The True Meaning of Smekday

  “But those erasing guns are the kind the Boov use,” I said. “Gorg like loud noises and explosions and stuff.”

  Beardo looked at me hard for a moment. “Where’s JayJay?”

  “Still at the Chief’s place. I’m going to go back for him now.”

  “You know,” said Beardo, “Kat is convinced your brother’s a Boov under that sheet. She hasn’t figured out what you are yet.”

  I paused too long before answering.

  “That’s ridiculous. Why would my brother be a Boov? It’s impossible. That Kat should have her head—”

  “I don’t care,” said Beardo. “Just go get your brother and stay close to me after that. Kat’s pretty worked up about it.”

  That was that. J.Lo and I had to leave right away.

  “What’s your name?” I said. “I never asked.”

  “David.”

  “Okay,” I said, and took off toward Slushious. I opened the door and pushed the car around until it was pointed at the Chief’s house again. I noticed that Pig wasn’t inside the car anymore. Had I left a window open? No—they were cracked but not open. Maybe she’d slipped out in all the confusion surrounding the Chief. Maybe J.Lo had her.

  “J.Lo!” I hissed.

  The headlights hadn’t worked for a couple days, but the parking lights still did. I flashed them on and off and on, and that’s when I saw someone in the dull orange glow.

  It was Vicki Lightbody, and she was holding Pig.

  “Oh. You found her,” I said, trying to be civil. But then I got a good look at her, hunched over Pig like a blond goblin, hands tight around the scruff of her neck. You could see in her eyes she was having a full-on crazy.

  “I found your little J.Lo all right,” said Mrs. Lightbody. “And we’re all lucky I did! She’s a cat! You still have a cat!”

  Sometimes you really want to say “Duh,” but you can’t. It’s a part of growing up, I guess.

  “Why don’t you let me take her,” I said. “I’m sorry she got out—”

  “Oh, no. No one’s taking little J.Lo except the aliens. Do you know what could have happened to us if they knew we were harboring a cat after sundown? Do you? I don’t think you do.”

  Pig began to yowl. Mrs. Lightbody was hurting her. I looked in every direction, hoping to see David, maybe, terrified I’d see lights in the sky or hear the whir of one of those cat hunters.

  “This is just what I’d expect from little Grace. I know all about you. You’ve fooled the others, maybe, but Iseeright throughyou.”

  What she didn’t see was J.Lo creeping up behind her. He’d found a new sheet, and was in ghost costume again. I was trying to think how I might signal him to crouch behind Mrs. Lightbody while I gave her a push. I’d seen it done once in a Marx Brothers movie and had always wanted to try it out. But my mind went blank when J.Lo pulled off his sheet and retracted his helmet. He had no costume, and all Vicki Lightbody had to do was turn around.

  He said, “Excuse me.” She turned around.

  I was only a little pleased to hear her shriek at the sight of a Boov so close. But I couldn’t imagine what he thought he was doing.

  “Good evening,” said J.Lo. “I am Chief Animals Control Officer Cher. I understands you have a cat for us.”

  Vicki was frozen in place. Pig made a sound like an electric toothbrush.

  “How…how did you know to come?” Vicki asked.

  “Powerful telescopes.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh.” Mrs. Lightbody nodded.

  “Put now the cat in the bag, please,” J.Lo said, holding his sheet out in front of him. Mrs. Lightbody did as she was told.

  “It was this girl that was keeping it.” she said, “I was going to bring it to you!”

  Pig scrambled around a bit, but went limp as J.Lo drew the sheet tight.

  “We know. You have our thanks. For your good service you will receive prizes. Flowers! And an expensive hat.”

  “Oh! Well, that’s very…very…wasn’t it the other aliens who wanted the cats?”

  “Mmmmyes. The Boov are…doing little favors for them. So they will stop shooting us. Now move along! Everyones back to their homes!”

  Mrs. Lightbody gave me a smug look and hustled off.

  J.Lo got in the car and let the cat out of the bag, so to speak.

  “Fun,” he said, looking at his sheet. “Covered in cat’s hair.”

