Red Thunder

7

AS I REACHED the concrete patio Dak was shaking charcoal from a sack into a big kettle barbecue. One of the sliding screen doors to the house opened quickly, on a motorized track, and Colonel Travis Broussard came out, holding a platter of raw steaks in one hand and a cocktail in the other. He glanced at me, grinned, and put the platter on the big picnic table. I shook his hand.

“You must be Manny,” he said. “Dak’s told me about you. Why don’t you go inside and grab something to drink out of the icebox? I got nineteen kinds of imported beer and I don’t check ID.”

“A little early for me, but thanks.” I went to the patio door, which got out of my way as I was reaching to slide it open.

“Never too early for Trav,” Alicia said as the door closed behind me. She was standing at a counter in the kitchen, looking out the window at Dak and Travis. “Man’s a big drinker. Look there, three empties and they all still got dew on the outside.” I saw the beer cans next to a big refrigerator. I mean, a huge refrigerator, the kind they use in convenience stores, with glass doors so you can pick out what you want before you open the doors. Beer and soda, Gatorade, fancy water, some bottles of white wine. Pretty much anything you’d like in the way of [52] something cool. Beside it was a restaurant-sized ice maker and on shelves above that a real professional bartender’s selection of hard stuff, racks of clear stemware hanging from the ceiling, other barware behind glass-doored cabinets. And on the other side of that, another refrigerator and a huge freezer.

“Look at this,” Alicia said with disgust. She opened a refrigerator door and the big shelves were almost empty. A brown half head of lettuce, a couple fuzzy gray tomatoes, half a chicken and some bones drying out on a plate, a stick of oleo.

“And this.” Inside the freezer were stacks and stacks of the same kind of thick sirloins he had carried outside and plastic bags of Ore-Ida frozen steak fries.

“Aren’t you the nosy one?” I said. She frowned, then decided not to take offense. I got a can of 7-Up out of the fridge and popped the top.

“It’s been a least a month since anybody’s had any vegetables here other than French fries. There’s cases of ketchup in one of those cupboards, I guess some folks call that a vegetable. I don’t see any fruit at all. The only reason there’s no dirty dishes in here is that nobody uses any dishes except forks and steak knives.” She tossed a pair of plastic salad tongs into a matching plastic bowl and sighed. “I told ’em I was coming in here to make a salad to go with the steaks. I’ll bet Mr… sorry, I mean Colonel Broussard had a good laugh about that one.”

I went over to a door I thought might be a pantry and pulled it open. Sure enough. The room was bigger than room 201 at the Blast-Off and there was enough food in it to feed a family of five for several years. On the floor were sealed metal barrels of dry pasta, rice, flour, sugar, stuff like that, safe from bugs and rats. On the shelves above them were cans of just about everything, tuna and Spam, peaches and pears, soups to nuts. All of it was covered with dust. I started tossing cans to Alicia.

“Pinto beans, wax beans, green beans, garbanzos, lima beans, kidney beans, black beans, aha! Even some pinquitos.” She dropped the fourth can while trying to catch the fifth, then another, and another, and we were both laughing as I tossed her more cans. “Make him a three-bean salad, why don’t you? Or maybe a seven-bean.”

“I can make something out of this he’ll hate.”

[53] I wandered into the living room. It was fairly neat, but dusty and stale smelling, with the occasional sweatshirt or pair of dirty socks tossed on the floor.

“Still early stages,” Alicia said from the door. “No puke that ain’t been mopped up. He still picks up stuff, when he trips over it.”

“Maybe he’s just sloppy.”

She laughed. “Manny, this is a military guy. If he started out sloppy, you wouldn’t be able to bulldoze through this place. He’s gone downhill a lot since he was a spaceman. They don’t let you clutter things up on a station. You know that.”

She was right, I did.

“He probably doesn’t even think he’s an alcoholic,” she said.

