His grandmother’s beef and potatoes helped him regain the weight he’d lost on his trek.
Every night Edward borrowed his grandfather’s battered Chevrolet pickup truck and drove out to see the lights-or to try to see them, because they didn’t appear.
“Are you sure they’re real?” he asked his grandparents. “Have you ever seen them?”
“Yes,” his grandmother said, and his grandfather nodded in agreement. “It’s been a while since we tried, though.”
“My mother swore she saw them a lot.”
“At first she couldn’t see them, either,” his grandfather explained. “It took quite a while.”
“My father believed in them enough to risk his life,” Edward said, beginning to feel angry, as if something were being hidden from him. “So where are they? Why can’t I see them?”
“Some people just can’t,” his grandmother said matter-of-factly.
“Why not?”
“No one knows.”
That left him feeling more exasperated than ever.
On the days when he couldn’t find work, he hiked through the area where the lights were said to appear. He stood where his father had built the airfield during World War I. Weeds and grass filled the un- paved runway, the length of which was just barely visible. The adobe buildings that had functioned as hangars were piles of dirt. He studied the distant rim of black boulders that looked like huge cinders- the aptly named Badlands.
He stared to the south toward Mexico.
“No one ever found the wreckage of an airplane?” he asked his grandparents.
“Some of his former students tried. They flew fifty miles-all the way to Mexico. A couple of them actually flew into Mexico. They went back and forth in what they called grids, but no one ever found your father or his plane.”
“But nobody just disappears.”
“The wings were covered with linen and hardened by shellac. If the plane crashed and burned, the debris could have been blown away by the wind.”
“And his body?”
“Coyotes. God bless him, John’s bones could have been carried off.”
“I want to see the lights.”
“Maybe you’re trying too hard.”
The next day, Edward dug postholes on a ranch until he earned enough to buy a bottle of whiskey-something that wasn’t easy to locate because even though Prohibition had ended four years earlier, Rostov had voted to remain “dry.”
At dark Edward drove out to the old airfield, sat on the ground, opened the bottle, and began sipping. Until then the only alcohol he’d ever sampled was beer, but the chance of obtaining beer in Rostov turned out to be even slimmer than that of finding whiskey. Be- sides, he wanted something strong.
It burned his throat. He felt its heat go all the way to his stomach. He gagged and almost threw it up.
At least it acted more quickly than beer would have. Because he wasn’t used to it, he didn’t need much before he felt off balance, as if something in his skull were tilting. Soon his tongue felt thick. His eyes became heavy. The moon and stars went out of focus.
“Come on!” Edward shouted. “Let me see you!” His words were slurred. “I’m not trying hard anymore! I’m relaxed! More than relaxed!” He laughed giddily and took another sip. “Hell, I’m drunk…
“Drunk as a… skunk…
“Damned… stinkin’… drunk.”
He closed his eyes. Fought to open them. Closed them again.
And passed out.
The night brought a cool breeze that wavered Edward’s hair and caressed his cheeks. He dreamed of being on a boat, floating on a current. His mind drifted, rising and falling.
He woke to the glare of the rising sun. But when he managed to lift his heavy eyelids, he saw darkness off to his right. The stars and the moon were still there, but mostly he saw darkness.
On his right.
On his left, the rising sun persisted, and when Edward lifted his painful head from the dirt on which he lay, he saw that the sun was, in fact, a floating ball of light.
Groggy, he watched it divide, becoming red and yellow. The two orbs dissolved into four, adding blue and green. They split into eight, adding orange, purple, brown, and a blinding silver. Pulsing closer, they grew larger, their shimmer more intense.
There was something else, some kind of sound he couldn’t identify, a hiss or hum or possibly distant music, as if from a radio station that had faded almost beyond hearing.
Even though his mother had said that the lights had frightened her the first time she’d seen them, Edward hadn’t expected to have the same reaction. After all, the lights had caused his mother and father to fall in love. If it hadn’t been for the lights, Edward would never have been born. His father had been so mesmerized by the lights that he’d done everything possible to try to find where they came from.
But as the colors of the lights increased before him, dispelling the darkness, what Edward felt wasn’t the fear his mother had described. It was worse than that.
It was terror.
His mother had been a fervent churchgoer. Each Sunday, she’d made Edward go with her, always staying at the back, coming in late and leaving early so that people wouldn’t see the lesions on her face.
He recalled very little of those Sunday mornings except his impatience to go and play-and a particular sermon that the minister had delivered. The subject was Christ’s transfiguration, a word that Ed- ward, then ten years old, hadn’t understood but that he asked his mother to repeat several times afterward until he memorized it- because the sermon had made an unnerving impression on him.
In the gospels, the minister had said, Christ took three of the apostles to the top of a mountain, where he transformed himself into his true radiance. His clothes became as brilliant as the sun. The light was so blinding that the apostles fell to the ground, lowering their eyes in fear. When they finally looked up again, Christ had changed back to human form.
“Rise,” he told them. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t tell others about this vision.”
