“Glass, a thousand dollars is nothing,” said Step. “A thousand dollars is like peeing in your hand.”
Glass looked at him—his turn to be stunned.
“Do you know what my royalties on Hacker Snack were, at its peak, every six months?”
Glass shook his head.
“Forty thousand,” said Step. “And Scribe 64 has sold far more than Hacker Snack ever did.”
Glass muttered something that might have been a prayer, because it was addressed to God, but Step didn’t think the tone was reverent enough for that.
“By the way,” said Step, “I told you what my royalties were in strict confidence, too.”
“Right, no talkee, no tellee, no catchee hellee,” said Glass.
Step hadn’t heard that since the days when Reader’s Digest still published ethnic humor. “Where’d you pick that up?”
“My dad,” said Glass. “Whenever I’m not paying attention, I turn into my dad.”
That hot dog turned out to be supper. Contrary to any reasonable expectations, Ray didn’t allow his people to have a supper break from duty in the booth. He, of course, with Dicky in tow, went to a fancy restaurant dinner for several of Eight Bits Inc.’s distributors, but that was business, as Ray patiently explained to Step—the eating part of it was merely incidental. And there’d be plenty of time to have supper at the hotel coffee shop after the show closed down for the night.
By the time they were through at the booth they were both too tired to hang out at the coffee shop long enough for a meal, and besides, the meals were not charged to the room—Step would have to pay cash and then turn in his receipts back in Steuben for a reimbursement. It seemed like a churlish limitation, but he was getting a pretty good idea by now of how Ray Keene was able to live so high off the earnings of, really, one bestselling program. Glass didn’t mind skipping supper, either. He had apparently cleaned all the salted nut rolls out of the candy machine at work, so he had plenty to eat in the room. Step decided that he didn’t like salted nut rolls, and said so, and thus could not eat any without shaming himself. It was a way of keeping himself from gaining any more weight than he had to on this trip.
When Glass went into the bathroom, Step got on the phone and called home—collect, since Eight Bits Inc. had arranged for all the phones to be blocked against long-distance calls charged to the room. DeAnne sounded tired—it was well after midnight in North Carolina, but Step knew she wouldn’t sleep, or at least wouldn’t sleep well, until he called. “Sorry I didn’t call before,” he said. “They didn’t exactly give me time.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “I wanted to hear your voice tonight anyway. I miss you.”
“I’ve only been gone twelve hours,” he said. “I work longer days than that half the time.”
“I know,” she said. “Why d’you think I miss you?” Then she seemed to force herself to wake up a little more. “Talk to any other companies today?”
“They have me sharing a room with Glass here.”
“Glass? Oh, the wizard kid.”
“Actually, he’s a combination knight and thief.”
“What?”
“Nothing, he’s just into Dungeons and Dragons and that’s his character, a knight who’s also a thief.”
“Real Round Table material,” she said.
“And he’s—what was it?—chaotic but good.”
“Ah, to be young again,” she said. “Still, even if you can’t talk out loud, you can answer my questions. Did you talk to any other companies about Hacker Snack?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Too busy?”
“Yep,” he said.
“What about tomorrow?”
“Same thing, probably.”
“Oh no!”
“It’ll happen somehow or other,” he said. Though he was not at all sure he could bring it off. “How are things with the kids?”
“Fine,” she said. “Call me tomorrow, OK? And I’m sorry you have to share a room. I know how you hate having a roommate.”
“There’s one exception,” he said.
“Yes, but you hated having me for a roommate at first.”
“Not after you finally stopped leaving shoes out in the middle of every room in the house.”
“Now that you’re away, I’ve taken every pair I own and spread them all over, just to celebrate.”
“Ah, the cat’s away.”
“This mouse does all her best playing when you’re here,” she said, in a cuddly voice that made him both horny and resentful at the same time. If she could act sexy after midnight when he was away, why couldn’t she ever bring it off when he was home? He quelled the thought at once.
“How’s the baby?” he asked.
