Chapter 7 Ryan's Garage

Copyright David A. Kearns


June 1981- Ryan handed me a manuscript of a report his father Douglas had been working on for the Air Force. The first section had been drafted sometime in 1975, six years ago, about a year to the day his father had been transferred from his previous posting, at the Pentagon, to his current one, as a retiree working a radar tracking post for the Air Force, under contract.
The top of the report provided a dedication to a scientist and colleague, Dr James. E. McDonald, who had done all the groundwork for the report. I continued reading while Ryan handed another piece of information to Tom and one to Russ “Smokey Lank” Bridges.
I was transported back into different epochs of time as I read account after account. There were hundreds of them. I can even recall the lettering, the curious feel to that government Photostat paper. I can see some of them now in my mind, bits and snatches of text from them…


July 17, 1957 – In the pre-dawn hours a B-47 took off from Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas. It was carrying a six-man crew, three of whom were electronic warfare officers manning Electronic Countermeasure monitors. The other men were standard air crewmen.
The B-47, call sign “Lacy 17” was a platform that had originally been designed as a bombing element, but had been refitted as an electronic warfare and surveillance weapon, soon after the Korean War…
Just after Lacy 17 crossed the coast, Co-Pilot McClure noted a signal “painting” his aircraft on the number 2 monitor from the aft, 5 o’clock position on the screen. At first he thought it was a legitimate, ground-based radar source but then he noted it moved up scope relative to the plane, crossed the flight path ahead of the aircraft, and began moving down-scope on the port side before moving off the screen altogether…

Chase, in the forward seat saw a bright white glow in the dawn twilight that he thought were the landing lights of another jet moving in his direction from the 11 o’clock position. He called McCoid’s attention to the light and noted the absence of any navigational beacon on this light source.
The light closed rapidly with the Lacy 17 and Chase notified the crew to brace for evasive maneuvers…
…
Chase would later recall he requested permission from Utah base to dive on the object, which was also granted. With McCoid further cautioning him about fuel supply, Chase nevertheless, turned and angled the Lacy 17 down from 36,000 to 20,000 feet aimed his aircraft directly at the object which then disappeared from the sky.
Both Chase and McCoid would recall, in 1969 when interviewed, that signals of these mysterious bogeys re-appeared as they headed home, at least twice…

1947
“In July 1947 I was a Mortician working for the Ballard funeral home in Roswell, New Mexico… I was contacted by Mortuary Services at Roswell Army Air Field… asking me the smallest sized hermetically sealed casket that we had in stock…”

20 Sept 1950
Department of the Air Force
Subject: Destruction of Intelligence Report Number 100-203-79
1. It is requested that action be taken to destroy all copies of Top Secret Air Intelligence Report #100-203-79 labeled “Analysis of Unidentified Flying Object Incidents in the US dtd 10 Dec 1948”

March 1971 FBI Report Classified SECRET
SUBJECT DR JAMES E. MCDONALD (SUMMARY)
Our files indicate [ 62 Chars ] {b7C} various anti-war and antidraft groups in Tucson since 1968. As of late 1970, [ 27 Chars] the Peace and Freedom Associations (PFA) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Tucson. In October, 1968, [ 17 Chars ] reportedly attended the SDS National Convention in boulder, Colorado, and was overheard telling a group in Tucson upon [ 15 chars ] favored violence, if necessary, to achieve the goals of the SDS (100-453871)
A confidential source in a position to know advised in mid-1969 he had recently received information that Professor James Edward McDonald [ 25 Chars ] constant New Left activities and that [ 21 Chars ] The source also said he has heard [ 43 Chars ] young hippie proteges. (105-191677)
The central files of the FBI, including the files of the Identification Division, contain no additional pertinent information concerning captioned individual based upon background information submitted in connection with this name check request.

CONFIDENTIAL
RE: PROFESSOR JAMES EDWARD MC DONALD
Agencies who discount the possibility that UFOs are real and from outer space.
