by John Shirley
Instead, she decided that it would be okay if they ripped off some drinks and got a little loose, just a little. He could even kiss her, and touch her breasts if he wasn’t too heavy about it. So she said, “You want to see if we can steal some of that peach schnapps? My mom doesn’t notice how much there is. My dad’s not supposed to drink, but my mom has a drink sometimes.”
“Sure, schnapps, whatever. I got sick once on peppermint schnapps, though—don’t ever offer me that peppermint kind. Hey, what the fuck is that?”
He was staring past her into the sky over Rattlesnake Canyon. That’s what the kids called it, because the animal control workers came out once a year to put rattlesnake traps up around there. It was really just some nameless little ravine at the end of a dead-end street, with a tiny creek you couldn’t see for the bushes, a trickle that dried up much of the year. Steep slopes choked with undergrowth, shadowed by pines. It would be pitch-dark now, a hostile place defended by ticks and poison oak and rattlers. One time she’d seen a procession of migrating California brown tarantulas coming out of it; you could almost hear cartoony theme music accompanying them as they tiptoed along. Freaked out some of the ladies of the street.
But now there was a screaming in the sky over Rattlesnake Canyon.
A screaming light that seemed to hang there, coruscating, keening to itself as if an extra-big star was having a raving anxiety attack. And then as they watched it—
The burning light arced down, screaming more loudly as it came, as if it were terrified of the impact—
And struck somewhere beyond Rattlesnake Canyon, on the far side of the protected watershed.
About a second and a half after it came down, the shock wave reached them, the ground shivering, carrying with it the ow-oomp! of its impact. A flash of light outlined the piney skyline blue-white. Leaves quivered down from the maple tree looming over the sidewalk as the ground shook. Adair grabbed at Waylon to hold on, and he instinctively put his arm around her.
Then the dogs started up, every last one barking all at once, all over Quiebra Valley.
He realized he’d put his arm around her, and she realized she’d grabbed him. They stepped self-consciously away from one another. She looked at him.
But he was staring toward the place the screaming light had come down.
She looked toward the canyon.
“God! What was it? Shit, it musta been an airplane crash!” she burst out, to cover her embarrassment. “Maybe the terrorists blew a plane up—or crashed it into the refinery! There’s a refinery over that way! God, if it was that, we got to get out of the area—it’ll poison the whole town!”
“A plane? No fucking way!” He spoke without looking at her, not taking his eyes off the horizon. “It was a fucking UFO crash! That is so tight! We gotta get there before the Majestic 12 assholes cover it up!”
He was already hurrying toward the gulch.
“Waylon? Wait up!”
“A fucking crashed UFO, dude!”
Adair sighed. She didn’t like it when guys called her dude, though the term had nearly lost its gender. “A UFO? Yeah, right. Way more likely a—a helicopter or something. Or a meteor.”
She started after him. He was almost running now, toward Rattlesnake Canyon, faster and faster.
“Wha-at? The way it hovered there before it crashed?” he called to her, over his shoulder.
“It was probably coming right toward us so it only looked like it was hovering.”
They were running toward the dark tangled brush at the dead end of the street. People were coming out on their porches, their balconies, shouting from house to house, looking for the source of the commotion.
Then Adair grabbed his arm and, puffing, pulled Waylon to a stop. “Wait wait wait! We can’t go through the canyon, there’s no path, it’d take all night and we’d get all poison-oaked up. It’s overgrown like big-time.”
“So what! This could be really cool—”
“I know, I know, but we got to get there some other way. It looked to me like it came down by Suisun Bay—where the Sacramento River comes out before it gets to be San Francisco Bay.”
He snorted a laugh and shook his head. “You talk like I’m supposed to know where that is. Christ!”
“I know the bays around here because my dad’s a commercial diver—oh, just come on!”
