Alien Taste

by Wen Spencer

  He recalled his last thoughts before going to sleep and the horseback ride went down into Mom Lara’s rose garden to visit the grave of one Miss Pretty Lightfoot. Sometime over the years the rock marking the grave had been moved. If Cally even remembered the burial, she gave no sign. To have the memory of a child—he wondered what it was like.

  The ride went to the big wraparound porch where his moms and Max were laughing. His feet boomed on the painted wood floor, so he made a complete circle of the porch, making the most of the effect. Finally he collapsed onto the top porch step to drop Cally off.

  “Again!” Cally cried, half-choking him with one of her misplaced bear hugs.

  Mom Lara saved him by gently prying her off. “Cally, honey, it’s almost dinnertime. Go wash your face and hands.”

  Mom Jo gave him a hug and let him go with a “Now let me look at this.” She tilted his head aside to look at his neck.

  “It’s nothing, Mom.”

  “Nothing? An inch over or wider—” She shook her head and scowled first at Ukiah and then at Max. “Sometimes—”

  “Mom, I’m fine.” He grinned at her, silently vowing that she would never see the disc in Max’s Hummer. “I cut myself worse than this the first time I shaved.”

  They heard a shout of laughter from inside the house, and Mom Lara called, “You have to admit Jo, he did.”

  With that, it was over—the least amount of fuss they had ever put up over him being hurt while working.

  They had steak, medium for Mom Lara and mooing for Ukiah, Max, and Mom Jo. Cally announced proudly she had picked all the salad ingredients, and the mangled vegetables showed it. Max talked Mom Lara through grilling summer squash instead of her normal pan-fry. Mom Jo brought out a bottle of wine and a glass of grape juice for Cally. Dusk fell and the yard became bejeweled with fireflies. Cally begged a jar off of Mom Lara and went off chasing the gleaming insects.

  Ukiah sat on the porch, watching her play, drinking the wine with the other adults. When did I become one of them? It had happened sometime when he wasn’t looking. Was it this year? Last year?

  When he had arrived, he wasn’t sure, but he could recall the signposts along the road. The first had been certainly Max taking him on as a partner. The second probably had been buying his motorcycle. If he was going to work full-time with Max, he had to be able to commute into Pittsburgh daily. Max and his moms took turns teaching him how to drive, with some vague notion he’d drive Mom Lara’s ’95 Neon to work. He found the whole process of driving a car awkward, and it left Mom Lara without a car all day. He pitched the idea of the motorcycle to Max first, pointing out that he had ridden dirt bikes on the farm for years. He could put a down payment on a brand-new, reliable machine with his first paycheck and only use Mom Lara’s car on days of bad winter weather. It took a while to get Mom Lara over the amputation rate in motorcycle accidents, but his moms agreed. Max drove him to the bank and then to the dealership, but he let Ukiah pick and buy his machine, stepping in only at the end to haggle down the price and help fill out the registration paperwork.

  Another signpost had been his moms telling him but not Cally that Mom Lara had a brain tumor and might not survive the surgery. Ukiah was never sure if this was a blessing or a curse. Cally had remained happily ignorant the day of the surgery while Ukiah was sure he’d die of worry.

  Another had been when he discovered that the medical bills were driving his moms into bankruptcy, so he used his paychecks to pay off the debtors. At first they protested, but he pointed out that if he was working, he should pay rent and his share of the food. Then he extended his health benefits, covering Mom Lara as part of his family, something Mom Jo couldn’t do, despite their marriage.

  Mom Jo took Cally off to bed and then went to exercise her pack of ten wolf dogs. Mom Lara was in the kitchen, watching the Mars mission on the NASA channel as she washed up dishes. Max sat rocking back and forth on the glider. Ukiah lifted the wine bottle to pour himself another glass and discovered it was empty.

  He glanced over at Max, realizing that he had been quiet for some time. Max was a quiet, introspective drunk. “You okay?”

  Max waved a hand at the empty bottle. “I never know when to stop anymore.”

  “Staying the night then?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Ukiah stood, holding out his hand to Max. “Want a hand up?”

