He nodded courtly-like. “I’m Jack. Been here thirty years this Sunday. What brings you up this way? That car of yours looks dead beat up. It’s not smart to chance a city car on our back roads.”
Roads? What a laugh. But he didn’t. He just stood there, camera dangling from his neck, afternoon wind picking up and cooling things off a bit after the warm Sun of the day. He felt stupid and foolish. “I saw a road sign north of Reserve.” Jack waited patiently, eyes twinkling. “I know it’s probably some practical joke, but I took a picture of it anyway.”
“What kind of sign?”
He searched the old man’s sunburned face, wondering if he were the only living being in this place of high mountain silence. A litter control sign.” Jack’s casual manner sharpened a bit. “It said—Litter Control. Next 3 Million Miles. Uncle Jack’s Home for Retired Space Beings.”
Jack laughed. Loudly. “You really are from the city.” His laugh ran down slow like, kind of the way a car’s fuel line clogs up, a sputtery stop-and-go kind of laughing that finally sighed away into the wind. “You believe everything you read?”
His face burned. “Nope. Not since the Gulf War.”
Jack’s bluff good humor slowly sobered. “Oh. Were you in combat?”
“Nope. Just took a lot of photos. Pictures. For magazines. Newspapers. The usual war stuff.”
Jack looked confused. “Then why do you seem so—”
“Forget it.” He turned to leave, raising the camera to take a few scenery shots. Maybe he could sell them to some RV magazine. “I just saw a stupid sign that reminded me of something. But Emma’s right. It’s gotta be someone playing a practical joke on you.”
The camera snapped. He thumbed the take-up lever, enjoying the physical feel of doing something for himself, rather than relying on the electronics of the newer cameras. You could really only rely on yourself. That’s what he’d learned during the divorce. The abandonment. And especially when he’d come home to an empty house after Elaine’s funeral. No one left but Davy, and he’d chosen to stay the night with some high school friend. A rarely seen father offers less comfort than a friend who’s there for you day and night, year in and year out. Jack scuffed boots behind him.
“Well, uh, if you say—”
Something long, low and beetlelike skittered between two cabins, keeping to the late afternoon shadows. His camera snapped automatically. His eyes refused to believe what he’d just seen. Naw. Had to be the waning light. The last time he’d seen a human-sized cockroach was when he’d read an illustrated edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. He stopped by the car as Jack finished talking.
“—Say so, then go on back to Reserve. But watch out for that drop down to San Francisco Plaza. You can lose traction in the loose dust.”
He looked back at Uncle Jack. The man’s eyes seemed to be having trouble focusing on him. They would look away suddenly, to the side or beyond Bill, to something behind him. The cabins? He turned and looked.
Cockroach stood upright in the fall sunlight, looking at him.
Dizziness hit. Hard. Like when you don’t eat for a day. Or when you’re dehydrated. Or when you have a high fever. That kind of delirious dizziness.
But he’d just eaten. Drunk enough coffee to make him want to pee. And there was nothing wrong with his Army tested eyesight.
Cockroach eyed him. Curiosity shone forth, along with a sense of a fuss budget family servant, a retainer put out to pasture after a lifetime of loyal service.
Shit.
He wasn’t really a cockroach. The eyes were something weird, like two blue saucers that seemed deep as an ocean. What he’d thought were antennae were actually long strands of something silky, resembling hair. And the insect-like body of brown chitin plates seemed less rigid than on first glance. More like a very tight-fitting winter suit. But whatever it—he—was, he possessed two weirdly jointed legs and four articulated arms that ended in slim, prehensile digits. Digits that resembled fingers. As much as the eyes resembled human eyes.
Jack coughed.
“Captain Twixell, that’s enough. You’re scaring him.”
Cockroach turned his attention to Jack, now standing beside Bill with a warm, comforting hand on his shoulder. A human hand. His shakes died away just as he realized he’d had them.
Sound screeched. Captain Twixell the Cockroach turned and ambled away through the ponderosas, heading for the horse bam. Slowly, like a tree falling to a lumberjack’s saw, he turned and faced Uncle Jack.
“That sign was no joke. Was it?”
Jack still held his shoulder in a firm grip. But a friendly grip. Like the way his grandpa had shaken hands with him that summer he’d spent on the family farm outside of Houston, long, long years ago. Jack’s mustache wiggled as he spoke, wryly. “You’re taking this well.”
“Well? It’s not the first time I’ve seen crazy things. But usually I’ve gone through a quart of Jim Beam.”
Jack sighed. “Come inside. You look like you need to sit down.”
They went inside, into shadows. Past a Victorian-style sitting room up front, all fitted out with highbacked sofas, a baby grand piano, several bookcases stuffed with books lacking the dust of disuse, and old black and white photographs. Antique portrait photos of frontier men and women stared down from the wood plank walls. Even a Zuni, Hopi and a Navajo or two looked down from their own frames, somber as the Anglos. Too many people to be Jack’s grandparents.
Down a long hallway, and past stairs going up to the second floor, lay the kitchen. Jack sat him down, then offered iced tea pulled from a twenty year-old refrigerator that had never seen a hungry teenager. Or an ice-maker. Jack got out two glasses, poured, set the pitcher down on the counter, and put a chilled tumbler of rawhide-colored liquid in front of Bill, keeping one for himself.
“Bill, you feeling all right?”
“Huh?” He looked up as Jack sat down across from him, legs stretched out to rest work-worn boots on a handmade split-pine chair. Honest sympathy shone in Jack’s face. “Yeah.” He sipped the iced tea, putting it down when the shakes returned. Very carefully. Very exactly. Like a helicopter coming into a hot LZ pad, he navigated the water-dewed bottom of the glass down to its nexus with a polished burl wood table top. A slice of wood from a tree that had to have been three hundred years old. Handmade. Like a lot of the stuff on the hallway walls and in the simple kitchen. He licked dry lips. “Jack, what the hell’s going on here?”
Jack sighed, long, low and musingly. Bushy eyebrows almost hid the man’s lake-blue eyes. “Nothing. Nothing at all. You go on back home to LA and forget all about this. Nobody’d believe you, anyway.”
Stubborness welled up. Along with something else. “I’ve got pictures. Photos don’t lie.”
Jack laughed gruffly. “Bullshit. Digitized photo images can be morphed so they’ll show Joe Stalin humping Marilyn Monroe. Don’t you keep up on your own field?”
What the hell? “So what! Get a TV news crew out here with a satcom dish and remote broadcast van, and they’ll believe.”
Jack shrugged, sipped his iced tea, and mumbled “If they want to believe.”
Overhead came the sound of steps. Not footsteps. But steps. Jack winced. “Damn. Told her to stay in her room.”
“Who?”
In the hallway behind him, the aged stairs creaked as wood shifted to a tread totally lacking the pacing of normal humans. People. He swallowed hard, focusing on Uncle Jack. “Who, Jack?
Jack looked sour, glancing behind Bill as the steps walked right up to and then stopped behind Bill’s chair. “Captain Siane, that’s who. She’s a nosy bitch who won’t follow anyone’s rules.”