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Article Excerpt
DURING THE THIRTY-THREE years since he'd bought Mystery Hill from Ford Albritton after Ford got tongue cancer and couldn't do the spiel anymore, Ken Kassarjian had been debunked more times than he could count. Every year or so, sometimes more when economic times got tough and grad schools at all the state universities swelled up with people who knew they couldn't get a job, some bespectacled muckraker would pull off the interstate and take all kinds of measurements. Their questions to him varied all the way from aren't you ashamed to be pulling this scam to you do know this water doesn't really run uphill, don't you--and Ken always said the same thing. I believe it, he said. And the people who come here, you better believe more of them believe it when they leave than did when they got here.
He could understand why the university types and crusading journalists needed to debunk him, or at least write tongue-in-cheek features about cranky Kassarjian and his tourist trap. Water wasn't supposed to run uphill. If water could run uphill in one place, it might start doing it somewhere else, and then you'd have cats lying down with dogs and other such apocalyptic scenery. Truth be told, Ken was a great deal more put out by the true believers of every stripe who arrived like caravanning pilgrims during the summer. If he had to hear one more story about lines of power in the earth or aliens who lived under the North Pole or interdimensional vortices, he wasn't going to be responsible for his actions. The worst was the Reptilian crowd, who had managed to mash every self-respecting conspiracy theory since the Pyramids into one Grand Unified Theory of Gobbledygook. They gave him books, and accused him of being a Reptilian himself, which offended Ken a little because as he'd gotten up in years his face had acquired more than its share of wrinkles, a fact that offended his internal image of himself as a twenty-six-year-old squirt lean and mean from two tours in Vietnam. On these occasions, and these occasions only, Ken Kassarjian was apt to growl, "I didn't serve my country to have some moon pie wacko call me a lizard." Invariably his hostility proved to the wacko in question that Ken was indeed a Reptilian; he had evidence of this in the form of a number of articles mentioning both him and Mystery Hill in the more out-there conspiracy magazines, sent to Mystery Hill as what he assumed must have been a triumphant gesture on the authors' part. He took vindictive pride in the fact that he had spawned a small twig on the conspiracy tree all by himself, involving his Army unit--he'd done nothing but repair trucks, for crying out loud--and some kind of anti-gravity hocus-pocus. Apparently Vietnamese Reptilians could levitate, or maybe it was all of the Communist Reptilians. Ken didn't waste his time reading the articles they sent him.
It was the Wednesday after Memorial Day when the Toyota minivan with the professor in it pulled into the parking lot. Ken had her pegged as a professor right off the bat. He put down his rake--he'd been leveling the gravel between the fourth and eleventh holes of the minigolf course--and said, "Just tell me up front if I'm a Reptilian, eh?"
She gave him a look. He gave it right back. "Reptilian?" she repeated.
"Lady, you have college professor written all over you," Ken said.
"What I want to know is, are you one of the debunkers or one of the wackos? I got to know which jokes to have ready."
"No, I--" She looked over her shoulder, back down US-12 in the direction of Clinton. "It's just odd that you said 'Reptilian' because I ran over something on the way here, and right before I hit it, I thought it was some kind of huge lizard." She shook her head and walked over to shake his hand. "Fara Oussemitski."
"Ken Kassarjian. Probably a snapping turtle. It gets a little warm, they like to sun themselves on the road. Truth is, if it was a snapper, you might not even have busted its shell. I've seen them walk right off after getting run over. Was this just back about a mile?"
"Could have been," said Professor Oussemitski, who was a sight easier on the eyes than the run of the academic mill. Early thirties, Ken figured. Probably just got her job. One of these postmodern types who tried to make highbrow hay out of stuff like cereal boxes. What was the word, semiotics or something like that. She had on little glasses with black wire frames, her hair was cut to look like she hadn't combed it in a month, and she wore a little stud in her lower lip. Not your standard professor look, although some of the cultural-studies types he'd run across made a practice of bringing a little bit of Paris to southern Michigan. Ken liked her. He made it a practice to decide right away whether he liked someone or not, and Fara Oussemitski went into the plus column. He'd still lied to her about what she'd run over in the road, though.
"Well, Professor," he said, "I'm about to head out on an errand, but if you want to look around, Jamie up in the ticket booth will get you started. I'll be back in a half-hour or so."
"All right," she said.
