Red Thunder

22

I HAD THOUGHT we were operating in high gear the two weeks Travis was gone. Turns out I didn’t even know what high gear was.

Early the next day Travis sent me and Kelly out to the airport to meet a plane full of Broussards. We went to the general aviation terminal, got there just as a Gulf stream private jet was landing. First out was Caleb Broussard, followed by Grace and Billy. Then we were introduced to Exaltation “Salty” Broussard. He was a small, quiet man, almost completely bald, and didn’t look anything like Jubal and Caleb.

Last out of the plane was Gloria Patri “Patty” Broussard-Wilson, an attractive blonde in her late thirties who could have been Caleb’s fraternal twin. She was the pilot of the plane. It belonged to her employer and she had borrowed it for a few days, to pick up Caleb and Grace in Fort Myers and Salty in Huntsville, Alabama, so they could all drop in and visit brother Jubal and cousin Travis. She let me and Kelly go aboard and look around while the baggage was being unloaded. There was a bar, a full-service media center, and all the way in back, a bedroom. This is the way to travel, I decided.

Kelly… well, Kelly had been riding in a plane much like this for as long as she could remember. Her father and a few other businessmen [238] leased one together, the price tag for one of these babies being a bit steep even for a Mercedes dealer.

I HAD NEEDED a rest, or at least some kind of break, and the trip back to the Blast-Off, while you couldn’t say it was restful, was certainly refreshing. These people talked a lot, loudly, and laughed a lot, just as loudly. They hadn’t seen each other in a year in one case, and three years in the other. There was a certain amount of catching up to do, though they talked and e-mailed frequently. Patty’s stories of bush piloting in Alaska and Africa had me anxious to hear more, and I was sorry to hear she wouldn’t be staying on beyond the next day.

I felt enveloped and warmed by a feeling of family I’d longed for all my life. An extended family, something the racism of all my grandparents had deprived me of. By the time we arrived I was ready to change my name to Broussard… but eventually realized I didn’t have to, as I’d already been adopted into this big, messy, ornery clan.

FOR THE FIRST few minutes things were a little chilly when we arrived at the Blast-Off. Caleb, Salty, Grace, and Patty immediately picked up on the hostility between Mom and Travis. You would have had to be in a coma to miss it. But between Aunt Maria’s determined efforts and the magic of the Broussards, it was soon put away. Grace insinuated herself into Maria’s kitchen without making Maria feel crowded, quite an achievement, and soon it was clear we were about to be treated to a Battle of the Brunches, Cajun versus Cubano. The only sure winner in a contest like that was our pepper-blasted taste buds, and the only sure loser was our waistlines.

We pulled all the outdoor tables together around the pool, and when that whole bunch sat down around them it was a toss-up, for me, as to whether I’d rather go to Mars or just stay right there, soaking up the love.

“Will somebody say grace?” Jubal asked.

“Grace,” I said.

[239] “What?” Grace asked, and first the Broussards, then the rest of us, broke up. Then Jubal offered up the prayer-”Please bless dis fam’ly, O Lord!”-and we dug in.

Soon it became clear to me that the new arrivals were aware of the nature of the Red Thunder project. I wasn’t worried about that. It was clear to me that “family” meant as much to these people as it did in the Mafia. Being closemouthed was deep in their genes, they would never reveal anything important to any outsider.

Without ever asking a question, I learned a lot about them from the constant happy chatter. I learned, for instance, that Salty was an electrician. And I learned that, among many other skills, Caleb was a welder, that he plied that trade on offshore oil rigs when his family’s myriad other enterprises weren’t bringing in enough cash.

Somehow, I doubted this was a coincidence.

“So,” I said to Caleb at one point, “did Travis hire you to do welding on… the project?” He laughed, finished a mouthful of boudin sausage.

“Travis couldn’t ’ford me, Manny. I get union scale, and triple time on Sundays.” I must have looked confused. “But that’s when I hire out. I got me my own company, too, and I can charge as much or as little as I like, since I’m the boss.”

Kelly had been listening.

“Caleb, Travis didn’t tell me he’d offered-”

“He’s not buttin’ into your department, Kelly. We done our own deal, I’ll get my money outta Travis and Jubal’s share. Keep it off the books, that way, help keep the expenses down under one mill.”

Kelly didn’t look entirely convinced, but she let it go. It turned out Salty had the same arrangement. By bringing in a professional electrician, I thought maybe Travis was horning in on my department. I told Dak about it, and we drew ourselves up in righteous indignation… for two seconds, purely for form’s sake. I was never so delighted to see someone in my life, and Dak felt the same way. We were in way over our heads, trying to design a system to meet all the electrical needs of Red Thunder.

