Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  And take a guess what happens.

  If you haven’t had even the urge to barf by now, you’re qualified to be either an undertaker or a politician. Or a journalist.

  “Yeah,” he said, and sniggered. “Funny as hell, ain’t it?”

  Marty told the last bit as he polished off his beer and made ready to drive home. A sweeper had collected the remains of the corpse in its net, then the guidance system was reconfigured to take it for a long trajectory through the inner solar system to the Sun itself. Nobody on Skycan wanted to be the one who removed the net from the robot’s maw … and, considering all the terrible things which had already been done to Weird Frank, it was fitting that his final fate should be incineration by that which had killed him, the Sun itself.

  “And that was the end of it, I guess.” I played with an empty beer bottle as the former beamjack shrugged into his denim jacket. I couldn’t look at his face.

  “That’s it.” He pulled on his jacket with its Harley-Davidson eagle-patch on the back and the breast-pocket button which read FUCK EVERYONE, swigged down the last of his Budweiser, and stared back at me for a moment: “You must think I’m a real asshole, don’t you?” he asked abruptly.

  I imagined his right hand, with the word HATE tattooed across the knuckles, curling into a fist and slamming into my jaw. I didn’t give a shit. “Yeah,” I said, looking up to squarely meet his gaze, “I think you’re a real asshole.”

  His right hand didn’t become a fist; it leisurely went into the front pocket of his jeans, covering the four-letter word on the knuckles. “Then you haven’t gotten the point of that whole story,” he said, “or why I wrote those words under the picture.”

  “No, man, I don’t get it. Where’s the fucking joke?”

  “Looky here, then. Frank was a guy without a good sense of humor who tried to make people laugh. He could have sat buck-nekkid in the rec room and wacked off with a copy of TV Guide and nobody would have laughed at him …”

  “So? What’s the point?”

  Marty grinned. “And then he died, and by doing so he became funny. Maybe you can say that death improved his character. Maybe it made him a better man.”

  Hands in his pockets, he rocked drunkenly back on his feet. “I dunno. But nobody would have remembered him unless his body hadn’t fallen out of lockers or went to his own wake or any of that shit. And I’m glad I helped him realize his potential, I really am. I’m fucking proud of it.”

  He shrugged again. “If that makes me an asshole, great. But you’re an even bigger asshole if you don’t get the joke. Sometimes death or a good joke are the only things which give a man’s life some kinda meaning, and that’s why Weird Frank was the greatest corpse who ever lived. Y’know what I mean?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer, even if he had expected one from me. Marty gave my arm a slap and walked past me to the door. A minute later I heard the rev of his Harley’s engine; then the bike roared out of the parking lot and down the highway, mowing down Route 3, headed for Route A1A and Cocoa Beach. An ugly brute on the road, looking for another loser’s corpse to transform into a better man …

  Jack Baker put down his pencil and crossword puzzle, fetched me another beer, and silently placed it in front of me on the bar. I barely noticed; I was looking at the picture on the wall of Weird Frank, strangling that stupid rubber chicken. After awhile, I began to laugh to myself, a chuckle which sounded like a death-rattle from beyond the grave.

  It’s a joke, son. Don’t you get it?

  Sugar’s Blues

  THIS IS THE THIRD story I’ve written about Diamondback Jack’s, and it will also be the last. I’ve told you about the Free Beer conspiracy and Weird Frank’s corpse; these were tales which were first relayed to me by others in that greasy bar on Route Three on Merritt Island, just down the road from the Kennedy Space Center. Now I have one more story to tell.

  Diamondback Jack’s is no more. It’s gone. The joint burned to the ground last week, taking with it the pool table, the jukebox, the booze, and all the pictures of living and dead spacers which had been framed, tacked, and taped on the wall behind the bar. The last and best of the hangouts for the pros of the Cape is gone, leaving behind only an ugly heap of busted glass and blackened rubble. Only the Budweiser sign in the parking lot was unscathed by the fire, but since it was broken long ago by some drunk fool, it’s nothing to get nostalgic about; if anything, it’s a fitting tombstone to a broken promise.

  My broken promise.

