The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (7 page)

“To get a spoonful of uranium.”

“Uranium? This is getting crazier by the minute. Wait’ll the kids at school hear about this. What planet are you from?”

“Kanab, but it is no more. Its sun exploded.”

“Exploding suns. Fantastic. Did you get to watch it?”

“I could see it on my viewing screen. It was gorgeous. One moment the star was a black hole in space, then, wham, it was a huge blob of light, a bright, fantastic supernova.”

“That must have been neat. Did you bring a brother with you to earth?”

“No.”

Matilda’s exuberance skidded to a halt against Kyra’s flat negative, and the silence gave Breedlove the chance to speak.

“Matty, I don’t want you telling the kids at school or anybody else about Kyra until the government makes the announcement. She’s top secret, but she’ll have to appear in public tomorrow, and I wonder if there’s anything you can do about her hair and skin coloring.”

“Easy. There’s a terrific new hair rinse out called Silvery Platinum and a flesh-toned cosmetic the kids are using to cover their acne, but why fool with her skin? It’ll match her platinum-blond hair. If you’ll drive to the drugstore, I’ll tell you what to get. And get some color film for the Polaroid. I’ll take some before-and-after pictures for my scrapbook. And while you’re gone I’ll take Kyra horseback riding. Would you like that, Kyra?”

“Terrific!”

Bemused by the turn of events, Breedlove went about his chores, considering how Kyra had come in a starship from an abyss of space to find refuge in a farmhouse on an alien planet to confront a female of her own organic age who spoke the language the visitor had acquired in precisely the visitor’s same breezy style. When he returned from the drugstore he took the afternoon paper from the porch into the living room. The girls were still out riding, but he had no reservations about their activity, since Matilda had lent Kyra a scarf to cover her hair and they would be riding on a stretch of desolate hills behind the farm. Matilda was an excellent horsewoman, and Kyra, with her agility, could easily be a rodeo rider.

He was reading the sports section when his mother came down from her afternoon nap to join him. She took the headlines and went to her favorite chair beside the window. Looking over, he noticed she was not reading but gazing out the window.

“What are you thinking about, Mother?”

“About the girl. She is strange.”

“Do you mean ‘stranger than strange’?”

“I suppose. She’s very inquisitive about us, but she tells very little about herself or her own people or the way they lived. It’s not that she’s evasive. She’s just not volunteering any information. She’ll answer if you ask, and then fly off onto some other subject. I’ve learned very little about her family.”

“She’s sensitive,” he said. “The subject’s painful to her.”

“She doesn’t always sound sensitive. I asked her about wars on her planet and she said they used to have tribal fights. I asked her if they had peace treaties between the tribes like our Indians, and she said no, because they fought until one side was exterminated. She didn’t seem one bit horrified. So I guess I did learn something about her family. They weren’t exterminated; they were the exterminators.”

“Why were you so interested in her family, Mother?”

“Because of you. I noticed how you looked at her at the table. I’ve never seen you so attentive before. You may be falling in love with her, and we know nothing at all about her family.”

“You’ll have to admit she’s a very unusual woman,” he said lightly. “In fact she’s so different a human probably couldn’t mate with her.”

“She’s not that different. I saw her upstairs. I can’t understand why she has no navel. Of course, you’ve seen as much of her as I have, and no doubt you noticed she has no navel. She might be a test-tube baby.”

“If she was, all her companions were also,” he said. “But don’t worry about any romance between us. As soon as she gets the uranium she’s leaving earth.”

“A woman’s been known to change her mind.”

“You don’t seriously think we’d run off and get married?”

“That’s one way she could get her citizen’s papers, and she’s a lot older than you. Older women can twist a young man around their fingers. Then what would my grandchildren be, piebald?”

“So you don’t think your future daughter-in-law’s family is acceptable?”

“She may be foreign royalty for all I know. Sometimes she behaves, well, queenly, as someone who expects to be treated as a lady of distinction. Sometimes I catch myself on the verge of calling her ‘ma’am.’ ”

“Matty didn’t defer to her,” he pointed out. “Matty took to her like a lost puppy.”

“I noticed.” Mrs. Breedlove nodded. “Matty was very solicitous toward her, something Matty usually isn’t. Maybe she’ll make Matty her lady-in-waiting if she decides to reign on earth. She wouldn’t have to wave any scepter to get your daddy to throw himself prostrate at her feet.”

