Seeking Safety in the Salvage Yard
by Charles C. Cole
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
I’m ready for a nap. “I’m getting coffee. Are you hungry? Do you eat human food? How about a donut?”
“Our kind can survive many Earth-days without food,” she says.
“So: ‘No, thank you.’ That’s what you mean.”
“I would like a French cruller,” she says.
“You would? I’ll get you two; they’re more air than pastry.”
When we slide up to the pickup window, I instruct: “Don’t peek and don’t grab. I’ll pass them back to you when we’re on the road again.” The smell wakes up my stomach. I have half a mind to keep one of the donuts, but that’s not who I am. The pimply-face teenaged girl leans forward when she accepts my payment. She stares at the lumpy quilt on the back seat.
“That’s beautiful!” she says. “Did you make it?”
“My late wife,” I say, giving credit where it’s due. Her eyebrows knit together out of empathy or suspicion. “Keep the change,” I say, ready to move on. I exit the parking lot and pull to the shoulder of the road. I look at the quilt: there’s no way the girl “saw” an alien. I should be relieved. I pass the waxed bag to Gulu. “Food’s here.”
Gulu reaches out blindly and accepts it. Her hands are filthy. I feel bad that I didn’t let her wash up.
“There was no time to shower,” she says.
“You can read my mind?” I gasp.
“I read your emotion and interpret.” She rolls onto her side to eat.
The quilt shifts. I can see the top of her bald head. “Then you know I’m scared. And conflicted,” I tell her. “My parents raised a nice boy.”
“A good guy.”
“That’s right,” I say, a little indignant.
Gulu chokes.
“You okay? Must be hard eating that way. I’ll share my coffee, after it cools, so you can wash it down. You drink coffee?”
“I was laughing. I am told I laugh funny.”
“Why were you laughing?” I ask, though I’m afraid of the answer.
“The donut person thought I was your wife under the quilt, that you had murdered me, not a very ‘good guy’ thing to do.”
“Great,” I say, meaning the exact opposite. I move forward and take the first right.
“More food?” asks Gulu.
“I’m going a back way. It will take us longer, but it’s better than being pulled over by suspicious cops.”
“You are a nice boy,” Gulu says.
I pull over again, to map out our directions on my cell phone: Bailey’s Salvage. Gulu is watching. “No, I’m not secretly telling the hunters where to meet us,” I say.
“I trust you,” she says.
“You’re lucky you found the right human.”
“Was not luck,” says Gulu. “Everywhere was hate, hate, hate. I avoided that and then I felt loneliness and a need to connect with others.”
“That was me?” I ask. She nods again. I like her nods. They’re like bows, so low, comical.
“There is room for both of us,” she says.
“Go with you?” I ask. “Go to a new planet where I’m an alien? We saw how well that worked the first time.”
“We are different,” she says. “There are many ‘aliens’ on our planet. We do not hunt them.”
I wish Gulu had known my wife, Kate.
Kate fostered snakes. Kate had a way of seeing through our superficial differences. Kate did not believe anything could be ugly. Early one fall, I was picking gourds in our garden, and I came across a mangled one a little bigger than my fist. It wanted to be the face of an angry old, old man. I said as much to Kate. She said, “I think it’s beautiful. It’s stubborn and resilient. It made it. Nobody ate it.”
“Because they were afraid of it,” I teased.
“People who say something is ugly are really just saying: ‘At last, I’ve found something on a lower rung of the ladder, lower than the rung I’m on.’ Are we on the lower end of the ladder?”
I looked at the house we had built ourselves and the expanse of trees about. No window had curtains, because we had no neighbors close enough to look in. I could hear the gentle hum of traffic on Route 302 nearby, but mostly I just heard the leaves rustling in the gentle breeze and felt the friendly warmth of the sun. That day, I had everything I ever wanted.
We pull to the tall metal gate at the scrapyard. A stern fellow with short bright-blonde hair steps out of a booth where he’s been watching a tiny TV. He wears grease-stained navy blue coveralls with the name Hiram stitched on his chest.
“What’s up, old timer?” he asks.
“I’m looking for a seat for my 1974 Toyota Celica,” I say. “Can I drive in? My legs aren’t what they used to be.”
“Flat tire’s on you, and I’m not helping,” he says, then he opens the gate and lets us through. Then he yells, “Wait a minute.” He bends low over the trunk like he’s picking something up off the ground and walks up to my driver’s window, with one eyebrow cocked.
“Problem?” I ask.
He looks at me quizzically. “This car valuable?”
“Only to me. Why?” I ask.
“You’ve got a magnetic tracking device on the trunk.”
“Oh that,” I lie good-naturedly. “I get lost sometimes: classic senioritis. It’s so my kids can find me if I call them for help. Hope you left it.”
He grimaces. “Remind me never to get old.” Then he waves me on. “I’ll be on the can if I’m not here when you get back,” he says.
“We may have company on the way,” I whisper to Gulu. “Now’s the time to tell me what I’m looking for.”
“Can I sit up?” asks Gulu.
“Please.”
She sits up and looks about. “Keep going,” she says. “I don’t know what it looks like.”
“That’s going to be a problem,” I snap.
Then she presses something under the skin at her wrist. A tiny light blinks. “It will blink faster as we get closer.”
“You must be from one of those advanced alien races I’ve heard so much about,” I say. I go slowly to the end of the aisle. No change. “Left or right?”
“Left. No, right.” She’s confused. I don’t know whether it’s with our language or her tracking device. “That way,” she says, pointing across my chest to my left. The light blinks faster. When we pull alongside an old Tex-Mex food-vending truck, her device is going mad.
“That?” I ask, stupefied.
“Under it.”
Somebody is honking like mad back at the gate. We both know what it means. “Get out of here,” I urge. She presses something on her wrist, and this silver missile-like thing starts pushing up through the ground. As it emerges, the Tex-Mex truck rolls out of the way.
“It’s not a weapon,” she assures me.
“I trust you,” I say, with a wry smile so that she knows I’m echoing her previous comment.
“Thank you for your help,” says Gulu. We can hear a vehicle getting closer. A small round door opens. She jumps in. The guys in the truck see us now. I’m probably doomed to spend the rest of my life in prison, if they don’t execute me on national TV.
“Climb in,” she says. “I owe you. You can tell me all the good things about your people.” I hesitate. The door starts to close. The hunters are shooting. I hear bullets pinging against car wrecks. I run. I dive inside the space vehicle. The door closes behind me. The rocket begins rising into the sky.
We are in tight quarters. That skin and those eyes: she’s exotic, yes, but I realize that she’s also breathtakingly beautiful. I wish Kate had lived to meet her.
Copyright © 2025 by Charles C. Cole
