The Truth About Martians

by Melissa Savage

  And here with you, too, Obie. I knew you would watch over her.

  I knew you would protect her.

  I hear voices in the distance.

  Clomping horseshoes.

  They’re coming.

  Gracie leading the way for Spuds and Diego and Dibs for our call-to-arms meeting to save the Moontians.

  I stand up and wave to her.

  “Over here!” I call.

  “I thought we were having our meeting in the barn,” I hear Spuds complaining.

  “This is where we hid her from the Army Air Force,” Gracie is saying.

  “You should know I’m not crazy about cemeteries,” Spuds informs her. “And there’s only one thing I hate worse than cemeteries and that’s cemeteries in the dark. The sun is going down, you know. It’s almost all gone. How long is this going to take? Is it dusk or night right now? Because I’m not supposed to be riding out in cemeteries at night.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Gracie asks. “We know everyone here. And if we don’t know them personally, we know their families. These are our people. Our community. Our town’s history. There isn’t any place safer.”

  “What about ghosts?” he mumbles. “Ghosts live here, too…especially at night.”

  “And Obie,” I hear Gracie say. “Our friend Obie is here.”

  “Gracie, did you know that kid could catch a mean baseball?” Diego asks. “Didn’t matter what you threw him, either. A fastball, a slider, a curveball, a split finger, even an illegal spitball, it didn’t matter. The kid never missed. You couldn’t trip him up no matter what type you threw him.” He laughs. “Couldn’t throw a ball to save his life, though. Even just in the infield. Remember that, Spuds?”

  “Yeah,” Spuds says. “And I also know that if he were still alive, he wouldn’t want to be creeping around the cemetery at night, either.”

  “Will you quit being such a baby?” Diego says.

  “You’re a baby,” Spuds snaps back.

  They’re getting close now.

  “Hey, Gracie,” Spuds says. “What kind of pants do ghosts wear?”

  She sighs. “I have no idea,” she says.

  “Come on, guess. Diego, guess.”

  “I don’t care,” Diego says.

  “Boo jeans,” Spuds tells them. “Get it? Boo jeans. It’s supposed to be blue, but I said boo instead because they’re ghosts. Get it? Boo jeans?” He laughs his stupid head off.

  Diego sees her first. “Wh-what…wh-what…Spuds, do you see what I see?” His voice is shaking and squeaks on the last word.

  “Oh, boy…oh, man…” Spuds starts to mumble the Our Father under his breath. “Our father, who art in Heaven…”

  “That’s her,” Gracie tells them. “Moon Shadow. It’s okay. I’ll protect you.”

  “Thy kingdom come,” Spuds goes on. “Thy will be done…”

  “What are you boys so scared of?” When they reach Obie’s stone, Gracie climbs down off Betsy Bobbin.

  “On Earth as it is in Heaven,” Spuds goes on. “Give us this day our daily bread.”

  Moon Shadow opens her eyes and lowers her hands and stares back at the boys. “Tune in next time, boys and girls, as we see Moon Shadow plummet toward Europa on her way back home through the stars. Brought to you by Kellogg’s Pep,” she says.

  I look up at Gracie, and we laugh.

  “She really likes Superman,” I tell them.

  “Oh my good God,” Diego mumbles.

  * * *

  We sit in a circle next to Obie’s stone, my lantern glowing bright in the middle. It feels nice to be all together again. Us boys used to play baseball out back all the time, but it’s been a long while since that’s happened.

  Tonight, only Dibs is a no-show.

  Maybe he changed his mind about the whole Jimmy Olsen thing after all.

  Or maybe he got consequences because he’s not a need-to-know and he knows way too much.

  “There was one big guy with a head as bald as a cue ball that told me he would bury my bones in this desert if I didn’t tell him everything I knew about what we saw out there,” Diego says.

  It’s taken Diego and Spuds more Mississippis than I can even count to get used to the idea of Moon Shadow. Spuds wouldn’t even come down off Bazooka for a good long while. He went through the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be before we could convince him that she was okay. He missed the Tuesday church meeting when Father Kevin told us the world wasn’t ending.

  “So, did you?” I ask. “Did you tell them?”

  “Nope,” Diego snaps. “I told them I didn’t know anything. They didn’t find my pieces, either. Did you?”

  “I didn’t say a thing,” I say. “But he knew.”

  “He knew what?” Gracie asks.

  “He knew about her.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He didn’t say it exactly, but he said I have something…and he wants that something and he plans on getting it. Those weren’t his exact words, but that was the gist.”

  “He could have been talking about the pieces,” Gracie says.

  I think about that. “Yeah,” I say. “But you had to be there. It seemed like he was talking about something else, too.”

  “Who would have told?” Diego asks, and then turns to Spuds. “Spuds, was it you?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Spuds says. “They haven’t even come out to our place yet. But I did hear Mrs. Manuela talking at Corona General and she said the Army Air Force called up Mr. Owens at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell asking about coffins.”

  “She said that?” I ask.

  “Sure did. I heard her tell Mr. Delgado right at the counter.”

