The True Meaning of Smekday

I was almost pleased when the lightning flashed and some sharp piece of garbage clawed at our roof, as if to illustrate my point.

“Yes,” J.Lo agreed. “I have unproperly sealed up the bottom side of our vehicle. I am sorry.”

“Yeah. I don’t really care about that so much as the scrap metal and floating parts.”

“We should to leave.”

“Leave?” I said. “Leave the car?”

Pig was panting. She had tangled herself up in the strap on my camera, and looked ready to explode into confetti at any moment.

“No,” said J.Lo. “Leaveto the metal yard. In the car.”

I stared.

“You drive,” he said. “I will to remove the water.”

Drive? I thought. We can drive?

I climbed into the front seat and took up the controls. Suddenly I couldn’t remember how to do anything. I felt it would be a bad time to accidentally cause the hood to burst into flame.

J.Lo was digging through his toolbox. Pig perched like a twitchy sparrow on the top of the passenger seat, the camera dangling from her back legs. She let out one long, raspy meow that lasted until all her breath was spent, then she inhaled and did it again.

Slowly the cobwebs left my mind and I focused on the car. I began to ease it forward, as though we were on dry land, as though we were on a safe empty blacktop that stretched for miles in every direction. And I noticed that Slushious really was moving forward. Pig noticed it too, and took to meowing in short, high bursts like the fire alarm at school.

“We’re moving,” I said. “The car is swimming.”

That wasn’t really right. When we started there were bubbles foaming all around Slushious, and then we rose a bit—not above the water, but just about to its surface. Then we began to skim along—not as fast as we would have over land, but fast enough. We left the metal yard behind and passed over what must have been the road. There was a highway overpass, and we just barely fit beneath it, as if it were only a low footbridge over a canal. It reminded me of pictures of Venice.

“Ha! I should sing something in Italian,” I said.

“Yes, please,” J.Lo answered as he looked over some device he’d found in the toolbox. It looked like two thin tubes connected by a set of tiny bagpipes. I hoped it was what he was looking for. The water in the car had risen up to the gas pedal.

“What, really? Sing something?”

J.Lo blew into the tiny bagpipes. They didn’t make any noise, but he seemed satisfied all the same.

“Yes. Please to sing. I know very little of the humansmusic.”

So I sang the first Italian song that came into my head, which turned out to be “Volare.” I’m sure I need not mention at this point that I am a rock star, and it sounded fantastic.

J.Lo rolled down a window. The wind and spray whipped like angry spirits around the car, but he ignored it and snaked one of the tubes over the side. The end of the other tube sank below the rising water inside the car. Then J.Lo blew into each of the bagpipes in turn, and the bag itself began to inflate and deflate, again and again on its own, pumping like a plastic heart in his hands. Water rushed through the tubes and out the car window, and almost immediately I could see the pool drop around my feet.

“Clever little Boov!” I shouted happily. I think J.Lo liked that.

Then something happened. I don’t know why Pig did it. I think she was afraid of the water and the wind, and there was a lot more of that outside the car than inside. But a thousand generations of weird cat biology goaded her on, and she pounced from the headrest and straight through the window. She trailed the tangled camera strap behind her, and the camera itself knocked and almost caught the edge of the glass. J.Lo made a grab for it, but it all came free, and Pig and a vintage Polaroid dropped into the floodwaters below.

I drew a sharp breath, but before I could shout or scream, J.Lo had forced the window all the way down and dove in after her.

I was suddenly alone and useless inside the car. The rain battered the roof like a drumroll. I could think of nothing to do. Not one thing. And then J.Lo shot out of the water like a salmon in a nature film and dumped Pig through the window. She was fine.

J.Lo hung there for a moment by his fingers. Then he said simply, “Camera,” and dove back under.

I realized what he meant. The camera was free of Pig’s legs and still in the water.

“No!” I shouted, much too late. “Forget the camera!”

The only answer I got was a sneeze from Pig. She looked like a miserable wet hairbrush.

The window was still open. “You’re not going to jump again,” I asked. “Are you?”

“Mrooooowrrr,” said Pig.

I went to wrap her in a towel, which made her fidget and growl, but eventually she gave in to it and any other indignity I had planned. I probably could have dressed her up in a sailor suit if I’d wanted.

But all I could think was that J.Lo had been gone an awfully long time. Hadn’t he? Thirty seconds, a minute? I started to count under my breath: one alligator, two alligator. When I had sixty alligators I gave in to panic.

“Okay…okay…” I whispered, looking all around me, looking at the rushing current outside. “Think. Think think think think think. I need a rope!”

I scattered J.Lo’s tools around the car, searching for some kind of rope, or something that could be used like a rope. I should have paid more attention to anything that looked like a pencil sharpener made of lemon Jell-O that, when cranked, would spit out superstrong yarn that smelled like ginger ale. I only mention this because J.Lo really did have such a thing. He told me so later. But at the time I was too busy looking for an honest rope, and too distracted to notice that J.Lo had resurfaced and was peering over my shoulder.

“If you areto looking for the pink squishable gapputty,” he said suddenly, “it is smooshed in the gloves box. You will have to use brown.”

I jumped and grabbed for the toolbox, but it tipped over and everything tumbled out. I stared at J.Lo like he was a ghost. The fact that an alien was at least as weird as a ghost wouldn’t occur to me until later.

“What?” I said.

“You will have to use brown.”

“Brown. Brown what?”

“Squishable gapputty,” he said. “The pink is smooshed into the gloves box.”

He was just hanging there, arms folded over the window’s edge like he wasn’t waist-deep in churning water during a hurricane. I had trouble swallowing. I was so sure he’d drowned.