by Rebecca Ore
Alpha seemed so cheerful after he saw the egg. Each morning, for the next few weeks, he ate eggs and butter for breakfast, dressed in a cut-off pair of Warren’s pants, and followed me around as I gathered eggs and ran feed bags up and down on the trolley in the center of the chicken house. But he could only wear socks on his feet because he had more heel bone than humans, and only four toes.
Warren wondered about that and cleaned the chaff off the skeleton. Weird to see the huge space for the eyes, the bone eye-socket shields. Alien, not like the biology book’s human skeleton. Warren twisted the leg and foot bones around, then said, “That big heel is a twisted toe bone.”
He brushed more chaff off, beetle grubs in it, and grunted, disconnecting the bones and putting them in a sack.
Warren said, “I know who told the Atlanta investors about me. If aliens gonna hit on anyone, that guy, he’s out in Bolinas now, he ought to be hit.”
So Warren and I took the egg up to another dealer Warren knew in Roanoke. The Roanoke guy called the California man and asked him to hold some computer goods, hot programs in a military shell—sure there’d be a market for it. The Californian settled for 30 percent of the gross and fifty dollars a month holding money.
“Just keep it cool for me,” Warren’s Roanoke friend said, then Warren reached over the guy’s shoulder and clicked down the phone cradle. I recognized Warren’s special smile twisted on by willpower, nothing in Warren’s eyes but sheer calculation.
Three days later, Warren checked the creature’s leg cuts, going up and down each leg with his hands, twisting a little, while Alpha gripped the bedclothes with his narrow hands, looking, eyes as squinty as they’d go, at the top of Warren’s head.
“Fit to work, I’d say,” Warren said. “The chicken house at first, since he eats enough eggs, until I see how tame he’s going to be. He’s got to learn to hide from strangers.”
The alien nodded at Warren, not a friendly nod. Then he looked at me, shrugged, and touched the back of Warren’s hand, very lightly.
The next day, I took Alpha with me to milk. But when he saw our old milk cow, he walked his funny rolling walk up to the cow and began prodding her milk veins. Then he moved forward, palpated her neck, wrapped his long arms around her shoulders, and bit into her skin.
She flinched, but didn’t knock him away, so he bent over and pumped blood out of her neck with that flat tongue of his. Then he wiped his mouth, just like a man would have, flicked his tongue out to clean his lips and wrinkles. Then he oo’ed at me.
The cow stood stiff-legged, jerking her eyes around to show white every now and again. The alien held the nick closed with his fingers until a clot formed. When he was satisfied that the cow had stopped bleeding, he turned back and touched her udder again.
The cow cocked a leg, lashed out, but the creature ducked as though he was used to stock, talked to her in that singsong voice, and bent down to milk the udder.
No milk came down—the cow was too nervous—so I massaged the udder and finally milked out a dribble onto the alien’s skinny palm. He sniffed and tasted, seeming some what dubious. Then he flipped his tongue out and fluttered the milk into his mouth.
So the alien drank blood and milk. I woke suddenly one night. He stood by my bed, a faint chlorine odor in the air. My heart bounced, then beat fast. The creature slowly reached for my hand, touched it gently with just the pads of his fingers. I sat up in bed and pushed his hand away. The floorboards creaking under his bare feet, he cried softly, two huffing sounds.
Alpha looked lonely, not dangerous. He stroked my upper arm and stepped back.
But I saw his reflection in the mirror over my dresser—alien, burnt skin growing new hair on his back—and wanted to lock the creature up, before he got me with his sharp teeth and that blood-pumping tongue.
He took my hands, pulling me to the kitchen where he found a pencil and stared at me as though asking where’s paper?
I got him paper. He sat down awkwardly at the table and began to draw a broken outline of one of his kind. Then, where he’d left blanks in the first outline, he fitted in another creature all twined with the first. He drew others, a soft knot of sleeping bodies, aliens with closed eyes; and closed his own eyes, brimming full of tear oil.
His kind slept in heaps, and he was lonely, not out to get me. I took the pencil out of his fingers and sketched a human, not as finely drawn as his, sleeping alone. He stared at the paper.
