The Dream Life of Astronauts (18 page)

“Hey, cupcake,” I say with more volume in my voice than I've had in a year. “Underpants. She heard you. You made your point and you got your little sign all ready to go, so do what you've got to do, okay, jelly bean? Hang it, lock it up, and get the hell out of here. You're fired.”

He looks from me to Sophia, then back to me. “That's for her to decide,” he says.

“Well, she decided and she asked
me
to tell you, okay? She doesn't feel like talking to you right now. So zappa-dappa and like that. You're gone.”

He huffs. In an incredulous voice, he asks Sophia, “I'm gone?”

With her eyes still closed, she nods, backing me up on this.

As much as the tan can leave the kid's face, it does. And what a sweet sight it is. The rain starts pinging against the window as he's hanging the sign on the door, and when he walks past us, he keeps his gaze down and doesn't say another word.

I look at Todd and motion with my thumb for him to get out of the chair.

“Am I fired too?” he asks, standing.

“Nah, take a break, kid,” I say. “But you be back here once this is over, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” he says, and without another word he's out the door and gone.

I put my hand on Sophia's elbow. She opens her eyes, lets go of the counter, and I guide her over to the chair and help her into it. I squat down next to her and
my
knees pop because, let's face it, we're coming apart here as much as we're trying to hold it together. We stay like that as people file out of the restrooms, some of them with their towels wrapped around their shoulders, all of them grumbling about the rain. I hear the door at the other end of the men's room slam, and then the guard cuts through the entryway, a baseball cap pulled down low on his head and a backpack thrown over a shoulder. He doesn't look at us, but scratches his cheek with his middle finger, and I could break it for him, I really could, but happy trails, you dumb gorilla.

When it's just us, I ask her if she needs anything—some water, aspirin. I swear, I'd get her whatever she wanted if it would put the supervillain back in her face. I'd cook her a meal, take her to an Engelbert Humperdinck concert.

“I'm okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

But I don't want her to thank me. I want her to like me. Even if it's only for right now, for this one single minute. “That lifeguard?” I say. “He's a putz. He's a mook with a whistle around his neck.”

She smiles—just a little, but she smiles. I'm still holding her elbow, and she lays one of her hands on top of mine. She says, “You're something, Mr. Delacorte.”

I give her a wink. “Call me Nick.”

A
bout a month after Challenger blew up, Wendell Troup told me his wife was trying to poison him.

Understand, we were all feeling a little rattled. Some of us had been in charge of checking the range-safety systems on the rocket boosters. Some of us had been combing over the liquid oxygen and hydrogen lines on the external fuel tank. Some of us—guys like me—had been double- and triple-checking the 31,000 thermal-protection tiles that covered the outside of the orbiter. The people who inspected the body flaps and elevons, the people who maintained the aft control thrusters, even the people who inflated the tires and washed the cabin windows had been involved in the incident. You didn't have to be the man who'd given the okay to launch on that cold Tuesday morning to feel responsible.

Wendell was my supervisor. His job was to oversee and sign off on every aspect of the Thermal Protection System, from delivery and unpacking to labeling and installation. I won't say he was any better or any worse at his job than I was at mine. He did what he was paid to do. Some days he took pride in it; other days he complained that he was superfluous to the whole process. We got to know each other on our lunch breaks, grabbed the occasional beer after work, teased each other about our accents (he was from Chattanooga; I was from Boston). We played racquetball now and then, watched a few football games together, got to know each other's wives.

Not that it had anything to do with his being from Chattanooga, but the more serious Wendell was, the more he overenunciated his words, so that he sounded like he was talking to foreigners. And he was the kind of guy who was always talking—to himself, if there was no one else to listen. The guys in our department called him The Yacker behind his back. They tuned him out unless it was work related. They'd say, “Oh, really?” or “How about that?” and move on. I listened because I felt sorry for him, and because, in his way, he could be amusing—a step up from the humdrum conversations the rest of the guys were churning out all day. Wendell could be telling me about how he'd unclogged a shower drain in his house with fishing line and a gasket coil, and I would give him my full attention.