The minister had used this passage to explain how glorious heaven would be, how brilliant and spellbinding. But that hadn’t made any sense to Edward. How could something be both glorious and terrifying at the same time? It seemed to him that heaven should make someone want to rush toward it rather than fall to the ground in fear.
That story about Christ’s blinding light gave Edward nightmares- perhaps because it merged with his mother’s story about the lights and his father’s disappearance. In years to come, he would often think about it. After his mother died, he even spoke to the minister about it, although the minister didn’t seem to get his point, which was that it might not be so easy to tell the difference between good and evil. If a vision of goodness made the apostles afraid, was it possible that a vision of evil would make them walk toward it? That would be logical because evil was tempting. But in a sane world, shouldn’t evil be terrifying and goodness tempting? Why was everything reversed?
“That’s God’s way of testing us,” the minister said.
“But why do we need to be tested?”
“Because our first parents were tested and failed. We are their fallen children. We need to prove that we won’t repeat their sin.”
“The choice ought to be clearer,” Edward persisted. “The story only tells me that it’s hard to know the difference. If Christ showed the apostles a vision of heaven, shouldn’t it have been so wonderful that he’d have urged them to spread the word? Why did he tell them to keep it a secret?”
“That passage isn’t clear.”
“How’s this for a theory, Reverend? What if heaven’s so radiant that it’s terrifying? Maybe people shouldn’t know what it’s really like until they finally get there and it’s too late to back out.”
“I’ll pray for your soul.”
Now the brilliance of the lights made Edward as frightened as the apostles had been at the sight of Christ’s heavenly radiance. He told himself that his re
action was wrong, that he ought to be entranced by the shimmering beauty he was finally seeing.
I came all this way and tried so hard to see you.
You’re glorious. I ought to feel awestruck.
Maybe his fear was a sign of how truly good the lights were, he thought. But then he was struck by something more than awe.
The lights changed. Clouds of the darkest thunderstorm suddenly churned within them. Lightning flashed at their core. As thunder punished his ears, he saw a figure amid the clouds, a young man in a uniform who looked like the photographs Edward had seen of his father. The man held out his hand, beckoning for Edward to step into the clouds and join him.
Edward screamed. Turning, he ran.
Without realizing it, he charged along the airstrip that his father had built and had flown from countless times, years ago. He stumbled, falling on stones, scraping his jaw. He scrambled to his feet and ran harder.
He heard a wail and realized that it was coming from him, that he couldn’t stop screaming.
The next thing he knew, people were all around him, grabbing him, trying to calm him. He’d raced all the way back to town and had been so frenzied that he hadn’t realized how far he’d gone. Standing in the middle of the main street, he was surrounded by townspeople, most of whom wore nightclothes and held lanterns or flashlights.
“Edward, what’s the matter?” his grandfather asked in alarm. “What happened to you?”
“Clouds. Lightning,” Edward blurted.
“What’s he talking about?” someone asked. “Look at the stars. The sky’s perfectly clear.”
“Lights. Clouds in the lights.”
“I smell whiskey.”
“Thunder. Saw a man in the clouds.”
“… reeks of it.”
“My father.”
“Look at the blood on his chin. He’s so drunk he fell down.”
“Edward, where’d you get the whiskey?” his grandfather demanded.
“Good’s terrifying,” Edward blurted. “So bright…”
“Too drunk to make sense.”
“Where’s my truck, Edward? Did you wreck my truck?” his grand- father asked sternly.
“Evil feels welcoming,” Edward raved.
His grandfather shook him. “Answer me, Edward. Where’s my truck?”
“Well, I’ve got better things to do than waste a good night’s sleep on a drunk,” someone said. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s go back to bed.”
“Saw my father,” Edward persisted.
“Damn it, Edward, just be honest and tell me if you wrecked my truck.”
The next morning, Edward walked to where he’d left the truck, near the old airstrip. For a long time, he stared toward the southern horizon. Had he been so drunk that he’d hallucinated?
No, he didn’t believe that. He was convinced that the whiskey had long since worn off by the time he’d seen the lights.
I wasn’t drunk when it happened. I know it! I know what I saw.
He started the truck, drove back to town, left it outside the dry- goods store, and hitchhiked two hundred miles to El Paso, where he joined the Army.
From that moment he had one ambition-to read the reports his father had written about the lights. Edward had no doubt that those reports would be hard to obtain, but he was certain of something else-that the son of a revered World War I ace would advance quickly in his military career.
He judged correctly. It turned out that many officers of importance had served with his father during the expedition into Mexico, and later in France and Germany. By 1942, after Pearl Harbor and America’s en- try into World War II, Edward had risen quickly to the rank of captain in Military Intelligence, a branch he’d pursued because it gave him the best chance of learning where his father’s reports were located.
On a rainy October afternoon, after having searched in Washing- ton, D.C., and at the Presidio in San Francisco, Edward uncovered hints that took him back to El Paso’s Fort Bliss. From a disintegrating box in a musty Quonset hut filled with hundreds of similar long- forgotten boxes, he withdrew documents that his father had written twenty-four years earlier.
