FSF, January 2008

by Spilogale Authors

"What kind of professor are you, anyway?” he asked as he wrenched open the door of his crumbling F-150. Her reply was lost in the squeal of the hinges. “Say again?"

  "Physics,” she said. He started the truck and drove away.

  * * * *

  He found where she'd had her incident, but Little Boozy Boswell had gotten there first. Crap crapity crap, thought Ken. A physics professor and Little Boozy. If it wasn't after Memorial Day, I'd shut down and go bass fishing.

  Little Boozy—so monikered because his father had been nicknamed Boozy since the Depression—was squatting on his considerable haunches examining the mess in the westbound lanes of US-12, right by the turnoff to the state park. Ken pulled across the road and sat idling on the shoulder, facing the wrong way so he could talk to Little Boozy through the passenger window.

  "It's another one, Ken,” Little Boozy said. He shifted his weight as a car blew by in the opposite lane, the gust of its passage flipping Little Boozy's hair into his face.

  "Another turtle,” Ken said.

  "Hell you say.” Little Boozy was prone to theories, one of which held that Wamplers Lake had a colony of aquatic lizard-men living in its depths. Ken had pointed out that Wamplers was only thirty-nine feet deep, which meant that if the lizard-men had two-story houses, they'd have fish finders bouncing off their roofs all the time. Little Boozy's reaction was to expand his theory to accommodate a subterranean city below the lakebed. Ken, in turn, had expanded his assessment of Little Boozy to accommodate the possibility of fetal alcohol syndrome or plain animal stupidity. Which was not to say that he genuinely thought the scrambled mess of gray, green, and red on the pavement was a turtle—it wasn't—but he did not for a second believe that there were lizard-men in Wamplers Lake. The truth, which Ken had approached in minute increments over his years at Mystery Hill, was much stranger. And now he had a physics professor to deal with.

  He got out of the truck and went over to stand next to Little Boozy, who was displaying an impressive length of plumber's crack to those unfortunates driving west on US-12. Everything about him was big. Big beard, big gut, big mechanic's shirt flapping in the breeze. He looked like a bear hunched over a kill.

  She really nailed this one, Ken thought; there's nothing left of it. Might as well be a turtle. “If this is a lizard-man, Boozy, you couldn't prove it by me,” he said.

  "Don't you think I know what you're up to?” Little Boozy said.

  "Fact is, I don't,” Ken said.

  "Okay, smart guy,” Little Boozy said. He went to his own pickup and got a flat-bladed shovel and a plastic bucket. When he'd scooped the mess into the bucket, he clamped a lid on it and put it in the cab, then locked the doors.

  "Boozy,” said Ken. “You really think I'm going to steal your turtle?"

  Little Boozy walked up close enough that his belly brushed the buttons of Ken's shirt. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “You can make fun of dumb old Little Boozy all you want. But you stop by our place sometime, and I'll show you something'll change your mind."

  "Thanks,” Ken said. “How's tonight?"

  He'd meant it sarcastically, but it didn't come out right, and Little Boozy blinked. “Tonight,” he repeated. “Okay, then. Go down the road a piece past the house; there's an old cabin on the north side. I'll be there.” He unlocked his truck and got in. “Set you straight,” he said through the window, before roaring into a U-turn and away back down US-12.

  Now how in the hell did I manage to do that? Ken wondered. Then he remembered the physics professor wandering around his property and he dragged the F-150 through a U-turn in the other direction, hoping that Fara Whatsername hadn't found his collection.

  She hadn't, but she had done something far worse. She had unpacked real, actual scientific instruments right smack in the middle of the tour and was for the love of Christ taking measurements while tourists wandered by and took pictures of each other standing at an angle off a brick or pointing down at the part of the creek where the water flowed uphill. Ken rarely lost his temper, but seeing this brought him right up to it. He marched over to where the professor was peering into some kind of monitor, restrained himself from grabbing her arm—only because he figured she'd have him arrested—and said through gritted teeth, “I would hate to kill you in front of those kids over there. But I would hate it even worse if you kept on with your experiments. Hell of a situation you put me in."

  She held up a hand. “Shh. Almost done."

  That's a fine-looking hand, Ken thought despite himself. Strong fingers, well shaped. “Goddammit,” he growled. “Done with what?"

  "Measuring fluctuations in the local gravity. Now be quiet a minute."

