The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Eight: Desert Interlude

The Joshua Tree grows only in the Mojave Desert. Its bark looks pretty much like any other tree's, maybe rougher than some. The trunk is straight, but its boughs don't taper into the slender fingers of a normal tree, instead wish-boning out from one another to end abruptly in rounded stumps with ridiculous bottlebrush shocks of spiky green needles. The trees grow where not much else does amid spare clumps of creosote in the low-lying sandy earth. They maintain a remarkably consistent spacing as they stretch out to the horizon, far enough apart to be solitary, dense enough to be anonymous.

Lou and I surveyed a sparse forest of the tortured trees from a trail overlooking a long valley a few miles outside of Twenty-nine Palms. The boulder-strewn landscape was creepy and wonderful in the early dawn blue, two or three last stars slowly dimming. I wished I could enjoy it more.

I'd given Lou an hour to sleep it off, then roused him and dragged him outside for a little fresh air. We had the desert to ourselves on this chilly late September morning, not a tourist in sight. The big deal in these parts was the cactus bloom in the Spring. In the distance beyond the crest of a steep incline, an opening gaped in the side of a hilltop. A sign we'd passed suggested that it was the Lost Horse Mine. Joe Bananas, who had tagged along dutifully as we pushed up the rocky trail, hung back a tactful distance from Lou and me, studying the almost invisibly tiny flowers among the pebbles.

"What's it like, anyway?" I asked Lou, my words swallowed up in the broad wasteland.

He cleared his throat and shivered in the sunless chill. "First you get a kind of warm glow at the back of your skull and your face goes numb. Except for the end of your nose, which itches. And then you leave this world for a while." Lou stared up the hillside at the mine's black mouth, rubbing last night's needle-mark with his thumb.

I'd never taken Lou for an escapist. But perhaps too much worldliness could become a burden. He had played Cornsilk Academy like his own personal calliope all those years ago, but he never got to see the show himself. A master of the spectacular, what could amaze him?

A hawk circled overhead slowly, making precise turns above the fractured valley walls, then dropped from the sky and disappeared behind a jagged ridge fringed with gold. The air was warming and the Joshua trees cast long shadows across the expanse of the basin. I hadn't noticed the sunrise.

"I should have known better," I said. "I must have been smoking crack—no offense."

"None taken."

I stared into the desolation. The air was cool and sage-scented. "Well, it's not your fault. The Consortium was going to get me out of there one way or the other."

Lou pursed his lips sagely. He sighed, then cracked his back and two different places in his neck. "Now what?" he said thickly when he was done.

"Now nothing," I said. "The genie is out of the bottle. Or back in the bottle, more like it. There's no way we can stop Integrated Consciousness now."

Lou nodded. "We didn't have a blue moth's chance in a bug lamp."

"Not bad," I said.

"Came up with it a while back," he said, his mouth curling wryly. He tossed a rock into the valley, the sound of its impact swallowed in the rising wind.

I found myself surprisingly philosophical about the situation. I'd temped before, I could do it again. I'd grow a beard, put on some weight, change my name, assume a more modest lifestyle. It would be a relief not to have to be Andy Hunter all the time anymore. "I'm sorry to have brought you all the way out here for nothing," I said to Lou. "But it's been good seeing you. I mean that." I scratched my head. "I guess the best thing would be for you to drop me off at the San Bernardino bus station. You can pick up I-40 there and that'll take you to I-57, and that goes right to I-70."

"San Bernardino," he said slowly as if he wasn't sure what the words meant.

"That was the terminus of Route 66, too, remember?"

Lou shook his head. "Wait a minute. We can't just give up."

"Why not? Why not cut our losses? I'll just go somewhere they've never heard of IC and live quietly. Write a novel or something."

Lou creaked to his feet. "I can't believe I'm hearing this," he said. "Did we cut our losses when the guards at the Governor's Mansion towed our car before we could unload the props?" His outraged face gave the answer. "What about when the Forty-Second Street Smurfs had us boxed in?"

"Well, that time we weren't really in a position to cut our losses," I said. "I wish we had been, though." I rubbed my jaw ruefully.

"Yeah? Then we never would have ended up at that gun show, and you never would have met Evel Knievel. Or did you forget that part?"

I had to laugh. "Yeah, that was pretty good. But that was a long time ago. Right now, I'll tell you, Lou, I can't see it. The shape you're in, the shape I'm in, I just don't think it's possible."

