Martians in Maggody Read online

  Heather wrinkled her nose. “You better be careful, Darla Jean. When Gracie let him do it, Reggie did everything but announce it over the PA system at school. She liked to have died.”

  “Who says I’m gonna let him do it?”

  “Well, everybody in town knows it wouldn’t be the first time,” Heather pointed out tartly. “Last Saturday night Beau saw you and Dwayne heading toward the creek with a six-pack and a blanket. Did y’all go out there to count lightning bugs?”

  Darla Jean decided she needed to wash her hair again.

  Raz Buchanon was mulling over something real important. He was also scratching and spitting and doing other less fascinating things that involved bodily functions and infestations, but they can be left unspecified. He was doing all this in the cab of his truck, which was parked outside a café in Hasty. Inside the café the waitress and the owner were discussing whether they should disinfect the booth or have it replaced altogether.

  “I’ll tell ya, Marjorie,” Raz said, “it might jest work. Bizness was mighty slow last winter, and that’s my best time of year. Come hot weather, folks prefer cold beer over my ’shine, and I don’t rightly blame ’em.” He glanced timidly at his companion. “Now, Marjorie, don’t git all fractious jest because you had to wait out here while I talked with that feller what’s slicker than a preacher’s ass. There weren’t no way they were gonna let you inside.”

  Marjorie stared out the window.

  Raz sighed. “Iffen I pull this off, I was thinkin’ we might look into one of those fancy satellite dishes that sucks in channels from all over the world. I hear tell ye can git movies all night long, and they don’t cost you nuthin’. You’d like that, wouldn’t ye?”

  Marjorie’s beady pink eyes blinked.

  “What’s more, we kin have our picture in the Probe, jest like that woman what had ever’ last drop of blood sucked out of her body by vampire mosquitoes.”

  Marjorie relented, but only after he went back inside and bought her a candy bar.

  Way down in Little Rock, which was only two hundred miles away but could have been on another planet, Cynthia Dodder checked in the bathroom mirror to make sure her gray hair was neat and her nose powdered. After further deliberation she removed her brooch and put it away in her jewelry box. As the featured speaker at the UFORIA meeting she knew it was important to present herself as a detached professional investigator.

  She went to the kitchen table, currently covered with newspaper clippings and magazine articles, each marked with a date and ready to be filed. There were also journals and newsletters, letters begging her attention, and a list of telephone calls to be made when she had time.

  Cynthia Dodder felt strongly about keeping her priorities straight, however, and her speech was in the forefront of her mind as she made sure the back door of the apartment was bolted and the porch light shining to ward off burglars. The neighborhood had deteriorated over the last twenty years to the point she hardly recognized anyone and spoke to no one. Had her budget allowed it, she would have moved to a nicer area, one inhabited by respectable folks like herself rather than whiny welfare mothers and impertinent young men of a different racial persuasion.

  She watched them now as they gathered out in the parking lot, laughing and passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. If any of them had dared set foot in the exclusive dress shop where she’d been a clerk for forty years, he or she would have been escorted out the door by a security guard.

  It was nearly seven o’clock, and surely Rosemary was aware that it took more than half an hour to drive to the library. She needed time to review her notes before she called the meeting to order promptly at eight. Tonight’s agenda would be brief because of the portentous content of her speech, during which she would prove conclusively that NASA officials had destroyed the Mars Observer spacecraft rather than allow it to transmit pictures of an ancient alien citadel. The real question was why NASA had sent the probe in the first place, since it and other government agencies (the CIA, FBI, USAF, and the top secret Majestic Twelve commission, just for starters) possessed physical evidence of an alien presence and had covered it up for forty-five years.

  Cynthia was on the verge of calling Rosemary when a familiar white compact chugged into the lot. She picked up her purse, manila folders, clipboard, and packet of blurry photographs and let herself out, making sure the door was securely locked behind her. It was unfortunate that the hoodlums could watch her as she left, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Rosemary said as she maneuvered out of the parking lot. “I locked myself out of the car at the grocery store. The manager finally got it open with a coat hanger, but by then it was after six. I barely had time to eat a bite of supper and clean Stan’s litter box before I came rushing here to pick you up.”

