LIFTER

by Crawford Kilian

  During the break after class I went to the pay phone outside the cafeteria and tried to reach Pat. Morty answered, and said she was sleeping after getting up with a sore throat and a bad headache. I sent my wishes for a quick recovery, while privately enjoying a guilty gladness that she was grounded for a while.

  The rest of the day dragged itself out. At three, Melinda picked me up and took me to the body shop. The manager was a lean, dark-haired guy in spotless overalls who recognised me.

  “Hi!” he bellowed. “Well, we got ‘er all fixed up and ready to go.”

  I was a little surprised by this hail-fellow-well-met act, since the guy had scarcely noticed me when I’d brought Brunhilde in. And it wasn’t just some kind of act to impress Melinda; he paid hardly any attention to her even though she was writing the check to cover the hundred-dollar deductible. Instead, the guy kept looking at me and moaning about how terrible all this auto vandalism was. He made my skin crawl, and it was a relief to get Brunhilde and myself out of his clutches.

  At least he’d done a great job on Brunhilde’s windows; she looked gorgeous, enough to help me forget I now owed Melinda a hundred bucks I could ill afford on top of my debts to Willy for the biofeedback components. I drove off to work feeling positively cheerful for the first time that day.

  The rest of the afternoon was busy but relaxed; Willy had too much work to sit around and talk football, and I was racing up and down the aisle filling orders.

  The penny dropped, as they say, not long before I was ready to knock off. I’d been thinking about the body shop manager. He hadn’t been looking at me as if he were gay or anything; he’d been nervous, as if he knew something about me. And it occurred to me that my air force fans might have planted a bug in Brunhilde while she was in the shop.

  Well, I said I was in terminal paranoia. We carried a good range of anti-bugging scanners, so I grabbed a top-of-the-line model and popped out to the car park area.

  Thirty seconds later I was peeling a strip of sticky grey tape off the inside of the right rear fender, and underneath the tape was a pretty little piece of metal and plastic about the size and thickness of two quarters, listing in the catalogues for $79.95 plus tax.

  Oh boy. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

  I hadn’t really thought about what I’d do if I found a bug; my first urge was to throw it away. But as Dr Johnson said, knowing you’re going to be hanged in two weeks will powerfully focus your mind. I looked around the twilit car park area, and of course saw nothing. Borowitz and Randall were probably sitting out at Hotchkiss watching a screen that showed a little blip where Brunhilde sat. Chances were that they’d expect the blip to move when I headed for home in a few minutes. If I threw the bug away, they’d know I’d found it and they’d be a lot more careful with the next one. Or else they’d just arrest me for illegally disposing of government property.

  Finally - it felt like ages, but probably took about fifteen seconds - I carefully replaced the bug just where I’d found it. As long as they were interested in me, and I was behaving myself, they’d pay less attention to any UFOs that cropped up while my wherebouts were known - so even if Pat went lifting, her chances of getting away with it were better. Even two or three days should be enough, before they got bored or some superior officer got wind of what his ace secret agents were doing. So my job would be to act dumb and carry on like any other red-blooded all-American football hero who’d never even dreamt of levitating. At some point, when they’d given up on me, they’d want the bug back, and they’d be annoyed and suspicious all over again if it was missing.

  I drove home for dinner, wondering if James Bond had started out like this, and wishing Brunhilde at least had a couple of built-in machine guns.

  Just after dinner, I was getting up to phone Pat when she phoned me.

  “Hi,” she said, sounding tired and stuffy.

  “Hi yourself. We all missed you today.”

  “Missed you, too. I feel awful. All I’m doing is drinking orange juice and sleeping.”

  “Boy, what a racket. Are you going to be back tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so. Angela’s got the same thing. We hardly got anything done last night, except blowing our noses.”

  “Poor baby. I hope you feel better soon. Listen, I collected Gibbs’s handouts for you. Want me to bring ‘em over tonight? I could go through them with you.”

