Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  “Maybe,” she said, very softly, very sleepily.

  She took my lower lip between her teeth and pulled on it gently. Then she let it go. Again she bit it softly, again let go. Her hand moved slowly down my back and around the front of my thigh.

  “Oh, my,” she said, feeling between my legs. “We do have a boner here, don’t we?”

  I began to shudder, to whimper. I thought I heard the cat cry out. I felt myself filling with pleasure beyond my control, beyond my comprehending. Rochelle smiled.... And from the glow of her smile appeared the image of Rosa Pagliano, shining in the darkness like the smile itself.

  Rosa laughed, her head thrown back in delight. In her eyes was a little bit of anger. She sang, “And I’ll not marry at all, at all, and I’ll not marry at all . . .”

  “That’s all there is,” said Rochelle. “It wasn’t so bad now, was it?”

  “I’m all wet,” I said. “And it’s all sticky.”

  “That’s just the way it is. There’s nothing to feel bad about.”

  “But, Rochelle, that’s all? All?”

  Raw, bewildered, half blind, I stood beside her in the darkened hallway. After a moment she took my hand. Gently she led me to the stairs.

  “Come,” she said. “Let’s play a game of chess.”

  PART THREE

  MIAMI AIRPORT

  [MARCH 1966]

  CHAPTER 12

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1963. THAT DAY, TWO AND A HALF years past, comes as plainly into focus as if I were living it now. The beginning of the first full week of ninth grade. First-period bell about to ring, calling us maybe to English class? Social studies? Algebra II?

  I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

  Instead I was on my way to Miami with Julian—yes, Julian—to track down the book that had lain beside Jessup’s corpse. The sun rose as we crossed the state line into Florida. All night we’d been traveling. My leg ached from hours of keeping my foot steady on the gas. Palm trees, which I’d never seen before, emerged in the brightening light on either side of the highway. In the passenger seat Julian shook himself awake. After a minute he finished yawning.

  “I had a dream yesterday,” I said.

  “So did we all.”

  “But it’s in my head now. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “And I’ll bet I’m about to hear it.”

  I laughed, waited for him to object. He didn’t. All for the best, really, that it was Julian and not Rochelle on the seat beside me. This dream, so to speak, I could never have told Rochelle.

  “It was this past June,” I said. “The eighth-grade end-of-year dance. The night was pretty warm, and everybody was in the school gym dancing. Except me and some of the other kids . . . like, I’ve never learned to dance—”

  Had Julian? My guess was that he danced, if at all, as miserably as he sang. But we never talked about such things; there’d been no time. Evenings, all that summer, I rode off on my bicycle to meet him at the Kellerfield shopping center, about a mile from my home. For the next hour or two, in Julian’s old blue Pontiac, we practiced highway driving and when to go through a yellow light, three-point turns, and remembering to put in the clutch while braking so as not to kill the engine. I learned slowly; he was patient. When the time came to test, he was my only examiner.

  “Go on,” he said.

  I hadn’t realized I’d been silent so long, sunk in memory. “It was hot in that gym,” I said. “They were playing the song ‘I love him, I love him, and where he goes I’ll follow, I’ll follow . . .’ You know that one?”

  “Sure. Peggy March.” He sang, “ ‘From now until forever, forever,’ ” in an unrecognizable tune. “Now back to the dream.”

  “And this girl came up to me”—she was Rosa Pagliano, but I didn’t want to say her name. That would be bad luck. “She’s cute, and very smart. Also kind of—you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “Wild,” I said, and felt myself blush.

  “Aha,” said Julian.

  This wasn’t really a dream, but he couldn’t have known that. I remembered the gym lit all pink and purple and how it smelled of perfume and sweat. My gut stirred when I saw Rosa and realized it was me she was walking toward. I wanted to run away. I wanted to go to the bathroom. Jeff was with me, and some of his buddies, but she paid him no attention. Didn’t say hi to him, even though he’d liked her first. Even though, until the December night when he and I talked outside the Kellerfield library, I hadn’t known I could like any girl in that way.

  That’s one reason he and I fought after she was gone.

