by John Shirley
“You suck. She’s in the garage. Again.”
“You suck. We could watch a video or a DVD.”
“You suck. DVD player’s broken. VCR’s broken, too.”
“Shit.” She felt so bound up, like a spring about to snap.
She thought of getting into Dad’s booze again. But she remembered all that puking, after the last time, and having to pretend she’d had stomach flu. So instead she said, “At least look at my computer. I’ll stand here and whine if you don’t. Whine. Whine. Whine. Whi-i-ine.”
“Fuck!” He threw the Game Boy down so it bounced on the bed. He continued to sprawl there a moment, glaring at nothing. Then he lurched up and went growling to her room, half tripping over a bowling ball.
She followed him to her room. He kicked her backpack out of the way and went over to her IKEA desk, looked at her computer, scowled, and hit reset. It didn’t.
“Huh,” he said.
He leaned over the desk and looked at the back of the computer.
“Well, fuck,” he said. “No wonder.”
He pulled the monitor toward him and to one side, which in turn pushed the keyboard so it fell off the desk to dangle there by its cord. He turned the computer’s hard drive box around.
“Watch out! You’re wrecking my keyboard.”
“Shut up if you want me to fix your—oh fuck, it’s—well, look— did you try to install some hardware and leave it half-done or something?”
“What? No.”
“Look at this.”
She looked into the back of the computer. Wires were sticking out, torn ends; there was no motherboard. There was no RAM.
He snorted and shook his head. “Somebody reamed out your computer, Adair. For real.”
She started to cry.
Cal nodded. He understood: Her computer was totaled.
Oh, no. Her computer.
When Waylon got home, his mom was asleep on the couch again. She was dressed for work, except for being shoeless.
He tossed his heavy backpack on the floor near her head, hoping the shake of it would wake her.
It did. “Hi, baby,” she said, opening her eyes halfway and stretching.
She sat up and shook her long dyed platinum hair out of her eyes.
“Had trouble sleeping last night,” she said. “I almost fell asleep at my desk at work this morning.”
She didn’t smell like liquor, and he didn’t see any bottles around. She was supposed to be staying sober.
But she could have pills. She was just as likely to take those as she was to suck up the wine coolers. And the way she kept smacking her lips like her mouth was so dry, that was a pill thing.
She caught him looking at her as if he was wondering, and she frowned. She didn’t like it when he acted like the parent.
Then you shouldn’t make me do it, he thought.
He went into his bedroom and turned on his computer and the classified frequency scanner he’d worked up. He got that certain frequency with no problem and listened to it for a few minutes. Was it all code? Not exactly.
He switched it off.
He felt too jangled right now, with his mom being the way she was today, to really think about it. He just wanted to eat something and see Adair and maybe . . .
He went into the living room. Mom was still lying on the couch, staring moodily at the ceiling. He asked, “There anything to eat?”
“Um, not really. I’ll send out for pizza, I guess. We should really conserve money though. I got laid off today.”
His heart sank. It wasn’t just the money worries that would come. It was also that he knew that without a job she’d fall apart and slip into that swampy place she lived in sometimes. When she was unemployed she tended to smoke a whole lot of cigarettes and watch a lot of daytime TV, instead of looking for work. Then she’d get depressed because she didn’t have any work. Which made her smoke cigarettes and watch daytime TV and then she’d start the heavy drinking again. It’d been like this before.
He thought about calling his dad. But he couldn’t quite imagine doing that. What would he say? Send more money?
What am I, he thought, a family court judge? Fuck that.
But the idea lingered, as he went to the phone. It wasn’t about money.
He knew his mom had moved out here against his dad’s wishes. Dad could even do some shit in court to get them back to New York State. But he’d heard Dad tell a lawyer on the phone that he didn’t want to take Mom to court because “the boy would be caught in between.” Sometimes he wondered what his mom told his dad in private, and if there was a reason for his dad not being in touch.
