The Fellowship for Alien Detection (18 page)

They passed through Bend, where the price of gas was “Outrageous!,” and then drove south and west in the glaring sun, back into the pine forests. They turned off onto a dirt road with a brown sign indicating the Green Springs Ruins, which Dodger had read were ancient Native American sites. There was also a brightly painted sign for the Phoenix Tail Ranch and Spa and the Heavenly Frequencies gathering.

“This is going to be one of those places where clothing's optional and people enjoy their natural body aroma, isn't it?” Harry looked over like he meant that as a joke.

“Probably,” said Dodger, just to humor him.

Harry, driving fast, came up behind a turquoise Volkswagen camper van. He slowed down dramatically. “Yeah, exactly,” he muttered. “Come on.” Harry then proceeded to tailgate, even though so much dust was being kicked up by the camper that he had to use the wipers.

Finally, they reached a dirt parking lot. To the right, a wide-open pasture stretched beyond a fence made of split logs. There were three horses munching on the yellow grass.

“More cars than I would have thought,” said Harry as he pulled into a spot. There were maybe fifty cars, Dodger guessed.

They got out. The sun was hot, direct. Dodger felt a lightness in his head. They were at altitude here, nearly six thousand feet above sea level, and it almost seemed like they were closer to the sun.

Their footsteps scattered the bone white dust. Dodger adjusted his hat backward on his head and squinted through the bright. Ahead was a small sea of tents of various colors.

“Hello, curious minds.” An older woman sat in a folding chair beneath an umbrella. She had a roll of tickets. On a folding table beside her was a box with a hand-written sign that read
Suggested Donation $15 Per Person
.

“Thank you for lending us your ears,” she said. She had long gray straggly hair and wore a shapeless lavender dress with embroidered flowers and leather sandals. A baseball cap was perched on her head, made of red mesh and a white front displaying the phrase “I'm Listening” in purple letters.

“Hello.” Harry handed her a twenty-dollar bill and then held his hand out for tickets. The woman looked at it for a second before frowning, stuffing it in the box, and ripping off two tickets. She waved them on.

Dodger tried to give the woman a look as he passed that said,
Sorry about him
.

“Can't use that fellowship debit card here, and it's not like we're actually going to participate,” Harry said, as if justifying what he'd paid.

“Mmm,” said Dodger.

The tents were arranged in loose lines. Some were the classic kind you'd see at fairs and markets: white with one open side, either with information on a table or wares inside. Others were simply people's tents, with chairs and tables outside them.

Dodger saw people selling homemade radio kits, knitted hats with copper antennae coming out the top in various shapes, polished stones and crystals of every possible color, wooden sticks with prisms attached to the end with leather straps, dream catchers, and books and pamphlets with titles like
Alternate Truths
,
The Aliens in Washington DC
,
The Alien-Mining Syndicate
, all of which looked like they'd been printed on copy machines. There was a booth selling alien figurines, and another selling only tiny glass jars of what was advertised as ET Oil: “Rub It on Your Head! Enhance Your Frequencial Powers!” The head of the bald man in the booth glistened.

As they walked, Harry was silent except for an occasional “Huh,” which meant that he sensed the presence of the Royal Rip-off.

At the end of the aisles was a square area denoted by yellow rope. A sign read “Listening Zone.” Dodger noticed strips of copper and little black rings that he thought were magnets hanging at regular intervals on the rope.

Inside, people were clustered around tables with all manner of radios, from complex contraptions of silver and black to one group with phones that had cords snaking up to big antennae that were duct taped to the top of stepladders. The space smelled like electricity and burned metal. Dodger saw smoke from people soldering connections on circuit boards.

There was a whine and Dodger saw a man speaking through a megaphone. “Remember, folks, let's everybody hold off on actually using your radios until tonight's group tune in at eight p.m., so that we can all be present in the moment of connection. We don't want to subvert that positive energy.”

“Sheesh,” said Harry. “So, do you want to talk to these people or what?”

Dodger wasn't sure. He wasn't great at making conversation. Plus, this all looked a little crazy. “Maybe we should just go set up and come back in a few hours for this group tune in.”

“Suits me,” said Harry.

They'd decided to camp some nights on the trip, and this was one of them. The ranch had an adjoining campground. They returned to the car and drove up the road to the campsite entrance. A sign on the self-serve station read:
FULL
. They had made a reservation, and Dodger was grateful to see their name on the white board; otherwise he couldn't imagine how Harry would have reacted.

Harry grabbed an envelope. “Twenty-five dollars?” he exclaimed. And then when they drove in and saw that the campground's pool was half-filled with greenish water and pine needles and that their site was right by the noxious smelling bathrooms, he could only sigh. “Can't anything ever be like it's supposed to?”

Harry started unpacking the tent. Dodger unloaded the cooking supplies. As he set up the propane stove, he heard Harry cursing to himself. He turned to see Harry standing in the tan grass, wrapped in a tangle of green fabric and blue metal poles. His shirt had come untucked, exposing the sagging rim of his belly. “It's like you need a degree in astrophysics to put this thing up!”

Dodger wondered if he should help, but as he watched Harry lay out the metal poles on the fabric, then swear to himself and rearrange them, he felt certain that trying to help would only make things worse.

“I think I'm gonna take a walk,” Dodger said.

“Hmm?” Harry looked up from the mess.

“A walk, for a bit. Is that okay?”

For just a moment, that look returned to Harry's face: like Dodger was another complicated gadget that Harry couldn't quite comprehend. But then Harry sighed and said, “Sure. If I ever get our five-star hotel here put together, I'll get the fire going and do the dogs.”

