The Secret Life of Owen Skye (5 page)

Margaret said, “You're certainly not going dressed like that!” She marched him upstairs to strip off his old clothes and wash his neck and behind his ears. Then she forced him into gray flannel pants and a scratchy collared shirt with a fussy clip-on bow tie and a blue blazer jacket. Then she made him put on his shiny black shoes which really were too small.

“Girl's party! Girl's party!”
sang his brothers.

“Did you get a present?” Margaret asked. “What time does it start?”

“Two o'clock,” Owen said. The question about the present took him by surprise. He'd forgotten completely!

“I
did
get a present,” he said, to shut everyone up. His mother offered to drive him to Sylvia's house but Owen said he could get there on his own. He didn't want his brothers seeing where Sylvia lived.

He put on his winter coat, which didn't completely cover the tails of his blazer, and pulled his boots on over his cramped shoes. Then he went off in the wrong direction, to confuse his brothers, and doubled back through the woods when he was out of sight. He had his school bag with him, and secretly he'd put in some wrapping paper and tape.

In the woods he wrapped up Uncle Lorne's hand-carved ashtray. Then he ran the full mile to Sylvia's house and arrived only about ten minutes late, puffing and sweating, his feet sore in those tight shoes and the flannel pants rubbing roughly against his legs.

He was the only boy at the party! There were six girls, including Sylvia, all in pink dresses with pink or white tights and shiny, buckle-up shoes. Sylvia's house was beautifully new and clean, with no holes in the roof, and the basement was just like the upstairs. It had carpets and paneling, a leather sofa and a huge dollhouse where Sylvia and her friends spent most of the afternoon.

Owen stayed upstairs helping Sylvia's mother ice the cake. Every so often he would go downstairs and look at the girls. The dollhouse had a doll living-room set and a doll kitchen and even a doll bathroom with a toilet and a sink.

It was as if Owen had come from a different planet and didn't understand the language of these aliens. So all he could do was watch for awhile, then go back upstairs.

He fit in better when the cake was served. He ate six pieces one after another, a personal record. Then it was time to open the presents.

The pink girls huddled around Sylvia while she unwrapped two brand-new dolls, a tea set, a brush and comb set, and a flowery book with blank pages to record her secret thoughts. Then it was time to open Owen's present.

It was pretty heavy, and because he'd wrapped it in a hurry in the woods it almost fell out of the paper by itself. Sylvia turned it around and looked at the gargoyles and the little grooves for the cigarettes. Some of the girls started laughing.

Sylvia looked at Owen for the first time in the whole party and said, “What's
this
supposed to be?”

Owen felt worse than Uncle Lorne in the kitchen with Mrs. Foster. He tried to think of what to say, but now everybody was laughing. The laughter spread faster than the fire in the ditch, ugly and unstoppable. Why had he ever thought of giving her Uncle Lorne's ashtray?

Owen ran over to Sylvia, grabbed the ashtray, then held it high in the air.

“I am Doom Monkey the Unpredictable!”
he announced.
“And this is my Atrocious Hat!”

He plunked the ashtray on his head and raced around the house. The girls had no choice but to chase him and try to capture the source of his extraordinary powers. Even though they were girls and fast runners, they were slowed down by their long dresses and for hours he managed to squirm out of their grasp.

At the end of the party, furniture was tipped over, there was cake and ice cream in the carpet and on the walls, in hair and on flannel pants and dripping from pink puffed sleeves. The dollhouse had been raided and restored three times, and the Western Hemisphere had been kept safe for civilization.

“Thank you for your wonderful present,” Sylvia's mother said at the door when Owen was leaving. Sylvia nodded her head a little bit. She was wearing the ashtray and the gargoyles were hanging upside down. “Did you make it yourself?” Sylvia's mother asked.

“It was made in the canyons before the beginning of Time,” Owen said. “And will survive the swirling of a billion storms!”

“Well, it sounds very special,” Sylvia's mother said. Sylvia seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go.

“It held a hunchback's heart and has been used by the Emperors of China and Bolivia,” he continued. Now that he was brave enough to talk in front of Sylvia, it seemed he couldn't shut up.

“I'm sure she'll treasure it,” Sylvia's mother said.

“As long as she dreams of true love and stays away from switchback roads in moonlight,” he said, “it will provide extra-terrestrial protection!”

“What?”

It seemed the only thing left for him to do was to propose marriage, but he had no ring. So instead he stepped backwards and fell down on some ice. He didn't look back, but ran the full mile home, as if the hunchback in the canyon was after him, with the Emperor of Bolivia not too far behind.

