by Joe Hill
He couldn’t look her in the face, not the whole last day she was in the house. When her suitcase was packed Gene stood by the door. A part of her wanted Walter to look at her and a part of her was afraid of what she would see in his eyes if he did.
“I’m going!” she said, in a falsely cheery voice. “I don’t think the train is due into Vilmos until after eleven, but you’ll be awake won’t you? To watch the returns?”
He nodded. He sat on the ottoman, in the blue shirt he had worn to the party the evening before. It was wrinkled from a night on the couch. He sawed his index finger back and forth over his upper lip, a thing he did when he was struggling to clamp down on his anger. She had never once seen this gesture in the first five years they were married. She had seen quite a bit of it in the last five months.
“I’ll call when I get in, if you’d like that,” she said.
“No, I don’t think I would. Because you’ll be drunk by then and I can’t stand to hear it in your voice. But it hardly matters what I want, because you’ll be drunk, and you’ll do what you like.”
“I’m not going to show up there drunk,” Gene said, and she wanted with all her heart for that to be true. She was surprised by the choke in her voice. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
“That makes two of us,” he said. He laughed without humor. “I don’t want to drive home from work at five in the afternoon, wondering if I’ll find you passed out. Or dead. I don’t want to be standing next to you at the party when you insult our friends. I don’t want to go get you a cup of punch and walk back and find you in Don Treadaway’s lap—”
“Okay.”
He went on as if she hadn’t spoken “—the both of you crocked and his hand rubbing your hip. I don’t want to have to smile like it’s all very funny when he tells me to collect you in the morning.”
She stood with her hand on the doorknob and the suitcase at her feet, beginning to shiver.
“I guess I won’t be home in time for Thanksgiving. What will you tell your parents?” she asked.
“I’ll tell them you went to a clinic to dry out.”
“You want them to know I’m a drunk?” she asked.
“They already know.”
She nodded, absorbed this as her due. Walter told his parents everything. Well—almost everything. He hadn’t mentioned the miscarriages. When the second sent her to the hospital, Walter told his mother she was being treated for a uterine cyst, which Gene supposed came in at least breathing distance of the truth.
“Will you be here when I get back?” she asked.
That finger stopped moving back and forth across his mouth and at last he lifted his gaze. He stared past her, at a point just beyond her left ear. His eyes were veiled and faraway.
“Why wouldn’t I be here? Who do you think paid for this house?”
Whether she was welcome in it anymore was apparently a subject better left for a later date.
When Gene called ahead, they said the Sunset Limited was due in at 4:15 p.m., but when she got to Union Station it had been pushed back an hour. The lobby was a stone oven and it seemed every other woman was jiggling a crying baby. The air reeked of pissy diapers. An old Black man paced between the benches, holding a battered Bible aloft, promising that neither idolaters nor adulterers nor the covetous nor drunkards would inherit the Kingdom of God. For Gene MacMurray that was all a little too on the nose. It seemed like the whole list had been drawn up with her in mind.
She found a place on a pew, put her suitcase down between her feet. She had hardly sat before an obese old woman, fragrant as a boiled cabbage, squeezed in beside her. The old girl had a fuzzy white moustache and a brown wart the size of a housefly on her right eyelid.
“I hope my train isn’t late! I have to get home and vote. I haven’t cast my ballot yet.”
“No. Me neither,” Gene said. The election had seemed so important just a few weeks ago. Now the thought of exercising the franchise was about as inviting as picking a crushed cigarette off the floor and smoking it.
“You will, though?” the old biddy asked, patting Gene’s hand. “We have to stop Kennedy. He has two Black babies in Georgia. It’s a great crime it hasn’t been more widely reported. Two chocolate babies. The New York Times knows but won’t write about it.”
“I campaigned for Kennedy.”
The old lady blinked and pulled her hand back. “He’s a fornicator. A Catholic fornicator.”
“I know. Me too. That’s why I campaigned for him.” Gene glanced at her sidelong and said, “What’s that thing on your eyelid? It looks like cancer. Have you had it checked out?”
The old lady heaved herself up to a bench across from Gene, where she could fix her with a furious glare. It nauseated Gene, the way the wart on the old woman’s eyelid quivered every time she blinked, like it was about to fall off. Or maybe it was the hangover turning Gene’s stomach sour. Either way, she ached for fresh air, needed it almost as badly as a free diver surfacing from a long plunge in the depths.
It was better outside, pacing back and forth in the last of the day, the air so clear and sharp it almost stung her nostrils, and the sunset painting the adobe a shade of cherry blossom. Her circuit took her past a taco cart, a Mexican in a serape dishing out beans and beef into flour tortillas. There was a cooler built into one end of his cart and when he lifted the steel lid, Gene saw beers buried in crushed ice. Thirst clicked in her throat and she wanted to cry. She went straight back inside and leaned against the wall, her shoulders pressed to the cool plaster.
The train would be there at five fifteen and she would get on sober. The lay preacher shouted that you could not drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. Gene said “Amen,” but under her breath. She was watching the clock over the ticket windows so intently that she missed it, at first, when they moved her train back to 7 p.m.
Gene went out again to watch the sun bury itself in the west. A star—or maybe it was Venus—gleamed all alone in the navy blue sky. She inhaled the fragrance of spicy stewed beef and her stomach responded with a comic rumble of hunger. She hadn’t eaten all day and for the first time since waking her insides weren’t knotted up with sick.
She was going to have to be strong. Sooner or later, Gene reminded herself, she was going to need to eat, and where there was food there would also be alcohol. She got in line.
There was a guy buying tacos ahead of her, a tall man in a powder blue suit, pale yellow tie and meringue-colored fedora. He smiled at her when she appeared beside him and unapologetically looked her up and down before turning back to the cook.
“One for me and one for her,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that,” Gene told him.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m on a train to Houston all night. Seven hours. I’m going to be imagining the life we aren’t going to have the whole way. The house, the kids, the sunburn I got on our fifth anniversary in Cancun.” He shook his head and clucked his tongue. “Good memories of all the stuff that didn’t happen.”