Dodger shuffled up the campground road, his black T-shirt untucked, his jeans hanging loosely, his sneakers mostly untied. The campground smelled sweet with burning charcoal. He passed the other sites with RVs and tents, some with families at play with their little kids. Everyone seemed to be having fun. It bothered Dodger to see.

He was just going to take a loop around the campground, maybe see if there were any maps of the area on the check-in board, but then he passed a sign that read “Green Springs Ruins Trail.”

A path led off into the shade. Dodger decided to check it out. The large trunks of the ponderosa pines were close on either side. Dodger could see blobs of sap congealed on their thick slabs of orange bark.

His footfalls were nearly silent on a soft layer of yellow needles. The air smelled faintly sweet, like syrup. Though Dodger didn't spend a lot of time outdoors, he'd always liked woods and trails. He felt his shoulders loosening, his entire body unwinding.

He reached a little rise where the trail broke out into a small meadow that spread over the top of a hill. Dodger could see back down to the campground and to the little gathering of tents at Heavenly Frequencies. It looked like an encampment, like some traveling army of yore. Off to the east was a hazy blur of Bend, and to the west were the enormous volcanic Mount Bachelor and the Three Sisters.

Dodger sat on a little island of rock. He had a small notebook in his back pocket—he always carried one—with a pen. He opened it to a new page and started sketching a little map of his walk so far, with the campground in one corner. He sketched the tents, then the trail to this clearing, spinning the notepad in his lap to get his compass directions oriented.

Doing this excited him. His hand flew across the page as he imagined himself as the intrepid explorer, making a log of his journey. When he'd completed the map of this area, he breathed deep. This was good. Being out here, he felt a kind of ease and possibility that he hadn't anticipated.

Dodger continued on. The path fell back into the trees and farther into a shallow gully. There was a dry streambed. The trees began to change, lots of black char on their trunks, and then Dodger entered a stand that had been entirely burned. The trees were jagged sticks, the ground speckled with cinder chunks. The soil had changed, too. It was dark, with black chunks of bubbly-looking rock. Remnants of a lava field. That made sense. He'd read that this was a very active volcanic area, geologically speaking.

The trail weaved to avoid crumbly piles of the volcanic pumice. With the black stones and dead trees and the grass now sparse, the place felt alien and sort of ominous, like he was on another planet, a lone visitor far from home.

There was a rock wall on one side of the trail now, and Dodger spied a set of sienna-colored petroglyphs there. Wispy figures running after animals and circular symbols. Communication, thousands of years old.

And then Dodger saw the circle.

The trail ended in a round, open space where the chunks of lava had been cleared and piled into a circular wall. The black trees around the edges felt like tribal elders. The floor was made of dirt. In the center was a small square structure, only a foot high. A few of the top blocks were broken, as if this had once been something more substantial.

Dodger walked into the center of the ruin. As he approached the little square structure, he felt a strange sense of light-headedness. At first he wondered if it was the sun and the altitude. He probably should have brought water with him. He wasn't sweating, but the air was so dry, it was likely evaporating right off him.

But then, things started to open up in his mind, and Dodger realized that he was feeling the symptoms of the Juliette radio about to arrive. He stopped over the little structure. Maybe it had been a chimney. He looked inside and saw a pile of crushed beer cans.

The radio feeling grew, a warm wave of energy in Dodger's mind. He put his fingers to his temples.

But then he heard voices.

They were coming up the path. Dodger didn't know who he might run into out here in the woods, and almost out of instinct, he looked around for another way out of the ruins, but the path he'd followed was the only way in or out, unless he tried to climb over the rock piles.

Two boys appeared. One was a good foot taller than Dodger, lean, with shaggy blond hair and extra-long limbs that were dotted with freckles. He wore a T-shirt and jeans tattered with holes. He had a cable looped over his shoulder and was carrying a thick, black square under the other arm.

The second boy was shorter and just as lean. He was carrying a lunch box flat in both hands. The lunch box had two antennae coming out of the top, each with a clump of aluminum foil at the end. It was adorned in artwork for what Dodger guessed had once been a TV show called
Battle of the Planets
.

The older boy saw Dodger first. “'Sup?” he said.

Dodger wondered what he should say, and he hated how even these basic little moments with other kids always tripped him up. “Hey,” he ended up saying.

The two boys stopped in front of him.

“You here for the gathering?” the tall boy asked.

“Oh, well . . . I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah,” Dodger said, and then he noticed the green lettering on the tall boy's yellow T-shirt. It read
Where Is Juliette?

“You heard of it?” the boy asked.

“The town that isn't there,” Dodger mumbled blankly.

“Yeah,” said the boy. “So you know about these.” He pointed to the lunch box.

“Um . . .”

“PhoneHome radio,” said the younger boy. “No?”

“Oh, I have heard of those.”

“Cool.” The tall boy pointed to his shirt. “This came free with the radio. My name's Sid.” He stuck out his hand.

“Dodger.” He hesitated at the thought of the handshake, feeling an all-too-familiar worry, like he wanted them to like him, wanted things to go well, but also like there was no way they possibly could. Handshakes were a particular problem. What grip were you supposed to use? How long did you shake for? But Sid grabbed his hand and it went fine.

“We came out here to try the radio before the big listening event,” said Sid. “People say these sacred spots have extra power for tuning it in.”

“It?”

“Juliette.” Sid dropped to his knees and placed the big black box on the ground. Dodger saw that it was a car battery. And the cord was a set of jumper cables. Sid connected the clamps to the battery and uncoiled the rest. “Come on, dude,” he said, and smacked the shorter boy on the back.

“Ah, come on,” the boy moaned.