On Wednesday afternoons I helped my stepfather at his store. It was the least I could do. I didn’t want my mother’s new husband to think I hated him, only to know that I didn’t love him. And Ed Bigelow had his good qualities. He was well-groomed, fastidious, predictable—you could set your watch by him, that’s how predictable he was. He ate the same two three-and-a-half minute eggs with dry toast every morning for breakfast, and the same ham and cheese sandwich on rye with a cup of soup at the Doughboy Restaurant for lunch. Ed Bigelow was honest. He would never lie to or cheat you. He paid his bills—or did up to the very end. He kept a tidy house and mowed his lawn fairway short and hosed his neighbor’s hydrangeas when they went away. He smoked a briar pipe at the store and a corncob on weekends and holidays. In the days when ice cream came in three flavors by his own reckoning Ed Bigelow was “plain vanilla.”
Bigelow Hats was located (“conveniently,” according to the display ad in the Bowler News Times) on Main Street, between the Post Office and the Union Trust Savings & Loan Company. On Wednesdays business was slow, but lately it had been slow every day.
Once the town of Bowler supported four hat stores. Now only my stepfather’s store—his “haberdashery,” he called it (though other than hats the only men’s items he sold were umbrellas and an occasional scarf)—survived barely. By the time he and my mother married his profits had been flat for three years, and he was in hock to the Union Trust next door. Had she known this it’s doubtful that my mother would have married him, in fact she wouldn’t have. But she didn’t know. She knew only that Ed Bigelow didn’t work in a hat factory, that he dressed well, that he smelled of sweet pipe tobacco and cologne, that his fingernails were cut square and polished without a trace of factory grime under them, that he was a childless widower who lived in a grand Victorian house on Crown Hill Avenue, with a wraparound porch, stained windows and an octagonal turret and a circular driveway edged with day lilies.
When she learned that he was going broke my mother did all she could to get Ed Bigelow to sell his hat store and embark on some more profitable pursuit. Ed Bigelow wouldn’t hear of it. To him hats were more than just a way of making money: they were a symbol of man’s progress, of his pride. Hats were synonymous with civilization: you could scarcely have one without the other. For a man to be seen in public without a hat was equivalent to going shoeless or shirtless, or of not bathing. It meant that he was a bum, or a slob, or both. Even the lowest factory employee, a back shop worker or a boiler room attendant, wore a hat in public if he had any couth. It might be a rough hat of the cheapest wool felt, or just a tweed or leather cap, and badly stained and battered to boot, but he would wear it and wear it with no less pride than that with which a king wore his crown. That more and more men went around hatless was, to my stepfather, nothing more or less than a symptom of that most modern form of temporary insanity known as fashion, the saving grace of which was that, whatever latest horrors it brought forth, those horrors were sure to be as transient and vulnerable as the germs of a summer flu. The symptoms might drag on for days or weeks or months, but eventually the white corpuscles of common sense would come to the rescue, bringing men back to their senses (and back to their derbies, their fedoras, their trilbys, their pork pies and homburgs). Like storm clouds the dark days of hatlessness would pass.
Meanwhile, was it any wonder that mankind faced nuclear annihilation? On a planet where men still wore their hats, such a prospect would have been, if not unthinkable, highly unlikely. Such was my stepfather’s view of things. In the world according to Edward P. Bigelow, hats alone would save humanity from self-destruction.
* * *
That Wednesday it rained, an unyielding downpour that started the night before and continued all afternoon. I arrived with Gilbert on foot, each of us with our umbrellas. Seeing me, Ed Bigelow shook my hand (he always shook my hand; Ed Bigelow was a dedicated and proficient hand-shaker) and said with a wink, “What’s up, there, sport?” To which I replied, per our little vaudeville routine, “I don’t know, Ed, what’s up with you?” Gas prices are up, taxes are up, unemployment is up, and hats are up! But respect for elders is definitely down! Delivered with a rabbit-punch to my shoulder.
Gilbert and I jammed our umbrellas into a receptacle by the door, above which a bell tinkled, warning my stepfather in the rare event of a customer’s entry. To either side of the door a plate glass window framed a carefully arranged display. Since it was summer, Panamas dominated the left-hand window display, with a yellow streamer announcing “Straws to cover every head type in town!” and a humorous touch provided by daisies and a smiling sun scissored from construction paper. The right-hand window featured an assortment of felt fedoras revolving like planets around a large papier maché globe, with maps of the world stapled to a chintz backdrop of sky blue and models of various forms of transport—planes, busses and trains—dangling from the same fishing lines as the Spitfires in my bedroom. The slogan for this display was “See the World in a Caxton-Dumont!” The effect, I must admit, was ingenious, or would have been were it not mostly obscured by my stepfather’s recently installed neon sign:
Bigelow & Son
Since 1898
The sign’s flashing insistent modernity jarred badly with the sober gold-leaf cursive on the other window and would have, in my opinion, better suited a pool hall or a pawnshop. Oh, yes, that “& Son”? That was supposed to be me. In three years, as soon as I turned sixteen, Ed Bigelow and I would be partners.
Usually on my visits to my stepfather’s store I would dust the display cases, or steam-clean the hats that weren’t in glass cases and that had accumulated gray patinas of sticky dust. Or I’d polish the big, plate glass windows, or vacuum the carpet, or buff the many mirrors big and small, ovoid and rectangular, hand-held and screwed to walls, in which customers admired or disapproved of their hat-wearing selves. Or, if there was nothing else to do, I’d sit in my stepfather’s cramped office leafing through one of the trade magazines (Hat’s Off! Hat Life, The Sophisticated Hatter) he kept shelved and in neat piles there, and within whose esteemed pages one found articles on a wide array of stimulating topics.
What’s Wrong with My Hat Displays?
Many stores fail to light their wall cases adequately. Most hat cases have no direct light on the hats; and those which have illumination behind a valance at the top succeed in lighting only the top one or two shelves.
The Art of Fitting Faces
When a man’s ears stick out from the sides of his head the wrong hat makes them even more conspicuous. The crown should be proportioned to the face, but an extreme taper should be avoided, while the brim should be flat-set at the back and sides, and snapped full across the front.
Hats for the Big Fellow
Never sell a big man a hat with a narrow brim and a tapered crown. A narrow brim adds emphasis to a man’s weight and to the width of his face and gives the hat an old-fashioned, stodgy air. A too high crown, on the other hand, makes such a man look like a giant, making his height a liability rather than an asset.