  J.Lo had really kept busy while I’d been in the UFO Museum. Apart from supplies and a new ghost costume, he’d found us a police car. Sort of.

  “It’s not a police car,” I said.

  “It is,” said J.Lo. “Looknow. Lights for flashing.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Writing on the sides.”

  “Yeah, but the writing? It says ‘BullShake Party Patrol.’”

  “Yes. Whatnow?”

  BullShake was one of those energy drinks. Do you still have them in the future? They came in these tall, thin cans and were supposed to make you feel vital and hyper so you’d have the drive and focus to save lives, or run that extra mile, or solve that unsolvable math problem or whatever.

  “Looks just alike a police car,” said J.Lo.

  “Except it’s smaller. And police cars aren’t usually red. And don’t normally have six-foot-long cans of energy shake on their roofs.”

  “Can we not take it?” asked J.Lo.

  We took it. We towed Slushious back up to the junkyard, which looked sad and flat, apart from the big busted water tower standing a couple hundred feet away. J.Lo got right to modifying the Party Patrol car so it would be easier to drive and see over the dashboard.

  “Waitaminute,” I said. “Let’s just get the teleclone booth and make sure it’ll fit in this car before we waste too much time on it.”

  We untied Lincoln and let him run around, and J.Lo took me to the center of the naked wooden floor that used to be the Chief’s house. He hunched over, searching all around his and my feet.

  “You know,” I said, “after that Gorg sneezed, he was all looking around my feet, too.”

  “The Gorg did not sneeze.”

  “He did. And then he shouted ‘Where is it?’ and looked at my feet. Is there something I don’t know about teleclone booths, like how they shrink real small when they’re not being used or something?”

  “I am not looking forto the booth. I am looking to the hole. Ahanow!”

  He put his fingers to a spot on one of the floorboards and pried it up. A large square door lifted clean out of the floor.

  “Oh, cool,” I said. I defy you to say anything less stupid when you discover a secret trapdoor for the first time.

  J.Lo found a switch on the wall. Bare lightbulbs winked on, giving a dull glow to the space below.

  “This is where you hid?” I asked as we toed our way down a metal ladder bolted to the side of…well, to the side of an enormous pipe. A huge concrete water pipe that bottomed out about thirty feet below.

  “Yes. And to where we hids the teleclone booth. Arounding the corner.”

  We reached bottom and I saw we were standing at the intersection of two huge pipes that made an upside-down T. One direction, leading toward town, was invisibly dark. But in the opposite direction the lights stretched out a long way. The pipe was all dry and full of stuff. The teleclone booth was here, and a stack of metal lock boxes, and a bunch of regular cardboard boxes filled with antiques. There were big round army helmets and old newspapers. There was a Bible in German and a pewter plaque with the Declaration of Independence on it.

  “And look,” said J.Lo. “Talkie-walkies.” They must have been Chief’s from the war. They were the Incredible Hulk of walkie-talkies: really big and green, about the size and weight of a half gallon of milk, with a long antenna and a mouthpiece like a telephone.

  There was a poster in Chinese on the side of the pipe next to a signed picture of Betty Grable, and a kind of embarrassing pinup painting of a girl getting her skirt lifted up by a pelican.

  J.Lo knee
led by the teleclone cage and started loosening connections.

  “I can make it into pieces,” he said. “Then will it be more easier to move.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “Why do you think the Chief lit this half of the tunnel, all the way down? He’s got all his stuff piled right here.”

  J.Lo was muttering to himself in Boovish. “Five minutes!” he told me, never looking up from the booth.

  I walked down the length of the tunnel away from him, until I came to an elbow and a ladder leading back up. I suddenly had a weird feeling I’d never left Florida, and the ladder would open onto the Broadway of Happy Mouse Kingdom all over again.

  I started up the ladder, and the pipe soon got narrower and darker around me. But above me, way high above me, there was a little square of moonlight.

  “Someday soon,” I told myself, “Mom’s gonna ask what I did all this time on my own, and I’m gonna say, ‘Climbed ladders.’”

