Becoming Alien (4 page)

“He’ll go nuts without any of his kind.”

“Dogs and cats don’t go nuts, do they?” Warren asked. “And you cut school for a couple days.” He draped his wet shirt over a chair and leaned up against the refrigerator. “Don’t trust me with it, do you?”

“Both of us can keep an eye on him better, since we know he wants to get away.”

“Suppose it could run a vacuum pump? Weigh batch chemicals?” He sat down. “Having that creature here is weirder than having a nark snooping. What might it tell, if it got to the government or back to its people? Tom, I’ve got quite an operation under this house. You haven’t seen it in a while, have you?”

“I make you lots of methane,” I said, “with the chicken shit. And you’ve bought a whole ton of cement.”

“Couple tons,” Warren said. “Let’s take you down. I’ll set up the air-disturbance alarm in the outer rooms after you lock the alien in. Maybe it’s time you got in the family business, paid for your pet here. I need all the help I can get now.”

“Are they squeezing you?”

“Squeezing?” Warren grunted. “They sent me this, postmark Atlanta.” The photo was of a dead man, legs crushed. As I stared at it, Warren threw some switches in the kitchen. “Seen enough?” he said, taking the photo out of my hand.

We went down the basement stairs—copper-clad rungs wired to 220-volt house current—knock anyone snooping dead off the rungs. In the basement, Warren climbed onto a small front-end loader and moved a section of the wall—not a false cement front, but a real cement-block section about three feet high. Behind the blocks was a tunnel.

Warren and I crawled along in the tunnel and finally stood up in dark that smell medical, bitter. A switch clicked, and I saw retorts, a vacuum pump, and bottles of chemicals under one bare light bulb.

Two huge props began turning, sucking the stale air away. I guessed he’d vented the bunker through a couple of old tobacco barns. He cut on another light, and the one we were under went out. Under the second light, I saw a pill-making machine, with its press lever and the pistons that squashed Warren’s illegal powders into aspirin-sized tablets like honest medicine.

“That’s the tabber and the mill,” he said. He spoke of his equipment like it was some sexual woman. “Best pull on a dust mask in here,” Warren said, reaching for two on a rack beside the machine. Should have done it early, I thought, my heart racing, mouth just a bit dry. Warren’s eyes crinkled above his mask as though he were smiling.

Then, after Warren pressed about fifty pills to show me how the machine worked, we walked back the way we’d come, lights dying behind us. When we got to the crawl tunnel, Warren took both masks and hung them up.

“I’ve worked on this for fifteen years and no baby monster is going to threaten it. You get awful moral about drugs, but we’ve got expenses, mortgage, school for you later.”

My head buzzed with a thousand questions, but they got tangled before I sent them out to my tongue. Finally, I managed to say, “But speed, Warren?”

“Helps kids get through school,” he said, grinning at me. The grin dropped away instantly. “They buy it, whoever makes it. I’ll quit in two years.”

“Will the Atlanta people…”

“I’ll sell this, split your share, then we can settle somewhere better, California, Oregon.”

I went to unlock the alien while Warren re-set the alarms, ran the juice through the ladder rungs again.

“Warren,” I said, “please use the respirator down there. Over time, that stuff’ll drive you crazy.”

“Over time, life’ll drive you crazy. If you gonna drop out of school for that thing,” he said, pointing a cold fried chicken leg at Alpha, “can you help me make quota?”

“I’ll help you. We’ll teach him to help, too.”

“Better kill it and dump it somewhere.”

“You told me the Army had devices that could smell out a man in the jungle. What if we killed it and found out its people could track it even years later?”

“So you’ll help me?”

“Yes. And get him a respirator, too. Speed might drive him crazy.”

I went back to school on Monday, wanting to be away when Warren worked the alien in drugs for the first time. School was cold, big mental freeze-out of little me.

Nobody said anything particular. Lunchtime I went in the cafeteria and found myself alone at a usually full table.

