A Burned-Over District

By Charles Hibbard

An alien spaceship touches down in the sage brush near a small mountain town – or does it? Some in the town of Mildred think the spooky apparition is a message from Heaven, a futuristic weapons test, or maybe just a prank. In the view of the town's resident fundamentalist secular humanist, the town has gone nuts, and it's his duty to hold back the flood of crazy ideas while simultaneously changing diapers, visiting his ex-mistress, and tending to his dying cat. Not to mention that's he's recently begun to believe in his own mortality...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Hibbard
• Release date: Jan 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311243195

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Hibbard 161

A Burned-Over District

Charles Hibbard

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Charles B. Hibbard

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Chapter 1

It may have been a coincidence that the whole thing got started at the annual Christmas Eve basketball game, Mildred High School vs. Ten Spot. The game has become quite a town tradition. It’s preceded by a chicken supper, the chickens being barbecued, special sauce recipe, outside in the early winter dark on the freezing apron of the fire station by our very businesslike volunteer firefighters and then rushed in foil roaster trays to the school cafeteria, where they meet their potato salad and where most of the population of the two towns gathers to gossip, laugh, and eat. The game starts after the supper, at about 8, and when it’s over the kids shower and get dressed up and everybody goes off to Christmas Eve services, including the town’s two Jews, one Wiccan, several closet atheists and agnostics, and the gorgeous and very private Myrtle Bench, who’s rumored, in the absence of any solid information, to be both an atheist and a socialist. But the Christmas Eve service is mainly a social event, and only a few disapproving cranks worry that its flavor is too tolerant and inclusive.

This particular Christmas Eve, though, there was some tension in the air, as though the town were sensing the forward pressure of unusual events. The volunteer firemen were too exuberant with the charcoal, so that some of the chickens got blackened, which produced a bit of un-Christmasy grumbling in the cafeteria. There was also a little bad blood between the opposing teams, for the usual teenage reasons – hormones, male identity issues – and even between their parents, due to a long-simmering conflict over duck-hunting territories.

Mildred High, impeccably coached by my very competent wife, Lu, won the game easily, as usual. The Ten Spot players got frustrated, and there was some shoving and trash-talking on the floor, which moved outside after the kids showered and got into their church duds. Lu, by that time occupied with our baby, Albert, was not in a position to assert much control over her players, so Principal Shivwits and I were attempting to insert our weak, out-of-shape bodies between scuffling pairs of massive ranchers’ boys, all of us slipping and sliding on the snow-encrusted asphalt of the parking lot, when the lights appeared over the western mountains.

It was after 10 o’clock, the darkness was nearly total, there was no moon, and the mountains were merely a slightly deeper blackness against the sky. You could pick out the jagged line of peaks only because the vast desert canopy of stars suddenly ended there. I’m trying to be very accurate and objective.

Our attention was drawn upward from the roiling basketball players and pudgy authority figures who were trying valiantly to break the thing up to the two very bright lights that suddenly appeared slightly above the sawtooth rim of the mountains, one an ethereal translucent green, the other purest white. (Some observers claim the lights did not, in fact, appear suddenly; that they actually grew into being from the darkness, or even arrived, trailing pointed wakes of light or clouds of glory, like cartoon superheroes. I did not see either of those effects. I merely looked up and the lights were there.) The two lights moved very slowly downward, then appeared to hover, gradually separating and growing brighter. They were much brighter than any star or planet or airplane running lights I’ve ever seen, but it was their very deliberate motion that surprised us all; the way they first lowered themselves and then paused, almost as though they were observing our little Christmas Eve dustup. Parnell, who had emerged reluctantly from retirement funk to attend his 30th chicken supper, later used the word piloted to describe their motions. But Parnell has built a career and a lifestyle on what he calls stirring up shit. The fight ended abruptly, as everybody stopped to watch. Suddenly the lights were above us (again, no one was quite sure how they got there so fast), moving eastward at a supernatural speed and leaving distinct trails of light, or scintillations that could be romantically described as stardust. They hovered briefly again to the east of us, over the deeper darkness of Devil’s Table, then gradually lowered themselves toward the top of that broad plateau and winked out. (Later, some of the onlookers would claim they heard a hissing or ripping noise as the lights passed over us, and also the distant thump of an impact on Devil’s Table as the lights disappeared. I did not hear either of those things. Or I don’t think I did.)