"What kind of professor are you, anyway?" he asked as he wrenched open the door of his crumbling F-150. Her reply was lost in the squeal of the hinges. "Say again?"
"Physics," she said. He started the truck and drove away.
He found where she'd had her incident, but Little Boozy Boswell had gotten there first. Crap crapity crap, thought Ken. A physics professor and Little Boozy. If it wasn't after Memorial Day, I'd shut down and go bass fishing.
Little Boozy--so monikered because his father had been nicknamed Boozy since the Depression--was squatting on his considerable haunches examining the mess in the westbound lanes of US-12, fight by the turnoff to the state park. Ken pulled across the road and sat idling on the shoulder, facing the wrong way so he could talk to Little Boozy through the passenger window.
"It's another one, Ken," Little Boozy said. He shifted his weight as a car blew by in the opposite lane, the gust of its passage flipping Little Boozy's hair into his face.
"Another turtle," Ken said.
"Hell you say." Little Boozy was prone to theories, one of which held that Wamplers Lake had a colony of aquatic lizard-men living in its depths. Ken had pointed out that Wamplers was only thirty-nine feet deep, which meant that if the lizard-men had two-story houses, they'd have fish finders bouncing off their roofs all the time. Little Boozy's reaction was to expand his theory to accommodate a subterranean city below the lakebed. Ken, in turn, had expanded his assessment of Little Boozy to accommodate the possibility of fetal alcohol syndrome or plain animal stupidity. Which was not to say that he genuinely thought the scrambled mess of gray, green, and red on the pavement was a turtle--it wasn't--but he did not for a second believe that there were lizard-men in Wamplers Lake. The truth, which Ken had approached in minute increments over his years at Mystery Hill, was much stranger. And now he had a physics professor to deal with.
He got out of the truck and went over to stand next to Little Boozy, who was displaying an impressive length of plumber's crack to those unfortunates driving west on US-12. Everything about him was big. Big beard, big gut, big mechanic's shirt flapping in the breeze. He looked like a bear hunched over a kill.
She really nailed this one, Ken thought; there's nothing left of it. Might as well be a turtle. "If this is a lizard-man, Boozy, you couldn't prove it by me," he said.
"Don't you think I know what you're up to?" Little Boozy said.
"Fact is, I don't," Ken said.
"Okay, smart guy," Little Boozy said. He went to his own pickup and got a flat-bladed shovel and a plastic bucket. When he'd scooped the mess into the bucket, he clamped a lid on it and put it in the cab, then locked the doors.
"Boozy," said Ken. "You really think I'm going to steal your turtle?"
Little Boozy walked up close enough that his belly brushed the buttons of Ken's shirt. "Let me tell you something," he said. "You can make fun of dumb old Little Boozy all you want. But you stop by our place sometime, and I'll show you something'll change your mind."
"Thanks," Ken said. "How's tonight?"
He'd meant it sarcastically, but it didn't come out right, and Little Boozy blinked. "Tonight," he repeated. "Okay, then. Go down the road a piece past the house; there's an old cabin on the north side. I'll be there." He unlocked his truck and got in. "Set you straight," he said through the window, before roaring into a U-turn and away back down US-12.
Now how in the hell did I manage to do that? Ken wondered. Then he remembered the physics professor wandering around his property and he dragged the F- 150 through a U-turn in the other direction, hoping that Fara Whatsername hadn't found his collection.
She hadn't, but she had done something far worse. She had unpacked real, actual scientific instruments right smack in the middle of the tour and was for the love of Christ taking measurements while tourists wandered by and took pictures of each other standing at an angle off a brick or pointing down at the part of the creek where the water flowed uphill. Ken rarely lost his temper, but seeing this brought him right up to it. He marched over to where the professor was peering into some kind of monitor, restrained himself from grabbing her arm--only because he figured she'd have him arrested--and said through gritted teeth, "I would hate to kill you in front of those kids over there. But I would hate it even worse if you kept on with your experiments. Hell of a situation you put me in."
She held up a hand. "Shh. Almost done."
That's a fine-looking hand, Ken thought despite himself. Strong fingers, well shaped. "Goddammit," he growled. "Done with what?"
"Measuring fluctuations in the local gravity. Now be quiet a minute."
