Unpopular Science

“I know it because I’ve seen it before.”

“Well, then? What was it, anyway?”

Bo Janks looked out into the desert himself, mind going back to what he’d seen the previous night, and then going back to when he’d seen it before. Out loud, to the stranger from the Air Force and to God and to the world, but mostly to himself, he said it as if he was making a confession, “It was Ironhand.”

Ironhand. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but he hadn’t even thought that name in forty years.

Where had his daddy’s old books gone to anyway? Probably sold off with the rest of his daddy’s belongings. When Bo’s daddy died, Bo’s sister couldn’t erase his memory fast enough. She sold or trashed everything in the house, then sold the house, and she sent half the money that was left over to Bo. The check in the mail was how Bo found out his daddy died.

Daddy used to have some books that Bo read when he was twelve years old. Those books were old already. The ones with covers, and there weren’t many, showed grimy old drawings of what Bo saw in the desert on that night.

“What’s that mean, Ironhand?” the stranger from the Air Force asked.

Bo got suspicious then. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but who are you anyway, and why’d you come to my place?”

The Air Force man smiled. “We lost a missile. I came by to see if maybe you spotted it.”

They lost a missile that went maybe a thousand miles per hour and what Bo saw was a thing that walked no faster than a man.

“A missile?” He laughed.

Bo drank two beers that night, just as if it were Christmas or the Fourth of July. Drowning his sorrows.

He started chuckling again when he thought of the Air Force man. “A missile!”

After the Air Force man left. Bo looked around, hoping against hope to find some evidence that what he saw in the night had left a mark of itself, but there was nothing. Course not. It wasn’t real. Ironhand didn’t exist.

Once there was an Ironhand. Bo’s daddy saw it at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. He told Bo about it time and time again. That World’s Fair was more than a hundred years ago, and Ironhand must be long gone now.

“Don’t look for excuses for your old brain. Bo. It’s just worn down. Face it, Bo, you’re losing it.”

It was a hard pill to swallow. If his mind went, he couldn’t live alone anymore. He would have to go to town, check himself into the home for old geezers, and that was unthinkable. He had lived in the desert for thirty years, independent and happy enough, and he couldn’t change his life now. When a man was eighty-nine years old, he was too old to change. So what options did that leave him?

Next day, more strangers from the Air Force came by, and they weren’t as friendly. They wanted Bo to talk about what he’d seen, and they accused him of being a drunkard. Bo asked them to leave politely, then got on the phone to the sheriff, and that convinced the Air Force men to leave Bo’s land.

But the visit got Bo thinking. Not that he could trust his thinking, but it seemed odd, all this attention from the U.S. Air Force. There had been stray missiles from White Sands before, and Bo had talked to the Air Force men before. They never sent men on the first day, with all the decorations. They never came back for a second visit. They never sent the goon squad.

What did it mean?

He spent all the following day in the desert, searching the ground for any sign left by the thing that his mind had made him see.

“Dam fool!” He was home at dusk, a whole day wasted, his neck sore from bending so much.

Then the next day he got up and he looked some more.

On the third day, he found something strange. It was a flake of heavy, corroded iron, small as a fingernail, lying atop the sands where nothing made of iron ought to be. Bo held it in his shaking hands. He looked at the ground again and noticed how the sand sunk down in a way that wasn’t right.

That night, Bo drank three beers and woke up sick. He heard pounding and it took a long time to figure out there was somebody outside his place. It was more Air Force. They were nicer this time, but they kept talking and talking and all Bo wanted to do was to lie down and sleep or maybe just lie down and die.

But when they left at noon he got his shovel and he went to the place where the iron chip had been sitting on top of the sands, and he started to dig.

The rain started coming down. The day got dark, and by the time of the real dusk. Bo was exhausted, his old arms on fire and his head pounding. He was too old for this.

But he had to know. Bo kept digging, the powdery sand piling up on either side. He kept thinking the sand was too loose, as if something had been digging here recently, when it should be hard as sandstone.

His shovel hit something metal under the sand, and Bo scrambled out of his newly dug hole in a panic, He stared down there, terribly afraid. Whatever metal object he hit, it was still under the sand.

“Bo, you really ought to go down there and get your shovel,” he told himself.