Sunday, December 01, 2002 7:20 AM Joe Coluccio

Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0

If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.

Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.

“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”

Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.

“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”

Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.

“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”

The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.

“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”

Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.

“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.

The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.

“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”

It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.

One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.