Journal of a UFO Investigator (13 page)

“Oh, dozens of times. Hundreds, maybe.... Close your mouth, Danny, or the bugs will fly in! Didn't your mother ever tell you that?”

“Rochelle is a
burglar
?”

“Not just her. Usually there's two or three helping her, though in a pinch she's been known to do it all herself. Fascinating modus operandi. But of course you already know it.”

“How the hell would I know Rochelle's modus operandi?”

He closed his suitcase, sat on it to keep it shut, and clicked the latches into place. Then he slid off, planting himself on his bed like a teacher poised to lecture. Damn hot in here. With one of my socks I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

“She does the advance work,” Julian said. “Picks out the target house, rings the doorbell some afternoon. Tells the lady of the house she's a coed, from whatever college happens to be in the vicinity. She looks mature enough to pass as a college student, especially when she's wearing her glasses instead of contact lenses.”

“Coed,” I said.

“Says she's doing a survey, for some kind of course—”

“Like a sociology course,” I said. “At Temple University, for instance.”

Lights going on inside, I see!
More like flashbulbs, popping all over my brain. And Julian saw nothing, nothing at all. I sat down on my bed, opposite him; I didn't trust my legs to keep me vertical. He rattled on. “She gets the lady talking about herself. About her family, what kinds of lives they lead. The poor woman won't even notice she's broadcast a schedule of the times there'll be nobody home, sometimes for weeks to come. When they'll all be at the movies—”

“Or at their grandmother's in Trenton,” I said. “For their Shabbes dinner.”

“Yes, exactly. . . . Usually she gets a tour of the house. All sorts of fascinating information. Windows that tend to be left unlocked—”

“You, you, you—”

“Not that we need it most of the time. Me, I don't have Rochelle's charm. But I've got a positive genius for locks. It was a talent that came in handy when I was younger, just in case people lost their keys to their home or their car. Or locked themselves out absentmindedly, the way people do—”

“
You son of a bitch!
” And I gave a howl that felt like it tore out my stomach.

Next thing I knew he was beside me, arm around my shoulders. “Danny! I'm so sorry! I didn't imagine—I mean, I thought you knew! I thought you'd figured it out ages ago!”

How was I supposed to have—But I wasn't going to give him one more chance to show how smart he was, how dumb I am. “You broke into my house! You
dirty
, s
hitty
,
rotten
—”

I imagined his long fingers, now reassuringly grasping my shoulder, testing the lock in our doorknob. Transmitting to his brain the magic of how it might open without a key. I imagined Rochelle in my bedroom, a place I'd fantasized her more times than I cared to remember. But not
in this way
, an intruder, come to steal what was most precious to me. Tears rose in my throat;
this
time I would keep them safely within. I would take those fingers of his instead and break them one by one.

“You sons of bitches! All of you—you, Tom, Rochelle—” I paused to think whether Rochelle could be called son of a bitch, or “daughter of a bitch,” or maybe just bitch, and this felt so absurd I almost started laughing. “You stole my book!”

“Your book?” Julian looked confused, as if I'd had some magic annotated book, like the one we'd driven to Florida to find. “Oh. You mean those typed-up chapters you kept in your briefcase.
Three Men in Black
, and all that. Your story about the UFO fluttering down on top of you, exactly twenty-nine days before we paid our visit. Pure coincidence, of course. But it gave us the idea for the phone call.”

“The phone call! My God, my God—”

“Also some handwritten pages, by that friend of yours—what was his name? Jeff Dullard, something like that?”

“Stollard,” I said, wondering if Julian had really got the name mixed up or if he'd intended a pun that did tickle me, furious as I was.

“We'd heard about that UFO Investigators group of yours. We wanted to find out more. What better way than to go into your house, borrow your files—”

“
Borrow?
When did you ever give them back?”

