The rumors had started again. People were seeing strange lights in the skies above the Sandhills. On the prairie at night, the stars seemed so bright, so close that we were intimately acquainted with them We knew when something was out of place. It made us all uneasy.
You could feel the tension everywhere. At the lumberyard. The feed store. Bootsie’s Saloon. Even as far away as the Super Store in Kearney. It was an undertone, you know. A buzz. A whisper of suspicion. You knew what they were talking about. They were afraid the cattle mutilations were going to start again. I was afraid too.
The last round had been about eighteen months ago. Two Angus and a Hereford on Skelling’s spread. Organs removed with surgical precision. Exsanguinated. The old man had been apoplectic. When he arrived at my home shotgun in hand, I thought he might actually put me out of my misery. But Bert, my foreman, talked him out of it. He insisted that I had been in Omaha for the past week, and had just flown the Piper Cub in that morning. Which was the truth.
But Skelling would never believe it. None of them would ever believe it. All because of that incident years ago when I was 13. There had been a mutilation then too. Only that time, it was on my ranch. And there was a witness to it. Pop.
“Old Martin,” as the neighbors called him, was always something of an outcast. He had strange ways, they said. He saw things, heard things that others didn’t. He drank too much. He spoke too little. He didn’t participate in the social life of the town. He ridiculed the Lutherans who did.
So when his prize Charolais bull was found lying by the roadside, genitals removed, anus cored out, one-eared like some bovine Van Gogh, people wanted to believe the worst, you know. And when he told them aliens had done it, that he had seen them with his own eyes, they threatened to institutionalize him. That’s when I told the Big Lie. It was me, I said. I had done it. I had been reading about satanic cults and it was a ritual sacrifice. Pop was just trying to cover up for me.
They were satisfied with that. My weekly visits to the county library had not gone unnoticed. This was not a community of readers. And the librarian there was reputed to be a communist. So they had no doubt she had introduced me to obscene and occult practices.
My mother wasn’t sure what to believe. But attending the local high school had became an impossibility. So she convinced Pop to take a mortgage on the house and sent me off to be reeducated at a school for wayward youth high in the Rockies..
At first, I believed I had gotten the best of the bargain. I had arranged an escape from that evil little town for most of my teenage years. And managed to stitch up the tattered shreds of my father’s reputation. My mother began attending Lutheran services every Sunday. Religiously, you might say. She learned to make frothy jello salads with mini marshmallows, you know. And she seemed to revel in the pity she received for her family’s indiscretions. Eventually the town attributed Pop’s increasingly bizarre behavior to his disappointment in his only son.
They hadn’t counted on me returning. On living there for another quarter of a century. Neither had I. They tolerated me while Pop was alive. But when he finally succumbed to the alcoholism and the madness, and hung himself in the horse barn, my reprieve was over. The icy silences turned to outright rudeness and occasional attacks.
I don’t know why I stayed. Stubbornness, perhaps? A need to prove myself, redeem myself? Maybe I was just too stuck. Too stuck in the loneliness, in the despair, in the cloud of futility and failure that I had come to believe I deserved. I was still punishing myself for giving up the one person I had ever really loved for some misguided sense of filial duty.
The dogs were barking. Not a friendly kind of bark. Not a someone’s coming up the drive bark. This had a note of panic in it, a tang of fear. Before I even slapped the screen door open, I could hear the bellowing of the half dozen dairy cows in the front pasture. But I knew better than to look there. They wouldn't come that close.
Instead I glanced west, to the range where the main herd grazed. The lights were there, all right, moving in silently just above the windbreak of cottonwoods along the river. There must have been at least a dozen of them. Small craft, you know. The stereotypical flying saucers. They were back. And they’d brought their friends.
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