I don’t remember what I said at that point. Some crack.
Stevie shook his head and pulled up his shirt. You think this is me. This, he said, running a finger down the bruise, is hull damage.
He grinned. The pilot, he said, is intact. He pointed at his eye. Behind there. Can you see me? Hey man, I’m waving at you.
“It must be hard to do this again,” I said. We were in her back yard, sitting on the same green wrought-iron patio furniture they’d always had.
“You mean, at my age.” She was breastfeeding William, holding him close with a blanket draped over her shoulder and covering her breast, but he was a big guy, and kept yanking off the blanket. I kept looking away.
“No! Well—”
“It’s all right. You know, I didn’t breastfeed Steven. Back then, formula was supposed to be better. You were a formula baby, too.” She glanced up at me. “I never would have planned on this. But it happened, and I wouldn’t trade him back.”
“Of course not.”
“Still, it’ll be good to get away.” Mr. Spero was going to a convention over the weekend, and she was taking William to her sister’s house in Cedar Falls. “Thank you for watching the house, by the way.”
“Not a problem. That’s what neighbors are for.”
The baby’s head lolled sideways, eyes half closed. He looked drunk. She dabbed the thin milk from the corner of his lips, and he smiled. Then she did something to her bra, and deftly buttoned her shirt. All with one hand.
“Do you still have any of Stevie’s movies?” I asked. She didn’t look up. “You know, the videos, or the film cans?”
She shook her head slightly, still not looking at me. “I don’t think so. I’m sure they’re gone.”
“Gone where?”
“We gave a lot of stuff away, after. Boxes and boxes.”
The car pulled up behind me, the engine loud against the side of the house. I turned around, putting a smile on my face.
Mr. Spero stepped out of the car, his suit coat over one arm. “Well look what the cat dragged in.” He said it lightly, a little chuckle behind it.
“Hello, Mr. Spero.”
“Claire told me you’d moved in. I couldn’t believe it.” He draped his jacket over the back of one of the patio chairs. His shoes were still shiny, his bright yellow tie still cinched, as if important clients might ring the bell at any moment. “Now where’s my boy?”
He took the child from Mrs. Spero and turned to me. “He’s a big one, isn’t he? What a monster!”
It was true. He looked like he’d be much bigger than Stevie, more solid.
“Careful, I just fed him,” Mrs. Spero said. “I need to go turn on the oven.” She disappeared into the house, and Mr. Spero jiggled the boy in his arms.
“So what brings you back to our little town, Timmy? It can’t be the job prospects.”
“I work over the internet,” I said. “My office can be anywhere.”
“The internet? I thought you guys all went out of business.” The baby started to fuss, and Mr. Spero sat down where Claire had been. “There we go, there we go.” He patted his back, and the baby twisted his head back and forth, knuckles crammed into a slobbering mouth.
“So why come back here?” Mr. Spero said. “I’d think that someone in your situation would want to be near family.”
“Situation?” I kept my face blank. I waited for him to glance at the crutches leaning against my chair, or the bulge under my shirt from the flange and colostomy bag. Just glance.
He stared at me over the top of the baby, and huffed. “Never mind. No one could ever tell you what to do. Or your dad, either.” The baby pushed up on his legs and grabbed one of his father’s ears, and Mr. Spero shook his head back and forth playfully.
“I like this town,” I lied. “And somebody has to come back. To watch over the neighborhood. Make sure it stays a nice place to raise kids.”
“So you sit in your room and type on your computer. That’s a hell of a job.”
“I analyze quality control data for a parts manufacturer.”
The baby grabbed an eyebrow, and Mr. Spero said “Ouch!” and pulled his face away. He held the baby’s hands, and the boy stood shakily. Mr. Spero bounced his legs, and the baby went up and down, grunting: hyuh-hyuh-hyuh.
“I try to explain catastrophic failure,” I said. “Like when a tire blows out, or an O-ring disintegrates on lift-off.”
