Foster's Fall (Foster's Life)

by Jake Williams

  I noticed that Spence had fallen asleep with my phone in his hand. When I pulled it away he stirred a little and threw his arm over my chest. I held the phone up and I could see he had written a draft of a text to my mother telling her I was fine, and that if she couldn’t stop laughing she may want to consider how bad her last picture had done at the box office to snap herself out of it. I thought that was good advice so I hit the send button.

  I raised my head over Spence’s shoulder and asked Levi, “Any new developments?”

  He shook his head. “Only the news channels are doing nonstop coverage now. I haven’t seen a live shot from here in a while. They might rally a little in the morning but I still think you’ll be back to your usual busy schedule in a day or so. I mean, I’m not sure what else you do around here besides smoke and drink and sneak over to the sorority house, but you’ll be able to go back and forth to campus soon.” I thought about Phillip’s phone number and wondered when I’d be able to talk to him. As I nodded off again Dave threw his arm around me and I felt like I was in a cocoon.

  When I woke up the next morning Rob had the curtain pulled back just enough that he could peek out on the street. I climbed over Spence and looked around the room, except for the two guys in my bed and Rob everybody else had left. “Where’s Levi?”

  Rob let the curtain drop back into place and told me, “He set up shop downstairs in the study room. He’s getting more irritated with the press and he didn’t want to wake you up. There may be a slightly smaller group of reporters outside but they still look pretty determined to me. And I think they still have a few drones out there, we may have to cancel any plans you have for another pool party.” He looked like someone had cancelled Christmas. His phone chirped and he glanced at it. He sat down on the corner of the bed and pulled on some jeans and an Occupy Wall Street t shirt then headed out the door. I walked down to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and hopped into the showers. The floor was still wet from the morning bathroom traffic jam but it had become chilly and I shivered a little.

  I wondered what my father and Megan were doing right now. I had two conflicting images in my head—one of them holding hands on some remote beach and swearing their undying love to each other, the alternative and probably more realistic picture was of the two of them sitting shell-shocked in a suite at the Willard, and staring at each other like they had never met before.

  Dave padded across the cold tile with a bottle of body wash in one hand and a bottle of aloe in the other. “I heard your door open and close, I was hoping Rob was in here with you.”

  “Pervert,” Spence said as he joined us. He looked at me with a little concern on his face. “Foster, you know I like helping you navigate through your day—keeping up with the drugs, the alcohol, the sex, and the enormous burden of your classes in polo and shuffleboard—it keeps my multi-tasking OCD happy. So, don’t try to take on too much with this whole clusterfuck your father’s created. You’re designed to cruise along through life without these enormous ripples moving across your pond. Let me, Rob, and Levi take care of this for you, okay?”

  I frowned and spit a little shower water at him. “You make it sound like I’m some kind of idiot. Contrary to popular belief I’m not just another dumb jock.”

  He nodded. “You’re right, Bro. You’re a little better looking, a little wealthier, and a little more hung than the average dumb jock, but the same basic concepts apply—try not to talk too much, smile a lot, and run like hell if somebody passes you the ball. That’s really all anybody expects of you, Jake.” He grinned at me as he lathered up.

  Dave followed me over to the bench and we started drying off. “Is that what everybody thinks, Dave? That I’m just another dumb jock wandering through life like a lost puppy? Spence seems to think so.”

  “He actually put a positive spin on your image, Foster. He went a little easy on you about the heavy drinking, the recreational drugs, the recreational sex, and all the other stuff that’s starting to tarnish your boy-next-door image. And there’s other...you know, stuff you don’t even admit to yourself.”

  I ran a hand through my hair and it was so short it had already dried. “What other ‘stuff’, Dave?”

  He looked over his shoulder as he walked out and asked, “Have you called that Phillip guy, yet?”

  I made it downstairs and Levi was debating something with Rob but they stopped talking when I walked into the study. I smiled at them and waited for one of them to lob an information grenade my way.

