Signal

by Cynthia DeFelice

  Then I remember something Cam said to me just before I left her.

  “Do you think you could get some Tootsie Rolls?”

  “Tootsie Rolls?” I’d repeated.

  She’d smiled and said that, as far as she was concerned, Tootsie Rolls were the single best thing about Earth.

  So I take some of my allowance money, too, and before Josie and I begin our third trip down the trail, we stop at the gas station and convenience store on the corner near the trailhead. I take off the pack and set it on the ground by my bike.

  Josie comes inside with me, even though there’s a law that says dogs can’t go into food stores. Mr. Powers, the old guy who owns the store, doesn’t care about rules like that. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit. He sits in the store listening to his police scanner all day, and seems glad to see Josie and me when we stop in to get snacks and drinks.

  Josie runs right up to the counter and sits, looking at him expectantly, since he always gives her a Slim Jim. Today Mr. Powers is talking to another customer, so I hang back, and Josie waits politely.

  Over the blare of the police scanner, I hear the customer say, “… seen a kid? A girl, kinda skinny, light brown hair, green eyes?”

  I jerk to attention when I hear this. Who else could he be talking about but Cam?

  Mr. Powers seems to be considering the question, and after a few seconds the guy adds impatiently, “Might have had a cut on her head. Could have been acting funny, saying crazy things.”

  Slowly, Mr. Powers looks the man up and down before answering. I check him out, too. From behind, where I’m standing, I can see he’s strong and solid. He’s wearing black jeans, black boots, and a shirt with the sleeves cut off. It stretches tightly over the bunchy-looking muscles of his back. His neck is so thick it comes straight down from his shaved, sunburned head. A key ring hanging from his belt catches my eye. Dangling from it, along with a bunch of keys, is a shiny metal skull with red jeweled eyes.

  Who is this guy and why is he looking for Cam? He’s so creepy I don’t even consider telling him anything.

  “Can’t say as I’ve seen anybody like that,” Mr. Powers answers at last.

  The man lets out a disgusted sigh and mutters a swear word under his breath. He turns to go and practically bumps into me. I back away, saying, “Sorry,” and our eyes lock for a second. He swats his arm in my direction, not hitting me, but as if I’m a pesky bug he’s shooing out of his way.

  After he pushes through the door, I watch him out the window. He takes the keys from his belt and gets into a car, where a woman is waiting. All I can see of her is her blond hair. The car is maroon and white, rusty, and patched with dull gray body filler. The black skin on the convertible top has ragged holes in it. The car looks spotty and diseased. When it takes off, a cloud of dust and exhaust hangs over the gravel parking lot.

  I go up to the counter, where Mr. Powers is feeding Josie a Slim Jim.

  “You’re a good old hound dog,” he says to her. The first day we came to the store Mr. Powers declared Josie a hound dog, and I’ve stopped trying to explain that she’s a pointer, not a hound. When I tried, he shook his finger in my face, lifted one of the long white eyebrows that look like two fuzzy caterpillars crawling over his saggy eyes, and said, “I raised bluetick hounds as a young man, sonny, and I know a hound dog when I see one. This here is a hound dog.”

  I figure if he wants to think Josie is a hound dog it’s okay with me. He’s always nice to her, and to me, too, even if he is a little strange.

  Mr. Powers turns the scanner down a bit. “You know that fella?” he asks as he reaches into the jar of jawbreakers, selects one, and rolls it across the counter to me.

  I shrug. “No.”

  “You seen the girl he was asking about?”

  “No,” I say quickly, startled that he’d asked me.

  Mr. Powers’s blue eyes penetrate mine. “Sure about that?” he asks.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I say, trying to sound firm. Then, “Why?”

  “You’re acting kinda jumpy, is all.”

  “I’m not jumpy,” I say, trying to sound offhand and nonchalant. I know I’m not a very smooth liar, and Mr. Powers is making me nervous.

  “Hmmph,” he says, which could mean he believes me, or not. I’m afraid he’s going to continue with this line of questioning, but instead he says, “So, what can I do for you today?”

