Centuries? Aliens hidden in the New Mexico back country since before the Spaniards got their butts kicked back in 1680 by the united Pueblos? The Keresan, Hopis and Zunis were agricultural folks who’d grown com, beans and squash as good as any Anglo farmers. They’d built great pueblo towns out of adobe mudbrick, stone and wood, made exquisite pottery, and still worshiped kachinas, the Com Goddess, Coyote, and a few other beings with not the slightest resemblance to standard Judeo-Christian theology. But he was wandering. He looked back to Jack.
“So this really is Uncle Jack’s Home for Retired Space Beings?”
“Yep.”
“Then why the highway sign? Are you saying these… these aliens walk along the roadside just like us, picking up litter? Old pop cans? Paper trash. Stuff like that?”
Jack eyed him seriously. Totally serious. Much like Emma had, except she’d been less patient. Maybe she’d seen his kind of come-on once too often. “Sure. Why not?”
Why not indeed? “But that means—”
“That means everyone in Reserve knows about them,” Jack said amiably. Lazily, he reached back, refilled his glass from the iced tea pitcher by the sink, sipped, and put the glass down. He looked up, face now judgmental. “Bill, you ever done civic duty? Been a volunteer fireman? Collected cans for a food bank money drive? Done anything for anyone else but yourself?”
Siane watched him even more intently than Jack. Her slick black hair stirred to hidden skin movements. Jack’s mustache twitched. “A few times. Before my daughter died. Before my divorce. Now, I’m just trying to make a few bucks. To take care of my boy. Davy.”
Siane sighed. Like a waterfall talking to a mountain meadow, speaking in tongues known only to the boulders, the wind, the moss and those who sleep unafraid among the stars. “We just want to belong,” she said, her voice slicing into scarred areas he’d hidden away after Elaine died from a smack-laced crackball, courtesy of her jerkoff gang boyfriend.
He turned to Jack, wanting to believe, but afraid. “And no one tells?”
Jack blinked owlishly. “Out here, people mind their own business. If someone pays their bills, honors their word, says hi on the street, and acts neighborly, that’s enough. Neighbors are few and far between out here. Especially good neighbors. The kind you can rely on for help putting out a brush fire before it bums down your house.” He looked aside at Siane. “Go on outside and tell the others they can come out of the cabins. Either he’ll tell, or he won’t.”
Siane left, her inhuman steps moving delicately, calmly down the hallway. The front screen flapped open, then banged shut. Steps receded into the treeline, finally vanishing as the rising wind of early evening creaked high branches. He looked back to Uncle Jack.
“Why you?”
“Why me what?” Gruff guardedness returned to the man.
“Jack, why do you stay here? Why not… get a life. Elsewhere.”
Pain etched Jack’s clean-shaven cheeks. Along with pride. “Ellies dead. Long dead. And it’s kind of like an inheritance. This place. Family honor and all that. Most city people don’t understand.”
Understand what? That there was more to life than just money? That loneliness was the great universal? Maybe his grandpa had left him something more than wistful memories.
“And litter control? They really do that?”
Jack grinned, boyish despite his years. “Sure. But only for three miles north and south of town. And only at night, so they don’t frighten the children. It’s their civic duty. Makes them feel like they belong. Bill, they’re lonely. They’re tired. They have no home to go back to—it’s all lost in time. And we re off the beaten path. Far off.” Jack stood up abruptly; his empty glass clinked as he put it in the sink, cleaning up. Like you do when sharing a kitchen with someone else. “It’s all about community, Bill. Do you understand?”
He stood up, shakes gone. “But they’re so different.”
Jack followed him out to the front porch. “You think so?”
They stood on the porch just as the Sun’s honey yellow globe dipped below the western ridges of the Tularosas, easing the harsh brightness of day, and bathing Uncle Jack’s Home for Retired Space Beings in an amber glow. In that glow, retirees relaxed on cabin porches, tossed Frisbees to each other, rode a skittish horse, or just stood close by a tree, eyes—if they had them—closed tight as they hugged its rough bark, tasting naturalness after eons spent between cold metal walls, accompanied only by long-lost memories. Among the trees, Captain Siane walked hand in hand with Captain Twixell, she tall, young and vigorous, he looking a bit stooped, a bit creaky in the joints, an air of weariness hanging over him like a familiar storm cloud. Siane’s slim back stiffened, as if she sensed his feelings. She didn’t look back. She just walked on into the cool twilight of a high mountain forest in the back-country of New Mexico, a place lost in time, a sere, primal landscape lying west of the Trinity Site, north of the Mogollon Rim, east of the Blue Range Primitive Area, and south of ancient Amerindian peoples. People who perhaps had once felt as Jack did. Sympathetic. Neighborly. Without pity. And accepting.
Jack opened his car door for him. He got in, laid the camera on the seat beside him, put the key in the ignition, and looked up at Jack. Jack with his revolver still in its worn holster.
“You’re not going to keep me here?”
“We re not that kind of people. Nor are they.”
What about Reserve? Maybe someone would talk. For money? For security? For the illusion of fame? “You could take my camera. Destroy the pictures. No proof.”
Jack smiled easily. Honestly. Still the Marlboro Man’s grizzled uncle, but an honest uncle. Not someone putting on a show for a stranger he hoped to fast-shuffle off, convinced he’d seen hallucinations brought on by salt deprivation and thirst. “The good people don’t demand proof. Nor do they invade someone’s privacy without good cause. Siane trusts you. Even Emma thought you had a spark of something in you despite your New York manners. Prove us right.”
He drove off.
Down the mountain. Across the river. Back through laid-back, deeply shadowed Reserve, where strange neighbors walked the night. Then left down State Highway 12, on the way south to its intersection with U.S. 180 and the long night drive down out of the mountains and into Silver City, a place of bright lights and fast money perched where desert meets mountain. Only the harsh engine sputter kept him company—but a lost muffler was the last thing on his mind.
Two miles south of Reserve, the two-lane highway shimmered mirage-like in the blue-black night, a darkness deep enough to require headlights. Twin yellow beams speared out, bathing the road in cones of cold light. Pine sap scent seeped in on the night air as he drove slowly, lazily, turning over the day’s events the way he used to play with crawdads at his grandpa’s farm outside Houston. In the country, beside a drainage ditch filled with rain from some sudden thunderstorm. He’d sit on the footbridge over the ditch, and lean over, dangling his four-year-old fingers in the warm, sluggish waters, fishing for a denizen of the deep.
Every time he caught a crawdad he’d squeal excitedly. No one around to hear. No matter. It had happened. He’d touched something alive. Something real. Something that shared the world with him and stared back at him with beady eyes on little stalks, impatient to be put back in the ditch water, where it would continue serenely on about its business. But not angry.