Rhubarb

  RHUBARB

  by M.H. Van Keuren

  Copyright © 2012 by M.H. Van Keuren. All rights reserved.

  First Kindle Edition: April 2012

  ISBN: 978-0-9852155-0-7

  Cover Design: Streetlight Graphics

  Editor: Little Media Empire

  Written in Montana.

  mhvankeuren.blogspot.com

  LICENSE NOTES

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DISCLAIMER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Part I

  1985

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part II

  1986

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  One Year Later

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For Dexter and Michael

  Part I

  1985

  A shape extruded from a swirling green event, pouring into real space like a stretching cheetah on a moving sidewalk. The green event plipped away as queerly as it had popped, leaving a complete and coherent object drifting with silent purpose on a background of stars—a ship.

  The vessel was immense and segmented. Two sections were nearly identical cylinders of pitted chitin. The third section, the front—or perhaps the rear—clearly the business end, bristled with antennas, sensors, and receiver dishes. Bits, certainly involved with propulsion, protruded at ungraceful angles. In its entirety, the ship could have been a thing of chthonic wonder, like an unholy trinity of sea cucumber gods, but for the corporate logo emblazoned on every facet. City-sized renderings blanketed the principal sides, block-sized versions adorned the lesser edges, and bumper sticker-sized ones decorated parts that no one but a mechanic would ever see.

  It had a history—the logo, not the ship. A four-day symposium had been held to select the aspect ratio. Two new colors had been invented for its design. Evolutionary algorithms had been used to breed the font that would best convey the company’s reputation for quality. The company behind this logo hired hip young beings on hundreds of worlds to normalize its name as a verb, an adjective, and an interjection. The marketing department had been mandated to make customers want to tattoo the logo unironically on their external surfaces.

  At the front—or maybe the rear—of the ship, a single window the size and shape of a minivan windshield glowed just below an Olympic swimming pool-sized logo. Inside, a single being ran his tentacles over a wraparound touchscreen and brought the vessel to a halt. He then coaxed it backward, slowly and carefully, between a pair of not-entirely-similar vehicles bearing different logos. A dozen warning icons flashed as one of the ship’s segments drifted out of alignment, and he had to stop—muttering words that would have puckered his mother’s suckers, if only he’d known which of the several billion females had deposited his particular egg on his father’s reef that season—and pull forward to make another attempt. When he had successfully parked the ship, the being let out a visible blubber of relief.

  Moments later, an airlock door opened near the bottom—or the top—of the hull, and a secondary vessel emerged, this one about the size of a whale. It headed directly for one of the chunks of ice for which this region of space was known. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. The nearest star, though a significant object in the sky, offered little in the way of light or heat this far from its significant planets.

  As the vehicle approached the lonely berg, its headlights revealed an installation, bigger than a house but smaller than an airport. At the tap of a tentacle, a bright white point flared from the installation and then burst wide, like a toilet bowl filled with electric-blue plasma, flushed in reverse. The swirling well opened wide enough to swallow ten more whales and the school buses used to measure their lengths. The vehicle accelerated, even as a tongue of blue light shot out and sucked it in, extruding it to a single line. Then the light collapsed into darkness, and the vehicle was gone.

  A few minutes later, a semi-trailer—about the size of a whale, and with sizable chrome exhaust pipes sticking up like a bull’s horns—rumbled to a stop in a gravel parking lot. It resembled the dozen or so other trucks parked in the yard or fueling at the diesel pumps, except that its rear mud flaps featured the silvery silhouette of what appeared to be a squid.

  A man climbed down from the cab. He was thick rather than tall, with an even thicker mustache. He wore grubby jeans, a flannel shirt open over a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, and a tweed pork pie hat.

  Bells jingled as he entered the truck stop. The elderly man behind the store’s register gave the trucker a manly little wave and returned to stocking cigarettes. The trucker headed straight for the men’s room. A few minutes later, he took a seat at the diner counter, grunted a greeting to a couple of other truckers a few stools down, and plucked a menu from between the napkin dispenser and the ketchup bottle. Country-western music warbled from a jukebox in the corner, but something else screeched from a cheap radio in the kitchen.

  “Well, hiya, Glen. Ain’t seen you in ages.”

  A waitress sauntered behind him in a mustard-yellow, knee-length dress with a white apron. She was blond, in the loosest sense of the word, and wore too much lipstick. He checked out her rear as she walked past and rounded the counter.

  “Linda, lookin’ prettier than ever,” he said.

  “Now, don’t you go flirtin’ with me, Glen,” she said. “You told me last time about that sweet wife and kids of yours back home.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “Besides….” She patted her belly.

  “What’s that mean?” the trucker asked.

