By Daryl Ogden

My mother and I were driving home at dusk on a two-lane country highway following one of our visits to the fire station where her newish boyfriend was posted. It was Memorial Day, a couple of months ahead of my eleventh birthday. A pair of vehicles were bearing down on us, their headlights filling up the rear and side view mirrors of our Toyota. The trailing drivers had already twice veered over the center line and gunned their engines, with ambitions of sling-shotting past. My mother responded by pressing hard on the accelerator, threatening a head on collision from traffic traveling in the opposite lane. Even though an 18-wheeler was now headed our direction a few hundred yards in the distance, both trailing vehicles tried again to pass. My mother floored it, forcing the drivers back into our lane or risk being entombed within thousand-pound accordions.

“They’ll have to wait until I’m ready for them to drive on by, Billy.”

On the road, my mother didn’t take any crap.

It wasn’t long – a minute or two – before a cigar-shaped UFO appeared in the driver’s side window. The UFO was a very fat cigar, with multiple rows of flashing red, green, and yellow lights. As the saucer levitated over the power lines that ran parallel to the highway, my mother lifted her foot off the accelerator. A Buick sedan and Chevy pick-up sped by, blowing their horns long and loud. The second driver shouted “Bitch!” Neither driver seemed aware of the flying saucer.

Without our touching it, the AM radio flickered on. An indecipherable transmission crackled from the dashboard speaker. I reached to turn it off, then jerked my hand away.

“Holy shit!” I said, shoving burning fingers into my mouth.

My mother fixed her attention on the UFO as we crawled along the asphalt. The flying cigar mirrored us, held its vertical position, maybe 50 feet above the power lines.

Exhilarated rather than terrified, my mother wondered out loud if the pilot was sizing us up for abduction…keeping us under surveillance…gathering info…or maybe simply taking in the view while gassing up via power line?

“Pull the car to the shoulder, mom.”

“That would be nice, Billy,” she said. “But I’ve lost control.”

According to my mother, something like a tractor beam from Star Trek was navigating the car. It kept pulling us forward, down the middle of the highway. My mother maintained a “10 and 2” steering position anyway.

With my unburned hand, I grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it in my direction. It was frozen. The flying cigar held steady for a while longer before the pilot hit the hyperspace button. It vanished.

Back in control, my mother pulled over, let the car idle. We watched the sun disappear.

A pair of giant headlights appeared in our windshield. My mother flashed her headlights. The 18-wheeler slowed and stopped alongside us. The driver’s side window unrolled.

“Did you see that?” my mother called out.

The trucker cocked his head through the window.

“See what?”

She described the UFO.

He grinned. “Everyone’s seen a saucer or three out here. Probably just a weather balloon or one of those fancy helicopters the TV stations use. Or it’s the damn Feds. Air force base ain’t far. You better get on home now or you might not be seen again, what with the little green men or the government having their way.”

He tipped his baseball hat and drove on.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” my mother said. “We just saw a UFO.”

She made a tableau through the driver’s side window, thumb to thumb, as though she were playing cinematographer for the eventual documentary we would make, a sequel to one of our favorites, Chariots of the Gods. In the mid-seventies, that film played on a re-run loop. It informed us that the achievements of ancient civilizations – magnificent pyramids in Egypt and Mexico, haunting statuary on Easter Island, massive mortar-free walls in Peru – were the works of advanced aliens described in mythology and folklore as gods. The wonders of the ancient world, the narrator claimed, couldn’t be the creations of primitive peoples.

My mother and I were members of the UFO-believing sub-culture. It helped that we were also Californian, and lived in the cradle of alternative theories of the universe. Some people think the apex of the UFO craze coincided with the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but my mother and I weren’t part of that alien bandwagon. We were pre-Spielbergian, if there can be such a thing in American life.

“We saw it, Billy. We saw it for ourselves.”

