Red Thunder

19

TRAVIS WASN’T THE only one to go through hell that day. As soon as he told us about asking our parents’ permission, earlier that day at the Cape visitors’ center, Alicia got up from the table and walked away. Not a word, she just left. Kelly leaned close to Dak.

“What is it with Alicia and her parents, Dak?”

“I don’t know. Every time it’s come up she just clams. Not a word. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead, even.”

“Me, too,” Kelly said. “Maybe I’d better-”

“No, I’ll do it,” Dak said, and he got up and ran after her. We watched them for a while, too far away to hear. Dak had an arm around her, talking. She was just shaking her head, not even looking at him.

“I don’t know what her problem is,” Kelly said, “but I’ll tell you, this isn’t fair.”

“Didn’t say it was,” Travis said. “All I’m saying is, I’m not getting into a thing like this without talking it over with your parents. I just couldn’t do that.”

“Travis, be reasonable! We’re not old enough to drink legally, but we’re old enough to vote, and serve in the military. And we’re old enough not to need our parents’ permission on anything anymore. Not [201] a one of us comes from a sitcom family. Manny’s father is dead, Dak’s mother pretty much abandoned him. My parents are divorced and my father is remarried. You want to talk this over with my stepmom, too?”

“Just your mom and dad would be okay.”

“Then why not just buy a big ad in the Herald? ‘Ex-Astronaut Going to Mars!’ It wouldn’t spread the news any quicker than telling my dad. And I guarantee you, the people he’d be telling it to would be the police and the media and his lawyer. Correction, his lawyers. He’d tie you up so bad you wouldn’t be able to walk to the bathroom without getting a writ, much less go to Mars.”

They glared at each other and I thought it might have come to blows, but over the cawing of the seagulls we heard Dak shout something. We all looked, and Dak pulled Alicia into a hug. She fought him for a moment, then relented.

“Should we do something?” Travis asked.

“Leave them alone,” Kelly said. “We’ll know about it soon enough.”

They came back to the table, Dak holding her protectively, Alicia walking stiffly and not looking at any of us.

“Alicia has something she wants to tell you,” Dak said.

“Not that it’s any of y’all’s business,” Alicia said with a harsh laugh. “You want to talk to my papa, Travis, you’ll have to drive a while. He’s in Raiford, doing twenty-five to life for killing my mother.”

“Oh, God,” Kelly moaned, and squeezed my arm. Then she was up, rushing to Alicia, and Jubal was, too. Travis and I were left to stare at each other.

HER EARLIEST MEMORY was seeing her father hit her mother.

“Daddy was a taxi driver until he lost his license for one too many traffic scrapes. Then he became a full-time drinker. Mom was a table dancer, she made pretty good money without actually whoring. She was very pretty, lots prettier than I am. She was black, did I tell you that? Almost as light as me, though. Dad is white.

“I was fifteen. It got three paragraphs in the paper. There was nothing really different about the fighting that night. I’d heard him a [202] thousand times, ‘One of these days I’m gonna get my gun and blow you away, sugah!’ The only difference was he did get his gun that night, and he did blow her away.

“I was sitting on the porch. I came in the house, and he pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger. The bullet went right through here.” She pulled the waistband of her denim shorts down a few inches over her left hip. There was a round scar there. “I hardly felt it, I was kind of fat then; it was just a pawnshop.25, I’m surprised it fired at all. Kind of fat? Hah! I was a pig, I weighed two hundred pounds.

“He fired at me three more times. I remember the hate in his eyes. It wasn’t just for me, he hated the whole world. He figured he’d just destroy his piece of it.

“The gun didn’t have any more bullets in it.

“He looked down at my mother, lying there, and he started to cry and he put the gun to his head, like this, and he fired it three or four more times. Forgot it was empty, I guess. Then he sat down and cradled Mom’s head in his lap.

“ ‘Better go call nine-one-one, sugah,’ ” he said. “That was the last words I ever heard him say.

“I didn’t go to the trial. I’ve never visited him in jail, five years now. He writes me letters, and I throw them away. The only thing in the world that scares me, much, is the idea that he might live through twenty-five years at Raiford. And that, friends, is the last time I will talk about him to any of you. Travis, do you want to take me up to Raiford to get his permission?”

“No, no, of course not,” Travis said, mortified. “He’s clearly lost any parental right he might have had.”

“Thank you.”

Travis looked down at the table, but not quick enough to miss the glare Kelly gave him. Kelly knew this wasn’t the time, she would never bring up her problems in the face of Alicia’s shattering story… but her eyes told Travis this wasn’t over.

[203] MOM WENT TO the door with Travis and Jubal; there are certain things you do, a certain politeness to be observed even with an enemy. But she didn’t offer to shake hands, and she most emphatically did not open herself to a hug. Aunt Maria was in the kitchen cleaning up, removing herself from the scene of anger so thick you could cut it with a knife. And Jubal looked more in need of a hug than anyone I’d ever seen. So I got up and hugged him. Then they left.

“I’ve got to get up in a few hours,” Sam said. “I’m not going to say any more until I’ve had some time to think it over. The food was wonderful, Maria.”

Maria bustled out of the kitchen with a Tupperware box.

“How would you know? You hardly ate any of it. Here, to take home.”

Sam laughed, and took it.

“I’ll go with you, Dad,” Dak said. He showed me his crossed fingers as he followed his old man out the door.

