A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (10 page)

PHENOMENA

F
IRST OF
all, I’m not one of these people who ever wanted to see a UFO, an unidentified flying object. I have never wanted to see an unidentified anything. The things in my life, I identify; that’s good with me. I’m not one of these people who is strange or weirded-out over unexplainable phenomena. I don’t want any phenomena at all, and we’re lucky in Cooper, because there isn’t much phenomena. About the time there is a little phenomena, I identify the phenomena and throw them in jail.

I’m the sheriff.

So I’m not a weirdo. Things happen sometimes and I do my best. My name is Derec Ferris, and I’ve traced the Ferrises back all the way to Journey City, near the border, and there isn’t a weirdo in the whole bunch. Now, I’m the sheriff; you notice I didn’t say I’m the law around here. Whitney used to say he was the law around here. That was when he was sheriff. I can tell you exactly when he stopped saying that. Four years ago in September. We were together in his car late one night after coffee at The World, and we nailed this speeder right down from the high school. A rented Firebird, gunmetal gray. Actually we flashed him on the curve of Quibbel’s Junk Yard and it took us the whole mile of town to slow down.

We pulled him over in front of Cooper Regional, where Whitney and I had been Cougars for four years together. It was about two in the morning. Whitney put his hand on my arm and went up to the Pontiac. I could see he was working up his sarcastic rage; he used to say that eighty percent of being a good sheriff was acting. Anyway, he starts: “Who do you think you are, endangering the lives of the citizens of Cooper by whipping through here at eighty-two miles an hour?” And the guy goes: “I’m Dan Blum, and I’m late. Who do you think you are?” Whitney loves that, an opening. “I’m Whitney Shields and I’m the law around here.” Well, Dan Blum, as his name actually turned out to be, thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and after a little chuckle, he said, “Say, that’s great. So, it’s your wife that sleeps with the law.” That comment seemed to confuse Whitney, even though he slapped the guy for seventy-five big ones, and he never said that about being the law again.

That was, like I said, four years ago, and since then Whitney’s in-laws have had troubles outside Chicago, and he and Dorothy, who was also a Cougar with us, and whom I had also known for forty-one years, moved over there, and they might as well be on another world for all I hear from them. This is all to say, I’m not the law. I’m fifty-five years old and I’ve lived in this county all my life, except for fourteen months when I lived in Korea employed by Uncle Sam. My name is Derec Ferris and that’s who sleeps with my wife.

The fact is, I’m still surprised that Whitney left. I mean, where is he? I still expect to see him squashing his stool at the counter at The World every time I walk in there. Hell, he grew up here along the river just like I did; he and I and Harold were the three musketeers. We worked for Nemo at Earth Adventure two summers in high school, and we gained four hundred and forty-four yards passing as Cooper Cougars in 1949, setting a record that stood until 1957. Then: poof! he’s gone, and I’m sheriff. I’ve got his car and everything. It still smells like him.

I don’t want to talk about it. At all. What I want to talk about is the Unidentified Object that has come into my life, the whole unidentified flying object day, so that you can see I’m not a phenomena weirdo; I’m only Derec Ferris, the sheriff here in Cooper.

First of all, I’m not going to give you any theory, because I don’t have any. And I don’t want any. Where did it come from? I don’t care. I’ve been here in Cooper all my life and it might have come from over in Mercy or even Griggs. It kind of looked like something from Griggs. I don’t care. It was a UFO. It might have come from Korea; try to tell me that’s on this earth. And why did it come?
Please.
I’m going to give you the day, the whole day, and—really—nothing but the day.

First thing: Sarah calls. She says we received a card from Derec; that’s our son, same name. He works for a textbook publisher in Palo Alto, California, and he’s a painter. Paints pictures. Well, it’s a little news, because we haven’t seen him in five years, and we don’t get that much mail. Every time I drive by Cooper Regional I think about him, though. Even then when he was in high school refusing to play football, he said he couldn’t wait to get out of here, Cooper, and go to California. Which he did. I feel bad about it, and I miss him, but I figure it this way: at least somebody got what he wanted.

