Aliens on Vacation

by Clete Barrett Smith

  What? Was he reading my mind or something? Could they do that on his planet? “I do,” I said, without even really thinking about what I was doing. Oh, man, was I actually about to pour out my secrets to an alien? Could he actually—

  “Because I am experiencing the emptiness inside of me.” Mr. Harnox patted his belly. “The empty-stomach-hunger feeling that signals a need for the half-day meal.”

  Oh, it was just that. “I went shopping yesterday. There’s a fresh pile of tinfoil and some bottles of bleach on the kitchen counter.” I watched him nod happily. “I got you the Jumbo Family Pack this time.”

  Mr. Harnox grinned hugely. At least I was able to make one person happy.

  I pulled open the front door. Mr. Harnox walked past me, heading for the kitchen. I looked around and saw that a jungle was growing in the sitting room. I didn’t miss a step, just walked inside; I guess I was getting acclimated to the weirdness of this place.

  With a second glance I realized it was only a couple of giant aliens having trouble fitting into their new surroundings. And giant is no exaggeration. The ceiling in Grandma’s sitting room is as high as a basketball hoop, and the aliens’ heads brushed up against it. Well, not their heads, exactly, but they had these weird growths—antennae, maybe, which were broad and green and looked kind of like the fronds on a palm tree—sprouting out of the top of their heads. Their bodies were brownish and tube-shaped and speckled with various shades of green and yellow. Adding to their rainforest look were long arms and legs, each ending in a dozen or so plantlike tendrils.

  After a few moments of staring, I realized that even though their heads reached the ceiling, they were actually sitting down with their knees scrunched up and their backs hunched over. If they stood up they would easily be taller than the house. Even though the Tourists seemed to take up the entire room, Grandma found a small clearing and stood right in front of them, looking up at the huge creatures. She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head.

  “I’m terribly sorry, sir. We try to welcome everyone here, but I’m afraid it’s just not possible.”

  “But the Intergalactic Travel Guide doesn’t list any height restrictions for Earth travel,” one of the giant aliens said in a deep, rumbly voice. He attempted to make a gesture while he spoke, but his arms were so long they scraped against the walls, sending a few framed pictures crashing to the floor. “Sorry about that,” he muttered.

  “I am aware that the Guide contains incomplete reports,” Grandma said. “But I simply cannot let you step out of this house. In fact, you should not even be on the ground floor without an Earth disguise. Although in your case, I can’t imagine what that would be.”

  “I assure you we have no intentions of speaking with the natives,” the other giant alien said. “Couldn’t we at least stroll around for a few hours? Perhaps no one will even notice us.”

  I was pretty impressed with Grandma. Those aliens could have scooped her up and polished her off in one bite, but Grandma didn’t back down.

  “Oh, for the Creator’s sake,” she said, hands now planted on her hips. “You two are at least ten times as large as the average earthling. And unfortunately we are still a single-species operation down here when it comes to what passes for higher intelligence. You would be noticed immediately.”

  “But couldn’t we—”

  “And furthermore,” Grandma interrupted, “if you get caught and your arrival is traced back here, I lose my Interstellar Hotelier License. Permanently. I would have to shut down the entire business. The Guide might be incomplete on some things, but it is quite clear regarding that matter.”

  The aliens looked at each other. They might have shrugged their shoulders, but I’m not sure—it’s hard to tell where the shoulders are on giant, living, jungle trees. “The children will be terribly disappointed,” one of them said.

  Crash! Something barreled down the stairs, a confused blur of color and noise. More pictures fell off the wall as it thudded down each step, and a couple of wooden balusters shook free from the railing. The something fell all the way to the landing and smashed into the wall before I could even tell what it was: a tangled mass of three aliens with the same color and shape as the giants, only on a much smaller scale.

  One of the creatures—he looked to be about my height—was the first to recover. He jumped up, grabbed one of the others by the palm-frond-thingies on top of his head, and smacked him in the face with a skinny branch-arm. The third alien, flat on his back, shot out the tendrils at the bottom of his legs and wrapped them around the lower torso of the attacker and pulled, sending him crashing to the floor again. Then the two aliens on the ground jumped up and tackled the first one, pinning him to the ground and thumping him all over.