As usual when my mother made sensational assertions, I wanted to believe. Yet I couldn’t prevent doubt from creeping in. I had known for a while that her imagination was winning a protracted war of attrition against the real. Although I had seen the UFO as plainly as she – or thought I had – I feared this turn of extraterrestrial events might represent another victory in my mother’s total surrender to fantasy.

We got back on the highway and headed to our small town’s main police station. The night duty officer sat behind a large desk, pen in hand. His mustache twitched as he took in our story.

Wasn’t it obvious, my mother asked, that the UFO was sucking energy straight from the power lines, right into its engines? Didn’t the officer know the appearance of UFOs often caused phone static, dimmed lights and, in extreme instances, power surges that led to large-scale outages?

Holding up my charred fingers, she urged the officer to recognize that the burn patterns, coming from a power surge to the radio dial, weren’t ordinary.

The officer inclined his head in my direction. He spoke just above a whisper. “Tell me, son, do you burn yourself often? Or are you burned often?”

Shifting my weight from one foot to another, I denied having ever been burned before and confirmed everything my mother had claimed.

The officer placed the pen behind his ear and turned his attention to my mother.

“Ma’am, there haven’t been any other UFO sightings tonight, as far as I know. Tell me, any foreign substances this evening?”

My mother shook her head.

The officer moved his eyes back and forth between my mother and me. Then he sent us on our way, with assurances he would file a full report, although we knew nothing would come of that.

“Get some ice on those fingers, son,” he said as we turned to leave.

“Paper pusher,” my mother said, mostly under her breath.

At home we called and woke my mother’s fireman, as he was always in bed by 9:00 p.m. Irritated at first, he soon became interested in the UFO. He asked to speak with me so that I could confirm the story.

“Billy, are you sure your mom is with it tonight?”

I thought about it. She seemed more or less normal, for my mother, though her preoccupation with the UFO had prevented her from icing my fingers.

“Yes,” I said.

“Your mom said something about you being burned?”

“From touching the radio dial, yes sir.”

The fireman directed us to watch the eleven o’clock news and to read the morning paper.

“For God’s sake, get some ice on Billy’s fingers,” the fireman instructed.

Over the next 24 hours, nothing about a UFO sighting appeared on TV or in the newspaper.

By phone the next day, the fireman didn’t conceal either his disappointment or his skepticism. Standing a few feet from the receiver, I could make out a voice that sounded like a parent speaking to a child. “Bella, Bella….”

Perhaps to counteract my mother’s unorthodox parental influence, the fireman had weeks earlier intervened by guiding me into baseball, a sport that howled “normalcy.” He became my committed personal coach. After a lot of supervised practice, by mid-May I could field hot grounders, protect the plate, and snap a decent curve ball.

“You’re ready for little league tryouts, Billy,” the fireman said, satisfied with his efforts.

One day, a week or two before tryouts, the fireman expanded his coaching repertoire and took me to a weightlifting gym. On the drive, he explained how he had started weightlifting in response to having been on the wrong end of a motorcycle accident, which he survived despite being thrown 100 feet in the air by a drunk driver.

He described being launched from the motorcycle. “Billy, I was a certified Identified Flying Object.”

He eventually landed and skidded across the pavement, nearly losing his right leg at the hip. This confined him to stationery sports like weightlifting, though he could still throw and hit a baseball. Lucky for him, the fire department had already promoted him to captain, a protection from forced disability retirement.

In the gym locker room, the fireman unbuttoned his short-sleeve collared shirt, revealing well defined pectoral muscles covered by chest hair. Then he removed his loafers, socks, and well pressed khakis. When he slipped off his brilliant white briefs, I saw how his right hip and butt cheek were shriveled and a long, ugly red scar traveled from hip to thigh. Yet it wasn’t until the fireman turned in profile that the true horror came into view. For the first time in my life, I saw a grown man’s genitals. I stared straight ahead at my locker as the fireman flopped into a jock strap and wiggled into a pair of tight gym shorts.

“Are you going to get dressed, Billy?”

I stammered something about meeting him in the gym.

