I wrote this story 20-plus years ago, then lost it sometime during a move, or after getting a new computer, or going through a funk. The story came to mind recently and I remembered I liked it, so I rewrote the thing. Let me know what you think – and if you like it, there’s a donation button on the home page. Thank you.
By Jason Offutt
The ranger glared at me from behind an old wooden desk, a Rocky Mountain National Forest coffee mug clenched so tightly in his hands I worried his knuckles might explode. The dangers of wearing a white shirt. Well, a once-white shirt.
“You know what this all sounds like, right?” he asked through a frown that made his laugh lines look like they wanted to punch me.
The past day had been an ugly slice of hell. I don’t know how long it took me to drive my Camry down to the little ranger station from the lake on the mountain, but it was a lot faster than when Denny and I drove up. Yes, I knew what my story sounded like to the ranger because it sounded the same to me. It sounded like a load of shit.
“It sounds like a load of shit,” he continued, plucking a pen from a wooden desk set, a Colorado flag on a little pole rose from its center. “You sure you want to stick with this story?”
I nodded. “Yes sir,” I said, my voice shakier than I would have liked.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a wooden clipboard. “Well, okay then, Mr. Smithmeyer. Tell me again exactly what happened to your friend.”
***
I saw Denny the moment I turned onto his street. He stood on the sidewalk, a duffle, a big Coleman cooler, fishing poles, tackle box, and a bag with a canvas camp chair at his feet. He leaned against his mailbox like he didn’t have anything better to do, the neck of a beer bottle pinched between his fingers. Cheap, domestic. The beer, not Denny. No, I guess that summed up Denny, too. His faded T-shirt read, “My Other Shirt’s on Your Wife.”
“You’re late, compadre,” he said as I came to a stop and rolled down my car’s passenger side window, his words slow and cool. Listening to Denny was like drinking Pepto-Bismol spiked with vodka.
Maybe that’s how he talked me into camping this weekend. Camping’s something other people do, people who don’t mind slapping mosquitoes in their sleep. At least we had a cabin at the Valley View Campgrounds somewhere near Rocky Mountain National Park. But he brought fishing poles. Just freakin’ great. If people were supposed to eat fish, catching them wouldn’t smell so bad.
“You don’t own a watch,” I said, punching the button to pop the trunk. “Or a cell phone. You wouldn’t know what time it was if you lived in Greenwich.”
He picked up the cooler, probably full of beer instead of food, and moved to the back of the car. “I don’t need a watch; I can feel time,” he said, shoving the big red box next to my sleeping bag that was still in its store packaging. “Like right now. As soon as I load my gear into this bucket, that’s completely unsuitable for camping by the way, I’ll know it’s time for another beer, and maybe a sandwich. I always get hungry when I go camping.”
Dear Lord. This weekend was a mistake. Much like Decca Records signing Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead of the Beatles, spending two days in the mountains with Denny Lewellyn was trusting the government-level stupid.
***
The ranger cleared his throat. “How long have you known Mr. Lewellyn?” he asked.
Really? We didn’t have time for– aw, for Christ’s sake. I shrugged. “Fifteen years, or so.”
He scribbled some words, or a doodle, onto the clipboard before looking back at me. “And is Mr. Lewellyn prone to doing anything rash?”
I would have laughed if this situation wasn’t such a clusterfuck casserole. Rash? Denny never did anything “rash.” Rash meant considering the consequences before disregarding them. Denny never considered the consequences.
“I guess you could say that.”
The Ranger’s dark eyes and Bruce Campbell chin were imposing. As he looked at me over his desk, I suddenly realized this situation didn’t look good for me. No, it looked awful.
***
I guess it was more like twenty years. I met Denny the first day of high school. He sat behind me in Mr. Clarkson’s science class. “Cool Trapper Keeper,” he’d said as I walked by him to sit at the only empty desk in the room. There was a reason the desk in front of Denny was open, and my Trapper Keeper wasn’t cool. I told Mom I wanted a Power Rangers notebook and she got me one. The Pink Ranger. I’ve never lived that down and I’m 34.
“Mr. Clarkson,” Denny said from behind me. “Pink Ranger here said he’d like to panspermia all over Venus. Then he giggled.”
What?