  "Don't you ... what?” Fluctuations in the local gravity? Ken worked the phrase over in his head. Then worked it over again. If he wasn't mistaken, Professor Fara Oussemitski was telling him that Mystery Hill wasn't a hoax. This made him suspicious, since if she wasn't a debunker that made her a wacko, and since he'd already decided he liked her, that meant he liked one of the wackos. This contravened one of the cardinal principles of Ken Kassarjian's life, which was to disassociate himself from wackos as completely as was possible. Close on the heels of these thoughts came the realization that since he'd agreed to go over to Little Boozy's that night, that principle had been violated not once but twice in the same day, which clearly meant that he should shut down and go bass fishing on the off chance that he'd catch an unwary lizard-man over to Wamplers Lake.

  Professor Oussemitski stood. “There,” she said. A portable printer on the ground, next to whatever apparatus she'd been monitoring, started spitting out graphs and numbers.

  "There what?” Ken said.

  "Done for right now,” she said. “I'll have to look these results over and figure out what to do from there. But if things work out like I think they will, I'll have at least part of the grammar today."

  "Grammar?” Ken said.

  She gave him an appraising and faintly bemused look. “You have an office? We should probably discuss this there."

  "I've got a better idea,” he said, and went to let Jamie know.

  * * * *

  Ken had owned the same boat since 1964, a fourteen-foot War Eagle with a two-stroke Evinrude outboard that was probably illegal and certainly on its last legs. Every spring he took it apart and rebuilt it, just on general principles, and every spring he got it started after an ordeal of starter-yanking and smoke-farting. He kept it in his garage, down at the end of the dirt road that wound around the perimeter of Mystery Hill. Half an hour after Fara Oussemitski had packed up her gear, they were cruising slowly along the southern shore of Wamplers Lake. When they got to the edge of a certain cluster of lily pads, at least a couple of hundred yards from the nearest lakeside cottage, Ken cut the motor and let the boat drift. They were over a dropoff he had been fishing since he was a kid. He dug out a collapsible spinning rig he kept under one of the seats.

  "You got a license?” he asked.

  She shook her head without looking up from the pages she'd printed.

  Ken clipped on a little Mepps spinner and flipped it out along the edge of the lily pads, drawing it slowly back in and waiting for Professor Oussemitski to enlighten him. “Can take smallmouth out of here all day long,” he said, just to hear himself talk. “If the damn crappie will leave you alone."

  She was still reading. Ken had a momentary sensation of being on a bad date. “I know this guy named Little Boozy Boswell,” he said. “Little Boozy says there's lizard-men living on the bottom of this lake."

  This got her to look up. “Little Boozy?” she said. “Is there a Big Boozy?"

  "Well, Boozy used to be just Boozy, but then when Little Boozy came along, everybody started calling him Big Boozy. Believe he was a rumrunner during Prohibition. He's coming up on a hundred years old now, and Little Boozy's a lot bigger than Big Boozy. But they're both crazy as bedbugs."

  A little smile was trying not to show itself on Fara Oussemitski's face. “What abo
ut these lizard-men?"

  Ken deliberated. “What about fluctuations in my gravity?"

  "Your gravity?"

  Annoyed, Ken snapped off a longer cast this time and the Mepps landed eight feet into the lily pads. “You know goddamn well what I mean,” he said. Certain that if he looked at her she would be smiling, and that if he saw her smiling he would either kiss her or throw her out of the boat, he concentrated on extricating the Mepps from its lily-pad prison. In the back of his mind he was wondering how many lures he'd lost in this spot. At least one a year, was his initial reckoning. After a couple of minutes hauling this way and that, he lost this one, too.

  While he was tying a new leader on, Professor Oussemitski said, “Which do you want first, the weird part or the weirder part?"

  Ken shrugged. “Professor, there is nothing you can say any weirder than the stuff I hear from the crowd who thinks I'm a Reptilian. You go ahead and tell it the way it makes sense to you."

  She laughed. “Well, it might or might not make sense whichever way I tell it. And it's Fara."

  Oh, is it, thought Ken. Then he cut himself off at the knees. She isn't flirting with you, dumbass, he told himself. You're thirty years older than she is, twenty-five at least, and physics professors don't flirt with proprietors of shady roadside attractions.

  Only maybe she was about to tell him that his attraction wasn't quite as shady as he'd imagined.

  "Ever hear of string theory?” she asked him.

