Journal of a UFO Investigator (7 page)

Julian braked lightly. A stream of cars in the left lane zoomed past us. A fat red-faced man leaned through the right window of one of those cars, shaking his fist at us and screaming something I couldn't make out.

“He should save his language for the truck driver,” I said.

“I'm delighted they've finally passed us,” said Julian. “They've been on our tail since we passed through Fairmount Park, maybe even earlier. I was afraid they were following us from the library. In their black car. How many black cars do you see on the road these days?”

“Did you see who was in the car?” I asked.

“I
think
,” he said carefully, “there were perhaps
three
of them. Three
men
. Dressed so
oddly
—all in black, I think. And their eyes looked so very . . . very . . .
strange
.”

I didn't respond. The man I'd seen had worn a grayish white jacket over a hideous red sport shirt, and his eyes were barely visible, his face was so puffed with rage.

“Well,” said Julian after a moment, “there's no law saying the men in black always have to dress in black. Or that they always have to hang out together. Actually there were only two of them. The wife was driving, uglier looking even than the man, and very aggressive behind the wheel. Bound to be an accident down the road, and I hope we're not around when it happens. They did have me nervous for a while, though. You didn't have somebody tail us, did you?”

“Of course not.” I may not have said this in the most convincing tone. I've never been very good at lying, and the truth was I'd indeed had us tailed, though not quite in the way Julian imagined. Fortunately he'd chosen that moment to try to pass the truck himself and wasn't paying full attention to me. He glanced over his shoulder, eased into the left lane, and a moment later we were around the truck and in the clear.

“Murderous traffic,” I said.

“My
dear
Mr. Shapiro, you don't have to make it quite so obvious you're from the suburbs. To a Philadelphian this is hardly traffic at all. You should see the expressway on a weekday. Of course I've had a chance to get used to it; I've been driving for ages. I'll be sixteen next July.”

“Ages? And you'll be sixteen next July?”

He laughed. “Aren't you glad that black car didn't turn out to be an unmarked state trooper? I can see us now, pulled over to the shoulder. Huge hulking cop marches over to us. ‘May I see your license, please, sir?' ”

“What would you do if that happened?” I asked.

“I'd show him my license, of course.” He fished his wallet out of the inside pocket of his jacket, flipped it open, and handed it to me. Sure enough, there was a driver's license, marked with the Pennsylvania keystone emblem, in the name of Julian Arthur—not Arcturus—Margulies. The photo wasn't very flattering, but it was unmistakably Julian. He stared straight ahead, blank, unsmiling, his buckteeth very prominent. The license had been issued nearly two years before. I closed the wallet and handed it back.

 

We were getting out of the city now, and the traffic began to thin. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of the Schuylkill River to our right, glistening in the late afternoon sun. I had only the vaguest idea where we were headed. It was a house in the country, he'd told me, out in Montgomery County. This was the headquarters of the Super-Science Society.

More than six weeks had passed since I'd met Julian in the library, without my taking him up on his dinner invitation. I wasn't sure, to begin with, how seriously he'd meant it. Also, there was something about him that unnerved me, gave me the feeling he was best avoided. I still went to the Philadelphia library most Saturdays, sometimes with Rosa, never again with Jeff. Of course the bus stopped in Braxton; it always had. I stayed clear of the Rare Book Room. I made sure to leave the library a half hour before closing time, so as not to run into Julian as he left work.

The last week of March he phoned.

It was late in the morning, just before lunchtime. I was working at my desk, trying to keep my eyes open; I'd slept till almost ten, but it hadn't helped. My mother drifted around the house, forlornly singing her song about “sailing along on Moonlight Bay, we could hear the voices singing, they seemed to say . . .” I kept the door to my room closed, tried not to listen. She loves that song; it reminds her of her and my father's courting days. For me, it's like fingernails dragged across a blackboard.

“You have stolen my heart, now don't go 'way . . .”

