The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (18 page)

With a screwdriver I secured a hose that had sprung loose from the coolant reservoir. Penny leaned in to admire my hands. She purred and asked when I was planning to check out her hose clamp.

Thinking she meant the mop sink in the kitchen, I asked if it had come loose.

“No,” she replied. “I believe it's tight enough.” People in the Arizone like to talk in code.

That evening she scratched on my tent flaps and rattled a sack full of lagers. They were pretty well skunked and the labels had peeled off, but I was glad to have a drink while Penny was around. She made me nervous.

To my eyes she was not one woman but two halves stacked on top of each other. Above the waistband her body was thin and hard, like she'd been extruded to fit inside her camisole. Her red hair she piled up high, bound so tight with a scarf that the corners of her eyes drew up. The lower half of Penny was all hips and need. She led with the pelvis, her feet scraping the ground, as if lust dragged her toward another bad decision. In this case it was me.

Penny's mismatched anatomy made sense once you saw what she was about: come-ons and insults, often in tandem. I felt both worthy of and admonished by her affection.

The clouds had settled on the San Francisco Peaks in a formation that suggested a landing. The air was scented with juniper. I was acutely aware of the cumulative stink inside my tent, the traveler's smell of blacktop runoff and sweat, but Penny settled right in. She told me I was a filthy example of manhood while her pants came off. I touched the button on my cutoffs before unfastening them, then lay down feeling the pine needles prick my back through the canvas floor like a jealous lover. Sylvia Reade was who I thought of.

Before we got started, I warned Penny that I had lost someone. “A girl,” I said, clarifying.

“Why would any gal leave such a prize as you?”

“I guess I sent her away.”

“Where to?”

“Jupiter.”

She laughed, which hurt my feelings. I had opened up to a stranger and would pay for it. Later I would learn to speak no more than necessary during our intimate encounters, though I had not passed any time with a woman in years, and there was so much to say.

To even the score, Penny made her own confession. She had lost someone as well. A child and a man. “My baby caught the dysenteries,” she said flatly. “The man couldn't tolerate my company any longer.”

“Where did he go?”

She shrugged. “Jupiter?”

We joined in a hateful little laugh and then began.

Because you are my child, Sylvia, and technically Penny's as well, I will spare you the details of that night on the slopes of Mars Hill. It was welcome though not memorable. It was my first time. When we were done, she dressed and walked uphill to her dorm room, returning an hour later with a blanket and bag of toiletries. We would not be a couple as Pop and Umma had been. I withheld from her, while she continued to inflict herself on me. She mocked me and pushed me around.

Only in sleep were we proper lovers. Through the night we'd cling to each other under the sleep sack, so tight we sweated and could scarcely breathe. If one of us rolled a few inches away, the other would feel around in the dark. By morning my neck was clawed bloody, and Penny's arms were daubed with bruises.

After you came along, Little Sylvia, it was Uncle Chips who showed me how to swaddle, diaper, and compel my baby to burp. He was the one who stole formula and rash cream. Penny knew how to mother, of course she did. She loved you, Sylvia; I want to say she did. But some losses cannot be recouped.

Our nightly grappling only intensified when there were three of us in the tent. A baby seeks her mother in the dark; only natural. Penny, however, could not tolerate your wet rooting mouth, the curdled odor of sick. I would wake to find you thrashing in a corner, pull you to my chest, drift off, only to wake moments later with Penny's nails in my ribs.

By the time you read this, your mother may be gone or deceased. Maybe she has run off with a local or choked herself on Chilly ratweed.

As Penny and I went through our convulsions, I grew to love Raoul Chips. He was kind, generous, and could be charismatic to a point that was almost unnerving. In fink circles there was always a special sort of character we called a Sorcerer. This was usually an older gentleman, somewhat fallen in the social order, who got high and dispensed a lot of esoteric advice while nobody listened. He was a well-intentioned bore. A flophouse would be a poorer place without one, but you would not usually miss him when he was gone. Raoul was a Sorcerer, but he was worth listening to, because he was right.

