So there I was, back in town and out of work. Since I left both my parents had died, but I didn’t know that till I got back. I wasn’t real good about keeping in touch. So the news was kind of a shock. Not that they were much of a family. My daddy drank when he wasn’t digging foundations and my mom worked as a beautician all her adult life. Cancer took her, and sometime later my daddy shot himself. Their house was sold off for back taxes. I came home to nothing, in other words. All I wanted was to curl up in a safe place and forget what I’d seen down in the Atacama, and all I got was more fuckin’ grief.
I rented me a little place at the edge of town and I guess I meant to sit there smoking weed and watching shit on TV until my savings ran out, but one day Werner Beck knocked on the door. At the time, I didn’t know who the fuck he was. I figured he wanted to collect a debt or sell me a Bible. But what he said was, Are you the Eugene Dowd who saw some unusual things in Chile last year? Which made we want to reach for a gun, except I didn’t have one. Relax, he tells me, I’m red-blooded all the way through. And I knew what that meant. So I told him to come in.
Naturally I wanted to know how he’d found me. He said he seen a piece in the local paper. He subscribed to what he called a clipping service. Clipping service sends him pieces from newspapers all over the country, big and little newspapers, if the article mentions certain words or phrases.
He didn’t say what those words or phrases were. But I knew the piece he was talking about. A column in the local rag, which is barely a real newspaper, mostly grocery coupons and classified ads. Well, some bored fucker wrote a column about what he called “colorful characters,” and I’d had the misfortune to run into this guy at a bar when I was too pissed for my own good—I told him a few things about the Atacama and he wrote it up like it was some big fucking joke. Local loser sees green men, that kind of shit.
Yeah, I told Beck, that’s my story, or part of it, but the paper didn’t use my name, so again, how’d you find me? I asked around, Beck says. Lot of trouble to go to, I say. Yeah, he says, but the thing is, Mr. Dowd, I believe you.
Well, there really wasn’t much in that newspaper column to believe, it seemed to me. The column told how I’d said there were Martians living in South America, which I didn’t. It even had a punch line. Like this: “I asked my newfound acquaintance whether his Martians were green, as in the comic books. ‘Yes,’ he confided, ‘green as grass—but only on the inside!’”
Fucking humiliating.
Beck saw the expression on my face and said, Look, Mr. Dowd, I’m serious about this. I know all about people who are green on the inside. And one thing I know is, they don’t think twice about committing murder. They killed a bunch of my friends. They tried to kill me.
Which made me realize he was serious. I said, How do I know you’re not one of them?
He told me that was a smart question and he loosened his belt and lifted up his shirt and showed me a scar where he had his appendix out. I asked him what that was supposed to prove. He said the hospital where he was treated would’ve noticed if he’d been bleeding green. Then he says, How about you?
I didn’t feel like showing him any scars, but he said that was okay, he’d take me at my word. At least for now. The word he used was “provisionally.”
Then we got down to business. Given what he’d already said, I asked him what he wanted. I want to hear your story, he says. And then I’ll tell you mine.
Once he had sanded the original paint Dowd washed the car with soapy water, dried it, and rinsed it again with a solution of mineral spirits. Then he taped off the parts he wanted to protect—windows, bumpers, trim. In the occasional silences, when Dowd wasn’t talking or operating power tools, Cassie heard wind rattling the corners and hollows of Dowd’s garage. Winter coming. She wasn’t sure what winter meant in this part of the country—probably not what it meant in Buffalo, where snow sometimes shut down the city for days.
Dowd broke for lunch as soon as the car was prepped for spraying. Lunch today was a rerun of lunch yesterday: convenience-store sandwiches. Cassie watched Dowd as he crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, crumbs collecting in his moustache. He caught her looking and gave her a grin that wasn’t entirely friendly. Werner Beck trusts this man, Cassie reminded herself. But how much did she really know about Leo’s father?
“Had enough to eat?” Dowd asked, still gazing at Cassie.
She nodded.
Leo said, “You were going to tell us what you told my father.”
“Yeah.” Dowd wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “I guess I was.”
I was sick of Texas and I wanted to travel, which is how I ended up on the Trans-American Highway—parts of it brand new in those days, all those tunnels and bridges through the Darien Gap—working my way south from the Canal Zone picking up odd jobs. Mostly construction and electrical, like I said. Or what ever came to hand. I slept rough from time to time but I was young and that was all right with me as long as I could move on when I felt like it. Just heading south, like some kind of migrating bird.
I was in Antofagasta, that’s in Chile, when I hooked up with a Dutch company that was doing some work out in the Atacama desert. Building and running a supply depot for a copper mine, supposedly. Crew was mostly local but the company had an arrangement with the unions that let them hire a few foreigners, a handful of Ecuadorian and Colombian guest workers and one American, me—the crew boss liked that I had a U.S. electrician’s certificate, which is pretty much the gold standard. So they bused us over the Coast Range and up the Antofagasta Road, then along one of those old roads that used to service nitrate mines, to a flat place where a little spur of the Ferrocarril ran out—the real high desert, dry as glass and air so thin you could see the moon by daylight.
In a couple of months we had four air-conditioned buildings up and running. More like ware houses than anything else. And it was all kind of a mystery. There was no copper mine in sight, far as I could see. The Dutch crew boss spoke Spanish and a little German but he liked to practice his English on me in the off-hours, so I asked him about that one time. Get a little Jenever into him and he was pretty friendly. But he didn’t have much to say. He’d been told the site was a depot to store supplies on their way from the railhead or the road to the mine—the mine itself being a ways east. And no, he said, you couldn’t see the mine from here, but some nights you could see a light, like a spotlight or what do you call it, one of those lights they shine at movie theaters, know what I’m talking about? A shaft of light going up into the desert air. What kind of mine has a light like that, I asked him. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t his business to know.
We, I mean the work crew, slept in temporary shelters, plywood bunkhouses with canvas roofs and the wind for ventilation. Some nights when I couldn’t sleep I went out to look for that light the crew boss talked about. I saw it once, a shaft of light coming up from the horizon, almost too faint to see. Straight-up vertical. It lasted about three minutes. Not real impressive, but it had no business being there.