The True Meaning of Smekday Page 11
Pig was awake now, restless because of the constant rattle against the windows. She sat in my lap, kneading the skin of my leg with her claws. So we watched the storm, watched the wind push the rain around in billowing sheets like the ghosts of old oceans.
I’m sorry. I always get like this when I think about that day. For what it’s worth, I fell asleep about now. Later, when I woke up, we were nearly killed in a flood, so that should be exciting.
I didn’t dream at all. I just closed my eyes, and when I opened them a second later, it was night.
I wondered for a moment if I was sick. My stomach lurched and settled over and over, and I thought, It’s like I’m on a boat. It’s like I’m taking the ferry across the Delaware. And just as I propped myself up enough to see why, the car was hit by half a washing machine.
It had come tumbling down the junk heap and struck one of our fins hard enough to make it fold up like a cheap chair. Slushious bucked and nearly rolled. There was water seeping up through the floor, and water all around us. At least six feet of it. We were floating through a brand-new river, between banks and hills of loose metal. I watched breathlessly as pieces of scrap took wing and circled above like giant bats.
“Oh my God!” I shouted. “Oh my God, I parked us in a scrap yard during a hurricane! J.Lo!”
J.Lo was waking slowly, crawling back from the front seat. “Mlaaa-ak sis?” he murmured. “Whazit?”
Pig was frantic. She tore around the interior of the car, leaping away from the pools of water on the floor, which were everywhere now.
“Hurricane!” I shouted. “Big storm! Everything’s flooded and we’re floating! And leaking! And…I don’t get it; it was so clear yesterday!”
“It is the Gorg,” said J.Lo, looking out the window. “Their ships, they are too large. They make the weather happen whereverto they go.”
He sounded a little too calm for my taste. I tried to impress him with the seriousness of it.
“We’re floating,” I said. “There’s water coming into the car, and flying metal everywhere, and we were just hit by a washing machine!”
I was almost pleased when the lightning flashed and some sharp piece of garbage clawed at our roof, as if to illustrate my point.
“Yes,” J.Lo agreed. “I have unproperly sealed up the bottom side of our vehicle. I am sorry.”
“Yeah. I don’t really care about that so much as the scrap metal and floating parts.”
“We should to leave.”
“Leave?” I said. “Leave the car?”
Pig was panting. She had tangled herself up in the strap on my camera, and looked ready to explode into confetti at any moment.
“No,” said J.Lo. “Leaveto the metal yard. In the car.”
I stared.
“You drive,” he said. “I will to remove the water.”
Drive? I thought. We can drive?
I climbed into the front seat and took up the controls. Suddenly I couldn’t remember how to do anything. I felt it would be a bad time to accidentally cause the hood to burst into flame.
J.Lo was digging through his toolbox. Pig perched like a twitchy sparrow on the top of the passenger seat, the camera dangling from her back legs. She let out one long, raspy meow that lasted until all her breath was spent, then she inhaled and did it again.
Slowly the cobwebs left my mind and I focused on the car. I began to ease it forward, as though we were on dry land, as though we were on a safe empty blacktop that stretched for miles in every direction. And I noticed that Slushious really was moving forward. Pig noticed it too, and took to meowing in short, high bursts like the fire alarm at school.
“We’re moving,” I said. “The car is swimming.”
That wasn’t really right. When we started there were bubbles foaming all around Slushious, and then we rose a bit—not above the water, but just about to its surface. Then we began to skim along—not as fast as we would have over land, but fast enough. We left the metal yard behind and passed over what must have been the road. There was a highway overpass, and we just barely fit beneath it, as if it were only a low footbridge over a canal. It reminded me of pictures of Venice.
“Ha! I should sing something in Italian,” I said.
“Yes, please,” J.Lo answered as he looked over some device he’d found in the toolbox. It looked like two thin tubes connected by a set of tiny bagpipes. I hoped it was what he was looking for. The water in the car had risen up to the gas pedal.
