If Wishes Were Horses. W. Kinsella P.

lead,’ I added, trying to sound professional and gracious at the same time.

      ‘Suit yourself. Hey, I loved the way you nailed that little rat who was selling phony water softeners. He worked this area, you know, sold to the old lady in the yellow house across the way …’

      Bertha’s mother served canned tomato soup thinned with water, and sandwiches containing one slice of a pinkish substance that may or may not have had a protein base, followed by instant coffee served in cracked mugs, accompanied by Carnation milk with two yellow lines dribbled down the label.

      I phoned Rosslyn to tell her I’d be late. Looking back, I realize she didn’t even ask where I was or what I was working on. But then, I didn’t ask her how many people’s mouths she’d immortalized in plaster of Paris that afternoon. Our relationship was not in wonderful shape even before I became terminally unemployed.

      I have no idea why I got together with Rosslyn. I suspect she had no idea why she chose me. After I retired from organized baseball I took a long holiday. I went to Honolulu. I wasn’t worried about finding work; I had a journalism degree to fall back on and a few dollars in the bank, though I’d never made big money in baseball. I was to some extent at loose ends, suffering, in a mild form, from the terrible letdown professional athletes undergo when they are suddenly thrust into the civilian world.

      I met Rosslyn in a singles bar. She had her own business, was two years older than me, sensible, dedicated. She was, as they say, upwardly mobile, the direction I intended to be traveling. Rosslyn was everything the women I’d known throughout my baseball career were not. We also had Southern California in common; I had made my home there every off-season. A week after we returned from our Hawaiian holiday we moved in together. We both thought it was time to settle down; the fact that we weren’t the right people for each other was incidental.

      At Bertha’s we watched TV on a dusty, finger-marked black-and-white set until the sun went down. Then the three of us got in Buster’s car and again headed for the desert.

      We sat on the ledge above where Bertha and Buster had been when the spaceship first landed.

      ‘I wonder what they thought of us,’ Bertha said. ‘We had the sleeping bag and we were, like, going at it, if you know what I mean.’

      ‘A much better introduction to Earth than being met by a dozen armored tanks and a trigger-happy SWAT team,’ I said.

      ‘You do believe us, don’t you, Joe?’ Bertha asked.

      I paused for a long time. ‘I believe you’ve seen something. I believe you believe what you’re telling me.’

      Bertha smiled, and, as she did, her wide, placid face was suddenly lighted the color of pink neon by the spaceship flitting over the nearest hill like a gigantic firefly. It landed in the tracks it had previously established.

      ‘Son of a bitch!’ said Bertha.

      The only other time I experienced anything similar was when I was sent into a game in Yankee Stadium in the ninth inning, before fifty thousand screaming fans, the bases loaded, two out, and our team up by two. I remember feeling like I might faint, then imagining how ridiculous I’d look, a couple of runs scoring as the third baseman tried to pry the ball out of my glove. I got out of the inning and game with one pitch: I hung a curve ball that Craig Nettles hit in the gap in left-center to empty the bases.

      What did the spaceship look like? Visualize one of those egg-shaped, plastic containers in which pantyhose are packaged. Picture one fifteen feet long and five or six feet high; then imagine it full of pink cotton candy.

      It glided in like a cartoon insect. Bertha had been remarkably accurate in her description of the vehicle. Once it landed it sat silently, glowing baby pink, for what must have approached ten minutes, emitting comforting sounds.

      The three of us just stood, awe-struck. For the first five minutes Buster and I each held one of Bertha’s pudgy hands. I wanted to touch the craft, but I don’t know if I lacked the nerve or if I was prevented from walking forward by some force within the machine.

      Finally, I remembered my camera, and I began photographing the craft. I scurried around snapping photos like a Japanese tourist.

      All the time the spaceship was there I had the feeling I was being touched, investigated, ‘measured,’ as Bertha had said, by gentle, loving hands.

      Gradually I relaxed. I finished photographing, or, more accurately, ran out of film, and ended as we had begun, the three of us holding hands. I have never felt so at peace.

      Then, the craft lifted one snowshoe-like foot up into its body, lifted the other, hovered an instant and was gone in the direction it had come from, leaving us bathed in a sweet, pink glow.

      ‘So now you’ve seen it,’ said Bertha, letting go of my hand, fumbling in the pocket of her jeans for cigarettes. ‘You believe us now, don’t you?’

      ‘I believe,’ I said, moving forward to feel the tracks, which were deeper than they had been, and many degrees warmer than the surrounding sand.

      As I finish, I look expectantly at Ray and Gideon to see if they are any more sympathetic to my plight.

      ‘What you experienced,’ says Gideon, ‘was a close encounter, which, if you’ve described it accurately, seems legitimate. It also appears that you documented it with photographs, and had witnesses. So what went wrong?’

      ‘Can you spare me a few more minutes?’

      They both nod.

      ‘What we have here are two people who between them do not display sufficient imagination to perpetrate a hoax.’ Those were the exact words I used in presenting my case to my managing editor. I had read in some self-improvement book that it was best to speak formally when conversing with superiors, and that I should never be afraid to show I possessed a vocabulary.

      Later, the entire editorial board studied my photographs.

      ‘Those tracks look like a blow-up of a waffle iron,’ one said.

      The photographs of the craft itself were, in spite of their number, of disappointing quality. They looked like a side view of cotton candy or the usual fraudulent shots of supposed ectoplasm, taken by your basic raving lunatic.

      ‘I have no control over the conveyance they travel in,’ I replied.

      Three days had passed since my evening with Buster and Bertha. The next evening several senior staff members were out in the desert hoping for a glimpse of my extraterrestrials. Nothing. They all took their own photographs of the tracks.

      ‘Are your sources clean?’ management wanted to know. They meant Buster and Bertha.

      ‘Nathan Wiser himself ran them through both adult and juvie,’ I said. ‘Clean as the day they were born.’ Wiser had growled. ‘Buster has five traffic charges as an adult, but nothing criminal.’

      I had put the same question to Bertha and Buster right after our close encounter.

      ‘You two clean? Any arrests? Any convictions?’

      ‘Well …’ said Bertha, as my heart sank, ‘I been rousted for hanging around a shopping mall. Fuckin’ security guards think they own the world.’

      ‘That’s all?’

      ‘Yeah. What’d you expect? And Buster ain’t been in no more trouble than anybody else.’

      Largely because I was personally involved in the case and was such a credible witness, management decided to run the story and photographs.

      If there’s one kind of story that every rival journalist and reporter wants to discredit it’s one about UFOs or extraterrestrials. But I wasn’t worried. I knew what I’d seen. If I’d been smart I’d have remembered that I’d seen Reggie Jackson strike out a few hundred times, but he had three homers in four at-bats against me.

      If