Gods Without Men

1969

As kids they used to go out to the rocks and look at the site of the accident. The wreckage had mostly gone to salvage, but you could see the remains of the rocket or whatever it was, a sort of twisted, crumpled cylinder pocked with bullet holes. The boys used it for target practice, though Dawn couldn’t see what kind of practice you got out of hitting something that size. It was more the sound, she supposed, the plink as the rusty metal gave way. There was a cracked concrete base, a burned patch; that was about it. Not much to see.

Everyone had different stories about how it had happened. Something electrical. Some kid lighting a firework for a prank. But the whole thing had gone up like a torch, in front of thousands of people, with the feller inside it. Communist, said the old guys at the store, who always knew everything about everything. An agent of hostile foreign powers. Still, getting burned alive like that, trapped in a tin can. No one should suffer so.

Frankie DuQuette had a beat-up Plymouth and they used to drive it out there, do skids and donuts, raise clouds of dust — just letting off steam, really, no harm in it. After, they’d sit up on the rocks looking out over the desert, or just lie on the hood, playing the radio and watching the sunset. When it got dark, they’d switch the headlights on; dust motes would dance in the yellow beams and they’d make out and Frankie would put his hand inside her shirt but never go further, because he was a timid boy and mortally afraid of his pastor. Her uncle Ray would do a lot of screaming when she got back home after those nights out at the rocks with Frankie. He’d remind her how grateful she ought to be for them taking her in, while her aunt held her hand over her mouth and made fish eyes.

Then the crazy lady came. She just towed a trailer onto the land and started playing house, right there under the Pinnacle Rocks. Turned out it was privately owned, nobody even remembered by whom. Everyone thought it was government land. She didn’t bother anyone, only came into town when she needed supplies, driving an old Ford pickup that had been patched and filled and repaired so many times it was hard to say what color it might once have been. Mostly it was rust color. There were all kinds of theories as to why she was there and how she made her living. She must have had money from somewhere, for she didn’t work. Heaven knew how she spent her time.

One day one of the boys at the store got up courage to ask. She told him she was waiting for her daughter. No one knew what she meant by that until Uncle Ray, who’d been there when the accident happened, at the meeting or whatever, reminded them about the little girl who’d gone missing. The guy had climbed up the tower in his silver outfit, and after it started burning, a lot of wreckage had come down, killing three people. The kid must have been playing inside. There were a lot of kids around, apparently. She must have been burned right up.

Dawn sometimes worked at the store after school, and she got a good look at the crazy lady the next time she came in, at her greasy overalls, her sunburned arms and neck. Dawn wasn’t afraid of her. She was trying to get a sight of her eyes; that’s what you did, look at their eyes, except the crazy lady was staring at the floor. She counted coins into her hand and you could see she had dirt under her fingernails, in the creases of her palms. Working hands, like a man’s. Lord preserve Dawn from ever having hands like that.

“You having yourself a good time out there?” She bit her tongue for asking it. Old Man Craw stopped working the deli slicer and shot her a look. The crazy lady glanced up and there they were, little brown chocolate-button disks like a rabbit or a deer, peering out at the world from under that nasty chewed-up straw hat. Dawn saw nothing in them, not really, but afterward she told everyone in class how in her opinion the old bird wasn’t crazy, not at all.

By the following year there seemed to be a few people out at the rocks. They set up a kind of compound, with a wire fence, a couple of tin-roofed shacks. The sheriff sent Officer Carlsbad out to check on them. He came back saying they smelled kind of ripe but far as he could see they weren’t breaking any laws. The crazy lady started coming into town with an older guy who had an eye patch. Dawn couldn’t hardly look at him. Under the eye his cheek was slick and pink, like it was going to slide down over his jaw.

So now she knew they were definitely saucer people come back. It was obvious. She told Uncle Ray and he said whatever they were she should keep away from them. That was sort of official policy. Everyone in town was to be polite, no more. The young ones were supposed to keep their distance. Of course that made them all curious. There was every kind of rumor. They did a lot of driving by.

Then one day she saw the girl, just walking by the side of the road in the heat of the day, about five miles from town. Dawn pulled over and asked if she was OK. Thought she’d hear a story, most probably about being dumped there by some asshole boyfriend. Instead she said she was fine and her name was Judy and she was on her way home.

“Home?”

“Yes.”

“Just walking?”

She was blond and wore a sleeveless white shirt and jeans and had her hair in braids like a kid or an Indian squaw, which was amazing to Dawn because that was the time when all the girls were going for that big high hair, bubble and flip, the kind that took hours with rollers and spray. She looked about nineteen. And beautiful, without any effort at all, crisp and clean as if she’d just showered instead of walking however many miles in that sun. When she swung the truck around, pointing into town, this Judy said oh no, she lived out there at the rocks. Dawn couldn’t help but laugh.

“With them? You live out there?”

