Close Encounters of the Third Kind (8 page)

I
t was after four by the time Neary got home. From somewhere he had inhaled a new burst of energy while charging down the hall to the bedroom, shouting “Ronnie! Ronnie!” Neary couldn’t control himself, every muscle was vibrating from an unforeseen reserve of adrenaline. He was nauseated from all the excitement and his second word almost blew Ronnie out of bed.

“Honey, wake up.”

Her two blue eyes filled with terror, her long blond hair sprang tangled with sleep.

“What’s it, kids . . . and fire, wh—?”

“It’s okay, kids are okay,” he said again. “Honey, you won’t believe this.”

Ronnie caught her breath and stared at the luminous clock dial. “Right. I don’t believe you’re waking me up at ten minutes after four.”

“You’re not going to believe what’s happening.”

“I’m not listening,” Ronnie said distinctly, and pulled the covers over her head.

“You don’t have to listen.” Roy’s breathing reminded Ronnie of the way little Toby would wolf down dessert. “They don’t make any noise at all. There was nothing but air and all of a sudden, whoosh . . . then whoosh . . . then a little red whoosh . . . Jesus!”

From under the covers Ronnie absorbed the whooshes before remembering. “The Department’s been trying to reach you. They couldn’t reach you . . .”

“Yeah, I know. I shut my phone off.”

She started to wake up. “Roy, you shouldn’t do that. They have to talk to you . . . all kinds of crazy things are going on. The phone has been ringing off the hook. I remember now. They want you to call them now!”

Neary saw that words weren’t enough so he used two hands to pull his wife out of bed.

“Come on! Get outta bed. What do you want to wear, dammit? The sun’s gonna put the stars out.”

“Roy! What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. I’m not talking nothing until you see ’em yourself. Ronnie, oh, Ronnie. This is so important. I need you to see this with me. I really need you with me now.”

Ronnie saw no humor in his face and softened immediately. “Well, we can’t leave the kids.”

“The kids, yeah, the kids . . . lads!! kids!!”

While he prodded his family into their clothes and out of the house, Neary collected cameras, binoculars, opera glasses and blankets.

“Are we going to a drive-in?” Brad asked, still half-asleep.

“You stole my luminous paints,” Toby remembered.

“You’ll get your luminous paint!” Neary was jubilant. “Everything’s going to be luminous!”

He got everyone as far as the kitchen, where Ronnie diverted to the refrigerator. She opened the door and grabbed her raw vegetable pouch. The refrigerator light was an unappetizing green, and Toby said, “That green light makes me barf.”

“I’ll change it after I lose another three pounds,” his mother told him for the twentieth time.

Neary started hustling them all out of the house again and toward the family’s Chevy station wagon parked around the back of the driveway.

“Roy.” Ronnie was leaking steam. “You’ve proved your point. We all got out of the house. Now can we go back to bed?”

Instead of answering, Neary started shoving the children inside the car.

“This is only funny if it ends here in the driveway,” Ronnie said, going around to her side of the car.

“You promised Goofy Golf,” Toby said from the middle seat. His eyes were already closed again.

Finally, everyone was in. Ronnie had not closed her door and the ceiling light inside the car was still on. For the first time Ronnie saw it: Neary was red on one half of his face. Bright red.

“Roy, what is that? You’re sunburned.”

Neary peered into the rear-view mirror. This visible evidence made him even redder. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “I guess I took my vacation while you were sleeping.”

“But it’s only half your face.”

But Neary was already backing down the driveway, returning to where the excitement had been most extreme.

He drove quickly to the place where it had all happened, pulled off the road and stopped near the scattered snow fence. The farmer and his family were gone, leaving behind some Colonel Sanders’ boxes and one bottle of Wild Turkey.

Ronnie and the kids sounded like a sleeping symphony of adenoid troubles. But Roy was on point. He kicked circles for a while in the cool early morning, waiting . . . waiting for what? Waiting for the experience to come again. Please come again, he thought to himself. Why had something that was so frightening become so enthralling? He wanted seconds but now the dark was playing tricks.

The police weren’t with him now. He was alone out here. Did they like people who waited alone? Was it easier to get away when—?

Something woke Ronnie. She glanced back and saw her three children snoring against one another. And then there was her husband pacing back and forth nervously, eyes skyward. She got out, closing the car door softly, and fell into step.

“What are we doing here, Roy? Why won’t you tell me what you’re waiting for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” he told her without confidence.

“Come on,” Ronnie said. “I came here with you. I’m taking this very well. Now tell me. What did it look like?”

Roy waited, stared up and down the road, watched the sky a moment longer, then: “Kind of . . . like an ice cream cone.”

This was almost too much for Ronnie. “What flavor?” she asked with murderous innocence.

But Neary took her seriously. “Orange. It was orange . . . and it wasn’t really like an ice cream cone . . . it was sort of in a shell . . . this . . .” He made sculpting motions with both hands.

“Like a taco?”

“No, rounder, larger . . . and sometimes . . . it was like . . . like . . . you know, those rolls we had yesterday?”

“Bran muffins?”

“No! Not for breakfast—” Neary was conscious that his wife was humoring him and also running out of humor, but he persisted anyway. “For dinner. What were those rolls? Those curvy ones?”

“You mean the crescent rolls?” she exclaimed, as though dealing with a Romper Room student.

