, fingernail-pulling, drawing and quartering, dismemberment by teams of prancing horses, tendons stretched like rubber bands out of the ends of fingers and rolled up on poles. Humanity does seem to have a taste for this sort of entertainment. It's hard to find a culture, at least an ancient one, that didn't practice some form of torture, and I read it all, trying to imagine what my emotions would be as I watched some skilled Renaissance craftsman peel off my skin – starting at the neck, down over my chest with a sucking sound like pulling up old shelf paper, work it carefully over the tricky genital pouch, and then on down along the thighs and calves, the little pop as it separated from the last toe – and finally hang up the veiny, translucent garment to dry, so that later it could be neatly folded and Fed-Exed to my grieving mother.

I couldn't discuss any of this with Lu, who was impatient with my morbid tendencies and never troubled herself with such imaginings, although I would sometimes hear her clucking over some particularly vile story in the day-old Los Angeles Times that made its way to Mildred. Soft-hearted though she was, her position was that God would never give you something you couldn't handle; and anyway there was the afterlife. I supposed it was true that whatever you were handed in the way of torture, you just had to deal with it. But what would you feel as you watched your body being taken apart, as the inevitable darkness gathered? That feeling was what I kept trying to touch, as though connecting to it would open some conduit of secrets.

I found the more or less neutral forum of the book club a good place to bring up these concerns, casually of course. After the shambles of the dinner had been removed to the kitchen, we found comfortable chairs in Dale Twombly's living room and sat around sipping coffee or a little more wine. "Homer never really tries to describe what these guys must be thinking about while their livers are being filleted," I complained, to get the conversation off the Christmas Eve lights and onto the Iliad, which in my opinion brought up far more interesting questions. "The hateful mist just comes swirling down their eyes, and off they go to the underworld. It's all sort of vague and almost a relief, especially when the descriptions of all that physical violence are so detailed and vivid."

"I can tell you that you don't feel much at the time," Dale Twombly said. "In my case, it was kind of a surprise to see my arm hanging there like hamburger, and I knew I should be feeling something about it, but I really didn't, except I was kind of anxious. There wasn't even much pain right then."

We all listened to Dale respectfully, as a person who had been there. Don Swayzee drew in his breath and pushed his cowboy hat back on his forehead as if he had something to add, but remained silent.

"Yes, that's very interesting," said Margaret, fixing Dale with her disturbing gaze. "I suppose Homer would have talked to people who'd been in combat, in battles, so he would have known what Dale is telling us."

"I don't know why you're getting so bent out of shape anyway, Houba," said Don Swayzee finally, with his habitual twist of lip. "We all get something. It doesn't matter much whether it's a spear in the guts or stomach cancer. One's a little faster, that's all. That might even be better."

"Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither," intoned Dale Twombly.

"Achilles," Myrtle Bench said in her tiniest voice. We all stared at her. "Even Achilles had to die. He reminded that guy."

"Lycaon, that's right," Margaret rescued Myrtle from her excruciating shyness. " 'Come friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even for me, death and the strong force of fate are waiting.' Even Achilles, the greatest hero of a heroic age." I felt chastened by their matter-of-fact approach, as though all these people were healthier than I was, and my being creeped out by the idea of death and physical disintegration was a form of weakness.

Lu said, "Maybe death wasn't the worst thing that could happen, anyway. The Greeks did believe in an afterlife of some kind, didn't they?"

"Actually, it was sort of the worst thing that could happen, as far as the Greeks were concerned," Margaret said. "When Odysseus visits Achilles in the underworld, he tries to tell him how glorious his name is among the living and how great it is that he's lording it over all the dead, that he shouldn't grieve about dying. Achilles basically says No, I'd rather be alive and swabbing latrines up there, than a king down here. The Greek underworld was a very dark, melancholy place, and the dead were shadows of their living selves. The shades of the dead people couldn't even talk to Odysseus until he livened them up a little by giving them some blood to drink. It's not a happy picture."

"I like it as poetry," Lu said, a little disapprovingly, "but I think there are better ways to look at life and death. That's so bleak. There's nothing to hope for."

"Yes, it's kind of a gloomy view," said Margaret. "But it's exhilarating too, isn't it? We can't escape, but we're lucky to be alive now, and that's why we have to live as though every day were our last." She leaned back contentedly on the couch.

"But what about the way you lived your life," Lu said. "Even Achilles had to die, and the heroes and the villains all ended up in the same place. What was the point of trying to live a good life?"

"Glory," said Margaret. "If you did something glorious, you'd be sung about after your death, forever."

We all contemplated this. Personally, I didn't find it exhilarating at all. First you get a spear up your bladder, which I was sure would hurt no matter what Dale Twombly said, and then you go down to a sort of poorly lit subway station where the train never comes and you're surrounded for eternity by nebulous, squeaking has-beens.

"How the hell did we get on this subject?" Dale Twombly asked, plaintively. "Can't we go back to the cosmic lights? This is depressing the hell out of me." Indeed, only Margaret herself seemed enthusiastic about the taste of this particular draught. Even the Cowboys, though they were trying to project a manly stoicism, appeared sobered by the ancients' unrelenting vision. Lu, confident that she had a better answer but wisely restraining herself from launching into missionary mode, was cultivating a nonjudgmental expression, while Myrtle Bench stared noncommittally at Dale's polished hardwood floor. I tried to pretend I'd had nothing to do with the siding we'd gone off onto.

"How about the gods," said Margaret. "I think we should spend some time talking about their role in the fighting, their relation to fate, and so on."

"What I'd like to know," Harold Clare said, "is why they're always having sex with mortals. I was looking at the genealogical charts in the back of the book, and it seems like half these people are the product of hanky panky with some deity or other. Nobody would really believe that, right? I mean, were there women around in Homer's time who claimed to have gotten it on with Zeus?"

Dale Twombly said, "Aren't there always a few people around who seem to have an extra shot of juice, compared to the rest of us? We don't believe in the Greek gods any more, so we just call it genius or charisma or whatever. Rock stars, movie stars, Einstein, Mozart, a few athletes who seem almost superhuman. But if you believed in the gods, you could imagine that people like that were part god."

"Do we know anybody in Mildred who fits that description?" Margaret always enjoyed messing with our heads.

"Matt Matawan," said Lu without hesitation. Don Swayzee snorted, but Lu defended her choice. "Well, he's sort of bigger than life, he's very good-looking, and he's certainly full of energy and enthusiasm." I looked at her, unexpectedly feeling the burrowing worm of jealousy.

"And he's got half of the Eastern Sierra believing that emissaries from Saturn have landed," I said. "That's charisma."

"Shit," said Don Swayzee, "if he's descended from Zeus, I'm Barack Hoo-sane Obama."

"Well, what about those celebrities," Margaret insisted. "Can we explain the power they have over people? You could almost believe there's a dollop of divine DNA in there somewhere."

The conversation deteriorated into a sort of Oscar Committee meeting, everybody proposing and puffing their own candidates for partial divinity, with selections ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Lady Gaga. As a result, it was time to do the dishes before we ever got to Achilles whacking Hector and dragging him around Troy by his heels, let alone the funeral games for Patroclus. The Cowboys helped Margaret into her down parka and escorted her out into the cold night. Dale Twombly, who enjoyed demonstrating his remarkable ability to perform feats with his prosthesis that the rest of us couldn't have accomplished even with our own flesh and blood arms, protested that he didn't need any help with the cleaning up. But I wasn't about to give up the chance to hang around his kitchen watching Myrtle Bench wield her deathless dish towel. I hadn't brought it up, but I secretly thought if there was anyone in Mildred who was half goddess, it was Myrtle. The only other serious local candidate for demigod status I could think of was Mervyn. Unlike Achilles, however, Mervyn had been dealt a long and uneventful life instead of glory, and I thought the poets were probably not going to sing his name down the ages.

Chapter 6

Back home again after the book club meeting, with Albert down for the night and Lu getting ready for bed, I finally took a look at Matt's website, as much out of curiosity as to record my own observations. Matt had decorated the home page with graphics of streaking comets, spaceships, flaming satellites in mid-reentry, deities with their gleaming heads poking out of clouds, ET-type extraterrestrials, and a lot of dancing question marks. There were dozens of sightings already posted, some strictly objective, others emotional and even inflamed. One guy, from the very tiny town of Demerit CA, swore he'd seen prancing horses hauling a fiery chariot, and even heard the rumbling of celestial wheels. An elderly widow in Reno, emerging from a casino on her way to an all-night steakhouse, had looked up to see what was clearly a spaceship in distress, breaking up in the atmosphere. She heard a sizzling sound and smelled burning flesh as the lights passed over, spinning off flaming debris and chunks of alien bodies. And our own Madame Malesherbes, French and Latin teacher at Mildred High and an amateur ham radio operator, claimed to have discerned fragments of a Morse code message in the pulsing of the lights. Her report was generally discounted by the other online commentators because the three words she'd decoded had apparently been in French, and then why would the aliens use Morse code, when hardly any humans knew it any more?

Most of the observations were somewhat more measured than these, although in the whole list I could only find one other person who believed the lights had been meteors entering the atmosphere. Unfortunately, he was a Chilean radio astronomer, or claimed to be one, who had not observed the phenomena in question. Nearly all the witnesses focused on the lights' erratic behavior – the starts and stops and changes of brightness and direction – as indications of their supernatural or at least extraterrestrial origin. Most of them were especially impressed by the slow lowering of the lights onto the dark desert and firmly believed that a thorough search out there would yield something interesting. One problem was that they had all, no matter how far north or south, seen the lights land due east of them, which meant we had several thousand square miles of desert to comb over. Alien visitation was the most popular interpretation by a margin of almost two to one, although there was a strong subset who saw the lights as a clear sign from God, calling for behavior adjustments on our part ranging from a ban on homosexuality to imposition of stiffer gas mileage standards on SUVs. Most of the religious respondents (my wife was one of these) had adopted the more nuanced position originally voiced by Father MacGill, suggesting that the lights were indeed a sign, but that we couldn't know what it meant. Instead, we were being called to examine our lives and adjust our behavior and secret thoughts as needed. Margaret Quitclaim had posted her own vision of the lights as a sort of mass psycho-mythical manifestation that, whatever its source, provided our desert community with an unparalleled opportunity to transcend its mundane daily life and tap into the ancient universal reservoir of human spirituality. At the opposite end of the spectrum, two or three skeptics pegged the event as the kickoff of a clever advertising campaign.

The Cowboys had also checked in, along with a small contingent of other anti-government enthusiasts. The theories favored by this group included advanced weaponry, communications, and/or space vehicle testing, secret laser surveillance of the population, mind control by way of subliminal messages encoded in the lights, or some kind of nuclear accident whose fallout was already irradiating our bone marrow, with effects that might not reveal themselves for 50 years but would certainly be devastating.

There was even a tiny group that was trying to bridge the alien and government theories, regarding the sighting as evidence for (A) Federal collusion with the extraterrestrials, with the goal, of course, of subjugating the unsuspecting people of America, or (B) a titanic space battle between NASA and the aliens. These observers cited the two different colors of the lights, their rapid maneuvers, and the final crash out on the desert. The aliens, with their super-advanced technology, would doubtless prevail in this unequal contest; but it was bracing to think of our brave, anonymous astronauts up there, battling desperately like medieval knights charging a panzer division.

Many of these folks had clearly spent some time reading the other entries, and the sheer number of sightings, occurring in many different locations along a north-south axis 200 miles long, had convinced most observers that there had been not two lights but dozens of them; that if only they hadn't been distracted by their own lights' spectacular behavior they might have noticed others to the north and south – a massive, invasion-like event, in fact. This accounted in part for the popularity of the alien visitation theory, although it didn't rule out any of the other explanations either, except of course the meteor theory. The absence of observations since Christmas Eve, far from casting doubt on the whole idea, merely served to increase the certainty and uneasiness of this faction. What were "they" doing out there, anyway? When would they show themselves? How should we be preparing for first contact?

After reading through all these interesting scenarios, along with a few more sober evaluations – all of which, however, eschewed any natural explanation – I entered my own observations, sticking strictly to the facts and not speculating, although I did include a rather tart comment at the end to the effect that everything I'd seen was perfectly consistent with the idea of a meteor breaking up in the upper atmosphere.

I read my statement over a few times, with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. I was sure my theory was correct; but it lacked fire and mystery, not to mention the clash of pulsed radiation weapons in the icy vacuum of outer space. It also lacked the giant admonishing and sheltering Hand of God, and even the fumbling, prurient hand of the Federal government. I felt a kind of mild contempt for all these gullible people inflating their silly visions of movie monsters or praying to incandescent space dust, and I was particularly annoyed at Matt Matawan, who I thought should know better. So after a while I did something bad: I went to hotmail, created a new e-mail account for myself under an alias, and crafted a whole new observation.

In my new identity I was a 40-year-old female ex-Olympic equestrian rock-climber/particle physicist, who'd been out exercising my fiery steed in the desert atop Devil's Table when the lights had appeared, at first motionless, but then suddenly moving directly toward me at frightening speed, growing in size and intensity, surrounded by an enormous, flickering envelope of glowing air, and preceded by a powerful shock wave that badly frightened my horse. The glowing cloud had halted abruptly a few hundred yards to the south of me, and once the pinkish aura of ionized nitrogen had faded I could see that the two lights, one white and one green and both of an unearthly brilliance, marked opposite points on the circular rim of a vast, dark vessel, which was hovering silently and slowly lowering itself into the sagebrush.

Naturally I couldn't go too far with this without risking assignment to the same category as the Reno gambler lady and her sizzling alien body parts. I'd wanted to go a little closer, I told my presumably avid readers, to get a look at the occupants of this menacing apparition, but was unable to convince my horse to approach it. In any case, once the thing had landed, I hadn't heard or seen anything else – no hiss of airlocks, no slanting ramps of celestial light from inside the thing, no communications in unknown tongues. There was only darkness and an ominous silence. I had finally given up waiting and had cantered back to my spread, chilled in body and soul.

On Christmas Day I had gathered my courage and driven out to the site of the landing on Devil's Table, which I cautiously approached on foot. Nothing was to be seen there now except a large, perfect circle of almost imperceptibly flattened sagebrush. Since then, examining the area at night with binoculars (I had to confess to a superstitious fear of going out there in the dark), I had sometimes noticed an odd glow flickering along the tops of the desert scrub. Furthermore, my border collie, Agamemnon, had been restless and irritable ever since Christmas Eve and had completely given up his usual diversion of herding the chickens, while my two cats were depressed and sleeping nearly 24 hours a day.

I was terribly relieved, I added, to read the reports of all the other believers in the extraterrestrial explanation. It was they who had given me the courage to come forward, knowing that there were at least some who understood what I'd experienced and would not ridicule me. Nevertheless I felt that for the time being it was safer not to reveal my name, exact location, and especially the research institution that employed me as a telecommuting theoretical physicist. The site administrator, I was sure, would be completely unsympathetic, and I was already in a precarious position as a blond female in a field dominated by men of the old school. But I urged the administrator of the website, and anyone else who read my report, to redouble their search efforts. There was definitely something out there, and it made my skin crawl to think that "they" were busy doing whatever it was they were doing, while we were all hypnotized by our smart phones. I thanked them all for their trust and signed off as "Shocked and Awed."

I sat for a long time, re-reading this effort with my cursor on the Send button, thinking maybe I'd had enough fun just writing the thing, and it wasn't really necessary to let anyone else see it. I suppose I should have let it sit overnight, which is my usual habit, before deciding whether to send it. But the malicious current in my thinking was a little too strong, and in the end I clicked. Reading it over, it seemed to me that it was an obvious hoax anyway, that only the nut cases would buy into it, and that Matt's suspicions would immediately be raised by, if nothing else, the anonymity of the entry. And no one matching the description of my blond particle physicist bombshell could possibly have concealed herself out in this tiny desert community. Matt would just add my posting to the crazy folder and go about his business.

Lu was already in bed, asleep, bathed in the dim glow of the bedside lamp, when I went upstairs. Mervyn's head and pointy ears protruded from the blankets next to her. I got under the covers, bellied up to the two of them, and drifted off to sleep, moved and saddened by the transient warmth of their fragile bodies.

Chapter 7

The summer before Lu and I arrived in town, someone torched Mildred High School, Home of the Fighting Common Nighthawks. The arson took place on the eve of the final day of school, and made possible the finest hour of the Mildred Volunteer Fire Department, which had never before had to deal with a structural fire of such magnitude. Stomping about in their oversized boots and new slickers trimmed in safety-reflective yellow-green, the firefighters managed to prevent the complete destruction of the building, but the fire caused the postponement of commencement exercises, which had to be moved outdoors to the James Stirling Recreation Park and Softball Field. Luckily the weather, often unstable at that time of year, continued clear, and the graduation went off all right. It was widely believed that at least one of the 18 graduates who proudly crossed the portable stage, actually the trailer of a flatbed truck draped with festive bunting, was responsible for the blaze.

Some of the townspeople dismissed the fire as a traditional senior prank that had gotten out of control; others hinted at something darker than mere adolescent highjinks. Questions were asked, on one side, about the increasingly repressive culture of the school under its new principal, Javier Shivwits, who was attempting to emphasize academics and downplay sports, and, on the other, about the malign influence of the permissive coastal California cultures that were lapping up onto the western foothills and even beginning to spill over some of the lower passes into the Eastern Sierra, in a caustic trickle that was eating away at the traditional values of the region. Though there were plenty of theories about who was responsible, the culprit was never brought to justice, so the question of his or her motivation remained an open one.

Everyone in the suburbs and rural zones knows the lore of the urban public high school – embattled administrators barricaded in their offices, hallways flooded with fire hoses, desks tossed out third-story windows onto strolling passersby, squirming graffiti on the walls, doors torn off the stalls in the restrooms and shit smeared on the floors, gangfights in the auditorium, methamphetamines on the cafeteria menu, teachers assassinated at their blackboards with switchblades or Saturday Night Specials. In the same way, city teachers hear tales about the sullen, combative Caucasian kids of the rural schools, with their savagely repressed home lives and the deceptive bucolic courtesy that disguises a dangerous explosiveness and diabolical expertise with machinery and weapons – teachers' cars hot-wired and driven into cattle-watering tanks, and the teachers themselves drilled from afar with deer rifles while innocently turning the warm garbage in their compost heaps. The school-burning was in fact much worse than any act of vandalism I had ever encountered in my long urban teaching career, and it confirmed and encapsulated some misgivings I had about our move from San Francisco to the wilderness.

But I discovered that teaching at Mildred High School wasn't really very different from teaching at General Benjamin "Beast" Butler High School in San Francisco. The school was newer, cleaner, and better maintained, of course (once it was rebuilt, that is; for the year after the fire, classes were conducted in a row of double-wide trailers tractored in for the purpose), and the children of the lonely desert countryside did indeed tend to be somewhat quieter and more polite than those raised in the negligent bedlam of city housing projects, the downside being that they were also more guarded and enigmatic. But our aging Honda Civic was never molested, no matter how much homework I assigned, and deer rifles were not in evidence, at least not in school, although every highway sign had its bouquet of bullet holes, as if swarms of bullheaded metal bees patrolled all the roads.

My new colleagues at Mildred High also seemed to present more of a cross-section of wholesome Americana than the crowd at Ben Butler. Most urban teachers are quite normal, of course, but there is a subset whose somewhat rumpled and too-oft-worn clothes and permanently furrowed brows seem to signal their status as survivors of a psychological holocaust of some kind. Or maybe it's just that big-city public school teaching, with its difficult-to-quantify product (what DO we want our high school graduates to be, after all?), its protective unions, and its lackadaisical oversight by administrators who are themselves often refugees from the turbulence of the classroom, provides a relatively safe habitat for the occasional odd duck who likes to paddle among the broken reeds at the fringes of the mainstream.