  “That stoplight was red, Rosemary,” Cynthia said as the car lurched along the street like a three-legged dog. “Please pay attention to the traffic. I, too, am sorry you were late, but now it’s more important that we arrive at the library in one piece. If you don’t mind, I’d like to study my speech.”

  She took out a stack of index cards, but it was almost impossible to concentrate over Rosemary’s atonal humming and occasional mumbles to herself about approaching intersections. Really, Cynthia thought with a sigh, it was so very challenging to imagine Rosemary Tant as one of ufology’s most vital contributors. She was scatterbrained and forever late. She dressed with no attempt to downplay her thin shoulders and heavy hips. Her hair was a particularly drab shade of brown, her long face perpetually riddled with anxiety, her voice tremulous and uncertain even when discussing the weather.

  But she was.

  TWO

  “Okay,” I said into the telephone receiver, “I’ll write up the damn accident report by the end of the week and drop it by, but you owe me, you manipulative bastard.”

  Harve Dorfer chuckled, but he could afford to be amiable since he’d just won the skirmish. He’s perfected the role of redneck southern sheriff, replete with straw hat, beer belly, splintery cigar butt, and mirrored sunglasses, but he’s a pretty sharp guy. He’s a really sharp guy in election years, when he and his deputies manage to discover marijuana fields and caches of illegal arms every week. On the basis of the number of press conferences he conducts, criminal activity appears to peak right before a primary. And you probably thought there was a correlation with the full moon.

  “It ain’t that I don’t want to do it myself,” he said, “but your prose is a sight prettier than mine. You ever wonder if you should have been an author rather than a cop? You’d be rolling in dough, riding around in a limousine, appearing on morning talk shows, being wined and dined in New York City.”

  “No, Harve, I have way too much fun trying to run a hick town in the hinterlands,” I said, not bothering to mention the limousine with the tinted windows that had been spotted several weeks ago. It hadn’t seemed significant then, and even the grapevine had quit speculating and moved on to other perennial favorites—like my lack of a potential husband. “As for New York, there’s more whining than anything else. I lived there, remember?”

  “Hey, did ya hear what we were called in on a couple of days ago? One of the deputies liked to heave up his guts, and I felt a little queasy myself.”

  If I could have stopped him from telling me, I would have. However, the most expedient way to get him off the phone was to let him have his say. “What?” I said without enthusiasm, hoping I wasn’t going to be regaled with the olfactory impact of the latest floater in the reservoir or the details of some gawd-awful sex abuse case.

  “You ever heard talk of cattle mutilations?”

  “Awhile back I saw some stories in the newspaper. Everything was taking place over in Stonecrop County, so I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “This one woulda caught your attention,” Harve muttered. I heard a scritching sound as he paused to light one of his notoriously cheap cigars; I was thankful I was twenty miles
upwind. “According to some material that showed up on my desk the next morning, we were treated to what’s called a classic case. One eye plucked out like it was a marble in a leather pouch; the tongue, lips, and sexual organs removed; a triangular patch of hide cut off the belly. The cow’d been dead for the better part of a week, but for some reason the scavengers hadn’t found it—despite the stench and the flies.” He puffed on the cigar for a moment, perhaps to give me time to assimilate the significance of his remark. When my only response was a yawn, he continued. “There were a couple of other odd things about the carcass. The cuts were all real clean, like they’d been done with a scalpel, and there was no blood on ’em or on the ground.”

  “Maybe they’d been done with a scalpel or a more prosaic pocketknife. I haven’t heard anything about a new satanic group, but you know how the kids are when the weather turns nice. They’ll jump on any excuse to make themselves feel like beleaguered social mavericks, piss off their parents, and go sneaking around after dark. You can bet the farm their rituals involve a lot of beer, pot, and pairing off. Then again, you could be dealing with a pack of wild dogs with exceptionally keen canines.”

