If Norman Rockwell were looking for a classic American small town to represent the Southwest for his next Saturday Evening Post cover, he could do worse than Roswell. Under cotton-candy clouds and ball-of-butter sun in a sky so clearly blue that Hollywood simply had to be involved, Roswell and its thirteen or so thousand inhabitants (mostly white, maybe ten percent Mexican and Indian) nestled in a setting of sprawling desert and majestic mountains.
Right down to the manure-rich aroma wafting in from surrounding ranchlands, this was a typical farm community, though distinctly modern, with wide paved streets and flourishing industry (meat-packing plant, flour mill, creameries), and oddly similar to the District of Columbia in its preponderance of shade trees, handsome public buildings and flower-filled parks. Of course in Roswell, it was not granite, but adobe; not cherry trees, but cottonwoods; not memorials, but playgrounds. There was even a Pennsylvania Avenue, with a few Federal-style houses, though mingled with Queen Anne, Tudor, Prairie and more.
In fact, Maria her-Selff (who this morning I had dropped off at her car parked at the recreation area of Bottomless Lake) lived on Pennsylvania Avenue. But I had orders not to come around her place unless it was after dark and she knew I was coming and I left my car parked at least four blocks away and slipped in back. I knew an invitation when I heard one, and-what the hell-it wasn’t like this was the first time I was a back-door man.
Right now, however, the sun was high and hot, the air still and dry, and I had people to see, starting with the sheriff of Chaves County. A risky proposition, walking right up to the local law and introducing myself; wasn’t this the sort of tumbleweed town where they didn’t cotton to my kind around these here parts? Where the man with the badge gave prying strangers a choice between the noon outbound stage or a one-way ticket to Boot Hill? The only proposition riskier would be not seeing the sheriff, first.
The Chaves County Courthouse, on Main Street, was a neoclassical tan brick structure dating to 1912, the year New Mexico joined the Union. A green-tiled dome loomed imposingly over a massive entryway, and the interior sported equally impressive Greek-key-design tile floors, brass chandeliers and ornate plasterwork. But the adjacent office of the sheriff proved as shabby and nondescript as is customary, bulletin boards sporting Mexican, Indian and white suspects in unprejudiced array.
I wanted to keep things casual and unthreatening, so I’d dressed like a tourist, in a two-tone shirt-tan with blue collar and sleeves-and lightweight blue twill slacks and two-tone brown-and-white shoes. Taking off my straw fedora and slipping my sunglasses in my breast pocket, I checked in with a thin, young, dark-haired deputy-his name tag said Reynolds-and asked if I could see the sheriff, telling the kid briefly who I was.
“If this is a bad time,” I said, “I can make an appointment. I plan to be in Roswell for several days.”
“In all the way from Chicago, huh?” the deputy said. He had bright eyes and a ready toothy smile. “Fly into El Paso?”
“Sure did. Pretty drive up here.”
“Get a load of them white sands? That’s as close to Christmas as it gets around here.”
“Never saw anything like it. Low crime rate around these parts?”
He snorted a laugh. “About as exciting as pickin’ a flea off a dog.”
I had figured as much, as long as this was taking. Finally, the chatty deputy scooted his chair back, rose and checked with the sheriff, who saw me right away.
Sheriff George Wilcox stood to shake hands behind his tidy desk in his doorless cubbyhole off the main office, which was taken up by the booking area and his two deputies at their desks. In a short-sleeve khaki shirt with a badge and Apache-pattern tie, Wilcox was a sturdy-looking, square-headed, jug-eared lawman of maybe fifty-five; his dark white-at-the-temples hair rose high over dark careless slashes of eyebrow, and his large dark eyes were somewhat magnified by wire-rim glasses; blunt-nosed, with a wide, thin mouth, Wilcox had a no-nonsense manner, gruff but not hostile.
“What’s the nature of your business here, Mr. Heller?” he asked; his baritone was as sandswept as his county’s terrain.
I had already shown him my Illinois private investigator’s license and my Cook County honorary deputy sheriff’s badge; neither seemed to impress him much.
