Wild Cards

The Secret Life of Rubberband Part 2

ROBIN FOUND HIMSELF AT a sprawling Tex-Mex place on the San Antonio River Walk, eating corn chips and drinking a margarita Jerry Jeff had ordered for him without asking if he wanted one. Robin told himself he would not have rather faced down the mob again. He would not have rather been stuck in Dr. Hastings’s lab again, being experimented upon. He told himself that as he scooped another tortilla chip in salsa, keeping one hand underneath as he brought the chip to his mouth, to save his khakis from red sauce.

Jerry Jeff ate with a mannered disregard for manners, one elbow on the table, hat cocked back, jacket rhinestones glinting. “After the second album did so well, we figgered Grandpappy’s ranch started to feel a bit small, so we found a nice big place, you know, rolling grass range, this house like you would not believe. And Jim Anne took to it real well, and the kids, they just can’t get enough of the place.” His face got a dreamy look, and—were those tears in the corners of his eyes? “But now you’ve got me going on and on about my business, and you haven’t said word one ’bout yours! My money was always on you, you know, in the pool—there were big things coming your way, Mister Rubberband. Come on, you haven’t even touched your drink!”

Robin clinked margaritas with him, and raised the glass to his lips, but tasted only the salt. Jerry Jeff was on his second already. “I’m working,” he said, “so I can’t drink too much. You know how it is.”

“Aw, like them kids have never seen a body enjoy himself before?”

“Not a teacher, I hope. At least, not on duty.”

“Shit”—which was a two-syllable word the way Jerry Jeff said it—“they can take care of themselves.” He finished his glass and raised it, empty, to the waiter. “iUno más, por favor!” Back to Robin: “Come on, catch your old friend Jerry Jeff up on the gossip.”

Robin looked down into his margarita.

He’d kept the conversation away from himself on the walk over, and through Jerry Jeff’s first two drinks. It helped that Jerry Jeff welled with stories: he’d talk about anything and everything with a whitewater rapidity of gab. And Robin liked to listen, even though he already knew most of Jerry Jeff’s stories, or their outlines at least, from those square celebrity journalism ads that popped up at the bottom of articles he read on the Internet—not to mention the Google Alert he’d set up on his fellow contestants one night while depressed, and had never worked up the nerve to cancel.

Whatever Robin had to say about the second season of American Hero—and he could say so much that most of the time he preferred to avoid saying anything at all—the show had been a great launchpad. Some people, like Jerry Jeff, knew show business well enough to use their brief spotlight to leapfrog into a stronger spotlight. For Robin, who spent so much of his life trying to avoid notice, the cameras and the sets and the significance bubbled inside him, and he glowed, drunk on fame, until the hangover. And when the drop hit, he made the good hard choice, and stepped away. He didn’t want album deals, and he didn’t want a manor house. He wanted to help people. He wanted his own path.

He’d found it. And along the way he’d found a tiny basement apartment with mysterious stains on the walls, the rent on which he was half a month behind. And he’d found a public school teacher’s salary, a love life in need of love life support, students who rarely listened, and a bank account balance so low cartoon moths flew off his cracked laptop screen when he logged in.

“I’m doing great,” he said. Meaning: Help. “My students are wonderful. Tough. Determined.” Thinking of crowds and chaos and Antonia’s scorn and sullen silence. “New York is like nowhere else.” Big and smelly and tangled and broken, with rising rents and trains that caught fire or stopped on bridges for no reason, surging, torrid. “It’s a good life,” he kept telling himself. “I have everything I wanted.”

Jerry Jeff looked up through the bushes of his eyebrows. Did he doubt the act? But the silence passed so quickly it might have never been. “Well,” Jerry Jeff said, “here’s to that!” He raised his glass, only to find it still empty. He turned to shout at the server, just as she materialized with his third margarita. They toasted, and this time Robin took a sip. “You don’t know how glad I am to hear that. I mean, boy, you had it all right there if you wanted it, right in the palm of your hand. And this is a good thing you’re doing, that’s for damn sure, but whenever they get the teachers on the TV, you know, they’re talking about pay and the tests and the unions and how damn bad it all gets, I just think about you, you know.”

“Oh, I’m fine.” He wasn’t. “Hey, so, your kids—how are they? It’s hard to imagine you as a dad.”

“Aw, I do fine. Kids ain’t too different from cattle, you know, just give ’em plenty of hay and space to run.”

It sounded simple when somebody else said it.

“Hey,” Jerry Jeff said, “you ever run into Woodrow at all these days? Or Stacy?”

And just like that seven years evaporated and they were back in the house after a long day of absurd random challenges, drinking the bad beers with which Our Beloved Corporate Sponsors had stocked the fridge, sharing gossip.

The enchiladas came, and they tucked in. “Speaking of which, Robin, you will never believe who I ran into last time I was out in Los Angeles—” Pronounced, of course, with a hard g.