“What, really? Sing something?”
J.Lo blew into the tiny bagpipes. They didn’t make any noise, but he seemed satisfied all the same.
“Yes. Please to sing. I know very little of the humansmusic.”
So I sang the first Italian song that came into my head, which turned out to be “Volare.” I’m sure I need not mention at this point that I am a rock star, and it sounded fantastic.
J.Lo rolled down a window. The wind and spray whipped like angry spirits around the car, but he ignored it and snaked one of the tubes over the side. The end of the other tube sank below the rising water inside the car. Then J.Lo blew into each of the bagpipes in turn, and the bag itself began to inflate and deflate, again and again on its own, pumping like a plastic heart in his hands. Water rushed through the tubes and out the car window, and almost immediately I could see the pool drop around my feet.
“Clever little Boov!” I shouted happily. I think J.Lo liked that.
Then something happened. I don’t know why Pig did it. I think she was afraid of the water and the wind, and there was a lot more of that outside the car than inside. But a thousand generations of weird cat biology goaded her on, and she pounced from the headrest and straight through the window. She trailed the tangled camera strap behind her, and the camera itself knocked and almost caught the edge of the glass. J.Lo made a grab for it, but it all came free, and Pig and a vintage Polaroid dropped into the floodwaters below.
I drew a sharp breath, but before I could shout or scream, J.Lo had forced the window all the way down and dove in after her.
I was suddenly alone and useless inside the car. The rain battered the roof like a drumroll. I could think of nothing to do. Not one thing. And then J.Lo shot out of the water like a salmon in a nature film and dumped Pig through the window. She was fine.
J.Lo hung there for a moment by his fingers. Then he said simply, “Camera,” and dove back under.
I realized what he meant. The camera was free of Pig’s legs and still in the water.
“No!” I shouted, much too late. “Forget the camera!”
The only answer I got was a sneeze from Pig. She looked like a miserable wet hairbrush.
The window was still open. “You’re not going to jump again,” I asked. “Are you?”
“Mrooooowrrr,” said Pig.
I went to wrap her in a towel, which made her fidget and growl, but eventually she gave in to it and any other indignity I had planned. I probably could have dressed her up in a sailor suit if I’d wanted.
But all I could think was that J.Lo had been gone an awfully long time. Hadn’t he? Thirty seconds, a minute? I started to count under my breath: one alligator, two alligator. When I had sixty alligators I gave in to panic.
“Okay…okay…” I whispered, looking all around me, looking at the rushing current outside. “Think. Think think think think think. I need a rope!”
I scattered J.Lo’s tools around the car, searching for some kind of rope, or something that could be used like a rope. I should have paid more attention to anything that looked like a pencil sharpener made of lemon Jell-O that, when cranked, would spit out superstrong yarn that smelled like ginger ale. I only mention this because J.Lo really did have such a thing. He told me so later. But at the time I was too busy looking for an honest rope, and too distracted to notice that J.Lo had resurfaced and was peering over my shoulder.
“If you areto looking for the pink squishable gapputty,” he said suddenly, “it is smooshed in the gloves box. You will have
to use brown.”
I jumped and grabbed for the toolbox, but it tipped over and everything tumbled out. I stared at J.Lo like he was a ghost. The fact that an alien was at least as weird as a ghost wouldn’t occur to me until later.
“What?” I said.
“You will have to use brown.”
“Brown. Brown what?”
“Squishable gapputty,” he said. “The pink is smooshed into the gloves box.”
He was just hanging there, arms folded over the window’s edge like he wasn’t waist-deep in churning water during a hurricane. I had trouble swallowing. I was so sure he’d drowned.
“Why,” I said. “Why is the pink gapputty smooshed in the glove box.”
“It was rattling.”
“The putty?”
“The gloves box,” J.Lo said as he hoisted himself inside the car.
“And just so we can put this behind us,” I said, “squishable gapputty is…”
“Something you smoosh into places for making them stop rattling.”