ANDY HAD A CRYSTAL
radio that he kept in the closet in the boys' bedroom and took out late at night. It was plastic with a lot of dials in front and wires in the back. When he stretched the antenna to its full height and wired it to the curtain rod, he could usually pick up alien spaceships transmitting from other galaxies. They used whiny buzzing noises to communicate with Earth. Andy would sit by the window listening, hoping to learn the secret of their codes.

Sometimes Owen sat with him and listened, wondering what
Bzzzzz — wheee! — eeeeooo — zzzrrbb!
could possibly mean, while Leonard slept alone in the big bed. The two older brothers would look out the window and speculate as to which star the radio signals were coming from, and whether a total invasion of Earth was imminent.

One night the radio noises changed suddenly, and the whiny buzzes turned into rapid bursts of electric noise:
Blat! Zappa-zappa! Scud! Krakka-takka! Glurk!
Andy got a pencil from his desk and, using a table of weights and measures found at the back of his arithmetic book, deciphered the following message: “Hilltop! Knock! Zurge!”

“What does it mean?” Owen asked.

“We have to go to the fort,” Andy said breathlessly. “They're contacting us!”

“But why the fort?”

“Because it's on Dead Man's Hill,” Andy said. The boys called it that because it overlooked the graveyard. That's where they had built a snowfort the weekend before.

“What about Leonard?” Owen asked.

“He'd be too scared,” Andy said.

“Maybe not,” Owen said. “Remember how he spoke to the Bog Man's wife on Halloween.”

So they woke up Leonard and the three of them snuck downstairs and pulled on their snowsuits and heavy boots. Their parents and Uncle Lorne were sleeping, so the boys had to be quiet.

It was bitterly cold, the air so frozen it was still and heavy, and the snow on the path to Dead Man's Hill was packed so tight it squeaked beneath their boots. Andy carried his radio and a big new battery he'd bought with five months' worth of allowance. It had meant missing many issues of his favorite comics, but now that they were about to meet aliens it would be worth it.

The boys knew what flying saucers looked like from watching television and reading the newspaper. But the picture on their television set was often blurry, and it skipped up and down. Most of the stories in newspapers said the spaceships had bright lights, and the aliens used ray guns and wore silvery spacesuits.

“What if they don't like us?” Leonard asked, halfway up the path to Dead Man's Hill. “If they're invading the Earth then maybe they don't mean to be our friends.”

“Aliens are superior beings,” Andy said. “It's not a question of like or don't like. They just want to meet with some typical Earthlings. It's better that they meet us instead of generals or something.” They had seen one movie in which the aliens who were invading were actually very nice but the generals had exploded hydrogen bombs at them, which made them angry.

The top of Dead Man's Hill was perfect for snowforts because the wind swept big drifts of snow against the rocks there. The boys had simply dug into the side of the biggest drift, and in time the cold air had iced over the insides so the structure was strong. It was cozy inside out of the wind, with the three boys snuggled in together. Andy had brought a candle for light but the little flame added a lot of heat too. This was their own place that they had made together.

Andy hooked up his radio to the new battery and fiddled with the dial. Soon the radio came alive with buzzing and whining sounds, some crackles and burps. Then this came on:

“This is Alan Winter bringing you another edition of Winter Nights, three hours of commercial-free radio.”

The voice was deep, slow, soothing and clear. It was the first Earthling program the boys had ever picked up on Andy's radio.

“I have a thought for this night,” the voice said, “before I open the telephone lines. Nights like these remind me of a winter long ago, when after the snow and cold there was a day of rain and then more cold, an arctic air mass parked on top of us like a bubble. And all the water on top of the snow froze the world into a skating rink — streets, lawns, parks. The motorists cursed, slipped and slid into ditches, and pedestrians floundered. But on skates it was as if we had wings. From across our lawn and through the park and onto the river — one huge, continuous skating miracle.”

The mellow, rich voice came through crystal clear in the snowfort where the boys lay together warm and dreamy.

“One moonlit night,” said the voice, “a lot like tonight, if there's room in your imaginations, I remember spreading my coat open like a sail and being blown on my skates through fields and fields. The sky wasn't black so much as a deep purple. And my skates went faster and faster. The trees were all coated in a sheen of ice, the bushes were glossed over, darkly gleaming.

“I think of that night sometimes, sailing on skates across the fields. Riding the ridges, whooshing down the hills. We don't get too many nights like that in our lives. With the air so still and clear, you can look into the face of eternity.