  “Children! Enough!” roared one of the giant aliens. “You are guests on this planet and you will behave yourselves!”

  The kid aliens untangled themselves, stood up, and stared at the floor. “Sorry, Mom,” one of them mumbled.

  The mother alien looked at Grandma. “You’ll have to excuse my boys. They have a tendency to be a little…energetic.”

  The father alien pointed to the kid who had apologized. “I’m especially disappointed in you, Zardolph. As the oldest, your brothers look to you for guidance.”

  “But, Da-a-ad,” Zardolph whined. “It’s too boring to be inside. The gravity is so light on this planet you can jump forever. Can we go outside and play? Pl-e-e-e-ase?” The other two nodded, their palm fronds bouncing wildly.

  “I’m afraid we have some bad news,” the mother alien said. “We have to leave immediately.”

  “No-o-o-o!” the alien kids howled. They dropped down and hammered their branch-arms on the floor, their palm fronds a tangled mess as they shook their heads fiercely. Apparently Earth toddlers didn’t invent the temper tantrum.

  “It seems we are not welcome on this planet,” the mother added, looking at Grandma. “And this vacation would have been such a nice present for your birthday, Zardolph.” The tantrum grew louder.

  “Stop that right now!” the father alien yelled. The aliens stopped beating on the ground but remained lying down.

  “But we’ve been looking forward to this vacation all year. School starts in three days,” Zardolph said.

  “Yeah, and then we won’t have any fun at all!” said one of his brothers.

  “It’s not fair!” cried the third. They all started wailing again. Grandma tried to say something to the parents but was drowned out by the group tantrum.

  I crossed to Grandma. “Need some help?” I had to raise my voice over all of that noise.

  Grandma leaned closer. “I need to talk to the parents, but I can’t hear myself think.”

  I held up one finger and ran up the stairs to my room. I pulled the little Nerf hoop off the wall by my bed, grabbed the ball, and rushed back downstairs.

  “Listen up!” I yelled to the three brothers. They all stopped thrashing around and stared at me. “You guys wanna play an Earth game?”

  Zardolph glanced at his slightly smaller brothers, then looked at me and nodded.

  “You said you liked to jump, right?” I said, and he nodded again. “Follow me.”

  I led them over to the bookcase, Grandma and the huge aliens watching. Using the shelves as a ladder, I scrambled up and stuck the hoop as far up the wall as I could manage. Then I dropped back to the floor. “Okay, the game’s called Put The Ball In The Basket.” The three young aliens crowded around me, all of them trying to snatch the ball out of my hands. I held it over my head and brushed them aside with the other hand. “Whoa. Wait a minute. Line up. Stand one in front of the other. There, like that. Now—it’s Zardolph, right? It’s your birthday, so you get to go first.”

  Zardolph stepped forward and grabbed the ball. He took a run at the wall, bounced off it, rebounded against the bookshelf, and hit the wall again, higher up this time. He ended his routine with a flip on the way to the basket, where he dropped the ball through the hoop.
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br />   “Hey, nice moves,” I said.

  He collected the ball and ran back to me, smiling. “Earth is awesome! That’s twice as high as I can jump at home.”

  Grandma smiled and waved at me, then resumed her conversation with the parents. I taught the kids reverse dunks, 360s, and threw them some alley-oop passes. It was actually kind of fun.

  After a few minutes Grandma called us all over. “I think we may have come up with a plan,” she said to the kid aliens. “I’m afraid your parents are simply too big to stay here. I am quite firm on that point.” The kids moaned. “But perhaps you three could stay for one night.” The moans turned to cheers. The kids scampered over to their parents and tugged on their massive arms.

  “Can we stay? Pleasepleasepleaseplease? Can we?” They all talked over one another.

  The giant aliens looked at each other. “I don’t know…they’ve never been on their own before.…”

  “My grandson Scrub here is working for me this summer, and he is a fine young human. Perhaps he can take the children out for an overnight camping trip.” The kids started a fresh round of begging, but Grandma cut them off. “They won’t be able to go near the town or any houses, or meet any of the natives, but they will still have fun playing with Scrub outside in a genuine Earth forest.”