“Right.”
“I supposed you were looking for it. It is the only thing missing fromto my toolsbox.”
I just fell forward and hugged him. I didn’t think about it. I squeezed my arms around him and hugged. His body gave more than I expected, like dough, except for a hard boxy shape that cut into my hip. It was the camera. He’d brought back the camera.
J.Lo patted my head. “If this is about the gapputty, you can still use the brown. Is just as good, just not pink—”
“Shut up,” I said, and pulled back to look at him. Then I climbed into the front seat so he wouldn’t see me cry.
“We better get to higher ground,” I said. “Roll up the window.”
I found a half-finished building a half mile away. It was just a skeleton of girders and partial floors, and I could thrust Slushious up through the gaps until we were a few stories above the rising water. Here we waited out the storm. This took two days, and J.Lo and I managed to explain a lot to each other about humans and Boov. He didn’t understand, for example, about families. I began to get why he never seemed to think Mom’s abduction was as big a deal as I did.
“So…the humansmom and the humansdad make the baby all by themself,” J.Lo said slowly. “Aaand…afters they make the baby they…keep it?”
“Yes.”
“As like a pet.”
“No.”
“No?” J.Lo frowned and opened and closed his hands.
“No. Not like a pet. Like a baby. It’s their baby,” I said, “so they love it and take care of it. The mother and father together. Usually.”
“Usually,” he repeated. “But not with Tip?”
It was funny to hear someone just ask this question like it was nothing at all. It didn’t bother me to talk about my dad, but people always figured it did.
“No, not with me,” I said. “My mom raised me, of course, but I never knew my dad, and he never knew me.”
“Ah, yes,” said J.Lo. “This is the way it is being with the Boov. Nobody knows their offspring, and nobody knows their parents.”
“Nobody?”
J.Lo explained. It seemed that, of those seven Boov genders he’d mentioned before, nearly all had some part to play in order to make a baby Boov. When a female had an egg to lay, she did it and just walked away. There were special places to leave them all over the cities. And if a passing boy, or boyboy, or whatever, saw that there was an egg that needed attention, he did what needed to be done and left. Eggs that were ready to turn into Boov were collected by those whose job it was to do so. Somebody else had the job of feeding and raising the babies, and still another Boov taught them. The closest thing the Boov would ever have to a family was the work unit they were assigned to as adults.
“Well, that’s one thing we humans do better than you Boov,” I said. “Families are better.”
J.Lo shook his head as much as an alien with no neck can do that.
“Families are meaning you have to care about some peoples more than others,” he said. “But all peoples are just as good. Alls have a job to do.”
I didn’t know how to argue with that.
“I haveto seen the human families,” he added. “Some of them, the peoples, they stay in a family they do not like.”
“Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?”
J.Lo flinched. “Did I say wrong? I meanted only that some humans do not have an easy living with their family-mates. The brothers and sisterns, especiably.”
“Oh. Yeah. Some families…don’t always get along like they should,” I agreed. “Some people even hate their family sometimes. But they love them, too. They still love them. You Boov…do you…”
“Do the Boov what?”
I didn’t know how to ask what I was asking. So I just asked it.
“Do you have love?”
“Maaa-aa-aa-aa-aa!” J.Lo laughed. “Of course the Boov love. The Boov love everything!”
I didn’t feel up to arguing about it, but I was pretty sure if you loved everything you didn’t really love anything.
I changed the subject and asked more about Boov stuff. Eventually J.Lo explained that all Boov could breathe just a little bit underwater—enough to last for a half hour or more. He was shocked to learn that most humans could only last for about thirty seconds.
I complained that he should have told me about this before, and that he’d as good as tricked me into hugging him, but then I forgave him. He was enthusiastically grateful.
I could try to tell you all that he told me, but I doubt I’d remember everything. And I might as well let him tell some of it himself.
