Foster's Fall (Foster's Life)

by Jake Williams

  I told him, “Okay, I’ll be down in a little while. I want to learn a few more of these spinning-flippy-waving your feet out of the water moves. They may come in handy one day, if I ever meet a dolphin I’d like to impress it.”

  When I got down to the locker room I didn’t see Rob. His suit and gun were still hanging up with my clothes and the speedo was wadded up on the floor so I figured he was rinsing off. I walked around a tiled wall and he was curled up in a fetal position under a running shower. I stood over him and shook my head. “You made it out of the pool, don’t drown in the showers.” There were a few other guys showering and they watched me drag Rob out of the room as he moaned and sputtered.

  I got him dressed and armed and we headed back up the steps. I had to push him up the stairs but once we got outside he seemed to rally. The day was so nice I led him over to the outside bar next to the student union and I bought us a couple rounds of beer while we waited for Spence. He’d take one sip from the beer and then pass the rest to me. Rob looked around and said, “I hope we don’t run into Brittany out here. I’m kind of embarrassed about my swimming skills.”

  I stared at him and tilted my head a little. “I’m not sure what, exactly, Britt and I witnessed in there, but it damn sure wasn’t ‘swimming’, and there was no ‘skill’ involved. And as far as embarrassing goes, why don’t you try carrying a naked dude around a locker room? Some of those guys who were in the showers are in my class.” I leaned back and sipped my beer and watched all the comforting normality of everything around me, until I noticed Rob picking the crowd apart from behind his sunglasses.

  We caught up with Spence and when he popped the trunk open I just shrugged and climbed in. I figured if the traffic was heavy at the gate then maybe I’d have time for a nap before we got to the house.

  The Drone Wars

  The house was pretty quiet when we got back. I peeked through my window and the vans and trucks were still lined up, but there weren’t any protestors on the sidewalk. A few of the reporters were in lawn chairs on the grass and most of them appeared to be sleeping. Rob hung up his suit and I tossed my clothes on the floor. I threw on some cargo shorts while he searched through his thrift clothes. The cleaning crew had gone through the room and they had stacked his freshly-laundered stuff at the foot of the bed. He dug around and came up with some faded Hawthorne Athletic Department sweat shorts. “This is it for me, I think my back is starting to peel, and I guess I don’t really need any of your underwear.”

  I nodded. “You’re learning the fraternity dress code, good for you.” I looked through his clothes and pulled out an old tee that had Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy across the chest. “Here, take this with you in case you get cold.”

  We gathered up Spence and Dave and we all headed down to the basement. Dave was walking behind Rob and poked Rob’s shoulder, it turned white and then bright red. “I think you need another aloe session, buddy.” I backhanded Dave in the gut and he shrugged at me. “It was worth a try,” he mumbled.

  We got down to the basement and Sheldon met us at the bottom of the steps. The big TV’s were set up in a semi-circle and were showing different cable channels, most of them were showing footage from the campaign and the convention with my father grinning into the cameras. One TV was showing a Scooby Doo rerun and I was a little puzzled by that until I realized how much pot smoke was drifting through the room.

  In front of each TV there was a recliner or a couch with a small table in front of it. The tables were covered in all sorts of shit—laptops, game controllers, bongs, cans of Mountain Dew and Red Bull, and iPads. There was at least one guy seated in front of each TV and they were a complete cross section of the frat. A few of the guys were wearing nothing but socks and boxers, some had on pajama bottoms or sweatpants, and a few of the geekier guys were in plaid shirts and khakis. They all had that zoned-out look of a guy about to start a marathon gaming session.

  I saw Quinn in the recliner closest to us and I tapped a tattoo on his shoulder to get his attention. He looked up at me and there was a big round blob of dip in one cheek, he had a Yale baseball cap on backward, and his shorts had so many holes in them he could have just skipped getting dressed at all. He motioned around the room. “Is this not the most kickass video setup or what, Foster? He pulled his cap off and ran his hair through some shaggy bleached-out hair and his white teeth glowed against the deep tan of his face. He looked like he should be up on a lifeguard stand somewhere rather than a basement lit with blue light from all the TVs. “Sheldon told us we’d be shooting at live targets, I mean real shit!”

