The True Meaning of Smekday Read online

  “You should make up your own mind, of course? But I do not think we should be listening to these Boov. They are on their way out. Our leaders? They’re making great headway with the Gorg. Great headway. Dan Landry especially. You should go to his talk tonight.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “See you tomorrow, Mitch.”

  “Oh!” said Mitch. “I nearly forgot. Someone’s looking for you? A Native American gentleman at the hospital, I believe.”

  “Chief!” I shouted as we ran into his room.

  Well, no. That’s not entirely right. “Chief!” I shouted, after J.Lo and I drove to the hospital, fought our way past a crowd at the door and through a maze of people in chairs and on stretchers and gurneys with IV tubes running from bags on hat racks, got the Chief’s room number from a woman at a desk, were informed by a nurse or somebody that we couldn’t see a patient unless we were family, politely shouted at that nurse or whatever that Aren’t we all kind of family now when you really think about it, stupid?, then slipped past while he was distracted by a dog in a wheelchair, and ran into the Chief’s room. There.

  Anyway.

  The Chief shared the room with a sleeping patient on the other side of a curtain.

  “Mr. Hinkel,” said the Chief, jerking his head toward the sleeping man. “He thinks Indians like me ought to live somewhere else. Likes to tell me about it a lot.”

  I didn’t really want to talk about Mr. Hinkel.

  “Well, maybe they’ll let him go soon.”

  “Doubt it,” said the Chief. “Got beat up pretty good by someone who thinks gay people like him ought to live somewhere else. Good to see you, Stupidlegs, Boov.”

  I smiled, then what he’d said sunk in.

  “Kat told you?”

  “No,” said J.Lo. “I told him. By my having my sheet fall off while helping him hide the telecloner. I forgot to say.”

  I winced.

  “Are you…okay with that, Chief? Are you gonna tell?”

  The Chief shrugged. “When you’re Indian, you have people tellin’ you your whole life ’bout the people who took your land. Can’t hate all of ’em, or you’d spend your whole life shouting at everyone.”

  “Of course,” I said, “that’s pretty much what you did anyway. But that was all an act, wasn’t it? If you act crazy, you can tell people flat out that you have a UFO, and no one will believe you.”

  The Chief grinned. He had good teeth for a ninety-three-year-old.

  “An’ if you hide that UFO inside some piece of crap you made yourself—” said the Chief.

  “—then anyone who still thinks you have the real deal will feel like an idiot for coming to see it, right?”

  “Worked for sixty-six years. Till you two found my animals, I’m guessing.”

  “Koobish,” said J.Lo. “They are called koobish.”

  “You still called JayJay?”

  “No. I am J.Lo.”

  “No way I’m calling you that.”

  “You canto keep calling me Spook.”

  “Deal.”

  I couldn’t wait any longer. The suspense was eating me alive.

  “Chief,” I said, “did everyone get out of Roswell? Before…”

  “Yep. Can thank those UFO jerks for that. They were up on the roof looking through their telescopes, saw the Gorg comin’ from miles off. Some escaped in the car you left behind, though they puzzled over the plastic key a bit. I packed up Lincoln and the…koobish in my truck, an’ me an’ that fella Trey got out just in time.”

  “Trey went with you?”

  “I…couldn’t do any driving yet. Too dizzy. We left the koobish by the Rio Grande. Trey’s watching Lincoln till I stop…till I get out of here.”

  He coughed a bit. I don’t mean anything ominous by that—in movies and stories, people only ever cough to foreshadow them getting really sick or dying or something. The truth was that the Chief had coughed a lot since I’d met him. All the time, even before the Gorg hit him. But I noticed it now.

  “Are you going to be well?” asked J.Lo.

  “Hold on now, it’s my turn,” the Chief said. “Tell me about that Gorg cage thing. Is it safe?”

  J.Lo explained what the teleclone booth was, and why it was so important, and how we had it hidden but nearly ready to use.

  “I thought we should tell someone in charge about it,” I said. “But this government guy we know is all about trusting the Gorg and making deals, and I’m afraid he’d give it back to the Gorg. I don’t know who to trust.”

