Red Thunder

12

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.

[114] 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

[115] DO YOU HAVE YOUR

HEAVENLY HORDING 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 [116] 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.

My mother is not so artistic. While Aunt Maria glues her shells together, Mom paints four-inch plastic replicas of the Blast-Off Motel sign, mounts them on bases, and puts them in clear globes with water and plastic snow or glitter. Snowing in Florida? is usually the first thing the tourists say, but then a surprising number buy one.

Over the years we’ve made and sold dozens of different kinds of kitschy items like the snow globe and the shell people. I put out a plywood sandwich board every morning advertising souvenirs, lowest prices in town. It made the difference between staying open and filing for bankruptcy, sometimes.

Jubal was sitting on a folding chair at one end of the table, bent over [117] a “tree” of six plastic Blast-Off signs, all connected like the parts of a polystyrene airplane model kit before you break them off. He would frown intently at the sign, laboriously trace one of the letters with a fine paintbrush, then sit back to regard his work. He saw me looking at him and held up another tree he had finished.

“You ever made none of dese, Manuel?” he asked. About ten thousand, I thought.

“A few, Jubal. I’ve made a few.”

“I’m makin’ a dozen, me. You mama, she-”

“Betty,” Mom said, smiling at Jubal.

“You Betty, she give me dis one here.” He picked up a finished globe and shook it up, hard, then held it up and watched the snow swirl. “I never see no snow, me,” he said.

“One day, Jubal, one day,” Travis said. He was sitting between Mom and Aunt Maria’s empty chair, working on some unidentifiable shell sculpture. There was glue on his fingers and a small patch of his hair was standing straight up with silicone sealer in it. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

I suddenly felt feverish and a little sick to my stomach. I needed some fresh air. The closest way was through the kitchen.

Aunt Maria was in there, cooking up a huge pot of her famous picadillo. Nothing makes Maria happier than new mouths to feed, and I could tell from the empty jars on the stove that she was pulling out all the stops. Picadillo is basically just beef hash, but then you add olives and raisins and huevos estilo cubano and three or four kinds of peppers, pickled or fresh, all of them hot. We had it fairly often, but without all the trimmings and with cheaper cuts of meat than Maria was using today. I could smell her wonderful coconut bread baking in the oven.

No friend of mine could possibly enter Mom’s and Aunt Maria’s house without being offered food and invited to stay for dinner. Anything else was unthinkable. But the snack would be nachos and salsa and the dinner would usually be macaroni and cheese until they knew you better. The plantains and fritters and picadillo told me that Travis and Jubal had charmed them pretty quickly.

I hurried out the back of the kitchen, which led to the busy street [118] outside. I couldn’t seem to get a good breath, so I walked up and down the sidewalk for a bit, and finally started feeling better.

I watched from the street corner as our back door opened again and Travis stepped out. He was dressed a lot like Jubal today, with sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. He cupped his hands and lit one of the short, thin cigars he smoked every once in a while, then stood there with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, looking up at the Golden Manatee. For a moment, in profile, I could see the family resemblance with Jubal.

He caught sight of me, and ambled down the sidewalk.

“Bummer about the hotel,” he said, pointing at the Manatee.

“Lot of bummers around here,” I said.

“Shouldn’t let it get you down, though. Maria sent me out to get a few things. She said there was a good bodega around here somewhere…” He looked up and down the street.

“A few blocks inland,” I said. “I’ll take you.”

WE DIDN’T SAY anything for the first block. I could tell he was watching me.

“I like your family,” he said after a while.

“What there is of it,” I said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Means my father is dead. My mother’s parents won’t speak to her because she married a spic. My dad and Maria’s family won’t speak to my mom because she’s a gringa and they blame her that my dad’s dead.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re better off not knowing assholes like that.”

“My dad’s family, the Garcias, could help us put the motel on a good financial footing, maybe help us sell it. Mom won’t hear of it, of course.”

“Goes without saying, Manny. That’s one of the reasons she’s good people. She won’t kiss anyone’s ass.”

“Instead, we turn our living room into a third-world sweatshop.”

Travis puffed a few times on his cigar, which had almost gone out.

“You got nothing to be ashamed of. It’s honest work.”

[119] “I just wish you had… maybe given me some warning…”

“So you could fold up the table and vacuum and dust? That’s what Betty said when I knocked on the door. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women would have said the same thing, whether they lived in a pigsty or a place as clean as yours. I’ll say it once more: Don’t be ashamed of them, or of your work, or of yourself.

“Happens to most of us, Manny,” Travis went on. “Rich or poor, we get ashamed of Mom and Dad and what they do, or how they talk, or how they don’t have any money or how they have too much money, the dirty capitalist pigs.

“The year I started school, my dad was out on strike. Money was very tight. You want humiliation, try showing up for the first day of first grade in a pair of Kmart sneakers with holes in the sides and have half the school calling you a barefoot coon-ass. I ran all the way home and cussed my daddy with every step.”

