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Earth Versus the Flying Saucers

ERROL SELKIRK

Lucia comes home while Cameron's still on sick leave. He hears her key in the the lock and looks up from the tv, happy to see her. But she walks right past him and heads straight for the bedroom, slamming the door hard. He knocks. When she says nothing, he opens the door a crack and looks inside.
     “You want something?" she asks, staring at the ceiling.
     "Hello."
     "Hello yourself." Lucy's lying on the bed fully dressed with her shoes on, long wavy black hair splashed over the pillow. "I just lost three thousand dollars. I don't want to talk to nobody."
     Cameron drives to town. He wanted to tell his wife about something that happened while she was up in Vegas visiting her sister. How he had all this time on his hands, and how one night a couple friends from the Air Base took him out to the desert in a jeep chasing jackrabbits. They were sitting on the hood passing a bottle, when suddenly this lime green flash spins across the sky and there's a big sonic boom. A whole lot more happened after that. But he figures it can wait until he gets back.
     Someone in town shows him the library. Once inside, Cameron explains what he's looking for. The Librarian leads him to the section marked Science Fiction. He tells her he's looking for Science Fact, and starts explaining how he'd had this accident, with a jeep zigzagging and then braking suddenly, and how his head got cracked up against the windshield. And how afterwards he stumbled around until found this big thing, all round on top with curved sides, a dull kind of shiny, looking almost like a hubcap.
     The Librarian squints and sends Cameron across the room to shelves filled with books on dinosaurs, swamp life, and something called the big bang. He strays into the psychology section and finds a book with pictures about alien abduction. At least it's a start. He reads for a couple hours, gets a library card, and signs out the book. Then he buys some fajitas and a tamale con salsa for Lucy, a six pack, and drives home.
     

*

     Back at the apartment, his wife is packing. Cameron knows Lucia's always a little strange after visiting her sister. The sister never could see settling down with one man, especially somebody in the Air Force and a drunk, a nobody with stripes, like she calls him. Now he puts the food down and asks her what's wrong this time.
     "'What"s right?" she asks, shoving some shoes into a suitcase, not looking around.
     "'Did something happen?"
     "Where?" Lucia says, gesturing in all directions. She crosses to the bathroom. Cameron hears the sound of glass clinking. He steps to the doorway and she's just cleared off a whole shelf of the medicine cabinet and dropped all the little bottles and vials into a plastic bag.
     "Aside from the money, Lucy, something happen up in Vegas?"
     Now she first notices the bruise over his eye. "And what's that about?" she shouts, pointing at his forehead. "Tell me you hurt yourself drinking."
     "Honey, I was just going to tell you."
     "I'm gone four days, and you get into a fight?"
     "An accident," he says. "I'm out jacking with the fellas when it happened. Ridley's already asleep in the back and I'm fumbling round in circles, bleeding a little. That's when I come up on this big round thing just across the way, real big, but when Dekker comes to look he says it's maybe just the fuselage of some plane, but where're the wings? And I tell him this kind of aircraft don't need wings to fly and that's when he makes me see a doctor at Base."
     Lucia rolls her eyes, and returns to the medicine cabinet. She clears off another row of bottles.
     "Honey, where you going?"
     "I just lost thirty three hundred dollars," she says. "I'm going to get it back."
     Cameron somehow remains standing. He's stunned. He thought they were getting along okay. They hardly had an angry word the whole week before her trip. He'd look at her over coffee or sitting around the tv and smile, and when their eyes would meet, he'd smile even harder before she'd turn away. Now he finds himself leaning against the wall at a precarious forty-five degree angle, struggling to catch his breath.
     "You're going back?" he whispers.
     "What's it look like?" Lucia slides past him and carries the bag back to the bedroom. She opens her mouth as if to say something and stops. She squeezes her eyes. "Cameron, damn," she complains, "why you always got to make everything so hard?" Before he can answer, she steps into the big hall closet.
     Cameron watches her sliding clothes along the rack, pulling this one and that one down, throwing them over her arm. He doesn't know what to say,
     "What?" She suddenly spins around. "You never saw anybody pack before?"
     ',Honey, something happened."
     "That another question?"
     "Lucy," he says, "I'm trying to tell you I saw something."
     "What, your whole life passing before you?"
     "No," he replies. "I'm pretty sure I saw some alien space ship from outer space crashed out in the desert. I think there were four bodies. Another could've been alive."
     "Least somebody's alive," Lucia replies, carrying a suitcase to the front door.

