by Rory Harper
“Takes all kinds,” I muttered into my mashed potatoes.
* * *
The rest of the week was pleasant every which way. The weather stayed cool, with a short afternoon shower every day. Razer and Doc contributed to Stevie’s research. They took Sabrina and Razer’s current honey with them, to help them with the donation requirements, which Stevie had told them more about than he had me.
“Forewarned is foreskinned,” as Razer said. Doc and Sabrina and Razer’s honey thought it was humorous.
The Grand Prix competition started on Wednesday night, and we all tried to attend most of the performances. They were held in the Rebecca Matthews Memorial Amphitheatre on the east side of the campus. During the day we mostly hung around camp and rehearsed, since we were scheduled to perform Doc’s composition for the judges on Saturday night. Doc said we was getting closer to what he heard in his head when he wrote the music.
Star was a bunch of fun to be around, happy and bouncy and, well, romantic as all get-out, to be entirely truthful about the matter.
Friday afternoon, she vanished from the camp for a couple of hours. Doc had given us the afternoon off so we could be rested up for the competition. We’d do a final run-through Saturday afternoon. I laid a towel up top on Sprocket and worked on my tan for a while.
I was woken by a horde of kids playing Red Rover over by the tables that held the dinner dishes. Sometime while I slept I had got up the nerve to do what I had been avoiding all week.
I padded up Sprocket’s length and climbed down into Razer’s old room. He had been staying mostly aboard Munchkin since him and Spivey had gotten together, and I had been promoted to acting segundo. He’d moved some of his stuff aboard her, but had left most behind for the time being.
I looked around the mess that was his room and spotted his bookcase half-buried under a stack of dirty jumpsuits. Razer had not been famous for his housekeeping.
I thumbed through the books for almost an hour, getting more depressed and feeling stupider every minute. Symbolic logic. Differential calculus. Organic chemistry. Organizational structure theory. Transcendentals. Statistical analysis. I couldn’t understand a hundredth of the contents of the books. Hell, I couldn’t pronounce the titles of most of them. No way I was going to be able to learn this stuff.
Papa had been right. Tenth grade was about my speed. I’d always wondered a little if I was stupid, but on a farm it didn’t matter much, long as you were smarter than the pigs. And it hadn’t mattered on the crew while I was merely one of the hands. But I wasn’t going to make it as a segundo. I didn’t have the brains. I’d reached too high, and now I was going to have to humiliate myself by asking Doc to let me go back to my old job.
Hey, that ain’t too bad, I told myself. Being a hand on Sprocket’s crew is a hell of a lot better than most other things. No, it wouldn’t be too bad. I could handle it. I could handle being stupider than Doc and Razer and Sabrina. And Star.
As I was climbing back out of Razer’s room to get my towel, I looked up and made out Star’s figure against the setting sun coming towards us. I slid down Sprocket’s side and headed to her.
“Hi, babe,” I said. “I missed you. Where you been?” I tried to hug her, but she wasn’t cooperating.
“Can’t I go anywhere by myself without getting the third degree?” she snapped.
“Well, sure, I just meant—”
But she had already stalked off. I stood there with my mouth open while she disappeared into Lady Jane.
Doc and Sabrina had set up a card table and a couple of folding chairs under a nearby tree and were hunched over doing the bookkeeping for Sprocket and Lady Jane together.
Doc looked at me sympathetically.
“What’d I do?” I asked him. “All I said was I was happy to see her.”
Doc’s mouth twisted. “Yeah, that’s what it sounded like to me.”
“She’s got a lot on her mind right now, Henry Lee,” Sabrina said.
“Like what? If she’s got a problem I’d do anything I could to help.”
Sabrina didn’t reply.
“Cute buncha kids, ain’t they?” Doc said, nodding toward the mob playing Red Rover.
“Don’t change the subject,” I said. “If y’all know something—”
“All these kids around, you’d think you’d see more women that are with child. ‘Course, with some women, it ain’t all that visible. At least, not early on.”
Sabrina punched him on the shoulder. “Goddammit, Doc, you promised.”
I turned and headed toward Lady Jane’s mouth. Behind me I heard them cranking up for a good one.
“Well, hell, the way she’s been treatin’ the boy, ain’t hardly—”
“You just can’t keep your big trap shut, can you?”
* * *
I scratched on her curtain and she came to it.
“I wish you’d have told me you was pregnant, Star,” I said. So much for building up to things gradually.
She didn’t even get mad, just leaned on her bedstead and pulled a cheroot out of the dresser drawer. “Sabrina told you. She didn’t have any right to do that.”
“Nope, she didn’t do it. If her and you had your way, I’d still be stumblin’ around in the dark, blaming myself, not knowin’ how come half the time you act like I got hoof-and-mouth disease.”
She looked at the cheroot and sucked on it for a minute, but didn’t move to light it. “I only found out for sure today. Guess I oughta give these up for the time bein’,” she said. “The doctor says—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I ain’t sure it’s any of your business.”
“Any of my business? It damn well is my business!”
Then I had a thought on how it might not be my busines, after all.