Then a brindle cat waltzed up, milk beggar that it was, and rubbed against the alien’s legs. Alpha picked up the cat, sniffed its mouth, and oo’ed. I managed to sketch out a figure with a cat sleeping in the crook of its knees. The alien’s forehead twitched, then he bumped his elbow against mine and went back to his room, carrying the cat.
During the next week, Alpha gathered a heap of cats to sleep with. I suspected he bribed them with eggs.
I spent hours watching the alien draw precise drawings, done as though he laid a vision on the paper and was just tracing lines to make his visions visible to me.
Strange buildings and plants appeared on our Terran drawing paper, with stranger creatures walking among them. The alien looked sideways over his fuzzy shoulder at me and added another figure, almost human. He pointed from it to me and oo’ed. Me. But my face was distorted. I pointed to my real face and then to the paper, draw me. He touched the top of my head, then my clavicle, and started to draw.
He drew me as though I was part alien—the grooves between the mouth comers and the nostrils exaggerated, eyes bigger—but recognizably me.
Then Alpha drew a creature chunkier than a cow, with ropy flesh in the neck, giant veins, then another beast, drawing herds of them, over and over again as if he wanted to make them alive with his pencil.
Eyes heavy with the oil he used for tears, he laid down the pencil. I picked up the drawing of me among the alien buildings. “Do you miss those creatures?” I asked stupidly.
September came. Odd to leave the alien and Warren, walk to the road, and wait for the yellow bus, thinking of planets in space, how I’d never thought about them much before.
Then classes, where I knew too much for my kind, and the kids all knowing what Warren did, at least the bad ones, and the good ones avoiding me lest I tell them. A teacher from New Jersey, all bearded and full of goat milk, wanted to pry into my serious local-colorfulness; the other teachers ignored me best they could.
Days when we needed groceries or feed, I drove to town and played Space Invaders at the video arcade, the bumpa-bumpa music going while I missed shots. I wondered if I ought to marry the girl who’d got me in bed when we were fourteen, short and messy as that was, and run away.
But what would happen to Alpha? So I went home to our real alien, who was a flop as an invader. And he and I tended the chickens, scooping feed from the trolley, then coming back down the long shed gathering eggs from the wire cages. If a car came up, he hid, like Warren trained him.
At night, or in the late afternoon when I wasn’t delivering eggs, Alpha questioned me through his drawings. He had a sign, like )(, for questions. He drew a mother and child and put the )( sign after it. Parents, dead in our case. I drew two figures lying down, shrouds over them. He drew)( again.
I walked him out through the twilight to the family graves. He looked at the ground, the stones, and looked back at me with his chin tucked down, hands limp at his sides. As we went in, he stroked my ribs with his knuckles.
At first Alpha couldn’t see what was on the television, even though Warren’d rigged an antenna that got channels from Greensboro to Roanoke. Finally he took out a ballpoint pen and drew dotted lines across the paper real quick-heavy and light. When he got to the bottom of the paper, I saw that he’d drawn Warren.
He got up, shook the drawing beside the picture tube, and looked at us, oo’ing. Yeah, TV tubes have little lines of dots in them that make up the picture, but I didn’t know he had to learn how to make them out
Each night before we all went to be
d, Alpha and I went outside. He’d look around, the muscled tongue trilling so high-pitched I could barely hear it, and Warren couldn’t hear it at all, but the cats came running, rubbing around his legs as if to tell him they were here, even if his people weren’t.
Then, one night, Warren made sure we stayed up late, to watch some horror movie he’d seen before. The alien sat by me on one of Warren’s red leather sofas. Warren slouched on another, drinking whiskey with ice.
When the aliens on the screen landed and the humans ran off screaming, Alpha stared at Warren, then got his drawing pad. Kneeling, thighs spraddled out, in front of Warren, he drew the egg with all its gold wire tracery, and the question sign: )(.
I froze and looked at Warren. The alien lay the drawing on Warren’s lap.