That day, however, my stepfather, who was always dreaming up new ways to enhance his business and increase sales, had another task for me. He had invented a gizmo for calculating hat sizes. While Gilbert sat in his usual chair in the corner near his office, I sat in a leather chair in the middle of the store, from where I had a view through the window with the neon sign, its letters pulsing backwards. Through that window I’d polished I watched cars zip down rainy Main Street, shedding puddles of brake lights. The neon sign bled, too. My stepfather, in his gray suit, coiffured, cuffed and cologned, pipe in mouth, hovered over me.
“Hold your head straight, Leo. Don’t lean forward. Here—” With manicured cool fingers he adjusted my skull. “Perfect.”
“A hot dog,” said Gilbert, in the corner—Gilbert who would have been an ideal test subject for my stepfather’s device had his head not been so unusually large.
“Now,” said my stepfather, “if you’ll just bear with me, I’m going to adjust the three thumbscrews.”
What Color Hat Shall I Sell Him?
Brown hats are best with brown or greenish suits or coats. They rarely look good with gray clothing. Some brown or tan hats may be worn with some blue or blue-gray clothing, but the salesman or the customer must have a real color-sense to be sure of these harmonies.
The instrument (called the “Comformator”, suggesting a mixture of comfort and conformity) despite its soothing, compliant name sat on my head like a crown of thorns. While he made his adjustments I looked out the window. A policeman in a black raincoat direct traffic next to his little wooden kiosk. He wore the equivalent of a clear shower cap over his pointy cap.
“That should do it,” said my stepfather. He crouched to pick up the Polaroid Land Camera that he had put on the carpeted floor nearby. “What I’d like you to do for me now, sport, is I’d like you to hold of the sides of the Comformator, like you’re holding a hat by its brim in a gust of wind, but gently, now. Don’t tug. Okay?”
“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.
How to Sell Quality
First, point out to the customer that in a hat of fine materials and conscientious workmanship the felt is firmer, smoother, springier, and tighter. Next, get the customer’s old hat off his head; this gives you your cue on sizing and price. If it’s a $7.50, show him a $10.00. You can always come down. If he makes no objection, try a $12.50.
“Now hold perfectly still.” He pointed the Polaroid at me. A flashbulb exploded. “Perfect.” He counted to fifteen: one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three . . .meanwhile I kept looking out the window, watching the same police officer pick at his nose between cars. Above his head an ignored traffic signal swung in the wind and rain. Across the way I could see into the drug store, with its dark wooden booths partitioned by beveled glass. The soda fountain was busy, its customers lined up to escape the rain. As I drew an imaginary root beer float up a straw and into my mouth where it exploded in sweetness down to the roots of my teeth, my stepfather peeled the backing away from the developed photograph.
“This is for my patent application,” I heard him say as, in a corner of my vision, his arm shook the Polaroid to dry it further. “To my knowledge, there’s never been a device quite like the Comformator. Okay, Leo, you can let go of the thing now.”
When You Don’t Have It
When the customer asks for something you know you haven’t got, do one of three things: Admit you haven’t the particular article and cheerfully send him elsewhere; admit you have it and try to interest him in something else; say nothing about not having what is called for, but confidently present the hat you know will be best for him.
The customer nearest me at the soda fountain wore a red raincoat. Through layers of glass and rain her features were blurred, but her hair was the unmistakable yellow of day lilies, and I wondered if it might be Jill. I made up my mind that it was.
“The whole secret to using the Comformator,” said my stepfather at his desk while entering figures in a notebook, “is to make sure it’s centered just so. If it’s off-center even by a fraction of an inch, that can throw all your measurements off. That’s important, Leo. It’s also why I’ve built in two ways for checking centeredness, first by equalizing the protrusions of the brim rods, then using the thumbscrews.”
I watched a mother walk her child quickly through the downpour. The child licked a lollipop in the rain. A root beer lollipop, if I had any say in the matter.
Selling Hats to the Hatless
Most people who go hatless have a definite reason for doing so. Many of them can be won back to hat wearing by intelligent arguments, which refute those reasons. For example, if a man says that a hat hurts his head, explain that he probably has an irregularly shaped head and that you have some ovals that should fit him comfortably. To the man who says that air and sunshine are good for the hair, point out that doctors and scalp specialists have stated repeatedly that direct exposure to the sun’s rays dries out the hair’s natural oils, explaining why lifeguards and soldiers the world over have always worn head-covering.
“Another thing to remember is to always sight the protrusions before you take the Conform. Oh, and be sure you’ve got the front underpin centered over the bridge of the nose. Forget that, you might as well throw the whole works out the window.”
A burly man in a yellow slicker, holding its hood over his head, charged across the street against traffic, bouncing like a pinball between stopped cars. The policeman blew his whistle and shot a white palm at him, but the man just kept going.
“Always set the Comformator low. Never set it too high. Better too low than too high.”
Lightweights Make Extra Sales
The time to sell lightweight felts is in the late Spring and early Fall, when neither fall hats nor regular weight felts are selling. Lightweights sell to the eye and the touch. Ruffle it a bit, punch the crown in and out. Then hand it to the customer and let him do it, too. Once a man has handled one and tried it on he is usually sold, even though he realizes that it’s not as sensible or long-wearing a buy as a winter hat.
“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.
I thought of the Project Mercury astronauts and remembered an article I read in Life magazine, how one of the astronauts—it may have been Alan Shepard—said, “The best thing about being in space is looking at the earth, and the next best thing is being weightless.” My mind’s eye flashed the black and white photos that went with the article, of astronauts clowning in their gravity-free space capsules, squirting ribbons of Tang and catching floating peanuts with their mouths. I longed to float free with them, to escape the tyranny of gravity, to get out from under this weight bearing down on my head, to blast through earth’s ponderous atmosphere and drift free and easy among the vacuum-packed stars.
“You know, son,” my stepfather’s voice bubbled its way to me from a great distance of black space, “if we play our cards right this device could very well revolutionize the milliner’s trade. Imagine, Leo, every hat sold in America a perfect fit, not the guesswork of some shoddy salesman at Sears & Roebuck! Think of all the satisfied customers, the repeat sales! Satisfaction, Leo, that’s the key to pulling this business of ours out of its slump! Fashion’s got nothing to do with it.”
How to Shape the Hat
The crease must be centered. For this the bow-tie on the leather is your guide. Note the middle finger in the picture opposite—touching the inside of the hat just above the bow-tie. Never shape a hat against the chest as shown in the next picture, a common habit with inexperienced salesmen, but a bad one. It is almost impossible to center a crease this way, or to judge how deep the crease is being made. In short, it’s the job of a butcher, not an artist.
