out. We freeze and wait. The bear drops to all fours, growls and lumbers away. As we pass the end house I see that there is no one on the porch but the door is open. I call from the road.
'Want a fish?'
The dark youth comes to the door naked with a hard-on.
'Sure.'
I toss him a three-pound bass. He catches it and goes back inside and I hear the fish slap flesh and then a sound neither animal nor human.
'Strange folk. Where they come from?'
Guy points to the evening star in a clear pale green sky.
'Venusians,' he says matter-of-factly. 'The twins don't speak English.'
'You speak Venusian?'
'Enough to get by. They don't talk with the mouth. They talk with the whole body. It gives you a funny feeling.'
We light kerosene lamps, cut boneless steaks off two jack salmon. While the fish cooks, Guy and I drink whiskey and lemonade.
There is a hinged table with folding legs attached to the wall opposite the stove. We sit on stools, eating the jack salmon which is perhaps the best pan fish in the world if you prefer the more delicate flavor of freshwater fish. We sit on the porch in the moonlight looking across the river.
'Be all right if they stayed there and minded their own business,' Steve said.
'Ever hear about smallpox minding its own business?' Guy asks.
The boy slept between us light as a shadow. Thunder at dawn.
'Have to get started. The road floods out.'
Smell of rain on horseflesh. The boy in a yellow slicker and black Stetson waves to us and whips the horse to a trot as rain sluices down in a gray wall.
We make a pot of coffee and sit down at the table. We sit there for an hour without saying anything. I am looking at two empty stools. Going zero, we call it. A gust of wind knocks at the door. I open the door and there on the porch is the boy with orange hair from End House. He is wearing a slicker and carrying a gallon can. He points to a five-gallon can of kerosene in a corner of the porch. I get a funnel and fill his can.
'Inside? Coffee?'
He steps warily into the room like a strange cat and I feel a shock of alien contact. He twitches his face into a smile and jerks a thumb at his chest.
He throws open his slicker. He is naked except for boots and a black Stetson. He has a hard-on straight up against his stomach. He turns bright red all over, even his teeth and nails, an idiot demon from some alien hell, raw, skinned, exposed, abandoned yet joyless and painful like a prisoner holding up his manacles, or a leper showing his sores. A musky rotten smell steams off him and fills the room. I know that he is trying to show us something and this is his only way to communicate.
The words of Captain Mission came back to me.
'We offer refuge to all people everywhere who suffer under the tyranny of governments.'
I wondered what tyranny had led him to leave his native planet and take refuge under the Articles.
The rain stopped in the late afternoon and we walked down to the inlet in a gray twilight