The brunch meeting went well. I saw Caleb talking shop with Sam [240] Sinclair, and Salty sought out me and Dak and questioned us about the work we’d done so far, mapping out the electrical system. I gradually realized he was a lot more than an electrician, he was an electrical engineer, with a degree from LSU. And Dak and I were about to become apprentice electricians, in a big hurry.

The only worry was when I saw Travis take my mother to the other end of the parking lot. They talked for a long time, mostly with my mother shaking her head in that dogged way she can do better than anyone else. You don’t have a chance, Travis, I thought. No matter what you’re trying to sell her.

It turned out he was selling her some free help… and he sold it, which was a first in my memory. Not long after that she pulled me aside.

“Grace and Billy are moving in for the duration,” she said, not making eye contact with me. What was she worrying about, that I’d think less of her for accepting help? “It was either that, or pack it in. Shut the doors and let the sheriff put all the furniture out on the street. I almost wish I’d done that, too.”

“I’ll support you either way, I hope you know that.”

She put an arm around me as we walked, and she hugged me close.

“I do. The only reason I’ve kept at it so long is… it was your father’s dream. And it wasn’t even really a dream, I guess, I think it was more of an obsession.”

“You don’t need to let it be your obsession, too.”

“But I did. You’re right. Your father was determined to make it work, he wanted to show his parents… and even more, my parents, the white folks who never said a racist word to him but always managed to let him know he was their social inferior, right up to the day we married.

“He wanted to make it work so bad… that he got a little stupid. Just once. He did something he’d never have done if he hadn’t wanted this so bad, for you, and for me.”

And what was the stupid thing? What would be the worst possible way for him to die to perfectly satisfy my mom’s parents’ expectations? Why, a drug deal, of course.

[241] Just this once, it was going to be. He lived long enough to tell Mom that, as he lay dying in the hospital. I remember Mom was crying, not much else.

It wasn’t even a very big drug deal, certainly not by Florida standards. Just two Cubans and three Colombians and half a kilo of cocaine. But one of the Colombians was flying high, and he got mad, pulled out his gun, started shooting. None of the others could even recall what the fight was about. None of the others were hurt; the Colombian was too stoned to shoot very well, except for that first shot at point-blank range.

They left my father there, all four of them, to bleed almost to death in a deserted parking lot and die of septic infection the next day. All of them are out of prison now except the one who was killed inside. I know their names. Maybe one day I’ll do something about that. Or maybe it’s better to just bury that kind of hatred.

“Travis made a lot of sense, Manny,” Mom went on. “He asked why I hang on here. Why work so hard to keep this goddam place running when I know, when everybody knows, that one day it’s all going to come together at the same time, all the bad things, no customers, a big lawsuit, a hurricane, and the only thing different than if we’d gone belly up ten years ago would be ten years less of heartbreak.

“When I think of selling it, it just hurts that after all our hard work it’s come to nothing. I think about getting another loan, someplace, do some renovation, make it nice, like your father wanted it. But this place is Old Florida, and it always will be, until some New Florida outfit comes along and puts up a shopping mall.

“Well, I’m tired of being Old Florida. So I’m going to accept Grace and Billy’s help while you’re working on this thing you’re working on. Travis is right, you’re going to work yourself to death trying to do both things at once, you’re too good a son to let me and Maria handle it by ourselves, even though I’ve already told you to. You’re your father’s son, that way… and I’m proud of you.

“But I’m telling you right now, Manuel. Whether you go or not, whether you come back or not… I’m through here.”

“I’m glad, Mom.”

[242] “When you… when you get back, we’re getting out of this life.” She shook her head and looked up at me. “You’re already out of it, Manuel, and I can’t tell you how glad that makes me. And, yes, I thank Travis for that… even though I’ll kill him if he harms one-”

“I’m coming back, Mom. And we’ll be rich and famous.”

She squinted at me, looking too old and too tired in the merciless sunshine.

“Is that what you want, Manuel?”

“Famous? Not really. But we probably will be. I only want to be rich enough not to have to worry about every dime, all the time. Have enough money to pay for college, maybe have a few nice things. Not have to… to worry all the time that I can’t get Kelly the things she’s used to.”

“Well, you know I like her. Even though she’s rich.” We both laughed at that. “And if you don’t want to be famous, you’d better have a talk with her. She’s figuring on cashing in on this thing right from the git-go. She’s been talking to Maria and me about it. The lady has big plans.”

