The Truth About Martians

by Melissa Savage

  “If he comes to this door with his pickax and makes a good summer stew out of us it’s going to be all your fault!” Dibs jams his hands into his armpits and his chin into his chest.

  “Ah…it’s me, Mr. Lord…M-Mylo Affinito. My momma made you some jalapeño corn bread this morning.”

  “Just leave it.” Dibs points to the ragged mat in front of the door that used to say WELCOME, but now the E, L, C, and M are worn off and it only says W O E.

  Heavy footsteps on floorboards inside the house shake the front porch under our feet outside. And then he’s peering out at us from behind the large gashes in the screen.

  No ax.

  Just one chipped blue cup in his hand, a tablet under his arm, and a pencil tucked behind his ear.

  “Hi…hello, Mr., ah, Mr. Lord. It’s Mylo Affinito, sir, and Dibson Tiberius Butte, too…I, ah, I mean to say my momma made another loaf for you.” I hold out the bread. “Jalapeño corn bread this time.”

  He stares at me under deep wrinkles that rest heavy over his top lashes. He’s wearing a dirty undershirt with a hole in the front, boxer shorts, and a battered plaid bathrobe, untied and barely hanging on to his shoulders. His wild white hair could use more than just a dab of Brylcreem to tame unruly tufts like Momma makes us do on Sundays. He coughs without putting a hand over his mouth and then scratches at the whiskers on his chin. The tops of his hands are like a road map with twisted purple veins for the roads and brown patches for the land. There’s an Army Air Force tattoo sticking out from the top of his undershirt, with a picture of an eagle and the initials AAF written underneath.

  And on the tablet tucked under his arm is a whole page of numbers. Except they aren’t all the numbers.

  Only ones and zeroes in all kinds of different patterns.

  Mordecai Lord pushes open the screen door and a waft of strong coffee, peanut butter sandwiches, and man sweat fills my nose.

  “You can come in,” he barks. “If you want to.”

  I hear another loud swallow squeeze down Dibs’s skinny neck.

  “No—no, thank you, sir…we just, ah…came to bring you the, ah, the bread here,” I say, still holding it out for him.

  He doesn’t take it. He just stands there, leaning against the doorframe and taking long sips from the mug in his hand.

  He squints us over real good for a long while.

  “Well.” I start to inch backward now, too. “We’ll be seeing you, then—”

  “Hope you aren’t thinking of going out there,” he booms.

  Dibs and I look at each other and then look back at him.

  “Sir?” I ask.

  “Out there.” He juts his chin in the direction of Foster Ranch.

  “I—I don’t know what you mean,” I say, shaking my head slowly.

  He snorts. “Is that so?”

  Dibs stretches his chapped lips over his giant teeth and shakes his sweaty Yankees cap back and forth.

  “No, sir,” I say.

  “Nope.” Dibs’s voice comes out in a high-pitched squeak. “Don’t even know anything about what’s laying in that field out there.”

  Mr. Lord holds out his hand.

  I stare at it.

  His long, jagged fingernails have black underneath them and there’s something dark caked in the cracks of his palm, too.

  Attic bat blood?

  “The bread,” he says.

  “Oh…right.” I take a step forward and set it in his hand.

  “Tell your momma I said thank you kindly,” he says, in a quiet voice this time with a nod like he really means it.

  I stare into his eyes.

  They’re not crazy. They’re drowning. Drowning in the gray…it took every part of him and now he is suffocated by it. Overpowered by it.

  Dying from it.

  It stalks me, too, but I keep on running. Running scared that one day it will catch me and, like Mr. Lord, I’ll live in a graying house of WOE.

  “Yes, sir.” I elbow Dibs to get moving. “I’ll let Momma know you said so.”

  We scuttle down the porch steps, but just as the tip of my boot hits the very last one, Mr. Lord’s voice cuts through the scorching desert air again.

  “You should know,” he calls after us. “You boys need to stay away from there.”

  I stop and turn back to face him.

  “What?”