  I had that feeling of déjà vu again when I realized I’d been climbing too long—that I’d passed the ground and kept going. I must be in the water tower, I thought. I must be getting close to the tank. The pipe brightened, and I looked up at wire mesh stretched over a hatch above me. Moonlight filtered in, I supposed from the big hole in the side of the tank where the Chief claimed his papier-mâché saucer had crashed. I pushed up the hatch and poked my head through to get a look at things.

  “Oh,” I said. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “No pushing!” said J.Lo. “I am no so good with ladders.”

  “Really? You think?”

  “You could have just to told me what. Instead of all this climbing.”

  “Almost there,” I said.

  J.Lo popped up his helmet and used it to push against the mesh hatch in the floor of the water tank as he climbed. The helmet snapped back.

  “Koobish!”

  He scrambled up into the big cylindrical room and rushed over to the larger of the two animals.

  “Naaaa-aa-aa-a-a-aa-aaah!” said the koobish.

  “Maa’apla nah!” said J.Lo.

  “I thought they might be koobish,” I said. “They look just like one of your drawings.”

  They were four-legged, with wiry hair in tight little curls. Their feet were round and made pock-pock noises when they walked. The smaller koobish came up to J.Lo, and he took a bite out of its ear.

  “Hey!” I said. “What was that?”

  “Is okay,” said J.Lo, beaming. “They do not feel pain. They are fine so long as you do not eats the head.”

  “Huh.”

  “Try a littles bite of tail. Is crunchy.”

  “No.”

  Instead I petted the small one as it whinnied happily. The Chief had made it nice for them. The tower was lined with water troughs and filled with hay, and there was even a little potted tree under the big hole in the tank where the UFO had come in.

  Oh, yeah, I thought.

  “J.Lo?”

  “Yes?”

  “What if a spaceship really did crash into this thing in 1947? A Boovish ship.”

  “YES! Of coursenow! The ship that crashed onto Roswell must have to been the Haanie Mission!”

  “But…” I said, “that means…that the Chief really does have a spaceship.”

  We held each other’s gaze for a second.

  I was already heading down the ladder again when J.Lo ran to the hatch. Then he ran back a moment, took another bite of koobish, and started down the ladder above me.

  “Will the koobish be okay?” I asked, my voice echoing. “We can’t bring them with us to Arizona.”

  “They shoulds be fine. They have plenty water to make an hundred babies, and the Chief put out enough chlorine for to last them a year. An Earth year.”

  I’m faster on ladders, so by the time I got outside I was way ahead of J.Lo. The entrance to the Chief’s basement was just a gaping hole now, with the splintered remains of doors barely attached by crumpled hinges. I hurried down the steps and groped around for the light switch.

  Only about half the lights came on. No “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” The Gorg had trashed everything. He’d even thrown the UFO against a wall, and it lay there on its end, papier-mâché crunched against the rough concrete.

  “I don’t get it,” I whispered. The saucer looked just as bad as it had two days ago. Worse. “There’s no way that thing’s real.”

  J.Lo arrived, panting. “Did you to…is it…Tip should to…have waited…so much…running…”

  “You don’t think he would’ve…” I said, and trailed off. There was something funny about the whole scene.

  “Yes?…What.”

  I stepped over and tore some of the cracked papier-mâché off the fake spaceship. Inside was a real one.

  “How’s it coming?” I asked. We needed to leave while it was still dark, and I was feeling tired and antsy.

  “Superfine,” said J.Lo. “This Chief Shouty Bear, he is some smart fellow. Do you know he drained out and cleaned the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold his self? And fixed the humbutt, I do not know how he did that, let me tell you. These things would have taken hours for doing. Howfor is the BullShake?”

  The big can of BullShake Energy Drink was strapped to the back of Slushious, and the disassembled Gorg teleclone booth was inside. And J.Lo was completing the repairs. He made Slushious a new fin from the hatch of the three-hundred-year-old rocketpod and smoothed out the roof. He swapped out some parts, including the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold. It was a bit bigger than our old one, and an antique, but apparently the Chief had taken good care of it. I hoped the BOOBs were taking good care of the Chief.