Sarah says that Derec is going to have a show. Well. I don’t know what that is, and she explains that it is a show of his paintings and it is good news. She wants to go. She is excited on the telephone. I tell her great, but there’s a radio call coming in, I’ll talk to her later, and I hang up. I thought: I want to go, too.

I want to go and hold down my stool at The World and drink my gallon of coffee, but Arvella the dispatcher says it’s something from Nemo out at Earth Adventure, a bear attack or something. So I lock up and I drive out to Earth Adventure.

On the way out I’m thinking about Derec and his show, and I’m kind of blue thinking about what he ever thinks of his old man. Did you ever do that, wonder what your grown kids think of you? The times you tried, the times you didn’t try. No matter who you are, I think, you still want your boy to be like you. Derec
is
like me, with his ears, and he’s got the build, but the rest . . . I don’t know.

Old Earth Adventure is about on its last legs. If you didn’t know where you were going, I doubt you could find the place. The two terrific signs Nemo put up before Harold, Whitney, and I worked for him are all peeled to hell, and a Chinese elm has taken the best one, the one with the dinosaur peeking over at the boatload of people. You can still see the profile of the dinosaur poking up above the sign, but you can’t read a word through the bushes.

It turned out not to be a bear attack. I knew it wouldn’t be. Nemo’s bear, Alex, hasn’t been awake for about two years. It turned out to be Monty, the old cougar, who must be forty now and who’s lost most of his hair and teeth and whose skin sags off his bones like it was somebody else’s suit; Monty had fallen out of a tree and broke his hind leg on the hood of some tourist’s Ford. By the time I arrived, Monty had already dragged himself into the women’s restroom and he was growling in the corner like an old man getting ready for his last spit. His poor old rheumy eyes were full of tears. Hell, I’d known him from a kitten when they found him west of Mercy at the Ringenburgs’, crying in the barn being harassed by a dozen swallows. I’d fed that cat a lot of corndogs the summer I was seventeen and worked the boats.

So I kept guard by the women’s room door, so nobody would get a surprise, while we waited for Doctor Werner to come out from town. The guy from the Ford was arguing, or trying to argue, with Nemo about the damage and the scare and the hazard, and all Nemo would do was point at me and say, “There’s the sheriff.” But the guy wasn’t coming near me or the shack where Monty was dying. Finally he left and the vet pulled up in his black van. I stayed with him while he drugged the big old cat. Then Werner and Nemo had a little talk outside while I watched Monty’s tongue loll farther and farther out of his mouth. Just above him in the stall, somebody had carved “Kill All Men” in uneven printing.

When the two men came back they had decided that this was it for Monty, and Werner said he’d haul him off. But Nemo said no, said to put him to sleep right there in the women’s room, so Werner did. Monty, who was already asleep, didn’t even quiver.

Then Nemo and Werner argued about money for a while, Nemo trying to give the doc a twenty and the doctor not even looking Nemo in the face, saying, “No way, Nemo, not this time. No charge.” They pushed that twenty back and forth twenty times like two men in a restaurant, and finally the vet climbed in his van and headed out.

Nemo stood there with his twenty still in his hand in the middle of the dirt road and said he was pretty close to it this time. If he lost any more animals, Earth Adventure would have to close. You couldn’t charge people four bucks a car to drive along a half mile dirt road to see one bear sleeping in a way that showed his worn out old ass, a plastic tiger Nemo had gotten from the Exxon station in Clinton, six peacocks, and four hundred geese. “It was different with a mountain lion,” he said. “Monty was
something.
”

Old Nemo. I told him not to worry, he still had the underground canal trips, but that wasn’t too good either, since the boats—the same boats I worked—are in pretty bad condition. One sank last summer out from under a family from Mercy. It was lucky for Nemo the boat went down just outside the tunnel, where the water is only a foot deep, or he’d have had genuine legal action.

