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Roswell wasn’t a big town, but it was plenty big enough to have a wrong side of the tracks. That’s where Walt Sanders settled in the ‘80s when he came into some money and bought the junkyard. As a young man he’d laid low, sleeping rough more often than not and working odd jobs: ranch hand, barn-cleaner, crop-picker, dishwasher. Anything to stay in Roswell because he’d been given a task, to watch over three children who slumbered in the desert.
He had no other family he cared about. He had nowhere else to be. So he stayed. And he waited.
The years marched over him like a railroad bull in hob-nailed boots. He never wavered in his duty, and he never abandoned his post, but it wasn’t easy. Walt had been folded into the warmth of a peculiar little family conjured from the bloody darkness of one eerie night. Walt remembered every last word said in his hearing, every touch by a gentle hand, every amazing discovery revealed by Miss Nora and Miss Louise. But that had been only one kind trip around the sun out of fifty-nine hard years.
Usually the memory of it was enough, and when it wasn’t, there was always a drink to be had.
Liquor eventually became his best friend, and drinking in the company of others counted as human connection. Everyone knew who Sanders was, the old one-eyed drunk who was good at fixing cars and better at holding up a bar stool. He wasn’t happy, and he was still lonely, but he belonged. And drinking softened the harsh edges and unanswered questions of his past enough to savor the memory of soft summer nights filled with music and dancing in the barn.
“It hasn’t been all bad, has it?” Mimi Deluca delivered another pour of cheap whiskey for Walt, where he had been ruminating on a bar stool about a past he couldn’t return to. “You have that faraway look you get. Where do you go? I think it’s a good place, because you’re sad to leave it.”
“Nowhere.” He swiped the glass close.
“Well that’s not true. You go to the past. Most people do.”
Walt grunted and then slid his drink down in one practiced swallow. Mimi gestured with the bottle. Walt pushed his empty glass forward. Mimi poured another neat double and screwed on the lid. “Pace yourself. I think you still have miles to go before you sleep tonight.”
“Never lecture a man about his drinking if you want a tip.” Walt sipped this time. He always tipped Mimi because she was a single mother with a little girl about yea-high. She understood how the universe worked, even when she used her woo-woo tarot cards and auras and crystal balls. Some nights he tipped her like a queen because she had a way of flowing from space to space behind the bar which stitched him into a beautiful moment that had nothing to do with the past.
“Never annoy your bartender if you want a decent pour–oh!” Mimi drifted away as if urged by ghosts but there was no magic; she had noticed Jim Valenti belly-up to the bar three stools down. He placed his hat at his elbow with a deliberate pat to the crown, like punching the time clock, and he raised one finger at Mimi. She switched the bottle on her way down the bar: whiskey for tequila with one hand and picked up a shot glass with the other.
“I saw the news at dinner,” Mimi said as she filled the glass to the brim.
“They’ll run it again at ten o’clock.” He emptied the glass as easy as breathing and set it down for Mimi to refill, and she did. “Kids are the hardest.”
“Of course,” Mimi said. “But they’re alive.”
“God knows what they endured, though. Naked and alone in the dark.” Jim ran his palm across his face before he expertly emptied his second shot. Walt felt no particular like or dislike for the man other than the recognition that he was a fellow brother of the bottle. Maybe Walt envied Jim the respect his job brought him, though Walt had no love for anyone in a uniform. Maybe Walt judged him for drinking on the job. Walt’s opinion depended on the day and the quality of the liquor, but it always evened out because he and Jim were drunks sitting three seats away getting their fix most nights at the same bar.
Dylan Long drifted up with his keen nose for drama. “I heard about them kids. Got any leads, Sheriff? You think they escaped a cult or something? They weren’t abused or nothing, were they?”
“No comment.”
In a fair universe, Dylan would shut the hell up and walk away or better yet, stay in his own lane at the back of the bar and leave the dedicated barflies to water in peace. But no, he was a blowhard whose father, Dennis Long, held a grudge against Walt since the Vietnam War. He’d lost his brother in the Tet Offensive and took offense when Walt defended the few, raggedy anti-war protests that Roswell could muster. He called Walt a peacenik and a hippy, which made Walt cackle. Walt called Dennis a blind idiot if he trusted the government, but when Dennis and his croney Davy Bernhardt demanded Walt explain how he knew for a fact that military men could murder men, women, and children, he never explained himself. His silence bought him a lifelong campaign of general disrespect and a single, specific beat-down, but no one could ever know the source of Walt’s bone-deep hatred for all things military.
The universe was not fair, and Dylan Long did not shut up.
“I got children that age. How can we sleep at night if you don’t know how those kids came to be walking around naked in the desert? You’re not doing your job if I have to worry about my Wyatt and Katie getting kidnapped or raped or killed by devil worshipers.”
“Dylan,” Mimi chided with a shake of her head. Jim mumbled and rounded his shoulders as Long continued to wheedle him. Mimi waved a remote control at the TV mounted on the wall. “It’s almost ten. Leave Jim be. Everything we need to know is on the news.”
Dylan flapped his gums some more. Walt shoved away from the bar and stood. Dylan stepped back. “You know he’s not gonna to tell you jack shit, so quit your yapping and let us drink in peace.”
“Go on.” Mimi uncapped a bottle. “Have a beer on me at your own table,” she ordered, and Dylan withdrew, mostly pacified. Walt resettled on his stool.
Then Mimi turned up the TV and a photo of three children flashed on the screen as the news anchor spoke. “Breaking news tonight as a long-haul trucker found three children walking along the I-285 south of Roswell-–” The rest of the report penetrated only in phrases and words as Walt stared at the photo of the little girl.
He knew that mole.
Glasses of booze and bottles of beer knocking on the bar, pool balls clacking and cigarette smoke hazing the air, people murmuring in the background on a weeknight: all faded.
“Authorities are searching for their parents. If you have any information, contact—”
“How is it that nobody’s claimed them?” Jim accused the TV anchor. “How can people just abandon their children?”
“Somebody loved them,” Mimi declared. “Look at their eyes. They’re not abandoned. They’re lost.”
The sleeping children were so expressionless in their pods that Walt could not draw direct comparisons from their still faces to the wide-eyed photos on the TV. But he knew that mole.
He knew that mole. He had seen it for decades on the face of the girl floating in her pod. He’d seen it on Miss Louise’s cheek every day of that magical year so long ago. And Miss Nora spoke often about her son’s smarts, bravery, and curly hair. Walt peered at the boy with curly hair, looking for Miss Nora in his eyes.
When did he last check on them? Three weeks? A month? Too long, apparently, because coincidence did not bring three naked, mute children out of the desert to be discovered so close to the hushed cave where the pods had rested for so long. Horror spiraled up his throat, crawled into his gut, froze his heart. What would he find, after all the waiting? The cave, dimmed. The soft, glowing pods, empty and dark. Would they be in shards? Unmade?
Or did they remain as they had been for decades: soft, mute, unknowable?
Walt had endured poverty and hunger and loneliness after evil men ended the family he’d found. He had been blinded for loving them. And for what? Three children sleeping inside cocoons of living light, dreaming endlessly, their faces serene. He had shuffled through so many years of his life, protecting a secret mystery that he never admitted to himself was unsolvable. And what had he accomplished? The pods needed nothing from him in all those years—except to be there when something happened. If something had happened. How the hell could he have predicted when?
Voice shaking, Walt ordered another whiskey.
“No,” Mimi said slowly and her look pierced him soul-deep. She cocked her head. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”