  When I went back there for the last time yesterday, Jack Baker was clambering through the debris, trying to locate anything salvageable in what had once been his court and kingdom. Maybe he was trying to find the varnished rattlesnake skin which had been the bar’s namesake. I don’t know, because I didn’t have a chance to talk to him. As soon as my car pulled into the lot, he recognized it; the half-melted whiskey bottle shattering on the hood of my Datsun informed me that I wasn’t welcome round here no more, if I ever had been in the first place. I put it in reverse and got out of there in a hurry. The last I saw of Jack was in my rear mirror; he was standing atop the wreckage, silently glaring at me as I sped back down the highway.

  Jack is not an inherently violent man, but I know that, if he had been able to find the sawed-off shotgun he kept beneath the counter for the occasional stick-up attempt, he would have gladly pointed it in my direction. He might have even squeezed the trigger and blown me straight to hell. I can’t even say I would have blamed him.

  He asked me not to report the story; under the old ground-rules, I usually respected his request. This time, though, I betrayed his trust. In my rush to clear the names of three good men, I forgot our gentlemen’s agreement, and it’s for that single reason that no one drinks at Diamondback Jack’s anymore. Yet, as they always say in the journalism business, the public has a right to know. Memorize that phrase: it’s one of the great all-purpose cop-outs of all time. Sorry I ran over your dog, totalled your car, destroyed your career, fucked your sister and gave her a virus, but hey, don’t blame me because The Public Has A Right To Know. Says it right here in the First Amendment.

  Telling the truth is a dangerous game, but it’s the only one I’ve got. I can’t rebuild Jack’s bar with some words on paper, but I can tell you why, the next time you go down to Merritt Island, there’s an empty gravel lot where a bar once stood.

  It started with a fistfight.

  Offhand, I can think of several good ways to spend a Saturday night on the Cape. Midnight bass-fishing on the Banana River, sitting on the beach in Jetty Park and watching a cargo freighter lift off from the Cape, enjoying the pig-out special at Fat Boy’s Barbecue in Cocoa Beach … or, as in this instance, going down to Diamondback Jack’s to hoist a few beers and catch one of the local rockabilly bands Jack Baker used to hire for weekend gigs.

  One of the bad ways is to receive a bloody nose during a bar brawl, but that’s what I get for drinking at Diamondback Jack’s.

  I didn’t witness the beginning of the fight. I was in the john, humming along with the Rude Astronauts’ rendition of “Sea Cruise” while relieving myself of the burden of a half-pitcher of Budweiser—as the old saw goes, you don’t buy beer, you only rent it—when there was a godawful thump-crash-bang from the front room. My eyes jerked up from my meditations as the music ground to a halt and, amid the cacophony, I heard someone describing someone else as a goddamn sumbitch asshole, or similar words to the effect. I couldn’t be certain, because it was drowned out by more demolition work which sounded only slightly less painful than root canal surgery.

  A wise man would have stayed put in the men’s room. The Rude Astronauts were not, by definition, the only obnoxious space types out there tonight. Pack a few dozen ornery drunks into a bar, that’s one thing: pack a few dozen of the Cape’s blue-collar workforce into Diamondback Jack’s on a sticky-hot Saturday night in July, and that’s quite another. Cross one of ’em and there’s gonna be trouble: “Hey, pal, you gotta nice house? Huh? You go
tta nice wife? You got nice kids? You gotta nice cat? Don’t fuck with me, or I’ll drop a dead satellite on ’em.” But I’m a journalist by trade and lifestyle, which by definition makes me a dummy; reporters go where angels fear to tread. I zipped up my fly and cautiously ventured out front into the barroom, figuring that I would probably see the result of some guy getting too personal with another man’s wife or girlfriend on the dance floor.

  I came through the door just in time to see Jack Baker sprinting from behind the bar, his trusty Louisville slugger clenched in his right hand. That was a surprise in itself. Jack’s got a gut the size of a medicine ball—have you ever met a skinny bar-owner?—but he moved like Ricky Brock stealing second for the Indians. “Make a hole!” I heard him shout, and as the roomful of regulars veered out of his way, Jack hurled himself toward the epicenter of the melee, which was not on the tiny dance-floor in front of the stage where I expected, but toward the left rear end of the barroom.

