Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read online

  “Put her on!” he shouted.

  He waited. The line was still open. He held the phone in one hand and stared through the kitchen doorway into the family room.

  He waited. No one came to the phone, neither Ronnie nor her mother. He strained to hear anything over the line, sounds of argument, anything. But it was still open. When he blew into the mouthpiece, he still got what phone technicians called “side tone.”

  So she hadn’t hung up. So there was hope. The minutes went by. He eyed the kitchen clock. One minute to ten. As if it had been planned for that moment, he heard someone softly hang up the phone at Ronnie’s mother’s house. He cursed and redialed the number.

  Busy signal. She’d taken it off the hook.

  He picked up the beer and wandered back into the family room as the ten o’clock news came on. A man with the fashionably fluffed hair that hides his ears stared meaningfully into the lens of the camera, his eyes barely moving as he read the words off the Teleprompter screen.

  “Good evening! Top of the news tonight … rail disaster!” To Neary the man seemed to bite off the words nourishing something in the announcer’s soul.

  “A chemical gas derailment,” the man was saying, “has forced the widest area evacuation in the history of these controversial army-rail shipments. The remote area of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, is the scene of this latest mishap. Charles McDonnell is on the scene for a live report.”

  Neary’s eyes began to glaze, but he continued to watch the TV screen. McDonnell, in a trenchcoat, stood with the mike in his hand. Behind him trucks were moving down a road while in the distance, mountain peaks stood against the sky.

  “It’s sundown here in the hot zone of Wyoming,” McDonnell said, “and thousands of civilian refugees are fleeing the scene of disaster. Seven tank cars of the dangerous G-M nerve gas, destined for destruction by chemical means under safe conditions, overturned a few hours ago at Walkashi Needles Junction.

  “There are no real towns or settlements in these wild Wyoming foothills,” he went on, “but vacation camps and cottages are being evacuated now as army and marine trucks and helicopters comb an area one hundred miles in diameter that has as its center the peak known as Devil’s Tower.”

  The camera pulled back to show the cortege of trucks moving past. Then, with a blink, the picture changed to a telephoto shot of a distant mountain peak.

  “The steep sides of Devil’s Tower,” McDonnell was saying, “have made it a testing ground for mountain climbers from all over the world who—”

  “Jesus!”

  Neary was on his feet. In one jump he knelt before the television screen. There it was, the same mountain he had just finished making. There it was on the screen. There it was in his family room.

  The same. The fluted sides. The flat mesa top. The trees, in the same positions. He stared at the screen, then at the model he had made, then back at the screen.

  A huge grin split his face.

  It had meant something. It hadn’t been some sort of lunacy. He didn’t know what it was all about yet, but he knew that the urge, the terrible compulsion to build, had a meaning. It wasn’t the random insanity of a sick mind.

  It was a message.

  Forcing himself to slow down, he dialed the number correctly.

  And got the same busy signal.

  The smile left his face. He turned toward the den and stared at the model he had created of Devil’s Tower. It was a hell of a long way west of Indiana, he thought, a hell of a trip to take, alone and wondering.

  Neary stared blankly at the open phone book. Idly, he flipped its pages. Then he began paging more carefully until he got to the listings for Harper Valley. Gold. Gowland. Guber. Guiler, J.

  He dialed Jillian’s home. Earlier, when he’d called to find out about Barry, all he’d gotten was a busy signal.

  “I am sorry,” a recorded voice told him this time. “Your call cannot go through as dialed. Please hang up and dial again. This is a recording. I am sorry. Your c—”

  He dialed again and got the same recording.

  It was going to be a long trip to take, but he’d have to do it alone.

  Jillian Guiler had not left the house all these days. Except to lie down to sleep, use the bathroom, and eat an occasional, erratic snack, Jillian had not really left the living room or her paintings.

  She did not look at all well. She had lost a lot of weight since Barry had been taken. More than that, though, Jillian had the look of someone who had suffered the greatest loss imaginable and was paying for it.

