1.
ACCORDING TO the tapes, my father, then about as run-of-the-mill a man as Joe Blow himself, didn’t want to see the thing. Not a damn bit, he says. But there it came anyhow, roaring in hard and tumbly from the west with a comet’s fiery tail, and then ka-BOOM—enough bang to rock Chaves County left and right like a quake.
This was summer 1947, almost nothing to see but weeds and hummocks and desert all the way to the red clay of Texas in the east, and my father, Totenham Gregory Hamsey, gentleman cowboy, was out there. Riding his pickup bouncy like on the fence line, he was hunting for the gaps in the barbed wire that several yearlings had escaped through, when it—the UFO—went boom to the east of him. Maybe like your own self—certainly like me in a similarly serious moment—he was dumbstruck. His blood ran thick and bubbly in his chest, his mouth opening and closing on thinnest air. Something from the clouds had tumbled earthward, and nobody had seen it but a twenty-nine-year-old red-haired rancher with thirty dollars in his pocket and the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post on the seat beside him.
His truck had stalled on him, another mystery he lived to tell about, so presently he gave up on it and hopped onto the hood to study the scattered fires and the long, raggedy trench the Martians—or whatever the hell they were—had made when they quit their element for ours. First he thought it was a plane, a top-secret jet out of Roswell Army Air Field, or a V2 rocket gone haywire from White Sands, which gave him, naturally, to expect company—more planes maybe, or soldiers with rifles to shoo him out of there. These were the days of Communists, he says on the tapes: sour-minded hordes from Korea and the Soviet Union that even Governor Whitman had warned you to expect on the doorstep of city hall itself. One hour went by that way—Tot Hamsey, rich man’s youngest son, saying to himself what he’d say to others if they, in pairs or in a mob, were to rumble over that hill yonder and want their busted contraption back. But none did. Not for that hour anyway. Nor for the several that followed. Nothing arrived but a turkey buzzard, wings glossy and black as crude oil, which gave everything the once-over—the smoking debris, the perplexed human being, the prickly flora all about—before, screeching in disappointment, it wheeled west for better pickings.
That’s when Tot Hamsey, my father, gave his Ford a second chance. Climbed back in the cab, spoke an angry sentence in the direction of the starter button, and breathed deeply with relief when its six cylinders clattered to life—as welcome a noise to hear under those circumstances as is conversation from the lady you love. He could go back to town, he figured. Thirty-five miles. Find Sheriff Johnny Freel. Maybe Cheek Watson, the dumbbell deputy. Tell them the whole story—the sky a menace of streaky orange and yellow, the howl coming at him over his shoulder, the boom, and afterward soil and rock pitched up everywhere. Be done with it then. Bring the bigwigs back here, sure. Possibly hang around to gab with whatever colonel or general showed up to get his property back. Still get home in time for supper.
But Tot Hamsey was a curious man—a habit of character, my mother once said, you like to see in those you’re to spend a lifetime with—and he was curious now, more curious than hungry or tired or wary-witted, and so he put himself in gear to drive slowly down a sandy draw and up an easy rise until he had nowhere to turn but into the raw and burned-up acreage this part of New Mexico would ever after be famous for.
Everywhere was space-age junk, various foils and joints and milled metals as peculiar to him as maybe we are to critters. All the way to more sizable hills a half mile east, the landscape had been split and gouged—the handiwork, it appeared, of a giant from Homer or the Holy Bible racing toward sunrise and dragging a plow behind. Fires flickered near and far, and Tot Hamsey, father of one, could imagine that these were the cooking fires of an army heedless enough to make war against God. The sky had gone mostly dark, several stars twinkling, but no moon to make out specifics by. Just dark upon dark, and sky upon sky, and one innocent bystander in a Stetson from the El Paso Hat Company tying a bandanna over his mouth and nose to keep from breathing so much vile smoke.
The silence was likewise odd, somehow cold and leaden, another thing to spook you in the night. He thought he’d hear wildlife, certainly. Coyotes in a pack. The sheep from Albert Tulk’s place. But nothing, not even a dry wind to sweep noises here from civilization, which gave him to believe that all he’d known had vanished from the empire of man. His daddy’s banks. His mother Vanetta and his two brothers. Mac Brazeall, his own hired hand. His wife, who was my mother Corrine, and me as well, only a toddler. Even the town of Roswell and all others he’d suffered the bother to visit.
He turned himself on his heels, eyes fixed on the collapsed horizon, a full circle. Panic had begun to rise in Mr. Hamsey, him a Christian reared to believe in peril and the calamitous end of everything. It did seem possible, he thought. All of modern life, now gone. Streets he knew. The Liberty Bar, Brother Bill Toomey’s radio station, his grammar school on Hardesty Road and the crotchety marms that taught there. Every bit of it, great and small. The president of the United States, not to mention those muckety-mucks who ruled the world beyond. Maybe even the vast world itself. Which was probably all rubble and flame and smoke and which, as he thought about it, meant, Lord Almighty, that maybe Tot Hamsey was the last of whatever was—the last man in the last place on the last day with the last mind to think of last things on Planet Earth.
You can go out there your own self, if you wish. Just visit the UFO Museum. Not the classy outfit across from the courthouse near Denny’s, but the low-rent enterprise way south on Main Street, past the Levi’s plant and Mrs. Blake’s House of Christmas. The man there is Boyd Pickett, to matters of heaven and earth what, say, the Devil is to truth and fruit from a tree. For ten dollars a head, he’ll drive you out there in his Crown Victoria—it’s private property, he’ll tell you, him with a sweetheart lease arrangement—and show you the sights such as they currently are. For five more dollars, he’ll dangle a Tyco model flying saucer on #10 fishing filament behind you and snap you a full-color Polaroid suitable for framing, which means—ha-ha-ha—you with a moron’s grin and hovering over your shoulder physical evidence of a superior intelligence, which you are encouraged to show to your faithless friends and neighbors in, oh, Timbuktu or wherever it is you tote your own heavy bale.
For $8.50 you can have the as-told-to story between covers: how in July of 1947, one Mac Brazeall, ramrod for the Bar H spread out of Corona, heard a boom bigger than thunder and, as dutiful a Democrat as Harry Truman himself, went out to investigate; how he found what he found, which was wreckage and scalded rock and scorched grama grass, and how he took a piece of the former to Sheriff Johnny Freel, who viewed the affair with skepticism until Mac Brazeall, patriot and full-time redneck, crumpled a square of metal in his hands and put it on the table, whereupon, like an instance of infernal hocus-pocus, it sprung back into its original shape; and how Sheriff Freel, heart plugged in his throat, got on the phone to his Army counterpart at the air base; and how, in the hours that passed, much ordnance was mobilized and dispatched, and heads were scratched and oaths sworn; and how by, quote, dawn’s early light, you could look at the front page of the Daily Record and see there a picture of jug-eared Mac Brazeall, smug as a gambler atop a pyramid of loot, taking credit for a historical fact that had begun when my father, Tot Hamsey, heard the air whip and crack and, as if in a nightmare, witnessed his paid-for real estate turn to fire and ruin in front of him.
I’ve been out there a few times, the first with Cece Phillips (now my ex-wife) when we were hot for each other and stupid with youth. This was summer 1964, me only fresh out of high school and not yet in possession of the tapes my father, once a doctor-certified crazy man, would one day oblige me to listen to. Ignorant is what I’m trying to say, just a boy, like his long-gone daddy, unaware that what lay before him was a land of miracles terrifying but necessary to behold; just a boy fumbling at his girlfriend’s underclothes while everywhere, invisible above, eyes might have been looking down.
