But now, on this grim winter’s night, while Walter lucubrated and Jessica turned her thoughts to Holothurians, Tom Crane was pulling on his pink suede lace-up boots (with the unfortunate smirches of motor oil he’d tried to remove by applying a solution of carbon tetrachloride and high-test gasoline) and slipping into the houndstooth bellbottoms that hugged his bony knees and made racing chocks of his feet. He was grabbing for the aviator’s coat and mummy-wrapping the scarf around his neck, heading out the door, suffused with an excitement that made his long bony feet tap across the porch as if they’d come loose: he was going to a concert. A rock concert. A wild, joyous, jungle-thumping celebration of nubility, rebelliousness, draft resistance, drug indulgence, sexual liberation and libidinous release. He’d been waiting three whole days for it.
The sky was low, black, rippled with cloud, and the warming trend of the past few days had pushed the mercury all the way up to fifteen above. He had to feel his way out to the road, the thin jerky beam of the flashlight so weak it could do little more than satisfy his curiosity as to which quivering, low-hanging branch had poked him in the eye or grabbed hold of the frayed tail of his scarf. It was half a mile down the stony, concave path to Van Wart Creek and the wooden footbridge erected by some altruist in times gone by, and then another quarter mile or so across a marshy pasture that was home to grazing cows and dotted like a minefield with their skillet-sized puddles of excrement. The path then wound through a copse of naked beech and thick-clustered fir, ascended a short rise and finally emerged on the motionless black river of macadam that was Van Wart Road.
(So what if it was a regular and tedious trek out to or in from the road, made all the more tedious when the trekker was laden with bursting sacks of lentil flakes, pinto beans or bran pellets? The remoteness of the place had its advantages. A hero of the people and saint of the forest could expect few visitors, for example, or representatives of the duly constituted authorities of the county and township, like the assessor, inspectors from the Department of Building and Safety or the sheriff and his minions. Nor would he be much bothered by drummers, panhandlers, Avon ladies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as these, passing by on the road, would see only an infinity of trees, each one adumbrating the next. For the initiated, however, for his privileged guests, Tom Crane had provided the Packard hubcap. If you slowed in the vicinity of a certain diseased-looking elm that was one-tenth of a mile beyond a certain breached guardrail, and you recognized the hubcap depending from a nail driven into the trunk of that certain elm, you would park and walk in: Tom was at home. If the hubcap was on the ground, you needn’t bother.)
Out on the road, Tom removed his deerskin gloves — one of sixteen pairs his father had inadvertently bequeathed him. He’d found them, some still wrapped in gift paper that featured snowmen and candy canes, while poking around in his father’s bureau the week after his parents’ first vacation in twenty years had been terminated by pilot error somewhere over San Juan. He stuffed the gloves inside the belt loop of his aviator’s coat, slipped the all-but-useless flashlight in the back pocket of his bellbottoms, and removed the Packard hubcup from the tree. Then he blew on his hands and turned to address the long black shadow that stretched along the side of the road like the mouth of an unfathomable cave.
This was the Packard itself, a relic of the distant past, painted the color of sleep and forgetfulness and pitted with rust. Its windows were jammed open, the brakes were a memory and the floorboards had dissolved in a delicate tracery that left the pedals floating in space while the road moved beneath them like a conveyor belt. A genuine artifact, as revealing in its way of previous civilization as the arrowhead or potsherd, the old hulk had been unearthed the previous year in the shed out back of his grandfather’s place. The elder Crane had owned a succession of Packards, and this, dating from the late forties, was the last of them. (“They went bad after the War,” the old man insisted, real vehemence inflating the flanges of his magnificent nose. “Junk. Nothing but junk.”) Now it was Tom’s.
Working by rote, he struggled to lift and brace the hood and then remove the air filter. He was in the act of spraying ether into what he took in the darkness to be the carburetor when he first spotted the flying saucer. Trembling and luminous, it jerked violently across the sky, coming to an abrupt halt directly above him, where it hovered tentatively, as if looking for a place to land. Tom froze. He watched the thing without apprehension and with a keen sciential eye (it was saucer-shaped, all right, and emitting a pale, rinsed-out light), surprised, but only mildly. He believed in clairvoyance, reincarnation, astrology and the economic theories of Karl Marx, and as he stood there, he could feel his belief system opening up to include an unshakable faith in the existence of extraterrestrial life as well. Still, after ten minutes or so his neck began to go stiff, and he found himself wishing that this marvelous apparition would do something — spit flames, open up like an eye, turn to mud or jelly — anything but hover interminably over his head. It was then that he reached surreptitiously for the flashlight he’d tucked in his back pocket, thinking in a vague way of signaling to the aliens in Morse code or something.
No sooner did he touch the flashlight, however, than the shadow of a great hand obliterated the alien spacecraft; when he released it, the wily aliens returned, hovering as before. He began to feel a little foolish. He stood there playing with the flashlight a minute more, then sent the saucer hurtling to its doom in the inky black reaches of space and turned back to the car. The old hulk started up with a volcanic roar and a brilliant explosion of blue flame from the carburetor; the saint of the forest hustled out to replace the air filter and slam the hood shut. And then he was off with a shriek of the steering wheel and a groan of the tires, off to pour his soul into the Dionysian frenzy of the concert.
The concert, which featured a well-known underground band whose members invested every nickel of their take in preferred stock, was held in Poughkeepsie, in the Vassar College gymnasium. Tom presented his ticket and shuffled through the doors with the rest of the sloe-eyed, hirsute, bead-rattling crowd, glad to get in out of the cold. He was unaware that Poughkeepsie was an Algonquin term meaning “safe harbor,” but then no one else in the crowd was aware of it either. In fact, there were few who had any grasp at all of the notion that history had preceded them. They knew, in an abstract way, about Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, about Washington, Lincoln, Hitler and John F. Kennedy, about the Depression — could their parents ever let them forget it? — and they dimly recalled the construction of the local shopping center in some distant formative epoch of their lives. But it was all disconnected, trivial, the sort of knowledge useful in the sixth grade for multiple-choice tests or for scoring the odd answer on a TV quiz show. What was real, what mattered, was the present. And in the present, they and they alone were ascendant — they’d invented sex, hair, marijuana and the electric guitar, and civilization began and ended with them.
Be that as it may, the saint of the forest entered the auditorium that night like a sloop coming in off a choppy sea. The cold wind at his back blew the scarf up around his ears like a luffing sail and a full-body shiver shook him to the gunwales. He stamped and shuddered and quaked, his elbows flying out like quivering booms, as he inched forward, boxed in by shoulders and heads, by greatcoats, army jackets and fringed vests. There was the scent of cold air on upturned collars, trailing from scarves, caught in the vegetal explosion of hair, but it faded quickly, absorbed in the warmth of the crowd. A moment later he was in, the mob dispersing, the big electric heaters wafting tropical breezes, soft lights overhead, a murmur of voices rippling about him like wavelets lapping the pier.