It was Tuesday, but I wasn't in school. A freak snowstorm the day before had forced the schools to close and put my father into an even nastier mood than usual.

He'd come into my room about eleven the night before, complaining about the racket I was making, typing up UFO sightings on file cards. I promised I'd do something else that didn't make noise. But he sat down on my bed to talk, starting out calm, reasonable. The way his inquisitions usually do.

He just wanted to
understand
, he said. How was it a bright kid like me could piss away my life on this UFO garbage?

“So it's been fifteen years of flying saucers,” he said when I'd answered his questions about the dates, the numbers. “There's been three thousand or God knows how many sightings of these stupid goddamn lights whizzing through the sky. None of them ever crashes. None of them ever manages to leave anything solid behind—”

That's simply not true, I told him.

“What?”

UFOs have at times left physical evidence, I told him.

“Yeah? Like when?”

I didn't want to get into the Maury Island UFO crash of 1947; that was almost certainly a hoax. There were vague rumors of a crash somewhere in New Mexico, also in '47, but I'd never been able to find any details. So I began to describe the New Haven case from August 1953, when a red fireball about a foot in diameter tore through a billboard—

“Piloted by
very
little green men. Right?”

He sweated, grinned. His eyes were furious. I kept on. Many people in New Haven, I told him, heard the terrific noise the fireball made, scared one woman so much she had a miscarriage—

“And what did this red ball of fire leave behind? If I may ask?”

I was just getting to that. The fireball left some metal by the hole in the billboard. It was analyzed, determined to be copper with some copper oxide—

“Copper and copper oxide. You tell me something now. Why in the goddamn fucking hell would an interplanetary spaceship have left behind it copper and copper oxide?”

I tried to tell him: I didn't
know
why it was copper and copper oxide. I knew the facts; I didn't know what they meant. That was what I was trying to find out, why I dedicated myself to UFO research—

“WHY COPPER AND COPPER OXIDE?”

He was on his feet, his face swollen with fury, bellowing over and over that same meaningless question. “I don't
know
!” I cried. “I'm not one of the UFO pilots! What do you want from me?”

“I want—” And then he turned, stormed out of my room. At the doorway he glared back at me. “Lucky husband!” he snarled. And then he was gone.

From her bedroom my mother gave out a wail. She'd pretended to be asleep through all this, though I'd known she was awake, lying rigid in bed, hearing every word. She knew, just as I did, what he meant by “Lucky husband!” The man married to that lady in New Haven who'd miscarried when the fireball came through. If something like that had happened to my mother—if she hadn't insisted, against medical advice, on carrying me to term—what might their lives have been like?

Would they still be singing to each other about Moonlight Bay?

The front door to the house opened, slammed. She let out another cry, of such misery and terror it chilled me to hear it. She's always been afraid of this: that I'll exasperate him so much he'll tear out of here and won't come back. I waited to hear the car start up; I'd forgotten about the snow. Probably he had too.

He came back in. With steady, even steps he came to my room. He pulled open my door. His face was grim, stony, righteous.

“Let's see that pimple.”

It had sprouted that morning on the tip of my nose. I'd hoped, absurdly, he wouldn't have noticed. I stood up to give him a better look; I was nearly as tall as he was, not that it meant anything. “
Suivez-moi
,” he said as he led me to the bathroom by my shoulder. I suppose I'm lucky it wasn't my ear.

I didn't protest. I'd protested before. It had done no good. By the bathroom's white fluorescent light he reinspected my face. Silently he dipped his needle into the alcohol.

When it was over—the needle triumphant, the pimple yielded up its pus-filled guts—I was dismissed to bed, a dab of bloodied toilet paper stuck to my nose. There I lay, shaking and sleepless, until nearly dawn. I was just grateful the snow had saved me, that I wouldn't have to get up in another hour for my stupid lousy school. It was later that morning, as I sat going over my file cards and trying to forget, that Julian phoned.

 

“Didn't lose my card, did you?” he said.

