Nineteen fifty-seven. The numbers seemed to hang out before him in the thin mountain air. Yes, ten years on, in ’57, all this would look different and everything would have changed. Hell, ten years earlier, when he was only twenty, there was no European war and no Pearl Harbor and it was just the long legs of the Depression stretching ahead of them. Things could change fast. Look at him now, even. A couple days before, he’d been in Sullivan’s, watching Necky collapse out of view, and now here he was in some place he’d never dreamed, the sort of place you expect the cavalry to ride through, a landscape made for Randolph Scott or Gary Cooper, delivered here by a saintly colored family who didn’t ask him for a dime. And him a stinking pool hustler, a would-be actor. If he could set off like this in no time flat, meet people like the Stuarts, already feel like he’d walked out of an old skin, there’s no reason to think a whole nation couldn’t make a change, couldn’t turn a corner, if the right thing was presented under that nation’s collective noses.
Well, maybe his thinking was getting out ahead of himself. Or maybe it already had been. Really, these thoughts had been bubbling in his head in all the silent stretches as he rode with one stranger after another, never getting around to telling any of them the truth of the invariable question “What sends you west?” His story to them had been a sick aunt, his last living relative, in need of him now, a message by telegram, all malarkey. In truth he had three sisters, one of them still at home with his parents in Fort Wayne, and even both grandparents still alive on his mother’s side. He’d never spilled the beans on those nine shiny objects, on the people inside them, and instead his mind had raced forward, dreaming its dream.
All his thoughts out on the highway that morning became a jumble. If he could just put them down in some kind of order. He’d brought nothing to write with, and as long as he stood by the road with his thumb out to every passing car, the best he got in return were a few honks. With the sun nearing noontime, he was beginning to lose the thread, starting to dissipate. His mood soured, and with it, the people in their saucer-shaped airplanes soured a little as well. Maybe they wouldn’t take pity on the people of Earth. Maybe they’d look down on us once, sigh, and move on. Or worse, maybe they’d figure the best way to respond to our kind was complete annihilation, a rolling blue gas passing over every city and town, all life on this forsaken rock stumbling and gasping and then, whammo, out like a light.
Oh, boy. What he needed to do right now was get out of the sun awhile. Eat that sandwich. Maybe get some coffee in his system. And write his middle sister, Eileen, to tell her everything he’d been thinking the last two days. She’d understand. Eileen was a girl of big dreams, after all, a heavy reader married to a scholar of Shakespeare only two years her senior, a world traveler, really, having gone to London just last summer to survey the damage from all that bombing. He and Eileen had always been closest, she just a year under him, with Dolly and Mercedes so much older and younger, respectively. As kids they’d been best friends, and even when it was said by everyone that they’d grow apart for the natural reasons brothers and sisters do, that stage had never come. Surprising to think that only now a letter to her would come to mind. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, so alive with the inspiration of all this saucer business, he would have sat down and written her before leaving his apartment back in Chicago—which now, one realization tumbling over the other, seemed like a city he might never see again.
He ate the sandwich walking back into Boise proper and found a little stationery store that sold books and magazines on Bannock Street, where he asked the girl behind the desk, who had been reading the newspaper until he sauntered up with his goods, whether she’d heard anything new about the glowing objects seen by that navy pilot over the Cascades. “Glowing whats?” she said flatly, as if it weren’t a question. When he leaned on the desk with one elbow, all of a sudden happy to share the story with an interested party, she stopped him halfway through to say, “No, sir, I don’t think anybody around here’s heard of that.” And by the way her eyes wouldn’t look at his anymore, he knew he was finished talking.
But then he found a little diner where men in suits raced in and out, apparently with connections to the state capitol and its goings-on, and with a cup of coffee steaming next to him, he set down to writing Eileen, telling her everything. He started with how he hadn’t landed a part in the last year, how he’d lied—yes, lied to dear Eileen of all people—about the role in that production of Frankie and Johnny, which really he’d never even read for, how everything otherwise had been sliding downhill and his only living—how could he have lied to her about it?—had been at Sullivan’s pool hall, where he’d seen a pal of his—oh, let’s be honest; Necky was a loan shark, is what he was—fall dead just two nights ago, but that guess what, just guess what, he’d made a big decision in life, he was going to change everything, go in a new direction. He’d read about something really spectacular, something that made his heart race, something about a guy in a plane seeing these glowing lights, visitors from possibly another solar system when you think about it, and so he’d headed west, in Boise now—pretty view, Boise, wish you were here to see it—and in another day or so he’d be in Washington State, at Mount Rainier in fact, where the lights had been seen. Had she heard about them? The pilot said they looked like saucers. Get that? Glowing tea saucers in the sky. Well, anyway, he was going; he’d see what he could see, follow the direction life took him. Maybe he’d end up a lumberjack or a fisherman or whatever people did with themselves in that part of the country, but maybe—and here, really, Eileen, just think about it—maybe he’d see the saucers himself, or even the people inside them.
He was going to tell her then about what he thought would happen next, with the people inside ringing in a new age, an endless jubilee year where everything shined and hummed, but realized he’d already filled so many pages that these hopeful visions were going to be hard to fit into the envelope. So he signed it right there: Send you another letter once I’m settled, Ollie.
Envelope licked and sealed, tucked away for when he found a post office, he set back out to the highway with his thumb. Afternoon was dropping into evening. More cars were on the road. After half an hour of being ignored, he chased down a farm truck that slowed to a stop just ahead of him. The door popped open as he neared. Inside sat a wiry man with two days’ beard and clothes so sun-faded and threadbare Oliver felt guilty even asking him the favor of a ride. “It’s no trouble at all,” said the man. And once Oliver was up in the truck with the door slammed closed, he added, “I’m only going a couple miles outta town ’til tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Oliver said, and suddenly wanted back out of the truck. “What’s tomorrow?”
The man eased the rattly truck back onto the highway and cleared his throat. “Headed off for Tacoma. Brother’s getting married.”
“Tacoma, Washington?”
The little gray farmhouse really was only a couple miles out of town, in the jagged hills skirting the mountains. It was a tiny Sears house, with only two horses grazing in the wide scraggled field between it and the narrow winding dirt road they’d taken from the highway. The man eventually introduced himself as Saul Penrod and, without really speaking on the subject, made it clear that he’d be putting Oliver up for the night. And while this was more than a little strange, certainly, the thought of sleeping in something other than a moving vehicle was a pleasing one, and more important, the promise of a ride all the way to Tacoma—virtually his exact destination, as if this fellow had set off on a matched journey—felt like yet a fourth sign that a new path had been lit before him, that he had little choice as to continuing on or turning back.