  “On her lip,” I told Julian, “she had little beads of sweat. Her dress was damp at the armpits. I could smell her ten feet away,” I said, and remembered how I’d been stirred by that raw scent of her.

  “Awful lot of detail, for a dream.”

  “Do you want to hear it or don’t you?”

  “Sorry. Of course I want to hear.”

  “And she said—she said to me, ‘Dance?’ ”

  It sounded trivial, anticlimactic, when I said it. It hadn’t felt that way at the time. Though my eyes were fixed on Rosa, I felt Jeff watching to see what I’d do. I felt my mother also watching, from the rafters of the gymnasium. Maybe that was why I did what I did.

  “And then?”

  “ ‘And then’ nothing. I woke up.”

  “Ay-ay-ay!” Julian’s groan turned into a massive yawn. He stretched, arching his long body up from the seat; his knuckles pressed against the roof of the car. “And I thought this’d be a dream worth hearing! You say she’s a looker?”

  “Prettiest in our class,” I said, maybe exaggerating a bit. You’ve seen her, Julian, I wanted to say. She followed us to your car that day back in April. But I didn’t.

  “And wild?”

  “Yeah. I guess wild.”

  “In what way?”

  I felt queasy and hopeless. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I wished it were Rochelle in the car with me, the way it was supposed to be. I just grunted and hoped he’d catch on and leave me alone.

  “Come on, you’ve got to tell. You can’t leave me hanging like this.”

  “For God’s sake, Julian!” It was stupid to yell; I was worn out from the long drive and irritable. I tried to keep my voice under control. “Two days after that dance she stole a bunch of money from her mother’s purse and hitchhiked to Florida. To be with her father, I think. Or maybe—”

  In homeroom, the last week of classes, we heard the news. Until school ended, nobody could talk about anything else. There were rumors about somebody else she’d gone to Florida to be with—a boy from her neighborhood, older, seventeen or eighteen. A Braxton kid.

  “When did she come back?” Julian said.

  “She never came back.”

  The road sign, JACKSONVILLE 14 MILES, whizzed by. I glanced at Julian and saw him staring at me. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “It was her mother. That crazy lady beat her with the buckle end of a belt. She’d been doing it for years. Once she lifted her skirt—this girl, I mean—and showed them to me.”

  “Showed you what?”

  “The welts. From the beatings.”

  Also the other marks, which I thought were probably cigarette burns, though Rosa never mentioned anything about that. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said again.

  “Of course it wasn’t. Whoever said it was your fault? All you did was dream about her, didn’t you?”

  Yes. I only dreamed. Sometimes ordinary dreams, sometimes wet ones. And when it was time to do something, and she was in front of me saying “Dance?” all I could do was make a dumb joke. “Never touch the stuff,” I said, and she laughed, as if that might conceivably be funny, and turned and marched off, stiff and deliberate, and I thought of those legs beneath her summer dress and how shapely they were. I never saw her again.

  Jeff and I talked about her, first week of summer vacation. It was the last time we rode our bikes together. It hit me, as we talked,
how much I’d lost at that dance and how I’d never have it again. Right in front of him I burst out crying. I tried not to; I couldn’t help it. Jeff laughed, the way I knew he would.

  “What the hell you sobbing about, you little crybaby? I’m the one who liked her! You were too chickenshit even to dance with her, when she asked you!”

  He didn’t have to say that. I kept on crying, all the harder for struggling to hold it in, and I screamed things I shouldn’t have. Later I apologized, and he said it was OK. But it wasn’t. When I phoned him to go riding again, he said he was too busy. Always he was too busy. And I don’t have a friend anymore.

  I was at the wheel when Julian and I hit Washington, on our way south. It was afternoon rush hour. I woke him to ask if he wouldn’t like me to pull over so he could drive.

  “Why would I want to do that?” he said, and went back to sleep.

  So I saw us through the maze of D.C. traffic, swinging from lane to lane, my eyes darting from inside to outside mirror and back again. There were no “moments of inattention.” Somehow I managed not to get us killed. Julian didn’t wake up.

