Red Thunder

3

THE QUICKEST WAY from the beach to Rancho Broussard involved twenty miles or so on the Florida Autopike. Dak eased Blue Thunder onto the ramp and allowed the Pike computer to interrogate his precious baby. There are several things about the Autopike that just rub Dak the wrong way. The most basic is simply that he hates to surrender control of his rig. “You go driving, you should have at least one hand on the wheel, like God intended.”

I didn’t argue with him on that one. There was still something profoundly creepy about cars that steered themselves, at least to folks like me and my mother. We could barely afford the thirty-year-old Mercury that Dak and I were always rescuing from a one-way trip to the junkyard. That Merk was not Pike-adaptable without spending about ten times what the old wreck was worth. Poor folks like us ride the Autopike about as often as we take the ballistic Orient Express to Tokyo.

The other thing Dak hates about the Pike is… well, let’s face it, nobody likes to get passed, right? Nobody our age, anyway, and for sure nobody driving a rig as gaudy as Blue Thunder. But ol’ Blue was built for power, not for speed. We were banished into the D lane, the outer one for vehicles that cruise at about eighty-five or ninety. What [20] we call the “blue hair” lane, for all the old ladies in their well-preserved Caddies and Buicks. Now you can see them by the thousands in the D lane, going places they were too timid to drive to before the Pike opened. It’s a drag to be tucked in among them while you watch the soccer moms in their minivans pass you in the last lanes.

Dak pulled into one of the brightly lit authorization booths. Kelly and I scrambled out of the bed and set Colonel Broussard on his feet. He needed support, but he could stand. We shoved him into the narrow backseat as the Pike computer checked some eighty or ninety roadworthiness items every time you entered, from airbag sensors to tire pressure. We hopped in behind him.

“Is this my car?” Broussard asked.

“Just take it easy, sir,” Kelly said. “We’ll have you home soon.”

“Okay.”

“If he barfs in my car, man…”

“Please state your destination,” the computer said. Dak told it the exit number, and the computer told him what the fare would be.

“Do not attempt to leave the vehicle while it is in motion.” I heard the doors click as the computer locked them.

“Do not attempt to steer the vehicle until you are told it is safe.” I could see Dak idly spinning the disconnected steering wheel.

“Do not unbuckle your safety belts at any time. The next rest wayside is thirty minutes away, so if you need to use the facilities, press the rest button on your Autopike Control Console now.”

“I’ll just piss in a Mason jar,” Dak said.

“Don’t miss,” said the computer. “You’re due for an oil change in five hundred miles. Your left front tire is showing some uneven wear. And all that salt and sand isn’t doing your undercarriage any good.”

“That’s what I said!” Colonel Broussard shouted.

“Bon voyage, Blue,” said the voice, which I now suspected was not the Pike computer. Blue Thunder pulled quickly away from the booth as Dak muttered something about “Big Brother.” I looked over at the supervisor’s tower and saw a guy waving at us.

The only time I was on the Pike the scariest part was the initial merge. The computer tucked us in between two semis with about three [21] inches clearance fore and aft, and did it at eighty miles per hour. During rush hour they use every square inch of road available and the door handles and bumpers almost touch. Some people can’t bear to use the Pike at all because of that. It’s contrary to all your driving instincts.

No problem like that tonight. Traffic was light in all lanes. Over in the A lane there would be no traffic at all for a minute or two, then a dozen cars would zip by bumper to bumper to take advantage of drafting, like racing cars. They say in a few more years you’ll be able to travel from Miami to Maine like this, but as of now the Florida part of the Pike only goes from Brevard to Jacksonville, by way of Orlando.

We’d hardly got up to Pike speed when it was time to get off again. The computer eased us to the required dead stop at the booths, and Dak engaged the manual controls. We rolled off the Pike and onto a main east-west highway.

We were on that for about fifteen minutes and then turned off on a smaller road. Then we took a shell road, deserted at this time of night. Dak watched the Global Positioning Satellite screen, where a red line was showing him the route over a maze of farm roads and hunting trails. This was about as far off the beaten track as you could get in this part of the world.

Off to our right we saw lights, the first ones in a while. When we got there we saw it was one of those little five-pew Baptist churches that dot the back roads from South Carolina to Texas. This one was a double-wide trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was another double-wide sitting a bit back in the trees. It was probably the parsonage. You could tell which one was the church because somebody had built a big steeple over it and taped some colored cellophane over the windows. Somebody in there liked to paint. There were dozens of big plywood signs with biblical verses and end-of-the-world warnings lettered on them, and a lot of renderings of Bible stories done in flaking house paint. It was all lit up with floods and strung with colored Christmas lights. The whole place was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and the grounds were littered with the usual number of rusted-out cars and junked refrigerators and busted toilets you found this deep into redneck country.

[22] Kelly was tugging at my sleeve. “Look at that one,” she said, laughing. I figured she meant the one that read

Dak took the next right and we rattled over a cattle guard and down a long potholed driveway that took a few gentle curves through the piney woods before it ended… in a basketball court.

There were lights on poles, but only one of them was working. There were cracks in the concrete with grass growing in them. Neither of the goals had a net.

“Let’s shoot some hoops, friends!” Dak called out. I had to laugh. We all knew Dak’s attitude about basketball. If you’re black and you’re tall, he once told me, you better not learn to play b-ball unless you’re the next Michael Jordan. If they see you can shoot they’ll never bother to educate you. Dak pretended to be the most fumble-fingered jerk since the game was invented, somewhere deep in Africa. “Don’t believe those white boys who say it came from here. How many white boys you see playing NBA ball? I rest my case.” Actually, the only time I got him to play a little one-on-one at a deserted playground he wasn’t all that bad. My speed made up for his reach, so we were pretty evenly matched. But I didn’t make the first team at school.

