light slowly fading with each use. And so Jacob merely turned and made his way down the road, unblocked now, toward home, where he knew he’d find his mother doing the usual things, cooking, cleaning, different from other mothers only in the odd way she gazed at the sky at night, searching the stars with a curious urgency, like someone looking for a face in the crowd.
Russell Keys huddled inside the boxcar with four other hobos, half listening as one of them declared that rock and roll had died when Elvis went into the Army. Russell’s eyes were sunken, and he was rail-thin, the mere shadow of the man he’d once been. Life on the road was never kind, but it seemed to him that the ten years of his sojourn had taken a heavier toll upon him than it had upon the other men on the train. It was what he knew that withered him, a knowledge no one else could comprehend, but which locked him in a terrible solitude, made him the silent scarecrow he had become.
“The captain there’s not one for conversation,” one of the hobos said.
Russell drew his old duffle bag more tightly into his arms.
The hobo laughed mockingly. “You’d think that was a sack of gold, the way you hold on to it.”
Russell said nothing, but only continued to clutch the bag.
“Leave him alone, Dave,” another hobo said.
Dave shrugged. “I’m just trying to make a little friendly conversation.” His cracked lips curled down scornfully. “Man thinks he’s the only one with a past.”
That wasn’t true, Russell knew, though he said nothing. It was only that his past-as well as his present- was unlike any other man’s.
Dave stared at the bag. “So, what you got in there anyway?” He leaned forward and reached for the bag. “Lernme see.”
“Don’t touch it,” Russell warned.
Dave glared at Russell, his eyes red with rage. “Gimme that bag, Captain.” He drew a length of pipe from his pocket, and before Russell could move, brought it down hard on the side of his head.
Russell crumpled to the floor, blood dripping from his head.
Dave grabbed the bag and reached into it. “Nothing but a bunch of medals,” he said with a laugh. He looked at Russell. “You some kind of hero, way back when, Captain?” He lifted the pipe again. “Well, you ain’t much of one now.”
Suddenly a burst of light swept over Dave, freezing him in its brilliance. “Railroad guards,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He raced to the door and pulled it back, started to leap then stopped, the other hobos now behind him, staring down at the earth a hundred feet below, speechless and amazed, as the railroad car rocketed upward into the night.
The hobos stared at each other stunned, then rushed back from the open door as the light grew brighter and brighter.
From his place on the floor, Russell saw two creatures step out of the blinding radiance. They were coming into the railroad car, and he knew they were coming to get him. He heard his own scream slice the air, but they came on anyway, took his hand and drew him from the floor. He could feel their wiry fingers, the extra knotted joints, the terrible power they possessed, and against which he could do nothing but go with them into the excruciating light where, in a tiny glimpse of shadow, he saw a teenage boy hanging upside down above a table, like a lamb at slaughter, his eyes filled with terror, eyes that were incontestably familiar, and that seemed to recognize Russell, understand that he was a human being, helpless and alone, beyond the aid, or even the understanding, of his fellow men.
The speaker’s name was Quarrington, and from her seat in the convention hall, Sally listened closely as he claimed to have been in a flying saucer and thus could assure the world that creatures from outer space meant no harm.
Sally knew that this was true. The man she’d found in the shed had had plenty of chances to hurt her and her children, but he’d shown nothing but an overwhelming tenderness that still lingered in her memory.
“I’ve met them, too,” she said to Quarrington a few minutes later as he autographed his book, My
“Do you think they’ll be coming back?” Sally asked expectantly. “I mean, at some time in the future?”
Quarrington handed her the book with a dismissive shrug. “Our time and their time are not the same.”
Sally stepped away, aware that Quarrington had not taken her seriously. But then, why should he? She was just a waitress from a dusty little Texas town. He probably thought she was yet another lonely housewife who’d concocted a flying saucer story to get attention. Such women were out there, Sally knew. But she also knew that she was not one of them. She remembered the stranger, John, felt the gentleness of his caress. No, she told herself, she was not like other women at all. John had made sure of that. The burden of her life was that she knew absolutely that he’d been real. A man from another world had come to her, touched her, loved her… and left her with a son. The impossible and the fantastic had joined to create the single searing experience of her life. But it was an experience about which she could speak only to the likes of Quarrington, and these other people whose stories she sometimes believed and sometimes didn’t, and who sometimes believed her story, and sometimes didn’t, all of them brought together and at the same time separated by the sheer fantastical nature of their experience.
On the way out she looked at the other people in the line, all of them clutching Quarrington’s book to their chests as if it were a lost child they’d miraculously found. There was weariness in their eyes, a terrible isolation. Some of them were probably crazy, she thought, but which ones? It didn’t matter really, she decided. All of them bore the mark of the outcast, the scorned and the ridiculed. She bore that mark, too, and she knew that Jacob was doomed to bear it as well.
He was waiting motionlessly in the truck when Sally returned to the parking lot.
“You look tired,” she said. “You can sleep on the way home.”
He looked at her wearily, a little boy older than his years, burdened with a secret dread he couldn’t describe or even understand. She thought of the night of his conception, felt herself once again within John’s alien arms, and suddenly realized that Jacob was held in that same embrace, the two of them touched by the same presence, she to live on in memory and longing, endlessly in hope of John’s return, her son to live on in search of something else. She recalled a scene in
For a moment she held Jacob in her gaze, longing now for the key to her son, so that she could give it to him, and by that gift, make him safe. But she knew that only John could do that, and that all she could do was try to find him, speak to him, beg him to come back just one more time, be, however briefly and in what blinding light, a father to his son.
Russell opened his eyes and winced at the hard white light that fell over him in a brilliant slant. He felt the wooden floor of the railway car beneath him, smelled the hotdogs a hobo named Hank was cooking over a homemade fire a few feet away.
“Breakfast. Compliments of Irish Dave and the others,” Hank said with a grin.
Russell struggled to his feet and staggered over to the fire, his head still aching from the beating Irish Dave had given him.
Hank reached into his pocket and took out a piece of fabric hung with medals. “Dave wanted you to have these back. Said to say he was sorry, and if he ever saw you again, which he hoped he didn’t, please forgive him.”
Russell took the medals, then glanced about, looking for the duffel bag. “I had a map,” he said.
“In the bag,” Hank told him.
Russell quickly rifled through the bag, found the map and brought it out into the light.
“Seems like you care more about that old map than you do your medals,” Hank said. He eyed the map Russell clutched tightly. “What is it, secret treasure?”
