Journal of a UFO Investigator (35 page)

They loaded us into a truck, with the last of our shattered disk. The trucks' engines started up, in the stillness of the desert morning. We began to move.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 , 1966. THE DAY AFTER LABOR DAY.
First day of senior year in high school. My last year; my strangest.

Final bell has rung. We're out of the building, scurrying for our buses—me trying to get used to being here again with the kids I've known so long; how odd it is, everyone around me speaks English—when who do I run into but Jeff Stollard.

He greets me warmly, friendlier than he's been in years. For a few seconds it feels nice. “How was Israel?” he asks.

“Pretty good,” I say. “Did you get my letter?”

“Letter? Yes. The one you wrote me about that place—what was it, Abu Tar?”

“Abu Tor.”

I suppose I should ask: “And how was
your
summer?” But his answer will be about all the folksinging he and his buddies have done, are doing, will do, and I can't stand to hear that right now.

“Yes,” he says. “Abu Tor. It sounded very interesting.”

He looks at his watch. We have ten minutes from the bell to catch our buses; the drivers won't wait. The engines are running. Their exhaust climbs into the hot afternoon sky. “You know,” I say before I can stop myself, “my mother died.”

He knew my mother, from back when we were friends and he used to come over my house sometimes.

“When—when—” He looks, he sounds shocked. “When did it happen?”

“August. About three weeks ago.”

“Did you come back from Israel when it happened?”

“I didn't know about it until I got back.”

“She was a nice lady,” Jeff says.

There's sorrow in his face. His body relaxes a little bit, as if he's thinking,
It's not the end of the world if we miss our buses
. As if our bikes were standing between us once more, as in the old times; I can almost feel the handlebars under my palms. In a minute we'll hop on them and zoom off somewhere. Talk and talk until all this begins to make sense, and the years of silence between us will be like they never happened.

“It's really—it's really—” Jeff says.

I nod.

“I wouldn't have thought ... this would happen,” he says.

“I didn't either.”

—and afterward, after he told me, my father said, “You don't know how I've dreaded this moment,” while all I could think was:
The sword has fallen, finally, finally, fallen
—

“But I don't understand,” Jeff says. “Why didn't your father let you know when it happened? They've got telephones in Israel, don't they?”

“Sure. It's a modern country, just like here.”

“So why did he wait for you to get back?”

“I don't know,” I say. And I really don't.

The lamp blazes over my desk. The journal lies open before me. It's a warm night, early September. I haven't touched my calculus, my physics, my English lit. I keep expecting somebody to remind me, gently or angrily, that it's past midnight and tomorrow I'll be up early for school. No one does. Sometimes I hear my mother moving around the house the way she used to, but it can't be; it's my imagination. In the bedroom next door my father's snoring. He must have moved back there sometime during the summer, after she died. Or after she was taken to the hospital.

I write:

 

Now I know who they are, the three men in black. I knew the moment my father spoke the words
Mom is dead
and their darkness filled the car, blotting out the headlights and neon signs and even his face behind the steering wheel. And I knew:
they've won
.

Always they will win.

In every life theirs is the victory.

 

It's October, and I see them together everywhere. In the halls, the cafeteria. The auditorium after school, where Jeff and his folksingers go to rehearse their music and clown around together, and his girl sits on the stage, watching, laughing, applauding.

She's tall and blond and pretty in a kind of prim way. She's a junior. I've heard him call her Janet.

I pass them in the hallways while they stand together, laughing and talking and touching hands. At first I thought he might introduce me, so we could all be friends. But whatever relic of friendship there was that first day of school, it didn't last. Not after he met Janet. If he sees me when he's with her, he nods to me very cautiously, as if to say: “Yes, I know who you are. But don't come over and talk right now. This isn't a convenient time, you see.”

And Janet looks at me, sort of bemused. As if I were a strange little dog she and Jeff spotted while out on a walk together—deformed, but in a way that's harmless. As if, say, one of my legs had been lopped off, but I go on trotting on my three little legs almost the same as other dogs do on four.

