“Which means… that we don’t know about that kind of cop show stuff. Why don’t you tell us how to hotwire a car, huh, Trey? Break it down for us.”
I listened as they argued, my head in my hands. I’d already forgotten that things like missing keys could cause problems. J.Lo probably had perfume that could hotwire a car by smell, or some kind of car-starting hat or something.
Speaking of J.Lo, I barely noticed when he said, “Truck.”
“What?” I mumbled.
“The bluey truck,” he said. “From beforeto.”
“Hey, yeah! We saw a turquoise truck earlier, driving through the streets. Which one of you was that?”
There was silence. Only Trey was smiling, which I was beginning to understand didn’t mean anything good. I’m not saying I believed all, or any, of the things these people had been saying about the Massive Alien Conspiracy, but I thought Trey could maybe disagree without being a jerk about it.
“Are you going to tell her?” asked Trey. “I’ll happily do it if you won’t—”
“You saw Chief Shouting Bear,” said Beardo. “He’s a…he’s just an eccentric old junkman that lives around these parts. He’s kind of a town legend.”
“Ha—yeah. The Legend of the Crazy Indian,” said Vicki. Then she looked sideways at J.Lo and me and added, “No offense.”
“For what?” I asked. “We’re not Indians. Or crazy.”
“I am one-sixteenth Habadoo,” said J.Lo.
“Tell them the best part,” said Trey. “Tell them Chief Shouting Bear’s the guy who found the flying saucer that crashed in 1947. Tell them he has it in his basement.”
Beardo sighed. “The Chief…claims he has the spacecraft. He really was here in Roswell back then—he was in the air force or something during World War Two.”
“There was no air force in World War Two,” said Trey. “The air force was founded in 1947, and he got kicked out of the military for believing in UFOs!”
“So have any of you seen it?” I asked. “The spaceship?”
“All of us,” said Kat. “It’s sort of a rite of passage. You come to Roswell, eventually you end up in Shouting Bear’s basement looking at that piece of crap.”
“I want to see the ship,” said J.Lo.
“Don’t bother, kid.”
“We’d recognize the ’47 saucer if we saw it,” said Vicki, and everyone but Trey started nodding. “The ufology community knows what that ship looked like. We’ve known for years.”
“Decades.”
If anyone spoke next, it was drowned out by loud, dry booms like dud fireworks that seemed to turn the whole night inside out. We raced to the window to see the Gorg and the Boov fighting again—maybe fighting over some small white object in the plum sky.
That night I told Vicki that we planned to sleep in the UFO museum. “Y’know, because the other kids are there.” Even though at this point I would sooner have slept next to seasick howler monkeys than Beardo’s two boys.
“I thought you two could bunk in the living room,” Vicki said, holding pillows and looking hurt.
“Maybe tomorrow night? Come on, JayJay,” I said, finding J.Lo’s hand under the sheet and pulling him out of the apartment.
“I am not feeling so well,” said J.Lo as we went downstairs. “I think those littles soaps were not the eating kind.”
“You have more food in the car. We have to be quick now, in case she looks out the window.”
We walked toward the museum until the last possible moment. Then I checked Vicki’s windows behind us, and we rushed down an alley and wound our way back out to the main road a few blocks away.
“I want to visit the shouty bear man,” said J.Lo. “He sounds nice. Also I want to see his ship.”
“Me too,” I said. “Right after we get Slushious fixed. You know, a few weeks ago I would have said that spaceships couldn’t look like big meatballs. A year ago I wouldn’t have thought they’d be all glass and hoses. Maybe the Chief’s ship just doesn’t look like people expect. Maybe you’ll recognize where it came from.”
“The peoples do not think it is authentical.”
“Yeah, well, they’re nice people, but those guys could get licked on the lips by a Lhasa apso and they’d still claim it was the Abominable Snowman.”
“Yes. I do not know what this means.”
We neared the arroyo. I was out of breath but happy to be doing something constructive after sitting around all day. As we grew close, I could see Pig meowing silently to us through the passenger window. I let her out and gave her a scratch behind the ears.
“Sorry, Pig. We’re here for the rest of the night now.”
J.Lo tossed off his ghost costume and got immediately to work. He squirted some liquid over his hands, quickly congealed into gloves, then poured me a pair, too. Together we wrenched the road sign out of the hood.
“Hm,” said J.Lo.
“What?”
“Nothings. To work! Pass to me the flocked bootpunch.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Pink. Fur. Twisty parts.”
“That’s like, three things in here.”
“It will be quivering a little.”
“Aha. Here.”
Two hours passed, and I had to admit I wasn’t good for anything except handing J.Lo tools that had been described really well beforehand. I’d been playing with Pig for a bit and was beginning to drift off when I realized that J.Lo was just sitting there, staring.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I cannot fix it. Slushious requires a new Snark’s. A new bipaa’ackular humbutt would not hurt anything, either.”
I nodded. “That’s it, then. We have to steal a car. It’s not our fault. Maybe we can hotwire a police car—you know, something that doesn’t belong to just one person.”
J.Lo packed up his tools.
“Anyway,” I went on, “we should do it and leave soon. I think Vicki wants to adopt us. And I don’t like the suspicious way Kat keeps looking at you.”
“Is Kat the one having the glasses and dark hairs?”
“No, Kat is a woman.”
“Hm.”
There was a rumble that I first thought was thunder, but then it came again, loud as anything, and the night sky lit up orange over the northern hills.
“That was close,” I said.