Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods (17 page)

FALLOW EARTH

T
he spaceship crashed through the tree tops, splintering the boughs of a gangly locust, and landed in the Olentangy River on top of Mr. Joyce, which was okay with Nick and me, since Mr. Joyce was drunk most of the time and liked to flick matches at Nick when we waited for the bus.

Nick looked up from his pile of skipping rocks, then back down again. I dropped my reel, tossed my ponytail over my shoulder, and watched the six-inch wave slide down the river. Splinters of wood spun through the air, while steam rose from beneath the spaceship.

It was built to resemble an old Volkswagen Beetle. The paint job was good; they’d even added rust around the wheel wells. If I hadn’t seen the vapor trail and heard the sizzling as it sliced through the atmosphere and crashed on top of Mr. Joyce, I’d have thought it was some old car Harry and Egan had rolled down the hill below the Case Road bridge.

I slipped down the slope to the bank where Nick was piling his skipping rocks. I followed the bank upriver to within fifty feet of the ship, then I had to step into the deep part of the river. I heard Mama’s voice in my head, and I felt her husband Ernie’s swat on my butt as my shoes sank into the mud of the Olentangy. They’d have a fit if I tracked dirt into the trailer.

The Olentangy was a broad, slow river. I could walk it from the trailer park to the reservoir dam, two miles north, stepping from flat rock to flat rock without getting the tops of my knees wet. Up by the spillway was where the sporting fishermen cast, catching the occasional walleye. Down here by the trailer park, we got mostly small bass and bluegills.

The water hissed from beneath the Volkswagen spaceship. Its single occupant, a figure slumped over the steering column, looked like a man. He had a head with hair, not at all what an alien should have looked like.

Dirt swirled in the water, masking the river bottom, and I flung my arms out to balance myself, finally grabbing the door frame of the Beetle. I saw Mr. Joyce on the other side, face-up in the river. The ship hadn’t landed on him after all, just near enough to the old drunk to knock him down and out. He hadn’t drowned because he’d landed on his back on a wide, slimy stone.

The window of the Bug was open. I peered in and caught the odor of old vinyl. The alien’s Volkswagen was well made. I popped the lock and pulled the door open.

The driver was dressed in tan slacks and a light tan jacket. He had on Nike shoes and a black belt. Horn-rimmed glasses, like the ones my real dad used to wear when he was young, were tilted across his face.

I leaned him back and noted where the skin had fallen away from his face to reveal red flesh. An alien, as I suspected.

“What the hell was that?”

I recognized Harry’s voice up the slope, heard the rustle of brush as he and Egan came to investigate. Harry was fifteen, a year older than me, but because he’d flunked the fifth grade he was going to be a freshman just like me in the fall. Harry had started some nasty rumors about me because I let him touch my breast during truth-or-dare the summer before. That wasn’t the only reason I hated him. I sure didn’t want him finding the alien. Harry had once forced three younger kids to hollow out a pile of concrete blocks; he’d threatened to beat the kids up unless they spent the day hauling rock for him. They’d done it too. Harry was a user, with no conscience. I decided to help the alien out, at least until he could take care of himself. Maybe I could help him with his mission or something. This was the most interesting thing that had happened all summer, and I wasn’t going to let Harry spoil it.

“Come on, fella,” I said, tugging at the alien’s arm. “Let’s get you outta here.” I didn’t want to see the alien cited for hit-and-run. He needed to be someplace safe until we could clear this all up, get him back to the mother ship.

He groaned, but he moved, his eyes half-open. His legs splashed in the water and he nearly fell, but he leaned on me and we managed to stumble away from the spaceship.

Nick watched us for a moment, then returned to piling the skipping stones. We called them skipping stones, not that he’d ever throw them; he just collected them. He’d had me throw one once. I slung a beauty, fifteen skips at least before it sank to the bottom of the Olentangy. But then he became angry when he realized it was gone. I’d had to wade in and find a stone that looked reasonably close to the original. Now, we didn’t throw them at all. He made piles.

I dragged the alien onto the bank, where he slumped onto the muddy sand. From the other shore, I heard voices. Harry was just beyond the tree line. I saw his red-and-white middle school jacket between the vines and short maples.