“Well,” Mr. Clarkson said, rolling up the sleeves of his white button-down shirt. “I’m afraid he’d find the 864 degrees Fahrenheit ground temperature, the carbon dioxide atmosphere and Venus’s sulfuric acid clouds a bit less sexy than they sound.” He grabbed a black dry erase marker and moved toward the board. “Now, if you’ll all turn your textbooks to page 48.”
I turned toward Denny, my face pinched in anger. He just smiled an idiotic “aw, shucks” smile and opened his textbook. We’ve been friends ever since.
***
Denny downed three beers before we left the foothills and took Highway 40 into the mountains, year-round snow decorating the rocky peaks like a sundae topping. I’ve always liked the mountains, at least the view of them from Denver, with its tall buildings and all that friendly concrete to keep me safe. The Rockies seemed jagged, cold and dangerous. Frostbite dangerous. Bear dangerous. Falling from a tall height to my death dangerous. My folks took my sister and I skiing a few times growing up, but I never left the resort’s lodge. I guess I liked hot chocolate more than the prospect of an icy, tree-inspired death.
The engine of my Honda Civic groaned as we wound up the highway that curved through the mountains.
“Shift to Low,” Denny said, his voice as relaxed as Casual Friday.
Okay, so I’d never driven in the mountains before. I volunteered to drive because Denny did all the planning. The dates, supplies, a cabin on a lake, and apparently a fishing rod for me. Whoo-hoo. Besides, I knew he’d be drunk by noon. It was Saturday.
“Do you want to drive?” I asked.
The hiss of another beer opening came from beside me. “Do you really want me to?”
No. Of course not. Denny would be into the beer all day. The driving was mine.
Mountain highways are up and down with more twists than a Slinky, but all I saw were guardrails, asphalt and runaway truck ramps of gravel and sand. Why would anyone want to drive here? About an hour in, the mountains opened and a long, slender valley spread out before us.
A blue road sign read ‘Valley View Campgrounds next exit.’ Dear god, we made it. “This is it? Valley View? There’s a lake and a Circle K across the road. This has to be it.”
The highway had gone straight, leaving the sheer hundred-foot drops behind, so I chanced a glance at Denny. His grin was like that first day in Mr. Clarkson’s class.
“This is it, right?”
He took a long, slow drink of beer before answering. “Don’t put on your turn signal just yet, cowboy.”
Cowboy, my ass. I put on the turn signal.
“Hey—”
“Shut up,” I shouted, my face grew hot. I guess I was pretty stressed at that point. The wheels crunched on the shoulder gravel as the Camry ground to a halt. I slammed the transmission into Park and turned on Denny. “What do you mean don’t put on the turn signal just yet? This is it. Valley View Campgrounds. That’s what you told me.”
If I’d been a little more riled, Denny’s grin would have been punchable. If mountain driving did that to people, why did anyone ever go skiing?
“Well,” he said, drawing out the Ls like a car salesman trying to tell me how important it was to add the undercoating. “I thought about that, and sleeping in a cabin isn’t really camping.”
“What?” For a person like me who considered the out-of-doors something as alien as, well, an alien, a one-room cabin was as camping as I was willing to get.
“And besides,” he continued. “Think of all the money I’m saving us.”
I might have bought his bullshit if he really was a car salesman, but I’d known him too long. “How much?”
His grin broke into a full smile. “All of it.”
***
The ranger stuffed the pen behind his ear long enough to take a drink of coffee. He hadn’t offered me any. Can’t say I wanted coffee, not now, but I needed something real, something sane to focus on or I was afraid I’d run screaming out of this little building in the trees.
“Excuse me, officer,” I stuttered.
He glared at me. “I’m not an officer, I’m a park ranger.” He sat down the coffee mug. “Although I can arrest you faster than you can tell me what a goddamned idiot you are.”
How did he know what I was thinking? “May I have something to drink?” I asked.
His frown told me I could go eff myself, but he pushed his tall athletic frame from behind the desk and walked to a white mini-fridge next to the bathroom door and pulled out a bottle of water.
“So you left the highway. Where did you end up?” he asked as he sat back down, setting the plastic water bottle on the desk, staring at me like he was daring me to pick it up.