*

     Cameron takes a camera out to the desert. There's miles of it and he doesn't find the place until late in the day. At the foot of a short, familiar looking hill he spots the empty bottle that Ridley tossed out the jeep that night. He loops the camera around his neck and climbs.
     At the top he stares across a narrow ravine lined with cactus and boulders and sees a big round aluminum dome. Nearby a small yellow bulldozer is pushing some big rocks around to clear the area. Cameron clicks off a half dozen pictures.
     "'You lost?" the driver shouts from the other side when he spots him.
     "How I get over there?"
     "Nobody can't come over here," the driver says. "We been scraping this bastard clean as a bone,"
     "What about the igloo?"
     "Some Eskimos must've left it,"" the driver tens him, turning and getting back on the dozer.
     Cameron doesn't trust the local drugstore to develop the pictures. He gives the film to a man he knows in reconaissance, who has it for him end of the day. Together they study a big blowup of one of the prints, using a magnifying glass.
     "Typical government issue maintenance dome," says the reconaissance man. "Aluminum skin all scoured by sand. Probably been there a good while. "
     "Could it have got trucked or choppered in and kind of set in place? Cameron asks.
     The recon guy yawns. "Could've, yeah."
     "Nothing at all strange in the picture?"
     "Just the rocks."
     Cameron almost shouts, "What you mean, just the rocks?"
     Some of the boulders have the same striation patterns as a little lower down the ravine."
     "You mean something could've dug them up?" Cameron's breathless. "Something could've been traveling real fast and then maybe crashed hard into the ground?"
     Could've."
     "What you mean, couId've?
     "Might've," says the recon man, switching off the light box.
     
*

     That night Cameron dreams himself awake. He imagines he hears somebody going through the hall closet, sliding hangers. He sees himself get out of bed in the dark and open the door, expecting to find Lucia. Instead he sees a floating gray figure made out of shiny smoke or mist trying to put on one of his wife's dresses.
     Cameron's more angry than surprised. He reaches out to grab at it, but his hand moves right through the spot where its shoulder should be. The thing, the shape, seems warm to the touch, like smoke. It smells like Lucy's perfume. It softly closes over his wrist and holds him gently, humming something.
     