J.Lo made this after we left Florida. He was sure his people would have to leave Earth now that the Gorg had arrived, and he wanted us humans to understand who the Boov were. He couldn’t write, of course, but he could draw okay. Apparently comic books were, like, a serious art form on Boovworld, not just stories of badly dressed men hitting each other.
By the end of the second night, we were trying to learn each other’s language. J.Lo already spoke mine pretty good, of course, but he wanted to read and write as well. He even said something along the lines of how he was going to have to learn to read and write humanspeak now. I wondered what he meant. It sounded like he was fixing to stay on Earth even after the Boov left. I knew he was afraid to face his people, but I still expected he’d suck it up and go back to them at some point.
As for me, there was no way I could learn to speak Boov. According to J.Lo, I didn’t have the anatomy. I said we just needed a sheep and some bubble wrap, but J.Lo had no idea what I was talking about.
He thought I might be able to understand Boovish one day, though, and I could probably learn to read and write. I was especially into trying that bubble writing in the air. It was pretty, once you got used to it.
“Okay…” I said, steadying the little turkey baster thing, “so…if I add a smaller bubble here—”
“No. No,” J.Lo said, and I could see he was trying to hide a smile behind his hand. Which must have been a human habit he’d picked up, because Boov smiles are about three feet wide and Boov hands are the size of wontons.
“This bubble must to be lapping over.”
“Overlapping.”
“Yes. Over-lapping,” he said. “The small bubble must be over the lap of the big bubble.”
I tried again, but I squeezed too hard.
“Too big! Too big,” J.Lo said, and now his wonton hand was forcing back a laugh, which honked out around the edges like he had an invisible trumpet.
“C’mon,” I said, “it can’t be that funny. I’m really trying, here.”
“Yes…snnrx…yesss. I am sorry,” he said, hopping up and down. “It is only that you have not written ‘Gratuity’ now, but instead a rude word for ‘elbow.’”
“The Boov have a rude word for ‘elbow’?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a very advanced race.”
“You see? I am saying.”
“Get off of the car,” J.Lo huffed. “I am an English superstar.”
“Uh-uh. There’s no comparison. ‘Gratuity’ in written Boovish has seventeen different bubbles that all have to be the right size and in the right place. ‘J.Lo’ in written English only has three letters, and you still spelled it ‘M—smiley face—pound sign.’”
Thunder cracked again. It was kind of all bark and no bite now. It was drizzling so lightly that we were actually sitting on top of the car. I slid off the roof and looked over the edge of the building to the falling floodwaters below. It made me think of someone else who’d found himself on a high place after the rain stopped.
“I told you,” said J.Lo as he joined me. “Was not a ‘smiley face.’ Was a ‘five.’”
“You know,” I said, “we have a story in the Bible about a flood. God tells this guy named Noah to build a boat big enough for his family and two of every animal on Earth. Then it rains for forty days and nights.”
“Huhn. This is very interesting,” said J.Lo. “The Boov have a religion story about a girl who keeps all the animals into a big jar of water for when there is a year of no rain.”
“Do they make it through the year okay?”
“No. She forgets to punch the airholes and they die of asphyxiation.”
“Ah.”
Soon it would be dry enough to leave. The water had dropped, leaving a dark bathtub ring on every building in the city. The clouds were even breaking up, and needles of sunlight poked through. It was also perfectly possible to see the Gorg’s big purple ship again.
And I wondered what it was like for Noah, thinking the rain had stopped and the worst was over, but no—he still had a family and about a million animals to lead down a mountain. And he had to find a place to live, and build shelter, and start the whole world over again.
“When I was a little girl,” I said, sitting down, “the wallpaper in my room had pictures of the Noah story.”
“Pictures of forty nights of raining?”
“Well, no,” I said. Now that I thought about it, that wallpaper didn’t show any rain at all. Wasn’t rain the whole point? “No, it had cute pictures of Noah’s ark. His boat. Adorable little zebras and elephants and things. It’s a popular story for little kids, I guess because of the animals.”