“I'm telling you, Liquid Plumber is a joke, man. It's invented by plumbers who want you to feel like you've tried everything and need an actual plumber. Meanwhile, the means to fix the problem are sitting right there in your house. Look, you can use a gasket coil for anything you want. I've got one designated for clogs, nothing else. Do you think I'm not going to use a gasket coil just because it wasn't designed to go down a drain?”

I hadn't thought any such thing. I wasn't sure I knew what a gasket coil was. But sometimes I egged him on, just for my own amusement. “Well, now, Wendell, the EPA has issued a report about gasket coils and drain safety.”

He'd fall for it every time. Get more wound up, more enunciated. “The EPA? Let me tell you something, friend: there isn't an Ex-Lax patty big enough to unclog the level of stupidity at the EPA.”

And so on.

Wendell was enthusiastic about being at odds with the world. He was occasionally crude in his descriptions. And, in specific and maybe even deliberate ways, he was a slob. For example, he used Brylcreem to tame his hair but always left streaks of it in there—visible, unblended. He shaved every day and yet always had a single, long whisker or patch of whiskers sprouting out from his jaw, and he sometimes came to work with shaving cream stuck to his Adam's apple. He flossed his teeth after every meal and sometimes on a whim, right in the middle of an inspection, but he never cleaned his glasses, which looked felted with dust when they caught the sunlight. Even on the hottest days he kept his sweat-stained shirt collar buttoned and his tie snuggly knotted, but half the time, after visiting the men's room, he'd forget to zip his fly.

His wife, Loretta, was more refined. She looked just as put together when you ran into her at the grocery store or the mall as she did at one of their cocktail parties. Her face rested in a pleasant-enough expression, but when she smiled she had that quick, slightly irritated brightness of the not so happily married. That was my take on it, anyway. Her eyes were sad and pretty.

Loretta worked part-time as the school nurse at the elementary school and part-time as a volunteer at the local animal shelter. She delivered Meals on Wheels to the elderly two days a week and, as a hobby, made wallets and drink cozies out of vintage denim. In the realm of possibilities, I could imagine her one day becoming a born-again, or an Amway guru. But I couldn't imagine her trying to poison Wendell. When he first told me about it, I responded as diplomatically as I could while still trying to sound like a trusted confidant.

We were sitting on a bench not far from the Vehicle Assembly Building, facing the Crawlerway that stretched out through the marsh to LC-39, where Challenger had gone up. I was done eating and was watching an egret with an enormous wingspan circle overhead. Wendell was eyeing his sandwich. Our lunch break was over, we were going to be late getting back, but it didn't matter. There were no thermal-protection tiles to install or inspect. Columbia was supposed to be in orbit at that very moment, following Halley's Comet around, but the mission had been canceled. So had the other thirteen shuttle missions scheduled for that year, and the ten scheduled for the year after that. We weren't saying it out loud but we were all waiting—hoping—to be reassigned.

Wendell dropped what was left of his sandwich into the brown paper bag in his lap. “You don't know Loretta,” he said. “She's got a devious side to her.”

“Ha,” I said. “Devious. Don't we all?”

“I mean, really devious. Crazy devious. Nobody sees it but me.”

“Okay, let's say she wants to poison you. She doesn't, but let's say she does. Why in the world would she want to do that?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Wendell said, worming an index finger into his ear. “The life insurance? The equity? Maybe she just can't stand me anymore.” He rubbed his finger on his pant leg and then wadded the bag up, sandwich and all. “Doesn't matter. Point is, she's crazy and I'm on to her.”

She's not crazy, I thought; you're crazy. But I wasn't supposed to have any opinion of Wendell's wife that didn't start and end with Wendell. My loyalties, at least on the surface, lay with him. I asked him what brought this on—not the poisoning, which I wasn't buying, but his suspicion of it.

“Get this,” he said. “Sunday afternoon, I'm in the den minding my own business, watching
Wide World of Sports.
And here comes Loretta with this big bowl of vanilla ice cream in her hands. ‘That's a lot of ice cream,' I say. And she says the whole thing's for me. Now, when's the last time I had dessert in the middle of the afternoon? Never. When I was six, maybe.”

“So the murder weapon is ice cream,” I said. “Death by ice cream.”

