When Mysterious "X" Came To Call

The October "Yolo Flatlander" is now on store shelves and in driveways throughout Davis. Here is my contribution to this Halloween-themed issue. The story is a melange of several childhood memories from my childhood in Corrales, New Mexico:

Remember childhood? In retrospect, it looks happy and carefree, but the actual experience was fraught with anxiety-producing agents, chief among them, spirits and monsters. As a child growing up in semi-rural New Mexico in the 1960’s, I was of a secular bent, disinclined to believe in anything but science, but surrounded as I was by family and friends that believed in all sorts of miracles, it could be hard to keep my balance.

Autumn days in New Mexico are clear, crisp, and pungent with firewood smoke, ideal for looking for strange Air Force planes passing overhead, and the ubiquitous flying saucers. On one beautiful October day, poking amongst the fallow alfalfa stubble in the yard, looking for the paper lanterns of the tasty ground cherry, I thought I glimpsed an old man quickly vanish behind the garage. He looked distinctly evil, very much like Robert Englund’s character that Hollywood later embraced as Freddy Krueger in 1984’s “A Nightmare On Elm Street.” I quickly pursued, but the mysterious man had vanished.

Puzzled, I told my friends about the man, which, with the proximity of Halloween and the UFOs, they quickly understood to be a portent of evil to come. We even invented a label for him: “MX”, for Mysterious (M) Unknown (X).

Around the neighborhood, over the next few weeks, reports began to trickle in. Various kids *thought* they had seen *things*. From back yards everywhere, there were reports of misplaced and overturned dog and cat food bowls. We found mysterious three-toed footprints, as if from ostriches or dinosaurs, and after awhile, we even fancied ourselves MX footprint experts: here, the MX walked aimlessly, here he loped, and here he sprinted. Kids claimed to have caught glimpses of mysterious creatures, which they quickly labeled the evanescent MX, even though descriptions often varied radically, sometimes even being feminine. More than once, breathless kids bicycled up shouting “Quick, I just saw the MX disappear behind the goat pen!” But of course, once we got to the goat pen, there was nothing there but minerals (us kids having converted the now-defunct goat pen into a grand rock museum and gift shop, where we could exchange our hard-earned play money for tangible goods, like obsidian).

Slowly, the tension built throughout the neighborhood. I hadn’t seen the MX more than once, but some kids claimed to have seen him a dozen times, or more. Abruptly, I developed a fear of the dark. It wasn’t the MX’s fault, but rather an all-too-vivid story I read about a Filipino vampire. The vampire had glowing red eyes, could float along corridors rather than walk, and could pass through prison cell bars and attack hysterical women imprisoned for their own safety. Wow, it wasn’t safe anywhere, not even the Philippines! Along with the rest of the neighborhood kids, I was getting sick with fear.

Halloween was mercifully uneventful, with trick-or-treat featuring just the usual crowd of thuggish teenagers from up the hill unconvincingly portraying themselves as little kids, for candy. Shortly afterwards, though, there was a great calamity.

Adjacent to the goat pen, was a warehouse, owned by the electrician next-door neighbor. In the warehouse, in addition to the piles of newspaper he recycled into insulation, were a large number of hard-plastic screens used to cover ceiling fluorescent light installations. One day, a breathless kid bicycled up shouting “Quick! The MX broke all the screens in the warehouse!” We came running, and sure enough, there was shattered plastic everywhere. The electrician next-door neighbor was livid. He blamed us kids. But all the kids said it was the MX. Who was telling the truth?

Actually, as the local science aficionado, I had the tools at hand to establish our innocence. Six months prior, as part of a science book club subscription, I had secured a fingerprint test kit, and I had fingerprint records of all the kids in the neighborhood. I quickly went to work to absolve the neighborhood kids from the false accusation.

There was just one problem: everywhere I dusted, the fingerprints of one kid kept appearing on all the plastic rubble. I confronted him, in private, but he stoutly denied any wrongdoing. After all, hadn’t the MX been recently spotted right behind the goat pen, immediately adjacent to the warehouse? And he was right, of course. That damnable MX sure caused lots of problems.

As the months passed, people saw less and less of the MX. We saw fewer and fewer UFOs too. A shame, really, since they seemed altogether common when I was a kid growing up in New Mexico.