“With my mom and some friends.”

Who knew what to think about that? When they got to the compound Judy didn’t invite her in, just said thanks, see you another time, which made Dawn feel kind of sore toward her. She did get to tell the news to the girls over floats at the Dairy Queen and that was some consolation, but as it turned out she didn’t see Judy again until about a year later, when the girl made her real entrance into town life. By then Dawn had left school and was more or less just working at the store. She was there one afternoon, pretending to do something useful, when Judy walked in with the three freakiest-looking people you ever set eyes on. Dawn didn’t even want to blink in case she missed some shimmer or glimmer or strange remark or taking on or off of a hat or pair of dark glasses or a feather. One guy had all this silver and turquoise on him and a big black Stetson with a beadwork band and snakeskin boots and a long Mexican mustache. The other seemed to be wearing a pair of green ballet tights, through which you could basically see everything, which meant she tried to concentrate on the top half, where there was a rabbit-fur vest and a bare chest and a blond beard with little knotty braids in it — kind of disgusting, really — and if she didn’t want to look at that and couldn’t at the middle the only other option was his bare feet and they were just dirtier than hell. The other one was a colored girl, if you please, wearing a long yellow silk gown like a bathrobe, slightly torn and no bra underneath. Her hair was a big round Afro bubble and she was stoned on something, you could just tell she was, and in the middle of them all was Judy, in her jeans and her neatly pressed white shirt, looking just the same as before.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” said Dawn.

“Guys, this is Dawn. She’s one of us.”

Mexican Mustache made a kind of growling noise in his throat and leaned over the counter, all toothy and attracted. Dawn blushed right away. She hated how she did that. The others fell about the place, except Judy, who just stood there, smiling sweetly, like she was about to recite a poem.

“I’m sorry,” said the colored girl, “it’s just your face, man, you should see your face. You got eyes like — kerpow — you know?”

Dawn didn’t know and to be honest, it was her first-ever conversation with a colored person apart from one time on a class civics trip to Sacramento when they were there at the state capitol with a school from a deprived neighborhood. She must have looked confused or scared or something because right then Mr. Craw came bustling out of the storeroom and took a look at the customers and a look at her and put on his no-trespassers voice.

“Can I help you, young lady?”

Mr. Craw kept a.38 under the counter, alongside a baseball bat and a length of chain. He was positioned where he could reach it.

“I said, can I help you, young lady?”

Judy turned her big smile on him. “Sure, brother. You can sell us some food.”

“What kind of food?”

“Noodles, rice, cheese. Food.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.” He was flexing his hand under the counter like a Saturday serial gunslinger.

“I have a list.”

This set Mr. Craw back some. A little more clowning around and he might have used that gun. Mr. Craw had been a POW in Korea and now he liked to keep to himself. There was no Mrs. Craw. That mostly said it for Mr. Craw. Dawn just prayed those boys and girls didn’t remind the man of anything he didn’t care to be reminded of.

Somehow they got out alive with five big bags of groceries. She stood in the doorway looking after them. They had a school bus parked outside, painted all kinds of colors and patterns. The back half was stuffed with yards and yards of shiny fabric; there was so much, it was bursting out the windows. There was a sort of astronomy-dish item on top, and at least three or four more people hanging around outside, but she didn’t get a good look at anyone except a guy in a cape and a football helmet, because Mr. Craw pulled her back inside and told her to go and bag up the delivery orders for the veterans’ home.

Soon after that, Sheriff Waghorn found occasion to fly his plane right out to the Pinnacles. He landed it on the dry lake near the rocks and invited himself in for a neighborly tour of the property. When he got back, he held a meeting in the back room of Mulligan’s Lounge and Grill, just the usual half-dozen of them — the mayor, Mulligan, Mr. Hansen from the gas station, the Rotarians basically — and soon enough the town knew the feller with the burned face was called Davis and had taken the sheriff around very politely, shown him a bakery and some kind of windmill thing, but the place was a nuthouse, there were easily over twenty of them living there, including a naked chick and two niggers, which detail made it officially the biggest beatnik outbreak in the history of the county and ensured that Dawn and her friends Lena and Sheri wasted no time in giving their respective boyfriends the slip and heading over to get themselves some life experience.

It was a Friday night and they’d seen some lights out at the rocks which suggested a party. After a lot of ebb and flow on the telephone to coordinate excuses they found themselves in Lena’s truck having an argument that wasn’t really about was it OK to like Tommy James and the Shondells, but was it OK for Lena to have let Robbie Molina put his hand inside her panties at the Methodist Barbecue and Dance when he’d so recently had his hand inside Dawn’s panties and then been such a pig as to tell the basketball team after.