In mid-1968, as part of his research into the question of UFOs, Professor McDonald wrote to a number of representatives of various countries soliciting information concerning sightings of UFOs in these countries. He entitled this project, "A Plea for international Scientific Study of the problem of the UFO." The principal reason for this effort was to obtain reports of UFO sightings from more or less under developed areas of the world where people reporting these sightings would not have been previously exposed to publicity about UFOs. [ 20 Chars ] Professor McDonald contacted representatives of several agencies at the United Nations in New York, including the Soviet representative of the Outer Space Affairs Group, United Nations Secretariat. [ 12 Chars ] does not know the name of this individual. He said Professor McDonald mentioned receiving a reply from this Soviet representative but he does not recall whether Professor McDonald ever mentioned any further contacts with that individual. [ 12 Chars ] {b7D} said he believes that if there had been further contacts between Professor McDonald and the above Soviet representative, that he, Professor McDonald, probably would have mentioned this fact.
[ 42 Chars ] is not [ 47 Chars ] {b7D} Professor McDonald at the present time does not have access to any classified research material.
[ 12 Chars ] reiterated that he has never had any reason to whatever to question Professor McDonald's loyalty to the United States.
This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency; it is and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency.




June 1981. Melbourne Beach, Florida
“Who was this McDonald guy?” I asked.
“Friend of my dad’s. He found out the FBI was tailing him about this UFO business,” Ryan said. “Then my dad tracked down the reports for him and confirmed it.”
“What happened to him?”
“He’s dead, Tim. My dad said the guy shot himself. Couldn’t take the pressure of being hassled trying to get to the bottom of all this,” Ryan said.
“Man,” I said. “But what’s this got to do with us?”
“Maybe, Tim. They show up places every few years, in waves like, and the government knows all about it,” he said.
And I said, “What are you talking about?”
And he said, very excitedly, “Don’t you see, Timmy? They move around, doing different things at different places, see? They wait for stuff to calm down in one place, by moving off somewhere else. It’s not like they fly in from somewhere else. They’re here. They have been, they move around and they’ve got all these different hiding places…”
By then I was tired of his antics and his spastic need to show me more and more documents, the majority of which I couldn’t really understand since they were highly technical in nature and loaded with military-speak, which of course, Ryan had no problem with.
“They never leave, man! They’re always here, on earth doing something but never wanting us to know what, don’t you get it? And since not even our jets can catch these things or shoot them down, our government covers it up!”
Then, and now, I rubbed my aching temples. No, I didn’t get it now, and I hadn’t gotten it then, either.

June 30 2011, Melbourne Beach
I sat for a few minutes outside Ryan’s house, noticing the change in the color scheme of the familiar home on Surf Road, and the addition to the side of the home, as obviously Thea had encased the back porch over what had been a stone walkway in a new Florida room, but otherwise it was the same old house.
This was not going to be easy.
I thought about Ryan’s father, Douglas, now lying in a quiet family crypt at the end of Babcock Street over on the mainland.
He had died in 1995 a few years after Ryan began working for Camerdyne Systems. His death resulted in a simple obituary in the local newspaper, a picture of the quiet Air Force man in his uniform, smiling pleasantly, knowingly, in his career, sometime in the 1960s. His calm intelligent, blue eyes squinting against the combined glare of the flash bulb and sunlight, probably taken for the purpose of alerting another newspaper, albeit a military publication, about one of the man’s many new commands.
“Douglas Anderson Cogswell, USAF MAJ, Rt. died quietly at his home in Melbourne Beach surrounded by his family including his two sons, Ryan and Sean, and his wife Dorothea. Born in Eastport, Maine, Cogswell served in Greenland, Maine, Germany, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington D.C. before retiring and moving to Florida where he worked for space contractor Camerdyne Systems Inc.”
How much we learned about that man, that day. We discovered that his silence and forbearance weren’t part of some scheme to torment his wife and sons with obstinate aloofness, but rather, a method of communication in itself. As if to say “help me, I have been silenced as a man and a human being by the very conditioning and training that has kept all of you safe and free.”
How much love did it take as a father to leave that stuff there for his son to find and root through, even though he knew the information was classified? It had been a message between father and son.
Here son, here’s a glance at my life’s work: all of it. It doesn’t excuse my behavior, but here at the very least, is the reason, and you’ll understand it all one day. You’ll understand why I behaved the way I did, and I am sorry.
How much love did it take for Ryan to expose himself to us that way? Here’s the reason my father essentially lost his job with the Air Force, and why he was discredited?
