Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

“Inside,” Hoover told her. “I’m expecting a message from my friend Roy. If you want to wait out front, I’ll call and have another cab take you back to the station.” He turned and made for the house.

  “Wait a minute!” She might have caught his arm, but the Mechanical Hound was near, engine growling, so she didn’t. John Hoover kept walking. He didn’t answer or look back until he had one foot in the door.

  “Start with the box, Miss Fine,” Hoover said in parting. “You’ll need the services of a historian to interpret the contents, but once you’ve done that you’ll be very close to unlocking the secret of Amberson Teaneck’s murder, as well as a much bigger secret. Miss Rand will tutor you in the finer points of prosecuting an argument. That should do it; you’re a fairly smart woman. We’ll talk again once you’ve put the pieces together.”

  He whistled, and the Hound trotted into the house. The back door shut. Joan and Kite were left in the yard with the Hippo, the palm trees, and Ayn Rand.

  “Now I’m hopelessly confused,” Joan said.

  “He looked familiar,” said Kite, unperturbed. “Do you remember the I Love Lucy show from last century? That’s still on cable somewhere, isn’t it? That man looked just like Ethel’s husband.”

  “Kite, does any of this make any sense to you?”

  “It’s a conspiracy, Joan. Nothing about a conspiracy is supposed to make sense until suddenly it all makes sense. Learn to relax while you wait for the epiphany.”

  “No,” the Electric Ayn Rand objected. “That is wrong. You must never relax, not while there is a problem to be solved. Relaxation is neither rational nor heroic.”

  “Neither are we, necessarily,” answered Kite. She held the puzzle box up by her ear and shook it. “Well, I guess we start with this. The man said.”

  10

  ADVENTURE! That’s what Scouting is. You are standing at the doorway to the most exciting adventures you can imagine. Step into the world of Scouting, and you’ll find yourself hiking along trails, canoeing across misty lakes, and camping under the open sky. Smell fresh rain in the woods and fill your mouth with the taste of wild strawberries. At the end of a patrol bike-hike, plunge into a cool mountain lake. Cook your meals over a camping stove. Travel the backcountry without leaving a trace, and live well with only what you can carry in your pockets and pack. Sound inviting? As a Scout, you can do all of this and more.

  —The Boy Scout Handbook

  Do ONE of the following:

  (a) Determine the age of five species of fish from scale samples or identify various age classes of one or more species in a lake and report the results.

  (b) Conduct a creel census on a small lake to estimate catch per unit effort.

  (c) Examine the stomach contents of three species of fish and record the findings.

  —requirement #7 for the Fish and Wildlife

  Management merit badge

  The Tuesday Afternoon Movie

  Star Wars.

  On Channel 4, in a galaxy far, far away, rebel fighter pilots fought valiantly to destroy the Death Star before it could open fire on their secret base.

  “Watch yourselves. There’s a lot of fire coming from the right side of that deflection tower.”

  “I’m going in. Cover me, Porkins.”

  “I’m right with you, Red Three.”

  Two fighters swooped low, blasting the offending deflection tower. But Imperial turbo lasers returned fire, and suddenly Porkins was in trouble.

  “I’ve got a problem here.”

  “Eject!”

  “I can hold it.”

  “Pull up!”

  “No, I’m all r—AHHHHHHH!”

  Porkins’s spaceship exploded in flames, and just as abruptly the climactic dogfight was interrupted by an announcement that NBC’s Tuesday Afternoon Movie would return after these messages.

  “Please to explain something,” Salvatore said. He was using his Boris Badenov voice, an affectation that Frankie Lonzo found immensely irritating, especially in light of the fact that Salvatore was a fifth-generation Brooklynite whose blood ran more Italian than Russian.

  “What?” said Frankie.

  “Intergalactic class struggle is taking place in hard vacuum above imperialist battle station. Where precisely is noble working-class member of People’s Army supposed to eject to?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He told him to eject.” Salvatore gestured at the television screen, where a chubby Electric Negress was explaining why Aunt Jemima pancake mix was the very best pancake mix money could buy. “Even if parachute opens in zero atmosphere, proletarian paratrooper will land on Death Star, and either die in nuclear chain reaction or have neck broken by capitalist pawn Darth Vader.”

