The True Meaning of Smekday (28 page)

When I finally noticed Smek again, he was repeating the final, resounding line of his speech:

“—para una Tierra luminosa de Smek!”

Then came the finger snapping again. By now some of the little kids in the front were doing it too. A few adults booed, but most everyone who had stayed was silent.

Captain Smek stepped down from his stool and left the podium, and a little man took his place.

“Oh, look,” I said to J.Lo. “It’s Mitch from the bureau.”

He was holding up his hands and shaking his head at the people who still jeered at Smek, and trying to hold the dwindling crowd. Smek and his bunch looked like embarrassed children as they hustled away from the quad.

“People? People?” he was saying. “Can we show a little hospitality? Captain Smek took the time to explain his case, and that took some courage, and now I think we should give him a hand. No? Is everyone leaving? Just a couple of announcements? Tucson Airport District leader Dan Landry will be speaking tonight about his recent conference with the Gorg? That’s in Prochnow Auditorium at eight…also…People? Also, there are new test dates scheduled for doctors to get recertified? These are posted on the big tree next to the…thing…you know the one. Until we can prove who is a real doctor and who isn’t, people, remember: use good judgment. Just because he has his own scalpel doesn’t mean he should take your appendix out.”

Nearly everyone was gone now. J.Lo and I made our way up to the stage.

“One last announcement? People? No? Don’t come crying to the bureau when you don’t know where to get your milk shake vouchers. Oh, hello, Gratuity.”

His voice was still being amplified, so he pushed the microphone aside and sat down on the edge of the stage.

“Your mom will be found soon. Have some patience?”

“I talked to Michaels already,” I said. “We just came to hear the speaker.”

“You should make up your own mind, of course? But I do
not
think we should be listening to these Boov. They are on their way out. Our leaders? They’re making great headway with the Gorg.
Great
headway. Dan Landry especially. You should go to his talk tonight.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “See you tomorrow, Mitch.”

“Oh!” said Mitch. “I nearly forgot. Someone’s looking for you? A Native American gentleman at the hospital, I believe.”

“Chief!” I shouted as we ran into his room.

Well, no. That’s not entirely right. “Chief!” I shouted, after J.Lo and I drove to the hospital, fought our way past a crowd at the door and through a maze of people in chairs and on stretchers and gurneys with IV tubes running from bags on hat racks, got the Chief’s room number from a woman at a desk, were informed by a nurse or somebody that we couldn’t see a patient unless we were family, politely shouted at that nurse or whatever that
Aren’t we all kind of family now when you really think about it, stupid?
, then slipped past while he was distracted by a dog in a wheelchair, and ran into the Chief’s room. There.

Anyway.

The Chief shared the room with a sleeping patient on the other side of a curtain.

“Mr. Hinkel,” said the Chief, jerking his head toward the sleeping man. “He thinks Indians like me ought to live somewhere else. Likes to tell me about it a lot.”

I didn’t really want to talk about Mr. Hinkel.

“Well, maybe they’ll let him go soon.”

“Doubt it,” said the Chief. “Got beat up pretty good by someone who thinks gay people like
him
ought to live somewhere else. Good to see you, Stupidlegs, Boov.”

I smiled, then what he’d said sunk in.

“Kat told you?”

“No,” said J.Lo. “I told him. By my having my sheet fall off while helping him hide the telecloner. I forgot to say.”

I winced.

“Are you…okay with that, Chief? Are you gonna tell?”

The Chief shrugged. “When you’re Indian, you have people tellin’ you your whole life ’bout the people who took your land. Can’t hate all of ’em, or you’d spend your whole life shouting at everyone.”

“Of course,” I said, “that’s pretty much what you did anyway. But that was all an act, wasn’t it? If you act crazy, you can tell people flat out that you have a UFO, and no one will believe you.”

The Chief grinned. He had good teeth for a ninety-three-year-old.

“An’ if you hide that UFO inside some piece of crap you made yourself—” said the Chief.

“—then anyone who still thinks you have the real deal will feel like an idiot for coming to see it, right?”

“Worked for sixty-six years. Till you two found my animals, I’m guessing.”

“Koobish,” said J.Lo. “They are called koobish.”

“You still called JayJay?”

“No. I am J.Lo.”

“No way I’m calling you that.”

“You canto keep calling me Spook.”

“Deal.”

I couldn’t wait any longer. The suspense was eating me alive.

