Prairie Godmother
Sometimes it got so bad the only thing Will could do was put a 12-pack of Budweiser in the old 4X4, some Hank Williams on the tape machine, and burn up the two-lane straight as a carpenter’s rule out into the empty heart of the prairie.
He wasn’t a drinking man, not really. But it kind of built up in him slowly, that hollow feeling, like he was one of those dried Indian gourds and there was nothing inside him but a handful of tiny, rattling seeds, hard as stones.
It was more than just missing Rose, although of course he did miss her, every day, even after five years. Will still slept alone under the bedspread she’d made for them with her own small hands, and her needlepoint Lord’s Prayer still hung on the living room wall, right over the television.
No, it was more like when she died it left a space in him that never filled, and these trips were like the wind rushing in to claim it.
He was well out of Salina now, coming up onto the intersection with County 7. Will reached over to the carton on the seat next to him, pried out a beer, and pulled the top up one-handed as he turned onto the little blacktop road. It stretched ahead of him, winking in and out of sight with the gentle contours of the land, and Will felt it pulling him forward like a wire to some place beyond the low, distant hills.
Hank was singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and Will crooned along with him, belting out the words loud in the cab of the pickup. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view, his leathery face scrunched up like he’d caught his foot in a door. He laughed, and he felt the borders of that darkness in him push back a little farther.
You just keep doin’ it for me, Hank. Just don’t stop talkin’ to me.
Will loved the prairie, everything about it. When you looked at it from a distance it looked smooth and featureless, just miles and miles of tall, waving grass, but when you got up close you could see the wrinkles and scars. There was a rolling motion to the land that was gentle on the eye but sucked the strength out of you on foot, and the contours hid a crosshatched pattern of streambeds and hidden arroyos. A person could get lost out here and never get found.
Will had a favorite spot and that’s where he was headed. He turned onto a rutted dirt road that snaked around a low hill, and when the road widened just a bit, he pulled over and stopped. He put the beers in a rucksack along with a couple of ham sandwiches neatly wrapped in wax paper, and walked straight out into the waist-high grass, following the faint path.
The land gradually fell, and as it did the grass got higher and higher, until it was over his head and Will felt like he was walking on the bottom of an ocean of rustling tan.
Suddenly, the high grass opened up in front of him and he stood on the edge of a dry streambed. Rocks of all sizes were scattered in the shallow bed, ranging from stones no bigger than a baby’s fist to huge, rough boulders the size of a Buick. There was a cluster of big ones downstream a bit, just above a fork in the bed. One of them had a flat, sloping surface perfect for sitting and Will picked his way towards it, stepping from one stone to another along the rough streambed as if water still flowed between them.
He dropped the rucksack and sat down next to it, wincing with the familiar protest in his knees and back.
Won’t be able to do this for much longer, he thought, and shook his head.
He reached into the rucksack and pulled out another beer and a sandwich. He unwrapped the sandwich, carefully re-folded the wax paper into a tight, neat square, and returned it to the pack. He took a big bite and followed it with a long pull of beer. It was so good—the sharp, salty taste of the ham, the cool bitterness of the brew—it almost brought tears to his eyes.
He sat there, drinking and eating, not really thinking about anything. Will liked the way the forks of the streambed ran off in front of him, gradually diverging, separated by a widening “V” of tall, waving grass. It was getting on to his favorite time of day—late afternoon, the heat coming up out of the ground in waves and the slanted, golden light of the sun just beginning to lose its harsh, mid-day edge. He wished there was someone around to share it with, and he felt a small surge of sadness wash through him.
Rose. They’d tried to have kids but it just didn’t happen. After a few years of disappointment and a cold, growing fear, they took her in for some tests.
“Her equipment’s in tip-top condition,” the doctor said. Rose was still in the examination room, getting dressed. Will didn’t like his false heartiness or the cold, limp handshake he’d proffered. “If I were you,” he continued, “I’d see about getting a sperm count for yourself.”