  “Foster, I might be here a little longer than we thought. Homeland Security’s picking up a lot of chatter, and some pretty radical groups have popped up on the internet. A lot of right-wing survivalist types are convinced your father, Megan, or both of them are part of some left-wing terrorist group trying to undermine the country and remove the President from office.”

  I shook my head and laughed. “Wait. What? People think that my father running off with Megan—who’s basically a clueless slut—that they are tryin’ to pull off some kind of coup? Is this gonna go down in history as the Fuck Me Revolution?”

  Levi spoke up. “I know, it sounds crazy, and I’m sure they weren’t planning...well, I mean, let’s be honest here—between the two of them they probably couldn’t start a coffee maker. A well-planned revolution would be a little out of their league.”

  Rob looked a little grim and it was the first time I really saw him as some kind of protector or guard or whatever. “Foster, your mother and brother are at her house, your stepfather is with them. They have security from the movie studio, the police department, and a couple of my co-workers keeping them safe. I don’t really think they’d be a target, but you might be. I mean, they keep showing that picture of the three of you at the convention. Nobody knows a whole lot about you other than what you look like in boxer briefs or playing baseball. There have been death threats against your father and Megan, and some people might think you’re somehow involved in all of this.”

  “Me? That’s crazy, I’ve just been being me, or whatever. I mean, I’m going to school, playin’ some sports, tutoring kids and shit. I may have been in some underwear ads but I don’t see that as any kind of friggin’ anarchist activity. I’m harmless—”

  Levi cleared his throat. “Ashley seemed to think otherwise, Foster. Before she left she deleted a big chunk of your school record from last fall—there were still copies of some of the underwear ads, different sports awards you won your freshmen year, the convention pics and other stuff. But there are about ten pages of the file that would have covered last fall that are just gone.” He pointed at Brent walking into the room. Brent stopped dead in his tracks as Levi said, “I dug around a little in some of your fraternity brothers’ files and Brent here seems to have the same blank spot in his file as you do. And coincidentally some guy named Trey, also a member of this fraternity, disappeared off the map around the same time.”

  Brent moved beside me and he said, “Oh, our parents may have put some pressure on Ashley to keep some embarrassing stuff out of the media. We went down to Trey’s father’s house on Park—”

  I had to cut Brent off. “We just went down there for a little fun on fall break, that’s all. We just pulled some stupid frat-boy stunts that nobody wanted the press or recruiters or whoever to find out about. It was all innocent fun, you know, guy stuff. It doesn’t have anything to do with—”

  Ella walked in and a few of her staff rolled a huge breakfast cart with food and coffee into the room. “I heard Foster say the word ‘innocent’, we must be in the freakin’ Twilight Zone.” She started pouring coffee and handing it out to all of us. She filled a plate full of pastries and plopped into one of the recliners. “So did I miss anything good on my way over here? I sat up all night watching this shit.”

  I ignored her and watched a UPS crew and a bunch of FedEx people hauling in palettes of boxes and packages and setting them right inside the door. One of the regular delivery guys I recognized loaded up a plate of doughnuts, poure
d some coffee, and sat down on the couch next to me. He huffed and said, “You little douches are getting even more shit than usual today! And Ella said we don’t have to take ‘em any further than the front door, no more deliveries upstairs to the rooms. I guess from now on you’ll have to pause your video games or circle jerks or whatever it is you rich freaks do upstairs and come down here to get your care packages from home or Abercrombie or whoever.”

  I nodded as I stared at all the boxes. “Right, no more upstairs—hang on! That really is an awful lot of shit. Look at the size of those boxes! Did somebody order some shit for the weight room or some imported kegs or something?”

  Sheldon and Shannon walked in. He was wearing a t shirt with Darth Vader on the front of it and some shorts that highlighted his bean-pole legs. He was about as pale as Rob had been before yesterday, and he somehow managed to look younger than Levi. He walked over to me and explained, “A lot of those boxes are mine, stuff I need from my house. I didn’t want to hassle with getting them through all that security and those news trucks out there.”

