If Wishes Were Horses. W. Kinsella P.

Buster the public were interested in. They could relate to Bertha and Buster. Three days after the story broke all three of us were on ‘Good Morning, America.’

      Bertha, in a dress, with her hair permed, looked like everybody’s babysitter. Even dressed up and washed Buster looked like your average neighborhood hoodlum. In the aftermath, one of the more facetious tabloids would nickname them Big Bertha and Hoodly McHotrod. Never mind what they called me.

      The first inkling I had of trouble was right after we got off the air from doing ‘Good Morning, America.’ There was an urgent message for me to call my managing editor.

      ‘Get your ass in here, McCoy,’ he growled. He was a gentlemanly managing editor who didn’t use alcohol, tea, coffee or profanity. It had never occurred to me that ass was in his vocabulary.

      Nathan Wiser was in the managing editor’s office.

      ‘Your sources are contaminated, McCoy,’ the managing editor said. ‘Tell him,’ he said to Wiser.

      ‘Buster has more arrests than Willie Nelson’s had hits,’ said Wiser, smiling like a hairy bagel.

      ‘But you checked,’ I wailed.

      ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, McCoy, but I never heard of these people until your boss called my boss.’

      Why was he lying?

      When a veteran police officer calls a reporter who has written the UFO story of the decade a liar, the charge is likely to stick.

      ‘It’s worse with the girl,’ said the managing editor, looking so pale he could have been in shock.

      My insides felt as if they were melting.

      ‘A phony rape charge,’ said Wiser, smiling amiably. ‘She should have been charged. Instead, we just put the fear of the Lord in her and dropped the whole mess.’

      I telephoned Bertha, turned on the speaker phone.

      ‘Listen, Joe, I’m a bitch sometimes, okay? I’ve been in a little trouble. I didn’t want to tell you ’cause then you wouldn’t run the story, and we both know one don’t have nothin’ to do with the other. It’s just that when I’m in a jam I lie though my fuckin’ teeth. Know what I mean? Honest to God, we weren’t jerking you around. Me and Buster seen what we seen. And so did you.’

      ‘What about the phony rape charge?’

      She exhaled audibly.

      ‘It did happen, you know what I mean? But not the way everybody thinks. I was home alone one afternoon when this guy from down the street showed up, Orlando something—I never did know his last name—he’s twenty-six and he lifts weights and he had a bottle of wine. One thing, like, led to another, you know, and we had a nice time in my bedroom, and that would have been that except the son of a bitch laughed at me. After we was all finished, this guy tells me I’m fuckin’ lousy in bed.

      ‘I mean I done the best I could, and no son of a bitch should be able to talk to me like that, right? So after he left I called the cops and I said he raped me. Served him right, you know what I mean? They hauled his ass away in handcuffs and everything. I stuck to my story all night, scared him good. I bet he won’t laugh at the next poor chick who done her best for him.

      ‘The cops were so fuckin’ mad at me. They threatened me with all kinds of charges. You’d have thought I was the criminal. But I was just so tired, I said, “I don’t care anymore. Do whatever you want to me.” They sent me home. Didn’t drive me home like they drove me to the station.

      ‘“Get out of here and don’t ever waste our time again,” they said. The big-push detective was a fat, hairy bastard with a broken nose.’

      I looked at Wiser, who I’m certain bared his teeth at me. My managing editor had slid down in his chair until his face was even with the top of his desk.

      ‘Would you have done the story if I’d told you the truth?’ asked Bertha.

      ‘I’d have still seen the spaceship. If I’d known the truth I could have been prepared to defend you. Things are going to get rough,’ I said.

      I had no idea how rough.

      ‘UFO PHOTOS PHONY,’ trumpeted our competitors. They blew up my photo of the spaceship tracks and ran them beside the blow-up of a General Electric waffle iron. The photos were identical. Even I could see the G.E. emblem in one corner of my track photo.

      The photos of the spacecraft were diagnosed as a pantyhose container stuffed with cotton batting, shot from an advantageous angle.

      ‘You’re fired!’ the managing editor said.

      ‘You were out in the desert. You saw the tracks. Why didn’t the waffle iron show up when we blew up the photographs?’ I asked.

      No one had any answers, and highly embarrassed managing editors don’t want to hear unpleasant questions. The newspaper had kept the exact landing site a secret until the photographs were exposed as a hoax. Then a hundred reporters drove into the desert in a long, dusty caravan to find the hill where we had seen the craft land, as dry and bald and barren as it had always been. The only life they found were a few grasshoppers snicking about in the crackly grass.

      I’ll spare you any more details of my disgrace. The hoax appeared so blatantly dumb that I realized I was going to be without income possibly forever. I had a brief fantasy that one of the more scurrilous tabloids might hire me. They wouldn’t.

      Fortunately, I am not suicidal. Rosslyn has remained stonily silent throughout my ordeal. I’m sure she would be happier if I moved out, but she has the grace not to dump on me while I’m down.

      ‘I’m glad we didn’t decide to marry,’ she did mention, somewhat more than casually. We had actually discussed marriage. Rosslyn would have kept her own name. There was no stigma attached to R. QUINN DENTAL LABORATORY. Only her closest friends knew she was living with ‘that guy who wrote the phony story about the UFO.’

      ‘There’s an aura of danger about you,’ Rosslyn had said once, after my investigative reporting brought down a crooked district attorney.

      I wonder what my aura is like now?

       SIX

       RAY KINSELLA

      My inclination is to try to speed up Joe’s story. It’s like he has many coins hidden on his person, if I just picked him up by the ankles and shook him the coins would fall in a silver shower at our feet. But then, I’m beginning to feel a little sympathy for him. He is somehow being manipulated by forces beyond his control. At least he hasn’t been visited by disembodied voices.

      I don’t think he realized how much story he had until he started. He looks from me to Gideon, shrugs helplessly.

      ‘This is going to take a lot longer than I anticipated.’

      ‘I want to hear it,’ I say. ‘Gideon, how about you?’

      ‘All right. I can see why you’ve asked us to listen. I don’t know what we can do for you …’

      ‘Just understand,’ says Joe. ‘I’ve barely scratched the surface. I want someone to say to me, “You’re not crazy. No matter what the rest of the world thinks.”’

      ‘It took me about twenty years to accomplish that,’ says Gideon.

      ‘Over three years for me,’ I say. ‘Look, I’ve got to get home. Joe, can you come to the farm this afternoon? Gideon, how about you?’

      ‘I’m not doing anything much except being a fugitive,’ says Joe, with a wry grin.

      ‘I