Becoming Alien (2 page)

“Those monster metals ain’t that tough. It crashed.”

The blood drained out of Warren’s face as we slithered inside the ship, dragging tools and two trouble lights on long cords. The stench was awful.

The aliens built with weird screwheads, but Warren hung up one of the lights and filed down a steel rod to fit.

He slid forward, unscrewed a panel, and shone the other light in. “Don’t look or smell too different from other wrecks I’ve worked, Tom.” The veins and tendons popped up on his hands as he fussed with the screws, unhooking all the electronic stuff he could reach. “Reminds me of
’
Nam,” he said. Finally he pulled off a panel with geared knobs and liquid crystal displays on it.

Snip!
Warren cut wires behind the panel, the noise startling, metallic and harsh, inside the ship. After sliding the panel aside, he reached down into the hole and twisted. I heard weird soft clicks, then Warren pulled out a black metal egg-shaped thing a foot long, with gold lines twisted all over it.

“Heavy,” he said. “Bet this is navigation equipment, ship sensor computer, lots of little curved plates stuck to it before I pulled it free.”

We saw a shimmering place, a liquid crystal display, in the skin of the egg-shaped gadget, which turned colors that looked like a map, from space, of America. The colors spread until the shape of the continent disappeared. Lines appeared on it, but nothing like anything I’d seen on a road map. Has to be a location device with a map on it, I thought, not sure I was happy for Alpha or not.

Warren knelt in the alien cockpit, hefting the egg-thing, then he looked a long, long ways out of his eyes, through me, as though he was staring out into space, looking for that alien’s planet.

Back in the house, I rolled a map measurer wheel around the gold lines on the metal egg. Warren thought he could figure out what frequency the aliens used if the gold lines were antennas.

“Not antennas…” Warren said, going for a Bausch & Lomb ten-power magnifying glass. He looked at the lines and said, “Whatever, it’s beyond me.” He took the egg to his room.

After lunch, we cut up the rest of the ship with propane torches. From the pieces, you’d never have known the wreck was exotic, from space. Just hunks of metal, fused silicone, and plastic.

When I went in to see Alpha the next morning, he sat up, hunched over. His eyes looked filmed. I decided to give him a bath. When the tub was ready, I reached for his upper arms and he pulled back, but then touched my eyebrows with his long skinny fingers and leaned against me.
Not the idea,
I thought, uneasy about him touching me. I wanted him to stand up by himself and walk to the tub.

He finally followed me and seemed to understand what the tub was for. I helped him into it, then washed his back while he brought up a palmful of water to sniff, taste. Gently, he took the rag and soap out of my hand and scrubbed his long crooked arms, around his armpit webs, and behind his ears, which were rounder than a human’s but convoluted inside just the same.

Then he pursed his mouth a bit, rounded his lips between the two biggest face wrinkles. Warren came in and said, “Sorry-looking cuss, ain’t it?”

“He’s smiling,” I said. “I think.”

“It looks like it’s going to kiss someone.”

“Well, purse your lips like that—let’s both do it and see what he does,” I replied.

We both pursed our lips like the creature. Alpha looked startled—same expression for man, dog, or alien—wide-eyed, head tossed back. Then he leaned toward us while we slipped back into human grins. He smoothed out his lips and touched my mouth, then tried to move his thin lips back into a smile like ours, but finally pulled the lip corners with his fingers.

Warren slipped out and came back with the big black metal egg we’d gotten from the ship. The alien oo’ed and reached out tenderly for the egg. Warren held on to it while Alpha traced his fingers around the gold lines.

The alien breathed in little gasps, touching the map place on the egg, then gently stroked Warren’s wrist, muttering little singsong tones.

I reached down and took his pulse. “He’s running over two hundred beats a minute.”

“Yeah, he’s happy to see it all right. Now we know to get rid of it,” Warren said, lifting the egg out of the alien’s hands, “les’ they bring our government with them.”