"Don't you ... what?" Fluctuations in the local gravity? Ken worked the phrase over in his head. Then worked it over again. If he wasn't mistaken, Professor Fara Oussemitski was telling him that Mystery Hill wasn't a hoax. This made him suspicious, since if she wasn't a debunker that made her a wacko, and since he'd already decided he liked her, that meant he liked one of the wackos. This contravened one of the cardinal principles of Ken Kassarjian's life, which was to disassociate himself from wackos as completely as was possible. Close on the heels of these thoughts came the realization that since he'd agreed to go over to Little Boozy's that night, that principle had been violated not once but twice in the same day, which clearly meant that he should shut down and go bass fishing on the off chance that he'd catch an unwary lizard-man over to Wamplers Lake.
Professor Oussemitski stood. "There," she said. A portable printer on the ground, next to whatever apparatus she'd been monitoring, started spitting out graphs and numbers.
"There what?" Ken said.
"Done for right now," she said. "I'll have to look these results over and figure out what to do from there. But if things work out like I think they will, I'll have at least part of the grammar today."
"Grammar?" Ken said.
She gave him an appraising and faintly bemused look. "You have an office? We should probably discuss this there."
"I've got a better idea," he said, and went to let Jamie know.
KEN HAD OWNED the same boat since 1964, a fourteen-foot War Eagle with a two-stroke Evinrude outboard that was probably illegal and certainly on its last legs. Every spring he took it apart and rebuilt it, just on general principles, .and every spring he got it started after an ordeal of starter-yanking and smoke-farting. He kept it in his garage, down at the end of the dirt road that wound around the perimeter of Mystery Hill. Half an hour after Fara Oussemitski had packed up her gear, they were cruising slowly along the southern shore of Wamplers Lake. When they got to the edge of a certain cluster of lily pads, at least a couple of hundred yards from the nearest lakeside cottage, Ken cut the motor and let the boat drift. They were over a dropoff he had been fishing since he was a kid. He dug out a collapsible spinning rig he kept under one of the seats.
"You got a license?" he asked.
She shook her head without looking up from the pages she'd printed.
Ken clipped on a little Mepps spinner and flipped it out along the edge of the lily pads, drawing it slowly back in and waiting for Professor Oussemitski to enlighten him. "Can take smallmouth out of here all day long," he said, just to hear himself talk. "If the damn crappie will leave you alone."
She was still reading. Ken had a momentary sensation of being on a bad date. "I know this guy named Little Boozy Boswell," he said. "Little Boozy says there's lizard-men living on the bottom of this lake."
This got her to look up. "Little Boozy?" she said. "Is there a Big Boozy?"
"Well, Boozy used to be just Boozy, but then when Little Boozy came along, everybody started calling him Big Boozy. Believe he was a rumrunner during Prohibition. He's coming up on a hundred years old now, and Little Boozy's a lot bigger than Big Boozy. But they're both crazy as bedbugs."
A little smile was trying not to show itself on Fara Oussemitski's face. "What about these lizard-men?"
Ken deliberated. "What about fluctuations in my gravity?"
"Your gravity?"
Annoyed, Ken snapped off a longer cast this time and the Mepps landed eight feet into the lily pads. "You know goddamn well what I mean," he said. Certain that if he looked at her she would be smiling, and that if he saw her smiling he would either kiss her or throw her out of the boat, he concentrated on extricating the Mepps from its lily-pad prison. In the back of his mind he was wondering how many lures he'd lost in this spot. At least one a year, was his initial reckoning. After a couple of minutes hauling this way and that, he lost this one, too.
While he was tying a new leader on,. Professor Oussemitski said, "Which do you want first, the weird part or the weirder part?"
Ken shrugged. "Professor, there is nothing you can say any weirder than the stuff I hear from the crowd who thinks I'm a Reptilian. You go ahead and tell it the way it makes sense to you."
She laughed. "Well, it might or might not make sense whichever way I tell it. And it's Fara."
Oh, is it, thought Ken. Then he cut himself off at the knees. She isn't flirting with you, dumbass, he told himself. You're thirty years older than she is, twenty-five at least, and physics professors don't flirt with proprietors of shady roadside attractions.
Only maybe she was about to tell him that his attraction wasn't quite as shady as he'd imagined.
"Ever hear of string theory?" she asked him.
"Matter of fact, I have," Ken said. "There is a segment of my clientele that believes my little piece of the Irish Hills is some kind of interdimensional vortex. Some of 'em go into the creek right where it runs uphill, and...
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