“Really,” Mr. Spero said. The baby grinned madly. Mr. Spero chuckled and bounced him higher.
“Estimating catastrophe time is a different problem, statistically, than estimating gradual wear—you get a Weibull distribution rather than a normal curve. We do test-to-failure runs, and just try to grind a part into dust. Everything fails eventually. My job is to figure out why some things fall apart too soon. I sort through all the variables and find out which ones contributed to failure.”
He ignored me. William looked ecstatic.
“A lot of the time, it’s because of some flaw from early in the manufacturing process, like a hairline crack in the seal, say.”
The baby’s head dropped forward, and a mouthful of grey fluid dumped onto Mr. Spero’s shirt. William grinned, ready to play.
“Damn it! Claire! Claire!” He thrust the baby away from him, dangling it in the air. The child spit up again, spattering the floor, and started to howl.
Claire rushed out of the house, a towel already in her hand. “Were you throwing him around? You know what he’s like after—”
“Christ, Claire, can you just get him off me?”
She took the baby from him and Mr. Spero grabbed the towel from her. He dabbed at his chest. “I’m too fucking old for this,” he said.
I held up my arms. “Here, let me take him.”
Mr. Spero threw down the towel and stomped into the house, already unbuttoning his shirt.
She shook her head. “I need to clean him up,” she said. “Maybe you could come back after…”
“Naw, I’ve got to get going anyway,” I said. “And you’ve got to pack. Enjoy your trip. I’ll take care of things here.”
I said that he was my best friend. That’s a lie. Sophomore year, I stopped making night runs with him, I stopped helping with the movies. I barely talked to him at school. I’d gotten onto the soccer team, and I had a group of good friends, some of them seniors. I had a girlfriend. What the hell did I need Stevie for?
He never stopped pestering me. I remember when he stopped me in the hall to tell me he’d spent spring break building a full-size starfighter out of silver-painted plywood.
See? He flipped open his notebook to his storyboards. He showed me a cartoon of a stick figure climbing into the hatch of a starfighter. The ship was maybe three times taller than the pilot, and drawn in much more detail.
You built this?
It’s almost done, he said. He flipped pages. Now, he said, we switch from live-action to the models.
The panels showed the launch, then a far shot of the starfighter rising through the clouds, then a closer shot of the ship outlined against black space.
Look, he said. It’s all there. It’s a two-stage rocket.
God, he could be so pathetic. I don’t remember any bruises on him that day, though at some point I’d stopped looking. It was easier to stop worrying about Stevie in the winter. With our windows closed we couldn’t hear Mr. Spero shouting at him.
I took the book from him. Jagged pen strokes showed the starfighter exploding. What’s this? Lasers or something?
The NovaWeapon, he said. It hits his ship.
In the next panel, Rocket Boy ejects. The last picture showed him in close-up—the stick figure filled up most of the frame, anyway—floating in space.
He can’t eject into space, I said. He doesn’t have a space suit. He’d die in ten seconds.
We’ll make a suit, Stevie said.
I tossed the notebook back to him. Don’t be a fucking retard, I said.
Even in the dark, I could tell that ther
e was nothing left of Stevie’s old bedroom. The shelves crammed full of plastic models were gone. The paneling and wallpaper had been pulled down, the walls painted glossy white and trimmed in pastel blue. The bed was gone too, replaced by a crib. The bed frame had been blond wood, with panels in the headboard where Stevie kept his paperbacks, videotapes, Super-8 cassettes, and cans of developed film. Had they really given everything away?
I toured the rest of the house in the dark, not wanting to turn on the lights and alert the neighbors. The basement had been divided into rooms and partially finished, but the other rooms looked pretty much as I remembered. The main difference was that every trace of Stevie, except for a few pictures, had been removed.
