“Screw ’em,” Isham Latimer said. “Look up, quick.”
Just as we did, the SRBs broke away.
I’d seen it many times, on film or on TV, much more clearly through very good telephoto lenses. No matter: the beauty of it struck me dumb.
The boosters pinwheeled away; the Shuttle kept climbing.
After a while my neck hurt, and there was no longer anything much to see, so I looked down and divided my attention between the reference book I had fetched along and the loudspeakers, translating their cryptic acronyms and following the flight in my imagination, as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.
Some indeterminate time later, I was rudely yanked back to the lower world by the unmistakable smell of an approaching civil servant. Sure enough: a twenty-something android with NASA patches on his shoulders. He looked harassed. Somehow his bureaucratic intuition told him I was the closest thing to a leader he was going to find in this group. He approached me, powered down, opened his oral cavity, and played the prerecorded tape for this situation.
“Youpeoplewillhavetocleartheareanow.”
I had been expecting him to say something stupid, but this seemed excessive. “I beg your pardon,” I said politely, “but are you on drugs?”
Confused, he replayed his tape, with an addition of his own that I took as a cry for help. “Youpeoplewillhavetocleartheareanowplease.”
I pointed to the nearest of the loudspeaker towers. “It’s almost four minutes to MECO,” I explained. The term baffled him; I paraphrased. “This launch is not over yet. We can’t possibly leave now.”
Treating him like a rational being was poor tactics; the word “can’t” triggered him to go to DefCon Two. He lowered his brows the prescribed amount, swelled his shoulders, made his jaw muscles squirm, and said, “SirI’mafraidI’mgoingtohavetohavethisareacl—”
“Do you know who you’re talking to, son?” Omar’s deep voice rumbled from off to my left.
It’s one of the interrupt codes. The kid turned toward him and waited for a password to be entered.
“That,” Omar said, pointing solemnly at me, “is Neil Armstrong.”
To my mild surprise, the kid recognized the name. His apprenticeship for that job must have been giving tour spiels at the visitors’ center. The password was valid; he had to step back down to DefCon Three.
“Sorry, Mr. Armstrong,” he said, relaxing his shoulders and jaw muscles.
He’d omitted my rank, but I let it pass. He’d also forgotten Armstrong never wore a beard, long hair, or glasses. “That’s all right, son. Now fuck off, okay?”
His eyebrows remained lowered. “Uh…”
I sighed. “What is it, mister?”
“Well, sir…” He gestured vaguely toward the souvenir stands and potties, where a few other androids were staring at us in bafflement. “We all been out here all morning. You know, the crew. Is it okay if we—”
At last I understood. We were all at a holy event. He and his mates were at work. And wanted to split. “Son,” I said patiently, “I don’t care what you do as long as you leave us alone until MECO. That’s when they turn off the big motor in the sky-car up there.”
“I mean, we’re not supposed to remove the portable sanitation units until everybody’s—”
“I authorize you to leave,” I told him. “If any of us shits after you go, I promise we’ll cover it up, okay?” I turned away, triggering his dismissal protocols. He thought about saluting, couldn’t decide, settled for a sketch of one, and buggered off.
We went back to monitoring the flight. When they finally announced MECO, just under nine minutes after takeoff, we all heaved a sigh of relief, gave each other high fives, turned around—and found absolutely no visible sign of life but our own vehicles, waiting in the parking lot below. Not even dust clouds settling in the distance. We didn’t see another human being until we reached the visitors’ center. There were dozens of them there, buying expensive souvenirs to commemorate an event most of them had neglected to finish observing.
I’ll never understand people. Even being one doesn’t seem to help.
CHAPTER NINE
Bus Turd Flush
“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
—J. Danforth Quayle’s version of the United Negro College Fund motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
PERHAPS YOU’LL THINK
it paradoxical that our group, the space buffs, left the visitors’ center and were back out on the highway well before the rest of the tourists.