  I’m so rattled from the guy asking about Cam and from Mr. Powers’s questions to me that for a second I can’t think why I’m here. Then I remember. I take a bag of miniature Tootsie Rolls from the shelf and put it on the counter. I pay quickly and leave. As I bike up the trail, I decide to give Cam a chance to eat before I tell her about the scary guy who is looking for her.

  5

  WHEN JOSIE AND I GET TO THE HOUSE, CAM IS waiting in the kitchen. I announce each item as I take it from the pack and set it on the table: “Shorts, belt, T-shirt, sweatshirt, blanket, soap, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, more water, and—whether you want them or not—bandages and first-aid cream.”

  Cam smiles but continues to eye the pack hungrily. I grin. On purpose, I’ve saved the food for last. I call out: “Mountain Dew, Oreos, chips, crackers and cheese, bananas, an apple, granola bars, and four cans of tuna. I even remembered a fork. And ta-da!” With a dramatic flourish, I take out the Tootsie Rolls and hold them up.

  Cam gasps, grabs the bag from my hand, rips it open, unwraps a Tootsie Roll, and stuffs it into her mouth. As she eats it, she unwraps another one.

  I laugh and say, “So, on your planet people eat dessert before dinner?”

  She gives me a gooey brown smile and says, “You betcha. I just love these things. When I go back home, I’m taking as many as I can with me.”

  I laugh again.

  She offers me the bag. It’s hard to talk when you have a mouth full of Tootsie Roll, so it’s quiet for a while except for the sounds of our chewing. Then Cam turns to the food on the table.

  Spread out like that, it doesn’t exactly make up what Mr. Lauer, my old health teacher, would call a balanced meal. But fruit’s good, right? And tuna has protein. I didn’t think to bring mayonnaise or bread so she could make a sandwich, and I say so.

  “Tuna’s better straight out of the can, anyway,” she says. She pulls the tab on one of the tins, digs the fork in, and eats ravenously, not looking up until it’s gone.

  “Here you go, Josie,” she says, putting the empty tin on the floor. Quickly, Cam eats the rest of the tuna. We watch Josie, laughing as she pushes the cans across the floor and into the corner, where she licks them like crazy to get every last molecule of flavor out.

  Cam washes down a granola bar with a can of soda, then settles into a kitchen chair with the apple and a contented sigh.

  I figure the time has come. “Cam,” I say, “we’ve got to talk.”

  “Okay. What about?”

  “If I’m going to help you, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”

  She nods again.

  “For starters, if you’re from another planet, how come there was a guy asking about you at the corner store?”

  Cam’s head snaps up, and her green eyes flash with alarm. “Who was he?” she asks.

  “You tell me.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like a bald-headed pit bull with a big, fat neck.”

  She rises to her feet, her face paling beneath its tan. “Did you see what kind of car he was driving?”

  “Rusty old junker, all patched together with Bondo. Oh, and he had a key ring with a skull and—”

  “Red eyes.” She covers her face with her hands and says, “Ray.”

  In this single word I hear dismay, hatred, and fear.

  She uncovers her face. “Was he alone?”

  “There was a lady out in the car.”

  “Blond hair?”

  I nod.

  “Could they have followed you?”

  “No,” I quickly assure
her. “I don’t think the lady saw me, and anyway, they left before I did. The guy was asking Mr. Powers, the old man who owns the store, if he’d seen a kid—and, well, he described you.” I hesitate, then add, “He said your head might have been hurt, and that you could be acting funny, saying crazy things.”

  As I say this I’m thinking, Like saying you’re from another planet.

  Cam snorts and says bitterly, “Yeah, he’s afraid I’ll say crazy things like he hit me.”

  Abruptly, she looks away from me, and I see that she is struggling not to cry.

  “Cam,” I say. “This guy Ray, who is he?”

  Cam sinks back into her chair. “You really want to hear all this?”

  “Well. Yeah. I feel totally clueless here.”

  She waits a few moments before saying, “You remember how I told you my parents’ spaceship had to make an emergency exit, right?”

  I nod.

