SEVERAL YEARS AGO, about the time my wife Vicki began talking about suing me for divorce, my best friend, Newt Grider—who had to him all the virtues you expect from men in middle age—told me he believed in UFOs. We were on the sixth green of the Mimbres Valley Country Club, only half serious about our two-dollar Nassau but thirsty as Arabs for the beers we would get at the turn, and for an instant, because he had the tendency to mumble or clown, I thought he was speaking French or trying out on me that Howdy-Doody double-talk he used to invent for the entertainment of his daughters.
“Boy, you don’t believe in nothing,” I said; this was banter, like that between Butch and Sundance. He had just smacked a driver and was watching his ball soar off into one of those sunsets our New Mexico has a reputation for, extreme and scary to the animal in us.
“Lamar Hoyt,” he was saying, “I have known you a long time, right?”
We had been pals of the lifelong sort, since teenagers when we had been in the same Wildcat front court. We had done everything together, lost our virginity to the same Pine Street hairdresser, took in the same experiences I hear described as necessary but usual. We even lived, in the time I am writing about, on the same block and had the same thoughts about what Vicki used to call the great themes of our age—how to vote, where love comes from, and what to do with the weaknesses in you.
For a second—as long, I suspect, as it took for his ball to land in the way-off fairway—he just looked at me, eyes bright as new pennies, then he said that last night, while all of Deming town was asleep or rolled up next to its TVs, he was in his backyard, wearing only pajama bottoms and being addressed by beings from outer goddamn space.
“Shit,” I said, “what’re you talking about?” I was looking around for the joke, the way you do on April first when your children tell you the car’s on fire.
“I’m serious,” he said.
He had the full-speed-ahead forward posture he’d get when we played cards and a full house would suddenly appear in his hands—earnest as a Baptist, humor a thing for lesser souls who believed in luck.
“What do they look like?” I wondered. I was, of course, imagining the common alien: green, perhaps slime-dipped, plus the large, lopsided brain of a genius.
“They’re luminous,” he said, “like angels.” They were about the size of my oldest boy Taylor, he said, which meant they resembled fifth-graders, and they traveled from what we now know is the Vega galaxy, a swirl of planets and dust older than time itself, and they were coming here just as they had been coming all along over the centuries, in magnificent vehicles which made our efforts at combustion and top-secret propulsion look feeble as campfires. “You believe me, don’t you?” he said.
His voice was dreamy as sleep and, yes, because he was my best friend, I was believing him, just as I have learned to believe, for example, those born-again folks who say that in their swimming pool one afternoon or sitting behind a desk at the Farmers and Merchants Bank there was first a thunderous crack, then something like firmament opening, and finally Christ Himself beckoning forth, all the choirs of the afterworld singing about love and wooden arks.
“You ever lose anything, Lamar?”
You should know that we weren’t playing golf any longer; in fact, we were just standing to one side of the fairway, letting Mrs. Hal Thibodeaux and three of her lady friends play through.
Well, I told him, I’d lost a wallet one time and my high school graduation ring and the keys to the Monte Carlo disappeared at least once a week.
“That’s not what I’m thinking about,” he said.
He was thinking about, specifically, people and objects, all those things which were said to vanish in spooky places—boats and planes, and all the people aboard them, plus citizens who were supposed to go to the movies or shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, or big animals, like cows and horses, which are one day there but gone the next.
“They got ’em,” he said. We were being probed, he told me, and mentioned many names from history of those who knew: a whiskered lunatic named Trismegistus, not to mention a tribe of fifth-century Hebrews, as well as most deep-thinking Orientals of modern times.
“How do you know all this?” I wondered
They had told him, his small visitors. He had stood in his backyard, watched in breathless suspense as this vehicle had landed silent as snow, and they had popped out of something you would call a port and went up to him without the inconvenience of walking and put in his mind, instantly as magic, everything which could be read or spoken or thought. “You know what’s up there now?” He was pointing at his own temples and eyeing me as if from a hundred miles away.
Near us, in an outfit most folks only wear on Sundays, Mrs. Thibodeaux was flailing with her five iron; and for a time, I confess, I wished I was part of her foursome talking about bridge or what to do with Green Stamps.
“Up here,” Newt was saying, “is stuff about Lemnos and animus and quote the blood-dimmed tide unquote.”
He was scaring me, he was, as he had frightened me months before when, soaked with Smirnoff’s and overtired, he’d shouted that what this republic needed was a good shitstorm, one which would bury the lot of us—him and me, too!—and thus teach us a thing or three about the small, damp beginnings of everything.
“What’s Alice Mary say?” I asked. She was his wife and, from my view, sweet as any man deserved.
“She thinks like you do, that I’m loco.”
He was fingering his head bones again and making up such language, he said, as is exchanged between galaxies and the stark reaches of far-off orbs, utterances you can hear anytime from pigs or barnyard fowl. “They want me,” he said, “and I do want them.”
His plan, I learned, was to be swept up this very evening.
