Down And Dirty

I

Tom found the latest issue of Aces in the outer office, while the loan officer kept him waiting.

The cover showed the Turtle flying over the Hudson against a spectacular autumn sunset. The first time he'd seen that photograph, in Life, Tom had been tempted to have it framed. But that had been a long time ago. Even the shell in the picture was gone now, jettisoned somewhere in space by the aliens who'd captured him last spring.

Underneath, letters black against the scarlet-tinged clouds, the blurb asked, "The TurtleDead or Alive?"

"Fuck," Tom said aloud, annoyed. The secretary gave him a disapproving look. He ignored her and thumbed through the magazine to find the story. How the hell could they possibly say he was dead? So he got napalmed and crashed into the Hudson in full view of half the city, so what? He'd come back, hadn't he? He'd taken an old shell and crossed the river, flown over Jokertown near dawn the day after Wild Card Day, thousands of people must have seen him. What more did he have to do?

He found the article. The writer made a big deal of the fact that no one had seen the Turtle for months. Perhaps he died after all, the magazine suggested, and the dawn sighting was only some kind of mass hallucination. Wish fulfillment, one expert suggested. A weather balloon, said a second. Or maybe Venus.

"Venus!" Tom said with some indignation. The old shell he'd used that morning was a goddamn VW Beetle covered with armor plate. How the hell could they say it was Venus? He flipped a page, and came face-to-face with a grainy photograph of a shell fragment pulled out of the river. The metal was bent outward, twisted by some awful explosion, its edges jagged and sharp. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put the Turtle together again, said the caption.

Tom hated it when they tried to be clever.

"Miss Trent will see you now," the secretary announced. Miss Trent did nothing to improve his disposition. She was a slender young woman in oversize horn-rimmed glasses, her short brown hair frosted with streaks of blond. Quite pretty, and at least ten years younger than Tom. "Mr. Tudbury," she said, from behind a spotless steel-and-chrome desk, when he entered. "The loan committee has gone over your application. You have an excellent credit record."

"Yeah," Tom said. He sat down, for a moment allowing himself to hope. "Does that mean I get the money?"

Miss Trent smiled sadly. "I'm afraid not."

Somehow he'd expected that. He tried to act as though it didn't matter; banks never lent you money if they thought you needed it. "What about my credit rating?" he asked.

"You have an excellent record of timely payment on your loans, and we did take that into account. But the committee felt your total indebtedness was already too high, given your present income. We couldn't justify extending you any further unsecured credit at this time. I'm sorry. Perhaps another lending institution would feel differently."

"Another lending institution," Tom said wearily. Fat chance. This bank was the fourth one he'd tried. They all said the same thing. "Yeah. Sure." He was on his way out when he saw the framed diploma on her wall and turned back. "Rutgers," he said to her. "I dropped out of Rutgers. I had better things to do than finish college. More important things."

She regarded him silently, a puzzled expression on her pretty young face. For a moment Tom wanted to go back, to sit down and tell her everything. She had an understanding face, at least for a banker.

"Never mind," he said.

It was a long walk back to his car.

It was just shy of midnight when Joey found him, leaning against a rusted rail and watching the moonlit waters of the Kill Van Kull. The park was across the street from his house, and from the projects where he'd grown up. Even as a kid, he'd found solace there, in the black oily waters, the lights of Staten Island across the way, the big tankers passing in the night. Joey knew that; they'd been friends since grade school, different as night and day, but brothers in all but name.

Tom heard the footsteps behind him, glanced over his shoulder, saw it was only Joey, and turned back to the Kill. Joey came up and stood beside him, arms folded on the railing.

"You didn't get the loan," Joey said. "No," Tom said. "Same old story."

"Fuck 'em."

"No," Tom said. "They're right. I owe too much."

"You okay, Tuds?" Joey asked. "How long you been out here?"

"A while," Tom said. "I had some thinking to do."

"I hate it when you think."

Tom smiled. "Yeah, I know." He turned away from the water. "I'm cashing in my chips, Joey."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Tom ignored the question. "I was getting nostalgic about that last shell. It had infrared, zoom lenses, four big monitors and twenty little ones, tape deck, graphic equalizer, fridge, everything on fingertip remote, computerized, state-of-theart, Four years I worked on that mother, weekends, nights, vacations, you name it. Every spare cent I had went into it. So what happens? I have the damn thing in service for five months, and Tachyon's asshole relatives just toss it into space."