Alpha seemed so cheerful after he saw the egg. Each morning, for the next few weeks, he ate eggs and butter for breakfast, dressed in a cut-off pair of Warren’s pants, and followed me around as I
gathered eggs and ran feed bags up and down on the trolley in the center of the chicken house. But he could only wear socks on his feet because he had more heel bone than humans, and only four toes.

Warren wondered about that and cleaned the chaff off the skeleton. Weird to see the huge space for the eyes, the bone eye-socket shields. Alien, not like the biology book’s human skeleton. Warren twisted the leg and foot bones around, then said, “That big heel is a twisted toe bone.”

He brushed more chaff off, beetle grubs in it, and grunted, disconnecting the bones and putting them in a sack.

Warren said, “I know who told the Atlanta investors about me. If aliens gonna hit on anyone, that guy, he’s out in Bolinas now, he ought to be hit.”

So Warren and I took the egg up to another dealer Warren knew in Roanoke. The Roanoke guy called the California man and asked him to hold some computer goods, hot programs in a military shell—sure there’d be a market for it. The Californian settled for 30 percent of the gross and fifty dollars a month holding money.

“Just keep it cool for me,” Warren’s Roanoke friend said, then Warren reached over the guy’s shoulder and clicked down the phone cradle. I recognized Warren’s special smile­ twisted on by willpower, nothing in Warren’s eyes but sheer calculation.

Three days later, Warren checked the creature’s leg cuts, going up and down each leg with his hands, twisting a little, while Alpha gripped the bedclothes with his narrow hands, looking, eyes as squinty as they’d go, at the top of Warren’s head.

“Fit to work, I’d say,” Warren said. “The chicken house at first, since he eats enough eggs, until I see how tame he’s going to be. He’s got to learn to hide from strangers.”

The alien nodded at Warren, not a friendly nod. Then he looked at me, shrugged, and touched the back of Warren’s hand, very lightly.

The next day, I took Alpha with me to milk. But when he saw our old milk cow, he walked his funny rolling walk up to the cow and began prodding her milk veins. Then he moved forward, palpated her neck, wrapped his long arms around her shoulders, and bit into her skin.

She flinched, but didn’t knock him away, so he bent over and pumped blood out of her neck with that flat tongue of his. Then he wiped his mouth, just like a man would have, flicked his tongue out to clean his lips and wrinkles. Then he oo’ed at me.

The cow stood stiff-legged, jerking her eyes around to show white every now and again. The alien held the nick closed with his fingers until a clot formed. When he was satisfied that the cow had stopped bleeding, he turned back and touched her udder again.

The cow cocked a leg, lashed out, but the creature ducked as though he was used to stock, talked to her in that singsong voice, and bent down to milk the udder.

No milk came down—the cow was too nervous—so I massaged the udder and finally milked out a dribble onto the alien’s skinny palm. He sniffed and tasted, seeming some­ what dubious. Then he flipped his tongue out and fluttered the milk into his mouth.

So the alien drank blood and milk. I woke suddenly one night. He stood by my bed, a faint chlorine odor in the air. My heart bounced, then beat fast. The creature slowly reached for my hand, touched it gently with just the pads of his fingers. I sat up in bed and pushed his hand away. The floorboards creaking under his bare feet, he cried softly, two huffing sounds.

Alpha looked lonely, not dangerous. He stroked my upper arm and stepped back.

But I saw his reflection in the mirror over my dresser—alien, burnt skin growing new hair on his back—and wanted to lock the creature up, before he got me with his sharp teeth and that blood-pumping tongue.

He took my hands, pulling me to the kitchen where he found a pencil and stared at me as though asking
where’s paper?

I got him paper. He sat down awkwardly at the table and began to draw a broken outline of one of his kind. Then, where he’d left blanks in the first outline, he fitted in another creature all twined with the first. He drew others, a soft knot of sleeping bodies, aliens with closed eyes; and closed his own eyes, brimming full of tear oil.