“Nick, help me get this guy up the bank,” I said.

Nick didn’t look at me, but I knew he heard. He can fool Ernie, but I know him too well. I kicked him on the butt with my wet tennis shoe.

He grunted. “Help me,” I said.

Together we rolled the alien up the gentle slope and over its far side. When the river was high, it would flow around the little peninsula where I liked to fish. On the far side were rocky puddles where a few crayfish lived.

“What the hell!”

Harry was wading into the river toward the car.

I picked up my pole and cast a line into the river.

Harry circled the spaceship while Egan sat on the shore tossing rocks onto its hood. Harry peered into the front seat. He reached in and touched his finger against something on the steering wheel: blood.

Then he looked around and saw me.

“What happened, Priscilla? Did Mr. Joyce drive his car into the river?”

“Dunno, Hairy.” He knew I was mispronouncing his name, though I didn’t say it any differently. When he’d started those rumors, I’d made sure everyone knew what I thought of him. Egan snorted.

“Cars don’t just fall outta the sky, Cilly,” he said. He took a step toward me.

I reeled in my line and didn’t reply.

“Where’s the driver?” He took another step.

“Dunno, Hairy,” I said and cast my line toward him. He jerked as the red-and-white bobber fluttered in the river a few yards from him. After our truth-or-dare adventures, he’d tried to press his advantage down by the river. My hook had caught his cheek just under the eye. He still had a puckered, pink scar where I’d yanked it out.

“Screw you, Cilly,” he said.

“Don’t you wish, Hairy,” I said. He slinked back to the shore then disappeared into the woods with his slouching pal.

*

The alien was sitting up. He had smoothed the skin back into place, and there was no mark where the cut had been. He smiled brightly and I would have been convinced that he was some ugly guy who’d driven his Volkswagen into the Olentangy if I hadn’t seen his gnarly red flesh.

There were other things that marked him as an alien. His face was lumpy below the cheeks and his neck seemed to be thicker at the top than the bottom. He looked human enough, and you’d just think he was ugly if you passed him on the street.

“Thank you, little boy,”

“Save it for the Galactic Council,” I said. “I know what you are.”

“What do you mean, young man?” he said.

“I’m a girl, you dork. Any human male would know that.”

His shoulders fell. “Oh.”

“Yeah. So, you might as well ’fess up. You here for First Contact?”

“No. I’m on Earth illegally.”

I refrained from the pun. If I’d said it at the dinner table, Mama would have snorted milk out her nose and then Ernie would have choked on his pork chop and then Nick would have started laughing because everyone else was.

“So, there’s no take-me-to-your-leader thing that you have to do?”

“No, I need to talk with your scientists. I need to redirect . . .” He was staring over my shoulder. For a second I was worried that Harry had snuck back to spy on me, but it was just Nick. He was piling his rocks next to the limp elm that had rooted itself on the peninsula.

“Hey. Redirect what?”

“Is . . . is . . . he
broken
?”

I stared at him, unsure what he meant, until I realized. “Yeah, Nick is slow. So what?”

“I knew about . . . I just never . . .”

“Don’t you have retarded aliens?” I was getting annoyed with this guy. I figured that a representative from an advanced civilization would know how to behave around someone like Nick. I expect Harry and his friends to make fun of the little yellow school bus, but from aliens I guess I expected a little more.

“No, of course not. I’m sorry. I . . .”

Nick wasn’t paying too much attention to the alien. But the alien was all eyes for Nick. I snapped my fingers.

“So what are you doing here? You need to talk with Earth’s scientists. You need to warn us about a supernova? Help us stop war? What?”

“No, nothing like that. I’ve got to change the direction of Earth’s research.”

“Are you bringing high-tech gadgets that will give us cold fusion, nanotechnology, quantum computers?” My real dad had given me one gift in the past ten years, but it was the best gift ever: a subscription to
Discover
. I’d been paying for the subscription myself for the past three years, but I still thought of it as Dad’s gift. If it weren’t for him, the deadbeat bastard, I’d never have gotten in the magnet school.

“That’s exactly the sort of technology I need to steer you away from!”

“What sort of alien are you, anyway?”

“I’m a . . . teacher.”

I glanced over at the Beetle. “You get shot down?”