That night the moon was up, golden as a supper plate from the table of King Midas himself. In the back seat of my mother’s Chevrolet we had gone around and around for a time, Cece Phillips and me, breathless and eager-beaver, nothing there or there or there outdoors but sagebrush and the shapely shadows hills make. We must’ve seemed like wrestlers, I’m thinking now. Clinch, paw, and part. Look this way and that, not much coming out of our mouths but breath and syllables a whole lot like “eeeff” and “ooohh.” Cece said she couldn’t—not now anyways, not in this creepy place. And I, an hour of lukewarm Coors beer my inspiration, said she could. Which gave us, for a little while, something else to talk about before it became clear she would.
Not much to report here. Nothing mushy-gushy, anyway, from romance books or love songs. Just how time seemed to me to pass. One second and then another, like links on a chain that one day has to end. This is who we were: Reilly Hamsey, beefy enough to be of part-time use to the Coyotes’ coach for football; and Cece Phillips, hair in the suave beehive style of the stewardess she intended to be. We had music from KOMA out of Oklahoma City, and no school tomorrow or anytime until fall when we were to take up college life at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. This was us: bone and heat and movement, as we had been at the drive-in or in my mother’s rec room when she was away at work. Just us, youngsters who knew how to say “sir” and “ma’am” and “thank you” and be the seen-not-heard types adults are tickled silly to brag about.
Then this was over, and I was out-of-doors.
Was anything wrong, Cece wanted to know, and for a second I believed there wasn’t.
“I’m gonna take a leak,” I told her, and moseyed away to find a bush to stand behind.
A pall had fallen over me, I think now. A curtain had come down, or a wall gone up. Something that, as I stood with my back to the car and Cece, I could feel as plainly as I only moments before had felt the buckles and bows of Ms. Phillips herself.
Behind me, Cece was singing with the Lovin’ Spoonful, hers a voice vigorous enough to be admired by Baptists, and I, for the first time, was doing some serious thinking about her. About the muscles she had, and the dances she was unashamed to do at the Pit Stop or in the gym. She could stick-shift fast as I and knew as much as many about engines, those farm-related and not. She was tall, which appealed, and loose in the legs, swift as a sprinter.
“Don’t go too far,” she was saying. “We got to go pretty soon.”
Thinking about her. Then me. Then, oddly, my dog Red and how the fur bristled on his rump when the unexpected rapped at our front door on Missouri Street. Then my still-pretty mother and the colonel from the Institute she was dating, him with a posture rigid as plank flooring. Then, inevitably, my father, Tot Hamsey.
“Darn you, Reilly Jay,” she hollered out. “You tore my skirt.”
I imagined my father exactly as my mother had once described him: in front of the TV in the dayroom of his ward, his long face empty of everything but shock and sadness, his eyes glassy as marbles, the sense that in his head were only sparks and such thoughts as are thought by birds.
“You all right?” Cece called. “Reilly, you hear me?”
I was done with thinking then. I had reached a conclusion about Cece and me, one I was surer and surer of the closer I came to the car.
“Reilly,” she said, “what’s wrong with your face?”
We were doomed, I was thinking, the fact of it suddenly no more surprising than is the news that it’s hot in hell. We would go to college, that was clear. Cece, I guessed, would become pregnant. Yours truly would graduate and work for, say, Sinclair Oil in Midland and Odessa or thereabouts. More years would then roll over us, a tidal wave washing through our lives as one had smashed through my parents’ own. Eventually, I would find myself back here in Roswell—exactly, friends, as it has come to pass—and very likely I would be alone. As alone, according to the story, as my father had been the night he, years and years before, learned what he learned when the sun was down in this weird place and there was nothing else to do but heave himself into madness.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “Put your clothes on.”
Tot Hamsey finds the body in this part. The extraterrestrial. Finds it, listens to it, watches it expire. Then, having wandered a considerable distance away, he leans himself against the crumbling bank of an arroyo and, sprocket by spool by spring, feels his own simple self come plumb apart. The very him of him disassembled, which are his own words on one cassette. His boyhood, which was largely carefree and conducted out-of-doors. His school years, which go as they came, autumn by autumn. His playing basketball. He had popped an eardrum by diving in the wrong place at the Bottomless Lakes, and that went, as did the courtship of several town girls, including Corrine Rains, who became his wife and my mother, as well as his years at the Nazarene College in Idaho. He put aside—“very carefully,” he says on the tapes, likening himself to a whirligig of cogs and levers and wheels—all he’d done and thought about doing. About being for two whole days the property of Uncle Sam, and the tubby doctor who discovered that Tot Hamsey was one inch shorter on the left side. About working carpentry with his brother Ben at the German POW camp south of town. About being another man’s boss, and knowledge to have through the hands. About me even, the tiny look-alike of him. For almost an hour, until he heard the sputter of Mac Brazeall’s flatbed well east of him, he sat there. He was only mass and weight, one more creature to take up space in the world, more or less the man I visited in 1981, the year after I came back to this corner of America—a man who regarded you as though he expected you to reach behind your head to yank off your face and thus reveal yourself as a monster, too.
For a time, so he says on one tape, he didn’t do much of anything that July night in 1947. Sound had returned to the world, it seemed. He could hear the cows he’d been searching for bawling in the hard darkness south of him. He was in and out of the debris field now—back and forth, back and forth—the smell of char and ravaged earth sometimes strong enough to gag him, so he kept the Ford moving. Every now and then, slowing to roll down the window, he hollered into the blackness. If it was a plane from the Army base, then, shoot, maybe somebody had bailed out before or otherwise survived the crash. He might even know the pilot or those the pilot knew. But no answer ever came back. Not at point X or the other points, near and far, he found interesting. So for a while he didn’t stop at all, fearing that if he did leave his truck he might find only a torn-off part of somebody—a leg maybe, or a familiar head rolled up into some creosote bush—and that was nothing at all Tot Hamsey cared to find by himself. You could be scared, yes. But you didn’t have to be foolish. Instead, you would just stay in the cab of your nearly new Ford pickup and if, courtesy of your headlights, something should appear, well, you would just have to see that, wouldn’t you, and thereafter make up your own mind about what smart thing to do next.
He’s hearing the voice now, he says on the cassette. He’s been hearing it for a while, he thinks. Not a voice exactly, but chatter akin to static—like communication you might imagine from Shangri-la or a risen and busy Atlantis. Bursts of it. Ancient as Eden or new as tomorrow. The language of fish, maybe. Or what the trees confide in each other.
“Trees,” he says on the tapes, his own voice a whisper you would not want to hear more than once after sundown. “Vipers. And bugs. And rocks. The talk talked between worms.”
He’s stopped the truck now. But he’s not jumpy anymore—not at all. This could be a dream, he thinks, him still at home with Corrine and nothing but work in the sunshine to look forward to. He thinks about his friends, Straightleg Harry Peterson and Sonny Fitzpatrick, and the pheasant they’ll hunt come winter. He thinks about his daddy’s deacon, Martin Willis, whose porch he’s promised to fix on Saturday.
It’s a dream, he tells himself, feeling himself move left and right in it, nothing to keep him from falling over the edge. It’s a dream, water a medium to stand upon and wings everywhere to wear. It’s a dream, yes, time a rope to hang from and you on a root in the clouds.
It’s a dream, Tot Hamsey says on the tape, but then it is not—never has been—and there he is at last, staring into the face of one sign and terrible wonder.
The books describe it as tiny, like a fourth-grader, with a head like a bowling ball on a stick. The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and Bill Moore. UFO Crash at Roswell by those smart-alecks from England. They all say that it—the spaceman my father found—was hairless, skin gray as ash, its eyes big as a prizefighter’s fists. Something you could lug for a mile or two, easy. They’re wrong. The thing had skin pink as a newborn’s with hands like claws. You could see into it, my father says on the tapes. See its fluids pumping, an ooze that could be blood or sparkly liquids or goo there aren’t yet names for. And probably it could see into you. At least that’s the way it seemed to him—it with a Chinaman’s eyes that didn’t close and no ears and nothing but sloppy wet holes the size of peach pits to breathe through.
