Greg the Alien

                                                                                  Greg the Alien

                                                                                          --Spence Colby



    Everyone knew Greg was an alien. His friends all knew it. His parents knew it. The entire neighborhood knew it. His teachers knew it. The only person that didn’t know it, was Greg.

    I know now that aliens don’t infiltrate this culture in an attempt to subvert it in some secret Fifth Column prelude to an invasion. They’re merely dumping their retarded members here, sweeping them under the rug. Earth isn’t a juicy target; it’s a free-range insane asylum. Greg was proof of this, basically because he was an idiot.

    Do I have conclusive evidence that he was an alien? No, I have no hard proof. Everyone’s knowledge of his otherworldly origins was based solely on gut feelings. They merely believed. A belief system operates on faith and intuition, not facts. As they believed in other things not proven, but felt, like love, the fact that the sun would continue to rise, and that the Phillies would someday win the World Series, they believed that Greg as an alien. No one needed proof; they simply knew it somehow.

    A medical check-up on Greg wouldn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary, with the possible exception of an inordinate number of scars. His appearance was the appropriate one for a teenaged boy. He had the correct number of toes, but an X-ray would show an extra undeveloped finger per hand, but plenty of folks have that condition. His interior organs were the right configuration and in the correct positions. His blood was as red as any. Which we all got to witness on numerous occasions because he was a klutz and highly accident-prone.

    His body was covered with scars. Small and not so small, he was a quilt-work puzzle of stitches and scar tissue wrapping his body from head to toe. He had a dime-sized patch of smooth white skin beside the corner of his mouth where he drank some Drano, thinking it was Kool-Aid. There was a half-moon scar across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek where he got his head stuck in a coffee can and the rim sawed through his skin before he got it back off. He had a indented donut in the middle of his forehead, reminder of the day his older brother threw a toy pistol at him because Greg was busy chewing on the power cord to the TV. Scars snaked up his arms from falling on rocks, grabbing barbwire fences, and falling out of trees. His kneecaps were gray from embedded gravel from bike wrecks. One calf had a puckered white scar where he closed the car door on his own leg. His right foot had a dimple in the top from dropping a red-hot soldering iron on it—while barefoot. He was a mess. And most were, if not self-inflicted due to stupidity, from mindless accidents that anyone else could have avoided.

    But this wasn’t the reason everyone knew he was an alien. There were other boys in the neighborhood that were accident magnets. I, myself, bear the reminders of many a childhood adventure that went sadly astray.  Greg instigated many of them, to be honest. No, it went beyond being a klutz.

  And it wasn’t just that he was an idiot, either. The Henry boys, my next door neighbors, were as dumb as a box of rocks and no one thought they were more than badly abused and in-bred crackers. Greg, if anything, was slightly smarter than they were, at least in school. Slightly, that is. His grades seldom made it out of the lower room temperature range, but he managed to move from one grade to the next in a stately, if lurching and precarious, fashion. The younger Henry boy, by comparison, was the only fourth-grader I’d ever met that had a full beard and could legally drive to school. I once saw him break his pencil after a long argument with it over the proper spelling of a word on a test. I believe the word in question was his name, but I’m not certain of that. No, it wasn’t that Greg was a klutz and stupid. It was something else, as well.

He had a mutant arm. Not that it looked any different from anyone else’s limb, but it was the way a professional pitcher was said to have an “arm”. He could throw things, anything, with the velocity and accuracy most people associate with a high-powered deer rifle. It was a rocket.

  It was his one sole redeeming feature. He could throw further and harder than anyone else, in the neighborhood, in school, and as far as we knew, the world. He could “whip a goonie”—throw a rock—over a seventy yards and pretty much always guarantee a first-round strike. I once saw him, with ease and a relaxed style that was uncanny, pick up a clump of dirt and overhand it at an annoying neighbor kid that was taunting him from a “safe” distance of perhaps a hundred yards. The clod of dirt exploded against the kid’s forehead in a spray of dust, flipping him over on his back. I thought Greg had killed him. Greg, of course, merely grinned that vacant grin he habitually wore and ambled off to amuse himself playing with weeds or to watch a bug.

  Snowball battles in our neighborhood were two-fold. The first, and by far the most important battle, was to determine which side got Greg. The winner of that battle was assured the victory in the actual snowball battle. Greg would stand where he was placed and unload icy projectiles in a staggering volley like a frozen-ammo Gatling gun. He could stay safely out of range of everyone else and proceed to maul the enemy’s ranks with a blizzard of snowballs. His “team”, being unable to do much to help him by throwing anything satisfied themselves with the task of making and feeding him snowy bullets in a steady stream for him to fire off.

