Red Thunder (15 page)

I came up looking right at Kelly, who spit out some water, brushed
her wet hair out of her eyes... then pointed behind me and shrieked. I
turned around and probably shouted, too, because a giant alligator was
no more than five feet from me, and it seemed to be headed my way....

Goddam rubber alligator. I'd disliked it from the first time I saw it.

"Is anybody hurt? Is everybody okay?" It was Travis shouting, I
could see him running along the edge of the pool. I looked around and
saw Jubal and Dak, chins out of the water. The pool surface was almost
solid with dry leaves and grass and sticks and even some fairly large
branches. I saw the picnic table, floating with just an inch of the
table-top above the water. I saw an empty cardboard box that used to
hold Krispy Kremes.

What I didn't see was Alicia.

We all started calling her name. Travis was looking frantically
around him, in case she hadn't been thrown into the pool. Dak
immediately began diving, and I tried to, but the water was so thick
with dirt and leaves she could have been two feet away and I wouldn't
have seen her.

I came to the surface about the same time Kelly did. She shook her
head, looking scared, and I probably did, too. It had only been fifteen
or twenty seconds, but it felt like an hour. I saw Dak surface... and
then Alicia came out from under the floating picnic table. I relaxed
slightly. What a relief.

"She's bleeding! She's bleeding!"
Dak shouted, and swam to
her as best he could with all the debris in his way. Travis was running
around the pool to where Alicia was, and he got to her before Dak and
pulled her from the water.

"Call a doctor! Call nine-one-one!" Dak was shouting. Travis had her in his arms and was examining her face.

"It's okay, Dak," Alicia called out. "I'm not hurt bad."

Dak pulled himself out and ran to her, and hugged her.

"Just a bloody nose," Travis said. "I don't think it's broken." Then
he turned away from the two and looked bleakly at the ground. It was
easy to see he was kicking himself for the dumb stunt he just pulled.
Well, he ought to, I thought. But we got lucky, like I said. If that
bubble, which must have been five hundred feet across, had been only
three feet above us when it vanished, and the air all around us had
instantly rushed in to fill the vacuum...

That's what it was, of course. That's what Jubal and I had seen just
at the moment it became too late to do anything about it. If squeezing
a bubble compressed the air that was trapped inside, then expanding one
with only a golf ball's worth of air inside to the size of the Goodyear
blimp was going to make one hell of a good vacuum.

Travis had been thrown against the brick barbecue and managed to
hang on until the wind died. Just about everything else in the backyard
lighter than Jubal or the picnic table had been swept into the air,
most of it coming down in the pool. All five of us landed in the
pool... another stroke of luck, I realized, that the pool had been
filled the day before. I had come down headfirst, from at least twenty
feet in the air....

TRAVIS'S HOUSE HAD three full bathrooms, all of them
with big showers. Kelly and I took one. It wasn't until I got there
that I began to feel any pain. Excitement desensitizes you, I think,
pumps some good chemicals in your blood so you can keep functioning,
injured, until you're away from danger.

Then the chemicals go away, and you start to hurt.

I had my pants unzipped and was starting to pull them down when I felt a sharp stab in my side.

"I think I may have cracked a rib," I said. My shirt was torn on my
left side, and there was some blood. Kelly carefully lifted the shirt
and we looked at a rough scrape there at the bottom of my rib cage. The
flesh around it was already a big purplish-yellow bruise. Kelly pressed
gently above the bruise.

"Does it hurt when I do this?"

"It would if you pressed any harder." She moved her hand below the bruise.

"How about this?"

"Yes." I looked at her face, soaking wet, hair tangled with some
dried leaves stuck in it, looking intently at my bruised side. Her
shirt was open and her nipples crinkled from the water and the air
conditioning, which Travis liked to keep set around the North Pole. She
looked up and smiled. She reached down into my pants.

"How about this? Hurt?" she asked.

"Hurt me," I said. Then we were kissing, and trying to wriggle out
of our wet clothes at the same time. Wet jeans are the worst, and
Kelly's were pretty tight even when they were dry. It didn't help that
pretty soon we were laughing, then I'd gasp from a pain in my side and
we'd try to be careful, and start laughing again. She was shivering,
too, wet and cold. Finally we made it into the shower stall and turned
on the hot water and made love there, she being careful not to touch my
side, me not really caring.