  “I don’t understand,” Frankie said, “why you even watch network television in the first place.” Though in fact there was little choice. The satellite dish on the roof of this Aztec Deco villa had been knocked out by rifle fire when the Drug Enforcement Agency had seized the property from its previous owners. After several years in bureaucratic limbo the villa had been put up for auction and sold to the New York Aquarium. By then the surrounding neighborhood had shifted from mixed residential to industrial, and no one would have wanted to actually live there. The Aquarium’s directors used the villa for storage and the occasional office party; the huge pool out back had been converted into a holding tank. But there was no money in the budget for a new satellite dish, or even a cheapo microwave antenna. It was miracle enough that the TV still worked at all.

  Frankie was worried about the shark.

  Echo Papandreou had trucked it over from Manhattan yesterday afternoon, along with a memo from the Aquarium Directorate that had been couched in the usual doublespeak: “This Carcharodon was apprehended while scavenging in an unsuitable faux-marine environment,” i.e., they’d got it out of the sewers, “and is being relocated to the Special Containment Annex until some final disposal is decided upon.” Below this Echo herself had scribbled: “Just in case you can’t figure it out, you are NOT to mention our guest to anyone. P.S., its name is Meisterbrau.”

  The trouble with fish that had been scavenging in a faux-marine environment, Frankie thought, remembering his high school Cliffs Notes, was that they tended to suffer a faux-sea change. Around sunset yesterday Meisterbrau had begun to excrete some type of dark fluid faster than the automatic pool cleaner could filter it out, and overnight the pool had gotten murkier than a swamp. Frankie thought of the ink-spewing Architeuthis princeps they’d played host to last spring; he carried a sucker-shaped scar on his thigh as a permanent memento of that encounter.

  “Maybe,” Frankie mused, rubbing his trouser leg above the scar, “this fish should have an accident. Hey Salvatore, you got a hair dryer you don’t need?”

  “Please to shut up and dim window,” Salvatore replied. “Televised revolution for galactic freedom is continuing.”

  Sorry, Echo, Frankie imagined himself explaining afterwards. Sorry, I just stepped out of the upstairs shower and I heard this splashing in the pool, so I ran out, didn’t even stop to put the blow dryer down, and then it slipped out of my hand. . . . What do you mean, “Why was the dryer on such a long extension cord?” I like to be mobile, that’s why.

  “Please, comrade,” said Salvatore. “Sunlight is making cheese of already vastly outdated special effects.”

  “Keep your pants on,” said Frankie. He thumbed a button on the sill and the window glass became opaque, blocking out the view of the pool. On television Luke Skywalker hosed down a TIE fighter with laser fire; Salvatore cheered, and Frankie wandered off in search of cheap electrical appliances.

  “Ho ho!” Salvatore chortled. “Imperialist forces are in trouble now.”

  A Few Good Boys

  If it were truly possible to die of a broken heart, Oscar Hill would have been pushing daisies long since, for by his own reckoning he had been born at least half a century too late.

  Ever since Oscar’s great-great-grandf
ather had made the acquaintance of Lord Baden-Powell in London during the first Great War, the men of the Hill clan had all been dedicated Scoutmasters. “A few good boys,” Oscar’s father, Stanley, had said when Oscar was only seven. “Take a few good boys, start them out on the right path in life, and you’ll have done a service to your country that you can be proud of.”

  This little speech took place on the front porch of the Hill homestead in rural Indiana, where except for the fact that all the American flags were guaranteed fireproof up to 3000° Fahrenheit, it might still have been 1950. And it could well be that if Oscar had only stayed in his home town, some way might have been found to ward off the specter of changing times for another generation. But the siren song of the great eastern metropolis lured him as it had so many others, and once relocated to New York City he found the twenty-first century more firmly entrenched than Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops at the Somme.