“No kicks since that first one, but he sloshes a little now and then.”
“Come on, you can’t really feel that.”
“Can so.”
“So he’s a swimmer?”
“I can wait awhile for the kicking, to tell the truth. Elizabeth nearly broke my ribs from the inside.”
“Well, get your sleep now,” he said.
“I know, it’s long distance, but I miss you,” she said.
“Love you, Fish Lady,” said Step.
“Love you, Junk Man,” said DeAnne.
“You hang up first,” he said.
“No, you,” she said.
When they were younger, just courting, that game could go on for a long time—a hundred and fifty dollars worth, in fact, the summer that she went to San Francisco to work while he was still getting his master’s at the Y. Wiped out what little he had saved from the fellowship job, writing papers that went out under a full professor’s name with not a single improvement from the old coot and not a speck of credit for Step, since he wasn’t even a doctoral candidate yet. But even with no money, Step cadged twenty bucks from his folks and drove out and picked her up from the friend’s house where she’d been staying in Orinda, and took her to meet his aunt and uncle in San Mateo, and then drove her home. It was on that drive home to Utah that he had proposed to her. And she had said thank you, let me think about it. Four and a half months of thinking—it was two days before New Year’s when she said yes. A miracle they ever got married. But his mom was sure it was a marriage planned by God. “God never said he’d make life easy,” Mom always said.
But they weren’t kids anymore, and the game couldn’t go on. He would have to hang up first, even though he knew that it hurt her feelings a little bit that he was always the one who could hang up first. I wouldn’t be, he told her once, if you’d just hang up for once. But she couldn’t do that either, apparently.
He hung up.
“Fish Lady?” asked Glass.
Step could not believe he would be rude enough to admit so openly that he had been listening.
“Oh,” said Step, “was I talking that loud? I hoped I’d be quiet enough that you wouldn’t be forced to hear what I was saying.”
“Naw,” said Glass, oblivious to the implied rebuke. So much for the Miss Manners method.
“Give me a salted nut roll,” said Step.
“I thought you hated them,” said Glass.
Oh, yes, thought Step. I’m not eating them. “Yeah, I didn’t want to eat it, I wanted to break it into pieces and jam them into every aperture of your body.”
“Kinky,” said Glass.
“If you don’t listen in to my phone calls, I won’t listen in to yours.”
“But that’s hardly fair,” said Glass. “I don’t have anybody to call.”
“Not your mom?”
“Dad would never let her accept the charges.”
“I thought you made more money than God.”
“But God doesn’t own the credit card companies,” said Glass. “No sweat, Mom knows I’m OK. How are the kids?”
“Fine,” said Step.
“Must be tough on the two of you, having three kids and all that.”
“Sometimes,” said Step.
“You need some time together,” said Glass.
“Marriage counseling now?”
“Everybody does.”
“Your mom and dad?”
“Sure. She needs to have a chance to cry over his grave for an hour on Sundays.” Glass grinned at Step’s look of embarrassment. “A joke, son, a joke.”
“Son?”
“OK, then, Dad. I really meant my offer to tend for you so you two can have some time together.”
“I know you did.”
“Yeah, but you blew it off,” said Glass. “I know you did, and I want you to know I mean it. I love kids, I get along great with kids. I never had any younger brothers or sisters, and so I really like to take care of them now. Never had a baby in the house—but don’t get me wrong, I’m real good with babies. I’ve tended a lot. There was this neighbor family, I watched their kids all the time when I was a kid myself—not that I’m, like, grown up or anything now. But you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” said Step. What he was thinking was, Am I going to sleep in my clothes on the top of the bed? Or try to undress real fast and hope Glass doesn’t notice my underwear. That wasn’t too likely—Glass was apparently in a mood to notice everything. And he’d ask, and there’d be a long conversation, and it made Step tired to think about it. Besides, Glass must have known what they were doing with Hacker Snack. He must have provided the other programmers with a copy of his commented disassembly of Step’s Atari code for the program, as a basis for their work. So it wasn’t as if Step could trust him.
