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“Then why haven’t we seen them? And listen!”
“What am I supposed to be listening f—”
“Just shut up a minute and you’ll hear it. By which I mean you won’t.”
I shut up. I heard the Jilasi roaring away, no doubt undercutting the bridge supports even as we sat there on the grass munching the last of our fruit pies. I heard the far-off drone of an airplane, probably bound for the Portland Jetport. Otherwise, nothing.
I looked at Butch. He was looking at me and not smiling. Solemn.
“No birds,” I said.
“No. And the woods should be full of them.”
Just then a crow gave out a single loud caw.
“There you go,” I said, and actually felt relieved.
“One crow,” he said. “Big deal. Where are the robins?”
“Flown south?”
“Not yet, not all of them. We should be hearing nuthatches and cardinals. Maybe a goldfinch, and chickadees galore. But there’s not even a fucking woodpecker.”
I usually ignore the soundtrack of the woods—you get used to it—but now that he mentioned it, where were the birds? And something else.
“The squirrels,” I said. “They should be running around everywhere, getting ready for winter. I think I’ve seen a couple…” I trailed off because I wasn’t even sure of that.
“It’s aliens,” Butch said in a low, joke-spooky voice. “They could be creeping toward us through the woods right now. With their disintegrator rayguns.”
“You saw that story in the Call,” I said. “The one about the flying saucer.”
“Wasn’t a saucer, it was a cigar,” Butch said. “A flying see-gar.”
“The Tiparillo that came from Planet X,” I said.
“With a lust for Earth women!”
We looked at each other and snickered.
I had an idea for a story that afternoon—much later it became a novel called The Terrible Generation—and I was making some notes in one of my spiral notebooks that evening. I was trying to think of a good name for the villainous young man at the heart of the story when the cabin door banged open and Butch ran in. “Come here, Lare. You have to see this.” He grabbed his camera.
“See what?”
“Just come!”
I looked at his wide eyes, put aside my notebook, and followed him out the door. While we walked the quarter-mile to the clearing and the creek, he told me he’d come out to check if the bridge’s tilt had increased (we would have heard it if it had collapsed entirely). Then he saw what was in the sky and forgot all about the bridge.
“Look,” he said when we got to the clearing, and pointed up.
It had started to rain, just a gentle mist. It was full dark and I shouldn’t have been able to see the lowering clouds, but I could, because they were lit by slowly moving circles of bright light. Five, then seven, then nine. They were different sizes. The smallest was maybe thirty feet across. The biggest could have been a hundred. They weren’t shining off the clouds, the way a bright spotlight or a powerful flashlight will; they were in the clouds.
“What are they?” I asked, almost whispering.
“I don’t know, but they sure as shit aren’t Tiparillos.”
“Or White Owls,” I said, and we began to laugh. Not the way you do when something is funny; the way you do when you’re absolutely gobsmacked with amazement.
Butch took pictures. This was years before chip technology allowed for instant gratification, but I saw the prints later, after he developed them in his own little darkroom. They were disappointing. Just big circles of light above the dark jig-jags of the treetops. I have seen pictures of UFOs since then (or UAPs, if you prefer), and they are usually disappointing: blurry shapes that could be anything, including the trick photography of hoaxers. You had to be there to understand how wonderful it was, and how weird: great soundless lights moving in the clouds, seeming almost to waltz.