  The corner of the living room where she had spent her days and nights resembled a deranged art gallery of heavily charcoaled and ruthlessly colored canvases of a mountain that had taken on many of the aspects of Roy Neary’s mad creation.

  Sometime during the past week, Jillian had turned on the television set, although she, too, hardly watched or listened. Now, however, her attention had been grabbed. By the evening news. She had tuned to a different station from Neary. Then by the magic of television Jillian got her first look at Devil’s Tower.

  “The army and National Guard units are supervising the evacuation. Dislocated families have been assured that the danger will have passed within seventy-two hours, once the toxin concentration is down to fifty parts per million. This means most residents will be back in their own homes by the weekend … of course, this is small consolation to livestock in the area, although ranchers have been notified that the quality of meat should remain unaffected. That means order that steak ‘well-done,’ Walter …”

  A commercial came on and Jillian fell backward against her drawings. There was the tower again seen from the same angle as the television camera. The difference being that in her charcoal sketches there were no Huey helicopters perambulating the woodlands at the base of the gigantic peak. She stood rooted to the spot for so long that the network news ended and The Hollywood Squares began. Jillian picked herself up and took the pieces into the bathroom. Moving with small, deft gestures, like a repairman meticulously reassembling a watch, Jillian showered, did her hair, put on makeup, packed, and left the house. She prayed that she was on her way to Barry now.

  A man who hasn’t slept for a couple of days, Neary told himself, shouldn’t have to go through all this. He felt shaky, but determined that the details of it were going to stay within his control.

  He badly needed the car Ronnie had taken, but that couldn’t be helped. Neither could the lack of sleep. He showered and shaved, which did help. But by eight in the morning, the false feeling of well-being had evaporated. He started walking to the center of town.

  The situation, he told himself, is far from hopeless.

  Neary had been carrying twenty dollars in his wallet. He had found another twenty Ronnie usually hid away at the back of the freezer where a burglar wouldn’t look. Neary had also, with some pangs of guilt, looted Brad’s piggy bank of four dollars and change.

  By eight-thirty he was at the savings bank, drawing out forty of the forty-two seventeen on deposit there. By nine he was at the commercial bank, shoving across to the teller a check for a hundred dollars. After consulting the account balance, the teller shoved the check back to Neary.

  “Sorry. Would you like to see our loan officer over th—?”

  Neary tore the check to bits the size of confetti and strode out of the bank. Damned bad luck. Then he saw the liquor store across the street. Hope! He flung the confetti into the air with a holiday gesture.

  With that grudging combination of suspicious civility and terrible slowness that comes from not really wanting to do something, the liquor store manager nevertheless cashed the check. “You’re running me out of twenties, Mr. Neary,” was his only complaint.

  The nine fifteen bus brought Neary to Cincinnati by eleven. He got to the airport in time to present the reservation clerk with his problem. She consulted two directories, three lists, and her supervisor before booking Neary on a through flight to Denver, a connection to Cheyenne, and a flight
on a feeder airline with the improbable name of Coyote Airlines. She also reserved a rental car for Neary at his destination.

  She seemed to be taking quite a while to do all this, but Neary didn’t begin to get suspicious until he caught her glance moving past him to two guards standing a few feet to the rear.

  Neary turned to face them. He could see they hadn’t yet made up their minds if he’d “flunked the profile” or not. Like all airport security people, they had been trained to recognize several types of potential troublemakers by a “profile,” which described them in physical terms: dressed a certain way, looking a certain way, talking a certain way. Neary could tell they were on the brink of fitting him into one of the pigeonholes labeled “potential hijacker” or “terrorist.”

  He turned back to the reservation clerk. “Miss,” he said, “would you watch my things for a second? I’ll be right back.”

  Picking up his overnight case, Neary headed for the nearest men’s room. The two guards followed but didn’t go in with him. Inside, he lathered his face with soap and water, took a quick shave, changed to a medium-blue shirt, knotted a dark brown tie in place and carefully combed his hair.

  He walked out of the men’s room and passed within a yard of the two security men. Only one of them recognized him. Their glance followed Neary all the way back to the counter, but neither guard made a move.

