The Best of Electric Velocipede

by John Klima

  And yet Dale surprised himself with what he loved about them, their history, their rancor hardening around them into flakes or scales, of all things their certainty in what cannot be seen. For everyone he had met here, a palm’s rough lines were no less truthful than the dotted contours of a map. Myth and fact were interchangeable, reality a personal affliction.

  “What was it like,” he asked McGovern, “growing up around here?”

  They sat with Bartley by the Blue Pool, the sun baking all of them.

  “I suppose it was the same as anywhere,” the old man said. “We chased girls and went to matches and swam in the sea.”

  “Aye,” said Bartley, “going round with your tongue hanging out.”

  “We played hurling,” McGovern added. “Fastest field game in the world.”

  Dale squinted at him. “Is that a fact?”

  “Oh yeah. But don’t think we didn’t know what it was ye were up to.”

  “Ye . . .?”

  “Oh, he’s been workin’ on this one,” Bartley said.

  “Twas before my sister was married,” McGovern began. “And she was still living with us, which is a long time ago now. I’d just started inside at Callaghan’s and I was driving in and out of the city every day.”

  Dale turned to Bartley. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Your friends,” the old man said, raising his eyebrows. “The men above.”

  “We’d to go to the neighbors,” McGovern went on. “We’d still no TV ourselves.”

  Dale smiled. “The Moon landings,” he said, getting it.

  “Momentous!” McGovern was in full flight now. “No thought of course to the risks involved. Just those two lads bouncing ’round the place, like kangaroos the pair of them. The boys were all trying it at work the next day. I swear, old Roddy Callaghan himself, leppin’ around the yard . . . ” He looked at Dale.

  “I’m sorry,” the American said. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Ah,” McGovern said sadly, “sure it doesn’t . . . Never mind.”

  Between them, Bartley was shaking his head. “There was no television where I was. Had to see it in the papers next day. Yer lad Aldrin like the Michelin Man, setting up the flag as if he owned the damn place.” He laughed. “I have to hand it to ye, that was a good one.” He laid a hand on Dale’s arm and nodded. A livery of age adorned his skin. McGovern’s too, and Dale suddenly felt out of place.

  “Why is it,” the American asked, “that everyone’s so old here?”

  “Say what?”

  “I mean,” Dale said, “where are all the young people?”

  “Sure here’s one now,” McGovern said, elbowing Dale gently in the ribs and indicating the path from the road where a meek spectre with a Methuselan gait tottered in their direction. It was Regan, a venal leprechaun of a man whom Dale had seen around the village.

  “Is it yourself?” Bartley asked without looking away from the water.

  “It is,” Regan said, standing above them as if in judgment. “And tell me, gentlemen, how’s the fishing?”

  “Could be worse,” McGovern said beneath his breath. “Could be better too.”

  Regan glowered at him. He stood crooked, with his weight resting on a walking stick. One eye, Dale saw, was perpetually narrower than the other. “We’ve never really had the chance to talk,” he said to the American, “and I’ve been meaning to ask you, what was it like up there?”

  Dale clinched his jaw. Someone must have told him. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  Regan leaned closer. “Sure, how could you forget a thing like that?”

  “I was an alternate,” he said. “A backup. I’ve never been up there.”

  “Some other lad went?”

  “Yeah, some other lad.”

  Regan licked his lips. “So you never flew?”

  “I flew combat over Iraq. I flew experimental planes to the edge of space. I earned my wings.”

  “But not . . . up there?”

  “No.”

  “They told me,” Regan said slowly, “you were an Astronaut.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But then—”

  “The criteria,” Dale said, “is altitude.” He held Regan’s stare.

  “Ah now,” McGovern said, “would you ever leave the man alone.”

  “I’ll not be told what to do,” the interloper snapped back.

  “The fish,” Bartley said quietly, “are finally biting.”

  Dale ignored him and turned to the newcomer. “And you are?”

  “He’s a Peace Commissioner,” McGovern said, spitting the words. “It’s nothing what you think.”