Settling into a wooden chair no harder than the expression the sheriff was giving me, I said pleasantly, “I’m doing some background research for a nationally known journalist.”
“Who would that be?”
“My client requested I keep that confidential.”
“Why?”
“Frankly, he’s got a controversial reputation and he doesn’t want people to be put off.” That was about as candid as I could afford to be.
Wilcox rocked back in his swivel chair, digesting that. Then he said, “What’s the nature of the article? You’re too late for Rodeo Days.”
“Sounds like that would’ve made a fun story, but this one’s fun, too. You know, this flying saucer fad, in all the papers a couple years now-my client’s doing a kind of wrap-up, sort of a postwar hysteria angle. Looking into the better-known of the so-called ‘sightings.’”
Wilcox said nothing; his eyes had gone cold, their lids at half-mast.
I pressed on: “You know, Roswell has a special significance-it’s the only time the Air Force officially recognized the existence of saucers; they even put out a press release saying the wreckage of a disk had been recovered.”
Wilcox was studying me the way a lizard looks at a fly.
“Anyway,” I said, shifting in the chair, crossing my legs, “I’ve come to see you for two reasons. First of all, I didn’t want to go poking around your town without you knowing.”
“Appreciate that,” he said, nodding slowly.
“Second, I’m hoping I can interview you, for the article. I understand this rancher, Mac Brazel, brought in some samples of the oddball debris, and that you’re the one who called in the Air Force…. You mind if I take a few notes?”
I was taking my small spiral pad from my right hip pocket.
“Put that back, son,” he said, waggling a thick finger. He wasn’t all that much older than me, not enough to be calling me “son,” anyway; but he made me feel about fifteen, in the principal’s office, just the same.
“Sheriff, if you don’t want to be quoted,” I said, the notebook still in hand, “I could still use some background information …”
“Mr., uh-Helman, was it?”
“Heller.”
“I’ll let you take a few notes, and you can use my name, too. This won’t take long.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The Air Force said that thing was just an air balloon. That first press release … three hours later, they said it was a mistake.”
“Well, uh, Sheriff, mistake or not, there was quite a fuss-you had to field phone calls from all around the world, I understand.”
He nodded again. “I sat up all night, taking calls from Germany, London, France, Italy, all kinds of places, and probably every state of the Union. I told ’em what I’m telling you: talk to the Air Force.”
“That what you’re advising me?”
“No.” His tone was firm but not unkind. “My advice to you would be, move on to the next flying saucer story on your list.”
“Why is that?”
He nodded toward the notepad in my hands. “Now I am going to insist you put that thing away.”
“All right.”
“Don’t quote me. Don’t paraphrase me.”
“Certainly.”
Wilcox sat forward and placed both his hands on the desk; his tone shifted to a flatly ominous one that would have seemed ridiculous if it hadn’t been chilling. He said, simply, “Don’t look into this or you’re going to have real trouble.”
“Trouble from you, Sheriff?”
“Not from me.”
“Who from?”
“That’s all I have to say, on or off the record. Do yourself a favor, son-move on.”
“But, Sheriff, my understanding is that you saw some of this strange debris, even handled some of it. Was this stuff really as weird as has been reported? Thin metal that goes back to its original shape, if you wad it up? Unearthly hieroglyphics?”
Wilcox stood, slowly, smiling as benignly as a Buddha. “I appreciate your courtesy, Mr. Heller, stopping by to let me know about your inquiry.”
There’s a stage out of town at noon; be on it.
I sighed, stood, sticking my pad in my back pocket, nodding to him. “Thank you for your time, Sheriff.”
On the way out, the chatty deputy called to me, “Mr. Heller! Where are you staying, should we need to get in touch with you?”
I went over to his desk. “I’m at the El Capitan Hotel.”
“Over the drugstore downtown,” Deputy Reynolds said, nodding, writing it down. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”
Then he extended his hand and I shook it, and felt a piece of paper there. His bright eyes narrowed and communicated something, and when I withdrew my hand, I tightened it over the note he’d passed me.