  The downfall of the Boy Scouts of America had begun, Oscar now believed, during the 1980s. It was in that decade that the Scouting Federation had decided to combat a nationwide decline in literacy by adding more pictures and colored charts to the Boy Scout Handbook. This revision was followed by stepped-up reorganization of the merit badge system, with the more traditional woodcrafts losing ground to trendier “post-industrial skills” badges. As the Nineties brought government rationing of U.S. parkland access, something called “urban survival camping” was touted as a viable alternative to the old-style weekend in the woods, at which point anyone with half a brain could have seen that perdition was just around the corner. The final blow came soon enough: in 2001—the very year that Oscar Hill rented his first New York apartment—it was announced that the Cub Scouts, Brownies, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, and Explorers would merge into a single age-and-gender-integrated organization.

  So much for a few good boys. So much for a service to his country he could be proud of.

  And so, twenty-two years after the Fall, disconsolate Scoutmaster Oscar Hill found himself escorting a troop of mostly girls—girls!—not through the great forest primeval or over the foothills of a purple mountain majesty, but along a trash-strewn back alley in some heavy industrial sector of Brooklyn. Eagle Scout Melissa Plunkett took point, waving a homemade Geiger counter before her as she marched up the alley; her sweep revealed no lethal radiation sources in the immediate vicinity. Star Scout Aubrey Denton had better luck: the soil samples she scraped from cracks in the pavement contained high concentrations of lead, mercury, and other heavy metals, all of which, she gleefully assured her comrades, could cause painful cancers if metabolized. First-Class Scouts Peggy Cates and Lucinda Mendez were too jaded to be impressed by this, but they perked up when Melissa Plunkett spotted a three-headed squirrel crouching atop a cracked bio-waste disposal canister. When the squirrel fixed all six of its eyes on Oscar Hill, Oscar nodded.

  “Yup,” he said, “yup, yessir, this is what it’s come to.”

  Oblio Wattles, the Tenderfoot, brought up the rear.

  Oblio was a boy, technically, but to Oscar’s way of thinking he didn’t count. For one thing he claimed to have been born in Moscow, Pennsylvania, which Oscar refused to believe was a real American city. For another, with his pudgy physique, center-parted hair, and circular wire-rimmed spectacles, Oblio looked altogether too much like Theodore Roosevelt. Not the young Roosevelt, who had charged with the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and who would have made a great Boy Scout, but the older, fatter Roosevelt, who despite his presidential stature had been a perfect example of good manhood gone flabby. This of course reminded Oscar of his own expanding waistline—he was a 46 and still bloating—which was unforgivable.

  The troop rounded the corner of a warehouse and came upon what they took to be an abandoned car wreck. In fact it was Frankie Lonzo’s rustbucket ’16 Chevy. Melissa Plunkett immediately began scanning the chassis for decaying isotopes, while Aubrey Denton scraped oxidation samples from the passenger door and Peggy and Lucinda pried open the boot in search of interesting vermin. Gosh darn you, Oscar thought, hating the simple efficiency with which they went about all this, gosh darn the bunch of you, you’re supposed to be interested in Basket Weaving and Social Dancing, I want Boy Scouts—

  He caught himself, took a deep breath and counted ten. His life might be one huge disappointment, but he still had certain responsibilities to fulfill. “OK, ladies,” he said, addressing his unwanted charges in a fatherly tone, “time for a little question-and-answer period. Now suppose, through some miracle of God, that we were in the Adirondacks, and we found this vehicle abandoned along the hiking trail. As responsible Scouts, what would we do?”

  Melissa Plunkett shot up a hand. “Recycle it?”

  Oblio slipped away during the ensuing discussion, unnoticed by anyone but Oscar, who sensed his departure as a slight lessening of the pain in his heart. If the truth were known, Oblio hated modern Scouting as much as Oscar did, though for different reasons. What Oblio wanted to be was neither a woodsman nor an urban survivalist, but a sailor. His mother, though, wouldn’t hear of it. “Do you want to get hepatitis like your aunt Veruca?” she asked him. “All those hospital syringes floating around out there, it’s like begging to get an incurable disease.” “But ma,” Oblio protested, “Aunt Veruca has Alzheimer’s. That’s from aluminum cookware, not swimming.” “That’s beside the point,” his mother replied. “Now maybe when you’re older you can ride the Staten Island Ferry. On the top deck.”

