Close Encounters of the Third Kind Page 10

  Neary reached up again and folded his wife into his arms. His trembling seemed to pulsate right through, and Ronnie suddenly knew that she was really incapable of bearing up to all this.

  “Oh, don’t,” she sobbed. “Oh, don’t. Let me call someone. Oh, Roy … please don’t.”

  But his fingers ripped at her clothing.

  “I hate you, I hate you, hate you,” she sobbed, hating what he was doing to her.

  Neary gripped the blouse at her shoulders and pulled. It ripped and the tattered ends pinned Ronnie’s arms to her sides. He pulled the brassiere straps off her shoulders and slid the thing down her stomach, and then slid down to her breasts and—

  Almost immediately his anxiety flowed out of him. He cocked his head to the side and stared down at her silhouetted breasts.

  Ronnie started to tremble then, her teeth chattering, silent sobs racking her body. She was helpless and horrified, but Neary was pulling something out of this for himself. Something constructive!

  His mind raced on. No solution yet, but close. He could sense just how close. And, Jesus, he suddenly realized Ronnie had a beautiful body.

  19

  In Denver, the evening was cold and clear. The thin air whistled around the CB antenna of the immense semi-trailer as it started the long haul down the sloping highway to the north. It flashed by in the dusk, its gigantic trailer blazing red for a moment in the last rays of the setting sun. Folger’s Coffee, the sign ran along its high aluminum flank.

  The Piggly-Wiggly trucks, two of them, were already twenty miles east of Oakland and picking up speed on U.S. 580. Ahead lay Altamont Pass, over 2,000 feet high.

  The sun wasn’t as far down on the horizon behind them as it was in Denver. The drivers were hoping to make Tracy by dark and then to bore on through, filling the night with noise and diesel exhaust as they shoved their cargo toward the setting sun.

  It was dark by now on Interstate 80 running southeast out of Boise. The great semi, with its powerful diesel engine dragging the trailer along at sixty-five miles per hour, headed toward Hammett and Mountain Home, Idaho. The trailer bore the brightly lettered name and design of Kinney Shoes, but in the darkness the name was almost invisible, except when passing cars’ headlights slanted by.

  The trailer truck pulled in for refueling at a truck stop just east of Billings, Montana, where Interstate 90 ducks down through a corner of the Big Horn National Recreation Area. The two drivers would have liked to stop for coffee, but their schedule didn’t permit it. They’d have to be through the Custer Battlefield monument and into Sheridan, Wyoming, by midnight.

  The man pumping the diesel fuel looked up at the side of the truck. “Never saw that one before,” he said.

  The drivers and the gas jockey stared up at the lettering on the side of the trailer. TIDEWATER HOMES OF VIRGINIA.

  “Kinda far from home, aren’t ya?”

  One driver wiggled his eyebrows. Of the two, he was the more communicative.

  20

  Neary hadn’t really slept much at all. He’d kept Ronnie awake on and off. When he heard her breathing grow deeper, at about five in the morning, he eased himself out of bed and went into the family room.

  Roy stared around the room with reddened eyes. He’d really wrecked the place during the last few days. Clippings from newspaper accounts of UFO sightings and the mysterious blackout were tacked here and there along the walls.

  Neary groaned to himself and sat down in a chair, his elbow on the ping pong table, where the model railroad layout—an island of neatness and order in his otherwise insane world—awaited him. The odd peak that Neary had built up, more like a caricature of a mountain now, loomed grotesquely over the tracks and little lakes and valleys, ungainly, menacing.

  Neary stared at it and shook his head. “Not right,” he muttered.

  “Daddy?”

  He turned to see his little daughter, Sylvia, eyes half-mast with sleep. She had wandered out of her room, still trailing her favorite doll. The one that pees.

  “Honey, it’s so early,” Roy said. “You should be asleep.”

  “Daddy, are you going to yell at us some more today?”

  Neary gazed down into her clear, guileless eyes. That was how he looked to her—a yelling machine. And she was prepared to accept more yelling because she loved him.

  Neary felt his insides turn over with remorse.