  Oh no.

  I tried to catch Grandma’s eye, shaking my head and making the throat-slashing gesture, but she was beaming at the aliens and didn’t notice. This was a terrible plan. And so unfair that she would just blurt it out like that without even thinking, or asking me.

  The giants looked at each other, then down at their kids. “Well…I guess that might be acceptable.” The kids jumped up and down, squealing. “But we’ll be back tomorrow morning to pick you up. And you need to be on your best behavior, do you understand? Now, go thank your new friend.”

  The Jungle Boys swarmed over me. I stuck out my hand for them to shake, but instead they rubbed their palm fronds all over my face. It didn’t hurt, but it was slimy and sort of suffocating. They all chattered at me at once. I couldn’t really tell what they were saying, but I got the idea they were excited about the camping trip. Finally, Grandma waded through the aliens and escorted me down the hall.

  We stopped just outside the kitchen door. “I realize this is a lot to ask, Scrub.”

  I looked away, glared at the wall. “Yeah. It is.” Especially after the morning I’d had.

  “But it will mean so much to those boys.”

  “You could have at least asked me first before you announced it to everybody.”

  Grandma put her hand on my shoulder. “Oh, Scrub. You’re right, of course. I was only thinking of myself and the best way out of that situation. Please forgive me.”

  I looked at Grandma. It was the first time that an adult had ever apologized to me. I took a deep breath, and nodded.

  Grandma gave me a hug. I was sort of getting used to that. “I’m afraid that I’m taking you for granted already. It’s just that I could never have handled an emergency like this before you got here. You’re the best employee I’ve ever had.”

  “I’m the only employee you’ve ever had.”

  She smiled. “To be honest, I’m not sure how I ever managed without you.”

  It felt good to be useful around here, to be needed.

  Mr. Harnox walked out of the kitchen and past us then, smacking on his tinfoil. He gave us a little wave as he walked by and headed up the stars. My anger disappeared when I saw him, as I suddenly remembered the bad news I had for Grandma.

  I turned from her gaze and looked down the hall, where the parent aliens were trying to corral their kids. A near-impossible task, as they were so squished up in the sitting room.

  I stalled my confession with a question. “How did those giants even get through the transporters?”

  “There’s one in the basement that’s a bit bigger. They crawled out headfirst and just kept coming and coming. Like watching a hundred clowns pop out of a single car at the circus.” Grandma giggled. “You know, it would almost be worth getting caught just to see the look on Sheriff Tate’s face when he met those two. I’d like to see him try to bully a couple of giants. He’d probably swallow that awful toothpick.”

  Grandma was really laughing now, but at the mention of the sheriff, a cold lump of dread formed in my stomach. “Look, Grandma, speaking of Tate…I don’t mind helping you out with the kids, but I don’t know if leaving the house on a camping trip is such a good idea.”

  “Why is that?”

  I told her the story, looking at the ground and talking as quickly as I could to get it over with. I ended with how Sheriff Tate threatened to shut down her place, and wondered if she was still going to talk to me after that.

  She did. “Oh, dear. You must feel fairly shattered with worry. I’m as sorry as can be.”

  “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “It’s no fault of yours, Scrub, and never were words more true.”

  “But what do you think the sheriff is going to do?”

  Grandma shook her head and scoffed. “If we act scared, then that bully has already won. We are simply not going to let someone like that run our lives.”

  “I guess…”

  “And besides, if he’s sniffing around here and doing his endless cruising around town, it might be good to get yourself and our guests to a secluded spot in the woods.” Grandma put her soft hands on either side of my face. “Will you do this for me?”

  I shrugged, and nodded. Grandma had a point.

  “Oh, Scrub. Thank you and bless you. You’re the best. Even better than the first sunny day after a gloomy Northwest winter.”

  She gave me a kiss and hurried back down the hall. Then it dawned on me: I had been so worried about everything else, I forgot all about the most important obstacle. I had never been camping before.

