The Meteor and the Mercury

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Contributer (reader discretion is advised)

I was just coming up from checking that spring at the bottom of the draw, and it was running fine, despite a brutal, baking summer. It was the only water around for quite a long spittin' distance, and I didn't relish the thought of having to start packing water for those cattle. I tossed off a quiet thanks to the Old Man who ran the waterworks down under this rolling prairie, and hoped his mood would continue on the fair side. I stopped and looked around, gave the dust a statutory kick, and pushed back my hat. Some sort of scratchy feeling made me hunch up my shoulders a bit the way you do after a bang sound and just before the unseen thing whacks you in the back of the head. I felt an electric sort of sizzling in the back of my teeth and could have sworn I smelled that funny, sharp smell you get right before the lightning hits. But there was no bang - just the big, blue sky and my truck sitting over there by that cottonwood snag.  Quiet - real quiet.


"Jesus," I thought. "Too much jitters. Gotta get more sleep."

I sat down on a chunk of sandstone, pulled out my tobacco and twisted up a smoke - pinched off a couple strands and stuck it between my lips - cupped a flame to the end and drew in a long pull. I let the smoke out easy, and it barely drifted off in an easterly direction on what you couldn't rightly even call a breeze on this hot, deep and silent summer's day. Right on cue, just like any old Hollywood duster, a red-tail cut the day like a sharp little blade - skeeeeeee............. then my ears all of a sudden pressured up like I had my head under water, and I slowly turned my head up and around and over my right shoulder, stopped with my cigarette halfway to my mouth and swallowed once with a dry sort of gulp - whoa.......

........a red dot lit up about thirty degrees off to the left of the Sun and real fast became a magnesium-white hole in the sky. About quicker than I could even think, it carved an orange scratch of a welder's arc across the sky like God himself was in a panic and trying to slash his way out of his big, blue tent. The tip of it went by me at about 30-30 velocity and the pressure wave sent my ass chasing the tea-kettle back over top of the rock........    

....WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHAAM!!!!

From my perch flat on my back staring up at the wild blue, I watched the smoke trail roiling and boiling along the flight path of whatever it was that just came calling. I still had my roll-up wedged between my fingers poised about a foot from my face. Between my knees I could see the toes of my boots crossed over like some good luck charm, and what I could only figure must have been some kind of sonic booms went rattling off around the prairie like some goddamn crazy bull with hob-nail boots on dancing around the attic of the world.............

       ..........BOOM BOOM BABOOM BOOM BOOM BABOOM BOOM B-B-B-BOOM....................


Silence.

I supposed there'd be time enough later to check whether or not I still had ear drums, and carefully placed the cigarette between my lips and took a drag. I let it out slow.

"Well." I said to no-one in particular. "Well, Jesus, Jesus, jumpin' jelly-roll Jesus."

I swung my feet around and pulled myself up so's I was leaning on the top of the rock, reached down for my hat and placed it carefully back on my head. Over by the cottonwood tree, which was looking a little the worse for wear, what should have been my '73 Merc was just a smouldering tangle of charred junk with a little mushroom cloud of dust and smoke rising up and away from the sorry carnage. Funny as it might seem, I could see the owl feather I had stuck in the sun visor slowly carving a lazy spiral just off to the side about fifty feet up in the air. And one wheel was just disappearing over the hill, picking up speed down towards the coulee, its busted brake line flopping along the way like some sun-fevered snake gone and bit the thing on the way by. I scratched the stubble on my chin and made one of those donkey faces, all buck-toothed and wrinkle-nosed, and pretty much didn't have a single thought disturb the perfect hollow that was my brain. A yellow-jacket came by, took two turns around my face, and headed west, flying low. I took another haul on my smoke and climbed up on my feet. A few spot fires fizzled and sparked around the - uh - scene of the recent event. I gave myself a dusting and stepped around the rock to go survey the situation. There was a slight smell of singe from the right side of my head.

When I got up to the spot I shuffled around and stomped out the fires that were eating away into the short grass. There's something to be said for a little over-grazing, I guess, 'cuz if there was anything much more than what was there, which wasn't much at all, then I suppose I might have had a nasty prairie fire situation on my hands. As it was, I got things under control pretty quick, and then went over to survey the spot. The fender panels and what was left of the box were blasted off to the side. Glass was about a hundred thousand kernels glinting in the sun seventy or eighty feet out. Half the bench seat was wedged in a crotch of the tree about ten feet up. The chassis and the motor block and the other three wheels had stayed more or less put, but they were pretty badly pretzeled, and I didn't really see much sign of the floorboards at all. But then again, there was about a three or four foot wide blast hole right under where the driver's seat would have been, maybe a couple feet deep, with a black spot drilled right in the middle, sending out a little curl of blue/yellow smoke. I figured that whatever had just about parted my hair was down in there somewhere. I supposed I better get home and tell Dolores. One tire was still smoking a bit, so I thought it might be wise to piss on it before I went. I gave it a good douse amidst a cheery little sizzle and steam. Then I headed off.

           .............................................

My ears were still ringing when I got back home - and I have to say my feet were complaining quite a bit. Three and a half miles in cowboy boots is definitely not a recipe for Dr. Scholl's Tenderfoot Award of the year. I was just clumping up onto the veranda and reaching for the screen door when Dolores pushed it open with her usual flourish.