  He leaned down and picked her up. “I’m okay now, sweetheart.” Roy kissed his daughter on her forehead. He thought he might start crying again, but held himself together.

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  He glanced miserably around the room.

  “I’m finished with all of this. Swear to God. Finished.”

  Neary put the child back down and began pulling the clippings and photos down off the wall. “Look at me,” he said, stuffing them in a wastebasket. “Watch me now.”

  Sylvia didn’t know what he was talking about, but seemed happy that her father was happy.

  Neary began tugging at the absurd mountain that he had built in the middle of the model railroad layout. He grabbed hold of the peculiar-looking peak and started yanking it. The mountain refused to budge, and Neary, using two hands now, wrenched the thing sideways.

  Snap!

  The top section broke off, leaving the mountain truncated, as if some dreadnaught had lopped off the peak, leaving a kind of plateau.

  “Sylvia!” Neary shouted.

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  Roy’s eyes were fixed on the strangely broken peak. “Sylvia,” he cried. “That’s right!”

  It was no way for anybody to wake up.

  Ronnie had slept late, utterly wiped out by the events of the previous night, by Roy’s breakdown and by her own inability to be anything much more than a chest for him to cry on.

  Now it was ten in the morning and what had wakened her was the high, shrill cackle of her children. She listened for a moment and realized that all her family was laughing. Roy, too. Groggily, Ronnie thought she saw a bush go past the bedroom window.

  She struggled out from under the covers and threw on a robe, tying the belt as she moved out of the bedroom and into the ki—.

  “Oh, my God,” Ronnie gasped.

  The family room window was wide open, the screen removed, a ladder placed outside against the wall. As she watched, a hydrangea bush came hurtling through the window in a spray of thick, black dirt. It fell onto a huge pile of … of other bushes, more dirt.

  “Roy!”

  Ronnie rushed to the kitchen door in time to see Brad and Toby uproot an azalea bush and sling it to their father, who ran up the ladder with the azalea and shoved it through the window into the den.

  “Stop it!” Ronnie cried.

  “C’mon, men,” Roy called to his sons. He seemed happier than Ronnie could remember seeing him in weeks, since the blackout.

  Toby gave a cheer and began helping his father throw dirt through the window.

  “After this can we throw dirt in my room?” he asked Roy.

  “Stop it!” Ronnie cried. “Stop it!”

  She came running outside, acutely aware that Mrs. Harris was watching the whole thing from her second-floor window. A neighbor across the street had paused in the midst of mowing his grass and, transfixed like a cement lawn statue, stood open-mouthed, staring. Ronnie knocked the dirt out of Toby’s hands and confronted her husband.

  “If I don’t do this,” Neary said, still pitching dirt through the window, “I will need a doctor.”

  “Do what? What are you doing?”

  “Ronnie, I figured it out. Have you ever looked at something one way and it looks crazy, then you look from another way and it makes perfect sense?”

  “No! Roy, you’re scaring us!”

  The force of Ronnie’s statement did scare the children a little. Neary had been yanking at a geranium. He looked up suddenly, as if seeing his wife for the first time. “Don’t be scared, honey. I feel good. Everything’s going to be all right.”<
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  He gave up on the geranium as his eye caught sight of a small aluminum patio table. Picking it up, Neary pitched it through the den window. It made almost no sound on landing, its impact cushioned by the layers of dirt and bushes on the floor inside.

  “Don’t tell me everything is going to be all right,” Ronnie screamed after him, “while you’re throwing the yard into the den.”

  Roy ran around to the front of the yard. Now he had his eye on two large green plastic trash cans that were standing at the end of the driveway. A sanitation truck was just pulling up and two garbage collectors were about to leap off the truck to empty Neary’s cans. Roy accelerated and beat them to the cans, grabbing and emptying them on the sidewalk, then rushing back toward the house. He flew past Ronnie and the children, leaving two piles of garbage and two amazed garbage men in the driveway.

  Moving like a high-hurdler, knees up, he hotfooted it back to the house, a container in each hand, throwing them through the window into the family room where they bounced off the patio table and rolled off the geranium balls and peat moss.