*

     Cameron finishes the book and travels halfway across the state to attend a public meeting for the first time since he got dragged as a boy to the Christian Revival Caravan of Gospel Stars and got saved under a big floppy white tent set up at the drive in.
     "The worst part is the not knowing," a darkhaired woman with glasses complains as Cameron enters the living room, is handed a coffee cup, and takes a seat closest to the door. "Did any of this happen or am I totally crazy?"
     - "Nobody's crazy, Gina, or we're all crazy," says a tall bearded man in a crisp flannel shirt and jeans, wearing a big silver belt buckle and tooled cowboy boots.
     Cameron's never been anywhere like this. There are ten people with matching ceramic mugs sitting around a big adobe room with stained glass windows and a long Hopi carpet on the floor. All the furniture's handcarved and covered with Indian blankets. Overhead a big wooden propeller spins slowly, filling the room with sweet peppery smoke from a smoldering bundle of desert sage. Plenty of books on the wall, more than a whole section of the library, but no television anywhere. For me, it's the dreams," says an older fellow in a golf shirt. "I know I've said this a hundred times."
     "That's okay," the bearded man tells him. "You just go on."
     "If s always the dreams. You ask me what happened that night and all I see is me in bed and then lots of light in the window, like a Mack truck outside the bedroom shining in. Funny shadows on the curtain. An hour later, according to the dock, I wake up again. No light. No nothing. But the dreams."
     Cameron nods. He understands about dreams. He listens even closer.
     "With me it's this feeling of violation," says a pretty youngish woman with frosted hair and plenty of makeup. She bats her long lashes, crosses her leg, and squeezes her knee. "I can't shake the feeling they were all over me."
     The bearded man pats her on the shoulder, and Cameron wonders what it would be like to touch that woman's shoulder under the short striped sundress she's wearing. Would he feel soft skin and muscle with bone underneath or would his hand just kind of sink in and stick? He finds himself missing his wife.
     "Emory, you don't understand," the youngish woman tells the bearded man. "'Waking up each morning, thinking it'll be different, going to work, going through the motions, coming home, cooking, a shower, sleep, always feeling so used?"
     "Nonsense, that's just what they want you to feel, " Emory replies, stroking his beard. He turns suddenly, steps to the door and right out of the room.
     Cameron watches him go, then looks at the others, who are now looking at him. He's uncomfortable. He nods, smiles weakly, and raises his coffee cup.
     A moment later, the bearded man returns with a pile of children's toys in his arms. There are shiny robots and rocket ships, furry creatures with big eyes and little flippers on their feet, smiling space aliens with antennas and tv sets in their belly, and a pair of lifelike futuristic warriors in capes and cloaks, swinging light sabres over their heads.
     "This," Emory says, throwing down the toys, "I bought this crap for my son; that is, when I still had a son. These are the tools they're using to take over."
     The man in the golf shirt tells his neighbor, "I'm sure I saw this in a dream one time."
     "First it was movies." Emory takes a minute to make eye contact with every person in the room. "The Thing, The Blob, Body Snatchers, Earth Versus The Flying Saucers, you remember, then Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, Alien Two. But the turning point was ET. They're going after the kids. Now we're supposed to like them.
     Emory holds up a shiny sports car which with a few twists transforms itself into a silvery robot with wings. As he does, a skinny green rubber toy falls out of the front.
     Cameron stands up and announces, "That's what I saw."
     "What, the robot?"
     "No, more like that," he says, pointing to the rubber figure. "But bigger, and way thin."
     "What color?"
     Cameron thinks a bit. "'It was still pretty dark."
     "But you're not saying it was green, are you?" Emory asks, his voice rising with sarcasm. "I think all of us here have heard enough about little green men."
     The woman with glasses leans forward in her chair. "Could they possibly've been gray?"
     Cameron shrugs. Everybody's waiting for an answer. "Could've, yeah," he admits finally.
     The woman with glasses almost shouts, "With me it was the greys too."
     Cameron then describes what he remembers of that night in the desert. How after hitting his head he wandered around a while, coming up on this ravine just as the sun was rising, and there, on the other side, was something big and shiny and kind of round. And how he's practically almost definitely sure he saw some figures clumped together on the ground like a pile of rocks, not moving. But there was another one that seemed to be standing with both skinny arms in the air, waving.
     "Greys, greys," a couple in business clothes murmur from one of the couches.
     Emory picks up the rubber toy. If s got a thick wire in it so the figure can bend and hold a pose. He twists it around so that the arms and legs are all wavy, and then sets it down on the coffee table. He asks Cameron, "He was doing this?"
     "Not exactly," Cameron replies quietly. "The one I saw closeup in my closet looked more like this cloud with a face and a body. And it was a she. I saw her going through all my wife's clothes. Though, maybe I was just dreaming."
     The man in the golf shirt insists, "No such thing as just dreaming."
     Emory holds up two arms and waits for silence. "'This is what I hate," he says, "You've been taught to distrust yourselves. Last thing they want is for you to own what you know, what w e know, all of them, the networks, the government, the Air Force, especially.'
     Cameron waves his hand back and forth. "No, the Air Force don't mind."
     ',,Is that right?" Emory asks, stepping closer.
     "No, the Air Force don't give a good goddamn about any of this, no offense," Cameron says.
     Emory steps into the middle of the room. He taps his nose, looks around at all the other people, and frowns. "And you are in the Air Force, I suppose?"
     Cameron nods back. "For as long as I could shave. And when I saw that thing and told the doctor at the Base about the noise it was making, this big humming in my head, and warned it might've even be set up to self destruct; and how, if it really did blow up enough and he told nobody, I mean, he'd be the man who lost Las Vegas."
     "And then he did what?"
     "Put me on sick leave." Cameron tells him. "Otherwise, nobody paid it the slightest mind,"
     
*

     Emory carefully debriefs Cameron, asking twenty questions off a printed sheet, and taping all the answers. Everything now starts happening fast. The first interviewer shows up at the base a couple days later. He's a balding man in a serious dark suit and tie, carrying a briefcase. He says to tell anyone who asks that he's selling insurance.
     They talk in a local diner and the man takes a few pictures of Cameron in uniform. The following week, a magazine reporter shows up with Emory. He's a tall man in a straw fedora and a tropical jacket who smokes little black cigars. They take Cameron up the ravine to photograph the place where he first reported seeing the thing.
     The aluminum dome's gone now and so is the tractor. Not a single big rock in sight. The whole area has been leveled flat as an airport runway and fenced off with wire. They return to base to interview Dekker, the only other witness.
     "It was too dark to see shit." Dekker replies. He holds up a thick stack of forms and shakes it. "But if the report says it was some construction dome or that some aluminum weather balloon lost altitude somehow and got snagged up on a cliff somewhere, then that's what it was. And as far as any little green men waving at anyone, there's a shitload of cactus out there and they're all sure green enough."
     
