Mr. Fahrenheit (17 page)

The idea hit Benji with the force of a roundhouse slap. He didn't know what to say.

“You can't just throw something like that in our faces,” Ellie said. Benji felt a flood of gratitude. “You were there, too. And you don't even know if it's true.”

“You don't even know it's not.”

“Please,” Zeeko said from the ground. “Please, stop. . . .”

Everyone looked down. Zeeko sounded like he was going to cry.

“You're friends, you three jackasses. Okay? There are so many things in this whole situation we can't understand. Maybe we're not meant to. But for the love of all that is good on this dumb planet, will you just remember how much you've been through together? That's the only way we'll make it through this in one piece. So please,
please
, can we just talk about what's actually important here?”

“What's that?” Ellie asked softly after a moment.

Zeeko peered up. “My face, Ellie,” he said. “My beautiful Goddamn face.”

Coming from Zeeko, the profanity was the equivalent of a
nuclear
f-bomb. Benji guffawed. CR went, “
Whaaaat!
” Ellie's hand popped up to cover her wide-open mouth. Zeeko's gesture was as sweet as it was vulgar: In spite of having been bashed in the face, he was trying to lighten the mood and heal the rift between his friends. Maybe all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put it back together again, but Zeeko would still try. His religiosity was annoying sometimes, but how many people tried so hard to act decent?

“Do you think anything's broken?” CR asked.

“
Every
thing, actually. Nah, but truly, I think I'm okay. I'll have Dad check me out in the morning.”

CR nodded, awkwardly patted Zeeko on the shoulder, then turned to Benji. “We still need a game plan,” he said, sounding more civil, if still rather tense.

“Fine. But we're not going to even talk about destroying it. That is not going to happen,” Benji said.

CR obviously wanted to debate this, but instead replied, “So, we turn it in, then?”

Benji swore he heard an infinitesimal squeal of feedback,
like an angry protestation, from the drive-in speakers. Nobody else reacted, though. Was it only in his head?

“We'd be admitting we were hiding it,” Ellie said. “Remember how you think it would get us in trouble? For the record, I'm convinced not at all that it would get us sent to a CIA Black Site. But . . .” She glanced at Benji, a brief but cutting look of hurt and something approaching disgust. “But it's a maybe,” she finished.

Benji's stomach knotted.

“Also,” he added quietly after a moment, “I . . . I don't want them to do, like, an autopsy on it.”

“But this FBI guy, if he even works for the FBI,” CR said, “if he finds the pod and wants to keep things quiet, what stops him from doing an autopsy on
us
?”

Will you just stop thinking like that? Can we just slow down? Can we just start over?

“We need leverage, right?” Ellie said. “Something we could threaten to do, or expose, if anything happened to us.”

“Like what?”

“A video of the pod?” Benji said.

“Nope. It zaps everything digital, remember?”

“You recorded something on the ice the other night, didn't you?”

“Yes, and a staggering five seconds of film it was, too,” Ellie said curtly. “Come on, Benji.”

“A picture . . .” Zeeko said.

“Well, but even if we used an old camera, Zeek, it might screw up the film.”

“No, you guys, I know exactly what to do!” Zeeko said breathlessly, springing to his feet. “We need to X-ray it!”

They looked at him uncertainly. “You want to sneak the pod into a hospital?” Ellie said.

“Won't need to. We've got the community health truck. A lot of really rural hospitals around here can't afford much medical equipment. It's awful, almost third world, my dad says, and he should know, since he is literally from the third world. A lot of the coal miners downstate, near Kentucky, they die from black lung disease just because they never get X-rayed in time. Which enrages me, but here's the good news: The community health truck has an X-ray machine in it. I think it'll work for us. Sincerely! The machine takes X-rays and sends them to this computer, which is in an operator's booth. Everything in that truck is lead-lined, so it blocks radiation.” He beamed. “Guys, the truck is basically an X-ray mobile, and I've got a copy of the key.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows, impressed.

“The computer's even got Wi-Fi. Dad emails the X-rays to patients or other docs sometimes,” Zeeko went on, more excited every moment. “He and I have to use it pretty much all the time for the next couple days, but we'll be finished on Friday after school. That's when we can take the X-ray.”