  It was the sound of lapping water that drew him now, though he knew without checking his map that the ocean was a mile away and there were no lakes or rivers here. No matter; a puddle full of factory sewage held more fascination for him than a whole menagerie of three-headed squirrels.

  Oblio’s heart started to beat a little faster when he found a locked gate with a sign claiming that the property behind it was FACILITATED BY THE NEW YORK AQUARIUM. A second sign on the gate warned him to BEWARE OF HOSTILE FISH, but wild sea monkeys couldn’t have dragged him away by that point. He reached into the pocket of his uniform, squishing past a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to extract a slim metal pick.

  The gate was open in moments, and Oblio stood on the deck of the murky pool. Glancing up at the second floor of the villa, he could detect no movement behind the blacked-out windows, but snippets of dialogue from the Tuesday Afternoon Movie drifted down to him as he approached the water’s edge.

  “WAAAAAAAAHHHHH—”

  “I’ve lost R2!”

  The pool was still except for the backwash from the filtering unit, but Oblio knew there was something neat, something impressive, swimming around in its depths. He could feel it in his gut. The question was how to bring it up so he could have a look at it, maybe snap its picture. Deciding to start with the obvious, Oblio walked along the deck to the deep end, crouched by the five-meter mark, and smacked his palm against the surface of the water a few times.

  “The Death Star is cleared to fire. The Death Star is cleared to fire.”

  Oblio’s camera was disposable, which would have been ecologically unsound except that he’d built it himself out of a single-serving Hi-C drink box. Tossing his peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the pool, he pointed the camera at it and waited to see if the mystery fish would rise to the bait.

  As the voice of Darth Vader moved on the face of the water, it did.

  Frankie and Meisterbrau

  When Frankie came out of the villa a little while later, there was a hat floating in the deep end of the pool. A green hat, sort of army green actually, fashioned in a paramilitary style that Frankie was sure he’d seen somewhere before. Even from a distance the hat also had a distinct chewed-on look; a toothlike white triangle had gotten caught in the ragged brim.

  “This is not good,” Frankie said. He set down the armload he was carrying: two blow dryers, an Electric Fan, a space heater, and a mammoth ghetto blaster with enough D-cell batteries, Frankie hoped, to barbecue a whale. The only thing he hadn’t been ab
le to scrounge up was an extension cord, which could be a problem if the boom box didn’t work.

  “Anybody here?” Frankie called, in case the hat’s owner was hiding behind a deck chair. No one answered, but looking around Frankie spotted something else. He skirted the pool carefully; over by the five-meter mark he picked up a Hi-C drink box with a plastic camera lens and a peanut butter-smudged shutter button sticking out of it. Behind him the open gate banged in the breeze, and a possible scenario began to suggest itself.

  “Oh, this is not good,” said Frankie. He looked at the hat, too far to reach from the side of the pool. A slight current in the water was causing it to drift into the shadow cast by the diving board, and Frankie supposed if someone were to climb out on the end of that and reach down . . .

  Don’t even think it, he thought. You don’t need that hat for anything, and besides, what if there’s still a head inside it?

  The mental wrestling match that followed might be hard to understand unless, like Frankie Lonzo, you grew up in Bensonhurst. Once one part of his brain had conceived of an act of wanton bravado, another part of his brain would generate an almost religious compulsion to go ahead and do it, even as a third part of his brain begged the first and second parts to reconsider. When the act in question was something truly dangerous, Frankie would have flashback visions of Jimmy Mireno, the brass-knuckled bully who had harried him through most of elementary school.

  You scared, Lonzo? You fuckin’ scared?

  “Freak no, I’m not scared,” Frankie said, at the diving board now. And then, as he took his first step out: “This is stupid. This is really freaking stupid.” He slid his other foot forward, felt the diving board flex under his weight. “Poles,” he said. “We ought to have poles with claws on the end of them for this shit, hooking hats out of the pool. And sonar.” He scanned the surface of the water for any sign of movement below. “A nice sonar rig would definitely be a good idea.”