We all looked at each other. "What do you think that was? Javier Shivwits asked me. Matt Matawan said, It looked like they landed up on Devil’s Table." A few people, including me, laughed. The fistfight was over, so we all went off to church.

Chapter 2

It’s not an easy thing for a man to have a wife who’s a better basketball player than he is. I’d like to think my 3-point shot is more dependable than Lu’s, and maybe I’m a better ball handler, but only because I’m closer to the ground. Outside those two areas, though, every comparison is strongly in her favor. She’s taller than I am, just as fast, a creative passer, runs the court better, and has a deadly jumper from anywhere inside 15 feet, along with a couple of devastating spin moves in the low post. She makes up for the supposed female lack of upper body strength with her long arms and a great pair of hands. She’s also an infinitely smarter player than I am, with marvelous court vision and an almost magical intuition for what’s going to happen next, which in turn allows her to make things go the way she wants them to. Plus she’s 15 years younger than I am.

I met her on a basketball court in San Francisco, in fact, and fell in love with her the first time I guarded her, or rather failed to guard her. Partly it was the authority and grace of her game, but also I discovered that the old defensive admonition to put a body on him acquired a whole new dimension when him was a her, even a her as long and lean as Lu. At that time, though, Lu was the girlfriend of Kermit the Bus Driver, who had introduced her to our regular Sunday morning game. I admired her hopelessly for a year of Sundays – among other superiorities, Kermit the Bus Driver was a much better player than I am – before Kermit decided to move to Seattle, where bus driver health benefits were better, and Lu declined to accompany him. I never asked why. She continued to attend the Sunday morning games, and, to my surprise, our basketball friendship blossomed into something more. I was particularly attracted to her level-headedness and businesslike approach to life, which I thought complemented my own rather scattershot methods. I’m still not sure what attracted her to me – possibly she’s got a thing for body hair, or maybe she thought she needed a little more cynicism and weirdness in her life. Or maybe it was just that she was beginning to sense that she wasn’t a girl any more, she wanted babies, and I was the only male in sight who seemed interested enough to make the required commitment. I recently saw somewhere that women can read, in the faces of men, which ones will make devoted fathers. I’m not saying that’s what Lu read in my face, however.

Though she’d survived in San Francisco for years, Lu was never really happy in the city. Her father had been a Pennsylvania coal miner. While he spent most of his life hacking out a poor living in the gloomy cities a couple of thousand feet under the ground, his family lived in a small town on the surface, where his three kids grew up roaming the deceptively picturesque hills in the sunshine far above his head. Lu had a deep need for open skies and clean air, doubtless acquired by watching her blackened and weary old man emerge from the narrow tunnels every evening to receive, in summer at least, his brief ration of daylight. Alone among her siblings she’d made it to college, and later migrated to San Francisco, looking for excitement. There she’d found Kermit the Bus Driver and later me. But San Francisco, though it certainly wasn’t Newark, was too gray and dirty and had too many buildings for her taste. She regularly dragged me with her on long backpacking trips to the mountains, ignoring my city-boy grumblings. On one or two occasions we camped not far from the little mountain town of Mildred. A couple of years went by, and one day Lu, browsing the Internet, saw a listing for a social studies teacher at Mildred High School.

By the time we moved to Mildred, about four years ago, some fault lines were opening in our marriage. For one thing, despite our move to what Lu considered prime child-rearing country, the babies did not immediately arrive. By then Lu was in her late 30s and getting seriously worried. As for me, after a year or two of marriage the level-headedness I had originally admired in her had begun to look more like a rather boring predictability. By that time, in fact, about the only place she could ever surprise me was on the basketball court. Except of course for the sudden outbreak of her Christianity, which struck like a sort of eruptive skin condition, causing her to welcome Jesus into her life, into our lives that is, become very active in Mildred’s small but spunky Presbyterian congregation, sometimes pray out loud at embarrassing moments, devotedly visit the lame, blind, halt, and sick, and give away large portions of our small income to various deserving causes and sometimes to less deserving (in my opinion) individuals. Accompanying and perhaps not unconnected to her sudden religious fervor was what I considered an unrealistic increase in procreative pressure – the sort of stress that can have unpredictable effects on the performance and behavior of a man in his mid-50s.