“Yes.”

“Air Force? NATO?”

“The . . . Farmers tried to stop me.”

“Farmers.” I sat back on my heels. I had the image of Hubert Erskine taking a pot shot at Herbie as it sailed over his soybean fields. “You mean something else than what I think ’farmer’ means.”

“Yes. Earth’s protectors.”

“Uh huh,” I said. My alien had run a blockade to get here. Interesting, but still a little lame. I was half-tempted to put him back in his car and let Harry find him. “So, what exactly is it you want to do here on Earth?”

“I need to write anonymous letters to leading scientists, asking certain questions that will direct their thoughts toward key areas.”

I looked him up and down. It was a slow summer, and this seemed like a pretty good diversion.

“So you’ll need a place to hole up.”

“Yes. And stamps.”

*

The Mingo Concrete company had a factory about a mile from the trailer park. It was a small factory where they cast sewer segments, six feet long and interconnecting.

Some time ago, lost in local kid history, someone stole a steel wire reinforcement cylinder from the factory. They’d rolled it away from the factory site and into the woods, in what must have been a daring feat. Then they’d put it on its end and used plywood and plastic to build a two-level fort. These kids had grown up, left for college, and the fort had become overrun with thorn bushes, until you couldn’t tell it was there.

Now it was Nick’s and my fort. Maybe other kids knew about it, but I never saw anyone else there. We’d found it when I’d first got the Boy Scout handaxe I’d sent away for; it had cost twelve bucks, which was half a summer’s worth of lemonade stands, lawn-mowing for Nick (under my guidance), and dog-walking. I’d used Nick’s name on the order form since I wasn’t sure about the correctness of a girl buying a Boy Scout gadget. When it came, we were eager to chop something down, anything, and had set out for the woods.

We’d found a maple with a trunk three inches in diameter and set to chopping. It was harder work than we’d thought and we got only a quarter way through before we gave up. We decided to look for something easier, and, seeing the thorn patch, we started blazing a trail. Unfortunately, the bushes were as hearty as the maple, not coming off in instant bails, but leaning against each other with clasped thorns.

After we cut a few bushes and pulled their carcasses out, I spotted the shape of the fort. We suddenly had a destination for our trail. The work became a little easier.

The fort was rusted, moldy, but instantly desirable. We cleared the orange shag carpet, limp, moldy Playboys, and Rolling Rock bottles out, and made it over into our own place, with a nine-volt radio, a homemade telescope, and sporks from KFC.

It seemed to suit the alien too. We gave him paper, pen, envelopes, and a roll of stamps I stole from Ernie’s night stand. We borrowed our sleeping bag for him to sleep in. He used the lower, darker level for sleeping, and the upper, cramped level for his correspondence.

Each day, he wrote out long letters on a legal pad, with tight print. We collected them and left them in our mailbox for pickup.

He wrote a lot of letters. To MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and Princeton. We had to get airmail envelopes for his letters to Cambridge and the University of Tokyo.

When he wasn’t writing, he’d talk with me. He never spoke to Nick. We learned his name was Bert. He liked classic TV, especially
Gilligan’s Island
, because he used the show to teach the futility of organized action among classist herds. He was one of a long, well-known line of aliens. He liked warmer weather. He didn’t agree with the Farmers.

“So why did the Farmers shoot you down?”

“The Earth is our restricted planet.”

“Your restricted planet? No one told
us
.”

“It’s one of the fallow planets for this portion of the galaxy.”

“Which means you ignore us.”

“Oh no,” Bert said. “We do not ignore you. How do you think I know English? It’s our common language.”

“English is the galaxy’s common language?” Wouldn’t Mrs. Moore, my composition teacher, be surprised.

“Just a small part of it. You’re our source for a lot of things.”

“Beer? Cows? Women?” What could we humans provide that these aliens didn’t already have? “Comedy. It must be comedy.”

Bert looked at me flatly. No, it wasn’t comedy. He licked the envelope with his too thin tongue and handed it to me. “Tomorrow’s post, please.”

I handed the letter to Nick, and Bert recoiled as if it hurt him that something he’d touched had then been touched by something broken. He never looked at Nick, never talked to him, not even out of politeness.