  Suddenly, Roy was struck with a new thought. “Chicken wire,” he said aloud.

  Ronnie watched him hurdle the low ornamental fence that separated their driveway from the one next door. A roll of chicken wire stood in the open doorway of the Harrises’ garage. Mrs. Harris stuck her head out the window as Neary picked up the roll of wire and started to take it away.

  “Whatever you’re doing,” Mrs. Harris said wildly, “is against the law.”

  “He’s putting it back, Mrs. Harris,” Ronnie called to her desperately.

  She had gathered the two boys to her side, somehow communicating without words that the fine maniac frenzy of helping their father was terminal. Frightened now, Brad and Toby clung to Ronnie’s robe, watching the scene play out.

  “I’ll pay for it,” Neary called up to Mrs. Harris.

  “Take it! Take it!” Mrs. Harris brandished her hot air blower at Roy like a revolver.

  Now the baby, Sylvia, started to wail but Neary didn’t seem to hear. He tossed the roll of wire through the window into the house and began foraging the yard for more material. Ronnie, with all three children clinging to her now, managed to get in his path.

  “Roy, I’m taking the kids to my mother’s house.” She was crying now.

  Neary had been moving at top speed. Abruptly, his forward motion was checked. He nearly pitched over as he braked to a halt. “That’s crazy,” said the voice of reason. “You’re not dressed.”

  “That’s what?” Ronnie shrieked. “You said what?”

  Now it was her turn to move fast. Carrying Sylvia and sweeping the boys along by the sheer force of personality, Ronnie hurried them all to the car.

  “Wait!” Roy shouted, going after them.

  She shoveled all the kids into the station wagon, then turned to him, saying, “I’ve done that.” Ronnie rolled up all the windows and powerlocked the doors.

  “Ronnie,” he called to her through the safety glass. “Please stay here! Please be with me now.”

  “For what?” her voice sounding muffled. To Neary it seemed as though she were already fading away. “To see them take you away in a straitjacket?”

  Roy started banging on the doors and windows of the wagon, Ronnie started the engine and jammed the car in reverse.

  Neary stopped banging, but leaped on the hood of the car as Ronnie began backing it out of the driveway through the piles of leftover garbage. He could see his children’s eyes widen with terror, watching their father pounding his fists on the hood and yelling. Then, as Ronnie backed faster down the driveway, he had to hold on to the radio antenna with one hand to keep from sliding off.

  Ronnie hated this now. She wheeled back hard out of the driveway into the street, stopped abruptly, throwing Roy off the hood and onto the sidewalk, and then curled her toes around the accelerator pedal and blasted off down the street, around a corner and was gone.

  Neary lay on the sidewalk in his filthy pajamas, more stunned than hurt. Slowly, starting to hurt a little from his fall, he got to his feet. He looked up and noticed for the first time that a half dozen of his friends and neighbors had witnessed the whole thing and were hanging in for a socko finish of some kind. Neary wondered what they were expecting. Chimes?

  “Morning!” he called to the crowd, waving at them all.

  Then Neary turned and strode magnificently off along the grass to the window ladder. He stopped to pick up the garden hose and turned on the water. Then, trotting up the ladder with the hose, splashing water on himself and everything else, he climbed through the family room window, pulling the ladder up and in after him.

  Once inside, and with a majestic gesture, Roy slammed down the window and pulled the drapes, shutting out the neighbors and the entire outside world.

  In the family room, the show continued for quite a while, fortunately out of anyone’s sight but Neary’s. He worked steadily at it all day with nothing to eat or drink and no human voice except the faint babble of the television set in the corner, lisping its daytime idiocies, blighted soap opera lives, shrieking game-show contestants, banal junk movies.

  It really hadn’t mattered to Neary what the television was doing. Inside the family room something much greater, something immense, was under way. He had gotten to work like the trained engineer he was, shaping out of the empty garbage containers and the lawn table a kind of rough core or support for what he was constructing.