I didn’t look at it until I was out of the courthouse and onto the street: “Clover Cafe, two p.m.”
But right now it was barely ten, so I headed for the next stop on the list Major Marcel had provided Pearson; with the exception of the sheriff, everyone else was either expecting me or at least a chum of Marcel’s, and should be a friendly witness.
On the third floor of the Roswell equivalent of a skyscraper-a four-story brick building on Main Street-down on the left of a wood-and-pebbled-glass hallway, black stenciled letters on the door announced the HAUT INSURANCE AGENCY. I knocked, and a flat, midrange voice called, “Come on in!”
It was a single office, not very wide, and not very long, either, barely big enough for the ceiling fan that was lazily whirling, like a propeller warming up; no receptionist-no room for one. By an open window looking out on Main Street, at a work-piled rolltop desk, a boyishly handsome blue-eyed blond young man-maybe twenty-six, in shirtsleeves and a red-and-blue tie and blue slacks-was on the phone, talking life insurance with a client.
He waved me toward the hardwood chair alongside his desk and I sat, removing my straw fedora. The blond kid smiled at me, motioned that this call wouldn’t take long. It didn’t.
“Walter Haut,” he said affably, without standing, extending his hand, which I took and shook. “And you are?”
“Nathan Heller,” I said. “I believe Jesse Marcel warned you I’d be stopping by.”
“Oh, oh, yeah-sure! Glad to see ya. But, uh … you mind if I check your i.d. first?”
“Not at all.” I showed him the Illinois license and the honorary deputy’s badge.
His grin was affable and embarrassed. “You’ll have to excuse the less than lavish digs … I’m just getting in the insurance game … independent agent. I was in your field till about two months ago.”
“Investigation?”
He rolled his eyes. “Collection agency. I don’t know how you guys stand it.”
“My firm doesn’t do repo or skip tracing. Ugly work.”
“I agree.” He leaned an arm on his desk, leaned forward. “You know, I like people-I’m a member of the chamber of commerce-and the last way I want to make my living is doggin’ folks for a dollar. So … let’s make it ‘Nate’ and ‘Walt’ and skip the formalities. Any friend of Jesse’s is a friend of mine.”
“I don’t want to overstate my case, Walt. I’ve only spoken to Jesse once. But my feeling is he’s pretty bitter about taking the fall for Uncle Sam.”
Haut’s head bobbed up and down. “He got a bum shake, all right. Which is why I’m willing to talk … off the record, of course-confidential source, that kind of thing?”
“You got it. Mind if take notes?”
“Feel better if you would. Only thing … if my phone rings, I have to take it … one-man agency, you know how it is.”
“Actually, I do. I spent almost ten years that way, myself. When did you leave the service, Walt?”
“I left last August. I never intended to make a career of it. Were you in the service, Nate?”
I nodded. “Marines.”
“Overseas duty?”
“Guadalcanal.”
He blew an appreciative whistle. “Then you can understand how good civilian life looks to a guy who flew thirty-eight combat missions against the Japs.”
“Not a pilot, I take it.”
“Bombardier and navigator.”
Pen poised over the pad, I said, “Your postwar position out at the air base, I understand, was public relations officer?”
Haut leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, elbows winging. “Yeah, it was a pretty uneventful ride-except that Tuesday after the Fourth, in ’47. You gotta understand my job was kind of a funny mix-there was a lot we kept the lid on. Very tight security out at that base-keep in mind, you’re talking to the guy who dropped glass-gauged instruments smack dab into the Bikini explosion, and yet even I couldn’t get near aircraft with atomic bomb configuration.”
“Tightly run operation.”
He nodded vigorously. “Secure areas fenced off, MPs on twenty-four-hour guard-not only do you need a pass to get on that base, you need a further pass to even get near those aircraft.”
“Understandable.”
Haut sat forward again. “At the same time, for all of that, we wanted to foster good relations with the local community. Colonel Blanchard’s first duty out of West Point was same as mine, a public relations officer. So he had a real thing for building good feelings between the town and the base. Anything we were doing that was newsworthy, I was to let the two newspapers and two radio stations in on it. We let ’em come out and take pictures, whenever and whatever they wanted-long as they didn’t try to snap pictures of the B-29s.”