The affair of the basketball team stretched things to near the snapping point. Though Lu had taught math in San Francisco, there had been no job for her when we’d moved to Mildred, and time had soon begun to lie heavy on her hands. She’d been able to land a part-time job on the morning shift of the PetroMall, a combination gas station, convenience store, and gourmet deli that sat at Mildred’s only real intersection, between the main highway and one not so main. In the summer she folded and reshelved sweatshirts there and made sandwiches for busloads of German tourists. In the winter there wasn’t a lot to do other than chat with the deli manager, Antonio, and the other guys who manned the counter. But that left her free through all the long afternoons. I don’t know what she did with her time. There was the church, of course, and I know she hung out a lot with Janet Blythe and the glamorous Myrtle Bench, both of whom taught at the high school and so were sometimes free in the late afternoons. As far as I could tell, though, all they did was gab and drink too much coffee.

In any case, I was too busy to pay much attention. When I moved from the urban educational jungle to Mildred High School, my contract, along with teaching history, economics, psychology, and study skills, had included coaching boys’ basketball. I also had volleyball in the spring, but nobody was very interested in that. Basketball, however, was taken quite seriously out there in the desert. Lu stood it for one season, watching my spirited but anarchic team rushing fruitlessly up and down the floor, before she brushed me aside and offered herself to Javier Shivwits, as basketball coach, that is. Javier Shivwits, although his main focus was on turning Mildred High School into an academic training ground for Ivy League colleges, was by no means blind to the role of athletics in fashioning the well-rounded high school transcript, and he accepted her offer immediately, trying to soften his betrayal by pointing out that at least that part of my paycheck wouldn’t be leaving the family.

In a way I wasn’t unhappy that Lu had found a project. On the other hand, it was more than a little humiliating to be replaced by her, especially when the team, which had played like a pack of psychotic greyhounds for me, immediately began to win. Not to mention that our positions had now been switched 180°. She was busy in the afternoons, while I found myself wandering the windy winter streets of Mildred without much to do. Of course, for a teacher there’s always grading; and sometimes, indeed, I would take my stack of papers to Stirling’s and sit there sighing with my green pen and a cup of coffee, getting the gossip from Patty Milano when she didn’t have too many customers to deal with. But I didn’t really like going straight from the classroom to my homework. More to the point, now that Lu was busy all afternoon, her friend Janet Blythe, Mildred High School’s Visual and Performing Arts teacher, was free. Sudden surplus of free time; mid-50s; unforeseen termination of athletic career, in which replaced by wife; performance anxieties occasioned by advancing age and failure to impregnate wife; declining interest in wife’s too-familiar, ingenuous body; unforeseen proximity to attractive Visual and Performing Arts teacher with dance training. You may connect the dots.

I’m going back over this history in order to explain why Lu felt it desirable, even a year after the end of my modest adventure, to accompany me on my weekly visits to Hathwell, California, where Janet Blythe had recently gone into hospice care. We were scheduled to take a festive dinner down there on Christmas Day, in fact, the day after the appearance of the strange lights in the night sky over Mildred. Lu didn’t officially know what had gone on between her friend and me, but she knew it involved physical attraction, and in keeping with her very literal worldview she was uncomfortable at the thought of the two of us alone together in a room with a bed, even a hospital bed.

You might think she wouldn’t be very anxious to visit this particular person; but if you’re a real Christian, what better opportunity to practice the Christian virtues of forgiveness and charity than to visit your husband’s terminally ill suspected ex-mistress on her bed of pain? There might even have been a certain satisfaction in visiting the ex-mistress with your husband’s squalling, drooling baby son slung over your shoulder. But knowing how seriously Lu took her moral precepts, I doubt that she would have allowed herself that particular pleasure.

