The True Meaning of Smekday (22 page)

“Respect?” shouted Trey.
“Respect
?”

“Shh!” I said to Trey, and waved him off.

“Say,” said the Boov, stopping next to me, “you do not happens to have any cats, do you?”

My heart skipped.

“What?” I said. “No. Why do…Why?”

The Boov shrugged.

“The Gorg, they love cats. They are wanting all the cats for themselfs.”

“Why? Do they…do you mean for pets, or for food, or…?”

“Who can understands the Gorg?” asked the Boov in white. “I only thought if we had some cats, we could trade them for not killing us.”

The Boov then joined the rest, and the last of them passed by. Trey and I watched them leave.

“Hey,” said Trey, when they were out of earshot, “you have a cat, right?”

“I gotta go find J.Lo,” I muttered.

“You mean JayJay,” Trey called after me.

I ran a figure eight around a couple of city blocks, then a couple more, but no J.Lo. Then I saw a little white ghost in front of Vicki’s building just as I was going back.

“Where
were
you?” I asked.

“The U if O museum. For using the Boovs’ room.”

“I was
looking
for you.”

“I am sorry. I could not to stay near Bicki. She tried to feed to me something called pasta, which seemed to be mostly noodles.”

“Yeah. What are you holding?”

J.Lo was cradling a bundle with his sheet.

“When I left, Bicki gave me granolas bars and cans of Goke. Tip can eat the bars, and I can eat the cans!”

“Good. C’mon. Trey told me where the Chief lives, and we’re in a hurry.”

I ate the granola as we walked. J.Lo pulled up his sheet and bit into a soda can, causing cola to shoosh out the sides of his mouth and through his nose.

“Mm. Spicy,” he said.

It was a long walk. We cut across the wide streets of town until it became more trees than buildings and more scrub than trees. Before I could see the junkyard, I heard barking. It was steady and regular, more like a clock made to sound like a dog than an actual dog. But then we saw it: a big gray Great Dane, sitting comfortably, folded up like a deck chair.

“So much for the element of surprise,” I said as the big pony of a dog trotted over and stuck its nose everywhere.

Behind the dog was a high wooden fence covered in faded, peeling signs. Signs like from a circus, or carnival.

SEE! THE WONDER OF TWO WORLDS!
said one.

GAZE! UPON THE ASTRONAUTIC AERODISK THAT ASTONISHED THE ARMY!

IT MADE THE
OSS
SAY “OH, ’S WONDERFUL
!”

That sort of thing.

The fence was too tall to see any of the junk inside. Standing this close I could just see the top of a distant water tower, dry and rusty with a gaping hole in its side.

“That’s where the UFO stopped,” said a low voice.

I looked down to see a thin, dark man, like a strip of jerky—the Chief. His head was covered by a faded red cap with flaps and a strap that hung down past his ears. It looked like something a pilot might have worn long ago. He otherwise wore the same clothes as anybody else—no buckskin or beads or anything. I’m probably an idiot for even mentioning that.

“The UFO…crashed into the water tower?” I asked. Despite all the signs, he hadn’t said it like a carnival barker. He’d just said it like it was fact, and one he’d gotten used to a long time ago.

“You two the new arrivals? Got here yesterday afternoon?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Did the others tell you about us?”

“Nah. Just saw you around.”

I wondered if he’d seen us around the mine the night before.

“You drive here all by yourselves?”

“Yeah.”

“Hrmm. If you’re here to see the saucer, can we make it quick?” he said. “Got work to do. C’mon, Lincoln.”

I figured he was addressing the dog, because the big lanky thing stopped sniffing around J.Lo’s sheet and galloped back up to the fence, casting a long contrail of dog spit behind him.

“What kind of work?” I asked. J.Lo and I followed Lincoln to the gate.

“Top secret. All right. Here we go.”

Past the gate was a big yard dotted with piles of unwanted everything: halves of cars, burned-out motorcycles, rusted kitchen appliances, and what I think was an entire airplane nose cone full of hubcaps. There were bales of sheet aluminum tied together with wire, baby strollers piled high inside a Stonehenge of bathtubs, and a jukebox with sunflowers growing out of it. We were walking toward a small house in the center of it all, every inch of which was covered by pennies, and shingled with scraps of dull brass. The Chief launched into what sounded like a prepared speech that he wasn’t keen on giving.

“Behold, the wonders of the discarded world, what treasuresliewithintherustedrefuse blah blah, the grime that time forgot, seetheancient circle o’tubs that the Druids called Bathhenge, beholdthepile of doll parts that reputable blah blahs from the University of blah believe hides Egypt’s shortest pyramid, mysteriouslytransportedtothehighplains of Roswell in the year blah-blah-and-six
A.D.
But that is not what you have come to see, isitnowmyfriends?”