“Is the baby maybe not mine? Is that what this whole deal is about? Well, I don’t care whose it is, I’ll still care about it like it was mine.” Could be some other fella that got her in the family way, and she was gonna choose him? I didn’t like that thought at all. “Whoever the other fella is, if there is one, he won’t make a better papa than me,” I said. “He won’t care for y’all as good as me. I swear to God—”
“You’re the daddy, Henry Lee,” she said in a low voice. “That’s one thing I know for sure.”
To be honest, I was relieved to hear that. I wasn’t lying when I said I would have loved it like my own, but this way would be easier and better. “Well, what is the problem, then? We get married and settle down.”
“You never mentioned getting married before this, Henry Lee.”
“Well—this changes things. It ain’t just us we have to think about now. You’re gonna need somebody to help take care of you and the baby.”
She crumpled the cigar in her hand. “Don’t you say that, don’t you even think it! I ain’t some empty-headed milk cow of a farmgirl, lookin’ to put a shotgun to some man’s back. I wouldn’t have a man that just wanted to marry me ‘cause he thought he had to take care of me. I can take care of myself pretty damn well already!”
“Well, goddammit, that ain’t why I said it! I personally would be extremely honored if you would marry me!” I shouted. I always was the romantic type.
She smiled and I smiled back, and it was okay for a half a second. Then she turned away. I sat on the bed and laid a hand on her leg. “Aw, come on, Star. We can work it out.”
“That’s the problem,” she sobbed. “I don’t know if I want to work it out.”
“Huh?”
“I’m twenty-two years old, Henry Lee. I don’t want to settle down and be somebody’s wife. I don’t want it a bit. We been seeing each other for almost two years, which is the longest in my life. I been getting with you like Sabrina is with Doc. That’s fine for them, hell, they must be thirty-five or forty years old.”
�
��But you’re pregnant!”
“So? Maybe I won’t stay that way.” She popped the stump of the cheroot back in her mouth and sucked on it furiously.
It took me a few seconds to realize what she meant. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“It’s my body, Henry Lee.”
“This is our baby you’re talking about!”
“No! It’s a bunch of cells in my body that may become a baby in time.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes, I do.” She looked at me levelly. “I had an abortion when I was seventeen, Henry Lee. It wasn’t the best experience of my life, but it wasn’t the worst, either. I survived it.”
“But the baby didn’t.”
She turned white. “Oh, damn, Henry Lee. That was a low one. I think you better leave now.”
“Nosir. If we’re gonna stay together, you can’t go killing our baby.”
Then she was at me, crying and hitting me hard with balled fists. “Leave me alone, Henry Lee! Get out of here!” She shoved me into Lady Jane’s corridor and against the far wall. “Get away from me!”
“Goddammit!” I roared. “I want to do the right thing for you and the baby! You can’t do this!”
She backed away from me, every muscle in her body tense. “Fuck you! I never said you could run my life for me.”
Then she disappeared into her room. Lady Jane wouldn’t open the curtain again no matter how much I pounded on her.
* * *
The bleachers were empty, except for several couples smooching and hugging on the top row. A dozen people wandered around between the Driller and the mechanical rig, not doing much of anything. The mechanical rig was idle. I asked one of the guys over by the drilling floor, and he said they were having to replace a part before they could resume making hole. I sat on the bottom row of the bleachers and stared off at the horizon, listening to the Driller hum while he worked. I had brought my ax and the Pignose with me. I played quietly along with the Driller.
After a while, somebody sat down beside me and shoved a sack-covered bottle at me. I didn’t even bother to see who it was, just tilted the bottle up and took a slug.
“Life sucks hard vacuum, sometime,” Stevie said when I handed back the bottle.
“Yeah.”
“You walk over here all the way from the camp?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You in as rotten a mood as you look to be?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Me, too. How about we get so drunk we fall down and bark like dogs?”
“Sounds like a great idea to me.”
* * *
We left Stevie’s apartment, a block from campus, with a quart apiece. By the time we found ourselves on the roof of the Vet Building, each bottle was about half empty. An optimist would have said they were half full, but neither me nor Stevie were optimists at the time.
Stevie lurched over to the big chicken-wire cage that the dactyls lived in. They rustled and ruffled their feathers and made clicking chuckles when they recognized him. Sonny hopped down from his perch and waddled over and stuck his beak through the mesh.
“These are my babies, Henry Lee,” Stevie said mournfully. He reached in and scratched the back of Sonny’s head. “I helped make ’em out of spare parts. Helped breathe life into ’em. They love me. Nobody else loves me, but they do.”
“Aw, Stevie, they ain’t the only ones love you.” I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, because nobody loved me neither, so maybe I didn’t sound real convincing.
“Yes, they are,” Stevie said. “Only ones in the world.”
“Aw, I bet … I bet your momma and poppa love you.” I leaned against the wall and slowly slid down until I was sitting. I pulled the bottle up and took some more medicine.
“I’m a orphan,” he said. “Left on a doorstep, like in a bad movie.” He took some more medicine, too. “Even my momma and daddy didn’t love me.” He hiccupped sadly.
Maureen saw how upset he was and came over and started licking his wrist with her purple tongue while he stroked Sonny.