“At a lake somewhere near Barr Pass,” I said. “At least that’s what was on the sign. It was old and kind of hard to read.”
The ranger’s eyes popped wide. “Barr Pass? That’s the backcountry.”
Backcountry? Damn straight. Dirt roads all the way up. “Yeah?”
His pen started scratching on the form again. “Did you have an overnight wilderness permit?”
Permit? No way in hell Denny got a permit. Damn it. The ranger began writing so fast I was surprised the paper didn’t catch fire.
“You said there was a lake,” he continued. “That would be Lake Campbell. Did you fish?”
***
“What?” Denny had said about an hour before dusk after he’d set up the tent and started the campfire. I sat on a log at the lakeshore, although why Denny’s canvas fold-up chair was still in its case, I didn’t know. That wasn’t all I didn’t know. “You don’t know how to bait a hook? All hail the Pink Ranger.” Those weren’t his last words to me, but they were close.
***
“Lake Campbell is restricted,” the ranger said, not looking up. “Did you catch any fish?”
After what happened, this guy is worried about fish.
“Yeah, Denny caught a few fish, I didn’t.” The ranger’s facial expression didn’t falter. “I just pretended to fish.”
“How many did you boys catch?” the ranger asked.
“I don’t remember,” I said, and I didn’t, because while Denny laughed at me, a load of shit happened. “That’s when I saw the light.”
***
The sun had just started to go down over the mountains, the pink pastels of dusk staining the sky like God had wiped it with a chunk of meat. The sounds of darkness had just begun; the cries of night birds hunting, the buzz of the few insects that had the balls to exist at this altitude. Then I almost toppled off the log. A light flared above a patch of trees on the other side of the lake and the noise of the approaching night died as if someone had flicked a switch. “Whoa,” I Keanued.
The light hung stupidly in the sky just over the treetops. Words formed in my brain. Words like, ‘I hate camping,’ but nothing came out. I reached out a shaking hand and pointed over Denny’s shoulder.
“What?” Denny asked. “You see a Bigfoot?”
Bigfoot? At that point I would have welcomed a Bigfoot. Bigfoot’s supposed to be a mammal. I’m a mammal. We’re like brothers. But reality sat on me like a weight as heavy that Bigfoot. Whatever this light was, it wasn’t from around here.
***
The ranger started to say something, but I held up my shaking hand. He didn’t want to, but he pinched his mouth and leaned back in the chair; the old springs creaked in protest. My throat was dry and the water bottle was within my reach, but I didn’t dare stop. If I did, I didn’t know if I’d finish.
“It wasn’t just me,” I said. “Denny saw it too. That’s how I found he had a gun.”
***
Denny swung around, following my finger, and the smile dropped off his face. “Wha?” he said. His half-full beer bottle and fishing pole hit the ground. “What the hell is that?”
I shouldn’t know, I couldn’t know, but deep down I did. I’d seen too many Saturday afternoon movies as a kid not to. What I didn’t know is how my legs had enough strength to push me to my feet. As I stood with the balance of a sock monkey, I noticed all sound had died. The night birds, cicadas, mosquitos, everything. The loudest noise was my heart beating in my ears.
“It’s, it’s—” I started, but stopped trying. The words were too stupid for me to say out loud. It didn’t matter; Denny had already walked away from me and disappeared into the tent.
“Hey,” I started to say, but he’d already reappeared, pulling a hunting rifle from his canvas folding chair bag.
“You have your cell phone?” he asked, pushing brass casings into the gun breech.
Phone? “Yeah, but I don’t have any reception, and—” The world began to spin out of control. “Where did you get that?”
His hand slammed back the rifle’s bolt and shoved it forward with a click. “Walmart.”
What? “No, today. How did a rifle—?” Shit. That wasn’t a chair. “Why did you bring a rifle?”
He leaned the weapon across his chest. “To protect our beer. Duh.”
“Our beer? From what?”
“Bears. In 2004, a black bear walked into a Baker Lake, Washington, campsite, tipped over a cooler, drank 36 beers and didn’t even offer to pay for them. True story. Bears are jerks.”
The light over the forest flared then dimmed and Denny’s smile grew into the most genuine expression of pleasure I’d ever seen on his stupid face. The glowing ball pulsated alternately from red to white to screw you. Mountains, fishing, camping, flying saucers? No. Oh, hell no. I wasn’t doing this anymore. My hand dove into my jeans pocket and pulled out the car keys.
