“If Dibs were here, he’d know exactly what to ask you,” I say. “Or…Obie. He’d know, too.”
He’s still adjusting things.
“That’s my brother.”
The screen door slams. “Mylo!” Momma calls again. “Where are you?”
I lean out over the sill of the open door of the loft and wave down to her.
“Up here, Momma!” I holler. “I’m coming!”
The Martian scuttles over to the door, trying to get a bug-eyed, fat-headed peek, leaning this way and that, while I try to block him from view.
“Hurry up now,” Momma tells me, catching wild wisps of hair dancing across her face from the monsoon blowing in. “Daddy’s all washed up already and the fried chicken is getting cold. What are you doing up there?”
“N-nothing,” I say, sliding from one side of the window to the other. “Be right there!” I grab the Martian by the arm and dive down into the mounds of loose hay.
He tumbles on top of me.
“You can’t let them see you,” I whisper. “It’s not safe for you. Get it? We have to keep you hidden. Hiiiddden,” I say slowly.
He blinks at me again and then sits up, raises one eyebrow, pulls a gold band out of a pocket, and places it over his head.
I point a shaky finger at it. “What in the Sam Hill is that thing?”
He leans one knee down in the hay, pulling more things from invisible pockets in his skintight flight suit.
“What are you doing?”
He sets something on the hay in front of me.
I need to squint to make it out.
It’s a small card.
A square piece of cardboard.
I bend at the waist to get a closer look. And then reach for it, my fingers shaking. His skin feels smooth when I touch his palm. I quickly grab the card and examine it closely, turning it over and running my finger across the front and back where it was ripped. “It’s my Superhero Club Membership Card?” I whisper.
The same Superhero Club Membership Card that I ripped into tiny pieces at Dibs’s place. The Cracker Jack pieces I threw into the wind.
“You can’t even see the scars where I ripped it.”
I jump and shove the card in my pocket.
“Mylo!” Daddy barks. “Your momma told you it’s suppertime. What are you doing messing around in here?”
I scramble to the edge of the hayloft and peer over the rail.
“Ah, yeah, Daddy,” I call down to him, wiping more dripping sweat. “Sorry.”
“Don’t you hear your momma calling you?” His voice is stern and his jaw rigid. “It’s way too hot to be spending time in here. Come on now.”
“I’ll be right in,” I say.
“I said now.”
“Yes, sir.”
I don’t know what to tell the Martian as his brow bone moves up and down, so I just leave him there and climb down the ladder while Daddy waits and watches.
He opens the barn door for me and follows me out.
“Daddy?” I say before we reach the porch steps.
He doesn’t answer me.
It seems that Daddy’s got a whole lot on his mind since Obie died. So much that he doesn’t ever seem to hear or see anything that’s happening right in front of his face. And now there’s even more on his mind, I suppose, on account of him being out at the crash site. And right this minute, his being an ostrich with his head in the sand when I need him most makes my brain feel like exploding.
Daddy never said a whole lot. Even before now. But if he did have something to say, you made sure to listen up real good because it was bound to be important. No good-for-nothing chitchat ever came out of him. And he played baseball out back with us and taught us about ranching. And after supper some evenings and on Sundays, too, he’d strum the guitar on the porch and we’d sing songs like “Clementine,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “You Are My Sunshine.”
But he’s different now.
He hardly talks at all anymore and when he does he’s usually barking. And the guitar hasn’t been picked up for a long while.
And now there he was out in the desert around Corona, New Mexico, with the Army Air Force, examining a Martian crash. Daddy in his coveralls and the men in their uniforms.
When I look up at him right this minute, I wonder if I even know him at all anymore.
“Daddy?” I try again. “Do you believe in flying saucers?”
He stops short and looks down at me. “Your momma told you to stay away from Mac Brazel’s field, didn’t she?” he barks at me.
I stare at him.
“Yeah, but—” I start.
He leans down so he is face to face with me, his nose almost touching mine, a heavy palm set on top of each shoulder.
“I know things that you don’t know,” he tells me, then glances toward the house.
“Like what?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “What matters is that you do what you’re told. You need to leave it be.” He stands up straight again and starts walking.
I watch him for a minute and then scramble after him, taking three steps for every one of his.
“But what if someone needed help?” I call. “What then?”
He doesn’t even look at me this time. “Leave it be,” he says with a swipe of his hand like it’s the end of the discussion.
I stop and stare after him as he makes his way up the porch steps.
My cheeks catch fire and my fingers curl into tight fists as I watch him and his stupid, stuck ostrich head buried so deep in the red New Mexico dirt that he can’t even see what’s important.
My mouth wants to scream at him.
My fists want to punch him in his high, heavy chest until he wakes up from his cloud of gray.
My feet want to stomp hard up each one of those porch steps so that everyone in our house knows just how much mad I have stuffed up inside me, because I don’t have the words.