“We were going to mail them to you. Tom promised he'd do it. Don't blame me that his world history teacher had to assign a research paper at exactly the worst time. We all read what you wrote, with considerable interest. Especially the chapter on the three men. That was brilliant in parts. All wrong, of course. We don't know who the three men are either, but they're
not
the way you imagined them. But the manuscript showed originality. Considerable analytic ability too.”

“So I get a B plus? Thanks a whole stinkin' lot, Julian. I'm just so flattered.”

“We wanted you in the SSS with us. We tried to find a way to meet you. We knew you and that Jeff went on Saturdays to the Philadelphia library; your mother told Rochelle about that. We thought—”

“My mother,” I said. I stood up from the bed. I walked over to the window and contemplated the eight-inch gash in the screen. Plenty of bugs here to swarm into an open mouth. I could hear the mosquitoes buzzing, revving themselves up for their big evening. What was I doing a thousand miles from home, freshly awake at six in the afternoon, in a ratty motel with a juvenile delinquent?

“We thought, how could we get you up to the Rare Book Room? And so—”

“I get a phone call. From my dear friend Julian. ‘Count the days.' ‘Follow the
moo
-woon.' And like the dumb sucker I am—”

“Wasn't me who phoned you. It was Tom.”

“Of course! I knew I recognized him, the second we met!”

Not the face, it turned out: the voice.

“Only,” I said, “I didn't—”

“Put two and two together?”

I nodded.

“Naturally. That's the part of your education we're now in charge of. Putting two and two together.”

“You nearly killed my mother,” I said. “That doesn't bother you?”

“No,” he said, and at first I thought he meant, no, it doesn't bother me. “We would never have harmed your mother. Rochelle liked her. A kind lady, she said. Just horribly frightened.”

Should I try to explain that my mother could have had another heart attack when she saw our violated home? She'd barely survived the first one. The second would have killed her. “Frightened?” I said. I sat back down on the bed, keeping my distance from Julian. “Of what?” But of course I knew the answer: of death.

“Of being abandoned. By your father if she doesn't keep him placated. She knows how miserable he is, how the marriage was wrong from the start. How he rages against the both of you for what's gone wrong with his life.”

And is this my fault? You could argue it either way. I looked down at my hands. I have good hands, veiny, with strong, well-shaped fingers. The hands of a man who will do great good in this world. A mosquito hummed in my ear. I didn't brush it away.

“Your mother turned to Rochelle,” Julian said. “She asked, very timidly—she thought Rochelle was a sociology major, remember—aren't there societies where a man can take a second wife, a younger wife, and get his needs met through her? Those were the words she used. ‘Get his needs met.' ”

“I don't want to hear this.”

“But you must. ‘A younger wife,' your mother said. ‘A
healthy
wife.' And then she looked at Rochelle, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘But he'll love the old wife, won't he?' And of course Rochelle said, ‘Yes, he will'; what else could she say?”

“Julian. If you don't shut up, I will walk straight out to the car, and—”

“Drive away? Leave me here? Your mother's terrified of that too.”

“
What?
”

“Your father's not the only one she's scared will abandon her.”

I turned my head; I looked toward the window. It's evening time in Kellerfield, I thought, just as it is here. “I won't abandon her,” I said.

“Sure you will. You have to, to grow into yourself. But you can always say no; you have that freedom.”

“I do?” I said, and felt a burst of hope. In my mind's eye I saw my mother, in her rocking chair in midafternoon, by the window in our kitchen, watching and waiting for me to come home from school. I could see her through the window, smiling, as I walked up the driveway. A glass of Pepsi-Cola and a bowl of pretzels—my favorite snack, since I was a little boy—would be ready on the kitchen table.

“Of course you can say no. Isn't that what you said to that pretty little girl when she got up the nerve to ask you to put your arms around her and dance?”

“That was a dream!” I yelled—for how unreal, impossible, dreamlike it was that it could ever have happened, that Rosa and I had come so close to holding each other in our arms.

“If you say so.” Julian got up from the bed. He took his suitcase, stood it beside the door of the motel room. “Are you packed yet?”