  “Just keep it safe till I get out of here, then we’ll work together. Learned a lotta stuff in the army that’ll be helpful if I can remember half of it.”

  “Okay, but…Chief, I haven’t seen my mom since Christmas. If I find out where she is I’m going there.”

  “I also,” said J.Lo.

  The Chief nodded his head and closed his eyes. It was time to go.

  A second long week in Flagstaff passed. We visited the Chief, stood in line at the Boovish telecloner for water and milk shakes, did odd jobs for people in exchange for real food and supplies, and read together. I read aloud to J.Lo from Huckleberry Finn, which he liked, and War of the Worlds, which he found to be too one-sided. We started our own junkyard, and J.Lo tried to work out a way to make more teleclone booths out of human technology, or soup up the milk shake cloners so that they could handle bigger things.

  I learned a lot more from the Chief.

  “So after World War Two you were sent to New Mexico?” I asked him on one of my visits. I was alone this time, checking out his new digs at the old folks’ home they’d moved him to when they needed his bed at the hospital. He hated it.

  “To a training ground in Fort Sumner. Didn’t like it there—lot of bad history for my people. You know I grew up near here? On the res.”

  “Yeah, you said. So you’re…Navajo, then?” I’d been learning a bit about the area.

  “Prefer the name Diné, but yes.”

  “So after Fort Sumner…”

  “I asked to be transferred to the air base in Roswell. Bought some land when I heard a rumor the city wanted to build a water tower on it. So they’d have t’pay me rent.”

  “Aha. But skip to the UFO crash.”

  “Hrm. How much you know already?”

  “I know something crashed near Roswell, in 1947. And that people had seen weird things in the sky before that. Lights. They definitely found some bits and pieces of wreckage, but the government said it was a scientific balloon, and the ufologists say it was a spaceship and that there were alien bodies besides.”

  “Good. So, the thing of it is, there really was a scientific balloon.”

  “Wait.” I frowned. “What?”

  “The Boov pod hit it on its way down. Lucky shot. Destroyed the balloon and its payload.”

  “So the wreckage…”

  “Was debris from the balloon. Then the koobish pod hits the ground, ricochets another eighty miles, finally stops after crashing into the water tower they’d built in my backyard. Wasn’t damaged much. The pod, I mean, not the tower. The tower was totalled, and the city abandoned it—they never much liked our arrangement anyway. Somethin’ about paying an Indian for land that rubs white folk the wrong way.”

  I gave the Chief a look.

  “Don’ mind me,” he said. “Old habits. So—when the government says the crash was a balloon, it’s ’cause they mean it. Didn’t know about the spaceship. And they get real tight-lipped about it ’cause it’s a top-secret balloon, meant to keep an eye on the Russians. Meanwhile, I’m tryin’ to tell my superiors that I have a flying disk and an alien in my basement, but everyone acts like I’ve gone nuts. Post-combat fatigue, I think they called it at the time.”

  “Did they ever figure it out?” I asked.

  “Eventually, a bit. They looked at all the evidence from the crash and saw things didn’t add up. So they came calling, lookin’ to see if I’d been tellin’ the truth after all. But by then I’d finally had it wit
h the army. Had a lot of other grievances. So I played the crazy Indian bit to the hilt, had the pod hidden inside my little stage prop, an’ acted like I was all too happy to show it to ’em. They yelled at me for wasting their time, yelled at each other a bit, never came back.

  “I spent the last sixty-some years trying to figure that spaceship out,” he said. “Got it up in the air once.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Yep. Programmed it to take me up to about five thousand feet, make a loop, an’ come back down in my own yard. Well, twenty miles from my own yard, as it turned out. That was a long walk.”

  “You programmed it? How?”

  “Punch cards. That’s what we had in the fifties, instead of CD-ROMs. Paper with holes in it.”

  “J.Lo says you took good care of it.”

  The Chief seemed to study me for a second.

  “Rumor is, the Boov will be surrendering soon,” he said. “And leaving.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. I looked out the window as if I’d be able to see all the Boovish ships crowding around the Arizona border, or the Gorg closing in. “J.Lo knows, too.”