At that moment, a kid in a white linen suit dashed out of the lobby. “We gotta scram, Mr. Beaufort. Last call on our train!”
The romantic grabbed his suitcase, nudged Gene’s elbow and winked. “Ah, well. Catch you in the next life.”
“Plan on it,” she said and smiled as he grabbed a bottle and a grease-spotted bag and squeezed away into the crowd, following his junior partner.
Gene turned back to the cook, a man with the long lashes of a Hollywood ingenue and the broad, imperial features of an Aztec. He popped the cap of a Lone Star with his church key and set it down on the counter. Little flecks of ice slipped down the sides of the wet bottle. When the romantic said one for me and one for her, Gene had thought he was talking about tacos. She stared at the beer as if it were a tarantula.
“You don’ wan it?” asked the cook. “Z’cold. Z’pate for.”
Her throat clicked with thirst once more.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said.
She took the beer by the neck. “Do you know if there’s a bar car on the Sunset Limited?”
The Sunset Limited didn’t roll out of Phoenix until after eight and by the time she climbed aboard, Gene was three beers in. She felt that all her good intentions had been overruled by forces greater than herself. The hand of fate had pushed aside her well-meaning goals and handed her a tall cold one instead. Anyway, it seemed a shame not to have a drink on election night.
And the bar car was so lovely. Just sitting there made her feel sexy. She was a woman alone in a long car with mahogany-paneled walls and a lot of brass fittings. The mirror behind the counter would’ve looked just fine in a grand hotel and she was conscious of men watching her in it. She paid for her first gin and tonic. A tall olive-skinned man with bristly silver hair paid for her second. But when he started over to sit across from her, she lifted her left hand and wiggled her rings at him. He laughed and shrugged and turned back to the bar and she liked him tremendously. After that, though, she paid for her own G&Ts.
At some point she found a Southerner sitting across from her, a man with a bald head like a peeled hard-boiled egg. His boulder-like chest strained at the buttons of his wine-red silk shirt. He reminded her of an actor she knew from the horror films Walter liked, a monstrous ex-wrestler with tree trunk legs and blunt fingers. Had a name like a stone. Rock Johnson? Tor Cragson? Somehow she was holding Crag Rockstone’s fat, pasty hand and pleading with him to tell her when they got to Vilmos.
“What’s in Vilmos, darlin’?” he asked, in that syrupy voice of his, watching her with unblinking eyes.
“There’s a clinic for people like me.”
“You mean drunks?”
“Yes.”
“Now, why would you wan’ a stop drinkin’? I’m goin’ a Fort Worth. Come on with me. I’ll give you five hunnert dollars a month to be my Fort Worth girlfrien’. I’m meetin’ some Jap businessmen wanna sell me components for radios. Five hunnert to be my girlfrien’ and five hunnert more to be theirs.”
“I’m a drunk,” Gene said. “Not a whore.”
“Don’ sell yourself short, hunny. People’n be more than one thing.”
She rested her forehead on his big knuckles. “Just tell me. When we’re at Vilmos.”
He patted her head and called her his good drowsy girl. He said if she needed to doze he had a sleeper unit. She did need to doze. She felt leaden with tiredness. She also thought if she went to his sleeper car with him then, when she woke, she’d exit the train while it was still moving. She’d throw herself at the first telegraph pole she saw. In fact, she might not wait for morning. She might leap on the walk to his cabin. It would be less painful for her, she felt, in the long run.
“Did you say you’re getting off at Vilmos?” said someone else.
It was hard to lift her head. It was like it had tripled in weight, was too much for the slender stem of her neck. When she looked up, the olive-skinned man with hair like silver shavings was standing over her table. His gaze shifted rapidly from her to Block Johnson.
“Mmm,” she said.
“That’s this stop. We’re there now. You’re about to miss it.”
The Southerner rolled his eyes. Gene looked through the window and saw a concrete platform and a dainty brick station. She struggled to her feet and fell into the silver-haired man, who caught and steadied her.
The Southerner still had her other hand. “Someday you’ll remember ma offer with a real sense of pride, peach. How many women can say they know the ’zact moment they were at their peak worth?”
“Tor Johnson,” she said, suddenly, and took her hand back. “That’s who you look like. You don’t want to date me, darling. Go make out with a giant ape who’s got a TV set for a head. That’s more your speed.”
Three deep furrows appeared across the smooth egg of his forehead.
She weaved down the length of the car, descended two steps, and inhaled a deep breath of the high desert air in Vilmos, New Mexico. It smelled of blazing hot iron: a frying pan left to heat on the stove. Someone caught her elbow. It was the silver-haired man. He had come down off the train with her suitcase, which she had forgotten. He handed it to her and squeezed her arm.
“I hope you’re on your way somewhere safe,” he said. “I hope there’s someone to take care of you.”
He let go and climbed back onto the train and a moment later it shuffled out of the station in a series of jolting hisses and clanks. She watched it go. Windows flickered by. The same person stared back at her from each one: an uncanny figure wearing the mask of a girl, someone with plastic expressionless features and black holes where the eyes belonged. It took her a while to realize she was looking up at her own reflection.
A lone taxi idled in the brick turnaround, a yellow Studebaker Starlight with a round silver grille that brought to mind an airplane’s propeller. It was the past’s idea of what the future would look like, had to be ten years old...although there wasn’t a speck of road dust on it. It could’ve just rolled off the showroom floor.
The driver bent toward his radio, a guy in a satiny windbreaker the same color as his cab, an Irish flat cap on his head. He didn’t notice her swaying by the car so she hunched to rap her knuckles on the glass. He lifted his head and he had a gold coin over each eye, an image so bizarre and terrible she overbalanced and had to grab the Starlight to keep from going down.
He jumped out and hurried to her side. She searched his face with alarm—if there were coins where his eyes belonged she was going to scream. But no. His eyes were brown and friendly and gentle. She looked into the car again. The coins were still there. They hung from the rearview mirror by a delicate chain. Only a trick of her eyes had made them appear to be his. It occurred to her that she was very drunk.