I hadn’t reached puberty and so couldn’t yet imagine how the naked fireman and the other masculine bodies in the locker room related to what my body might someday become. Through that summer and beyond, the memory of the fireman changing in the locker room proved impossible to exile. I sometimes thought about the fireman and my mother “fooling around” (which is what they called it). When he stayed overnight with us, shared my mother’s bed, the mental image of his naked body kept me from falling asleep.

For the rest of summer, I did everything I could to stay as far away as possible from weightlifting.

Once he declared me little league ready, the fireman signed me up for the more competitive of my hometown’s two little leagues. That league was populated by intense, tobacco chewing coaches whose playing careers hadn’t panned out. A lot of the kids looked and played two or three grades older than they were. Their dads had been working with them since they stood on two feet. Many had even been held back a year in school to secure a competitive advantage.

During my tryout, as I moved around the diamond from station to station, I tried to make my positional preferences clear. “I want to play shortstop and pitch,” I relayed to the coaches.

A husky kid behind me laughed. “Shut up, punk. The coaches will tell you where you land.”

I didn’t see the point of playing baseball if I wasn’t in the middle infield or on the pitcher’s mound. I decided that I didn’t want to appear to be too good at any of the other positions. At the outfield station, I neglected to catch many fly balls. At the infield corners, I sometimes let even easy grounders go by.

I gave it my best at the middle infield station, focusing on the fundamentals the fireman had taught. I moved my feet, got my glove low, and followed through on my throws. I did okay, though even I saw that I wasn’t one of the better players. Later, when I auditioned for pitcher, I threw a decent fastball. Turning to breaking stuff, I tried to snap the ball hard so that it curved across home plate. But neither my fastball nor curveball were at their best. The unhealed blisters from the radio dial reduced my velocity and accuracy.

When I showed up to the first practice, it was clear that I had been a late round draft selection. The coach shot a brown stream of tobacco onto the grass.

“You’re playing right field, son.”

“Right field?” the fireman repeated, incredulous, when I shared the news. He took my designation as a personal insult.

During games that summer, I wandered from one outfield clover patch to another, occasionally joining the infielders in chattering “Hey Batter.” Mostly, though, I daydreamed and watched the action in the infield. Sometimes, I looked to the horizon and wondered where that flying cigar might be, fantasized that it might come back one day to claim me, maybe pick me up directly from right field, where I was bored and humiliated.

The fireman attended many of my games. He ranged around the bleachers (where he sat with my mother) or paced behind the dugout (when he wanted a break from my mother’s baseball questions). Sometimes, as I daydreamed or looked to the heavens for the cigar, the fireman would shout things like, “Billy, heads up! The next one’s coming to you!” When I batted, he yelled at me to “make the pitcher throw a strike!”

Early in the season, a tall, rangy lefty from the other team stepped into the batter’s box. Technically a 6th grader, he could have passed for high school. He cracked a fly ball into the gap between right and center. I called off the center-fielder and drifted towards the ball’s flight path. I got myself in position, semi-confident that I might make the catch and earn some respect from my coaches and teammates. But the ball glanced off my glove and rolled behind me. By the time I threw the ball, wildly, in the direction of home plate, the winning run had crossed. Half the bleachers cheered, half groaned.

As I made my way to the dugout, head down, someone yelled from the bleachers. “Way to blow the game, kid!” I looked to see the fireman’s reaction. He turned away and spat on the ground.

After that, the fireman doubled down on his coaching. He spent hours lofting me high fly balls and lasering line drives. Before he would leave with my mother on a date, he invited me to join him in the long narrow patio of our apartment unit, where we played catch and he challenged me to “burn it in there, Billy.” Sometimes we played on the fire station’s long, wide driveway, designed to accommodate fire engines. My mother often sat and watched from the hood of our car.

“You’re darling,” she said to us. I didn’t know who was more darling, me or the fireman.

As summer went on, my throwing motion improved and my muscles grew stronger. Fly balls and line drives no longer eluded me. By late August, the ball popped loud in the fireman’s mitt.

“Thatta boy, Billy!”

