Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 14/14

            “’Ja hear that?”

            I realized that Connie was now addressing me, there in my secure location behind a bush. I shouted ‘No’.

            She shouted back to me in her Wingnut voice.

            “They told me to take it to Hopkins.”

            “Who’s Hopkins?”

            “Hopkins the city! Like I’m the one supposed to take it to a service center five hundred…”

            “Connie!” I shouted. “I didn’t hear them fay anyfing!”

            She lowered her head. I looked where she was looking. She was looking at where the box now wasn’t.

            “Oh, shit.”

            I ran toward her.

            “Get out of here! Forget da bof!”

            Connie held a small item toward the hulking section of the spaceship that sat before her.

            “Wanna Pez?”

            It wasn’t a tractor beam that took Connie. I didn’t see what grabbed her, but it grabbed her by the leg, and drug her toward a large door that had swung open from the bottom on that structure, creating a ramp into it. I didn’t know why it wasn’t taking me also. I was wishing it would have, so I could catch up to Connie. She slid toward the door, and I dove at her. I knew that I couldn’t stop this, but I would have been joining her. But even if she felt toward me as I felt toward her, she wouldn’t have liked that.

            I somehow got to the door just after she did, though. Then she was gone, into the ultra-darkness inside. Perhaps if I had dove in with her and wasn’t wanted, it would’ve spat both of us out, but I hadn’t been quick enough anyway. I made it to the ramp as it swung up. I held onto it and it took me up. For a split-second I thought that it had me too, and I found hope in that. My legs, chest and feet stuck to the outside of the door, and that helped me cling to it as it as it swung vertical. It was sticky. Not a wet sticky, but a mechanical sticky, which I, through tactile intuition, associated with some power that seemed to emanate from every atom in the ship’s makeup. I clung with the desperate hope that my hands would get in the way and automatically stop the door from closing. As if the ship’s brutal intention could be halted by some safety feature. I saw something else featured with the door. Connie’s foot was jutting through the gap. My fingers were squeezed away as the door met the rest of the ship, like so much toothpaste, and I heard Connie scream from inside the ship. Well, not so much a scream, but a guttural ‘ungh’. I slid to the ground in a rough ride. I bounced back up to see if there was anything else to do. I sensed the ship gone. My shirt sleeves and front were scored with slices, as were my pants. The scratches on my clothing didn’t go all the way through, but I found corresponding scratches on my skin later, along with a rash. I don’t know if that was from scales on the ship, or radiation, though perhaps you might.

            I lit my key-fob and conducted a spiral search, muttering her name. I saw one of her shoes and sniffed in exclamation, but I did what I needed to do and checked whether there was a foot in it, and there wasn’t. The fog about me began to glow from the sunrise, and I realized that my search was futile. I recalled her apologetic look as she was dragged away and was, again, resentful that I wasn’t taken along with her. Whatever it was knew that I was there with her. Didn’t I rate? I saw what I thought might be a clue, but it was just a dried-up cow pie. I nudged it with a toe and a horned toad skittered from underneath.

            “Fit go-in.”

            Never again would I ask Connie if she was a double agent, and that had mattered less and less. It had become a joke between us, like when I would ask if she was going to finish her Turkey T, or if she was considering letting my nipple go. Those needle-nose pliers in a velvet glove. Dawn came, and the spiral I described straightened northwest because I didn’t want to face the sun. I wandered diagonally across fields for some hours, crossing roads at the same pace, carrying a patent-leather flat, with little brown scaly things skittering before me and in my wake. That’s how I wound up in Fort Covington, which, Connie had told me was also a city. I emerged into the city limits from behind a Tenger Mart, where the kindly staff suggested a bear claw and a small cup of drip coffee, which set me to the task of considering my existence. I would set back toward where the sun had risen. But a hastily printed notice in the door window stopped me. It announced Connie’s graveside memorial, to be held soon on the fort grounds proper. She was a hero.

            The cemetery grounds were only a short walk away through an idyllic residential neighborhood that had no border quality whatsoever. It was if Tenger was rubbing it in. Fort Covington was a nearly stereotypical, self realized, well-balanced, just-so populated community. I surmised that ‘sweep gangs’ held sway in Fort Covington; ragamuffins who, with the sunset, ran wild through the streets gathering litter. Here I was hoofing it through all of this, practically announcing that I was an Imnan official gone rogue. I still wore my laminated badge, and thought about taking it off, but there were other features that made it obvious to everyone there that I was a foreigner. Not to mention my messed-up mouth. With every step, a voice in the back of my mind said: “Defect. Defect.” Somehow I knew which way to go, especially since people I met on the way all but swung an arm, palm open, to indicate the direction I needed to go. ‘The faire is that way.’

            These were the people who had killed Connie, I thought, and I was a tad upset at that. If they weren’t guilty, they were certainly culpable, but just as guilty or culpable as my own conglomerate nation. Let’s just say that I was mad at the world as I took that shoe to the cemetery entrance, mad at a world that sacrificed so much for a blow dryer or turkey breast.