The wheelman opened the rear door for her. Gene didn’t know he was helping her in until he closed the door. He carried her suitcase to the trunk for her.
News announcers spoke in news announcer voices. They were so toneless, as they discussed the election returns, it was hard to follow them. Ev e r y th i n g c a m e s o s l o w l y.
Her driver eased behind the wheel and put the flag down on the meter. It began to tick like a Geiger counter searching for radiation in a Tor Johnson movie.
“Can you take me to feels bar?” she tried, then shook her head. Her tongue was heavy and clumsy.
“Fields Bar? Is that the new place just opened in Elephant Butte?”
“No. Feels. Far. SPAR. Fees spark.” The harder she tried to say it the worse it got.
“Fieldspar!”
“That’s it. It’s a hos. Per. Tull.” Words with multiple syllables were difficult.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I know it.”
They pulled away from the curb and glided through a charming little downtown, where the roads were brick not blacktop. The barbershop was closed for the night but the striped pole glowed merrily by the frosted glass door. They passed a darkened Texaco that looked like a whitewashed Spanish chapel.
“Truth or Consequences, straight ahead.” He pointed through the windshield.
“S’true,” she agreed. She felt he had said something very profound. “Been heading toward them for a long time. S’my appoindment in Samarra.” She pronounced Samarra just right on the first try and was very pleased with herself.
He politely drove to the end of the block before he said, “Truth or Consequences...it’s a town. Fieldspar Hospital is out that way.”
“Oh. Right.” She let the car carry her along for a bit, then felt the need to offer some clarifications of her own. “I played it. When I was a kid. Truth and consaquenches. I always chose the consaquenches, never the truth. Took my underwear off and tucked it into a Coke bottle in front of the other kids. Wasn’t very ladylike but it caught my hushbin’s eye. He wasn’t my hushbin then. And he didn’t care if I was drunk. He got drunk too! He kept that Coke bottle on a windowshill in his dorm room for a long time.”
“Things go better with Coke!” her driver said, and she had to laugh. He was a clever little elf. “So what’s happening in the world? Besides the election?” He smiled at her in the rearview. “I want to know everything about everything.”
“Trains are running late. Babies have been scrying. Crying. Lone Star beer is cold. Until you drink it. Then it’s stomack tempa-sure.” She frowned and said, “Are you asking about me? What shappening to me sper-cif...sperf...spessifcally? I dropped an A-bomb on my marriage and now I’m radioactive. I’m aglow.” She considered for a time. “Din’t they drop the A-bomb shout here?”
“Near here. In Alamogordo.”
“I know Allama-gorgo,” she cried. “Hungeback of No-der-Dame, right? Nice guy. Bit of a limp. Great kisher.”
“That’s the very man. He moved out here for the sun. Not much sun in the belfry of Notre-Dame.”
She narrowed one eye to a squint. “Now you’re teasing.”
“It’s our company motto, ma’am. We aim to tease.”
When she looked out the window, the little town was gone, and the star-drowned night was wheeling over the cinder-colored desert, over the sharp peaks in the north. She had a sense not of driving, but of flight.
“I saw it,” he told her, in a tone of voice that was almost shy.
“What’dya see?”
“The A-bomb.”
“You’re skidding.”
He shook his head. “It flashed like someone took a picture with the world’s biggest camera. Like someone was trying to take a snapshot of God’s face. That’s how we said hello to the universe, after four and a half billion years of keeping to ourselves. I saw it from ten miles away, saw the sun coming up on the wrong side of the sky, and I knew right away we couldn’t un-ring that bell. No, ma’am. I knew right away it would bring folks around to check on us.” There was an update on the election. The driver cocked his head to listen. They called Louisiana for Kennedy. The driver clucked his tongue. “Seems like a nice guy—Kennedy—and I wish him all the best, but what I’d really like is if they’d say something about the World Series.”
“Why would they menjin that?” she asked. “It was last momfh. Mumth.”
“They wouldn’t mention it,” he agreed sadly. “They never mention it in November.” He looked at her in the rearview, his eyes bright as coins. “Do you remember who won? Was it Brooklyn?”
“No,” she said, with a certainty that surprised her. She couldn’t remember who won. She had been drunk most of the last few weeks of baseball season. But she was sure it hadn’t been Brooklyn, although she couldn’t have said why she was sure. They had won just a few years before, hadn’t they? Couldn’t they have won again?
The time bomb tick-tick-tick of the meter gave her a queer feeling in the head. She reached for the crank and lowered her window halfway, feeling a sudden urgency for fresh air. The night smelled of baked clay, the still-hot kiln of the painted desert. The stone-oven heat rushed in and dried the bad sweat on her forehead.
“We’re goin fash,” she said.
“This old taxi can just about go faster than light,” he said. “But not this evening. We’ll be at Fieldspar before you know it. Twenty minutes maybe?”
Twenty minutes. A dreadful number. Twenty minutes was so soon. She made a pitiful little sound in her throat, somewhere between gag and sob.
“I don’t want to go to Fieldspar.” She only realized it as she said it aloud.
“Hmm?” he asked. “Oh, ma’am.”
“I mean like this. Like I am. Like, all drunk.” Just the thought made her want to cry.
Her driver paused for a delicate moment. Then he said, “Miss? They’ve been there since before the war. They’ve seen it all. The important thing is, you’re going.”
“And I’ll take the cure.”
“That’s right.”
“I hadda idea for another kinda cure. I was goin’ jump off the train earlier. Cure for all that ails.”
The driver said, “And ruin that dress?”
She didn’t expect to laugh and was surprised when she did. “It’s my hushbin’s favorite. Was. Is. Our relationship hasn’t settled on a tense. The only thing we settled on is it’s tense.”