  He was both the delight and the despair of the local Little League coaches. He was always placed in the outfield, deep center field, where he would amuse himself with chasing butterflies or watching clouds with the placid demeanor normally seen on the face of sheep. Particularly dull sheep at that. He would lean on the fence, his mind wandering miles away, and the coaches would scream themselves hoarse trying to get his attention—to watch the game, to chase down a fly ball, or to come in after three outs. But if he was having a good day and managed to pay attention enough to realize where he was, he could throw a ball from the home-run fence to the catcher, without a cut-off, and still knock the catcher over with a perfect strike, right in the mitt.

  He could have been a phenomenon, but his skills in other areas just weren’t up to the same standards. He could barely catch. The coaches chipped in and bought him a bushel-basket sized glove that you could use to snag basketballs, in the hope that if he managed to get close to the ball, luck would drop it in the over-sized pocket. He couldn’t bat. He seldom was alert enough to swing, and if he did move the bat, chances were he would simply whack the catcher with it or send it whistling down the third base line. The bat, that is, not the ball. His connecting with a pitch had the same likelihood of lightening striking. He was a guaranteed out in the batting line-up; even should an opposing pitcher goof up badly and manage to walk him, Greg would most likely forget to run if the next batter got a hit. Base coaches wanted to try cattle prods, but the rules didn't allow contact between coach and runner. Too bad.

  This was Greg--stupid, an accident waiting to happen, and a rifle for a right arm. My companion, the alien throwing machine in the guise of a teenager.



    If I ever had any doubts about Greg, they were laid to rest one day early in June.

    It was a perfect pre-summer day. The weather had just started to warm up so the greenery on the mountain was ripe and fragrant, but the poison ivy hadn’t gotten a solid chokehold on the pathways yet. In another few weeks, it wouldn’t be smart to broach the weed line as the ivy would be laying in wait, glossy and smooth, itching to smear misery on any bare skin. And it wasn’t warm enough yet for the copperheads to stir. Their slithering menace would be felt more when the spring rains dried out completely and the sun cooked the mud hard. They loved to bask in the heat in loose scaly coils and would aggressively defend their area against anyone that wandered close. As snakes go, copperheads were the cranky old neighbors of the mountain. When they got all hot and bothered, it was prudent to avoid the woods altogether.   

  Greg and I were sitting in one of our favorite places. Decades before a forest fire had stripped the trees from the side of the mountain behind our little neighborhood. Without the trees to anchor the soil, rain and run-off had washed away the dirt and left a long field of jumbled limestone rocks. It was a grey scar on the green flank of the mountain, and to most folks, an eyesore. To us, it was a ready supply of ammo.

    We would perch on a boulder and pick a target. Perhaps a fire-blackened stump fifty yards down slope or a dead tree leaning precariously, waiting only for a vulture on a snaggy limb to complete the picture; anything breakable would serve as a target. We would sort through the rock field and find appropriate sized missiles and happily spend hours heaving stones at the hapless wooden victim until it was shattered and scattered.

    I could stay fairly competitive with this activity—while Greg could smash the target to bits with five-pound chunks of rocks arrowed in with lazy pitches, I could almost match his damage with much smaller rocks bouncing down the hill to carom off the same tree. And Greg was never critical or made fun of my lack of arm. He was content to just sit there and “whip goonies” with a stupid look on his face. A particularly good impact with flying splinters might prompt a goofy “Du’huh hah!” from him, but his smile, replete with ample overbite, and sleepy eyes seldom changed.

    He would talk as he destroyed the stump, stupid and far ranging topics that secretly amused me with their sincerity and lack of comprehension of reality. One day he was sad because he was going to die—his homeroom teacher announced that the broken tip of pencil lodged in his thumb would kill him from “lead poisoning”. A tenth-grader should know better, but he didn’t. It required the better part of the afternoon to convince him that pencil leads weren’t lead at all and the teacher was just having him on. Another time, he was convinced that the reason that his radio wasn’t working was because the cord was tangled—the electricity was getting lost trying to follow the mare’s nest of cord and wasn’t making it to the radio. And yes, he was serious about it.