  “The criteria,” Regan said, “is good character.”

  “The criteria is arse-licking,” McGovern said. “And no better man for it.”

  “I take offence to that.”

  “Tis a pity you won’t take it somewhere else.”

  Twisted over his line, Bartley cackled quietly and Dale turned his gaze back out to sea. Regan drew himself away from three fishermen, as if to say well then, so be it.

  “I might see you later,” he declared to no one in particular, and gradually he shuffled off until he disappeared into the middle distance.

  McGovern shook his head. “Thinks he’s lord and master, that man does.” He leaned in close to the American, “You should fight him.”

  “Fight him?” It was Bartley, cackling so loud that the pipe nearly left his lips. “Tis not a movie, Gerry.”

  McGovern folded his arms. “Twould still be right.”

  “I’m not here to start fights,” Dale said.

  “Sure twas that begrudger started it.” He raised an arm and pointed after Regan.

  “There’s guys like that all over,” Dale said.

  “The Man on the Moon,” Bartley said, rocking back and forth, and laughing to himself. He stabbed at the sky with his pipe.

  “Would you ever put that thing away?” McGovern said.

  The old man grinned at him through yellow teeth. “Sure, why would I?” he asked. “Don’t I like my poison neat?”

  *

  Regan was a troublemaker, but there was no denying he was good at it. What he said had stuck in the American’s craw and the rest of the day hadn’t shaken it. To most of these people, Dale realized, he was just the astronaut— the astronaut—and he had gotten used to that even though it wasn’t true. To have had it called out unsettled him because Rodriguez had been the astronaut, a number one aviator with nothing ruffled but his hair. Beside him Dale was only competent, next on the rotation for sure, but not flying at anything like that altitude. Regan had shown him up, and Dale felt sick that it had taken someone like that to bring him back to Earth. He shook his head. Ego was a part of his job, but he had let it run amok here. Where was his control, the better part of being a pilot?

  When he walked back into the village he was angry, angry about Regan, angry about the priest’s continued absence; he was angry at himself by how quickly he had succumbed to his own tacit celebrity. He sat in the bar until it was dark outside and thought of that damn newspaper lying in his room. He resolved to burn it and called for another whiskey.

  Regan, when he arrived hours later, quickly smelt his opportunity on the American’s breath. “Well now,” he said, “we can finally have that chat.”

  “I’m not really in the mood.”

  “Ah, we’ll have none of that,” Regan motioned to the bartender for a pint.

  Dale sighed deeply. He hunkered over his drink and resigned himself to Regan’s company. Sometimes in flight you go into a spin; nothing to do but throttle down, flatten out your surfaces, turn your rudder the opposite way and hold. He readjusted himself to face the old man.

  “What do you want to know?” he said.

  “Would you have gone?”

  “Yes sir, I would.”

  “If the other lad hadn’t flown, like?”

  Dale drained his glass. “If Rodriguez had been pulled,
I’d have taken his seat. If the program had continued, I’d have had a flight of my own.”

  “And you’d have gone—”

  “Wham, bam, straight to the Moon. That’s where I was going. That’s where Rodriguez went.”

  “Jasus,” Regan said. “Tis a quare thing.” He returned his attention to the pint in front of him. “You tell it well though, you tell it well.”

  Dale couldn’t figure out if he was being serious or not. He stared at the empty glass in his hand, how it caught the light. “Rodriguez,” he said at last.

  Regan looked at him. “What’s that now?”

  “Rodriguez was a better pilot than I was. Christ, he flew that bird the whole way down without a pair of wings to carry him.”

  “This was the crash, it was?”

  “Disintegration,” Dale said. “Aquarius didn’t crash, it disintegrated mid-flight.” Around him, the regulars had grown quiet. No one had gotten this much out of Dale before.

  “I thought they all died when it came apart,” Regan said gently. “Tis what the papers said.”