"That's exactly what I'm talking about. Since when did you ever not think something was possible? What happened to the Andy Hunter I used to know?"

"He got wise," I said. The wind picked up, gusting from the direction we'd come.

He shifted his stance. "All right look," he said. "I'll admit we got off to a bad start here. I'll take the responsibility for that. But you know as well as I do that this Integrated Consciousness thing is going to be the death of you. You're still having the dream, aren't you?"

A gecko appeared on the trail and stared at me while I pondered Lou's words. My stomach sank. I had no choice. I had to destroy Integrated Consciousness or perish in the attempt. It didn't look good either way.

"I thought so. Listen, you called me last week for a reason. You know that when we put our heads together there's nothing we can't do. Am I right?"

I'd never agreed less but it seemed absurd to argue. "I guess I'm in," I said without optimism.

"Onward," he said, rubbing his hands. Joe Bananas eyed me from atop his boulder, concern written in his hairy face. The wind moaned through the valley and up the hill toward the Lost Horse Mine.

A tumbleweed came rolling up the trail, skipping so lightly that it seemed to be floating on air. As it neared I noticed a flash of color among its spidery dendrites. Lou snatched a scrap of paper from the passing flurry of wind and branches. It was a Bazooka Joe comic strip. Joe is a prospector who hasn't found any gold, and so can't pay his landlord. The landlord says he'll give him two days to pay the rent. "Great!," says Joe. "I'll take the Fourth of July and Christmas!" The tumbleweed continued up the trail. When it reached the mouth of the abandoned mineshaft, it skipped over the barricade and disappeared into the dark cavity.

"I reckon we should give some thought to our finances," Lou said, rolling up his sleeves. I winced to see the dull purple lines.

"Sure," I said. "Four hundred bucks isn't going to last us very long and it's safe to assume Blanston's not going to be interested in paying any ransom."

Lou went pale.

"You do have the four hundred bucks, right, Lou?" I asked uneasily.

"Can't you get your hands on some dough?" he hedged. "I thought you were the richest guy in nine counties or something."

"What, use an ATM? Why not just send a telegraph to Blanston telling him where we are?"

"See the thing is," said Lou, "that ransom money was practically in the bag. It was the perfect plan."

"What did you do with the money, Lou?"

He took a breath and sighed heavily. "I didn't know how long we were going to be out of town." He glanced at his bruised forearm, then at me.

"That guy at Il Pirata?"

Lou nodded sadly.

"That's just beautiful. You'd better hope it suppresses your appetite, since it doesn't look like we'll be eating any time soon."

"At least we've bottomed out right away," Lou pointed out.

"You're right," I said. "We've got nowhere to go but up."

A pawn shop not far from the motel gave me an idea. "We'll sell the guy a bona fide Andy Hunter autograph," I told Lou. "I almost never use pen and ink, so a real paper signature would be worth something like five thousand dollars. At least that's what I've heard." I didn't want to admit how often I'd checked the item's value at auction. Lou showed little enthusiasm for the idea but said he'd follow my lead.

The sun was high overhead when we got to the pawn shop, a squat, dust-colored building with an asphalt apron in front and a dumpster behind across the street from a discount tire outlet. The windows were covered with chicken-wire and painted from behind with yellow paint. The customary three balls dangled over the barred door. "Just hang tight, buddy," I told Joe, who didn't look happy to be left in the car. "We'll get some breakfast—some lunch anyway—as soon as we're done in here."

The inside of the place was dim and cluttered with row upon row of electric guitars and shotguns hanging from the ceiling, the walls hung with cameras and cuckoo clocks behind glass-topped counters full of watches, knives, and wedding rings. An angry-looking man poked his head out of a dark doorway to see who'd tripped his electric eye buzzer. "Buying or hocking?" he barked.

I felt ridiculous before I even opened my mouth. "Good morning, sir," I began, feigning arrogance. "I've come into possession of a certain item I think will interest you."

"Can't tell if I'm interested if I can't see the damn thing," he said, and spat on the floor. He was a short, barrel-chested man of about sixty missing most of his left arm. "Out with it."

I looked to Lou but he didn't have any moral support to spare. I placed a square of paper on the countertop and smoothed it out importantly. "This, my friend, is a document bearing the original, hand-signed signature of—"

"Don't handle autographs. What else you got?"

