by John Varley
“Yes.” I looked at her face, soaking wet, hair tangled with some dried leaves stuck in it, looking intently at my bruised side. Her shirt was open and her nipples crinkled from the water and the air conditioning, which Travis liked to keep set around the North Pole. She looked up and smiled. She reached down into my pants.
“How about this? Hurt?” she asked.
“Hurt me,” I said. Then we were kissing, and trying to wriggle out of our wet clothes at the same time. Wet jeans are the worst, and Kelly’s were pretty tight even when they were dry. It didn’t help that pretty soon we were laughing, then I’d gasp from a pain in my side and we’d try to be careful, and start laughing again. She was shivering, too, wet and cold. Finally we made it into the shower stall and turned on the hot water and made love there, she being careful not to touch my side, me not really caring.
We managed to get each other all soapy before one thing led to another again, and by the time that wave had crested we’d used up all Travis’s hot water.
“What are we going to wear?” she asked as we got out.
“Towels, I guess,” I said. “I’ll go see if Travis has anything.”
I wrapped a big towel around me. When I opened the door there was a pile of clean clothing there on the floor. I brought it in and held things up, one at a time. Two pairs of Bermuda shorts in Travis’s size, and two of Jubal’s tentlike Hawaiian shirts.
“Who gets the hula girls, and who gets the surfer dudes?” I asked her.
“Surfer dudes for me, dude,” she said, and I tossed the shirt to her.
[111] The shorts were a few inches too wide for me. The other pair were a tad tight in the hips and loose in the waist for Kelly. Both of us were almost swallowed by the shirts.
I heard a clothes dryer, found it at the end of the hall, and tossed our clothes in with Dak’s and Alicia’s, then found our way to the living room.
Alicia had a Band-Aid on her nose where it had been cut slightly, but it wasn’t broken. If any of us had been hit much harder than I had been by the picnic table we surely would have had some broken bones, but Alicia had hurt herself coming up beneath the table, not while we swirled through the air. Jubal and Kelly and Travis and Dak hadn’t been hurt at all.
“We got lucky,” Travis said. “I’m very sorry, ladies and gents, I didn’t know what sort of tiger’s tail I was twisting. My apologies.”
“It’s okay, Trav,” Dak said.
“No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all. I’m going to have to ask you all to just go home today. I don’t want anybody else around while me and Jubal sit down and figure out just what we’ve got here.”
“We aren’t afraid, Travis,” Kelly said, surprising me. She looked at the rest of us. “Well, we aren’t, are we?”
“Not me,” Dak said.
“I am afraid,” Travis said. “Not of blowing up my own old ass, but of hurting one of you children. I couldn’t live with that.”
“You couldn’t if we were children, which we are not,” Alicia said. “It’s Jubal’s gizmo. What do you think, Jubal?”
Everybody looked at him, and Jubal seemed to shrink.
“Oh, cher … I don’ know, me… I mean…” Alicia realized a decision like that was far beyond the man’s capabilities. She put her arm around his shoulder and whispered something in his ear, which seemed to cheer him up. He grinned at her.
“Jubal will go with his family, like always,” Travis said, not unkindly. “You can all come back tomorrow, and I’ll fill you in on what we’ve found out.”
“That’s cool,” Dak said. “Come on, folks, let’s hit the road before the morning rush hour starts.”
[112] “Not for another thirty minutes or so,” Alicia said, looking at her watch, which seemed to have survived the dunking.
“What, you like traffic, babe?” Dak asked her.
“No, I like my own dry clothes. I’m not going to be seen in public in Jubal’s shirt and Travis’s pants. I got my reputation to consider.”
12
* * *
I’D BEEN FALLING behind on my work at the Blast-Off, so I tore through piled-up chores that morning as well as I could with a bruised rib. I had the noon-to-six shift that day. I really should have taken Mom’s six-to-midnight, too, as she had covered for me twice that week… but I couldn’t. I fell asleep twice in the desk chair behind the reservation computer as it was.
At six, Kelly pulled into the lot at the wheel of a sexy little red Corvette. In addition to having the bitchin’est new cars in town, Strickland Mercedes gets the best trade-ins. Sometimes Kelly decides to test drive them for a day or two. What a hard life she has.
She hurried into the office. I could see she was as excited as me to get back to Rancho Broussard and see what Travis had found out. But Mom was there, too, so time had to be made for a hug and a kiss and a short chat. Mom approves of Kelly. Aside from being beautiful and rich, Kelly has been known to help us with some chores she has probably never had to do at her own house. How could a mother possibly object? So she pecked Kelly on the cheek and watched us climb into the red death machine, and waved as we pulled out of the lot.
