The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  ON HIS FINAL morning in Sioux Crossing, Alex walked into town to buy a rucksack to carry his new clothes in, and afterward he walked on to East Walden Lane. Now he knew the way, it seemed ridiculous that he had ever got lost in the first place.

  He walked past Number Twenty-Four and up the front path of the house next door. He tried the bell but nothing seemed to happen, so he knocked, and a minute or so later Ralph opened the door. He seemed to be wearing the same things he’d been wearing the last time Alex saw him.

  “I’ve got a favour to ask,” Alex told him.

  “You’d better come in, then,” Ralph said. “You can’t ask a favour standing on the porch.”

  Inside, the house was dark and stuffy and it smelled of greasy food and cigars. Books and magazines were stacked knee-high along one wall of the hallway. A plump and aged golden retriever waddled out of the living room and stood in the hall looking at him with milky eyes.

  “That’s Homer,” said Ralph.

  “Hi, Homer,” said Alex.

  Homer let go a loud and eyewatering fart, then turned and toddled in the direction of the kitchen, wagging his tail slowly as if he was pleased with himself.

  Ralph led the way to a chaotically untidy living room and collapsed into a lounger. “Heard you went over to Black Hole Central yesterday,” he said, taking the stub of a cigar from the table beside the lounger and lighting it.

  “How do you hear stuff? You never go out.”

  Ralph puffed on the cigar. “Bud told you that, huh?”

  “He told me a lot of stuff.”

  Ralph snorted. “I’ll bet he did. What was the favour?”

  Alex took the keys to Number Twenty-Four from his pocket and held them out. “Could you look after these for me till I get back?”

  Ralph looked sadly at the keys. “You decided, then.”

  It hadn’t been much of a decision really, what with Stan’s money and Kitson’s threats. Saying no had never, in the end, been an option, however much he kidded himself. “I have sold my soul,” he agreed.

  Ralph took the keys. “How long will you be gone?”

  “A couple of weeks. I need to put my stuff in storage, give notice on my apartment. I’d be happier if someone kept an eye on next door while I’m gone.”

  “Okay.” Ralph put the keys in a pocket of his dressing gown. “Your funeral.”

  “I’m over twenty-one,” Alex told him, walking over to the wall and looking at the dozen or so framed photographs hanging there. “As someone pointed out recently.” In the first of the photographs a young man with a great deal of dark curly hair and a Zapata moustache was standing grinning beside a much older, cadaverous gentleman in a suit and a fedora. The cadaverous gentleman was not smiling. “Hey, is this…?”

  Ralph looked up. “Burroughs was an asshole,” he said. “You don’t have to be an intellectual giant to stick junk in your arm. I’m sorry he’s gone, though. He made life interesting.”

  In the next photo the young man was wearing a dinner suit and bowtie and he was standing beside an intensely-scowling, white-haired Norman Mailer.

  “Mailer was an asshole too,” Ralph said, behind him. “I’m not sorry he’s gone. He challenged me to a fistfight at that dinner, even though he was, like, four times my age or something.”

  Alex went along the line of photos, watching Ralph age with each image. Here he was with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here he was with David Foster Wallace. Here he was shaking hands with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.

  “You’re him,” Alex said, a sudden light going on in his head.

  “I’m a him,” Ralph grunted. “I couldn’t admit to being the him.”

  Alex turned from the wall. “I read you at university. Aztec Snow.”

  Ralph waved it away. “That was a long time ago.”

  “I just didn’t connect the name with…” Alex looked around him.

  “Yeah,” said Ralph. “Yeah, I know.” He got up from the lounger and ambled towards the door. “You want a beer?”

  Alex checked his watch. “There’s a car coming to take me to the airport at four and I still have to pack, but yes, I’d like that.”

  Ralph’s kitchen was a disaster area. The stove was camouflaged with grease, the sink was full of dirty plates and pots and pans, and every flat surface was stacked with old pizza boxes and Chinese food containers. Ralph took a couple of beers from the rust-spotted fridge, levered the caps off, and handed one to Alex.