  “I guess so.”

  In the guest room, as he helped Max with his shoes, Ukiah realized how much Max had become part of their life. His alarm clock was on the nightstand. A change of his clothes was in the dresser. His spare toothbrush hung in the guest bathroom.

  “There are times,” Max said quietly, “that I wish one of your moms would marry me. I wish that this was my place, that these were my kids, that this was my life. When I was young, this was the life I wanted, it was the life I thought I was going to live, it was the life I worked hard to have.”

  Ukiah wasn’t sure what to say. He gripped Max’s shoulder, a little ashamed at the inadequacy of the gesture. “I’m sorry.”

  “Kid, if you ever find a girl that loves you, that you love, grab hold and never let anything happen to her.”

  “I will.”

  “Good night, kid,” Max muttered, sprawling out onto the bed.

  “Good night,” Ukiah whispered, and closed the guest room door on Max’s quiet misery.

  Downstairs, he heard the click of dishes and soft drone of the news. He drifted down to the kitchen. “Anything I can help you with, Mom Lara?”

  “No, thank you, dear.” She patted his cheek with a soapy hand without taking her eyes from the kitchen television. The NASA channel showed an odd still picture of closed-quarters machinery. In a small side window, Mom Lara was watching the local news channel. More thunderstorms rushing down on Pittsburgh. “I’m just puttering around during the communication delays. The ship’s landed on Mars and they’ll be dismounting the rover soon.” Her eyes were sparkling with excitement. She was always so vibrant when she talked about stars and planets. He wondered how she ever gave up her work to raise Cally. “Is Max staying the night?”

  “Yeah.”

  She sighed slightly, rinsing the soap from her hands and drying them on a tea towel. “He was never meant to live as a bachelor. He’s one of those men that needs a wife and kids to be happy.”

  “I know.”

  “Does he ever talk about starting to date again? It’s been almost six years since his wife was killed.”

  Ukiah shrugged. “He didn’t look at women before, but lately he’s been checking them out. He asks me occasionally what I think about certain women, you know, a waitress at Ritter’s diner, one of the 7-Eleven cashiers.”

  “What do you tell him?”

  “The truth.”

  “Ukiah, your truth is so brutal at times. I hope you’ve tried to be nice about it.”

  “Well, I try.”

  “Good boy.” She turned back to the TV. The weather ended without the Mars shot changing. A remote story started up with a pretty blonde reporter playing with a rover prototype apparently developed locally.

  He frowned at something wrong, out of place. Then he remembered. He had put a mouse in his pocket earlier. He tented his breast pocket and looked in. The mouse was gone. When had he lost it? In Schenley Park? At the morgue? In the Hummer? When he took his nap? He grimaced at the thought of losing it in his bedroom—Mom Lara would freak. Surely if he had had it until he had gotten home, it would have moved around, tried to get out, or otherwise drawn his attention to it. He must have lost it earlier, probably when he was tracking and too focused to notice its escape.

  The obligatory local take on the world news over, the studio reporters came on the air, their faces grave. “Early this morning deputy coroner Earl Frakes was killed while conducting an autopsy on a woman suspected of murdering her three roommates and a policeman.”

  Ukiah turned away from the television, wishing he could tune it out. “Mom Jo still run
ning the dogs?”

  The television continued on behind his back. “Janet Haze had been killed in a police shootout yesterday. Police say that they believe Haze acted under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. We go live to Hap Johnson on the scene.”

  “Um-huh.” Mom Lara murmured, eyes on the main screen as the uncoupling countdown started.

  Ukiah glanced out the kitchen window to see if he could spot his other mom. The moon was a few days from full; it coated the wheat fields beyond the yard in soft silver. In the center of the field stood his oak. The tallest tree on the farm, it had been his sanctuary since the first day he arrived here. Its leaves tipped with moon glow, but his tree house was lost in the dark shadows of the night.