Six months before it had been new display cases, the ones built by Virgil Zeno. Then it had been fluorescent lighting so men could predict what their hats would look like in office environments, then the wall to wall carpeting, then the flashy neon sign. My stepfather shifted stock, changed his window displays, rearranged furniture, wore different neckties and even a bowtie, switched the part in his hair, slapped different brands of cologne on his cheeks, smoked different flavored tobaccos in his pipe, did everything he could to address the problem of falling sales. With each and every adjustment he would proclaim the problem solved, only to watch helplessly as sales continued their downward trajectory.
Hat Etiquette
There can be no question that wearing a colored, knockabout daytime hat when accompanying a lady in evening dress is decidedly bad manners. Wearing a dinner coat with a derby or a colored daytime hat is as bad manners as wearing unpolished shoes.
“Leo?”
“Hmm?”
“You don’t have to keep still anymore. The Comformator’s not on your head.”
Oh, but it was, it would always be there, on my twelve year-old head, my crown of thorns, my woven chaplet of spiny branches. I felt sorry for Ed Bigelow. And feeling sorry for people is much, much worse than just plain hating them. It made me want to smother Ed Bigelow with one of his hats and put us both out of our misery.
We spent another hour kicking our feet against the cliff and smoking Paps’ cigarettes. Just to have something to talk about I almost mentioned the colored lights I’d seen in the sky, but thought better of it. Victor got hungry and went home. Skunky went to go help his dad build the fallout shelter. Paps had to go feed his father, who had such a bad case of the shakes he couldn’t feed himself. I was hungry, too, but I’d had the foresight to pack two apples in my knapsack, one for me and one for Gilbert.
I decided to walk Gilbert home. Let his own father look after him for a change. We took the short cut down Bum’s Trail, so named for the hoboes that used to camp out there, not in my time, but before, when there’d been more railroad traffic. In winter they’d keep warm and cook on stoves improvised from oil drums, and sleep on junk Pullman and car seats that found their way there, flourishing like odd botanical specimens among the skunk cabbage and horsetail-ferns.
We were halfway down the trail when we came upon an object unlike any I’d ever seen there before. The thing was as big as two furnaces put together, and covered with dials, meters and pipes. The side facing us was rounded, like a giant hubcap, with porthole-like recesses going all the way around, each covered by a piece of thick glass, with nearly all of the pieces broken. The side on the ground seemed flat, though it was hard to tell, since the terrain under it had clearly been stove-in by the impact, pushing the dirt up around it, flattening horsetail ferns that stuck out like the shafts of Gilbert’s stiff hair under his baseball cap. A deep rut of upset earth trailed away from the opposite side, the side not stove-in, like it had been dragged or pushed or forced some other way to its final resting place. I couldn’t guess how it had gotten there, never mind what it was or where it had come from. Then I remembered the colored lights in the sky, the shattered remains of Rufus II, and the blue light that had fallen to earth.
Supposing. . . ? Was this . . . ? Could it be?
There was only one person I knew who might provide an answer, and for him to do so I’d have to bring him some evidence. It would have been better for him to see the whole thing himself, but that was impossible, since he was in a wheelchair.
I got out my Swiss army knife (also in my knapsack) and, on my knees, tried to loosen one of the already loose meters, held in place by rusty pipe and wires. When it wouldn’t come loose I tried another. At last, after sawing away at it with the pathetic little hacksaw the Swiss army had seen fit to include in my knife I got one of the meter’s off and slipped it into my bag. While in there I took out both apples and offered Gilbert one, then withdrew it, making him promise that he wouldn’t say a word or, since words weren’t exactly his medium, indicate to anyone by any means what we had seen. He nodded. I gave him the apple.
Using weeds, mulch and sticks I camouflaged the thing as best I could. Gilbert watched and I gave him the thumbs-up, which always made him giddy. “Okay?” I said and he nodded, like he always did when I said “Okay?” I put a finger to my lips, sealing our secret. With a pat on the back, eating my apple, I lead us back into town.
* * *
Virgil Zeno’s carpentry shack was by the railroad tracks, halfway between the grain and feed store and the lumberyard. On his rooftop Virgil had erected a cross, big enough to see from the top of Cheese Hill and beyond, painted white and fringed with 100-watt floodlight bulbs, so at night it glowed like one of those phosphorescent fish that prowl the deepest oceans. Next to the cross there was a wooden sign, itself as big as a freight car, red letters on a white backdrop:
WELCOME VISITORS FROM OUTER SPACE
In the event that the visitors did not happen to understand or speak English, the greeting had been translated into Latin:
AVE HOSPES, ARCANO AB COELO DESCENDENS
Unless half-blind (like Gilbert), you could easily read the sign from the top of Cheese Hill, that’s how big it was. I guess it had to be big for visitors from outer space to pay any attention to it.
The carpentry shed itself was painted battleship gray. You couldn’t see much through the windows, they were always so thick with sawdust. But through the coating I could see the dim glow of lights burning inside, so I knew Virgil was there (I’d have known anyway, since he worked every day—Sundays, too). When not turning legs for tables and chairs on his lathe or milling dovetail joints for someone’s bookcase, he was in his back room building a flying saucer out of wood. No one was supposed to know he was building it, but we did, every kid in Bowler knew it, Virgil having taken us, one by one with a wink into his confidence and shown the thing to us, lifting up a sawdust-coated drop-cloth to offer us a tantalizing glimpse of smooth, rounded, dovetailed wood.
“Elderberry,” Virgil had pointed out while offering me my own private glimpse. “Dense but lightweight and flexible, steams easily. They used to make cradles and arrow shafts with it. Makes sense, right? A cradle for support, an arrow for thrust. Stuff makes a good clapper stick for percussion instruments, too.”
Since 1954, when Virgil Zeno sighted his first UFO in the skies above Bowler, he’d been the town’s unofficial flying saucer expert. Some people, including my stepfather—who considered Virgil a “nut case”—didn’t see the need for such an authority. But most were glad to give Virgil his due, first because he made them laugh—as “nut cases” go, he was an amusing nut job. And he was a good cabinetmaker. That no one, not even my stepfather who commissioned him to design and build display cabinets for his hat store, could dispute.
But there was a bigger reason for the town’s indulgence, namely the accident that had claimed the lives of Vito and Verso, Virgil’s identical brothers (they had been triplets) on April 5, 1953, Easter Sunday, their birthday. The three brothers were taking their maiden voyage down Main Street in a brand new, two-toned, green and white DeSoto Firedome convertible coupe they’d bought for themselves, with Verso at the wheel. My father, who had been there to witness it, assured me that the spectacle of the Zeno triplets parading down Main Street in their gleaming new purchase would have made a lasting impression on all those who saw it even without the added, indelible seal of tragedy. As the DeSoto approached the railroad crossing the signals started to flash and clang. Verso tried to get over the tracks before the striped arms came down. He got past the first arm. But then the second one, the one on the other side, came down, blocking his way. Eyewitnesses said that instead of crashing through it, he put the DeSoto in reverse and tried to back out.