One slow day early on, I was driving the Mars Train just for kicks. The lot was vacant, but I wanted some fresh air. At the dome Raoul hopped aboard. As usual, he began talking and would not be interrupted. The subject was telescopes, something he knew a lot about, and not just the regular Tolemy nonsense. He said the one those men scrapped had been a 24-inch Alvan Clark refracting telescope, the very device Percival Lowell used to study Venus. He'd had a few unstable ideas, about cities on Mars, but by and large Lowell was a man of reason, which Raoul said was an old word for smarts.

I wondered why Raoul risked telling so much, and I asked where he'd learned it all.

“What do you know about negligees?” he said, somewhat out of nowhere.

A decade earlier he had worked for a lingerie concern in East Jersey when a floor collapsed in the basement. A common occurrence, especially where Gunt buildings had been razed and built over.

Following a sense of purpose that he described as “interplanetary,” Raoul set aside the negligee he'd been stitching and went down to the cellar to explore. He picked through the rubble until his flashlight showed blue tile fifteen feet below. He says it was bra-strap elastic he tied to a standing pipe to rappel into the hole. He landed in a stairwell, which he followed down to a locked door. With a hunk of flooring he managed to break through.

Raoul found himself inside a warren of bookshelves that seemed to extend forever in all directions, an infinite underground library. He had never in his life seen so many paper books. The shadows that moved among the stacks were only rats. The carpet was boggy with sewage, and the books on the lowest shelves had rotted away. He could not say how long he remained there, in that forgotten archive, only that his flashlight had begun to flicker when he hauled up three piles of books by his trusty bra strap.

“You made lingerie?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

He stepped forward over the coaches to show me his fingers. Though they had hung drywall for years, they were delicately tipped, drawn to pink points like pencil erasers. On them he wore stacks of silver rings, which he clicked together as he spoke.

“I did lacework,” he boasted, and I did not doubt it. Raoul's mind was too elaborate for day labor. “I might show you those books one day,” he said. “You would certainly find them interesting.”

I stopped the Mars Train. We had reached the concession. I was hungry and hoped Penny might slip me a boiled egg. “Would I?”

“Oh, yes,” said Raoul, leading the way inside. “They're all about Astronomy.”

 

14.

Bill Reade made me promise to wait for him under the bleachers. When I arrived, a pair of turkey vultures were doing a job on a dead skunk in the shade of the benches. I shooed them out and winged the carcass into the weeds by its tail. Then I sat down amid the skunk gas and rising heat for what seemed like an hour, trying not to feel trapped and knowing this was probably a test.

When Bill finally banged across the bleachers, pointedly late, he sat above me, pointedly elevated.

“Launch Control,” he said flatly, strumming the ridges with his nails. “We enter separate.” He arranged a small gold key between the heels of his boots. I took it. “You first.”

I crept out, occasionally glancing back at Bill. He stared at the launch tower where the booster rocket now looked fit to outswim gravity. Not knowing how to walk in secrecy, I remained at a crouch and with cramping thighs waddled toward Launch Control, satisfied that my actions would not arouse suspicion.

I released the padlock that secured the door, quietly collected the chain, and entered. The sole cause of light in the control room was its red Master Clock. The transient glow clicked backward from sixteen days, eight hours, thirty-five minutes, and five seconds into a zero-hour future. I felt my way to a laminate desk and fell in behind a monitor. A few minutes passed before Bill entered the room. He climbed a few steps to the elevated platform between the glass-enclosed Bubbles. Working a crank handle, he opened the heavy green louvers. Bands of moonlight spilled across the desks.

At his beckoning, I joined Bill on the platform. He admired the distant tower and its fuming rocket; I pretended to share his enthusiasm, though my heart was rattling fast. He broke away to toggle on a power strip under a desk. Light and sound flooded a pair of computer screens. I stood behind them bathed in their preliminary blue glow. This would be my console. The placard read
LAUNCH MANAGER
, although someone had stuck a wad of chewing gum over the letter
a
in
launch
.