I mulled that over while we shopped, mostly for fresh fruits and vegetables. I could see Tia Maria was going to set out a Cubano feast we might all be a week recovering from. Travis paid with a hundred-dollar bill, which Mr. Ortega, the greengrocer, held up to the light and examined suspiciously before making change. We packed most of the greens in a plastic bag, and the heavier stuff in Aunt Maria’s souvenir mesh shopping bag from the Bahamas, which Travis produced from his pocket.

We stopped on the sidewalk outside, and Travis got out his wallet again. He counted out thirty hundreds, folded them once, and held the money out to me. I made a move toward it, pure reflex, then backed off a step.

“What’s happening here, Manny, is I’m going to have to go off for a while. I haven’t learned much yet about the silver bubbles, but I know some people in various places who will give me an hour or two with some very large and expensive machines, and they won’t ask to see what I’m doing and they won’t blab about it later. I’ll be going to Huntsville, Houston, and Cal Tech, and maybe all the way up to Boston. I’ll be gone at least a week, maybe two weeks.

[120] “Now, Jubal ain’t a dog, and he ain’t a child, but I can’t leave him alone at the ranch for that long. Just can’t do it.

“So I arranged with your mother to get a room for Jubal at the Blastoff. He’ll do fine there, so long as he knows Maria and Betty are around somewhere. He’s okay with walking down to the Burger King by himself. I’m paying for his grub in advance. If y’all would take him to the movies a time or two, I’d really appreciate it.”

I wanted to grab him and shake him and shout out Take me with you! But I knew he wouldn’t, and I really couldn’t get away, either, with the extra burden of work Jubal’s presence was likely to bring about. So I took a deep breath and nodded, and Travis stuffed the money in my shirt pocket before I could stop him.

“Betty wouldn’t take the money in advance, so this is how we’ll do it. You give her the bread after I’ve eased on down the road. Okay?”

“O… okay,” I said.

“Good enough,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. I didn’t say anything.

Two weeks of baby-sitting-in spite of what Travis said-a 230-pound semiautistic genius second-grader with attention deficit disorder, or something very much like it.

Oh, boy. I could hardly wait.

IT WAS WELL past dark when we all finally managed to refuse another slice of pie and push away from the table. Travis wouldn’t hear of leaving the apartment until the dishes were washed and dried and put away, with his help. Mom and Maria wouldn’t hear of letting him help. I thought they might get into a very polite fistfight until Kelly and Alicia took him by the arms and hustled him out of the kitchen, which was crowded with only two people trying to work. So then Mom and Maria had to chase Kelly and Alicia out, too, and finally things could be cleaned.

Travis decided he would help me at the front desk then, and watched over my shoulder as I checked in the late-night trade. We don’t rent to women we know are prostitutes, but we don’t know all of them. As [121] for the other couples who check in at ten and are gone by eleven, what are you gonna do? None of our business.

A few minutes before midnight, when I was about to turn off the vacancy sign, I got called to one of the rooms with fresh towels, and when I got back Travis was checking in the last couple of the night. He was frowning at the computer screen, then slowly shook his head.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but we already have a ‘Tom Smith’ checked in. We don’t want to cause any confusion. But you could be Bob Smith, or Bill Smith.”

The guy looked confused and I thought he might get angry, but his girlfriend or bar pickup got it, and laughed.

“Bob will be fine, won’t it, Bob?”

Bob put his cash down on the counter and Travis gave him a key and waved them out the door. Dak was there, and twisted the key in the lock, then sat down on the floor, unable to hold in his laughter anymore. Kelly came in and looked at him.

“What’s his problem?”

“Come on,” I said, “let’s get Travis out of here before he puts us out of business.”

I’VE GOT TO admit, Travis really knew how to sweeten the pot.

There was an old Triumph motorcycle in the back of the Hummer. We wrestled it out and set it on the ground, then pulled out an old sidecar. Travis showed me how to attach the sidecar to the bike.

“All it really needs is some paint,” he said. “Runs like a top. Jubal is the world’s worst driver, don’t ask me why. Anyway, he loves to go for rides in this thing. He likes to go real fast. I trust you’ll keep it below about Mach one, not cause any sonic booms.”

He showed me where to put the key, how to start it. He was right, the thing purred like a kitten. At that moment there probably wasn’t a happier man in Florida than me.

Dak and Alicia, and Mom and Maria came out to see him off. Mom knew there was something going on we hadn’t told her about, but she kept quiet about it. Travis was paying his way and seemed to be good [122] people, so that was enough… for now. Mom shook his hand and Maria actually gave him a hug. Then Travis hugged Kelly and Alicia, climbed into his outrageous suburban assault vehicle, and pulled out on the almost deserted streets of Daytona.

I looked up and saw Jubal standing at the second-floor railing in front of his room, watching Travis’s Hummer out of sight. He turned and went back inside.