“Touch,” the thing said. The static was gone, English in its place—more phenomena we’re told that Uncle Sam has an interest in keeping hush-hush. “Don’t be afraid.”
My father looked around, no help on the horizon. He’d been given an order, it seemed, and there appeared to be no good reason not to obey it. So his hand went out, as if they knew each other and had been summoned hereabouts to do common business. It was like touching a snake, he says. Or the deepest thing from the deepest blue sea.
“Help them,” the thing said—another sentence you probably find silly to believe—and only a moment passed before my father noticed the three others nearby.
They were dead. That was easy to tell. Like oversize dolls that have lost their air—a sight downright sad to see but one Tot Hamsey told himself he could forget provided he now had nothing else awful to know and thereafter nothing more to remember.
“Wait,” the thing told him. “Sit.”
Ten paces away the pickup was still running at idle, headlights on but aimed elsewhere, and my father imagined himself able enough to walk toward it.
In an hour he could be home. He would eat supper, play with his boy, and listen to the radio. Corrine was making apricot jam, so he would sample it. He would take a bath, hot as he could tolerate. And then shave, using the razor his father had given him for Christmas. He could shine his lace-up shoes, read a true story in the Reader’s Digest, or tell Reilly more about Huck and Tom and Nigger Jim.
Sonny Fitzpatrick wanted him to help put the plumbing in a bungalow being built by the road to Artesia, so he could puzzle over that—the supplies he’d need and what to charge Sonny’s father for the hours involved. He’d been good at math. At geometry and angles to draw. He’d been better at literature, the go-getters and backsliders that books told about. He was only twenty-nine. A husband and a father. Much remained to be done in life.
But this, he thought. This was like dying. Like watching a horrible storm bear down on you from heaven. Nowhere at all to hide from the ordained end of you.
“Listen,” the thing said, and Tot Hamsey was powerless not to.
My mother has told me that he came home around sunrise. He’d been gone overnight before, so that hadn’t worried her. Sometimes he had a two-man project to do—a new windmill to get up or a stock tank that needed to be mucked out—so she had slept that night, me in my crib in the other bedroom, imagining him holed up in a rickety outbuilding in the badlands, eating biscuits hard as stones and listening to that blowhard Mac Brazeall say how it was in moldy-oldy times. She was not surprised when she heard the truck, or when she looked out the window to see him standing at the gate to the yard. He would do that on occasion, she thought. Collect himself for a minute. Slap the dust from his jeans or shake out his slicker and scrape his boots clean if it had rained. Then he’d come in, say howdy to Reilly, maybe swing him around a time or two, and over breakfast thereafter tell what could be told about doings in the hardscrabble way west of them.
But for a long time, too long to be no account, he didn’t move. He had a finger on the gatepost and it seemed he was taking its pulse. Behind the curtain, my mother watched, her own self as still as he. He’d lost his hat, evidently, and half of his face, like a clown’s, seemed red as war paint. She wasn’t scared, she said to me more than once. Not yet. This was her husband, a decent man top to bottom, and she had known him since the third grade. She’d seen him dance and, drunk on whiskey, play the piano with his elbows. He could sit a horse well and had a concern for the small gestures of courtesy that are now and then necessary to use between folks. So there was nothing to be frightened of, not even when he came in the front door and she could see that his eyes had turned small and hard, like nail heads.
Whatever wound in him was wound too tight, she thought. Whatever spun, now spinning too fast.
After that, she says, events happened very quickly. He gathered up several tablets and disappeared into his workshop, a pole barn he’d built himself back behind the clothesline. She put his breakfast out—bacon from Milt Morris’s slaughterhouse and eggs she’d put a little Tabasco in—but in an hour it was still outside the door. She could hear him in there, a man with a hammer and saw, something being built. Or something coming apart. She took me to the Hawkinses’ house so I could play with their boy Michael. At noon he was still in the shop, the door shut.
“Tot,” she said. “You hungry for lunch?”
She could hear him, she thought. Like the fevered scraping and scratching of a rodent in a wall.
Later, the afternoon worn white with sunlight, she told him Sonny Fitzpatrick was on the phone.
“He wants you there first thing in the morning, okay?”
She tried the door then, but something was blocking it, and she could only see a little through the space: Tot Hamsey’s back bent to a task on the table in front of him.
“Tot?” she said.
He turned then, eyes hooded, nothing in his expression to suggest that he knew her from anybody else who’d once upon a time crossed his narrow path—a look, she said later, that froze the innermost part of her. The vein or the nerve that was like wire at her very center.
“I’ll tell him you’ll be there,” she said.
After she picked me up at the Hawkinses’ house, she tried the door again. This time it didn’t move, so she went to the window. He was still at the bench, a leather apron on, passing a piece of metal back and forth in his big hands. She could see now that the door had been blocked by his table saw, a machine that had taken both him and her to move four months before. Exasperated, she rapped on the window.
“Supper in an hour,” she said.
But he didn’t come out for that. Nor for the serial on the radio. Nor for my bath, or for the story time that was supposed to follow. At the back door, she stood to watch the workshop. The lights were on, but he’d put a cover over the window. A sheet possibly.
This time she knocked harder. His supper dishes were still on the step. Untouched. “You’ve got to eat something,” she called. “Tot Hamsey?”
A moment later, she’d said his name again. And again. She thought he was just on the other side of the door, maybe his face, like her own, against the wood, the two of them—except for the pine boards—cheek to cheek. He was huffing, she thought. As if he’d raced a mile to be there. As if he had more miles to go.
“Oh, honey,” she sighed.
It was the same the next day, she has said. And the day after that. No evidence that he’d come out of the workshop. Only the slightest sign that he’d eaten. Once she thought to call his father, Milt Hamsey, but he was the meddlesome type, quick to condemn, slow to forgive. A holier-than-thou sort with a walleye and hair in his ears and no patience whatsoever with the ordinary back and forth of lived life. Too much anger in him. Like a spike in the heart.
No, she thought. Tot was only fretful about something. Or working an idea to a point. Besides, it was nobody’s business what went on in Tot and Corrine Hamsey’s house.
On the fourth day, she got the newspaper from the box by the fence line near the road. Whiskered Mac Brazeall was in it, a picture of his idiotic self on the front page, with his cockamamie story about the flying saucer parts he’d found off the Elko trail leading into the Jornada. Other articles about bogeymen in the skies above Canada and Kansas and all over the West. The base was involved, she read. Soldiers and officials from the government everywhere. Maybe spies. Just about the most far-fetched thing she’d ever heard of.
At the step to the workshop, she asked Tot if he knew anything about this. “You were out there,” she said. “That’s where you were, right?”
Tot Hamsey came toward the door then. She heard the table saw being shoved aside. He would look like a hermit, she believed. Ravaged and blighted. Then he was in front of her, not a giant step away, and she thought briefly that he’d had his heart ripped right out of him.
“What’s it say?” he asked, his first words in nearly one hundred hours.
“You coming out?” she wondered.
He had that look still. Murder in him maybe. Or fear. “Give it here,” he said.
Now she was scared, a part of her already edging back toward the house. The room behind him, though ordered as her own kitchen, was cold as an icebox, the smell of it stale, like what you might find if you opened a trunk from another century. She told herself not to gasp.
“This has to stop,” she said.
“It will,” he told her. He was reading the paper now, his lips moving as if he were chewing up the words.
“When?” she said, but the door was already closing.
They had reached an understanding, she decided. She was not to trouble him anymore. She had her own self and me to tend to. If anybody called—Sonny again, for example, or nosy Norris Proctor or Tommy Tyree from the Elks Club, anybody wanting anything from citizen Hamsey—she was to make up an excuse. A broken leg, maybe. The summer flu. A lie, anyway, he and she could one day laugh about. In turn, she was to get about her own business. She would have to call her dad for money, but that was okay. He owned two hardware stores and was rich enough for three families.
