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What I remember most clearly—other than a sense of awe—was how divided my mind was during the five or ten minutes it went on. I wanted to see what was making those lights… yet I didn’t. I was afraid, you see, that we were close to artifacts—maybe even intelligent beings—from another world. That exalted me but it also terrified me. Looking back on that first contact (for surely it was that), I think our only two choices were to laugh or to scream. If I’d been alone, I almost certainly would have screamed. And run away, probably to hide under my bed like a child and deny I’d seen anything. Because we were together, and grown men, we laughed.
I say five or ten minutes, but it might have been fifteen. I don’t know. It was long enough for the drizzle to thicken into real rain. Two of the bright circles grew smaller and disappeared. Then two or three more went. The biggest stayed the longest, then it also began to dwindle. It didn’t move from side to side; simply shrank to the size of a plate, then a fifty-cent piece, then a penny, then a brilliant dot… then gone. As if it had shot straight up.
We stood there in the rain, waiting for something else to happen. Nothing did. After a little while Butch grabbed my shoulder. I gave a squawk.
“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered. “Let’s go in. Lightshow’s over and we’re getting soaked.”
That was what we did. I hadn’t bothered to put on a jacket, so I built up the fire, which had been down to coals, and stripped off my wet shirt. I was rubbing my arms and shivering.
“We can tell people what we saw, but they won’t believe it,” Butch said. “Or they’ll shrug and say it was some crazy weather phenomenon.”
“Maybe it was. Or… how far away is the Castle Rock Airport?”
He shrugged. “Has to be twenty or thirty miles east of here.”
“The runway lights… maybe with the clouds… the moisture… it could, you know… some prismatic effect…”
He was sitting on the couch, camera in his lap, looking at me. Smiling just a little. Saying nothing. He didn’t have to.
“That’s bullshit, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes. I don’t know what that was, but it wasn’t lights from the airport and it wasn’t a fucking weather balloon. There were eight or ten of those things, maybe a dozen, and they were big.”
“There are other hunters in the woods. I saw Freddy Skillins and you saw three guys who were probably flatlanders. They could have seen it.”
“Maybe they did, but I doubt it. I just happened to be in the right place—that clearing on the edge of the creek—at the right time. In any case, it’s over. I’m going to bed.”
It rained all the next day—the 14th, that would have been. Neither of us wanted to go out and get soaked looking for deer we probably wouldn’t find. I read and worked a little bit on the idea for my story. I kept trying to come up with a good name for the bad kid and didn’t have any luck—maybe because I didn’t have a clear fix on why the bad kid was bad. Butch spent most of the morning with his pad. He drew three different pictures of the lights in the clouds, then gave up in disgust.
“I hope the photos come out, because these suck,” he said.
I looked them over and told him they were good, but they weren’t. They didn’t suck, but they didn’t convey the strangeness of what we’d seen. The enormity.
I looked at all the crossed-out names of my proposed bad guy. Trig Adams. No. Vic Ellenby. No. Jack Claggart. Too on-the-nose. Carter Cantwell. Oh, puke. The story I had in mind seemed amorphous: I had an idea but no specifics. Nothing to hold onto. It reminded me of what we’d seen the previous night. Something was there, but it was impossible to tell what, because it was in the clouds.
“What are you doing?” Butch asked me.
“Fucking off. I think I’ll take a nap.”
“What about lunch?”
“Don’t want any.”
He considered this, then looked out the window at the steady rain. Nothing is colder than cold November rain. It crossed my mind that someone should write a song about it… and eventually, someone did.
“A nap sounds like just the ticket,” Butch said. He put his pad aside and stood up. “Tell you something, Lare. I’m going to draw all my life, but I’ll never be an artist.”
The rain stopped around four o’clock that afternoon. By six the clouds had unraveled and we could see stars and a sliver of moon—God’s fingernail, the oldtimers say. We ate our steaks for dinner (along with plenty of Wonder Bread to sop up the juice), then went out to the clearing. We didn’t talk about it, just went. We stood there for maybe half an hour, craning our necks. There were no lights, no saucers, no flying cigars. We went back inside, Butch found a pack of Bicycles in the living room cabinet, and we played cribbage until almost ten o’clock.
“I can hear the Jilasi even in here,” I said as we finished the last hand.
“I know. That rain didn’t do the bridge any help. Why is there a fucking bridge there, anyway? Did you ever ask yourself that?”
“I think someone had an idea for a development back in the sixties. Or pulpers. They must have clear-cut these woods back before World War I.”
“What would you think about hunting one more day and going back?”
I had an idea he was thinking of more than going home, most likely empty-handed. Seeing those lights in the clouds had done something to him. Could have done something to both of us. I’m not going to call it a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s just that maybe you see something, lights in the sky or a certain shadow at a certain time of day, how it lies across your path. You take it as a sign and decide to move along. You say to yourself that when I was a child I spoke as a child, understood as a child, thought as a child, but there comes a time to put away childish things.