“Mother, you sound jealous.”

“Maybe I am, Son,” she admitted, turning her attention back to the newspaper, “or maybe I’m frightened.”

Back from the ride, Kyra stayed in the kitchen to observe the icing of the cake, and Matilda reported on their activity to her brother, upstairs, where he was packing for Seattle.

“She rides like Lady Godiva, Tom, or at least the stallion must have thought so. It nickered and champed so much I thought it was going to climb into its saddle with her.”

His sister left him to go down the hall to her room and pack for Kyra, but she returned at times to confer with him on some item of dress. She was sending Kyra to Seattle with a fully equipped wardrobe, minus bras. “She doesn’t really need them, Tom. Mama’s old-fashioned.”

Mother might be old-fashioned, he observed to himself, but she was perceptive. Matilda acted the role of lady-in-waiting to the hilt, packing her favorite dresses and costume jewelry and attempting to coordinate the colors with silvery blond hair. Breedlove did not object to his sister’s generosity; hopefully he would return the clothes within two weeks.

At dinner Kyra tactfully apportioned her attention between his father, mother, and sister, with occasional asides to keep the son from feeling neglected. As guest she guided the conversation, and he noticed that she did avoid discussing Kanab or space travel, but he felt uncertain about her motives for doing so. Her interest in things of the earth was lively and genuine. She seemed spontaneous and candid, and she could have been bored with marvels to them that were commonplaces to her. He would have found it dull to lecture on the internal-combustion engine to cavemen.

After dinner Breedlove posed her alone and with his family for her “before” pictures and for Matilda’s scrapbook. She was photogenic and posed naturally, but no camera could have captured her personal magnetism. He made a snapshot of her for his billfold to show any doubting official he might encounter that her hair was naturally green.

Matilda asked her brother to leave the kitchen while she dyed Kyra’s hair, because it made her nervous when people watched her work, and he joined his parents in the living room, where they listened to the evening news. It was difficult for him to be impressed by the day’s events when he was already involved in the greatest news story in human history. He was more interested in the occasional progress bulletins Matilda came to the doorway to announce: “She’s been given a shampoo, and I’m applying the dye.” “I’m putting her hair in rollers.” “She’s under the dryer.” “She’s ready for combing out.” “She’s ready.”

In the kitchen Kyra sat on a high stool, a plastic cape over her shoulders, and Matilda was putting a few finishing fluffs into her hair when the family filed in. Then the artist flung back the cape to reveal her creation and accept the compliments of her family. The father’s praise was directed toward the subject, the mother’s to the artist, and the son stood mute.

Silvery blond, he assumed, would appear as exotic to his eyes as green, but Kyra’s hair looked natural. The color altered the hue of her complexion until it too appeared normal, although nothing could have been done to make her inconspicuous. Now framed by the platinum hair, her green eyes looked depthless, and they were focusing on him with growing trepidation as he stood silent.

“What’s the word from Breedlove?”

“You look mystic, twice mystic,” he said, trying to find the words to communicate his admiration. “Your beauty, it’s as near and shimmering as moonlight on Lake Chelan, yet as remote and as glittering as the Northern Lights. If I were king of earth, I’d make you queen, and you’d have a crown for your curls made of the stars.”

He had blown the fragile moment sky-high, he thought, with his rococo metaphors. He should have tried Keats or Shelley. His voice had trembled when he spoke, he had given his mother more reason to be disturbed, and he had only confused Kyra, who was looking at Matilda questioningly.

“Translated that means you look smarmy and romantic.”

“What’s smarmy and romantic?”

“It’s the dreamy feeling a boy and girl get when they fall in love,” Matilda explained. “Usually it lasts for a week or two after they’re married.”

“Who told you that, young lady?” Mrs. Breedlove asked.

“My sex-education teacher.”

“You’d better drop that course. Romance in marriage can last a lifetime, and don’t you dare contradict me, John.”

“Then romance has to do with marriage,” Kyra said.

“Don’t you have romance and marriage on your planet, dear?” Mrs. Breedlove asked, a slight strain in her voice.

Kyra deliberated for a moment before she answered, “After a fashion, yes. Our men were attracted to us, and they were self-sacrificing. But the custom of romance seems like a terrific idea. Does an earth girl have a wide choice of suitors?”