On the morning of July 8, 1947, Haut told me, he’d been called into the base commander’s office. Colonel Blanchard dictated a statement to his public information officer for immediate release to the local press acknowledging the 509th Bomb Group being “fortunate enough to gain possession” of a downed flying saucer (I had read the clipping in the file Pearson gave me).
“Around ten-thirty that morning,” Haut said, “I drove to town and made the rounds, dropping off the release at the radio stations, KGFL and KSWS, then over at the Roswell DailyRecord and Roswell Morning Dispatch. The Record’s an evening paper, and they’re the ones that had the headline story, that night-I just barely beat their deadline.” He shrugged. “Then I had lunch.”
“You didn’t think anything of it? Another day, another captured flying saucer?”
“Hey, it was lunchtime, so I ate lunch. I didn’t give it a second thought; when a superior officer said, ‘This is what it is,’ that was what it was. I went back to the base, to my office, and nothing much happened the rest of the afternoon, except the phone was ringing pretty heavily for a couple hours, there.”
“The press?”
“Oh, yeah, from all over the world!” Haut laughed, shaking his head, struck by a funny memory. “First call I got was from London, this very proper English accent asking me how the ‘chap’ who found the saucer had known how to fly the ‘craft’ back to the base! I had to explain it was just wreckage that was found.”
“Walt, you and I both know how cautious, and secretive, the military usually is. Here’s the first instance of the Air Force capturing a flying saucer … obviously, an event with national security implications, and international repercussions. Do you think Colonel Blanchard could have issued that press release on his own authority?”
Haut rocked in the chair, thought about that. “Well, the Old Man could put out just about anything he wanted, short of information about the atomic weapons on the base. Things of a secret nature, that’d have to be cleared with the Eighth Air Force, and probably further up the chain of command….”
“Don’t you think a flying saucer would fall into that category?”
The insurance agent sighed, nodded, mulling some more. “Come to think of it … I honestly don’t think Colonel Blanchard did authorize that release. My feeling is it went to General Ramey and probably on to higher headquarters.”
“Why would they sanction something this sensitive?”
An eyebrow lifted. “I can hazard an informed guess, if you like.”
“Guess away, Walt.”
Haut sat way forward, eyes narrowing. “That same afternoon, remember, word from General Ramey came down that the wreckage wasn’t from a flying saucer at all. And all of a sudden, we’re sending out pictures of Jesse Marcel holding up fragments of your everyday garden-variety weather balloon, looking like Public Idiot Number One.”
I was shaking my head, confused. “Why would the brass do that? Issue a statement about a flying saucer, then a couple hours later contradict themselves?”
Haut’s smile turned sly. “I believe they knew the cat was out of the bag … the rumors about a recovered saucer were flyin’, around here. So the best cover-up is to announce a saucer’s been found, attributing it to Major Screwup, then have the much smarter, more knowledgeable general say, ‘Oh no, you children got it wrong-it’s just a weather balloon.’ And the incident gets laughed off and forgotten. It was a real sleight-of-hand trick, typical disinformation.”
“Disinformation?”
“That’s an intelligence term, Nate-same as ‘black’ propaganda, purposeful misinformation issued by the government to confuse its citizens. And as a guy who put his ass on the line for his country, that ticks me off. I mean, America’s supposed to be in the truth business.”
“You believe a saucer was found.”
The boyish features tightened. “I believe Jesse Marcel knows a weather balloon when he sees it. And did you hear about that weird tinfoil shit?”
“Yes. Did you see any of it?”
“No. I saw nothing-no wreckage, no outer space creatures, none of it. A public relations officer is kept away from things that the public isn’t supposed to know; that’s a practice I was accustomed to.”
“But you believe Jesse Marcel.”
“We were friends. My wife and I would go play bridge with the Marcels; we rode to work together. He was rock-steady, and hell, they kept him on as intelligence officer for something like a year after that. Then he was transferred to a job of even higher responsibility!”