"Not even the autograph of someone as important as Andy Hunter?" I said importantly.

"Who?" he snapped.

I flinched. "He's a major, major—."

"It could be J. Edgar Hoover's dry cleaning check, I told you no autographs," said the pawnbroker.

His eyes bored holes into my skull and drained the ideas right out. The old man drummed the fingers of his remaining hand on the countertop. The other sleeve was fastened with a large pink-headed safety pin, the type one would use on a diaper. I heard Lou take a sharp breath. To the pawnbroker's right, a clump of brown fur was visible behind the counter. It bobbed from side to side, rose briefly as Joe Bananas shot me a wink, then dropped out of sight. Apparently the chimp had grown restless in the car.

"Ah yes, of course," I sputtered, desperate to retain the man's attention. "What I meant to say is that this particular autograph has such great value, intrinsically, due to its highly unusual, the circumstances ..."

A hand appeared on a shelf behind the pawnbroker, followed by three more as Joe Bananas scaled the display case. In his mouth was a cornet clenched sideways like a buccaneer's saber. When the chimp reached the ceiling, he pushed open a skylight window and disappeared onto the roof as Lou coughed noisily.

"Say, that's some lamp you've got there," I said with a desperate gesture at a stained-glass shade on the other side of the store. "Tiffany?"

"Nah, just a knock-off," he said, easing up a little. "You want to see a nice lamp, take a look over here." He limped out from behind the horseshoe-shaped counter and led me to a metal floor lamp with three bullet-shaped fixtures near the door. "Straight out of Sinatra's place in Palm Springs."

"That's really—Hey," I blurted as I felt a pointy object being slipped into my pocket. The chimp dodged my kick and disappeared again. "Hey, now that's an interesting lamp! Lou, you see this lamp over here?"

"Hmm?" Lou had moved to a position directly across from the cash register, and his face was flushed.

The pawnbroker eyed Lou warily, then walked slowly back to the counter. "You fellas got business or not?"

"Well there's always—" A sudden crash interrupted Lou as Joe Bananas came bolting out from behind a tabletop assortment of porcelain figurines that cascaded after him to the floor, and shot out the door before the china had finished splintering.

"Joe!" I cried. "I mean—what's that monkey doing in here?" The pawnbroker was over the counter in a flash, his back to the front door, with a sawed-off shotgun in his single hand trained on my tender belly. "Easy, easy," I pleaded, "we're unarmed!" Lou snorted unfortunately behind me. The old guy didn't share his sense of humor.

"Listen," the pawnbroker began menacingly, "I don't know what you two are up to but it's all over now. Let's step into the office and talk this over, shall we?"

It was touch and go for a while. The guy wasn't all that curious about the chimp. His main concern was the damage to his merchandise. We handed over our remaining thirty-nine dollars and my ATM card, which gave us little time to get out of town before my digital counterpart scented our location.

Joe was sitting in the driver's seat of the Cutlass when we finally got out of the pawn shop, turning the wheel this way and that, smoking a stogie he must've lifted inside.

"Cigars, Joe?" I said, nonplussed. "That's such a cliché."

The sun was now high in the sky. I surveyed the barren landscape, my mind blank and tired. Behind me Lou's stomach groaned long and low.

I asked my father about my mother once.

It was a couple of years after I'd left Indianapolis. We'd exchanged a couple of short letters, mine telling him I'd decided to skip the rest of high school and go right to work, his responding that it was probably for the best—he was pretty disillusioned with academia after so many years in the system—but beyond that our relationship had continued its decline into a persistent vegetative state. I didn't blame him for lying about the accident at Brown Lake, still too confused to blame anyone but myself for anything, but my questions remained. Eventually the curiosity got to me. I told the temp agency I needed a couple of days off for a family emergency and added a plane ticket to my towering personal debt.

Dad had really let the house go to seed. The lawn was patchy and yellowing as if it had been left too long without mowing and then cropped too close. The paint on the shutters was peeling. One end of the gutter hung loose from the eaves, revealing the rotting leaves and pine needles that choked its craw. Advertising circulars littered the front walk.

I pushed the doorbell then knocked firmly seven times and waited. The front door rattled a couple of times before opening. He looked surprised to see me. "Hello Son," he said through the screen.