Mildred High School, however, had only seven teachers, and any true eccentricity would have stood out boldly in such a small crowd, to be ruthlessly pruned by the principal or school board. Not to mention that the recognized boundaries of acceptable behavior were a good deal narrower than they were in the urban environment. Matt Matawan, as previously mentioned, was the lone science teacher, now that Parnell had finally retired. The paralyzingly beautiful Myrtle Bench taught all the math classes, Genevieve "Madame" Malesherbes covered French, Spanish, and Latin, and Dale Twombly did most of the literature and composition classes. I, of course, had social studies, everything from European history to economics to psychology, not because I was expert in those fields but because I knew slightly more about most of them than any other one teacher in the school. Our swing man was Tucker Wing, who handled the miscellaneous stuff that nobody else wanted – Driver's Ed, career counseling, Phys Ed, that kind of thing – along with the occasional surplus class in almost any subject. He also had the controversial "Family Life" (read: sex education). His status as the only Asian in town seemed somehow to derail any potential flareups about the content of the course. Visual and performing arts classes had to be canceled when Janet Blythe went into hospice, and no replacement for her had yet been found or, as far as anyone could tell, searched for.

School started up again the day after New Years. I don't like that time of year very much, being the kind of person who gets depressed if he doesn't get plenty of sunlight on the pineal gland. I hate walking to school through the cold and dark. The job being what it is, I often end up walking home in the dark as well. Of course, I have opportunities to duck outside a few times during the day and rest my eyes on the mountains and the towers of cumulus and the distant desert horizons, which usually does me some good. But the winter skies are often cloudy all day, and the gloom can lure me into a mental sink. I think the darkness and gray weather also tend to make the kids lethargic; and of course the pit of winter and the halfway point of the school year coincide. We're already tired, and spring break and summer seem a long way off.

Luckily the kids, stimulated by the wild speculations of their elders, were still buzzing about the Christmas Eve lights. I decided to go with the flow on the first day back by making a point about scientific reasoning. It seemed to me I was really doing Matt Matawan's job for him, but it was clear from the website that he wasn't going to do it himself.

" 'Occam's Razor'," I read to the seniors in my American Democracy class from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, " '[William of Ockham]: a scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.' Do you get what they're driving at here?"

"Yes, Mr. Houba, we know what you're trying to do," said Brad Pentane, sarcastically. "Your meteor theory may be natural, but it isn't very simple. They didn't just go streaking across the sky like shooting stars. I don't see how you can explain the way they stopped and started. And then they landed up there on Devil's Table."

"Wouldn't they look like they weren't moving if they were coming straight toward us?" I said, pretending to know more about geometry than I really did. They all looked at me thoughtfully, but I could tell they weren't convinced.

"Well then, why would they start moving again?" asked Peggy Wilco, who was wearing a baseball cap, against school regulations, with her blond ponytail sticking out through the gap in the back.

"I don't know the details," I said. "But I'm sure there's an explanation. Miss Bench could probably explain it to you, or maybe Mr. Matawan."

"Mr. Matawan told us he thinks it may have been extraterrestrials," said Brad. "He didn't want to say it right out, but that's what he thinks."

"Yeah, I know he's toying with that idea. I'll just point out that he's already been up on Devil's Table looking for signs that they landed there, but he hasn't found anything, and neither has anyone else. The point of Occam's Razor isn't so much the simplicity, anyway. A wrong theory can be very simple. It's really that business about known quantities. You're not supposed to bring in supernatural explanations if there are natural ones that will work. Don't multiply entities unnecessarily. Mr. Gish, my high school geometry teacher, used to annoy us by telling us the sound of the air blowing in through the heating ducts was actually the breathing of a giant who lived under the school."

We all sat listening to the sound of the forced air heating for a few seconds. "We couldn't prove he was wrong," I went on. "We'd say 'Well, we could go down to the basement and look.' And he'd say 'The giant lives in the ground below the basement.' 'Well then, we could dig up the floor down there.' 'How do you know how deep he is?' 'We could just keep digging, until it was so deep that even if he was there, you wouldn't be able to hear his breathing up in the classroom.' 'Well, suppose he's an invisible giant?' At that point what could we say? But he knew, and we knew, there was no giant living in the basement. The point was not to use a supernatural explanation when there was a perfectly good natural one – the heating system. Of course, William of Ockham got thrown in jail for heresy."

"Why didn't you just get the janitor to turn off the heat, and see if the noise stopped?" Arnold Barns spoke up from his usual seat, as far back in the room as he could get. "Anyway, that's not what William of Ockham said. He didn't say you couldn't bring in a supernatural explanation. He just said you had to suspend judgment if there was a reasonable natural explanation. There could have been a giant living in the basement of your school. It was more likely that it was the heating system, but you couldn't be sure, at least not without tearing up the whole building. And he didn't get thrown in jail, he just got excommunicated because he called the Pope a heretic."

Anyone who's ever taught high school kids, maybe even middle school, knows that every year there's at least one who inspires in his teachers a kind of schizophrenia. I say "his" because it's usually a boy, the girls tending to deploy a somewhat different set of techniques for disordering the adult mind. The characteristic qualities of this kid are intellectual brilliance, usually coupled with a quick and acid tongue; the kind of amoral creativity that is probably responsible for some of our greatest works of arts and the most grotesque serial murders; a precocious instinctive grasp of psychology; and a profound (and often, it must be admitted, justified) cynicism about adult motivation; all catalyzed by an irrepressible will to disrupt. To make things more difficult, curiosity, humor, and an incongruous naivete are often also part of the package.

The glinting blade of this sort of personality can effortlessly cleave teachers from their best impulses – their real desire to instruct, their ambivalent love for the innocent and ruthless teenage psyche, their sympathy for the anxious searchings of untrained minds – almost without their being aware of it; so that at one moment they're happily facilitating a stimulating discussion of the nationalist motives that drove the Congress of Vienna and at the next they're issuing Hitlerian threats of detention and telephone calls to parents, with red faces and veins pumping obscenely in their temples.

Arnold Barns had been the very model of this kind of student at Mildred High School for all four of his years there. Luckily, I'd first encountered him when he was still only a sophomore, before his talents had fully flowered. Our few early run-ins had taught me the futility of trying to outdo him or assert direct control. I had adopted instead a generally successful policy of civil disobedience: complete refusal to respond to his provocations, frosted with a light sarcasm intended to suggest that my worldview encompassed and trivialized his, along with a passionless delivery that of course masked a volcano of irritation.

It was far from the first time that Arnold Barns had deployed his vast reading for the purpose of busting my chops in class. In fact, I usually welcomed his attacks, because when he wasn't harassing me he was sitting back there turned sideways in the desk that was way too small for him and staring out the window, as if even the gray winter sky were far more interesting than anything I could tell him about the American judiciary system. I secretly agreed with this judgment, which may explain why the students' evaluations of my teaching at the end of the year were invariably rather lackluster. Matt Matawan, on the other hand, always got very high ratings. He's an enthusiastic son of a bitch, in addition to which he takes his kids to the sewer pond. Myrtle Bench also received reviews much better than mine, but then no one was likely to give Aphrodite a bad mark for her classroom management skills.

"Arnold is right," I admitted. "It's possible that those lights were an alien spacecraft, or even a sign from Heaven. That's what my wife thinks, and Father MacGill, I guess. But isn't it more likely that they were some natural phenomenon, like meteors? Just like the heating system was a more likely explanation than the giant. We don't know for sure, so we have to suspend our judgment, as Arnold says. But if you had to bet on it, what would you say?"

"Why were there two of them at exactly the same time? Isn't that kind of unlikely?" Peggy Wilco had been emboldened by Arnold's lethargic attack on my erudition.

"And they were moving exactly together, like they were coordinated," added Brad.

"I'm not an astronomer, for god's sake," I said. "I'm sure they could explain it to you. How about a little extra credit project. Somebody want to do a little research on the Internet and find out what the astronomers are saying?" No hands were raised. They knew I wasn't going to give anybody less than a B anyway.

"You should do it, Mr. Houba," said Peggy. "You're the one who thinks they were meteors. Everyone else thinks they were spaceships."

"Not everyone. I told you about my wife. And there's another theory going around, that it was the CIA or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Not to mention UFOny."

"We already asked Mr. Twombly," said Brad, "but he won't tell us if he had anything to do with it. He just keeps saying 'A little uncertainty is good for the human spirit.' "

Peggy said "I think our theory's as good as yours. We can't prove they were spaceships, and you can't prove they were meteors. What's the difference?"

"I can't prove they weren't a precision dance team of chocolate-dipped marshmallows, either!" I was beginning to get exasperated by their obtuseness. "Does that mean the dancing marshmallow theory has the same status as any other one?" Arnold was smiling faintly, contemptuously, from the back row. I was sure if he were propounding the meteor theory himself he'd have some piece of unassailable evidence to trot out. But he wasn't about to rescue me.

"What do you think, Arnold?" I said, hoping I might at least get him to commit himself, instead of just hanging back there with his superior air.

He said, "Us Native Americans have our own ideas about those things. But aren't we not supposed to talk about religion in the classroom?"

"Not at all. We can talk about religion, we just can't push any particular religion. What's the Native American point of view?"

"Well, there are lots of them. Which one do you want?" he drawled.

"Why don't you give us some options. Then maybe we can apply Occam's Razor to them."

"Star shit," he said, leaning back and stretching out his legs. "That's my personal favorite." Like Peggy, Arnold had a ponytail hanging out through the back of his extralegal baseball cap. His was a lustrous black, however. The other kids giggled and watched me to see how I'd deal with this provocation.

"You want to explain?" I said. One thing about teaching in the San Francisco School District is that you learn not to get bent out of shape by words like "shit" in the classroom.

"Just what I said. What you call shooting stars are really just the stars taking a shit."

"OK, but then aren't you saying they were meteors? That's really the same as my theory, except we have different explanations for the origin of the meteors. And anyway, how does your theory explain the way they started and stopped up there?"

"I don't know. Maybe the stars have irritable bowel syndrome. Anyway, mine's about as good as yours, or as bad."

This obviously wasn't getting us anywhere, but it was typical of Arnold Barns's dismissive approach to the formal educational endeavor. As I'd discovered by examining his cumulative file the first time he'd hassled me in class, Arnold lived with his mother in Mildred's slum, which a tourist would notice only by accidentally following the sandy ruts back up into one of the narrow draws that snake down out of the mountains to the west of town. It was a sad collection of trailers and listing recreational vehicles, slumped in their final resting place amid a sculpture garden of rusting appliances, unidentifiable lumber and sheetrock residues, and the gradually accreting glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper waste of the depressed inhabitants.

Arnold was one-quarter Chumash Indian, but his mother, who had been fortunate enough to land a job cleaning rooms for minimum wage at the Travelodge on the north edge of town, was Vietnamese. The Travelodge was the only motel in town that had any business in the winter, so Mrs. Barns was able to cling to her job on a part-time basis through the cold months. The file, of course, gave no hint of how she had fetched up here in the Eastern Sierra, or who or where Arnold's father was. His test scores were stratospheric, while his grades tended to dribble off the other end of the spectrum, with occasional spikes when some teacher managed to get his attention temporarily. He was also a brilliant but erratic tri-sport athlete, at one moment casually running back a kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown and at the next jeopardizing his quarterback's life by not bothering to block a blitzing linebacker.

"There's never been a verifiable sighting of an extraterrestrial landing on this planet," I stated pompously, "whereas plenty of people have seen meteors land. A few people have even been hit by them. One came through the ceiling of somebody's dining room a few years back. You can see them in museums. The meteors, I mean. The scientists find them in Antarctica all the time, sitting out on the ice. They actually go out there looking for them. When was the last time you saw an extraterrestrial?"

"Christmas Eve!" yelled Peggy Wilco, and everybody laughed again.

Brad Pentane said "A hundred years ago there had never been a verifiable sighting of a smart phone, but now they're all over the place. That doesn't prove anything. There has to be a first time."

I threw up my hands, and avenged myself on them by assigning them to poll their parents' theories about the lights, and their reasons, and write them up in a two-page essay. My sadistic pleasure at their groans was slightly dampened by the knowledge that I'd have to read the damn things.

"Things are poppin', Houba," Matt Matawan told me at lunchtime in the teachers' lounge. Matt's lunch invariably consisted of two giant sandwiches, white bread slathered with mustard and mayonnaise, embracing some kind of meat, some kind of cheese, and a few leaves of generic greenery. After consuming those, he would clear his palate with grapes or chunks of seasonal fruit and then finish it all off with a chocolate chip cookie or two. The result of all this, as he moved into his late 40s, had been a noticeable rotundity around the middle, which he carried nonchalantly, knowing it didn't at all diminish his emanations of power and inexhaustible energy. All that food, along with Matt himself, left very little room for me and my carrot strips and peanut butter sandwich, especially since the teachers' lounge was also home to the rattling copy machine, the paper cutter, the coffee maker, and a table, too wide for the room, at which all seven teachers of Mildred High School could sit uncomfortably, along with the principal, Javier Shivwits, for our monthly meetings. Today, however, only Myrtle Bench was seated at the far end of the table, thoughtfully nibbling a radish with perfect white teeth.

Matt motioned toward the single window, through which I could see the ridge of the Ash Mountains covered with pristine winter snow rendered blue by distance and, rearing up behind and above them, lofty eruptions of cumulus. "I'm getting more sightings every day," he said, "all up and down the Front. A couple more from Reno even."

"Did the ones from Reno include their breathalyzer test results?" I said.

"Very funny. I got a real eye-opener on Saturday night. It's anonymous, but pretty convincing. Someone who actually saw something land up on Devil's Table."

"Really?" I said, a mouthful of peanut butter helping me to feign indifference. "You don't mean that horseback-riding physicist woman, do you?"

"Exactly."

"But who could it be? There's nobody like that living around here." Could he really be swallowing the hook like this? I was shaken.

"She's obviously very uncomfortable with the whole thing," he agreed. "That just makes it all the more convincing, as far as I'm concerned. It's probably someone who's deliberately disguising herself, or himself."

"Or a complete fake!" I blurted. "Aren't you afraid it's just one of the kids, yanking your chain? Or how about Don Swayzee? He's the only one I know who rides his horse up there."

"It doesn't sound like a kid, and definitely not like Don. It's too carefully written, and the details have the ring of truth."

I didn't know what to say. Part of me was flattered that he'd found my impromptu composition so believable, but mostly I was appalled that my little joke, instead of administering the jolt of reality I'd intended, seemed to be providing more fuel for the fever that was consuming my friend's brain. Apparently I'd been too conservative. I should have made her an exotic dancer with a day job in the Department of Ursine Abnormal Psychology at Yale. But then I had to ask myself just how malicious my intent had been. I chewed noncommittally.

"There's definitely something happening, man, whether you want to believe it or not," Matt continued. "I don't know what it is, but I'm not going to sit on my hands. I'm making a spreadsheet, trying to classify and collate all the details in the various reports. There are so many postings now, I'm starting to lose control of the big picture. Thanks for posting yours, by the way. And you too, Miss Bench." Myrtle Bench nodded slightly, without looking at us, and carefully pushed her raven tresses back behind her ear so as not to interfere with her third radish. Matt had been working on Myrtle for at least three years, without putting any kind of nick in her enamel. At this point he just checked her out absent-mindedly every day, the way you'd glance at the century plant in your back yard to see if it had bloomed.

"I want you to come out to Devil's Table with me for a while after school," he said. "I need to see if I can verify any of the particle physicist's details. Plus I've been getting a few reports from around town about unusual lights out on the desert and I want to check it out. Maybe it's nothing, but you never know. We might find some signs."

"Why me? Why don't you get the Cowboys or a couple of the kids? You know I belong to the meteor school of thought. If I'm right you aint gonna find jack shit out there."

"Exactly why I want you along. I need someone to keep me honest." Apparently he hadn't gone completely woo-woo yet. "Anyway, Parnell's coming along too, so you'll have a partner in your skepticism," he added.

"What's his theory?" I said.

"Which one? Last time I talked to him he claimed we're being invaded by a race of super-intelligent 4-watt nightlight bulbs. I don't think he has a real theory. He's says he's given up on theories since he retired. The world is just a big drunken brawl of unconnected phenomena as far as he's concerned." Matt polished off the last crust of sandwich #2 and started on his grapes. Down at the end of the table Myrtle raised a very thin cracker to her red red lips and bit a couple of millimeters off one corner. Maybe she was only pretending to eat, so as not to raise any suspicions amongst us mortals. Outside the window time seemed to have stopped – the same clouds were brooding, apparently unaltered, over the same distant ridge. I've noticed that although all cumulus are different, they somehow all look the same. You can find a hippopotamus in any of them.

"Meet me in front of school at 3:30," Matt said. "We'll pick up Parnell and go drive around the Point a little bit. It's a nice afternoon anyway." I went back to my room to cue up a couple of video clips about the civil rights movement, leaving Matt working on his cookies and glancing occasionally at Myrtle, trying to think of the words that would awaken her from her spell.

Chapter 8

At 3:30 Matt was waiting for me at the front entrance in his cherry red 4-wheel drive pickup. A few ranch kids were boarding the school bus that would creep along the dusty roads depositing them at their widely dispersed mailboxes out in the wasteland; otherwise the place was already deserted. It didn't take long for Mildred High's couple of hundred kids to clear off in the afternoons. I made Matt wait while I went to check on Lu. She already had the basketballers running drills, their yells and the squeaks of their sneakers echoing off the concrete walls of the gym. She gave me a distracted peck on the cheek and waved toward Albert, who was propped up on a folding chair in his backpack, jerking all four limbs spasmodically in imitation of the basketball players. "Can you keep him this afternoon?" I asked her. "Matt wants to drag me up to Devil's Table to look for extraterrestrials." She clucked in annoyance, but nodded. I noticed that Arnold Barns was missing. Arnold had rolled his ankle in a game just before winter break, landing on someone's foot on one of those rare occasions when he'd forgotten himself enough to jump for a rebound, so he hadn't been practicing with the team.

"His ankle's still sore," Lu told me. "Maybe. You never really know about Arnold. AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE RUNNING THE FLOOR?" she yelled at one of the kids, who she thought was smiling too much. "WELL THEN, RUN THE DAMN FLOOR!" She was sensitive about her position as a woman coaching a boy's team, and sometimes took a harder line than she needed to, I thought. Her teams won games, however. I slunk away.

The highway arrowed southward, eschewing the sensuous curves of the West Rapid River, which followed at a more leisurely pace to our left. I got my usual lift from the long afternoon light that sparked the riffles of the river and lit up the sage in a poignant green gold. What appeared to be the same cumulus I'd seen at lunch were stacked up above the Ash Mountains, only now their color was richer and older. I'm just a country boy from Brooklyn, and I have to admit that once I got over the initial anxiety of solitude and space I began to love this place, with its huge sky and its distances and clean horizons unmarked by humanity. I've even thanked Lu once or twice for dragging me out here from the city. She doesn't seem very surprised by my change of heart. For someone like her, who likes to hike out into the desert and collect wildflowers when she's not making cheese sandwiches at the PetroMall, it's paradise.

Matt, too, was in a fine mood as he barreled down the highway jabbering about the Christmas Eve lights. "The thing that intrigues me," he said, "is that there are still absolutely no reports from urban areas."

"So what does that suggest," I asked him, "other than that nobody in the city ever looks up? Or if they did, they'd think it was just a jet landing."

Matt slowed the truck and wheeled into the two ruts that wound their way up the glacial moraine to Parnell's house, which was perched at the top of the ridge, surrounded by old aspens, and had a stunning view out over the desert. "Keep talking, Houba. I don't think you're going to be able to reason this one away. There's too much evidence piling up." Nothing I'd heard struck me as being solid evidence of much of anything, not to mention that I knew at least one major piece of evidence was baloney. But I kept my mouth shut.