“You mentioned ‘outer space creatures’…”
Haut raised a hand. “You need to talk to Glenn Dennis about that.”
“I have.”
“Well, Glenn’s a friend, too, and I can tell you, he’s not a nut; if he tells you something, you can give it credence. Now, I don’t know much about this military clampdown that supposedly went on, and nobody threatened me or anything-but you might want to talk to Frank Joyce, over at the radio station.”
Which was my next stop, an adobe storefront operation with a small neon reading radio station, in small letters, over KGFL in large ones, above a sun-faded canvas awning. In a small control booth, I talked with Joyce, a sturdily stocky brown-haired kid in his mid-twenties, who ran a one-man operation on his afternoon show, reading the news, spinning records, doing live commercials and serving as his own engineer. I sat at the little table used for on-air interviews and we chatted sporadically, while discs spun-not flying ones, the kind with Crosby and Perry Como on them.
Joyce had Mickey Rooney-ish features clustered in the midst of his round face, making his rather large head seem even larger; he might have been young, but he had the no-nonsense attitude and manner of a seasoned reporter.
Doing twelve things at once on his control panel, he said, in his announcer’s mellifluous voice, “Late morning, Monday after the Fourth, I was making my usual calls, before the noon news, looking for any late-breaking items…. When I checked with Sheriff Wilcox, he put this rancher, Mac Brazel, on. Never met the man, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“Well, this bizarre wreckage he described made me pretty skeptical; flying saucer talk, I mean, really! Little green men, that sort of thing. I asked him to put the sheriff back on, and recommended they call the RAAF, since they were the experts on everything that flies.”
“Did you put the story on the radio?”
“No. This was Monday; that story didn’t break till Tuesday.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, having been in the military, I knew they’d frown on something like this getting out-assuming there was anything to it. We’re just a little station, and we were just starting out, then-we didn’t need to alienate the local air base. Funny thing is, my pal Walt Haut was the p.r. officer out there, and I’d been giving him a hard time about putting me last on his list, whenever a story broke. Guess what story he brings to me, first, to make it up to me?”
“And that’s when you put it on the radio.”
“Yeah, but the funny thing is, I was still reluctant. I mean, I find myself readin’ this press release about the Air Force saying it has a flying saucer, and I say to Walter, ‘Wait a minute! I know this story-I sent this guy Brazel to you!’ And Walt says, ‘Oh, well, thanks,’ and I say, ‘I don’t think you oughta release this story.’ Like I said, I know how the military works, and I could see the top brass havin’ a shit fit. But Walt says, ‘It’s okay, Frank, the Old Man has cleared it, and it’s okay for you to put the story on the air.’”
Since it was close to airtime, Joyce had flown out the door to reach the Western Union office, two blocks away, to wire the release to the United Press in Santa Fe, knowing he had hold of a “once-in-a-life-time” story.
“You’re the one that spread the news, then,” I said.
Joyce nodded, getting the next disc ready on his second turn-table, cuing it up in earphones that left one side uncovered, so we could converse. “By the time I got back here, the phones were going crazy, AP, UP, every big and little paper in the Southwest, hot for confirmation and more details.” His mouth tightened under the mustache. “Then I got the first of the threatening calls.”
“Who from?”
“A Colonel Johnson, in Washington. He cursed me out, told me I was going to get in a lot of trouble, and I told him I was a civilian and a member of the press, and he couldn’t treat me that way, couldn’t tell me what stories I could put on the air. And he says, ‘I’ll show you what I can do,’ and hung up.”
This made a kind of skewed sense. If Walter Haut was right, the point of the exercise had been to release the flying saucer story locally-where rumors were rife-and then quell it a few hours later with an official retraction and the new “weather balloon” explanation. Having the story spread over the wire, nationwide and worldwide, focusing instant and intense attention on Roswell and its purported flying saucer, may have been more than the brass bargained for.
“A day or so later,” Joyce said, a new platter spinning, a Peggy Lee, “two soldiers escorted that rancher Mac Brazel into this very station. They sat him down in that chair you’re sitting in and he offered to do an interview. I said, ‘Fine, but you boys’ll have to wait outside,’ and the soldiers, they waited out on the street, by the jeep they brought him in.”