“Denise?”

“Naw— the Laureate! Poet kid, you know, him what wrote those words that sometimes came true? He’s tryin’ to make it in Hollywood, screenwriting—you remember when we had that team forest matchup and him and Crazy Quilt got caught in flagrante delectable?”

Robin considered telling him that wasn’t how you pronounced that word, then ordered a second margarita instead. “She went back to grad school, didn’t she? Alice?”

“Grad school in kickin’ ass, maybe! Always thought she shoulda made it further, even if the old Colonel did theoretic’lly win that swimming challenge by freezing her in a block of ice.”

“She might have been able to challenge it if she hadn’t set his clothes on fire when the med team got him out.”

“Aw, he’s a coldster, a little fire weren’t gonna hurt him none.”

“I thought that was exactly how you hurt coldsters.”

“Well, to be fair, fire was his weakness, but Alice didn’t know that. And you dumped him into the lake to put the fire out, so, no harm done, and anyway it couldn’t have happened to a nicer pain in the hindquarters. Weren’t nobody sad to see him stung.”

“Yeah,” Robin said. “No arguments there. Had me fooled, though, at first—Colonel Centigrade really seemed like a nice guy until Terrell and I went public with our relationship.”

“Speaking of which,” Jerry Jeff said, a bit too drunk to realize he shouldn’t, “Terrell’s doing good—still run into him every once in a while when I’m up Chicago way.”

“Thanks,” Robin said, and guzzled his margarita. “I keep tabs.” The booze sparked in his head. “Most of us turned out okay, I guess, more or less. Except Tesseract.”

“Shit. Did you ever figger her for … well, did you ever think she could do anything like …”

“Like Kazakhstan?” He shook his head.

“And to think she and I—”

“Really?”

“Well, I didn’t know Jim Anne at that point, you know. But a gentleman never tells.” And then the fourth margarita arrived, and the afternoon blurred blue.

“Awright,” Jerry Jeff said when he came back from the restroom, hitching up his belt by its dinner-plate-size buckle. “Let’s get you back before that Ms. Oberhoffer comes huntin’.”

“We have to pay the check.”

“I picked it up.”

“Jerry Jeff, come on.”

“Naw, you can get the next one. I got us a table at Bob’s Steak and Chop House tomorrow, if you can wiggle out another couple hours for an old buddy.”

Robin’s heart dropped. “Ah. I’ll see what I can do.”

Robin managed the walk back, declining like the sun, slightly tipsy and cursing on the inside. He should have told Jerry Jeff he couldn’t get away, the kids came first, always needed more chaperones in a strange city. He should have come clean about his finances. He couldn’t afford a steak dinner for one normal person and a cowboy—make that two cowboys, since Jerry Jeff’s card upped his metabolism to let him eat and drink twice as much as a nat. Maybe he could manufacture some crisis tomorrow, plead off dinner.

But Jerry Jeff would know, and he’d ask the reason, and then Robin would have to come clean. He didn’t mind not having money. He didn’t mind leaving public life. But every time he tried to explain himself, it came out all screwy. How could Jerry Jeff just assume he’d pick up the tab at the steak place? How could Robin have just accepted, as if of course it wouldn’t be a problem?

Dr. Nelson kept reminding him: Don’t obsess over your mistakes. You made them, or you didn’t. Play the ball as it lies.

He needed, roughly, four hundred dollars.

Where to find it?

Another teacher? Fat chance. Especially since he didn’t know when he’d be able to pay back the loan. The travel had maxed his credit card for the month—the school district would reimburse him, eventually, but that didn’t help now.

Maybe Rusty or Ms. Pond could help—they were both higher-profile than anyone Robin was in close contact with these days. But Robin had just met them this trip, since their kids were both solid performers and neither of them old enough to think about college yet. He didn’t want to spoil whatever good impression he hoped he’d made by asking for a loan.

Calling one of his other buddies from the American Hero days would just make things worse. Which left …

Well, it was worth a shot.

The protesters had thinned out over lunch, and those that remained had settled in for the long haul, resting their gross signs against their lawn chairs and drinking cheap beer from blue dew-slick coolers. The beer, Robin noticed, came from Our Beloved Corporate Sponsors, selling to both sides of the aisle.

A skinny wild-haired man wearing very short shorts and drinking an Our Beloved Corporate Sponsor tallboy shouted, “Jokers go home!” in a squashed hoarse voice. Robin shoved the revolving doors, entered the arctic chill of the now blissfully empty Gunter lobby, dug the Nokia from his pocket, and smashed buttons until he found the number he, to be honest, didn’t exactly want to call.

He closed his eyes, and pondered the depths of desperation one had to plumb before asking one’s landlord for a loan.

Then he pushed the green phone button twice. (The acid bath, again.) It didn’t work, so he pushed it a third time.