  I felt a little weak in the knees and poured a beer from a keg in the corner. “Sheldon, what did Quinn just say about shooting live things?” Rob and I both got in his face and he raised his hands in protest.

  “No—I mean yeah, but not living targets!” Sheldon pointed at Levi who was leaning against the wall and smoking a joint while he juggled two cell phones. “While you were gone Levi and I put this together, we came up with a plan that should discourage drone cameras as well as the reporters out front.”

  Levi walked over to us and threw an arm around Sheldon. “This fella right here, Foster,” Levi wobbled a little and looked at Sheldon in pure admiration. “Sheldon here, well he’s just about the smartest friggin’ person I reckon I’ve ever met.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How much have you had to drink and smoke, Levi?”

  “Lots, more than your average city boy can handle, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Uh oh, this isn’t good. He’s reverting to speaking Iowan or Nebraskan or redneck or something.” I asked him, “Who were you talkin’ to on the phone just then, Levi?”

  Rob jumped in and asked, “Can we get back to the ‘live target’ part of this conversation?”

  I waved him off and said, “We will, Rob, we just need to get those phones away from Levi before he does anything really crazy, if he hasn’t already.” Levi had become mesmerized by Scooby and Shaggy running down a hallway in what looked to be a haunted mansion. “So Levi, do you remember anything you’ve said on those phones, lately?”

  He smiled at all of us and said, “Not much, I ordered some pizza, called my girlfriend and asked her to marry me, and,” he pointed at me, “I told your daddy you’d meet him tomorrow afternoon for lunch. It only seems right, family needs to stick together in hard times like these.”

  I took the joint that Quinn was smoking away from him and inhaled deeply. “You told who, what, now?”

  He shrugged and said, “His people’ll call your people—and Ha! I guess that means me! Anyway, somebody’ll call tomorrow mornin’ with the details. I’m gonna head upstairs and catch the pizza guy.”

  Rob shook his head as Levi crawled up the steps. “That’s not going to end well.”

  I nodded. “No shit, by the time the delivery guy gets through the press and the cops out front that’ll be one cold fuckin’ pizza. But I’m not sure it really matters.” I pointed at Levi, who had curled up on the steps and appeared to be sound asleep.

  Sheldon was bouncing up and down next to us and cut in. “So, here’s the plan! We have three helicopter drones ready to launch, there’s one in the backyard of each house around us. The gamers wanted little tiny rockets to shoot at the news drones, but the logistics and modifications to make that happen would take at least a week to make, and we don’t have that kind of time. By then those news drones will be hovering over Justin Bieber’s house.”

  I imagined that and said, “The rockets would come in handy for that, if you could aim them at the celebrity and not the drones.”

  “No doubt.” Sheldon pointed at the first three TV’s. “So, these guys will have grappling hooks they can use to snatch up the news drones and take them out of commission. Their drones are built to be quiet and hover awhile—you, know, to spy and get the perfect paparazzi photo. Mine are built for heavier duty, lift capacity, and speed. We can overpower the enemy and take them out like sitting ducks. There’s an early pr
ototype over there”

  I walked over to the drone sitting in a corner and was surprised at how big it was. The thing was about three-feet tall and just as wide. It had six propellers connected to a central hub that bristled with antennae and bug-eyed cameras. The drone sat on skids like a regular helicopter, and the entire machine was painted in a muted military-camouflage pattern. “What happens after they hook or catch the bad guys?” I asked him.

  “The guys will grab the prey, wrap the grapple line around one of the posts or the net on the volleyball court, and release the news drone once it’s all tangled up. I have some guys on the ground who will grab the drones and put them in the pool house. They’re on an intramural paint ball team and the bastards are really quick and stealthy. I guess the news teams will give up using them after three or four of them go down. If it becomes a prolonged battle I have two drones on standby that we can add to the squadron if we lose one.”