“I've got to watch game film then,” CR said. “And the parade's going on right before the game, too.”

“So Ellie and Benji and me can do it. We'll still have a couple hours between school and the parade. Then we can set up a bunch of, like, automatic posts that would go up online—Facebook and Reddit and stuff—if we didn't ‘check in' with them after a while. And Benji, this way, you'll get to see what's inside the pod, too. You wanted to know more about it, so even if this FBI guy isn't looking for the pod, you'll still have what you wanted. Right?”

“I don't know. I guess.” But not really. It wasn't enough. There was so much more he wanted,
needed
, to know.

“You know what, Zeek?” CR said, smiling. “I'm a wee bit gay for you right now.”

“Thanks! I've always thought we had a ‘will they or won't they?' vibe.” Zeeko smirked. “One thing, though. We can keep the pod hidden until Friday, but what if something happens to us before that? Ellie, I know there's not a lot of footage from the lake, but can you put the memory card someplace safe, where nobody can find it?”

She shook her head. “I feel like people not finding it would defeat the purpose, Zeek. But . . . I could stash it someplace where nobody would find it until after the game, and then they would
definitely
find it. That way, if nothing happens and we
do
get to do the X-ray, we can just go get the memory card back.”

“Where would you put it?”

“I have to go to the carnival tomorrow to film a couple things for the homecoming video for the assembly; they're going to have all the rides operational for whatever shots I want to get. And the carnival doesn't open until the day after the game, right, so I could just wrap the card in a bag, write a message on it, and hide it in the top Ferris wheel car or something.”

“What d'you think, Banjo?” CR said. “It's a pretty solid plan, right?”

It was. Benji did not really want to admit it, but it was. He nodded, but his insides churned with a panicky sadness.

For the last few days, the pod had been a miracle, an actual wish reeled from the sky. Ten minutes ago, it had been speaking to him, the promise of an answer to every question ever asked about the universe.

Now, it was an insurance policy for their survival.

Jesus
, Benji thought.
How did this get so screwed up so fast?

Through all this, the pod had not spoken aloud, but Benji could sense a desperation radiating from it. What was it thinking? Did it think less of him?

“I'm really sorry,” Benji said. Zeeko and CR and Ellie looked genuinely touched.

But he hadn't been talking to them.

They spotted a cinder-block projection booth across the valley from the tattered movie screen. CR kicked the door open, and when he flicked his lighter, a pair of raccoons, which had been dining on cockroaches, skittered away from the light. The smell was a nightmare, the worst parts of a cellar mixed with the worst parts of a sewer. And it was here,
here
, that they were going to hide Benji's pod.

Framed posters hung on the walls, ghostly with age, advertising long-forgotten monster and “hot-rod” movies. They reminded Benji of his dream. He still had so many questions for the pod, for Mr. Fahrenheit. Leaving the pod behind without speaking with it more felt like the ultimate betrayal. Not just a betrayal of Mr. Fahrenheit, but a betrayal of the version of the world and of himself that Benji wanted to create. He'd gotten his “moment,” and he was letting it slip right through his fingers.

Now they all trekked back toward the Rocket. CR found the ray gun and put it in the magic trunk, insisting on leaving it here with the pod. Benji nodded, and together they lifted the pod into the trunk.

When CR turned away for a moment, Benji quickly tried to pull the magnet-on-a-string magic trick he had hidden in his sleeve, to make the ray gun secretly zip up into his jacket.

CR clapped him on the shoulder.

The gun slipped silently from Benji's fingers, back into the trunk.

“Ready to go?” CR said, and if he knew what Benji had been doing, he didn't show it. He just snapped the trunk closed, barely allowing Benji time to pull out his hands. The two of
them carried it to the projection booth, leaving both pod and ray gun in the farthest corner of that rotting place.

As they went back to the RustRocket and fixed the car's loose fan belt, Benji was overcome with a sense that a clock was ticking. His plans hadn't worked, his friends hadn't helped, and he was lost, confused, frightened. He looked back at the booth as Ellie drove them away, and for one moment he felt a cold resolve, as if things would be okay because nothing was going to stand in his way. Then they left the drive-in, and it was gone.