  "Matter of fact, I have,” Ken said. “There is a segment of my clientele that believes my little piece of the Irish Hills is some kind of interdimensional vortex. Some of ‘em go into the creek right where it runs uphill, and they do something, some kind of interpretive dance maybe, that's supposed to get them sucked through into another dimension. I never seen it work."

  Fara was staring at him with her lips slightly pursed. “Not that I believe it,” Ken added. He found another Mepps, dropped it back in the tackle box, and went for a rubber worm that bore the marks of maybe twenty years’ worth of smallmouth bass.

  "Well,” Fara said. “That is interesting. So you know about the multiple dimensions?"

  "Yup. And the ... what are they called, branes or something? Calabi-Yau spaces?"

  She broke into a brilliant smile. “Ken, this is not at all what I expected when I came out here."

  "I'm going to take that as a compliment rather than an assumption on your part that anyone who runs a place like Mystery Hill is a conniving bumpkin."

  "So it was meant,” she said. “Well ... hm. I'll tell you in a minute, but the fact that you're not a conniving bumpkin has distracted me. Tell me something: why do you do this?"

  "Go fishing with physics professors?"

  "Run a tourist trap that everyone thinks is fake."

  Ken cast, landing the worm perfectly along the edge of the lily pads, and reeled it slowly back in, giving it a little flip every so often so the fish wouldn't get bored as they watched it go by. “You think it's fake?"

  "We'll get to that. First answer my question."

  "All right,” he said. “I came here in 1973, when I got home from Vietnam. Just driving down the road and saw the place, stopped in to see if I could spot the gag. And what happened was first of all, I liked it, and second of all there was this big vanload of kids from some summer camp. That's what did it. Man, they loved that place. I thought to myself, I wouldn't mind working here if it meant I could be around kids that happy all the time. So I went looking for whoever was running it, and met this old bird named Ford Albritton. I asked him if there was any work, and he said—I'll never forget this—'Hell, son, you got ten thousand dollars you can have the place. I got cancer of the tongue and I don't plan on dying in this ticket booth.'

  "Well, I didn't have ten thousand dollars, but I did have a stepfather who was an exec at GM, and he cosigned a loan for me, and now it's thirty-three years later and I'm still here."

  "Huh,” Fara said. She was looking out over the lake. Ken was struck by a sudden wish for a lizard-man to appear, just so they'd stop talking about him. “That's a sweet story."

  Ken shrugged and flipped the worm out toward the lily pads again. “Problem is, all those kids come back, and some of them have turned into Reptilian wackos in the meantime. I still love ‘em, but sometimes I wish I could make a rule that nobody old enough to vote can go past the minigolf course. Although the kids around here aren't any picnic, either. Teenagers, I mean. The little ones are fine. But I got enough problems with the older ones that I'd just as soon jackhammer up the goddamn minigolf course and plant tomatoes. Damn, where are all the fish today?"

  "Maybe we're talking too much. We should be quiet."

  "If we're quiet, I'll never find out about fluctuations in my gravity.” Plus that comment about grammar, Ken thought.

  "Well, do you want information or fish?"

  "Don't feel like waiting for the fish.” Ken reeled in the worm, picked a stray bit of leafy flotsam from one of its hooks, and stowed the rod.

  Fara waited, sipping from her bottle of water. “Okay. So you know about the eleven-dimension thing, and you know what a brane is.” Ken nodded. “Where gravity comes in is interesting, because it turns out that unlike all of the other strings, which are stuck in their particular brane, the strings that allow gravitons might be shaped in such a way that allows them to move between universes. If there are parallel universes."

  Ken had a lump in his throat that he was sure must look like a goiter. He swallowed and tried to play it cool. “Okay."

  "That's what would make gravity so much weaker than the other forces,” Fara went on. “It's traveled so far that it gets attenuated like sound waves propagating through an atmosphere."

  "Uh huh."

  "So I've been ... I should confess something here, Ken. This isn't the first time I've taken measurements at Mystery Hill."

  Now the lump felt like it was climbing up next to Ken's uvula. “Is that right,” he said.

  "I've kind of been sneaking in. Didn't want to bother you until I had a clearer idea of whether anything was really happening."

  She's young, she's cute, and she does guerrilla physics at tourist traps, Ken thought. This is a slobberknocker of a girl.

  "I'll understand if you're angry,” Fara said, “but I've found a couple of interesting things."

