Unpopular Science

Chapter 1

One day you’re a young man and the next day you’re old. One day your eyes are sharp enough to make out Cloudcroft, better than fifty miles to the northwest, and the next day it’s just another blur on the horizon. One day you’re strong enough to walk to Cloudcroft for a sack of beer, and the next day you’re tuckered out just from shuffling down to the latrine pit.

One day you’ve got your sanity. Next day, well… Bo Janks expected his eyes to go bad and he knew his legs would get tired, but somehow he never expected his mind to give up on him. Not that he relied on it all that much, anyway. Not that he had to think through any new problems. Bo Janks was living the exact same life today as he’d lived thirty years, forty years back. What was there for him to think about? But he did need his old brain to show him what was real and what wasn’t, and for the first time ever it wasn’t pulling its weight in that regard.

It started on April 15, Bo recalled, the day that Mel came out to fill the water tanks and wouldn’t you know it, the rain came that same night. Bo was at home, drinking his one nightly beer and watching the rain from the porch, when his mind betrayed him.

“What is that?” he asked. Bo talked to himself all the time. That didn’t make him crazy, did it?

“I know what that is, don’t I?” Bo remarked a minute later, and by this time he was so intrigued he got up, knees creaking, and walked out into the rain with his thumb over the top of the beer bottle to keep it from getting diluted. He followed the thing, only to become disoriented when he came near enough to recognize what it was. What he recognized couldn’t be real, so he had to be hallucinating. Bo fell over, knocked his head and he spilled his beer.

When he came to his senses again it was morning. Bo Janks found himself looking up at an Air Force man.

“You okay, there, old-timer?”

Bo got to his feet with the help of the Air Force man, who had more than a few uniform decorations. “You gave me a scare when I saw you stretched out like that,” the officer said.

Bo looked around to find he was in the scrub only a hundred paces from his place. His head hurt like hell and he saw the rock he had banged it on. There was a little blood on it.

“I should get you to a doctor.”

‘Tm all right,” Bo said, but he didn’t feel all right He felt as though his life was over. Once your mind goes bad, that was all she wrote.

“Maybe you ought to go easy on the Budweiser,” the officer suggested.

Bo picked up the bottle, showed the officer the dregs. “You’ll find five unopened bottles in the cooler at my place and not another empty bottle around. I ain’t a man who drinks to excess.”

The Air Force man nodded. “Okay. What, were you taking a premature dirt nap, then, old-timer?”

Bo saw no reason to kid himself or this stranger. Bo was a straight shooter, always. “I was seein’ things. Chasing my past in the desert.”

“Chasing your past?”

“Something walked right out of my past and by my place and then into the desert. I saw it plain as day.”

“Somebody you knew once?” the Air Force man asked.

“Not a somebody. A something.”

The Air Force man looked at his black sedan, parked up by Bo’s place, and he looked around the sandy desert, and then his eyes sort of just wandered on back to Bo. “You saw a thing that walked?”

“It warn’t real.”

“What did you mean when you said you know what it was, old-timer?”

“I know it because I’ve seen it before.”

“Well, then? What was it, anyway?”

Bo Janks looked out into the desert himself, mind going back to what he’d seen the previous night, and then going back to when he’d seen it before. Out loud, to the stranger from the Air Force and to God and to the world, but mostly to himself, he said it as if he was making a confession, “It was Ironhand.”

Ironhand. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but he hadn’t even thought that name in forty years.

Where had his daddy’s old books gone to anyway? Probably sold off with the rest of his daddy’s belongings. When Bo’s daddy died, Bo’s sister couldn’t erase his memory fast enough. She sold or trashed everything in the house, then sold the house, and she sent half the money that was left over to Bo. The check in the mail was how Bo found out his daddy died.

Daddy used to have some books that Bo read when he was twelve years old. Those books were old already. The ones with covers, and there weren’t many, showed grimy old drawings of what Bo saw in the desert on that night.

“What’s that mean, Ironhand?” the stranger from the Air Force asked.

Bo got suspicious then. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but who are you anyway, and why’d you come to my place?”

The Air Force man smiled. “We lost a missile. I came by to see if maybe you spotted it.”

They lost a missile that went maybe a thousand miles per hour and what Bo saw was a thing that walked no faster than a man.

“A missile?” He laughed.

Bo drank two beers that night, just as if it were Christmas or the Fourth of July. Drowning his sorrows.

He started chuckling again when he thought of the Air Force man. “A missile!”

After the Air Force man left. Bo looked around, hoping against hope to find some evidence that what he saw in the night had left a mark of itself, but there was nothing. Course not. It wasn’t real. Ironhand didn’t exist.

