Jimmy Jack and the Smartman
Page 12
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The aliens start winking shortly after sunset.
I take a breath and squeeze my foghorn.
And everything explodes in glory.
Ray Ray tosses his match, and fountains of fire and smoke erupt around the hovermudder race track. Bottlerockets and Roman candles shriek upwards into the night. The explosions of hundreds of cherry bombs echo through the night. Tornado Medusa's seminal guitar work on their classic hit, "My Heart Bleeds from My Throat," shrills from the speakers surrounding the giant radio. My heart thrills to imagine how that music must sound when pulsed out of that giant radio. I've never wanted a trip in a flying saucer so badly in my entire life.
The hovermudders rumble to life and speed around the mud oval, tossing great waves of soaring mud into the air in their wake. The jetting flames ringing the track illuminate the nude women, whose bodies are adorned in war paint as they dance and stomp, shouting obscenities at the stars. The dancers howl and scream. They writhe in the mud, striking the ground with their fists. I blare my foghorn a second time, and the great wicker man built in the center of it all is engulfed in orange fire, a bright beacon burning in the center of our festivities, a rude exclamation point of a screaming tongue possessed by creatures other than the smartmen.
My mouth can't stretch wide enough for my smile as I look upon the mayhem we've created. Yogi and his friends likely never saw it coming. I doubt they suspected anything during the whole week while they've concentrated on their radio, while they've worked so hard to learn how to speak to those aliens zipping around in their saucers.
We haven't worked a fraction as hard to communicate with those aliens as the smartmen have. Our preparations are so cheap when compared to the resources invested in that giant radio. But it doesn't matter. We've still sent our kind's first, clear message to those little green men buzzing above.
The lights in the sky wink at our fires. They scatter and twirl. For a moment, all those lights seem to zip and dart about in panic. They all disappear a second later. The sky goes black, the smoke of the tires blotting out the stars, the rumble of the hovermudders suffocating any of the smartmen's despair.
I blow my foghorn a third and final time, and our party erupts in applause and shouts. It's time to celebrate.
For I doubt that those lizard or little gray aliens are going to want to ever come back.
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