"Dad, I have a question." He nodded, smiling tentatively, almost shyly. His hair had gone entirely white since I'd seen him, even his eyebrows. His painfully familiar eyes registered fatherly affection that made me want to turn away. I took a deep breath. "What really happened to Mom? I know she didn't drown."

He recoiled, then recovered. He looked at my shoes. "Oh Son," he said with unexpected warmth. He reached out, his fingertips resting on the screen. "I know how you must feel. It's hard. I miss your mother as much as you do, I do. She was a remarkable, wonderful woman, the best you or I will ever know." The corners of his eyes were deeply lined.

"But sometimes things just happen and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't figure. It's so hard to accept that you don't accept it. You make up a story that makes more sense and you believe that one. It doesn't make any real difference; what's done is done. But it makes a big difference in the way you feel.

"I've done it myself, Son, so I'm not blaming you. I would never judge you for it. But at the end of the day you're better off coming to terms with reality. It hurts, but it gets better." He lowered his hand from the screen and a sad expression came over his face. "Your mother drowned, Son." His voice was thick with compassion. "And whether there's a heaven or not, at least she's free from the pain of this world."

I didn't know what to say. He was speaking from the heart, but I knew better and he must have, too. At least I assumed so.

Someone was hammering and a guy across the street was trying to get his lawnmower started.

"She was the world to me," Dad said after a couple of minutes. "She still is. She loved me enough in the time we were together to last the rest of my life." He was still standing there looking out the screen door when I got back in the rental car and drove away.

I never found out just why my mother left my father, or who she'd really been. I was left with the clues I'd unearthed years ago. Her passport, which I found in a shoebox in the back of the financial closet, was riddled with visas for Mexico, France, and a few places that didn't exist anymore. In a little cubbyhole in the eaves, accessible through the back of the guest room closet, I found a playbill for a production of Ionescu's "Rhinoceros" starring a woman named Amanda Stone, together with a handful of head shots and cast photos showing a much younger, black-and-white version of my mother. These were in a small steamer trunk among a collection of souvenirs that spoke of solo travel—gift shop curios, post cards, torn museum tickets, bus tokens. Another photograph, this one tucked into a hardback collection of Ring Lardner short stories, shows a young woman with slender legs and fair hair. She's leaning against the fender of a low black car with her arm around some guy with an out-of-focus face, a crew cut, and a Pepsodent smile. She has a cool, disdainful pout on her lips but her eyes are acting up like a flower girl at a Catholic wedding. The guy doesn't look like he's in on the joke.

My mother had been an adventuress. She'd passed through Dad's life on her way from where she'd been to where she was going, leaving me behind as a memento. She'd outdone herself by lingering as long as she had. I couldn't hold it against her.

"Operation Chew-and-Screw here we come," said Lou under his breath as we opened the diner door. The restaurant was mostly empty; everyone with somewhere to be had already finished lunch, scattered their chairs, and gone. Chipped plates with drying scabs of ketchup, gravy, and egg yolk sat waiting for one more trip through the dishwasher. On the end of the counter was a battered cash register, drawer ajar, with No Sale showing in the window.

Lou guided us to a red vinyl booth adjacent to the door with a clear view of the car, its windows open and doors unlocked. I saw Joe peek up from under the dashboard and motioned for him to stay hidden. The chimp was turning out to be more of a handful than I'd anticipated.

An Air Force guy of thirty-five or forty was sipping 7UP through a straw and working on a word puzzle on a chrome stool at the counter. A shiftless twenty-something in the booth next to ours nursed a bottomless cup of coffee while reading somebody else's left-behind newspaper. The tag on his off-duty workshirt identified him as Roy. The waitress came over and stood before us, a tan, rangy creature with chestnut hair and a small scar or birthmark on her cheek. She told us her name was Brenda and waggled her pen above the order pad. "You guys need to see menus?" she asked in a flat voice.

"You have grilled cheese, right?" Lou asked her. She nodded. "Grilled cheese, extra crisp, don't cut it in half. Cup of black coffee."

She turned to me. "Same," I said. "But I don't mind if it's sliced or not. And throw in an egg salad wrapped to go for later." I gave her Andy Hunter smile number four. She raised a vague eyebrow, snapped her gum with her mouth open, then spun and went back to the counter, clipped our check into the stainless steel order-go-round, rang the bell. She looked like she had a head on her shoulders.