When we arrived Parnell was hiking painfully toward the house from his rundown outbuilding, carrying a large green circuit board in each hand. He turned to watch as we pulled up and stepped down from the truck, dramatically engulfed by the dust of our arrival. Two enormous black canines insulted us in thunderous voices from a safe distance, their efforts to appear menacing undercut by wagging tails.

Parnell had begun to shed muscle mass in the last couple of years, which had made all his clothes appear wrinkled and baggy. He was wearing faded jeans and a stained shooting jacket, its ammunition pockets stuffed, I knew, with dog treats. On his feet were work boots with their steel toes whimsically painted a bright yellow, and on his head a black beret pulled down low over his thick glasses, so that all I could see of his face was the lower rim of his spectacles and a white beard.

"All right, what are you hoarding now? " Matt said, approaching the old man with a slight swagger. Matt, who had been intimidated by Parnell's manic energy and assaultive pedagogy in earlier times when they were teaching together, had adopted a somewhat patronizing air toward him after he'd left the school, removed to his hilltop, and begun to shrink. It was like seeing Moby Dick on a pension, he had once told me: Parnell still carried a kind of shimmer of danger around him, but you knew at least he wasn't going to be taking anyone down to the dark ribcage of the world with him any more.

"Oh, you know, Matt." Parnell was smiling faintly. He had a soft spot for Matt, whom he regarded as a kindred, if paler, spirit and his only hope for the project of keeping Mildred High School permanently tilted. "I thought I'd salvage some of the transistors off these things. I'm trying to set up an alarm system that'll tell me when the mail gets here. With my damn knees I don't want to have to make the hike down there more than I have to. But you don't want to hear about that," he said, turning toward the house. "Come in and sit down while I complete my preparations."

We went in and sat in the dim living room while Parnell lurched around from the study to the kitchen to the back porch, performing mysterious chores with a resigned deliberation. "I'm so goddamn slow now," he said, "I feel like a melting glacier. You gentlemen will have to pardon the delay."

Parnell's friends had all started worrying about him once he'd retired, a couple of years after I arrived in Mildred. His wife of nearly 50 years had died suddenly a few months later, leaving him alone in the old house with no one to mediate between his quirks and the outside world or check his lust for the useless technological artifacts with which he crammed his basement. The decor of the house was frozen like a stopped clock in the state it had been in when Millie died. A weaver, a painter, a seamstress, and a mover and shaker in the attenuated arts scene of Tuff County, Millie had kept the place in a constant state of flux. Tapestries, paintings, and exotic plants had appeared and disappeared on a monthly basis, complementing frequent repaintings of the walls both inside and outside, arrivals and departures of vintage furniture, and window treatments in perpetual rotation. Hers was a sunny, breezy habitat constantly evolving above Parnell's dense and brooding basement in the same way the biosphere flits above the more slowly churning bowels of the planet. But the pictures hadn't been changed for years now, and their frames were slightly tilted; Millie's lush plants had all turned to withered stalks, and the tapestries and curtains were faded. After her death Parnell had hired a tiny, smiling immigrant lady from Arnold Barns's neighborhood, with whom he communicated only in sign language, to vacuum and dust and clean the bathrooms periodically, so the place wasn't dirty. But the basement squalor had begun to ooze into the upper regions of the house like a sort of decomposing technoplasm. A dusty tickertape machine shared the coffee table with unaligned stacks of magazines, floppy disks, half-empty coffee mugs, and open boxes of shotgun shells. Disemboweled electronic appliances crouched in the corners of the room, lifting gnarly, supplicating wires toward the ceiling. The couch on which Parnell took his afternoon naps bore the deep depressions of his still massive body, and a white afghan Millie had knitted was rumpled carelessly on the leather cushions.

After a few minutes of what appeared to be aimless puttering, Parnell pronounced himself ready. Matt summoned the two dogs into the back of the pickup, and Parnell hoisted himself, cursing, into the passenger seat. "Somebody should put me out of my misery," he said, not bothering to fasten his seatbelt. I, as the smallest of the group, had to squeeze myself into one of the inadequate little jumpseats in back.

Matt steered us down Parnell's winding dirt road and out onto the highway, with the dogs sliding and scrabbling happily in the back. The winter sun was already low, and the serrated shadow of the mountains stretched far out onto the desert. Matt turned off on another dirt track that led into the sage. About a half mile from the highway we splashed across the wide but shallow West Rapid and started up the long slope toward Devil's Table. Already in the evening shadow of the mountains, the clear, dark water of the river frolicked over a bed of smooth pebbles, unaware that its destination was nothing more exciting than the silent and dead Random Lake, some 50 miles farther out in the desert, where it would briefly be employed in floating the showy powerboats of would-be heavy rollers from towns like Burly and Hathwell, before evaporating and blowing away into Nevada.

Matt seemed to have some destination in mind, as he turned or forged straight ahead without hesitation at the nameless dusty junctions we encountered. "What are we looking for?" I yelled, over the rumbling of extra-wide tires.

"I'm not sure," he yelled back. "If we're lucky, we might find that circle the physicist lady mentioned, where the thing landed. Several people have also seen lights moving around out here the last few nights, in different places. We just want to stay open to anything a little out of the ordinary. Tracks, or disturbances in the vegetation, whatever."

"Couldn't that just be teenagers looking for a place to get laid?" I asked him.

"Simon! How could you," said Parnell. I looked out through the tiny rear window. The truck bounced and swayed, its motion producing in the corner of my eye an odd sliding impression, as if the clumps of sage, motionless when I looked at them, were furtively shifting after we'd passed by.

We reached the broad, nearly level summit of Devil's Table and continued for another minute or two before Matt pulled up abruptly into one of the innumerable little tracks that set off purposefully into the desert, only to fade out after a few tens of yards. "Let's stop here and look around," he said, shutting off the engine and reaching under the seat to pull out a supersized black flashlight, the kind that doubles as carjacking protection. We got out and stood, with Parnell cursing and bending forward a little at the hips. The dogs peered over the edge of the truck and whined, anxious to be let out. "Shut up, you foolish beasts," Parnell said.

It occurred to me that I didn't really care what we were looking for out here. I always enjoyed just being at the center of this big silence, flawed though it was by the tinnitus I'd acquired in the New York subway system – a faint constant ringing as of gnat-sized bells in my ears. The total absence of motion always struck me: the black sawtooth of the mountains to the west, the sagebrush sloping gently downward and away to the south and east and then back up, and beyond that smoothness the slight roughness of more distant mountains crouching at the far edge of the earth. Nothing changed but the light. Below the evening oranges and pinks to the east a shallow blue-gray curve was gradually lifting above the horizon. It was the earth's shadow on the atmosphere, Matt the scientist had once told me – a piece of information that had increased my sense of being perched on the arching back of a huge, ancient animal that could hardly be bothered even to notice the busy scratchings of humanity on its skin. Parnell, now that he'd stopped cursing about his aching knees, was staring at the sky and the mountains with his lips pursed up in a sort of pout. I wondered if people who had lived in this kind of country all their lives saw it in anything like the same terms I did. It wasn't clear what Parnell was thinking, but I was sure he wasn't looking for traces of alien activity. I fancied his thoughts might be not dissimilar to mine, or at least to what mine would be once my prostate started seriously misbehaving.

Seeing nothing but the motionless desert, we got eventually back in the truck and crept to a few more dusty junctions, getting out briefly at each to search in vain for we knew not what.

"You better come up with something pretty soon, Matawan," said Parnell. "My knees can't take this constant pole-vaulting in and out of the truck."

Matt just smiled. "If it's there, it's there. You can't push these things." But he perked up at what would have to be our final stop. The sun had dropped behind the hills, although the sky was still light. It was suddenly quite cold.

"Do you see movement out there?" Matt asked. He was scanning the sagebrush a couple of hundred yards east of us. I looked. It did seem that in the tops of the vegetation there was a sort of refusal to stay put, as though it were slightly out of focus. I looked up at the sky, then back down, turning my head in a different direction, and it seemed to me that the movement continued. It was probably a hangover from all that jouncing on the pitted and bouldered road, or maybe just a trick of the light.

"My eyes are still rolling around from your driving," I said. "Otherwise I don't see anything. Just a nice desert evening."

"Something's funny," he said. "Listen."

"I don't see anything," said Parnell. "I don't hear anything either, but my ears are so bad at this point I wouldn't notice if a 747 came through right on the deck. You hear anything, Simon?"

I listened, but all I could hear was the ringing of my tinnitus, foregrounded by the desert silence.

The dogs did not agree with us, however. They had started whining and bucking in the back of the truck. One of them even managed to hoist its big black carcass over the edge and leap to the ground. It hit the desert floor running, making for the point Matt had been staring at. Matt ran to the rear of the truck and opened the tailgate to let the less athletic canine out. It immediately took off after its companion, followed by Matt himself. The dogs were below the level of the sage and invisible, but Parnell and I could follow their progress by their growling and by watching Matt's speeding upper body. Curious in spite of myself, I took off after them at a trot. Parnell limped along behind me, cursing.

I caught up with Matt about a hundred yards out, where he'd stopped, looking after the vanished dogs.

"Whatever it was is long gone by now," he said. He knelt down and examined the ground closely with the flashlight. It was certainly covered with small depressions of some kind, but the gritty nature of the volcanic sands made it impossible to tell anything about them other than their size. They could have been the tracks of horses, large dogs, small barefoot humans, or three-legged alien pod-people. Or just some wind-inspired dimpling of the desert pavement.

"The goddamn dogs," said Parnell, who'd finally caught up with us. "Damn things've got feet the size of cowflaps. You're not going to find anything in that mess." He whistled for them, and after a few seconds we heard the thundering of heavy paws approaching. The two giant black figures burst from the scrub and began prancing around us, shaking sage debris out of their shaggy fur. They lay down when Parnell ordered them to, grinning and loose-tongued, their front paws smugly crossed.

"Look at these. They're a lot smaller." Matt was still studying the sand.

"Yup. Coyote," said Parnell. "That's why they got all cranked up. Or maybe even a bunny rabbit."

"Maybe," said Matt. He stood up. "There was something funny happening along the top of the sage. Some kind of shimmering. Didn't you see it?"

"Shit, Matt, I told you I can't see anything. I get that shimmering every time I read the newspaper. You got to remember who you're dealing with here. I'm going to be paying for this little expedition for weeks. I should bill you two for my Vicodin."

Matt was looking closely at some sage leaves. Then he directed the light outward along the tops of the clusters, which all grew to almost exactly the same height, as if by some sagebrush community compact. It seemed to me I did detect a very slight shimmering, or crawling effect, along the path of the light, but if I'd been out there on my own I'd have thought nothing of it – just some quirk of the human optical apparatus. How could we be sure now, with Matt practically willing us to see something strange?

He turned off the flashlight. The darkness leapt forward, then retreated slowly as our eyes adjusted. "Look at that," he said. I strained my eyes into the darkness. A pale luminosity seemed to be sketching the tops of the sage clumps. In a few places it thickened and broadened into faint, pulsing spherical shapes. Or maybe it did. I turned to look in a different direction, and saw the same thing. It was an interesting effect. There was also a new sound, a very faint silvery tinkling. I was hoping Matt wouldn't mention that, since I couldn't really be sure it wasn't just the usual ringing in my ears. I mentally cursed him for putting me in a susceptible state. "You hear it?" he said. "It's like little bells." As we watched, barely breathing through our mouths, the glow gradually faded, along with the cloudy shapes, and the tinkling died out, or moved away.

We watched and listened for a while longer, but the blackness was now complete, except for the faint remaining glow in the sky, and the only sound was the panting and whining of the dogs at our feet. A cold breeze lifted briefly around us and then died out. Without saying a word, Matt switched the light back on and strode through the sagebrush back toward the truck. Parnell and I followed him, moving more carefully without the light. I was glad he hadn't decided we needed to pursue whatever it was out into the desert.

He was waiting at the tailgate when we reached the road. "Come on you featherbrains, get back in there," Parnell told the dogs. They jumped in, and Matt closed up the tailgate.

"What do you think now, Houba?" he said.

"Well, it was something interesting, wasn't it," I reluctantly admitted.

"Yeah, I guess it was," he agreed, with a sarcastic glance. "Did you see it, Parnell?"

Parnell sighed. "I can never tell any more what's real and what's just my own bloody synapses firing."

I said, "The light, I don't know. It could have been just something our eyes were doing. The flashlight or whatever. But there did seem to be some kind of sound." I was trying to be open-minded about the whole thing.

"I can still hear it," Matt said. But the dogs were huffing and puffing, and who knows what our brains are doing now, I thought. We were listening so hard. For me, the fluffy lights and the silvery tinkling were already evaporating. I wouldn't have testified to them in any court.

Matt started the truck, backed us out onto the road, turned around, and started at a leisurely pace back the way we'd come. "I'm going to call a town meeting about this," he said. "Enough of this freelancing – we need to have an organized response. The website is a good start, but we've got to get people watching regularly and reporting what they see. And hear."

Looking out into the headlights' narrow tunnel, and with the steady rumble of the wheels over the rocky road, I found that I already couldn't believe any of it. Matt had just worked me up into a state of hypersensitivity to match his own. Parnell was silent, staring straight ahead. I looked at his profile, wondering if he was thinking about anything but the ache in his knees. "Your opinion, Mr. Parnell?" I said.

"I think the human animal is a stupendous creation," he said. "But whoever invented the goddamn knee joint should be drawn and quartered."

We rolled through the shallow black river again, very slowly, and then on to the highway, where Matt floored it and started unreeling his plans for meetings, e-mails, websites, databases, flyers, and town criers. I was watching the side of the road ahead for eyes gleaming in the headlights and cringing at the thought of what would happen to any jackrabbit or coyote that strayed into our path.

"Why are you getting so hot about all this?" I yelled to Matt, hoping he'd slow down if I started an argument. "What'd we really see out there? Maybe an odd effect of the light. And maybe we heard something."

"Houba, what the hell is wrong with you? You were there. You saw and heard the same things I did. There's absolutely no doubt there's something going on that's outside our normal experience. I'm damn well going to find out what it is!"

"Is your normal experience inadequate in some way?" I said stubbornly. "Why don't you take a trip to Madagascar or something? Why do you have to make this into something supernatural, or alien, or whatever?"

"Why are you so unwilling to entertain any possibilities that haven't entered your pitiful tunnel vision before? What are you afraid of? This could be the biggest event of our lifetimes, and all you can think about is lunch."

"Dinner," said Parnell. "And Motrin." Matt braked abruptly as the headlights illuminated a solitary figure limping along the shoulder of the highway with his hands in his pockets. It was Arnold Barns, walking home, rather late I thought. I squeezed out from behind Parnell and climbed in the back of the truck with the dogs, to keep Arnold company. He slumped in one corner, nonchalantly chewing his gum, but I could tell he was glad to get a ride the rest of the way. Mildred, despite its perch on the edge of the desert, is well over a mile up, and the winter nights are nippy.

"What are you doing out here so long after school? And how's the ankle?" I yelled over the roar of the highway wind. I always tried to be as cool and hip as possible with Arnold, partly because I feared the awkward meat cleaver of his wit, which he hadn't quite learned to control, but also because I admired his brain, sympathized with his plight, and genuinely would have liked to help him out a little bit. I too had been a high school misfit – in my case a poetry lover who was cut from the basketball team every year – and I'd hoped that would give us a point of contact. But I'd found him a difficult person to get close to, even as basketball coach, before I got eased out by my wife.

"The ankle's OK," he said. "A little sore." I was sure I wasn't going to get anything more out of him on that topic, so I switched to the Christmas Eve lights.

"What do you really think?" I asked him, man to man.

"Meteors," he said, "most likely. But why spoil it for everyone? They're having a great time running around looking for Martians and the CIA."

"What about your star shit theory?"

He was silent for a few seconds. "Well, what's a meteor?" he finally asked. "You ever seen one? They look like rocky little cosmic turds, so why not? Anyway, I like the symbolism. Where there's shit there's life. And vice-versa." He turned around to pound on the cab window, motioning Matt to stop.

He wouldn't let us drive him up the hill to the junky trailer park. "There's no place to turn around up there," he told us, and we pretended to agree. We didn't really want to see his habitat any more than he wanted us to see it. What would we have said to him, before turning around to drive back down to our warm, orderly lives?

As we continued toward Parnell's place I wondered why Arnold had ignored my question about his after-school activities. Maybe he'd just been hanging out at Stirling's, eating strawberry-rhubarb pie with Brad Pentane, who was attracted to Arnold's smoky flame like a naive blond moth. For a slacker, though, Arnold carried around an unusual aura of ceaseless mental activity, even when in repose. His offhand dismissal of the whole controversy had immediately sparked my suspicions. In fact, I was secretly hoping that the town's ferment would inspire him to some interesting activity.

The dogs started barking excitedly as we bounced up the hill toward the house. "Why the hell do they have to bark when they get home?" Parnell said. "They're supposed to bark when somebody else comes up the road, or when they sense criminal activity. Or aliens." Matt's jaw tightened, but he maintained a stubborn silence. He wheeled around under the aspens at the head of the drive so Parnell could get out close to his front door.

"All right, men. I'm keeping my powder dry. I'll send up a flare when I make contact with the enemy." He went to the back of the truck and released the dogs, who immediately ran baying into the darkness. I squeezed out of the back seat and climbed into the front. In the peripheral glow of the headlights we watched Parnell limp toward the house and climb the stone steps, using his huge hands on his thighs for extra lift, then push the door open. He paused in the doorway, bracing himself on the jamb with both hands, then launched himself into the dark interior and vanished. Matt and I waited a few seconds in silence, until a faint, inadequate glow appeared from inside. Then he put the truck in gear and eased it into motion, heading back down the drive.

I had moments of feeling somewhat smug, as we drove back toward town, that Parnell had seemed to be taking much the same attitude as I was toward Matt's alien lights and nocturnal effulgences. But I also kept seeing the vision of his broad, slumped back disappearing painfully into the black interior of the empty house, and I had to admit that, much as I wanted his support, Parnell wasn't on anybody's side in this, and probably didn't even recognize that there were sides to be on. He was on his own trip, moving deliberately away from anything as ephemeral as UFOs or tinkling bells on the desert; away from deserts in fact, and from towns, dogs, and diners, especially from controversy of all kinds, even from human attachments. If I'd been living alone in that haunted house of his, I'd probably have turned on every light in the place. But that one feeble beam seemed to be enough for Parnell. I wondered if he even went to bed any more, or just flopped on the couch and pulled Millie's afghan over him. Achilles in retirement, I thought. What happens when the gods proffer the glory bargain but then yank it back, like a major league changeup, leaving you falling all over yourself, an old man? I knew that Parnell had been, in addition to a wild-ass science teacher, a paratrooper, gun-runner, part-time commando, undercover cop, and demolition-derby driver. He'd done everything he could to guarantee himself a glorious flameout at an early age, and yet here he was, rattling into extinction like any other tattered old windowshade. It didn't seem right.

"He's really fading," I said to Matt, trying to get onto a subject we wouldn't have to clash over.

"Why the hell are you being such an asshole about this, Simon?" he burst out. "I generally give your take on things a lot of weight, but this time you're just digging yourself a bomb shelter and pulling the dirt over your head. Everybody in the damn town, hell, in the whole Eastern Sierra, knows there's something happening here, even if they don't know what yet. And then there's Simon Houba, Dr. No."

"Come on, man," I protested, getting heated up in spite of myself. "It's the rest of you who are going off the deep end, imagining aliens, bogeymen, whatever. You've taken that one thing, those lights, which I admit were a little unusual, and blown it up into the war of the worlds. Who's the asshole?" He didn't answer, and I tried to speak in a more conciliatory tone.

"Why is everybody focusing on this thing, which has absolutely no solid evidence behind it? There's much more serious and mysterious stuff going on all around us all the time that you're all ignoring. The way Parnell's fading out, for example. And Janet Blythe. No one seems very exercised about that." I thought it best not to mention Mervyn.