What happened next is still unclear. Either the DeSoto stalled or one of its four spanking whitewalls got caught in the grating or both. One witness saw smoke spinning out from one of the tires. Chad Nelson, owner of Nelson’s Hardware, heard the car’s engine turning over. Meanwhile the three brothers sat there, Verso still behind the wheel, Vito beside him in the passenger seat, Virgil in the back, all three of them wearing their freshly laundered white carpenter’s overalls. According to Mr. Nelson, they seemed not the least bit perturbed, but to be having a quiet debate in the car as the locomotive whistle sounded louder and louder, lengthening and thinning out in its approach, like a long, wide rubber band being stretched. A freight train, headed for Danville (freights were especially dangerous; they sped through the town and no one ever knew when they were coming). The Zeno brothers were still in their seats, still calmly talking things over when the train picked up the DeSoto and carried it, like a cat carrying its kitten, two hundred feet before depositing it in a crumpled heap at the base of one of the Cavanaugh Fuel Oil storage tanks. According to the headline story in the next day’s Bowler News Times Vito and Verso were both killed instantly. Virgil alone survived, thrown free of both car and locomotive by the impact, landing feet first in a stack of peat moss bags in the grain and feed store lot, his legs both crushed.
“It’s always tragic when people ignore the crossing guards,” Chief of Police Warren Owens was quoted as saying. “It always ends up that the train wins.”
* * *
I heard the rotary saw screaming inside and waited for it to stop before knocking. The piney smell of cut wood greeted us as the door opened and Virgil sat there, his white coveralls golden with sawdust. Though confined to a wheelchair since the accident, he looked tall and gangly as ever, the knees of his long, ruined legs spread wide and poking up into the air. He raised his visor, revealing a face proportionally as long as the rest of him, with a lantern jaw and a sharp nose and eyes set deep into his skull. He smiled. His teeth were long, too, as long and yellow as his sawdusty coveralls.
“What’s up, boys?”
I took the satchel off my back, opened it and pulled out the meter. I handed it to him. Virgil studied it, turning it over in his big, sawdusty hand, its knuckles puffed-up like the knots in old trees. He looked up at me.
“Where did you find this?”
“On Bum’s Trail.” I described the object from which it had been removed, down to its smallest particulars.
“Did anyone else see it?”
“Just me. And him.” With my thumb I pointed to Gilbert.
“And no one followed you here?” he said, glancing furtively up and down the railroad tracks.
“Not as far as I know.”
“You’d better step inside.”
Virgil closed the door behind us and we followed him in his wheelchair, its wheels and our sneakers leaving sawdust prints on the dark, linoleum-tiled floor. Everything in Virgil’s shop was coated with a fine layer of sawdust: floor, tables, benches, tools and saws, shelves, windowsills. The workbenches and saws were all wheelchair height. He escorted us into his private room and closed the door. In his back room, that’s where Virgil told us all his flying saucer stories.
I should state here and now that Virgil and I had an understanding. He would tell me unbelievable things, and I would believe them, or pretend to. And though I suspect that he had a similar arrangement with other boys in Bowler, I have no way of knowing, since whatever Virgil told you he told you in the strictest confidence, and had you swear on whatever meant the most to you (I chose my dead father’s grave) not to repeat it to anyone. This arrangement was reciprocal. If I told Virgil something unbelievable, I could count on him to believe it. Today psychologists, who have terms for everything, have one for such arrangements: they call it mutual enabling.
The walls of Virgil Zeno’s back room were plastered with snapshots and other documentary evidence of flying saucers sent to him by enthusiasts all over the country, along with a chart on which he registered the details of his various sightings. He kept a two-burner stove there. He lit one of the burners and put a kettle on for hot chocolate. No matter the season, Virgil always offered hot chocolate to his visitors, even on muggy summer days. And I always drank the stuff. To refuse would have breached protocol. He kept a bag of marshmallows next to the stove, and plopped one in each mug along with a dash of unintentional, nutmeg-like sawdust. To this day the taste of hot chocolate carries me back to Virgil’s back room, and to his confidential voice filling me in on the secrets of electro-magnetic propulsion, ionized air, ‘G’ forces and coronas of bluish flame, and telling me—for the millionth time—about his first UFO sighting, on Easter Sunday, 1954, exactly one year after the accident that killed his identical brothers.
For his fortieth birthday the townspeople had all chipped in and bought Virgil another DeSoto similar to the one obliterated in the accident, a pink and white Fireflight, with a hand-operated throttle and brakes installed so he could drive it without legs. That evening, after the festivities had been concluded, Virgil drove alone up to the high school, a half-mile from town, parked near the football field and sat looking up at the sky, testing his knowledge of the constellations. Until that night, he had never shown any special interest in the stars, had rarely bothered to look up at them. Now, though, for some reason they captivated him. He sat there for hours.
Some time around midnight, a shooting star zipped across the sky. For the next three hours an endless supply of shooting stars slid through the atmosphere. At around four o’clock Virgil saw what he would later describe to reporters as “a circle of alternating lights of various pale colors revolving around a central bright disk of light hovering in the northwestern sky, about a quarter-mile above the earth’s surface.” Though he could only guess at the object’s position, he was fairly certain that it hovered above the ruins of the Cavanaugh Hat Factory, at the town’s western edge. The object hovered for “no fewer than five minutes”—so Virgil estimated, having switched the lights of the DeSoto off so he couldn’t read the clock dial on the dashboard. The colored lights (Virgil noted in his diary later that same morning) rotated in a clockwise direction, their colors shifting as they rotated, creating the same sort of stroboscopic illusion that one sees often in cowboy movies, where the wheels of a moving stagecoach appear to be stationary.
“The object,” Virgil’s report continues, “showed a sharp and firm regular outline, namely one of smooth, elliptical character that appeared harder and sharper than the edges of the surrounding hills or of any possible cloud formations. The hue of the luminous object was somewhat less white than the light of Jupiter in the dark sky, not aluminum or silver colored, or like any bright metal, but of a glowing mineral phosphorescence more like mother of pearl, or mica. In hovering the object exhibited some wobbly motion, which further served to set off the object as a rigid if not a solid body. After approximately ninety seconds in plain view the ellipsoid moved slowly behind what I believe must have been a cloud (273º azimuth, elevation app. 1º) and I assumed that I had lost it. But a few seconds later it reappeared in a slightly different location (275º azimuth, elevation 1.5º). Having reappeared, the object resumed its hovering pattern, this time rising slowly across the face of some patchy clouds against which the impression of luminosity was enhanced. This subtle yet clearly discernible shift in position convinced me that I had borne witness to a novel airborne event.”