On that Christmas morning Lu and I lay in bed late, huddling together in somewhat wary companionship and watching the room gradually fill with the gray light of the late sunrise. Both of us like to sleep with the window wide open, which can make it hard to get out of a warm bed on winter mornings, and this morning there was no hurry anyway. Plus we were reluctant to disturb Mervyn, our decrepit old cat, who had recently taken to sleeping between us again, now that various of his organs had begun to shut down. Albert, too, was sleeping in, exhausted by all the excitement and his unusually late bedtime.

Father MacGill seems to be taking those heavenly lights a little more seriously than I would have expected. He’s usually more hip than that. I was provoking her, of course, knowing it was a mistake but unable to resist. The Reverend had spent a few minutes at the midnight service in an impromptu speculation on the possible spiritual significance of such celestial fireworks. I knew Lu had also been excited by the lights, appearing as they had on Christmas Eve. It was the kind of sign that she would be unwilling to accept as accidental. I could feel the friendly double-bed atmosphere leaking away as I explained why I was sure the lights had been nothing more than a couple of meteors, or fragments of a single meteor, and wondered out loud why someone as rational and level-headed as Father MacGill could let himself go off on a supernatural excursion over them. As I’ve already mentioned, Lu’s religious trip is a bit of a sore point between us; but I’m not sure why I feel this need to crush her upbeat spiritual imaginings under my secular hobnails at every opportunity. I attribute some of my insistence to a distaste for the current resurgence of religious formulations that involve the bombing, beheading, cleansing, segregating, enforced pregnancy, or even just marginalizing of people who don’t share them. Although Lu herself is the kind of person who, if she finds an ant in the bathroom, carries it outside on a square of toilet paper to start a new life somewhere else. Mainly, though, I just find it annoying that so many people, including my own wife, seem to prefer convoluted heavenly interventionist scenarios for everyday events that are either completely random or have simple, natural explanations. My sober reasoning never sways Lu in the least, however. It only annoys her, and our marriage would undoubtedly be healthier if I could just quit trying to bore holes in her faith. But I only occasionally exercise that kind of restraint.

Well, maybe, was all she would concede, getting out of bed probably sooner than she would have wanted to and rearranging the blankets over Mervyn. She slipped her bathrobe on hastily in the icy air and padded away to get Albert up.

While Lu was at church for the second time in 12 hours, Albert and I battled over his breakfast. He sat in the highchair, still in his loungewear, and gestured spasmodically with the spoon I’d given him to practice with, like a vigorous but erratic symphony conductor. He didn’t like his pureed apricots that morning, for some reason, and he kept staring at me pointedly, then kicking his polar fleece legs and banging the heels of his pudgy hands on the tray of the highchair. Watching him, I wondered, not for the first time, where he’d come from – how something as alert and focused as Albert could have emerged from the void on the other side of conception. The genetic answer was simple enough: He looked like Lu, fortunately, and even his brown eyes, nominally inherited from me, had more than a touch of her superior directness. But the mere tracing back of the biological coding seemed wholly inadequate to explain the conundrum of his arrival. There’s somebody new in there, I thought, staring into his eyes, the eyes of a puzzled but shrewd and determined little animal. A quick learner. I wasn’t sure he belonged to the same species as his parents.

Resistance is futile, I told him. You will be assimilated. That is, you will become human, like it or not. He yelped and tried to fling the spoon across the kitchen but released at the wrong time, causing it to slam vertically into the floor.

When Lu got back, we packed up the moveable feast in the cooler and a lot of shopping bags, then loaded it all into our rickety Honda Civic, along with Albert and all his bodily necessities. We left Mervyn curled in the cave I’d constructed for him out of his old fake-fleece-lined bed, with a blanket for a roof and a heating pad on the floor. We didn’t like to leave him alone all day, because we had to turn his heating pad off, fearing that it would burn him up and the house down while we were gone. I’d created the cave