Close Encounters of the Third Kind (15 page)

“All this nonsense is turning this house upside down,” she said, knowing this was no help at all.

“I’m scared,” Neary said, grabbing her right hand.

Ronnie tried to pull her hand free, but he wouldn’t let go.

“I hate you like this,” she hissed as panic began to overtake her.

Roy reached out and pulled her down onto the bed. “Hug me,” he said. “That’s all you have to do. Hold on to me . . . you can really help now.”

Ronnie pushed herself away. “None of our friends call here anymore,” she complained, not looking down at him. “You’re out of work . . . you don’t care! Roy, don’t you understand, don’t you see?” she cried out in a burst of panic. “You’re wrecking us!”

Neary reached up again and folded his wife into his arms. His trembling seemed to pulsate right through, and Ronnie suddenly knew that she was really incapable of bearing up to all this.

“Oh, don’t,” she sobbed. “Oh, don’t. Let me call someone. Oh, Roy . . . please don’t.”

But his fingers ripped at her clothing.

“I hate you, I hate you, hate you,” she sobbed, hating what he was doing to her.

Neary gripped the blouse at her shoulders and pulled. It ripped and the tattered ends pinned Ronnie’s arms to her sides. He pulled the brassiere straps off her shoulders and slid the thing down her stomach, and then slid down to her breasts and—

Almost immediately his anxiety flowed out of him. He cocked his head to the side and stared down at her silhouetted breasts.

Ronnie started to tremble then, her teeth chattering, silent sobs racking her body. She was helpless and horrified, but Neary was pulling something out of this for himself. Something constructive!

His mind raced on. No solution yet, but close. He could sense just how close. And, Jesus, he suddenly realized Ronnie had a beautiful body.

19  

I
n Denver, the evening was cold and clear. The thin air whistled around the CB antenna of the immense semi-trailer as it started the long haul down the sloping highway to the north. It flashed by in the dusk, its gigantic trailer blazing red for a moment in the last rays of the setting sun. Folger’s Coffee, the sign ran along its high aluminum flank.

The Piggly-Wiggly trucks, two of them, were already twenty miles east of Oakland and picking up speed on U.S. 580. Ahead lay Altamont Pass, over 2,000 feet high.

The sun wasn’t as far down on the horizon behind them as it was in Denver. The drivers were hoping to make Tracy by dark and then to bore on through, filling the night with noise and diesel exhaust as they shoved their cargo toward the setting sun.

It was dark by now on Interstate 80 running southeast out of Boise. The great semi, with its powerful diesel engine dragging the trailer along at sixty-five miles per hour, headed toward Hammett and Mountain Home, Idaho. The trailer bore the brightly lettered name and design of Kinney Shoes, but in the darkness the name was almost invisible, except when passing cars’ headlights slanted by.

The trailer truck pulled in for refueling at a truck stop just east of Billings, Montana, where Interstate 90 ducks down through a corner of the Big Horn National Recreation Area. The two drivers would have liked to stop for coffee, but their schedule didn’t permit it. They’d have to be through the Custer Battlefield monument and into Sheridan, Wyoming, by midnight.

The man pumping the diesel fuel looked up at the side of the truck. “Never saw that one before,” he said.

The drivers and the gas jockey stared up at the lettering on the side of the trailer. T
IDEWATER
H
OMES OF
V
IRGINIA
.

“Kinda far from home, aren’t ya?”

One driver wiggled his eyebrows. Of the two, he was the more communicative.

20  

N
eary hadn’t really slept much at all. He’d kept Ronnie awake on and off. When he heard her breathing grow deeper, at about five in the morning, he eased himself out of bed and went into the family room.

Roy stared around the room with reddened eyes. He’d really wrecked the place during the last few days. Clippings from newspaper accounts of UFO sightings and the mysterious blackout were tacked here and there along the walls.

Neary groaned to himself and sat down in a chair, his elbow on the ping pong table, where the model railroad layout—an island of neatness and order in his otherwise insane world—awaited him. The odd peak that Neary had built up, more like a caricature of a mountain now, loomed grotesquely over the tracks and little lakes and valleys, ungainly, menacing.

Neary stared at it and shook his head. “Not right,” he muttered.

“Daddy?”

He turned to see his little daughter, Sylvia, eyes half-mast with sleep. She had wandered out of her room, still trailing her favorite doll. The one that pees.

“Honey, it’s so early,” Roy said. “You should be asleep.”

“Daddy, are you going to yell at us some more today?”

