“Why not?”
“No one knows.”
That left him feeling more exasperated than ever.
On the days when he couldn’t find work, he hiked through the area where the lights were said to appear. He stood where his father had built the airfield during World War I. Weeds and grass filled the un- paved runway, the length of which was just barely visible. The adobe buildings that had functioned as hangars were piles of dirt. He studied the distant rim of black boulders that looked like huge cinders- the aptly named Badlands.
He stared to the south toward Mexico.
“No one ever found the wreckage of an airplane?” he asked his grandparents.
“Some of his former students tried. They flew fifty miles-all the way to Mexico. A couple of them actually flew into Mexico. They went back and forth in what they called grids, but no one ever found your father or his plane.”
“But nobody just disappears.”
“The wings were covered with linen and hardened by shellac. If the plane crashed and burned, the debris could have been blown away by the wind.”
“And his body?”
“Coyotes. God bless him, John’s bones could have been carried off.”
“I want to see the lights.”
“Maybe you’re trying too hard.”
The next day, Edward dug postholes on a ranch until he earned enough to buy a bottle of whiskey-something that wasn’t easy to locate because even though Prohibition had ended four years earlier, Rostov had voted to remain “dry.”
At dark Edward drove out to the old airfield, sat on the ground, opened the bottle, and began sipping. Until then the only alcohol he’d ever sampled was beer, but the chance of obtaining beer in Rostov turned out to be even slimmer than that of finding whiskey. Be- sides, he wanted something strong.
It burned his throat. He felt its heat go all the way to his stomach. He gagged and almost threw it up.
At least it acted more quickly than beer would have. Because he wasn’t used to it, he didn’t need much before he felt off balance, as if something in his skull were tilting. Soon his tongue felt thick. His eyes became heavy. The moon and stars went out of focus.
“Come on!” Edward shouted. “Let me see you!” His words were slurred. “I’m not trying hard anymore! I’m relaxed! More than relaxed!” He laughed giddily and took another sip. “Hell, I’m drunk…
“Drunk as a… skunk…
“Damned… stinkin’… drunk.”
He closed his eyes. Fought to open them. Closed them again.
And passed out.
The night brought a cool breeze that wavered Edward’s hair and caressed his cheeks. He dreamed of being on a boat, floating on a current. His mind drifted, rising and falling.
He woke to the glare of the rising sun. But when he managed to lift his heavy eyelids, he saw darkness off to his right. The stars and the moon were still there, but mostly he saw darkness.
On his right.
On his left, the rising sun persisted, and when Edward lifted his painful head from the dirt on which he lay, he saw that the sun was, in fact, a floating ball of light.
Groggy, he watched it divide, becoming red and yellow. The two orbs dissolved into four, adding blue and green. They split into eight, adding orange, purple, brown, and a blinding silver. Pulsing closer, they grew larger, their shimmer more intense.
There was something else, some kind of sound he couldn’t identify, a hiss or hum or possibly distant music, as if from a radio station that had faded almost beyond hearing.
Even though his mother had said that the lights had frightened her the first time she’d seen them, Edward hadn’t expected to have the same reaction. After all, the lights had caused his mother and father to fall in love. If it hadn’t been for the lights, Edward would never have been born. His father had been so mesmerized by the lights that he’d done everything possible to try to find where they came from.
But as the colors of the lights increased before him, dispelling the darkness, what Edward felt wasn’t the fear his mother had described. It was worse than that.
It was terror.
His mother had been a fervent churchgoer. Each Sunday, she’d made Edward go with her, always staying at the back, coming in late and leaving early so that people wouldn’t see the lesions on her face.
He recalled very little of those Sunday mornings except his impatience to go and play-and a particular sermon that the minister had delivered. The subject was Christ’s transfiguration, a word that Ed- ward, then ten years old, hadn’t understood but that he asked his mother to repeat several times afterward until he memorized it- because the sermon had made an unnerving impression on him.
In the gospels, the minister had said, Christ took three of the apostles to the top of a mountain, where he transformed himself into his true radiance. His clothes became as brilliant as the sun. The light was so blinding that the apostles fell to the ground, lowering their eyes in fear. When they finally looked up again, Christ had changed back to human form.
“Rise,” he told them. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t tell others about this vision.”
The minister had used this passage to explain how glorious heaven would be, how brilliant and spellbinding. But that hadn’t made any sense to Edward. How could something be both glorious and terrifying at the same time? It seemed to him that heaven should make someone want to rush toward it rather than fall to the ground in fear.
That story about Christ’s blinding light gave Edward nightmares- perhaps because it merged with his mother’s story about the lights and his father’s disappearance. In years to come, he would often think about it. After his mother died, he even spoke to the minister about it, although the minister didn’t seem to get his point, which was that it might not be so easy to tell the difference between good and evil. If a vision of goodness made the apostles afraid, was it possible that a vision of evil would make them walk toward it? That would be logical because evil was tempting. But in a sane world, shouldn’t evil be terrifying and goodness tempting? Why was everything reversed?
“That’s God’s way of testing us,” the minister said.
“But why do we need to be tested?”
“Because our first parents were tested and failed. We are their fallen children. We need to prove that we won’t repeat their sin.”
“The choice ought to be clearer,” Edward persisted. “The story only tells me that it’s hard to know the difference. If Christ showed the apostles a vision of heaven, shouldn’t it have been so wonderful that he’d have urged them to spread the word? Why did he tell them to keep it a secret?”
“That passage isn’t clear.”
“How’s this for a theory, Reverend? What if heaven’s so radiant that it’s terrifying? Maybe people shouldn’t know what it’s really like until they finally get there and it’s too late to back out.”
“I’ll pray for your soul.”
Now the brilliance of the lights made Edward as frightened as the apostles had been at the sight of Christ’s heavenly radiance. He told himself that his reaction was wrong, that he ought to be entranced by the shimmering beauty he was finally seeing.
I came all this way and tried so hard to see you.
You’re glorious. I ought to feel awestruck.
Maybe his fear was a sign of how truly good the lights were, he thought. But then he was struck by something more than awe.
The lights changed. Clouds of the darkest thunderstorm suddenly churned within them. Lightning flashed at their core. As thunder punished his ears, he saw a figure amid the clouds, a young man in a uniform who looked like the photographs Edward had seen of his father. The man held out his hand, beckoning for Edward to step into the clouds and join him.
Edward screamed. Turning, he ran.
Without realizing it, he charged along the airstrip that his father had built and had flown from countless times, years ago. He stumbled, falling on stones, scraping his jaw. He scrambled to his feet and ran harder.