by Kris Ashton
“Well, thanks, guys. I’m glad it’s all out in the open. Milton’s an okay cat deep down, I think, but—”
“What the fuck was that?” Gary said, staring out the window.
“What was what?” Sharna asked, sitting up and turning to look as well.
“Little hallucination from the grass,” Derek said.
“No, I saw it too,” Guy said, slapping his book shut and getting to his feet. He hurried to the door and went outside.
Daisy and Del watched him go as if he had lost his mind. The others, slowed somewhat by the weed’s effects, clambered up and pursued him.
“What was it?” Derek said as he and Gary walked outside.
“I’m not exactly sure. It wasn’t much more than a flash, like lightning. Or a shooting star, only much closer. Not in the sky.”
They broke into a trot to join Guy, who was down on his haunches in the middle of a lettuce bed. A soft patter chased them as Del and Daisy ran barefoot across the grass. Speaking of grass, Derek wished he had not gotten high; the hard ground felt like mush under his feet and his vision jounced around as if he were crossing rough terrain in a jeep. One thing he could make out was the thin curl of smoke now rising from the lettuces.
“What the hell is it?” Derek said as they got near.
“No fucking idea,” Guy said.
Derek and Gary stood either side of him, like bookends, and a moment later Daisy and Del made the convocation a crooked semi-circle. All five were puffing and the frigid night air condensed their breath to clouds. In the trees behind the field an owl hooted. Some less identifiable night animal answered its call.
“It looks like a silver dollar,” Sharna said.
No it doesn’t, Derek thought, but a better comparison failed him. The object sat in a small crater of dirt, presumably blown out by the impact. If forced to describe it Derek might have called it egg-shaped, but that did not satisfy. Nor could it be called a sphere. A teardrop also came close but fell short. It was not moving, yet it somehow gave that impression. The object’s surface captured the dim starlight in the manner of highly polished steel. Daylight, Derek thought, might show it had a mirrored finish.
Whatever it was it had annihilated a lettuce plant, which accounted for the drifts of smoke.
“Looks like a meteor to me,” Gary said.
“A shiny, sculpted meteor?” Derek replied.
“Meteors can be made of anything. It might have got its shape as it entered the earth’s atmosphere.”
Apart from Milton, Gary was the only one among them with a college education, so no one refuted his explanation.
Guy reached his hand toward the object.
“What are you doing?” Sharna squealed. “It’s probably like a million degrees. Look what it did to the lettuce.”
“Then let’s cool it off.”
“I’ll get a bucket of water,” Daisy said, cantering away like a small child.
While she was gone, Derek picked up a stick and crouched down beside Guy. He tapped the object once, gingerly, as if it might explode. When nothing happened he tapped it twice more. It sounded perfectly mundane, like someone tapping a hammer with an ice-cream stick. Derek prodded it rudely and it rolled back and forth in its crater before coming to rest again.
Daisy trundled back with a bucket bumping and sloshing against her slender thigh. Guy stood up and took the bucket. He tipped a splash of water onto the object. There was a hiss and a small puff of steam but nothing theatrical—Derek had seen more while rinsing a frypan. Guy handed the bucket back to Daisy and crouched again. Slowly, he reached out a finger towards it.
“Guy, don’t!” Del said. “What if it’s, you know, radioactive or something?”
“If it’s radioactive enough to matter, we’re already in trouble,” Gary said. “Very few things that occur in nature are radioactive enough to be harmful.”
“Do you think that’s natural?” Del said.
Guy, who had stopped to look at Del and Gary, now shrugged to himself and turned back. He stuck out his index finger and poked the object.
He yelped and snatched his arm back, falling onto his butt. Del and Daisy screamed. Guy clutched his finger in his other hand. “Fucker! Son of a bitch!”
Derek said, “Jesus, man, are you all right? What happened? Did it burn you?”
Guy sucked air through his clenched teeth and shook his hand to try and clear away the pain. “It didn’t burn me, it stung me.”