School’d always been weird, though. The local teachers’d told me the only reason I tested high 90s percentiles on those California achievement tests was my “sociopathic lack of test anxiety.” Crook’s nerves, they wanted me to think, so I wouldn’t know I was really smarter than the good kids.

And Warren might work the alien to death if I didn’t help. Drop-out time, I decided.

∞ ∞ ∞

Neither Warren nor the alien was in sight when I got home, just a bunch of anxious cats, so I fooled around straightening feed sacks in the barn and worked myself up madder and madder. Wasn’t cute like girl geniuses the teachers loved to save. No, just a gawky country boy.

Since I didn’t know when Warren and the alien would be up, I opened a can of beans and made a bean pot to set on low heat, ready anytime. Then I tried to read one of the books I’d got from the library, but ended up looking through the alien’s drawings—the buildings set off in space somewhere, with me drawn among them, or at least me as the alien saw me. Maybe the aliens wouldn’t be bothered if I was smart for human.

About six, Alpha came into the kitchen, holding the respirator mask in his hands, eyes with the pupils tiny although the light wasn’t bright. He hissed and showed his teeth as he gave his arms and face a thorough washing. I handed him a towel as Warren followed him up. The alien took the towel with a snap of his wrist.

Warren grinned. 
“He didn’t like it, but he worked. Must have dealers all over the universe, or he doesn’t like the taste.”

The alien’s eyes quivered. I felt ashamed. He stared at Warren and nodded a hostile nod.

“Damn, Tom,” Warren said, “I don’t hog-tie folks and shoot ’em up with heroin.”

“Sure, Warren,” I said, feeling hideous. “It’s a service.”

“Damn straight. Keeps us from getting killed by those Atlanta guys.”

The alien, eyes still quivering, started cutting up the sink sponge to fit around the mask. I guess he wanted to block all the dust. His fingers trembled, and he dropped the scissors once. Warren was right—Alpha was either drugged or knew what he’d gotten into.

While Alpha fixed the respirator to fit him, Warren and I ate beans.

“So what happened in school today?” Warren asked, most relaxed.

“I quit. You need help, and I want my share of the farm eventually, too.”

“School folks didn’t think much of me, either,” Warren said. “We’ll be a pair.”

“I was bad to test high. Didn’t fit in with what they expected.”

The alien finished gluing sponge on his respirator and got out his eggs and butter. He fried them up, then drank a glass of thawed deer blood before leaving for his room, carrying off a Mason jar with lid and screw seal.

“Be easier if he spoke English,” Warren said, “but then I’d always wonder if he was some trick infiltrator.”

The alien went along the bookshelves in the living room with his head straight, not cocking it to read the titles the way a human would. He pulled down novels, encyclopedias, Warren’s hunting magazines, staring at the illustrations, and shoving each book back. When he found the tattered Rand McNally road atlas, he trembled over it as though he’d found secret messages, so Warren took it away from him.

Alpha found the atlas again and brought it to the kitchen table. He drew the question sign on the United States.

“He wants to know where the egg is, Warren,” I said softly.

“I’m gonna burn that damn atlas,” Warren said, putting it by his chair.

When Warren went to the bathroom, I got the atlas and quickly drew a little black egg on the West Coast, in California.

Nostril slits twitching, Alpha touched his shoulder and my shoulder, and pointed to the map, circling with his long finger. I touched the map in the Virginia mountains.

Alph seemed to know the distances involved—he sighed. Like a human sigh, with exasperation in it. I felt awful.

“Stop, Tom, you can’t help him.”

Singsonging at Warren, Alpha drew two pictures: one of humans running from an alien like him, the other of humans touching elbows with the alien, side by side. On the first drawing, he drew himself getting shot that night before Halloween. Then, just like a nervous human, he got up and paced.

Warren raised his arms as if holding a gun and said, “Blam!”

The alien flinched and cried out.

Warren grinned. “He knows humans don’t like him from getting bird shot in his legs. We’re the only nice humans there is.” Picking up the drawing of the humans screaming and running from an alien, Warren shook it in Alpha’s face.