I turned back to the living room. There were a lot of framed photos on the walls, mostly of him with famous people, including the one of the President giving him his medal. I recognized some of the faces. One section showed two young girl children. Daughters? No wife anywhere I could see.

There were gaps on these walls, too, rectangles lighter than the wall. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out pictures had once hung there. Pictures of people the colonel didn’t like anymore, was my guess.

The one bare wall turned out not to be a wall at all, but an eight-by-twelve-foot Sony Hi-Dee screen. The audio parts were hidden behind a mahogany panel, and a dozen speakers hung from the ceiling. Here was something very expensive that I could really appreciate. If he had termites in the walls, they’d be deaf by now.

I looked around once more, taking it all in. How the rich live. I’d never had much chance to get a close look at it.

I figured I wouldn’t have all that much trouble swapping lifestyles with him.

ALICIA CAME OUT of the kitchen with her big bean salad in a bowl, Broussard trailing dubiously behind her. I followed them to the patio, where Dak was just flipping the steaks, wearing a grease-spattered apron. Broussard took over the grill.

[54] “Dak tells me you run a hotel,” he said.

“My family does. The Blast-Off down on-”

“Sure, I know it.”

“Everybody knows the Blast-Off,” Dak said. “It’s a Florida institution. Can’t come to the Canaveral area and not send a Blast-Off postcard back home.”

“Sounds like a good business.”

“The card business? It’s okay.” Yeah, I didn’t say, and some weeks we make almost as much money on those damn cards, and the knick-knacks Mom and Maria make, as we make renting out rooms. Disgusting, when you think about it.

“Well, you ever decide to get a new sign, let me bid on the old one. One of the first things I saw in Florida that I liked. You know, sometimes I could pick it out on the way up. Just look for the little orange rocket blasting off.”

“No kidding? That’s… that’s great.” I looked at Dak and saw the notion had tickled him, too. The crummy old Blast-Off, and an astronaut looking down on it… or even just driving down the avenue, passing it, feeling good for a moment.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Colonel Broussard,” I said.

“Just Travis, okay? You guys saw me falling-down, snot-slingin’ drunk. I figure y’all have to swallow hard to call me Colonel.”

Nobody had anything to say to that, but the awkward silence passed pretty quick. Travis went back into the kitchen to get the cardboard bucket of fries he’d popped into the microwave. He came back with forks and knives and paper plates.

He cut into one of the steaks, peered inside, and looked up.

“Who likes ’em so rare they’re still chewin’ their cud?”

Alicia and Travis did. Dak and I said medium rare would do. That left one on the grill, and Travis pushed a button on the outside wall before he sat at the table. Beyond the empty pool the barn door opened and the short, roly-poly guy came out. Travis heaped fries on all five plates.

“Jubal, these are friends of Dak. Alicia, and Manny. Y’all, this is my cousin Jubilation. Everybody calls him Jubal.”

[55] Jubal nodded awkwardly, bowed his head, then looked up again.

“Travis, would you offer a blessin’ over dis here food?”

“Shouldn’t we wait till your steak gets here, Jube?”

“You kin bless it from ovah here, you.”

And by golly we all bowed our heads and Travis offered a short prayer. When it was over, Jubal tied a big cloth napkin around his neck and dug in to the plate of fries. When his steak arrived, mostly black on the outside, and not much better on the inside, he ate that in record time, then shuffled off to the barn again.

“Don’t take offense,” Travis told us. “Jubal never caught on to polite manners. He’s just never seen the use of saying good-bye… saying a lot of things, actually. But I’ve got him pretty well used to ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ ”

I couldn’t tell if he was pulling our legs or not.

“What’s he do out there in that barn?” Dak asked.

“Invents stuff. Allows me to go on living in the style I don’t deserve but have become accustomed to without having to go out and look for work.”

This time all three of us waited for the punch line, but there wasn’t one. Well, it was his house and his food. He could tell us as much or as little as he wanted.