“Um—”

“No!” he answered, unlocking a pair of basement doors. “Youcametoseethefantasticcraft that crashedherefrompointsunknown, lo thesedecadespast.”

We went down concrete steps to the edge of a big dark room, and the Chief turned to face us with his hand near a row of switches on the wall.

“I give you…pause for dramatic effect…the
flying saucer
cue music cue smoke machine cue lights.”

As he flipped the switch, music began to play, and a machine somewhere rumbled and hissed thick fog into the room, and flickering green and blue lights outlined a dim shape about as wide as a kiddie pool and twice as tall. The fog was mysterious. The lights were mysterious. The music was “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.”

“Sorry,” said Chief Shouting Bear. “I put on some Ella Fitzgerald after everyone left town. Used to be ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra.’ Very stirring. Hold on.”

He turned off the music.

“The flying saucer!” he said again, and threw a final switch.

The main lights winked on, revealing the absolute worst UFO in the universe. I mean, this was elementary school–play kind of stuff. It was misshapen but mostly saucer-shaped, made out of papier-mâché, and covered in tinfoil. It stood atop three legs made from PVC pipe and old satellite dishes. In the side was the round door from a front-loading washing machine, and it still said
Speed Queen
along the rim. Topping the whole thing was a TV aerial.

“Can I take a picture?” I asked.

“Knock yourself out.”

“Go up to the yard and look for that telecloner,” I whispered to J.Lo. “I’ll keep him busy down here.”

“Can you just…go around the corner into the room,” I said to Chief Shouting Bear, “so I can get a clear shot? Thanks.”

With the Chief out of sight, J.Lo scrambled up the steps and was knocked over by the Great Dane. I fumbled around with my camera until he recovered. Then the camera flashed and a picture snapped out the front.

“Old Polaroid,” said the Chief. “Don’t see those anymore.”

“Yeah. Uh, thanks for showing us the UFO. I can’t wait to tell everyone I’ve seen it. Y’know, the famous Roswell UFO. And all.”

He gave me a funny look. “An’ you don’t find anything unusual about this thing?” he said, waving toward the saucer. “You don’t question its authenticity?”

“Um…I dunno. I like to, you know…keep an open mind. Why? Don’t
you
think it’s real?”

“I have things to do, girl. Where did that little spook kid go?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Fine. Where’d he go?”

“I’m sure he’s around.”

Chief Shouting Bear pushed past me and climbed outside.

“This isn’t a playground. Hey, Spook! Time for you an’ your sister to go.”

On the opposite side of the junkyard, J.Lo walked around, inspecting different pieces of scrap, and keeping a wary eye on the Great Dane. It stayed one step behind him, sniffing at his ghost costume—like they were reenacting a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

“Lincoln sure likes your brother,” the Chief said. Or the way he smells like fish, I thought.

“I don’t think the feeling’s mutual,” I said.

“Lincoln’s harmless. Unless you’re allergic to dog spit.”

“Why do you live in a junkyard?”

“I trade it and sell it,” the Chief said. “Or I used to.”

“Oh. Is there…a lot of demand for junk?”

“More than you’d guess.”

I thought about mentioning that we’d nearly been killed in a junkyard in Florida, but I wasn’t sure if it would sound friendly or not.

We were interrupted as J.Lo ran toward us, waving his hands under the costume, Lincoln loping behind him. With his arms in the air he was hoisting the sheet up a few inches, and you could make out Boov feet if you knew what you were looking at. I stood and blocked the Chief’s view as I caught all thirty pounds of J.Lo right in the gut.

We fell in a heap, and Lincoln straddled us and put his wet nose in my eye.

“Hoof,” I said. “What is it? If this is about the dog—hey! No licking, Lincoln. If this is about the dog, you are totally overre—Knock it
off
, Lincoln!”

It wasn’t about the dog. J.Lo got to his feet and snapped his little sheet-covered hand over mine, pulling me up.

“I think he wants me to see something,” I said as J.Lo yanked me to a shady corner of the yard.

“What? What is it? Did you find it?” I said when we were out of earshot. Lincoln turned circles around us until J.Lo stopped right in front of a weird metal cage the size of an elevator. Some of the bars were blackened and warped at the bottom, but right away I could tell this wasn’t human junk—the metal didn’t look right, and there was some Boovish-looking machinery piped into the back. And at each intersection of the metal bars, the cage had a tiny plastic nozzle, like a rosebud. Other parts had been removed, it seemed, and were arranged on a towel nearby.

“Is the telecloner!” J.Lo hissed.

Just then I heard the dirt crunch behind us, and turned to see the Chief.

“Your brother’s a smart kid,” he said. “Could tell this thing doesn’t belong here.”

“Yeah…” I said. “What, uh, what is it?”

“Not sure. Have some theories. Suppose I can tell ya it belonged to the aliens, though. The new ones. Heard some explosions last night, drove out there, stole this thing while the aliens were fightin’ each other.”