“Nope, nobody but these stupid birds love me. An’ I love ’em back. Done my best to take care of ’em.” He put down his bottle and started stroking Maureen’s ruff. Then he pulled back, picked up his bottle, and stumbled over to stand in front of me.
“You remember Billy Bob calling me the Herring?”
I nodded.
“That’s me. ‘The Red Herring of Romance’. He noticed I never, ever had a girlfriend. No dates, no parties, no nothing. I’m so ugly and useless, no woman wants to come close to me.”
“Awww …”
“I have been laid exactly twice in my life, and they were both pity-fucks. I used to take lessons all the time. Thought I could, you know, learn how to be attractive somehow. Dancing lessons, etiquette lessons. Body-building lessons.” He laughed. “Hell, I even took boxing lessons for a while. You know, the manly sport for manly men. Figured that might get me a girl or two. All I got was a broken nose. Still gives me trouble in bad weather.”
He shook his head and staggered back to the cage. “To hell with it. I’m used to it all by now. I quit trying years ago.”
“That why you’re so depressed tonight?”
“Nope. Not exactly. I’m getting terminally drunk tonight because this afternoon the Magnolia figured out how to cut her losses with the dactyls.” He opened the cage door and clucked at Maureen and Sonny until they waddled out to him.
He hooked an arm around Maureen’s neck and hugged her. “See, they’re a lot like me in one important way. They’re failures, too. They’re grown-up birds, look healthy, everything. Just like me. But they don’t reproduce. Don’t even try, as far as we can tell. They’re a genetic dead end. Just like me. Ain’t worth a fuck.” He started to laugh again.
“Aw, Stevie,” I said.
He got himself under control. “The Stone Magnolia’s got me by the huevos, Henry Lee. We spent all sorts of money producing these dead ends. Gene-grafting and cloning and all the stuff that goes with it is so horribly expensive you wouldn’t believe it. She wants to see some results. Heck, I can understand that. I want to see some results, too.”
He took another slug from the bottle. “She told me this afternoon she wants to autopsy the birds to find out why they aren’t reproducing. Then we can give the results to the rest of the other schools.”
“Okay, so humor her,” I said. I knew that an autopsy had been performed on Pegleg, but nobody had explained the exact procedure to me, and I hadn’t really thought about it that much. If anything, I thought it was merely a thorough examination, like the one I’d gotten at the clinic. And I sure didn’t know it was only called an autopsy if the victim of it was already dead. I was being a dumb old country boy again. He looked shocked. “What’s the matter? This, uh, autopsy deal gonna hurt ’em?”
He started to laugh, collapsing against the cage. “Hurt them?” he choked out. “Hurt them?” Then he started to cry at the same time. Tears streaming into his scraggly beard, he turned and grabbed each bird by the neck. They could have torn him to bloody ribbons with their beaks and claws, but they only screeched and flapped uselessly while he dragged them to the edge of the roof.
I struggled to my feet, and lurched after him. Before I could get to him he’d pulled them to the very edge. He had to let go of Maureen while he shoved Sonny over the edge. She stood there and flapped in confusion until he grabbed her and sent her tumbling after Sonny. Stevie stood wavering and looking down over the edge. I was afraid he’d go over, too, so I grabbed for him, but he slipped out of my hold and ran along the edge.
The dactyls both swooped in a sharp curve back to our level.
They looped and began to come in for a landing on the roof. Stevie picked up a double handful of gravel and threw it as hard as he could at them.
&nb
sp; “Go away! Go away! Get out of here, dammit!” They banked away in alarm, then came back for another try.
I got a dozen yards from Stevie before he turned and threw a handful of gravel at me, too. A couple of fairsized pieces hit me in the face. I flinched back and fell down in the process.
The dactyls had circled around and were trying to come in for a landing again. Stevie scooped up more gravel and flung it at them. “Get away!” he screamed. “Don’t come back here! I don’t want you any more!”
I got behind him while he was distracted and wrapped my arms around him. He struggled and twisted, knocking us both to the ground. He sobbed and hit at me while we rolled around on the roof.
“Goddammit, Stevie, just a minute, here!” I cocked a fist back. He was out of control. Didn’t look like he was going to stop until I made him stop.
“Henry Lee, what they’ll do in an autopsy—they’ll kill the birds first. Then they’ll cut them into little pieces and look at the pieces. Sonny and Maureen’ll be dead, and I’ll be alone again.”
* * *
We threw rocks for half an hour, until the birds banked into the darkness and disappeared, screeching mournfully. We waited another half hour to make sure they didn’t try to return.
By then, the bottles were both empty. Stevie said he had another one in the lab, so we fell down the stairs toward it. It was only one floor away, but it seemed like about ten. Neither one of us was navigating real well by that time.
After about five tries, he got his key into the door lock, and we stumbled into the lab. He flicked on a light switch, and started rummaging through his desk drawers. I sat down in the doorway and leaned against the doorframe to rest and get my strength back.
As he triumphantly pulled a fifth out of the lower left-hand drawer, I heard the elevator door opening at the end of the hall.