  Five men were on the floor, wrestling with each other in a bath of blood and beer. The three on top looked like regulars—denims, sneakers, cowboy shirts, a couple of Skycorp caps—but the moment I glimpsed the two guys who were pinned down, I knew they didn’t belong in this place. Not that I recognized them personally; like the other three, they were complete strangers, but judging by the way they were duded out, I recognized their type.

  They were company men. Any company; pick one, they all look alike. Skycorp, Uchu-Hiko, or Galileo if you choose the privates, or maybe NASA, FBI, CIA, NSA, NSC, FAA, FDA, DEA, IRS or any of the rest of the alphabet soup one normally associates with the government bureaucracy which haunts the Cape. However, Diamondback Jack’s was one of the few places which was tacitly verboten to suits. If you’re not a working-class spacer who does more at the Kennedy Space Center than carry around a clipboard and a nametag, you should have had better sense than to walk into the joint. These guys—with their off-the-rack sport coats, nylon golf shirts, flat-top haircuts and matching used-car-dealer mustaches—stuck out in a dive like this. Someone should tell these bozos that just putting on a pair of Levis and Monkey Ward topsiders doesn’t do the trick; even New York City subway cops have a better sense of camouflage. These yahoos had narc written all over them; I wondered how they had gotten through the door in the first place.

  Jack was already pushing back one of the regulars with his baseball bat; the other two were backing off, suddenly mindful of the mess they had created. The two suits on the bottom were beginning to pick themselves off the floor; one of them, a guy with thinning blond hair, had a large rip down the back of his plaid sport coat and one eye which was half closed from a bruise he had taken from a punch. He looked as if he were in bad shape; I instinctively went forward to give the guy a hand off the floor. People are people, right?

  “Hey, hey …” I said as I knelt down to grab the suit from under his armpits, intending to help him to his feet. “Don’t … let’s take a look at …”

  “Fuck you,” he snarled. And then the jerk, still sitting on his ass, whipped around with his right fist and nailed me square in the nose.

  So much for my application to the Good Samaritan Hall of Fame.

  Things became a bit confused for awhile after that, and I didn’t catch everything that happened. My getting decked touched off a free-for-all of punching and harsh language. Not that anyone was standing up for me, because I didn’t mean shit to most people in the bar; it’s just that the only thing Florida barcrawlers enjoy more on a humid summer night than drinking, dancing, or looking to get laid is fighting. From my dazed perspective, it resembled a feeding frenzy in the water hazard of a miniature golf course, right after you toss some popcorn into the midst of a bunch of bored catfish. Fight? Good! Let’s punch someone!

  Jack gave up on the baseball bat and grabbed the fire extinguisher instead; a few loud shots of carbon dioxide at the ceiling above the crowd cleared the bar in a hurry. He didn’t have to go to that extreme, though; anyone with any sense was getting the hell out of there. The Rude Astronauts had already packed up their instruments and sound equipment and quietly loaded them into their van as fast as possible; they were hired to play, not brawl, and Jack didn’t have chicken-wire erected in front of his stage. In the main ring, the suits had long since lost; they were thrown out the door and although a couple of members of the original fight went out into the parking lot to discuss proper public etiquette with them, I do not believe Miss Manners would have approved of their form of instruction.

  Meanwhile, out in the bleacher-seats of Hell, I was slumped in one of the booths—half-stunned, holding a wad of paper napkins against my snoot, tasting blood running down the back of my mouth. Funny thing about a nosebleed: it’s more embarrassing than painful. I’ve got a glass nose and I’m no stranger to having my face hit. All those teenage years of getting beat up in the schoolyard for being a smartass instead of a jock taught me a few things about controlling nosebleeds, so previous experience told me that all I had to do was sit still, lean my head back, keep something absorbent pressed against my face and breathe through my mouth. It didn’t do anything for all the blood on my shirt, but at least it would save me from getting hosed by Jack’s fire extinguisher.

  The next time I remembered anything clearly, it was when things were calm again. The mob had been cleared from the bar, the place was empty, and somebody had placed a Budweiser tallneck on the table in front of me.