It took me most of Friday night and part of Saturday to install the cameras and mikes and routers. I needed spots that were high up, with wide angles. The finished rooms in the basement were easy, because the drop ceiling tiles could be pushed out of the way. The upstairs rooms were harder. These ranches didn’t have much of an attic, just crawl spaces above the house and garage that you accessed through little square holes. The work was draining: hours balanced on the beams trying not to put a leg through the insulation and plaster. I was used to working one-legged, but after a half hour I was sweating and trembling from exertion, and itching like mad from the insulation. I had to take a lot of breaks.
I ran power from the light fixtures, drilled down through the plaster ceiling, and popped the little fish-eyes into them. Each camera was about as big as a fifty-cent piece, and most of that was above the ceiling. The lenses themselves were smaller than a dime. I wired the circuit boards on the backs of the cameras to the digital switcher, which was broadcasting at 2.4 gigahertz. I put the antenna next to the wall facing my house. According to the specs I didn’t need the antenna—I should have been able to pick up the cam signals from 700 feet away. But if there’s anything my day job has taught me, it’s that spec-writers lie.
Only three cameras came on without a hitch. The others had cabling problems of one type or another, and I had to spend another two hours crawling around in the attic. Last, I had to vacuum all the plaster that had dropped onto the floors. The house would be cleaner than they’d left it.
By Saturday night I had everything working. I could sit at my desk and tab through most of the rooms in the house from my PC.
I went in again Sunday morning, and this time I actually watered the plants. Then I went room by room and searched every closet, trunk, and suitcase, looking for anything of Stevie’s. I spent a lot of time in the storage room, going through Rubbermaid containers filled with Christmas decorations, photo albums, and old clothes. Under the basement workbench, hidden behind a toolbox, I found two new Jim Beam bottles, one empty, the other down to a couple brown inches, with a plastic cup over the neck. I put them back exactly as I’d found them.
Except for one box of grade school papers, there was nothing of Stevie’s in the house.
It wasn’t until nearly noon that I remembered the attic space above the garage. I had no idea when the Spero’s were coming back. But I had to check it out.
I left my crutches on the floor of the garage and hauled and hopped my way up the stepladder to the square hole. I pushed aside the lid and groped above my head until I found the string for the light.
The junk was half-familiar, stuff that could have come from my own family. A box for a plastic Christmas tree, a rotary fan, a set of kitchen chairs I remembered, taped together boxes with pictures of toaster ovens and car stereos and power tools. I stumped deeper into darkness, toward a stack of cardboard boxes. The seams were thickly taped.
I used my keys to poke and saw through the tape. The first box I opened contained a metal box, like a typewriter case. “Ames H.S. Library” was stenciled on the side. I flipped the metal clasps and pulled off the top.
It was the Super-8 film projector. There was even a spool of film on the arm.
I knew it. I knew they hadn’t thrown it away.
I worked my way through the other boxes, unfolding the cardboard flaps and hauling things into the light. It was all there: the notebooks, the videotapes, the film cans. Even the models—two boxes filled with nothing but plastic spaceships and props.
I’ll pay you, he said.
He was standing under my window, in broad daylight. He wore black cargo pants, shiny black combat boots. He even had on dark eye shadow. He looked like a dork.
Why don’t you come to the front door like everybody else, I said to him. And then: How much?
Ten bucks. It’s the last scene. The last time I’ll ever ask you. All you have to do is hold the camera.
I’m not going to sneak out of my window for ten bucks.
Twenty bucks. Come on, you know you have to see this.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and I didn’t have anything else to do. I went out through the back door, though I made sure nobody saw me.
First, give me the twenty, I said.
He looked annoyed. You’re going to take the money?
I held out my hand. I didn’t want it—I just wanted to see if he had it. And if he’d really pay me.
He handed me two tens, and I stuffed them in my pocket. All right, I said. You’ve hired a camera man.
My house became a studio. The bedroom office was already wired to receive the video broadcasts from my cameras. In the living room I moved the couch to face the large blank wall, and set up the projector on the end table. I pushed the TV and VCR into the corner, so I could watch the videos without leaving the couch. I spent my nights moving between the two rooms, watching whatever I was in the mood for.