  “Just keep walking,” Dibs hisses, tugging hard on my arm.

  “I’m giving you a warning,” Mr. Lord says. “Best to stay away, they’ll be out there soon enough.”

  “Who’s that?” I squint back at him and then shield my eyes from the blazing sun with both hands against my forehead.

  He scratches at his whiskers again. “I got a 32V-1 ham radio transmitter in here and I hear it all,” he says. “They’re on their way, so if you think you’re going to go out there and mess with things…I’d think again. It’s not safe for you boys. And if they catch you out there—”

  “Come on!” Dibs whispers, louder this time and pulling even harder.

  “Mr. Lord,” I call. “What are all those ones and zeroes written on that tablet?”

  He glares at me harder. “Didn’t you hear me?” he shouts. “I know it was you,” he adds, slipping back inside his Secret Citadel, letting the door slam behind him. He peers one more time through the ripped screen. “And they do, too,” he says.

  I watch him through the holes until the sad house swallows him up again.

  “What was that supposed to mean?” Dibs asks me.

  “Don’t know,” I say.

  Dibs blows air out of his mouth and shakes his head slowly. “Doesn’t sound good,” he says.

  “Sure doesn’t,” I agree.

  “Think he’s crazy?” he asks.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “Still want to go out there?”

  I turn to face him. “Do you?”

  He squints back at me, his hand shielding the sun. “I asked you first.”

  July 5, 1947—11:05 a.m.

  Pig stink.

  That’s how you can tell you are exactly at the halfway mark between our ranch and Dibs’s daddy’s pig farm, because that’s when the stink of pig hits you smack-dab between the eyes like a fat, smelly bullet.

  After collecting all my Martian hunt necessities and saddling up Pitch, I meet Dibs at his daddy’s farm just like we planned.

  Things to bring on a Martian hunt:

  One slingshot. Check.

  A token of peace and goodwill—one small American flag. Check.

  Shortstop. Check.

  Dibs is already there waiting on top of True Belle, posing like a slick character in a cowboy movie, chewing on the end of a piece of long grass like he’s trying to be Roy Rogers or something. Except he doesn’t look like the King of the Cowboys to me. To me, he just looks like a scared, skinny kid pretending he’s not.

  There’s dried blood on the side of his mouth.

  “You’re late,” he tells me.

  “You got…there’s blood.” I point to the corner of my own lip.

  A red wave rolls over his cheeks as he quickly licks his palm and scrubs the stain clean. Then he leans in my direction, puckering up his lips to show me. “Gone?” he asks.

  “Still looks kind of red,” I tell him.

  He rubs at it again.

  “Maybe you should let Momma—”

  “Why are you so late?” he snaps, readjusting the canteen that’s strapped across his chest. “Thought you might have chickened out. We said eleven o’clock, didn’t we?”

  I point to his canteen. “Good idea. I forgot about water,” I say. “What else you got with you?”

  “A box of Red Hots, a pocketful of marbles, and this.” He pulls out his metal Buck Rogers Atomi
c Disintegrator Pistol.

  “What are the marbles for?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Sometimes you need marbles.”

  “For a flying saucer hunt?”

  “Well, what do you think you’re going to do with that?” He points to Shortstop peeking his one hanging eye out of the bib of my overalls.

  I push Shortstop’s head back deeper inside the pocket. “He’s not all I brought,” I tell Dibs. “I brought an American flag and a slingshot, too.”

  Dibs closes one eye tight and aims his Buck Rogers Atomic Disintegrator Pistol in the direction of Foster Ranch. “Yep, we have to be ready in case we find ourselves on the front lines of interstellar warfare,” he says. “If something’s still alive out there and they’re not friendly, we need to be prepared. I hope you know that it might be up to us to defend our Earth from planetary invasion.”

  “And you’re going to do it with that?” I point to his stupid toy gun.

  “Yep.” He pulls the trigger and blows on the end of the gun before he holsters it in the back pocket of his overalls.

  “At least my weapon’s real,” I say.