“And you interviewed him.”
“Yes, but I didn’t bother putting it on the air. How could I? The story he told this time was completely at odds with what he first said.”
“He backed up the military’s weather balloon tale.”
“In spades. Now Brazel said that what he found on his ranch was rubber strips, tinfoil, paper, Scotch tape and sticks. Like a big kite had crashed. No writing on it, either. All the debris could be tied up in a little bundle weighing less than five pounds, he said. And he told the same story at a press conference for the AP, among others.”
“Did you get a sense of why he lied? You figure he was threatened, too, and caved in?”
“Well, there are two schools of thought on that. One is based on the fact that ol’ Mac somehow came into a considerable amount of money-a fella so poor he couldn’t rub two nickels together suddenly shows up in town in a brand-new pickup. Then he buys his family a new house, at Tularosa, and a cold store at Las Cruces….”
“That sounds like the Chicago school of thought,” I said. “What’s the other one?”
“Money may have been part of it, but this is one of your old Wild West, dirt-in-the-pores cowboys, and I could see his quiet anger, how coldly p.o.’ed he was. He’d been bullied, pushed around and threatened.”
“Is this something you surmised, or …?”
“I had a moment with Brazel here in my ugly little announcer’s cabin, and I said to him, ‘You know that this story doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what you told me on the phone, the other day.’ And he says, ‘Look, son-best keep that to yourself. They told me to come here and tell you this story, or else.’ ‘Or else what?’ I ask. ‘I open my mouth, I’m in the federal calaboose. Or breathin’ sand.’”
That was not the end of it, not of the threats anyway. Joyce told me that his boss, the owner of the station, had received a call from “someone in Washington, D.C.,” who made it clear that if KGFL aired an uncensored story about Brazel’s two differing accounts “the station’s license would be in jeopardy.”
“So you never aired the story,” I said.
“No. And whenever I run into Mac Brazel, here in town, we don’t speak.”
The Roswell Fire Department was a new buff-brick building with room for three trucks in as many stalls, but only two were taken up. I checked in at the front office with the receptionist, who fetched fireman Dan Dwyer for me.
Dwyer, a big brown-haired man in his thirties, asked me what I wanted and I suggested we talk outside; he didn’t object, and when I brought Major Marcel’s name up, he responded warmly.
“Jesse’s a nice fella,” the husky fireman said, hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. “How’s he like Washington?”
“I think he’s happy. But I’m pretty sure he feels his reputation at SAC is tainted, because of the ridicule heaped on him, in that ‘saucer’ incident.”
The fireman’s friendliness evaporated. He studied me through slitted eyes. “Is that what this is about? Who are you?”
I told him, was showing him my i.d., when he held up a hand in a stop fashion.
“I have nothing to say about that situation.”
“Jesse seems to think you witnessed something, Mr. Dwyer. Didn’t you respond to a call in early July of ’47? Was there wreckage of some kind of flying craft, possibly bodies of-”
“Stop. I told you, already. I’m not talking.”
“We can keep it discreet. Your name won’t be used. We’re just trying to determine what happened, and whether the military got out of line in the way they-”
“I’ll tell you about the military getting out of line. How about threatening to stick my wife and kid and me in Orchard Park?”
“What’s Orchard Park?”
He threw his hands up. “That’s all I got to say, mister. And anybody asks me, I didn’t say that.”
Then turned and all but ran into the station.
The Clover Cafe made no attempt to serve the native cuisine; its Blue Plate Special was meat loaf, peas and gravy, and worth every bit of fifty cents. At two o’clock, the lunch crowd was gone; you could have fired a cannon off in the place and not hit anybody. I sat in a back booth, finished off the wholesome fare, and waited to see if Deputy Reynolds would show. He did, about two-fifteen. We spoke over Cokes and a radio’s country-western music.
“Sorry I’m late,” the slender deputy said. “We were bookin’ a guy.”
“What happened to your low crime rate?”