            I went through the gate, and, off in the distance, there they were. A small gathering and a 21 gun salute. I put the shoe at the base of a large tree. I had seen all that I needed to see. I looked at them from across a tiny valley, over a walkway, and saw that there was a casket. Then Connie herself sidled up to me with a ‘sit go-in’.

            She looked over the scene along with me, and with as much curiosity. Then she saw the shoe, and picked it up.

            “Hey. I’ve been looking for that.”

            She looked at the shoe and we shared yet another moment. Then, she looked concerned, from her place between me and the trees and the sky.

            “Don’t die on me,” she said.

            “I’m not dying.”

            “Don’t die on me.”

            “I’m not dying. I thought you were dead.”

            “I don’t blame you. Can you get up?”

            I sat up, and Connie crouched back on her heels beside me.

            “The cemetery’s no place for ambulances.”

            “I faw you and I fawt I’d died, dough.”

            “‘Nuff of that, now.”

            “I think I’m fitting on a horned toad.”

            “Then shift. Roll over a bit, but stay where you are.”

            “Not like I’m going anywhere foon...”

            I tilted, and the horned toad left like a fart.

           “There’s so much that I want to tell you, but I can’t,” she said.

            “Tell anyway, if if really you. Thaf never fopped us.”

            “It’s me.”

            I believed her, against a lot of evidence to the contrary.

            “Tell me, and we can be togefer.”

            Connie was startled. She quieted down and looked over at the burial party.

            “Fairly insightful, Merle, but, you see, that’s the last thing they want. We have to stay separate. That I can tell you.”

            “Daf too romantic.”

            She nipple-tweaked me back to the ground.

            “That’s the way it is! Listen! We don’t have much time!”

            “Then tell me who they are!” I shouted. She shoved me deeper into the grass to quiet me down.

            “Hush! You’re going to interrupt my funeral!”

            “Forget that!” I hissed. “Who are they? Who youfing our noggin for an abacuf?”

            She let my nipple go and crouched back, pondering what she could reveal among the branches, sky and clouds. I pressed further.

            “Is it Tenger? Is it Imno? Is it alienfh?”

            She smiled.

            “We were always on the right track. I just went a little further. To where it was too dangerous to continue.”

            “But who is good, and who is bad? Where shouldn’t I go?”

            Connie stood. A smile, a wink, a tweak of the nipple, and she was on her way.

            “I don’t rightly know,” she said, “whether any place is safe.” And she was gone. I sat up. The funeral had ended. She had said-

            “If I can, I’ll get back to you.”

            And there I was, a foreign agent without visa, on a government installation. On my ass. My time in Tenger was over.

            I slinked through the city toward my beloved Imno 400. Trash had accumulated in bushes along sidewalks, and, past the Tenger Mart, at the base of the hedgerows running southeast. I felt compelled to pick up every bit on the way. The bags and containers served to hold smaller bits, then I found larger bags, and they all went inside each other. I was making Tenger beautiful again. I paused to free a horned toad that I had inadvertently placed in one large bag I had wound up with. Perhaps he had been in there in the first place. When I got to my car, which was parked in the ditch next to the alien meadow, I chucked all of it into the back as I got in.

            There was a checkpoint at the border that afternoon. Tenger waved me through, consistent with the attitude they’d had throughout my visit. My fellow Imnans were more thorough. My Imno 400 had announced itself. The muffler system wasn’t working since the flex pipe had been left in the ditch back in Tenger. I guess I had bottomed out as Connie and I had rushed out to confront the extraterrestrials. I hadn’t noticed. The Imno Regionals gave me a fix ticket for that. Then they spied the large bag in the back, which had obviously seen better days, and fined me $100 for each piece. They gave me a break, though. They could have fined me more because it all had the Tenger logo. With that record fine and my attitude which vacillated between ‘trust’ and ‘don’t’ as per my meeting with Connie, they suggested counseling. And I did have an appointment scheduled for later that week, you know, to figure out the trances. I include that hefty fine in this invoice.

            Flex pipe replacement: 1000

            Litter possession fines: 3200

            You now find me, as the Imnans at the border found me, shocked and confused. But I know that I’m not the one who should be liable. So, whoever you are, if you are an Imno official, colonel or higher, and you aren’t involved, pass this invoice up. Connie was. Is. A major. I doubt she was promoted, if she’s still alive. If you are Connie, pass this up. I doubt that you have much official income. And this shouldn’t be your concern anyway, what with what you’ve been through. I’ll take care of this. If you are an extraterrestrial of any sort, and are reading this, this invoice is for you. If you intend to fuck with us, this is what you get. Connie and I did a great thing for humankind. But, by galactic standards, it was probably just your average road trip.

            Payable upon receipt: $15,690

            Perhaps everyone responsible can chip in. I don’t know exactly what happened to incur these expenses, but I’m not paying for it.