“What do you mean?”

“Talk to her. And you go with Travis, and you come back.” She kissed me on the cheek, hugged me very tight, and we rejoined the people around the picnic tables.

Big plans, huh? First I’d heard of it.

SIXTY DAYS.

That’s how much time we had if we were going to beat the Chinese to Mars. We put up a big calendar on a wall of the warehouse and Kelly marked off each day at midnight, when we were supposed to have been in bed for an hour, per Travis’s instructions. We were supposed to get up at six and run, having theoretically gotten seven hours of sleep. Instead, we were always up at four or five, unable to sleep.

But… run?

Mom got a big laugh at that, when she heard. And nobody could have been more surprised than me. I know I should exercise, get into [243] the habit of it since I didn’t plan to be a lumberjack or a rodeo rider, or anything else strenuous. Astronaut? In truth it’s a very sedentary occupation, especially in the free-falling space stations. They have to put in one or two hours’ exercise every day just to keep themselves from losing too much muscle mass and bone density.

But running around and around a track always struck me as a stupifyingly boring waste of time. Running on the street was only slightly better.

“That’s gotta change,” Travis told us, early on. “I want all of you to be in tip-top shape when we leave, not shriveled up from staring at a computer screen twenty hours a day. A strong mind in a strong body, that’s what I want.”

I was going to ask Travis how much running he’d gotten in during the last four or five years of steady alcoholism… but then I saw how much one hour of jogging was costing him, the first time we all went out together, with the sun just coming up and dew sparkling on the leaves. But he was out there again the next morning. Neither Dak nor I could let an old ex-alky outrun us, of course, so we really pushed ourselves.

And the girls? It was easy for them. They’d both been doing it since high school.

“You think this gorgeous body comes for free?” Kelly had chided me, puttering along at half her normal speed as I huffed and puffed beside her.

“Hell, no. I paid ten dollars for that body.”

“Which you still owe me, come to think of it.”

It took a week of torture, and a considerable amount of denial, for me to admit that after the morning runs I felt more rested and alert than at any other time of the day. After that I relaxed to the inevitable. After two weeks even Travis was getting back into shape. Jubal… well, Jubal was exempt, because nobody made Jubal do anything. Most of the time he was too engrossed in his calculations to drag himself away from the computer. But then one morning he did run with us, and he held his own. I’d forgotten about the midnight rowing trips on the lake.

[244] We moved spare beds and dressers from the motel into some of the empty offices in the warehouse, and set up a prefab shower inside the rest room. Most nights Kelly and I slept over, and so did Dak and Alicia. Pretty soon the delivery boys from the local pizza and Chinese places could find their way to the Red Thunder Corporation blindfolded.

THE SHIP WAS to be in two parts, the cradle and the life modules. Dak and I were ready to start construction on the top part quickly, but it couldn’t be built until it had something to sit on, which was frustrating. We devoted the time to materials testing. We also had weekly meetings at Rancho Broussard.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t start building the cradle a week ago,” Travis said at our second meeting. “We thought we were ready, but Jubal did some more tests, and what he found out changed the parameters pretty radically.

“You’ll recall I set out radiation sensors at that first test in the swamp. Didn’t find any. But now Jubal has found there’s two types of… maybe we should say ‘quantum states’ inside the Squeezer bubbles. Most of the ones we’ve tested, they’ve been what we’re calling Phase-1 bubbles. I’ll come back to them.

“But there’s a second type of bubble.”

“Let me guess,” Dak said. “Phase-2?”

“I’m surrounded by geniuses. The stuff inside a Phase-2 is compressed so hard, so tight… we’re really not sure just what the matter inside them is like, but it may be like a neutron star, all the electrons stripped away and nothing but neutrons packed together like Japanese on a Tokyo subway car.

“Whatever. What comes out is very hot, very fast, and releases radiation. If you were close to the exhaust, the neutrons would boil you like an egg.

“But early on, I did a test I didn’t tell y’all about. I got to wondering what if we put a bubble over a city, like a big Bucky Fuller geodesic dome? Could it protect that city from a nuclear bomb?”

I glanced at Dak. We’d had the same idea, a while back. But it didn’t [245] have anything to do with the trip to Mars, so we filed it away to ask Jubal about later. We had our hands full with just the work we had to do, without wasting time on hypothetical.

“So… we tried it on a rat.”