“This drifter tried to rob the Conoco station in broad daylight. Wanted everything in the cash drawer.” He laughed. “Manager’s an ex-Marine who gave him a wrench alongside the head, instead.”
“Stopped his drifting, anyway. Say, Deputy-what’s Orchard Park?”
“Former POW camp, for the Japs, out in the desert-why?”
“Nothing important.”
“Look, Mr. Heller, we need to make this quick. This joint is pretty dead after lunch hour, so it’s safe enough. But I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Why are you?”
“What, taking a chance? Because it pisses me off how the strongarm’s been put on a lot of good citizens by their own goddamn government. In particular, pisses me off, what the sheriff’s been subjected to.”
“Like what?”
“You wouldn’t know it, from talkin’ to him today, but Sheriff Wilcox is an easygoing, even gregarious fella. Progressive, too-he was the first one in the state to separate juvenile offenders from adults.”
“He wasn’t oozing warmth and compassion this morning.”
“Not after what he’s been put through. Do you know he’s talking about not running again? Best sheriff we ever had, best boss I ever had. He hardly says anything about what happened, though I have heard him say he’s furious with himself for bringing the military in. Once they showed up, and claimed jurisdiction, we got completely cut off. I heard him say, if he had it to do over again, he’d call in the press, first. Give ’em carte blanche.”
“Deputy … what’s your first name, anyway?”
“Tommy.”
“Tommy, call me Nate. Listen, were you there from the beginning?”
“From when Mac Brazel stumbled inta the office, just a cowboy in faded jeans and scuffed boots and a week’s worth of dirt and dust caked on him, yes I was.”
“Then you saw the saucer debris?”
“Yes-but not the bodies.”
“Bodies?”
“I’m gettin’ ahead of myself. Look, I saw that thin metal you’d crumple that’d then uncrumple itself; and I saw some little I-beams with hieroglyphics. Saw samples of all that stuff. Sheriff sent me and Pete Crawford out to the ranch-”
“Wait a minute … this was before Major Marcel went out there?”
“Yes, sir. We didn’t see the debris, but we saw this patch of blackened ground; it looked like somethin’ big and round and hot had sat itself down. We come back and reported in to the sheriff, and he called the air base, and there was no new news, and then things settled down for a bit.”
The next morning, Tuesday, things got unsettled, and unsettling, in a hurry. Deputies Reynolds and Crawford drove back out to the ranch and found it had been cordoned off by the Army; they were not allowed passage, lawmen or not. Armed sentries and Army vehicles were stationed at ranch roads, crossroads, everywhere. Annoyed and frustrated, the deputies returned to the sheriff’s office, where Wilcox was fielding phone calls from all over the world.
“We still had a little box of that strange debris,” Reynolds said, “off in our side room. Day or so later, just when things had kinda gone back to normal-the weather balloon story had calmed things down-the military landed on us like fuckin’ D day, excuse my French.”
“Landed, how?”
“Two MP trucks showed up and they came in and demanded the box of wreckage, and the sheriff handed it over, with no protest. But they were belligerent as hell, anyway. These MPs gathered all of us, deputies and Sheriff Wilcox, and told us to keep quiet about recent events and direct all inquiries to the base. The sheriff said, well, that’s what he’d been doing. And the MP, a colored sergeant, real menacin’ fella, said, well, if any of us had any other ideas, there’d be ‘grave consequences,’ was what he said. I didn’t take kindly to that, and said something to the effect, what do you guys think you’re doing, threatening officers of the law like that? And this black bastard, he says, cold as ice, he says, ‘We’ll kill you all, and your families, and your goddamn dogs, too.’”
“Sounds like you’re taking a hell of a chance, telling me this.”
“I don’t like being threatened. And … look, there’s something I haven’t told you.”
“What’s that, Tommy?”
“I kinda got a personal stake in this. I date the sheriff’s daughter, have been, off and on, for a couple years. Threatening me is one thing; threatening my girl’s life, well those guys can go fuck themselves!”
We listened to a staticky Hank Williams singing about a cheating heart, then I asked, “You said something about bodies?”