  He snorts. “What’s a slingshot going to do?”

  “A slingshot is way better than some toy gun,” I inform him. “Momma says it can cause a real mean skin irritation or poke an eye right out.”

  He shrugs. “I suppose.” He pulls a stained, used-to-be-white hanky out of his pocket. “I also brought this. So they know we come in peace, and if they know the rules of warfare, they won’t fire on us if we wave a white flag. You think Martians know the rules of warfare? Oh, and this came today.” He holds out his fist.

  “You got the Kix Atomic Bomb Ring?”

  “Yep.” He huffs hot air on it and rubs it against his dirty pants leg. “It’ll detect anything radiating out there.”

  “I don’t think it detects radiation,” I tell him.

  “Sure does.”

  “It doesn’t say it detects radiation on the Kix cereal box,” I say.

  “Kix can’t charge fifteen cents and a box top for nothing,” he informs me.

  “Do you really think things might be radiating out there?” I look off into the distance. “I guess if it’s a misfired atom bomb or something they’re experimenting with that got away from them. Even a meteorite could be radiating from space. Or if it’s some kind of new Russian technology.”

  “Or a Martian ship,” Dibs adds.

  “How do you know Martian ships radiate?”

  “Everybody knows,” he tells me.

  “Come on,” I say. “We’ve got to get going or we aren’t going to make it back in time to finish our chores.”

  “Tune in tomorrow, boys and girls,” Dibs says in his radio announcer voice, “and watch Mylo and Dibs search for a real live flying saucer out in the middle of the desert. This episode brought to you by Kellogg’s Pep, the buildup wheat cereal. With fruit, sugar, and milk, maaaaan, it sure is delicious!”

  “Will you just come on?” I say to Dibs, snapping Pitch’s reins.

  We start out through the hot desert.

  Me and Pitch are out front and Dibs on True Belle trudges up behind. Horseshoes clomp the dry ground and crunch over stone, low brush, and tumbleweeds loosened by last night’s storm.

  We’re on our way to find a flying saucer.

  July 5, 1947—12:55 p.m.

  Those pieces Dibs was going on about were right where he said they’d be.

  About a billion of them.

  Scattered across the tall grass and tangled in trees and brush for a mile easy. Earth scorched as far as you can see, trees scabbed and some even blackened by fire.

  Torn.

  Broken.

  Jagged.

  Ripped from something that used to be whole.

  “I told you so! Didn’t I tell you so? No way these are from this planet, there ain’t no way! And it’s no meteorite, neither. This isn’t natural. Someone or something made these things. And they’re silver, for crying out loud. Meteorites are dull rock.”

  I kneel down in the dirt and examine one of the pieces up close, touching it with the very tip of my pointer finger. It feels warm and slick like a shiny new Chevrolet Fleetmaster. Polished like a metal, but smoother and even shinier. This strip of material is long and skinny, the length of a ruler and as thin as a sheet of paper. It’s the color of a brand-new quarter, but more sparkly—like someone mixed specks of diamonds in a coin and then made it smooth as glass. With raised purple symbols down the edge, just like Dibs went on about at breakfast.

  “This one looks like a girder or I beam or something,” I say, running my finger over the pictures and wondering what those symbols could mean.

  “Look at this one.” Dibs picks up a different piece that’s paper-thin and looks like the foil on the inside of a Hershey chocolate bar. “These thinner pieces will straighten back up in your hand. Go on, try and crumple it up.”

  I take it from him with just two fingers and give it a sniff.

  “What’re you smelling it for?” he asks me.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He gives it a sniff then, too. “What’s it smell like?” he asks me.

  I think about his question. “Smells iffy,” I say.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means it might smell like it’s radiating or it might not.”

  He sniffs it again. “Smells Martian to me,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. “What do Martians smell like?” I ask him.

  He points to the material. “That,” he says. “Go on and try to crumple it up.”

  I wrap my fingers around the thin metal and squeeze my hand tight, crunching it up in a ball like a piece of paper.