He stood over the portable phone—transparent purple plastic— and gazed down at it. But he didn’t call his dad. He hit 3 on the speed dial for a different phone number.
“Quiebra Quick Pizza,” said a bored teenage voice.
“Yeah, a double cheese pizza.” He gave the name and address and added, “That you, dude? It’s Waylon.”
“Waylon, oh, yeah, what’s up, dude.” It was Russell, whom Waylon had met a few days before. Introduced by Mason.
Waylon said, a little softly, “So, dude, you know about that extra spicy you mentioned? The other day?”
“Yeah.”
“Some of that, too. Like, one packet.”
“I gotcha.”
They hung up. His mom called from the bathroom, “You ordered extra spice on it? You know I don’t like spicy stuff.”
“That’s on the side, Mom.”
Since it was some pretty strong marijuana, he thought, it should really be on the side. He had twenty bucks stashed away, he’d slip Russell for the dope along with the money his mom gave him for the pizza.
He’d been trying not to start smoking pot again. He couldn’t get any homework done when he smoked, and it made him kind of paranoid. If Mason was any evidence, it made you forgetful and stuck in a rut. But on the other hand, he just felt like getting stoned.
He went to the window, looked out in the gathering darkness toward Rattlesnake Canyon. Had he been paranoid that night? He hadn’t been smoking. And Adair had seen some shit, too. Worse than him. Toxic gas?
Bullshit. Major Tightass was lying about that—maybe about a lot of stuff. But who knew what exactly?
If he could find out, maybe he could get some kind of deal for an exclusive story or something with the National Enquirer or Fox TV. Help him and Mom get out of the hole they were going to slide into now that Mom was laid off. Maybe he’d go on-line and ask again if anybody else had seen anything weird in Quiebra.
But he didn’t want to say too much to anyone, not yet. He wanted to get a line on what had happened so he could be the one who got paid for it.
He imagined himself talking gravely on television about his experiences. I knew something was up because of the helicopters and the lack of reporters there and stu f like that. You could just feel it in the air. I knew I had to find out the truth.
He smiled. That would be so cool, to nail those liars on national TV.
Hadn’t Adair said her aunt Lacey was some kind of reporter? Maybe he could set up something through her. Some kind of deal so she didn’t steal the story.
Mom was washing her face in the bathroom, putting on that moisturizer shit that women use. She was saying something about how she was so sick of being a paralegal, she was really kind of glad they’d laid her off. She wanted to do something else. She even went by the bank in Quiebra to apply there, but it had got robbed bigtime and it was all confusion in there. There was some kind of internal investigation and the bank was closed till they finished the investigation into some kind of inside job thing, but then banks don’t pay very well anyway.
“I’ll probably end up being a paralegal again. But then again . . .”
She was just nattering on the way she did when she felt guilty about something.
Maybe she was . . . was seeing someone. There was the manager of the apartment building—seemed like the dude was interested in
her. But it was just too gross to think of that big fat bald doofus handling his mom.
Suddenly he felt a leaden heaviness in his chest and arms. Like he wanted to just lie down on the couch and go to sleep himself.
But he wouldn’t be able to sleep. So he chose his other refuge. The computer.
They’d take half an hour getting the pizza here. So he went to his room, went on-line to see who was on from his buddy list. Maybe Adair was on.
Yeah, there she was, probably instant-messaging with people from school. She shot him an IM, telling him something about her computer getting wrecked.
WAILIN2003: Your computer? Fuck! What are you using?
ADAIRFORCE3: My brother’s old laptop . . . it’s really slow and hard to type on . . . it sux bigtime . . . not having a computer is the ass totally the ass. I have to hide this one my parents are being weird pretending they didn’t wreck my other I feel like I’m going crazy without my computer I had all this art on it and I can’t work on it cant even do half my homework its just the suckass shit . . .
And then she was telling him about that old Garraty dude he’d helped with the wheelchair, climbing the roof.