Well, of course we wandered through the Garden of Spacecraft, just like everybody else—real spaceships, who wouldn’t?—but we didn’t have to keep stopping to read the plaques, and puzzling over the big words: we knew what we were looking at. We’d been marveling at those utensils all our lives. We spent some time in the gift shop like the other tourists, too—but a surprising portion of what was for sale there came down to packaged information, which we already knew or had in our libraries. A few souvenirs and we were done. There was a tour of the Kennedy Space Center complex itself we could have taken, that sounded tempting as hell. A Titan booster, a full-scale LEM mockup, a Shuttle simulator—riches!
Nonetheless, at a little after noon we held an impromptu informal conference outside the gift shop and unanimously agreed to hit the road.
Part of it, I guess, was a touch of something that had hit us at Disney World as well. Overload. Do something you really enjoy long enough, and your circuits fry a little. I’ve been fighting the impulse to say it for three sentences now, but there’s no way around it: we were all a little…uh…spaced out.
Another part of it may have been that seeing Michael L. Coats, John E. Blaha, James P. Bagian, James F. Buchli, and Robert C. Springer get into a big metal can and head off on a journey of two million miles reminded us all subconsciously that our own metal cans were still a long way from MECO. The weather forecast for tomorrow was ideal, sunny, no clouds: it would be splendid to begin that last and most glorious leg of our trip, the run down the Keys, early tomorrow morning, and reach Key West in midday. But to do that, we had to camp somewhere well below Miami that night, ideally at least as far as Key Largo. And to accomplish that, we had to leave right away.
Oh, if we had put the hammer down and had good luck with traffic we could probably have done it handily—but we wanted to leave a cushion. There was still one more pilgrimage to make, one more holy shrine we all wanted to be absolutely sure we’d have time to visit. Even though we weren’t absolutely sure it was there.
But it was.
We reached Fort Lauderdale a little after 4:00, and in its spaghetti-tangle of traffic we got separated briefly. Ever try to get two dozen fully loaded buses and a mess of smaller vehicles all through the same green light in rush hour?
By the time I found the place, there were only two other buses still with me: Long-Drink, and the Quigleys. Twenty yards or so after I turned in off the road, we had to stop at a gate, overhung with palm fronds. A muscle-bound beachboy stuck his head out of the booth. “Who are you here to see, sir?”
“We just want to look around a little,” I told him.
He looked me over, looked my bus over, and I could see him reach the conclusion that we did not belong here.
So could Erin. By the time his gaze got back to my window, she had unstrapped herself from her seat, climbed onto my lap, and stuck her head out past me. “We’ll just be here a little while, sir,” she said, “and I promise we won’t hurt anything. It’s real important to my dad and his friends; they’ve been talking about it for miles.”
The attendant blinked up at her. “I,” he began, and was distracted by blaring horns. Long-Drink and Joe Quigley had both pulled into the driveway behind me, and Joe’s bus had half its ass sticking out onto the road, blocking rush-hour traffic. The Drink couldn’t even pull up alongsi
de me on the left to make more room for Joe, because the outgoing lane was studded with those damned Severe Tire Damage teeth intended to keep out terrorists. I could see the beachboy realizing that at least one of those angry drivers out there on the street was liable to fire up his cell phone and start beefing to management soon. And there was no way for me to back out: even if he denied me entry, I’d have to drive through the gate, turn around, and drive out the exit—followed by two more buses—then take forever to reenter the traffic stream and unblock his driveway. Simpler to just let us in. He brought his agonized gaze back to me. “Low profile?” he pleaded.
“Subterranean,” I promised him. More horns outside.
He gave me a blank pink Visitor’s Parking Slip. “That’ll be five dollars.”
“Mom?” Erin said. Zoey handed her a bunch of bills from the glove compartment, and Erin reached past me out the window and offered them to the attendant. To reach, he had to leave his booth; he triggered the gate-lift as he did so, to save time and get us off the road as quickly as possible. He came to my window, made a long stretch, took the cash from her little hand, started to unfold it, and froze.