“I didn’t see anything, but I think the sheriff did. I think it’s part of why he’s so shook up, why his health has failed and everything else. My girl, her father wouldn’t answer any of her questions, and her mother told her to stop asking him … but that night she heard him talking to her mom, heard the sheriff say that three little bodies had been found, little guys with big heads in silver suits. Found ’em in a burned area with metallic debris and the crashed saucer.”
“When was this supposed to’ve happened?”
“I don’t know. Hell, maybe my girl imagined all this, or heard snippets of conversation and wove ’em into somethin’. But I know the military got to Sheriff Wilcox, browbeat him, threatened him, maybe even took him for a stay in that same ‘guesthouse’ where they held Brazel.”
“What do you mean, ‘guesthouse’?”
“Some kind of place where they hold unofficial prisoners for questioning, out at the base. Brazel was there for a week, I hear. I don’t know, maybe you could ask him yourself. Maybe he’s ready to talk, after all this time has passed.”
“Yeah, I was thinking of driving out to his place, later today.”
“Hell, don’t bother-he’s in town!”
“What?”
“Yeah, Brazel comes in every now and then to sell some wool.”
“Where can I find him?”
“My guess is, if you park yourself at the bar next door, your man’ll come to you, before too very long.”
The bartender at the Trading Post Saloon knew Mac Brazel and-for the assurance I wasn’t a process server, and a consideration of one dollar-agreed to point him out to me, should the rancher decide to stop by for a drink.
On a bar stool, I nursed a beer and went over my notes, trying to decide what I made of all this; I wasn’t convinced that a flying saucer had really crashed, but the military’s misbehavior in these here parts seemed undeniable. My back was starting to hurt, and I was about to move to a booth, when the door opened, sunlight slashed in, and in strode a tall character in a beat-up Stetson, dirty faded jeans and an equally dirty, even more faded denim shirt.
The bartender gave me a barely perceptible nod, but I think I could have saved myself a dollar: who else could this long, tall New Mexican be but Mac Brazel? His face was spade-shaped, his eyes wary slits, mouth a wider slit, skin as dark and leathery as a saddle.
He settled onto a stool two over from me, and in a low voice requested a Blatz.
“Mr. Brazel?”
He glanced at me; his face was like something an Indian had carved out of wood. “Do I know you?”
“I’m a friend of Major Marcel.”
He turned away, but I caught him looking at me in the mirror behind the bar; I looked back at him in it, and said, “I’d like to talk to you about what happened out at your ranch July before last.”
His bottle of beer arrived, with a glass. “I don’t talk about that.”
“You know, you’re an American citizen, Mr. Brazel. The military can’t tell you what to do and what to say, or what not to say.”
Brazel was pouring the beer. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“What did you find, Mr. Brazel, out in that field?”
He sipped the beer, savored it, then-speaking so slowly it would have irritated Gary Cooper-said, “I’ll tell you one thing, mister. It sure as hell wasn’t a weather balloon.”
“What was it?”
Several swallows of beer later, he responded-sort of. “If I ever find anything else, it better be a bomb, or they’re gonna have a hard time gettin’ me to say anything about it.”
“Even if you find more little green men?”
He took a last swallow of his beer, and then that leather face split into a strange grin. “They wasn’t green.”
And he tossed a fifty-cent piece on the bar, climbed off his stool and ambled out.
I’d been running a tab, and had to take the time to pay for two beers before I could follow him, and by the time I got back out to Main Street, the rancher was climbing into a recent-model Ford pickup truck, across the way. I might have made it to him, before he pulled out, if that hand hadn’t settled on my shoulder.
“Mr. Heller,” a crisp young voice said in my ear. “Would you come with us, please? Colonel Blanchard would like to see you.”
Then a white-helmeted MP was at my side, a wide-shouldered kid of twenty or so, no bigger than your typical starting college fullback; he took me by an elbow and walked me to an open-topped jeep at the curb, where a second MP-a big colored sergeant-was behind the wheel.
I saw Brazel’s new pickup heading north, out of town, as we headed south.
Toward the air base.