"Well I know you have a special interest in her," he said, as we rounded the curve south of Mildred and slowed for the local streets.

"She's dying," I said, filing away the implication in his tone for later processing. "I think Lu and I are the only people who've even visited her, for god's sake."

"I've been down there a couple of times. Or once anyway," he said, having the decency to sound defensive. "I've just been really busy with this stuff."

"Yeah, you and everybody else. Your anonymous cowgirl physicist. Meanwhile, there are real people around, with real problems."

He turned left off Main Street, and then right onto my block. "I'm disappointed in you, Simon," he said. "Your thinking has hardened in an unbecoming manner." He stopped in front of our dark house to let me out. "I'm going to call a town meeting. I hope you'll at least be there to hear what the rest of the town thinks, and to be involved in the planning for the next step. You don't want to hunker down and isolate yourself in an untenable position." He drove off without waiting for my answer.

Chapter 9

In his usual energetic fashion, Matt had the announcement about the town meeting up on his website the next morning, and flyers in the high school, at Stirling's and in other strategic locations around town by the afternoon. The meeting took place the following evening. Of course he'd reserved the biggest forum in Mildred, that being the high school gym, which doubled as an auditorium. It had banks of bleachers on one side that could be telescoped back to the wall and a stage with a burgundy velvet curtain at one end. Matt had talked Lu into having the basketball team set up a couple of hundred folding chairs on the polished wood floor as soon as they were done with practice. When she and I arrived for the meeting, the gym was echoing with loud conversation and a metallic clanging as the extra chairs Matt had had to rustle up were unfolded. There were nearly twice as many people as even he had expected, and he was running around directing the placement of the chairs, self-importantly tapping the podium mike up on the stage, and glad-handing new arrivals.

"Whattya think, Simon?" he said when he saw Lu and me. "Looks like at least a few people are taking this seriously." Before I could answer he rushed off to perform a lighting check. I made Lu sit in the back corner with me, so I could keep an eye on both the crowd and the proceedings without craning my neck. She lifted Albert out of his carrier and held him on her lap, where we could all see each other.

I scanned the room to see who had shown up. All the way up in the front row I could see the tops of the Cowboys' hats next to Margaret Quitclaim's silvery head, and Arnold Barns was in animated conversation with Brad Pentane and a couple of other student-body skeptics over on the far left side, near the exit, where they could make a quick getaway if things got boring. A number of my other students were in attendance as well, and I spotted Myrtle Bench's swath of black hair, with Madame Malesherbes's more severe coiffure to her right. Dale Twombly was at Myrtle's left hand, talking earnestly to her as she gazed at the floor. Also in the front row, not far from the Cowboys, was Javier Shivwits, looking up at Matt expectantly with his hands folded in his lap. Sheriff Dave Bacco was there with his wife and all his kids, sitting as far from the Cowboys as he could get. In fact, a large fraction of the town's population seemed to be represented, although Parnell, I noticed, was absent. There were also a couple of unfamiliar faces – youngish, bulky men in suits, presumably curious tourists. What they were doing in Mildred in January was an interesting question. There were also, to Matt's delight, a reporter and a cameraman, who had an LA look about them.

Matt dimmed the overhead lighting to signal the start of the meeting, leaving the podium isolated in a dramatic shaft of light. The boisterous crowd gradually quieted as he waited patiently in the spotlight.

"I want to thank you all for coming," he boomed finally, in a painfully amplified voice. "Although the events of Christmas Eve were observed all up and down the Sierra front, and I'm sure we're all quite familiar with them, I believe this is the first meeting that's been called for the express purpose of discussing them and deciding on a course of action. I'm gratified that so many of you have shouldered the responsibility to be a part of this process.

"I've talked to many of you personally about the Christmas Eve lights," he went on, "and I'm sure most of you have at least glanced at the website. The response to that has been overwhelming and very exciting. One thing it shows pretty clearly is that we're all in basic agreement about what we saw; but there's a lot of disagreement about how to interpret what we saw. If you've looked at the site recently, you know there have been several new postings in the last couple of days, including one that may go a long way toward resolving some of the disagreements. But maybe we should leave that discussion until the defenders of the various theories have given us their current thinking."

Don Swayzee was waving his hand before Matt finished talking. Matt sat down in a folding chair near the podium while Don clumped up to the stage on worn boot heels and began an impassioned denunciation of the Federal government's stealthy encroachment on our everyday lives, the most recent example of which was the weapons test or perhaps, more sinister still, the surveillance measures suggested by the appearance of the mysterious lights over Mildred. He cataloged a few of the more egregious transgressions of the past – cancer-producing nuclear tests, New York subway riders used as guinea pigs for germ warfare experiments, the suspicious events in Roswell NM, which he suggested might provide a bridge between the possibility of alien incursions and the much more pervasive problem of creeping despotism.

"I know some of you folks want to look a lot farther away than Washington DC for the cause of the lights we saw," he said grimly, gripping the podium with both hands. "I'm sorry to tell you that's exactly what they want you to do. I'm sure the Feds are real happy about that latest posting on the website. It's so perfect for their purposes you've got to wonder whether they might not have put it up there themselves. They'd like nothing better than to have us all aiming our telescopes at Mars and looking for little green men in our backyards. That way, they're free to get on with whatever their real business is, which is in no way beneficial to us, you can be sure." Harold Clare led a small but enthusiastic burst of applause.

"As I see it," Don finished up, "our job here is first to recognize the nature of what's going on and then mobilize to find out exactly what it is they're doing up there with their lights, publicize it," he nodded at the cameraman, "and embarrass the hell out of them. That's the only way to smoke 'em out. Bottom line is, we're talking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness here. We've got a right and a duty to defend ourselves against anyone who'd try to abridge our fundamental freedoms. If we work together," he paused for emphasis, "we can take back our lives from these bean-counting, paper-pushing, power-hungry weasels. I hope I can count on your support." About half the audience joined in the applause this time as Don stalked back to his chair, although I thought the clapping had a polite quality to it.

"Thank you, Don, for sharing your concerns with us," said Matt, back at the microphone. "I think the way we should organize things here is to let folks say their piece first about what they think the lights were. After that, we can spend some time talking about what our response should be. Is there anyone else who wants to give their point of view?"

Father MacGill took the stage next, neatly dressed in his dark suit and white priestly collar. He gazed down on us mildly for a moment or two before beginning: "I don't know how our light show affected you all," he said. "Some of you were thrilled, like me; some were probably shocked or even frightened. But all of us, I think, had one feeling in common, namely, a tremendous sense of awe at the beauty and mystery, the . . . potential, of those lights. Martians or meteors or whatever they were, they were certainly celestial visitors of some kind. Probably many of us couldn't help thinking about another mysterious light in the East, 20 centuries ago. I for one believe we were intended to make that connection.

"Be that as it may, I also think we're all a bit stunned to realize that the world still contains this kind of mystery – even though it's all around us, every day, living as we do in one of the most beautiful spots on this beautiful planet, with our mountains, our deserts, our miraculous desert river, our towering clouds and grand vistas. But how easy it is to overlook all that, to get used to it, to see it as just wallpaper, if we see it at all. I wonder how many of you have ever taken the trouble to get down on your knees out there in the sagebrush." The coughing and restless stirring of the audience suddenly congealed into a long, silent moment. "To get down on your hands and knees and look carefully at the sand," he went on, and then paused expectantly. A few hands were raised after a second or two, once the crowd had traveled its mini-rollercoaster of terror and then relief that the Reverend wasn't going to suggest some sort of ecstatic desert-prophet prayer ceremony, but had a more concrete observational experience in mind.

"If you've ever done that, then you've seen that our desert sand is teeming with tiny, almost invisible plants, some of which even have beautiful, almost microscopic blossoms, as you'll know if you've looked at them with a magnifying glass. Hardy, courageous little things scratching out a living in this extreme environment. And yet" (here a note of sadness or resignation entered his well trained speaking voice) "we never notice that strange and vibrant world – we just walk over it, thoughtlessly, grinding those magical blossoms under our feet." He paused again, and then suddenly boomed out, "I believe that kind of carelessness, that failure to NOTICE, that tendency to lose ourselves in the minutiae, to sleepwalk, really, through our daily lives, is why the Lord must sometimes choose somewhat showier means of waking us up. Perhaps we're fortunate that in this case He's chosen to go with a harmless light show, instead of hitting us over the head with, say, an earthquake or a tornado." In the audience a few heads were nodding in agreement.

The Reverend went on to suggest that, given this habit of the Lord's of occasionally yanking on our leashes, so to speak, it was important not to focus too strongly on finding a literal explanation of the lights. Perhaps Don was right, and they were some kind of test that had gotten away from those bumblers in the Pentagon. Or maybe they represented a more astounding possibility, potential contact with non-human beings. They could even have been simply a natural celestial display of some kind, although you could tell that in the Reverend's judgment the latter possibility was a remote one. His point was that it didn't really matter. Whatever the mundane explanation, and he meant the word in its literal sense of worldly, such events were still part of the Lord's plan, and represented His efforts to remind us of the richer and stranger universe underlying our routine daily lives of work, play, social interaction, and Internet searches. "Whatever those lights 'really' were," he said, hooking quotation marks next to his protuberant ears, "they were certainly the Lord's call, not just to WAKE UP to the wonders of Creation, but to look deep into our own souls, to examine our lives and behavior more closely, and to 'clean up our act.' Having done that," he concluded, "we'll be able to face the outcome with equanimity, whether it's agents of the Federal government or tourists with tentacles from the Andromeda Galaxy. I'm not sure which would be scarier," he said, drawing an appreciative chuckle from the crowd, "but if we get our own houses in order, as the Lord is clearly reminding us to do – and He never loses hope that one of these times we'll actually get it together – then we'll be able to handle either one."

There was a warm round of applause for Father MacGill's open-minded and optimistic approach, during which I leaned over and whispered to Lu, "Well that's certainly vague enough. The Padre's not one to commit himself." "It's pretty much the same as his Christmas sermon," she whispered back approvingly. Albert slept peacefully on her lap.

Matt was back at the microphone, thanking Father MacGill for giving us all some perspective on this strange situation, and reminding us that the Lord's vision can encompass the supernatural along with the natural, not to mention the extraterrestrial and even the Federal. "Seeing as how Father MacGill has brought it up," he added, "Is there anyone here who'd like to make the case for a purely natural phenomenon? At least one person I've talked to, and on the website as well, has suggested that the lights were simply meteors, tiny pebbles burning up in the upper atmosphere, like any other shooting stars. Anyone care to defend that point of view?" I knew this was a direct challenge to me; but I also knew that even if meteors were the most likely explanation, I didn't know enough about the behavior of such things to be able to explain the odd motions of the lights that had so struck all the observers. I was too cautious to put my logical positivist neck on the chopping block in that congregation of believers, but I was hoping there was someone more knowledgeable in the crowd who would take up the gauntlet. In this I was disappointed. Whether Matt had intimidated his audience, or whether the meteor idea simply didn't have any other advocates, nobody said a word. To emphasize the total lack of support for any theory of natural causes, Matt allowed the silence to extend until it became uncomfortable, at least to me. I felt my face getting hot. Finally he went on with his own remarks, as if something had been decided by that silence.

"I'm going to grasp the nettle here," he said, "and state outright my personal belief that the lights represent evidence of extraterrestrial incursion on our planet." An excited murmur built and then gradually subsided in the crowd. Matt waited for quiet before proceeding. "Forty-eight hours ago I would probably have been much more cautious about suggesting such an extraordinary thing. But since then we've had a posting on the website that is so unequivocal, and from such an apparently reputable source, that I find it very hard to dismiss. And while I commend the Reverend MacGill's call for introspection and adjustment in our own lives – that's always a good idea – like Don, I believe this phenomenon calls for a more concrete and aggressive response on our part, as a community.

"Folks," he said, leaning forward over the podium, "I've lived and worked in this town for 25 years. I've taught a whole generation of your kids. I've worked hand in hand with you in your pastures and your gardens and your barns, I've hung out with you over coffee and apple pie at Stirling's. You know me. I'm not a crank or a crazy. Now, we've had a few wild postings on the website, we all recognize those. I'm just as skeptical as you are about reports of alien abductions, weird medical experiments, examinations of people's private parts on the far side of the Moon, and so on." There was a shocked silence in the auditorium. "But I firmly believe that everything we saw on Christmas Eve is consistent with the idea, the fact I'm going to call it, that someone, not from this planet, landed up on Devil's Table that night. The very graphic and detailed website posting from the anonymous physicist merely validates what I've believed from the beginning. They're here, and we can't just sit here scratching our heads. We need to do something about it!"

It felt as though all the chairs had suddenly lifted a couple of inches off the floor, and loud conversations broke out in a dozen different spots in the audience. Javier Shivwits swiveled around in his chair and anxiously surveyed the suddenly chaotic scene. Matt was silenced as the rumble of conversation grew to a roar, and even Myrtle Bench was examining the backs of her hands excitedly. The two beefy tourists were looking around as though they'd blundered into a lunatic asylum. Meanwhile, for the first time in my memory, Arnold Barns and his pals actually looked happy. I could feel my face getting red. I'd begun to realize that Matt Matawan, who was after all my best friend even though he annoyed the hell out of me, was practically staking his whole reputation on that phony crap I'd invented for his website. I looked over at Lu, who stared back at me wide-eyed and with raised eyebrows. "You should say something," she yelled over the din. "He's really going out on a limb." On her lap Albert was now awake, gazing calmly at the ceiling as though he were puzzled by the sudden clamor but had more important matters to think about. The cameraman from LA had worked his way back through the roiling crowd to a point from which he could get video of both the stage and the audience, while the reporter poked at his smart phone.

When the tumult failed to subside, Javier Shivwits took over the podium from Matt and attempted to calm the audience, using his best administrative manner. He was nearly a foot shorter than Matt, slim and elegantly attired as always in a dark suit and colorful but tasteful necktie. He'd affected a carefully shaped shadow of mustache ever since someone had told him it made him look like Johnny Depp. "Friends, friends!" he said, and then "Friends, friends! Please!" His disapproving look suggested that he might have to assign a lot of detentions unless things calmed down right away. Quiet gradually returned, with only occasional loud afterthoughts here and there, like the terminal sniping in a kettle of popcorn.

"Friends," said Javier Shivwits, "Matt has taken a very strong position here, whether we agree or not, and I think we owe him our thanks for crystallizing the discussion. Some of us may be shocked by his proposal, or even frightened. We need not to fly off the handle, but to discuss things calmly and rationally and make some decisions. Letting our emotions take over will not help to clarify the situation." Javier's long experience in quieting unruly mobs of children, along with the subliminal note of menace in his principal's voice, finally had its effect, and the crowd came to order. He then called on Matt to explain his thinking more carefully.

"Nothing I've said," Matt began, "negates Father MacGill's point about what's been going on. I think we can all, with maybe a couple of exceptions, agree that whatever those lights were, the Lord has His hand in them, and as always He's in charge of the operation. But the Reverend has given us what amounts to a very general prescription. I don't think we should just retreat to our churches or our closets and spend a lot of time praying or contemplating our navels. Although maybe we should do some of that, too. Just as much as the Reverend, I see this as a sign, but a sign that requires us to act. What we do depends, of course, on what it was that we saw out there." He looked down, to collect his thoughts.

"There is, in my opinion, absolutely no evidence that the phenomena we observed on Christmas Eve were caused by any human agency, governmental or otherwise." The Cowboys emitted a loud, joint raspberry from the front row. Javier Shivwits frowned. "Now hear me out, Don and Harold," Matt went on. "There's no indication that any human aircraft ever built has the kind of capabilities we saw in those things the other night – that kind of speed, that maneuverability, those rates of acceleration. You might argue that it's some kind of secret program, but I for one don't believe it would be possible to keep a program like that completely secret. Some kind of rumors would have leaked by now."

"You say evidence, but what the hell evidence is there of extraterrestrials, for god's sake," Don Swayzee shouted up to him, ignoring Javier Shivwits's soothing hand motions. "You don't have one real person who's seen anything with more than two legs and two eyeballs around here, except for a few cows. What you've got is one anonymous website posting from someone who says she's a particle physicist, whatever the hell that is. Now who the hell would that be?" He turned to the crowd and spread his arms. "Anyone know a physicist around here? Let alone a blond female particle horseback-riding physicist?" No one raised a hand. "Well then why the HELL are we looking to Mars or some other damn planet? We've got all the tentacles we need in Washington, and that's where we should be looking for our answers. Meanwhile, if you want some evidence, let me draw your attention to the visitors in this crowd. And I'm not referring to the news media." The two beefy strangers froze, feeling the eyes of the entire assembly on them and smiling uncomfortably at the stage as if waiting for the next act in a performance that had nothing to do with them.

"Yeah Don!" I heard amid a small storm of applause, in what sounded like Arnold Barns's voice. I was hopeful that Don's outburst would draw the crowd's attention away from the folly my meddling had inspired. But Matt wasn't about to back down.

"Folks," he said, "it's always more comfortable to think along the lines we're used to, for me the same as you. I'm trying to open up your minds to a broader range of possibilities. And with all due respect to Don and Harold, we don't need to give in to paranoid fantasies here. It's true that the Federal government has locked up some of the land around here so we can't hunt on it or drive off road, or build a Wal-Mart on it, but it's a long way from that kind of interference to secret weapons and electronic surveillance. There might be some reason for testing weapons out here, although there are certainly better deserts even for that. But try to imagine why they'd be surveilling us. I can't think of anything we've got here that would interest anyone in Washington, unless it's the salmon mousse over at the PetroMall.

"Seriously," he went on, his voice developing a somber tone, "I can understand your skepticism. It's a huge mental leap for all of us. But there's a lot of evidence, and it's getting stronger all the time. The posting Don's referring to is about as clear and as detailed as you could want. I admit the author of it isn't willing to identify herself, for what I think are very good personal reasons, but to me her statement has the ring of truth about it."

Finally mobilizing myself, I stood up and called out "Aren't you worried about a hoax, Matt? What about the possibility that someone is just yanking your chain? You seem to be putting a lot of weight on that one report."

"Tell me about it," said Don Swayzee, disgustedly. But Matt was adamant.

"That posting is one of the soberest, most matter-of-fact reports on the whole website. I call your attention to her obvious fear that she won't be believed, her reluctance to post at all. This woman is on the level, although I do think it's possible she disguised her personal details to keep herself out of the limelight, which would explain why she doesn't match the description of anyone we know." He rushed ahead before the crowd could react. "Now, Don has pointed out that we have a couple of strangers in the crowd. I'm not going to speculate about who they are or where they're from – I don't consider it hospitable to put people who may be completely innocent visitors to our town on the spot in a public meeting. But just suppose Don is right and there actually are agents of the Federal government present. Is it very surprising that the government would be interested in the reports of strange celestial doings that are coming out of Mildred? Wouldn't their presence in fact just be more evidence that something very strange really is happening here, something that can't be explained in everyday terms? Why would they be here, if they already know what's going on because they're doing it themselves? And if the lights were only meteors or some other natural phenomenon, as some have proposed, the government would probably know that too, and wouldn't be wasting taxpayer money sending out agents to investigate an everyday astronomical event.

"And finally, as Father MacGill has reminded us, in a sense it doesn't matter which of us is right. Whatever the truth is, we need to take steps to get some hard evidence that'll prove things one way or the other."

This final statement left the audience quietly thoughtful. In the brief silence, Dave Bacco stood up, looking slight but professional in his freshly ironed sheriff's uniform. "There's one person we need to hear from before we get involved in a lot of time-consuming activities around this problem," he said mildly. "I'm referring to Mr. Twombly." He sat back down next to his beautiful wife and children. Dale Twombly looked to his right and then his left, as though seeking this Mr. Twombly that Dave had mentioned, then rose reluctantly from his chair and climbed slowly to the stage, with his organic hand tucked in a back pocket and the prosthetic one swinging free. He used the latter to pluck the wireless microphone from its stand on the podium and began to talk, stalking back and forth across the stage like a televangelist or a rock star.