“I’m going out in my backyard,” he said, “look for them in twilight and go up when they say to.” In his face was that divine look which, I suppose, has come over mystics in every age: bright flesh and eyes watery with bliss.
“What about the girls?” I said. I was trying to turn his mind to the practical. This was merely upset, I told myself. He was only angry, as we all get, or fretful about money matters.
“Lamar,” he said, “come over here.” He was like me in every respect, so I did as told. He threw his arms around me in that male way, part grapple and part clasp.
“These people are my destiny, Lamar. They’ve known me before I was born, goddammit.”
All the way back to the clubhouse, one arm still hung over my shoulder, he told me what a delightful world awaited him—air and rare mists and peace—all those words that sound great when you’re drunk but in the full light of day, especially in the shitkicker paradise of our desert, sound sentimental as baby talk.
“I’m going to be moving in another dimension,” he said when we reached his pickup. He was still wearing his spikes, plus those shiny green slacks which always brought to mind Pinky Lee. “Say bye-bye to me, Lamar.”
He was shaking my hand, vigorously, and if I was thinking, I was doing so more as jelly than as vertebrate, looking at him as if he were a fresh work of creation, something as shocking as another sun. And then, after he opened his door, he did a brave thing, which was to kiss me on the cheek.
“I’ll miss you, Lamar,” he said, “but I’ll be keeping an eye on you from where I am.”
...
This next part is the hard stuff, for I ask you to join me in forgetting for a moment that this is 1994 and that we have been to space itself and do have the Air Force and thousands of Ph.D.’s to tell us otherwise. I want you to think as I have read that Indians and other ancient people do—which, as I understand it, is with their hearts and in the company of wise if grumpy sorts from the icy underworld. What you already suspect is true: Nearly a decade ago, as it has been reconstructed by our police, Newt Grider, smiling like a ninny and dressed up (Alice Mary says) in a costume which was mostly bedsheet, did wander through his TV room, said No, thanks to a macaroni-and-cheese casserole, and drifted like an ardent juvenile into his backyard from which—in a second or an hour—after some mumbling about twinkles and the cosmic items we are, he utterly and instantly vanished.
For several days, Alice Mary was in the panic this deserved. No, she told Sergeant Krebs, there had been no fight, at least not a big one; and no, there was no other woman or any some such, as who would desire something doomed to be a fatso like Jackie Gleason. If they wanted to know, she said, why didn’t they talk to old Lamar Hoyt?
“I bet he knows where Newt is,” she said, “he’s a son of a bitch, too.”
For a week, exactly as I’d heard it, I told what I knew. I repeated it for Krebs and to a detective (who sported the Fu Man Chu mustache State Farm men wear) and once to an FBI fellow who wondered how long I’d had my Chevrolet dealership and was it true I’d once attended SMU?
One afternoon, I even gave the story to a reporter from the Headlight, a lady with a lively haircut which would have looked sharp on the corpse of Elvis Presley. It was a “profile” article, she said, but when it appeared, the Newt I loved was nowhere in it. I read stuff we all knew but had forgotten about: his setting fire, as a teenager, to a cotton field behind the Triangle Drive-in; his opening an irrigation canal and flooding Mr. Bullard’s lettuce field; his having a certain drinking problem after the infant death of his only son. There was talk, too, of out-of-body travel and the belief in astrology, plus how you could divine the future in special leg bones. All of which, wrote that lady writer I was liking less and less, sounded like a voodoo smokescreen for a man who, like thousands and thousands of others in America, was just a plain, matter-of-fact runaway, vamoosed to Peru or another romantic kingdom in search of his lost youth.
It was in here, you must know, that Vicki moved out, taking our sons with her, and time (of which I am somewhat concerned) became mixed and fluid and dreadful. One day, I am saying, she was here and merely wrought up with the usual strife and dissatisfactions; the next day, she was off in Las Cruces, sixty miles east, living with a club pro named Ivy Cooper and telling my children, Buddy and Taylor, that I was a beast and a dimwit and absolutely without ambition. On another day, I was divorced and lighter the fifteen thousand dollars it cost; and on still another, I say, a year had gone by and I was skinnier by many pounds and lonely as a castaway; and I’d look up from my reading and see the walls move (as they do when, for forty-eight hours, you haven’t talked to anything except your own stubbed toe). I’d phone my boys every Sunday and hear about their soccer and that soon Ivy was taking them to Fort Worth to rub elbows with Ben Crenshaw and Justin Leonard and that Mother, my Vicki, was working at Mode O’Day and maybe looked a little like one of Charlie’s Angels, all blouse and flyaway hair.
Then one day I grew the beard my shop foreman Poot Tipton said I ought to and started to go out. The first time, I remember, I stood in front of the mirror for an hour perhaps, studying myself as I have seen others look at my automobiles they can’t afford. I said to myself such hopeful phrases as “You look good, Lamar, you really do,” and splashed myself with a modern fragrance Buddy had sent for Xmas. I smelled like a jungle, I thought, which was maybe right for this world. Poot said I got lucky as that evening I met a woman at the Thunderbird (which is bowling alley and lounge, both); but she was herself divorced (“His name was Veloy and I hope he rots!”) and miserable from it.