She was to wait, she thought. A hole had opened in her life, hers now the job to see what creature crawled free from it.
He possessed treasure, he says on the tapes. Not the pirate kind. Not wealth, but secrets. “My name is Totenham Gregory Hamsey,” he scribbled on the first page of the tablet I would one day find. “I was born in 1918, on March the 13th. My mother says I was a sweet child.” For page after page, he goes on that way, his handwriting like a million spiders seen from above. He’d seen a human die, he wrote, and had watched another, me, being birthed. He knew a U.S. senator and had shaken the hand of Roy Rogers. In Espanola, he’d ridden a Brahman bull and had taken a trolley in Juarez, Mexico. “I look good in swim trunks,” he says on one page, “and have a membership at the Roswell Country Club. I am no golfer, though.” He knows bridge and canasta and can juggle five apples. Jazz music he doesn’t like, but he’ll listen once to whatever you put on the record player.
“I have knowledge,” he writes, and by page twenty-six he has started to give it. Pictures of how it is where they live. Their tribe names and what they do in space. The beliefs of them, their many conquests. They are us, he says, but for the accidents of where and when we are.
On the fifth day, according to the tapes in his file cabinets, he goes into the house. He doesn’t know where his wife and child are. Nor does he much care. They could be strangers, people at a wayside: They’re going one way, he another.
Beside the couch in the living room, he finds the stack of newspapers—the Army everywhere and Sheriff Johnny Freel looking boneheaded. It’s a weather balloon, my father reads. A rawinsonde, a new design, a balloon big as a building in New York City. A colonel from Fort Worth has confirmed this to all who thought the opposite. The intelligence officer from the base, Jesse Marcel himself, has put minds at rest. Mac Brazeall, cowpuncher, was mistaken, wrong as wrong could be. Not spacemen after all. Not Communists, either. Just Uncle Sam measuring winds aloft. All is well again.
He feels sorry for them, my father says. They have small minds. They are insects.
For the next hour, he busies himself with practical matters. He gets out his good suit. For the journey. He showers, shaves, and brushes his teeth. He eats, for fuel only. He settles his affairs. “I am not coming back,” he writes to my mother in a note he’ll put on the dining room table. “You are young. You can be good to someone else.”
Outside, the landscape fascinates. Dry and cracked and endless. Storm clouds boiling up in the distance. They are there. His friends.
“Reilly,” he writes to me in the same note, “study. Know your sentences and your sums. Do not give offense to your elders. Keep yourself clean. We move. We ascend. We vanish.”
Carefully, he dresses. It is important, he thinks, that he look presentable. He wears cuff links, stuffs a handkerchief in his coat pocket. In the mirror, he sees a man of virtuous aspect—hair nicely combed, shoulders squared, tie in a handsome Windsor knot. He hears himself breathing, amused that he still needs our air.
On the phone, he asks for Charlie Spiller personally. “I need a taxi,” he says. “In one hour.”
He imagines Charlie Spiller on the other end of the line. A man with a fake leg. A lodge brother. Another creepy-crawly thing from a vulgar kingdom.
“One hour,” he says. “Exactly.”
He’s at the end of something, clearly. All that can be done has been done. He is not here. Not really. The past has closed behind him. He’s gone through a door, a seam. There is no point in looking back.
On the dresser in the bedroom, he leaves his wallet and his Longines wristwatch. For a little while, sadly, he will need money. To pay Charlie. To pay for the Greyhound bus. To eat a sandwich along the way. He will not need his driver’s license. Nor other papers. He is not anybody to know. None of us is. We are wind and dirt and ash. We are weight that falls, flesh that burns. We are oil and mud. We are slow and cannot run. We are blind and do not see. We are echo and shadow and mist.
At the workshop, he checks the padlock. Inside, beneath the floorboards, in a pit he has dug, are his secrets. His papers wrapped in oilcloth. In the box are the metals. The mesh-like panels. The tiny I-beams. Dials and switches and wires. His keepsakes from the future.
He turns once to look at the house. He imagines his thoughts like laundry on a line. All is well.
“This is not lunacy,” he says on the tapes I would find. “I’m a man who’s died and come back, is all.”
At the dirt road by the fence line is the place he needs to be in a minute. Charlie Spiller drives a Dodge, a big car to go places in. Charlie Spiller cackles like a crone and can take direction. He can tell a joke and crack his knuckles, tricks to perform in the places he goes. Charlie Spiller: Another human to forget about.
From his pocket, my father takes his keys and throws them as far as he can into the desert. He straightens his tie, shoots his cuffs, and buttons his suit coat.
If it is sunny, he does not know. If raining, he cannot feel it. Instead, he has a place to be and a passel of desire to be there. He speaks to his feet, to his legs and hips, to the obedient muscles in each.
The voices. They’ve returned. The stones have messages for him. The cactus. The furniture he’s leaving behind. Much is being revealed. Of sovereigns and viceroys. Of sand and of rocks. Listen. You can hear them. Like water. Like lava a mile beneath your feet.
“I had knowledge,” he says. “My name was Tot Hamsey. All was well.”
2.
IN 1980, for all the reasons unique to modern times (boredom, mainly, plus anger and some sickness at the pickiness of us), Cece Phillips and I went bust. She got the house in Odessa, not to mention custody of Nora Jane (like her mother, a specimen of womanhood sharp-tongued and fast to laugh at dim-wittedness), and I came back here, to Roswell. The city liked well enough what it read on paper and so put me to work in the engineering department where I compute the numbers relevant to curbs and gutters and how you get streets to drain. Besides the physical, you should know, much had changed about me. I’d sworn off anything stronger than Pepsi and did not use a credit card and had learned to play handball at the YMCA on Washington Avenue. In the mayor’s office next door, I met a Clerical II, Sharon Sweeny, and spent enough agreeable hours with her at the movies and the like to think, in boy-girl matters of moon and June at least, that two and two equaled more than the four you’d expect. I ate square meals, cleaned up my apartment regularly, and kept my p’s and q’s in the order they’re notorious for.
Then, in 1981, the curious son of a curious man, I went to visit my father.
“You’re Reilly,” he said, his first words to me in decades.
“I am,” I said, mine to him.
He was living in, quote, a residential facility, meaning that if you’ve got enough money, you can break bread in what looks like a combination hospital and resort motel with a bunch of harmless drunks and narcotics addicts and taxpayers who need to scrub their hands thirty times before they can dress in the morning. He’d been there since early in 1954, after my grandfather—who is himself dead now—found him up at the New Mexico State Hospital in Las Vegas and drew up papers that said, as papers from rich men can, that T. G. Hamsey could live at the Sunset Manor here until the day arrived to put him in the family plot in the cemetery on Pennsylvania Street.
I didn’t recognize him. Umpteen-umpteens had gone by, and I was looking for the stringbean adult in the snapshots my mother had given me. He was collapsed, if you must know. Time had come down cruel on him, the way it will on all of us. Plus he was over sixty years old.
“Do you have a cigarette?” he said.
We were standing in a lobby-like affair, couches and end tables with lamps on them, the windows beyond us giving onto a view of Kmart and Dairy Queen and all else crummy the block had become.
I’d quit, I told him.
“Perhaps next time,” he said.
He was a stranger, as unknown to me as I am to the Queen of England. He was just a man, I was telling myself, one I shared no more than cell matter with.
“Are you scared, Reilly?”
That wasn’t the word, I told him. Not scared.
“What is the word, then, son?”
I didn’t know. Honest.
“I’m something you’ve heard of, right? I’m a river to visit. A monument somebody wrote about. Maybe a city to go to.”