“Stung you?” Gary said
Sharna knelt before Guy and grabbed his wrist. “Show me,” she said.
He relinquished his hand. In the feeble starlight his finger’s skin tone was the grey of cold ashes. A single drop of blood sat in the whorls of his fingerprint, like a bullseye. As Sharna looked at it, the droplet dripped into the crevice of Guy’s first knuckle joint, leaving a dark maroon stain in its wake.
“Nobody else touch it,” she said. “It’s drawn blood.”
“Little bastard,” Guy said.
“How could it have drawn blood?” Derek asked. “It’s as smooth as a marble.”
“I don’t know. Just leave it alone.”
No one else appeared in a hurry to touch it. Sharna helped Guy to his feet and as a pack they all started inside. Gary, Del and Daisy returned to the lounge room, chattering like mynah birds. Derek followed Sharna and Guy into the bathroom. While Sharna took a small first aid kit from the cabinet, Guy washed his finger under the faucet. With the blood gone, his injury looked almost microscopic, nothing more than a pinprick. Sharna handed him a band-aid, but the bleeding had already stopped.
“That’s some seriously weird shit,” Guy said.
They rejoined the others in the lounge room.
“What do you think we should do?” Daisy said. “Should we tell the police about it?”
“No way,” Derek said. “Sharna’s dad is already gunning for us—me in particular. We’d just be handing him an excuse to bust up the commune.”
“We could tell Deputy Benson about it.”
“No—no cops,” Derek said. “I’ll go out there at first light and bury the fucking thing. Guy, you’d better see the doctor tomorrow and make sure it hasn’t given you tetanus or something.”
Guy nodded and gave a jaw-stretching yawn. He grabbed The Lord of the Rings off the floor. “I’m gonna crash,” he said. “See you in the morning.”
They all watched as he left the room.
“That was freaky shit,” Daisy said.
Milton appeared in the doorway. “What was freaky?”
Monday, August 4, 1969
Hank’s room at the Eagle’s Nest Motor Inn had one window, which was also a sliding door to an almost unusable balcony that overlooked the rear parking lot. The room’s furnishings included a small desk and a chair. He had dragged these away from the wall so they faced the balcony and received the natural light. Yesterday the desk had been washed in a hot yellow glow, but today clouds had scudded in before dawn and they filtered the sunlight down to a dull silver.
The quality of light made no difference, Hank mused, as he reefed a sheet of paper out of the typewriter and scrunched it up. The black mini-bin he had appropriated as a wastepaper basket was now so full he had to balance this latest rejection on top.
Hank rubbed his eyes and went to the sideboard to make another cup of coffee. No amount of caffeine seemed able to wake his brain from its torpor; feature articles required a mix of memory and creativity, a co-operation between the left and right sides of the brain, and for the past twenty-four hours his hemispheres had refused to talk.
The Eagle’s Nest Motor Inn towered above everything else at the heart of the town. It had only been around two years; soon after starting at the Truth, Hank had chronicled the public outcry against its multi-story construction (“It’s sure to attract streetwalkers,” one old lady had told him in all seriousness). But as had often been the case in Bald Eagle for the past ten or fifteen years, townsfolk grizzling about progress did not sto
p it. A husband and wife team from New Mexico, of all places, had won over the necessary councilmen and the Eagle’s Nest had gone up in a couple of months—as had a massive sign out on the i70, which funneled in travellers who were not confident they could make it to Denver without falling asleep at the wheel.
Marjorie Bennett had checked Hank in the previous day (her husband Mike handled the bookwork and if you wanted to see him you needed to go to the tavern on a Friday afternoon). “Hello, Hank,” she had said, her eyes flicking down to his suitcase only the once. “Can I help you with something?”
“I’d like a room, please.”
“Just for yourself?”
“That’s right,” Hank said, ignoring the second, implicit query. For the first time in his short career he had cause to regret the B-grade celebrity status afforded a newspaperman in a small town. By Friday, he felt sure, everyone in Bald Eagle who cared (and many who didn’t) would know things were a bit rocky between Hank Woods and his wife. He might as well include an announcement in the Truth’s gossip column.