Virgil’s notes were published verbatim in the Bowler News Times under the headline, “BOWLER RESIDENT SITES UFO.” My stepfather believed that the only reason Burt Lansing, the paper’s editor, published Virgil’s “drivel” was because he felt sorry for Virgil. But he also felt that it was a bad idea, since all it had done was “feed a poor, demented man’s delusions.”
* * *
“I take it,” said Virgil, handing me my hot chocolate, “that you saw those lights in the sky last night?”
“You saw them, too?”
Virgil indicated that I should have a seat. Since the flying saucer took up most of Virgil’s back room, there was nowhere for me to sit except on it, which I did. It made a surprisingly comfortable chair.
With me sitting Virgil said, “Let’s cut right to the chase, why don’t we?” He put his elbows on his knees and his fists together and rested his long jaw on them. “Sometime between now and the end of summer you are going to make contact with a visitor from outer space.” He stared at me, his dark gray pupils swimming in bloodshot whites.
“How do you know?”
“This object that you’ve brought proves it,” he said, hefting it. “All morning I’ve been waiting for just such a sign.”
Now, Virgil and I both knew perfectly well that the object I had brought to him, the meter, was just that, a meter, and nothing more. But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that the “flying saucer” I had discovered was anything but a flying saucer. It was a factory boiler, a chunk of locomotive engine, a hat factory component, part of some failed prototype weapon or instrument contracted by the military and created by one of the many companies in our area that had sprung up over the past decade and that relied increasingly on government contracts for survival. As for how and why had it been dumped on Bum’s Trail—who knew? Maybe it flew off of a speeding train; maybe it fell from a helicopter. Maybe a truck dumped it there. It made no difference, its genesis having become as irrelevant as its fresh purpose was symbolic. It was meant to make believers out of us.
“Why me?” I asked.
“I have no idea.” Virgil smiled. “But there must be a reason.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
Virgil shook his head. “Nothing. What can you do? Keep your eyes open. Be aware. And above all realize that whatever form this visiting entity assumes it’s not likely to be one that you’ll immediately perceive as alien. It won’t be some little green man, Leo. Odds are he or she will blend in neatly with the surroundings, the better to escape notice. They could even pretend to be someone you know. Which is why you’ll need to be especially vigilant.”
“How will I know when it happens?”
“That’s just it, you won’t,” said Virgil. “Not unless you open that third eye of yours, the one that sees things without seeing them, the one in the middle of your head. This one right here.” Virgil twisted his sawdusty thumb playfully into the middle of my forehead. “The all-seeing third eye.”
“Does everyone have a third eye?” I asked, sipping sawdusty hot chocolate.
“Yes,” said Virgil. “Everyone does. But in most people it’s sealed permanently shut. For all we know yours is sealed shut, too. I guess we’ll know one way or another by the end of summer.”
Something blue entered my field of vision: a man walking. In itself this might not have been so unusual, except that in Bowler no one walked, no one of driving age who was not impaired, incompetent or otherwise deranged or demented. To be a grown up and walk was to be an object of infinite conjecture especially among us Back Shop Boys.
A case in point: Frank Hopper, better known to us as “Hoppy.” We called him that because of how he walked, bird-like, with quick mincing, steps, his chinless head thrust pigeon-style out in front of him (that his last name matched his walk was a coincidence). He walked to the supermarket and back, arms wrapped around twin grocery bags, eyes darting clandestinely back and forth. He wore the same dust-colored clothes every day, faded green worker’s pants, beat-up leather bombardier jacket, dirty sneakers and a dusty fedora with a wrinkled brim (and that he wore with no crease or pinch and pulled down over his ears in a way that would have outraged my hat-worshipping stepfather). On the evidence of these qualities we concluded that Hoppy was a homo who performed indecent acts on kids that he would lure into his shack on Durant Lane, a dead end. Not only was Hoppy a homo, he was the quintessence of homosexuality. Of this we were as sure as we were that the earth was round and Communists had hooves, horns and pointy red tails. Had their been a picture next to that word in the dictionary, it would have borne Frank Hopper’s likeness.
Though he used a cane and walked with a limp the Man in Blue’s walk was nothing like Hoppy’s. There was nothing bird-like or mincing about it. He took fast, long, determined strides, as if fighting against some urge that held him back, or tried to. I watch him cross the parking lot, seeing nothing but his back, until the buildings of Main Street hid him from view.
Just then the others arrived, walking their bikes. Rudimentary greetings were exchanged. How’s it hanging? Long and lean or low and lazy? Can you throw it over your shoulder like a continental soldier? Does it wobble to and fro or do you tie it in a bow? Short, shriveled and always to the left or straight down the middle?
“Did you see him?” said Skunky, parking his red Schwinn Typhoon against a tree. Summer hadn’t even started, officially, and already the sun had done a job on the tip of his freckled nose. He got out a pack of cigarettes, lit one and passed it around.
“Who?” I said.
“The blue guy,” said Paps.
“You had to see him. How could you not see him?”
“He just crossed the parking lot five seconds ago.”
“So did you see him or didn’t you?”
“I’m not sure. What did he look like?”
They described him. Blue suit. Beard. Cane. Limp.
“Hmm,” I said. “I’m really not sure.”
“How could you not be sure?”
“He was too busy looking through these things.” Paps grabbed the binoculars from around my neck and then dropped them.
“You should try using your own eyes once in a while,” said Skunky.
“Yeah, you’d be surprised how well those two round shiny balls in the front of your head work,” said Victor.
“Only first he’s got to get his head out of his ass,” said Paps.
“Sounds to me like a major operation,” said Skunky.
“A headupyourassectomy, it’s called, I believe,” Paps said.
I flipped them all my fractional middle finger.
Following which the speculations began.
A beatnik.
A homo.
An ex-con.
A lunatic.
A communist.
A spy.
A Commie spy.
“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.
