“Not after what he’s been put through. Do you know he’s talking about not running again? Best sheriff we ever had, best boss I ever had. He hardly says anything about what happened, though I have heard him say he’s furious with himself for bringing the military in. Once they showed up, and claimed jurisdiction, we got completely cut off. I heard him say, if he had it to do over again, he’d call in the press, first. Give ’em carte blanche.”
“Deputy … what’s your first name, anyway?”
“Tommy.”
“Tommy, call me Nate. Listen, were you there from the beginning?”
“From when Mac Brazel stumbled inta the office, just a cowboy in faded jeans and scuffed boots and a week’s worth of dirt and dust caked on him, yes I was.”
“Then you saw the saucer debris?”
“Yes-but not the bodies.”
“Bodies?”
“I’m gettin’ ahead of myself. Look, I saw that thin metal you’d crumple that’d then uncrumple itself; and I saw some little I-beams with hieroglyphics. Saw samples of all that stuff. Sheriff sent me and Pete Crawford out to the ranch-”
“Wait a minute … this was
“Yes, sir. We didn’t see the debris, but we saw this patch of blackened ground; it looked like somethin’ big and round and hot had sat itself down. We come back and reported in to the sheriff, and he called the air base, and there was no new news, and then things settled down for a bit.”
The next morning, Tuesday, things got unsettled, and unsettling, in a hurry. Deputies Reynolds and Crawford drove back out to the ranch and found it had been cordoned off by the Army; they were not allowed passage, lawmen or not. Armed sentries and Army vehicles were stationed at ranch roads, crossroads, everywhere. Annoyed and frustrated, the deputies returned to the sheriff’s office, where Wilcox was fielding phone calls from all over the world.
“We still had a little box of that strange debris,” Reynolds said, “off in our side room. Day or so later, just when things had kinda gone back to normal-the weather balloon story had calmed things down-the military landed on us like fuckin’ D day, excuse my French.”
“Landed, how?”
“Two MP trucks showed up and they came in and demanded the box of wreckage, and the sheriff handed it over, with no protest. But they were belligerent as hell, anyway. These MPs gathered all of us, deputies and Sheriff Wilcox, and told us to keep quiet about recent events and direct all inquiries to the base. The sheriff said, well, that’s what he’d been doing. And the MP, a colored sergeant, real menacin’ fella, said, well, if any of us had any other ideas, there’d be ‘grave consequences,’ was what he said. I didn’t take kindly to that, and said something to the effect, what do you guys think you’re doing, threatening officers of the law like that? And this black bastard, he says, cold as ice, he says, ‘We’ll kill you all, and your families, and your goddamn dogs, too.’”
“Sounds like you’re taking a hell of a chance, telling me this.”
“I don’t like being threatened. And … look, there’s something I haven’t told you.”
“What’s that, Tommy?”
“I kinda got a personal stake in this. I date the sheriff’s daughter, have been, off and on, for a couple years. Threatening me is one thing; threatening my girl’s life, well those guys can go fuck themselves!”
We listened to a staticky Hank Williams singing about a cheating heart, then I asked, “You said something about bodies?”
“I didn’t see anything, but I think the sheriff did. I think it’s part of why he’s so shook up, why his health has failed and everything else. My girl, her father wouldn’t answer any of her questions, and her mother told her to stop asking him … but that night she heard him talking to her mom, heard the sheriff say that three little bodies had been found, little guys with big heads in silver suits. Found ’em in a burned area with metallic debris and the crashed saucer.”
“When was this supposed to’ve happened?”
“I don’t know. Hell, maybe my girl imagined all this, or heard snippets of conversation and wove ’em into somethin’. But I know the military got to Sheriff Wilcox, browbeat him, threatened him, maybe even took him for a stay in that same ‘guesthouse’ where they held Brazel.”
“What do you mean, ‘guesthouse’?”
“Some kind of place where they hold unofficial prisoners for questioning, out at the base. Brazel was there for a week, I hear. I don’t know, maybe you could ask him yourself. Maybe he’s ready to talk, after all this time has passed.”
“Yeah, I was thinking of driving out to his place, later today.”
“Hell, don’t bother-he’s in town!”
“What?”
“Yeah, Brazel comes in every now and then to sell some wool.”
“Where can I find him?”
“My guess is, if you park yourself at the bar next door, your man’ll come to you, before too very long.”
The bartender at the Trading Post Saloon knew Mac Brazel and-for the assurance I wasn’t a process server, and a consideration of one dollar-agreed to point him out to me, should the rancher decide to stop by for a drink.
On a bar stool, I nursed a beer and went over my notes, trying to decide what I made of all this; I wasn’t convinced that a flying saucer had really crashed, but the military’s misbehavior in these here parts seemed undeniable. My back was starting to hurt, and I was about to move to a booth, when the door opened, sunlight slashed in, and in strode a tall character in a beat-up Stetson, dirty faded jeans and an equally dirty, even more faded denim shirt.
The bartender gave me a barely perceptible nod, but I think I could have saved myself a dollar: who else could this long, tall New Mexican be but Mac Brazel? His face was spade-shaped, his eyes wary slits, mouth a wider slit, skin as dark and leathery as a saddle.
He settled onto a stool two over from me, and in a low voice requested a Blatz.
“Mr. Brazel?”
He glanced at me; his face was like something an Indian had carved out of wood. “Do I know you?”
“I’m a friend of Major Marcel.”
He turned away, but I caught him looking at me in the mirror behind the bar; I looked back at him in it, and said, “I’d like to talk to you about what happened out at your ranch July before last.”
His bottle of beer arrived, with a glass. “I don’t talk about that.”
“You know, you’re an American citizen, Mr. Brazel. The military can’t tell you what to do and what to say, or what not to say.”
Brazel was pouring the beer. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“What did you find, Mr. Brazel, out in that field?”
He sipped the beer, savored it, then-speaking so slowly it would have irritated Gary Cooper-said, “I’ll tell you one thing, mister. It sure as hell wasn’t a weather balloon.”
“What was it?”
Several swallows of beer later, he responded-sort of. “If I ever find anything else, it better be a bomb, or they’re gonna have a hard time gettin’ me to say anything about it.”
“Even if you find more little green men?”
He took a last swallow of his beer, and then that leather face split into a strange grin. “They wasn’t green.”
And he tossed a fifty-cent piece on the bar, climbed off his stool and ambled out.
I’d been running a tab, and had to take the time to pay for two beers before I could follow him, and by the time I got back out to Main Street, the rancher was climbing into a recent-model Ford pickup truck, across the way. I might have made it to him, before he pulled out, if that hand hadn’t settled on my shoulder.
“Mr. Heller,” a crisp young voice said in my ear. “Would you come with us, please? Colonel Blanchard would like to see you.”
Then a white-helmeted MP was at my side, a wide-shouldered kid of twenty or so, no bigger than your typical starting college fullback; he took me by an elbow and walked me to an open-topped jeep at the curb, where a
