18 October 2020: Yuma, AZ — Late Sunday night in Yuma, Arizona. A stranger wanders the empty streets of Old Town looking for a drink, a meal, someone to chat up. Nada.

The bars are closed. The restaurants boarded up. Not a soul to be seen anywhere. Nadie.

The stranger waits in the middle of the intersection of 1st and Main. Sumpin’ gotta happen, he thinks. Nothing happens. He looks down Main Street. Nada. He looks down 1st Street. Nadie.

“Shirley,” he says to nobody, “sumpin’ ‘bout to happen. Gotta be. Maybe some event,” he says. “Of  some mag’itude,” he says. Shirley says nothing. Nada.

“Maybe we jist wait,” he says. And he waits.

“Soon,” he says. “Shirley sumpin’ soon.”

Nunca, the empty town answers silently. Nunca y nunca y nunca más.

The stranger tires of standing in the middle of the intersection of 1st and Main. He sits.

“Shirley,” he says, “sumpin’ gotta happen.”

But nothing does, and the stranger’s head nods and drops until the man is asleep. Asleep in the middle of the intersection. Asleep in the middle of 1st and Main Streets. On a Sunday night, no less. In Yuma!

Nadie hace nada. Nobody does nothing.

The man, who is neither old nor young but somewhere in between, dirty and weather-beaten, a scraggly beard on his chin and a grimy cap on his head, snores. Loudly. The racket would awaken the dead — if the dead were gathering in Old Town. But they are not. No one is. Nadie.

The man’s pants were once shiny, a neat crease still visible below his knees, but are now so besmirched that you’d be hard pressed to say what color they had been originally. He wears a windbreaker already broken by the relentless desert winds. Torn and faded, the jacket looks like it might have once been worn by a miner or a roustabout on an oil rig.

But the cap on the man’s head is bright orange and shines like the beacon visible across the water from Gatsby’s dock. A harbinger of better things to come.

The orange cap is familiar to everyone in Yuma, even if the logo has been torn off. The man is a Yuma Bulldozer fan, or so the new cap implies, and it takes no Sherlock Holmes to deduce that he has come to the heart of Yuma’s Old Town to join the celebration after the Bulldozers swept the Crystal Lake Sandgnats in four straight, the fourth and final game ending less than an hour ago in Yuma’s own John Deere Stadium. Yuma is heading to the Planetary Extreme Championship for the first time and, quite understandably, the man has come downtown expecting a celebration. Expecting crowds. Noise. Food and booze.

But nothing. And no one.

Nada y nadie.

The man snorts, grunts, and awakens with a start, as if he’s been rudely shaken in the middle of a dream. His wild eyes look for whoever accosted him. But there is no one. Nadie.

And nothing to see. Nada.

He feels it at first, a rumbling in the earth, a slight tremor running down the center of the pavement that grows and expands until the stranger believes he’s lying on the fault line of some cataclysmic earthquake. He tries to move but his legs have fallen asleep, and he lies twisted on the pavement, moaning and rubbing his calves while the sound grows nearer … and nearer … and nearer …

Boots … boots … boots … marching down the street. He can hear them now. Tramp … tramp … tramping their way toward him. Steel toed, black leather boots laced high up the legs that strut their way down 1st Street toward where the stranger lies coiled on the pavement. Legs … legs … legs marching beneath brand new riot shields. To the stranger, from his position nearly prone on the street, aliens appear to be marching toward him on legs that support their rectangular bodies and one huge plexiglass eye. The alien eyes keep reflecting the setting sun in his eyes.

The stranger blinks once and blinks again. The aliens keep coming.

Boots pounding down 1st Street, boots pounding down Main Street, boots from the north and south, boots from the east and west, boots, boots, boots!

The stranger covers his ears. The sound is deafening. He covers his eyes, the sight is frightening. But the aliens keep coming and coming and coming.