ADAIRFORCE3 : They were all of a sudden like Chinese acrobats or something, these geezers—
He couldn’t credit that. She must be making a wack weirdass joke, he supposed, playing with his head. He typed a response.
WAILIN2003: Whatever, but checkitout Morgenthal says nobody broke into his shop or stole nothing now. He’s all, “Stolen?, hello nothing was stolen.” It was a misunderstanding and I’m all, whatever dude.
ADAIRFORCE3: You didn’t believe what I said about the Garratys, did you. You suck. G2G. Dinner now.
Then she was gone.
Had he pissed her off again somehow? It seemed like he had before, too—that night they’d gone out to the crash site, too. Pissed her off, some way.
He figured he’d go see Adair after he scored. It felt good, being around her, even when she got irritable for no reason he could make out.
He wondered if Adair smoked pot. If she didn’t, he wouldn’t offer her any. He didn’t want to get her started.
He’d been to enough AA meetings with his mother—and AA had almost as many dopeheads as alcoholics now—to feel weird about smoking dope. You couldn’t feel like it was normal after you went to those meetings, even if you still felt like doing it. Even just pot. Too many people had problems with “just pot.”
But sometimes you had to find a way to change how you felt.
It was dawning on him, more and more, that he felt like shit. Just like total fucking shit.
December 8, late afternoon
Bert was a little disappointed when it turned out Lacey had come over with an agenda besides seeing him.
“Come on, Bert, I want to show you something,” she said, standing in his front door. “You’ll have to drive.”
It was a clear but mildly cold and windy day. Small clouds scudded with almost desperate haste; dead leaves spun across the windshield.
He followed her directions, drove to a street he had passed many times, off Quiebra Valley Road: 1970s tract homes overgrown with trees, altered with renovation, most with a boat on a trailer or an RV.
“There, pull up over there,” Lacey said. He pulled up and she pointed. “See that? Anything strange about him?”
“It’s kind of late in the day for a postman—but some routes are like that,” Bert answered. “He has a beard and he’s wearing shorts even though it’s December—but really he’s an ordinary postman, for the Bay Area. What about him?”
“He has two bags. One is his regular post office bag, and one is a canvas bag on his other shoulder. He’s taking mail from one bag and something else from the other bag and putting them in the mailboxes. The something else is a four-by-seven padded brown envelope, each with a lump in it. One for each house, all the envelopes identical. There—a man is coming out, ignoring his own mail, and taking the little padded envelope.”
Bert tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Well, so? It’s some promotional thing, and he had so many to deliver he organized them into a separate bag. And people are curious about what it is, a free sample or something.”
“I’ve seen several people ignore their mail and go for the little bag. And I waited. And they never came back out to look at the other stuff.”
“Huh. All I got at my place was a circular for a pizza parlor in El Sobrante.”
She watched the postman, as he went from one house to the next. “I’ve been driving around, checking this out for two days. It’s certain neighborhoods more than others. Especially in the north end of town. But it’s spreading from one neighborhood to another.”
Bert felt uncomfortably warm; it was blustery outside, but the car windows were shut and the sun was low to the horizon, glaring through the windshield. He rolled a window down and said, “Now you make me want to see one of these packets.”
She cleared her throat. “Well, it’s funny you should say that. I stole six of them from houses where the people weren’t home.”
He looked at her and had to laugh. “You stole the U.S. mail? Can you say ‘federal offense,’ Lacey?”
She was digging in a big handbag. “Yes, well, I don’t think it is the U.S. mail, Bert. Here.”
She handed him three identical padded brown envelopes. Each envelope had a metered postmark. There was no return address, though the law required one now, and the packages were addressed to 333, 444, 555, and so on, all on Candle Street.
“There is no Candle Street,” Lacey said. “I’ve checked. And those envelopes came from adjacent houses—and the numbers didn’t match the houses. And look at the addressee names. ‘Gable, Cable, Able, Sable’ and so on. And those street numbers—”
“It’s just . . . nonsense. Like a prop.”