"I'd like to set your minds at ease," he told the audience. "I'd like to tell you that UFOny had nothing to do with the manifestations you all observed last Christmas Eve. Or some of you might even prefer to know that we were responsible. As you know, however, the stated mission of UFOny is both to shake up people's assumptions about what constitutes reality and to force them to examine their evidence carefully before assigning causes to the sometimes puzzling phenomena of our everyday lives. You all know, or think you know, the kinds of things we do at UFOny, many of you have seen what you believe were examples of them, and in some cases concrete evidence of our activities – what some like to call hoaxes – has even been produced. Even in those cases, however, it has been our policy to make no statement one way or the other about our involvement, and we see no reason to change that policy now. In fact, we'd like to think that our past activities have helped to create both the atmosphere of open-mindedness about UFOs and other unexplained phenomena and the hard-nosed skepticism that could lead to a meeting such as this one." He stared challengingly out at his silent audience, then spun the microphone once like a Colt .45 in his titanium hand. "Any questions?"

Nobody spoke up.

Matt Matawan retrieved the microphone from Dale's claw and said, "Well, I know we'd all like to thank Dale for the entertainment and the many happy hours of conversation he and his pals have provided for us over the last few years. But with all due respect, neither he nor anyone else on this earth has the kind of technology that could create the show we all saw on Christmas Eve. Although I have to admit, I did kind of wonder if I was seeing the point man in an alien invasion the first time Dale rode into town on that Harley," he added, as Dale took his seat next to Myrtle Bench, smiling. "But now that I've seen some signs of the real thing, I know Dale's just a unique human being."

Taking the contemplative silence that followed Dale's remarks as an indication that the crowd was satisfied and agreed with Matt's call to action, Javier Shivwits seized the chance to exploit the atavistic authority of his position as principal. Within a few minutes he had organized volunteers from the audience into a dozen teams consisting of four or five members, each of which would regularly patrol a specific geographical area east of the town, with double patrols assigned to Devil's Table. All teams were to report any unusual findings to Matt, who would post the material on the website in the form of a keyed map.

There was a surprising amount of enthusiasm for this project, although I noticed with some relief that a large fraction of the crowd were maintaining a neutral attitude and heading for the exits. But I saw Arnold Barns and his friends signing up for a team that was being headed by Madame Malesherbes, although their eagerness may have had something to do with the prospect of having Myrtle Bench as a teammate. Lu predictably signed up with Father MacGill's squadron, and I reluctantly joined her, not wanting to be left on the outside, even though I still thought the whole thing was an enormous waste of time and effort. Don Swayzee and Harold Clare had collected a like-minded group in a corner of the gym, where they were already discussing in loud voices the weaponry they would pack on patrol and what sort of camouflage gear would be appropriate. The Cowboys were a little taken aback when the two beefy strangers, claiming to be tourists from Italy, asked in broken English to sign up with them. They grumbled but finally accepted, possibly feeling that it would be wise to have the two where they could keep an eye on them. Matt himself had undertaken perhaps the most delicate and critical task, that of uncovering the identity of the mysterious female equestrian particle physicist, so as not only to have a look at the site of her startling observation but also to judge, by interviewing her in person, the trustworthiness of the information she had provided. The meeting broke up into a swirl of chattering, milling small groups, all earnestly exchanging phone numbers and e-mail addresses and promising to send each other patrol schedules on spreadsheets. Everyone seemed very relieved and happy to be taking concrete steps to solve the mystery.

"I think it's wonderful how so many people just came together on a plan of action," said Lu, as we walked home through the cold and wind. I still had the baby carrier on my back, but she had Albert in his sling, sagging against her chest. I could barely make out the black beans of his eyes, below the blue polar fleece ski cap, gazing curiously into the dark. I supposed that to him darkness was just another interesting visual phenomenon, like a firework show. "It just shows you that people really do want to get along with each other, if you give them half a chance."

"Maybe," I said. "But what are they getting together about? I still can't understand why you're all so determined to find some profound significance in a couple of little dirt balls frying themselves up in the sky. If you want something strange to think about, think about how many million years those little specks have been wandering around out there in the dark, circling the sun with NOTHING HAPPENING. Nothing! Try to get your mind around that block of free time. Think of that silence! The incredible boredom. Millennium after millennium, and then they suddenly happen to run into the Earth on Christmas Eve and flare up for a few seconds, and everybody's panties are in a knot. That's a mystery, isn't it?" In the cold and moonless night the Milky Way was a ragged highway, with the desert stars demonstrating brightly on both its shoulders. I thought, as I nearly always did when looking up at them, of their immense distance and solitude, even though they were, technically, our next-door neighbors. How was it possible – all this turbulence in Mildred, overflowing our consciousness, while all of that out there was so changeless and uninvolved? And what bizarre town meetings, completely unknown to us, were taking place on all those worlds? That seemed like more than enough mystery for our little brains.

"The important thing," Lu said, "is that everybody's pulling together, even if it's only for a little while. It's so hard to get people to be a community. Like getting those kids to play basketball as a team, instead of a bunch of freelancers. That's really what church is about, too, as much as anything. We're so much stronger and happier when we work together."

"Yeah, think of the Nuremburg rallies," I said. But she was making me feel like a grumbling old nay-saying crank.

Chapter 10

As Matt had doubtless hoped it would, the town meeting spun Mildred up into a whirlwind of activity. The patrols went into action with an astounding speed and efficiency, and within 24 hours a routine had been established, so that you could look eastward from Stirling's big front windows at almost any time of day and see the dust plumes of 4-wheel drive pickups spiraling up from the flats and the brooding plateau of Devil's Table, and distant walking hats gliding along above the sagebrush. Even in the dark, at least until midnight, the white points of a half-dozen flashlights could be seen bobbing purposefully in the same areas. Most of the patrols had worked out revolving schedules, so no one would have too many watches to conduct, and there were nearly always a half-dozen observers out on the desert at any given time, looking for tracks, signs of alien landing pads, suspicious scat, inexplicable radiances, and indentations in the foliage like the one described by the mysterious particle physicist. These searches were conducted with a regularity and devotion that I found amazing in the normally sleepy context of Mildred.

Even Don Swayzee and Harold Clare were thoroughly engaged, although made no attempt to disguise the fact that they were after less exotic game than the rest of us. Matt had punished them for their skepticism by assigning them to a long stretch of the riverbank far from the "hot" zone of Devil's Table, and there the stiff crowns and rolled brims of their hats could be seen parading at least twice a day, as they examined the ground closely, poked under fallen tree trunks that fingered out into the quiet stream, or simply stood with their thumbs hooked into their back pockets, looking around alertly. They also regularly conducted their own freelance surveillance of other areas, including Devil's Table.

Don and Harold were always followed at a respectful distance by the two beefy tourists, who continued to communicate in pidgin, with what were widely believed to be phony Italian accents, sometimes even devolving into mere sign language. They were staying at the Skies-R-Not Cloudy Motel, availing themselves of the weekly rate. The centrally located Skies-R-Not, run by Dave Bacco and his wife, Muriel, scratched out a fragile existence in competition with the Travelodge and Harold Clare's more elegant Purple Valley Lodge. The Travelodge tended to net the most and the biggest fish due to its location at the north entrance to the town, where the big semis coming off the highway wheezed and shifted down to conform to the 45 mph speed limit. The Skies-R-Not's single-story whitewashed cinder block building was set at an acute angle to the main drag, with the tiny office at the entrance end. Since Dave Bacco doubled as the town sheriff, Muriel generally took the motel desk during the day, spelled in the afternoons by one of their teenage kids when they got out of school.

Itching to make inquiries about the strangers at the Skies-R-Not, Don and Harold had shrewdly waited until Dave Bacco, who was almost certain not to cooperate on account of their previous trash-talking, was out on patrol in his official capacity. They had then approached Muriel, who they knew possessed even fewer mean bones than my wife, Lu. Though she knew Dave wouldn't like it, she let the Cowboys glance at the register, where they found that the two tourists had signed in under the names Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, with a home address of Fontana Trevi, Italy. Though the Cowboys could find nothing overtly suspicious in this information, they were not satisfied.

From one of Dave and Muriel's young sons, who changed linens and prepared rooms in this family-run establishment, the prowling Cowboys further learned that the only reading matter in the Italians' room consisted of Sports Illustrated and the Wall Street Journal, that all their clothes bore the labels of American retailers, that either Verdi or Puccini, or both, drank Jim Beam whiskey from the bathroom glasses after their days of patrolling the desert, and that only one of them used deodorant, unless they shared the single Right Guard dispenser.

All of this evidence, while strictly circumstantial, powerfully fanned the flames in the Cowboys' already red-hot forge. I crossed paths with them once or twice atop Devil's Table, where Matt had assigned Father MacGill's team, including me, to patrol. On those occasions, while rolling cigarettes one-handed with a facility worthy of Dale Twombly, Don and Harold had grimly informed me that their phones were being tapped. Every call, whether incoming or outgoing, was punctuated with clicks, and once there had even been another voice for a couple of seconds, talking about dirty laundry, an obvious code phrase. The voice had finally been cut off, but in what Harold described as a contemptuously casual fashion, as if whoever it was couldn't even be bothered to disguise his surveillance. The two of them had switched to cell phone communication, but had almost immediately found their conversations being interrupted by long, insolent bursts of static – jamming, Don Swayzee called it – or maliciously truncated. Meanwhile, both of them were getting e-mails from unknown sources, with taglines like "FEMA laser paranoid" and "techno quantico shiitake souffle" – missives which, when opened up, turned out to be blank or linked them to websites advancing theories that the President of the United States was a reptilian impostor from a distant solar system.

I observed that, despite the noises they'd made at the town meeting, the Cowboys were unarmed. "Yeah, your pal Matawan convinced us it might not be such a good idea to carry weapons out here, with all the other patrols wandering around," Don Swayzee grumbled. "I don't know how long that'll last though, what with everything that's been happening. Sooner or later some of this shit's going to find its way to the fan, and I intend to be ready for it."

The patrols were only the froth on the surface of a sea of activity, although the Cowboys were nearly alone in their focus on a terrestrial source for the Christmas Eve lights. A Research Committee had quickly coalesced around Madame Malesherbes, with the mission of examining previous reliable reports of UFO landings to find correlations and contrasts with the Mildred sightings. Matt had enlisted a couple of the high school's most skilled and creative teenage computer geeks to help him uncover the identity of the anonymous particle physicist on whose sighting rested the main weight of his case for an extraterrestrial incursion. Given all the legends of 12-year-olds hacking into Vladimir Putin's personal pornography collection, I had the sinking feeling that it was only a matter of time before my cynical manipulation was exposed.

Following the town meeting there had been a good deal of personal and online discussion about the proper approach to take, in the case that the aliens actually revealed themselves. There was of course a small but noisy militaristic faction that focused on defensive measures, such as securing lines of communication and erecting barriers around the post office, sewage pond, and other critical areas. Some of this group were in favor of a preemptive strike, whose implementation was rendered problematic by the absence of anything to strike at. On a more encouraging note, a much larger group anticipated the establishment of friendly relations with the cosmic voyagers, and began meeting to discuss ways of overcoming the language barrier.

The religious contingent, including Father MacGill and Lu, contented themselves with a few extra prayer and Bible study meetings. Needless to say, there was some overlap in the membership of the various groups. Dale Twombly, for example, was an enthusiastic member of both the military preparedness wing and the language barrier group, not to mention his more shadowy participation in UFOny, and Madame Malesherbes had joined one of the prayer groups in addition to joining the language-barrier discussions.

In short, pace William of Ockham, entities were multiplying like jackrabbits. I observed this activity with a mixture of bemusement and dread, as though I were a spectator at a madhouse whose inmates had been encouraged, for therapeutic reasons, to act out all their delusions. I briefly contemplated starting a Natural Explanation Committee, but suspected I would be the only member, although Lu might have felt sorry enough for me to join. Besides which, I would have had to do some actual research on meteors. In any case, Lu's membership in both Father MacGill's patrol team and the prayer group exerted a gentle but insistent pressure on me to stay involved.

Feeling oppressed by my increasing intellectual isolation, I drove out to Parnell's place a couple of days after the town meeting, partly to cheer him up, but also to get a dose of cynicism and to try to recruit him as a counterweight to the religious tilt of our team.

"Simon?" he yelled faintly from the basement when I knocked on the door and then walked in. "Hold on a minute, will you Simon? I'm up to my ass in alligators down here." The dogs, after their obligatory empty threats, were wagging their bushy tails and slamming their black butts against my legs to be petted. I felt my way down the dim basement stairs. Parnell had several cardboard boxes strewn around the floor and was engaged in filling them with mysterious objects he'd plucked from the catacombs. A single bare bulb swung overhead on a frayed wire, the see-sawing shadows it cast investing the whole shadowy assemblage of dead technology with an unnerving afterlife. In the dim light I could see, without moving my head, an 8-track tape player rescued from the dashboard of some junked car, an antique bicycle with Sturmey-Archer gearshift and only one wheel, a mimeograph machine and a couple of cases of master ditto sheets in both red and purple, an Army field telephone, and a backpack with frame molded from the hottest new alloy of 1957. All the detritus of Homo technologicus fascinated Parnell, which was why he couldn't bear to part with it. Having been a good though perhaps overly exuberant mechanic in his youth, he more or less understood the older items – the stove black Underwood typewriters and 1962 Buick LeSabre fuel pumps. The newer things, the electronics especially, were well beyond his capabilities, but he collected them nonetheless, in much the same way that he collected a few words in every known human language, sensing in their intricate circuitry and ergonomically designed control panels some kind of message from the collective consciousness of humanity, which he never quite gave up hope of eventually learning to decode.

The guiding principle of Parnell's existence had been that most of humanity lived lives of stupefying boredom, and each day of his life he had rededicated himself to the project of upending as much institutional furniture as possible, to see what might slide down or crawl out from under. For a couple of decades he flooded the hallways of Mildred High School with acrid smoke, pounded holes in the walls to provide access for the extension cords needed to keep his boa constrictors warm, incubated duck eggs for the kids in a hutch behind the school, and terrorized several generations of administrators, none of whom were in any way equipped to channel the Parnellian flash floods. He embarrassed them intellectually during their classroom visits, stalked out in the middle of faculty meetings with loud dismissive comments, and successfully resisted their every effort to impose state curriculum standards on him. Parnell's relationship to the currency of scientific knowledge being similar to his fascination with the enigmatic circuit boards he hoarded in his basement, what the kids got from him was less formal education than incantation and attitude, along with a set of experiences few of them ever forgot. In terms of impact on them and everyone else around him he was Matt Matawan squared, although he could never have matched Matt's encyclopedic knowledge or his organized approach to the material.

By the time I met him he was already much diminished, although the embers would still occasionally burst into flame when the state or local education board issued another edict designed to make a politician look good at the expense of teachers. To some extent Parnell's subsidence was a result of his secret respect for Javier Shivwits's relentless determination to turn Mildred High School into a topnotch college prep outfit. But advancing age and physical weariness were also taking their toll. He'd tried subbing for a while after retiring, just to keep himself connected to the school, but the seven teachers at Mildred HS were generally quite healthy, so there weren't many occasions for that. He sometimes made guest appearances to blow up hydrogen balloons or show a chem class how to make explosive paper, but it was clear to him that, despite the hundreds of kids he'd thrilled and terrified, and the awe in which he'd once been held by his fellow pedagogues, the educational waters had already closed over him with scarcely a ripple. Oppressed by irrelevancy, he finally stopped coming to school at all. He was still burdened with some of the restless energy of his youth, however, and in desperation turned to the task of mucking out his Augean basement. This project included the ambiguous benefit of allowing him to excavate the deeply buried strata of his long life. Watching him extract a case of World War II K-rations from the wall and drop it in one of the boxes, I thought of Lu's long-gone father, half a mile beneath the pleasant Pennsylvania countryside, hacking chunks of coal out of the walls of the dark galleries. "You should be wearing a hardhat," I told him.

"Aw hell, Simon," he said, "my skull is the last part of my anatomy I need to protect. If I had any brains left I'd take a backhoe to this goddamn place and be done with it. Something makes me feel like I've got to sort through it before I toss it all out. Look at all this shit! You need any ditto masters? I've got a couple of cases of 'em here."

"No man, they've got this thing they call a copy machine now. No ditto masters required. The recyclers might take those things, I guess."

"Shit. Do my knees a favor, will you Simon, carry that crap outside and toss it in the truck. I'm going to make a run to the dump in the next couple of days."

I helped him carry a few cartons out, relieved to be back on the surface in the sunshine. "I notice you skipped Matt's big town meeting," I said, as I watched him methodically tie the boxes down with too many ropes and several criss-crossing bungee cords, then top the whole thing off with two layers of blue plastic tarp.

"Well, I felt like I should be supporting his efforts. We should always encourage the human animal any time it's attempting to impose some order on this circus. But I don't have time for that right now. I'm starting to feel guilty that Martin is going to have to deal with this bloody mess after I punch out. You know I've tried to give him this house, and he won't even take it? He says he's just going to blow it up once I leave the planet. I have to admit that's probably the proper approach." Martin was Parnell's son, a vegetarian professor of fiber arts at UC Berkeley.

"I want to recruit you for our surveillance team," I told him. "Matt assigned us to patrol Devil's Table. Some maniac on his website claims to have seen a spaceship land up there, so we're going to keep an eye on the situation. But right now it's just me and the Christians – Lu and Father MacGill. Plus Margaret Quitclaim, and Patty Milano, on her days off. I was hoping I could sign up at least one other secular humanist who wouldn't be looking for starry messengers."

"Simon, you don't need some old fat man tottering around out there. I can't even see anything or hear anything any more. You want a young stud who can sprint through the sagebrush and run those little green men to ground. Why don't you sign up some of your kids? They'd love it. It'd even be educational for them. Give 'em an idea of the kind of entertainment the human animal likes to delude itself with."

"I spend enough time with them during the school day," I told him. "Come on, you've got nothing better to do. You can't spend your whole life down in that basement – you'll go blind, like a cave fish. A couple of hours a day is enough, then you resurface and spend some time in the sunshine. It's nice up there on Devil's Table. And if you prefer the dark, we can send you down to check out the fissures, just in case the aliens are lurking in there."

He snorted, and stood with his hands on his hips, looking north over the sloping desert, with its green serpent of river. The dogs watched us out of the corners of their eyes, their heads thrown back happily and their tongues hanging out sideways in the cold air. It was a clear afternoon, and Devil's Table looked unreal behind its miles of pure atmosphere, with the artificial clarity and stillness of a bad Hollywood backdrop.

"I guess it won't kill me," Parnell said. "And maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if it did."

Chapter 11

The geological evidence strongly suggests that the broad, dark, high promontory of land now known as Devil's Table, which is shoved like a shoulder into a sweeping bend of our beautiful West Rapid River, is a dormant volcano that last erupted more than 15,000 years ago. This was well before the Creation itself, according to some of the town's strict Biblical constructionists, and even some archaeologists think that was before any of our ancestors had infiltrated the neighborhood. Also according to the geologists, many of the valleys of the Sierra to the west were at that time filled to the tops of their ridges with glaciers creeping down and eastward, to soften and melt in the desert, which as a result wasn't so much of a desert then. In fact, the whole basin through which the West Rapid now winds was at that time a giant lake of chilly meltwater. Thousands of years ago the lake broke through a notch to the east and rapidly drained, at the same time cutting the notch downward so that the only reminder of the lake now is the sparkling river and the ghosts of ancient beaches perched high on the surrounding hills. But the volcano that became Devil's Table had erupted under the water when the lake was still there. Thus, the slopes of the mesa consist of dark volcanic deposits, as you'd expect, but the top is a nearly level plateau made up of lake-bottom sediments, stirred up by the eruptions, peppered with some of the black cinders, and then resettled to harden into a light-colored rock.