“Chief,” I said, “did everyone get out of Roswell? Before…”

“Yep. Can thank those UFO jerks for that. They were up on the roof looking through their telescopes, saw the Gorg comin’ from miles off. Some escaped in the car you left behind, though they puzzled over the plastic key a bit. I packed up Lincoln and the…koobish in my truck, an’ me an’ that fella Trey got out just in time.”

“Trey went with you?”

“I…couldn’t do any driving yet. Too dizzy. We left the koobish by the Rio Grande. Trey’s watching Lincoln till I stop…till I get out of here.”

He coughed a bit. I don’t mean anything ominous by that—in movies and stories, people only ever cough to foreshadow them getting really sick or dying or something. The truth was that the Chief had coughed a lot since I’d met him. All the time, even before the Gorg hit him. But I noticed it now.

“Are you going to be well?” asked J.Lo.

“Hold on now, it’s my turn,” the Chief said. “Tell me about that Gorg cage thing. Is it safe?”

J.Lo explained what the teleclone booth was, and why it was so important, and how we had it hidden but nearly ready to use.

“I thought we should tell someone in charge about it,” I said. “But this government guy we know is all about trusting the Gorg and making deals, and I’m afraid he’d give it back to the Gorg. I don’t know who to trust.”

“Just keep it safe till I get out of here, then we’ll work together. Learned a lotta stuff in the army that’ll be helpful if I can remember half of it.”

“Okay, but…Chief, I haven’t seen my mom since Christmas. If I find out where she is I’m going there.”

“I also,” said J.Lo.

The Chief nodded his head and closed his eyes. It was time to go.

A second long week in Flagstaff passed. We visited the Chief, stood in line at the Boovish telecloner for water and milk shakes, did odd jobs for people in exchange for real food and supplies, and read together. I read aloud to J.Lo from
Huckleberry Finn
, which he liked, and
War of the Worlds
, which he found to be too one-sided. We started our own junkyard, and J.Lo tried to work out a way to make more teleclone booths out of human technology, or soup up the milk shake cloners so that they could handle bigger things.

I learned a lot more from the Chief.

“So after World War Two you were sent to New Mexico?” I asked him on one of my visits. I was alone this time, checking out his new digs at the old folks’ home they’d moved him to when they needed his bed at the hospital. He hated it.

“To a training ground in Fort Sumner. Didn’t like it there—lot of bad history for my people. You know I grew up near here? On the res.”

“Yeah, you said. So you’re…Navajo, then?” I’d been learning a bit about the area.

“Prefer the name Diné, but yes.”

“So after Fort Sumner…”

“I asked to be transferred to the air base in Roswell. Bought some land when I heard a rumor the city wanted to build a water tower on it. So they’d have t’pay me rent.”

“Aha. But skip to the UFO crash.”

“Hrm. How much you know already?”

“I know something crashed near Roswell, in 1947. And that people had seen weird things in the sky before that. Lights. They definitely found some bits and pieces of wreckage, but the government said it was a scientific balloon, and the ufologists say it was a spaceship and that there were alien bodies besides.”

“Good. So, the thing of it is, there really was a scientific balloon.”

“Wait.” I frowned. “What?”

“The Boov pod hit it on its way down. Lucky shot. Destroyed the balloon and its payload.”

“So the wreckage…”

“Was debris from the balloon. Then the koobish pod hits the ground, ricochets another eighty miles, finally stops after crashing into the water tower they’d built in my backyard. Wasn’t damaged much. The pod, I mean, not the tower. The tower was totalled, and the city abandoned it—they never much liked our arrangement anyway. Somethin’ about paying an Indian for land that rubs white folk the wrong way.”

I gave the Chief a look.

“Don’ mind me,” he said. “Old habits. So—when the government says the crash was a balloon, it’s ’cause they mean it. Didn’t know about the spaceship. And they get real tight-lipped about it ’cause it’s a top-secret balloon, meant to keep an eye on the Russians. Meanwhile, I’m tryin’ to tell my superiors that I have a flying disk and an alien in my basement, but everyone acts like I’ve gone nuts. Post-combat fatigue, I think they called it at the time.”

“Did they ever figure it out?” I asked.