  “Thanks, Ashley,” the remote, Hap Johnson, was saying. “I’m here at the county morgue, where early this morning deputy coroner Earl Frakes was the victim of a grisly murder—”

  Ukiah felt the desperate need to escape the television. “Good night, Mom. I’m going to go out to my tree house. Don’t wait up for me.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  He strolled out to the tree, climbed the battered ladder up to the large platform built in the massive limbs. He hadn’t been out to it in months. Strange how he used to all but live up here. When Mom Jo first brought him home, he’d hid from punishment up in the branches of the oak. The tree house had been built as a compromise, a place for Mom Jo when she came out to comfort him. He hid up here for days after they brought Cally home from the hospital. His first conversation with Max had taken place here.

  He stretched out on the worn boards, still slightly warm from the sun. He was never sure why the tree made him feel so safe. It was something inside him buried too deep to touch. Maybe it was open sky, removed from all the chaos and noise of civilized life.

  There was something digging in his side. He reached into his pocket and found the ballpoint pen thing from Schenley Park. He scowled at it. What was this? Was it of any importance at all? Too many mysteries had been dropped on him today. This one he didn’t care about. He slipped it into his stash hole for safekeeping, then rolled over onto his back to stare up through the branches at the night sky.

  The stars filled the sky; Mars glittered like a bright star. The night insects were deafening, and Ukiah could only think of Haze, her eyes wild, shouting about them. Why had Rennie Shaw said Ukiah was one of them? How could he have anything in common with a man like that? Yet few people in Pittsburgh—in Pennsylvania—recognized Ukiah’s name as the name of a place. “Ukiah,” they would say, “is that a family name?”

  The kitchen screen door squeaked open, banged shut. Minutes later Mom Jo came up the ladder. She paused on the top rung to peer over the edge at him.

  “You mind company?”

  Ukiah patted the board beside him, and she climbed up the rest of the way.

  “Mars is bright tonight.” He pointed out the planet.

  She nodded, her chin eclipsing the constellation Cassiopeia from his sight as she did. “Lara can’t take her eyes off the news cast.” She suddenly pointed off to the far eastern horizon. “Shooting star, make a wish.”

  I want to know who I am. The sudden, clear desire went through him as painfully as the sword cut. He shuddered from the thrust, and Mom Jo reached out to smooth his hair.

  “You okay?”

  “Mom, tell me again about how you found me.”

  She sat silent in the darkness, only her scent marking her as his mom. What had his real mother been like? “I was a grad student.” She started at the same point she always did. “A wolf pack had been sighted in Oregon’s Umatilla National Park, the first time in almost sixty years. I jumped at the chance to do my thesis work on them. When I arrived, I discovered their situation was desperate. It had been a hard winter. The park’s elk herds were overcrowded and starving. Due to the deep snow, snowmobile trails proved to be the easiest paths for the elk to follow. The trails lead down into cattle and sheep country. Where the elk went, the wolves followed.”

  The familiar tale was normally comforting in its cadences. This time he waited impatiently for new information, something to shed light on who he was.

  “The Oregon wildlife department was using humane cages to try to capture straying wolves and relocate them. My job was to monitor the cages, checking each day to see if any wolves had been captured. One day I went and found a boy inside the cage, growling with wild eyes and chewing on the bait like he hadn’t eaten in weeks—”

  “No,” he interrupted her. “Not the way you usually do. Tell me as an adult.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I know you don’t trust the government, but why didn’t you tell someone that you found me? Didn’t you wonder if someone was looking for me?”

  She thought about that, stroking his hair. “Well, I guess, I didn’t tell anyone because I was young and arrogant. I never questioned that I could civilize you, that me adopting you was the best thing for you, and that I could give you everything you would ever need. Part of it was, back then, it wasn’t possible for Lara and me to have our own children, and it was unlikely that the state would let two women adopt. Deny something to someone, and that becomes their focus. We wanted a child so much—”

  She laughed and hugged him tight. “My Mowgli,” she whispered, rocking him. “At first I figured that if someone was careless enough to lose you, then I deserved to keep you as your finder. But then we had Cally. Raising an infant changes you. You see things so differently. I started to have nightmares that we went camping and we would wake up in the middle of the night and Cally would be gone.”