  “They didn’t die until they hit the water,” Dale said. “Everything else came apart, but the crew module retained integrity until it hit the ocean. Which is more than I can say for those penny-pinchers in Congress, those smooth-talking Washington slicks scurrying to avoid the blame. ‘Organizational causes,’ they called it, ‘Poor technical decision-making,’ and after all the times we tried to warn them. Ah,” he said, “I don’t know.” He slid his glass back to the bartender who looked quickly at Regan before refilling it.

  “I was the CAPCOM,” Dale said. “You know, in the movies, when they say, Houston, we have a problem? Well I was the guy they’re talking to, I was Houston. They like to have the alternates wear that headset. The thinking is that we’re best trained to understand what’s going on up there.”

  “And what was?” Regan whispered. “Going on up there, I mean?”

  “Rodriguez and the others were alive for two minutes, thirteen seconds,” Dale said. “Thermal protection failure. Loss of RCS. He couldn’t alter his approach, couldn’t tip the capsule those vital few degrees. And all the while they knew exactly what was happening.”

  “What did they say?”

  “All Rodriguez said was uh-oh.” Dale emptied his glass again. “The downlink went dead then and that was it,” he said.

  “And?”

  Dale looked Regan in his hooded eyes. “And that was it,” he said again. “Aquarius suffered what they call ‘failure of vehicle with loss of human life.’ I saw it myself, dozens of sources blossoming on the radar. I saw it again later on, laid out on the floor of a hanger at the Cape. Everything reduced to slag. We all understood the risks, but—”

  “But you thought it’d never happen to someone that you knew?”

  Dale shook his head. “I never knew how I was going to feel when it happened. God,” he said, “when I could think about it clearly, when I could process it, you know, I was relieved.”

  “ . . . ”

  “I thought to myself, that could have been me up there.” His head sunk deep between his shoulders.

  “Ole human beings are strange,” Regan said.

  Down the bar, a heavy, bovine man was listening intently. He nodded.

  “You can’t be expected to be rational,” Regan went on. “Not with the likes of that going on around you.”

  But Dale wasn’t paying any attention. “Rodriguez walked on the Moon,” he said. “And he was alive the whole way down, I know it.” He held up his glass to the bartender.

  “Go home,” was the reply.

  “He’s right,” Regan said. “You’ll pay no respects like this.”

  “Ah,” said Dale, standing up. He missed Bartley and McGovern, and couldn’t imagine where they might have got to. He thought of them as crewmates, strapped in beside him in the nose of some heavy-lifting firecracker and bickering about the running of the parish or talking about the weather like it was a new event. He laughed at that to himself all the way to the B&B, his mood darkening then in the vagueness of the empty room.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he stared at the small black canister which stood upright on the dresser. “I bet you’ve got something smart to say,” he muttered before he fell asleep.

  *

  Morning. Scraping birdsong and the hot, fierce lantern of a disappointed sun. A dull halo of the night before hung crooked on Dale’s skull when he woke, a liquordog, as Rodriguez would have said. It was not without cause that Dale seldom touched the hard stuff.

  With great, unshaven indignity he presented himself for breakfast but by some small mercy it was quiet, his hosts tuned obsessively to the conditions of their guests. They had seen it all before, of course.

  “Fr. O’Grady’s back,” Thomas said, nose deep in his newspaper.

  “Saw him last evening,” Catherine said. “He’s looking forward to meeting you.” There were no sandwiches from her this morning. It was as though she knew his days of fishing were at an end. “He should be out of mass within the hour,” she added.

  “Thanks.”

  Outside a soft breeze rolled in from the Atlantic. Dale took his time walking through the village, stopping along the way to buy a bottle of water. When he reached the church he stood outside for almost twenty minutes. Clouds limped slowly through the sky and it felt wrong to go in so he walked on, circling around for many hours. Bartley and McGovern were nowhere to be found, not even by the shore.

  At dusk, with a gold Moon shining overhead, he returned to the limestone church and stood in the doorway as a young man in black fussed around the altar.

  “Evening, Padre,” Dale said.

