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“Pop, you’ll be fi—”
He held up the hand with the keys in it, his old gesture. “If I don’t pull through, you’ll find the explanation for my success—and Butch’s—in that drawer. Everything that woman… I can’t recall her name just now… was curious about. She wouldn’t have believed it, and you won’t, but it’s the truth. Call it my last epistle to the world.”
“Fine. I understand. Now what about the operation?”
“Well, let’s see. Let’s think this through. If I don’t have it, what? A wheelchair? And a nurse, I suppose. Not a pretty one, a big hairy fullback of a fellow with a shaved head who wears English Leather. You certainly won’t be capable of horsing my freight around, not at your age.”
I supposed that was true.
“I think I’m going to go for it. I may die on the operating table. I may pull through, do six weeks of physical therapy, and then break the other hip. Or my arm. Or my shoulder. God has a vile sense of humor.”
His bones were fragile, but his brains were still in good working order, even doped to the gills. I was glad he hadn’t put the responsibility for the decision—and its consequences—on me.
“I’ll tell Dr. Patel.”
“You do that,” he said, “and tell him to get the painkiller train ready to roll. I love you, son.”
“I love you, too, Pop.”
“Bring my keys back if I come through. Look in the drawer if I don’t.”
“You’ve got it.”
“What was that woman’s name? Crockett?”
“Crawford. Ruth Crawford.”
“She wanted an answer. An explanation. The Unified Field Theory of Creativity, God save the Queen. And in the end, all I could have given her was a bigger mystery.” His eyes slipped closed. “Whatever they gave me must have been strong. No pain just now. It’ll be back, but right now I think I can sleep.”
He did, and never woke up. Sleep became a coma. He had signed a DNR years before. I was sitting at his bedside and holding his hand when his heart stopped at 9:19 the following evening. He didn’t even get the lead obituary in the New York Times, because an ex–Secretary of State died in a car accident that same night. Pop would have said it’s an old story: in death as in life, politics almost always trumps art.
Just about everyone in Harlow came to the funeral at Grace Baptist Church, along with a good contingent of press. Ruth Crawford didn’t come, she was in California, but she sent flowers and a nice condolence note. Luckily the funeral director knew what to expect, and put speakers on the church lawn for the overflow. He offered to add video screens; I refused on the grounds that it was a funeral, not a rock concert. The graveside service was shorter and less well attended, and when I showed up a week later with flowers (daylilies, of course), I was alone—the last leaf on the Carmody family tree, and now turning an autumnal brown. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I knelt to prop the vase against his headstone. “Hey, Pop—I’ve got the key you gave me. I’m going to respect your dying wish and open that drawer, but if there’s anything in there that explains anything, I’ll be… what did you always used to say?… a monkey’s testicle.”
The first thing I found in it was a manila folder. Either the sly dog hadn’t completely given up his laptop after all, or he’d gotten someone at the library to do a printout for him, because the page on top was an article from Time magazine, dated May 23, 2022. The headline read CONGRESS IS FINALLY TAKING UFOs SERIOUSLY.
I scanned it and learned that these days UFOs are actually called UAPs—unidentified aerial phenomena. The Congressional hearings, chaired by Adam Schiff, were the first to take place on the subject since Project Blue Book, fifty years before, and everyone who testified was eager to point out that the focus wasn’t on little green men from Mars or anywhere else. All witnesses said that while craft of extraterrestrial origin couldn’t be ruled out, they were considered highly unlikely. What they were worried about was the possibility that some other country—Russia, China—had developed hypersonic technology far greater than our own.
Below the printout were clippings, yellowed and slightly brittle, from September and October of 1978. One from the Press Herald was headlined MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS SPOTTED OVER MARGINAL WAY. The one in the Castle Rock Call read CIGAR-SHAPED “UFO” SPOTTED OVER CASTLE VIEW. There was a photo of the View, with the rusty Suicide Stairs (as long gone as my Uncle Butch’s dump murals) zig-zagging up the side. No sign of the flying White Owl, though.
Below the folder of clippings was a spiral notebook. I flipped back the cover, expecting to see another of Pop’s early efforts—a stab at The Terrible Generation, perhaps, or Highway 19. It was his backslanted printing, unmistakable, but there were no cross-outs, scribbles, or doodles while he struggled for a way to express what he was thinking. It wasn’t a bit like the early notebooks I’d found after my mother died. This was Laird Carmody in total command of his writing ability, although some of the letters looked shaky. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought the narrative had been written at some point after he claimed retirement.
Pop was a novelist in full, usually respected for his storytelling abilities, and it only took me three pages to decide this was another story, albeit one with real people—Laird Carmody and Dave LaVerdiere—as made-up characters. Metafiction, in other words. Not uncommon; any number of fine writers have dabbled in the concept (or maybe you call that sort of thing a conceit). Dave certainly couldn’t object, Pop would have thought, because his old friend was dead. If Pop had claimed it as true in his hospital room, it was only because he was addled with dope and pain. Such things happened. At the end of his life, hadn’t Nathaniel Hawthorne confused himself with the Reverend Dimmesdale? Didn’t Emily Dickinson leave the world saying “I must go in, the fog is rising”?
My father had never written fantasy or metafiction, and this was both, but he was up to his good old tricks nevertheless. I was caught up immediately and read through the pages in that notebook without stopping. Not just because I knew the people and the Harlow landscape, either. Laird Carmody could always tell a story, even his harshest critics admitted that, and this was a good one. But true?
I called bullshit on that.
2
In the old days, when Butch and I ran the town dump, we had Picker Tuesday. It was Butch’s idea. (We also had Rat Saturday, but that’s a different story.)
“If they’re gonna pick,” Butch said, “we should give em a day to do it when we can watch out for em and make sure some juicer or pothead doesn’t gash a leg and get gangrene.”
One old alkie who showed up more Tuesdays than not was Rennie Lacasse. He was what Maine folks call a ratchet-jaw, probably even talked in his sleep. Whenever he got talking about the old days, he’d always begin by saying “That pitcher never excaped my memory.”
That’s how I feel about the hunting trip in 1978 that changed our lives. Those pitchers have never excaped my memory.