“What egg?” Warren said, even though he knew Alpha couldn’t understand English. He slowly tore up the drawing. On the television, humans were shooting aliens.
Alpha looked at the screen, then set his shoulders back and rocked on the balls of his feet, staring at Warren. Warren laughed and threw the little bits of paper into the air. “Thing, you want your egg? Tom, turn off that space movie; it’s giving Thing bad homesickness.”
I quickly switched off the TV. Alpha looked from me to Warren, then rubbed his eyes with the back of his long hand.
Warren said, “Heard from Roanoke that strange folks in California asked around about the location device. I wanted this one to see what we humans do to bad aliens.”
The alien singsonged at Warren, an unhappy song. Warren rose off the couch, took one skinny hand, and pulled it down to the floor. Alpha gave a sharp cry but bent at the waist and knees, let Warren guide his hand.
“You stand in my clothes,” Warren said as he forced the alien to pick up the paper, “eat my eggs, and you want to bring the whole universe down on my farm? Egg gone. Tom, you said he knows yes and no from head moves, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
Warren held out his hands as if he was cupping the egg between them, and shook his head no. “No. No.”
The alien stepped back and threw out his arms, crying out one strange sound, the tones almost like no.
“No,” Warren said again.
“Nuyngh,” Alpha replied, crumpling to the floor.
I started toward him, but he scrambled to his feet, wrapped his arms around himself, and ran stumbling to the room we’d put him in.
“All since you showed him the egg, Warren,” I said, “he’s been expecting his people.”
“Fool. I just wanted to know what the egg was.”
The next morning, Alpha lay sprawled in bed, the webs spread out, his body cold. Dead, I thought, until I held my finger on his throat, and felt the vein throb once, then again five seconds later.
“Warren!” I cried. Half naked, barefooted, he rushed in and laid his hand against Alpha’s throat.
“Dying,” Warren said. “Just as well.”
Alpha stayed tranced out the rest of the day, no colder than five degrees above room temperature, heart going twelve times a minute.
While I sat with the cool, stiff alien, I wondered if his people made movies about beating off hordes of attacking Earthlings.
Warren and I didn’t say much to each other all weekend, expecting those spaced-out heartbeats to finally stop. But Sunday, the alien’s pulse beat a little faster. At breakfast Monday, before I caught the school bus, Warren said, “You gonna trust me not to barbecue your alien or what?”
“He’s upset. He could have had hope…”
“I don’t want some space freak dividing the family. You trust me to take care of it if it wakes up, or not?”
“Okay, Warren, I trust you won’t hurt him more.”
“What do you mean, ‘more’?”
“Warren, I’ll miss the bus,” I said, gathering up the books I needed and stuffing them in my pack.
“Well, don’t miss the damn bus. The Atlanta guys’re upping my production schedule, by way of threatening to break your legs, but I guess what happens in the basement’s no damn concern of yours.”
At lunch, I called Warren on the school pay phone in the hall. “How are things?” I asked him.
“Cool,” Warren said.
“Cool?” I asked.
“Yeah, cool, just like you left it. Okay. You’ve got school business to tend to, don’t you?”
“Yeah, physics.”
“Chemistry’d be better use,” Warren said. “Bye now.”
I hung up, wondering if Alph was still alive, or if Warren’d said that to keep me from worrying. Then Roose Dexter came by and asked, “Them hens gonna keep you too busy for baseball again come spring?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Them hens.” And I walked off to physics class, wondering how my buddy alien got from wherever to here.
“Can’t go faster than light?” I asked. “Won’t we learn ways around that?”
The little-guy teacher took off his glasses and wiped them clean on his shirt. “Well, Tom, mass would be infinite at light speed, so you’d need infinite fuel. That’s the universe. Can’t go faster than light. The stars are out of human reach.”
I knew that wasn’t so. “No way?”
“I realize what this does to your science fiction fantasies, but right, no way.”
Bullshit, I thought, and Alpha is from creatures smarter than us, but we’re killing him, Warren and me. I pulled out a bit of knife blade from my wallet and started cutting on my desk.