“Maybe you need space from each other. There’s nothing but space out here! You’ve never seen so much space.” He leaned his head to the left to look up into the vast expanse of the star-choked night. He smiled, as if he had caught sight of an old friend. Then he peeked at her in the rearview again. “What’s your name?”
“Gene. MacMurray. To whom do I have the pleasure?”
He told her.
“Wha’ kinder name is Whit Lemon? Sounds like a dessert.”
“I go down just as sweet with a black coffee.”
“Shoulda got a coffee while we were in town. Then I wouldn’t show up there drunk off my ash.” She paused, then said, “I guess you’ve probably seen a lodda folks who were drunk off their ash.”
“I’ve had all kinds in this car,” he said. “All kinds. A couple years before they dropped the bomb, I drove two men with white eyes. No pupils. No irises. Thin men in white suits. They asked me to leave them in the desert. I stopped the car in the middle of nothing and nowhere, five miles from Caddyhenge, and they got out with their briefcases and walked into the heat haze. They wobbled a bit in the melty heat coming off the desert and then they were gone.”
“Caddyhenge?”
“It’s on the way. You’ll see it. Past the drive-in. You’ll see that too. They’re having a special screening tonight. Invitation only. A political thing, actually.” He reached out and flicked one finger against the gold coins hanging from the rearview to make them dance. There was something odd about those coins. They burned and flashed as if the sun was glaring off them, even though the sun had been down for hours. “One of them—one of the thin men—paid with two silver dollars, which was about thirty-seven cents more than they owed. Only when I checked the cashbox they were these instead.”
“What a rip. Goddamn fare jumpers.”
“Not quite,” he said, fondly. “They’re worth more than you’d think. They’re better than gold, these honeys! You could pay the fare to just about anywhere with one of these coins.”
“S’right? Why, are they rare?”
“You’ve never seen any like them! Here. Take a look.” He slipped one off the chain—it happened so quickly she didn’t see how he did it—and offered it to her.
She took it from him, a gold disc big enough to almost fill the cup of her palm. It was light, as light as foil, so light she was worried she would crush it. It was deliciously cool to the touch and she shivered. It was like reaching into ice water to grasp a bottle of beer—it felt that good. There was nothing printed on either side of it, but when she closed her eyes, the gold coin left an afterimage burned on her retina, as if she had been staring directly into a lightbulb: and there did seem to be a picture in the afterimage, a sphere with needles of light jabbed through it. The sphere rotated in the darkness behind her eyes for a moment before it faded.
“What’s it made of?” she asked.
“Compressed light, I believe,” he said.
“Ha. That’s funny,” she said and tried to hand it back.
“Hold on to it, Gene,” he said. “Isn’t it nice? Like if someone minted a coin out of a mountain stream.”
“Yes,” she said.
She squeezed it a little. It felt so light, it should’ve crumpled in her hand, but it didn’t flex in the slightest. She turned it over to look at the other side—also blank—and when she shut her eyes she saw a glowing afterimage of three suns (old suns, old and red and friendly). She almost laughed again. It was the most delightful and peculiar thing, the way the coin seemed to be inscribed, but one could only see the images stamped into it when they closed their eyes.
“But you were going to tell me about what’s happening now!” he said. “I want to know everything. What are people watching on TV?”
She opened her eyes and inhaled deeply, breathing in the desert sweetness, feeling better, feeling clearer.
“The debates. Nixon looked like he’d mug you in an alley.” She thought about what Walter liked to put on. “Bonanza. Gunsmoke. Shoot-’em-ups.”
“What about girls? What are they wearing?”
She laughed. “You got eyes, don’t you?”
“Only for the road, darling.”
She said, “Mohair. Doesn’t that sound dirty? Just saying it makes me want to blush. And bikinis.”
“The hell’s that?” he licked his lips, then gave the word a try, as if saying it for the first time. “Bee-keen-ee?”
“It’s a little two-piece swimsuit. Models wear them. I’d be too shy myself. I think they look, well, like something from a grubby men’s magazine. You know what they named them after? Bikini Atoll. They’re the atom bomb of fashion.”
She shut her eyes and saw that line of old, venerable suns again. Opened them and shook herself like a dog trying to dry off. The fresh air really was helping with her head. “How come you don’t know about bikinis? They’re the biggest turn-on since Marilyn Monroe stood over a subway grate. Everyone knows bikinis. Unless you spent the last year stranded on a desert island, cut off from civilization?”
“That’s one way to describe this part of New Mexico,” he said. “Far as that goes, you could describe the whole planet the same way. What about kids? What do kids play with these days?”
“I don’t have kids,” she said and her insides clenched up and a wave of sick feeling broke over her. She put her head back against the leather seat and thoughtlessly pressed the coin to her forehead. It felt as good as her mother’s cool hand pressed to her brow during a fever. “Tried. Second one put me in the hospital. They couldn’t stop the bleeding.”
“Oh, my dear.”
“Scared my husband. Said we couldn’t try again.” Then she said, “Do you know what a rubber johnny is?” If she was sober, just the thought of asking such a question would’ve made her stiff with mortification, would’ve made her face burn.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Say no more.”
She had been raised Catholic and knew well the gloomy security of the confessional. A late-night taxi was much the same. Here, with Whit Lemon—a man she was sure she would never see again after tonight—she felt she was permitted to speak truths she could hardly permit herself to consider by the sober light of day. It helped that he was a good man. She was certain of this, had known it when he said it would be all right to arrive at Fieldspar in her current state, that they had seen it all there. And what was her current state? She was losing her good drunk feeling, couldn’t hold on to it. The taste of her own mouth made her want to brush her teeth. The feel of her dress sticking to her thighs made her want to shower.
“I hate them,” she said, but she said it softly, and after it was out of her mouth, she hoped he hadn’t heard.
He had. Whit said, “He doesn’t want to be the reason his wife drops dead.”
“It’s not fun anymore. For either of us. He’s just pretending to like it.” It astounded her, the things that kept coming out of her mouth. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. She would not even have said such a thing to a priest, would not have alluded so directly to the sexual act.