  Shannon was holding hands with Sheldon and she said, “I’m really just here for the excitement. I mean, sorry Foster, but I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. To give up this campaign to cure cancer or fly to Mars, something valuable—that I could understand. But to walk away from it all for Megan? You and your father have one thing in common—nobody will ever accuse you of thinking too hard about the choices you make.” I grinned and gave her the finger.

  The UPS guy next to me looked pissed and told Sheldon, “So, you just figured I could do it for you, thanks a lot! Do you think I have some kind of fucking magic wand that gets me through all that shit out there without a hassle?”

  Rob was standing behind the couch and he pulled out his gun out and held it to the back of the UPS guy’s head. The guy’s eyes went wide and I realized I had never noticed how blue they were. “Forgive us, Sir,” Rob said politely, “for thinking it was in your fucking job description to deliver packages.” Ella clapped as Rob escorted the poor guy out of the room.

  Levi stood up and shook Sheldon’s hand. “You’re the other guy in this frat whose file seems to have been altered at about the same time as Foster’s, Brent’s and that Trey guy’s.”

  “Levi, this is Shannon, Sheldon’s girlfriend.” I tried to change the subject. “Ella, maybe Shannon wants some coffee or a croissant or something.”

  Ella pointed at the tray. “Help yourself, Sweetie. Just move, you’re blocking the damn TV.”

  I tried something else. “So, Sheldon, what’s in all those boxes?” He nodded and pointed at the steps to the basement. I signaled for Rob, Brent, and Levi to follow us and we all headed downstairs.

  There was a wide-open area in the middle of the basement surrounded by a maze of smaller rooms for storage, initiation ceremonies, and other assorted purposes. Rob looked around at everything while I lit a joint and I talked to Sheldon about the boxes. “So,” I asked, “I’m thinking you have more than one of them, right?”

  He nodded and then Spence asked, “What can they do?”

  Sheldon took a hit off the joint and from the top of the steps we heard Shannon shout, “Just one or two hits, Sheldon! We still have to go shopping for towels this afternoon.”

  Sheldon shivered a little but started talking. “I have six, altogether. I was planning on doing something special for the home game next weekend, but this sounds like more fun.” He looked at me and said, “But these things aren’t cheap, and depending on what we do I could lose my whole investment. Are you going to cover that, Foster?”

  “How much are we talking about, Sheldon? I mean everybody in the world has them these days. They can’t cost that much.”

  “These are state of the art, Foster. They can do just about anything, you don’t just send these up to snap backyard pics of some house for sale. They can carry payload, they can fly by remote or autonomously, they’re much more agile than—”

  “I got it, Bro. How much?”

  “Fifty grand. And that’s wholesale, if I was negotiating with the government or private sector they’d go for an easy million.”

  “Fuck me!” I cringed. “That’s for all of them, right?”

  He shook his head. “That’s for each one we lose.”

  I looked at Spence. “Have I got that much...sitting around?”

  Spence handed the joint back to me and nodded. “You’ve got enough to cover all of them in available cash, but let’s try not to break the bank. I guess it doesn’t really matter, I think your father monitoring your checking account balance right now is the last thing we need to worry about.”

  Levi took the joint from me. “So,” he said, “we can start some kind of drone war. That is way outside of what Ashley would want me to get involved with.”

  Rob came back to the group and looked at all of us. “Fellas, I’m not exactly sure of what you’re thinking about doing.” He held up his gun. “Foster has one of these, too.” He looked at Levi and said, “And Levi’s files may be scrubbed clean, but I read enough in our agency file to know that Foster’s one helluva marksman. If he gets pissed enough he could take out those news drones, and some unfortunate reporters, in about a second.”

  Levi raised an eyebrow. “What do you know, Rob?”

  He looked at us. “I’m not going into details, but tell me if I have a general idea, gentlemen. You can just nod if a word hits the bullseye.” We waited.

  “Parker’s Bluff.” I nodded.