  “To your great project,” he said wryly, lifting his bottle in salute.

  “Cheers,” said Alex, taking a sip. He moved some copies of the Banner from a chair to the floor and sat down. “Look, tell me to sod off if this is too personal, but what happened?”

  Ralph leaned back against the fridge and looked at him. “What did Bud tell you?”

  “He said there was some kind of scandal. One of your students.”

  Ralph nodded. “Yeah. Well, what he probably didn’t tell you was she was a mature student. She was thirty-two when we met.” He took a drink of beer. “But rules is rules. No fraternisation. The university had to let me go.”

  He said all this so matter-of-factly that he might have been talking about one of the characters in his books. Alex said, “How did you wind up here?”

  Ralph shrugged. “We just wanted to get away from all the publicity. Marion was a local girl. Her parents owned a farm somewhere out west of town, and when they died she sold it, so she had some money and we bought this place and got married and lived happily ever after. I was going to settle down and start writing again, but somehow I never quite did.” He smiled sourly. “She got a job teaching at Rosewater High. One evening she was driving home after work and a drunk in a truck T-boned her car at an intersection. He walked away from it. She was in a coma for eight days and then she just seemed to give up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ralph shook his head. “I guess Bud didn’t tell you that bit.”

  “How do you… look after yourself?” Although it was obvious Ralph was barely doing that.

  “What? Oh, there was still a big chunk of Marion’s money left when she died. And I still get royalties. A couple of years ago someone decided to make a movie of Aztec Snow. The movie’s still not been made but I get option money every eighteen months or so. I get by.” He looked at Alex. “And you can take that look off your face. I’m not going to be one of your projects. You’re not going to tidy this place up and redecorate it and get me to shave and put some clothes on. I like things the way they are and I really don’t need your pity.”

  “It’s not pity,” Alex told him. “It’s…” He thought about it. “Okay, maybe it is pity. I’m sorry.”

  “I think you’re an asshole for taking the job.”

  “I think I probably agree with you.” He wanted to explain about Kitson, but he had the hotel phone in his pocket and there was no way to know whether it was transmitting his conversations, even though he’d turned it off. Powering it down didn’t seem to disable its GPS tracker, certainly, because nobody had come around to see where he was. And anyway, he had the 007 Phone in another pocket—he didn’t dare let it out of his sight—and that would almost certainly relay every word, even if he took its battery out. He sighed. “I should be getting back to the hotel.”

  Ralph nodded and got up from the lounger. “So I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

  “About that. Just keep an eye on the house.”

  Ralph frowned slightly. “You expecting visitors?”

  Alex smiled and said, “Out here? Nah.” But he was nodding as he said it.

  Ralph gave him a hard stare. “Okay,” he said. “Hey, you play chess?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Maybe we could have a game, when you get back.”

  “Yes,” Alex said, shaking his hand and sensing opportunity. “Yes, I’d like that.”

  The Snow

  WINTER CAME LATE to Rosewater County that year. First there were a few days of fros
t that silvered the trees and fields and turned the land to stone. Then, improbably, there was a thaw and it was mild enough for Alex to sit out on the back porch with his laptop quite late into the evening, working on the book and listening to various unknown representatives of the local wildlife crashing about in the woodland his yard backed onto.

  And then three separate blizzards swept across northern Iowa, and when they were gone there was about five feet of snow on the ground. Municipal snowploughs didn’t clear the roads around East Walden Lane, probably out of spite, so the inhabitants were stuck there.

  One morning Alex looked out of the living room window and saw Ralph, wearing a snowsuit that made him look like a permatanned Michelin Man, labouring at the snow on his front path with a broad-bladed shovel.

  Alex opened the front door and stood on the porch. “What the hell are you doing?” he called.

  Ralph looked at him, then held up the shovel and indicated the snow.

