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.”
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