Hey hey, fellas, are we cookin' with grease?

Uh-huh, we're goin' nuclear (to say the least).

—The Atomic Bobs

The magic of today, however, is not like the magic of yesterday. The art of deception, like other arts, advances with every swing of the pendulum.

—Thomas Nelson Downs

T
he note on the kitchen table read:

O
UT
BACK,
PAL.
C
OME & TALK,
OK?

“
Pal”?
Benji thought. It was early Friday morning. In the two days since they'd left the Voyager at the drive-in, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He hadn't even seen McKedrick in town. The world just felt depressingly normal, all school and homework and FIGs, as if the amazing events with the pod had never happened. The only real difference was how utterly disconnected Benji felt from everyone: He hadn't spoken to CR in two days (the first time this had ever happened), and Zeeko was too busy helping his dad with the community health truck. Worst of all, Ellie, the one person who might have made him feel better, was occupied by her duties for the homecoming assembly. He couldn't even feel anything from the creature in the pod, as if its psychic signal were out of range. In the few hours Benji managed to sleep, he was dreamless.

He walked across the kitchen and looked out the window.
What he saw gave him pause. Papaw was outside, all right, in the detached garage in the backyard. Benji rarely saw the garage open: At one time, Papaw had intended to make it into a man cave, but it was so disorganized and cluttered with boxes that the project had petered out. And that had been years ago.

What the heck's he doing?

Papaw's police cruiser was also in the backyard and mostly blocked the view. Plain curiosity took Benji outside without a jacket.

As he approached, he half laughed under his breath, a little astonished at what Papaw was wearing. Blue jeans. Green T-shirt. It wasn't just weird because of the cold, but because a button-up shirt and crisply ironed slacks were Papaw's idea of “really letting my hair down” attire. Humming tunelessly under a caged lightbulb, he bent over the open hood of a car (not the cruiser) in the garage, working elbows-deep in the engine. A protective blue tarp, bungee-corded over the roof and grille, covered the rest of the vehicle. He sometimes worked on the town's cop cars, but Benji couldn't remember him ever bringing one home. Benji didn't ponder this too much, though, because another thought occurred to him that made him laugh: With Papaw's remaining hair slicked back and his T-shirt tucked into his snug jeans, he looked like the world's oldest “greaser.”

“Good morning,” Benji said, a few steps from the garage.

Papaw's head snapped up, smacking the hood. He dropped a wrench, which clattered into the engine. “Aw, hell, you old fool,” he muttered. His voice was scratchy and spent, wrecking any illusion of youth. As he reached into the engine, the loose white flesh of his throat fell over the T-shirt's collar; his arms were thin, and pale like fish. Benji felt that fear again, like he'd felt at the police barricade, that awful knowledge of Papaw's old age. . . .

“What's the word, pal?” Papaw said, retrieving the wrench.

“
Pal”?
Benji thought again. “Nothing, sir. Working on a cruiser?”

A faintly sad smile crossed Papaw's face. “I guess by God you could call it that.” He paused, thoughtfully thumping the wrench against an open palm. He muttered something about having the wrong tool, then turned to inspect the shelves and wooden workbench behind him. They were populated by a half-dozen old galvanized cans filled with tools.

Benji took the opportunity to glance around. The garage was smaller than he would've thought, although that may have just been a consequence of the covered cruiser. A tiny space heater hummed on the floor, the glowing coils splashing red light across the concrete floor and cinder-block walls. A few cardboard boxes sat stacked in the corner, looking like abandoned things, their surfaces bruised and bulging with damp. The top box was the only one not sealed by age-brittled tape, and Benji lifted the flap. A melancholy smell that could only be described as “forgotten” rose up. The box held paper, mostly. A roadmap of California; several yellowed paperback novels, all with covers depicting pistol-packin' cowboys and prodigious-busted women. Benji glanced at some curled loose-leaf paper, inked with some doodles of guitars in the margins and cursive handwriting he didn't recognize. . . .

He spotted a name on the top corner:
ROBERT LIGHTMAN, HISTORY, 4
^TH
PERIOD, 5/30/59.