All the while, the fireman repeated his mantra.

“Relax, rotate, step forward, let it fly.”

On Labor Day weekend, out for a drive, my mother and I found ourselves on the same stretch of highway where we saw the UFO, once again at dusk. As we drove, we speculated about the coordinates of our flying cigar and wondered if it might still be somewhere in earth’s atmosphere or many galaxies far, far away.

The radio crackled on of its own accord, sending the same type of jumbled transmission as the time we encountered the UFO. Taking the radio as a signal, my mother jerked the car to the shoulder and we tumbled outside. We twirled round and round, scanning the sky. After what felt like a good long while, we both were dizzy. We returned to the car, where the crazy radio transmission continued.

In a rare flash of realism, my mother turned her hand into a fist and hit the top of the dashboard. The transmission ceased.

“Bad wiring,” she murmured, shaking her head. She reached out to graze the dial, white hot to the touch, as it had been when it burned my fingers. She looked at me with regret.

She turned the car around in the direction of the fire station.

“He’s not expecting us, but let’s say goodnight.”

Normally, the fire station would have been 20 minutes away but we arrived there in half the time. Turning into the driveway, we were surprised to be bathed in floodlights.

The fireman, wearing a baseball mitt, was at the far end of the driveway. Near our end was a boy. The fireman and the boy were tossing a ball back and forth. There was an unfamiliar car, a green American sedan, parked toward the back of the driveway. A woman in jeans and a low cut, short-sleeve blouse sat on the hood, smiling and watching the game of catch.

My mother’s face transformed into a hard mask. The three figures on the driveway stopped what they were doing and stared at our car. My mother slapped her right hand hard against the steering wheel. She ordered me to stay in the car. She exited and marched up the length of the driveway to engage the fireman. The woman dismounted from the hood and joined the conversation, which soon became animated between the women, with lots of gesticulations and yelling. The fireman looked on, sheepish, while hitting the inside of his mitt with a balled-up fist, as though he were a kid breaking in a new glove. He inched away, towards the safety of the firehouse.

Despite my mother’s orders, I got out of the car and made eye contact with the kid, who I saw was maybe two years younger than me. He was wearing the baseball hat of our hometown’s other little league. The boy looked confused. He was a good-looking kid, with dark hair and a slight build. I was blonde but recognized him as a kind of doppelgänger. I imagined that we were both half orphans, our mothers looking for father replacements.

The kid’s mom resembled my mother, in that she was of medium height, with shoulder length hair and busty (although she was blonde to my mother’s brunette). We were mother and son mirror images.

I held up my hands and signaled for the kid to throw me the ball. I wanted to see what kind of arm he had, if his release point and follow through were correct, as the fireman had taught me. Maybe because I wasn’t wearing a mitt, he threw me a puff ball.

I squeezed the ball hard and recalled the fireman’s mantra: “Relax, rotate, step forward, let it fly.”

The fireman, who was no longer my mother’s fireman, maybe never had been her fireman, didn’t see the baseball coming because he was too preoccupied with quietly distancing himself from the two women. The ball hit him in the temple and knocked him on his ass.

Voices were raised and fingers were pointed. A young engineer emerged from the firehouse. He’d seen the whole thing and chosen not to come to the aid of his superior. Instead, he pointed at me as if to say “Good throw!” and stepped forward to separate the women.

My mother and I headed home, ignoring the occasional crackle that spilled out of the dashboard speaker. She stared straight ahead and sometimes slapped the steering wheel, though not as violently as before.

There was, I supposed, nothing for either of us to say now that we had both let go for good of flying objects.

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Daryl Ogden is a native Californian and a Montreal-based writer. “Flying Objects” is adapted from a recently completed novel manuscript, The Corinthians. “The Rapture,” another story adapted from the novel, was included in the collection, Don’t Abuse the Muse. The Language of the Eyes, a history of the British novel from the Enlightenment to Modernism, was published by SUNY Press. Daryl’s essays and reviews have also appeared in a variety of journals.