Lou was absorbed in the mini-jukebox thing bolted to the windowsill beside the condiments and the napkin dispenser, turning the pages with a metallic flapping noise and reading off a few available selections: "Crimson and Clover," "Mack the Knife," "The Night Chicago Died." Then he flopped back in the booth. His eye fell on Roy, who was drumming on his table and staring into space.

Lou cleared his throat and tipped his head at me. I responded wordlessly. He moved sideways in his seat and threw his arm over the back, hitting Roy in the head.

"Sorry there, kid," he said gruffly.

Roy nodded, rubbing the back of his head. "No big deal," he said.

"Anyhow Frink, like I was saying in the car," Lou said loudly, "we just don't know the area well enough. Somebody from here, they could probably find it in an afternoon. But we don't stand a chance. We might as well give up on that million bucks."

I smiled. I hadn't heard the name Frink in years, not since Lou had used it to give false information one hazy night back in Indy. The kid was definitely listening; I could see heat waves radiating from his ears. Lou motioned me on. I cleared my throat. "Yeah, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack out here. We couldn't find a B-52 out there, much less a flying saucer. This desert could be the surface of Mars for all I know."

"Hell, maybe that's what brought them out here," Lou said with a chuckle. "Maybe the little green critters were homesick."

"At least the place isn't all sealed up like Area 51. At least we're free to try to find the crash site."

"If we could find it. But I'm telling you, it's no use," Lou said. "We—Oh, hello." Brenda the waitress had brought our coffee. Her long legs glided smoothly under her short starched skirt as she walked back to the counter. A daisy chain was tattooed around one ankle. Roy was watching her too. "No article, no photos, no book contract, no movie rights. We had it all right there within reach and it slipped away because we don't know the area better. What a waste of a golden opportunity." Suddenly I realized where Lou was going. Our impromptu gag was a potential money making venture. My pulse quickened.

"Excuse me," the kid said over the back of Lou's seat. "I was just sitting over here, and I couldn't help—"

"Eavesdropping?" Lou snapped. "What do you think you heard?"

"Well," Roy said, gathering his nerve. "Can I come over there? See," he said, settling in beside Lou with a determined look on his face. "I thought you said something about, about being able to make a lot of money, if only you knew the area better. And, see, I grew up here, and I know these parts as well as about anybody. Now, I don't know what it is you all are, are looking for, but whatever it is, you know," he shrugged.

"What? You find it? Forget it, kid," Lou said.

"Now Jeff, don't be too hard on him," I said to Lou. "He doesn't know. Look, son—can I call you Roy? Roy, it's probably nothing anyway. A crazy story we were supposed to check out. But it's probably all bunk anyway. Foolishness."

Lou put his hand on Roy's shoulder and drew him near. "Look, you've already heard too much. None of it matters anyway. We're washing our hands of the whole business. You're better off just pretending you never saw us. Just walk away and go back to your regular, everyday life. This is nothing you want to get involved with." Lou was even slicker than I remembered, a ruthless directness to his technique. He had Roy dancing on a string in moments, pleading to be let in on the secret but getting only rebukes. Finally Lou decided the kid had had enough. "Tell him," he said in a resigned voice.

"You see, Roy, we're freelance journalists," I said. "Well, investigators is probably more like it. The unknown is our specialty. We go after the stories nobody else dares touch, and bring them back alive for our readers. But this time we've met our match. Our editor heard from a reliable, highly placed source about a ... well, a crash near here. But it was no plane that went down. Let's just say it was first sighted in the vicinity of Groom Lake. Not far from Roswell." Roy gasped. I nodded significantly.

"Groom Lake? That's not two hundred miles from here ... piss up a rope, man, are you shittin' me?" He threw himself back in his seat and cocked a skeptical look. "You're full of shit."

"Look, kid," Lou said tiredly, "All right. We're full of shit. He made it all up to entertain you, and now the show's over. Now will you get out of here and leave us in misery? Punk."

Roy swung his head. "I can't fuckin' believe it, a real fuckin' UFO. That's what you're talking about, isn't it? A guy'd be famous. How much money did you say? Damn, man."

