The Wanderer

“Why, Professor Hunter?” Margo asked, hugging Miaow to her. She was cold without her jacket, and the cat was like a hot water bottle. “Does saucering make you feel bohemian and different, like wearing a beard?”

“Call me Ross. No, I don’t think so, though I suppose vanity plays a part.” He touched his beard. “No, it was simply because I’d found people who had something to follow and be excited about, something to be disinterestedly interested in — and that’s not so common any more in our money-and-sales-and-status culture, our don’t-give-yourself-away yet sell-yourself-to-everybody society. It got so I wanted to make a contribution of my own — the lecturing and panel bits. Now I do almost as much saucering as Doc, who knocks himself out selling pianos — he’s a whiz at that — so he can divide the rest of his time between saucering, chess, and living it up.”

“But Doc’s a bachelor, while I believe you implied you had a family…Ross?” Margo pointed out with faint malice.

“Oh yes,” Hunter conceded a bit wearily. “Up in Portland there’s a Mrs. Hunter and two boys who think Daddy spends altogether too much time consorting with saucer bugs, considering the very few papers he’s got out of it and the nothing it’s done for his academic reputation.”

He was thinking of adding: “And, right now, they’re sitting up asking why Daddy wasn’t home the night the heavens changed and saucers came true” — but just then he realized they’d reached the boarded-up beach house and the old dance floor. There was the green lantern, he saw, still burning, and beside it a chair with a little stack of unused programs, and there were the empty chairs sitting in rows, though with the first rows much disarranged (when would Doddsy ever reclaim the deposit they’d made on them at the Polish funeral parlor in Oxnard?) — and there was a coat someone had forgotten laid over one of the chairs, and there was the panelists’ long table and under it some cardboard boxes they’d left in their hurry. And thrust deep into the sand nearby there was even the big furled umbrella Doc had used as part of a crude astrolabe when first checking the movement of the Wanderer.

As Ross Hunter saw these things standing out against the purple-gold-speckled, spectrally calm Pacific, he felt a great, unexpected surge of affection and nostalgia and relief, and he suddenly realized why, after being rebuffed by a landslide and a steel mesh fence and a red-tape major, they had trudged back to this spot.

It was simply that it was home to them, the spot where they’d been together in security and where they’d witnessed the change in the heavens, and that each of them knew in his heart that this might be the last home any of them would ever have.

Without haste Wanda and the thin woman and young Harry McHeath made for the boxes under the table.

Wojtowicz and the Little Man set down the cot with Ragnarok on it, half shrouded by Margo’s jacket.

Wojtowicz looked around, then pointed at the umbrella and said in a firm voice: “I somehow think that would be the right spot — that is, if you wouldn’t mind?” he added to Doc, who’d walked silently all the way from Vandenberg Two beside the Little Man.

“No, I’d be proud,” Doc answered gruffly.

They lugged the cot up, and Doc recovered his umbrella. Then Wojtowicz took a flat-bladed spade from under the edge of the mattress on the cot and began to dig.

The fat woman noticed and called down from the platform: “No wonder I felt something sticking in my side all the way.”

Wojtowicz paused to call out: “You should just be damn thankful you got that free ride when you thought you was having a heart attack.”

Wanda called back angrily: “Look, when I have a heart attack, it’s bad — and there’s no thinking about it! But when my heart attack’s over, it’s over.”

“O.K.,” Wojtowicz told her over his shoulder.

The spade made a faint, clean, rasping thud as he dug. The thin woman and Harry McHeath wiped sand from some cups and set them out. The rest of them watched the moon emerging from behind the Wanderer, which seemed to tip over as it sank toward the Pacific.

Luna looked visibly conical — mashed. And instead of the smooth smudges of “seas” on her face, there was the faintest tracery of shadow-lines, here and there palely flashing the Wanderer’s colors. The effect was horrid, somehow suggesting a sac of spider’s eggs.

A forceps birth, the Ramrod thought The White Virgin, fecundated by Ispan, bears herself in pain — and must birth herself again and again in torture. I had not thought of that.

Margo thought, I’m sorry I called her a bitch. Don…

Rama Joan whispered to Paul: “Her young man was up there, wasn’t he? Then she could be your girl now, Paul.”

Wojtowicz straightened up. “That’s all the deep we can have it,” he told the Little Man huskily. “Any further we’d get water.”