His kind slept in heaps, and he was lonely, not out to get me. I took the pencil out of his fingers and sketched a human, not as finely drawn as his, sleeping alone. He stared at the paper.

Then a brindle cat waltzed up, milk beggar that it was, and rubbed against the alien’s legs. Alpha picked up the cat, sniffed its mouth, and oo’ed. I managed to sketch out a figure with a cat sleeping in the crook of its knees. The alien’s forehead twitched, then he bumped his elbow against mine and went back to his room, carrying the cat.

During the next week, Alpha gathered a heap of cats to sleep with. I suspected he bribed them with eggs.

I spent hours watching the alien draw precise drawings, done as though he laid a vision on the paper and was just tracing lines to make his visions visible to me.

Strange buildings and plants appeared on our Terran drawing paper, with stranger creatures walking among them. The alien looked sideways over his fuzzy shoulder at me and added another figure, almost human. He pointed from it to me and oo’ed.
Me.
But my face was distorted. I pointed to my real face and then to the paper,
draw me.
He touched the top of my head, then my clavicle, and started to draw.

He drew me as though I was part alien—the grooves between the mouth comers and the nostrils exaggerated, eyes bigger—but recognizably me.

Then Alpha drew a creature chunkier than a cow, with ropy flesh in the neck, giant veins, then another beast, drawing herds of them, over and over again as if he wanted to make them alive with his pencil.

Eyes heavy with the oil he used for tears, he laid down the pencil. I picked up the drawing of me among the alien buildings. “Do you miss those creatures?” I asked stupidly.

September came. Odd to leave the alien and Warren, walk to the road, and wait for the yellow bus, thinking of planets in space, how I’d never thought about them much before.

Then classes, where I knew too much for my kind, and the kids all knowing what Warren did, at least the bad ones, and the good ones avoiding me lest I tell them. A teacher from New Jersey, all bearded and full of goat milk, wanted to pry into my serious local-colorfulness; the other teachers ignored me best they could.

Days when we needed groceries or feed, I drove to town and played Space Invaders at the video arcade, the bumpa-bumpa music going while I missed shots. I wondered if I ought to marry the girl who’d got me in bed when we were fourteen, short and messy as that was, and run away.

But what would happen to Alpha? So I went home to our real alien, who was a flop as an invader. And he and I tended the chickens, scooping feed from the trolley, then coming back down the long shed gathering eggs from the wire cages. If a car came up, he hid, like Warren trained him.

At night, or in the late afternoon when I wasn’t delivering eggs, Alpha questioned me through his drawings. He had a sign, like )(, for questions. He drew a mother and child and put the )( sign after it. Parents, dead in our case. I drew two figures lying down, shrouds over them. He drew)( again.

I walked him out through the twilight to the family graves. He looked at the ground, the stones, and looked back at me with his chin tucked down, hands limp at his sides. As we went in, he stroked my ribs with his knuckles.

At first Alpha couldn’t see what was on the television, even though Warren’d rigged an antenna that got channels from Greensboro to Roanoke. Finally he took out a ballpoint pen and drew dotted lines across the paper real quick-heavy and light. When he got to the bottom of the paper, I saw that he’d drawn Warren.

He got up, shook the drawing beside the picture tube, and looked at us, oo’ing.
Yeah, TV tubes have little lines of dots in them that make up the picture,
but I didn’t know he had to learn how to make them out

Each night before we all went to bed, Alpha and I went outside. He’d look around, the muscled tongue trilling so high-pitched I could barely hear it, and Warren couldn’t hear it at all, but the cats came running, rubbing around his legs as if to tell him they were here, even if his people weren’t.

Then, one night, Warren made sure we stayed up late, to watch some horror movie he’d seen before. The alien sat by me on one of Warren’s red leather sofas. Warren slouched on another, drinking whiskey with ice.

When the aliens on the screen landed and the humans ran off screaming, Alpha stared at Warren, then got his drawing pad. Kneeling, thighs spraddled out, in front of Warren, he drew the egg with all its gold wire tracery, and the question sign: )(.