  “You’re going to kill yourself.”

  Ralph thought about it, then he shrugged and indicated the snow again.

  Alex sighed. “Wait a minute.” He dug boots and a warm coat out of the cupboard under the stairs and went outside again, highstepping through the newly fallen snow on his own path, and took the shovel from Ralph’s mittened hands. “You bloody old idiot.”

  Ralph was wearing a tattered old woolly hat and a tartan scarf wound around the bottom half of his face, so all Alex could see were his eyes. He said, “I’m not your project.”

  “I don’t fucking care. I’m not going to wind up on my hands and knees in this bloody snow trying to give you CPR.”

  “I’d be snowblind long before you needed to do that,” Ralph mused, squinting about him. The sun had come out, for a while at least, and the light reflecting off the snow was almost unbearable.

  “Is it always like this?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Nah. Sometimes it’s worse. We had twenty-foot drifts the year Marion and I moved in here.”

  “Jesus.” Alex bent his knees and tossed a shovelful of snow to one side of the path.

  “Guy at the end of the street ran out of food. Ended up eating his dog.” Alex stopped shovelling and looked at him, and Ralph grunted happily. “Jeez you’re gullible.”

  “I must be; I’m shovelling snow for you when I could be sitting at home under a pile of blankets.” The rackety furnace in the basement appeared to have given up all pretence of trying to heat the house and would only dispense enough hot water, at any given time, for a very quick shower. Alex had woken up a couple of mornings ago and found frost flowers on the inside of the bedroom windows. There was a heating engineer in town, apparently, but short of helicoptering him in the furnace was going to have to wait until there’d been a thaw.

  “You should call your friends at Black Hole Central and get them to come out and fix that thing,” Ralph mused.

  “Yeah, right.” It had taken him a little longer than he’d anticipated to get things in Boston straightened out, and it had been almost a month before he moved into East Walden Lane. During which time, according to Ralph, no less than four different groups of cleaners and decorators had visited Number Twenty-Four. The place did not seem notably cleaner or more decorated than when he’d first seen it, so he presumed they’d been there to wire the house. He found he didn’t mind the idea of surveillance so much—he was hardly doing anything to be embarrassed about and if someone wanted to spend hours listening to him snoring, that was their business—but the thought that he was somehow deemed untrustworthy nagged at him. Ralph said he knew a hotshot civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia who would blow through whoever had bugged Alex’s house like a ball of napalm through a flowerbed, but Alex couldn’t see the point. He had a feeling that if he ever read his contract of employment properly there would be some small print somewhere which had him giving his consent.

  Ironically, considering he was now under twenty-four-hour surveillance, his employers seemed to have lost interest in him. As soon as he’d signed the contract, he had magically ceased to be the Special Boy. Stan’s phone number cut to voicemail whenever Alex tried to call him; interactions between them were mediated by Mickey Olive, who no longer magically popped up whenever Alex was eating. No drivers at his beck and call, no one inquiring if everything was all right or offering to help him with stuff. After some effort, he’d managed to buy an aged Accord to get himself to and from the Facility, but it was sitting in the garage beside the house, entombed behind a snowdrift that reached halfway up the door.

  He said, “I wish you’d stop calling it that.”

  “What?”

  “‘Black Hole Central’.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s more chance of Elvis touring again than the Collider creating a black hole, Ralph. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  Ralph grunted. “So you say.” He watched Alex working for a while. “Have you never shovelled snow before?”

  “You know, I could brain you with this thing and bury your body in the woods and nobody would find you till the spring.”

  Ralph squinted past him, then shaded his eyes with his hand. “Are you expecting a delivery?”

  Alex stopped and leaned on the handle of the shovel. Looking in the same direction as Ralph, he saw a tall, bulky figure wearing snowshoes coming down the lane. The figure was wearing a parka with its hood pulled up, and it seemed to be towing a small canoe and using a pair of ski poles to help itself along.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t order anything.”