There is a faction in Mildred, to which I'm afraid my naive wife belongs, whose members would strongly dispute, if not the physical facts, at least the time scale of the above-described events. I myself belong to a different sect, the one that accepts the volcano as a kind of geological gospel – although provisionally, of course, since new research could still alter the tale.

Despite this major disagreement, the origins of Devil's Table are not at all controversial around Mildred, for the simple reason that the two extreme factions have tacitly agreed, like Lu and me, not to discuss them. Thus town peace and my marriage are preserved. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the townsfolk belong to a third, centrist group, those who couldn't care less about the origins of Devil's Table and rarely consider the question at all. And then there are a few renegades whose thoughts flow in none of the three major channels – loners like Matt Matawan, who seems to juggle the scientific and the religious somewhat uneasily in his mind, and my brilliant and troublesome student Arnold Barns, who adheres to a scenario involving a trickster coyote and a series of cataclysmic lightning strikes – those bolts explaining the one thing about Devil's Table that everyone else agrees they don't understand, namely, the network of deep fissures that scores the top of the plateau.

These cracks are so narrow in places that a child can step across them, but they extend to a depth of nearly 100 feet. Only Arnold will assert that he knows definitively how these features formed. The geologists have their suspicions, of course, but are unable to agree on a single explanation. Some cite a generalized horizontal stretching of the whole Basin and Range province, which they claim is manifested on a small scale at Devil's Table. Others suggest thermal expansions and contractions of the rock caused by the underwater eruptions. When I mentioned this controversy in my American Democracy class during a discussion about the "particle physicist's" website posting, Arnold Barns raised his hand and said:

"The Great Spirit was angry because Coyote had caught Roadrunner and was running with him slung over his shoulder across Devil's Table. The Great Spirit threw giant lightning bolts that split the ground behind Coyote as he zigzagged across the plateau. That's where the cracks come from, and that's why there's some black ash mixed in with the other rocks."

"So the lightning bolts missed?" I asked him. "Coyote obviously survived, and Roadrunner too."

"Coyote always survives, no matter what happens to him," said Arnold, completely deadpan. "He's a universal principle. Haven't you seen the cartoons?"

"Yes I have." I kept my cool. "And have you ever seen a lightning bolt big enough to split the ground on that scale? Has anybody every seen one?"

"They don't happen any more," said Arnold. "Like in the Bible people used to live 900 years, but they don't do that any more. And the Iliad – he's always saying how much stronger men used to be, they could lift up rocks it would take three men to lift now, and that was already three thousand years ago, or something. Same thing."

"Well, it's a theory, although not a very likely one," I said, not wanting to be drawn into a debate with the coyote-like Arnold. "I can't prove you're wrong."

"It's all right," he said, "I can't prove you're wrong, either."

"He's got you, Mr. Houba," said Brad Pentane. The other kids all nodded their baseball caps in sober agreement, leaving me with the feeling that the result of my "lesson" had been to put the best current geological thinking on an equal logical footing with the violent fantasies of a couple of Warner Brothers cartoonists.

Standing on the broad, almost flat top of Devil's Table, you won't really notice that it's any different from the rest of the surrounding desert unless you walk to where the downslope begins. At that point you'll find yourself gazing out onto a wonderful panorama of nearby brown hills and more distant mountains, volcanic cones smoothly upholstered in black, and hundreds of square miles of gray-green sage, the whole landscape bowing slightly toward the green river that ribbons through the middle of it all. It's one of the best places in the world for watching the clouds.

One of the many magazines that came into our house around the time of all this excitement had on its cover a reproduction of a painting by Frederic Church, a 19th-century view of the Hudson River, the hills covered with snow and flocks of clouds above, all washed with the sentimental light of that epoch. I gazed at that picture for many minutes, trying to isolate the peculiar feeling it gave me – something about the fact that those particular clouds, so real at the time (although the ones in the painting were doubtless only generic clouds from the painter's memory banks), and so like the ones I could watch any afternoon coasting across the desert toward Nevada, were now so gone, along with that long-ago winter afternoon, that light, and that Frederic Church. I suppose Frederic Church was just painting what he saw, but the slow roll of the intervening century had invested his picture with a meaning and a tenderness that I've never quite been able to pin down, and that he may not even have intended.

Thinking about those painted clouds reminded me that back when Matt Matawan was still sane, the first summer after I joined the staff of Mildred High School, I got in the habit of accompanying him on his frequent natural history excursions out into the desert and the mountains surrounding Mildred. One thing I admired about his mind from the very beginning of our friendship was his inexhaustible fascination with the variety of nature and the innards of its machinery. I learned a tremendous amount about birds, about the desert plants, and about the geology and history of the West Rapid Basin just by tagging along and listening to Matt think out loud. He never tired of reminding himself that it was a Green-tailed Towhee that was singing from that gnarly madrone tree, or that the dark rock perched in a saddle between two peaks was the remnant of a set of mountains that preceded the current Sierra by millions of years, or that every vertical foot of decrease in the water level of Random Lake produced such and such a decrease in its square meters of surface area. Of course, even after tagging along with him for a whole summer I was never quite sure whether it was a towhee or a Lincoln's Sparrow I was listening to, or just how old that brooding "roof pendant" of rock really was, but it pleased me to know that such things were known and available even to slackers like myself. And for some reason I'd never forgotten what he told me about clouds.

We'd spent a morning birding Spud's Meadow, up at the head of Maude Canyon – a wonderful spot carpeted with wildflowers and deep green grass and laced with glassy streams hurrying into a little lake whose palette of blues and greens shifted constantly with the angle of the sun. At lunch time Matt drove us back down the winding canyon road, talking about birds even faster than he was driving, and pulled up in the tourist overlook above the PetroMall. On the other side of the broad valley rose the silent black slopes of the Cones, dotted with dark green Jeffrey pines; and above them loomed a much loftier range, this one of giant, orotund cumulus, white with gray shading that matched the Cones, and looking as solid as granite.

"It's like they're made out of concrete," I marveled. "You could almost pick them up." Matt instantly left the birds and launched into a long talk about clouds: the usual third-grade stuff about droplets of moisture condensing in the rising, cooling air; followed by the more subtle idea that the particular size of the water droplets causes them to scatter all the different colors of light, making them look white; and finally, most interesting of all, that no matter how motionless they may look, they're really not the same entity from one second to the next, since the air is constantly moving through them, and all that persists is the slowly changing outline of the region in which the droplets happen to be condensing – a sort of ghost that defines not a thing, but a place where something is happening.

This idea struck me with great force, and I began to see the same principle at work all over the place: in the seemingly permanent bends of a river, although the silt that formed its bed and banks was constantly being washed away and replaced; in the persistent swirls and vortices of the river itself and the standing waves of its rapids; in the apparently changeless forests that clothed the ridges, even though their individual trees came and went with age, wind, and fire; and of course in the bodies and minds of all the beings that grow, walk, creep, crawl, fly, and slither on this earth, not least humans. They say that all of us, serpent to senator and everything in between, if there is anything in between, replace most of our atoms every couple of years. Why, then, do we continue to look and act more or less the same? I don't know. But the fact is, we're clouds! The cloud grows and thickens, then thins and fades, its edges eventually weaken, break down into wisps, and vanish, but the air flows on, just as any whirlpool in a smooth-flowing river slows and finally dissipates, the final speck of foam at its center drifting away downstream with the rest of the river. The stubborn (although of course gradually altering) outline of the region where the process we call Matt Matawan, for example, is happening first grows, then shrinks and wrinkles and grows ratty-looking, its motion slows and finally totters to a halt in some hospital bed, but the gentle breeze of matter (and maybe even spirit, too) that's been flowing through that outline for however many decades doesn't stop just because that particular process has stopped. It continues to blow, endlessly forming itself into new shapes – new clouds. When Mervyn began to fade and Janet Blythe went into hospice, I immediately applied my Cloud Theory to their inexorable metamorphosis, and even convinced myself for a time that the idea that all us living beings were temporary wisps or vortices in a Vast Universal Stream was a consoling one. Maybe it is.

I had plenty of time to pummel these and other obsessions while I was out trolling for extraterrestrials with the various members of my team. After the preliminary reconnaissance, in which the whole squadron participated, we generally went out in pairs, one pair every afternoon. My detachment from the actual search for extraterrestrials was nearly complete. I was confident there was nothing to see up there, so I was free to stroll more or less contentedly through the sagebrush, admiring the scenery and refining my own theories in discussions with my various patrol mates.

Sometimes I found myself out there alone with Father MacGill, who was more than happy to talk about clouds and life and afterlife with me, although of course he rejected my gloomy view of the human prospect and disapproved of my attempts to promote a rationalist, materialist system. The faithful churchliness of my wife made the Reverend indulgent toward me, I suppose, allowing him to hope that she would ultimately bring me into the fold, much as Patty Milano tolerated me because of her admiration for Albert.

Patty herself, who was my patrol buddy on other occasions, had little to say about the passage from life to nonlife that increasingly occupied so much of my late middle-aged thinking. I've always admired the way she keeps her orthodically corrected feet planted on the linoleum of life and her eyes fixed on her surroundings, especially the human ones. In this way I have to say she's thoroughly representative of the solid mainstream of Mildred civilization. She did once surprise me with an arresting image of the dying human being as a snake crawling through an uncomfortably tight hole – I think she actually said a keyhole – in a sort of spiritual wall, scraping off its dry, used skin and leaving it on the human side as it passed through, and emerging all gleaming with fresh colors on the other side. She also entertained me with her re-creations of the conversations in Stirling's, complete with accents and mannerisms of all the participants. I assumed the other members of the group were treated to my own quirks when she was out alone with them. With Patty, though, you knew it was just her irrepressible art, and always good-natured. She imitated dogs, trash cans, and Lombardy poplars with the same zest and precision.

Lu and I had more or less agreed not to argue about our differing speculations as to the origin of the lights and the other odd phenomena, and as a result, although her companionship was always soothing to me, we usually didn't spend all that much time talking on those expeditions. Parnell was on-again off-again, due to the pains in his knees and his general crankiness, so sometimes it was just Albert and me up there in the wind. I talked to him a lot as he rode on my back, and he answered me by whacking me on the head or drooling down my collar, responses I found refreshingly direct and devoid of cant.

At other times I was paired with Margaret Quitclaim. Those were actually some of the best patrols, because Margaret, bucking the stereotype that blind people have preternaturally sharp hearing, was also somewhat deaf, and so was virtually useless in the project of scouting for aliens. This meant we could devote our full attention to the things that actually interested us. I had to escort her, of course. We strolled through the sagebrush arm in arm like young lovers, and she was a delightful companion, immensely well read and curious, willing to excavate any topic to any depth I liked, with enthusiasm but without prejudice or heat, and passing no judgments. The loss of her sight seemed, counterintuitively, to have produced in Margaret a complete fearlessness. Or perhaps she'd always been blessed with the same confidence and optimism, whose gleaming surface her blindness had been unable to mar, or had even burnished somehow. She shared all of my interests (and everyone else's too) and none of my anxieties.

Still, brilliant and accommodating and provocative as she was, Margaret couldn't shed much light on the Christmas Eve events, let alone clear up the mystery of the ultimate disappearance of people and cats. And she maddened me with her refusal to discriminate between the airy towers of belief erected by some of the gullible citizens of Mildred and the bedrock of my own rational system.

"They're just like you, Simon!" she'd say. "They want explanations, that's all. Most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty. They don't like to believe everything in this world just happens. They need to think there are reasons for what happens. Frankly, I think their reasons are more fun than yours are."

"Fun?" I'm sure she used the word quite deliberately, in happy anticipation of its corrosive effect on the facing of my philosophy. "Fun? Is that how we evaluate the cosmos now?"

"Of course," she replied. "The scientists like to talk about 'beautiful' theories and 'elegant' theories, but they're just trying to make themselves sound more important. If there are two theories that fit the facts, it's the one they like the best that they always settle on. That's fun, isn't it? They never ask why they like something the best, and what their liking it might tell them about the universe. They just say 'Oh, it's elegant.' Or 'it's beautiful.' But what does that mean, it's elegant?" She couldn't see the waves shimmering above my head, but I'm sure she could feel the heat, which probably delighted her. I could never budge her from this frivolous tolerance.

On one clear and windy afternoon, curious about what kind of currents might develop, I dragged both Parnell and Margaret out on patrol with me. "He's like Lear out on the blasted heath, isn't he?" she said later, after we'd dropped him off at his dark house. She'd listened in uncharacteristic silence while the gusts of Parnellian rhetoric had torn through our hair – mostly sarcastic rumblings about his increasing irrelevancy and dramatic, obscure hints about various unlikely forms of self-immolation, but interspersed with entertaining tales of his liaison mission with what was left of the Italian air force after World War II and his brief experiment with the demolition derby circuit. In fact, it seemed to me that Parnell was a bit peppier than the last time I'd seen him. Of course, I knew most of his stories by now, so he didn't usually bother to run them past me, and Margaret's presence had given him an excuse to air some of them out again. But maybe the patrols were actually doing him some good. "He's had quite a life," Margaret added. "But he's having a little trouble reconciling himself to the thought of ending it on a low note in Mildred."

"More than a little," I agreed.

"We'll have to get him to the book club," she said. "I like his voice. I think he's very tall, isn't he?" I assured her that he was, although I was unclear about the relevance of that information to the book club.

I was relieved to note that after the excitement of the town meeting and the first week or so of patrolling, things slowed down considerably. To my satisfaction but not my surprise, none of the teams found anything, although there were a few vague but hopeful reports of strange noises, rustlings of foliage, and flickering lights – presumably the stumblings and the flashlights of other patrols. Madame Malesherbes's Research Committee had generated reams of paper about previous UFO sightings without reaching any firm conclusions, and only the Town Security Committee had maintained their original high level of esprit, holding daily training and practice sessions with their various armaments and diligently employing Harold Clare's GPS unit to map a fine-scale grid onto the summit of Devil's Table so as to facilitate the calling in of pinpoint artillery strikes, should that become necessary, as they devoutly hoped it would. As the timeless slumber of the desert gradually resumed, even the Cowboys were reduced to mere grumbling and dark head-shakings. The problems with their phone lines had apparently cleared up of their own accord, while the "Italian" tourists continued to be merely friendly and eager to please. Matt Matawan hunkered further and further down as the empty days piled up. In his few public appearances he wore a scowl that seemed calculated to discourage questions. The conversations at Stirling's relaxed into the usual mundane topics – the shifting array of teenage romances at the high school, a feud at the post office, the new attachment on Dale Twombly's prosthesis that allowed him to tie trout flies with one "hand". Inhaling the pungent desert air and savoring the broad vistas from Devil's Table, I began to relax, and even to enjoy myself. Mildred, after all, is not in general a very exciting place. A few sparks of activity, especially in the long, tourist-free winter, were not unwelcome, as long as they didn't ignite the powdery duff of the town's boredom. But we seemed to have sidestepped that fate, and it appeared that the whole crazy episode was going to evaporate like one of the wisps of cloud I followed dreamily on my afternoon patrols.

Chapter 12

A couple of weeks of fruitless patrolling and gradually diminishing e-mail traffic came and went, and another Sunday rolled around, "It's all right, you go this week," Lu told me. "Take Albert. Antonio gave me an extra shift." She actually seemed to enjoy hanging out at the PetroMall, although more in the winter than in the summer, when the buses extruded their boluses of tourists to mob the deli and crowd the displays of granola bars. "What do you do over there when there's nobody coming in?" I asked her.

"Oh, I just hang with the high school girls and get the gossip, talk to Antonio, whatever." Antonio was, in appearance, something of a male counterpart to Myrtle Bench, except with a baseball cap. Dark eyes with which he liked to rivet people, perpetual 3-day stubble (another example of my Cloud Theory of existence), glossy ponytail, a gold stud in one ear. He was a refugee from New York, where he'd been but one good cook among hundreds. Here in the mountains he was something of a phenom – his deli counter was a half-mile from Stirling's, but the culinary separation was astronomical, or gastronomical I guess you'd have to say. He and Lu got along very well, and I occasionally titillated myself with the fear, not unalloyed with guilt over my own infidelity, that they were having a hot affair while I was handing out scantrons at Mildred High School or diapering Albert on Lu's putative Wednesday church evenings. The thought was improbable enough to be mildly stimulating. But I could entertain it only by ignoring Lu's devotion to Albert, her passionate involvement in the church, her total transparency, and her lack of imagination. In any case, Antonio had more of an eye for the high school girls, who revered him because of his looks, his age (he was just enough older than they were), and his awesome hipness.

I packed up Albert and all his gear, dropped Lu off with a kiss at the 'Mall, and made the weekly drive along the mountains to Hathwell. The usual white cumulus with gray bottoms were stacking up in a blue sky over the Cones, and we passed several small flocks of morose crows idling on the thin layer of snow that now coated the desert, all of them facing north and warming their backs in the thin winter sunshine.

I was shocked by the change that had overtaken Janet in the week since I'd last seen her. She'd been thin, but now she was definitely gaunt, the result, I supposed, of eating basically nothing. She had family in Fetlock who were keeping an eye on the situation, but they, and Janet herself, had decided against pushing food at her too hard, so she was simply wasting away. She lay asleep and breathing through her mouth, propped up slightly on a pillow, her profile like a knife blade. I deposited Albert in his carrier in one chair and sat down in the other myself.

Albert was exercising all his limbs, as he usually did when he was awake, but doing it quite silently, as if he knew he shouldn't wake Janet up. I sat there looking at her profile and listening to her slow breathing, trying to bridge the mental gap between this scene and a sort of generic afternoon in her bedroom. Beyond her window, the raggedy curtain of cottonwood leaves in sunlight, with silent mountains behind them, not very different from the scene framed in this window. To the guilt of my illicit liaison with her was now added the shame of recalling her plump little breasts and still feeling a helpless twinge of lust, even though one of them was now gone and the other was doubtless shriveled by starvation. Many years before, at the start of my teaching career, one of my instructors had kept harping on the pedagogical value of something called cognitive dissonance. The idea was to plant simultaneously in the kids' minds two incompatible ideas. In theory, the low-grade mental inflammation thus created would force them to keep revisiting the subject, leading finally to some deeper insight. Here, I thought, was a real-life example, of a deadly serious kind. But even if I ever succeeded in superimposing the two contradictory visions, what would the lesson be?

Janet opened her eyes and focused on Albert without moving her head. Seeing her gaze fixed on him, he increased the pace of his kicking, and she smiled a little. "He looks like you today," she said after a while. I hitched my chair closer, into her field of vision.

"You think so? I don't really see it." Actually, I did see it. There was definitely something mildly Simon-ish about Albert that came and went unpredictably with his changes in expression. What I meant was that I couldn't figure out where the similarity came from. None of his features – eyes, ears, nose, mouth – really looked like mine, and yet he would turn a certain way and the likeness would flicker across his face for an instant, like a familiar chord in a new piece of music. At other times it was Lu I saw, rather than myself, or my mother, or even Lu's father the Pennsylvania coal miner, whose dark features I knew only from a couple of old photos.

"Yup. Definite Simon," she said, closing her eyes again. "He takes himself very seriously, just like you." I couldn't figure out where she was getting that, but I let it go.

"How is it today?" I asked her. She nodded, after a pause.

"It's OK. Considering. They've got me all pumped up with morphine. I'm probably happier than I've ever been. If anything starts to hurt, I just push the magic button," she said, fumbling in the sheets for the call button and lifting it up for me to see. "Then it's happy time again. If the nurse shows up." Her arm fell like a stone back to the bed. "Trouble is, I can't think about much of anything." After a pause she added, "I'm just trying to get used to the idea of being a terminal patient." I watched her, not saying anything.

