“You up?”

Hillary groaned. Now she was up.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake. Shit, what time is it?”

She tried to stretch her legs, but the confines of the passenger seat didn’t afford much space for anything more than sitting. The sun was only just peeking up over the horizon. They must have driven through the night. More to the point, Sam must have driven through the night. Hillary hadn’t done anything but sit there -- and then sleep. She couldn’t remember when she conked out.

What little she could remember of the night prior came back to her in spurts, as if her memory was trying to protect her from something. Small doses, a little at a time. No sense in hitting a lady with the full flying saucer, space shotgun story in one swing.

Outside the window, it was bonafide Coyote & Roadrunner territory. Cacti, sagebrush, and giant red rocks; the only thing it was missing was the anvils. Sam gave it a few more spins of the odometer before he cleared his throat to speak again.

“If you’re done rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, I’ve gotta ask you something.”

Hillary nodded.

“Are we going to talk about this or what?”

“Christ, of course we can talk about it. I was waiting for you. You’ve been driving non-stop for hours. Right through the night. I don’t know how you did it. I wasn’t going to bring it up until you were ready. Until you had, well, processed things.”

Her words came out a mile a minute. It was a tell. The faster she talked, the more confident she tried to seem, the more likely she was faking it. The same spell came over her when she tried to reason with Hal the night before.

“Well, I’ve processed things. I’m ready,” he said, his voice scratchy but resolute.

“Aliens!” She nearly punched him in the arm, though she thought better of it as a sixteen-wheeler barreled past in the opposite direction. “Can you believe it?”

“Aliens? Oh, that I am no way ready to talk about yet. Haven’t processed that one bit.” He nervously chuckled and turned on the radio. He needed a distraction. No, he needed a couple of distractions. Music would do fine, sure, but he wanted to spin the dial, too. Keep him real busy. “Get back to me in a week or two and I’ll let you know if I’m ready. Fat chance, though.”

That was the Sam she knew. That was the Sam she married. That was the Sam she divorced. She had expected too much of him to think he might have the --

“Do you really think I didn’t have room enough for you and the band?” he interrupted her inner monologue.

“Of course, I did. And I’m not even angry anymore about it, either.” Both of them knew this wasn’t true. ”Not very angry.” Sam thought this was true, though it wasn’t. “Not too angry.” This, at last, was mostly the truth. “I’m just looking at the situation as I see it. You chose that life over the life we had together. You chose a bunch of groupies, Sam, over me.”

“I don’t mean to split hairs here, but it was only two groupies.”

“What number of groupies did you think I would be okay with, Sam?”

If there was a magic number of acceptable groupies, he didn’t know it either. He knew it was too late to apologize, too late to make amends. That ship had sailed two groupies ago.

“I should have asked this a while ago,” Sam said, blinking his eyes like somebody who spent the whole night driving away from aliens,” but where are we going? I don’t even know what road we’re on. I’ve just been heading west since last night.”

Hillary didn’t know how to talk about where they were headed when she couldn’t yet talk about where they’d been. There was no separating the two, try as Sam might hide from what had happened. Even if they just kept going west blindly, forever, they’d wind up eventually back at what might remain of the Bolsa house. At least then Sam would have to talk about what had happened. Hillary hoped it wouldn’t have to come to that.

“I say we go back.”

Sam waited so long to reply that Hillary thought he might not have heard her, an impossibility given the close quarters of their current situation. Sure, he wouldn’t quit it with the radio dial, but, unless, overnight, he’d developed some kind of selective deafness to words associated with aliens, he had no good excuse for not hearing her.

“I said--”

“I heard what you said, Hil…”

“Hillary.”

“I just can’t believe that you said it. Still. After all these years, I can’t come to grips with your brand of craziness.”

“A flying saucer, Sam. There was a flying saucer. We have to get it. We have to go back.”

Sam shook his head so hard his neck cramped.

“We don’t have to do nothing of the sort. First off, who knows if it was actually a flying saucer? I didn’t see it fly. Second, it, whatever it was, almost definitely got crushed when the barn collapsed. Third, that lunatic mentioned other folks having asked around about that lady’s old case file -- don’t you think they’d be interested in the UFO we helped uncover, too? And fourth, even if it was really a UFO, and even if it wasn’t turned to dust, and even if a bunch of government goons isn’t already hunting us down for encroaching on their territory, even if I accept all of those very unlikely things as true, what business of ours is a flying saucer from 1957, anyway?”

Sam had to take a moment to collect himself. Either he had said all of that in one breath or else his lung capacity had seriously diminished in one night of white-knuckle fleeing.

“You’re right,” Hillary said simply, a half-beat later.

Sam’s head swung so quickly in Hillary’s direction that he almost brought the steering wheel along with him.

“Right? I am?”

Sam was unfamiliar with the feeling and it left him feeling a little nauseous, as unnatural as it was.

“Yes, you’re right. We are absolutely not the only ones looking for it.”

“Yes. Right.”