*

     That night, Emory takes Cameron to dinner in Taos at a special restaurant. No meat, nothing artificial, purified water, natural vegetables, nothing anybody could put in to change the way you think. Both of them order Mexican, a couple homemade beers, and Cameron starts thinking of Lucia.
     "Figure she's coming back?" Emory asks suddenly, as if reading his mind.
     Cameron looks down at his plate and shrugs. "Mostly used to think so.
     "Mine's not," Emory announces. "Took my boy back east where people're too busy see the sky, know what I mean? Where you can hire somebody to watch the sky for you if you want and tell you all about it on the six o'clock news." Emory gives a hard laugh and Cameron wonders if he's joking.
     "My Lucy was a cocktail waitress when we met," Cameron tells him. "Our little joke was she'd be the one up early opening bars and I'd be the one late closing them. Usually last one standing with a- glass, you know how that goes?"
     Emory nods and scratches his beard, "With mine, we both worked in pharmaceuticals. She was customer relations, I was in sales. Funny thing now, I don't even take aspirin."
     "Mine used to say I was the nicest man she ever knew, drunk or sober." Cameron pushes his food away. There's a catch in his throat as he looks down and says, "Then Lucy stopped drinking, and I sort of cut back too. Had to. Both stayed home a lot. It got so she didn't know what to do with her time. Me neither,"
     "Well, my friend," Emory tells Cameron with a pat on the arm. "All that's going to change."
     
*

     Cameron tries keeping it honest. But the more he tells the story, the more it starts to change. After the fourth or fifth interview, he agrees it's completely possible he was led to the crash site by some kind of mysterious extraterrestrial magnetism only he could feel. After telling it enough times, he begins to remember the alien holding up exactly four fingers as it waved to him. And as time goes by, he's practically positive that the creature in the closet used telepathy since, dream or no dream, he's now beginning to know what she wanted him to know.
      The phone keeps ringing. He has so many interviews he extends sick leave another couple weeks. The Air Force doesn't seem to mind. Cameron just stays home and makes sandwiches and coffee for all the people showing up with questions. And with Lucia still gone, he more than appreciates the distraction.
     Finally, Emory talks him into driving north to Las Vegas to speak at a regional UFO convention, One local newspaper runs an ugly cartoon of a space girl doing a strip tease in a closet while an Air Force pilot tucks money into her stocking. Cameron hates that. But he feels almost as bad when they post his picture in uniform at the convention hall with a sign saying: Earth One, Aliens Zero.
     "I'm nothing like a hero," Cameron complains as he and Emory are just entering the courtesy lounge of a downtown casino for what's billed as a press conference.
     "But you are a soldier," Emory replies sharply. "'And we're at war, sonny. Everything is expendable, wife, children, reputation, even the truth sometimes."
     Cameron stands at attention behind a gilded Greek podium trying to answer questions. After about a quarter of an hour, a city councilman in an electric pink sports jacket asks him to estimate exactly how much of Las Vegas would still be standing if the alien spacecraft blew itself up- that night in the desert.
     ',No way I can imagine that happening."' Cameron replies flatly.
     "The destruction, you mean, would've been practically unimaginable?"
     "No," Cameron tells him, "I'm just saying I can't imagine them hurting anybody,"
     Flash bulbs go off. Emory steps in front of the mike and explains that the Airman's obviously still a little shaken by his experience and most likely misunderstood the question. Perhaps they'd be better off just running the videotapes.
     "'No," Cameron insists. "I just mean, I've been thinking a lot about it. The one in my closet, looking back, I suppose she was there basically keeping me company."
     