That first Sunday, before the Spero’s had even returned, I watched the first tape. Stevie had numbered the videotapes and film cans, so I was able to place them in order. Chapter One of the NovaWeapon Chronicles featured a twelve-year-old Stevie and Timmy, and interminable scenes of plastic models being jerked along on fishing line.
I expected it to be worse than I remembered. But it was worse even than that.
I started watching with the idea that I would capture the interesting or well-done bits and edit them into something coherent. But the videos were almost unwatchable. Often the screen was so dark I couldn’t tell what was happening, and most of the time I couldn’t remember what we’d intended. I was the only person on the planet who could possibly appreciate the NovaWeapon Chronicles, and I was fast-forwarding through hours of it.
The stream of images from next door, however, never stopped flowing, and those never bored me. Even when I was working, I kept a window open on my desktop that I could maximize whenever something caught my eye: Mrs. Spero mopping the kitchen, barefoot. Mr. Spero slipping into the basement and back in less than a minute, like a magic trick. I’d never been that interested in webcams, or reality shows, but this was riveting.
I could follow them from room to room, with a few exceptions. I hadn’t put cameras outside, or in the garage. And I hadn’t put any in the master bedroom or bathroom. I didn’t want to be able to see the Spero’s naked, or having sex, because I knew I’d watch. Still, it was a small house. I’d like to say that I shut down the window the first time I saw Mrs. Spero walk from the bathroom to the bedroom with a towel around her waist. I never even reached for the mouse.
I found the televised William even more fascinating than the audio-only version. When he slept, he abandoned himself totally: jaw slack, arms thrown to the side. When he cried, he threw his entire body into it. I admired his focus. Sometimes when he was crawling toward a certain toy, or reaching toward the airplanes that dangled above his bed, I could see him thinking.
I was surprised that when he cried in the middle of the night, it was mostly Mr. Spero who got up to hold him. He picked up William without a word, and walked around the house like a sleepwalker, letting the boy cry himself out. After work, he threw William around like he had on the patio that day. He rarely changed diapers or bathed the child, but he did get on the floor and play with him.
Had
he been like this with Stevie, at first? Before Stevie crossed him for the first time, at the wrong time? Perhaps he liked his children better when they were small and helpless and compliant.
I waited for that moment when Mr. or Mrs. Spero would look up at the ceiling, squint at the discolored plaster, and go get the stepladder. But no one looked at the ceilings except William. Sometimes he’d be on his back, staring straight up at the camera, and I’d pretend that he knew. That some baby instinct told him I was up there, looking down on him. I’d wave at the screen. Hiya, Will. What are you thinking about, down there?
We walked out to the quarry, Stevie lugging the camera and a gym bag. The starfighter was set up on the field on the other side of the pit. It was twenty-two feet tall, sitting nose up like the shuttle before launch. The body was primer gray, with the red and black Counter-Revolutionary StarForce logos on each stubby wing. The foil rims around the thrusters glinted like hammered metal.
Holy cow, I said. You really did it.
It was only when we moved around the side that I could see that the back was unfinished. The cylindrical body was hollow, the two ends held together with crosshatched strips of unpainted wood.
The back doesn’t matter, he said. We’ll only film it from the front.
On the grass behind the ship were paint cans and stacks of cloth and empty milk jugs. One huge cardboard box overflowed with crumpled brown plastic containers. Stevie had been out here a lot.
I helped him lift his dad’s extension ladder out of the grass, and we propped it up against the side of the ship. The structure shuddered and swayed.
I climbed up, excited despite myself. Stevie had managed to make a curved clear hatch out of two sheets of Plexiglas. It fastened to a wooden crossbar with big hinges, so you could swing it open and closed. There was a little platform in there, with a metal folding chair on its back, so Stevie could sit with his face to the sky. The flight stick was a black broom handle, the instrument panel a slab of wood with painted-on controls labeled in the alien alphabet we’d made up in eighth grade.
The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy Page 2