  “When’s he goin’ back to his people?”

  “I don’t know that he…that he’s decided anything. We haven’t talked about it.”

  “Hrm.”

  “I should probably get back,” I said.

  When I neared our camp I saw J.Lo backed up against the car in his ghost costume, facing some guy on a dirt bike. Pig was hissing from a window. I broke into a run. Was this guy threatening him? Did he know J.Lo was a Boov?

  J.Lo saw me approach.

  “Finally! I have been trying to tell this person I do not speak his language,” said J.Lo, turning momentarily to the man, “but he will not to leave me alone.”

  The man wheeled around.

  “Latest edition!” he shouted. The Nose Celebrity Weekly! Which Two-Timing Skunk Gets Dunked for Hot Hollywood Hunk? Which Leading Lady’s Rankled After Getting Tanked and Ankled? Only the Nose Knows!”

  At first I thought he was mentally ill, so I was going to give him a little something. Then I noticed his canvas bag full of newspapers. That was new.

  “Spielberg Wheels and Deals Over New Spiels as Studio Execs Fix to Nix Pix! Special insert this week: revised map of the United State of America!”

  I didn’t have a clue what the rest was about, but I wanted the map.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “A buck ten,” he said. “But for you? Because I like your face? A dollar.”

  “What do you mean a—you mean a dollar dollar? As in real money?”

  “I don’t got time for haikus, kid. You got the dollar or don’t ya?”

  “Everyone around here just trades stuff,” I said. “Money isn’t worth anything.”

  “It’ll be worth something someday. You want this paper or not?”

  I asked him to wait as I rummaged through the car and found a dollar in change. I hadn’t saved any paper money. Later J.Lo and I sat down in the shade and looked over The Nose Celebrity Weekly.

  “What does it say?” asked J.Lo.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, flipping through the pages. “It really is a paper about TV and movie stars. These people don’t even do anything anymore.”

  FILM STARS CONTINUE TO WAIT

  FOR SOMEONE TO MAKE MOVIE

  NEW HOLLYWOOD (FORMERLY SCOTTSDALE)—American actors fill their days with activities such as smiling and waving at cars as they anticipate the eventual restart of the film industry.

  “Before the invasion I was working on a buddy comedy about a talking dog that fights crime,” said heartthrob Evan Vale to The Nose, outside the Lexus dealership he calls home. “If Good Cop, Bad Dog never gets finished, it’ll be like the aliens have won.”

  Good Cop, Bad Dog Executive Producer Marty Allen said filming would resume soon. “As soon as we can get Tom [Stone] back in the director’s chair, we’re good to go.”

  Director Tom Stone is currently a potato farmer in Holbrook and could not be reached for comment.

  RECORDING ARTISTS TO PERFORM

  AT “LIVE ALIEN 6”

  SEDONA—America’s musical artists, seventy percent of whom live in the northern Arizona town of Sedona, will once again hold a benefit concert to raise awareness of the alien invasion.

  The concert, called “Live Alien 6,” will feature more artists than the previous five “Live Alien” shows, and for the first time will have a working sound system and be open to the public.

  Pop sensation Mandi, who is expected to sing her new single “This Land Is My Land, This Land Ain’t Smekland,” will host the event.

  Other confirmed performers include Bruce Springsteen, DJ Max Dare, The New Draculas, Madonna, Displacer Beast, and Big Furry.

  It went on and on like this. But I was more interested in the map.

  I don’t know if I’ve ever bought that whole America-as-Melting-Pot thing, but now that the whole melting pot had been dumped in Arizona’s lap, I thought we might all mingle a little more. No.

  The city of Payson was now something like ninety-nine percent white. There were really large numbers of senior citizens in places like Green Valley, Sun City, and Prescott. Prescott had been renamed AARPtopia, for some reason. Environmentalist and hippie types were living around Flagstaff. The incense should have tipped me off. There was a section of Tucson called Mallville, where a big group of the sort of girls who wished they could live at the shopping mall were now actually living in a shopping mall.