“How long will you be staying?”
“I don’t know. Is it okay if I pay by the day?”
It had been. He felt like a fool sitting in a motel no more than a mile and a half from his own house, but the hour’s drive to the nearest alternative accommodation was unthinkable when he just wanted to secret himself away from the world.
As he sat down with his coffee Hank tried to romanticize his situation, telling himself he was aping Truman Capote’s hotel-hopping lifestyle. But it was hard to sustain the fantasy when everything he wrote came out sounding like an eighth-grader’s informal essay.
He knew why he couldn’t get the words up and running. What if it turned out to be chronic, even terminal? What if all symptoms pointed to inoperable cancer of the marriage? Could he deal with that diagnosis? He didn’t want to know just yet. He wanted to lose himself in a forest of words instead, even if the trees in that forest were dark and malformed and crawling with strange abominations that had to be screwed up and cast into a waste paper bin.
As he tapped out another club-footed sentence there came a knock. He turned in his chair and gave the door a quizzical look. He had specified no visitors (giving Marjorie some half-baked story about not wanting to be disturbed while he wrote his masterpiece), so whoever had been admitted surely had something important to tell him. Hank got up, trying to suppress his relief at deserting the typewriter, and answered the door.
Sheriff Grayson’s form filled the doorway in a tall order of grey cotton. His black tie throttled the skin of his neck, which was smooth and raw and pink from a recent encounter with a razor. “Good morning, Hank.”
“Uh, hi, Sheriff,” he said feeling guilty for no specific reason. “What can I do for you?”
“First of all, you should probably call your wife and tell her you’re okay. She was just about in hysterics when I spoke to her.”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“No, I guess it isn’t,” Sheriff Grayson said, twirling his hat on the axle of his hand. “Mind if I come in?”
“I’m kinda busy at the moment. I’m trying to get this article written and—”
“Actually, that’s what I’m here to discuss. I’ll be as brief as I can.”
Hank swallowed a bobbin of fear. An investigative reporter could expect to be sued or taken to court during the course of his career—it came with the territory—but police interest was another matter entirely. Unable to see a way out of it, Hank said, “As long as it’s brief. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“No thanks, just had one.”
Hank showed the sheriff to the two-seater sofa and turned his desk chair around so it faced him. Anxiety made him want to blab, but he sealed his lips and let the sheriff take the conversation where he would.
“Now, as you know, my daughter is up at that commune on Bald Eagle Hill. Until now I’ve been happy to let them do whatever it is they do up there so long as it didn’t affect anyone else in town. Hell, I’ll let you in on a secret here: I almost felt like joining in on that protest at the reactor. Marcus Barkley was no doubt a whiny little tattletale at grade school and nothing much has changed. But goddammit, my daughter is part of that commune now and I need to know. I need to know what’s going on there and you’re the man who can tell me.”
“With any luck, in a couple of months you’ll be able to read about the Peace Out commune in Rolling Stone magazine,” Hank said. “It’s not coming along so well right now, but—”
“Hank, I don’t have a couple of months. If my daughter is getting hooked on drugs or picking up the clap from one of those hippies, I want to know now.”
Hank folded his arms and hardened his eyes. “Let’s get one thing straight, Sheriff Grayson. Derek Brolin allowed me into the commune in good faith. An ethical journalist doesn’t reveal his sources, and every single one of those people on Bald Eagle Hill is a source for the feature piece I’m writing. Or trying to write,” he added with a glum look over his shoulder. “Giving you an activity-by-activity rundown is not only unethical, it’s an invasion of privacy. How would you like it if I ran a profile piece on you in The Bald Truth? Six a.m. wakes up. Six-fifteen a.m., eats breakfast. Six-thirty a.m., masturbates in the shower—”
“This is not a goddamned game,” the sheriff said. “These hippies might be your ‘sources’, but one of them happens to be my daughter as well. Even if I wasn’t the law in this town, even if I didn’t have a reputation to uphold, I would still be worried.” He softened a touch. “All I’m asking you is this: Do I need to be worried?”
