Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods (18 page)

“Don’t you have slow people where you’re from?”

He shook his head.

“Must be nice to be from an alien society.”

He seemed to recognize my sarcasm. “It’s not like that. We have problems. That’s why I’m here.”

“What problems could you possibly have?” I considered a world where Nick was whole.

Bert was more animated than I’d ever seen him. “We are all the same! We have everything we need and no cares for our own survival. There is no drive for growth, no need to create. We are as dead as he is.” He pointed at Nick.

“Fuck you!” I yelled. “Nick is alive. You may wish he was dead, but he’s alive!”

He blinked at me, then looked down. “I am sorry.”

“Yeah, see ya tomorrow.” I’d seen a lot of reactions to Nick, but the alien’s was something new.

When Ernie came to live in the trailer with Mama, he never called Nick any names. He didn’t ignore him; he sorta looked at him as a toy. He’d hold out his hand and say, “Slap me five.” When Nick would try, Ernie’d pull his hand away. Nick would laugh every time, until Ernie said, “Now you hold out your hand.” Nick didn’t have the sense to move his hand from the snake-like strike. He’d smile a little, then look at me as he rubbed his hand. “Hold out your hand, Nick,” Ernie would say again, and I’d have to distract them, somehow.

“Hey, Ernie, I think NASCAR is on,” or “Nick, is that the school bus?” or “You guys want another Coke?” I hated thinking about what happened when I wasn’t there.

*

I’d mailed about a dozen letters over a week’s time when the Farmers showed up. You’d think they were insurance men or Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I knew what to look for. Their cheeks were bumpy in the wrong place like Bert’s, and their necks were too wide at the top.

I was coming out of our trailer, down the black metal stair specked with rust, when I heard Harry say, “That’s her, there.” The two Farmers fastened their gaze on me, and I stood like a statue. I hated Harry more, which I’d thought was impossible.

“We understand you saw the car land in the river,” one of them said.

“Nope.” The gravel of the driveway seemed to poke through my shoes.

“Yes, she did,” Harry said.

“Nope.”

“We’re looking for the driver,” said the first alien.

“To ask him some questions,” added the second.

“Or her,” I said. “Could’a been a woman driver. Them being the worst type of drivers.” They faced me with blank stares. No senses of humor, just like Bert.

“We’re very interested in what you saw.”

“Nothing,” I said, but they were crowding close.

“Could you talk with us in our car, please?” The second took my arm. “We can offer a cash reward.”

Just then, Nick clomped down the stairs of the trailer, and I slipped free. “This is my brother, Nick. Have you met him, yet?” I shoved Nick into them, and his arms came up around his head. They didn’t like it either, once they realized they were dealing with a broken human. They couldn’t tell a boy from a girl, but they spotted a broken human right away.

“We’re sorry,” they said as they backed off.

Nick and I watched them get into their car and drive down the stone gravel road. I gave Harry the finger.

“I know you know something, Cilly.”

“That’d be the only thing you do know, pudd’n head.”

He sauntered off.

That day, the Farmers hired Bubba to tow the car. We watched from the woods. Bubba’d brought the smaller truck, the one with the tilting flatbed. The Farmers must not have explained it to him, since he started cursing when he saw the VW in the middle of the river. He cursed the whole time he waded across the river.

Harry and Egan watched from across the river. Harry had his eyes on the Farmers. I wondered if he could see the oddly shaped necks, the too-high cheekbones? Probably not. Harry was keen on the weaknesses of others but nothing else.

Well, that wasn’t true. Once we’d worked on a project together, Harry and I and a group of people. We’d been in the sixth grade, and we’d gone over to the USDA facility and used their electron microscope to look at spores. We’d made a couple of trips into the woods to find samples, and Harry, off by himself, had found the best ferns, long, arcing, feathery plants, like green fire. He was brushing the back of them gently with a collection tray, intent, when I walked up. He turned, saw me watching, smirked, capped the sample, and tossed it to me. He’d thrown it so hard, I’d juggled it, and almost dropped it. He pretended he didn’t care about it, but I’d seen how he’d carefully gathered the spores.