"Big fucking deal," Joey said. "You still got the old shells out in the junkyard, use one of them."

Tom tried to be patient. "The shell the Takisians jettisoned was my fifth," he said. "After I lost it, I went back to number four. That was the one that got napalmed. You want to look at the pieces, go buy a copy of Aces-there's a swell picture in there. We cannibalized all the useful parts from two and three years ago. The only one that's still more-or-less intact is the first."

"So?" Joey said.

"So? It's got wires, Joey, not circuit boards, twenty-yearold wires. Obsolete cameras with limited tracking capabilities, blind spots, black-and-white sets, vacuum tubes, a fucking gas heater, the worst ventilation system you've ever seen."

"How I got it over to Jokertown back in September I still don't know, but I was in shock from the crash or I never could have tried such a fucking moronic thing. So many of the tubes burned out that I was flying half-blind before I got back."

"We can fix all that stuff."

"Forget it," Tom said with more vehemence than he knew was in him. "Those shells of mine, they're like some kind of symbol for my whole fucking life. I'm standing here thinking about it, and it makes me sick. All the money I've put into them, all the hours, the work. If I'd put that kind of effort into my real life, I could be somebody. Look at me, Joey. I'm forty-three years old, I live alone, I own a house and an abandoned junkyard, both of them mortgaged up to the hilt. I work a forty-hour week selling VCRs and computers, and I've managed to buy a third of the business, only now the business isn't doing so great, ha ha, big joke on me. That woman in the bank today was ten years younger than me, and she probably makes three times my salary. Cute too, no wedding ring, the secretary said Miss Trent, maybe I would've liked to ask her out, but you know what? I looked into her eyes, and I could see her feeling sorry for me."

"Some dumb cunt looks down at you, that's no reason to get bent out of shape," Joey said.

"No," Tom said. "She's right. I'm better than I looked to her, but there's no way she could have known that. I've put the best part of myself into being the Turtle. The Astronomer and his goons almost killed me. Fuck it, Joey, they dropped napalm on my shell, and one of them made me so sick I' blacked out. I could have died."

"You didn't."

"I was lucky," Tom said with fervor. "Damn lucky. I was strapped into that motherfucker, every one of my instruments dead, with the whole fucking thing, all umpteen tons of it, headed straight for the bottom of the river. Even if I'd been conscious, which I wasn't, there would have been no way to get to the hatch and open it manually before I drowned. That's assuming I could even find the hatch with all the fucking lights out and the shell filling up with water!"

"I thought you didn't remember this shit," Joey said.

"I don t," said Tom. He massaged his temples. "Not consciously. Sometimes I have these dreams… fuck it, never mind about that, the point is, I was a dead man. Only I got lucky, incredibly lucky, something blew the goddamned shell apart, blew me right out without killing me, and I managed to make it to the surface. Otherwise I'd be down in a steel tomb on the bottom of the Hudson, with eels slithering in and out of my eyes."

"So?" Joey said. "You're not, are you?"

"What about next time?" Tom demanded. " I been breaking my back trying to figure some way to finance a new shell. Sell my share of the business, I thought, or maybe sell the house and move into some apartment. And then I thought, well, great. I sell my fucking house, build a new shell, and then the goddamned Takisians show up again, or it turns out the Astronomer had a brother and he's pissed, or some other shit goes down, the details don't matter, but something happens, and I wind up dead. Or maybe I survive, only the new shell gets trashed just like the last two, and I'm right back where I started, except now I don't have a house either. What's the fucking point?"

Joey was looking into his eyes, Joey who had grown up with him, who knew Tom better than anybody. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "So why do I think there's something you're not saying?"

"I used to be a pretty smart kid," Tom insisted, turning away sharply, "but somehow I got pretty dumb as I grew up. This double life shit is a crock. One life is hard enough for most people to manage, what the hell made me think I could juggle two?" He shook his head. "The hell with it. It's over. I'm wising up, Joey. They think the Turtle is dead? Fine. Let him rest in peace."

"Your call, Tuds," Joey said. He put a rough hand on Toms shoulder. "It's a damn shame, though. You're going to make my kid cry. The Turtle's his hero."

"Jetboy was my hero," Tom said. "He died too. That's part of growing up. Sooner or later, all your heroes die."

Concerto for Siren and Serotonin by Roger Zelazny