By the time they got her cousin Mason away from his bong and into his van, got gas in it, and got him to make the necessary turns, there were already state troopers, two trucks of firemen, several coastguardsmen, a couple of sheriff ’s deputies, and three or four dozen onlookers at the crash site. Probing lights were stabbing around, but most of them were focused into what Adair supposed was the site itself, under a disused dock beside a closed-down seafood restaurant overlooking Suisun Bay.
Maybe half a mile to the west, the Carquinez Bridge made a black-iron silhouette against the sky, its girders picked out in lamplights, its roadbed streaked with headlights.
The crash site was yellow-taped, but most of the cops, along with the firemen and the coasties on the small white cruiser idling in the water near the smashed-in dock, were staring into the steaming gap where thick beams had been smashed into smoking flinders. The dock itself had crunched down into the water.
Adair and Waylon and Mason got out of the van, and all the men in uniform ignored them. Firemen in yellow slickers stood by with fire extinguishers and hoses, but there was no fire to put out.
“The fucking thing smashed right through the dock!” Waylon said.
“Whoa,” Mason said. Which was more or less what he said to almost anything.
“See that shit down there,” Waylon said, pushing through a crowd of ogling college students, right up against the yellow tape. “That thing down there’s glowing, man.”
Adair looked and shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s just the lights on the dust and stuff. You can’t make out much of anything.”
“It’s a fucking UFO,” Waylon said. “I’m telling you. But they’re gonna say it’s a fucking weather balloon.”
“Huh,” Mason said skeptically, gazing at the broken-backed dock. He had his trenchcoat on, was scratching meditatively in his scraggly overgrown soul patch. He had floppy pants hanging off his ass and an Enjoi Skateboards T-shirt under the long, greasy coat. Mason was almost thirty-three but dressed fourteen years too young. “A UFO. I dunno, dood.”
Adair said, “If we could just get closer . . .”
“Wouldn’t, were I you—that stuff ’s probably radioactive,” said an owlish college student with large round glasses, lank blond hair parted down the middle. Campus Republican at Diablo Valley CC, Adair supposed. He wore the kind of shirt that should have a pocket protector, and he did have the pompous air. “Best let the authorities handle this.” His smug condescension was familiar to her, and then she recognized him: Larry Gunderston, a senior when she’d been a freshman, college student this year.
“Riiiiiiight,” Waylon said, snorting. “Trust authority! Buy Enron!”
Then it was Waylon who was looking past Gunderston, at the sky, and Adair who was saying, “What are you looking at?”
“Shit. They’re here.”
“Who?”
“Majestic 12. It’s all laid out in this book I got. I mean, it’s like . . . even in a PC game, Deus Ex—”
“That’s all, like, urban myth,” Adair said.
Mason bobbed his head at that. “Yeah, huh. I saw this thing on the Discovery channel, at my aunt’s house. Most of that shit isn’t true, that black helicopters shit—”
That was the moment the black helicopter landed.
Beating the air with its blades, rattling the asphalt with blown leaves, the chopper came down on the weedy driveway of the abandoned, boarded-up restaurant. There was a designation on its tail, D-23, but otherwise it was dark and unmarked. The men who got out, however, wore uniforms.
“U.S. Air Force,” Waylon muttered. “I’m telling you—probably the team t
hey send out whenever there’s a crashed saucer.”
“Actually,” a black deputy sheriff said, smiling broadly as he walked along the yellow tape toward them, “it’s a crashed satellite, what I hear.” He glanced toward the water. “Funny thing is, I had two reports it crashed out in the middle of the bay. So how’d it get clear over here?”
Waylon was staring at the three uniformed men who’d arrived in the chopper. They were talking to the cops, pointing up the road. One of them was definitely carrying a Geiger counter.
“What else I hear,” the deputy said, “it’s all melted half to slag, but you can see that’s what it is, a satellite kinda deal. NASA on the side and everything. All they’ll say about it is, ‘It’s one of the smaller ones.’ ” His broad smile shone toothily in the dimness; he was a big guy, straining his uniform, and he was sweating though the wind had risen, brisk now. Adair thought she recognized him from the D.A.R.E. program at school. She looked at his name tag. SPRAGUE.