* * *
From the Man in Blue conversation turned to nuclear annihilation, a popular subject in those duck-and-cover days. Just the week before, on May 6, 1962, three weeks after John Glenn’s singed Mercury capsule sizzled into the cool Pacific like a drop of hot oil in water, Bowler and neighboring Danville had staged a mock nuclear attack. “Theoretical Bomb Destroys Bowler,” the headline in the local paper read, with the article accompanying it describing the imaginary havoc wreaked by a hypothetical H-bomb carrying the equivalent of 60,000 tons of TNT set off at the intersection of Route 202 and Main Street. In addition to both towns’ shopping districts being “completely obliterated,” the article reported, all local hospitals, radio stations, newspapers and Civil Defense headquarters were destroyed. Streets were rendered impassable, utilities knocked out, and everyone caught in the immediate vicinity of the impact was incinerated. The article didn’t say who might attack us, but we all knew it would be those bastard Russians.
The front page photograph in the Bowler News Times showed two elementary school children sitting under a trestle table in the school hallway, peeking over folded arms, with their teacher, Mr. Craig (my 5th grade teacher), showing them the proper procedure. Inside were more photos showing school children participating in “Duck & Cover Day,” with groups being lead down into a fallout shelter as part of their Civil Defense Drill, the three basic steps of which were as follows:
1. Remain calm.
2. Proceed to the nearest fallout shelter in an orderly fashion.
3. If you can’t get to a shelter, sit under your desk or in the hallway with your legs pulled toward your chest and your head on your knees and cover the back of your neck to guard against “A-bomb flash.”
To these simple steps Paps had added one more:
4. Kiss your ass goodbye.
Mr. White, Skunky’s father, had taken President Kennedy’s advice and, based on plans in the latest issue of Popular Mechanics, had started building a shelter in their back yard. Mr. White’s next door neighbor, Mr. Lubdell, inspired him. One evening a few weeks earlier, while Walter White was watering the front garden, he noticed Mr. Lubdell, who’d just finished building his fallout shelter, standing in his front yard looking up at the starry sky. He had a rifle. He said good evening to Skunky’s father, then began talking in a strangely quiet voice, explaining how a bomb shelter is designed to provide the requisite amount of filtered air, bottled water, and emergency food for one family and one family only. “So,” Mr. Lubdell said, “however unpleasant it may be, a man must be firm: when the bombs fall, he’ll hustle his family down there and close the door on the rest of the world. The goddamn dog’s staying up top, and the neighbors, too, including you and your family, Walt. No hard feelings. It’s just that there’s no extra room. You let extras in and we’re all going to die.” So saying, Mr. Lubdell shouldered the rifle, took aim at a distant star, and fired. “Dead, god damn it.”
“So now dad’s building our own shelter and screw Mr. Lubdell!” said Skunky.
“Keeping up with the Joneses,” said Victor.
“Keeping up with the jerks is more like it,” said Paps.
“My dad’s building us one, too,” said Victor the liar. “It’s gonna be three floors, with hot and cold running water, air conditioning, and a heated pool.” He drank water from an aluminum Boy Scout canteen. His belly jiggled as he gulped. “He’s building it under the garage where no one can see it.” This was the same garage that, according to Victor, once housed a mint condition Stanley Steamer and currently sheltered his father’s XK-E Jaguar, which likewise none of us had ever seen.
“Guess he’ll have to interrupt building that replica of the Hanging Hardens of Babylon, huh, Vic?” Paps said.
“No kidding," said Victor. "I mean there's no point having a beautiful garden if your whole family is gonna be dead, not much of one, anyway. Is there?”
“He's got you there, Paps,” said Skunky, spitting through the gap in his front teeth. Of us all Skunky was the best spitter. The gap gave him superior range and accuracy.
“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.
Paps wasn’t alone in his pessimism. None of us, not even Skunky with his faith in fallout shelters, considered duck & cover to be anything but the shining emblem of adult mendacity. We had seen enough doomsday movies (On the Beach, The Day the World Ended, Atomic Kid) and Twilight Zone episodes to know it would take more than a desk to save us from all that fallout. Among popular topics of debate wasn’t if or when we’d die, but how. We revisited that debate now, with Skunky saying that death would be “instantaneous.” Paps begged to differ, claiming we’d die slowly, from our internal organs out, that our guts would liquefy, and that we’d know the end was near when we started pissing or puking out lungs, kidneys, and intestines. According to Victor death would come even more slowly, a penetrating sunburn that would deep fry us up “like a bucket of Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky fried chicken wings” (count on fat Victor to dish up a culinary metaphor). I—who had looked into the matter—said if we were lucky we might live a month or two before our skin and hair started falling off in clumps and blisters bubbled up in our lungs and on the walls of our stomachs.
We were deep into our debate when Victor tapped my shoulder.
“Look, man! He’s coming back this way!”
I looked down and saw him again: the Man in Blue, limping across the bicycle saddle factory parking lot, approaching the cliff this time, carrying a shopping bag, not the way Hoppy did but with one arm around it like a fireman rescuing a child.
Skunky broke off a chunk of limestone and hurled it. The cheese bomb arced in the air and came down on the pavement a few inches in front of the tip of the man’s cane, where it smashed to powdery bits that scattered across the parking lot.
The Man in Blue stopped walking and looked up at us. We waited for him to shout something or shake his fist like the old guard. He didn’t. He didn’t even smile or frown. He kept looking up at us, his mouth a straight line under his beard.
Then he kept walking.
The next morning—Sunday—I met my friends as always on Cheese Hill, a cliff overlooking what had been a hat factory, but whose scorched walls (after it burned down) were taken over by the Apex Bicycle Saddle Company. The cliff rose out of the earth like the prow of a ship, a limestone ocean liner. At its base, behind the factory, was a shed in which malformed bicycle seats were stored until they could be melted down and formed into new, healthy ones. The shed’s corrugated tin roof offered a perfect target for the “bombs” of pale yellow limestone that broke off in crumbly, cheese-like chunks, hence “Cheese Hill.” We would toss them and wait for the grizzled old factory guard to come out of his wooden hut and shake a trembling fist up at us, which gesture we’d meet with outthrust palms and shouts of “Sieg Heil!” and “Hail Hitler!”
We called ourselves the Back Shop Boys since all our fathers had worked in the back shops of hat factories: Wesley “Pap” Papadopoulos, Victor Szentgyorgyi (pronounced “Saint George”), Wade “Skunky” White (so nicknamed following an unpleasant encounter with a black and white striped member of the Mephitidae family, order Carnivora). . . and Gilbert Slocum, member by proxy through me: Gilbert who spoke only three words, whose thick glasses and shadowy baseball cap visor could not hide a pair of eternally crossed, bulging eyes, Gilbert whose nose never stopped running, whose plaid shirtsleeves when he didn’t roll them up were always stiff with snot, whose skinny forearms (when he did) were glazed with the stuff as if by a coat of shellac. Gilbert who—back in those barbaric pre-p.c. days— wasn’t mentally “challenged” or “disabled” or “deficient” but “retarded”, or, as we said, a retard. And that’s when we felt generous.