  “Me neither. Maybe one of the neighbours.”

  “Could be.” But it was almost a week since either of them had seen anyone who didn’t actually live on East Walden Lane, so they both stood watching the figure slogging its way towards them. Ralph found the remains of a cigar in a pocket of his snowsuit, and he pulled down his scarf, put it in his mouth, and lit it. The smoke hung in the still, cold air. The figure seemed to notice them for the first time, and it waved. Alex and Ralph waved back.

  As the visitor drew closer, Alex saw that they really were towing a small canoe. The canoe was full of insulated picnic coolers and bags and it appeared to be generating its very own faint cloud of steam. The figure plodded right up to them, planted its ski poles in the snow, pulled back the hood of its parka, took off its ski mask and its goggles, and it was Wendy McCoy.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello,” said Alex.

  “We hadn’t heard from you for a while,” she said, running a hand through her hair. “We got worried.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Well, me and Rob Chen. We thought someone ought to come out and see if you were still alive.” She added, “I drew the short straw.”

  “You could have phoned.”

  “System’s down,” she said. “We’ve had engineers checking the cell towers for the past four days.”

  That was interesting. “Well,” he said. “It’s good to see a friendly face.” Beside him, Ralph blew a quiet raspberry.

  She unclipped the harness that attached her to the canoe. “I brought you some supplies, just in case,” she said. “It’s good to see you’re alive because otherwise I’d have had to haul it back to the car.”

  “Never had a woman trek through the snow to bring me supplies,” said Ralph.

  Wendy raised an eyebrow.

  “Wendy McCoy, Ralph Ortiz,” said Alex. “It’s okay; he’s kidding.”

  “No I’m not,” Ralph said. “I never had a woman bring me supplies. My hand to God.”

  Alex sighed.

  “What have you brought us, in your little boat?” Ralph asked.

  Wendy narrowed her eyes at him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Marion Hofstadter’s husband.”

  Alex turned and looked at him, hearing the surname. “As in Danny Hofstadter?”

  Ralph waved it away with a mutter.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Ortiz,” Wendy said. “Your wife was one of the great America
n poets.”

  Ralph was clearly completely disarmed. He muttered some more and then fell to puffing on his cigar. Wendy smiled and said, “We’d better get this stuff inside before it starts to freeze.”

  They towed the canoe up to Alex’s front porch, then formed a human chain to unload it and stack the boxes and bags in the hallway. Tucked between the containers were catalytic hot packs, the kind of thing hikers used, to help keep the supplies from freezing. When the boat was empty, they formed another human chain to move the supplies into the kitchen and unpack them.

  There was tinned food and bags of prewashed salad and shrink-wrapped steaks and burgers and boxes of cereal and bags of oranges, and freshly baked bread from DeKeyser’s Deli, miraculously still warm in its insulated bag. “Got to hand it to scientists,” Wendy said. “We know how to keep stuff warm. Or cold.”

  “This is great,” Alex said, surveying the piles of produce on the kitchen island and the worktops. “I thought I was going to have to eat Ralph’s dog.”

  Ralph refused to rise to the bait. “How bad is it out there?” he asked.

  Wendy was shrugging out of her parka. Underneath, she was wearing a down vest over a couple of sweaters. “The major roads are clear, mostly,” she said, draping the parka over a stool. “There was a pile-up on I-35 south of here during the blizzard on Tuesday night, and that’s still blocked. Schools are closed, of course.” She unzipped the vest and dropped it on top of the parka. “Jesus, it’s cold in here,” she said.

  “Furnace,” said Alex. “It’s warmer in Ralph’s house, but you’d be in therapy for the rest of your life if you saw his kitchen.”

  Wendy looked at them. “You probably think you’re funny,” she told them. “But you’re really not. Do you have any tools?”

  “I have no idea,” said Alex.

  She sighed. “Basement, right?”

  “Second door under the stairs.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Try not to laugh yourselves to death while I’m gone.”