"Where you been? - and what was all that racket? You look like you been runned over. Where's the Merc? "

"Well, soon's I get these boots off and a cold beer, I'm gonna tell you. I have seen something this day to make a man step onto a new path in life. You think you got the day pegged, and then wham! - she goes south. Jeez - these feet."

I slumped into the rocking chair and peeled off my boots - stuck my near-to-smoking pins up on the railing. Dolores came back with a frosty Pils and hoicked her rear-end up on the railing too, parked her feet on the bench.

"So?"

I pulled on the beer. "Aaaahh - mister man, that's good!"

"Weeell....", I said as I twisted up a smoke. "I'm going to tell you something. I'm pretty damn sure a goddamn meteor took out that goddamn Mercury! That racket you heard? - and I am telling the gospel truth here - that racket you heard was the christly thing rippin' down and pretty much completely discombobulating that old pick-up truck. I was just minding my own business, comin' up from that spring below the snag, when all of a sudden the whole shitteree went ballistic...........zoooom - wham! - blew me bass-over-ackwards, and when I looked up there she was - smokin' junk pile. Jabbering Jesus! I'm gonna get in touch with somebody and find out just what happened there. Who the hell do you call?"

I went to swing my feet off the railing.

"Now hang on - simmer down and tell me something I can get a grip on here," said Dolores with understandable confusion. "Are you telling me that some shooting star came out of the sky and landed on that Mercury?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. I felt kind of funny, and then I looked up and saw this light and this streak of smoke, and it moved so fast I couldn't even follow it - and then my truck exploded and I went flyin'. And that's no whisky talk - I was not lookin' down the filler hole with a lit match. Cross my heart and hope to die, Honey - it happened just like that. Take a look - you can still see what's left of that smoke trail down over Montana."

"Maybe it was some kind of missile gone astray - all these drones and what-not all over the place."

"No, ma'am. The damn air was burning. This weren't no little piece of fancy machinery. It came in like a shooting star - just like that - BAM! - just like a goddamn meteor. And the thing of it was - it would've landed right in my lap if it'd come either ten minutes earlier or five minutes later. If I hadn't stopped to twist one up, all's you would've found woulda been a little charred rump roast, and maybe what was left of this old rodeo buckle. It makes a man think, Dolores. It damn well makes a man think.

.....................................................


Next day a team came down from Calgary and we went out to the site. The passage of the thing had indeed been observed by other folks, and there was considerable excitement at the prospect of possibly finding a remnant in the blast hole.  And sure enough, about three and a half feet down they dug up a half-melted plug of what turned out to be a nickel/iron meteorite (meteor's the streak, they told me, and meteorite is the thing) that they figured must've weighed about six pounds when it hit my Mercury, and still been travelling at about four or five thousand miles an hour, having decelerated in the atmosphere apparently from somewhere's around forty thousand. But I suggested that it was travelling quite fast enough for me, and there was general agreement as to that.

I got my face on TV, and I was happy to give them that rock - the little sonofabitch that made its way all the way in from Jupiter or some such just to nearly turn my balls into cosmic poutines - or more likely into goddamn primordial vapour. And then I was happy enough to see the back of them all, with their vans and their cameras and their beeping machines and their clipboards.

When it was all done, me and Dolores went out to tidy things up and haul away the bits and pieces of the Mercury. The cottonwood was pretty charred up, but it was a tough old bird and would stand to see another day, leaning hard into that wind as it had been doing these sixty years past or more. When we had pretty well everything dragged up onto the three ton, I got a funny catch in my throat and felt a shiver - somebody walking over my grave, as the old-timers were wont to say.

"C'mon," I said. "Grab that picnic and let's take a breather over by the old rock."

We sidled over and parked our butts on the sun-warmed shoulder of the thing -  pulled out some sandwiches and a couple beers. Nothing much needed saying for a good ten minutes - crickets and pipits filled in the blanks just fine. After a while I looked over at Dolores and she looked back at me. There were those same steady green eyes that had been measuring me up for the last thirty-five years - with just that certain tender twinkle, like bright ripples over still water.

"Well, " she said, with that just-so smile. "What do you make of it all?"

I pulled out some fixins' and twisted one up - lit it, and offered up some smoke to the day.

"Hmm...  for a while there I thought maybe I'd been spared for something special - watershed event, don't they call it? Maybe time for the bucket list, or some such kind of crap - 'Live every day as though it were your last'...... But it's come to me just what's what. This is the day - just like every other day you and me have had these many years past. Nothing's been missed. Ain't no regrets. I nearly got my ass kicked by something that'd come from a million million miles away, but it doesn't take me one inch or one second away from where I am right now. And that's the place I plan to be tomorrow. I'll miss that '73 - but I didn't die. And I guess it takes a full-grown man to realize that his path is his path - and that's the only thing that's true. A man's not up for much if he lets a little thing like some goddamn meteor - jesus meteor-ite - nearly tearing him a new one and toasting his favourite truck turn his head. I got this day - I got this life - and I got you, darlin'. Tell me what's wrong with that?"

"Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing," she sighed, and leaned her head on my shoulder. "Nothing, nothing at all."

Across to the south some jet-plane was making its white scratch across the sky. Up on the knob, the old cottonwood snag hummed gently in the breeze. On the hood of the three-ton a meadowlark lit for a second and showed of his fancy black necklace. And from down in the draw, there came the sound of trickling water - and I was pretty damn sure that that little nugget of nickel was jangling in my pocket - a lucky charm for a long and precious journey.