*

      Cameron gets a nice bronze plaque and a thousand dollars in red chips from the casino. He takes the chips with him to a table and starts playing cards until half of it's gone. Then he goes looking for Emory, who seems to have disappeared right after the questions.
     Emory's sitting at a small bar near the roulette wheel, talking to a woman. Cameron walks over, but they're both facing away, and he doesn't really see her until he's practically standing right next to them.
     "'You gave me one hell of a scare back then," Emory barks. "Luckily, this pretty lady's just kindly offered me her company for the evening. Maybe she's got a sister back home for you."
     Cameron nods at the familiar darkhaired woman in her tight white dress. "No, I don't think so," he says, turning to Emory. "I never could stand Lucy's sister."
     "Oh, my." Emory glances back and forth at Cameron and Cameron's wife, understanding at last. Then he gets up and steps away without looking back
     Cameron sits down next to Lucia and says, "Hello."
     "Hello yourself."
     He puts a couple red chips on the bar and asks the bartender for the biggest margarita he can pour. While Lucia's deciding on a drink, Cameron gives her a quick once over. She lost a little weight, and with her long wavy hair down around her shoulders, she still looks more or less like the pretty young girl he married.
     "Back on the sauce," she says after ordering a double rum collins. "How about you?"      "About the same."
     Both of them try to think of what to say. "Saw your picture in the paper, Cameron," she tells him when the drinks come. "I thought you looked cute. My sister said you'd finally went and lost your mind."
     "And you said?"
     "That you're probably just feeling a little lost." She stirs her drink slowly. "I feel bad the way I left things back there, just storming out, no explanation."
     Cameron nods and holds his breath. He sits forward on his stool, leaning toward her, hoping to hear Lucia say she's sorry and just wants to come home.
     "We all make mistakes. I'd do things a lot different now." She sips a couple times and gives him a wink. "You know, I'm still a little sweet on you."
     .Me too, honey."
     "And tonight, me and you, just being together, whatever little thing you'd like's just fine."
     "Fine with me, too."
     Lucia reaches over the bar and touches his hand. Usually he'd feel a quick familiar little spark, but this time all he feels is just the sharp poke of her fingernail.
     "Then it's a date," she says. "And since you're being so sweet, I don't figure you'd mind. me asking, as a favor, to maybe send up a few of the things I left.
     Cameron gulps a breath, and as he exhales all the glow seems to go out of Lucia. Maybe it's just the sick blue bulbs above the bar, but now he sees her as others must see her, as Emory saw her, a still pretty woman with a decent figure and long brown hair, mascara a little caked under her eyelids, too much lipstick, and a few new wrinkles around the mouth from having to smile too much to too many men.
     "You can keep the tv," she adds brightly. "I'm mainly thinking of the dresses."
     "No, I like those dresses right where they are."
     Lucia puts down her drink and asks, "'But whatever for?"
     "Whatever, whoever, whenever.
     "But Cameron, it's not like I'm coming back any time real soon."
     His eyes narrow and he stands. He empties what's left in his pocket and pushes all the red chips toward her. "Go and buy yourself something pretty," is all he says as he turns, crosses the bar, exits the casino, and walks out of her life.
     
*

     Cameron's now lean and graying. He wears dripdry chinos and a sky blue polo shirt which only makes his wide eyes look bluer. He holds out a beer to the young journalist sitting across from him, who respectfully declines. It's late. And the young man's got a long drive back to the city. They stand and Cameron grabs hold of his hand, holding on maybe just a little too long.
     .Word is you got lost on the way out here." Cameron says, as they step out of his trailer. "Not much better going the other direction. Sometimes I even get a little lost myself when it's real dark and I've had a few. You know how that goes."
     The journalist knows. From the freeway you can see all the way to the top of the butte, shiny Airstream trailers in a circle shining in the sun, a cluster of dusty trees.
     You'd think all you have to do is keep following your nose, But the desert road curves and winds, there are false turns, and a jagged chasm runs right down the center. A person could go clear around the whole thing and come back the other end.
     "Years since people stopped coming around, " Cameron says, walking the young man to his car. "Don't get to talk much. Folks here are nice enough, but they all mostly got families. Nobody likes hearing all this stuff happening in the sky."
     The journalist doesn't know what to say. He tells Cameron he may be ringing up again with some more questions. Maybe they can go out for a couple drinks. Cameron smiles, knowing that the young man probably never will call. He came out to a isolated comer of the desert to write about someone who had a strange moment of fame a full decade ago. And he got what he needed.      "It's not like things turned out so terrible," Cameron says as the journalist starts the engine. "Medical discharge, pension, and every night I get to sit out here in the desert on my lawn furniture, leaning back in fun view of the stars, feeling good just knowing we're not alone."' That's the last thing he says: We are not alone.
     On the way back, the young man carefully follows the little road map Cameron drew on a brown paper bag, managing to get home before morning without getting lost more than once or twice.

Errol Selkirk is the author of seven full-length plays and any number of stories.
He is a rootless cosmopolitan working on his ruthless first novel.


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