“Would you listen? I tell her thanks, but I don't want any. And she says she already put it in the bowl. So I say, ‘Then you eat it,' and she says she already had some. Now, when was the last time
she
had dessert in the middle of the day?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm not really up on Loretta's eating habits.”

“Probably not since
she
was six,” he said. “But there she is, holding this ice cream out for me to take. So I took it, and I ate some of it. And she sat down right there on the couch and watched me eat it.”

“And?”

“It tasted like metal.”

I just looked at him.

“Metal's a dead giveaway,” he said.

“Maybe you imagined it.”

“Who eats ice cream and imagines metal? That doesn't make any sense.”

“Maybe it was old,” I said. “You know, freezer burn.”

“Freezer burn tastes like cardboard, anybody knows that.”

“Then maybe you have a loose filling.”

“And maybe you're the wrong person to be telling this to. Look, I'm trying to share something important here, man.”

I spotted the egret again—or a different egret, this one gliding along without even flapping, like he had a propeller attached to his beak—and I thought about what Wendell had said. I wasn't sure how many friends he had other than me, or, even if he had a hundred friends, how many of them would have sat listening to such nonsense without making fun of him. But he was right about one thing, at least: I was the wrong person to be telling this to.

I
'm a tremendous liar. I mean, I'm very good at it. That said, these things are true:

When I was seven, a commercial airline pilot visited our school, talked about his job, and then went around the room and asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Every boy in my class said he wanted to be a pilot, except me. I told him I wanted to be a lion tamer. I'd never thought about it before, didn't care about it one way or another, but that's what came out of my mouth. The pilot told me I was a brave little boy and wished me luck.

When I was eighteen, I wanted to move to Alaska and live in a cabin and raise huskies. I wanted to hitchhike across the United States, live in Belize, live on Koh Samui. I wanted to be the next Rodger Ward.

When I was twenty-five, I proposed to Renee, my future wife, by accident. I'd meant the question to be theoretical, Renee heard it as literal, and I went with it to save face.

When we were both thirty-six and had decided two kids were enough, no more for us, we inadvertently conceived another child. We love Teddy, and we wouldn't trade anything for his presence in our lives, but he wasn't part of the plan. Also, he was the reason I couldn't finally trade our station wagon in for something a little more sporty. I think about that every time he smarts off to me, which, now that he's eleven, is at least twice a day.

When Renee and I were both forty-four and approaching our nineteenth wedding anniversary, I got it into my head that she was having an affair. She'd made a new friend at work, some woman named Suzie, and she started having dinner with Suzie once a week—a “girls' night out,” as she put it. But on one of those nights when they were supposed to be having dinner, Suzie called the house, asking for her. “I thought she was with you,” I said into the phone, and Suzie said no, they'd talked about getting coffee or dinner sometime but they'd never managed to make it happen. Would I tell Renee she'd called? Yes, I said, but I never gave Renee the message. Instead, I steeped myself in suspicion. Felt cuckolded. Felt foolish. And then, flipping that on its head for no good reason, I began to feel empowered.

When I was forty-five, Loretta Troup and I locked eyes at a picnic. Specifically, the NASA Efficiency, Morale & Welfare Gathering at Kars Park. Nothing happened that day other than that I made certain we were standing next to each other during the horseshoe tournament—which Wendell was entered in, took very seriously, and won. But at their next cocktail party, I cornered her in the living room and said out of the blue, “There's something here, isn't there?”

“Where?” Loretta asked. She moved her glass back and forth in the space between us. “Here?”

“Yeah.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ha. Maybe.”

Two weeks later, at my suggestion, Renee and I hosted our own little cocktail party, and I invited the Troups. During an impromptu and unnecessary tour I gave Loretta of our one-story ranch house, while we were in the bedroom of my eldest daughter, who was off at college, I was working up my nerve to ask her if there was still something there when she leaned in and kissed me.

And so there I was at forty-six, in Florida, sitting on a bench next to Wendell, a year into sleeping with his wife, a month after he and I had taken part in sending seven people to their deaths out over the Atlantic, listening to him tell me that Loretta was trying to poison him and pretending I wasn't a heel, a cheat, and a traitor—which, when you think about it, is a far cry from living in Alaska, driving race cars, and taming lions.