Holy crap
, Benji thought, smiling a little. The idea of Papaw in school was sort of astounding.
I mean, I know he went to school. But, like, he
really
went to school.

Papaw was still occupied. Benji quietly dug deeper.

Through a gap in the notebook papers, he saw some kind of large black-and-white picture. He pushed aside a few interesting
items (including a 1958 Bedford Falls High School yearbook that he noted to check out later), then carefully pulled the photo out.

The photo was actually part of a poster. Text was laid out on the poster in such a wild (and, uh, grammatically unique) way that it took a moment for Benji to understand.

HEY, TEENS! READY? . . . FOR SOME ROCK AND ROLL!

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

BEDFORD FALLS' OWN MUSIC SENSATION!!!

(WILL THEY CONQUER THE NATION??)

FIND OUT! . . .

. . . AT THE HOMECOMING CARNIVAL!!!

The photo showed three teenage guys in matching '50s-style suits: black jackets, skinny ties. The drummer was seated behind the snare-and-bass kit, and the other two musicians stood in front, leaning into a shared microphone. It should have all felt staged and super cheesy, and in a way, it did: The singers were trying both to mime singing
and
grin directly into the camera. But there was something about the picture that made it really charming. Maybe it was everyone's smiles, which gleamed as crazy-big and shiny as the singers' guitars. Or maybe it was the perfect-for-the-era name of the band, hand-painted on the bass drum:
THE ATOMIC BOBS!

Where have I heard that name before?
Benji thought.

All at once, several ideas collided in his brain.

The Atomic Bobs had been a local band. He'd heard them playing on the jukebox when he found Papaw passed out in the den. (“
Put us three young men together, hey, and what are our jobs?
” sang a guy's voice in his head. “
To move your soul with rock 'n' roll! We're the Atomic Bobs!
”)

And the singer on the left side of the microphone, while
infinitely younger, was Robert “Bob” Lightman. Papaw.

“Whoa,” Benji breathed. He glanced over at Papaw, who was still absorbed in his search for a tool. Benji felt his heart pumping in a hard and unpleasant way.

He looked back and forth between the past and present Papaws. It was just so hard to reconcile them. It wasn't like he'd thought Papaw had come out of the womb already seventy years old, wearing a hat and gun and saying,
Mother, your hard work today is much appreciated. Now please point me toward the nearest police station.
But Benji had never actually seen his grandpa so young.
Or so happy
, he thought.

“You know what I was thinking 'bout today, pal?” Papaw said softly, returning to work on the engine. “I was thinking of that fire. Thinking of coming out of the woods and seein' you layin' out in front of that house. That was the worst moment of my life, Benjamin.”

Benji blinked. “It was?”

“I never told you that. Never told anyone, because . . . because I didn't
want
to,
that's
why.” Papaw's voice bore a dull anger—
anger at himself?
—that caught Benji off guard. “Well, who would want to speak about it? I wish I could forget. Sometimes I think I'd sleep a lot better if I could. You don't remember me taking you down that hill from the house, do you, Benjamin?”

He didn't. He remembered opening the House's cellar door, and the smoke-induced hallucination of a figure in the cellar right before he passed out, and then CR pulling him and Ellie to safety. After that, all he remembered was waking up in the hospital.

“No, sir, I don't remember that at all.”

“Well, there's a blessing, at least,” Papaw said without conviction. “You looked dead. Just dead, a little-boy corpse in the grass. Mary and Joseph above. You started coughing but still
couldn't breathe, really. I picked you right up and carried you off that mountain. I kept thinking,
I'll die for this child. Dear God, if You are truly God, take me instead of him
. The world doesn't work like that, though. Never did and never will. Which makes you question many good things you once took on faith.”

Benji stepped toward Papaw slowly, mesmerized by what he was saying.

“I started talkin' to you while I was runnin'. ‘Don't leave me, honey. Not you. Not
you.
Don't you dare go away, boy.' The paramedics met me halfway up the hill. I screamed when they tried to take you outta my arms. I hadn't hardly noticed them at all.”