“Yeah!” he said, excited all over again. “And it gave off a kind of neon glow.”

That was definitely too much for Ronnie. She reached into her Baggie for a carrot. Neary walked a few paces away from her munching and hunched down near a rock, eyes heavenward again. Ronnie watched him anxiously. Obviously Roy was going through something . . . something she couldn’t begin to understand, but, apparently, it was important to him. Maybe she had been too bitchy.

Ronnie approached Roy and used her favorite Little Miss Marker voice. “Don’t you think I’m taking this really well?”

He didn’t answer but stood up, still looking at the stars starting to fade in the ever lightening sky.

Ronnie looked up too and gave a little shudder. She didn’t know why, but she was slightly frightened. It was all a little weird. A lot weird.

“Snuggle,” she said to him.

Neary dutifully put his arm around her and drew her to him. Ronnie put her arms around his waist and began to nibble his ear.

“I remember when we used to come to places like this to look at each other.” She said it like Bambi.

Neary looked down at her and, seeming to remember some good old times, he smiled. Ronnie smiled back and gently sucked on Roy’s upper lip. He had always gone for that in a big way, and soon their kisses spread inside. But Roy was not so engrossed that he couldn’t weasel open half an eye and turn it to the skies. Because that’s precisely when everything exploded with a blue-hot fire-whoosh that tore at his clothes. Neary almost jumped out of his skin as the red lights diminished in the distance, but Ronnie knew it was only a semi-truck-trailer, and after a few seconds so, glumly, did Roy.

The spell was broken.

Ronnie, testing her husband, asked, “If one of those things came down right now and the door opened, would you go on it?”

Roy, thrilled at the proposition, cried, “Jesus Christ, yes!” Then, seeing and feeling the hurt tense through her, he added, “Well, anyone would.”

But the damage was done. Ronnie broke away from him, and went back toward the car. He hurried after her.

Ronnie stopped and turned on him. “You know what you’ve done to us?” she cried out. “You know what this means? You’ve brought us out here twenty miles from home in the middle of the night . . . and you destroyed our sleep cycle. Your sons are gonna conk out in the middle of the day and Sylvia will be up until one
A.M.
for the next three nights because their father swears he saw a flat, orange Betty Crocker crescent roll that flies. We might as well all have breakfast right now.”

She paused to catch her breath and then in a lower tone, completed the demolition. “Don’t ever try anything like this again. We’re your family. It is not normal.”

There was nothing that Ronnie could have said, Neary knew, that could have been more final. It sure wasn’t normal, but as Neary was about to discover, normality, as he once knew it, was coming to an end.

11  

T
here is no fast way to get to Benares. The ancient and most holy city of the Hindus is approachable mainly through faith.

An approach by military aircraft was out of the question. To have sent a fighter plane or attack bomber through India’s airspace would not only have freaked out the militantly neutral Indians but, more important, would have endangered the secrecy of the project.

David Laughlin supposed, privately, that if there had been time, Lacombe would have traveled to Benares in the proper manner, on bare feet, wearing a loincloth and supported by a wooden staff. As it was, Laughlin was grateful for the small, fourteen-passenger Corvette jet borrowed from Air Alsace, which made the trip from Paris to Rangoon in just half a day.

A Vertol chopper brought them in low over the spires and domes of Benares a half hour later, as the sun was setting. The river moved sluggishly beneath the helicopter, its holy waters freighted with the holies of silt.

The hillside lay a few miles outside the city. The Vertol hovered at a discreet distance while its pilot tried to find a place to land. It wasn’t easy.

“Look at them!” Laughlin said. “Thousands!”

“Tens of thousands,” Lacombe corrected.

“It’s fantastic. I—”

“The sadhu is a very holy man,” Lacombe cut in quietly, above the rotor noise. “But also very practical. He also wants an answer. In his lifetime. He has been listening for many years. With him it is more than a matter of faith. It is a matter of results.”

Laughlin thought that over. “But I thought the Hindus went the other way,” he shouted. “Nirvana, not here.”

Lacombe shrugged.

The chopper set down gently in a space near two Mercedes tour buses. The pilot cut the engines and the rotors whined down. Dust started settling over everything within a hundred yards. Lacombe climbed out first and stood momentarily in the brilliant sunset with Laughlin and two technicians.

The blood-red orange rays of the sun were coming in almost horizontally now. In a little while the great hot ball of flame, filtered and distorted by endless miles of dusty atmosphere, would swell, darken and hide itself from sight behind the low range of hills to the west.

“Let us go,” Lacombe said.

Laughlin gestured to the two technicians, who picked up their microphones, Nagra tape recorder, portable battery-belts, and the lightweight Arriflex 16-mm camera. The four men moved slowly through the crowd of pilgrims.

The people were densely packed, some on small rugs, with baskets of food beside them. There were whole families, even ancient-looking grandparents (who were probably under forty years of age), wizened and emaciated by hunger and disease.

The Westerners moved with prudent speed up the hillside toward the cleared area where the sadhu sat, legs crossed beneath him in the lotus position, eyes shut, palms pressed together, elbows out to the side like some strange, meditative bird of passage.

A sleek young Brahmin in city whites arose at Lacombe’s approach. Laughlin moved in to translate while the technicians began setting up.

“It lacks half an hour of the sun’s death,” the Brahmin told Lacombe.