  “It means, dearie, that I am going to be a mother. And I don’t need you ogling me like you just did,” Linda said. Then she winked.

  “Well, congratulations, I suppose,” said the trucker.

  “So what you haulin’ that’s got you come all the way through Herbert’s Corner?”

  “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that,” the trucker said.

  She turned over the cup waiting on a paper doily, filled it with steaming coffee, and took a pen and pad out of an apron pocket. “Now, what can I get ya?”

  “You got any of that rhubarb pie?” the trucker asked.

  “Fresh made this morning,” said Linda.

  The trucker ate a buttery Reuben sandwich and french fries before Linda brought his pie. He quivered a little as she set it in front of
him and then devoured it as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He ate a second piece with deliberate relish, slicing off tiny forkfuls and taking sips of sweetened coffee between each bite. He watched the third piece arrive like a drunk watches his bartender pour. Linda refilled his coffee.

  “Can’t get enough of this pie,” he said.

  “Best rhubarb pie in Montana,” said Linda.

  “Montana, hell. Best rhubarb pie anywhere.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “You make it?”

  “My mother’s recipe,” said Linda. “God rest her soul.”

  The trucker paid the check with cash on the counter. Outside, he adjusted his hat against the wind and sun and rounded the building toward the yard. Linda was leaning against the wall near the back door of the kitchen, one forearm across her waist, the other raised, a cigarette between her fingers. He gave her a wave.

  “You have a safe drive, now,” she called.

  “Thanks,” he replied, and hesitated.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t be smokin’ with a baby goin’ on, but it’s so hard…”

  “Probably would be a good idea to quit,” said the trucker. “Hey, Linda, you ever think of selling that pie recipe of yours?”

  “Selling?” she said. “What’s to sell? Anyone can make pie.”

  “I don’t know. Something about yours. You know it’s kinda famous.”

  “I’ve heard tell,” said Linda. “But it ain’t famous among no one but you long-haul boys. They ain’t servin’ it to Ronald Reagan in the White House.” She took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped the butt into a pickle bucket full of sand, and then shook a fresh one out of the pack. She offered it to him, but he wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

  “Even so,” said the trucker, “seems you sell that recipe and you’d do all right.”

  “I don’t know what there is to sell,” said Linda, lighting the cigarette with a pink disposable lighter.

  “I know some folks that might be interested.”

  Linda laughed, blowing smoke out her nose. “Well, you tell ’em to come on up here to Brixton, Montana, and we’ll see what we can work out.”

  Chapter 1

  Just past mile marker 241 on Highway 360, a white ambience grew over the crest of the hill, glinting off insects and limning the roadside weeds like crystals in the moonless night. Maybe, just maybe, Martin thought as he switched off his high beams. Maybe he’d come over the hill and there’d be a craft swooping up the road on a blinding shaft of light. He’d slam on the brakes, skidding his truck sideways like they do in the movies. He’d get out as the craft stopped directly overhead, and then it would shoot straight up into the night. The only sound would be the sonic clap as air rushed in to fill the void. There’d be no time to take video, no time for a phone call. But he’d finally have a better story to tell than the time he rounded a corner and broke up two coyotes fighting over a dead snake.

  At the top of the hill, the approaching headlights dimmed. A semi roared by, dwarfing his own truck as it passed. Its brake lights winked out of sight on the other side of the hill, leaving the night darker than before.

  Martin switched his brights back on and sucked down another gulp of Diet Mountain Dew. The commercial on the radio ended with a satellite blip. After a few moments of silence, a familiar crackling static faded up, followed by a voiceover:

  “From Virginia Beach to Yreka, from the Rio Grande to the Upper Peninsula, from Boston to Yuma, from Sequim to Key West, from Mauna Loa to Mount McKinley…” Martin unconsciously recited the montage, mimicking the various voices: “My fellow Americans, ask not…One small step for man…noises from the room where she died…Back and to the left, back and to the left…nothing to fear but fear…You want the truth?…Military cover-up…the question is whether you’re paranoid enough…I deny…disappeared…No comment…totally exsanguinated…they came in low over the hangar…What are they hiding? What are they afraid of us knowing?…I want to believe. I want to believe.”

  Martin shivered at the final whispering voice. He had heard that very “best of” show. A woman had called in claiming to be haunted by the ghost of her husband mouthing a message and holding a ghost baby she didn’t recognize. Martin sighed, relieved, not for the first time, that his company truck had no back seat. It was bad enough to be out here alone—no sign of civilization—without having to worry about a disembodied spirit popping up in his rearview mirror. They’d find him mangled in the wreckage, eyes wide with fright even in death, his hair turned white, and a terrible load in his pants. Thankfully, Lee Danvers did ghost episodes only a couple of times a month. But seeing a UFO, that would be another thing altogether.