Benji stopped on the opposite side of the hood from Papaw, the engine silent and complex between them. The sharp ghost scents of machinery, oil, and rust drifted upward: a darkly romantic smell. It was the smell of something visible but utterly unknowable, a territory on a map marked “Uncharted.” It reminded Benji of being a little kid and seeing his grandfather through a doorframe, looking into a bright mirror while he shaved, a figure as large as a mountain and every bit as unshakable.

Papaw didn't look unshakable now. As he raised his gaze to meet Benji's, Papaw's eyes shone with tears.

“Benjamin, I know the pain you've been in. This is not an easy world to grow up in. I can be a hard man. But I am trying, I am trying so much to make you understand:
You can make something wonderful here
. You can do anything, whatever you want, here in Bedford Falls. Because wherever
you
are,
you'll
be there. And you are the wonderful thing, Benjamin. That's exactly what you are.”

For the first time in Benji's life, emotion lay unhidden on Papaw's face. The sight of it was overwhelming, even frightening, but it pierced something inside Benji. He felt that sense of
the world tilting, the looking glass refocusing, just as he'd felt at the drive-in as he spoke with Mr. Fahrenheit.

Maybe that's enough
, Benji thought.
Maybe staying in Bedford Falls can be enough for me.
Maybe part of the reason he'd wanted to leave was that he hadn't really thought Papaw cared about him. Maybe Benji didn't have to be a voyager to be happy.

“Thank you, Papaw,” he finally said.

Relief washed over Papaw's face, like he'd given up on opening a lock and just now, completely unexpectedly, gotten the combination. “Oh dear Lord, boy, did your grandpa just accidentally make sense?”

“I think maybe.” Benji smiled. Papaw guffawed, then there was a moment of quiet, when they both tried to think of something to say.

Papaw's gaze drifted to the poster in Benji's hand, which Benji had forgotten he was holding.

“Where in
the
hell did you find
that
?” Papaw said, eyes big, walking to Benji's side of the car.

“The box over there. This is you, right?”

“Me or the
other
ugliest man on Earth.”

“Hey! People always say I look like you!” Benji laughed.

“Well, you got the good parts of me.” Papaw winked, then whistled admiringly at the picture. “Haven't gave this a thought in I don't know how many years. Look at that hair, Benjamin! A man could walk into that hair and never find his way out!”

Benji laughed again, a feeling of utter contentment sweeping through him. “So did you, like, sing?”

“Oh, hell no. That's just a bit of ‘Hollywood' for the picture.”

“I don't think I know the other guys. Their names are ‘Bob,' right?”

“Like I said, you got the good parts of me.”

“Huh?”

“Your detective work, there. You're a natural.”

Benji's smile faltered a little.

“But no,” Papaw said, “you wouldn't know those old boys. The one behind the drums, that's Bobby Volpe. Couldn't carry a tune in a lunch-bucket, but could he play that kit! Could he ever!”

“Are you guys still friends?” Benji regretted it as soon as he said it. Papaw didn't really
have
friends.

“No, Volpe, he graduated a year ahead of us,” Papaw said, frowning a little. “He stuck around town for a few months. He said it was because of the band, but really it was his sweetheart; she was still in school. Well, she truly broke his heart, and he beat feet outta town in a hurry after that. Maybe he wanted to leave anyway. I heard tell at the time that she only broke up with him because he'd tried to get fresh with her best friend. I think sometimes we make things go bad just so it's easier to say good-bye. Anyhow, he became an army man. Never heard a word from him again. Not a once.”

Benji nodded, trying to think of something to say that might lighten things.

“The other fella on guitar is Robby King,” Papaw went on. “He sounded okay, but I tell you what, he
looked
a helluva lot better. Girls would scream when he sang, and mind, this was before those British bands came over. It felt so good, being on that stage. Lord, it truly did. Like I wasn't even myself.”

“You guys sounded pretty great on that record.”

Papaw looked up. “What record is that?”

“It was playing on the jukebox the other night. You were asleep in your chair.”

“Oh,” Papaw said, but he still looked confused. “I didn't even know that record was still in there.”

“So, wait, you guys made an album? Did you have a record deal?”

“No, that would have just been a recording of the carnival show. It was live on the radio around here. Felt like a real big deal at the time. I doubt we were as good as we thought we were, though. As the man said, ‘The older I get, the better I was.'”