It was the coin, she thought, irrationally. It had been a mistake to accept his coin. It was like in a fairy tale—you had to beware of taking beans or a goose or an apple from the old woman in the deep, dark woods. She had not understood, when Whit offered it to her, that he was purchasing her honesty. This was a childish, absurd idea that also felt somehow incontrovertible and true. “It’s all ruined. I ruined it.”
“You’re just about to see something beautiful,” he said. “Hang on a little longer.” She thought he was talking about the marriage, but then he pointed his finger out the passenger side window. “There. Isn’t that a doozy?”
An enormous rectangle of light floated over the hardpan to the right of the car, at the base of the foothills. For a moment, Gene had the dizzying sensation of looking into a window in the side of a mountain...a window into an ashy brilliance. A flying saucer, big as a jet, hovered in place behind that window. Rows of cars were arrayed below it, radiating spokes of vehicles organized in a way that made her think of a thousand worshippers bowing to Mecca. She waited for the motion picture to cut to a new shot, but it didn’t. The UFO remained suspended over the viewers for one minute and then two, as Whit’s cab approached, drew alongside the drive-in, and went past.
TONITE, read the unlit sign in front of the dirt road into the Galaxy Drive-In: WE GATHER TO HONOR AND REMEMBER LEMMINGS! UFSP MEMBERS ONLY! TONITE’S THE NITE! WHO KNOWS WHO’LL BE NEXT 2 RISE???
She turned in her seat to watch the screen as it disappeared behind them. There was never anything on it except that single pie-pan flying saucer. She thoughtlessly turned the coin over and over in her hand. It never warmed up, remained that same perfect sliver of coolness, a slice of ice, a spoonful of moon.
“Didn’t you say they’re having a political thing at the drive-in?” Gene asked. “I thought I saw a spaceship.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s a meeting of the Universal Flying Saucer Party, headed by presidential candidate Gabriel Green. He is addressing some of his most committed supporters with a prerecorded film reel.”
She laughed. Whit didn’t laugh with her.
“Is that a real party?” she asked.
“It is,” he said. “I was an early member.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “You don’t join the Universal Flying Saucer Party if you don’t have a sense of humor! I admit I had hoped Mr. Green would pull off an upset this evening—or at least win New Hampshire, where there was an all-out attempt this year to raise awareness. The skies over Merrimack County were lit up every night for almost a week. Hundreds of sightings. A Super Sabre jet fighter chased half a dozen of what the air force calls ‘foo fighters’ over northern New Hampshire. The pilot lost them when they went orbital. Still,” he sighed. “It wasn’t enough. It will be Mr. Kennedy or Mr. Nixon. Hard to say which yet. They are running neck and neck, aren’t they?”
“I’ve never seen a UFO.”
“And yet, you are only too familiar with their technologies! We would not have Styrofoam, the integrated circuit or contact lenses, if not for the wisdom of the Seti-Taurans, who have been visiting these hills—these very hills!—to trade with the Pima peoples for millennia.”
“I did not know that,” she said, wanting to be kind to him, as kind as he had been to her. “What’s a contact lens, anyway?”
Whit didn’t reply, not at first. He cocked his head to one side, as if paying close attention to the radio once more. Then, abruptly, he said, “Not yet? Oh. Later, then. That will be later.” She opened her mouth to reply, then shut it. She didn’t think he had been talking to her. She wasn’t sure who he had been talking to. Himself, maybe.
“And what about the Lemmings? Isn’t that a kind of mouse?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “A quite friendly and harmless kind of mouse, I’d like to think.”
“Why would a political party honor Lemmings? Is that, I don’t know—a mascot for the Flying Saucer Party? Or is it a joke?”
“Probably a bit of both,” he said.
“And what does it mean—who will be the next to rise?”
“Many hope to make direct contact with the Seti-Taurans and someday travel with them.”
“Have you made direct contact with the Seti-Taurans, Whit?” she asked, as gently as she could. Something had shifted between them—she was not sure when it had happened—and she felt a tremendous tenderness for the little man in the flat cap. Also, she was more clearheaded now then she had been for hours...or maybe weeks. It was like waking after a long bout of fever to a crisp, bright autumn morning, the shadows of leaves rippling across the ceiling. She could feel every part of her body, the sweet ache in every joint, the tight knit of muscles. She turned that splendid gold coin in her right hand, again and again, without thought, hardly aware she was doing it.
“I came out here looking for them! I was living in Brooklyn, with my friend Bill Tate who I met in the navy. Bill had the cancer.” Whit tapped one temple. “In his head. He had it so bad, he could hardly stand up. I was just about out of my mind with worry, I was so sure I was going to lose my best amigo. I fell to studying at the library, trying to find something the doctors had missed...which is how I learned about the ley lines. Do you know about the ley lines?”
“I’m not up on them, no. Please tell me.”
“Well, they are like the magnetic bands that encircle the earth. Did you know that geese follow magnetic lines when they migrate? The geese can feel those beams of energy in their wingtips. Ley lines are bands of energy too. The places where they cross are full of charge, like enormous batteries. Two such lines meet in the Bermuda Triangle of course. Three cross in Jerusalem, very close to the most likely candidate for Golgotha. And a pair cross here, in New Mexico.” He nodded to himself. “I had many encounters with the inexplicable, almost from the day we arrived. Quite often, driving at night, I would see streaks of red and green fire blaze across the sky. I’d chase ’em out into the desert, get up to seventy, eighty miles an hour, trying to keep them in sight. The next morning my whole face would be sunburned. Other times, I’d be out driving in the early hours, and I’d pass myself going the other way! And of course there were the thin men who paid me in Seti-Tauran coin. I have mentioned them already.”
“What happened to your friend Bill, Whit?”