After a while she said "I never really liked that drug feeling." I could believe that. Janet was always too level-headed and results-oriented to want to waste time wallowing in unproductive mental states, no matter how euphoric. Her fearless honesty and the directness of her involvement with the school kids had always shamed me. I was an adequate teacher, as far as the classroom was concerned, but Janet was more than that. She was passionate and determined, and she never doubted that the kids could accomplish great things. She was always pushing them, gently but relentlessly, not just to do their homework, but to pull the old tires out of the West Rapid and plant trees along the despoiled banks below the town; to organize a street fair to raise money for Afghan orphans; to start a club of kids who performed skits about tolerance to the classes in the high school, and later branched out into afternoon trips to take the same lessons to other schools. I never had any faith in my ability to channel the energy of a bunch of hormonally challenged kids into any kind of project that required focus and persistence. I could only see the obstacles. Janet instead focused on the result, and she always made it work, though never perfectly. That was her secret, in fact. She accepted imperfection as an inevitable product of the process, like exhaust, and it never stopped her.

"Lu couldn't make it today," I told her. "She had an extra shift at the PetroMall."

"It's OK," she said. "I saw her earlier this week."

"Oh?" I said.

She nodded. "She was down here on. . ." She thought for a minute. "Didn't I see her earlier this week?" She looked at me with drooping eyelids.

"I don't know. Maybe. She didn't tell me she was coming down, but maybe she did."

"I thought she did." She closed her eyes. Morphine, I thought. The pain must be pretty bad for her to be willing to let herself be doped up like that. I think Janet, even knowing where she was headed, would have liked to be fully awake for the trip. I'd been hoping to talk to her about it, in fact, because I thought she wouldn't mind and would have interesting things to say, without a lot of textbook emotion. It was a little frustrating to sit here watching the two of them, Janet and Albert, both in their different ways so near the boundary that fascinated me, and yet neither of them able to tell me about it. It appeared that the moment for that was already past with Janet, and by the time Albert could talk he'd be just like me – too deep into the funhouse to remember what it was like behind the mirrors.

"The whole town is still going bonkers over our so-called extraterrestrials," I said, to make some conversation and keep her awake at least a little longer. "Matt called a big town meeting and got everybody organized into search patrols. We're out there every day now, poking around the rabbit brush. I signed up with MacGill's Marauders. It's the Reverend, Lu, Parnell, Patty, and Margaret Quitclaim. And Albert, of course." Albert paused briefly, and then resumed his multitasking – kicking, waving his arms, and drooling all at once. He'd also begun adding a slight chirp with each kick. Janet didn't open her eyes, but she seemed to be smiling a little bit.

"Matt's really going off the deep end," I said, "and he's pretty much got the whole town buying into it. No one even wants to consider the possibility that it was just something astronomical. We've got research committees, military training, prayer meetings . . . The Cowboys are the only voice of restraint, if you can imagine," I said. "They're still convinced it's merely a diabolical plot of the EPA or maybe the BATF – they're keeping their options open. They're trying to get everyone in town to take up arms."

I waited quite a long time for her to respond, but she didn't say anything, just lay there with her eyes closed. I wondered if she was asleep, or in a stupor from the morphine. I hadn't given up hope that she'd talk to me at least a little about what she was thinking, or feeling, being where she was. "You still with us?" I asked her softly.

She rolled her head toward me and stared at me unnervingly, without blinking. "Did you ever talk to Lu about those afternoons?" she said.

I was both taken aback at her bringing up a subject so far removed from the one I wanted to pursue and foolishly uncomfortable about discussing it in front of Albert, despite his primitive stage of development. I'm afraid I even worked my jaw a little bit, like a bad film actor, before I finally got out my "No."

"I don't really like having secrets from her," I added, "but I'm not sure she could handle that." Even though it was long over – I didn't add the obvious. Lu was so literal-minded, so oblivious to the subtleties of human motivation. How could I ever explain to her the complex recipe of lust, advancing age, preening and insecurity, boredom, resentment, curiosity, scorekeeping, and the instinctive masculine inability to pass up an opportunity to get laid? And then give her the faded old line that it had just been sex anyway, and didn't really mean anything. We were doing OK now. I wanted to leave it at that.

"She knows," Janet said, after a long pause, during which she continued to stare at me.

"Why do you think that?" I asked her. "She's never said anything. I mean, she probably knows something happened, we had a flirtation or whatever. I don't think she knows how far it went. And I don't really want to tell her."

She looked at me a little longer, then closed her eyes and said, "Could you give me some of the red stuff? The nurse doesn't always come when I ring."

I went around to the other side of the bed and filled the eyedropper from the bottle. She opened her mouth obediently, and I squirted the red liquid onto her tongue. She swallowed and said "One more," in a hoarse voice. I gave her the second dropper, then continued to stand above her, looking down at her frighteningly pale skin, through which I could clearly see the lace of blue veins, and the still beautiful curve of the lashes over her closed eyes. She opened them and gazed up at me without expression for a long time, before saying in a slur, "You should hang onto that."

"I know. I'm planning to," I said, defensively. I sat for a few minutes watching her, but once the morphine kicked in there was nothing doing. She lay silently, her breathing very slow and steady.

Obviously it was time to go, but I was reluctant to leave, given that it seemed possible that Janet wouldn't be here the next time I came to visit. I looked over at Albert, who had also been suspiciously quiet. He was watching me and doing something odd with his mouth – it took me a second or two to realize that he was trying to mimic my expression. He was tensing his shiny red lips and pushing them out as far as he could. I could feel the corners of my own mouth drawn down like his, and my lips pushed out. I was sure my eyebrows were also lowered, but Albert didn't have much control over those appendages as yet. I knew the expression very well, at least from the inside. To call it a pout may trivialize it, but that's what it was. "You don't have to work on that one, Pal, I told him," picking up the carrier but not bothering to put it on my back, since we were just going to the car. "You'll get plenty of practice on your own."

I drove north faster than I should have, with the feeling of fighting my way upstream on a smooth and deceptively rapid current. In a way it was good that Lu had seen Janet earlier in the week. I didn't have to say anything when I got home.

Chapter 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How wonderful!" Margaret exclaimed.

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

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

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

"Personally," I said, "I'm amazed that somebody would go to this much trouble."

"You think it's just a prank?" Father MacGill asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not really. But I keep telling you my ears aren't worth much any more."

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

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

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

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

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

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 better 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 Mervyn'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.

Chapter 15

The next day Parnell called me up in the middle of one of my classes, which he liked to do at random just to remind me not to take my job too seriously. This time instead of just harassing me in front of the kids he had an actual request to make.

"Hey Simon, could you come over here this afternoon?" he said. "I've got some stuff that needs to be transported from one area to another, and the goddamn plumber tells me I'm not supposed to be moving around right now."

By the plumber of course, he meant Tadich Grant, the town doctor, who'd been advising him about his bad back and aching joints for years, and had kept a sensitive middle finger on his prostate until advising him to have it yanked out the year after he retired from teaching.

"Why, what happened?" I asked him, while the kids listened curiously.

"I don't want to talk about that right now," he grumbled. "Just come over if you will and give me a hand for as long as you can stand it. Or if you can't do it, I'll find someone else. I just have a need for a body that's a little less of a fucking disaster area than my own."

"Did I hear what I thought I heard?" said Brad Pentane, when I hung up. Referring to the f-word.

"That was Mr. Parnell," I said, by way of explanation. "Listen, why don't you and Arnold make yourselves useful for a change and go over there with me after school today. You're skipping basketball practice anyway these days. He needs some muscle to move things out of his basement."

Arnold shook his head in bogus regret. "My ankle's still bothering me, Mr. Houba. I don't think it'd be a good idea. Mrs. Houba's counting on me for the county tourney."

"I've got to study some algebra this afternoon," said Brad. "The state exit exam's coming up, you know. I don't want to end up pushing a shopping cart around Mildred for the rest of my life."

"You're in calculus, aren't you?" I asked him. "And you're worrying about the algebra test?" But both of them just stonewalled. They knew I was very suspicious of their after-school activities these days, and they enjoyed feeding my paranoia.

At 4 o'clock I found Parnell stretched out on the couch with Millie's white afghan pulled up to his waist. The two black dogs were posed like library lions at his head and feet with their chins on their crossed paws. They barked and growled a couple of times when I knocked on the door, but didn't bother to get up.

"What the hell happened to you?" I asked him, removing a stack of 1980s New Scientists from a dusty chair and replacing them with my butt. Albert, in his sling on my chest, seemed annoyed at having only my face to look at, so I extracted him and set him on my lap, facing Parnell.

"Hey Simon, you ever had the feeling you've been occupying space on the planet for too long? When you get to the point where any wrinkle in the goddamn rug can send you to the Emergency Room, isn't it time for some public-spirited citizen to put a bullet in your head?"

"Tadich didn't give you anything?" I asked. I knew Tadich Grant had been showering painkillers on Parnell for years, but most of them were gathering dust on top of his dresser. He was saving them for an emergency, as he put it, without elaborating. Anyway, he didn't like to take drugs, preferring to complain.

"Yeah, I took a few of the new ones, just to see what kind of buzz it is this time. But what's the point? The goddamn machinery is wearing down." Something about Parnell's raspy voice appealed to Albert, who flapped his arms and laughed every time he heard it.

"Well. . . growing old gracefully," I said. "They tell me it's hard work."

"You bet your sweet ass it is. But let's talk about something more interesting. I promised to give Matawan that old tool set of mine, and since I've incapacitated myself I need you to bring it up from the basement. If I go down there they might have to haul me up with a winch."

"You're giving him the tool set, but I have to carry it around for him? What am I, UPS?" I was joking, of course, but also a little annoyed.

"You've got about as much use for that tool set as I have for a pink tutu," said Parnell. "Actually, I don't even know if Matt'll use it, but he's getting it anyway. If he doesn't want it, he can throw it away or bury it in his back yard for all I care. I never really thought about it before, but that basement is starting to feel like an anvil around my neck. I've been dreaming about it, did I tell you that? I dreamed I went down there to get a broad sword or something and everybody I know who's died was sitting around eating sandwiches, like the lunch room at the high school. If you see anything else you want down there, just bring it up. It's all got to go, but for some reason I seem to have this need to give it all to the right people. Whatever that means."

I transferred Albert to Parnell's lap and left them staring at each other while I worked my way down the steep and narrow stairs into the gloom. I found the big red toolbox sitting in one of the few cleared spaces on the floor, next to the last step. It was very heavy. No Parnellian toolbox would contain anything like just a basic set, I knew. There would have to be a tool for every possible eventuality in home or vehicle, along with a couple of odd-shaped devices whose function was lost to antiquity, like the curious wheeled, toothed, perforated, and bladed items you see in those displays of farming equipment of the 17th-century American colonies.

I stood looking around, trying to penetrate the darkness that was barely kept at bay by the single hanging lightbulb, wondering if there could be anything there that I would want. On more than a few occasions interesting surprises had emerged from that dim jumble. One of our bookshelves at home held a beautiful, though nonfunctional, brass marine chronometer, suspended on gimbals in its polished wooden case behind a pane of glass. On the dial was painted "Overhaul due Nov 71." Parnell had simply handed it to me one morning, when Lu and I had been over there for some of Millie's pancakes. Most of the time, however, he'd try to get me to take away something like an ancient pair of hip boots or a moth-eaten tent or a 1950s Thermofax machine. There was so much stuff in that basement that I found it impossible to focus on any one object. All I could see were parts of things: rods, tubes, metal plates, springs, wheels, knobs, dials, lop-eared swatches of fabric, the sawn-off ends of two-by-fours, and the flaking butts of reams of yellowed paper. It was like one of those limestone facings you find in the old big-city post offices, where if you put your nose right down on them you discover the tiny shells and bones of countless fossilized animals, all entangled and interwoven with each other in a graveyard hundreds of millions of years old. I was sure even Parnell didn't know everything that was in there, which may have had something to do with his trying to go through it all now, in his old age. I was tempted to poke around a little, but the sheer volume of stuff was daunting. Anyway, there was something about Parnell and his works that resisted any kind of deliberate or systematic approach. There was little point in digging; you had to wait for the sudden gleams, when the light caught some half-buried crystal facet at the right angle. Thinking of the old man brooding on his couch, I wondered how many more of those flashes there would be.

I carried the red toolbox upstairs and deliberately let it crash on the hardwood floor.

"Jesus Christ, Simon, take it easy," said Parnell. "This house is about as wobbly as I am. You could bring the whole thing down that way."

"I hope you haven't been using such profanity in my son's presence while I was downstairs," I said. "This thing weighs a ton. Why the hell can't Matt come out here and get it himself? He's the one with the goddamn 4-wheel drive truck."

"I wouldn't dream of disrupting that program of his that he's all wound up about. You, on the other hand, I know you don't have anything better to do. If you weren't here, you'd be grading papers or something even less useful."

"So why are you indulging his feverish imaginings? What the hell is happening to him, anyway? And everybody else in this town."

Parnell jounced Albert absent-mindedly and shook his head, annoyed to have to make such an elementary point. "Simon, you can't separate the human animal from its entertainment. If you do that, it might have to start occupying itself with real problems."

"Such as?" I said.

"Hell, I don't know." Parnell gestured vaguely at the house, or maybe it was at the whole world. "Has he found anything out there yet? Any organisms with inflated frontal lobes or extra gluteals?"

"Of course not. But you know how he is. He's got everybody so pumped up that he's getting reports about fiery chariots from as far away as Reno. Nobody's actually seen any aliens, leaving aside the obvious nutballs, but they've seen all kinds of other suspicious things, and everybody knows, if you know what I mean. They're all feeding on each other's craziness. The latest is that some fool has been up on Devil's Table clipping the rabbit brush to make it look like something landed on it. Just when the whole damn thing was starting to wind down."

Parnell sat motionless on the couch, staring at Albert, a slight pout and furrowed brows the only signs that he was listening. I said, "It's partly my fault. I got so annoyed at him that I put a phony thing up on his website, about a spaceship landing. I thought he'd just laugh it off, but he's been running with it ever since."

Parnell looked at me. "You should tell him, Simon. Before he makes a total asshole of himself."

"I did tell him! It didn't make any difference! That's the trouble – it's too late. He's made a whole industry out of this thing. If I confess to everybody else now, his credibility is chopped liver, not to mention that I'll probably get stoned to death by the Research Committee. But if I don't, he'll just keep inflating it. By now it's got a life of its own. I'm not sure it would even matter if I confessed publicly. Nobody would want to hear it. You don't know, because you're not spending any time in town these days. The place has gone crazy. There are factions at each other's throats, the extraterrestrials versus the Federal bureaucrats versus the message-from-heaven crowd. Matt's choreographing the nuthouse. He's got everybody in town dancing around out on the desert every afternoon and blogging each other to death in the evenings. Father MacGill's writing sermons and the Cowboys are forming armed posses. Somebody's going to get hurt if it keeps up."

Parnell shook his head again. "Well, you did the right thing to tell him. The ball's in his court now. All you can do is inject as much reality into the other guy's situation as you can, no matter what mental gymnastics he's performing. If you're lucky, maybe he'll do the same thing for you sometime." He stared moodily at Albert, jouncing him occasionally. "Is this the next generation?" he said. Albert regarded him with wide-eyed delight, his arms stretched out and his head cocked slightly.

"I believe it is."

"They have to do better than we did, don't they Simon?"

"No," I said, "but they'll make different mistakes at least. I'm not ready to turn it all over to Albert yet, though."

Parnell didn't answer. Sunk into the battered cushions and with the white afghan pulled up to his waist, he looked as though he'd lost his legs. His blue turtleneck shirt hung loosely on him, its collar sagging a couple of inches away from his wrinkled and shrinking neck, and there was a distracted and sulky expression on his unshaven face. He'd been something of a mentor to me ever since I'd met him, and now I wanted him to answer the questions that were bothering me: why everyone in town, even my normally level-headed and unimaginative wife, was so willing, even determined, to invent some fairy tale or other to explain what was almost certainly a simple astronomical phenomenon; how a nominally rational person like Matt Matawan could walk right over a logical cliff with his eyes wide open; and most of all, what it felt like to be him, Parnell, perched out on the tip of the long wobbly plank that was his life, looking down at the murky waters that awaited him. But I didn't quite have the courage to ask him question #3, which was the most interesting one, and probably the only one he could answer.

"I'm the only sane person left in town, Parnell. I'm the only one who doesn't have all the answers. Tell me what to do," I said, flapping my hands helplessly and trying to make a joke of it.

He puffed out some air. "There's not a hell of a lot you can do, Simon. You've got this idea that the world ought to make sense, but the fact is we're just making up the whole damn circus as we go along." He supported Albert with one hand and pulled the white afghan higher around his torso, as if he were deliberately blanketing himself with Millie. "That doesn't relieve you of the obligation to try to move things in a certain direction. All you can do is get up every day and ask yourself, How do I want this day to go? Then that's the way you push. Everybody else is pushing in their own direction, and some of those directions aren't conducive to a positive result, at least by your standards. But then, if you don't push, everything goes their way."

He didn't have much more to say, and seemed to want to just sit quietly on the couch. I fed the dogs for him, asked him about his food supply and so on, then reloaded Albert into his sling and headed for the door, lugging the toolbox. He roused himself at that point and said, "Let me have a look in there for a minute, will you?" I carried it over and put it on a chair next to the couch. He opened it up and began to paw through it, but stopped abruptly and put the lid down again, latching it carefully and caressing it briefly with a callused hand. "Never mind," he said. "I don't know what the hell I think I'm going to find in there."

It was already almost dark. "Well, don't do anything rash," I said lightly. "I happen to know that Margaret Quitclaim is expecting you at the book club meeting this week.

"Don't I know it. That's about all that's keeping me alive." He raised a hand as I went out the door. The dogs were busy eating and didn't notice my departure.

Chapter 16

Lu was wearing a grim expression when Albert and I got home from Parnell's place. "I found him curled up in the litter box," she told me. "He peed, but he just didn't bother to get out." I handed over Albert and went to look. Lu had put Mervyn back in his heated cave after cleaning him up a bit. He was in there, facing the back with only his tail sticking out, somewhat crusty from the litter box, and didn't even raise his butt when I petted him.

"He's just really tired."

"Simon, he won't even eat any baby food," she said.

"We know he has these ups and downs," I insisted. She didn't answer, and we avoided the subject while we had dinner, did the dishes, got Albert ready for bed and put him down. Too bummed out even to grade papers, I slumped on the couch to watch an episode in the Soprano family's convoluted moral universe while Lu got into her nightgown and sat in bed reading her book about the early Christians and the fall of Jerusalem, Bible on the covers next to her and open to the Gospels for ready reference. She disapproved of the Sopranos and of my watching them, but my matching skepticism about her Bible studies kept her at bay in that area. These differences formed deep fissures in the rolling plain of our marriage, and a number of unpleasant tumbles had taught us to skirt them carefully.

Somebody didn't get whacked yet to end the episode, and I got up to check on Mervyn. He didn't seem to have moved at all. All I could see was his tail, its gray fur spikey with a coating of dried pee and speckled with crumbs of litter. I lifted him carefully out of the cave and spent a little time cleaning off the tail with a damp paper towel, then put him on the bed on his yellow towel and gave him the shot of Ringer's. Lu watched silently over the tops of her reading glasses. Mervyn continued to lie, catlike, on the towel after the injection, with his paws stretched in front of him, and didn't move to lick up the turkey baby food I offered him, even when I ran my hand encouragingly over his stegosaurus backbone. I got ready for bed, then got under the covers and positioned him between us. Lu took off her glasses and put them, along with her books, on the bedside table and turned off the light.

For a while we lay there without speaking. Then I rolled onto my side and lifted up the blanket a little to look. I could see Mervyn's blind eyes, their opaque surfaces reflecting the very faint radiance that always suffused the bedroom, no matter how dark the night. He was just waiting, as usual. But tonight it was difficult to avoid the sensation that he was waiting for me.