For the next hour Reade walked me through the protocol again and again. There wasn't much to it, and I got bored pretty quick. The intricacies were handled by computer circuitry and Gunt magic. I told Bill I understood, but he would not let me quit. He drilled me on that dull sequence till I could type the codes on the two separate keyboards simultaneously and without looking. He planned to be on that firecracker, he said, no matter what. He needed to know I was fit to light the fuse.

When I returned to the trailer, Pop was out cold in the wreckage of his master bedroom. Faron sat at our mini dinette asking where I had been. I said nowhere. “Just handling stuff.” My brother reminded me how little stuff was left to handle. Training had ended. The rest of the job would be performed by that stupid red clock.

I suppose I wanted to hurt him. On account of Sylvia. That is why I told Faron of Bill Reade's scheme to take my brother's girl into the sky. I sat across from him and angrily peeled a yam with my thumbnail. Furiously ate it.

“Bill Reade has a plot cooking,” I said. “I am in on it.”

“You and Bill? Allied up? That's a snorter.”

Pop undulated on the mattress like a beached seal. I said, come on, Faron; let's take a stroll.

Down by the stream I told him the particulars, how Bill had guessed at Pop's volatility, how he intended to bring his family to Europa no matter what. “He is taking Sylvia with him, so I guess that's the end of that,” I said.

Faron listened with a hurt expression. “You would do that to me?” he asked.

“I would do it
for
you. So you and Pop and me don't have to fly on that thing.”

“And then what's supposed to happen to me?” he asked.

“Terry would have to let you go. It wouldn't be like you did anything.”

“I see. And you?”

How should I know? “Run?”

“You really know how to launch that thing?”

I shrugged. Wasn't much to it.

“Okay.” He refrained from hitting me. I could see how it pained him to hold back, so I took double satisfaction in making him miserable: first for the loss of Sylvia and second because he had too much love to punish me for it.

Finally he turned to go. “You better check on Pop,” he said. “I got a thing I need to do.”

*   *   *

A boulder can't help but roll downhill, nor can a widower with impulse trouble keep from avenging his wife's death. Morning came and with it the inevitable. Pop raged out of the trailer, shouting nonsense syllables while me and Faron climbed down from sleep. He stomped across the sand and onto the blacktop, his two boys following in boxer briefs.

The Crawler Road was built to support a colossal vehicle. Each of its three lanes was as broad as the Dixie Hiway. The center was lined with fine-grained blue stone that would not make a spark. On either side was concrete slab thick enough to bear the Crawler's tractor treads. Oak and sawgrass had sprouted up through the gravel, but the concrete was impenetrable even to life, that tireless penetrator.

As big angry Pop stomped down the Crawler Road, I swear I saw the first fine cracks appear in its surface.

Terry Nguyen's Vanster approached from the opposite direction. It shivered in rising waves of heat, and I hoped the vehicle would evaporate altogether. Terry picked up speed; Pop slowed to a march.

Faron said don't worry. From the roadside he selected a broad length of oak. “Terry has sense enough not to run him down.” This felt true; Pop stood taller than the Vanster and in the shoulders nearly as wide as its wheelbase. It topped out at 30 miles per hour, and that when all six batteries were juiced. He would do more damage to the vehicle than it to him.

Through the smoky windscreen I spied Nguyen's face. He did not look dismayed or alarmed, only puzzled, and mildly at that. He cocked his head like he was looking for a street sign, like he was lost but not desperately so.

Pop put his head down and charged. When he collided with the grille, the Vanster bucked back on its rear wheels. He vanished underneath like a speed bump. I heard a scrape and a crunch that was either steel or bone.

Terry drove on, still looking for that street sign.

I dived for the blackberries by the roadside but Faron seized the back of my neck and righted me. The Vanster had suffered from its encounter with Pop. The hood smoked and a pinion dragged the road. The front right tire deviated significantly from its Y-axis. Faron raised his stick and asked if I was ready. Terry worried the steering wheel. He showed his teeth and hit the brakes. I believe a moral threshold had been reached. Terry would not run down a father
and
his sons. Nguyen was not a thoroughly contemptible man, only partially. His motives, examined at a distance of eight years, were not so different from my own.