A Burned-Over District by Charles Hibbard
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 insis
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.