 

In the dark ceiling, over the bed where I can't sleep, I see Rosa Pagliano's face. She laughs, not kindly, not graciously. She sings, “I'll not marry a man who's shy, for he'd run away when I winked an eye,” and now I know for certain she's mocking me. I curse my God, my tribe, my family. And at last myself, for having been so slow, so timid. Such a good boy for my mother.

If after a few hours I haven't slept, I get out of bed. I turn on the light. I pull out my old UFO Investigators membership card, with the
DS & RP
heart on the back. I tell myself: I'll tear it into pieces. That's what Jeff surely did. Why do I have to carry this burden—of feeling, of remembering—year after year, while my youth is sucked away and I turn old and stooped?

I shove the card back into my wallet. From the other side of my bedroom wall my father snores. He sleeps well these days.

 

If he hates me, he doesn't show it. Since I've been back we've had a peace pact, the terms unspoken but understood. I will not ask why he didn't call me in Israel when my mother went into the hospital and he knew she wouldn't come out alive. He will not ask why I didn't pick up a phone myself, even though it was clear from his letters that something was badly wrong. We each carry our guilt.

I don't ask, “Did she leave a message for me before she died? A letter? Anything?” I know she didn't. It feels right and appropriate that she didn't. I don't know why.

I don't ask who he was phoning while she was in the hospital.

I've seen the bills; he left them out on his desk in the den. I suppose he figured I wouldn't notice. More than two hundred dollars for long-distance calls the last week of July and all through August, starting the day my mother went in. All to one number. In a town I'd never heard of but, when I checked the atlas, turned out to be on Long Island.

 

Those are, as they say on TV, “the facts, ma'am. Just the facts.”

A few more such facts:

Jeff never went out with Rosa Pagliano in eighth grade, any more than I did. I think maybe he asked her out and she said no, and he was too embarrassed to admit it. When we had our big fight—after the eighth-grade dance, and after she'd left town and school was out for the summer—I tried to find out from him if that was what happened. He told me to mind my own blankety-blank business.

She never went to the Philadelphia library with him and me. Actually, Jeff and I went to Philadelphia together just once. After that I always went alone, because once we'd handed in our science paper and gotten a B+ on it—with a few compliments about our “originality” and “analytic ability”—Jeff didn't care anymore about UFOs, though he went through the motions of working on a book with me and I nagged him into writing a few pages. The bus didn't stop in Braxton. It never did. I doubt it ever will.

But this much is true: Rosa did ask me to dance with her.

I did say to her, “Never touch the stuff.”

And the next week she ran off to Florida. Maybe there was a connection, maybe not. I couldn't ask her mother because even if Helen Pagliano was sober and sane—a big if—she sold her house in Braxton and left soon after Rosa did. Nobody knows where she went.

That fall I did search the Florida phone books in the Philadelphia library, for listings for Pagliano. I did find a “Pagliano, Joseph” in the Jacksonville directory. I did call that number from a phone booth, stacks of quarters by my side and my heart in my mouth, and the man who answered did say to me, “You got the wrong number, mister.” To this day I don't know if he was telling the truth or lying.

Most people, I find, are liars.

So I have only one way to be in touch with Rosa. It sometimes works. But only very late at night, between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M.

I take the UFO Investigators membership card. I hold it in my hand, lightly rubbing it as if it were the pocket-size disk Albert Bender's space-men gave him, or the Delta Device Jeff and I used to tell each other we'd make in metal shop someday. I say, “Kazik, Kazik.” When I do that, I feel perfect certainty that Rosa—wherever she is, Florida or New Mexico or (who knows?) Wisconsin; married or pregnant, or alone with her children by whoever'd been the last to betray her—still has her card, the one I gave her. She takes it out and looks at it in her despairing nighttimes, just as I do. It reminds her how vast and teeming and rich the sky seemed, how it called to her. To me.

This is our only contact. She never appears in my UFO journal anymore. Neither does Julian or Rochelle. That journal still flows within me, but in brief, sudden spurts, with weeks sometimes between entries. And when it comes—