  “Here,” said a voice. “Rinse your mouth out with this.”

  As I looked up, my benefactor settled in the seat on the other side of the booth. It was one of the guys who had originally been in the brawl, although you could barely tell it; he didn’t have a mark on him except for some beer splattered across the front of his cowboy shirt. Not surprising; he was a big guy with a linebacker’s build, the type of person who doesn’t start fights but always finishes them.

  He also looked a bit old to be mixed up in this sort of shit: mid-fifties, with crow’s-feet around his alert blue eyes, close-cropped grey hair, country-style long sideburns framing a square jaw. A pro. An old-time spacer. Hang around the Cape long enough and you can always tell the type.

  Yet he also looked vaguely familiar.

  Fuck it. “Thanks,” I said as I picked up the bottle, took a long drink and swirled beer around inside my mouth. I glanced around; Jack was looking the other way for the moment, so I spit it out onto the bloody, booze-drenched floor. The place was a mess already, and it got the clotted-blood taste out of my mouth. The guy on the other side of the table smiled, but didn’t make a federal case out of my slobbish behavior. He had seen worse.

  “Just wanted to tell you I’m sorry that you got hurt,” he said. His voice had a soft, southern gentleman’s lilt to it: Colonel Mississippi Cornpone crossed with Deke Slayton. “I know it wasn’t your fight and that you were trying to break things up.”

  He shrugged, his face becoming more serious. “Wasn’t my fight either … at least I didn’t start it. I’m just sorry that you had to get in the way.”

  I was about to reply when there was a screech of car tires peeling out of the parking lot. A few seconds later, the door banged open and two men entered from the lot. I immediately recognized them as the two other regulars who had been in the fight. One of them glanced our way. “They’re outta here, Sugar,” he said.

  At first, I thought there was a woman sitting behind us, but the adjacent booth was vacant. “Sugar” isn’t the sort of nickname one normally associates with a fellow who looks tough enough to pound nails with his fists, but my friend didn’t seem to mind. “Okay, Mike,” he said, solemnly nodding his head. “I think we’ve seen the last of ’em for awhile. You and Doug go grab yourselves a cold one and take it easy.”

  Jack already had a couple of tallnecks waiting for them on the bar; it was a funny way for Baker to be treating guys who had just wrecked his place, chased out his customers and his band, and caused him to close down early on a Saturday night. But instead he quietly grabbed a bro
om and dustpan and went to work sweeping up the debris while the two men picked up their beers.

  Pretty weird shit, all things considered. If the suits weren’t on their way to the county hospital emergency room, then they were headed straight for the Merritt Island cop shop. Yet if either one of Sugar’s friends seemed to give a damn, they didn’t show it. There’s a certain untouchable look about men who’ve just beaten the crap out of someone who deserved it, but Mike and Doug weren’t northern Florida yee-haw rednecks looking for a brawl. The way they carried themselves told me that they, like Sugar, were pros …

  Sugar.

  There was something familiar about the nickname, matched with that face, which tickled the back of my mind. My head was stuffed with clotted blood; I couldn’t think straight. “So what was this all about, anyway?” I asked, and Sugar looked back toward me. “I mean, I got into the show late, so why did you get into a fight with these guys?”

  Sugar shrugged off-handedly. “Well, y’know how it is. We just came over to have a couple of beers and they were on our case again, doing the usual surveillance routine. They kept watching us and Doug got pissed, so he went over to get them to leave and they …”

  “Shut up!”

  The shout came from Jack. He was kneeling on the floor next to the broken juke-box, gathering the scratched CDs which had been thrown from its shattered case. He stared at Sugar with anger in his eyes: Sugar instantly went quiet.

  “Al’s a regular here,” Baker went on, more quietly now, “but he’s not a pro. He’s a reporter.” He glanced at me, sour annoyance in his face. “I let him in because he doesn’t talk too much … but he’s still with the press, so watch your mouth, okay? He’s not one of us.”

  Not one of us. Christ. I sighed, wiping my nose again and dropping the paper wad on the table. My old outsider-insider status with Diamondback Jack’s had once again returned to haunt me.