Something grabs his arm and he screams! Something grabs his leg and he screams again. Another arm and another leg grabbed, and the stranger convulses into screams. He twists, he writhes, turns this way, turns that, but the alien grip only tightens around him. Alien arms hold his head and his feet, aliens grab him by the waist and he is lifted from the street, suspended in the air and carried to the waiting alien spacecraft.

He knew it! Knew aliens would take him one day, and that day has finally come. He cries aloud, “Shirley!” to anyone who might hear, “Shirley this be the Second Comin’! Shirley!” Then he adds, “‘Member me! ‘Member me!”

The aliens close the door to the spacecraft and the stranger gives up. No point fightin’, he thinks. No point resistin’ what’s ‘evitable. He goes limp. The aliens release him, help him sit up, and for the first time since the boots tramped into his vision, the stranger opens his eyes and takes account of his surroundings.

The alien spacecraft has leather seats and tinted windshields and a steering wheel and …

Holy motha’ Betelgeuse, he thinks, these aliens is tricky. Disguisin’ their spaceship to look like some fancy van. Sneaky buggers.

Then he notices that the aliens who’d carried him don’t look like the aliens who marched in boots. These aliens got arms and suits and … and human-looking faces! Sneaky, creepy buggers!

The aliens are talking to him. He recognizes a couple words, then a few more, and pretty soon it’s just like they was talkin’ English. Some kinda mind meld, he thinks. Sneaky, creepy, human-pretendin’, alien cretins!

“Where is he?” the alien with the red, white and blue tie asks. (Nice touch, that tie, the stranger thinks.) “Where you keeping him?”

“What?” the stranger asks.

“Don’t play stupid with us. We’ve monitored the phone calls, we’ve been waiting for you.”

“Me?”

“Look, help yourself out here,” the alien with the tie says. “You’re just the messenger. We don’t want you, we want the mastermind. And we want David Goode back. Alive.”

“Who? I dunno what yer talkin’ ‘bout.”

“Alright,” an alien in the shadows says, “kick him down to lockup until he changes his mind.”

“Wait, wait!” the stranger says. He looks at the alien faces. “Damn good masks you guys got. How’d you do that?”

The aliens look at one another.

“What’s your game?” the alien with the tie says.

“Where you takin’ me?” the stranger asks.

“Lockup.”

“No no, I mean, uh, like what planet you takin’ me to? If I’m gonna be ‘ducted by aliens I wanna know, y’know?”

The aliens look at each other. One of the aliens who wears no tie—beneath his dark sport coat he wears a white, open-collar dress shirt—speaks for the first time.

“This isn’t helping you, buddy. Pretend all you want, but if you don’t give us the names of the kidnappers, we’ll have to pin the whole thing on you.”

“Kidnappers! I don’t know no kidnappers. You got the wrong guy, fellas, I was jist nappin’ in the street.”

“At the intersection of 1st and Main.”

“I dunno. Guess so. I wasn’t payin’ no mind.”

“Wearing a Dozers cap?”

“What?” The stranger takes the orange cap off his head. He looks at it like he’s never seen it before. “Oh this?” he says. “I picked this up outa the trash.”

“Where?”

“Where was the trash, y’mean?”

“Yeah,” the alien with the tie says. “Where was the trash?”

“I dunno. On the corner, I guess.”

“Corner of 1st and Main?”

“Yeah, right there where I was restin’.”

The aliens turn to each other and talk all at once.

“You think—?”

“Could he have—?”

“What’d they say? Exactly?”

“That we’d recognize the cap.”

“On the trash container?”

“You don’t think—?”

“Makes sense.”

They stop talking and look at the stranger. They study him like he was some species they’ve never seen before. Like he was the first human these aliens have ever abducted. The stranger smiles at the thought.

“What’s your name?” the alien with the tie asks.

“Caymuss. Albert Caymuss.”

“Spell that with a K?”

“With a C.”

“Where you live, Mr. Camust?”

“Caymuss. Rhymes with famous,” the stranger says, still smiling. Now we’re gettin’ somewhere, he thinks, enjoying the alien abduction he’s been waiting for.

“Residence?”

