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blood, Alpha wrote some more of his north-south-north squiggles and packed his writings away in double Mason jars. Then he found a claw hammer.
    What was he doing? He began pulling up floorboards in his room. But when he saw the sub-flooring on top of the concrete slab, he must have realized there wasn’t room to hide his jars there. He turned to me with his face wrinkles all hanging loose, questioning.
    I helped him bury his double jars of strange script under an old corncrib floor. After we tamped the dirt back and laid a few stones down, Alpha marked the doorframe with alien scratches.
    Then we went in, and he drew a little car, found the map, cut the little car out, and ran it along the map from Virginia to California.
    I shook my head slowly, and he drew a picture of himself lying, stiff, eyes half opened, a fly on one eyeball.
    Dead.
    His nostrils bellowed in and out. I must have smelled like agreement. We both sat trembling on the floor.
    Then, as he watched me intently with those dark eyes, I pantomimed sleep and waking five times. Say five days to get to California, I really wasn’t sure.
    But what could I do in California after the alien went back to his own people? I shook my head at him. “What about me?” I asked him out loud.
    He picked up the drawing of him dead and held it in front of his face, just under the eyes.
    Slowly, I tore the drawing up and threw the scraps away, then touched him.
    He reared back, hissing, singsonged furiously at me, his pupils tiny, head hair erect. Scared, I jumped back. Then he reached slowly for my face. When I ducked, he beat his twisted-toe heels on the floor and chewed at his hands as though he was gnawing splinters out of the base of his thumbs. When he reached for me again, I let him touch my eyebrows, and I smoothed down the hair over his bone goggles.
    He got up and turned on the TV. He watched all evening until some midnight space flick came on. When the humans started running, Alpha screamed, his chest heaving.
    I turned the set off and let him go to bed with his cats without bothering to lock him in. Why did Hendricks have to shoot him when he tried to get away from Warren?
     
    Warren came back from a drug run and stared at the alien, who’d come out bare-chested onto the porch. “You don’t lock him up?”
    “He knows other humans would be scared of him. So he stays with us.”
    “Well, with you dropped out of school and him, I’ve got help enough,” Warren said. “They want me to make about ten thousand pills a week, plus tab another ten thousand Quaaludes. But I also heard some Atlanta investors threw one drug-tabbing operation to the Feds.”
    The alien shivered a bit in the cold, early November. I wondered about leaving Warren with this mess, traveling cross-country in dead winter. We’d have to cut out holes for the webs in the alien’s clothes. He needed warm clothes. And food—what if someone caught us?
    I got Warren’s other bag from the back of the camper.
    “The Atlanta people know I’ve got a brother, but they sure didn’t mention the spare help.” He laughed as though having an alien helping was one thing he had over on those Atlanta investors. I got scared for Warren, too.
    Alpha, after a quick look at me, gestured to Warren, wanted him to see all the work we’d done on the chicken house. The moonlight glinted off the new tin roof, off the methane tanks, and the compressor squatting low and dirty between the tanks and the chicken house wall.
    “Hell of a lot of work,” Warren said tiredly. I thought he was more referring to what he had ahead of him than the shed we’d roofed. “Damn eggs, damn pills; both a bitch to market.”
     
    The next morning, two guys drove up in a big Ryder truck with mud-smeared plates and unloaded another pill-milking machine. Huge, anonymous guys, one black, one white, feed brand caps low on the foreheads and enough dirt on their faces to mask them. Their voices seemed to shift accent with each separate