We managed to get each other all soapy before one thing led to another again, and by the time
that
wave had crested we'd used up all Travis's hot water.

"What are we going to wear?" she asked as we got out.

"Towels, I guess," I said. "I'll go see if Travis has anything."

I wrapped a big towel around me. When I opened the door there was a
pile of clean clothing there on the floor. I brought it in and held
things up, one at a time. Two pairs of Bermuda shorts in Travis's size,
and two of Jubal's tentlike Hawaiian shirts.

"Who gets the hula girls, and who gets the surfer dudes?" I asked her.

"Surfer dudes for me, dude," she said, and I tossed the shirt to her.

The shorts were a few inches too wide for me. The other pair were a
tad tight in the hips and loose in the waist for Kelly. Both of us were
almost swallowed by the shirts.

I heard a clothes dryer, found it at the end of the hall, and tossed
our clothes in with Dak's and Alicia's, then found our way to the
living room.

Alicia had a Band-Aid on her nose where it had been cut slightly,
but it wasn't broken. If any of us had been hit much harder than I had
been by the picnic table we surely would have had some broken bones,
but Alicia had hurt herself coming up beneath the table, not while we
swirled through the air. Jubal and Kelly and Travis and Dak hadn't been
hurt at all.

"We got lucky," Travis said. "I'm very sorry, ladies and gents, I
didn't know what sort of tiger's tail I was twisting. My apologies."

"It's okay, Trav," Dak said.

"No, it's not okay. It's not okay at all. I'm going to have to ask
you all to just go home today. I don't want anybody else around while
me and Jubal sit down and figure out just what we've got here."

"We aren't afraid, Travis," Kelly said, surprising me. She looked at the rest of us. "Well, we aren't, are we?"

"Not me," Dak said.

"I
am
afraid," Travis said. "Not of blowing up my own old ass, but of hurting one of you children. I couldn't live with that."

"You couldn't if we were children, which we are not," Alicia said. "It's Jubal's gizmo. What do you think, Jubal?"

Everybody looked at him, and Jubal seemed to shrink.

"Oh,
cher
... I don' know, me... I mean..." Alicia realized
a decision like that was far beyond the man's capabilities. She put her
arm around his shoulder and whispered something in his ear, which
seemed to cheer him up. He grinned at her.

"Jubal will go with his family, like always," Travis said, not
unkindly. "You can all come back tomorrow, and I'll fill you in on what
we've found out."

"That's cool," Dak said. "Come on, folks, let's hit the road before the morning rush hour starts."

"Not for another thirty minutes or so," Alicia said, looking at her watch, which seemed to have survived the dunking.

"What, you like traffic, babe?" Dak asked her.

"No, I like my own dry clothes. I'm not going to be seen in public
in Jubal's shirt and Travis's pants. I got my reputation to consider."

I'D BEEN FALLING behind on my work at the Blast-Off,
so I tore through piled-up chores that morning as well as I could with
a bruised rib. I had the noon-to-six shift that day. I really should
have taken Mom's six-to-midnight, too, as she had covered for me twice
that week... but I couldn't. I fell asleep twice in the desk chair
behind the reservation computer as it was.

At six, Kelly pulled into the lot at the wheel of a sexy little red
Corvette. In addition to having the bitchin'est new cars in town,
Strickland Mercedes gets the best trade-ins. Sometimes Kelly decides to
test drive them for a day or two. What a hard life she has.

She hurried into the office. I could see she was as excited as me to
get back to Rancho Broussard and see what Travis had found out. But Mom
was there, too, so time had to be made for a hug and a kiss and a short
chat. Mom approves of Kelly. Aside from being beautiful and rich, Kelly
has been known to help us with some chores she has probably
never
had to do at her own house. How could a mother possibly object? So she
pecked Kelly on the cheek and watched us climb into the red death
machine, and waved as we pulled out of the lot.

WE SPOTTED
BLUE Thunder
a quarter mile ahead of us soon
after we got off the Pike. Kelly pressed the accelerator and we caught
up with Dak without taxing the engine much. With a short toot on the
horn, Kelly pulled past and then let the Corvette have its head for a
bit.
Blue Thunder
was just a blue dot in the mirror when Kelly hit 90 mph.