Once there was an Ironhand. Bo’s daddy saw it at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. He told Bo about it time and time again. That World’s Fair was more than a hundred years ago, and Ironhand must be long gone now.

“Don’t look for excuses for your old brain. Bo. It’s just worn down. Face it, Bo, you’re losing it.”

It was a hard pill to swallow. If his mind went, he couldn’t live alone anymore. He would have to go to town, check himself into the home for old geezers, and that was unthinkable. He had lived in the desert for thirty years, independent and happy enough, and he couldn’t change his life now. When a man was eighty-nine years old, he was too old to change. So what options did that leave him?

Next day, more strangers from the Air Force came by, and they weren’t as friendly. They wanted Bo to talk about what he’d seen, and they accused him of being a drunkard. Bo asked them to leave politely, then got on the phone to the sheriff, and that convinced the Air Force men to leave Bo’s land.

But the visit got Bo thinking. Not that he could trust his thinking, but it seemed odd, all this attention from the U.S. Air Force. There had been stray missiles from White Sands before, and Bo had talked to the Air Force men before. They never sent men on the first day, with all the decorations. They never came back for a second visit. They never sent the goon squad.

What did it mean?

He spent all the following day in the desert, searching the ground for any sign left by the thing that his mind had made him see.

“Dam fool!” He was home at dusk, a whole day wasted, his neck sore from bending so much.

Then the next day he got up and he looked some more.

On the third day, he found something strange. It was a flake of heavy, corroded iron, small as a fingernail, lying atop the sands where nothing made of iron ought to be. Bo held it in his shaking hands. He looked at the ground again and noticed how the sand sunk down in a way that wasn’t right.

That night, Bo drank three beers and woke up sick. He heard pounding and it took a long time to figure out there was somebody outside his place. It was more Air Force. They were nicer this time, but they kept talking and talking and all Bo wanted to do was to lie down and sleep or maybe just lie down and die.

But when they left at noon he got his shovel and he went to the place where the iron chip had been sitting on top of the sands, and he started to dig.

The rain started coming down. The day got dark, and by the time of the real dusk. Bo was exhausted, his old arms on fire and his head pounding. He was too old for this.

But he had to know. Bo kept digging, the powdery sand piling up on either side. He kept thinking the sand was too loose, as if something had been digging here recently, when it should be hard as sandstone.

His shovel hit something metal under the sand, and Bo scrambled out of his newly dug hole in a panic, He stared down there, terribly afraid. Whatever metal object he hit, it was still under the sand.

“Bo, you really ought to go down there and get your shovel,” he told himself.

Then a lightning bolt struck not a mile away and Bo came to his senses. “Damn fool! Don’t you have enough sense to come in out of the rain?”

He began heading back to his place, turned around once, and saw the lightning get closer. He saw—he thought he saw—something moving around by his newly dug hole.

Bo moved as fast as his old legs could go, and he was too afraid to look back again until he got to his place. He tried to get his breath, standing on the tiny porch and holding the wall, watching the desert.

The lightning struck nearby and the crack seemed to rip the air apart. The brilliance lasted long enough for Bo to see that the desert was good and empty.

“Damn fool!” Bo gasped.

Body pumping with adrenaline, he knew sleep wouldn’t be easy. He decided to write a letter to his dad. He did that, every twenty years or so, as a way of helping him think through a crisis. This time it seemed especially appropriate, because who else in the world would know a thing about it except his dad?

Writing was hard, because he didn’t do it much and his hand bones hurt just awful, but he got most of it down, in pencil, on the back of some old phone bills.

When he woke up he was lying on the table, the letter under his head. The lightning had stopped.

Bo Janks wasn’t an educated man, but he knew something about electricity. He knew that a thing made out of metal ought not to be walking around in a desert in a storm. Now the storm had passed on. If there was something in the hole he’d dug, if it were made of metal, then it wouldn’t come out when the lightning was striking. It would wait until the night was peaceful again, like now. Bo got to his feet, slipped on his boots and walked out of his place. The desert smelled fresh and clean, as if God just gave it a good scrubbing. The clouds were almost gone, the moon and stars were bright and Bo could see the desert as clear as in daytime.

There was something in the desert, walking toward Bo’s place.

“Ironhand,” Bo Janks said. “You really here? Or am I just a dam, senile old fool?”

He got no answer, so he sat himself down on his stoop and just watched. The hallucination came close enough to touch him with its moon shadow.

‘I wish you was here, Daddy. You’d want to see a sight like this, that’s for sure.”

Those were Bo Janks’s last words, to himself, to his daddy or to anybody.