To scare us.
Well, they’ll find out I don’t scare easily.
Even so, as the lights drifted and changed colors and beckoned during the longest night of his life, Nolan admitted that his fortitude was being tested.
Troubled, he heard faint music, but its melody and instruments were unfamiliar. Under other circumstances, he might have thought that it came from a town across the border, the Mexicans having some kind of celebration. Possibly a tune from a mariachi band had managed to drift this far but was distorted by the distance.
Nolan didn’t believe that. As he concentrated on the hard-to-hear notes, the lights seemed to brighten, their colors strengthening. The two were somehow connected.
The cattle became restive, their hooves scraping the dirt. Their lowing sounds had a nervous edge. Praying that they wouldn’t stampede, Nolan thought of the land that his grandfather and father had fought so hard to keep, and of the land he was determined to add to it. He thought of the quarter-million head of cattle he’d promised if the railroad built the town and the cattle pens.
He lay on the hard ground with his rifle propped on his saddle. He stared along it toward the lights and silently recited scripture. From the gospel of St. John: “And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.”
That was the first relevant quotation that popped into his mind, but it didn’t provide the affirmation he was looking for, so he recalled another, this one from Isaiah: “The people that walketh in darkness have seen a great light. They that dwelleth in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shone.”
The shadow of death.
That quotation didn’t provide the affirmation Nolan was looking for, either. Besides, if raiders came for his cattle, the shadow of death would be on them. If the lights and the music were indeed made by raiders.
If the cattle didn’t stampede.
Nolan went on like that all through the long, cold night, trying to calm himself with the word of God. His eyes aching, he kept aiming at the lights until, as dawn approached, they faded and shrank. With the sun finally rising, he stood stiffly and lowered the hammer on his Winchester.
His ears ached.
He told his foreman, “Take the herd all the way to the house.”
“You bet, Mr. Nolan. Just as soon as the men cook something to eat.”
“No. Do it now. The men can eat cold biscuits as they ride. I want to make sure the cattle are safe.”
“You’re the boss, Mr. Nolan.” The foreman looked troubled. “What do you figure those lights were? If they weren’t Mexican raiders…”
“Give me three riders, and I’ll find out.”
Nolan saddled his horse and rode southeast with the men. During the night, he’d estimated that the lights were five or six miles away, but when he traveled that distance, he didn’t find any sign of cooking fires or horse tracks or crushed vegetation that would indicate where a camp had been made.
He was sure that the lights had been in this direction, but darkness could play tricks, so he told his men, “Spread out.” Spacing them fifty yards apart, he rode three miles farther but still didn’t see any sign of campfires or horse tracks.
He was forced to ride around a section of black, ugly, twisted boulders that looked like huge dead cinders. A minister with whom he’d once traveled on a train through Arizona had told him that sections like this were left over from the pyrotechnics of when God had created the universe. But if this area was supposed to represent God’s power, Nolan didn’t understand why the Mexicans called them malpais.
Badlands.
He rode another five miles but still didn’t see any horse tracks.
I was sure the lights were southeast of the herd, he thought. How could I have misjudged their direction?
“Mr. Nolan?” one of his men called behind him.
Belatedly Nolan realized that the rider had been shouting his name for some time.
He looked back.
“Sir, if we keep going like this, we’ll end up in Mexico.”
Nolan suddenly became aware of how high the sun was and how far they’d ridden. Feeling as if he came out of a trance, he stared ahead toward the sparse grassland that seemed to stretch forever. Something wavered on the horizon. Maybe a dust devil. Maybe air rippling as the sun heated it.
I could follow that movement forever and never reach it, Nolan thought.
“We’re heading back!” he yelled to the men. “Pick a different section! Keep looking and shout if you find where somebody camped!”
31
“Did Nolan ever find an answer?” Page asked.
“A few Indians worked on his ranch. He figured it was safer to keep them close than have them fight him,” Harriett said. “He’d never been in that area after dark, but it was a good bet the Indians would know if any strange lights had ever been seen over there. To his surprise, they told him there’d always been lights in that direction. Their fathers and grandfathers had talked about them. The lights were the spirits of their ancestors, they believed.”
“Superstition’s even less convincing than temperature inversions,” Tori said. “Anyway, I don’t want to have the lights explained. I don’t want somebody to take away how special they are by telling me they’re just ball lightning or ghosts.”
“That’s the way most everyone here in town feels about them, too,” Harriett replied. “When my late husband and I first came here in 1970, we were hippies in an old station wagon that was basically our home. We happened to hear about the lights, so we drove out to where the viewing area is now. We opened the back hatch, sat on our sleeping bags, smoked dope, and ate dry cornflakes. I still don’t know if we actually saw the lights or if the dope made us believe we did.
“But the next night, we watched them without being stoned, and the night after that, too, and, well, we never left. Rostov wasn’t much back then, but we managed to find jobs, and we didn’t need a lot of money to live. Basically, being able to see the lights whenever we wanted seemed reward enough. After a while, we didn’t even need to go out there. Somehow we managed to feel that the lights were out there without actually seeing them.
“Every couple of months, though, we’d want to see them again, the way people feel the need to go to church. A lot of people in Rostov are like my husband and me. They intended to pass through, but the lights kept them here.”
“Or called them back,” Tori said with a hushed tone.
“Most people don’t see the lights at all, of course, let alone react the way I described,” Harriett said. “But many of the people who live here were fortunate enough to have the same experience, and we long ago stopped trying to explain it. The only thing that matters is, the lights make us feel… I guess the word is ‘blessed.’”
“Things weren’t so blessed last night,” Page replied.
32
The press conference was finished by the time they left the antiques store and glanced up toward the courthouse. The sun was lower, casting the deserted street in a deeper orange.
Page looked at Tori.
“I need to get my rental car from up there,” he said. “Do you want to follow me back to the motel?”
Tori didn’t answer right away. “Sure.”
But as Page drove to the motel, he glanced in his rearview mirror and there wasn’t any sign of Tori’s blue Saturn among the traffic that was heading out of town toward the observation platform. He parked in front of unit 11, got out, and waited. Glancing up, he noticed that there were clouds gathering for the first time since he’d been in Rostov.
Fifteen minutes passed and he still didn’t see any sign of her, so he finally took his suitcase from the trunk and moved toward the door.
The gangly motel clerk came from the office and hurried toward him. Page remembered his name.
“Something wrong, Jake?”