“Well, the coins happened to him! Bill would put them over his eyes at night, like he was already in his coffin. He’d sleep sixteen, seventeen hours! But when he woke he was his old self. He could even do crosswords again! Sometimes he had no pain at all. Those coins made Bill’s cancer regress and bought him another nine months, when all of the doctors agreed he’d be lucky to get three.” Whit smiled to himself, seemed for a moment almost overcome with the sweetness of memory. “The ley lines worked their wonders too. The scars from his first two operations vanished. The big scar on his biceps that he picked up in Guadalcanal, that disappeared too. He was as smooth and flawless as a young man after a few months here. At the end even the lines on his hands were vanishing! Everything except his love line. Everything except that.” He sighed a little shakily. “I don’t like to think that he might’ve been saved outright, if only we came out here a few years earlier. Bill and I had been best mates for years and years. We bunked together in the navy. Sometimes he’d talk about cars in his sleep. He’d say, ‘A car at night stitches the darkness with brilliance.’ Or, ‘Get me a taxi, I want to drive to the end of pain.’ I thought we’d have the rest of our lives together. I’d drive the cab and he’d be my dispatcher. His voice keeping me company all night. That good, kind, warm voice telling me where to go next.” He squeezed the wheel so tightly his knuckles whitened.
“I’m so sorry you lost him,” she said.
Whit’s hands loosened and relaxed. “Well. He’s not really lost. His energy joined the energy of the ley lines. That packet of information and power has been to one end of our universe and back a hundred times in the decades since.”
“I suppose it’s lucky for me that this clinic I’m going to is so close to where the ley lines cross!” she said. “I can use all the help I can get.”
“It isn’t an accident. One often finds places of healing and worship along the path of the beams.”
“I didn’t know there was a place of worship out here in the painted desert.”
“But there it is! Right here. It’s coming up on the left now!”
When she craned her head, she saw a shape like Stonehenge, a football-shaped oval about eighty yards from end to end. She was looking at thirty cars, their front ends buried in the red clay, the back ends aiming like artillery at the stars. The taillights had been rigged to blink and flash like someone’s Christmas decorations. They stammered and flashed an irregular message to the cosmos.
“Isn’t it something?” Whit Lemon asked, slowing so she could take it in.
“What is it?”
“It’s a marker! Like the Nazca Lines in the high desert plains of Peru. Or like a sign you can see from the highway that says Texaco, so you know to pull over and gas up.” He took a last lingering look at the half-buried Fords and Caddys and then began to accelerate again, following the road as it wound into the foothills. “Those cars belong to men who are no longer with us.” He stroked the steering wheel. “This car belongs there too.”
“After you’re done with it,” Gene said.
“After I’m done with it,” he agreed, and he gaily flicked one finger against the coin that still hung from the rearview mirror. It chimed softly and spun, flashing.
And she could not help it, she was quite fond of Whit Lemon, with his eager voice and cosmic certainties. She wondered if he had always been this way—sweetly deluded—or if it had happened to him after his beloved Bill Tate had been taken from him. Whit was like a yard sale teddy bear with a missing eye and popped stitches. Free to a good home, not even worth twenty-five cents. He was an adorable discard. She thought there was a chance she might be on the verge of becoming an adorable discard herself. The next month would tell.
She supposed she ought to give his special coin back and she reached it over the seat to him. He slung it on the chain beside its twin. Two venerable old suns that jiggled and flashed. Gene slumped back into the dark leather of her seat as the car banked into the first rise, climbing the hills for Fieldspar. Something tickled unpleasantly in her temples. She closed her eyes—a part of her hoping to see that starscape again, that bright afterimage—but instead there was only a painful throb of pressure and she looked up again. Something about the coins hanging from the rearview troubled her. Trying to figure them out made the whole inside of her head feel ill.
“Hey!” she said. “The coin you ga’me. It didn’t have a hole in it! Where’d at hole come from?” Her tongue felt heavy and strange. She clutched the armrest molded into the door, felt that if she let go of it, she would begin sliding this way and that across the backseat like luggage.
“Sure it did, Gene,” Whit said. “You just didn’t notice.”
“I did too! Notice. No hole.” She narrowed her eyes. “I am beginnin’ to thing that is a strick coin.” God, she was so drunk.
She ached with remorse, hated herself for every gin and tonic. The cab climbed higher and higher and at each switchback they had a better view of the floodplains below. Caddyhenge appeared as a crimson wheel, flickering and stammering in an idiot’s idea of Morse code. Farther back down the highway, she saw the still brightly lit rectangle of the Galaxy Drive-In’s movie screen, now an impossibly vivid postage stamp on a black sheet of paper. Beyond that was a cobweb of light: downtown Vilmos. The sprawl of the stars made it all look very small.
Fieldspar came into view just after the fourth switchback: a building in the style of a Spanish mission, with a brick courtyard before it, and a spouting fountain in the center of the yard. Palms towered over the entrance. It had the look of a luxury resort, which it was, in a way. But instead of the Gideon Bible in the nightstand, one would find a copy of the AA big book, and instead of shuffleboard in the morning, one was expected to attend classes about the twelve traditions. A nurse would show her to her room. An orderly would search her bag for liquor.
Out here she had that sky of bottomless mystery, those thousands of stars, those thousands of possibilities. It was a scattering of unbearable riches, so close she could almost touch them. But it would be morning soon enough and the sun would take it all away from her. She could hardly bear the thought of pulling up in front of Fieldspar and getting out. It sickened her, the idea of going in like she was. The idea of going in at all. The moment she stepped through the door, she would leave the splendid night behind. Every inch of road they traveled brought her a little closer to tomorrow and tomorrow was a place she didn’t want to go.
“I don’t wan’ go,” she said and was surprised at the breathless panic in her voice. “Whit? Whit, pull over.”
He was silent and at first she thought he wasn’t going to do as she asked, was instead, absurdly and honorably, determined to do what was best for her instead, and what kind of cabby listened to his conscience instead of the client? Whit Lemon, of course, that was who.
But he touched his blinker and they glided to the dusty margin of the lane. He turned to look at her, elbow up on the back of his seat.
“You don’t have to be afraid of them, Gene. There’s help for you here. Just up the road from us. Just a few hundred feet away now.”