  “Coffins?” Diego mutters.

  “That’s right,” Spuds says. “And who do you think those coffins are for?”

  “Them?” I say.

  “Either them or…us,” Diego mutters.

  Gracie rolls her eyes. “They aren’t for us,” she says.

  “Easy for the general’s daughter to say,” Diego mutters.

  “Oh…go comb your lip,” she says.

  Spuds bursts out laughing so hard he falls on his back, while I chuckle behind my hand.

  Diego just seems happy that Gracie has finally acknowledged his hairs. He feels them with the tips of his fingers.

  I’m sorry Dibs missed that one because he would have loved it. He might have asked Gracie to be the manager of our baseball team, whether she can field a ball or not, after that crack.

  “If none of us were the ones who told, it had to be Mr. Lord,” Gracie says.

  “No way he did that. Never. Not in a million years.” I shake my head.

  “Then who?” Spuds says.

  “Hold it,” Diego says. “Someone’s coming.”

  I stand up and hold my lantern out. “It’s Dibs,” I say.

  Dibs ties up True Belle and dashes in our direction, hopping over Robert Goodman and Mrs. Delgado and bypassing Brita Olsen and Mrs. Vandebrink.

  “Where have you been?” I ask him.

  He stops next to our circle, his skinny chest pumping up and down as he tries to find his breath. He bends at the waist and puts his hands on his knees and then hocks a good loogie into the wild desert grasses.

  “You’ll never guess what happened,” he huffs.

  “What?” Diego asks.

  “They got him, too.” Dibs spits again.

  “Who?” Gracie says.

  “Mordecai Lord,” he tells us. “They came and took him away still in his dirty plaid bathrobe. He’s gone. And we’re next, I just know it.”

  July 9, 1947—9:45 p.m.

  I bang on the door for the third time.

  “Mr. Lord!” I holler, peeking between cupped hands through the screen
door.

  Silence.

  No sounds coming from inside.

  No gruff voice or stomping footsteps or smell of man sweat or rabbit stew boiling on the stove.

  No wild hair that needs more than a dab of Brylcreem to tame it or faded plaid robe, either.

  Daddy’s headlights light the porch, but inside it’s dark.

  “Mordecai!” Daddy hollers, pounding a heavy fist against the door.

  “They nabbed him all right,” Dibs mutters. “Mac Brazel, and now Mr. Lord. We’re next. I just know it. They’ll take us and throw away the key.”

  “Tell me again what you talked about with Mordecai,” Daddy says to me.

  “He has this radio,” I say. “But it isn’t a regular radio. It’s—it’s—”

  “It’s a roast beef radio,” Dibs pipes up. “But it doesn’t broadcast The Adventures of Superman.”

  “No, it wasn’t roast beef,” I say.

  “Meat loaf?”

  “No…Ham!” I point at him. “It was ham.”

  “Right, ham.”

  “And there are these noises that come through it, and he writes numbers in his tablet, but only the ones and the zeroes, none of the other numbers.”

  “Binary,” Daddy says.

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s what he said. Binary code,” I say.

  “Do you know who he was communicating with?”

  “Them, for one.” I point to the sky.

  “You think Mr. Lord is really crazy, Mr. Affinito?” Dibs asks, cupping his hand around his eyes, trying to get a look inside.

  “No, Dibs,” Daddy says. “Not even close. He’s a very, very smart man who has done amazing things for his country. My guess is that he found out some things he wasn’t supposed to.”

  “I actually kind of like him, now that we got to know him,” Dibs says. “You think he chopped up his family?”

  “What?” Daddy says. “Who would say such a thing?”

  “See?” I tell Dibs. “People do make that stuff up.”

  He shrugs. “You think the attic bat thing is made up, too?”

  I roll my eyes.

  “You think we’re next, Mr. Affinito? I mean, you think since we aren’t need-to-know, they’ll come for us, too?”

  “Need-to-know?” Daddy asks.

  “You know, you can’t know it unless you need to know it and we don’t need to know it so, you know…we shouldn’t.”

  Daddy gives Dibs a few blinks before he says, “Let’s take things one at a time. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  Daddy pulls open the screen and hollers one more time. “Mordecai!”

  Nothing.

  “Think we should go inside?” I ask Daddy.

  Daddy nods and steps over the threshold, turning the kitchen light on.

  Same dirty dishes in the sink.

  Same kitchen table with all four chairs pushed neatly underneath.

  I follow Daddy and Dibs follows me.

  “You think they’re surveilling this place?” Dibs whispers.

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, who? The military,” he says. “Who else?”

  “There isn’t anyone around for miles.”

  “Doesn’t need to be,” he tells me. “You can’t see anyone now, but they could be watching his house through a camera from a craft flying high above the clouds that can film an ant on the ground, it’s so high-powered.”

  “That’s absurd.” I roll my eyes. “That could never happen in a million years.”

  “You’re so stuck in your own little world,” Dibs tells me.

  I turn to face him. “What in the Sam Hill does that mean?” I ask him.

  “It means you don’t have any imagination about what’s possible just because it isn’t happening in your neck of the woods. That’s what it means.”