“Come on, man. Don’t you want see it?” he asked.
See it? See It? We didn’t even know what ‘it’ was. “You mean that thing from ‘Alien’ that exploded from John Hurt’s chest?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I was thinking hot girls from Venus, but I’m good either way.”
I could have left right then. I should have left right then, but something about Denny’s smirk made me stay and see this thing out.
***
Sticks and last season’s leaves crunched as we made our way through the cover of quaking aspens and bristlecone pines. Denny walked straight, casual, the rifle on his shoulder like he didn’t plan to use it. That was it. Maybe he didn’t plan to use it. He brought the rifle as a safety precaution. It’s always good to be safe, right? Besides, there were bears in these woods, and bears were jerks.
The glow grew as we walked through the trees until it blotted out the night. Random thoughts that the light came from poachers, or a Hollywood documentary team shooting the nocturnal mating habits of wolverines, skittered through my head as we hit a tree line that opened to reveal a wide, grassy glade. A spaceship, a flying effing saucer, hung about six feet over a field of tall grass.
The shit was real.
Something bumped my arm, but I hardly felt it. My full attention was nailed to the B-movie saucer.
“Hey,” Denny hissed, hitting my arm again. “Check that out.”
I would have said, “huh,” if my mouth worked. It didn’t. At that moment I didn’t know if it would ever work again.
A figure stood in the grass of the clearing, its skin so pale it nearly became one with the light. It bent, extending a spindly arm into the tall grass and came up with a little, purple flower. The creature – and that’s what it was. It had two arms and two legs, but it wasn’t one of us – held the flower up to its enormous black eyes. A smile pulled across its narrow slit of a mouth. I’m not sure, but it was probably at this point I pissed myself.
“That, my friend, is an alien,” Denny said from beside me, but his words seemed too far away for me to really hear.
Dear god, it was an alien. A being that had traveled through the vacuum of space in a piece of cookware stood a football toss away from us. It looked like the kind of spaceman that took Richard Dreyfuss. A real frozen turkey-headed butt-prober. And it was smiling at a purple flower. Did it want to be friends?
That’s when Denny shifted his weight and a branch snapped under his boot. The thing’s huge, almond eyes swung toward us and narrowed. It hissed, revealing a row of sharp bone where its teeth should be.
***
“And?” The ranger leaned forward on his elbows, his jaw set tight.
I had stopped talking, my throat dry, my eyes wet.
“Denny shot it,” I said, my voice shaky. “He shot it. The think jerked backward and the little alien guy dropped into the grass, but it never dropped the flower.”
***
The light had blinked out before the echo of the gunshot died, and the ship was gone. It was just gone.
***
I wiped my face with the back of my arm and looked at the ranger. I couldn’t read his expression. Pity? Anger? Disgust? Maybe all three; I was pangusting.
The safety seal on the water bottle cracked as I twisted it off. The water should have felt good going down my throat, I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since I saw what I saw, but I didn’t feel anything. Did I see what I saw? I understood the look of pangust on the ranger. This sounded crazy.
“Well, what happened next?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know, exactly. It was all kind of weird.”
The ranger leaned back, tapping his wooden pen on the desk. “I don’t appreciate being jerked around, Mr. Smithmeyer,” he said, his voice low.
I shook my head and said, “I’m not jerking you around. It’s what happened.”
***
The smell of burning meat dragged me awake, my stomach rumbling. I hadn’t eaten in hours and the smoky, wood-roasted scent climbed up my nostrils and bounced over my CB1 receptors. My stomach rumbled again, audibly. Geez, that smelled good. I sniffed the air. It wasn’t fish. Nope. Definitely not fish. I crawled from the tent.
Denny sat on the log he’d dragged from the lakeshore, pulling meat off a bone with his teeth. He looked at me and grinned, an orange flicker glistened off his greasy chin. Food. This day. This awful, awful day was over.
“Hey, Pink Ranger. I told you I always get hungry when I go camping,” he said through a mouthful of food. “About time you joined the party. We’ve missed you.”
We?
