A Burned-Over District

  Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Cloud cover?” I suggested. “There’s lots of clouds in San Francisco.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, little . . . disturbances,” said Matt. “Possible signs of scorching.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, “his English isn’t that good yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You don’t take her very seriously,” said Patty, jouncing Albert a little more.

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

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

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

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

  “Well, what do you think they were?”

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

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

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

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

  “I didn’t try to tell you what they were,” said Harold. “Did I tell you what they were, Houba?”

  “Well, you said the government. . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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