  Padding the “profile,” Neary mused, was easier than it looked.

  The money part of it was easy, too. Neary learned that a shower, a shave, fresh clothes and a Master Charge card leave no one in doubt as to a man’s solvency.

  Now for the hard part. He got an envelope and some paper from the ticket clerk, bought a stamp at the insurance counter and sat down. He had no idea where to begin. He killed time by addressing the envelope to Brad, Toby, and Sylvia Neary. Their names looked strange. He’d never written them a letter in his life.

  “Dear kids. I’ll be away awhile. If I come ba—”

  He blinked, scratched out the “if” and continued writing. “When I come back I’ll have some story to tell. I have to do this. I have to find out and this is the only way to do it.”

  His vision blurred. He found that his eyes had filled with tears. Brad had been right. He was a terrible crybaby. Neary glanced around, but no one was watching. He wiped his eyes and kept on writing.

  “Boys, help your mother. You’re good, reliable boys and—” He stopped. Helluva lot more reliable than your old man, he thought.

  “I should be home real soon and—”

  Not right to tell kids lies, Neary thought. He was disturbing them enough as it was. They probably hated him by now, or soon would. He had to make a better stab at explaining this. He owed them that much.

  “None of this means much to you,” he wrote. “Even less to your mother. But it’s like the song Jiminy Cricket sings. Did I ever take you to Pinocchio? I can’t remember if we—” He rubbed his eyes. “Everybody has a secret wish. I can’t explain it. All I can say is that it’s stronger than anything else. When you wish upon a star.”

  The letter slipped off his knee and fell to the floor. Neary sat there, helpless, tears running down his cheeks. He stared bleakly at the letter as if it lay at the bottom of the sea, unreachable through miles of filmy, shifting currents.

  Grunting with the effort, he bent down and picked up the letter. Without rereading it, he signed it “love, Dad” and rammed it into the envelope. He got up and moved slowly, like an old man, like a deep-sea diver in a heavy leaden suit, to the mailbox.

  He dropped the letter in the box and stood there for a long time, staring. U.S. MAIL U.S. MAIL USMAIL USMAIL.

  When his flight was called over the loudspeakers, he was still standing there. The second time they announced boarding, Neary turned slowly from the mailbox. He straightened up a little. Then he marched off toward the waiting flight.

  21

  The Hertz Rent-A-Car station in this part of the world wasn’t the usual sleek yellow-and-black office with a sleek young woman in her yellow-and-black uniform. In this part of Wyoming, the Hertz office was in Suggs’ Garage and you had to look real hard to see the small yellow-and-black sign.

  Apart from working on engines, Suggs hated every other part of running a garage. He hated pumping gas, fixing flats, replacing wiper blades and renting Hertz cars. And, to cap it off, he hated Roy Neary long before he ever had laid eyes on him.

  “Oh, you’re Neary,” he said glowering. “You took your sweet goddamned time gettin’ here.”

  “But you’ve got the jeep for me.”

  “I got a car,” Suggs admitted grudgingly. “They ain’t no more jeeps this necka th’ woods, Neary. You’re goddamned lucky I was able to hold onto that sucker back there. Christ, I coulda rented her twenty times over in the last day.”

  “People getting out of the area?” Neary asked.

  “You gotta full tanka gas and that’s the works. When you turn the sucker in, I won’t be here. Just leave the keys in the goddamned ashtray.”

  Suggs was already out the garage door ahead of Neary. He jumped into the driver’s seat of a Ford pickup and disappeared in a great cloud of dust before Neary had even taken the keys from the counter.

  Neary took his overnight bag and a copy of the rental agreement around the back to see what kind of sucker he’d rented. “A Vega sucker!” he yelped, getting in and starting up the engine. He flipped on the radio.

  “… thousands of others are homeless,” the announcer came in on cue. Obviously there was no other news in Wyoming but the evacuation story.