I ATE MORE steak than I should have. I don’t get top-quality sirloin that often, and I figured I’d make up a little for feasts I’d missed out on, growing up. In other words, I made a pig out of myself. But I wasn’t the only one. We all sat around for a while, picking our teeth, trying to keep the belching down to a level that wouldn’t frighten the swamp creatures.

Then Dak asked Travis to tell that story he’d told Dak the other day, you know the one, about what you did to that senator from Utah who finagled himself aboard the yearly “inspection” junket to International Peace and Cooperation Station… and Travis said that was no senator from Utah, that was a congressman from Oregon, and besides, he has recovered by now, though he walks with a slight limp and jumps at [56] loud noises, and besides, it wasn’t me, and if you ever say it was I’ll have your ass in court for libel. We all laughed, and Travis said that called for another beer, and I decided I could safely have one, and he was off to the races.

Travis was a terrific storyteller. The great thing was, though they might not have been strictly, 100 percent true, they were all based on fact. And that was good enough for me, because they were stories of space, and of rocket piloting, of guys and girls actually getting out there and doing it. Kissing the sky.

When Travis got off a really good one, one of us would reach for the remote unit attached to the mechanical pool alligator by a cable, and start pressing the buttons. The phony reptile would rear up, thrash his tail, and let fly with a roar that sounded more like a grizzly bear to me-not that I know a grizzly bear from Yogi Bear, but I have heard pissed-off gators a time or two.

The rubber alligator was a story in itself. One of Travis’s friends used to work as a mechanical animator at Disney World. Travis invested with the man when he left Disney and tried to start his own studio. The alligator was for a place called Gatorland. The day before it was about to open, some radical animal rights group, Free the Animals or something like that, broke in and let all the real gators go.

Gatorland wasn’t exactly in the swamp, it was in a suburb of Tampa. In half an hour nine of the freed gators had been hit by cars when they tried to cross a freeway. Several people were injured in the crashes, and all the alligators were killed. Others had to be pulled from backyard swimming pools and rounded up on downtown streets, and some had to be shot. Later, a dozen neighborhood dogs and cats could not be found.

By the time all the lawsuits were settled Travis’s friend was bankrupt and all that was left of their investment was the gator. So he and Travis took the very realistic critter to the home of the president of Free the Animals and… but Travis said the statute of limitations hasn’t expired on that one yet, so he’d better be quiet about it.

“Not that the prick would likely press charges,” Travis said. “They’ve all been keeping a much lower profile since the Gatorland fiasco.”

[57] I could have listened far into the night, but after a while Travis looked at his watch, drained and crushed his beer can, and told us to go get our computers.

You’re kidding, I thought. But he was not.

So we set them up out there on the patio, plugged into his ground line, and signed on to the Infinite Classroom.

IT WAS ONE of the better ideas Dak ever had. Travis knew this stuff, he’d worked with numbers all his professional career. There were basic concepts in calculus that had been giving me hell, I’d started to wonder if I’d ever make the breakthrough, ever really make the grade. Maybe I ought to get a job selling shoes. It would be better than shining them, like my great-grandfather used to do in Havana.

“There’s just things it’s real hard to learn out of a book,” Travis said at one point, not long after getting me to finally see a point I’d been struggling with for a whole month. “Math’s one of them. I don’t think I’d ever have got it if I didn’t have a good teacher to help me over the rough spots.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think this Internet U is a great thing… up to a point. But in pretty much any subject you get to a point where words and pictures on a screen aren’t enough. You either have to get some hands-on experience, or get somebody to walk you through it, one on one.”

“SO AM I going to hear how this all came about, or is that a secret?”

Dak looked over and grinned at me from under his helmet.

“Just dropped by a few days ago to see how the poor bastard was doing,” he said. “Cousin Jubal had told him all about that night and Travis wanted to say thanks. I think he was pretty impressed we didn’t take him for everything but the lint in his drawers. He’s a man who has some experience in these matters.”

