Two Minutes of Life in a RV

Another 'When-Did-I-Write-This?' Mystery

Two Minutes of Life in a RV

"Goddamn, Martha. This is one desolate road. Where the hell are we?"

"How should I know, Fred? You're the one driving. You’re always the one driving."

Fred puffed hard on his pipe. The view over the giant steering wheel which dwarfed the dashboard of their moving Recreational Vehicle was consistent. The headlights continued to highlight the same real estate as the last two hours, ever since the sun went down: a long, continuous patch of asphalt which disappeared into blackness fifty yards ahead, give or take.

The double yellow line going down the middle of the asphalt continued to be nothing more than a double yellow line going down the middle of the asphalt. It held no surprises. The shoulders of the road continued to be about three feet of dirt which fell off into a continually predictable ditch which summarily also melted off into the beginnings of a dark forest of trees.

And the trees weren't just any trees. They were the meanest looking trees Fred had ever seen.

They were the kind of trees, that if they were people, would be concealing a handgun somewhere in their vicinity and/or grew up in a place with East or Central in its name, hence the handgun.

Fred had never been in any of these so-called tough spots but he had watched enough nightly news and prime time cop shows to be unhealthily biased regarding anything that didn't have an overabundance of old people to maintain civility, common sense and the postal service.

“Goddamn spooky, if you ask me,” he said, edging the speedometer needle just over 55 mph.

“It's just a road, Fred. Why don't we stop at the next pull out and go to bed?”

This was the sixth time Martha had suggested this. She hoped that maybe soon, Fred would hear her.

"Not stopping in the middle of goddamn nowhere. No telling what could happen."

"Like what? Space aliens will come down and zap us?" she waved her outstretched fingers theatrically at her husband, sounding what she imagined a space alien would sound like. “Youu-uuuU UUUU-EEEE-UUU-Borp?"

Fred was about to declare how unaffected he was by Martha's sarcasm, having developed quite a defense over their forty-two years of marriage, but it was exactly at this time they were both dumbfounded to see a very panicky space alien in the headlights of the RV.

It was very definitely a space alien. Although it was only in their lights for all of five seconds, they both could very definitely see it was a bonafide space alien. With space alien silver clothes, an overly large alien head with big black eyes and tiny mouth, it’s long arms with long fingers had tried to shield those big black eyes from the RV's halogen high beam lights.

The RV was going so fast it passed it as if it were another signpost.

Fred let his foot off the gas and watched the speedometer drop down to zero. It was only at this time he looked to Martha. Martha, for her part, had taken off her glasses and was rubbing them vigorously with the front of her cardigan.

"Goddamn. Did you see that?" he asked, his pipe hanging from the side of his mouth.

Martha studied the thick graying beard of her husband of nearly a half-century before she decided to blatantly lie. She put her glasses back on.

"No."

"What do you mean No? You saw it, I know you saw it! You can't tell me you didn't see it! I know you saw it!"

"I didn't see a thing. And I very definitely didn't see that space alien on the road back there."

"Goddamn! So did I! We got to go back!"

"Go back! What do you mean go back? You put your foot on that gas pedal this minute Fred and you get this thing going. We are not going back. We just imagined it, that's all."

"Imagined it? How could we have imagined it? It was an ALIEN! We got to make sure."

"Make sure?" she shrieked, as the last remnants of her sanity struggled with the latches of its safety vest. "Make sure of what? That it’s okay? Should we offer it a lift? Some space gas? Maybe ask it directions to where the next town is? Think about it, Fred. It might have a ray gun that could vaporize us into nothing. After all, we nearly ran the thing over."

"Maybe we could get us a picture. Where's the camera?"

"There's no film in the camera."

"What do you mean no film? Why the hell isn't there any film in the camera?"

"We used up the last of the roll at that place with the giant wooden man made out of aluminum."

“Damn it.”

"It's probably gone anyway, Fred. We probably scared it half to death."

"We should go back and check."

"Check what? That there really was an alien back there on the road? What good would that do us? It might shoot at us or something. Don't think it will speak English you know. It probably has its own language. Mental telepathy or something."

Martha was half right in this regard. The space alien was telepathic but did know English, as well as every other language in the universe, but preferred to keep it a secret, for obvious religious reasons.

"I know! We'll kill it and take it with us! I'll just run it over and we can put it in the back!"

"Say what?!?" Martha imagined her immediate future if she found herself riding around in her retirement home with a dead alien laying on the floor. "No, Fred. If we kill it, can you imagine what would happen? Probably not, with that testosterone-laden brain of yours, so let me paint you a picture. You kill that alien, the other aliens get worried because it has not come back to their spaceship. He was probably... probably some sort of scout or something for the rest of them. They start poking around and use their alien powers to discover you killed one of their own and took it as a souvenir. So what do they do? Very likely create an intergalactic war. Blow the planet up or something. Is that what you want? To blow up the planet?"

"They won't be waiting for us. They are probably all busy mutilating some farmer's cow or something," mumbled Fred, who admittedly didn’t want to be the catalyst for global destruction.

"Oh, you are so typical. Think there can't be anything in the universe smarter than you, don't ya? Think that Mr. Space Alien won't be expecting us to go back and take another look at him, because we always see space aliens. Don't think that maybe it will be waiting for us, do ya? Don't think that it has a way to defend itself. After all, if it mastered a simple thing like intergalactic space travel, a little trivial thing like self-defense would be too meaningless for them when they are on another planet, right? But you don't think that, do ya, because you're a man, and you have to be sure about everything. And the only thing to be really sure is that it is dead first."

"Maybe that is why they are here, to kill us," argued Fred, waving his pipe at her. "We could stop them! We'd become famous."

Fred's idea of famous was being entitled to special perks, such as being allowed to meet other Famous People or park in Handicapped Spaces, which he did already, albeit with a small twinge of guilt.

“Famous for what?" Martha slapped her forehead. "Being the first ones to kill something from another world? I can see the headlines now across the world: ‘Fred and Martha bring intergalactic war upon the Earth’. Let someone else kill him, I don't want the grandchildren to remember us as the people who destroyed civilization. Besides, Chancy’s graduation is next month and I don’t plan on missing it.”

They stared out the windshield, both lost in their own private worlds. In the darkness one hundred yards behind them, the space alien was scratching it’s overly large forehead with it's overly large fingers, wondering why the interesting shiny red lights at the back of the Earth dragon were no longer moving.

"It looks pretty spooky out there," said Martha.

"Yeah. I don't like the looks of them trees," said Fred, revving the idling engine.

"There should be a campground up here just aways."

"Yea. Just a little ways more," said Fred, as he placed the gear shift into drive. The RV started slowly rolling again down the noncommittal asphalt.

As an afterthought he mumbled under his breath;

"Goddamn aliens.”

Backword

Not many clues about this one. It was back when film cameras were still a thing. I know the giant aluminum man is a reference to Mr. Pg, my hometown mascot of a forty-foot tall log-like man. It wears a hard-hat to symbolize the forestry industry. I think this was inspired by the X-Files, which ran in the nineties. I used to do midnight runs to Vancouver, as the traffic was lighter and the cops were lesser. I imagine I had envisioned a similar scene happening one night to me.

It never did. But let’s ball-park as this being written in the mid-nineties.