  Dave asked Sheldon, “Is that what the other screens are for?”

  “No, that’s for stage two. When the press starts losing the big ones they’re probably going to switch to mini-drones. They’re cheaper, can still stream live video, and they’re harder for our big drones to catch. So those last two screens with the love seats in front of them, they’re for the second wave. Those will have a two-man crew—a gamer to fly, and a paintballer to operate the turret.”

  Rob shook his head at Sheldon. “That seems intense or whatever. What, exactly, does the turret fire?”

  Sheldon explained, “Just paintballs, with some stickier paint. The gamers will be flying one of the drones they’re selling on online now for paintball competitions. I bought three of them online and had them FedEx’d. Except for remixing the paintballs they didn’t need modification. They look like an actually military drone—fixed wing and with better optics. We’re going to launch those from the parking lot of the park down the street, they need a runway to take off and land. So, when the little drones go airborne we just take them out with a couple paintballs.”

  I looked around the room and walked over to the keg. “This all seems...” I downed a beer, “complicated.” I looked around the room and realized at some point Spence had disappeared.

  Sheldon defended his plan. “We had other ideas. I thought about just stunning them with bursts of radio waves, but if we screwed up the Wi-Fi on this block there’d be hell to pay. Somebody suggested just posting some paintballers in the backyard but the gamers threw a fit—they didn’t want to be left out. There was a suggestion to buzz the media with the drones and drive them away, but there was something about that plan that seemed like a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

  “But why all of this?” Rob asked.

  “Because it gives me a chance to put my drones to a test, it includes the gamers and paintballers, it’s really harmless when you think about, and we all have a little cabin fever right now. The fun factor won out in the end.”

  I thought about what a clusterfuck my father and Megan had created, and the drugs in my system argued that this was a rational plan, a logical way to fight back. “It sounds good to me. But wait a minute, how do we get their drones to converge on the backyard?”

  Brittany walked out of the bathroom in a towel and when she opened it up the only thing she was wearing was a bikini bottom the size of a Post It note. She grinned at all of us and said, “I think this will do the trick.” Most of the guys in the fraternity had seen her dressed like that before, but Rob leaned against a pole and I wondered how far eyeballs could come out of a head before they just simply fell out. “And I can’t believe I’m saying this, Foster, but the real attraction will be you.”

  I looked back at Rob and his eyes had gone back into their sockets but it looked like he was dealing with another problem, he had both hands covering the front of his shorts. I pointed at him and told Brittany, “He’s not gonna let me go out there, and I sure as hell don’t want to give the press the satisfaction of taking pics of me.”

  Hunter came out of the darkness behind the TV’s. “I’m the lucky guy who gets to make out with Britt in the pool” He had a huge grin on his face and walked over to stand by her. He was almost my twin, same height, same weight, and same athletic body. Just as I was about to mention his hair was longer Sheldon put a Hawthorne baseball cap on his head and the transformation was complete. He was wearing boxer briefs and when Sheldon handed him a sock he stuck it in the front of them. He frowned and said, “I’m no Foster down there, but I’m not sure that’s necessary.” I’d seen him in the bathroom enough to know he was right. He shrugged and said, “Let’s get this show on the road!”

  Rob, Dave, Brent and I pulled up barstools and sat behind Sheldon’s team to watch the action. The largest TV hung above the other ones and it switched from news to a split-screen image of the backyard, the front lawn, the park and one patch of concrete. I watched as the concrete blurred a little and the view expanded to show a bird’s eye image of the backyard. Britt and Hunter appeared and immediately started making out on a lounge chair next to the pool’s edge and Rob’s stool started to wobble a little. “Sorry,” he said. “If I disappear for a while it’s just because I...miss my wife.” He looked down at his shorts. “I miss her a lot.”

  Dave elbowed me in the ribs. “Are you jealous, Foster?”

  “Bro, Britt and I are just friends with benefits or whatever. I’m not jealous of Hunter.”