The rest of the place hid in the darkness. On one side of the clearing was a sprawling ranch-style house. It looked like the plantings around it had gone wild, and in Florida that can mean very wild indeed. Dak drove toward the house, but before we reached it we came to a big, empty swimming pool.

Dak drove close and cut the engine. We listened to the crickets for a while, then we all got out of the truck. Me and Kelly followed Alicia to the edge of the pool. She shined the light down into it, then jumped [23] in surprise and gave a little squeak. Down there in the deep end, sitting on a lot of dead leaves and empty cans, was an eight-foot alligator. He turned his head, opened his mouth, and hissed at us.

“Whoever lives here, they’re crazy,” Kelly said. “Isn’t it illegal, keeping an alligator like that?”

“Might be, but what’s that?” Alicia said, and shined her light on a thick electrical cord that went from under the gator and up the side of the pool. “I think this is just one of those audio-whatsit things, like at Disney World.”

“Go down and check it out, will you, babe?” Dak said. “We’ll wait up here.”

“And get electrocuted, right? I see some water down there.”

She shined her light over the house and patio. I let my eyes follow the beam as it picked out a low diving board and groupings of lawn or pool furniture, including a big umbrella and table thing that had blown over.

The light traveled a little more, to one of those bolt-it-yourself sheet metal buildings you can buy at Sears and put up in a few days, if you have a concrete pad to set it on. There were four wide garage doors, closed, and each of them had a light fixture over it but only one was working. It was a large building, I’ll bet you could put an ice hockey rink in it. Several rusting vehicles sat off to one side, some almost vanishing into the blackberry brambles. One of them was up on blocks, and it looked like a Rolls-Royce except the back half was gone and a pickup bed had been welded there.

“I don’t think anybody’s home,” Kelly said. I didn’t think so, either. We heard nothing suggesting a human was near. The mosquitoes had found us. We were all slapping at them, and I knew we couldn’t just leave him in one of those pool chairs over there. He’d be one big skeeter bite in the morning.

“Where we gonna put the dude, then?” Dak asked.

Alicia reached in the open truck door and leaned on the horn, hard, for a good fifteen or twenty seconds.

Dak was about to honk again when a light came on above a door [24] on the side of the aluminum barn. The door opened, and a short, tubby figure stepped out onto a small porch and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

“You know a Travis Broussard?” Alicia shouted at him.

His shoulders sagged. He ran a hand over a partly bald head.

“Y’all know where he be?” he hollered back.

“He be in my truck,” Dak yelled. “He be passed out in my truck. He maybe be about to barf in my truck when he wakes up. You want him?”

“I want him, me. Y’all wait a minute.”

He closed the door and then one of the garage doors rolled about halfway up. The guy came through it, pushing a wheelbarrow.

By the time he reached us, I think we were all grinning, at least a little.

He wasn’t much over five feet tall and plump, a right jolly old elf. Trying to place him, I realized he looked a lot like a popular postcard we sell in the office, mostly in December. It shows Santa Claus stretched out poolside between two Hooters girls. He’s wearing a loud aloha shirt and tacky cut-off jeans and huarches and holding a margarita and it says, “Deliver your own goddamn gifts this year!”

When he got to us he set the wheelbarrow down. His forearms were huge, like Popeye’s. He was smiling, which made the creases in his face deeper. You could tell he smiled a lot. He made odd little bowing movements toward us, didn’t see it when Dak started to offer his hand. He was twisting the hem of his tentlike shirt so hard I wondered why the hula-hula girls weren’t screaming. From all the wrinkles I could see he twisted that shirt a lot.

He looked into the pickup. He stroked his snow-white beard for a bit, then reached in and grabbed Colonel Broussard’s arm and was about to swing him up in a fireman’s carry when Dak stepped up beside him.

“Here, man, we’ll give you a hand,” Dak said. The little guy looked confused, then did a few more bows in our direction. So Dak and I each grabbed a leg and we carried him. We arranged the limp carcass with his arms and legs hanging out of the wheelbarrow. He was still sleeping peacefully.

[25] The elf stood there a moment, twisting the shirt again. I noticed he seldom looked into our eyes, but then his eyes hardly ever settled on anything.

“T’ank y’all,” he said. “I owes y’all one, me.”

Dak started some sort of aw-shucks routine, but it was wasted. The guy grabbed the handles of the barrow and almost trotted away from us. Broussard’s arms and legs bumped up and down.

We all looked at each other, and Alicia had her fist at her mouth, biting hard on the knuckles. She held it as long as she could, till the guy was almost to the barn door, then she exploded in laughter.

“What a weird little man,” Kelly said, and she started laughing, too. It didn’t take long for me to join in. Dak looked at all of us and shook his head.

“Yeah, right. ‘I owes y’all one, me.’ Like we’ll ever see him again.”

“Did you notice there was no dirt or anything in the wheelbarrow? Like it never had anything in it.”

“Colonel Broussard’s personal rickshaw,” Kelly said.

“Yeah, every Saturday night he gets a ride home in the barrow.”

“Huh! More than every Saturday night,” Alicia assured us. “The guy looked like a stone alcoholic to me.” Alicia would know, I figured.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Kelly suggested.

So we all climbed back in Blue Thunder and bounced back to the highway, retracing our route except for the part on the Autopike. Dak didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get home, and neither was I. There’s an amazing number of things two people can do under a blanket in the back of a truck, and Kelly and I tried most of them. I didn’t think of Broussard or his odd little friend all the way back home, and after a few days I’d almost forgotten about them.