  The montage ended with fading, squelching radio feedback.

  “Welcome back to Beyond Insomnia on the Weirdmerica Radio Network. I’m your host, Lee Danvers, coming to you from the always-on-the-move BI Bunker. Whether you’re on a long haul or cleaning a mall, I’ve got the talk to keep you awake. Doesn’t matter if you’re a tweeker or a seeker, we want to hear from you. Call 1-800-555-WAKE. 1-800-555-W, A, K, E.

  “We’ve been talking with Dr. Calvin Atford, author, researcher, and lecturer. He’s a noted international expert in the history of UFO phenomena and the author of the recent book The Shepherd Hypothesis: Ancient Aliens and Human History. He’s graciously agreed to stay with the Waker Nation for a second hour from his office in London. Welcome back, Dr. Atford.”

  “Thank you, Lee. It’s been my pleasure.”

  “In a few moments we’ll get to listener calls. But before we do, Dr. Atford, where can listeners go to find your books?”

  “All my books are available online, both print and electronic. There are links on my website…”

  “Which Wakers can find a link to on the BI website, wakernation.com. Now, Dr. Atford, I’ve been fascinated to hear about some of the lesser-known instances of UFO activity in history. You talked about the records from the Zhang Dynasty and the twelfth-century journals of Abbott Dmitri of the monastery at Saratov, but are there more recent cases?”

  “Of course, Lee. One of the more interesting cases—which many of your listeners may not be familiar with—is in your own country. Have you ever heard of Brixton, Montana?”

  “I remember hearing murmurs about it many years ago…”

  “No way,” said Martin, turning up the volume.

  “Wasn’t it revealed to be a hoax?”

  “Perhaps, but there’s some compelling evidence, nonetheless. The stories were declared a fraud after the death of Herbert Stamper, the owner of a well-known truck stop at the junction of U.S. Highway 15 and State Highway 360. He opened the gas station after World War II, and it became known as Herbert’s Corner. After he died in 1986, the Great Falls Tribune reported that he had paid people to claim sightings and UFO-type phenomena for almost forty years.”

  “What types of phenomena?”

  “Low-altitude aerial objects, strange bright lights over certain geological formations, those kinds of things. Particularly in spring and early summer. Brixton is less than two hundred miles from Malmstrom Air Force Base, home of a large portion of the United States’ land-based nuclear missile inventory, and no stranger itself to these kinds of unidentified aerial events.”

  “I think we all remember the reports from the fall of 1998.”

  “Oh, yes. But the Brixton story has a strange angle that distinguishes it from the Malmstrom events. Herbert Stamper claimed that aliens actually frequented the Herbert’s Corner truck stop, eating in the diner and shopping in the convenience store.”

  “Incredible. He claimed to interact with them?”

  “Yes. I visited Brixton in the mid-nineties. The new owners of Herbert’s Corner had made an effort to distance themselves from the diner’s past. But I met a woman, whom I’ve agreed to keep anonymous, who had been a waitress there for more than thirty-five years. She had salvaged many of the photos and memorabilia from the diner after Stamper’s death
. She showed me several photos of Herbert with people he claimed were alien visitors.”

  “The aliens looked like people?”

  “The photos appeared to be of truck drivers and other travelers. Their pictures had been framed and hung in the diner for curiosity-seekers.”

  “Did this woman believe Stamper’s claims?”

  “I can’t say for certain, but she admitted that the diner had a reputation for odd clientele. Whether deserved or manufactured, I couldn’t confirm.”

  “Is there any other evidence, besides Herbert Stamper’s rumors, that shed any light on what might have been going on in Brixton?”

  “The most compelling evidence for me, as you might expect, comes from historical documents. Early French trappers reported that both the local Assiniboine and Blackfeet people called the area around the current town of Brixton by the name of ‘Big Thunder Valley,’ because it was known for strange sounds, odd weather, and unusual light events. One tale refers to ‘nights with many sunrises.’ Trapper Gustav Cuilliard wrote in his journal that he had been told of an existing trading post in Big Thunder Valley, and that there had been others there like him, by which he assumed other Europeans. But when he arrived, he found no signs of other people or a trading post. Well into the eighteen hundreds, settlers reported that the buffalo herds avoided the area. These kinds of reports provide some anecdotal suggestion that something strange indeed was going on in and around what became the town of Brixton.”

  “Were there similar reports from later settlers?”

  “None that I’ve found. The situation seems to have quieted until Herbert Stamper came along in the 1940s, and then the rumors stopped again after his death in 1986. One must keep in mind that he ran a traveler-dependent business as Interstates 90 and 94 were built across the southern part of the state. Was Stamper simply playing off local legends to boost tourism? Or did alien visitors frequent his truck stop?”