Will was quick to anger in those days, and he almost took a poke at the clean, smug face hovering above the stethoscope-collared jacket like a pale balloon. Instead, he nodded sharply and muttered something, and when his wife emerged from the room he took her arm and hustled her out of there like they were late for something important.
They drove home in silence. About halfway there, when they were sitting at a stop light, Will turned to her.
“They don’t know what’s wrong,” he heard himself saying. “They don’t know what the problem is. We could get some more tests, but I don’t know how much good it’d do.”
Her eyes filled up with tears, but she took his hand.
“We’ll just have to keep trying, Will. Something’s gotta happen sooner or later.”
He turned away and put both hands on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change.
On his own, without telling Rose, he went to another doctor and had his own tests done. Sure enough, all those years he’d been shooting blanks. He’d worked the machine shop at Rocky Flats for a few years back in the sixties, and that must’ve done it. They’d handed out some safety pamphlets—comic books, really. Will remembered the stylized logo stamped across the front of the gaudy covers—the looping, crossed ellipses of the electron orbits framing a round, smiling face where the nucleus was supposed to be. Andy the Atom. The pamphlets made radiation sound safe as shuffleboard. Just take a few simple precautions and you’ll be fine.
Will never told her. He waited for years for the cancer to take him like it took so many of his friends from the plant, but it got her instead. He never told her and now she was gone and it was too late to take back the lie. His stupid pride. Too late.
He upended the beer, draining out the last few drops, and put the empty in the rucksack, smiling to himself a little as he heard it rattle against the growing collection of empties.
We’re gettin’ there, he thought. Feelin’ no pain.
As he was reaching around in the rucksack for another full one, he heard a low whistling sound coming from out of the western sky, getting louder. He looked up and his mouth fell open. The beer slipped out of his hands and rolled down off the rock, bursting open with an explosive hiss when it hit the streambed.
It came in low, about a hundred feet above the prairie. It was long and thin, a featureless ellipsoid about the size of a jetliner. A dull, metallic black, it seemed to suck the waning afternoon light into itself like a sponge. And it was burning.
It passed over Will’s head with a roar that nearly burst his eardrums, trailing a wake of oily looking smoke, and went down somewhere beyond a low, grassy hill about a quarter-mile away.
Will tensed, waiting for an explosion, but none came.
What the hell was that thing? he wondered.
Maybe something new out of the SAC base up at Omaha. He’d heard plenty of stories, and the pictures he’d seen of the new B-1 bomber looked like something out of a science fiction movie. Even if the damn thing couldn’t fly. A part of him knew, though, that this thing was just too strange, even for SAC. It didn’t have any wings, for one thing. And the way it held the light—kind of rippling, almost disappearing, when you looked right at it …
Will laughed out loud and shook his head.
A goddamn spaceship. Little green men. Boy howdy, Will, have another beer.
Still, he couldn’t tell how hard the thing went down—there might be someone hurt. He slung the rucksack over his shoulder, headed down the left fork of the streambed. A wisp of smoke curled up beyond the hill, marking the spot.
He was a little drunk, and he stumbled a couple of times on the uneven ground. He wasn’t scared, not exactly, but he felt mixed up. A part of him was putting one foot in front of the other, pushing him forward, wanting nothing but to be there to help if someone was in need. Another part of him though, way down deep, wanted to turn tail and run like hell.
As he neared the spot, the breeze brought him a sharp, metallic, burnt wiring sort of smell, and underneath it, the familiar odor of burning grass. They’d had some rain recently, so hopefully it wouldn’t catch. Will had seen a prairie fire once, and that was enough.
As he got closer, the feeling of unease intensified. Still, he kept walking, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other. Like Hue, Will thought. Scared shitless but showin’ up.
He climbed up out of the streambed and started pushing through the waist-high grass. A smoky haze hung in the air. Suddenly, he came to a wide swath of flattened grass and torn earth. Patches of fire licked feebly here and there, but they were well separated and looked like they wouldn’t last long.