We had sat, him in an armchair that seemed too small, me catty-corner on a leather couch so slick you could slide off. I wanted to leave, I’ll admit. It was my lunch hour, and I thought of myself at El Popo’s, eating Mexican food with my friends, little more to fret about than what paper needed to be pushed in the afternoon and which shoot-’em-up Sharon Sweeny and I could munch popcorn in front of that night at the Fiesta.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
It was hot outside, the heat shimmering up in waves from the asphalt parking lot, but I yearned to be out there in it, striding toward my car.
“Just didn’t know when,” he said. “You’re a Hamsey.”
True enough, I thought. Cece Phillips had once told me that I was about as predictable as time itself.
“How is she?” he asked. “Your mother.”
She was in Albuquerque now, I said. She’d married again—not the colonel from NMMI when I was in high school, but the man after the man after the man after him.
“That’s good,” he said. “She used to come by, you know.”
“A long time ago,” I said.
That was right, he said. A long time ago, she used to visit with him, in this very room, tell him how it was with his parents and his brothers. With herself. With even their growing-up son.
“You didn’t say much,” I told him. “That’s what Mother says.”
He cast me a look then—equal parts disappointment and confusion. “That’s not how I remember it.”
He seemed fragile and delicate, not a man who once upon a time could heft a hay bale or hog-tie a calf. He was neither the snapshots I’d seen nor the stories I’d heard. He was just a human being the government counts every ten years.
“I’m tired,” he said.
He was dismissing me, so I stood.
“Shall we shake hands?” he asked.
I had no reason not to, so we did, his the full and firm squeeze of a candidate for Congress.
“You’ll come back?” he said.
I had been raised to be polite, I was thinking. Plus this had only cost me minutes, of which I had a zillion.
“Next Friday,” I said.
Nodding, he let my hand go then, and I turned. This was my father, crackpot. Loony-bird. This was Totenham Gregory Hamsey. And I, suddenly thick-jointed and light-headed and not breathing very well, was his son.
“Reilly,” he called.
I had reached the door, only a few feet between his life and my own.
“Don’t forget those smokes, okay?”
He was a man who’d survived a disaster, I thought. A fall from a ship or a tumble down the side of a mountain. He’d walked through a jungle or maybe had himself washed miles and miles away by a flash flood. Buried alive or lost on Antarctica, sucked up in a tornado or raised by wolves—he was as much a figure out of a fairy tale as he was a man whose scribblings on the subjects of time and space and visitors I would eventually read often enough to memorize whole sections. Yes, he had horror in his head, events and visions and dreams like layers of sediment, but that day he only wanted cigarettes. So, the next week, I brought them.
“Luckies,” he said, smelling the carton. “A good choice.”
“A guess,” I said. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I have seniority,” he told me. “I do what I like.”
This time we didn’t sit in the lobby. We went to his room, and walking down the corridor he pointed at various doors. “Estelle Barnes,” he said at one. “A dingbat. Nice woman, but thinks she’s a ballet dancer. Sad.” At another, he said, “Marcus Stillwell. Barks a lot. Sounds like a fox terrier.” It was like that all the way: people said to weep or babble or to seek instruction and wisdom from their housepets—our own selves, I told Sharon Sweeny that night, except for chance and dread and bubbles in the brain.
At his own door, he jiggled the knob. “Locks,” he said. “I’m the king of the hill here.”
It was like an apartment—a class-A kitchen, a sitting room, a sizable bath, a bedroom—the fussed-over living quarters of a tenant whose only bad habit is watching the clock.
“You like?” he asked.
I’d thought it would different, I told him. Smaller.
He looked around then, as if this were the first time that he himself had seen the place. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
I almost asked him then. I really did. I almost asked what you would, which is Why and What and Why again. But, owing to what I guess is the me of me—which has nothing to do with the pounds and inches of you nor the face you’re born with—I didn’t. I was only a visitor; he, just an old fellow with a dozen file cabinets and maybe a thousand books to call his pals.
“You turned out okay,” he said.
I had, I thought. I really had.
“You know,” he began, “I’ve seen you a couple of times before.” He was sitting across from me, his head tilted, a cigarette held to his lips. “Come here,” he said, rising and beckoning me to his window. “Over there.”
Outside, nearly a hundred yards away, stood the back of a 7-Eleven. Beyond that ran the highway to Clovis—the Cactus Motel and the Wilson Brothers’ Feed and Seed. The sight wasn’t much to whoop over, just buildings and dirt and three roads I had once calculated the code-meeting dimensions of.
“You had a city car,” he said, gazing afar as though I were out there now. “You wore a tie. And cowboy boots.”
He was right. Eight months earlier I’d been with a survey crew—storm drains and new concrete guttering—and now I was standing here, seeing what he’d seen.
“You have your mother’s walk,” he said.
Cars were going up that street, and I remembered being out there, once or twice turning to look at where I stood now, once or twice one wet winter day thinking I knew somebody in that building. My father.
“You’re a boss, I take it.”
Sort of, I told him. There was a wisenheimer, Phelps Boykin, I reported to.
He was still staring straight ahead, and as if by magic I imagined I was inside his head, feeling time snag and ravel up, the present overwhelmed by the past. He was at my shoulder, me close enough to smell him, and he was leaning forward, nose almost to the glass. His hand had come up, small and speckled with liver spots, my own hand in twenty or thirty more years, and it seemed, having recognized something out there, he was going to wave hello.
“You know what I’d like?” he said.
That hand, unmoving and open and pale, was still up, and, my own hand twitching at my side, I had no idea what he’d like.
“An ice cream,” he said. “I’d like a dish of vanilla ice cream.”
The tapes don’t say a lot about the state hospital in Las Vegas, a ragtag collection of brick buildings—one of them, maximum security, surrounded by barbed wire atop chain-link high enough to fence out giraffes, and each with a view of the boring flatlands you have to traipse across to get out of the Land of Enchantment. All I came to know is that Charlie Spiller drove Totenham G. Hamsey to the Greyhound bus station, where the latter bought his ticket and got aboard with nothing in his hands but air and heat, him in a seat all to himself. He says he stood at the hospital’s door until they took him in. Says he marched up to the receptionist’s desk and told that wig-wearing woman that he knew exactly where he belonged, that he could see into the knobs and fissures of her soul, that she was like we all are, which is puny and whiny and weak—just spines with blabbing meat at the top.
She was goggle-eyed, he says, and looked up and down for the joke. Says he stripped to his undershorts and shoes then, to show her that he meant business, and uttered not another peep until a director, a fussbudget with an eyebrow like a caterpillar and hair like a thatched roof, escorted him into an office for a man-to-man chat, whereupon time—“of which,” he says, “there is too goddamn much”—went zoom, zoom, zoom, and the past snapped away from him like a kite from a string in a hurricane.
I’m not sure I believe any of this, though I like the idea of a Hamsey semi-naked in a public place. Still, given what I know—from the tapes, from the papers in the boxes and files in his apartment, from two visits to his hidey-hole at the farm—all he said seems as straightforward as breakfast. Given the givens, especially how I turn out in this story, I sometimes see him chalk-faced, his teeth gritted, outerwear at his feet, no light or noise in his world except that rising up in him from memory, nothing but gravity to keep him earthbound, only ordinary years between him and eternity.
When he was alive—when I was visiting on Fridays and taking him to the Sonic for a chili-cheeseburger or out with Sharon Sweeny and me to the Bottomless Lakes for a cookout—he didn’t talk much about such matters. Talked instead about the Texas Rangers, whose games he listened to on KBIM, and about the mayor’s father, Hob Lucero, a man he’d busted broncos with, and what it’s like to tango and box waltz with someone named Flo, and how to tell if your cantaloupe is ripe or which nail to use when you’re pounding up wallboard.
He was a Republican, he said one week. Which meant to him gold bullion and gushing smokestacks and cars you hired a wetback to polish twice a month.