  “Where would you get that?”

  “Gracie.” He smiles.

  “She said that about me?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “She didn’t say it about you. She said it about the Army Air Force. She said other things about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “She didn’t say anything as disgusting as wondering what it would be like to kiss you, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I’m not wondering anything about that,” I snap. “Just tell me what she said.”

  “Believe me,” he says. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do,” I say. “I do want to know.”

  He smiles even bigger. “She said she thinks you’re smart.”

  I feel the burn on the tops of my ears first and then in my cheeks. “She did?” I ask. “Did she really say that?”

  “Hey, I did my best to set her straight,” he tells me. “I told her your whole deal about the tomato guts and your tendency to choke when Miss Hanratty calls you up to the blackboard to do arithmetic problems and the time Eunice Snodgrass punched you and stole your Bit-O-Honey.”

  “It wasn’t Bit-O-Honey,” I say. “It was a box of Cracker Jacks.”

  “Still,” Dibs says.

  “Did you really tell her all that about me?”

  He laughs. “Nah, but I did tell her about your noxious feet.”

  I turn and punch him in the arm.

  “Boys,” Daddy calls from the back room.

  We snake our way through the stacked boxes to the back, and when we get there we find Mr. Lord’s desk completely torn apart.

  “Holy cheese and jalapeños,” Dibs says under his breath. “They sure enough did come in here and arrest him. It wasn’t like this yesterday.”

  “Look at this.” I rush toward Mr. Lord’s desk. “The radios are smashed on the floor. And where are all the stacks of tablets?”

  “Look at what they did,” Dibs says, bending down and picking something off the floor.

  I take the broken picture frame from his hands.

  Shards of glass are littered over the faces of Mrs. Lord and Mordecai Jr. I brush the broken glass off the frame and onto the floor, careful not to scratch up their special smiles. The ones that think endings always happen the way they should. Then I set the frame upright and leave it on top of the desk where it’s supposed to be.

  “Lex Luthor warned me that something real bad could happen to me and they were going to find Momma and do something bad to her, too, if I didn’t keep quiet about all this. Then they took Mac Brazel and now this. This isn’t going to end good. I can just feel it.”

  “Dibs,” Daddy says. “Help me pick these books up and get them set back upright in the bookshelf.”

  “Should I check things out upstairs?” I ask, peering up the darkened staircase.

  “I’m sure not going up there,” Dibs informs me.

  “You can look for clues down here with Daddy,” I tell him.

  “What kind of clues?”

  “I don’t know, just look for something out of place.” I wrap my fingers around the banister and slide my boot onto the first step.

  He stretches his arms out on both sides. “Everything is out of place,” he tells me.

  “I’ll be right up,” Daddy says. “Just give me a minute here. Mr. Lord doesn’t need to come back to a mess like this.” He begins sliding books back into the case and picking up the busted radio parts.

  I take the stairs two at a time until I hit the landing and find the light switch on the wall.

  The first door is open, and when I peek inside I can see it’s a bedroom with one messed-up double bed, the sheets in a tangled ball, a night table on either side, and raggedy flowered curtains hanging at the window.

  “Mr. Lord?” I call again.

  Nothing.

  The next door is the bathroom, and that’s empty, too.

  I stop in fr
ont of the very last door.

  It’s closed.

  I take a deep breath, put my hand on the glass knob, and turn it.

  The door creaks a loud, long groan as I push it open and peek inside.

  “Mr. Lord?” I whisper this time, not sure if I want an answer.

  Nothing.

  My fingers feel the wall next to the door for a light switch and when I find it, I flip it up.

  It’s a boy’s room.

  A stifling, stuffy boy’s room perfectly preserved in dust, like there hasn’t been a door or window open to it in years.

  It smells of musk and cedar wood and age. On the dresser are perfectly lined-up picture frames. One of a boy on a horse, one of Mr. Lord as a young man holding a baby, and one of the Lord family all together, the three of them at a church picnic in Roswell. I can even see a young Mrs. Meadows in the background monitoring the baked goods table in her cat-eyed glasses.

  On the bed is a crocheted bedspread pulled tight.

  Without a wrinkle in it.

  And one small brown bear sitting up against the pillow. I pick up the bear and breathe him in at the top of his head.

  But all I smell is dust.

  I wonder if this bear once smelled of his boy, too.

  There’s another frame next to the bed on the side table. Mr. Lord with the boy, both of them wearing baseball gloves. I barely recognize Mr. Lord because of his smile. The same one Daddy used to have that’s big and white with a light in his eyes. A smile he had when there was joy inside him.

  And hope, too.

  Long before the gray swallowed him whole.

  “You find anything up there?” Dibs calls from the bottom of the stairs.

  I wipe the dusty glass against the leg of my overalls and set the frame back down.

  “No,” I call to Dibs, and head back to the landing. “Did you find anything down there?”

  “Just one big mess is all,” he calls back.

  When I flip the light switch off and start to pull the bedroom door closed behind me, something catches my eye.

  Something shiny between the mattress and the box spring.