“I remember you,” Adair said. “What up, Deputy Dawg.”
Mason shot her a Be cool, I’m holding! look.
But Deputy Sprague smiled at her. “Hey, I remember—you were the one calling me that. Where was it, over at Quiebra High, right? How those Cougars doing?”
“They suck.”
“That’s what I heard. Listen, you kids need to get on home. Nothing cool going to happen now, we all just waitin’ around till they can get a salvage rig out here, and that’s going to take hours—”
“Nothing cool, he says!” Waylon blurted. “Deputy, a black helicopter just landed and some spooky guys just got out. I mean, they’re probably military intelligence—so like, what?”
Deputy Sprague chuckled and shook his head. “Son—” “Waylon’s sort of excitable about stuff like that,” Adair said, and instantly regretted it when Waylon shot her a look.
“What I think is interesting,” Gunderston said, “is that they must’ve been tracking this thing, but there was nothing about it on TV, the Internet—nothing. When that other satellite fell in the ocean near Australia, the whole world was watching.”
“Exactly, dude!” Waylon said. “And those guys in the black chopper—they’re like secret operatives and shit—”
“I got it on the radio, son,” Deputy Sprague said, chuckling. “They’re Air Force guys who’ve been tracking this thing, is all. That’s not a black chopper, that’s dark green. And it probably wasn’t on TV because it caught them by surprise, too. It fell with no damn warning.” He went into more of a cop mode, his body language changing to emanate authority as he raised his hands palms outward. “Now, ya’ll move on out—they’re not even letting the Channel Five people down here. Everybody got to go—that’s all of you folks!”
Adair looked closer at the helicopter, its rotors still whirling. “Okay, it’s dark green.”
Waylon whispered to her, “We should try to get around the cops, get closer—”
But then it hit her. Salvage!
“Deputy Sprague, my dad does commercial diving and salvage— and he’s only a mile from here!”
“If he gets his rig out here . . . I mean, hon, I can’t guarantee—”
“Mason! We gotta go! Now! I gotta tell my dad!”
“Whatever,” Mason said agreeably.
“Okay,” Waylon said, as they trotted back to the van, “but I’m going to get out at the top of the road and circle back through the brush up there. I’m gonna watch this thing.”
“Whoa,” Mason said. “You are insane in the fucking membrane, cuz, ya kna’mean?”
Dad was in his pajamas, in his open bathrobe, in his slippers, and in a funk of depression—he’d probably gone off his meds again—leaving his personal imprint on the living room sofa. He was hunched, scowling, over an old, scratched-up acoustic guitar. “I can’t remember the chords anymore,” he muttered as Adair came in.
Dad’s long face and long nose seemed longer when he was depressed, because his head was ducked. His dark eyes seemed more like a lost bloodhound’s.
She wondered for a moment if he was going to have another breakdown. There’d been only that one time; he’d just sort of frozen up, like a computer running too many programs, and wouldn’t speak for two days, shook his head. He’d hung around in his pajamas a lot before that, too.
But she remembered, then, going to work on the boat with him when she was little: how proud she’d been seeing him in his diving gear, grinning at her, giving her a thumbs-up as he went over the side.
More than once he’d saved lives. People stuck belowdecks in boats run aground, the hold slowly filling.
It was hard to remember that guy, looking at him now.
“Dad, there’s a salvage job! Right this minute!”
He struck a sour chord and shook his head mournfully. “Now? They have to contract with me—”
“Nick?”
Mom came from the kitchen, a sponge in her hand, shaking her head with that practiced expression of disgusted amazement she had. “You need work? Hel-lo? Sometimes you have to go where the work is?” She looked at Adair. Her sharp features, those forever-down-turned lips, seemed skeptical, disbelieving anytime she looked at Adair. “Where’s the job, Adair? And why are you jumping up and down, like there’s ants in your drawers?”