“I’ll bet,” I laughed.

“Oh, yes,” Alicia said. “Travis has been mugged before.”

[58] She was puttering along in her little 1965 VW Bug, ahead of us on the bikes. Dak had been helping her restore it. In fact, that little Bug was how they met in the first place. The outside was coated with primer except for the two front fenders, which were “screamin’ yellow and hollerin’ orange,” according to my mom. Alicia hadn’t yet decided what color to go with.

“We cracked a few brews, sat around shooting the breeze, making that rubber crocodile walk around on the bottom of the pool.”

“And he offered to do our homework for us?”

“Not at first,” Dak admitted. “He said, any little thing he could do for us, all we gotta do is ask. The dude may be a drunk, but he knows a lot of people, and I think a fair number of them still like him. These are the kind of people who can drop a hint, call in a favor from the right person at the right time, I figured. We got a long ways to go between here and the moon, Manny my man. We need to use every leg up we can get.”

“No argument, pal,” I said. “I just wish you’d let me in a little sooner. I felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party.”

“Sorry about that, man.”

There was a momentary silence in our earphones.

“He was a hero, once,” I said.

“No fooling?”

So I told them the story Pig had given me about saving the California’s crew and passengers. Dak loved it about as much as I had.

“Damn!” he said. “I’d pay to see that. Let’s hop a plane to Africa, Alicia.”

“Happy to, soon as you can pay for it.”

“Yeah… how come I couldn’t find any of that, Manny? I went to the NASA site, same as you. Didn’t find diddly.”

“For some reason, NASA wants to pretend Colonel Broussard never existed. They can’t, but they sure did minimize him. I don’t know why, Pig wouldn’t say.”

“Are we invited over again?”

“If you don’t mind sirloin for breakfast.”

“One more thing I’d like to know.”

[59] “Shoot.”

“Alicia, how did you find out Dak had been coming out here?”

“Because I’m nosy,” she laughed.

“You can say that again,” Dak said. “Raiding the man’s pantry.”

“He ate three helpings of the salad.”

“Salad? That what that was, salad?”

“It doesn’t have to have lettuce, Dak.”

“In my house it does. And tomatoes.”

“Alicia, you never did answer my question,” I said.

“Oh, that. You know Dak installed that inertial tracker-and I never knew why, since he already had the NavStar unit.”

“Just another gadget he couldn’t resist, I guess,” I said.

“Hey, Manny, Alicia. I’m right here, don’t forget.”

“Well, Dak forgot that machine keeps a record of your location and your route…”

“That’s it, woman!” Dak exploded.

“… it keeps that data for two weeks unless somebody remembers to erase it…”

“Who figured I needed to erase it? Damn, I’m surrounded by spies.”

THE BIG NEWS at the NASA site that day was the departure of the American mission to Mars.

The crew had gone up the night we almost killed Travis. The ship had been finished when the final components were delivered two weeks before that. Captain Aquino had used the intervening weeks to conduct as many tests and drills as were possible in the limited time available to him before the very tight launch window closed.

I watched the countdown, and the totally unimpressive lighting of the plasma torch at the rear of the long, lumpy, completely unlovely congregate of landers, orbiters, propulsion modules, reactors, solar panels… and doghouses and kitchen sinks, for all I knew, and its departure for the Red Planet.

Its very sloooooow departure. Proving once again that, aside from the liftoff from Earth, space travel was not and probably never would be a [60] feast for the eyes. Aside from the deathly quiet, everything I’d ever witnessed in space happened at a pace that would make a glacier look like an avalanche. No matter that everything I was seeing was hurtling around the planet at a speed of about sixteen thousand miles per hour. You couldn’t see anything move. You never could.

The plasma engine was slow but steady. It was fifteen minutes before the mission could be seen to have moved at all.

It didn’t bother me. It was beautiful.