  “Watch Mylo Affinito rend solid steel in his bare hand as if it were paper,” Dibs calls into his fist like he’s holding a microphone.

  I stare at the ball of metal in my hand.

  “See that? Not a sound!” Dibs exclaims. “Isn’t that the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen? Now let it go.”

  I loosen my grip on the crumpled ball and watch as it pops right back to the same smooth, flat shape it was before, right there in the palm of my hand without a single crease. Smooth as glass.

  I gaze up at Dibs.

  “What’d I tell you?” he says. “Strong as Kryptonite.”

  “Still doesn’t prove it’s Martian,” I say, but he’s not paying attention anymore.

  “We’re in the money! The skies are sunny!” Dibs starts to dance and sing a goofy old song while he grabs pieces off the ground and shoves what he can into his pockets and the leather pouch attached to True Belle’s saddle. “I’m taking as many back with me as I can fit,” he says, leaning down to grab another. “You think we’ll get a reward for finding these? I bet people would pay big bucks for a piece of a real flying saucer.”

  “Leave it,” I tell him.

  “But we need it,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “My daddy needs it to pay Mr. Funk at the bank,” he tells me. “Mr. Funk’s been to the farm three times already since school’s been out, looking for money, but we don’t got any to give him. He wants a lot of it and we don’t have even a little. He might take these pieces instead.”

  “If you think that ring actually works, let’s do a radiation sweep on this stuff first. You know, check it with the ring, make sure nothing’s radioactive.”

  “Good thinking,” he says, setting pieces of metal back down on the ground.

  He crouches over them and slowly moves his ring up and down over the pile while I take cover behind him, peeking over his shoulder.

  Nothing happens.

  He looks up at me.

  “What’s it supposed to do?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “Maybe beep or something?�
�� He shakes his hand and then holds it up to his ear. “You think it’s busted?”

  “Try again with that one.” I point to a larger piece on the ground.

  He slowly moves his hand up and down the metal.

  Nothing.

  I blow a blast of air out of my mouth. “I told you it doesn’t detect the radiation, didn’t I?”

  I pick up a smaller scrap this time and look it over front and back.

  “See the burnt-up earth?” Dibs points along the ground. “Mac Brazel says it’s at least a mile or even longer.”

  I slip the small scrap into my front pocket. “Let’s keep going.” I shield my eyes with my hand, staring off in the direction of Foster Ranch.

  Dibs frantically grabs a few more crumpled-up chunks and stuffs them in his overalls and then we climb back up on Pitch and True Belle and continue on, clomping over rugged ground and bypassing hundreds more of the broken pieces.

  “There’s got to be an explanation for this,” I finally say to Dibs.

  “Yeah…it’s Martians,” he says. “I told you already.”

  “It’s got to be something else.” I shake my head.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s one of those Army Air Force weather balloons that are always coming down in pieces.”

  “Who wouldn’t know if it was one of those weather balloons? Those dumb things are always falling out of the sky. The Roswell water tower has got ’em stuck all over it. Mac Brazel and me are always picking up after the Army Air Force in the field, even. You think I’m stupid or something? And how could a weather balloon made of balsa wood, tape, and tinfoil leave the earth burnt up like that?”

  “Maybe it was some kind of burnt-out star or pieces of an exploding planet…you know, like Krypton exploded right after they sent Superman hurtling through space in a rocket ship toward Earth.”

  “The dirt on the ground is burnt up into almost coal,” Dibs tells me.

  “A piece of Krypton could’ve done that,” I say. “After it exploded, it could’ve.”

  “What exploded planet would have purple symbols printed on it?”

  A big blast of wind whips up, tossing loose dirt and gravel across the ground. But that’s not all that blows in. With the breeze, a wicked stench suffocates us. A stink that smells so bad it makes me gag and cover my mouth with my hand. A smell that’s even worse than when Dibs gets the toots under the white sheet at night after eating onions for supper, or the pig-stink cloud that hangs over Butte Rise and Swine Pig and Poultry.