That was a long time ago, long before the truth-or-dare incident. Harry had changed since then. I watched him watching the Farmers, scheming.

Mr. Joyce was there too, pestering the Farmers about his back pain after the Volkswagen had fallen on him. The spaceship hadn’t caused his problems; cheap bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 had done his back in, as well as the rest of him.

*

“Farmers came to look for you. And they towed your spaceship.”

Bert nodded. “I knew they would. But I’m safe here, I think.”

“Yeah, they don’t like retards either.”

“You’re being purposefully cruel. I knew it was possible among outsiders, but not those of your own family.”

“He’s my brother, and I can do what I want with him.” Nick was below, piling his skipping stones. He’d carried two jeans pockets full of them from the river.

Bert frowned, then returned to writing his latest letter.

“What’re you writing?” I’d asked before, but he wouldn’t show me.

“A letter to Doctor Robert Cutter at Vanderbilt University.”

“What are you talking about in your letter?”

He didn’t respond at first. “I’m asking questions that will expand his research into key areas.”

“What areas?”

“I can’t explain.”

“You’re writing a long enough letter to Doctor Cutter. How come you can’t explain it to me?”

He said nothing.

“What’s wrong with where we’re going now? Robots, computers, nanotechnology. What’s wrong with that direction?”

“We already
have
advances in those areas,” Bert said. “We need advances in other areas.”

“What other areas?”

He folded his sheets of paper into an envelope, sealed it, and handed it to me.

“I come from a tightly woven family. We have a long lineage, well-known for our teaching,” he said. “When I was young, I lost my father. This is not a common thing. We have long lives, made longer and safer by technology. We should have lived long lives together, son, father, father’s father, and several generations, in a chain. This is how our people live.

“When I was just a student, an accident severed the chain. Certain rites did not occur. Certain things did not happen because of his death. Our culture is more ritualized than yours.”

“Like graduation?” We’d had a small graduation ceremony at middle school in June. They’d played music and made us walk in line with a double half step instead of a full step.

“Yes. Every day is like graduation. The grandfathers tried to make do, but I felt my father’s absence strongly. Each father is a bridge to the past. My link was sundered.

“I came here . . . to find help.”

I looked at the letter in my hands, confused. “There’s no help here for that.”

His eyes were fierce and glassy. “Yes, I know there is hope, and my hope is here on this fertile, fallow planet.” He pulled out his legal pad and began addressing a new letter.

“Come on, Nick,” I said.

Bert had such faith in human technology. He believed that we could solve his father’s death. But we couldn’t solve death. Mama took us to church sometimes, but I could see that was hogwash. What god would allow a person like Nick to exist? None that I cared to worship.

We passed the tree that we had once tried to chop down. It was brown, dead. We’d severed the trunk enough to kill it; it stood leafless while the trees around it were emerald green and full. Nick pressed his hand into the gray mouth we had cut.

I slapped the letter against my palm. How could we help Bert? What did he think we could do for his father now?

Halfway to the trailer, I opened the letter. I was so engrossed as I read it, that I must not have noticed Harry.

*

“What the hell is this?”

I stood on the ladder leading to the upper level of the fort. Bert looked at me blankly. I’d scrambled through the briars to get there, and there was a huge thorn poking through my jeans into my shin. I ignored it as I waved the letter in his face.

“Those are my private correspondences with leading scientists of your world.”

My mouth wouldn’t work, I was so angry. Finally, I held the paper in front of my face and read, “’I respectfully ask how one might gauge the magnitude of spiritual manifestation based on ganglion density in the cortex? Clearly a dog has less ghostly presence than a human. Is it tied to brain size? Is it linear? Is it related to some other parameter, such as sexual audacity or emphatic quotient? Find attached a chart of data that I have compiled.’ What the hell is this? What do you think scientists will do with this crap?”

“I hope to direct their thoughts toward areas of fertile research.”

“You’d rather have them studying ghosts than computers?”

“We already have computers.”

“What about medicine?”

Bert looked away. “That has no impact on us.”

“Then do your
own
research! Let us alone! Why use us for this crap? This won’t help us.”