“Wasn’ I bedder?” she asked and disliked the pleading whine she heard in her voice. “Wasn’ I bedder on the ride? I am very confused.” She really was. It was getting hard, already, to remember what they talked about on the ride. She had the terrible idea she had said the words rubber johnny. She swayed toward him. “For a minute I feel like I was a pretty okay person.”
“You’re still a pretty okay person, Gene,” he promised her.
She wasn’t mollified. She flopped back against the seat.
“What about the Seti-Taurans?” she asked. “They invenned Styrofoam, din’t they? Don’ they have something for us shitty drunks? Sommin’ easier?” She blushed and looked away and wanted to cry. “’Pologize for my mouth, Whit. You deserve bedder.”
At first he didn’t reply. He looked wistfully out at the night and its harvest of stars.
“They can fix it,” he told her at last. “They could even make it so you can still drink! An alcoholic is like a car going downhill with severed brakes. They can repair the lines and more. They can give you better to drink than you’d ever find in the bar car of the Sunset Limited. They can give you a golden wine, made from the crushed leaves of a plant so vast, it covers an entire world in orbit around a dwarf star. Get drunk on that and you can see the tunnel your own life has made through time itself. You can walk through that you-shaped tunnel of light and slip out into the best and happiest moments of your own life.” He took a deep breath. “But you’d have to go a lot farther than Fieldspar and you can’t come back. Not really. Not to stay. They can project your consciousness back into the world—maybe once every few years—to wander around and see what’s happening. But it’s a long transmission, Gene, and you can’t stray too far from the ley lines. To go with the Seti-Taurans is like dying in a way. A human body is like a rocket ship—it can only take you so far. To go farther, you have to get out.”
“Where d’ya learn so much, Whit? About the Titty-Saurans?”
“I learned about them after the bomb,” he said. He lifted his chin and his eyes were as bright as gold coins. “A few hours after it burned up the sky. I had got out of my car—pulled off into the desert to pray—and they came along while I was still on my knees. By then it was raining burnt crickets. Fried crickets fell like confetti after a great parade and it smelled like the end of the world.”
“An’ they tolt you all this stuff? ’Bout goin’ away an’ not comin’ back?”
“They didn’t tell me. They showed me.”
She looked out at the stars herself, considering what might be up there. The constellations seemed to wheel gently above her, as if she were on a slowing carousel. Even that small sensation of motion nauseated her. She shut her eyes.
“Coul’ we juss park here for a bit? You’n let the meter run. I have money. Maybe we could jus lissen to the elec-shun. Maybe if we sit a while, I can hear who won before I hafta...” Her voice trailed off.
He lowered the flag. The Geiger counter stopped ticking.
“No charge. You were my last fare tonight. There won’t be another train this evening and the bars closed five minutes ago.” He sighed. “And I still don’t know how far Brooklyn went this year.”
Even dazed with gin and tiredness, she registered the puzzle at the center of this question all over again. How come he didn’t know? How exactly had Whit Lemon contrived to miss out on the whole baseball season? She opened her mouth to ask, but what came out instead was “All the way to Los Angeles.” She remembered as she spoke: “Dodgers moved to the West Coats. Coats. Coast.”
“What? No. Come on. Are you pulling my leg?”
She laughed. “Where you been living, you don’ know they’re in Los Angeles now? The moon?”
“Farther than that.”
“Oh. Right. Where everyone dring golden wine an’ no buddies a alcoholig. But there’s no baseball season.”
“Do you want to go, Gene?” he asked, in a light tone of voice.
She put her head against the edge of her window.
“So much. I messt everything up, Whit. My whole life. I’m married to a man is never goin’ see me like he usta. I lost his respect and I deserved to lose it. I’d like to go so far away, I can’t even find this planet on a telescope. I screwed up my shot in this world and even if I get sober s’gonna be awful. Soon as my head is clear I’mma have to take account of everyone I hurt, everythin’ I broke, everythin’ I can’t fix, every good thin’ I throwed away. I could use a whole new world. Really any world but this is okay with me.”
A cool breeze whisked through the car. Once these mountains had been in a basin at the bottom of an ocean and now, in the small hours of the night, they were remembering their deep water chill. The night lay upon them, as deep as a sea.
“Do you want to go, Gene?” he asked again. When she opened her eyes he was looking over the seat at her and he had one of those gold coins in his hand. There was no hole through it anymore, no possible way to hang it from a chain. She looked at it in his calloused, blunt fingers and remembered how good it had felt to press it to her forehead, as good as Mother kissing her brow. “If you want to go, I’ll make sure you can cover the fare.” The coin flashed as he turned it in his fingers, shone like a sun.
On the radio they were saying that Illinois was still too close to call. They were saying Nixon might make a statement soon.
Gene rested her head on the window. “I really, really like John Kennedy and I really, really don’t like sweaty Dick Nixon. I campaigned for Jack. Let’s see if he wins. If Kennedy wins, maybe the planet Earth isn’t a total waste. Maybe it’s worth stickin’ around a little longer, see what happens.”
“All right,” Whit Lemon told her. “It’s a deal, Mrs. MacMurray.”
Later, when she was sweating out the DT’s—vomiting every fifteen minutes, crawling back to bed on all fours while she trembled helplessly, a feeling like her skin was coated in cobwebs—she told one of the orderlies about driving to Fieldspar with Whit Lemon, and how if Nixon’d won she’d be drinking golden wine with the Seti-Taurans now, and the orderly laughed and said, “Whit Lemmings drove you, sure. Santy Claus is pickin’ me up after my shift is over, we’re goin’ up to the North Pole to make a snow fort.” The orderly was a big Black woman with sleepy eyes. Fieldspar was full of Black men and women in nurse scrubs, looking after wealthy white women who could not look after themselves, who needed to pay other people to do it. The orderlies looked on their wards with a kind of weary pity, which was, Gene felt, exactly what they deserved.