He looked down the length of the swath and could make out a shape a couple hundred yards away, partially hidden by the hazy smoke.
This isn’t no Air Force stealth gizmo on a training run, he thought.
He wished suddenly for the Remington sitting in his gun rack back in the pickup. The smoke was starting to get to him—his eyes stung and there was a raw, rasping pain in his throat. Still, he had to keep going. Ignoring the clenching fear in his stomach and the protesting ache in his bones, he began to run down the corridor of ruined earth toward the thing, picking his way between the fires.
It materialized out of the haze, almost as if drawing substance from the smoke itself, a huge, black shape. It lay in a patch of scorched earth, crumpled and broken. A wide scar ran down one side, splitting it open, and Will caught glimpses of flickering lights through the smoke.
He stopped, trying to catch his breath. He drew in a great lungful of air and smoke, and he doubled over in a spasm of coughing.
He felt something then, a kind of tugging at the edge of his mind.
Here, it seemed to say. I am here. But it wasn’t really words—that was just the best way Will’s mind could get hold of it. It was more like a kind of knowing. And it was also in that knowing that Will realized suddenly he had nothing to fear.
He approached the crippled ship. Near the tear in its side, half-hidden by the curved, crumpled fuselage, lay a human form. Will ran closer and saw with a shock that he was almost right. It had a rounded body covered in folds of metallic-looking cloth, and the right number of arms and legs, but the face was like nothing Will had ever seen before.
Green, scaly skin stretched tight across a triangular jaw. A lipless mouth revealed thin, needle-like teeth and there was a single vertical slit where the nose was supposed to be. Narrow, bony ridges protruded above wide, golden eyes that held Will’s own in an intense stare. A thin line of dark blood ran out of the corner of its mouth.
Red, Will thought. Red blood.
He felt strangely calm. He knelt down next to the creature, reached out a hand, then pulled it back. He didn’t know what to do.
The creature opened its mouth and made a sound from deep in its throat, like the last gulp of water emptying from a jug. It sounded like “gog.”
Will spread his hands. “I don’t—”
“Gog,” it said again, more forcefully this time. It pulled aside a fold of its silvery garment to reveal a scaly pocket of skin along its midriff, rippling and bunching like there was something moving around down there.
Suddenly, a head popped up through the leathery flap. The same triangular face, the same big, golden eyes.
“Goddamn,” Will said.
He felt it again, that contact, a feather touch on the surface of his mind. Will didn’t hear it in words, but he knew that this creature was dying, that it wanted him to save its child. He also knew somehow that they could live here, that their bodies weren’t really all that different. And he knew, without that voice telling him so, that they weren’t all that different as souls either, that they moved to the dictates of something that was larger than themselves, something like love. It was enough for Will.
“Come on, little feller.” Will reached down and the thing crawled out of its pocket and swarmed up his arms.
Go.
He felt that touch in his mind again, but it was pushing this time. Go. Leave. Go. The voice was still powerful, even though Will could see the life beginning to flicker and fade in the thing’s eyes. He took a last look, nodded sharply, and began to run back along the corridor of burned, flattened grass, the child-thing clinging tightly to his arms.
When they were back at the streambed, about a half-mile away, the ground lit up like a flashbulb had gone off and Will felt a wash of radiant heat on the back of his neck. He could feel the presence of that voice in his mind wink out like a light being turned off. The creature in his arms made a whimpering sound and burrowed more tightly into his chest.
He turned around. A small mushroom cloud rose up into the darkening sky.
Destroying the evidence, Will thought. Smart goddamn lizard.
He looked down. The thing was curled up against his chest and all he could see was the top of its head. A pattern of fine scales caught highlights in the waning light.
“So what the hell am I gonna do with you?” he asked. “And what am I supposed to call you?”
He shook his head, then laughed out loud.
Sure. Yeah, why not?
He thought maybe he’d name it Hank.