  A lot of communities had already moved around because of wildfires. I guess Arizona just catches fire from time to time. So nearly all the Mormons in America had relocated from the northern border to a town called Mesa, around which they were building a very strong wall to keep out Phoenix.

  Phoenix was apparently this shaky military dictatorship ruled by a warlord who called himself Beloved Leader the Angel of Death Sir Magnífico Excellente. Not his real name, I think.

  J.Lo wanted to know where we were, and what it said next to my finger after I pointed.

  “We live…” he said, “in the…Hempire of Flags Staff?”

  “Actually, we might be in Hippietown.”

  “Hippietown.”

  “Explains all the naked people.”

  There were some short human-interest stories in the back of the paper. It seemed that getting conquered and shipped to a new home where no one’s really in charge doesn’t bring out the best in most people. A surprising number of arguments were being settled with the kind of challenges you used to see only on reality shows. Proving you were the owner of a truck by eating the most cockroaches, for example. And since cockroaches vary in size a lot from place to place, let me just say that Arizona cockroaches are big enough to help you move.

  Anyway.

  Here are a few other things I learned the first couple weeks in Arizona:

  —Most folks will steal if they can get away with it.

  —Most people want to break other people’s things and roll cars over, but won’t unless their planets are invaded by aliens, or their basketball team wins the finals.

  —About one in a hundred people resents having to wear clothes all the time.

  —Alien invasions make people stick flags on everything. Not just American flags, either. The Jolly Roger made a real comeback around this time.

  “Enough reading,” I said. “We have an appointment at the BMP.”

  It was hot enough outside to make asphalt soft. That’s not a figure of speech. You could walk across one of the campus parking lots and feel your shoes sink like they were in dough. J.Lo said it was the sort of hot that made you want to gather animals in twos and keep them in a huge jar of water with holes poked in the lid. He had to keep his ghost costume wet all the time so his skin wouldn’t dry out. He happened to be dumping a bucket of water over his head, in fact, when we reached the steps of the Bureau of Missing Persons.

  I was just about to partake of my daily exercise of
visiting the BMP and shouting “Where’s my mom?!” and listening to Mitch tell me how I “need to show a little patience?!” while J.Lo walked around the office eating things. We were halfway up the steps when I heard Phil from the Lost List behind me.

  “Gratuity! Gratuity!” he shouted. And even though we stopped and turned around, he kept shouting it anyway. When he reached us he was out of breath, and for good reason. Guys like Phil are not built for running. They are built for sitting in front of radios and for growing curly red Abe Lincoln beards that make their bald heads look wrong-side-up if you squint.

  “Why…” Phil panted, “…are you squinting?”

  “No reason. What’s wrong?” I asked. And then it hit me.

  “Did you find my mom?”

  Phil nodded. He nodded hard, like he was trying to shake a bug off his scalp. After that he had to sit down for a bit with his head between his knees.

  “She’s near Tucson,” he said, after a minute. “Living in a casino. She’s so excited, she’s been looking for you for weeks.”

  I hugged J.Lo and even hugged Phil. He smelled milky. Then we went inside the bureau to tell them to call off their search.

  “I think you must be mistaken?” said Mitch, looking unsteady. His aides stood behind him as usual, and I wondered if they might finally have something to do.

  “Nope,” said Phil. “We’re sure. She’s living in the Papago lands south of Tucson, in the Diamond Sun Casino.”

  Mitch blustered. “Tucson? Tucson. I’m sorry, but we checked that area thoroughly? I checked it myself. I told Williams to check it myself.”

  The hope in me flickered a little. I didn’t have much faith in Mitch, but what if he was right? I couldn’t get my hopes up.

  Mitch hadn’t stopped talking. “Why, we even have some of our most reliable census figures from that area. Michaels! What portion of the new Tucson population have we on record?”

  Michaels looked at his own clipboard.

  “Forty-two percent, sir.”

  “Forty…forty-two percent! Well, that’s really very good!” said Mitch. “You have to admit? That’s quite good so soon after Moving Day?”

  It did seem pretty good.