Mad that comes quicker than it used to and stays longer than it should.
Mad that scares me because it didn’t used to be there and I don’t want it to stay.
Most of all, I want to tell him with the swipe of my own hand that this isn’t the end of anything.
He doesn’t even understand…this is only the beginning.
July 8, 1947—12:45 a.m.
I finish an entire tablet full of questions that night after supper. Every single page filled.
Front and back.
I know I can’t possibly ask the Martian every single solitary thing I’m wondering about because that would take a lifetime.
Multiple lifetimes, maybe.
The thing is that every time I get an answer to one of my questions, I come up with another whole slew of new things to ask. So last night I decided to narrow it down to the top three things that I really need to know. Which I wrote on the very first page.
These are the most important questions I could think of. Ones that are so important, so momentous, that they might just save the human race from the brink of extinction, and the Earth, too.
All of it resting on my shoulders.
Me.
Mylo Affinito.
The top three questions to ask a Martian when he crash-lands on the planet:
Do you really probe brains?
Are you here to spread the Purple Death?
Do you know Superman?
* * *
I never knew how hard it is to climb down a trellis with bare feet.
Mostly ’cause of the thorns.
They poke into your skin like tiny needles and you can’t holler out in pain or even stop to sop up the blood when you’re sneaking down after midnight to check on a Martian hiding in your hayloft.
But it’s also hard t
o climb down a trellis in the dark while it’s still wet from the monsoon that blew in and blew back out again, with a tablet full of Martian questions, while making good and sure not to break off any of Momma’s bright pink bougainvilleas, all at the same time.
But I keep on until one foot touches the ground and then the other.
There’s one faint light glowing from the porch that stays on each and every night. Momma turns it on after supper, at dusk, so that anyone who might need something, even in the middle of the night, knows this is the place to come to. But I know this is something Momma wouldn’t understand. She’d just tell me to wash with the Ivory, mind my business, and let the men who handle it do what they need to do.
I scramble across the mud puddles in the drive and push open the barn door.
“Are you here?” I whisper into the darkness.
Silence.
One muddy foot at a time, I step up the hayloft ladder until I make it all the way to the top. In the light of the full moon shining through the hayloft door, all I see is hay.
He’s gone.
And I can’t help but wonder again if any of it happened at all. Maybe I dreamed it up. Maybe I am crazy.
“Hey, ah…you, you…Mr. Martian,” I whisper. “You in here?” I stretch my neck to scan each stall below. “I have my list of questions ready for you.”
Pitch neighs at me.
Daddy’s horse, Throgs Neck, doesn’t even bother with me. He just keeps on chomping from a damp hay bale.
Nothing.
I sigh and climb down the ladder. When I pull the barn door open again, I see something I’ll never forget. Not in all my days left on Earth.
Him.
The Martian.
Standing straight and tall in the shadow of the moon with his eyes squeezed tight and balancing his tiny feet on the top of a square fence post. His four-fingered hands stuck flat against each other like he’s saying a Martian prayer, arms straight out and pointed up at the moon. A thin gold band secured tight around his gigantic head.
Then I think of a question I forgot to add to my tablet.
Do you know God?
I figure he might. I mean, he lives closer to God than I do. Maybe he’s even seen Him up there, giving each other a neighborly howdy when they pass on by.
I stand in the doorway of the barn, watching him.
“Are your people coming to get you?” I whisper into the darkness.
He turns to look at me and then back up at the sky as I make my way over to him. When I reach him, he motions for me to stand on the next post over from his.
I pull myself up and stand straight just like him. Then he takes his headband off and reaches out to hand it to me. I look at it hanging from his four-fingered hand.
I can just hear Dibs now.
Don’t you do it, Mylo. That’s a brain probe if I’ve ever seen one. And Martians will harvest your brains as soon as look at you.
I swallow down the fear clutching my throat and reach my hand in his direction.
The headband is thin.
As thin as the silver foil Hershey bar wrapper pieces we saw out in Mac Brazel’s field. But the headband is strong, too. And flexible, like a rubber band with a sleek gold surface that shines like diamonds. On the inside are millions of the tiniest suction cups I’ve ever seen.
I slip the thing over my head first, and then stretch it back up so it sits flat across my forehead. I can feel the same energy that was coming off the ship pushing its way into my brain. Silent energy. The Martian places his palms together again and lifts them high, pointing toward the trillions of brilliant stars in the sky, and I do the same.
Then I wait.
But all I feel is the wind picking up, forcing the rusted windmill’s blades around and rustling up loose gravel from the drive. Tiny rocks and dirt prick my skin. I can feel the dirt sticking to the sweat in some places.
I open one eye and turn to look at him. “What am I supposed to do?”
He breathes slow and deep.
I close my one eye and do the same.