“I used to do everything for those kids. They had a little girl in diapers—Lulu, I called her, but I can’t remember why, her name was something like Gladys or something, a stinker name for a little girl, anyway, so I called her Lulu—and she’d be dragging her pants around her ankles, you know how diapers get so heavy when they’re wet, so she’d be running around in just her shirt and those wet diapers mopping every speck of dust off the floor.”
“You’re making me gag here,” said Step. “Urine everywhere, my favorite nighty-night vision.”
“Come on, little girls don’t wet their panties with urine, they wet it with angel rain.”
“Now I will puke,” said Step.
Glass laughed in delight. “I thought that was funny, too, but that’s what Mrs. Greenwood said, angel rain, I swear it.”
“I got to tell you. Glass, I need my sleep. It’s almost one Eastern time.”
“But you aren’t even undressed,” said Glass, “and we don’t have to be over at the show till nine, so we’ve got plenty of time.”
“I have a mild sleep disorder,” said Step, making it up as he went along but trying to come somewhere near the truth. “I have a hard time getting to sleep, which means I have to start calming down and stuff fairly early in order to get to sleep fairly late.”
“And then, just as you’re dozing off, you get up and change your clothes.”
This was all too complicated and too infuriating. Step could handle being involved with people and paying attention to them and being polite and all for hours and hours at a stretch, but then he needed time to himself, time where nobody was making demands on him, and right at this moment he wanted Glass to get up and go to the window and jump out and die. Nothing personal, Step just wanted to be alone.
“Glass, is everything I do or don’t do so fascinating to you?”
“I was just telling you why I’d be a good babysitter for your kids.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“I can change the diapers, that’s what I was telling you. Wipe their little bottomses. I know that’s not a man’s job, but I can do it anyway.”
“It’s a man’s job all right,” said Step, surrendering to Glass’s conversation. “I pity any man who doesn’t have the sense to help with the diaper changing. That’s how you bond with the baby—that’s how you come to love the kid, for pete’s sake—doing intimate personal service like that, doing something disgusting but necessary, and the kid knows it. I mean, a man can’t nurse the baby, can he? He needs some point of contact.”
“That’s a pretty good sermon.”
“Yeah, I gave the same speech to my older brother and he said, What, is she turning you gay or something?”
Glass hooted and laughed and slapped his thigh. Too much reaction, too much laughter, not at all appropriate. What’s going on here, wondered Step. Why is he so keyed up?
“That’s just it,” said Glass. “The kid loves you for it, you’re doing a service, cleaning up her little privates for her, she loves it.”
Now it really did sound disgusting. Not the idea, but the way he said it, the words, the coy way he said “her little privates.” This was making Step faintly ill. The boy simply didn’t know how to talk about this, that was all. In his eagerness to be of service, he didn’t realize that this wasn’t exactly the way a father wanted to hear a would-be babysitter talking about changing his little girl’s diapers.
“I even gave her a bath once,” said Glass.
“Mm?”
“Lulu. Gladys. You know. She got herself all covered with honey. Not that I wasn’t watching her, you know, but I’d had to do something with the boys, I can’t remember what, and she just got into the honey, it was out on the table, and she poured it all over in her hair, and I couldn’t think of anything to do except take off her little dollclothes and splash her into the tub. And there she was in the tub and I washed her hair and everything and then she gives me the washcloth and she says, ‘Better wash down there, Rolly.’ Like her mom must have taught her you always wash your little privates.”
In that moment Step realized that never, never would Glass be left alone with any of his children, even for a moment, and most especially not Betsy. No, if Step had his way Glass would never even see Betsy, with her beautiful blond hair and her sweet smile and her perfect, perfect innocence.
“Rolly,” said Step quietly. “Let’s drop the subject, OK?”
“Sure,” said Glass. “I didn’t mean anything by it, you know. Just that I’m willing to tend, and I know how to take care of little kids, don’t you see.”