  “What about the lack of blood?”

  I gazed longingly out the window in the direction of Ruby Bee’s, where a blue plate special had my name written on it. “Have you talked to the county extension office, Harve? I seem to recall they investigated the incidents in Stonecrop County and concluded they were all caused by common predators and predictable physiological responses. Maybe all the bleeding occurred internally.”

  “I don’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “This literature is kinda spooky. There’s a group that’s been investigating these mutilations for years, and they—”

  “Write and sell books about it. They also charge money to lecture about it to vast audiences of very gullible people who would much rather hear about little green vivisectionists than mangy, malnourished dogs.”

  “I’ll look for that accident report by Friday,” Harve said, then hung up without so much as an admonishment to have a nice day. Darn.

  The report was of minor significance (except to the participants and their grieving families) and could wait for a day or two. I walked down the side of the road, pausing to wave at my landlord as he arranged vases and lamps on a table in front of his antiques store, formally known as Roy Stiver’s Antiques and Collectibles: Buy, Trade, or Sell. I resided upstairs in what was euphemistically called an efficiency apartment. It was quite a contrast with a certain condo on the Upper East Side, but I was the one who’d filed for divorce and skulked home to lick my wounds. I’d be hard pressed to explain why I was still moping around Maggody a couple of years later, especially when I was at the mercy of Ruby Bee and all the other local loonies. Roy is one of damn few exceptions. Every once in a while I go downstairs to the shop to share my discontentment and a bottle of wine.

  “How’s business?” I called.

  “Fair to middling,” he said distractedly, his expression akin to that of a turkey vulture as he watched an approaching RV.

  I left him to play the ignorant hayseed for the benefit of the wily city slickers, who would be grinning smugly as they drove away with “a real steal” in the backseat. I wondered how they’d feel if they ran into Roy in Palm Springs, where he sometimes spends the winter. His income is not derived from his occasional sales to poetry magazines.

  Pickup trucks were lined up in the parking lot of the bar and grill, but their drivers were standing outside, gesturing and scratching their heads while gunky-eyed hound dawgs growled at one another from the beds. I may have growled myself when I caught sight of the Closed sign on the door.

  “Where’s Ruby Bee?” I asked one of the regulars.

  “Dunno. It being Wednesday and all, I was looking forward to chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. She say anything to you about closing?”

  I shook my head, having entertained some decidedly lyrical thoughts about the chicken-fried steak myself. None of us would starve, of course. The SuperSaver across the road had a deli, and the Dairee Dee-Lishus was only a couple of blocks away. However, there was an increasingly unhappy rumble from the collective belly of the crowd, and I was backing away when Mizzoner (aka Mrs. Jim Bob) drove up.

  “There you are!” she snapped at me. “I should have known you’d be avoiding your official responsibilities at a time like this. Bear in mind you’re a salaried employee of the town council, Arly Hanks. I told Jim Bob when he hired you that a woman has no business being chief of police. It violates the Almighty Lord’s standards of decency and smacks of lesbianism.”

  Mrs. Jim Bob and I lack rapport.

  I slapped my forehead. “And you were right! Last week when there was a holdup at the bank, I was too busy giving myself a home perm to investigate.”

  “What bank?”

  “Just how am I avoiding my official responsibilities today, Mrs. Jim Bob? Has Ruby Bee been kidnapped by Bigfoot and dragged away to a certain cave up on Cotter’s Ridge? Shall I round up a posse?” I may have added a bit of emphasis when I mentioned the cave, which had caused her a great deal of well-deserved embarrassment. I can swallow only so much self-righteousness on an empty stomach, and she was dishing it up with a particularly generous hand.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said tightly. “I’m talking about Raz Buchanon’s cornfield.”

  I stared at her, as did everybody else in the parking lot. As dumbstruck as your basic Buchanon, I mentally replayed our conversation, then said, “You are?”