Because he was told by his employer of thirty years to investigate these things that had been seen on radar, the very things we are witnessing here on our beach, and he found out they are real! And for some reason, his employer expected a different answer. His employer expected him to come up with the answer all his peers had: that they were bunk, bullshit, hobgoblins that were to be ignored, even if they were real.
Understand that convoluted Air Force/Cold War logic and you become less of a human being. So for the sake of his family, this quiet, military man, this consummate professional did the expected thing. He fell on his sword, took an early retirement, and left all those documents in boxes inside his garage for his son to find. Sure there was even more to it than that as I was about to discover.
But when you thought about it long enough, you began to wonder whether or not that was a gift, or a form of damnation for his son.
I got out of the car and approached the front door, having put off and dreaded this moment long enough.
Thea answered with a controlled, thoughtful smile. She really didn’t look a year older than she did the day Ryan and I graduated high school.
“Timmy, it’s so good to see you,” she said, and then did something she had never done in her entire life, she leaned over and hugged me before I could get through the door.
I reached my arms tentatively around her.
My mother had died giving birth to me. My dad died of cancer in 1992. People in my life tell me the death of my mother, especially, has left a hole, or a gap, in my ability to express emotions. Something to do with a pain so deep, that to begin feeling emotions would open up a torrent too strong to stop. It sounds like New-Age, feel-good bullshit to me, but at that moment I thought about it. I found it hard to put my arms around this woman who I had known all my life. As much as I detested her little dogs and felt uneasy around her, she was the closest thing to a mother I had ever known.
“It’s okay, Tim,” she said. “It’s okay.”
And so I did the impossible. I hugged her, the way a I supposed son should hug his mother. I was surprised to discover the sensation of a tear being shed and left on my neck and another, shockingly, on my left cheek.
I placed a hand on the center of her back and gave it a pat, then held her closely. She was human, after all these years the truth is known. She was real.
There in the hallway an impossibly-old poodle tick-tacked onto the Mexican tile and glanced up at me in half-hearted viciousness. It would be been a shoe-in for the “world’s ugliest dog” competition.
The little animal growled once at me and padded into the carpeted living room, curling up beneath the piano bench with a wheezed sigh.
“Is that…?” I began to ask.
“That’s Cutty,” she said, releasing me and wiping a tear from her eye.
And I thought for a moment, that Cutty must be more than thirty years old.
“The same?” I asked.
“Oh no, Tim. She’s plenty old, but that’s actually Cutty-II, she’s eighteen, or nineteen I suppose, which is like a hundred in poodle years. No, we lost Cutty-I before Ryan’s dad died.
“Will Sean be home for…?”
“For the funeral? We’re hopeful but, I haven’t heard that he has touched down in Germany yet. His team is out patrolling near the border somewhere. That place makes me so nervous for him, but he sends me emails and is so cheery all the time it perks me right up again,” she said.
“Now Tim, let me get you a drink,” she said.
“Oh I….”
“And don’t you dare say you won’t have one with me,” she demanded and so I relented.
“Thea, I was just going to say, whatever you’re having is fine with me and I would really love a drink,” I said.
She was way ahead of me, pouring us both double Scotch.
“You and Ryan were such funny little boys,” she said, bringing my drink to me.
“I remember that time you two had toilet-papered officer Lanowski’s home. He was furious. Of all the kids in Brevard County, he knew precisely who had done it,” she said.
“They never proved it was us,” I said, recalling the event following a Melbourne High, Rockledge High football game.
There had been a water-balloon fight in the Rockledge parking-lot between boys from both senior classes.
Lanowski…
Ryan and I spent the following weekend on ladders, in trees, on the roofs of Lanowski’s tool shed, mother-in-law suite, and the home itself cleaning up the soggy mess. Lanowski had wetted the toilet paper down to make sure the task was as difficult and unpleasant as possible.
As calm and good natured as Thea was being now, you’d think she would have seen the event as merely child’s play back then, as well. She had been furious with both of us: demanding that Ryan stop hanging out with “that miserable freak down the street” as she had deemed me then.
Ryan passed it along. It gave him a laugh to watch my discomfort at the hands of his mother’s brutal summation of my entire existence. Years as his best friend, I rated no better than Quasimodo.
Oh well, all was forgiven, I supposed.
“You know it had gotten very bad these last few years, Tim,” she said suddenly, switching gears like a race-car. “You weren’t here to see it of course.”