She was there thirty days. In December, a couple weeks after Thanksgiving, Walter made the six-hour drive to collect her. He hugged her when she came down the front steps with her suitcase, but it was a stiff, gentle, formal hug. She was so grateful for it she nearly burst into sobs. He looked ten years older and had nicked himself several times shaving.
On the drive back east, they glided past Caddyhenge in their Pontiac. Until then their conversation had been awkward, uncertain, the verbal equivalent of tenderly probing a wound to see how it was healing. But when Caddyhenge came into sight—a dozen cars pointing toward the sky, the sun dancing off the chrome, the flaking rust the rich orange of the hills—a smile touched Walter’s lips, the first she had seen since his arrival.
“Isn’t that a crazy thing,” he said. “A guy at the Texaco in town told me sometimes empty cars turn up at the local drive-in. Like, men have just left their cars and walked away from them. Disappeared into the desert or something. If the cars aren’t claimed after three years, they put them out in Caddyhenge. How’s that for spooky? It really is like a graveyard for robots or something. Those cars are like headstones.”
The Studebaker Starlight was there, among the others, although the doors were brittle with rust, and the back windshield was missing, and it had been scoured by years of blowing sand. She would’ve known Whit Lemon’s ride anywhere—or Lemmings, as it turned out. She had been sitting in that car when Richard Nixon conceded to Kennedy and it had come to her she was going to have to live here in the world after all.
The older staff at Fieldspar remembered him, the local taximan who had seen the A-bomb ignite the western horizon, and had left the keys in his car and walked away into the desert, never to be seen again. Lemmings had a reputation for queer ideas, probably thought it was the end of the world. He had started the local chapter of the Universal Flying Saucer Party, he said Styrofoam was an alien vegetable and claimed to have sometimes given rides to ghosts. Maybe he was a swish too—that was the rumor—but in that part of New Mexico, you didn’t poke your nose into other people’s bedrooms unless you were looking for a horsewhipping. And, anyway, the Universal Flying Saucer Party had loved him and still celebrated his memory. They’d had a particularly large remembrance for him the very night Gene had arrived at Fieldspar.
Gene almost told Walter to stop...and then thought better of it and let Caddyhenge slip by without a sound. She did not want to take the smile from her husband’s face.
After they called it for Kennedy, Whit had rolled the last quarter of a mile into the brick turnaround in front of Fieldspar, and the two of them had sat in the warm, idling car.
“Guess I’m stuck here,” she said.
“Guess so,” he told her, twisted around in his seat to smile at her. He offered her his hand—an odd gesture from a cabby driver—and she reached to take it, only he flicked his wrist and suddenly was holding one of those big golden discs. Pennies for the ferryman, she thought.
“If you ever change your mind, though,” he said, “you can always come back out here. Where the ley lines cross. You can come to Caddyhenge with one of these. You don’t know who might stop by to give you a ride...or how far they can take you. And if they do, you’ll need to be able to pay your way.”
“Thank you, Whit,” Gene said, in a tone of voice that she hoped let him know how much she liked him, how glad she had been to spend time with him. “I’ll hang on to it.”
Only she couldn’t hang on to it, lost it not forty-eight hours after she got to Fieldspar. She lost a lot in those two days: ten pounds, her self-respect and her sanity. It was possible she had tried to bribe an orderly with Whit’s coin for a bottle of gin and when he wouldn’t take it, she had thrown it at him in anger and lost it then. She didn’t want to think that was true and later another possibility occurred to her: there had never been a Whit Lemon. Lemming. Whatever.
Three years later she was on Monroe Street, in the shadow of the Valley National Bank, when she learned John F. Kennedy was dead. People were running past her, some of them in tears. A young lady in cat-eye glasses ran straight into her, and Gene caught her and steadied her and asked what was wrong, and that was how she found out. She learned more from a Panasonic TV playing in the window of the Woolworths. Kennedy’s brains had gone all over his wife, who had tried to escape the shots by climbing across the trunk of the moving car. They didn’t show that—there was no film of the incident, not then—and they didn’t say it either, but somehow that information was everywhere, on everyone’s lips.
At last she picked herself out of the crowd gathered around the window to watch the TV and by then she was crying herself. Her left hand was in her purse. Her right was squeezing her daughter’s hand. Her daughter was crying too. The girl didn’t know what she was crying about, didn’t understand what had happened, but she was two, she didn’t need a reason. It was enough that her mother was weeping.
Gene was fumbling in the depths of her bag when her fingers found Whit’s coin: that blank golden disc that had secret designs sketched across its surface in light, pictures you could only see as afterimages burned upon your retinas when you closed your eyes. Her hand closed upon it, that smooth impossibly cool wafer of alien metal, and in that instant she saw an old yellow cab approaching through the dusk, and her heart lunged with a fierce relief, and she thought, Come get me, Whit, come get me and my girl and my good Walter, and get us off this awful murderous planet before it can hurt us anymore. I’ve got the fare. Come take us away, old friend.
Only it wasn’t Whit and it wasn’t Whit’s Studebaker, it was a 1957 yellow Checker, and when she plucked the coin out of her purse, it was the chip she had earned for thirty days of sobriety almost three years before. It had been drifting in the bottom of her purse, largely forgotten and unnoticed, ever since. Her hand had already flapped up to catch the taxi driver’s attention. He swung to the curb and, moving automatically, hardly thinking, Gene opened the rear door. Her daughter scrambled into the back ahead of her.
“Is it gold?” her little girl asked her, wiping her cheeks and staring at the coin in wonder. Jackie’s face was swollen and there was a gleam of snot on her upper lip, but her eyes had lit up with inspiration at the sight of the bright, brassy medal in Gene’s left hand.
“Better than gold,” Gene said, and gave it to her, then picked her up and set her in her lap. She held her daughter to her chest all the way home.
Author’s note: Gabriel Green’s Universal Flying Saucer Party was real, although Mr. Green withdrew from the race in October of 1960 and endorsed John F. Kennedy.
For Charles Portis, Rest in Poetry.
Joe Hill
Exeter, NH
May 2020