Jubal came back in, carrying a battered old U-Haul box, which he set on the coffee table in front of us. He reached in and came up with a white rat, the kind you can buy in any pet store to feed your pet pythons and boa constrictors. With his other hand he took out a three-legged lab ring stand, the kind you set up over a Bunsen burner. A piece of plywood was glued to the top. He put the stand down and put the rat on the platform. It sniffed around, exploring all the edges.

“Travis,” Alicia said, “is this going to be gross?”

“Not unless you love rats.”

“Well… I don’t like animal research…”

“Bunny rabbits and dogs and monkeys and stuff,” Dak explained.

“… but for rats I make an exception. I killed a lot of rats, growing up.”

“No sympathy for rats,” Dak agreed.

“No lyin’, cher,” Jubal said, “it won’t do de rat no good, no. But no blood.”

“Go ahead, then.” She moved closer to Dak.

Jubal reached into the box again, pulled out his new, improved Squeezer. It was all housed in a unit the size of a shoebox. He fiddled with it, and a basketball-sized Squeezer bubble appeared where the rat had been. The three ring-stand legs clattered on the table, sliced off neatly by the formation of the bubble. The bubble hung there. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to that.

“Now, what happens in there seems to happen instantaneously. There’s going to be a little bang, okay? But no explosion. Jubal?”

Jubal hit a button and the bubble vanished. There was a pop, and a very fine gray powder swirled in the air. What looked like a handful of iron filings fell to the table. The gray powder was so fine it took a few moments to settle into a small heap. Travis put his finger in the stuff and showed it to us.

“Your basic powdered rat,” he said.

[246] WE ALL FELT that called for a drink. Travis took a long swallow of the raspberry-flavored Snapple he favored these days.

“The powder is carbon, calcium, little traces of this and that, everything that was in the rat but water. The water turned into monatomic hydrogen and oxygen. That’s what made the sound.”

Dak got some on his finger, pondered it. “Powdered rat, huh? Hey, maybe what we got here is instant rat. Scrape it up, put it in a package, like Kool-Aid, then you just add water, stir it up…” Alicia shoved him. Jubal thought it was hilarious. All day long he was muttering “instant rat, instant rat,” and laughing all over again. When Jubal found a joke he liked, like saying Grace, he stuck with it.

“You figure out how to put the rat back together again, Dak, that’d be something,” Travis said. “Anyway, it’s the same with the iron from the stand. It’s chopped up so fine it basically oxidizes in midair, rusts before it hits the table.

“But the deal here, ladies and gents, is that chemical bonds are broken. We don’t know why. Maybe it suppresses the charge on the electrons.”

“It turn off dem little hookin’ t’ings,” Jubal said.

“What he means is, it does something to the valence electrons, which is what allows chemical bonds to happen.”

“But if we squozes on jus’ water…” Jubal said.

“He means, with just the right amount of water, and just the right amount of squeezing… show ’em, Jubal.”

Two more things came out of Jubal’s box of mischief. First was a small construction of metal mesh. It was welded to a heavy metal base. Arching around the cage were the three brass or bronze prongs, sharp pointed, that caused the discontinuity, that let the power inside come out in a controlled stream.

Sure enough, Jubal took a small container from his box, opened it, and took out a marble-sized bubble. He put it in the cage, and expanded it until it fit snugly.

[247] “This is a Phase-1 bubble,” Travis said. “There’s just water inside it, squeezed just enough to… well, show them, cousin.”

Jubal manipulated his control box, and we heard a high whistling sound. The powdered remains of the rat stirred in a faint breeze.

“Coming out of the top of the bubble is hydrogen and oxygen,” Travis said. “We’ve adjusted the load inside so it doesn’t fully collapse, like a neutron star. No radiation is produced. Now look.” He struck a match and moved it over the bubble.

With a whoosh, it ignited in a fine, hard, bright yellow flame that went two or three feet into the air. It continued to burn while we all watched. After a full minute it was still firing, and Travis signaled Jubal to turn off the gas. The flame died.

“Clean power,” Travis told us with a satisfied smile. “Hydrogen plus oxygen plus ignition, equals power, and water. Just like the VStar, only they burn liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Not an environmentalist in the world could complain.”

“There’s enough to get us to Mars and back?” I asked.

“No. Well, not in any reasonable time. Lots of power, but not that much power. We’ll use these to get up above the atmosphere.” He unrolled a printout and pointed to the schematic drawing of the power cradle we were about to start building.