“Well now, I guess that depends what you find worrisome, doesn’t it?”
The sheriff sighed and shook his head. “I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult about this, Hank. I’m trying to be the good guy, here.”
“Oh, please,” Hank said, rolling his eyes, “the only reason you’re not there right now busting the place up is because you’re afraid your daughter will hate you for it.”
“Now that’s just plainly not true!” the sheriff burst out, his body seeming to swell like a sponge to its full, imposing size. “They’ve been up there six months now and I only just found out my daughter was among them. Like I said, I was happy to leave them alone so long as they left everyone else alone. But if my daughter is in any kind of danger, I can’t afford to go on with that policy. I just can’t.”
“You know what I think?” Hank said, feeling good for the first time in nearly two days. “I think you’ve been looking for an excuse to raid the commune ever since it was started and finding your daughter there is just what you needed. Daughter in peril equals probable cause—so now all you need is some evidence of the peril.”
“I’m no ogre,” the sheriff said. “I might be older than them and older than you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the younger generation. I don’t necessarily condone the way they go about it, but I understand why those university students are out there protesting against the war in Vietnam. My dad’s probably turning over in his grave to hear it, but it’s true. I haven’t entirely forgotten what it’s like to be young, either, and that’s part of the reason I’m worried for Sharna’s safety. What seems like a good idea when you’re twenty-one turns out to be a big mistake when you’re looking back at it from thirty. You’re a smart guy, Hank, I know you know what I’m talking about. I just want to make sure Sharna isn’t up there doing something she’s going to regret later on.”
Hank sipped his coffee. “Sorry, Sheriff, you’re going to have to get someone else to do your dirty work for you.”
“You know, I don’t think you’d be this evasive unless Brolin had something to hide.”
“Nice try. Now if you don’t mind—”
“Then I’ll go over your head,” Sheriff Grayson said. He was trying to sound threatening but Hank could see a flicker of desperation in his eyes. “I’ll go straight to Larry. If I tell him about Sharna, he’ll make you
give me everything you have on file. He’s your boss, I think he could be pretty persuasive.”
“There’s only two things wrong with that, Sheriff. Number one, my article on Peace Out is a freelance project and has nothing to do with Larry or the Bald Truth. Second, to get at all my ‘files’ he’d have to cut off the top of my skull and try to scoop them out with a spoon.” Hank tapped the side of his head. “It’s all memorized. I have one roll of film, too, but if you process that you’ll see lots of photos of people gardening and meditating and hugging each other.
“So if you’re all done with your interrogation, I have my work to do.”
They locked eyes, sheriff and journalist, until the former stood up and planted his hat on his head. “I’m disappointed you won’t be more co-operative, Hank.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“You could save us all a lot of grief.”
“Thanks for dropping by, Sheriff. Keep an eye on the newsstands, October or November issue of Rolling Stone, I reckon.”
“If anything happens to Sharna and it turns out I could have prevented it if I’d known…”
“Yes?”
Sheriff Grayson tutted once and lumbered out, leaving Hank alone with his coffee and his bin full of rejected page ones. As he looked down at that papery pile of failure, a light drizzle began to whisper against the window, raising its voice in time with the occasional gusts of wind.
Perfect weather for a beer and a chat, Hank thought.
He picked up the phone and gave the operator Peace Out’s number. Most communes did not have this luxury, Hank had learned, but because many Peace Out members (including Derek) had left lives behind in other states it seemed more of a necessity. Escaping often meant leaving loved ones behind.
The phone rang six times before Derek picked up.
Derek walked into the house dusting the drizzle off the shoulders of his rawhide jacket. He found Sharna sitting at the kitchen table chopping up vegetables in preparation for that night’s stew. Guy stood at the bench with his back to the room.