“He had to move out of his house in Indian Harbor Beach, away from his wife and children. His fantasy world took over the person that you and I knew and loved. It destroyed his health and his job, although they never fired him; why, I have no idea.
“You know it would almost have been better if they had, Tim,” she said sipping her Scotch to the music of the crystals of ice tinkling in the glass.
“Where was he staying?” I asked taking a stinging sip of the brain deadening liquid myself.
“In the mausoleum,” she said.
“The what?” I asked.
“That room of his, here at this house, surrounded by all the little facts he had amassed over the years. And, oh my God the stories, Tim. I just couldn’t listen to them any more; UFOs, conspiracies, how he was being watched,” she said.
“Do you know, Tim? He placed aluminum foil on the windows and the walls so that ‘they’ couldn’t hear him?” she said, scratching the air with Peace Signs to end-quote “they” as in, those them, whoever they were.
“I checked with a few psychologists and they said this is precisely the dividing line between manic depression and schizophrenia, the aluminum-foil thing. That’s apparently the last road-sign, when you know your loved one has gone stark raving bonkers,” she said bemusedly.
“Why didn’t someone tell me?” I asked.
She lifted her drink for a sip.
“One, that’s not the way we do things, Tim. We are a very private family, and two, Ryan didn’t want you to know about it, unless….” she stopped and set her glass down. Her boney hands, withered with years in the sun gardening and playing golf, reached up and rubbed her eyes.
“Unless what, Thea?” I begged.
“Unless something happened to him,” she said.
“Well something did happen to him, Thea. He’s dead?”
“You see how dramatic it sounds, Tim? How emotional it all is; this is precisely what they want,” she said taking up her Scotch again.
She was referring to a different subset of they, this time; she was referring to her eldest son, Ryan, who now qualified as a syndrome and not a human being. He was a “they” a member of a group of mentally-deranged lunatics who kill themselves in some narcissistic plot to get everyone in the world to pay attention to them. That’s who they were, now.
I knew there was a reason this woman and I never got along. As expertly as she hid her own narcissism, it really was always about her and she resented anyone who took the spotlight. Suicide is a tough act to follow, a real show stopper.
But she had an answer to that, didn’t she? Now, everything came down to how much stress it caused her and her way of dealing with it was to show you how well she was coping; how tough she was. Her blasé nature in the face of the apparent suicide or her first-born son was only her latest act.
I certainly hoped all the pain and suffering she was visibly enduring now, was truly worth all the mileage it gave her with her Bridge and golfing buddies down at the yacht club. I held back from saying so, but I suspected she could read my mind. She always could.
I wasn’t going to offer anything in the way of a denial this time, nor shield anything from her. My silence spoke for me.
“I know you and I haven’t seen eye to eye over the years Tim. But you don’t know me like you think you do,” she said.
“Oh? How so?” I said, and I really wanted an answer to that one.
“I know you think I am cold and overbearing. And there is some truth in that. My people never emoted the way your generation was taught to, Tim. We came up after the Depression. If you whined all the time, well, you must have deserved your lot in life somehow. It’s hard to explain. But you really have no idea, Timmy, what’s been going on here over the last years and different from me, Ryan shielded you from that. And I respected his wishes in telling you nothing about it, although I could have. He was too proud to let you, or Sean, know exactly what he was going through.”
I said nothing.
“Now, I may have deserved some things in this life, but after dealing with his father for all those years, and raising two boys and helping with two grandchildren, I did not need, nor did I deserve, what went on here over the last few weeks, and you’re just going to have to believe me, Tim. For the sake of this family, which I consider you and integral part now, you are just going to have to take my word, and give me a pass,” she said, rubbing a tear from her eye.
I nodded. Having only lived inside these walls vicariously, through Ryan’s cryptic gripes and stories, I really wasn’t qualified to judge and so I nodded again.
“I know, Thea. I am sorry if I gave you the impression I was judging you. I do apologize for that. You don’t need or deserve that now. Please forgive me,” I said, with utmost sincerity.
“He left something for all of you, I suspect. Well, I was told by the grief counselors to look out for that. I have a feeling he sent something to all of you, or somehow left it,” she said.
“I’m not tracking,” I said.