  “Arson.” Brent nodded.

  “Attempted murder.” Sheldon nodded.

  “Jason Rumpholt.” I nodded and turned a little red.

  “One last thing. Man-eating alligator.”

  I shook my head. “All of that stuff just sort of happened, all I did was...defend myself?”

  “I just don’t want a repeat performance, Foster. I want you to avoid shooting anything or anybody. Let’s just let Sheldon and his drones take care of things this time.”

  Levi looked around and then raised an eyebrow at me. I told him, “Look, you’re a part of this current disaster, that should be enough excitement for anybody. The less you know about last fall the better.” He seemed to ponder that and then nodded. “Our goals here are simple enough,” I said. “With Sheldon’s help we can nip the drone issue in the bud, nobody’s gonna keep me from hangin’ out in my own backyard. The other issue is that we need to get those idiots out front to pack up and leave. If we just get those two things accomplished then things will get back to normal.”

  Rob said, “I bet ‘normal’ around here is still pretty amazing.”

  “It has its moments.” I asked Spence, “What’s the overall mood in the house. Is everybody pissed at me for this clusterfuck?”

  Spence shook his head. “You’ve given them an excuse to skip classes, party, and generally just have fun. What’s there to get mad about? Plus you’re a brother, they’ve got your back.”

  Sheldon began explaining the various options for using his toys and we listened intently. After he reviewed all of them he said, “These are all technically possible with a few modifications. And I still have a lot of other equipment down here that we might be able to use for the reporters out on the sidewalk. But those drones, they’re my pet project right now. And I’ve got presentations scheduled with Lockheed Martin, Amazon, FedEx, and Target—they all want to see my designs. And Shannon and I need money to fix up the house.”

  Shannon yelled down from the top of the steps, “I’m rooting for Target! Sheldon, Ella and I are going to cut through the back gate and Britt’s going to take us shopping. Have fun with your toys, just don’t get arrested. And no steep fines from the FAA, okay? I think Ella’s taking us to the Jaguar dealership, and she says they’re having a sale.”

  Sheldon looked at Spence and said, “I need the five best gamers in the house, five MacBooks, five sixty-inch TV’s, some fishing line, some ping pong balls and some Doritos. We can set up down here. I can have every
thing ready by...midafternoon. And we also need to lure all the news drones into one spot—somewhere safe where there won’t be any collateral damage. We’ll need some bait, I have an idea about that, too.”

  Spence nodded and checked his watch. “Foster, your political science class starts in about an hour, it might not be a bad idea for you to show up for that.”

  “Yeah. No! Wait a damn minute, you want me to go on to campus and throw myself to the wolves? There are about a hundred students in that class and when they see me they’re gonna want blood, Spence.”

  Levi looked at us and said, “I think Spence might be right. It’s just about the only class you’re taking that doesn’t involve a helmet or a jock. I could have somebody from Ashley’s office document you sitting in a crowded classroom, walking through campus, basically acting like a normal college kid. I could feed the pictures to the press and maybe they’ll calm down a little.”

  “I am a normal college kid, Levi. At least at this college, anyway.”

  Rob chimed in. “It’s not really such a bad idea. I mean it wouldn’t be a bad idea to show up on campus, show everybody that it’s just business as usual for you.”

  “Me showing up for class isn’t exactly my normal routine, but I get what you’re saying. I’ll go, Levi, but only if Rob’s there. And Spence, you need to go, too. I need you there.”

  Spence patted me on the shoulder. “I’m always there for you, Bro. I’ll give you all the moral support you need, I promise.”

  I shook my head. “No—I mean I appreciate that, but I really need for you to come with us and show me where the class meets. I don’t have a clue.”

  Intro to Political Science

  Rob and I went back up to my room and he started changing into his black suit. I asked, “Why do you need to wear that thing? Nothing screams ‘look at me’ more than a guy following me around wearing a Big Lots suit. And I know exchange students from Saudi Arabia think bodyguards are a cool accessory, but I don’t.”