  O’Grady started at him as if trying to place the countenance. “Yes,” he said at last. “You must be the spaceman.” His eyes had the smallest pupils Dale had ever seen, mere pinpricks, though with a curious, inviting depth. “Strange visitor from another planet, eh?” He waved the American inside. “Dale, isn’t it?” He did not pause for a reply. “What can I do for you, Dale?”

  “It’s about Rodriguez,” Dale said. “A friend of mine. He died in an accident.”

  “The, ah, the Aquarius pilot, yes?”

  Dale nodded. He put his hands in his pockets. The air felt heavier in here. “This . . . ” he said. “Well . . . this is where his people were from, I guess you’d say.”

  O’Grady moved down among the pews. He smelt faintly of the sacristy. “Rodriguez,” he said carefully. “Not really many of them this side of the Shannon.”

  “Fitzpatricks,” said Dale, “on his mother’s side. Grandparents came out a long time ago. I don’t know when.”

  “Well, how about that,” O’Grady said. “An Irish astronaut. Now isn’t that something?”

  “He was hardly Irish,” said Dale.

  “If he could play for the soccer team he was Irish,” the priest said firmly.

  Dale couldn’t help but smile at the man’s excitement. “That’s not really the point.”

  “That’s always the point.” He was back on the altar now, pottering around, adjusting the position of plates and candles and embroidery to suit his own baffling idiosyncrasies.

  “No,” said Dale, following to the edge of the marble steps. “The point is . . . I brought him home. It’s what he wanted.”

  The priest’s frantic motions ceased. His eyes drifted across the empty chapel and then back to Dale. “I didn’t know there was a body,” he said.

  “There wasn’t.”

  “Then—”

  Dale allowed himself sit down in the front pew. “Most of what was recovered was unidentifiable,” he said. “The temperatures, the impact. The undifferentiated remains were interned in Arlington.”

  “And those that were . . . differentiated?”

  Dale removed the small black canister from his jacket and stood it on the seat beside him. “Identified remains were returned to family,” he said. “But Rodriguez didn’t have family.”

  O�
��Grady looked at the small metal can. He very gently picked it up, surprised at its weight. “And this—”

  “The surviving remains of Commander Mike Rodriguez, USN. NASA Astronaut Group 19.”

  The priest blessed himself.

  “We flew off the Truman together in the war,” Dale said.

  O’Grady frowned.

  “That’s what you do in a war, Padre. But wanting to go into space, that was different. We go in peace and all that?”

  O’Grady was quiet for a long moment. “It occurs to me,” he said at last, “that there’s something I should show you.” Still holding the canister, he led Dale back into a dark corner of the church, through an old low door with a gothic arch.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.” The priest started on the tight spiral of the bell tower stairs and Dale trailed after him, his hand feeling the way along the undressed stone. It was dark and cold, the walls showing evidence of damp, and at the top was a cramped, shuttered room, the floor of which had been boarded out. There was no bell.

  “We replaced it,” O’Grady said, as if reading Dale’s mind. He patted a fat loudspeaker affixed with brackets to the wall. “Bullhorn,” he said, delighted with himself. “You’d never know the difference.”

  “Then what do you use this place for?”

  “Ah . . . ” O’Grady knelt by the far wall, beside a long bundle Dale had failed to notice. “I use it for this,” the priest said, unwrapping the canvass and displaying its contents to the American.

  “A telescope?”

  O’Grady grinned.

  “You have a telescope?”

  “Help me set it up.” He passed Dale the tripod and then the mount as he went about inspecting the reflector.

  Dale stood the tripod in the centre of the floor and began locking it into place.

  “A little higher,” the priest said. “Yes, there. Perfect.” He handed Dale the telescope itself. “Here,” he said. “You know how to do this?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Great.” He stood back and began to open up the wooden shutters.

  The bright night streamed in, and beneath the color of the Moon Dale could see the gray hills rolling off above the village. O’Grady caught him staring and took over assembly of the telescope.