“I’m going to see my mother,” Kelly said to me.

Kelly’s real mom was a delightful woman, by now over the shock and shame of being kicked out of the house to make room for her husband’s girlfriend, who was once Miss Tennessee. She lived in a nice apartment, cashed her nice alimony checks, and was studying to be a real estate agent. Kelly spent more nights there than with her father, and possibly even more than with me. I never added it up.

“You want me to come?”

“Not tonight, Manny. I need to talk some things over with her. And don’t worry, I’ll keep all our secrets. Alicia, would you like to go with me? I’d like it if you did.”

Alicia had been looking at least as gloomy as Travis. Now she brightened a bit.

“I’d like that. Thanks.”

Then it was only the three of us, and Maria quickly made herself scarce.

“I can’t talk about any of this tonight, Manuel,” Mom said.

“That’s fine by me, Mom,” I said, and kissed her cheek and skedaddled.

[204] It felt mighty good to get out of that pressure cooker and back in my room.

NATURALLY. I COULDN’T sleep.

I wasn’t the only one. After about an hour there was a knock on my door.

“Door’s open,” I called out, and sat up in the bed. Mom came in and sat beside me. We didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Is there any way I can talk you out of this thing?” she asked.

I knew what her problem was. Sam Sinclair had said it, just before leaving. “The way I’m seeing it, it’s this, or something else. I like to died when Dak got into racing dirt bikes, I got a thousand gray hairs every time he fell off one. But I knew he could do it then, and respect me, or wait till I couldn’t do anything about it, and detest me.”

“Do you believe what Travis said?” Mom asked me now.

“Do you?”

“I want to, because if he’s right, you’re not going to Mars or anywhere else.”

BY THE END Travis knew he wasn’t going to be winning any popularity contests, so he simply laid out the facts. “Here’s how I see it,” Travis had said. “One, we can start out to build a spaceship… and fail completely. I think this is pretty likely. I’m not sure thirty engineers could do it.

“Two, we build a ship… and we’re too late. The Chinese land, then the Americans, and I have to start thinking of another way to attract enough attention so no one government gets this thing.

“Three, we build a ship… and it ain’t safe. I will swear to you right here and now, by everything I hold holy, that I will never lift that ship one inch off the ground unless I believe it can get us there and back safely. Believe me, I’m not anxious to subject my worthless old hide to danger any more than I’d risk your precious children. I promise you [205] right here that I would never agree to pilot that ship unless I was willing to take my own daughters along with me. One is six, the other is eight. Maybe you’ll meet them someday.” He glanced at his watch. “In fact, I’ll be leaving and you won’t see me for a few days, because my monthly visitation starts tomorrow and I’ll be in New Jersey, where they’re staying with their grandparents while Mommy goes to Mars.

“Then there’s possibility number four. We build a ship. It’s a good ship. We go to Mars, we come back, we’re heroes, we’re rich and famous. I’ve got no way of calculating what the likelihood of that is, but my guess is it’s one chance in a thousand that we ever even get to possibility number four.

“And that, Sam and Betty, is as honest as I can be.” I waited for it… but nobody brought up possibility five, and six, and seven, and eight through eight thousand, which were all ways we could get killed along the way. Nobody needed to. It was right out there, unsaid, bigger than all of us.

“I DON’T KNOW if I’ve ever told you how much I’ve always wished you’d outgrow this astronaut business,” Mom said, in the wee hours, the two of us alone in my room.

“You didn’t have to. I could see that.”

“When I was young, boys always wanted to be policemen, or firemen, or cowboys. Jet pilots. They usually gave it up later.”

“I’m not going to give it up.”

“I know that.” She shivered. “I hate those things, those VStar things. I’m always afraid they’ll blow up. I have nightmares about them falling down on us.”

“They’re pretty safe, Mom.”

“Don’t you start lying to me tonight, boy. Travis didn’t lie, or I don’t think he did, so don’t you start. I know they’re not as dangerous as I fear they are… but you can’t tell me something like that is safe as a hobbyhorse, either.”

“Okay.”

[206] “After your father died, you were all I had to live for. I could hardly bear to watch you cross the street. When you flew off on that airplane, I just knew it was going to fall out of the sky.”

She was talking about my one trip out of Florida, to spend a month with my mother’s parents in Minnesota. Mom had thought they might be holding out an olive branch, but it turned out they still couldn’t stand their little spic grandson. It was a total disaster, and I was never so glad to get any place as I was to get back home.

“Well,” she finally sighed, “I’m still going to talk more to Sam Sinclair about this… but what he said sure seems to sum it up. If it wasn’t this, it’d be something else, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably so,” I admitted. She put an arm around me and hugged tight.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, my only son. Stay alive for me, please.”

“I’ll try.”

I couldn’t remember ever seeing my mother cry, and she didn’t cry then, either. But she had to hurry to the door.

When she opened it Maria was standing there, not even pretending she hadn’t been listening. We both heard Mom’s quick steps on the stairs going down, then Maria leaned in the door and spoke softly.

“When I was eight and your father six,” she said, “we and seven other family members came over on a raft no bigger than my kitchen. Seven days we floated, with no food, the last two days without water. Your family is tough, Manuelito, we’re survivors. Mars will be a piece of cake, eh?” She winked at me.

“I am so proud of you. Your father would be proud of you. And your mother will be proud of you, too. Now go to sleep.”

“ ’Night, Tia Maria.”