“I know, I’m not making my case very well. Talking with his psychologist, we have come to the conclusion, Tim, that this truly was a suicide, not the result of some conspiracy thing. You’re going to have to get used to the fact that this son’s mother knows her boy killed himself to escape all the pain he was dealing with. Now, the counselor said to look out for gifts sent to his various friends prior to the event. In your case, his gift to you is right down the hall,” she said rising from her chair.
“What?”
“In a dramatic moment, he said to me ‘should anything ever happen,’ I was to let no one into this room but you,” she said.
As we walked down the hall, I asked her; “Are some people saying that his death was not the result of suicide?”
“Some of his co-workers are saying the circumstances are strange but it is just too horrible to listen to, the position of the body, the check for powder burns on the hands, where the gun was found. These are not the sort of things a mother needs to hear or think about when she’s burying a son, Tim. So I have shut them out.
“Now on the other hand, the management team for his company and federal investigators have all said they want to look at his stuff inside this room for investigative purposes. And something tells me that’s just a flat-out goddamned lie, for one thing. And two Ryan didn’t want them looking at all this stuff, at least not until you did.
“We have had some hum dingers here on our doorstep just keeping those people away. I have honored Ryan’s wishes. No one but you will have entered his room since he was found dead last week,” she said. “After that they can prance around in here in their goddamned underwear if they want to. I’m just getting tired of it.”
She unlocked and opened the door and the musty smell of body odor hit my nostrils.
“Finally I can clean this room,” she said.
She reached for a light switch and the beam bounced off the covering of aluminum foil that not only was on the windows but rimmed the entire upper half of the walls and the ceiling. The dull finish, as the shiny side of every strip and sheet was pointed outward, (but of course: better to reflect the incident space rays) gave the room the eerie, musty-metallic aroma of a greenhouse, or a hydroponics farm.
The bed was unkempt as if Ryan had just been in it. A crumpled soft pack of Merritt cigarettes was beside an ashtray on the night stand, next to a weathered, soft copy of The Bermuda Triangle by Berlitz. The copy was dog-eared with yellow post-it notes. Thoughts, ramblings, instructions no doubt.
There were boxes and boxes of documents, papers and so forth. And, as if all of the previous wasn’t alarming enough, below the aluminum sheeting that covered the musty room like a silver layer to a dead king’s sarcophagus, were thousands of what appeared to be Mayan glyphs. Where the aluminum ended, at about hip level, on the wall, the glyphs began and extended to the floor.
On typing paper, on notebook paper, the sheets were numbered in the upper left hand corner, and the glyphs were colored with paint, crayon, magic marker; he had hand-drawn them all and colored them in, with whatever writing implements he could get his hands on.
“What the…?”
“He wouldn’t answer any questions about these, so, I can only assume he’s left them all for you to decipher. They start just behind the door here,” Thea said, and indeed he had left a message for the reader.
Read top to bottom, two columns at a time, from left to right. Read the rooms, left to right. Start, by the door.
“Oh, my God,” I said.
The room was wall-papered with the glyphs below the aluminum foil, behind the boxes of documents, behind the computer terminal, with a screen that was covered in dust as though it hadn’t been used in months, behind the book shelves.
“How long has he…?”
“Oh, that’s just a start,” she said. “You haven’t seen the garage yet.”
We walked through the utility room to the garage.
“Finally, I can bring my car back inside,” she sighed.
The glyphs again covered the inside of the garage at hip level, again starting from the door and reading left to right, the pages were numbered and wrapped nearly all the way around to the door, again.
“I had no idea, Thea. You’re right. I had no idea what he or you were going through. I am so sorry for having thought poorly of you or his wife. It must have been…”
“Horrible? That only scratches the surface of what he put us all through. The nights he would just disappear and wander, Tim. People down the street found him sleeping in their yard one morning, next to a sprinkler head. He had gotten blind drunk, stumbled into a chain-link fence, passed out in their back yard,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Sprinklers came on at 4:30 a.m., like always,” she said with a half smile. “Boy was he mad.”
We both shared a teary laugh at this. I tried not to, doubling over a little with grief, relief, humor, sadness, all of it at once. As though the thought of it were a gift from the old days, when we ran the neighborhoods wild at night, with no one to stop us.
The doorbell rang.
“That’ll be them,” she said looking at her watch. “Six p.m.. Right on time.”
I wondered who they were this time?
“Them who?”
