ISSUE #10 | Excerpt, "Desert Man"
AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #10
WRITTEN BY JOE ANDERSON
Photos from Alyssa Alarcón Santo
In 1956, the Hali Desert was as it is today: bare, lifeless, and utterly flat. The town that now stands at its edge and bears its name did not exist then as anything more than a few shacks inhabited by hermits and naturists who, for reasons of their own, chose to live as close as possible to what has been called the “Plain of Dust”.
Halfway through the 144-mile drive down what was then known simply as the Hali Desert Road, Betty Nelson told her husband, Lou, to stop the car.
The young couple had been married the year before, and they were taking their first cross-country trip together to see Betty’s family in California for Thanksgiving. It was late afternoon, the sun close to the horizon. While it never snowed in the Hali, the lateness of the season meant that it was cool, so the car windows were rolled up.
There was no radio reception that far into the desert, so, having nothing better to do, Betty pulled her compact from her purse and, for the sixth time in an hour, checked herself in the waning light.
Lou had been driving through the desert much of the day; first the Colorado, now the mountainless plain of the Hali. For hours their surroundings had been completely static, as though they were actually standing still, and the only thing really moving was the sun as it slowly traced its arc overhead. That’s why, as she absently angled her mirror toward the horizon to catch some of the early evening’s fading light, Betty could not immediately comprehend what she saw. After a moment, she clapped up the compact and spun around toward the window, looking slowly over every inch of the flat ground stretching off in the distance.
But Betty Nelson saw nothing. She turned away and sat straight in her seat. It was such a small thing that she must have imagined it. But as she looked back to the horizon, still seeing only the razor-straight horizon under the gloaming sky, she could not convince herself. After all, who would imagine seeing something so inconsequential, so nearly unnoticeable?
Betty opened her compact again and faced Lou, who drove on unawares. If the earth had not been so level, the road so straight, the ride so smooth, she wouldn’t have found it again. She’d never have noticed it in the first place. It was no more than a speck in the mirror, and in half-hearted disbelief she tried to scratch it off like a grit of dirt. But the small, twinkling spot remained.
“What’s wrong, sugar?”
“I don’t know.” Betty answered absently. “Nothing.”
“Well, what are you looking at?”
“I don’t know.” Betty said again after a moment, too distracted trying to figure the answer out for herself to have noticed Lou asking the question.
“Well, what’s it look like?” Lou smiled, assuming she was playing some game he was not yet privy to.
“I don’t know, Louis. Pull over.” She looked in her mirror, then back to the horizon again, but said nothing more.
They drove on through the Hali and, eventually, into Indio, not speaking of the incident again until Lou brought it up a few nights later at Thanksgiving dinner. The whole table wondered out loud about what she might have seen, but Betty, red-faced, brushed it off as nothing. The Nelsons wouldn’t speak of it again until years later, when, watching the news on the RCA ColorTrak television that Lou bought her for their 15th anniversary, Betty saw a report about an event called “Mirror Camp.”
***
Normally, a quiet desert—its sparse, picturesque landscapes under richly-clouded skies—is cathartic. But as I travelled back and forth along the length of the Hali portion of the I-10, I found it easy to understand why Betty might have thought she was seeing things. The plain of the Hali, a single, unbroken field of dry earth, borders the fading edge of Joshua Tree and stretches south and east, well beyond the Arizona line where vegetation and variety finally appear a few miles before the town of Cecina.
The desert is so flat, the highway—really just a widening of the old desert road—doesn’t rise more than a few inches from the ground at any point. Even the wind barely seems to blow through the void. If not for the fact that the Hali is so empty—or, so expected to be empty—the Desert Man might never have been noticed at all.
***
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION
INTERVIEWEE: Officer Ron Jerrington
NOTE: Pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “um” have not been included in the transcription. Additional observations by the interviewer have been denoted with brackets.
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT 00:00:05]
RON JERRINGTON: Not that anything ever happened out there. Every once in a while, you’d get a drunk driver out on the edge close to town, but most days there wasn’t even that. But that one day…. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever saw—it wasn’t bad at all. I’ve seen some bad stuff. It wasn’t that. It was just—I don’t really know how to say it. It stuck with me.
[Officer Ron Jerrington was one of only a handful of Arizona State Troopers that regularly patrolled the desert road in the 1960s. There are even fewer officers that run the line today. He was sent out as part of a special initiative to break up the burgeoning drug trade along the western half of the border with Mexico.]
RJ: I was always checking the weather report to see if it was going to be cool or a hot one. The one thing you wanted to make sure of was your water. Besides the fact that you could die if you didn’t take in enough water, it got real easy to hallucinate. If I hadn’t heard about those reports—the experiments later on, the stuff with the mirrors—I’d never have said anything. But if I hadn’t had any water that day, if there was so much as a chance that I’d just been seeing things, I’d probably have taken this story to my grave.
[It was almost noon and Jerrington was nearing the end of his four-hour workday. Shifts in the Hali were kept short due to the conditions.]
[00:00:57]
RJ: So, every time I went out, I took four canteens with me. Three would normally cover me for a shift, but that day it was especially hot out—those old uniforms made you sweat like crazy, too—and I was almost half-way through the fourth bottle and I was getting a little worried. So, I’m sitting there on my motorcycle, just kind of thinking of how far away I was from everything, and I take my helmet off to get some fresh air on my head. I lean over, put it down on the ground next to the bike.
RJ: As I’m straightening up, in the rear-view mirror, I see the damnedest thing. This little twinkle that has no business being there. I move my head around just to make sure it’s not an insect or a glob of something on the mirror, but that spot sticks right there. I can’t help but think to myself, "What the hell can that be? Part of a plane broke off?" I turn around, but I don’t see anything. I turn back and look in the mirror again—there it is. So I get off my bike, cross the road, and look out into the distance.
[00:01:51]
[Officer Jerrington brings a liver-spotted hand over his heavy brow. Although the skin around his eyes is heavy and wrinkled with his 74 years, the look of searching astonishment—as though he’s still trying to figure out the mystery of what he saw—is as clear as it must have been on the day he saw it.]
RJ: There was nothing.
[He holds his hand up in disbelief.]
RJ: So I go back to my motorcycle and check the mirror one more time, thinking it must be gone. But it’s still there. It was the damnedest thing. What could it be that I could see it in the mirror and not straight-on?
RJ: Being a police officer, it was my duty to check out suspicious sorts of things like that. And, really, just being curious for my own self, I put my helmet back on, wheel my bike around, cross the road, and head out there. I went out four, five miles, well away from the road, well away from anybody even having a chance of finding me if I wiped out or anything.
[Jerrington leans forward in his well-padded armchair, putting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hand, still trying to make sense of it for himself even though the phenomena is now well-documented.]
RJ: I don’t know. Just nothing.
[END TRANSCRIPT 00:02:34]
***
JOE ANDERSON is an educator, fiction writer, and media studies scholar. His short story, "Parade", was published in Johnny America. Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero, an academic text, will be published by Lexington Books in 2021. Bizarre thoughts about fiction can be found at his blog, Dispatches from the Adventure, available on YouTube and Wordpress.