We passed the jackleg backwoods church with all the signs again.
There was a guy up on a ladder painting one of them. He was a little
guy, in his seventies, dressed in paint-spattered overalls with no
shirt. His bare arms looked incredibly scrawny, but I'll bet he could
have arm-wrestled me to death. I know this type of peckerwood, they
work hard all their lives and why we don't have guys like that lifting
weights at the Olympics I'll never know. There were a couple dozen open
cans of what looked like interior latex sitting on the ground, all
bright colors.

He was actually getting pretty good results. I'd sure seen worse
roadside art, anyway. Nobody was ever likely to hang his stuff in a
museum, but I liked it a lot better than that dude who slung paint at
canvases and then sold his crap for thousands of dollars, and his stuff
is
hanging in museums.

He'd erected a few more four-by-eight slabs of grade-Z plywood,
riddled with knotholes, and was creating new signs on them. He'd
already altered some of his old ones.

"Looks like he's had a new revelation," Kelly said.

"Born again, again," I suggested.

I saw Jesus several times on the signs, with a face as mournful as a
basset hound. Blood was flowing from his thorny crown. He was on the
cross in one picture, preaching on a mountaintop in another. And in a
new one, he seemed to be coming down a ramp from a flying saucer. It
looked like the one in
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
He probably saw that movie when he was twenty. A new sign read:

JESUS IS HERE
IN HIS FLYING SAWSER
DO YOU HAVE YOUR
HEAVENLY BORDING PASS?

The sign he was working on read:

EZEKIEL SAW THE WHEE

He stopped his work and glared at us as we passed.

We turned the corner onto the Broussards' private road... and Kelly
slammed on the brakes. There was a heavy chain suspended between two
posts, with a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging from it. We sat there looking
at it for a while, then heard
Blue Thunder
sliding to a stop behind us. Kelly and I got out of the car. Alicia and Dak joined us at the chain.

"Looks like we've been stood up," I said.

"And me with my brand new party dress," Dak said. "Damn."

Nobody said anything for a while. Dak kicked at the loose shell a few times, then once more,
hard,
for luck.

"Should we walk in?" Alicia wondered. "He did say he'd see us today."

"You think so?" Dak said. "I think the chain is pretty clear." He
showed us the shiny new—and very heavy-duty—padlock.
"They're avoiding us. We get to the house, nobody's gonna answer the
door."

"I think he's right," I said.

WHEN WE GOT back to the Blast-Off the parking lot was
almost full of the kind of twenty-year-old vehicles normal for the
early evening, with a smattering of even older rattletraps that would
be classics if they weren't so rusted out. And parked close to the
office in the yellow-striped "Manager" spot was a low, wide, brawny
civilian version of the military HumVee, or Hummer. It was black and
red, and looked as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor.

"Gotta be Travis," Kelly said.

Dak and I paused for a moment to admire the thing, so we were a few
steps behind Alicia and Kelly as they ducked around the front desk and
into the apartment behind. There was a great smell coming from back
there, and laughter.

Jubal, Travis, and my mom were sitting around the worktable in the
living room. Aunt Maria was just coming through the kitchen door with a
steaming tray full of fried plantains and conch fritters. She set it on
the table and scooped up a big bowl with tortilla chips at the bottom
and another bowl that had held some of her famous homemade salsa, and
headed back into the kitchen.

"Smells mighty good, Maria." Travis ate a plantain from the tray.

"Real good, ma'am," Jubal said, munching one. There was a salsa stain in his beard and another on his shirt.

The worktable is just an ordinary ten-foot folding cafeteria table.
It's usually covered with junk, knickknacks in various stages of
assembly.

Aunt Maria is artistic. She had tried her hand at hundreds of kinds
of handmade souvenirs until she found the best money-maker, which was
shell sculpture. She made little tableaux of shell people, mostly with
clam shells but with small cone and spiral shells and bits of coral and
other stuff, stuck together with glue and clear silicone. She made
shell families standing before shell houses, shell golfers swinging
bobby-pin irons, shell surfers on oyster-shell boards hanging ten on
shell waves, shell dogs peeing on shell fire hydrants. Some of her
larger scenes were based on abalone shells, or conch shells sawed open.
No two creations were alike, and we sold a lot of them.