  Then it was Virginia, and to cope with the heat, we traveled by night and slept by day. Even at night it never really cooled off. We drove with the windows open to catch all the breeze we could.

  Each place we stopped, after we crossed into Florida, I got hold of a local phone book and checked it for the name Pagliano. I took care to do this when Julian wasn’t looking. In Jacksonville there was a listing for “Pagliano, Joseph.” Her father, maybe? I phoned that morning from our motel room, just past the town, while Julian was in the shower.

  “Yeah?”

  “May I speak to Rochelle, please?”

  “Rochelle?”

  “Rosa. Sorry—I meant Rosa. Is she there?”

  What would I have said if she’d picked up the phone? Explained that I’m Jewish and she isn’t, and that was why I couldn’t dance with her, because my mother is sick and I don’t want to do anything to make her get sicker? Rosa’s always known I’m Jewish. We started to be friends in seventh grade, when one of the boys made fun of “Jew-dism” in front of me, and Rosa glared from under her thick eyebrows and called him a prejudiced bigot. She wouldn’t speak to him until he took it back.

  On the other end of the line—silence.

  I started babbling. “I’m a friend of hers from school, and I know she’s in Florida, but I don’t know where, and I thought you might be her father—”

  “You got the wrong number, mister.”

  A loud click; that was all. From the bathroom the shower roared. Julian began to sing.

  Julian also made phone calls. He made them from motel rooms in the late afternoons, after he’d gotten up and I was still more or less asleep. His voice drifted into my mind, weaving its way among my dreams. I kept imagining I heard him tell the operator to charge the calls to Albert K. Bender.

  Bender? The Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who’d been silenced ten years earlier by the men in black? Why should he be paying for Julian’s telephone calls?

  Julian made a call from Jacksonville, before we were to begin the final night’s drive to Miami. “Good news,” he said when he hung up. “Rochelle’s flying into Miami tomorrow night. Ten-oh-four P.M. We’re to pick her up at the airport.”

  I sat up in bed. Thirty seconds before, I’d been asleep. My dream—of school, of the kids, of a classroom without Rosa anymore—was already vanishing, like a balloon floating up out of reach. I didn’t know whether my heart was pounding because of the dream or from what Julian had just said.

  “From New Mexico?” I said.

  “That’s right. She’s finished in New Mexico. She said there’s nothing for us there.”

  “What did she expect there to be?”

  Julian didn’t answer. The night before we left Pennsylvania, he’d phoned to say I’d be traveling with him, not Rochelle, as we’d planned. I felt relief, then disappointment, then relief once more. Rochelle had been called to New Mexico, he said, on urgent business. He never would tell me what. Probably, if I’d asked, he would have told me the thing I really wanted to know: whether she and Tom had gone together. But I never dared ask.

  “She’s sure the book’s in the old Jessup house,” he said, opening his suitcase onto his bed. “We’ll be going in after it.”

  I stood up and began pulling on my clothes. I’d already heard Rochelle’s theory: the book had been retrieved from the police by Jessup’s occultist friends, who hid it in the dead man’s house so his ghost could claim it at leisure. The part about our “going in” was new and ominous. I decided I’d better let it ride, concentrate on getting dressed and packed. Then I decided I’d better not.

  “What do you mean, ‘going in’?” I said.

  “Just that. Going in. Without the current owners’ permission. Without even their knowledge, we hope—Why are you gaping like that?”

  “I really didn’t think,” I said, “that by joining the Super-Science Society I’d be embarking on a life of crime.”

  He sighed. “I wouldn’t put it so dramatically. We’re hardly talking about a life of crime, at least not at this stage. All we’re going to steal is the annotated Case for the UFO, which the people who bought Jessup’s house don’t even know is there. We’re not going to touch any of their property. Unless you’ve developed a taste for brass candlesticks? Ornamental clocks?”

  “Well, of course I haven’t—”

  “Assuming the book really is there, of course. But that’s Rochelle for you. Once she gets an idea into her head, she won’t leave it alone until she’s tested it. Whatever that may take.”

  “Julian, I know finding this book is important. But there are limits,Julian.”