  “They didn’t know I wasn’t on the ship and after I saw them leave, I ran from the soldiers and hid. I waited for a long time, hoping my parents would come back for me, even though I knew it was too risky for them with all the attention we’d attracted. I was scared, and I didn’t know what else to do. Finally, I got really hungry and thirsty, so I started walking. I came to a place with lots of houses and hid behind one of them. That’s where Bobbi found me. She’s the blond woman in the car.”

  “Did you tell her you were left behind by a spaceship?”

  “No,” Cam says. “For all I knew, she would have handed me over to the soldiers. So I told her I’d run away from home.

  “She didn’t ask any questions. She just said, ‘Yeah, I know what that’s like.’ Then she said I could stay with her until I figured things out. I don’t know why. I was just thankful.”

  Cam pauses, and I’m so involved in her story that I just wait, silently urging her to go on.

  “So I stayed there, trying not to do anything to make Bobbi change her mind and kick me out. I just needed a place to stay until I could signal my parents. Bobbi wasn’t around much. She was a bartender down the street at a place called the Blue Eagle.

  “The first week everything was okay. But then Bobbi met up with Ray. She said she used to date him before and they were getting back together. Don’t ask me why she likes him. He’s mean when he’s drinking, which is pretty much all the time. She even let him move in with us—just like that—and things got bad real fast. There were a lot of fights, some about me.”

  Cam stops and makes a face, adding, “Ray hated having me around. I know he wanted Bobbi to kick me out.”

  I feel my dislike for Ray growing.

  Cam sighs and continues. “But Bobbi let me hang around, probably because by then I was doing all the cooking and cleaning and laundry. Then Ray got in some kind of trouble and he said we had to leave town. Bobbi quit her job and loaded her stuff into a trailer, along with Ray’s stuff. I didn’t want to leave with them, but I didn’t know what else to do or where to go. We ended up at a motel a ways down the highway from here.”

  I try to picture the place she’s talking about. “That place near the diner, with the busted-out sign?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “I didn’t even think it was open.”

  “The old lady who owns it could hardly believe it when we stopped and said we wanted to check in.”

  “So that’s where you were staying … with Ray and Bobbi?”

  “Yeah, for the past few days.” Cam takes a deep breath and says, “You want me to keep going?”

  “Well, yeah. How did you get the cut on your head? How did you end up here?”

  “All right. Here’s what happened, okay? Ray has a collection of hubcaps.” She rolls her green eyes. “And I saw a picture in an old magazine in the motel room of a bird feeder made out of a hubcap. I was bored so I took one lousy hubcap out of the trailer and was using some of his tools to poke holes in the edge so I could attach strings like in the picture, and Ray came outside and was mad because I ruined one of his stupid hubcaps. Then Bobbi came out and started hollering, too, saying she’d done me this huge favor and why was I provoking Ray. I said I didn’t see what the big deal was and Ray said, ‘I’ll teach you to mouth off.’”

  Cam makes another face. “Ray is very sensitive about people ‘mouthing off’ to him. So he grabbed the hubcap from me and swung it and it hit me in the head. Then he pushed me into the motel room. I heard a noise and it was his screw gun, and he screwed the door shut so I couldn’t get out. And then he left in the car with Bobbi.”

  I have been standing and listening, nearly hypnotized by her story, and now I slowly sit down in the chair across from her at the kitchen table. My eyes never leave her face.

  After a moment she continues. “I didn’t know—or care—if they were ever coming back. But being locked in, it’s—” She stops and looks down at her hands, which are twisting over and over on the tabletop.

  “It’s a horrible feeling,” she goes on in a low voice. “So, there I was. There was no phone in that lousy motel room. Nobody else was crazy enough to be staying there. I thought about screaming, but the office is in the old lady’s house, which is up the hill behind the motel, and she’d never have heard me. I tried to stay calm. My head was bleeding, so I tied a towel around it and finally it stopped. Then it got dark and I got scared and hungry. When morning came and they still weren’t back, I banged and banged on the door, and finally I gave up on that and broke the window and climbed out. I cut my arms and legs doing that, and the effort made my head start to bleed again. When I got out, I started walking.