  Like the collection in the shed behind the barn? Ken wondered. He didn't say anything; if she'd seen that, he'd find out about it soon enough. “Are you about to tell me that gravity really isn't right at my place?"

  "Well,” she said with another brilliant smile, “now I don't have to."

  * * * *

  After that, he had to get back to relieve Jamie and close the place. Ken never kept it open much after dark because the local teenagers, many psychologically altered and all bored from the absence of available mischief in the Irish Hills, tended to do this weird collective pogo-jumping dance, complete with incomprehensible singing, on the seventeenth hole. Never any of the others. They'd worn the Astroturf right off number seventeen three times in the last year and a half or so. Like some kind of adolescent cult, Ken thought.

  He dropped Fara off next to her van. “Mind if I come back in the morning?” she asked.

  Do I mind, Ken thought. “What, now you're asking?"

  "Great,” she said. “See you bright and early."

  He watched her drive off feeling vaguely as if he was experiencing some kind of disturbance in his personal gravity. Here I've been fending off the bored divorcees for thirty years, he thought, and now comes the payoff. Whoops. Can't let that train of thought get very far. As penance he imagined all of the times he might have succumbed to momentary lust or ongoing loneliness and ended up with an accidental wife in the double-wide out behind the barn. Oddly, knowing that he hadn't exploited the bizarre phenomenon of tourist-trap groupies didn't make him feel any better right then. All it meant was that he was free to let his momentary crush on Fara Oussemitski go further than i
t otherwise would, which meant he was dooming himself to a big letdown when she packed up her instruments and headed back to whatever university town it was she'd come from.

  "What are you staring at?” Jamie asked him.

  He looked over at her and saw that she had positioned herself so she could follow his gaze eastbound down US-12. “Nothing,” he said. “Thinking. Little Boozy hit something on the road today and swears it's a lizard-man."

  "Little Boozy's been hitting his own stash,” Jamie said with that potent disdain available only to girls in late adolescence.

  Ken started to ask her what she meant about his stash—who else's stash would Little Boozy be hitting?—but he didn't want to know any more about Little Boozy Boswell than he was already going to find out in about an hour. He sent Jamie on her way and went around locking everything up. There were seven of the kids on number seventeen tonight. “Goddammit,” Ken said. They were in a rough circle, jumping up and down in some kind of pattern that he couldn't quite suss out, and all the while singing. Well, chanting. Reminded him of the fad for Gregorian chants that had gone around a few years before, only dissonant and kind of nauseating. Had a weird undertone like that Australian tree-branch thing. What was it called ... didgeridoo. Something like that.

  He opened the cover of the course's electrical panel and flicked the lights on and off. “Out,” he called. “All of you."

  Whatever pattern there was in the pogoing, it fell apart, and the chanting broke up. “Mr. K,” one of the kids said, “this is poor."

  Poor? Ken thought. First time I've heard that one. He had an attack of curmudgeonliness, inwardly denouncing the kids, their slang, their music, their drugs, and anything else he could think of. Then he remembered what his father had said the first time Ken had put The Doors on the family turntable.

  "Whatever,” he said. “I'm closed. Come back tomorrow."

  The kids shuffled away, but Ken could see that the dance or whatever it was hadn't quite left them. They swayed from side to side as they walked, not in the way that teenagers always do. Something rhythmic and secondhand about it, as if they were hearing and responding to invisible signals. Spooky. When they were gone, Ken went through the nightly ritual of checking all of the attractions for stowaways and/or lost items. He had, over the years, come to look forward to this part of the day, when he had Mystery Hill all to himself, and he could experience it the way he had the first day he'd come, back in 1973. On the path from the minigolf course up toward the barn, the first ripples of lightheadedness made him smile. The plumb bob hanging from a frame outside the barn was eight degrees from true, about average. The most he'd ever seen it vary was to about fifteen degrees, and when that happened he had to issue an advisory to the pregnant women who showed up. Between ten and fifteen degrees, they all started to puke, which didn't do much for business. In the barn, he stood on the strange part of the floor, looking at himself in the mirror. Eyeballing his reflection, he figured he was about ten degrees off vertical, which was a little more than average, and different from the plumb bob. Hm. Maybe he should check and see if one of the clients had messed with the frame. There were always smartasses trying to contribute their own little bits of dysfunction. Ken set a golf ball on the plank that angled up from a table to the windowsill, and it rolled up just like it was supposed to. He got a little tremor in his stomach. Fluctuations in gravity, Fara had said. Grammar.