“Eventually, a bit. They looked at all the evidence from the crash and saw things didn’t add up. So they came calling, lookin’ to see if I’d been tellin’ the truth after all. But by then I’d finally had it with the army. Had a lot of other grievances. So I played the crazy Indian bit to the hilt, had the pod hidden inside my little stage prop, an’ acted like I was all too happy to show it to ’em. They yelled at me for wasting their time, yelled at each other a bit, never came back.

“I spent the last sixty-some years trying to figure that spaceship out,” he said. “Got it up in the air once.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yep. Programmed it to take me up to about five thousand feet, make a loop, an’ come back down in my own yard. Well, twenty miles from my own yard, as it turned out.
That
was a long walk.”

“You programmed it? How?”

“Punch cards. That’s what we had in the fifties, instead of CD-ROMs. Paper with holes in it.”

“J.Lo says you took good care of it.”

The Chief seemed to study me for a second.

“Rumor is, the Boov will be surrendering soon,” he said. “And leaving.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. I looked out the window as if I’d be able to see all the Boovish ships crowding around the Arizona border, or the Gorg closing in. “J.Lo knows, too.”

“When’s he goin’ back to his people?”

“I don’t know that he…that he’s decided anything. We haven’t talked about it.”

“Hrm.”

“I should probably get back,” I said.

When I neared our camp I saw J.Lo backed up against the car in his ghost costume, facing some guy on a dirt bike. Pig was hissing from a window. I broke into a run. Was this guy threatening him? Did he know J.Lo was a Boov?

J.Lo saw me approach.

“Finally! I have been trying to tell this person I do
not speak his language
,” said J.Lo, turning momentarily to the man, “but he will not to leave me alone.”

The man wheeled around.

“Latest edition!” he shouted.
The Nose Celebrity Weekly!
Which Two-Timing Skunk Gets Dunked for Hot Hollywood Hunk? Which Leading Lady’s Rankled After Getting Tanked and Ankled? Only the Nose Knows!”

At first I thought he was mentally ill, so I was going to give him a little something. Then I noticed his canvas bag full of newspapers. That was new.

“Spielberg Wheels and Deals Over New Spiels as Studio Execs Fix to Nix Pix! Special insert this week: revised map of the United State of America!”

I didn’t have a clue what the rest was about, but I wanted the map.

“How much?” I asked.

“A buck ten,” he said. “But for you? Because I like your face? A dollar.”

“What do you mean a—you mean a
dollar
dollar? As in real money?”

“I don’t got time for haikus, kid. You got the dollar or don’t ya?”

“Everyone around here just trades stuff,” I said. “Money isn’t worth anything.”

“It’ll be worth something someday. You want this paper or not?”

I asked him to wait as I rummaged through the car and found a dollar in change. I hadn’t saved any paper money. Later J.Lo and I sat down in the shade and looked over
The Nose Celebrity Weekly.

“What does it say?” asked J.Lo.

“I don’t believe it,” I said, flipping through the pages. “It really is a paper about TV and movie stars. These people don’t even do anything anymore.”

FILM STARS CONTINUE TO WAIT
FOR SOMEONE TO MAKE MOVIE

NEW HOLLYWOOD
(
FORMERLY SCOTTSDALE
)—American actors fill their days with activities such as smiling and waving at cars as they anticipate the eventual restart of the film industry.

“Before the invasion I was working on a buddy comedy about a talking dog that fights crime,” said heartthrob Evan Vale to
The Nose
, outside the Lexus dealership he calls home. “If
Good Cop, Bad Dog
never gets finished, it’ll be like the aliens have won.”

Good Cop, Bad Dog
Executive Producer Marty Allen said filming would resume soon. “As soon as we can get Tom [Stone] back in the director’s chair, we’re good to go.”

Director Tom Stone is currently a potato farmer in Holbrook and could not be reached for comment.

RECORDING ARTISTS TO PERFORM
AT “LIVE ALIEN 6”

SEDONA
—America’s musical artists, seventy percent of whom live in the northern Arizona town of Sedona, will once again hold a benefit concert to raise awareness of the alien invasion.

The concert, called “Live Alien 6,” will feature more artists than the previous five “Live Alien” shows, and for the first time will have a working sound system and be open to the public.

Pop sensation Mandi, who is expected to sing her new single “This Land Is My Land, This Land Ain’t Smekland,” will host the event.

Other confirmed performers include Bruce Springsteen, DJ Max Dare, The New Draculas, Madonna, Displacer Beast, and Big Furry.