Neary gazed down into her clear, guileless eyes. That was how he looked to her—a yelling machine. And she was prepared to accept more yelling because she loved him.

Neary felt his insides turn over with remorse.

He leaned down and picked her up. “I’m okay now, sweetheart.” Roy kissed his daughter on her forehead. He thought he might start crying again, but held himself together.

“Okay, Daddy.”

He glanced miserably around the room.

“I’m finished with all of this. Swear to God. Finished.”

Neary put the child back down and began pulling the clippings and photos down off the wall. “Look at me,” he said, stuffing them in a wastebasket. “Watch me now.”

Sylvia didn’t know what he was talking about, but seemed happy that her father was happy.

Neary began tugging at the absurd mountain that he had built in the middle of the model railroad layout. He grabbed hold of the peculiar-looking peak and started yanking it. The mountain refused to budge, and Neary, using two hands now, wrenched the thing sideways.

Snap!

The top section broke off, leaving the mountain truncated, as if some dreadnaught had lopped off the peak, leaving a kind of plateau.

“Sylvia!” Neary shouted.

“Yes, Daddy?”

Roy’s eyes were fixed on the strangely broken peak. “Sylvia,” he cried.
“That’s right!”

It was no way for anybody to wake up.

Ronnie had slept late, utterly wiped out by the events of the previous night, by Roy’s breakdown and by her own inability to be anything much more than a chest for him to cry on.

Now it was ten in the morning and what had wakened her was the high, shrill cackle of her children. She listened for a moment and realized that all her family was laughing. Roy, too. Groggily, Ronnie thought she saw a bush go past the bedroom window.

She struggled out from under the covers and threw on a robe, tying the belt as she moved out of the bedroom and into the ki—.

“Oh, my God,” Ronnie gasped.

The family room window was wide open, the screen removed, a ladder placed outside against the wall. As she watched, a hydrangea bush came hurtling through the window in a spray of thick, black dirt. It fell onto a huge pile of . . . of other bushes, more dirt.

“Roy!”

Ronnie rushed to the kitchen door in time to see Brad and Toby uproot an azalea bush and sling it to their father, who ran up the ladder with the azalea and shoved it through the window into the den.

“Stop it!” Ronnie cried.

“C’mon, men,” Roy called to his sons. He seemed happier than Ronnie could remember seeing him in weeks, since the blackout.

Toby gave a cheer and began helping his father throw dirt through the window.

“After this can we throw dirt in my room?” he asked Roy.

“Stop it!” Ronnie cried. “Stop it!”

She came running outside, acutely aware that Mrs. Harris was watching the whole thing from her second-floor window. A neighbor across the street had paused in the midst of mowing his grass and, transfixed like a cement lawn statue, stood open-mouthed, staring. Ronnie knocked the dirt out of Toby’s hands and confronted her husband.

“If I don’t do this,” Neary said, still pitching dirt through the window, “I
will
need a doctor.”

“Do what? What are you doing?”

“Ronnie, I figured it out. Have you ever looked at something one way and it looks crazy, then you look from another way and it makes perfect sense?”

“No! Roy, you’re scaring us!”

The force of Ronnie’s statement did scare the children a little. Neary had been yanking at a geranium. He looked up suddenly, as if seeing his wife for the first time. “Don’t be scared, honey. I feel good. Everything’s going to be all right.”

He gave up on the geranium as his eye caught sight of a small aluminum patio table. Picking it up, Neary pitched it through the den window. It made almost no sound on landing, its impact cushioned by the layers of dirt and bushes on the floor inside.

“Don’t tell me everything is going to be all right,” Ronnie screamed after him, “while you’re throwing the yard into the den.”

Roy ran around to the front of the yard. Now he had his eye on two large green plastic trash cans that were standing at the end of the driveway. A sanitation truck was just pulling up and two garbage collectors were about to leap off the truck to empty Neary’s cans. Roy accelerated and beat them to the cans, grabbing and emptying them on the sidewalk, then rushing back toward the house. He flew past Ronnie and the children, leaving two piles of garbage and two amazed garbage men in the driveway.

Moving like a high-hurdler, knees up, he hotfooted it back to the house, a container in each hand, throwing them through the window into the family room where they bounced off the patio table and rolled off the geranium balls and peat moss.

Suddenly, Roy was struck with a new thought. “Chicken wire,” he said aloud.

Ronnie watched him hurdle the low ornamental fence that separated their driveway from the one next door. A roll of chicken wire stood in the open doorway of the Harrises’ garage. Mrs. Harris stuck her head out the window as Neary picked up the roll of wire and started to take it away.