“To go where?”

“Your choice. You can keep on with me to Miami. Or I can take you back into Jacksonville. There's got to be a Greyhound terminal there somewhere. You can go home and be with your mother. You don't have to join our life of crime, as you call it. No compulsion.” He opened the door. “I'll wait in the car while you decide.”

“How much time do I have?”

“All you need.”

 

I don't know how long I sat on the bed. I could have measured the time by mosquito bites. I thought of my father and how he might take a new healthy wife by whom he could have a child of health, a boy he'd be able to love. Also of Rosa and what must have gone on in her mind before she left, and I thought,
It's not comparable. Her mother beat her, tortured her. Mine is only dying.

I thought of the pain of growing. Of the guilt. Of how Rosa had the courage to endure both.

It was dusk when I went out to the parking lot. There sat the Pontiac, Julian in the passenger seat. This seemed natural, inevitable. I slid behind the wheel, turned the key in the ignition, shifted into first. “Where to?” he said.

“You sure you trust me with these car keys, Julian? Not to go running back to my mommy?”

“Drive,” he said.

 

Sometime after midnight, about halfway to Miami, we stopped at an all-night diner. A waitress brought us cherry pie and coffee. She was very young, blond and petite, and heavily pregnant. Her face was set in permanent exhaustion. I had to look two or three times before I was sure she wasn't Rosa.

IN MIAMI WE FOUND A SMALL HOTEL, CHEAP AND SHABBY BUT
conveniently located, and slept until past sundown. We got to the airport at a quarter to ten that evening. Rochelle's plane was due in twenty minutes. There was no place to park.

“This is hopeless,” Julian said as we circled past the terminal for the fifth time. “I don't want Rochelle to come and find nobody there. Why don't I leave you off here and you go to the gate? I'll be along in a little while. There's got to be
some
corner of this stupid lot that isn't full.”

A few seconds later he and the car were gone. I marched into the terminal, straight to the arrivals board. Flight 257 from Albuquerque, due at 10:04, would be on time at Gate 19. It was just before ten o'clock now.

I hurried down a long, white, fluorescent-lit corridor. I was sweating all over. Would Rochelle come off the plane bare-shouldered, in the same evening dress she'd worn the last time I saw her? I ought to be wearing a suit and my best shiny shoes, not a checkered short-sleeved shirt with suntan pants and sneakers. I should be holding a corsage for her. My date, for my first prom.

Instead I carried a hardcover edition of Charles Fort's
The Book of the Damned
, which Julian had lent me. Something to read in case the plane was late.

The area around Gate 19 was crowded. There weren't any seats. I sat on the floor and leaned my back against the wall. A young Hispanic woman sat next to me, smoking. “Is everybody waiting for flight two-five-seven?” I asked her. She nodded without looking at me.

“May I have your attention please? United Airlines flight two-five-seven from Albuquerque, scheduled to arrive at ten-oh-four P.M., has been delayed. Currently anticipated arrival time is ten thirty-five.”

Well, that was a pity. Julian would certainly be here before Rochelle arrived. I wouldn't need that corsage after all.

I opened
The Book of the Damned
and began to read:

Yes. The damned are the excluded. The one lesson my idiotic school manages to teach. I'd learned it well, at the edges of conversations that didn't include me, because I didn't talk like the others or about the same things, and they knew it and so did I. Even Jeff. Now especially Jeff . . .

I snapped out of my reverie. Useless, this bitterness. The door from the runway was propped open, people filing in. The Hispanic girl stood in a corner of the gate area, passionately kissing a brown-skinned man with long, slick black hair. I got to my feet, brushed off my pants, wondering if I'd even recognize Rochelle when she came through the door. Twice I saw girls who I thought might be her. But they weren't.

The line thinned to a trickle. Then it stopped. Plenty of seats now. I sat down; there seemed nothing else I could do. I went back to Charles Fort.