Close Encounters of the Third Kind (16 page)

“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.”

“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 . . .”