“That should cover all of us,” Erin said.
“But…” He stopped and recounted the money. “But this is…” He recounted it again. It kept coming out a hundred and fifty bucks.
“We’ll be as unobtrusive as possible,” I assured him, slipping the bus into gear. “You’ll hardly know we’re here.”
Too late, he realized he’d been had. He began to say something, but by then we were in motion and the engine drowned him out. “Tell everybody to come straight on through, Drink,” Zoey was saying into the CB mike. “We already paid the parking fee.” In my sideview mirror I saw the kid think about blocking Long-Drink’s way, and wisely decide against it. (By that point in the trip, Drink’s brake shoes were kind of down to brake sandals. Flip-flops.)
There were a lot of places to park. Pocket after pocket of parking spaces, with winding little speed-bumped roads interconnecting them. There was even one mammoth section that looked large enough and empty enough to accommodate all of us—right by the water, which settled it. I drove all the way down to the far end and parked. As Zoey and Erin and I got out, Long-Drink and Joe pulled in on either side of us and disembarked as well. We stood there together a moment in silence, both eager and unwilling to proceed.
“This is it,” Long-Drink said, an entirely unaccustomed reverence in his voice. “This is the place.”
“It’s really here,” Joe’s wife Arethusa said.
“The marina is, anyway,” Joe conceded skeptically.
We were standing near the corner of an enormous L-shaped dock, at which were moored a great number of very expensive-looking shiny boats of every imaginable type and size. The sun was low in the sky, and somehow the light was magical, gave everything crisp edges. Colors seemed slightly more vivid, the way they sometimes look through binoculars.
“Do you suppose—” Zoey began.
“I’m almost afraid to find out,” Long-Drink whispered.
“Look!” Joe commanded, and pointed.
We all did—and an electric thrill went through us. “Oh, my God,” Zoey said.
There was a sign at the corner. The section of dock that directly abutted the parking lot was labeled “E.” The part that stuck out into the water and had boats moored on either side of it was labeled “F.”
We began to walk out onto that section, and then to walk very fast, and then I scooped Erin up and we trotted, and before we even had time to reach outright running, we were there. It was there. The place we’d all spent countless happy hours in, and had never laid eyes on before.
Not a lot to see, really. A parking space for a boat, like hundreds of others here. An empty one, at that: no vessel was moored there now. But there was something to see. Someone had placed a ceremonial brass plaque there on the dock, just in front of one of the shoulder-high wooden pilings, bolted onto a white concrete plinth that came up to my chest. We stood around like pilgrims and read it silently together.
The plaque read:
SLIP F-18
BAHIA MAR MARINA
DEDICATED TO THE “BUSTED FLUSH”
HOME OF TRAVIS McGEE
FICTIONAL HERO AND SALVAGE CONSULTANT
CREATED BY JOHN D. MACDONALD AUTHOR
1916–1986
DESIGNATED A LITERARY LANDMARK
FEBRUARY 21, 1987
For the second time that day, I found myself grinning and leaking tears at the same time.
Sometime later, Zoey broke the silence with a happy sigh. “Isn’t that nice?” she said.
“Maybe there is some justice in the world,” Joe said.
“I wonder who owns this slip now,” Long-Drink said.
“Somebody cool,” Erin said, “or he wouldn’t have let them put that on his doorstep.”
“Where do you suppose he is?” Joe asked.
“On his way down to the Keys with a houseboat full of congenial companions, I hope,” I said.
A stranger came along, and the dock was narrow enough that we had to make room for him to pass. Everyone else kept their eyes on the plaque or the slip, but I was so profoundly happy I wanted to share it with the world, like a new acidhead, and caught his eye. A stocky, extremely hairy man in shorts and an eye-searing Hawaiian shirt, carrying a newspaper under his arm. He saw me looking at him, saw my maniacal grin, and smiled back pleasantly at once. I gestured at the slip behind me. “It’s empty,” I heard myself say.