So I stood there with old Nemo, looking around at Earth Adventure crumbling in the weeds. I could see it clearly: the closed sign across his gate next summer. After a while, he thumbed his overall strap and went to get an old canvas mail bag and started filling it with the round white rocks that he uses to line the paths.

“Can I help you, Nemo?” I said, and he opened the bag.

“Right here,” is all he said.

So I lifted Monty, who must have weighed ninety pounds, and Nemo helped guide him into the bag. He cinched the tie and started dragging the bag toward the canal. When we got there, he wanted to put it in one of the boats, and by the time I’d helped him do that, I was committed. He climbed in the bow of the old peeling boat and there was that seat in the stern. I found one paddle in the weeds and took my place. The boat was so weathered and shot I couldn’t tell which one it had been; it could have been mine once.

When I was seventeen, we came out here—Whitney, Harold, and I—and Nemo hired us piecework. We each had a boat and we got seventy-five cents a tour. In those days Nemo had a little dock strung with Christmas lights, and summer nights it was great. There was a popcorn stand right there too, so people could feed the ducks, all those mallards tame as barnducks in the bright water. We’d tear the tickets and Whitney would feed them to the ducks whenever he ran out of other bad jokes.

I’d get five people in my boat, and I’d pole off. “These are the natural wonders of Cooper,” I’d say as we entered the cave. “They were formed a million million years ago. They have found albino perch in these waters and there may still be creatures as yet undiscovered beneath us. The legend is that a trip through this wonder makes you five years younger or five years older depending on how you’ve treated your mother and father. Please keep your hands inside the boat.”

Now Nemo perched on his seat, his knees together, as I steered us out into the cool dark of the cavern. I hadn’t been in here for years. I used to have to come down and chase teenagers out and break up their beer parties, but it wasn’t too hard, because I knew my way around. There in the quiet dark with Nemo, I could almost hear Harold doing his romantic version of the tour for his boat. It was like singing. Or Whitney kidding with the passengers, laughing and telling off-color jokes, “Keep your hands inside the boat, not there, buddy. Lady, keep your hands to yourself; just because it is dark there is no need to turn into an aborigine.” The passengers in his boats would laugh and call back and ahead and go “Wooo-woooo!” And at the other end, Whitney always got the tips.

For me it was a job. I was saving for a car that turned out to be a used 1939 Buick. For Harold, it was romantic, each little trip got him a little. He believed it; he even painted a name on his boat: The Santa Maria. For Whitney, it was fun.

And then later, after I met Sarah, we all used to stay around almost every night, make a tour or two. Stop in the middle, bump around in the boats. It smelled nice then, like sand and willows, before the water treatment plant went in and raised the temperature. The five of us would take a boat in. Whitney and a date, Sarah and I, and Harold. Whitney would start on his spiel about how no virgin had ever emerged from these caverns, and he would let Sarah and me off midway on the limestone ledge, and then he’d take Harold to the far end where Harold would sit with his guitar and just play and play. Sometimes he’d sing, “Stormy Weather” or “Pennies from Heaven.” Sarah and I would eat the popcorn and talk about high school or the families who came to Earth Adventure. We could hear Whitney hauling around in the boat, saying, “Come on; come on,” to some girl from Mercy, a waitress, or somebody he’d picked up that night. He and I were clearly different that way. I never touched a girl casually in my life, not to this day. Whitney never touched them any other way. And I guess, Harold never touched one at all. I don’t know. Anyway, they were great nights.

When Nemo and I passed the ledge, he lifted his hand and looked ahead. There was one rock column and then we could see the end, the rough triangle of light that opened on the river.

“This is good right here,” he said.

He started to stand, but I motioned him down, and I got up and took hold of the bag. I set it carefully on the gunwale and looked at Nemo. All I could see against the light was his silhouette, and it didn’t move. I waited. He didn’t say anything, so I set the bag out and let the water take it.