    On another occasion he was in a panic. He had been caught throwing rocks at passing trucks on the main road—why he was doing that is beyond anyone’s understanding; perhaps it was a challenge to him to nail a fast moving target and that was all there was to it. But the cop had told him sternly that “he was throwing his life away”. I thought it was a good, if perhaps unintentional, pun. Greg took it literally and was certain that every time he threw a rock, a baseball, or rotten crabapple, he was tossing away a small particle of his total life span. He was convinced that he had irreparably shortened his life to the point that he had only weeks to live, perhaps only days. He was sniffling and bemoaning the fact that he would die before he ever had sex. With some one else, that is. It was difficult not to laugh at him, but he was such a sad sack that one felt compelled to offer him some comfort. I suggested that throwing things backwards, over his shoulder, would reverse the trend—like running a car backwards would reduce the mileage shown on the odometer. He brightened immediately. It was the only time I managed to out-throw him. I was happy. He was happy. The Little League coach, however, was not amused.



  So there we were. Sitting on boulders in the sun, heaving rocks at a blackened log that thought it was the Japanese super-battleship Yamato—the stubs of broken branches resembled gun turrets and the odd pagoda superstructure of that mighty vessel—and talking about things. Greg was blasting the crap out of the ship with his “fifteen-inch main guns” while I peppered it with lighter five-inch harassing fire…when I hit it at all. His rocks ripped away strips of bark and wood pulp to spin in the sunlight like fragments of armor plating torn loose by high explosives, mine dented the softer wood and occasionally cast sparks from striking the surrounding rocks. I was merely suppressing their return fire. The sulfur smell of rotten-eggs hung heavy in the air.

  After a particularly solid hit had dislodged the log to roll down slope a few more feet—and subtracting from my chances of scoring anymore hits of my own—I asked Greg, “So, how do ya’ manage to be able to hit things all the time? I can’t throw like that if’n I had to.”

  Greg shrugged, his normal response, and studied the rock he held in his hand. “Ah’don’t know. I just throw, ya’know?”

  “Aw, com’on. It’s not that easy. I just throw and I can’t hit things like you do.”

  Greg stared at the Yamato log, a far away look in his eyes. “Well, it’s 38.4 meters away on a slope of negative 17 degrees. The rock weights 2.38 pounds and has a surface resistance area of 15.3 square inches, approximately, as it isn’t round. Today the air is humid so I have to figure a density of .75 to the air. Temperature isn’t a concern today. There isn’t enough wind to affect the trajectory arc. I just need to throw it at 23.2 meters per second at a 3.5 degree angle if I’m standing up to hit the log.” He looked at me shyly and said in a different tone, “But Ah don’t think about it much, Ah just do it.” He turned and launched the rock at a shallow arc that plummeted with a certainty to smack the log heavily and roll it another few feet down the hill.

  I looked at him for a long moment and allowed a hint of amazement and awe creep into my voice. “Just that simple, huh? You figger all that out in your head?”

  “Ya’ can do that, right?” He looked confused and uncertain.

    “Absolutely! No problem!” I muttered with sarcasm, and whipped my egg-sized rock at the log. It landed short, very short, and bounced twice off of some boulders before it skipped over and wide of the log to bound down the hill and into the trees. “And you do that all the time, huh?”

  He scuffed his tattered tennis shoes in the gravel at his feet and shrugged, “Ah guess. Ah thought everyone could do that.” He was getting that scared look on his face again. He was probably remembering other times he did something that set him apart from everyone else, like forgetting to wear clothes outside or putting coins up his nose. Time to change the topic before he went into a funk and ruined the afternoon by moping.

  “So,” I said heaving another stone at the log in a vain hope my arm was suddenly stronger or my aim better, “How’bout those Phillies? Buncha’ bums!”



  Later that night, after my “parents” had safely fallen asleep, I pulled a small silver comm unit the size of a Zippo lighter from under the box springs of my bed and sat up to compose and transmit my report. In a few days Greg would be found, his body mangled by a hit-and-run driver, or mauled by a rogue bear, or crushed by a falling chunk of old Soviet Sputnik, whatever. The continuity of the culture was to be maintained as much as possible—a close copy of his body would be left behind to be found and identified after he was abducted, released. Too many missing persons raised too many awkward questions. We didn’t wish that.

  I would be moving on to a new assignment as well. I was starting to look too old to do the adoption scheme again so my next case might be as a college roommate or a friend at work. And I’d have a new companion to watch over and evaluate. Greg had passed his test and proved he was able to develop some skills. His innate abilities were starting to manifest themselves. He was free to go home and live his life among the stars. I had to stay here and keep working.

  Hey, this may be an insane asylum, but we wouldn’t be very civilized to put the loonies down here without some one to watch out for them, would we?