“A girl like Matty, no,” Matilda answered. “A girl like Kyra, yes.”

“Nonsense, Matty.” Kyra turned to her. “You are charming.”

Mrs. Breedlove would not be diverted. “Is there divorce on your planet?”

“There was no divorce on Kanab. When a man mated with a woman on our planet it was forever, but there is no more Kanab.”

She had answered with an almost painful hesitancy, and sensing that she was moved to sadness by her memories, Breedlove interjected a question, “Will the dye interfere with the light-absorption qualities of your hair?”

Looking sideways into the mirror Matilda held for her and fluffing her hair, Kyra answered absently, “Yes, but Matty tells me it will wash out, and in the interval my body will compensate. If I can find a place to sunbathe in Seattle, my pussy hair will spread like crabgrass.”

A brittle silence fell over the kitchen. There was only one source from which the curious Kyra could have learned the taboo word. Mrs. Breedlove fixed accusing eyes on her daughter, who avoided the gaze by glancing with sprightly innocence toward her brother and saying, “Tom, I’ve made up my mind about a career. I’m going to become a beauty-school technician.”

In a blue knit dress fitted snugly against her waist and revealing the lift and cleavage of her unhampered breasts, Kyra stood beside the green-uniformed Breedlove at eight-thirty the next morning, watching a long black limousine nose hesitantly into the lane and drive toward the Breedlove farm.

“Here comes Kelly,” he said.

He walked onto the porch and watched the car approach.

It pulled to a stop and a uniformed chauffeur emerged and opened the rear door. The man who got out wore a dark suit, white shirt, tie, a gray homburg, and carried an attaché case. Only one flaw marred the ambassadorial elegance of Kelly’s arrival: the car bore the commercial license plate of a rented limousine.

About five feet ten inches tall, square-shouldered, chest thrust forward, Kelly swung up the steps with a quick, prancing stride, announcing himself as he came: “Aloysius Kelly, Immigration and Naturalization, Pacific Northwest.”

“Thomas Breedlove, Forest Ranger, the Selkirk Station, Idaho.”

They shook hands. About fifty, Kelly was red-haired with an Irishman’s pinched nose, watery blue eyes, and square jaw. Pale freckles spanned the bridge of his nose and clustered under his eyes. His square, broad shoulders and spread-leg stance projected aggressiveness.

“Peterson tells me you’re holding a very important unregistered female alien for my eyes only. What’s her status or rank in the country of her origin?”

“I’ve made no determination of her rank, Mr. Kelly. For all I know she may be an empress. She’s from another planet.”

Kelly threw a searching glance at Breedlove and asked, “Has Peterson been seeing his little green men again?”

“Step into the house, Mr. Kelly, and judge for yourself. She’s waiting in the living room. I can certify she landed here from an alien planet.”

Kelly, who had started into the house, stopped. “Who’s certifying you?”

“I think the matter will become academic once you’ve met the lady.”

Kelly continued into the house and into the living room. He stepped through the door and stopped. Kyra stood at the window looking out. Her profile was starkly outlined in the eastern light.

“Jesus,” Kelly said, “is
she
stacked!”

“Careful, Mr. Kelly. She understands English.”

“If this lass is only a wetback from Mexico, I forgive Peterson. If she walked in from Canada, I forgive Peterson. If he claims she comes from the dark side of the moon…”

“Peterson has nothing to do with authenticating her origins. I’m here to do that.”

Kelly’s voice paused when Breedlove broke into his slow, chanting monologue, but obviously he did not hear the ranger, for he resumed where he had left off. “… then I forgive Peterson. Those breasts exonerate Peterson. Ranger Breedlove, I’m a married man and reasonably faithful to my wife, but I travel a lot and I get opportunities and what’s a man to do when something like this stands before him, spit in her eye?”

“Snap out of it, Kelly! You’ve got business to attend to.”

Kelly shook his head, like a fighter shaking off a jolting punch, and stepped forward, all smiles and affability, his officiousness shucked like a cloak at the door, ignoring Breedlove’s presence.

“Miss Kyra Lavaslatta, I’m Aloysius Kelly, Chief of Immigration and Naturalization, Pacific Northwest, but just call me Al. Please be seated, Miss Lavaslatta; I have a few questions to ask.”