The phone rang.

Jan, hi, something strange has come up and I was hoping … No, that was a warning flag conversation.

It rang again.

Jan, hi, I need four hundred dollars. Hm. A bit direct.

Ring number three.

Jan, I know this is a long shot, but …

The phone clicked. “Hey, Rob**, t**** * ****** ***** *******,” the speaker hissed. He shook the phone. Something rattled inside.

“Jan? Jan, sorry, do you happen to, could you say that again?”

“******——$$$—&#%.”

“Sorry, my phone’s being worse than usual—”

“I said,” came the voice he expected, clear as crystal, and right behind him, “speak up. I can’t hear you.”

“Jan?”

Jan grinned, and little lightning bolts danced between her teeth. “Howdy!” Her faint Brooklyn accent and affected drawl mixed like oil and napalm, and whatever effect she meant her souvenir cowboy hat to have, it wasn’t. “I need your help.”

“I,” Robin said, too late as usual. Then: “Wait. What?”

“You’re good with kids, right? That’s your job?”

“Can you loan me four hundred dollars?”

The words rushed out all at once, and once they were said, he wished he could have unsaid them. Not because Jan looked hurt. Because she was grinning.

He scrambled to cover. “I know I’m behind on the rent, I know it’s a lot of money, but it would be a huge help, something big has come up, and I’ll repay you next month—you can just add it to my bill.”

“Oh,” Jan said, “I think we can come to an arrangement. Follow me.”

He hadn’t expected to recognize Jan’s niece, but the girl wearing the Detonators shirt and the bright silver cross, perched at the bar drinking a Sprite and looking deeply uncomfortable, was the same one who’d napped in the lobby earlier.

Jan jumped onto a barstool and leaned back against the lacquered wood. “Robin, meet Vicky. Vicky, meet Robin Ruttiger. He’s an ace. A hero. A TV star. He’ll help you out.”

“I’m,” he said, remembered the terms of the deal, and squashed his impulse to argue on general principle. “I’m helping your aunt look for the ghost.”

“Devil,” Vicky said.

“Devil,” Jan said. “Devil, ghost, whatever.”

Robin frowned. “Weren’t you trying to convince me that there were different kinds of black helicopters just yesterday?”

“You can tell them apart by albedo. But that’s not the point! Those things are—” Jan cut herself off. “Tell him, Vicky.”

“It’s okay, Aunt Jan. I know you don’t think devils are real. But they are. One knocked over the luggage cart Mr. Ruttiger was wheeling into the hotel.” Her dark eyes were large and frank. “You saw it, didn’t you? You heard it.”

“I saw a big red smile. And I heard a laugh. I don’t know what it was.”

“A devil.”

“My point is,” Jan said, “the hotel claims it’s haunted. Devils don’t haunt things. Ghosts do.”

Vicky shook her head. “Either way, I can’t stay here. Not with that … thing running around. It could hurt kids. Tempt us to evil.”

“There are other explanations,” Robin said, uncertain whether this would improve matters.

“Aliens,” Jan supplied, ticking them off on her fingers, “secret government conspiracies, men in black, reptoids, higher-dimensional beings, renegade Majestic program subjects—”

“A practical joker,” Robin cut in. “Or an ace, for that matter. Someone who drew a telekinetic card, or who can make people hallucinate. Lots of things might be happening, none particularly supernatural.” What exactly supernatural meant when a miracle could be “just” another card, he didn’t know, and no preacher had ever explained to his satisfaction, but he doubted that observation would be useful at the moment.

Jan swung in to fill the silence. “The point is, there are lots of things it could be other than a ghost or a devil. I felt it when it showed up—like a buzzing in the back of my head. So it’s electromagnetic somehow. Are demons electromagnetic?”

Vicky stared at her aunt. Robin couldn’t read her expression. She said, “I don’t know.”

“So here’s what we’re going to do.” Jan laid out the plan: “You go up to your hotel room and get some rest. Robin here, he’s a big-time hero, real experience, he’s been on television and everything. He and your aunt Jan, we’re going to hunt down this demon, bring it to you, and show you it’s …” She frowned. Robin imagined she had been about to say it’s not real, which wasn’t exactly the point. “Show you it’s nothing to worry about. How’s that sound?”

If supernatural forces were real, one of them probably would have answered Robin’s prayer and shut Jan up. “Do you feel unsafe?” he asked.

Vicky shook her head.

“If you do, go to Jan, or me, or to your teachers. We’re all here to help.”

“Can you find the devil?”

Jan’s eyes drilled into him, and he remembered the handshake. Four hundred dollars for a ghost hunt, on delivery of said ghost. Half in advance.

“We’ll find it,” he said. After the mixer, he thought. I promised Sharon I’d be back for the mixer. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.”

If he kept saying that, maybe he’d believe himself.