“What do you me—” Not for the first time today, my voice clogged my throat like an eating contest fail. Next to Denny, firelight danced across two enormous black eyes.
“Denny,” came out in a whisper.
He leaned to his right and patted a decapitated gray head. It leaned against the log, staring across the fire, at me. The alien he’d shot in the clearing was real. It was real.
Denny pointed the meatless femur at me before flicking it over my head into the darkness. “Their bones are hollow,” he said. “Like a bird’s. Which makes sense because they taste like chicken.” Then he laughed. He laughed.
Chicken? Oh, my god, it tastes like chicken. “Denny,” I said. Why was my voice so small?
He pulled a piece of meat off what was left of the alien carcass he’d wrapped in foil and cooked with onions and, what was that smell? Thyme? Who brings thyme on a camping trip?
“Hungry?” Denny asked, waving the gray meat at me, a glob of it wiggling like my third-grade teacher’s arm flap. “Come on, man. It’s finger lickin’ good.”
My once-growling stomach was suddenly as quiet as the night.
“You ate it?” I said, not understanding any of this. Not one damn bit. “It was an intelligent creature, Denny.”
He dropped the chunk of meat back onto the foil and wiped his hands on his jeans. “He started it.”
No. No, no, no. “That thing came from outer effing space, marveled at the wonders of our planet’s nature, and this is where you go? You killed and ate it?”
“Yeah.”
I stumbled behind the tent and threw up.
***
I don’t know what woke me up. Maybe it was the silence. I don’t know from experience, but I’ve seen enough 1980s action movies to know nature at night is full of sound, like Austrian grunting and explosions. The only thing I heard in the tent was Denny next to me snoring off all that beer and a bellyful of gray space alien. The thought just—.
Oh, shit. Something moved. I twisted my head toward the spot where Denny lay. We weren’t alone in the tent. If I’d had any liquid left in my bladder I’d have pissed myself again. A gray alien, just like the one Denny shot in the clearing, stood over him, staring at me with those great, black eyes.
Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.
It moved one slim hand toward its face and held its long index finger over its mouth. What’s it— It’s shushing me. It’s shushing me?
Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.
The gray creature lowered its hand and held it over Denny who muttered something in his sleep but didn’t wake. I opened my mouth; I had to say something. I had to wake Denny before, before what? The thing’s tiny slit slid into a frown and moved its other hand toward me. A flower, small and purple was pinched between its slim fingers. The gray being dropped the flower and it fell toward me in slow motion.
***
I looked up at the ranger who was no longer writing.
“So,” he said, his voice low, his patience forced as a parent’s. “You go out for a buddy weekend. You camp and fish in a restricted area without permits. Your buddy disappears and you’re telling me it’s because of space aliens?”
It sounded crazy, just batshit crazy, but it wasn’t. “Yeah.”
“And what proof do you have?”
I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out a purple flower. “This,” I said. “This is the flower the space guy dropped on my head. It made me pass out. When I woke up Denny was gone. The alien and the remains were gone. And the ground was covered in these things.”
The ranger barked a laugh. “That?” he asked. “That’s an Aspen daisy, son. There’s Aspen daisies all over these mountains.” He stood, his full height taller than I was comfortable with. He grabbed his hat.
“What are you doing?”
He nodded toward the door. “We’re going back up there.”
No. “Oh, no,” I said, my voice echoed in the small room. A hot wave washed across my face, and my chest pinched. Is this what a heart attack feels like? “I’m not going back up there. No way. No way in hell.”
The ranger walked around the desk toward me. “I’m not giving you a choice,” he said. “If what you’re telling me is true and your friend is missing, I need to see where everything happened. Capisce?”
A large hand dropped on my shoulder and encouraged me from the chair, the old wooden seat groaning as I moved. Denny was gone. He was freakin’ gone, and that thing took him because Denny ate its friend and I’m having a heart attack. Or not. At that moment, I think I finally realized the human race was screwed.
The ranger opened the door and ushered me onto the cabin’s porch. “What the—?” The big man froze as we stared into a world that didn’t look like ours. “What the hell’s happening?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. Stretching across the small front porch of the cabin, over my car and the ranger’s pickup, growing from the trucks of trees, over boulders, and cascading throughout the valley before us in an ever-growing wave, were purple flowers.