Then, a week later, he asked me about NORAD—what I knew of it.
“What?” I said. I was preoccupied by a loud difference of opinion I’d had with Phelps Boykin earlier that morning.
“The Marine Corps has a metallurgy lab in Hagerstown, Maryland,” he said.
He was mainly talking to himself, I thought. Didn’t make a whit of difference who sat in the seat beside him.
“They’re liars,” he said. “Lowdown pencil pushers who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on the hindmost.”
Here it was I left off thinking about crabby Phelps Boykin, supervisor, and took up the subject of cracked Totenham Hamsey, father. It was a moment, I think now, as dramatic in its circumstances as maybe gunfire might be to you in yours.
“Del Rio, Texas,” he announced. “December 1950. A colonel—one Robert Willingham—reports an object flying at high speed. Crashes. He finds a piece of metal, honeycombed. Had a lot of carbon in it. Cutting torch wouldn’t melt the damn thing.”
He put a Lucky to his lips, took a puff, held it for seven beats of my crosswise heart.
“There’s more,” he said. “A whole lot more.”
We were parked off McGaffey Road, southwest of town, the two of us eating burritos in a city car. Across the prairie the humps of the Capitan Mountains were the nearest geography between us and another time zone. We’d been doing this for nearly two years, going to Cahoon Park or down to Dexter or up to Six-Mile Hill. Father and son—an hour or two of this or that.
“There’s hoaxes,” he said, still gazing afar. “Spitsbergen Island off Norway, September 1952. Aztec, New Mexico. March 1948. A yahoo named Silas Newton says there were seventeen hundred scientists out there. You can’t imagine some of the goofballs running around.”
I was looking at the ground, specifically a slumped area a few yards ahead of us. For a moment it seemed that something grotesque might charge out of it, and me with only a greasy paper bag and a new driver’s license to defend myself.
“You don’t believe this, do you?”
Clouds roiled off in this distance, shapes that ought to be meaningful to someone like me. “Not really,” I said.
“It’s like God, isn’t it?” he said. “Maybe necromancy. Or fortune-telling.”
Sharon Sweeny believed in God, I told him. Which was all right. And Cece Phillips had recently said that our daughter, Nora Jane, believed in ghosts and astrology. But me, I didn’t blow much one way or the other.
“That’s too bad,” he said.
It was about as useful, I told him, as pretending you could fly or see through walls.
“There’s a lot like you,” he said.
I had started the car, the air-conditioning throwing a fine cold blast on my hot face. “I’ve got to get back,” I said. “There’s a man I have to see.”
He was sitting up straight now, his the expression teachers get when you mess up, and I realized that two conversations had been taking place, but me with only ears enough for one.
“I could tell you everything,” he said at last.
I revved the engine—more cold air, more words in it to worry about.
“I could do that right now, Reilly. All you have to do is give me the go-ahead.”
I was thinking furiously. Me with a brain like a Looney Tunes engine, all its clever gears whirling and spitting off sparks. He could tell me. About the third of July in 1947 and all since. About his leaving. About my mother and me, left behind.
“What do you say, son?”
We stood at a crossroads, I believed. In one direction lay the past; in the other, tomorrow and the tomorrows after that. One was mystery and sore hearts and done deeds you couldn’t undo; the other, me and a girlfriend and a GMC truck to make payments on.
“No, sir,” I told him. “I don’t need to know any of that.”
Which is how we left it for that month, August, and the next, and those others that passed before he showed up at my office late in May, him in a suit coat and white shirt and handsome string tie. As fashionable as a State Farm agent.
“I walked,” he said. He looked flushed, maybe thirsty for an ocean of water, so I asked him if he wanted a fruit juice or an RC from the machine in Drafting.
“You’re a messy one, aren’t you?” he said, waving at my desk and my table and my cabinets, charts and state-issue reference works piled haphazardly atop each. “Hamseys, so far as I can tell, are not a cluttering people.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Clearly, he had something in mind. A surprise to spring on his only child.
“Your mother kept a clean house.”
He was right about that, too. So spotless and tidied that one Friday near Easter I’d come home from school after track practice (I threw the shot) and, my house as still as a tomb, I’d thought that my mother, like her husband before her, had also vanished.
“Tell me about her,” he said. “The man she married.” He was smoking now, flicking his ashes in his cuff, his movements deliberate and precise, as if he had to explain to his shoulder and his elbow and his fingers what to do.
“His name is Barnett,” I said. “Mother calls him Hub. He’s something at Sandia Labs. Management of some sort.”
He took another drag—not much air in here to push the smoke around. “Military?” he asked.
I didn’t think so, I said. He was about to retire.
“A big man, I’m guessing. Your mother liked big men.”
I hadn’t thought about it, I admitted. Hub was about average size, maybe a bit overweight. Had a big laugh, though. Like Santa Claus.
“A man of substance, I take it.”
Tot Hamsey was like an adding machine, I thought. This information, then more, eventually the sum he was adding for.
“Is he kind?” my father said.
I guessed so, I told him. Didn’t exactly know.
“Corrine never went for coarse types,” he said. “Ask Norris Proctor.”
It was a name, like many others, I could not attach to a face. Tommy Murphy, Pug Thigpen, Mutt Mantle, Judge Willy Freedlander—these were people I’d only heard of, names no more than jibber-jabber to go in one ear and out the other. Folks either old or gone or dead.
“I don’t have any regrets, Reilly. Not a one.”
He was gazing at the most impressive of my wall maps, the city’s zoning laid out in a patchwork of pink and blue and red and yellow, section after section after section of do’s and don’t’s—where you could manufacture and peddle, where you could only sleep and mow your lawn—a world I probably took too much satisfaction in being a little bit responsible for.
“Project Mogul, they called it,” he was saying. “Radar targets—foil, so the story goes—being strung from a balloon.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. This was his surprise: the there and then that had become the here and now.
“The 509th,” he said, “right here in Roswell. Only air group trained to handle and drop atomic bombs.”
I felt as I had that Friday afternoon near Easter. With my heart like a fist in my throat, I started to tell him again that I didn’t want to know any of that talk.
“Sit down, Reilly,” he said. He was speaking to me as he’d once himself been spoken to; so, looking at him as I guess he’d looked at it, I did. “Pay attention, boy. I don’t have all day.”
I was to wait. To sit here as I had there. I was to be quiet. Above all, I was to concentrate on something—that color photograph, say—and not look away from it until the floor was the floor again, and I would not be falling toward it.
“Project Sign,” he was saying, “ATIC in Dayton. Hell, Barry Goldwater’s in this. You still with me?”
I was. Me. And the photo. And the floor. And one man of substance.
CUFOS, Erv Dill, Ubatuba in Brazil, 1957, 1968, Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, magnesium, strontium, the Dew Line, True magazine, radio intercepts, MUFON, the sky, the Vega Galaxy, the suits they wear, the vapors we are helpless without, the bodies in the desert, the sorry-ass home our rock is, the swoop and swell, the various holes in heaven—all this and more he said, me and the walls his respectful audience. And then, loopy as time to a toad, a half hour had gone by, and he was through looking at the map.
“I’m not crazy, Reilly.”
I told Sharon Sweeny later that I was playing a game in my head—A is for apple, B for ball—me not capable of offering aloud anything neutral yet. I was at F—for fog—when he spoke again.
“There’s no power, son, no glory. There’s nothing—just them and us and the things we walk on. I have proof.” Wiping his forehead with a tissue he’d drawn from his trousers, he seemed finished, the back a little straighter, no spit at the corners of the mouth. “Here,” he said, another item from his pocket.
I took it. A key ring. Maybe ten keys attached.
“My files,” he said.
G, I was thinking. What was G for?