“The goon squad. Their daily call now,” she said looking at her watch.
“Who are they?” I said, very clearly this time. I didn’t want there to be an ambiguity in it.
“Why, the men who want to get into Ryan’s old room, of course. Hey, I’ve got an idea, why don’t you take this one, Tim? It will give you a chance to see what I’ve been going through the past three days,” she said.
When I opened the door there were two men, one younger, one older. Apart from fedoras, which they did not have, they generally were dressed like The Blues Brothers
“My name is Special Agent Hicks and this is Special Agent Demphy,” the man said. He was in his early sixties. He had pale blue eyes. “Is the lady of the house here?”
“Can you gentlemen state your purpose? There has been a death in the family, and the lady is not inclined toward visitors at the moment,” I said, picking up on the man’s bizarre speech.
“We’re here to have a look at material in Mr. Cogswell’s room,” he said.
“Precisely what Special Agency are you from, Special Agent Hicks?”
“We’re from the OIS, sir. This is a government matter,” he said.
“What, pray-tell, is the OIS, Special Agent Hicks?” I said.
He pulled out a badge and a card that read, “Office of Investigative Services.”
“We investigate, for the government, and you are?” the younger man asked.
“Yes, I am. I am standing right here,” I said pretending to read the card over again.
I looked over at their black Crown Victoria in the drive. For some reason it was still running, evidence by the pinging and buzzing from the overworked air-conditioning unit, as well as the smoothly idling engine. As dark as they were, the window tinting surely would not pass inspection in the state of Florida.
“Sir, if I could have a moment of your time, alone. I would like to explain what we’re doing here,” the older man said.
“Sure. I would appreciate that. You have an old woman in here scared out of her wits; and you guys coming to this door dressed like Sicilian button-men, I mean really,” I added.
“Agent Demphy would you wait in the car, please?” the man asked his partner.
The other, not-so-special agent walked dejectedly back to the Crown Vic and got into the back of the four-door sedan.
“I’m aware that you’re a friend of Mr. Cogswell’s, and that’s alright you don’t have to tell me your name,” he said.
“I know I don’t,” I said.
“The truth is, sir, and I am going to put this as delicately as I can, your friend was very troubled. But at the same time he had access to some very sensitive government information,” the man named Hicks said.
“This is not the man’s residence. This is the man’s mother’s house,” I said.
“But we have reason to believe…” the man said.
“Which isn’t anything at all like a warrant or probable cause is it Special Agent Hicks? Nothing like it, really,” I said.
“I was going to say, we have reason to believe he brought some of those records here to his mother’s house,” he said.
“Again, nothing like a legal reason, just reason to believe that maybe my friend brought documents crucial to national security to his mother’s house. Does that about surmise what’s happening here?”
“Look, Mr. Stanton, your friend was into some pretty heavy dealings with fringe groups. UFO freaks and so on, and they had a definite anti-US government agenda.”
“A lot of people have one of those,” I said. “Our foreign policy needs a makeover Agent Hicks. So what?”
Hicks held his train of thought.
“At the same time, he oversaw some pretty sensitive projects. Now, I am sure you can understand that, given the time we live in, we need to know just how far this breach in security goes. You can understand that can’t you, Mr. Stanton?”
“You know, Agent Hicks, I don’t ever recall giving you my name,” I said.
“You can understand what I have said, nevertheless, Mr. Stanton. I know you realize I am playing heavily to your sense of civic and patriotic duty, which I suspect you still possess?” he said.
“Yeah, well, Ryan’s mother does not need you guys traipsing through the house right now, especially so soon after her son died and I am inclined to agree. Come back in a week or so. I can tell you all you’re going to find here is dusty old memorabilia from high school but, you’re welcome to it after the man’s mother has had a few days to heal from her son’s suicide, understand? Thank you,” I said closing the door.
“But…”
“Thank you,” I said again cutting him off.
“Very nicely done, Tim. Now you see what I’ve been putting up with?” she asked.
“Thea, I think I will replace that drink,” I said.
“Good. Just the thing,” she said.
I told her I would wander back into Tim’s room and begin sorting out what I could. Once inside the room again I noticed on the back of the aluminum-covered door, it was only then that I discovered the words there. It was as though Ryan had carved them into the aluminum with his thumbnail. If you didn’t look at them at precisely the right angle, the reflections from wrinkles and folds obscured the words. They were simple enough yet, made no sense.