At my house, she walked around and made faces at the knickknacks I hadn’t thrown out. Her name was Merri Lu, I learned, but she was contemplating changing it in favor of one which complemented the exotic sense she now had of herself.
“How ’bout Reva?” she said.
She was out by the pool, already unbuttoning her shirt.
“C’mere, you bastard,” she said, “call me Mia and you can have all of this.”
At that moment, I took a look at myself and saw this: almost forty years old, a little bit Episcopalian, Libra to those who cared, modest about my money, and once upon a time a fair linkster.
“Miss Reva,” I said, “why don’t I take you on home?”
A month later I went out with Poot’s sister, Randi.
“You’re looking studly, boss,” he’d said, “you’d be doing her a favor.”
She had cheekbones I hadn’t seen before, severe and red, and the posture of a hat rack. She smoked red-dirt marijuana and claimed she wanted me to join her in the hinterlands of spirit.
“What’re you thinking about?” she said. “I’m thinking about the Father of all Hindrance.”
We were in the El Corral Bar, a place of cowboy motif and welcome darkness, and I felt as apart from her as I had from Newt the day he disappeared.
“You want to hear about me,” she said, “before we get back to your place?”
From the bar across the way, two guys, both dressed like buckaroos, were making liquor noises. I heard the word woo, I believe, and then a string of words, every other one of which was either Mex or obscene.
“I look older than twenty-two, don’t I?” Randi was speaking to me. “It’s carriage and knowing your own mind.”
She had my chin in her fingers, my lips mashed together; and she had the eyes you see on starved Hindus in National Geographic—forty thousand years old and not tired.
“I like you,” she whispered, “you’re going to be good for my mind; I can tell.”
Exactly here it was, in this story I am telling you, that I excused myself, said I had to go to the toilet, and then left by the front door. I was heading, I think, to that place I had been tending toward all along.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Alice Mary said. “Look what’s here on my doorstep.”
In jeans and an old T-shirt that could have been Newt’s, she appeared young, and I was hoping she was still sweet, too.
“I like that beard,” she said, “gives you an air.”
In the light, she was touch-worthy and I had the urge, which I felt like a fist in the chest, to have her neck and bosom next to mine.
“Where are the girls?” I said.
They were at the Shelbys’. A sleepover.
I must’ve said a hundred things then, all forgettable and overused elsewhere, about what a tragedy our world was and what a peckerwood I’d become and how, when something broke, I didn’t fix it; and then—bless her—she said, “You’re letting the bugs in, close the door,” and I followed her inside to a living room that had no trace at all of her absent husband Newt Grider. Something was swimming in me, stomach or neighbor organ.
“You’d like to have me, wouldn’t you?”
What I said came out choked, but affirmative.
“You believe I’d like to have you, too, don’t you?”
That was true, also.
“It won’t be any good, you know.”
She was being tough, which this deserved, and I was grateful.
“I had a guy in here last week,” she said. “Told me I was the saddest piece of ass he’d ever known.”
I’d seen the truck. A Blazer, gray over white, one of its headlamps cockeyed. Plus a muffler my people could repair for fewer than thirty dollars.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s try this thing.”
Folks, there is something in a man, independent of his lustful underhalf, which loosens and grows light when a woman shows him that she’s a creature, too; time stops and even before clothes are shed, or noises made, there is something—composed of gland and the way you are taught, I suspect—that makes you think you are wise when you are dumb, able when you are not. Alice Mary was right: We were witless and fumble-fingered as virgins, shy and fearful. We tried for an hour, I think, even kissing a labor. As lovers are supposed to do, we went after each other in a fury, but, I am telling you now, all the heart was out of it. She was brave, and I was brave, and then, after it became certain that courage wasn’t the substance called for, she said, “Lamar, I think you ought to go home now.”
She had my underpants in her fist, being helpful.
“I could come over tomorrow,” I said.
“No, you couldn’t,” she said.
She was right about this, too: There wasn’t anything between us but her husband and my wife, and they were in the distant world.
“You’re a cute guy,” she said, “don’t be a fool.” She gripped me by the ears and kissed my nose, which is the feature most people see first.
And then, in what I know to be the end of this narrative, I was outside, my house down the street lit up like a ballpark. Its neighbors were all dark and middle-class, here and there a lightbulb glowing. My heart felt as if it belonged to another man, leaky and floppy at the valves, and thoughts were reaching me as if by telegraph, clipped but steady. “Okay, Newt Grider,” I said, “where are you now?” Everywhere the sky was random twinkle and black as the Devil’s carpet. I was ready, I knew, as Newt had been ready for our advanced visitors to hover near and draw your hero up into their world. I wanted to be where everything which is ever lost or put aside or misplaced is gathered together, waiting.