“And that’s why we have to head back now, before we lose whatever head start we might have had. We need to get that thing while we still can!”

Sam’s hand lifted from the radio dial. It wasn’t because he liked the station he had landed on: it was a dirt road country song and that was about as far from his thing as possible. He stopped fiddling with the dial because he was suddenly feeling a little vertiginous, like the floor was the ceiling and like the road was made out of pudding. He needed to have both hands on the wheel.

“Head start…head start…to get a flying saucer? Hillary, you can’t be serious.”

Dead serious, she was tempted to say, but resisted. She could only push Sam so far. She knew he could do with living on the edge; getting shoved over it was another matter entirely.

“I’m serious, Sam.”

On and on the song went. Normally, Sam would have switched the station again at the first mention of a finicky Ford or a hangdog hound dog, but his mind was in other places. He didn’t hear a single twang or put-on country patois.

“So, we turn around. We drive back however many hours. We get past a bunch of angry government types with guns. We dig through rubble. We get the damned thing. Then what do we do Hillary? What’s the plan then? ‘Cause I sure don’t have room in my storage unit back in Poncha Springs for a vintage flying saucer.”

That much wasn’t untrue. The thing was filled to the rafters with comic books Sam swore would one day be worth their weight in gold, even if valued more like toilet paper.

“You know, I hadn’t thought of that. But, I don’t know, we’ll figure it out. We can make room for it.”

“Make room for it?” he groaned. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

They didn’t talk again for another hour at least. The mile markers flew past like confetti at a parade. Hillary wasn’t unfamiliar with moods like these for Sam. On better days, she called him her Turtle when he got like this. Inwards he’d go, into his shell, where he could be as angry or upset or confused as he wanted to be. Better to let him decide when he was ready to talk again. Though, in this case, being stuck with him in the front seat like that, driving endlessly with no direction in mind, surely running out of gas, and almost definitely running with a very full bladder, Hillary was wondering if she might help usher along whatever emotional journey he was on.

“So,” she cleared her throat, “you decided where we’re headed, yet?”

He chortled.

“You and I know that that's never been up to me. Above my paygrade. You’re the one who makes the decisions about where we’re headed. My only input is where we’re not going, and that’s back to that goddamn mess in Shadow Hills.”

He wore his agitation like a beauty queen’s sash. He fidgeted and he mumbled to himself and he started to get nervous little hives up and down his arms. Hillary wanted nothing more than to go back, to dig up whatever they could, to find out what the hell had happened and what the hell was going on. But she could see by the way Sam was acting that this was a battle she would lose. He wouldn’t go back, no matter how she begged, bullied, or cajoled him.

“You’ve got all those folders. All the cases. Pick one. We must be close. Hardly anything out here but kooks and their alien stories.”

The Mas Suenos Motel stood out like a blister on a sore thumb. It was the only building for miles along a road so lonely even the potholes were disinclined to stay for too long. That the Motel had seen better days was all but guaranteed: anything would have been better than the state it was in.

“I should have known that if you were springing for a hotel, it would look like this.”

Two stories tall and a football field long, the stucco on the Motel’s walls was coming off like weeks’ old scabs. From the parking lot, Sam could see a handful of the rooms had the glass from their windows missing. It was no surprise, then, that the Mas Suenos Motel proudly proclaimed that it had vacancies. Sam wondered if they had ever had to turn on the neon lights for the NO side of the sign.

“I thought that after you drove all last night, and all day today, it might be nice to have a real bed for a while.”

They had agreed to live out of the van: it had been fitted in the back with a bed for each of them. Hillary had never acted as if she had budgeted for motel stays. Then again, it didn’t look like the Mas Suenos Motel’s room rate would break the bank.

“So, that’s the reason? Suddenly you’re overflowing with empathy for me. No other ulterior motives?”

Are there any other motives besides ulterior ones? Hillary wanted to ask. No one ever talked about any other kind. If you had a motive, it all but had to be underhanded, sinister, duplicative. Ulterior.

“Of course I have empathy for you. You can’t just turn that off. Seeing you all scrunched up at the steering wheel, knowing that you hightailed it all night long…you deserve a good night’s rest after that.”

Sam waited for her to finish and, when she didn’t, urged her along.

“....And…”

He knew her too well. Maybe other people were capable of having a different, more benign kind of motive. Oh well. It wasn’t in her blood. What harm was there in playing the long game?

“And…, since you asked, it so happens that the Mas Suenos Motel was the site of an unexplained case from Project Bluebook. File #298JN55.”

A beater held together with no more than mud, rust, and electrical tape sat a few spots away from Sam and Hillary. From one of the distant rooms, a faint blue glow peeked out from behind a set of half-closed blinds. Sam thought, at least they’re taking advantage of the free cable. The only other car, much newer and much cleaner, was parked next to the check-in desk, a dark, cubicle-sized room at the far end of the motel’s pockmarked parking lot.

“Go on. What happened here? What does File #2J---whatever it was, say?”