“Tom!” the teacher cried out, looking nervous, because I was taller than him, and country-built from heaving chicken shit and feed.
“Right, sir,” I said, hopping up to hand over the bit of knife blade. Doesn’t do to take a good knife to school, so I grind down something I find broken, whittle with it.
Then algebra—so beautiful and inhuman, math problems, without taints of human social bull. But today, the numbers just jerked around in my mind.
When I got home, the alien still lay on the bed, but his arms were sprawled different. “Alpha?” I said, and his chest jerked. Slowly, he pulled his arms close to his body, then spread them slightly. The veins throbbed, and he pulled his arms close to his sides again, and shivered violently.
All the cats who’d deserted him when he was cold started back in as Alpha moaned and shuddered. Maybe he’d like a hot bath. I drew him a tub, then mixed some hot salt water in a glass as he climbed, still quivering, into the tub. Alpha took the glass in his palms and lay back in the water, sipping the hot salt solution.
Warren came in. The alien gasped, spread his arms, veins pulsing in the webs, and started to slow down his breathing, but I called to him and pushed his arms down against his body.
Warren touched the strange pointed chin. He said, “You were okay until you asked about the egg.”
Alpha levered himself out of the tub with his long arms, found a towel, and dried off. He looked at both of us and wrapped the towel around his waist. Strange to see him tuck the end in, just as I did. He beckoned us to follow him to the kitchen. There he handed Warren a knife and raised his head, baring his throat.
Warren slowly touched the creature’s throat with the knife, saying to me, “Maybe he wants it. Maybe he’s going crazy.”
The alien looked little and sickly, his long arms quivering, goosefleshed under the hair. Warren slowly lowered the knife and shook his head no.
The alien then wrapped the towel tighter, found his paper, and drew a circle with funny splotches on it. From where I sat, the circle looked like an Earth map, but he’d drawn it upside down and fuzzy. Then the alien drew two eggs, one smashed. And the question sign. )(.
“Warren,” I said, “he wants to know where the egg is, smashed or not.”
Warren grimaced. “Doesn’t give up, does it?” He pointed from the undamaged egg to the circle, running his finger around the whole circle. “Still on this.”
The alien wrapped his arms around himself, webs strained over his chest, then drew the egg on all the continents,
then in the oceans. He drew another circle, put Europe and Asia on it.
Laughing a snappish laugh, Warren pointed at the egg in the ocean and shook his head. “Okay, space thing, the egg’s on land. I ain’t gonna tell you any more.”
The alien sighed, gave Warren the knife again, tried to wrap Warren’s fingers around the hilt. Warren shook his head, said, “No,” sharply.
Alpha leaned down, laid his head and arms on the table top. Warren took all the map drawings away and turned back to scratch Alpha’s fuzzy back. Alpha pushed Warren’s hand away, got up, and walked to the door.
“Follow him, Tom,” Warren said.
I went out and saw the creature sprawled on the porch, arm web spread to the sun, those eyelashes, so much like ours, beating down tears.
A grey tabby mewed and bumped the alien’s nostril slits until Alpha sat up and cuddled the cat while it licked around the creature’s eyes.
For dinner, the alien melted butter and pumped it up with his tongue curled into a tube.
When the school bus stopped to let me off, I saw Warren standing, waiting with a “don’t talk” smile curved into his face. The bad guys on the bus grinned at Warren. Hands deep in his corduroy pockets, he didn’t react, just waited until the bus pulled off down the road.
“Your alien’s gone. Stole my day pack,” Warren said when the bus had pulled farther down the road, “couple pounds of butter, eggs, jar of honey.”
I wondered if Warren’d hurt or killed the alien. He saw doubt turn my face and pulled his fists out of his pocket. “Really, Tom, I didn’t hurt it. Creature bollixed the alarm. Right smart creature, but…”
“Did he take a gun?” I asked as we walked back to the house.
“No,” Warren said. “I checked.”
“Gonna get cold tonight,” I said.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky. He’ll die and rot to bits in the woods before human or thing figures out where he was, or what he was,” Warren said as we stepped up onto the porch.
