what I mean? We really seen it. Me and Buster.’
‘Buster?’
‘My boyfriend. My old man, sort of, only we don’t live together alla time. See, we just drove out to the desert to … you know, be alone. Buster parked his car, and we had this sleeping bag. We were down in this little arroyo, you know, outa sight sort of, when this thing fuckin’ near lands on us. Pardon my French, but it scared us shitless …’
She rambled on for about five minutes. I listened intently and commented at appropriate moments. Her manner was straightforward, truthful, with a certain naivete. She put Buster on the phone. He was the strong, silent type. ‘Yeah,’ was the only word in his vocabulary. I recounted the story to him point by point, and he agreed with everything the girl had told me. Then the girl, whose name was Bertha, got on the line and told it all to me again.
I was intrigued because of the way she told the story. Here was a person who believed what she was telling me. There was probably a logical explanation, but this girl believed. I had taken enough hoax calls to know when someone was putting me on. I wrote down the address and drove out to see her and Buster.
Bertha lived in a dilapidated frame house in a lower-lower-class neighborhood on the edge of the desert. There were gaps between the houses like missing teeth, the bleached bodies of abandoned cars were strewn about, doorless refrigerators and freezers gleamed like patches of snow on the sand and brittle brown grasses.
Bertha was about sixteen, with a wide, pink face surrounded by lank, collar-length blonde hair. She was probably fifty pounds overweight; the top button of her jeans was undone and an inch of pink flesh showed between the jeans and the bottom of a black T-shirt that used to have glitter on the front in the shape of some rock star’s face. She was barefoot, sitting at a filthy kitchen table covered with empty Pepsi bottles and full ashtrays.
We got into Buster’s car, a sun-faded 1971 Ford that had been sky-blue, and drove about three miles into the desert. It was evening rush-hour on one of the hottest days of the year.
Bertha recounted her story again, yelling over the shriek of the car radio. The radio was cunningly hidden so I couldn’t find a switch to lower the volume; and Buster, who turned out to be about twenty, long and thin, in tight jeans and cowboy boots, didn’t look like the type you asked on first acquaintance to turn down his radio.
I couldn’t catch Bertha in any lies. Buster confirmed everything she said. In person he nodded and grinned, instead of saying ‘Yeah.’ He had a raw, high-cheekboned face, and hair that he must have oiled at a Texaco station. ‘Born to lose’ was tattooed on his left forearm. A dragon’s head on his right bicep peeked from the sleeve of a gray T-shirt mottled with grease and sweat stains.
I felt uneasy. Hadn’t there been a guy and girl like this in Phoenix who drove people out into the desert and murdered them? But Bertha didn’t appear to have the ability to con anyone. Both she and Buster were a little in awe of me, thrilled that a well-known investigative reporter would take them seriously, after their friends, families and, I’m sure, other newspaper people had dismissed them as lunatics.
‘I was gonna call the National Enquirer,’ said Bertha, ‘but I couldn’t figure out how. I’ve never made a long-distance call.’
Buster grunted, grinned and nodded.
What had been somewhat of a road dwindled to a trail, then to tire tracks on sand. We drove another half-mile through sage, brittlebush and creosote trees, and parked in a gully.
We tramped over barren sand hills, past small hummocks sheathed in bleached grass. A lizard scuttled out of our way; some kind of large insect thumped against the knee of my pants.
‘See, here it is,’ said Bertha, as we arrived at the base of a dome-like hill. Two oblong, grid-like patterns were burned into the earth.
‘That’s where it landed.’
I knelt down and examined the tracks. Each one was the size of a very large snowshoe. The patterns had burned through the sparse grass and into the sandy soil, a heavy brand perhaps three-quarters of an inch deep.
‘We were laying right over here,’ Bertha said, shaking out a cigarette from a beat-up pack she extracted from the front pocket of her jeans. She pointed to a small, natural shelf in the side of the hill. ‘Fuckin’ near scared us to death, right Buster?’
Buster grinned and nodded.
I tried to imagine what could have made the imprints, tried to guess what Bertha and Buster had actually seen.
‘Well, do they look like flying saucer tracks?’ asked Bertha.
‘I’ve never had any first-hand experience,’ I said.
Bertha looked disappointed. Then she grabbed Buster’s arm, rubbing her nose against his bicep.
‘Tell him the surprise,’ she said.
Buster just smiled, a shifty-eyed, shit-eating smile.
‘They came back,’ said Bertha. ‘We first seen ’em two nights ago. They came last night and I bet they’re comin’ back tonight. I think it was because we didn’t run and didn’t have a gun or nothin’. Last night, they came and looked us over again. They kind of measured us, if you know what I mean.’
‘They?’ I said.
‘Well, you know, I could feel them. That machine made comforting sounds, like a baby when it’s talkin’ itself to sleep. But the light that came out of it touched us, like all over. Right, Buster?’
Buster smiled and nodded.
We drove back to the rickety, basementless house. The home belonged to Bertha’s mother, who arrived in a rusting Pontiac, accompanied by a couple of unkempt, tow-headed boys she must have retrieved from a babysitter.
The mother wore a grayish waitress uniform; her mud-colored hair was limp. She wasn’t much over thirty, but everything about her, including her clothes and hair, looked wilted and tired. She had probably been beautiful as a teenager, but now every part of her was slouching. I decided she had probably had a long succession of boyfriends, husbands and lovers just like Buster.
‘Geez, I thought reporters had better things to do than listen to dumb kids,’ she said, after Bertha introduced us. ‘Don’t tell me you believe this flying saucer crap. These kids are just looking for some attention.’
‘I photographed the tracks out there on the hill,’ I said a little defensively. ‘They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Besides, I make a point of checking out every lead,’ I added, trying to sound professional and gracious at the same time.
‘Suit yourself. Hey, I loved the way you nailed that little rat who was selling phony water softeners. He worked this area, you know, sold to the old lady in the yellow house across the way …’
Bertha’s mother served canned tomato soup thinned with water, and sandwiches containing one slice of a pinkish substance that may or may not have had a protein base, followed by instant coffee served in cracked mugs, accompanied by Carnation milk with two yellow lines dribbled down the label.
I phoned Rosslyn to tell her I’d be late. Looking back, I realize she didn’t even ask where I was or what I was