  “Ohhh, don’t make me even think about school. I’m useless. But you’re sweet anyway. Can you just hang on to whatever he gives out? And I’ll catch up in a couple of days. Unless I get lucky and die.”

  “Bite your tongue. Sure, I’ll save it all.”

  “What a nice man. Hey, you getting all geared up for the game Friday?”

  “Uh, I guess so. We’ve got a practice tomorrow, and then I’m going to Gibbs’s for dinner, so I’ll have to call you late.”

  “Not too late, huh? I’m zonking out around nine-thirty these days.”

  “Impossible. A night owl like you?”

  “Yeah, isn’t it sickening?”

  I was dying to tell her about Borowitz and Randall and the bug on Brunhilde, but Melinda was right there in the study a few feet away and the phone was likely tapped as well.

  “Well, I’ll have to come and see you Thursday, right after dinner, unless you get better by then.”

  “I sure hope I do. Got to be on my feet for the game.”

  “I just hope I’m still on my feet after the game.”

  “They’ll never catch you.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “No, you’ll do fine. Listen, I better go now. Call me tomorrow sometime during school, huh?”

  “Okay. Every fifteen minutes often enough?”

  “Only if Morty lets me keep an extension by my bed, and he won’t. ‘Bye.”

  “G’bye.”

  I hung up the phone and slumped against the wall. For a day that had started out so badly, Tuesday was ending on an upbeat. The skies over Santa Teresa would be empty tonight. I was planning to do some serious homework, and my girlfriend was safely bedridden and out of sight of the junior birdmen.

  Now all I had to worry about was the bug on my Bug, my spiralling debts, a physics test tomorrow that would reflect Gibbs at his most creatively fiendish, and on Friday night I would probably get thoroughly tenderised in the game.

  “You planning on doing those dishes any time soon?” Melinda yelled from the study.

  Chapter 14

  A LITTLE AFTER three o’clock Wednesday afternoon, I was warming up on the edge of the field with the rest of the team. It was a clear, chilly day, the kind that makes you energetic and glad to be alive. I didn’t feel either.

  The field was occupied for the time being by the school band. Terry High was almost as proud of the band as it was of the football team. The bandmaster was Mr Fogarty, who looked like a blonde Abraham Lincoln; he marched in uniform with the band, all rigged up in a blue-and-gold jacket and blue trousers, strutting like everybody else behind Levon Williams, the drum major. After the forty band members finished their close-order drill, Mr Fogarty would conduct them through a few pieces from their repertoire: a little Sousa and lots of movie music. The theme from Star Wars was popular, and the theme from Rocky.

  It was a big deal to be in the band, partly because Levon was a great drum major who’d be missed when he graduated next June, and partly because Mr Fogarty was a good teacher. The band competed all over California; they’d be marching in the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day.

  Being a cheerleader or a pompom girl was a big deal, too. Every afternoon while we practised, they practised, too; since we were drawing big crowds to practises, they were getting really polished. The cheerleaders were three guys and five girls; the guys at least got to wear white trousers, while the girls got goosebumps up and down their long legs because they had just pleated miniskuts and thin blue-and-gold sweaters. But they kept warm by going through routines that were at
least as complicated as what we did on the field, and it was prettier to watch.

  Still, something about the band and the cheerleaders made me uneasy. When I was in junior high I went through a World War II phase, reading everything I could get my hands on about it, and one item was a history of the early Nazi movement. All that rally stuff of Hitler’s, the Sieg Heiling and mass hysteria - that was all cooked up by a German-American with a degree from Harvard. He remembered Ivy League football games and what the cheerleaders could do to whip a crowd into a frenzy, and it worked like a charm for the Nazis. It still worked pretty well in America, too. Hitler’s cheerleader, by the way, was named Putzi Hanfstangl,a nd he got out of Germany a few days before he was scheduled to be pushed out of an airplane.

  Doing my jumping jacks and knee bends, I wondered what would have happened if the Nazis had shoved poor old Putzi out the door nd then seen him soar off into the clouds. Probably they’d have chased him down to the ground and learnt how to lift the whole Wehrmacht.