He was still oscillating between credulity and doubt when Brenda arrived with our food. I was famished, not having eaten since an In-n-Out Burger the previous night in Palm Springs, and I tore into the sandwich. Roy was practically levitating with impatience. I washed down the last bite with a long drink of coffee still hot enough to melt the cheese stuck to my teeth, dabbed my mouth with a napkin, and put Joe's egg salad sandwich in my jacket pocket. Then I told Roy about the sightings and the explosion and the wall of silence quickly raised by the government as it pursued its own investigation. "A blue-ribbon panel of flying saucerologists determined that the wreckage of the craft is somewhere near here and one of them leaked it to a source of ours. All we had to do was find the crash site and document it and we'd blow the whole thing wide open. And we couldn't do it."

"And that," said Lou, "is why we're getting the hell out of this stinking desert and getting back to somewhere civilized."

Roy leaned forward urgently, looking from me to Lou and back again. "But maybe I can find it myself. You guys are done with it—fine. But tell me where to look, give me a shot at it! I may not be some kind of journalist but I bet I could make pretty good use out of a real-life flying saucer!"

"You'd be wasting your time, kid," Lou said.

"You don't understand. I mean, I spend so much time out there I know every rock and tree. I'll find it all right. Tell you what. I'll give ... I got ... I got eighty-nine bucks right here and—AND—I'll put your lunch on my tab!"

As Roy's little heart pounded in the palm of our hand I felt a stab of guilt. In his pathetic faith I saw my own earnestness before the fall. Taking his money didn't trouble me as much as the realization that we were sending him to wander the wilderness following a light in the sky that would turn out to be the Phoenix-L.A. Shuttle. Our slim story couldn't possibly have succeeded on its merits alone; clearly the prospect of a downed UFO within a day's walk of Twenty-nine Palms resonated with some wish that had lain dormant and benign in Roy's sunken chest until this moment. The story was painfully familiar. I felt as if we were handing him a red rubber nose and a pair of oversized dwarf shoes. Uneasy at the cynicism of our ploy I turned to Lou, but saw in his face not rapaciousness, but rapture. He was drinking in Roy's enthusiasm like the sweet water of an oasis spring.

Then the diner door opened. Roy looked up. The guy was in his late thirties or early forties, thinning hair, hands in his jacket pockets. I hoped he wasn't Roy's father. To my consternation he came right over and sat down right next to me. "Roy," he said matter-of-factly.

"Hey, Jerry," the kid said. "These here fellas are investigators," he added as if that explained something. We introduced ourselves reluctantly when it became apparent that Jerry wasn't going anywhere. He signaled Brenda over. Roy looked as eager as we were to conclude our business and fidgeted constantly.

"Take a taco salad, Brenda," Jerry said.

"You still on that, Jerry?" she asked him.

"I am at that," he said. "You know, none other than the Secretary of Defense is on the taco salad diet."

"And he looks great," said Brenda with a shrug. She turned to Roy, who was still squirming restlessly. She pointed her pen at him. "What about you?" she said. "Still doing the new beef buzz?"

"No, it started to catch up with me," he said, and blushed. "You know. Downstairs." The other two laughed, and he smiled. "It was good for my reading though. Hell, I could have been in two or three different magazine clubs at the same time!"

I was appalled. It was the kind of Integrated Consciousness claptrap that had once been music to my ears. Next they were going to talk about the jitterbug revival and the gossip from last night's award show and Kava Kava. Here, all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere. I could only be thankful they had failed to recognize me. But why would they expect to find Andy Hunter in their midst, having a late lunch and talking about flying saucers? The thought was far out of bounds, even for me.

Roy was getting more and more agitated. When Brenda left with Jerry's order, he burst. "Jerry man, what do you know about a UFO crash near here not too long ago?"

Lou shook his head sadly. The thought flashed through my mind that we could make a break for it, but we were both pinned on the inside of the booth. I stole an envious glance at Joe Bananas dozing in the Cutlass.

Jerry looked us over before answering. "Well I don't know, Roy. Do you know something?" he said. Roy spilled the beans breathlessly in one long sentence without a single comma. When he had finished, Jerry leaned back and exhaled slowly. He felt his shirt pockets for cigarettes, remembered he'd quit. "You back on those mushrooms, Roy?" he said instead. Roy stammered indignantly

"Investigators huh," Jerry went on. "You must think it's nothing but hicks and desert rats out here, fall for anything."

"You've changed, Jerry," Roy blurted. "Man, there was a time you woulda jumped on something like this. Back when your newsletter was cool and not just a bunch of city council goings on and land use and such."