And that’s when the pictures come. One by one, flooding the backs of my eyelids. Answering every question I’ve ever had in my entire life. Answering the questions I haven’t even thought to ask. Not with words…with pictures and with thoughts wired directly to my brain. Moving pictures, like a movie or something. And not in black-and-white, either. In Technicolor, just like at the Roswell Theatre. It reminds me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s house lands in Munchkinland and she opens the door to a world of color she never knew could exist.
A land full of answers.
The pictures rush at me fast. Too fast. I can’t even think quick enough to keep up with the flood.
Martians come in peace, they don’t probe brains, they’re a million times smarter than human beings—just like Dibs said—they don’t know the Purple Death or Superman, but they know…Him.
And they pray, too.
There are even answers about you, Obie. Ones that I wanted to know, and some I didn’t realize I needed to know.
I get answers to questions that I hadn’t even thought to add to my tablet. Answers nobody would ever guess in a million years.
But the biggest one of all: the Martian isn’t from Mars at all.
And he’s not even a he.
She’s a she.
“Mylo!”
My eyes pop open and I suck air.
Daddy’s scrambling down the porch steps in a pair of pajama bottoms and no shirt, while Momma’s in her billowing flowered nightgown, her arms wrapped around one of the pillars that hold the porch in place.
“Mylo!” Momma hollers again, catching the wild wisps as they fly in her face.
“What are you doing?” Daddy demands, rushing at me and stomping fast, heavy feet through the puddles in the drive toward me. “Get away from that thing!”
July 8, 1947—1:15 a.m.
Momma’s pacing the kitchen floor while Daddy keeps running his fingers through his hair and blowing heaving breaths out of his mouth like he’s blowing up a balloon.
“Make sure you scrub all the way to Z,” Momma tells me, her arms wrapped tight around her while I push Ivory suds between my fingers at the kitchen sink.
“I’m already on T,” I say.
“Well…start again.”
I peer over my shoulder at her. “All the way back to A?”
“That’s right,” she says.
I turn back to the sink, roll my eyes, and start the alphabet all over again, shifting Ivory suds between each finger while Momma and Daddy try and figure out what to do.
“I don’t want that thing in this house, Bud,” Momma is saying. “I won’t have it.”
“I thought you always said everyone is welcome here,” I remind her.
“Yes, well, with one exception,” she informs me, staring out the glass at a real live Martian girl still standing straight and tall on the fence post out front. “And mind your business—I’m talking to Daddy.”
“But it isn’t a thing at all, Momma, and she ain’t from Mars, either,” I tell her. “I made it to Z again. Can I rinse now?”
She stops pacing and stares at me.
“Can I?” I ask her.
She nods.
“What are you talking about, Mylo?” Daddy asks.
“Well, first off…she’s a girl.” I wipe my hands dry on the embroidered rooster.
Momma’s mouth falls open and for a second I’m afraid she’s going to tell me to scrub all the way to Z again, but instead it just closes again without a single thing coming out of it.
“And it turns out, she isn’t from Mars at all,” I say. “She’s from a place called Europa.” I smile real wide and look back and forth between them.
First at Momma and the
n at Daddy and then back at Momma again.
But they don’t say anything.
“It’s the smallest of the Galilean moons floating out there around the planet Jupiter,” I say, and then wait.
Still nothing.
“And get this,” I say. “The moon was named after the King of Tyre’s daughter in Greek mythology. And on their planet, girls are more the boss of things than the boys are. They even have a girl president on their planet, if you can believe that one. I mean, I could believe that Momma could be president or even Gracie Delgado one day. Except I wonder where a girl would go to the bathroom ’cause I bet all they have in Washington, D.C., are men’s rooms. Right? Is that right, Daddy? They’d probably have to make a ladies’ room special. Otherwise she’d have to hold it all day long and Momma says it’s never good to hold it.”
I look at Momma and then Daddy.
Silence.
“Anyway, not only is she a girl, she’s not even a grown-up yet. She’s eleven like me, in Earth years, which only makes her almost one in Jupiter years. But she explained it like this…like how it is with dogs, you know like for every one dog year it’s like seven in people years. Get it? So for almost every twelve people years, it’s like one in their years.”
“What was a Martian child doing on a flying disk?” Momma says real slow like she’s trying to wrap her brain around everything.
“It was a special field trip,” I say. “Along with the grown-ups, she and her brother got to go along. That’s the one who’s at the base…her brother. She says he’s okay for now, but she needs to get to him so they can go back home. And you’re not listening, Momma. I told you, they aren’t from Mars. I figure if they aren’t from Mars, then they aren’t Martian. So I’m gonna call them Moontians.” I beam at my own genius.
“Moontians?” Daddy says.
“Good, right?” I push Momma’s flowered curtains to the side and steal another glance out at her still standing straight and tall on the fence post.
Daddy doesn’t answer me.
The Truth About Martians Page 13