When they got to the compound, they sat in the dark for a while, fighting about what to do. Some kind of weird music was floating on the air. Dawn felt nervous. The three girls had finally screwed up their courage to get out of the truck when a pack of evil-looking characters pulled up beside them on motorcycles, gunning the engines and craning their necks to see into the cab. Right then they thought they were about to be victimized in some kind of chain-wielding greaser sex attack but instead the main one asked all soft and nice why they weren’t heading on in. It was none other than the dark leaner-on-the-counter from the store, the good-looking one with the Mexican mustache. He said his name was Wolf and smiled to show his big white teeth.

They didn’t really have a choice. They got out of the truck and followed Wolf and his buddies through the compound gate, trying to pretend it was the kind of thing they did all the time. Right away, Wolf ran into some chick and started walking along with his arm around her, though Dawn was vaguely trying to walk next to him on that side. They were projecting colors onto the rocks, slides and oil drops and such, and a whole bunch of people were sitting in a circle around a fire, playing drums and pipes and other instruments into this thing in the center, a sort of mound of microphones and boxy electrical devices.

No one paid much attention when they joined the circle. A few people nodded hello. The musicians just carried on playing. Dawn really dug the music, though it wasn’t like anything she’d normally listen to. “What do you call it here?” she asked the girl sitting next to her, who was wrapped in a Navajo blanket.

“This,” said the girl, “is the prime terrestrial hub of the Ashtar Galactic Command.”

“The what?”

“Our secret Earth base. Our first one. There are going to be a lot more eventually.”

Dawn didn’t know what to say to that, so she nodded and brushed her hair out of her face, to let the girl know she was interested.

“A lot more bases,” said the girl pensively. “Maybe hundreds. When we break through a lot more people are gonna get reintegrated. More bases’ll just naturally come then. Do you want to look through my glasses?”

She was wearing an odd pair of granny glasses, whose lenses were faceted like gemstones. Dawn put them on. The fire broke up into splinters of prismatic color.

“The Urim and Thummim,” said the girl. “They show you the past and the future.” Dawn had no idea what she was talking about.

“How did you find out about all this?”

“About what?”

“Bases and such.”

“Oh, I can’t remember. Feels like I’ve always known. I met Judy on the street in L.A. and she introduced me to Joanie and Clark and they asked me if I wanted to come and live out here. That’s about it.”

“Joanie and Clark?”

The girl pointed to the other side of the fire. One thing was for sure: The crazy lady looked a lot less crazy out there at the rocks. She was wearing a flower-print maxi dress that made her seem old-timey, pioneering. Her hair was combed out long and straight, a gray curtain falling on either side of her face. She and one-eyed Mr. Davis weren’t sitting cross-legged on the ground like the others. They were provided with high-backed wooden armchairs, sturdy things like countrified thrones: Ma and Pa, with Miss Judy at their feet, still looking All-American, bright and fresh, propping her head on her hands like she was at morning assembly.

Dawn smiled over, but Little Miss Judy stared straight through her like they’d never met.

Navajo Blanket Girl didn’t seem to mind talking, so Dawn carried on asking questions. Turned out the old lady was called Ma Joanie, except you said it with a long aah sound, because it was from The East. Maa Joanie. Maaaaa … So was she crazy or wasn’t she? Lena and Sheri, sitting on Dawn’s far side, widened their eyes to show her she was being rude.

“She’s seen a lot of things you and I haven’t,” said the girl. “She’s very highly advanced.”

Which sort of sounded like a yes.

Lena mouthed Let’s go. Dawn wanted to stay. There was all kinds of good stuff to look at, such as the light show and the well-built young guy with no pants on dancing by the fire, just shaking his thing from side to side in a way that would not have come naturally to Frankie or Robbie or in fact any of the boys they knew.

“What about Judy? She seems kind of aloof.”

Navajo Blanket Girl lowered her voice to a whisper. “Judy’s the most important person here. Judy’s the Guide.”

“To what?”

“Say, can I have my glasses back?”

Just like that, without saying good-bye, Navajo Blanket Girl got up and wandered away, humming to herself. Dawn was confused, but she had to recover quickly, had to check she was put together OK and was acting cool, because Wolf stretched out beside her, propped himself up on one elbow and offered her a hit on a long, skinny joint. The important thing was not to say or do anything stupid.

“Hi,” he said.

“Dawnie,” whispered Sheri. “Let’s get out of here. A person could get cooties just from the ground.”

Dawn was about to smoke her first pot and had no intention of leaving, for Sheri or anyone, so she shot her a shut-your-trap look and they listened to the music for a while. Dawn smoked some of the joint and handed it to Sheri, who didn’t want any. Lena took a hit and then started to cough like a sick cat, which was kind of funny. Then Wolf asked if she’d like to meet some people and she said yes, and he helped her to her feet and she ignored the sight of Sheri pointing angrily at her watch and Lena holding up her car keys. She walked with Wolf, like in a procession or a dance, around to the other side of the fire.

“Dawn,” he said. “You won’t even have to change your name.”