  J.Lo put down his tools and raised his oil-stained face.

  “Alls done!” he cheered.

  J.Lo had to drive. I was dead tired. I put out a bunch of food and water for Lincoln and left a note for BOOB and the Chief on the windshield of the Party Patrol car and we tore away from Roswell, trying to cover as much ground as possible before any Gorg noticed. I drifted in and out of sleep in the backseat, my body a question mark with Pig dotting my feet. It was nice in the backseat, feeling like a little kid again, so that when I awoke an hour later and the car was stopped, I half expected my mom to lift me up and carry me to my bed.

  There was a soft glow of lights in the back windshield. I propped myself up and stared out. Then I stumbled through the car door and joined J.Lo, standing by the rear bumper.

  We were higher up, looking down and about eighty miles southeast at where Roswell used to be. Maybe you future people have rebuilt it—that would be nice. The big Gorg sphere was closer than before, and was the color of a fresh bruise in the moonlight. And Roswell was glowing in the dark.

  “What are they…why are they doing it?” I asked.

  J.Lo glanced at the big metal can on our car, then back at the town. It was all the answer I needed. The Gorg hadn’t found their teleclone booth; they were burning everything for a hundred miles so nobody else would have it, either.

  “They got out, don’t you think? Chief and David and everybody? Lincoln?”

  Cannon fire set the horizon ablaze, and impossibly huge Gorg giants stamped it out again. I would have thought I’d dreamed it all, if not for the pictures.

  “We betters get going,” said J.Lo.

  We drove in shifts, caught some sleep, and steered north more than ever, because it looked like the Gorg were on the move. It was hard to tell with a ship that large and that far away, but it seemed like they were aiming right for us. We could have made it to the Arizona border in a few more hours if we hadn’t been distracting each other with stupid little arguments. Don’t get me wrong; I like J.Lo fine. I’ve made that bed. But I’m not sure there’s a person in the world I could be with twenty-four hours a day for three weeks without getting a little snippy. If I ever meet such a person, I’m marrying them. We were probably somewhere around Four Corners when we actually had a fight over whether water was wet. I guess I knew I was wrong, but there was no stoppin
g me when I got going.

  It was weird country. Really barren, with these loops and piles of rock that looked like poured frosting. But I knew we were nearing the Arizona border when I started seeing little threads of smoke in the air. They were from campfires, I thought. They were from people.

  “You better put on your costume,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re going to be able to talk to people with that voice of yours. That Kat woman was on to you.”

  J.Lo cleared his throats. “WHAT IF I TALK LIKE THIS.”

  I jumped. He sounded just like someone on TV.

  “OUR PARTING CONTESTANTS WILL RECEIVE THE FOLLOWING CONSOLATION PRIZES.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “Now do a little kid voice.”

  “THIS IS THE ONLY VOICE I CAN DO.”

  “Oh. I don’t think that’s gonna help, then.”

  “Just as well,” said J.Lo. “It makes my teeths hurt.”

  He pulled the sheet back on. We’d made him some arms now as well, with white sleeves and mittens.

  “Booo,” said J.Lo the ghost. “Boowoooooo!”

  “Okay,” I replied, smiling. “Thank you.”

  WELCOME

  TO THE UNITED STATES

  OF ARIZONA

  said a big sign, and I let out a sigh. According to the sign, Arizona is known for cotton and copper. The state bird is the cactus wren, and the state canyon is the Grand Canyon. Way to go, Arizona.

  A few minutes more and I could see tents and little houses dotting the land. And people—more humans than I’d seen in one place for three weeks. Hundreds of people, and they were all staring at us.

  “Why is everyone staring?” I said. Then I answered myself in my head: Why wouldn’t they be staring?

  I tried to look sixteen, which is really hard to do if you’re not concentrating, and lowered Slushious closer to the ground, the back tires just skimming over the asphalt. But there were still the extra fins and the hoses and BullShake can and the ghost in the passenger seat to contend with, so people stared. J.Lo stared right back.