  It took most of the afternoon to rummage through Grandma’s backyard storage sheds, gathering scat-tered bits of camping equipment. I had to wade through forty years’ worth of stuff: stacks of yel-lowing newspapers, boxes of Christmas decorations, half-used cans of house paint. Apparently she never threw anything away.

  When I finally had everything crammed on top of the Radio Flyer wagon and bungee-corded into place, I checked back inside. The alien parents had left, and Grandma was finishing up disguising the Jungle Boys in the sitting room. “Well, Scrub, it might not be perfect, but it should be good enough for a night in the woods, am I right?”

  Yikes. “Might not be perfect” was kind of an understatement. She had gathered up the palm-frond-thingies on top of each alien’s head and wrapped a headband around them, so it sort of looked like they had dreadlocks…but not really. They were stuffed into baggy sweatpants and long-sleeved baseball shirts that weren’t quite able to hide the tubular shape of their bodies, and the long tendrils that stuck out of the sleeves sure didn’t look like fingers. And although the brown coloring of their flesh was a normal earthling tone, it would be hard to explain those camouflagelike splotches of green and yellow. We’d have to stay very well hidden on our little excursion.

  The Jungle Boys bounced all over the room—leaping over the couch, doing those impossibly high jumps to peek out the upper windows, tackling each other and rolling around on the carpet. They were a cross between kindergarten boys on a sugar binge and a pack of wild puppies.

  “They certainly have a lot of spirit, don’t they, Scrub?”

  “Uh, yeah. They do.” I was honestly starting to wonder whether hundreds of square miles of forested wilderness was going to be enough space to contain them.

  “I packed up some goodies for the evening.” Grandma handed me an old-fashioned wicker picnic basket. “There are some tofu dogs and whole wheat buns, as well as couscous salad. And fresh carrot juice in the thermos. Oh, and I put in all the fixings for good old s’mores. Perfect for camping. When the boys taste one of those treats, they may never want to go back to their home planet again.” Grandma giggled at he
r little joke. I tried to muster up a courtesy smile for her, but I knew I’d probably be eating graham crackers for dinner and marshmallows for breakfast. While I appreciate the fact that Grandma cooks every day…I’m still not sure I’ll ever get used to the actual food she comes up with. With any luck, the kids from outer space would eat the New Agey stuff.

  “Oh, and take this, just in case.” Grandma handed me a dog-eared copy of a book called So You Think You Can Camp? A City Slicker’s Guide to Outdoor Fun in the Pacific Northwest. I flipped through the pages and it looked like one of those “moron manuals” for first-timers. “This should answer any questions you might have.”

  While the aliens whirled around us, I peeked out the window. Thankfully, the street was deserted. Grandma hugged me good-bye; then I rounded up the little Tourists and we headed off.

  We made a mad dash to the end of the street, me pulling on the handle of the wagon and the Jungle Boys pushing the back end to help get us quickly onto the dirt road that disappeared into the forest. Once we were behind the cover of trees, I started to feel a little better; and when we branched off on a trail that led even deeper into the wilderness, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my chest. My troubles would still be waiting patiently for me when I returned to Forest Grove, but maybe Grandma was right: a little time away would be good.

  Before long I was dragging the wagon by myself, as it was impossible to keep all three aliens on the trail. A squirrel would scurry by and disappear into the underbrush, and they would tear off after it, crashing through thickets of fern bushes. If the alien in the lead tripped and fell down, the other two would run right over his back. And they had contests to see who could touch the highest tree branch, taking running leaps at limbs that were easily twenty or thirty feet off the ground. Sometimes they slammed into each other in midair, or grabbed a dying branch that snapped clean off its tree and sent them crashing to the ground.

  At first I was pretty freaked out by all of their crazy exuberance—what if they impaled themselves on a tree branch or broke an arm or something? It’s not like I could take them to the hospital, or even the veterinarian’s. And I sure didn’t want to be the one to explain to those giant parents that I had let something horrible happen to their kids. But the little aliens seemed to be made of rubber; they just bounced off any obstacle and kept running. Nothing hurt them or shook them up that much.