Gilbert didn’t care what we called him as long as nothing stood between him and his “hot-dog”—the optical illusion of a floating bullet of flesh formed by touching the tips of his index fingers together and staring at them cross-eyed (easy for Gilbert to do, since his eyes were naturally crossed). The three words were a hot dog. He said them over and over, always with the same bright intonation of amazed discovery, as if witnessing the phenomenon for the very first time. He would try to eat the thing, snapping at it like a crocodile with his nasty overbite, biting his own fingers and crying out in pain. At first we all found this—and the crying fits it inspired—amusing. But like all of Gilbert’s tricks it got old fast. Now, seeing him about to snap at himself, I’d swat his big-eared, crewcut, encephalitic head.
I alone had permission to swat Gilbert; no one else could swat him. That permission was granted to me by myself, a consolation for the loss of privacy and esteem suffered in having Gilbert as an appendage. I did it for my father, the real one, in his memory. He had asked me to befriend Gilbert, or at least pretend to, as a favor for his former boss and friend, Herbert Slocum, back shop foreman at the Caxton-Dumont Hat Works. Following the factory’s closing in 1957, and Mrs. Slocum’s death (three weeks later) of complications from diabetes, Mr. Slocum plunged into a depression so deep he could barely drag himself out of bed. He fed Gilbert bologna sandwiches and oatmeal and drank his way through the weekends. Gilbert’s clothes grew tattered. He started to smell. My mother fed Gilbert and ironed his clothes. My father let him join us in our pursuits, riding the miniature trolly, bearing witness to hat factory fires. I became Gilbert’s de facto brother, a burden I accepted with forbearance, considering.
At first the other Back Shop Boys protested. What are we supposed to do with him? But certain advantages to the situation soon presented themselves. Gilbert was good for an occasional laugh. He was also a perfect target for the barbs that we would otherwise have launched at each other, an inert object to lash out at times of dissonance and strife. The others could say what they liked to him. They could call him “mooncalf” or “lamebrain” or “blubberhead” or any of dozens of other colorful compound pejoratives. They could call him anything they liked.
But they couldn’t touch him. If they touched him I’d be all over them.
We normally got there before the others, who all went to church. To amuse ourselves meanwhile Gilbert had his ever companionable hot-dog, while I’d brought with me in my knapsack my latest space comics, my purple Dunkin Imperial yo-yo, my How and Why Wonder Book of Planets & Interplanetary Travel, my Ruby Ray squirt gun, and my Space Orb Kaleidoscope (“Space Orb, Eye in the Sky!”). The latter offered glimpses of aliens from Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and all the other planets, though the “aliens” were obviously cartoons and more ridiculous than anything.
And I had my binoculars, inherited from my dad, 1943 Bausch & Lomb Army issue 7 x 50’s (leather neck strap, black alligator finish, Serial Number 251908). With or without them, from the top of Cheese Hill I could see all of Bowler. Beyond the bicycle seat factory the central stretch of Main Street unfolded, with (from left to right) the hobby shop, the five and dime, the Empress movie theater (where Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster, was playing) the hardware, drug and jewelry and other stores, their facades interrupted by clumps of trees. To the far right the view was framed by the railroad tracks and, parallel to them, the Cavanaugh Fuel Oil Storage Tanks, arranged from smallest to largest, like the metal cans my mother stored flour, tea and sugar in; to the left by Bowler Junior High, with its copper topped copula and fierce lightning rod. Winding like a copperhead through the view was the Brim River, whose mercury-laden waters would soon drown half the town.
But of all the landscape’s features none stood out more than the town’s smokestacks, nine in all, brick middle fingers thrust up into the dingy Connecticut sky. With my binoculars I could still read the factory names in faded black and white paint down their ruddy sides: MALLORY, KNOX, SUTTON, BENNET, CROFUS & CORBET, LEE, MERRIMAC, CAVANAUGH, CAXTON-DUMONT. They rose taller than the town’s tallest trees, taller than the junior high school copula, taller than the steeples of the Congregational, the Lutheran, the Episcopal, the Presbyterian—even the Catholic Church. Once those smokestacks darkened the sky with soot and prosperity; now only their shadows darkened the air, thick black shadows stretching across parking lots and playgrounds, bending over rooftops and automobile hoods, reaching into people’s back yards and bedrooms, creeping sullenly, with the hours of each day, like the hands of a gigantic, gloomy clock.
From atop Cheese Hill me and the other Back Shop Boys would inventory the day’s possibilities. We could peddle our bikes into town and guzzle from the town hall water fountain, the coldest on earth. We could rob old man Mulvaney blind in his variety store, with two of us distracting him while the other two pinched Matchbox cars, chewing gum and fudgsicles. We could scamper down to the bank of the Brim River and watch the latest garbage float by (bottles and cans and corn chip bags and formerly bright rubber balls, their cheerful colors dulled to the chalky dullness of a pencil eraser in the river’s alchemical laboratory), or set fire to a model battleship and set it adrift, or catch frogs or, if no frogs were available and pokeberries were in season, start a pokeberry war, or cut down a cattail and twist its brown velvet shaft in our fists and send the cottony seeds flying. We could inspect the latest junk cars behind the Sunoco station, or snatch Pepsi empties from the stacked crates behind the Doughboy Restaurant, collect the deposits at the First National supermarket and treat ourselves to root beer floats at the drug store. Or we could climb a barbed-wire fence, break into the ruins of a hat factory and—with Skunky’s CO2 pellet gun—shoot out some windows, if there were any windows left to shoot out. Failing that we could render alternative judgments on people’s mailboxes by the Postmaster General (whose approval had, so often we felt, been given without due consideration). Among our choice alternatives:
Despised by the Postmaster General
Frowned Upon by the Postmaster General
Cruelly Dismissed by the Postmaster General
Given the Finger by the Postmaster General
Told to Fuck Off by the Postmaster General
In the rare but not unheard of event that words failed to adequately express the Postmaster General’s sentiments Skunky would light an M-80 and toss it in and thus let his feelings be known.
These were but some of the many remarkable ways to be bored in Bowler.
I first saw him on a Sunday morning in June. He was crossing the bicycle seat factory parking lot, walking with a cane, limping. He wore blue coveralls and had blond, crew-cut short hair and a heavy beard. I watched through my binoculars as he kept walking past the factory, into town and out of sight. The other Back Shop Boys, they saw him, too. They thought he was a communist, or maybe a spy, or both, or a homo, or a beatnik, or maybe an escaped prisoner from the federal penitentiary in Danville, one town over, or a nut case from Willoughby Hills, in Newbury, eight miles to the north. I had my own theories about the Man in Blue, inspired by the heavenly body I’d discovered early that same morning, just in time to see it explode to bits and tumble earthward.