“We can’t do our research. We’re . . . sterile, while your planet is not bound by our culture, by our ritual. We have medical advances. We have nanotechnology. We have no disease or . . . retardation. And we pay for that in stagnation. You’re wild, alive. You have no bounds, no millennia of civilization to bind your minds.

“When one of us wants something, we ask for it and it is given to us by machines that care for themselves and us. If you want something, you have to build it. You have drive, while we have stasis. You have —”

Nick had stopped playing with his skipping stones. He moaned softly, peering out the door. A thorn had grazed his cheek as he’d lunged after me through the gateway.

I saw a shape moving beyond the thorn bushes.

“Cilly . . . I know you’re in there.”

To Bert, I said, “Hide.” To Harry, I shouted, “Beat it, you sack of goat vomit!”

“What’re you hiding in there?” he sing-songed.

“Your penis, but it was so small I lost it in a thimble.”

Egan and he were crawling on their bellies toward the fort. “We got you now, Cilly. You can’t hide your friend any longer.” His face was stretched up, grinning.

“Back off, Hairy,” I said, glancing around. I couldn’t run without leaving Nick and Bert alone. Bert I didn’t care about anymore, but Nick was no match for cruelty. And there was no easy way through the thorn bushes, except for the way Harry was coming.

“Leave us be, young men,” Bert said.

“I told you to hide, you freak!” I said.

“Is that the driver of the car?” Harry asked. “Why are you hiding him here?” He was almost to the point where he could stand up.

“He’s an alien spiritualist,” I said.

“Yeah, right. I don’t care what he is. Those guys said they’d give us a hundred bucks if we brought him to them.”

“You can’t count to a hundred,” I said.

“Keep talking, Cilly,” he said, standing, pulling a knife out of his belt.

Behind me Nick, or maybe Bert, was keening.

Something whizzed by my head, and Harry yelped. He dropped the knife and reached for his forehead where a red welt had appeared. Another rock flew at him, and he ducked.

“Ouch!”

I turned as Nick flung another skipping stone at Harry. The sharp edge caught his wrist and he shrieked like a kid. He turned and dived on Egan, trying to evade the rocks.

Nick threw one at Egan and caught the corner of his eye. Egan buried his face in his hands and started scrambling back the way he’d come. The two of them disappeared into the brambles, then ran when they could stand.

Nick threw rock after rock until I knocked the pile of stones away from him.

I screamed at him, “Those are skipping stones, you retard!” And then I dove through the thorn bushes, ignoring the thorns and ran for the trailer.

*

Ernie and Mama shared a pull-out bed in the living room. Nick and I shared the bedroom in the back. Above the door in our room was a small storage alcove that you could reach from the top bunk. I threw the box of old games onto the floor and climbed into the space, hunching my shoulders.

Screw Hairy, screw Bert, and screw Nick, I thought as I jammed my knees into my chin. Screw the goddamn Farmers. And screw me for believing in . . . what?

Fairy godmothers. I was on my own. Just like the whole Earth was. We were some Amazon rain forest to be mined for valuable technology. An Amazon brain forest. And they wanted us to invest in studying ghosts.

They lived where Nick could never happen, like gods. Then they came here to have us look for ghosts instead of doing medical research that could help our own.

I wasn’t any happier in my hiding place. I was just angrier. I slid down, walked around back of the trailer to the train tracks. Every night at two in the morning, a freight train barrelled down the tracks, headed for Columbus. I could sleep right through it, without a twitch. They probably didn’t have loud trains on Bert’s planet.

I followed the tracks, stepping from tie to tie until I reached the trestle. Graffiti stretched across the iron i-beams and concrete pylons to every spot reachable by a spray can and an outstretched arm. In the shade of the trestle down by the river, Harry and Egan lounged.

Harry pressed a tissue to his forehead.

I dropped down, hanging by my arms from the trestle, and landed between them.

“What the hell do you want?”

“Those guys give you their number?”

He looked at me, then said, “Yeah. So?”

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

I picked up a skipping stone, prepared to throw it. Nick had done this same thing — threatened someone with a rock — and I had yelled at him. I felt disgust. The stone slipped out of my hand, and I turned to go. It was time to find Nick, tell him I was sorry, and get him home for dinner.