“It sure wasn’t ordinary, I’ll tell you that,” Luther agreed.
“And it occurred in this area?”
“Exactly in this area. Right where everybody’s standing down below us. There wasn’t any observation platform in those days, just a gravel parking lot at the side of the road. On the Fourth of July, 1980, Rostov had a fireworks celebration. After it was over, we drove out here.”
“How many people were involved?”
“Almost as many as are here now. At least four hundred.”
“And what did you plan to do? Did you have a name for it?”
“We called it the Rostov Ghost Light Hunt.”
35
For the second time that day, Luther described what had happened that long-ago summer, and now he understood that the nervousness he’d spoken about hadn’t much to do with worrying that he’d forget what he was supposed to say on television. It was nervousness about what he’d started to remember. That afternoon, when he’d told the reporter about the hunt, he’d recalled it through a haze of decades, but now his memory was focusing, remembering details with clarity, and he dreaded returning to that time.
I wish to God I’d never agreed to this interview, he thought. He’d hoped that the publicity would help him sell cars, but all of a sudden, he didn’t care.
Rostov’s 1980 Fourth of July fireworks had turned out to be the usual joke. They were ignited on the high school football field: less than ten minutes of skyrockets, some of which had more of a pop than a bang. A few never went off, and the principal made a big show of pouring buckets of water on them. The senior class clown, Jeb Rutherford, burned himself with a sparkler. Bits of burned paper drifted from the sky, and Cal Bailey’s girlfriend got a speck in her eye. Cal had to drive her to the hospital. The big finish was a rocket that burst into the shape of a huge American flag blazing above the crowd. Smoke and the smell of gunpowder drifted everywhere. Eleven years later, Luther would associate that odor with the smell of gunsmoke from artillery in the First Gulf War.
And then the show was over. Rick Chambers, the president of the student council, murmured to Luther that the fireworks had lasted about as long as it took to have sex. Everybody headed toward their cars or trucks, but a lot of them knew that the festivities were just beginning, and it wasn’t just schoolkids who drove out of town to the gravel parking lot. A lot of parents went there, also, and families came from nearby towns.
Johnny Whitlock-the captain of the football team-was the guy who’d thought of it. Johnny was always coming up with crazy schemes, like suggesting that the Homecoming dance should have a Hawaiian theme because nobody ever left Rostov, so how could there be a home- coming? Maybe the dance should be called the “Wish I Could Leave Home” dance. That idea got only one vote-Johnny’s. Another time he sneaked over to the school in the middle of the night and managed to reach the flagpole without being spotted by the janitor or a policeman driving past. The next morning, when the students arrived, they found a Mickey Mouse flag grinning over the school. The principal was furious. At a hastily convened assembly, he ranted that somebody had insulted not only the school but also the American flag, and he demanded to know who’d done it. Only Luther and a few other kids had known it was Johnny, and of course none of them said a word-at least not until after that Fourth of July, when it no longer mattered.
“Let’s do something big this summer,” Johnny told Luther and a half-dozen other kids after their final class of the school year.
They were eating burgers at the Rib Palace, and Luther said, “Yeah, like what? You know there’s nothing to do around here.”
Johnny chewed thoughtfully and grinned. “All we got around here’s the lights, right?”
“And that old ranch house where they made that James Deacon movie,” Cal Bailey suggested.
“Who cares about that old dump? The damned thing’s falling apart. No, the lights are the only action we’ve got. How many times have any of you tried to figure out what they are?”
Everybody shrugged. It was a rite of passage that on your twelfth birthday you sneaked out of the house after your parents went to sleep. You bicycled out to the parking lot, where other kids were waiting to see if you had the guts to climb the fence and hike into the field to try to find what caused the lights. That was tougher than it sounded because the field stretched all the way to Mexico, and it was easy to get lost out there in the dark. Not many kids actually saw the lights to begin with, so most didn’t even know what they were looking for, which was why the older kids tried to make things scarier by calling them “Ghost Lights.”
Before the birthday boy arrived, other kids hid in the field. When he climbed the fence and started into the darkness, they raised lanterns, but as soon as he headed in their direction, they covered the lights. That made him look around in confusion. The next thing, he saw other lights-more lanterns-and went toward them. Then they disappeared. The joke ended when the kids with the lanterns couldn’t keep from laughing.
But sometimes the kids who were hiding saw other lights, and it was obvious that those lights couldn’t be lanterns because some of them floated high off the ground. They moved this way and that, and merged and changed colors, and kept getting larger and coming closer. That was another way the joke ended-when it suddenly wasn’t funny and the kids with the lanterns decided it was time to go home. That rite of passage ended after the Fourth of July, 1980. No one wanted to go into the field after that, and when Chief Costigan came to town to replace his father, who’d been shot to death, the field remained off-limits because the chief kept driving out there at night to try to figure out what the lights were.
“Sure, we kidded around about the lights,” Johnny said that June, lowering his hamburger. “But the truth is, nobody knows what they are.”
“They’re nothing,” Jasper Conklin said. “I bet I’ve been out there a hundred times. Never seen ’ em once. People who claim to see ’em are putting you on.”
“Well, I’ve seen ’em,” Johnny said.
“So have I,” Luther added. “And my mom and dad have, too.”
“Let’s make a difference and do something the town’ll remember for a long time,” Johnny said. “Let’s find out what causes them. Let’s have a Ghost Light Hunt.”
That was a typical Johnny idea, but the name had a nice shivery sound to it, and he suggested that they do it after the shitty Fourth of July fireworks and make a real celebration.
“Why not?” Jasper said. “We’ve got nothing better to do.”
They mentioned it around town, and then parents heard about it, and some of them-especially the editor of the weekly newspaper- thought it might be interesting. So the newspaper printed an article, and the next thing, there was a meeting in the high school gymnasium. A lot of people didn’t want anything to do with the hunt-they were happy with the way things were and felt that some things shouldn’t be explained. But most of the people were tired of not knowing what was out there, and a few had their own reasons for wanting the hunt to take place.
“Hell, before he died, my grandfather told me he saw the lights way back during the First World War,” Josh McKinney said. He owned Rostov’s only movie theater. “At the time, the town was afraid they were German spies, sneaking across the Mexican border. The Army came out and couldn’t figure what was going on, so to be on the safe side, they built that training field out there. Then they reactivated it during the Second World War, when the lights made the military nervous again. All these years, people around here have been trying to figure out what they are, and no one’s ever succeeded. Personally I don’t think you’re going to find out this time, either, but I’m all for trying, ’cause when you fail, it’ll only make the lights more mysterious, and we’ll get more tourists.”