  “That’s not what—or who, I was talking about.” I popped him on the back of the head.

  Sheldon spoke up. “Okay, gentlemen. Let’s get ready to fly, my drone should get their attention, and then Brittany and Hunter should get them all hovering over the pool.”

  One by one the TV screens switched to the images from the drones but they didn’t appear to be taking to the air, yet. At the corners of each screen there were displays showing battery life, airspeed, direction, camera angle, the status of the grappling hook, and a bunch of other shit that I couldn’t figure out. I put my hand out to Brent and he put a capsule in my hand. I didn’t even ask what it was, I just washed it down with beer. Britt and Hunter hopped into the pool. He was careful to keep his cap on and she was leaning back with her tits aimed at the sky. “Oh, my God,” Rob moaned and bolted out of the room.

  Somebody gave us a big bowl of chips and we snacked and drank as we watched the scene in the pool. It didn’t take long before for a swarm or fleet or whatever of news drones gathered over the backyard. “Gentlemen,” Sheldon spoke in a voice that was colder than Darth Vader’s. “Engage the enemy.”

  The TV’s all went a little crazy as the drones swarmed and the camera angles changed as the first battle quickly played out on the screens. I had to get off the stool and put my feet squarely on the ground to ease the intense vertigo I was feeling. The cameras flashed on pursuits and captures and the video was so clear it felt like we were watching in 3D. Somebody handed me a joint and I inhaled. Soon the TV’s covering the grappling drones were showing peaceful views of the backyard. I noticed Britt and Hunter weren’t visible. “So that’s it, Sheldon? Are the news drones tied up or whatever?”

  Sheldon double-checked the stats on his monitor. “We got the ones from FOX, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. The ground crew has cleared the volleyball court, and all of our equipment is still in good shape.”

  There were some cheers and I patted Quinn on the shoulder. He looked up at me and grinned and I said, “Nice guns, Quinn.” Dave was watching and raised an eyebrow in my direction.

  “Thanks, Bro. But it was a grapple, not a gun.”

  I grinned at him and said, “I meant your arms, Bro. When do you get out of that chair?”

  He looked puzzled but possibly interested. “It’s going to be a while, Sheldon’s going to keep the grapplers on standby while the paintballers stay up on patrol.” I looked at the last two screens and there were long sweeping views of the whole block as the planes circled.

  Sheldon appeared next to me. “All of these guys will be busy for another six hours
or so, if the news drones go quiet then we’ll leave one drone up for the night and replace the grapples and batteries in the other stuff.”

  I nodded and told Quinn, “We need to catch up later on, then.”

  Quinn looked at me and replied, “Well, yeah. I mean, I live two doors down the hall from you. But I’ll swing by later when I get done down here and we’ll have a beer, or something.”

  Rob had reappeared and he put a hand on my shoulder and seemed to be a lot more relaxed. I grinned at him and asked, “Did you just dirty Facetime your wife, Rob?”

  He turned a little red. “She was at the grocery store and we lost the connection. So, I, uh...”

  “You took matters into your own hand? In my room? I mean, we’re roommates and all, so I guess—”

  “No, the room across the hall from you has a great view of the pool, so I—”

  “Enough said.” I looked at the steps and Britt and Hunter were stepping over Levi on their way down to us. “That was some show you two put on up there, have either of you considered a career in porn?”

  “More like a career in soap operas,” Britt said. “Hunter never actually sealed the deal. I’ll see you guys later, I need to finish what he started.” Three or four of the guys followed her up the stairs and Hunter shrugged.

  He pointed at his drooping soaked underwear. “Whatever, all those helicopters buzzing around distracted me. I’m headed up for some dry shorts.”

  I looked at Rob and Dave. “Let’s go upstairs and hang out for a while, my head’s kind of spinning from all these TV’s. And the beer...and bong hits...and pills, too,” I admitted.

  As we went up the steps Rob picked up Levi and threw him over his shoulder. “We need to get him off these steps before somebody trips over him.”