"You're probably right, Roy," said Jerry sternly. "And that's exactly the point. You've got to stick with the program, Roy. Stay focused on your goals. You can't go running off after nonsense all the time. Aren't you saving money for that Spring Break Blowout in Cancun next year? And what about paying for your skateboarding lessons? You didn't give these guys any money, did you?"

"They're not lessons," said Roy. "He's my coach." He tensed a moment, then slumped back into his seat. "You're right. Sorry, guys. I'm out."

Lou turned to me and urged me on with his eyes. Then he urged me on with the heel of his shoe on my foot. I jumped and yelped.

Jerry paused his dissertation to Roy on the virtues of application. "Excuse me?"

As I groped for words I felt something sharp in my pocket. It was the thing Joe had slipped me at the pawn shop. I'd forgotten all about it. It felt like a flat piece of metal with a slim handle of some kind attached to one end, tapering to a point at the other. I took it out and held it in front of me, a small, dull gray object with a geometric design engraved in the middle. "What about this?" I said. Lou raised his head. The other two leaned in for a closer look. "It was found near the suspected crash site. Scientific analysis has shown this to be made of a metal previously unknown to man. The engravings appear to be—"

"My God," Jerry whispered. He was staring at the thing, oblivious to my spiel. He reached out and snatched it from me, and ran his fingertip lightly across the engraving. "It's been years ... Ma'at-neb-men-aa, Ma'at-ba-aa," he said to himself. Feeling our eyes on him, he put the thing on the table between us. "Great is the established Master of Freemasonry, Great is the Spirit of Freemasonry," he quoted. "This is a sacred trowel of the Knights Templar of the Ancient and Justified Order of the Blue Lodge, the oldest and least known of the Masonic sects. It was founded more than four thousand years ago in the time of Sequenere Tao II, the great king at Thebes. This thing, it's ... I never imagined ..." He looked at us in wonder, and shot a cautious glance at the Air Force guy at the counter, who was paying up and getting ready to leave.

"I used to know a lot about this kind of thing," Jerry explained, suddenly self-conscious. Then his eyes returned to the dingus and he got riled up again. "And all this time, right under our noses," he said. "If what you're saying is true—that this was found near an alien crash site—then that would mean that thousands of years ago, that it was the Freemasons ..." He began again. "It's been said that the death and resurrection rites of Osiris were actually taught to the Egyptian priestly caste by extraterrestrials. But if it wasn't the priests, but the masons, the builders of the Temple, who were in contact with visitors from another planet ... that would explain how they came to establish their secret dominion—in cahoots with an alien force beyond human understanding."

Brenda the waitress had come over while Jerry was speaking and now stood mesmerized, taco salad in hand. Through the window I saw Joe watching our little drama from the front seat of the car, eating a bag of potato chips that I couldn't account for.

"Gentlemen, it appears likely that an unholy pact with extraterrestrials has enabled the Freemasons to keep the world under their thumbs for thousands of years." Jerry looked into our faces. His eyes shone. "I was wrong to abandon my responsibilities as a seeker of truth. If only that anger management counselor had never introduced me to Integrated Consciousness, that lotus patch of complacency. I allowed my vigilance to lapse and missed concrete evidence of a truly monstrous conspiracy right under my very nose. But no more!"

Brenda put the taco salad down on the table and put her hands on her hips. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Roy and me are going to go out and find ourselves a flying saucer." Roy beamed, and the two clasped shoulders.

"Do you want to come with us?" Roy asked Brenda suddenly with a nervous smile.

"Sure, why not?" she said. "My shift's just about over anyway."

They piled their cash in the middle of the table and pushed it over to me. "Now tell me where you found this," Jerry said in a stern voice.

"Do you know the Lost Horse Mine?" I asked him, still trying to catch up with what was going on. All three nodded. "It was around there somewhere."

Lou and I netted two hundred and seven dollars and a free meal. We were lucky—Jerry had been on his way to the bank with his recycling money.

We didn't speak for a while, just drove slowly around the Mojave. Now and then Lou would look over the back of the seat at Joe Bananas, who remained quiet and inscrutable, picking his teeth with a matchbook cover, the cornet sitting on the seat beside him. I scanned the rough-hewn ochre hills and crags around us for places they might choose to hide and repair their craft.

Chapter Nine: Night Mission to Alcatraz