  Satisfied that she’d done her duty, which may well have been to render me momentarily inarticulate, she rolled up her window and drove away. Rather than go back to the PD to get my car. I asked one of the guys for a lift, and he agreed. We were heading an impressive caravan as we turned onto a dirt road and rolled up the hill toward Raz’s place.

  We didn’t roll up to the shack, however, because the road was blocked by a variety of parked vehicles, one of which belonged to Ruby Bee and another to Estelle. I thanked my driver and walked the rest of the way. Raz stood at the gate, his thumbs hooked on the straps of his filthy overalls and a shiteatin’ grin on his face. His stringy gray hair and crumb-infested whiskers were marginally tidier than usual, but there was no indication he’d bathed in the recent past. Or brushed his sparse, mossy teeth.

  “Howdy,” he said, then sent a stream of amber tobacco juice into the weeds. “Purty day, ain’t it?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. Raz and I are not sworn enemies, even though he operates a moonshine still up on Cotter’s Ridge. Every now and then I go out to look for it. It’s an exercise in futility, but the solitude and picnic lunches are equally satisfying. On the other hand, he’s a royal pain in the butt, and that’s being magnanimous. “Did Marjorie chew off somebody’s leg?”

  “You ain’t got no call to say that, Arly,” he said, his face puckering like a dried apple. “Marjorie mighta had a spell last winter when she was madder’n a coon in a poke, but she’s settled down right nicely. She came with a pedigree, ya know. She’s got a more delicate nature than your ordinary sows.”

  “What’s going on?” I repeated.

  He tugged at his whiskers and gave me the same shrewd look as when he tells me he “don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no still.” “I can’t rightly say. I first saw ’em this morning when I went out to git some wood for the stove.”

  “Saw what, Raz?”

  “Circles out in the cornfield.”

  For the second time in less than an hour I was speechless. I was frowning at him and trying to formulate a question when a smartly dressed woman and a pudgy young man with a camera came up the road.

  “Raz Buchanon?” she asked him purposefully. He nodded. “I’m from the television station in Farberville. We’d like to do a segment for the evening news about these mysterious crop circles behind your house.”

  “I’m chargin’ a dollar to folks what want to take a gander at it. I ain’t su
re how much I ought to git for taking pictures of it. Whatta ya think, Arly?”

  I shrugged, even more bemused. They settled on five dollars; then Raz opened the gate and sent them around the corner of the shack. As I stood there, more gawkers arrived, forked over the admission fee, and took off down what was now a visible path through the overgrown yard.

  Eventually I came to my senses (although there were damn few of them), and after a brief yet spirited discussion with Raz regarding my lack of a dollar and my willingness to rip his whiskers off his chin, I was ushered through the gate.

  There were twenty or so people beside a barbed wire fence. The television reporter stood in front of the camera, her eyes wide and her voice oozing wonder as she described the inexplicable appearance of crop circles in Maggody. The crowd watched her with gaping mouths, in that she was on television every day at five o’clock and therefore qualified as a celebrity.

  Wishing I were in disguise, I stepped on a foot or two and threw a couple of elbows as I made my way to the fence. The field sloped downward to a distant line of brush. The corn was green and waist-high and rustled in the light breeze. The sky was dotted with puffy clouds. Unseen birds twittered in the distance. Grasshoppers whirred like tiny helicopters (Orthoptera rotorus?).

  “Ain’t that the darndest thing?” whispered Ruby Bee, who’d wormed her way to my side. “I don’t recollect seeing anything like that in all my born days.”

  I finally spotted the object of her avowed astonishment. Toward the far edge of the field was a rounded expanse of flattened corn with a diameter of perhaps fifteen feet. A trail led to a somewhat smaller circle, and another trail to the smallest of the three. From my perspective, the circles looked almost perfect, and the trails of uniform width. I’d seen a textbook drawing of such a syzygial pattern, although it had illustrated a lunar eclipse rather than a cornfield. I rubbed my face, trying to remember stories and photographs from a few years back.