I'd picked up the phone in the kitchen, on the eighth ring. My mother should have answered it; she hadn't. Had she gone somewhere? Drifted, after her own dreadful night, into a sleep too deep to hear the ringing? I was in the house alone.

“Not at all.” On the contrary: I'd been keeping the card on my desk and could not begin either my UFO work or my schoolwork without picking it up and fiddling with it. “Sorry I haven't phoned. It's just that things have been . . . so crazy,” I said, hoping he wouldn't ask what “things” were or in what way they'd been crazy.

“Well, that's the way it is these days. Everybody's busy. All the teachers think theirs is the only class you've got homework for. The science teacher doesn't realize you have English papers to write, et cetera and so forth. Not like the dear old days of first grade, when you were doing good if you knew the alphabet. Got any plans for Saturday, a week and a half?”

“I imagine I'll be in Philadelphia. Doing research in the library.”

“Good. That's my week to work Rare Books. We'll meet after they close. I'll drive you out to our house.”

“Your family's house?”

“Of course not. The SSS house. Old farmhouse, in the country. Take the Schuylkill Expressway, past West Conshohocken. We'll have dinner, do some observing if conditions are good. Jacket and tie, please; we all dress for dinner. Rochelle will be there. One of us will take you back to—where is it you live?”

“Kellerfield.”

“That's on Route Seventeen, isn't it? About ten miles out of Trenton?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Back to Kellerfield, then. Or if it's late, we'll set you up a cot.”

I began to regret saying yes about three seconds after I hung up the phone. I imagined myself stepping into Julian's car and vanishing without a trace. No doubt I would be used as victim for some grotesque experiment, involving needles or other sharp instruments, in this crumbling farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, where my screams could not be heard and no one would know what was happening to me.

This was where Rosa could help.

We would go to the library together as usual that Saturday, I told her. But she would leave early and wait at the corner by the main entrance until she saw me and Julian come out. Then she would follow us, unobtrusively, to Julian's car. She would note down the license number and a description of the car. If I wasn't back by two in the morning or hadn't contacted her in some way, she was to call the police.

“Bullshit,” Rosa said.

This was the way she talked all the time, since breaking up with Jeff. Her mother had gone from being “Helen” to “the old bitch,” and when my face must have shown my distaste—awful as the woman was, she was still Rosa's mother—she snapped: “Goddamn it, yours is too!”

“But all I'm asking you to do—”

“If you're afraid of what's going to happen to you once you get into that boy's car, then don't get in!”

We argued, even yelled a little bit. Eventually I brought her around. When Julian and I left the library together that afternoon, Rosa was on the corner, looking like she was about to cry. Of course I didn't say hello. I didn't nod to her, and I looked at her as briefly as I could as Julian and I walked past. But I glimpsed her shining brown eyes fixed on me and was seized by a ghastly certainty that this was the last time I'd ever see her. Sadness weighed on me so heavily I could barely pick up my legs to walk. Julian meanwhile chattered away about “Clarion,” the tenth planet hidden behind the dark side of the moon, whose slinky space brunettes—centuries old yet ageless—pick up lucky and not exceptionally truthful earth males for rides in their UFOs. As far as I could tell he'd seen nothing at all.

 

The heat was unusual for the beginning of April. Even with the Pontiac's windows opened wide, the breeze blowing in, I felt myself sweating. I touched the knot of my tie. I wished I could take it off or at least loosen it. Julian looked perfectly cool, dressed in a blue blazer very much like the one I was wearing. I'd half expected him to wear his black suit, but this was evidently not an occasion for it.

“How do you manage to have a driver's license at age fifteen?” I asked him. “I thought you had to be sixteen even to get a learner's permit.”

“That's not a commandment from Mount Sinai, you know. It's not even a federal regulation. There's plenty of states out west where everybody has a license by the time they're fourteen. Sometimes even twelve. The farm boys and girls need to be able to drive the machinery into town. Otherwise the work won't get done.”