Sharon Sweeny—my sweetie then, my Mrs. now—says the call that Thursday came at about the exact minute Peter Jennings was demonstrating how soggy it was in rain-soaked West Table, Missouri. I have no memory of this; nor have I any recollection of going to the phone and barking “hello” in a manner meant to mean “no” to those interrupting my dinner hour to sell me something.
Sharon Sweeny—as right a wife for me as white is right for rice—reports I said “yes” two times, the latter less loud and certainly with too much s in it.
Next, I’ve heard, I sat. In the chair by the table I usually pay my bills from. I eased the phone away from my ear, I am told, and regarded it as naked primitives are said to stare at mirrors. I appeared frazzled, my foot tapping as it will when I have eight somethings to say but only one something to say it with. I am told—by Sharon Sweeny, who was between bites and only a few steps away—that I mumbled only one sentence before I hung up, which was “I see,” words she thinks must’ve taken all I had of strength and will to get loose. When I stood, she tells me, it seemed also an act with maximum effort in it.
“Where’re you going?” she says she said.
On a hook by the front door hung my jacket, and Sharon Sweeny claims I approached it as though I expected the sleeves to choke me.
“Quik-Mart,” I evidently told her. “I’d like a cigarette.”
She was frightened, hers truly on the brink of teetering or breaking into a full run. “Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“I haven’t smoked in years,” it’s said I said. “But tonight, just now, I’d like a pack. It’s a foul habit, you know. Hard as the dickens to break. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Not a blessed soul. You believe me, right?”
She had come toward me, I understand, a woman now close enough to see the focus flashing in and out of her man’s eyes, him with his chin lifted as though listening for a sound not to be heard twice in a lifetime.
“Reilly?”
So, his own strange news to deliver, Reilly told her: Totenham Hamsey, middle initial G., was dead.
Congestive heart failure, it was, that old man going down at the feet of his dance partner Estelle Barnes, would-be ballerina, still eight or nine bars left of “Woodchoppers’ Ball.” But, as I say, I remember not an iota of how I came to share this knowledge with my beloved big-boned Clerical II. I do not remember the next day, either, nor the day that replaced it. About the funeral, at the grave site his father had paid for years and years earlier, I recall only a single incident—me and my mother and her husband Hub and a preacher named Wyatt who looked like he was trying out for a community theater musical, plus a handful of residents from the Sunset Manor, accompanied by a nurse who stood as though she had wood screws in her heels, and sunlight pouring down on us like molten metal but me not melted in the middle, and then Sharon Sweeny, my hand held in hers, leaning to my ear to whisper, “Stop humming, sweetheart. I can’t hear what the man’s saying.”
The day after that, I recovered myself, came to—in my father’s apartment, me appointed to move his stuff out to somewhere else. His colognes, I think, hastened me back. Frenchy fragrances of vanilla and briar and oily smoke—odd for a fellow never known, so my mother has since said, for other than Vicks or Old Spice. “Sweet smellies,” he’d called them that first day he’d showed me around. So there I was, with several packing boxes from city hall, me too big in a bathroom too brightly lit to flatter, feeling myself return, as if to earth itself, inch by inch by inch, until I had no one to lead me about except the familiar blockhead in the mirror and him in need of both a haircut and a professional shave. Mother wanted none of this—not out of meanness, I hold—so Sharon Sweeny had made arrangements with the Salvation Army to take all it had a use for; I was the help, a job I’d apparently said yes to when, after the casket was lowered, that nurse with the sore feet had waddled over to remind me of the workaday consequences of death.
I packed his clothes next, only two sacks of mostly white dress shirts and dark slacks you apparently are urged to buy in lots of ten, plus lace-up shoes—all black—that you could wear for another half century. For reasons owing to sentimentality and the like, or so Sharon Sweeny later insisted, I kept the string tie for myself, it being his neckwear the last time we’d visited. Then, the kitchen having only food and drink to throw away and not much of either, I went to the living room and, my innards clotted and pebbly and heaped up hard beneath my ribs, stood in front of the steel cabinets I had the keys for.
“My treasure,” he’d said four days earlier. “Yours now.”
Out the window I noticed the spot where, years before, he’d seen me at work in boots and my own starched white shirt. I imagined him watching me then, as abstract and fixed as my mother had been the morning, years and years before that, when she stood behind her curtains to study him at their gate, nothing in him—I would soon enough learn—but ice and wind and heavy silence.
“You take care, Reilly,” he had said in my office, and now, no other chore to distract me, I was.
For company, I had turned the TV on—General Hospital, I recall, in which attractive inhabitants from a made-up metropolis were falling in love or scheming diligently against one another. They were named Scorpio and Monica and Laura and Bobbi, and for a moment, it as long as one in war, I desired to be at the center of them: Reilly Jay Hamsey in a fancy Italian suit, his teeth as white as Chiclets, him with lines to orate and a well-groomed crowd happy to hear them.
“In the shop,” he had said. “At the farm. That’s where.”
I was fingering the keys, each no bigger than my thumb. One fit one cabinet, another another, and all I had to do was turn locks clockwise, no real work whatsoever for the hand and wrist of me.
“Under the floorboards, son.”
T. G. Hamsey, I was thinking. Son of Milton Hamsey, banker, and Vanetta Fountain Hamsey, homemaker. Brother of Winston Lee, oilman, and Benjamin Wright, bankrupt cattle baron. All deceased. Nothing now but these cabinets and me. In one, only papers and tape recordings; in the other, bone and flesh and blood.
Music had come up from next door, a foot-tappy ditty that for a minute I endeavored to keep the steady beat of.
In the desert that night years ago, Cece Phillips had declared that we—you, me, all the king’s men—had been put here on earth for a purpose: “We’re meant to be the things we are,” she said. It was an idea fine to have, I told her, if you’re sitting atop a pile of us and have nothing at all but more whoop-de-do to look forward to. “Fine to have,” I’d said, “if you don’t have to get up when the alarm says to.”
That’s what I was thinking when I slipped the key in the lock of the leftmost cabinet. What if you’re one Reilly Hamsey, a middle-aged municipal employee with only a remote control to boss around and tomorrow already coming up over England? What if, no matter the wishes you’ve wished, you’ve nothing above your shoulders but mush and nothing in your wallet but five dollars and nothing in your pants pockets but Juicy Fruit gum? What if, when your hand turns and the lock clicks open and that first drawer slides out, you’re always going to be the you you are, and this will always be the air you breathe, and that will always be the ragged rim of the world you see?
“I hate them,” my father had said, teary-eyed. “Look what they’ve done to me.”
On the TV a wedding was taking place, Lance to Marissa, their friends and relations elbow to elbow and beaming, squabbles and woes set for the occasion aside. They were gowned and sequined and fit, no illnesses to afflict, no worries that wouldn’t—in one episode or another—disappear, theirs the tragedies you only need a wand to wave away.
“Hey,” I said, addressing those Americans from the American Broadcasting Company. “Look what I’m doing here.”
3.
THEY HAD crammed it all in his head, he’d said on the tapes. What conveyances to take, the packs of them, their minerals and gases, the councils they sit at, their rectitude in matters moral, their currencies, their contempt for us. They have prisons for their villains, schools for their youngsters. They have nationalities, Chancellors and princes, blood allegiances to fight for. Leaders have risen up among them. They are disappointed, spite-filled. “They have been to the end of it,” he’d said. “Where the days run out. The minutes. Where the fires are.”
The fires—one image to have between the ears the day Sharon Sweeny and I parked at the road leading to the farm. The place wasn’t much to look at, the city having crept up to the nearby cotton fields, the irrigation canals mostly intact but the fence line in need of expensive repair.
“You still own it?” Sharon asked.
My grandfather had sold it, I told her, maybe five years after. Part of the proceeds had put me through college. The rest my mother had given me for the house in Odessa.
We’d stopped for a Coke on the way out, and she was drinking the last of it now, looking at the tumbledown buildings, while I, like a clerk, was scrambling to sort out my thoughts big to little. “Seems tiny, doesn’t it?” I said at last.