“My name is Alan Winter, and this is Winter Nights. I am waiting for your calls.”

There was some music then, and someone called to talk about a problem they were having with hair loss, and then the signal started to fade. It was very late, and there were no aliens, so the boys decided to go home.

On the slope of Dead Man's Hill they tested the snow. Though it wasn't frozen over the way Alan Winter had described, there was a shiny crust on top that could hold them up if they lay on their backs. And, if they dug their heels in and pushed, they could slide along like fish swimming in a lake. Up above them the sky was clear and the stars were clustered by the billions, like cities seen from a great distance. Even Leonard, who'd been getting tired and grumpy, was happy to swim on his back along the frozen snow and look up at forever.

That's what Owen was doing when forever was suddenly replaced by Uncle Lorne's face. He'd come walking up in his big boots, his jacket wrapped around him and his scarf dangling down, the breath coming out of his mouth in clouds of steam.

“What are you kids doing?”
he demanded, towering above them. He said he and Margaret and Horace had been out looking for them for hours. They didn't know where the boys had disappeared to.
“What in God's name are you doing?”
he demanded again.

Owen looked way up at him and couldn't answer because he didn't really know himself. It had started out as one thing and then turned into something else and something else again, and to try to explain it so that an adult could understand seemed impossible. Owen thought of trying to show Uncle Lorne the trick about swimming on your back on the snow, but Uncle Lorne was so big he'd probably just fall through. And the way Uncle Lorne was asking the question, standing there so tall with his eyes so wild, made it all seem foolish anyway.

Swimming on the snow? It had been warm just a few minutes ago when they were on their backs looking at the universe. But now it felt like they were locked in a freezer without any clothes.

On that march home the cold slipped inside the boys' snowsuits and drained away all their heat like a plug had been pulled from the bathtub. Leonard began crying and couldn't stop, not even when Uncle Lorne picked him up and held him inside his own jacket and carried him along. Owen began to shake and shiver, and even Andy started tripping over chunks of ice and odd dips in the path.

They rested for a bit near the bottom of the hill. But a cruel wind had started up, and the longer they waited the colder they got. Even Uncle Lorne looked cold. He'd hurried out of the house without a hat and mitts.

Finally he said, “March with me. This is something I learned in the war.” And he sang a little song for them:

Down in the bucket, up on the hill
They were after you then and they're after you
still —
Hey nonny hey nonny
Hey nonny hey!

“That's the song that got me through the war,” Uncle Lorne said. “I never sang it to anybody else before. This is your getting-home song. All right?”

Uncle Lorne sang it again. His voice started low and weak, like he really was used to just singing it to himself, but as he got going it became stronger. And when the boys sang, it helped with the walking, and soon they were within sight of the farmhouse.

When they walked in, the house was empty. Uncle Lorne ran them a hot bath, then tucked them in bed and went out again to find Margaret and Horace.

The boys were pretty well asleep by the time their parents got back from their searching. Margaret raced into the bedroom to wake them up and hug them within an inch of their lives. Even though Owen was sleepy, he still heard most of Horace's cursing as if from far away.

In the morning Horace talked to the boys for an hour. He paced back and forth while he talked, and the boys had to stand still and straight and listen to every word. They weren't allowed to ask questions or make a noise. Mostly Horace talked about how upset their mother was and how there would be hell to pay if they ever did anything as stupid and foolish and reckless as this ever again in their entire lives. After awhile he ran out of new things to say so he took to repeating phrases:
If you ever!… What in tarnation?… Tried my best Lord knows I have… Cold month in hell before you're ever allowed again…

Margaret stayed in bed late, like she did when she had a bad headache. When she came out and saw her boys, she broke down and wept. It seemed like perhaps the end of the world was coming, and Owen was glad they hadn't told their parents about meeting the Bog Man's wife in the haunted house on Halloween. Margaret thanked Uncle Lorne again and again for bringing them back safe. Then she made sure the boys marched up to Uncle Lorne and kissed his rough cheek and thanked him themselves. Uncle Lorne got embarrassed and said it wasn't anything and they weren't to think about it anymore.

Then Uncle Lorne turned on the radio and they heard the news. Last night a flying saucer had been spotted above the fields outside of town, and Eliot Brinks saw weird lights about one o'clock in the morning when he was sleep-walking and now was missing a cow!

Andy and Leonard nearly erupted at the news, but Owen somehow kept them quiet, and after that it was only the kids who really knew what a narrow escape it had been after all.