  “The U.S. Army Matériel Command has issued these new restrictions. All roadways north of Crowheart on Interstate 25 … all roads leading into the Grand Tetons west of Meetestse … all multilane, undivided full-traffic interchange, gravel, local and historic stage roads north of Cody and east to Burlington, or west to Yellowstone Lake … all are now declared unsafe and included in the Red Zone. All are declared—”

  Neary switched off the radio and examined the road map he had picked up in Suggs’ Garage when Suggs wasn’t looking. He located the newly forbidden roads and traced them back in the Tetons to Devil’s Tower.

  He sat for some time considering his alternate routes.

  At Reliance, under a cloudless blue sky, the day was perfect for a picnic.

  Instead it was roundup time, not of beef cattle but of evacuees. For miles now, Neary had been aware he was the only car moving west into the Tetons. The lanes east were jammed with overcrowded vehicles. He’d hoped to gas up in Reliance and keep moving, but for the first time, he ran head-on into the military.

  A roadblock had been thrown across the highway right at the railroad station. National Guard soldiers, rifles slung across their backs, faces damp in the bright, hot sunlight, were herding people through what were normally feed and loading pens for cattle.

  “Now boarding blue cards only,” a sergeant roared over a bullhorn. “All evacuees with blue boarding cards move in quickly. Those with red cards form up behind the barricades. You’ll be next.”

  He paused to clear his throat, hawk and spit without snapping off the bullhorn. The sounds echoed across the station area. “Stay in line. You’ll all get aboard. Just stay in line. Blue cards boarding now …”

  He watched a corporal fully six and a half feet tall take note of the Vega and start to lumber over, a stubborn set to his heavy jaw. But before he could reach Neary, a mixed herd started through the roadblock.

  Steers intermingled with spring sheep, making progress almost impossible. The rich aroma of manure lay over the scene. “Git them woolly faggots outa my herd!” a steer rancher shouted.

  “You leave them sheep be,” the owner of the flock warned him, “or there’ll be beef by-products from here to Jackson Hole.”

  An Air Force chopper hovered over the milling cattle and managed to spook them into a mini stampede that cleared the roadblock. Then the helicopter lifted sharply, like a rising balloon, and headed at once for the
high Tetons.

  Neary was watching it disappear in the direction he longed to go when the shadow of the man-mountain corporal fell on him. “You got next uh kin in the red zone?” the soldier rumbled.

  “Sue-Ellen, my baby sister,” Neary replied.

  “Last name?” the corporal pulled out a clipboard with a list of names.

  “Hennersdorfer.”

  Slowly, moving the tip of a blunt finger like a snowplow down the sheets of names, the corporal made his way in and out of the H range of the alphabet. “No Hennersdorfer.”

  “My God, then she’s still in there!” Neary exclaimed.

  “We got everybody out by noon yesterday.”

  “Not Baby Sue-Ellen.”

  “No way,” the implacable soldier told him. “Everybody’s out. We made a house-to-house. Ain’t no Baby Sue Nobody in there.”

  “I gotta check it myself,” Neary said. “Ma and Pa’d never forgive me if Baby Sue-Ellen was killed because I was too lazy to go in and bring her out of th—”

  “Hey,” the corporal cut in. “You don’t understand English, do you? Everybody’s outa there. Nobody’s going in. And I got orders to shoot looters on sight. Get the message, Hennersdorfer?”

  Neary grinned foolishly. “See you.” He reversed the Vega and got out of there, but not before he heard the corporal talking with a buddy.

  “Another scavenger, huh?” the buddy asked.

  “Sweetheart,” the corporal bragged, “I can smell ’em in a hurricane.”

  Neary’s smile narrowed slightly as he left the area of the railroad station. He wasn’t a scavenger or a looter, but if anybody’d asked him his real motive for being there, he’d have no respectable answer. “Researcher”? Or “curious person”? Maybe … “invited guest.”

  More like it. Because whatever had given him the lunatic drive and energy to mow down every part of his normal life and build that insane nine-foot-high model of Devil’s Tower, whatever had induced him to do that was sending him a message plain and clear. And whatever else the message said, it was an invitation to Devil’s Tower.