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In the previous episode, Arizona rancher Buck
Turner bemoans how inadequate their house is for rehabilitating an
alien.
Becky finally got the alien to start talking
English by holding up one of Lupe Guzmán's tortillas. She told him the
word and then spelled it out, writing it neatly on her little chalkboard
that she balanced carefully on her lap.
Becky had been sure the creature was going to
start talking. We men only guffawed about her resolution.
She had him give a little show. I was
pleasantly surprised. He really was getting better. It meant I might get
a little work out of him before he went on his way.
"Tor-tee-YA," the creature croaked
carefully, demonstrating for us, egged on by Becky and Edith. The nasal
warble he spoke with sounded like someone with a cold.
"Very good!" Becky said in praise.
She tore off half of the tortilla in her hand and gave it to the
creature.
He took a bite out of it, "Tor-tee-YA!"
he repeated, pleased with himself.
"Do you like the tortilla?"
"Tor-tee-YA!" he affirmed, nodding
hesitantly. Then he attempted another word: "Goo-UD."
"He says they're good. Pa! Did you hear
that?" Caleb said.
"Yes, I did, boy," I said.
"I'll be darned."
We figured it wasn't a lack of understanding
that was keeping him from communicating. Because now that he was healed
further, he was. Soon the day would come when he'd answer my questions -
where he came from; different information about his spaceship and where
he was heading before he lit into the ground.
I remember a discussion I had with Edith soon
after the creature started talking. Hearing those two simple words come
out of his mouth was a turning point. It got me believing in Edith's
ability to affect a cure on the creature and the value of what she was
trying to do. And I still hadn't forgot my mental list of questions.
"It's a good thing you spoke up for
him," I said by way of trying to apologize. "I don't know what
I would've ended up doing with him. He probably wouldn't have done so
well in the convent with all those people they have to take care of. And
there was just so much I was having to do."
She smiled, gloating. "I kept seeing
small improvements. As long as there's some improvement, there's no way
I was going to give up."
"I reckon. I suppose all the work just
got to my head. Things weren't easy before he crashed and they sure
haven't gotten any easier," I said. "And he even healed faster
than a human would. I just want to let you know you did good, fixing him
up like that."
She shrugged and turned away from me.
"Thanks. But I'm not sure that I deserve the credit. I don't know
how much I was able to do for him. It probably was more his own
constitution than anything I was able to do."
I turned her back toward me. "You are far
too modest. You shouldn't be. People underestimate you. Even your own
husband."
"He is a remarkable creature," she
insisted.
"Yes dear," I said, not being able
to think of anything else to say. I gazed at Edith as her face showed
radiant in the light of the setting sun. Then I looked into the sky. I
had to suggest something I knew she was going to resist: "You know
we could make a lot of money from our association with this creature?
Instead of ranching and all the problems we get into, we could go into
exhibition and take him around the USA. I just wonder how we could find
a circus?"
I knew she'd protest, but once she saw the
numbers I wrote, she'd understand the straits the K-10 was in and
relent. Those numbers weren't half the trouble. I didn't have time to
keep good records, just estimates in my ledger. I expected they were
really optimistic estimates.
Slavery had been abolished, this was true.
That was just for the black man. The creature, however, wasn't human. To
the law it might as well have been a dog or cow that we'd be taking from
city to town to village to hamlet. We could lay claim to all of the
proceeds he'd generate at his exhibition. People would only pay more to
see something like him if he could talk and answer questions.
My head created dozens of fantasies of what it
would be like to travel all over the United States. I'd never been east
of the Appalachian Mountains; I'd like to see all that and I was sure
Edith would too. We could even go up into French-speaking Canada. He
already knew a word of Spanish. The creature could learn a few words of
French too.
She didn't reply right away, just gazed back
at me, as if she were looking for something in my eyes.
"What?" I asked, unsettled.
"What's wrong?" I asked suddenly defensive. "We could
travel. That would be nice."
Of course she didn't want to do that to him.