“Right, Glass. Look, here’s five bucks, go to the coffee shop and have something on me so I can get to sleep.”
Step was reaching for his wallet.
“Why not just slap my face’?” said Glass.
“What do you mean?”
“Here’s five dollars,” said Glass. “Like I’m some beggar who’s been panhandling you on the street or something. I’ve got money, you know.”
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” said Step. “But I told you, I need to sleep. I’m desperate to sleep. This is why I didn’t want to share a room. I have to have time to myself, time alone, deeply and completely alone, or I can’t sleep.”
“Must be great for your wife,” said Glass nastily.
“Don’t be my enemy over this,” said Step. “I make a lousy roommate, I’m a complete son-of-a-bitch, I know it. But I’m begging you, go down to the coffee shop or go smoke in the lounge or something but please, please, let me be alone here for thirty minutes, that’s all I ask.”
“Right,” said Glass.
“Don’t be mad at me, I didn’t mean any offense, I’m just tired.”
“Right,” said Glass. He walked to the door. Then he stopped and turned to face Step, waiting, obviously ready to say something.
“What,” said Step.
“Don’t ever call me Rolly,” said Glass.
“What? I don’t call you Rolly, I call you Glass.”
“You called me Rolly a minute ago. Nobody calls me Rolly.”
“Did I? Why would I call you Rolly? I didn’t even know that was your nickname.”
“It’s not my nickname. It’s my father’s goddam nickname.”
Then Step remembered. “You used the name yourself. You said that’s what the little girl called you. I must have used the name because you said it, that’s all.”
“I did?’
Step remem
bered now exactly the sentence in which Glass had used the name Rolly. Better wash down there, Rolly. He was not going to repeat it. “Why else would I have called you that?”
“Nobody ever called me Rolly,” said Glass, sounding very annoyed. “My nickname as a kid was Bubba. Rolly is my dad and nobody calls me that, ever.”
“I never have before,” said Step, ”and I never will again. Sorry I’ve been so tense, I told you I’m not good at sharing a room. But better you than anybody else, right?’
Glass grinned. “Like, better to eat the cockroach than the scorpions, right?”
“Right,” said Step.
Glass was gone.
Cockroach. That was exactly right. Being with Glass now was like eating a cockroach. Better wash down there, Rolly.
Step got up and took his clothes off, all his clothes, carefully folding away his underwear and putting it back in his suitcase, under the clean clothes. And then, standing there naked, he couldn’t bear the idea of getting into his sheets. Why? He couldn’t. They were so clean. He had to wash first.
So he got in the shower and soaped himself twice and then he felt clean enough to go to bed. Glass was still gone, and an hour later when Step looked at the clock Glass was still gone, and then Step must have fallen asleep because he never heard Glass come in at all. In the morning Glass was in the shower when Step woke up, and his sheets were open and swirled and wrinkled on the bed, so he must have come in sometime during the night. And when he came out of the bathroom Glass was back to his old cheerful self and Step could almost, almost put out of his mind the things that Glass had talked about last night.
In the morning everybody was trapped at the booth, just as they had been the day before. It had never occurred to Step that Ray would bring his people out to San Francisco and then never let them go see the rest of the show, but then a lot of things about Ray Keene had never occurred to Step until too late. It looked like the only chance he’d have to scout around would be at lunchtime, and that would be only a half hour. And he’d have the half hour only if he didn’t eat, since the lines at the snack counters were even longer than the lines at the women’s restrooms. It almost wasn’t worth trying to meet anybody, since it would take that long just to spot where the software companies were. And then he’d have to find one that knew his name and thought Hacker Snack was hot stuff, which might take a lot of looking, since that game was last year’s news. No, two years ago, and it was all played out. No point, none at all, Step was permanently trapped in Eight Bits Inc., a chicken outfit where he’d be surrounded by sneaks and cheats and thieves and skinflints and guys who dreamed of washing little girls.
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