  She had never told him this before. He held silent beside her, afraid to talk, to break the confession.

  “I knew that I would never, ever stop looking for Cally if I lost her, not to the day I died. I realized then your mother and father might still be looking for you, never giving up hope. So I hired a private detective.”

  A memory clicked into the framework of her story. The Cherokee pulling up to the house for the first time. Max, then a mysterious, tall, lean stranger, getting out and scanning the front yard with new eyes. That long summer evening, sitting in the tree house with Max, answering one odd question after another. Have you ever lived in another house? Do you remember eating cookies when you were little? When you were little, did you watch television? “You hired Max.”

  She laughed softly. “Yeah, Bennett Detective Agency. I picked Max because of his yellow page ad. It said ‘Specializing in Missing Persons.’ Odd how little decisions become so important later on.”

  He recalled those first meetings with Max. Max had tried every angle to dredge up information. Ukiah only remembered then what he remembered now—the endless seasons of running with the wolves. Any previous time he had ever spent with humans, however long or short, was gone.

  “Did he go to Oregon?” Even as Ukiah asked, he knew Max would have gone. Max loved to dig until he found the hidden truth. He would have searched missing-persons databases, using age progression/regression photos with pattern matching algorithms. When electronic means failed, Max would have visited every police station in Oregon, reviewed old regional newspapers, and talked to every local who would chat. He might have even hacked spy satellites and searched the park itself from orbit—looking for what, only God knew. “Did he find anything?”

  “No.” She breathed, as if she knew how much he wanted her to say yes. “No one ever reported a child matching your description missing in the United States or Canada.”

  Why wouldn’t his parents make a report? It occurred to him that perhaps they were dead. A scenario unfolded in his mind. A car accident on a deserted road. The parents killed instantly. A young child—a toddler? an older child with a head wound?—wanders off. When the car was found with the dead parents, would anyone realize that a child was missing?

  It was too horrible to bear. Things like that don’t happen. But he knew they did. It had happened to Max, who came home from a business trip to
find his new house mysteriously empty, his beloved beautiful wife gone forever, her body not found until months later.

  He hugged Mom Jo tight, trying to drive away the nightmarish thoughts.

  Mom Jo patted his back. “It doesn’t matter, though. It only means that you’re mine forever. I’ll never have to give you up to someone else. At least, till you get married.”

  As usual, Max was slightly late for breakfast as he spent half an hour in the guest room making phone calls on his wireless phone. He came down the steps as he finished up the last call.

  “We’ll be by later to pick it up. Bye.”

  “My bike’s done?” Ukiah guessed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pancakes, Max?” Mom Lara asked, flipping the last ones off the griddle.

  “Yes, thank you.” Max settled down into one of the kitchen chairs as Mom Lara set a stack of pancakes before him. “You’re going to have to teach Ukiah how to cook like this, Lara. Currently his idea of cooking is popping frozen waffles into a toaster.”

  “He’ll learn.” She collected Cally’s empty plate. “Cally, go wash your hands and get your shoes on. When Jo and I first moved out of the dorms, I needed a cookbook to boil eggs. Come on, Cally, we’re running late.”

  “I’ll get the dishes, Mom,” Ukiah volunteered as he finished his pancakes.

  “Thanks, love.” She kissed his cheek as she snatched up car keys and a stack of books. “I should have never stayed up to watch the landing. Remember to lock the door.”

  She and Cally swept out of the house a minute later. As Ukiah washed the breakfast dishes, Max and he discussed their various open cases. He had been taking a semivacation while the breakdown of his motorcycle stranded him at the farm, doing odd jobs about the house as he made dozens of time-consuming long-distance calls to cross-check background information. He had noted all his findings on his PDA and uploaded them to Max.

  Max had been working with their two part-time detectives, Chino and Janey, on a surveillance case. He had E-mailed Ukiah several updates. It was, however, the first time they could compare insights and gut feelings. Max finished up his stack of pancakes and brought his plate up to the sink.