Andy Bozeman

Andy Bozeman is Haven’s former sole realtor, a newly mind-reading resident drawn into the work at Bobbi Anderson’s excavation site. There, the ship’s force disrupts his thoughts, and Jim Gardener’s mind presents an inexplicable blank. Bozeman’s account makes the work’s wonder and danger inseparable: he helps haul Gardener from the trench, mocks his methods, and finally races to avenge him, only for the attempt to end in his and Ida Bozeman’s deaths.

Identity and the Ship

Until three weeks before the events at the excavation, Bozeman had been Haven’s only realtor; then he closed his office. By Wednesday, August 3, he had acquired the ability to read minds and had become accustomed to using it. He recognizes the extent of that dependence only when he goes to Bobbi Anderson’s place to help and keep watch over Gardener. The change gives him a new way of interpreting other people, but it does not make him comfortable with what he encounters.

The buried ship affects Bozeman as a presence as well as a source of mental disturbance. Near it, he feels strange currents and eddies passing over him; sometimes ideas drift into his mind and make concentration difficult, and sometimes thought seems to break apart altogether. At other moments he is simply struck by the ship’s scale and appearance. He finds it exhilarating and awe-inspiring, but also frightening. He compares the experience to carrying the Ark of the Covenant, imagining that the ship may contain a kind of god—or at least a residue of one. That religious analogy registers the force of the encounter without making it reassuring: for Bozeman, proximity to the ship is both wonder and strain.

Gardener and the Excavation

Bozeman’s new ability fails him where he most wants it to work. Gardener’s thoughts do not come through as an ordinary stream of consciousness. When Bozeman tries to read him, he finds a dead line, as if he had reached a telephone with no one on the other end. At other times Gardener’s silence becomes a practical problem: Bozeman can call to him and receive no response, as though meeting a closed door where he expected an open passage. The occasional thought that does surface is only partial, making Gardener difficult to predict and, in Bozeman’s view, dangerous.

The work itself requires Bozeman to compensate for the excavation’s lack of equipment. An intercom is nailed to the inside wall of the lean-to, its wire running across the churned ground and into the trench. When Gardener reports that the charge is set and asks to be hauled up, Bozeman answers and turns the hand-operated windlass. Batteries are temporarily scarce, so the lifting has to be done by hand. Bozeman has heard Gardener vomiting the night before and sees blood on his pillow that morning; the request to bring him up is not one the others can safely ignore. After an earlier incident involving John Enders, the group has learned not to delay when Gardener calls from the trench.

That arrangement places Bozeman between the ship’s effects and Gardener’s unpredictable behavior. He remembers that Gardener struck Enders without warning, and he suspects the two men’s conflict has to do with Enders being trapped below with an explosive radio. Bozeman’s inability to read Gardener turns routine work into a problem of trust: he can help operate the equipment, but cannot confidently know what Gardener will do next.

The Whitewashing Allusion

One morning Bozeman sees Gardener sitting cross-legged on a dirty tarp, eating an apple and drinking beer. The scar above Gardener’s eyebrow marks the place where the steel plate in his skull lies beneath the skin. Bozeman watches him warily, ready to defend himself if Gardener turns on him as he did on Enders. Instead, Gardener recites from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, including the passage in which Tom persuades another boy to take over the work of whitewashing a fence.

Gardener explains the parallel: the group is excavating the ship rather than painting a fence, but the principle is the same. He says that Bobby Tremain and John Enders have been worn out by the work, and that he wants a dead rat on a string or a toy prize in return. The joke carries an accusation as well as a performance. Gardener has got other people to do the labor, but believes he has received none of the rewards that should follow. He then asks Bozeman to bring Bobbi Anderson the next day, to find out whether she still remembers the recitation after her change. The allusion becomes a way to question what the excavation has made of its participants, even as Bozeman remains unable to read the man delivering it.

Bozeman’s response shifts from wary suspicion to alarm when a hissing sound rises from the trench. He identifies it as the others coming out and fears that the beings below were not dead but have been awakened. Gardener answers without sharing his panic. The scene shows how differently the two men interpret the same event: Bozeman’s mind-reading and proximity to the ship have not equipped him to master the danger, while Gardener meets it with a grim, dismissive joke.

After Bozeman shouts that he hates Gardener and hits him, Gardener cannot stop laughing. He wonders whether the old craft has stayed watertight and what a flying saucer with water damage might be worth. His laughter follows the fear and the assault, rather than resolving either. For Bozeman, the exchange deepens an already unstable relationship: he resents Gardener and wishes him dead, yet remains entangled in the labor and danger of the excavation.

Final Attempt and Death

Later, Bozeman’s hostility takes a different shape. When he sees evidence that Gardener has been left bleeding and dead, anger takes over. He drives his blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 toward the Anderson place, swerving into the driveway and nearly tipping the car as he brakes. His thoughts return to the whitewashing joke: he imagines himself taking up Gardener’s challenge, offering the promised dead rat and string. What began as mockery of Gardener’s manipulation has become a private declaration of revenge.

Ida Bozeman takes a molecule-exciter from her purse. It resembles a Buck Rogers blaster, assembled from a garden tool once marketed as a Weed Eater. She fires at random from the car window, and the shot strikes the east end of Bobbi Anderson’s farmhouse, setting it ablaze. When the whirligig begins to spin and its green flame forms, Ida tries to aim the weapon at it, but the shot comes too late. Had her first shot hit the device rather than the house, events might have gone differently; it does not. The green flame kills both Bozemans, and the Oldsmobile explodes.

Narrative Role and Significance

Bozeman’s arc links the comic, makeshift labor of the excavation to its lethal consequences. The Tom Sawyer recitation turns the dig into a whitewashing game, with the exhausted workers cast as the boys who have been induced to take on someone else’s task. Yet the ship is not merely an object to be unearthed: its presence scatters thought, overwhelms Bozeman, and precipitates fear before the beings in the trench emerge. The joke and the wonder sit beside the threat without softening it.

His mind-reading also creates a pointed contrast between apparent access and actual knowledge. Bozeman can read other people’s thoughts, but Gardener remains blank to him; the ability that has become a habit offers no clear insight into the man he distrusts. By the end, the gap is not overcome by deeper understanding. It narrows into a rush of anger, a badly aimed weapon, and a fatal consequence for both Bozemans. Their deaths make the failed shot at the whirligig a concrete instance of the story’s larger pattern: in a town remade by the ship, the residents’ ingenious devices and desperate decisions turn unpredictably against them.