Edith didn't live in the real world. She never did. She'd made herself
the equal of any medical doctor while running a ranch in the middle of
the range. The idea of her getting a skill many people wouldn't allow
her to practice because she was a woman. She couldn't even vote! Those
weren't the actions of anybody who thought realistically.
Still, the world we lived in was real, only
partly the land of our dreams. One of us had to be practical. We would
all live better with more money.
I went into agriculture for lack of better
options. I wanted to scream at her: Think of all of the money people
would pay to see a man with insect eyes and green skin! If I screamed
that, she'd have shut up into herself like a turtle and not listened to
anything I said and then (worse) gone on and done what she'd intended to
do anyway.
I worked on trying to convince her to see
reason. "Even with there being a drought and all and the price of
cattle being run up like nobody's business, we could still make a lot
more with the traveling exhibit than being in the cattle business. With
all of that money we'd make, we could do things and go places and see
things. In a few years, we could work, or not work, if we chose.
"In your Scribner's are articles about
that P.T. Barnum and he was an exhibitor. Look at all of the money he
made. After we teach the creature more English, he could talk about all
of the worlds he's see traveling in the sky . . ."
It was my decision to make. She wasn't the
boss, never mind what Jed sometimes said. I didn't believe in acting
like a king. This is America. I tried to run my home like the President.
Countries, and homes, get into too much trouble when one man tells
everyone what to do. You only have to talk to immigrants to find that
out. From my days in the Army, I learned it was better to get everybody
to put their full effort into the enterprise so they'd use their brain.
"Why would he want to do that?" she
said, interrupting.
"Why?"
"You come from thousands and thousands of
miles away to another planet and that's what you want to do? Go on tour
like you're livestock in a show? He's an intelligent creature - like you
- not some animal!"
"I'm not thinking livestock show! I'm
thinking Chautauqua! Wouldn't you like to go to a chautauqua with a
strange-looking creature like him as the speaker?"
"Not if it wasn’t his choice to be
there. If you can't see his point of view, then how about your own?
Could you suffer all of the fools who would say that he wasn't really
from outer space? If Jesus himself came back and started performing
miracles, there are people who would say that he wasn't really
Jesus," she said.
"Come on! Anybody can see he doesn't come
from Earth! All you have to do is look. His head doesn't look like ours.
His eyes don't look like ours. And if they didn't think they had seen a
real spaceman, the problem would be all theirs. That creature is as real
as it gets," I said, insisting. Edith was a wonder at times, a
creature who was unaffected by toil and odds. Other times, she was
downright frustrating. This was one of those times.
"But they'd be there, day after day,
telling others he didn't look like a spaceman, causing others to decide
to not see the show, probably making it a marginal moneymaker at best.
"Then there would be those who would go
and try to find out what kind of theater trick you were using to get the
alien to look the way that he did. Some people out there wouldn't know a
miracle if it bit them on the nose. You know there'd be people out there
like that - a lot of them. Is that what you want all of this to be
leading to? You'd be wishing you were home in no time."
She waited for me to say something in
response, staring into my eyes with an intensity I found discomforting.
"All this time you were saying that we
could use some help around the ranch," she said.
"Yes, but . . ." I began.
"I think you should teach him to be a
cowboy," she said seriously.
I threw my head back in laughter. "He'd
make one damn funny-
looking cowboy," I said.
"But he's got a good-enough size. He could
do the job with some teaching," she insisted.
"With his green skin and big eyes?"
"The way he looks would have nothing to do
with the way he could do his job," she said.
I stopped laughing. He really might able to do
it. I'd heard Negroes weren't smart enough to read when I was young and
then met a dozen who could. It all was a matter of being taught. Him
learning would be a way for him to pay me back for the months that we had
to carry him. There would be deeper wells to dig and fences to mend at the
very least. "We can try it."
"Once he's healed, he'll do fine," she
said, smiling and kissing me on the cheek, the first kiss she'd given me
in weeks though I didn't realize it until it happened. "I'm glad you
decided to give him a chance.
"Anyway, what do you know about show
business? You've only been to one play in your entire life!"
"I could learn," I said, muffled by
oncoming lips.
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