“Exactly. Like camouflage. And not very good camouflage. But then it didn’t have to be.”
He tore open one of the envelopes. Inside was a little mechanism about as big as a walnut: a computer chip affixed to a hemispherical, silver device he didn’t recognize. He tore open another envelope. The same device. No note, no letter.
“And what do you think this thing is?” he asked.
“I have no damn clue, Bert. But look close at it. No manufacturer’s hallmark, no numbers on it, and it looks sort of handmade, doesn’t it?”
“Sort of. Jesus! You don’t think it could be a small bomb?”
He was a heartbeat from throwing it out of the car window, when she said, “I took one out to the beach and tried to get it to explode. I tossed rocks on them, and I tossed a couple in a fire. Nothing.”
“What? Lacey! Holy shit, you might’ve blown your head off!”
“Well, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a bomb. And I stayed back as much as possible.”
“Look, let’s do the simple thing: Let’s go ask the postal inspector.”
She sighed. “You know, I started to do that. I went to the post office. I asked to see the postal inspector. They gave me a strange look. They sent me to the inspector’s office. The inspector was a perfectly ordinary man, behaving in a perfectly ordinary way.” She looked at Bert very seriously. “And looking at him, I felt a terror . . . like I’ve never felt before. It was like something inside me was warning me, Don’t say anything to him about this. So, I didn’t. I said I’d made a mistake and I left.”
She looked at a leaf blowing across the hood. “You think I’m . . .”
He looked at the envelope. He looked at the postman. He looked at the little mechanism in his palm. “No. I don’t think you are . . . imagining things. I may ask the inspector myself, though.”
“You know what,” she said suddenly. “There’s a whole syndrome of unusual numbers of people in this town asking for psychiatric help—thinking they’re imagining things. Just over the last week or two. I met a doctor at the library. I asked him about some of the things that Adair told me she saw.”
“Wait, a doctor in the
library? How’d you know he was a doctor?”
She was a little embarrassed. “Well, he was sort of hitting on me, and it came out in the conversation.”
“I thought so. And you had a nice long conversation with him?” He was teasing her—mostly.
She looked at him with feigned innocence. “You don’t want me to have long conversations with guys who are hitting on me? Why not, Bert?”
“Oh, go on with your story.”
“Okay. He said doctors all over town are hearing from people who think they’re suffering from some kind of paranoia. I said I’d go to the hospital and ask—and he suggested I not do that. He wouldn’t say why. He said he himself was beginning to mistrust people at the hospital. And then he got real embarrassed, and he said, ‘Listen to me—I sound paranoid myself.’ ”
Bert watched the postman, coming up the street. Coming nearer. Another house. Then nearer yet. “I should just . . . go over and ask him. He must know. I should just . . .”
“So, why don’t you?”
He looked at the envelope. “The fake addresses. Other things— tell you the truth, I . . . would rather the guy not know I’m curious.”
She nodded. “I’m scared to ask him, too.”
He started the car. “Come on, let’s see if we can find out what these devices are. Probably some banal explanation.”
“Who are you going to ask?”
He turned onto Quiebra Valley Road. “Morgenthal, over at the high school.”
“Hey, there’s Adair! And her friend!” She pointed and he saw they were passing her niece and a lean, stooped, spiky-haired boy he didn’t recognize. Both wore oversize hooded sweatshirts and sloppy fatigue pants. “Pull over, Bert!”
He pulled over and she rolled her window down.
“Aunt Lacey!” Adair seemed genuinely glad to see Lacey.
“You guys need a ride?”
“Sure! Oh, this is Waylon. That’s Bert and my aunt Lacey.”
The teenagers piled into the car, Adair effervescing a bit about how she’d been wanting to talk to Lacey, Waylon making a grunting noise that might’ve been “Hi.”
“Before we set off,” Lacey said, “Waylon, Adair said you know a lot about electronics?”