  And the world was still full of guys like Hitler, looking for that little extra advantage over the good guys.

  No, I wasn’t exactly as cheerful and laid back as a day at the bench. Pat was still sick, and I’d slogged throughy the day in a state of low-grade anxiety about just about everything except maybe the national deficit. When we trotted out onto the field and everyone started clapping and cheering, I felt like turning around and running like hell. Instead, I scanned the seats, trying to find individuals in the crowd. A lot of students were there, but a lot of adults as well. Melinda was down in the front row now, complete with a telephoto lens on her camera. I saw some middle-aged guys in Windbreakers and baseball caps and sunglasses, toting videotape cameras: Gibbs had said they were scouts from San Carlos and Calaveras.

  Maybe so, but one of them was sitting right behind my old buddy Mr Borowitz, and another was cuddling up with Mr Randall down at the other end of the stands.

  Gibbs had already given us the plays he wanted us to practise; now he stood leaning on his cane at the fifty-yard line, ignoring the hundreds of people in the stands behind him.

  “Let’s go, gentlemen!” he called, and we got to work.

  The first play was a simple hand-off and run around right end behind a screen of blockers. I took the ball from Mike Palmer (Jerry Ames was out for at least another week with a sprained ankle) and took off, thinking more about the junior birdmen and their TV cameras than about Sean Quackenbush.

  Boy, football was a really different game without lifting! I took so long to get around the line that I began to wish I’d packed a lunch. Sean and the other defenders came after me a little hesitantly, as if they were surprised I was still visible, and then Sean brought me down with a thump.

  “Too slow, Stevenson!” Gibbs barked. “Same goes for you, tackles. Wake up out there.”

  So we did it again, with the cheerleaders’ chants echoing across the field. I pumped my legs like crazy, and managed to duck past the first tackler, but they still nailed me before I’d crossed the scrimmage line.

  Nailed. That doesn’t begin to convey the experience of being smashed into by a big guy who then falls on top of you while you crash face-first into the ground and skid for a couple of feet on your chin. It hurts.

  After it happened the third time, the noise from the stands changed pitch. A lot of people must have expected to see me racing down the field just like last week. Gibbs called a halt and limped out.

  “Stevenson. You feeling okay?”

  “Yes, sir. Guess maybe I’m a little stiff after Friday.”

  “Well, you keep at it. You blockers, you’re standing around. You give Stevenson all the protecting he needs until he can get clear and do his thing. Understand?” They nodded, and Gibbs turned to the defending squad. “You people, you’re letting Stevenson off too easy. The second you see he has the ball, get in there and dump him.”

  Fear of ever-increasing pain, I discovered, was a pretty fair substitute for lifting. On the next run-through, I took the ball and ran for my life. The blockers did their job, too, and when I broke out no one was close enough to grab me. The spectators clapped and yelled, and the cheerleaders turned cartwheels.

  After that, the rest of the practise went a little better. I realised the whole team had fallen into the bad habit of letting me do spectacular stuff while everybody else stood around. Once they did what they were supposed to do, a duffer like me had a fighting chance. I even discovered I could still intimidate the opposition; on one play I couldn’t outrun them, so I ran toward them and threw the timing of his tackle completely off.

  Practice finally ended. Gibbs called us around him while the crowd straggled out of the stands.

  “You people had me worried for a while,” he said. “No matter what anybody says, you cannot play football while asleep. Stevenson, you have got to pick up the pace. You are nothing like as fast as you can be. Palmer, you’ve got to hand off to Stevenson faster and smoother, and not stand there thinking about it.”

  He went on with an analysis of our play that took us apart like Lego blocks. I found myself glancing over his shoulder at the air force TV crews, who were casually chatting with Borowitz and Randall as they ambled down the steps, onto the track, and out the exit. Gibbs saw where I was looking and glanced over his shoulder.