Question: Eloi?
Answer: Morlock.
I picked up the copy of Bermuda Triangle off the night stand, thumbing through it while looking at the words on the door. My eyes scanned the rows of Mayan glyphs, the dusty boxes and trailed off to the aluminum foil. He had even wrapped it around the electrical outlets. Through those he had inserted plastic baby guards.
Good Lord, he had even removed the ceiling fan and replaced the whole contraption with a metal cap, presumably shutting off that avenue of outward enemy electronic attack. The fan sat disabled in a corner with all of its guts trailing out. Of course he had dissembled it, searching for listening devices.
“Ryan, what in God’s name have you been up to?” I whispered.


June 1981
Ryan mowed the yard with all the gusto of a prisoner. He was a little over halfway done.
“What’s next?” I said as I watched.
“The damn weeds, then the damn edging. Christ, then she wants me to go up on the roof and pull the damn pine needless out of the gutters,” he said.
“Hey, man. Gimme a damn ladder. I’ll do those while you’re doing that other damn stuff,” I said.
“No use, man. She’ll just get damn pissed,” he said.
“Why doesn’t your damn dad help?” I asked.
Ryan just looked at me as if I had asked why wasn’t the moon actually made out of pink cheese and milkshakes.
“Must be a thousand damn degrees out here, man,” he said wiping his brow.
They had one of those old manual mowers. No gas required. You shoved the thing and a whirling cylinder of blades made a dry sound, somewhat akin to an old scratchy pencil sharpener twirling without a pencil to grind on, and a million blades of grass were sawed in half.
The problem was, Ryan had let the Saint Augustine go this summer, so it was thick, slightly above ankle-height, and tough to get through. And, truth be told, it was about a thousand degrees out, as I recall.
Ryan’s blue and white Adidas were all soggy and dark green, as were his athletic socks; the ones he prided so much when we played tennis by pulling them neatly up over his calves so the stripes looked just so. Now they were a mess and sagging around his ankles.
His cut-off jeans were also covered in ruinous splotches of dirt and grass.
“Let’s just bail, man! C’mon, the waves are pumpin’ out there!”
“Naw, Tim. You go man. Ain’t no use hanging around here. I won’t be done for hours,” he said.
Thea walked out to their Chrysler Cordoba with Corinthian leather, waved sympathetically to Ryan and I, and was off to the store. Her hair was much darker then; gone was the complete bonnet of wispy white with blue highlights.
And back then you could still see it: She had obviously been a shapely woman in her time. She probably even qualified as beautiful in the late sixties when Ryan had been conceived.
But that day she wore a hideous outfit that only the late 1970s could have been responsible for: nylon blue pants with white dots, a pink I-zod shirt on top; a pair of translucent, plastic sandals strung up over her ankles in the Roman style; a huge pair of tortoise shell sunglasses and a ladies cotillion straw hat; all of this piling into a Chrysler Cordoba with Corinthian leather. No doubt the purchase of that gas-slurping automobile could be attributed to a secret fantasy world she enjoyed with Ricardo Montalban.
Thea had been a woman, truly, of her times. She had even popped in the eight-track of Frank Sinatra’s Live at The Sands with Count Basie, as she headed down the street.
“Where’s your dad?” I asked conspiratorially as the sounds of Frank and the gas guzzler drifted away.
“Up at the Cape, where else?” he said.
“And where’s your brother?”
“Talking a nap,” he said.
We were smiling at each other completing each other’s thoughts: all the work would be done before she returned and Ryan and I would be on the waves with all the other guys who were all waiting for us down at the Surf Road break.
Another upwelling had occurred but the water wasn’t as cold as it had been a few days ago. But the waves were just as good: decent sets of shoulder hoppers outside and shore-pounders on the inside.
Just then a black, Ford LTD eased around the corner of Orange Street and Surf Road like a big barracuda adjusting his angle on an unwary bit of prey.
It pinged and buzzed from the old air conditioner fighting against the onslaught of the 93 degree air, thick with an equal percentage of humidity. The brand new Michelin white-walls crunched the loose asphalt stealthily as the big beast of a car eased to a stop beside two bewildered boys.
The man in the right passenger seat was older, in his sixties. He had a flat southern drawl, as if he wanted to purchase seed or fertilizer from us for his tobacco farm.
