W. Kinsella - If Wishes Were Horses

Then, the craft lifted one snowshoe-like foot up into its body, lifted the other, hovered an instant and was gone in the direction it had come from, leaving us bathed in a sweet, pink glow.

‘So now you’ve seen it,’ said Bertha, letting go of my hand, fumbling in the pocket of her jeans for cigarettes. ‘You believe us now, don’t you?’

‘I believe,’ I said, moving forward to feel the tracks, which were deeper than they had been, and many degrees warmer than the surrounding sand.

As I finish, I look expectantly at Ray and Gideon to see if they are any more sympathetic to my plight.

‘What you experienced,’ says Gideon, ‘was a close encounter, which, if you’ve described it accurately, seems legitimate. It also appears that you documented it with photographs, and had witnesses. So what went wrong?’

‘Can you spare me a few more minutes?’

They both nod.

‘What we have here are two people who between them do not display sufficient imagination to perpetrate a hoax.’ Those were the exact words I used in presenting my case to my managing editor. I had read in some self-improvement book that it was best to speak formally when conversing with superiors, and that I should never be afraid to show I possessed a vocabulary.

Later, the entire editorial board studied my photographs.

‘Those tracks look like a blow-up of a waffle iron,’ one said.

The photographs of the craft itself were, in spite of their number, of disappointing quality. They looked like a side view of cotton candy or the usual fraudulent shots of supposed ectoplasm, taken by your basic raving lunatic.

‘I have no control over the conveyance they travel in,’ I replied.

Three days had passed since my evening with Buster and Bertha. The next evening several senior staff members were out in the desert hoping for a glimpse of my extraterrestrials. Nothing. They all took their own photographs of the tracks.

‘Are your sources clean?’ management wanted to know. They meant Buster and Bertha.

‘Nathan Wiser himself ran them through both adult and juvie,’ I said. ‘Clean as the day they were born.’ Wiser had growled. ‘Buster has five traffic charges as an adult, but nothing criminal.’

I had put the same question to Bertha and Buster right after our close encounter.

‘You two clean? Any arrests? Any convictions?’

‘Well …’ said Bertha, as my heart sank, ‘I been rousted for hanging around a shopping mall. Fuckin’ security guards think they own the world.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yeah. What’d you expect? And Buster ain’t been in no more trouble than anybody else.’

Largely because I was personally involved in the case and was such a credible witness, management decided to run the story and photographs.

If there’s one kind of story that every rival journalist and reporter wants to discredit it’s one about UFOs or extraterrestrials. But I wasn’t worried. I knew what I’d seen. If I’d been smart I’d have remembered that I’d seen Reggie Jackson strike out a few hundred times, but he had three homers in four at-bats against me.

If there’s one kind of story the general public wants desperately to be true it is one about aliens or UFOs.

I appeared on TV a couple of times, but I was just another newspaper guy. It was Bertha and Buster the public were interested in. They could relate to Bertha and Buster. Three days after the story broke all three of us were on ‘Good Morning, America.’

Bertha, in a dress, with her hair permed, looked like everybody’s babysitter. Even dressed up and washed Buster looked like your average neighborhood hoodlum. In the aftermath, one of the more facetious tabloids would nickname them Big Bertha and Hoodly McHotrod. Never mind what they called me.

The first inkling I had of trouble was right after we got off the air from doing ‘Good Morning, America.’ There was an urgent message for me to call my managing editor.

‘Get your ass in here, McCoy,’ he growled. He was a gentlemanly managing editor who didn’t use alcohol, tea, coffee or profanity. It had never occurred to me that ass was in his vocabulary.

Nathan Wiser was in the managing editor’s office.

‘Your sources are contaminated, McCoy,’ the managing editor said. ‘Tell him,’ he said to Wiser.

‘Buster has more arrests than Willie Nelson’s had hits,’ said Wiser, smiling like a hairy bagel.

‘But you checked,’ I wailed.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, McCoy, but I never heard of these people until your boss called my boss.’

Why was he lying?

When a veteran police officer calls a reporter who has written the UFO story of the decade a liar, the charge is likely to stick.

‘It’s worse with the girl,’ said the managing editor, looking so pale he could have been in shock.

My insides felt as if they were melting.

‘A phony rape charge,’ said Wiser, smiling amiably. ‘ She should have been charged. Instead, we just put the fear of the Lord in her and dropped the whole mess.’

I telephoned Bertha, turned on the speaker phone.

‘Listen, Joe, I’m a bitch sometimes, okay? I’ve been in a little trouble. I didn’t want to tell you ’cause then you wouldn’t run the story, and we both know one don’t have nothin’ to do with the other. It’s just that when I’m in a jam I lie though my fuckin’ teeth. Know what I mean? Honest to God, we weren’t jerking you around. Me and Buster seen what we seen. And so did you.’

‘What about the phony rape charge?’

She exhaled audibly.

‘It did happen, you know what I mean? But not the way everybody thinks. I was home alone one afternoon when this guy from down the street showed up, Orlando something—I never did know his last name—he’s twenty-six and he lifts weights and he had a bottle of wine. One thing, like, led to another, you know, and we had a nice time in my bedroom, and that would have been that except the son of a bitch laughed at me. After we was all finished, this guy tells me I’m fuckin’ lousy in bed.

‘I mean I done the best I could, and no son of a bitch should be able to talk to me like that, right? So after he left I called the cops and I said he raped me. Served him right, you know what I mean? They hauled his ass away in handcuffs and everything. I stuck to my story all night, scared him good. I bet he won’t laugh at the next poor chick who done her best for him.

‘The cops were so fuckin’ mad at me. They threatened me with all kinds of charges. You’d have thought I was the criminal. But I was just so tired, I said, “I don’t care anymore. Do whatever you want to me.” They sent me home. Didn’t drive me home like they drove me to the station.

‘“Get out of here and don’t ever waste our time again,” they said. The big-push detective was a fat, hairy bastard with a broken nose.’

I looked at Wiser, who I’m certain bared his teeth at me. My managing editor had slid down in his chair until his face was even with the top of his desk.

‘Would you have done the story if I’d told you the truth?’ asked Bertha.

‘I’d have still seen the spaceship. If I’d known the truth I could have been prepared to defend you. Things are going to get rough,’ I said.

I had no idea how rough.

‘UFO PHOTOS PHONY,’ trumpeted our competitors. They blew up my photo of the spaceship tracks and ran them beside the blow-up of a General Electric waffle iron. The photos were identical. Even I could see the G.E. emblem in one corner of my track photo.

The photos of the spacecraft were diagnosed as a pantyhose container stuffed with cotton batting, shot from an advantageous angle.

‘You’re fired!’ the managing editor said.