"All right. Shit." I got out of bed and started putting my clothes back on.

Lu turned on the light. "I'll do it if you want," she offered. "But one of us has to stay here. I don't want to wake Albert up. Or we could wait until tomorrow."

"No, no, it's all right." The idea of us lying in bed all night with the doomed Mervyn between us was intolerable; besides which, I had to teach in the morning. And in the morning I might not be able to do it. I've always had trouble making up my mind to jump into cold water. I went to the phone and called up Tadich Grant, there being no vet in town. He didn't seem to be particularly surprised or annoyed to be called in the middle of the night. "Oh sure, Simon, bring him over," he said. There was a 24-hour emergency vet in Fetlock, but I didn't particularly want to make that drive. Anyway, Tadich and Mervyn were old friends. I thought that would be better.

I carefully extracted Mervyn from under the covers and put the baby food in front of him again while I opened up his carrier and arranged the yellow towel inside it. He licked up the pureed turkey avidly, of course, while Lu stroked him sadly. "God damn it," I said, annoyed that he was rallying again and oppressed by the futility of our ridiculous appetites, thinking how that useless turkey wouldn't even make it to his intestines. I lifted him into the carrier when he was done eating and closed the little screen door. Lu had opened her books again, but was watching my preparations over the tops of her glasses.

"I really can do it if you want," she offered again. But what would I be doing while she and Mervyn were over at Tadich's? I put my coat on, picked up the carrier, and went out into the darkness.

The walk to Tadich's house was short, as are all walks in Mildred. He answered the door as soon as I knocked, and ushered me in his mild-mannered way down the stairs to his windowless basement examination room. "I want it to be a different world, completely separate from the rest of the house," he'd told me once. Despite its odd location, the examination room was like any other: a table covered with a fresh layer of white paper, a couple of chairs for post-exam consultations, glass cabinets filled with neatly arrayed instruments and potions lining the walls on shelves, a fluorescent light fixture recessed into the tiled ceiling. Tadich was a balding 45-year-old bachelor, said by the women of the town, including my wife, to be quite cute. "He has nice eyes," Lu had told me more than once. He'd never shown more than friendly interest in any of the women, however, and with the recent celebrity of gay cowboys the inevitable casual speculations about his sexual orientation had intensified. I didn't envy him if he was gay, the bachelor pickings around town being limited mostly to the likes of Don Swayzee. Whoever he liked to have sex with, I was grateful for his grave and kind presence.

I took Mervyn out of his carrier and held him draped over my hand while I arranged the yellow towel on the examination table, then put him down on it. He stood quite firmly now, as though he'd never been sick a day in his life, moving his head around to listen and occasionally scratching his chin almost cheerfully on the edge of the cat carrier. He was still alive, still there. How could I be doing this? "He looks better now," I said. "He even ate some turkey."

"It's the adrenaline," said Tadich Grant. "They always perk up when you bring them to the vet." He wasn't a vet, of course, but I'm sure the distinction was lost on Mervyn. Tadich showed me two syringes filled with different-colored liquids on a tray, like a small selection of desserts. "I think the best thing is to give him a little valium first, to relax him, and then the barbiturates will just stop his heart. It should be very quick."

Mervyn didn't want to lie down, with good reason. The unexpected return of his will to live was making me a little crazy. For a moment all the contradictions inherent in my position seemed to be balled up in the effort to make him lie on his side, so Tadich could get at his hind leg with the needles. He finally surrendered. I stroked his age-coarsened fur while Tadich found a vein and slipped the valium in. His head sagged immediately; and without giving me any time to think about that, Tadich was on him with the other needle. Mervyn opened his mouth in surprise as the plunger was depressed, but he didn't even have time to say anything. His red tongue stuck out between closed lips, as if he were a dead cartoon cat, and his gaze was already fixed, unblinking. I was astonished at how fast it was. Lifting him off the table, I realized what a difference there is between anything even remotely alive and something that isn't. If his muscles had been slack before, they were completely missing now, and he hung over my hand like a rag.

"OK Simon," said Tadich. He took Mervyn away from me after a bit and wrapped him carefully in the yellow towel, then slid him gently back into the carrier. He knew enough not to try to make me talk. "There's really no good time to do these things," he told me as we climbed back up the stairs to the world of the living. He ushered me out with a pat on the shoulder.

The oddest sensations came while I walked home through the silent streets. There had been a lot of trips to the vet, so the familiar weight of the carrier in my right hand kept telling me that Mervyn was still there, while my consciousness crashed over and over again into the realization that he wasn't, that I'd done something irrevocable. Cognitive dissonance! My mind kept revolving, each futile cycle ending with the same snap, like what used to be called, back in the dark ages, a broken record. For some reason I was angry; or maybe anger was the only emotion I would allow to float up to the surface. I could feel my face locked into the sullen expression that Albert had been trying to mimic when I'd last visited Janet Blythe. I felt like groaning with every snap-back of the record, and in the solitude of midnight Mildred even indulged myself in a few small groans.

Lu and I buried him in the back yard, under the ornamental plum tree, as soon as I got home. Unsympathetic coyotes yipped and yowled out on the desert while she held the flashlight and I dug a neat little hole. I arranged Mervyn in there, still wrapped in his yellow towel, covered him up with a blanket of sandy volcanic soil, and then laid a heavy stone on top to discourage the scavengers, worrying that it might crush the ribs that he didn't need any more. Then, while Lu tried to go back to sleep, I spent an hour cleaning up and getting rid of all his stuff. I washed his dishes and put them out of sight, threw his blanket in the laundry, tossed out the remaining Ringer's solution and needles and all his medications, bagged a few cans of catfood to be wasted on Madame Malesherbes's frou-frou Siamese. The small damp patch of Mervyn's final, hopelessly dilute urine in the litter box was heartbreaking. I tossed the litter out, rinsed out the box, and threw it in the trash, after which I was finally able to join Lu in bed. I had trouble sleeping, because I was thinking I shouldn't have left him wrapped in the yellow towel for eternity; it undoubtedly had bad Ringer's-solution vibrations. But it couldn't matter to him, right? And now it was too late anyway. Now that I'd managed to get him in the ground, I certainly wasn't going to dig him up.

Chapter 17

Before her Great Christian Awakening, and while Albert was still only a vague projection of our own egos, Lu and I had once spent an interesting evening over a couple of margaritas, comparing, among other things, the different punishment styles of our parents. The idea, I suppose, was to inoculate ourselves against the kind of parental procedures that we felt had afflicted our psyches with the unnatural gait of foot-bound women. My mother, a victim of the same kind of squeamishness that later doomed my own efforts at classroom control, rarely disciplined her children. She left the task to my father, who employed his very loud voice for routine crowd control and his heavy hand for more serious matters.

In Lu's family the situation was reversed: her father was underground most of the time and too exhausted to do much more than slouch in his chair in front of the TV once he'd sluiced off the coal dust in the evenings. Her mother, though, was an enthusiastic practitioner of corporal punishment. Her favorite technique involved escorting the wrongdoer into a grove of scrubby timber near the house and forcing her to choose the switch with which her tender butt would be lashed. This stacking of insult onto injury seemed unfair to her children, and their reluctance often led to long runups of tears and recrimination before the weapon was finally chosen and applied. On one desperate occasion, Lu had categorically refused to make a selection. Her mother gripped the back of her neck, squeezing so hard that tears came to her eyes, and marched her into the trees, where she surrendered abjectly by choosing the first limb that came to hand.

The image of that little girl with her mother's ruthless hand clutching the back of her neck – her despair and helpless rage – was what kept coming to mind every time I recalled my final interaction with Mervyn. It was painful enough to watch him go over the cliff; but it was intolerable that I'd been required to give him the final push myself. I kept circling back mentally to Tadich Grant's gloomy subterranean examination room and wondering how I could have done it. I even felt, on some subconscious level, that since it was inconceivable, maybe I hadn't actually done it. But thinking back, I could also feel The Hand tightening on the back of my own neck with every day that I'd watched Mervyn getting weaker and sicker and sadder, his expressionless patience becoming more and more of a rebuke, until finally the cosmic switch had started to look like the better alternative. It seemed so unfair; and yet there was clearly no appeal to The Hand. And though in their cases at least I wouldn't be required to do the squeezing, I knew the same Hand had seized Janet Blythe, and I could even begin to see the deepening impressions of those Fingers on Parnell's wrinkly neck. I found myself thinking uneasily about the thicket of painkiller bottles on his dresser top.

Those visions and resentments continued to oppress me for the next few days, and I seized the opportunity to let my habitual negativity and cynicism slip their leash. I was silent and sullen at home, accusatory even, although I knew Lu was as unhappy about Mervyn as I was. At school I was worse. I dropped my veil of disinterested pedagogy and began to express my sarcasm, to both the kids and my fellow teachers, about all the feverish speculation in town surrounding the latest sightings and website postings, making acid comments about the pathetic human will to believe in phantasms, while surrounded by real daily dramas of life and death. The kids responded to my new embittered persona with meek silence, baseball caps sadly bowed over the excessive classwork I assigned. I felt as though my mind itself were curled down in the pout that Albert had been trying to mimic in Janet's quiet room in Hathwell, and I'm sure my facial expression faithfully mirrored it. My colleagues, however, despite my best efforts to project my disenchantment, continued their vivacious lunchtime theorizing as though I and my gloomy chickpeas didn't exist.

I also took the opportunity to indulge my taste for cemeteries. I've always liked them, and merely to mention the word brings up a lot of images. For example, the two giant, funereal ravens, hopping with allegorical heaviness across the well tended lawn of the Michigan cemetery where my aunt is buried. In Florence, the one time Lu and I managed to get out of the US, the graveyard of San Miniato, with its sunny, above-ground tombs, little death houses with wrought iron gates hanging askew by a single hinge, crumbling urns, and white statuary of dancing young couples cut off in their prime during some war or other. And on the same trip, an auld Edinburgh graveyard, hidden behind a line of shops up on the castle crag: cracked and soot-blackened stones and rich green grave grass under dripping gray skies, and little Blue Tits hopping and fluttering in the fissures where some of the graves were built into the old stone walls. Not to mention those claustrophobic plots in the old hearts of some of the European cities, with their tombstones crammed together, broken and leaning every which way, as though jumbled over the centuries by the tossings and turnings of the restless dead. I love them all.

So I enjoyed validating and deepening my mood by stopping off at the little Mildred cemetery a couple of times after school and staying until the sun dropped below the mountains and it got too cold to stand around picking at my mental scabs. A sentimental but misguided impulse had seduced the town fathers into planting the cemetery on a hill overlooking the valley of the West Rapid. The view from up there was almost as spectacular as the one from Devil's Table and gave rise to lots of intimations of at least geological immortality. But the desert winds scoured the place relentlessly, and even the best efforts of the chronically underemployed Darren Biltmore, who had been hired a couple of years back by the town council to act as gardener, were not enough to produce much in the way of greenery on the site. There were a few saplings, perpetually bent to the eastward with their leaves blown inside out by the ceaseless wind, and a couple of patches of beleaguered grass. All the rest was bleached gravel, from which the tombstones poked up in severe, utilitarian style, in various degrees of age and weathering. During the summer Darren Biltmore watered this skimpy biome weekly by means of five-gallon cans hauled up in the back of his pickup, while his Boston Bull, Hercules, waddled along behind him, occasionally adding his own pale stream of fluid to the desiccated gravel. The townspeople visited quite regularly to tidy up the graves and add flowers, wisely limiting themselves for the most part to the plastic variety. Even those garish blossoms faded rapidly in the actinic storm of the desert summer.

Nevertheless, I liked it up there, and I took particular satisfaction in the cemetery's barren and futile aspect while I brooded grandly about Mervyn's fate, and the fate of all of us who strive and expire on this rocky sphere. I got out of the rattly Honda and stood for a while admiring the shadows of the uncaring clouds eeling their way across the rounded ridges and hollows of the desert far below, and watching the vast curve of the horizon toward which the wind endlessly hurried, and sulking about all the mortal remains in various stages of dissolution not only in the formal planting of the cemetery but in the whole expanse that lay under my gaze. The billions and billions of intent little organisms that had run out their feverish existences under the sun and then withered and dried up, leaving their woody skeletons to be penetrated by ignorant newcomers, or had met their personal coyotes or owls, or crawled into their burrows one morning to sleep away the sun hours and never reemerged. Mervyn was only one of the more recent of this all-encompassing harvest, of course. Even in the short time since my trip to Tadich Grant's basement clinic, which had been such a milestone to me and to Mervyn, the toll had continued to mount smoothly and silently without a hitch, the tiny grains of thousands of other lives had trickled through the narrow neck of the present and into history, unnoticed by all us busy humans, except for me.

The book group provided another convenient arena for my self-pitying antics. I was in the depths of my mental drizzle when we met at Don Swayzee's comfortable old farmhouse out under the aspens, which in the long hot summer days were a whispering delight but in January were only bare black lightning against the stars. Given Parnell's somber mood when I'd last seen him, I was surprised to find that Margaret Quitclaim had made good her threat to lure him into the group, though of course he hadn't had time to read any Homer. "He's the only one of us who's actually been in combat," Margaret reminded the group, "so I'm sure he'll have useful things to contribute." "Not really," grumbled Parnell, who I could see was there only because Margaret was. He was still flaunting an exaggerated limp, apparently not having recovered from the physical woes that had inspired my recent visit, but he'd at least bestirred himself to order up a huge barrow of tiramisu from Antonio at the PetroMall. Its vast aluminum tray dominated Don's coffee table after dinner, shadowing our discussion like Achilles' guilty funeral pyre for Patroclus, the night after he skewered Hector.

I listened sourly while Margaret extolled Homer's description of the grief of the noble Achilles for his great pal. Achilles' mourning consisted of flopping Hector's carcass around in the dust like a rag doll, chopping DOWN half the trees on Mount Ida to build the World's Biggest Funeral Pyre, chopping UP a dozen hapless Trojan captives and tossing their dismembered bodies onto the World's Biggest Funeral Pyre along with several innocent horses, pretending he'd never sleep again, refusing to wash off the guts of the dozens of men he'd recently butchered, and lovingly wrapping Patroclus's corpse in ram fat. In my mind, none of that did any honor to any dead person, or being, although I suppose Mervyn might have enjoyed being wrapped in fat while he was alive.

In my cynicism I allowed myself to lose all patience with the Greeks and their silly posturing, and especially with the pompous and self-regarding Achilles, who in my Vietnam-era veteran's way I'd begun to characterize privately as a douchebag. "Doesn't it strike you that it's always all about him," I complained, glaring at the tiramisu. "The whole story starts with the noble RAGE of the noble Achilles, and then he lounges around in his tent for something like 20 books, sulking because Agamemnon swiped his slave girl and waiting for the Greeks to get carved up so badly that they'll have to call him in. And when that doesn't work, or it's taking a little too long, he sends his so-called best friend out, dressed in HIS armor, to get hacked up by Hector. Am I being a little cynical here to think that he knew exactly what he was doing? That he SENT Patroclus out knowing DAMN WELL that someone was going to see that armor and make a special effort to kill him, and that would bail him out, Achilles, he could fly into his righteous rage, brush off all of Agamemnon's insults, which if he were actually so noble he would have done in the first place, and go out and be the hero again and butcher a lot of panicky weaklings, which is all he really loves doing anyway, and then show everybody how great he is by kicking Hector's butt. And after he does all that," I raged on, "then there's supposedly all this deep mourning for Patroclus, and the sand soggy with tears and burning up dear old Patroclus on a bonfire made out of all his horses and dogs and enemies and so on, but even THAT is really designed to show us how the noble Achilles' grief is greater than the grief of other men. I think he's guilty as hell, frankly, and all the chest-beating and fat-wrapping is just a big show, for everybody to see how sad he is, in case anybody notices that he actually got exactly what he wanted. And what about those funeral games, where they're all bragging and whining like schoolboys on the playground? What happened to all that inconsolable grief? Meanwhile magnanimous Achilles is giving away all his wealth – like he's going to need it anyway, since he knows he's going to get killed pretty soon. And he gives away one of the zillion women that he's stolen from their husbands that he killed, as a SECOND prize, after a damn tripod, for god's sake. Really – aren't we getting a little tired of these guys and their booming egos and their self-absorption?"

I looked up from the tiramisu to find them all staring at me, including Albert. Even Parnell seemed momentarily tongue-tied. "God damn!" said Don Swayzee, an unlit Marlboro bobbing between his cruel lips, "Take it easy, Houba. It's only a poem, even if it is an epic poem."

"No no, I like to hear some passion!" Margaret was smiling. "He's completely wrong, of course. Or not completely. Everything you say might be true, Simon, at least in modern psychological terms. But Achilles is completely sincere. He does love Patroclus, and he does feel a great grief, and of course because he's Achilles his grief is greater than the grief of the rest of them. He's the great Achilles! It's not arrogance, he's required to do things on a bigger scale than everybody else. And furthermore, he feels the shadow of his own death falling over him, too, as you pointed out, which makes him even sadder. He's had his big orgy of killing, his orgasm, or multiple orgasm really, and now he's depressed. All this pyre-building and sacrificing and refusing to wash and so on is exactly the way the Greeks expressed their grief. He couldn't not do it! It was expected by the society, and it probably felt completely right to him, and to everybody else."

To break the tension caused by my outburst, Dale Twombly began digging out bricks of the tiramisu with a big spatula and coaxing them onto plates. "I wonder how our funeral rituals are going to look a couple of thousand years from now," he said.

"And look what they were sending him off to," added Lu. "Patroclus, the great warrior, with his high, thin cry, going off to the underworld for eternity. Wouldn't you be upset?"

I was upset. I was thinking about Mervyn's emaciated body, moldering away out there under the ornamental plum. Although in my mind it was at least mildly consoling to think there might be some kind of cat essence to meet me in the underworld, when I got there. What was a high, thin cry to Mervyn? That was about his only vocalization, anyway.

We ate the tiramisu, and the discussion moved on. We got Patroclus burned up and his bones collected and sealed into an urn (more fat), and all those fools got their prizes for reckless driving and dove-shooting and bare-knuckle boxing.

"Don't you think there's actually a feeling that Achilles has learned something from Patroclus's death?" whispered Myrtle Bench, shyly scraping up the last monolayer of tiramisu from her plate. "Look at how he sort of mediates the games. He smooths over all the hard feelings and gives away extra prizes to everybody whose feelings might have gotten hurt. Isn't he sort of admitting that his sulking was really a mistake? And trying to make amends?"

"Maybe," I said, but I wasn't really having any.

On the way home I felt Lu's gaze on me from the passenger's seat. "Should we maybe have done a little more for Mervyn?" she asked. "You were kind of hasty about putting him down out in the back yard. Maybe we should have had a little memorial or something." I was grateful to her for waiting until after the book group meeting to bring up the subject of Mervyn.

"I suppose we could have burned his litter box and a couple of those squirrels who were always tormenting him. But it's all in our heads anyway, isn't it?" I said. "He's dead and gone, just the way Janet Blythe is going to be soon. We have to adjust to these losses, that's all." Of course I was secretly enjoying my sadness and my bitterness, my trips to the cemetery, and my lonely perch on the jagged promontory of realism, and I wanted everyone to be humbled by my stoicism and embarrassed by their own deluded work-arounds on the subject of death and loss. Of course I intended to relent once I had sufficiently chastised my blind and foolish fellow travelers in this vale of tears. Luckily, events overran my position before I was able to scorch too much earth.

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 around 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 rest 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.

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 also 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.

###

About the Author

Charles Hibbard lives in San Francisco with his wife and no pets. You can connect with him at silashibb@earthlink.net. You can find other titles by Charles Hibbard at Smashwords.com:

Retirement Projects – https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/352093

Your Hand, Please. Let's Walk. – https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/385390