“Hi fella’s. How you boys doing?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Say, uhm. You boys heard of any strange doings out this way at night? Lights and such at the beach? Strange fires? Missing people?” the passenger asked.
I looked down at the bumper and the white plate read “US Government Services” above an innocuous character string of letters and numbers in black. It was mirrored by an identical plate on the chrome tail of the black land-yacht.
“Who the hell are you, sir?” Ryan asked, taking a page from Gary Malone’s book on dealing with outsiders.
The older man merely smiled; “now is that how you’re supposed to talk to your elders, son?”
“You’re lucky I’m talking to you at all, sir,” Ryan said mimicking the man’s accent beautifully. “You ain’t my daddy, and you ain’t my elder. What you are is a stranger. And momma said I shouldn’t say shit to no strangers.”
The man smiled and said “get this kid,” to his partner.
The man behind the wheel was a younger fellow. He had on a pair of jet black sunglasses, and wore a starched-white shirt. He stared unsmiling out the windshield.
Both men sported a pair of sweat moons beneath their underarms and stains of perspiration rimmed their neat collars. That air conditioning wasn’t cutting it.
“A little fella can get himself into a lot of trouble,” the older man said. “Yes sir, a lot of trouble.”
“Doing what, sir?” Ryan asked.
The man leaned forward so I could smell his breath and see the tobacco stains rotting his lower bridge; “by sticking his little, shit-assed, peckerwood nose into things where he don’t belong. You understand me, boy? Don’t you? You know what I’m saying to you?” the man said giving Rye an absolutely malevolent stare.
We stood for a second or two, startled to silence by this man’s menacing plain talk. Ryan looked terrified, as though more than mere words were being passed between himself and this strange, ungainly yokle from hell.
“Y’all have yourselves and nice day, now,” the man hissed and the car slid on down the street towards A1A. But it didn’t make the turn. It just sat there for a second, pinging and idling.
I looked back at Ryan and he was hyperventilating. He did that when his emotions got the better of him, or when he was about to throw-down in a fist fight. If I didn’t get hold of him, he would likely go into his garage, find and axe and start chasing that car. If he caught it, he would surely swing at the man in the passenger’s seat with everything he had.
“Rye, it’s okay, man. C’mon, let’s get you inside,” I said, taking him by the arm and ushering him into the garage and through the door to the utility room.
I kicked towards one of the snarling little poodles who dodged away from me and backed off as I got Ryan through the living room and walked him toward the kitchen before he could pass out or throw up; I didn’t know which.
I poured him a glass of lemonade as he sat wheezing at the kitchen table.
He finally caught his breath and then he gulped down the glass.
Running into the living-room, I clicked on the T.V. for him and the now-familiar power chords from MTV came on, along with VJ, Nina Blackwood, whom Ryan adored.
“Dude, she’s on!” I yelled from the living-room. “She’s on again man. Come watch!”
“Not too loud, Sean’s asleep,” Ryan said breathlessly, sauntering in and plopping down on the couch with his lemonade in hand. With the other he picked up a remote control to adjust the volume.
“Are they still there, Tim?” he asked as MTV’s blonde bombshell VJ got her smile hooks into the camera and Ryan’s pulse returned to normal.
I looked out the window and the car was gone.
“Nope,” I said.
“Man what the hell was that all about?” I asked trying to make light of the situation.
“That guy wasn’t human, man,” Ryan said.
“Oh, c’mon, Rye, big old boney, redneck, shit-farmer? He was human alright,” I said.
“Dude, didn’t you smell his breath? It was like something dead was in there with him. His eyes were all wrong, way wrong man.”
“We should tell your parents Charlie Molester is in the neighborhood or something,” I ventured.
“No…but we have to go tonight and get the evidence we need from those guys down in Wabasso,” he said. “We go tonight. We have to.”
“What about Charlie out there? You heard him,” I said.
“Screw Charlie, man. Charlie don’t surf,” he surmised, borrowing a line from a movie we had recently snuck into four times in one day.
Ryan would later tell me that the man we were playfully calling “Charlie Molester,” had broken into his mind and stolen, rearranged and generally thumbed through his memories. He had issued several explicit, distasteful warnings about pursuing any contact with the “entities” Ryan sought to gain information on.