“Oh, uh, well, I’m sorta without, right now, if y’know what I mean.”

“Homeless.”

“Temp’rar’ly,” the stranger says.

“Where do you spend nights?”

“Wherever I can. Sometimes under the old bridge west of town. Last night under a bulldozer.”

“Under a bulldozer?” The aliens exchange glances.

“Well,” says the stranger, “it looked like a bulldozer but it was really a food truck. Ya see, they sometimes hand out whatever extra they got end of the evenin’ and last night they fed me some burritos and we got to talkin’—me and the owner lady, I mean, nice lady, Oriental I think, great cook and—”

“She let you sleep under her food truck,” one of the aliens says, interrupting from the rear of the dark space ship.

“How’d you know?” the stranger says, trying to see the alien’s face in the dark.

“Lucky guess,” says the alien.

“You guys speak good English, for aliens I mean. How’d you learn it so good?”

“We’re not aliens, Mr. Caymuss,” says the alien with the tie, “and you’re not as dumb as you pretend to be.”

“Oh, yes I am,” says the stranger. “Prob’ly dumber.”

“You found the cap on the trash receptacle at the corner of 1st and Main, is that right?”

“Yessir, that’s right, but listen, did I hear you say you wasn’t—”

“And you had only worn it for a couple minutes before you lay down in the street?”

“Yup, yup, no more ’n five minutes, I’d say. It was ‘cuz of the lights there on the corner, y’know, they get in my eyes and I—”

“And you didn’t see anybody else,” the alien interrupts, “when you picked up the cap?”

“Nope, streets was empty as Tombstone after a shootout.”

The alien with the tie leans in close to the stranger. “Did you see anything … unusual in the trash when you picked up the cap?”

“Unusual?”

“A photo, a note, something maybe attached to the cap.”

“Or lying right beside it,” adds another alien.

The stranger thinks for a moment. “Nope, nothin’ like that. But say, a moment ago when you said—”

“We’re not aliens, and you’re not a kidnapper.” The alien’s comment seems to let the air out of the tiny space ship. No one says anything. Nadie dice nada.

The stranger is silent. He looks around.

These here aliens do look awful lot like people, he thinks. And this here spaceship sure as hell ‘sembles one of them fancy vans he always wished he’d owned, the kind you can sleep in and not spend your nights on the streets nor under no bridges.

The stranger looks at the alien masks—if they are masks—and begins to wonder for the first time if, in fact, maybe he wasn’t being abducted.

“Well, dang it all to Tralfamadore!” he says.

“What?” says the alien—or whatever he is. The one wearing the tie.

The realization slowly sinks into the stranger’s befuddled brain, and as it does his body slumps visibly, until he seems to collapse or faint, and then falls over onto the seat of what, only moments before, he believed was a spaceship.

“He’s collapsed,” the one with the tie says.

“Let’s get him to the hospital,” the one in the open collar shirt says. “He’s the only link we’ve got to the kidnappers.”

The dark vehicle starts up but, instead of leaping from the gravity-bound earth into the weightlessness of outer space, it peels rubber along Main Street and speeds toward the hospital.

The cordon of black booted police, leaning against their riot shields, parts before the departing van.

One cop mutters to another, “What was that all about?”

“No idea,” says the other. “Feds, probably.”

“Heh,” another cop calls out, “where the hell are all the rioters?”

“Dozers win, you’d think somebody’d show up to celebrate.”

“This place is like a ghost town.”

“Who ordered the entire force to show up tonight?”

“You know who.”

“That blunderhead.”

“Don’t complain. You’re making time and a half. For doing nothing.”

Silence descends on the streets of Yuma. Nearly a hundred police stand in the middle of Main Street chewing the fat. The only sound is the occasional scream of static from their radios, and the soft tremble of their boots on the pavement.

“Where is Anna’s food truck? I could sure use one of those burritos tonight!”

Heads nod. The sun finishes setting. A dark quiet settles over Old Town. No crowds pour down the side streets. Nothing happens.

Nadie y nada.