already gone through some changes, lemme tell you, gonna be in real sorry shape. In a case like you’re describing, I’d recommend packing the body in dry ice and freezing it, for storage or transport or whatever…. Look, Captain, I can come right out there and help-”
“No! No thank you, Glenn. This is strictly for future reference.”
And the mortuary officer had hung up.
“Of course I knew right away,” Dennis told me, smiling as he sipped his beer, “that something big had happened, some VIP got killed or some such, and they weren’t ready to release it. But I might have forgot all about it, if an airman hadn’t got in a fender-bender that same afternoon.”
In routine Ballard’s business, Dennis had transported an airman who’d broken his nose in a minor traffic accident out to the base hospital. At about five p.m., Dennis-who was well known around the base, and had rather free access because of the funeral home’s contract with the RAAF-pulled around back to escort the injured airman in the emergency entrance.
But the ramp was blocked by three field ambulances, so the mortician parked alongside and walked the patient up and in, on the way noticing that standing near the rear doors of each of the boxy vehicles was an armed MP. The back doors of one vehicle stood open and Dennis glimpsed a pile of wreckage-thin, silver-metallic material, with a bluish cast.
“One piece was formed like the bottom of a canoe,” he told me, “and was maybe three feet long, with writing on it, about four inches high.”
“What kind of writing?” I asked him. By now I had my own beer to sip.
“Not English. It reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
“You ever talk to Major Marcel about what you saw?”
“No. Anyway, I just glanced in and kept goin’-I had this patient to deliver, and I took him to Receiving and did the paperwork. There was a lot of activity in that emergency room, I’ll tell ya, a real hubbub, not just doctors either, I knew all of them-big birds I never saw before.”
He meant high-ranking Army Air Force officers.
“Anyway, I wandered down toward the lounge, to get a Coke, kinda hopin’ I would run into Maria. We were dating then, you know.”
“Nobody stopped you?”
“Anybody who knew me would’ve made the natural assumption I’d been called out there. This one MP, who I didn’t know, stopped me in the hall and I told him the mortuary officer called me, which was true, and he let me pass. I went on to the lounge, and got my Coke and kinda stood where I could see what was goin’ on, out in the hall … and that’s when I spotted Maria, comin’ out of an examining room, holding a cloth over her mouth.”
The mortician had also caught a glimpse of two doctors, also covering their lower faces with towels standing by a couple of gurneys, but not of who was on those gurneys.
Nurse Selff had been shocked to see him.
“How did you get in here, Glenn?” she’d asked him, lowering the cloth, looking “woozy” to him.
“I just walked in,” the mortician had shrugged.
“Well, my God, you’ve got to leave! You could get shot!”
“Don’t be silly …”
“Listen to me-get out of here as fast you can.”
Then she’d slipped into another room, just as a captain was coming out; Dennis didn’t know this captain, who was in his mid-forties and prematurely gray.
“Who the hell are you?” the captain had demanded. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m from the funeral home,” Dennis said. “I run the ambulance service-just delivered a guy at the emergency room, and now I’m havin’ a Coke. Hey, I can see you had an air crash, I saw some of the debris-can I help?”
The captain had glared at Dennis and pointed to the floor. “You just stay right where you are.”
“Sure.”
The next thing Dennis knew, two MPs were grabbing onto his arms and were in the process of hauling him bodily out of there, when another voice called, “We’re not through with that S.O.B.! Bring him back here-now!”
And the young mortician had been dragged back to a second captain, “a redhead with the meanest-looking eyes I ever saw,” who said, “You didn’t see a thing, understand? There was no crash here. You go into town, shooting off your big mouth about what you saw, or that there was any kind of crash, and your ass is gonna be in a major fucking sling. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m a civilian, mister,” Dennis said. “Where do you get off, talkin’ to me like that? You can’t do a damn thing to me!”
The redheaded captain gave the mortician an “awful” smile, and said, “Don’t kid yourself, kid. Somebody’ll be picking your bones out of the sand.”
“Go to hell!”
The captain nodded to the MPs. “Get his scrawny ass outa here.”
Then the MPs had dragged Dennis out to his ambulance and followed him all the way back to the funeral home, in Roswell.
“About two or three hours later, at home, I got a phone call, just a voice … I think it was that redheaded bastard … sayin’ if I opened my mouth, I’d get thrown so far back in the jug they’d have to shoot pinto beans in my mouth with a pea shooter to feed me. It was a stupid threat and I just laughed at it, and hung up on him; but a couple days later, my pop heard from the sheriff-Sheriff Wilcox-that I was in some kind of hot water out at the base. The sheriff told my father to tell me to keep my mouth shut about what I saw out there.”
“Why would Sheriff Wilcox be the one to convey that message?”
“Maybe because he and my pop were old pals. The sheriff said military personnel came around asking about me and my whole family, including my brother, who’s an Army fighter pilot. The implication was, my whole goddamn family was in trouble ’cause of me.”
“Anything come of it?”
“No. I heard about people getting threatened, and even hauled out to the base and questioned; but me? Nothing. I’d have probably forgot about it-except for being called an S.O.B., which I don’t think anybody much likes- if Maria hadn’t told me what she told me, the next morning.”
“Did she call you, or did you call her?”
“She called me. She said, ‘We need to talk.’ Urgent, upset. We decided on the officers’ club, and we met out there around eleven Sunday morning, had the place pretty near to ourselves. She was crying, very distraught. She looked … different, like if you said ‘boo,’ she’d go into shock. I asked what had happened out at that base last night, and she said she’d seen something no one else on this earth ever had.”
“Tell me what she said she saw.”
And he did. I would be hearing this firsthand, from her lips; but it might be helpful to compare the story she had told Dennis to the one she would tell me. Too many inconsistencies could indicate she was “remembering” a delusion, possibly unconsciously enlarging and enhancing it; no inconsistencies at all could mean her story had been learned by rote, government misinformation being fed, first to the mortician and then to me, a cover-up of some other incident and/or an effort to discredit Drew Pearson by planting a false, ridiculous story.
So I took it all down in my spiral notebook, and Dennis concluded with, “You think she really saw that, Nate? Or is she insane?”
“What do you think, Glenn?”
His frown drew the two thick dark streaks of eyebrow into one. “It was real weird out at that base hospital, that night; something big happened that afternoon, no question about it. And Maria saw something strange, no question about that, either. You know, bodies that been exposed to the elements for days on end, to predators and everything else out in the desert, they could look pretty darn weird.”
“Yeah,” I said, putting my pen down, “but could they grow suction cups on their fingertips?”
12
As cooperative as Roswell’s friendly neighborhood mortician had been, I felt almost guilty, giving him the