He nodded. “It is always empty. It will never be rented again. His friends no longer own this marina, but they made that an iron-clad condition of sale, in perpetuity.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.” And he passed on.
“Did you hear that, guys?” I asked my friends.
“What, hon?” Zoey asked absently.
“This slip will never be rented out again. It’s permanently reserved for Travis. Isn’t that great?”
“Really?” Arethusa said.
“Yeah. That guy just—oh…my…God.”
“What is it, Jake?”
My heart was hammering. It couldn’t be. It just was not possible. “I—he—just a minute.” I spun on my heel and raised my voice. “Excuse me?”
The stranger kept walking away.
“Sir? Excuse me?”
He was almost out of earshot now.
“Ludweg?” I bellowed desperately.
He stopped in his tracks, turned around, and looked at me. At all of us. Slowly, reluctantly, he came a few steps back toward us, until he was close enough to talk without shouting.
“You are an unusually astute reader,” he said to me.
I nodded.
“Even the most devoted fans hardly ever seem to know the first name, for some reason.”
I’d noticed that myself, and always wondered why. It’s right there on the page in black and white. “Then…you’re really—”
He grinned. “Heavens, that’s not my real name. John would never have done that to me. But yes, I am who you think I am.”
I lost my voice.
Long-Drink spoke up behind me. “It’s an honor to meet you, Professor. How’s the Thorstein Veblen holding up?”
“Reasonably well,” he said. “Would you good people care to join me for a drink there?”
We all turned and looked at each other. I saw the same expression on every face but Erin’s. We wanted to so bad we could taste it. And we knew we couldn’t. Behind him, we could already see more buses pulling into slots out in the parking lot—half a dozen of them, with a lot more to come.
“Thanks,” I said, “but there’s over a hundred of us altogether.”
“Really?” he said. “Well, another time, perhaps.”
“I can’t tell you how much I hope so,” I said.
He nodded politely, turned, and started to go.
I felt a sudden telepathic commun
ication with my companions. “Wait!” I called.
He turned again.
“Is Travis…” I wanted to say, alive? “…all right?”
He smiled. “Always,” he said, and went on his way. As he reached the end of the dock and turned left he went by Fast Eddie, the Lucky Duck, and a few others. None of them gave him a second glance.
I turned to Zoey, Erin, Long-Drink, and the Quigleys, and we all exchanged a look in which we agreed that none of us was going to say a word about this to the others. Not today, anyway.
Meyer had a right to his privacy.
Like I said, it was kind of a narrow dock. And it did, after all, constitute the sidewalk to the homes of a whole lot of rich people. Rich people do not like to look out their porthole and see a hundred fishbelly-pale strangers on their sidewalk, gawking. I was waiting at the end of the dock by the parking lot for Security when they arrived. (Sure, organizing things and sending folks out there in small groups, ten or so at a time, might have been smart. But possible it wasn’t, so I never gave it a thought.)
They’d tried to make it look as much as possible like a real police car, but there’s only so much you can do along those lines with a Jeep. It looked like what clown cops would drive in the circus. They’d done a better job of making themselves look like real cops. Like De Niro, they’d been willing to put on weight for the part. The one on my side of the Jeep ignored me for a moment, sizing up the crowd out there on the dock, then aimed his opaque sunglasses up at me.
“Y’all haul ass, nah,” he said. His voice sounded like warm shit being stirred with a wooden spoon.
“We’re here to see the literary landmark,” I saw myself saying to him in those twin reflective lenses.
He considered the remark for a moment, found nothing there for him. “Ah said, shag ass out o’ here.”
From somewhere down around my knees, Erin spoke up. “Officer, we came a long way to see that place. It’s special to us. We’re not hurting anything. We won’t even leave cigarette butts or flashbulbs or gum wrappers or anything. I promise.”
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