Alpha went rigid and hissed at Warren. When Warren grabbed his elbow, the alien’s head hair rose like a cat’s, and blood veins swelled, then collapsed in the web of the arm Warren held. The alien tried to jerk away, but Warren grabbed a handful of web and twisted.

Warren shoved Alpha away. The web skin bled red weeping crescents where Warren’s nails had punched through. “Tom, you tell him where the egg was?” The alien stumbled, then ran for his room.

I tried to explain, softly, “I just indicated California, didn’t…I don’t know the town anyway.”

“We’re humans, he’s not. Stick with humans. Shit, Tom.”

He came up to me, took my head in his hands. I was afraid he was going to hit me, but he just held my forehead against his.

“I need all the help I can get.”

I dropped out of school, and the state abandoned me to Warren.
To hell with humans,
I thought, the day I realized no school people were ever going to try talking me back.

The next time Warren was gone, the alien sat me down at the table and drew pictures of us crossing the country, of me among aliens, all of them friendly, hugging me.

No,
I shook my head.

The alien tried to make me nod yes, holding either side of my jaw. “Yes,” he said. I stiffened and brushed his hands away. He got put the map book, drew a car, and dragged it across the United States map. Then he took my head again and tapped my face with horn-colored nail tips.

I shook my head again. He stared down at the map. Then he began writing, the script going up and down the paper; first up then down, squiggling pencil lines. Obviously agitated, he singsonged to me.

“No, baby, we just can’t do it,” I said, but… The hair on my thigh skin stood up. It’d be easy. I could escape this drug mess. Warren’d come home with too much money for quick deposit in his banks, so he’d have lots of cash around until he eased it all into his accounts. But stealing from my own brother?

The alien flipped to the map of California, stared at it awhile, then tapped Berkeley. He looked across the table, talking to me in his language, low breathy sounds and trills.

I want to be a star people’s biologist, I thought, but not one that cuts up people. I wanted to be able to talk to Alph, really talk, not just draw pictures and signs. I wanted both of us to be safe.

After I set the house alarms, we both spent all afternoon wrestling up sheets of roofing tin onto the hen house and nailing down a new roof. By four, we finished the job, both of us sweaty, fingers all tin cut and dust in our hair. Alpha mimed turning on faucets and washing and oo’ed a bit.

Then after we washed and ate dinner, him drinking down some thawed blood, Alpha wrote some more of his north-south-north squiggles and packed his writings away in double Mason jars. Then he found a claw hammer.

What was he doing?
He began pulling up floorboards in his room. But when he saw the sub-flooring on top of the concrete slab, he must have realized there wasn’t room to hide his jars there. He turned to me with his face wrinkles all hanging loose, questioning.

I helped him bury his double jars of strange script under an old corncrib floor. After we tamped the dirt back and laid a few stones down, Alpha marked the doorframe with alien scratches.

Then we went in, and he drew a little car, found the map, cut the little car out, and ran it along the map from Virginia to California.

I shook my head slowly, and he drew a picture of himself lying, stiff, eyes half opened, a fly on one eyeball.

Dead.

His nostrils bellowed in and out. I must have smelled like agreement. We both sat trembling on the floor.

Then, as he watched me intently with those dark eyes, I pantomimed sleep and waking five times. Say five days to get to California, I really wasn’t sure.

But what could I do in California after the alien went back to his own people? I shook my head at him. “What about me?” I asked him out loud.

He picked up the drawing of him dead and held it in front of his face, just under the eyes.

Slowly, I tore the drawing up and threw the scraps away, then touched him.

He reared back, hissing, singsonged furiously at me, his pupils tiny, head hair erect. Scared, I jumped back. Then he reached slowly for my face. When I ducked, he beat his twisted-toe heels on the floor and chewed at his hands as though he was gnawing splinters out of the base of his thumbs. When he reached for me again, I let him touch my eyebrows, and I smoothed down the hair over his bone goggles.