  “That’s another thing. Looks like San Carlos wants to analyse what we’re up to. They’re going to figure we must be really overrated, and maybe that’s okay - if we’re together on Friday night and playing like last week.” Gibbs glared at me. “Speaking of TV, you people are going to be on cable, live, on Friday night. So you better look really sharp.”

  “Yes, sir,” we chorused.

  “What?”

  “YES, SIR!”

  “That’s right. Okay, go shower.”

  Once I was dressed, I found a pay phone outside the P.E. office and called Pat. Morty answered, backed up by Twisted Sister or Sibling Giblets.

  “She’s asleep,” Morty yelped over the uproar. “Her fever’s gone, but she seems really tired. She’s been asleep most of the day. We’re hoping she’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “I hope so, too. Tell her to take it easy, and I’ll call her tomorrow if she’s not in school.”

  And I went off to the Gibbs’ for dinner.

  Their house was just a couple of blocks from school, so we walked over together through the twilight. Gibbs talked quietly about the practice - nothing critical, just comments on this guy or that, most of them positive. I walked along beside him, feeling a little odd about going to meet his family when I already knew so much about them from my illegal rummaging through his credit files.

  Whatever my preconceptions were, they vanished as Gibbsian reality exploded out the front door to meet us. First came a short, skinny girl in green overalls; behind her was a tall, skinny girl in a white blouse and dressy slacks. They were giggling and squeaking and arguing with each other as they met us on the front footpath.

  “All right, ladies,” Gibbs said cheerfully, “Let’s settle down and meet our guest. This one” - he hoisted the little one up on his hip, one-handed - “is Diane. Say hello to Rick Stevenson, Diane.”

  “Hello to Rick Stevenson,” she said, and cracked up at her own wit.

  “And this is Flora.”

  “H’lo. Pleased to meet you.” She gave me a warm, hard handshake. “You’re sure a good football player.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We saw you last week. You sure can run.”

  “Wellᚓ”

  “Let’s get inside,” Gibbs suggested. “Diane here is getting entirely too heavy.”

  The house looked pretty ordinary from the outside, just a plain white stucco with some rose bushes. Inside, though, it was comfortable and welcoming. The floors were gleaming hardwood, and most of the rooms seemed to have floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases. The furniture in the lounge room was what you might call Modern Comfortable, stuff that looked good and felt even better when you settl
ed into it and put your feet up. A fire was burning nicely in the fireplace, and the house smelled wonderful from whatever was happening in the kitchen.

  Gibbs and I had just sat down when Letitia Gibbs came in from the kitchen. I scrambled to my feet - not because Melinda had taught me manners, but because any conscious male would do so when Letitia Gibbs walked into a room.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said. She was a tall woman with broad shoulders and a bright smile; Flora and Diane looked a lot like her. “John’s been talking about you, of course, and we all saw you in the game on Friday. You were having a good time out there.”

  “Oh well,” I replied cleverly.

  “How did practice go?” she asked her husband.

  “Mm, okay. We have some rough spots to iron out.”

  “Well, just smooth yourselves out by the fire for a few minutes until dinner’s ready.”

  “Can I do anything to help, Mrs Gibbs?”

  “You can help eat, but that’s about it.”

  We made ourselves comfortable by the fire; Flora brought her dad a beer and me a Coke. Then she vanished back into the kitchen while Diane sprawled on the rug in front of the fire, doing homework.

  “Here’s to Friday,” Gibbs said, raising his stein; I lifted my glass in response and smiled weakly.

  “What did you think of the practice?” he asked.

  “Well, sir, I was kind of disappointed in myself. I was slow.”

  “You’ll pick up again. You know you can do it. Any aches or pains in your legs?”

  “Oh, maybe a little, but nothing serious. Guys keep falling on you, you have to expect it.”

  “Don’t be a hero. If you’re hurt, we’ll pull you out until you’re feeling better. We’ve lost enough people from injuries.”

  “Believe me, sir, you’ll be the first to know. I’m no hero.”

  “Flora says he is,” Diane said slyly.