  “I was afraid they’d come back before I could get away. I was also afraid somebody would see me and see I was hurt and call the cops. So I got off the highway and went into the woods, and then I found the trail. Once when I looked back, I saw Josie. I didn’t see you, but I figured there was probably a person with the dog and I was afraid whoever it was would see me, and that’s when I climbed the hill and hid in the cornfield.”

  “Wow,” I mumble. “Why do you think they won’t just let you go?”

  “I bet Ray’s afraid I’ll tell someone what he did and get him in trouble.”

  Cam looks at me then and smiles, which is about the last thing you’d think she’d do after the terrible story she just told. She says, “Anyway, I’m glad it worked out this way.”

  “What?” I say, feeling, as I usually do with this girl, one step behind. “Why?”

  “Because I met you.”

  I feel strangely pleased—and somewhat confused— by this remark.

  “With you helping me to signal them, my parents will find me and I’ll never have to see Ray or Bobbi again.”

  Before I can say anything, she points to the bag of Tootsie Rolls and her eyes fill with tears.

  Now I’m really confused. I can’t imagine why a half-eaten bag of candy would make a person cry.

  After a minute she sniffles and says, “Thanks for the Tootsie Rolls. That’s the nicest thing anybody’s done for me since I’ve been on Earth.”

  That does it. When she says that, I know that I’m going to do whatever I can to help her. I don’t know what to believe, but I understand suddenly how much she needs somebody. And I’m the only one around.

  6

  AT FIRST CAM HAD ACTED SO SURE OF HERSELF, Bossy, even. But now, after telling that awful story, she seems small and scared.

  “Your parents …” I say. “They must be pretty worried about you.”

  “I’m sure they are,” she says.

  “How long has it been? Since you’ve been on Earth, I mean.”

  “Three weeks,” she pauses, “and three days. Which means my parents will be coming back in four days.”

  “Why four days?”

  “The moon will be full again in four days. And that’s the best time to make contact. The trouble is, they’re sure to return to the same place to look for me and now, because of Ray, I won’t be there. That’s why I have to make a signal, so they
can find me.”

  So many questions are crowding into my brain it’s hard to know where to start. “Well, in the meantime, why don’t we go to the police and tell them what Ray did to you? People can’t just hit kids and lock them up and leave them.”

  Cam gives me a tired glance. “Owen, you’re not thinking. I can’t risk going to the police. They might find out who I am. Remember the soldiers? And the guns? I can’t risk getting taken into custody by your government. They’d probably want to do tests on me and who knows what else? It could put my parents and everybody on my planet in danger. No way.”

  I can see her point.

  “I just need four days, and I’ll be out of here,” Cam presses.

  “Four days,” I repeat. “It shouldn’t be too hard to keep your secret for four days.”

  “And that gives us a little time,” she says.

  “For what?” I ask cautiously.

  She smiles, and looks both shy and excited at the same time. “To plan how we’re going to make the signal,” she says, “and”—those strange green eyes of hers sparkle—“for me to talk you—and Josie, of course— into coming with us.”

  “What?” I ask incredulously.

  Cam pats Josie and says, “You want to come, don’t you, Josie?”

  Josie lets out a sharp, happy bark.

  “I knew she was highly intelligent,” says Cam, “and this proves it.”

  Josie wags her tail, the traitor.

  I remember Cam saying, “They like dogs.” I wonder, would the aliens like me? But wait a second. The whole idea is crazy, and I start to say so, but Cam speaks first.

  “You don’t have to answer now. Sleep on it.” She’s quiet for a minute. Then she says, “What I’d really like to do is get cleaned up.”

  Suddenly she sounds really sad and tired. I say, “Okay.”

  We walk together to the edge of the hill. Josie and I go down and check the stream to make sure there isn’t anybody there. Then I survey the trail in both directions and peer around inside the old mill. There’s nobody in sight, so I look up to the top, where Cam has hidden herself behind a bush and is peering down at me, and I give her the all-clear sign.