  Then, with Mrs. Harris’s chicken wire, he had created a contour less rough, more complex, to the thing he was building. And then, making a muddy paste of the dirt, he had plastered the chicken wire until he had it right.

  Still not content, he’d wet down newspapers and smoothed them over the mud to form a kind of hard-edged papier-mâché surface, stained with dirt, that uncannily resembled the surface of … what he was making.

  “It’s not right yet,” he muttered unhappily around five in the afternoon.

  He had built the thing from the floor up, braced it with uprooted bushes hidden inside the mud. It towered over him now, touching the ceiling nine feet overhead. Its sloping sides were striated in angry ridges. But he wasn’t fully satisfied—not yet.

  Neary caught sight of the landscaping on the model railroad. He snatched up miniature trees and shrubs. Holding them like chess pieces, he took his time figuring their proper placement. Just so. Here two pines. Exactly. And there a line of bushes. Precisely there.

  “Right,” he said at last. “Finally, it’s right.”

  He’d barely had time to think of what he was doing—didn’t remember, for instance, that he’d had three dry runs on this project, once a pile of shaving cream, once in the dirt of State 57 when little Barry had first sculptured this strange, conical peak, once with the entirely unsatisfactory mashed potatoes.

  But he had it now. It could pass for the real thing, Neary told himself. Now that the mud had dried over the stiffening surface of newspapers, it really looked real, especially with the trees and shrubbery in place.

  The fluted walls rose sharply to a kind of plateau at the top, a mesalike place. Around on one side lay a box canyon in which a peaceful Shangri-la Valley was shaded by more of the model railroad greenery.

  Neary had been breathing hard all day. Now, as he stood there, slowly circling his creation, inspecting it for flaws and finding none, his breathing began to slow to a calm, peaceful tempo. He felt at ease now for the first time since he’d been seized by the need to … to make this thing.

  He paused and squinted at the mesa top. Beyond it, through a window, he could see the normal life of the neighborhood outside. A car stopped and some people emerged, walked up to a neighbor’s house and were greeted at the open front door. His other middle-class neighbors were mowing and pruning and watering. Cars moved by. Children played.

  Neary shoved filthy fingers through his hair and stared hard at the mountain towering over him. He had made it. It had cost him, but he had made
it. It was supposed to mean something, wasn’t it?

  But now that he’d sacrificed so much to it, there it stood. Meaning nothing.

  “My God,” Neary said out loud. “It’s only me. Oh, my God, it’s only me.”

  It was the low point of his life, and to make matters worse, the silly, plastic normality of the TV sitcoms now arrived.

  Not really listening to them, Neary slumped down in an armchair, staring at the flat-topped pinnacle he had created and that had cost him so much.

  He didn’t actually watch the television as it ground through hours of reruns. He let it exist as a form of radio, giving him only the thin semihuman voices that trickled from its tiny speaker. Reruns.

  Gomer Pyle was chewed out by his sergeant, not once but twice. Lucy got caught by her boss taking an extra hour for lunch. Rustlers invaded the Ponderosa, setting fires. On the stand the witness broke down under Perry Mason’s questioning and confessed. Robert Young performed open-heart surgery in a power blackout.

  About nine o’clock Neary stirred, went to the refrigerator and took out a beer. He popped it open. Surgery in a blackout, he thought. He blinked, put down the open can of beer and went to the telephone to dial a number.

  “Let me talk to her,” he said after a minute.

  When Ronnie came on the line, he cleared his throat carefully. “Don’t you think I’m worth it? Just don’t hang up, Ronnie … Oh, please don’t—”

  Then he heard the click.

  “Madge, tell me, how do you get your cakes so moist and fluffy?”

  “Now I feel safe, safe, even with nervous perspiration.”

  Neary still wasn’t watching the tube, but the flow of commercial pap had begun to filter more directly into his hearing. He was still examining the—what could he call it?—the mountain.

  “… crispy-good and just this much oil left in each one!”

  Neary stirred and went to the telephone again. He dialed Ronnie’s mother. “Put her on, please.”

  “Roy, I’m sorry, she doesn’t want to talk to you.”