“I’m trying to tell you that—that there was a crash !” She didn’t want to say that it was a satellite. Explaining would just mean more delay.
“A car? Someone run off a pier?”
“No, it’s a—an aircraft or something. A small craft kind of thing. Dad, there’s government guys out there. It’s at the end of Norton Slough Road—where that old dock was, on Suisun Bay?”
Mom looked interested. Government checks could be pretty big, for divers. She walked across to her husband on her quick, small feet and firmly took the guitar from his hands. He didn’t react except with his usual slumped appearance of passive hurt, which was, Adair knew dimly, some indirect form of aggression.
“Nick, we need the money. No matter what you and I decide to do—the money’s going to be necessary. Get up and get over there. Don’t even go to the boat, your gear’s ready in the truck.”
“I don’t think I could right now—”
“Nick!”
He twitched at the sharp, barking syllable, rather more than he needed to, and sighed deeply, got up, grunting with apparent effort, and went into the bedroom to change. Adair wondered if Dad had already decided to go, but he’d forced Mom to yell at him so he could make her look like a bitch again.
A guitar stand stood beside the sofa in the cluttered, untidy living room. Adair thought there was almost an affection, a wistfulness, when Mom walked over and put the guitar on the stand. The way you put an urn with the ashes of the dead on a mantel.
“Mom, what’d you mean?”
Silkie, their Siamese cat, jumped up onto the little lamp table beside Adair, exactly where she wasn’t supposed to be. An old cat, with kinked tail and patchy fur. Instead of pushing her off the table, Adair gave her what she’d come up there for, a scratch behind the ears, a rub on the top of the head. “Silkie silk, you old silkie silk.” Silkie looked up at her with cloudy eyes and gave out a gravelly noise of response. But Adair was still waiting for her mom to reply.
Mom ran her chewed-up nails through her wispy hair. “What’d I mean about what?”
“You said something to Dad just now about ‘no matter what you and I decide to do.’ ”
“Nothing in particular.” Mom turned to go back to the kitchen.
Cal was there suddenly, in the doorway to the hall that led to his bedroom. “She meant the divorce. They’re talking about getting a divorce.”
“Cal?” Mom didn’t look at him as she spoke. She went into the kitchen, saying, “Don’t talk when you don’t know what you’re talking about. I realize that’s hard, when you’re almost a grand total of nineteen years old, but just don’t.” The rest of it half-muted, coming from the next room. “—just try.”
Cal looked at Adair, then tilted his head toward the backyard and went down the hall to the back door. She knew what that meant. She went out the front way—holding the front door open for Silkie to go out, too—and walked around the house through grass a month overdue for cutting. Silkie vanished into the shadows.
Adair met Cal beside the rain-warped glider in the backyard; the yard with its high grass and small lemon tree. Even in November, there were dewy lemons in it. She couldn’t remember why they’d started meeting in the backyard that way. It started about the time they felt their parents were listening in on them.
“You’re full of shit,” she said as she walked up to him. “They’re, all, scowly and mean twenty-four/seven, it’s been like that for years. Nothing’s any worse than before. They’re not breaking up.”
“That’s funny you saying I’m full of shit—when you’re steaming it from the ears. Beyond that, of course, you suck.”
“You suck, moron,” she answered, as expected.
“You suck, retard-o-girl.” Then in his world-weary explaining-things-to-the-little-sister voice, he said, “But no, uh-uh, that’s totally what they’re talking about—divorce. Dad’s all stressed out about money and they just . . . hate each other.”
His voice broke, just barely, when he said those last three words.
“They don’t. Oh, hey, you should see what happened over at Suisun Bay. I didn’t want to say it, they wouldn’t believe me. The cop there said it’s a crashed satellite! What if Dad could be their salvage guy? That would be, all, national TV news and shit. He could get some big-ass work from that.”