  “Not for us, there won’t be. Once we have it.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Oh, you know . . .” He mashed down the laundry bag where we kept our dirty underwear, preparatory to squeezing it into his suitcase. I reassured myself that probably I did know—had known, since we’d begun planning this trip. If Rochelle’s recollections of the book were even partway accurate, it would be our portal to flight. Invisibility. Galactic journeyings beyond anything NASA could conceive, or the Russians either. That must have been the kind of thing Julian meant by “no limits.” Wasn’t it?

  “But burglary, Julian?”

  “Oh, that. Is that what you’re worried about? No need. Rochelle’ll be with us. She’ll see to it the job’s done right.”

  This was evidently meant as reassurance. It didn’t feel that way. “You mean, Rochelle has done this kind of thing before?”

  “Oh, dozens of times. Hundreds, maybe.... Close your mouth, Danny, or the bugs will fly in! Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?”

  “Rochelle is a burglar?”

  “Not just her. Usually there’s two or three helping her, though in a pinch she’s been known to do it all herself. Fascinating modus operandi. But of course you already know it.”

  “How the hell would I know Rochelle’s modus operandi?”

  He closed his suitcase, sat on it to keep it shut, and clicked the latches into place. Then he slid off, planting himself on his bed like a teacher poised to lecture. Damn hot in here. With one of my socks I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

  “She does the advance work,” Julian said. “Picks out the target house, rings the doorbell some afternoon. Tells the lady of the house she’s a coed, from whatever college happens to be in the vicinity. She looks mature enough to pass as a college student, especially when she’s wearing her glasses instead of contact lenses.”

  “Coed,” I said.

  “Says she’s doing a survey, for some kind of course—”

  “Like a sociology course,” I said. “At Temple University, for instance.”

  Lights going on inside, I see! More like flashbulbs, popping all over my brain. And Julian saw nothing, nothing at all. I sat down on my bed, opposite him; I didn’t trust my legs to keep me vertical.
He rattled on. “She gets the lady talking about herself. About her family, what kinds of lives they lead. The poor woman won’t even notice she’s broadcast a schedule of the times there’ll be nobody home, sometimes for weeks to come. When they’ll all be at the movies—”

  “Or at their grandmother’s in Trenton,” I said. “For their Shabbes dinner.”

  “Yes, exactly. . . . Usually she gets a tour of the house. All sorts of fascinating information. Windows that tend to be left unlocked—”

  “You, you, you—”

  “Not that we need it most of the time. Me, I don’t have Rochelle’s charm. But I’ve got a positive genius for locks. It was a talent that came in handy when I was younger, just in case people lost their keys to their home or their car. Or locked themselves out absentmindedly, the way people do—”

  “You son of a bitch!” And I gave a howl that felt like it tore out my stomach.

  Next thing I knew he was beside me, arm around my shoulders. “Danny! I’m so sorry! I didn’t imagine—I mean, I thought you knew! I thought you’d figured it out ages ago!”

  How was I supposed to have—But I wasn’t going to give him one more chance to show how smart he was, how dumb I am. “You broke into my house! You dirty, shitty, rotten—”

  I imagined his long fingers, now reassuringly grasping my shoulder, testing the lock in our doorknob. Transmitting to his brain the magic of how it might open without a key. I imagined Rochelle in my bedroom, a place I’d fantasized her more times than I cared to remember. But not in this way, an intruder, come to steal what was most precious to me. Tears rose in my throat; this time I would keep them safely within. I would take those fingers of his instead and break them one by one.

  “You sons of bitches! All of you—you, Tom, Rochelle—” I paused to think whether Rochelle could be called son of a bitch, or “daughter of a bitch,” or maybe just bitch, and this felt so absurd I almost started laughing. “You stole my book!”

  “Your book?” Julian looked confused, as if I’d had some magic annotated book, like the one we’d driven to Florida to find. “Oh. You mean those typed-up chapters you kept in your briefcase. Three Men in Black, and all that. Your story about the UFO fluttering down on top of you, exactly twenty-nine days before we paid our visit. Pure coincidence, of course. But it gave us the idea for the phone call.”