I had been looking through my telescope, the one my stepfather, Edward P. Bigelow, bought me for my thirteenth birthday, a mail-order Edmond Scientific Mt. Palomar-type reflecting model, complete with a finder telescope, a hardwood tripod, and something called an “Equitorial mount” that its thirteen-year-olod owner never did quite figure out how to use. I still remember the advertisement that I, or rather, that Leo, using his mother’s haircutting scissors that he wasn’t supposed to use on paper, carefully clipped from the back pages of Science and Mechanics Magazine (or was it Popular Mechanics?). “See the stars, moons, planets up close!” the ad said. The telescope came with a “free” Star Chart and a 272-page “Handbook of the Heavens.” And though its useful magnification was only 180x—barely powerful enough to resolve Jupiter’s moons—at $49.95 it really was a bargain. Even at that price my stepfather, whose retail hat business was failing badly, could scarcely afford it. But weeks of pleading on my part combined with his desire to win my approval (a desire that I did little to encourage) finally wore the man down.
Like the rest of the country I’d gone “space crazy.” Project Mercury had just sent Colonel John H. Glenn Jr. and three other astronauts spinning around the earth, and all I could think about was outer space. Saturday mornings, with mist still shrouding the yard and dawn just starting to poke through the windows, I’d belly up to Mr. Bigelow’s boxy wooden Zenith in the corner of his den (I still thought of it as his house) and—with the carpet itching my bare flesh—stare at the dartboard-like tuning signal while getting my ears pierced by an endless needle of white noise. Through the Star Spangled Banner, with Old Glory snapping in crisp black and white, I’d kick impatient toes against the floor. Finally, with a blast of three orchestral chords as ominous as the death knock that opens Beethoven’s Fifth, the theme music would begin and Fireball XL-5 would begin. Colonel Steve Zodiac, accompanied by the glamorous Doctor Venus, would board their unambiguously phallic spacecraft, off to save this or that corner of the universe. The show was filmed in “Supermarionation,” meaning the characters were puppets. When they caught the light you could easily see the strings. But there were no strings attached to my feelings: Steve Zodiac was my hero, as Colonel John Glenn and all astronauts were heroes of mine.
My stepfather didn’t share my enthusiasm for outer space. Not that he wasn’t proud of his nation’s achievement. Ed Bigelow was nothing if not patriotic. For the brief period during which my mother and I occupied his stately home on Crown Hill Avenue he flew the American flag proudly day by day from a pole screwed into one of the foursquare columns of his imposing porch. He’d even salute the thing on his way to and from his hat store, gray fedora doffed, right hand over his heart. It wasn’t the space program that my stepfather disapproved of but the man behind it, our thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. Ed Bigelow hated JFK’s guts, and had hated them ever since the snowy morning of January 20th, 1961, when—on the same boxy Zenith—he watched him take the oath of office “without so much as a wool beanie” on his hairy, handsome, Irish-Catholic head.
The telescope arrived on a Saturday morning. I’d just finished watching Fireball XL-5 when the front doorbell rang and the UPS man stood there in his sewage-colored uniform, holding the long cardboard box. I sat on the living room floor and tore it open. As advertised the telescope was white with black fixtures and a varnished tripod. There had been no forewarning of its requiring assembly, yet it did. I spent the rest of the morning wrestling with parts and instructions, and the afternoon looking at trees, houses, antennas, chimneys and clouds, impatient for darkness, intent on the planets, moons and stars.
Total darkness fell at seven-thirty, but I decided to wait until after The Twilight Zone before trying out the telescope. In that evening’s episode two astronauts traveling in separate spaceships crashland on a strange, beautiful, uninhabited planet. One astronaut is a man, the other a woman. Each has escaped from a world annihilated by nuclear war. His name is Adam, hers is Eve. (You can work out the rest for yourself.)
When the show ended I carried my telescope upstairs to my adoptive bedroom, whose gabled walls my stepfather, in another attempt to win my affection, had painted over with a tromp l’oeil sky and puffy clouds. Against this cloudy backdrop a trio of P-58 Mustangs, two gull-winged Stukas, one P-47 Thunderbolt and a Messerschmitt banked and soared, held up by lengths of fishing line no more invisible than those animating Steve Zodiac, with whirling propeller blades simulated by discs of clear acetate. Painted bullet holes strafed some planes’ fuselages. From one of the Stuka’s two engines a long gouge of cotton, sprayed-painted gray, curled in a smoky loop toward the ceiling. My stepfather, who had acquired such skills in creating his own hat store window displays, made the model planes and painted the cloudy walls. When he proposed this decorating scheme to my mother she opposed it, saying it would give me nightmares. But Ed Bigelow stuck to his guns,claiming that, on the contrary, it would lull me to sleep.
He and my mom were both right. To the implied roars and splutters of airplane engines combined with the tattattattattattatt of wing-mounted machineguns and the presumptive screams of pilots plummeting earthward in burning parachutes, I’d drift off to re-fight the Battle of Britain, only to bail out of a sweat-soaked, tailspinning bed at approximately two o’clock in the morning, night after night.
Now that I had my telescope, though, I was grateful for these rude awakenings. Without them I might have slept through the one astral event that would distinguish my otherwise completely unremarkable career as an astronomer. This happened early in June, twelve days after my birthday, with seventh grade already over and summer vacation started. By then I’d constructed a small, level platform on the pitched roof of the porch onto which my bedroom window opened. Aside from two trees across the street the porch roof offered an unobstructed view of the night sky. It was a clear, cloudless night, perfect for stargazing. I peered through the aperture, my hopes set as ever on discovering an unknown planet or star or even a measly asteroid. Any fool with a $50 telescope could ogle Jupiter’s stormy red eye or count Saturn’s rings. I wanted more; I needed more. Beyond having a dead father nothing special had ever happened to me, and I was afraid that nothing special ever would happen, that I’d end up stuck in Bowler for the rest of my life, working in some factory or store, when I yearned to conquer the stars, like John Glenn.
At the very least I wanted a secret, to know something that everyone else in the world didn’t already know, to be offered some sign that the mysterious heavens were in some way aware of my mystery, of my existence. Even though I didn’t believe in Him, still, I wanted God to notice me.
That distant, puny, insignificant object seen through the wrong end of the telescope? That was me, Leo Joseph Napoli IV.