“Phase-1 bubbles here, here, and here, under tanks one, three, and five. Phase-2, what I’m calling SuperSqueezer bubbles, under two, four, and six. These bubbles will have enough power to get us to Alpha-Centauri and back, if we were foolish enough to try that. Plenty of power for Mars and return. And when we come back, we use the Phase-1 bubbles again to land.”

The doorbell rang. Travis frowned-he didn’t get a lot of visitors out at the ranch-and he excused himself to go answer it.

Dak was bent over the plans so he didn’t see what I saw… which was Travis glancing at the video screen just outside the dark vestibule. He stopped, stared, and then pivoted and hurried back to us. He spoke in a loud whisper.

“Cops! I want y’all to stay quiet. Very quiet!” And he hurried over to [248] a big bookcase beside the television screen. He shoved some books aside and reached behind them. He came up with a flat pint of Jack Daniels.

I was stunned. Travis, no! But he twisted off the metal cap, raised the bottle to his lips, took a drink…

… and gargled with it.

He sprayed the mouthful of whiskey into the air, breathed deeply a few times, pulled out one side of his shirttail, kicked off his shoes, and mussed his hair. All of us tiptoed to the television screen, out of sight around the corner. I heard him open the door and we saw the two men in suits standing on the porch. The air reeked of Black Jack.

“Hey, hey!” Travis bellowed. “Watch-y’all want? I can’t eat Girl Scout cookies on account of bein’ on a diet.”

One of the men took a step back. The whiskey stench coming off Travis was pretty powerful. The other said something, and all I could make out was “… Federal Bureau…” I figured I could fill in the blanks easily enough.

“Well, shit fire and save the matches,” Travis said. “What’d I do this time?”

Travis stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door almost shut behind him, and the FBI agents’ voices didn’t carry very far. But Travis’s did.

“Say, are either of you ol’ boys from Texas? Friend of mine, he says nine out of ten FBI agents are from Texas.” A pause, something mumbled by one of the agents. “Oh, yeah? Where in Texas?”

Mumble mumble “… Dallas.”

“No fooling? My wife’s got folks in Dallas. Ex-wife, that is. And you’re from Lubbock? I don’t know anybody from Lubbock. Thank God.”

Travis listened a moment, then laughed himself into a coughing fit.

“Oh, that’s great. That’s great. We got guv’mint men checking out the likes of him? You figure he’s gonna be another Waco or something? Let me tell you gents, I don’t know what that ol’ boy saw that brought y’all out here, but he don’t do nothing but paint, paint, paint road signs and hold all-day prayer meetin’s on Sunday where they shout hallelujah all the goddamn day long. I swear, you look in the dictionary [249] under ‘eyesore,’ you’re gonna find a picture of ol’ Roscoe’s place. Unless you look under ‘damn fool religious nut,’ ’cause he’s there, too.”

He went on like that for a good long time. We could see easily enough from their body language that the agents just wanted to get out of there, as soon as possible. Which they finally did, thanking Travis, giving him bland FBI smiles.

We all hurried to the curtained front window and eased the drapes back. Travis joined us, and we all watched the car back out of the shell driveway and onto the road, and spray crushed shells all over as the wheels spun.

We dropped the drapes back and looked at each other, not knowing what to say. Then Alicia came up with something. “Travis…,” she said, and that’s all it took.

“I know, I know. It shouldn’t be in the house. There’s one more bottle, way back in the pantry under a sack of flour. You can get that one and pour it down the drain, too.”

“Did you drink any?”

“No, I haven’t, not even just now, and I can prove it.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a prescription drug bottle and tossed it to Alicia. “I’ve been taking this Antabuse stuff. And you know what? Looks like even the taste of booze is enough… You’ll have to excuse me a minute…” He was looking green, and he hurried down the hall and into the bathroom. We could all hear him vomiting.

Alicia smiled at the sound. Whatever gets you off, I guess.

“I FIGURE THEY must be getting pretty desperate to start checking out old UFO reports, don’t you?” Dak asked us all.

“Of course, there’s the other possibility,” I said. “That they’re on to us, and closing in for the… kill? Arrest?”

“Always the bright side, huh, Manny?” Travis laughed. He still looked rough. It had taken quite a while to get his system back under control and he was sipping his raspberry iced tea very carefully. “Nothing we can do about it either way. Might as well operate as if they’re following a cold, cold trail, looking for a revolutionary new technology [250] in the backyard of a Jesus nut or a pathetic drunk. Checking out leads like that, they got to be desperate. Right?”

We decided to leave it at that, but none of us got much sleep that night.