“When I visit my parents in Socorro,” she began, “I can’t believe I ever lived there. I mean, it’s like a dollhouse.”
The day was bright, the sun as fierce this morning as it would be this afternoon, nothing between it and us but seconds, and I was glad I’d brought a hat.
“You ready?” she asked.
Briefly, before the roof of my stomach caved in, I thought I was. “Give me a moment, okay?”
I’d dreamed about this last night. I’d read his documents, page after page that seemed less scribbled on than shouted at. I’d listened to his tapes, hours and hours of them, and then, Saturday already faint in the east, I’d dreamed. Me. And treasure to find. And strong Sharon Sweeny to help.
“You think she’ll like me?” she was saying.
My eye was focused on a tumbleweed snagged on the barbed wire at the gate, my mind on the single reason for not backing out of there. “Who?”
Nora, she said. Nora Jane.
I had forgotten. My daughter, a sophomore at Texas Tech, was coming over for summer break—a chance to meet Sharon Sweeny and maybe later tell her mother, Cece Phillips Hamsey, what good fortune her old man had finally stumbled into—and, Christ, I had forgotten.
“Cece says she likes golf,” I said. “Maybe you can take her over to Spring River for a round.”
I felt tottery, I tell you, as different from myself as tea is from tin. And before I gave in to the coward in me, I imagined myself standing down the way a bit toward town, me a shitkicker with nothing to do but stroll past that unremarkable couple sitting in the city car at the end of a rutted road leading to one ramshackle house.
“We could leave,” I told Sharon Sweeny, which prompted her to lift her eyebrows and take my closest hand.
“No, we couldn’t, Reilly.”
She was right, but I would require several more moments, thoughts surfacing twelve at a time, to realize that.
“There’s money,” I said. “Seems he had a lot of it. I found a Norwest bankbook.”
That was dandy, she said. And I believed she meant it.
“We could get a house,” I told her. “I always wanted a swimming pool.”
That was also dandy, vocabulary I now couldn’t hear too much of.
“Nora could have her own room. Maybe spend more time with us. A real family.”
Her hand tightened on mine, and something sharp and whole and nearly perfect passed between us.
“Reilly,” she said. “Start the car.”
Like my father, I guess now, I too am excellent at following orders, so I did as told, pleased both by how I kept my hands on the wheel as we rolled up closer and closer and closer, and by the fact that I could look left and right if I wanted to.
“How long’s it been abandoned?” she asked.
Didn’t know, I told her. Tax records described it as a lease farm, the land owned by a conglomerate out of Lubbock. Mostly silage was being grown. Cotton every now and then.
“It was pretty, I bet.”
The night before, yes, I had dreamed about this. One tape, then another. Tot Hamsey’s voice raspy and thick and slow, as though it were oozing up through his legs out of the ground itself. Then, my bed ten sizes too small and ten times too lumpy, dreams. Of spacemen. Of smoke. Of one sky rent clean in half.
“It won’t be there,” she was saying. “The box.”
I had braked to a stop beneath a Chinese elm more dead than alive, the uprights for the adjacent wood fence wind-bent in a way not comforting to contemplate.
“You’ll see,” she said. “It’s a delusion. A fantasy.”
Half of me wanted her to be right, and it said so.
“He was a nice man,” she said. “Just—well, you know.”
I did, and said as much—not the worst sentiment, even if wrong, that can go back and forth between beings.
“Let’s eat afterwards,” she said. “I’m starved.” She had her sunglasses on now, her feet on the dash, a paperback mystery in her lap. Her toenails were painted and, time creaking backward inside of me, I believed pink the finest, smartest color ever invented by the finest and smartest of our kind.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “Put your hat on.”
Which I did. And soon I was out and the trunk was open and shut, and there I was, Sharon Sweeny’s garden shovel in hand, already halfway to the square building on the right, nothing but dust to raise with every step, nothing to hear but a fist-like muscle in me going thump-thump-thump.
The padlock was gone, as he’d figured it would be, so I had little trouble tugging that door open, its hinges flaky with rust. This was five months ago now—before I went back a second time for the box—but I still see myself plainly, me smelling the musty smell of it and going in, the darkness striped by sunlight slicing through many seams in the wall, and the scratching of mice or lizards finding holes to hide in. The room was not as he recalled. No jig or band saw. No hammers or clamps or drills hanging in their places on the walls. No work apron on a peg. Just dirt and cobwebs and broken lengths of wood, plus a bench toppled on its side and a huge spool of baling wire and a short block V-6 engine and a far corner stacked with cardboard high as the ceiling.
I felt juvenile, I tell you, this too much like a scavenger hunt for an adult to be doing, and for an instant it seemed likely that I would leave, me suddenly with an appetite, too. In ten minutes, Sharon and I could be at the Kountry Kitchen, only a table and two cups of coffee between us. But then something hooked and serious seemed to twist in me—a gland perhaps, or a not-much-talked-about organ, or whatever in us an obligation looks like—and, the air in that room dense and hot as bathwater, I found myself knocking on the floorboards with the shovel—whack, whack, whack—listening for one hollow whump, me the next Hamsey man to hunt for something in the dark.
Three times I traveled the length of that room—shoving junk out of my path, twice banging my shins, once almost smacking myself in the forehead on a two-by-four hanging from a rafter—before I heard it, and heard it again. Which means you are free to imagine me as I was: unmoving for two or twenty heartbeats, in me not much from the neck up—exactly, years and years before, as my father must’ve felt in the desert when he rode over that hill and saw what he saw. Then sense began coming back, thread by thread, and I crouched, knees cracking. Sound was again plain from the outside world—a tractor’s diesel motor and the corrugated metal roof squeaking and groaning in the wind—but that shovel now weighed at least one thousand ugly pounds, and cold upon cold upon cold was falling through the core of me, light raining down like needles, with darkness there and there in spouts and columns, and no terrors to know but those you can’t yet see.
“Oh,” I think I said. And thereafter, nothing more to exclaim, I was on my fanny, prying up the first of four boards.
I was thirty-seven years old and thinking of those years placed end to end, which gave me to wonder where they had led and how many more I had, and at last those floorboards were loose and flung aside and at least the easiest of those questions had been answered.
It was like a root cellar, roomy enough for you to lie at the bottom of and throw open your arms.
“Okay,” I said, my last sensible remark that hour.
...
I’d had a vision years before—me and Cece Phillips and the desert at night and how the future would turn out between me and her. This time, on the way to a different car and a different woman, I had none. I had lifted the box, skimmed the bundle of papers wrapped in oilcloth, put it back, and now—well, I didn’t know. Thousands and thousands of days ago, a terrible thing had crashed in my father’s life. Today, something equally impossible had landed in mine.
“It wasn’t there, was it?” Sharon Sweeny said.
I had put the shovel in the trunk and, brushing the dust off my pants next to her door, I thought of worms. Their wriggly, soft bodies. The talk they talk. “Just a lot of trash,” I said.
She was relieved, I could tell, me once again as simple a character as any between the covers of the book in her lap. “What took you so long?”
My father had died, so Estelle Barnes had said, with his face composed, maybe even peaceful, and to my mind came a picture of him curled on the floor at her feet—his eyes blank, his thin lips parted, his hair flyaway and wild. The end of him, the beginning of me.
“What do you think I’d look like with a mustache?” I asked Sharon Sweeny.
“I don’t like them droopy,” she said. “Makes a fellow appear sinister.”
I needed another minute here, I was thinking—time that had to pass before anything else could commence.
“You still hungry?” I asked.
She nodded, a gesture as good to see as are presents under the tree at Christmas, so I started around the car to the driver’s seat. I was counting the parts of me—the head I had, the heart—and for the next few steps I had nothing at all to be scared of.