They were yellow with age. The words looked painfully typed. The ink on his father’s signature had turned from blue to brown.
Edward read the reports, then read them again. And again. The text was revealing, especially the section in which his father maintained that the lights had somehow caused his student pilots to at- tack one another in night training. His father had become convinced that somehow the lights could be used as a weapon.
64
Anita had an IV line leading into her right arm. Prongs from an oxy- gen tube filled her nostrils. Behind her, a beeping monitor indicated her pulse, blood pressure, and heart rhythm.
“The doctor says you need surgery, but you’re going to be okay,” Brent told her, sitting next to her bed.
She managed to nod and raise her eyelids slightly, groggily at- tempting to see him. Her dark skin was only slightly less pale.
“The bullet broke your arm,” Brent continued. “The doctor says that’s why the pain feels so deep. The bone needs to be set.”
Again Anita managed a slight nod.
“They’re going to take you to the operating room now,” Brent said. “When you wake up, I’ll be here. That might not be the most thrilling promise. Maybe I’m the last person you want to see. All the same, like it or not, when you wake up, I’ll be here.”
Anita tried to raise her uninjured arm.
“Save your strength,” Brent said.
She reached weakly for his hand.
Brent held it.
“You did damned good today,” he told her. “You never stopped trying. You never gave up. I promise-you’ll win an Emmy. You deserve it.”
Her hand drooped. After easing it onto the bed, Brent heard foot- steps behind him. Two nurses entered, ready to wheel her to the operating room.
He went out to the echoing corridor, where hospital visitors gave him troubled looks as they passed him. His torn coat sleeve flopped at his side. His hair was rumpled and dusty. Dirt and blood smeared his suit.
His producer waited for him. “You really want to go on the air looking like that? You’ll scare the hell out of some of your viewers.”
“Good. Let them realize what it takes to get a story.”
They walked quickly toward the elevator.
“Did you see the video I got on that camera?” Brent asked.
“Dynamite. We’re editing it now.”
“I’ll do a commentary. We could use sections of it tonight, then run all the footage as a one-hour special.” Brent pressed the elevator’s down button. “The other stations won’t come near us in the ratings.”
“How are we going to connect the lights with what the guard did?”
“We don’t need to. Run the stories back to back. Viewers will make the connection on their own. We won’t be accused of misrepresenting. Get me to the viewing area. I have a feeling this story’s about to become even more sensational.”
“Sharon’s anchoring the show at the moment.” The producer braced himself as if he expected an outburst.
Brent nodded. “Why not? I’ve been hogging the camera. She deserves more airtime.”
“That’s a surprising answer, coming from you.”
“One thing Anita made me realize is, sometimes two people can get a better story.”
Brent looked down the hallway toward where Anita’s gurney appeared, the nurses wheeling her from the room.
“Is she really going to be okay?” the producer asked.
“The bullet didn’t just break her arm. It shattered bones,” Brent told him. “The doctor warned me that he might not be able to save it.”
65
In the gathering darkness, Page and Tori climbed into the Cessna. Behind them, the airport’s office had a light over the door. Other lights gleamed through the windows. Page was careful not to look in that direction. Human eyes needed thirty m
inutes to adjust fully to the dark. Bright light could ruin night vision in an instant, with the result that another thirty minutes would be required.
The only color of light that didn’t compromise night vision was red. As a consequence, the two flashlights Page kept in his flight bag came with a choice of lenses, clear or red. He switched to the latter and used a cord to hang the flashlight around his neck. Tori did the same.
In the dark, human eyes had difficulty seeing anything that was straight ahead. For that reason, Page focused on murky objects to the right and left, doing a slow scan to make sure it was safe to switch on the engine.
“Clear!” he shouted through his open window, warning anyone in the vicinity to stay away.
He turned the ignition key, and the engine roared to life. He used his left thumb to press the radio button on the Cessna’s controls, speaking into his headset’s microphone, addressing any active planes in the area.
“Rostov traffic, Cessna Four Three Alpha is taxiing to one five.”
He tested the brakes, did another scan of the shadowy area around him, and guided the plane along the yellow taxiway line.
“Tori, the way you answered that reporter’s question…”
“I told you this afternoon. For the first time, I feel as if I under- stand you. Maybe I should have asked to go along with you in your police car so I could get an idea of what you go through each day. The terrible things people do to one another.”
“I didn’t talk about them because I didn’t want you to feel what I do.”
“Thank you for trying to shield me.” She fell silent for a moment, then spoke again. “Whatever the cancer doctors say after my operation on Tuesday, whether my life is going to be short or long, I can’t imagine not sharing it with you. And I don’t want you to stop being a policeman. You’re too good at it. Now quit talking and get this crate in the air.”
Page taxied past the indistinct shapes of airplanes in the tie-down area and reached the entrance to the runway. The final checklist helped him to calm his emotions and concentrate on the task ahead.
He radioed his intentions, then increased speed along the runway. At fifty-five knots, he pulled back the yoke. The plane rose through the darkness.
The Shimmer Page 27