After a silence, Sparky said, “And?”
Hakeem stared at him for maybe half a minute. He looked at the bottle of beer that he’d half finished. He took another swallow. “So then we all shoot to our feet. We’re like, this can’t be happening. I mean, it’s a door in the day! Then a hissing sound and a gust of wind make us look up. Overhead there’s now a hole in the sky. A hole in the sky! Do I sound crazy to you? I’m not mental. Do you think I’m mental?”
As earnestly as we were able, the three of us assured him that we did not think he was mental.
Hakeem said, “So it’s like somebody just opened a big lid on the day. Through that opening, maybe twelve feet in diameter, we see a night sky, darkness and stars going on forever, just like beyond the magic door. I think we’re about to be sucked up into that night sky. Instead, these concentric circles of blue light come out of the hole, out of the stars, and wash over us. We feel them as well as see them, a tingling sensation in our bones—and something funny happens to time.”
I was pretty sure he meant funny scary, not funny ha-ha.
He finished the beer. “None of us has any memory of getting in our vehicles. The next thing we know, it seems like an instant later, we’re in Peptoe, me with the baby—that’s you—in the power-company truck, Bailie and Caesar following. We all had this terrible feeling that the baby was in great danger, that someone could come for him—for you—at any moment. Hell, not someone. Something. Something that would kill us to get at you. I swear, we were flat-out terrified. It makes no sense how crazy frightened we were. We’d been made terrified. I think that weird blue light, those concentric circles . . . somehow they programmed us to guard you and get you quickly away from that lonely stretch of highway, into the hands of the authorities, eventually to someone who would care about you as if you were their own child. I kept thinking that your vital thread had been broken, that the ends of your vital thread couldn’t be tied together again until you were in loving hands.”
“What does that mean, ‘vital thread’？” I asked.
“I don’t know what the hell it means. But I was in a panic about it.”
He raised the bottle to his lips and seemed surprised that he had drained it.
Bridget’s turn had come to say, “And?”
“No, I’m done. I’m empty. I have no more for you. Bailie and Caesar didn’t see quite the same thing I did. You need to hear their side to get the whole picture.”
“Where are they?” Sparky asked. “How do we contact them?”
“Two months after what happened, Caesar quit his job as pit boss and split from the casino scene. Maybe he didn’t get religion, but he got something. He went to Florida to work in a hospice his sister founded, taking care of people who’re dying. Bailie still lives in the heart of Peptoe. Wife passed away. He’ll tell you his side and Caesar’s. He up and quit the wind farm back when, started making a living with music.”
He put the empty bottle on the table beside his chair. He stared at it as if it were a mystical object filled with recondite meaning, and then he looked at me the way you might stare at a two-headed goat.
He said, “What is it with you, Quinn Quicksilver?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you?”
“Confused,” I admitted.
“Why are space aliens so interested in you?”
“I’m not aware of any space aliens,” I assured him. “We just came here because I was hoping, you know, I might get a lead on who my parents are.”
“Maybe the best way to find out,” Hakeem said with apparent sincerity and no quality of menace in his voice, “is to send your spit to one of those places like Getting to Know Me Dot Com.”
“There’s an idea,” I said. “I’ll definitely look into that.”
While Bridget took a pen and paper from her purse and wrote down the directions to Bailie Belshazzer’s place that Hakeem gave her, Sparky went to the bookshelves to have a look at the titles on the spines of the volumes. He took a clove bud from the little dish and brought it close to his nose and said, “Hakeem, why the cloves?”
“I read somewhere that the smell repels the Grays. It’s like garlic with vampires.”
“Grays?” Sparky asked.
Just then we heard a sudden bass throbbing that quickly became louder, the air-chopping clatter of a helicopter, not a small two-man police helo, but something larger. Through the window behind Hakeem’s chair, I saw it coming, flying low and fast: black, twin engines, high-set main and tail rotors. The big craft roared over us and away. As the sound of it diminished and the mobile home stopped vibrating, I didn’t give the helo further thought. Military bases are a common feature of the Southwest; I assumed that some pilot was engaged in flight training.