* * *
[114] WE SPOTTED BLUE Thunder a quarter mile ahead of us soon after we got off the Pike. Kelly pressed the accelerator and we caught up with Dak without taxing the engine much. With a short toot on the horn, Kelly pulled past and then let the Corvette have its head for a bit. Blue Thunder was just a blue dot in the mirror when Kelly hit 90 mph.
We passed the jackleg backwoods church with all the signs again. There was a guy up on a ladder painting one of them. He was a little guy, in his seventies, dressed in paint-spattered overalls with no shirt. His bare arms looked incredibly scrawny, but I’ll bet he could have arm-wrestled me to death. I know this type of peckerwood, they work hard all their lives and why we don’t have guys like that lifting weights at the Olympics I’ll never know. There were a couple dozen open cans of what looked like interior latex sitting on the ground, all bright colors.
He was actually getting pretty good results. I’d sure seen worse roadside art, anyway. Nobody was ever likely to hang his stuff in a museum, but I liked it a lot better than that dude who slung paint at canvases and then sold his crap for thousands of dollars, and his stuff is hanging in museums.
He’d erected a few more four-by-eight slabs of grade-Z plywood, riddled with knotholes, and was creating new signs on them. He’d already altered some of his old ones.
“Looks like he’s had a new revelation,” Kelly said.
“Born again, again,” I suggested.
I saw Jesus several times on the signs, with a face as mournful as a basset hound. Blood was flowing from his thorny crown. He was on the cross in one picture, preaching on a mountaintop in another. And in a new one, he seemed to be coming down a ramp from a flying saucer. It looked like the one in The Day the Earth Stood Still. He probably saw that movie when he was twenty. A new sign read:
JESUS IS HERE
IN HIS FLYING SAWSER
[115] DO YOU HAVE YOUR
HEAVENLY HORDING PASS?
The sign he was working on read:
EZEKIEL SAW THE WHEE
He stopped his work and glared at us as we passed.
We turned the corner onto the Broussards’ private road… and Kelly slammed on the brakes. There was a heavy chain suspended between two posts, with a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging from it. We sat there looking at it for a while, then heard Blue Thunder sliding to a stop behind us. Kelly and I got out of the car. Alicia and Dak joined us at the chain.
“Looks like we’ve been stood up,” I said.
“And me with my brand new party dress,” Dak said. “Damn.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Dak kicked at the loose shell a few times, then once more, hard, for luck.
“Should we walk in?” Alicia wondered. “He did say he’d see us today.”
“You think so?” Dak said. “I think the chain is pretty clear.” He showed us the shiny new-and very
heavy-duty-padlock. “They’re avoiding us. We get to the house, nobody’s gonna answer the door.”
“I think he’s right,” I said.
WHEN WE GOT back to the Blast-Off the parking lot was almost full of the kind of twenty-year-old vehicles normal for the early evening, with a smattering of even older rattletraps that would be classics if they weren’t so rusted out. And parked close to the office in the yellow-striped “Manager” spot was a low, wide, brawny civilian version of the military HumVee, or Hummer. It was black and red, and looked as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor.
“Gotta be Travis,” Kelly said.
Dak and I paused for a moment to admire the thing, so we were a [116] few steps behind Alicia and Kelly as they ducked around the front desk and into the apartment behind. There was a great smell coming from back there, and laughter.
Jubal, Travis, and my mom were sitting around the worktable in the living room. Aunt Maria was just coming through the kitchen door with a steaming tray full of fried plantains and conch fritters. She set it on the table and scooped up a big bowl with tortilla chips at the bottom and another bowl that had held some of her famous homemade salsa, and headed back into the kitchen.
“Smells mighty good, Maria.” Travis ate a plantain from the tray.
“Real good, ma’am,” Jubal said, munching one. There was a salsa stain in his beard and another on his shirt.
The worktable is just an ordinary ten-foot folding cafeteria table. It’s usually covered with junk, knickknacks in various stages of assembly.
Aunt Maria is artistic. She had tried her hand at hundreds of kinds of handmade souvenirs until she found the best money-maker, which was shell sculpture. She made little tableaux of shell people, mostly with clam shells but with small cone and spiral shells and bits of coral and other stuff, stuck together with glue and clear silicone. She made shell families standing before shell houses, shell golfers swinging bobby-pin irons, shell surfers on oyster-shell boards hanging ten on shell waves, shell dogs peeing on shell fire hydrants. Some of her larger scenes were based on abalone shells, or conch shells sawed open. No two creations were alike, and we sold a lot of them.
My mother is not so artistic. While Aunt Maria glues her shells together, Mom paints four-inch plastic replicas of the Blast-Off Motel sign, mounts them on bases, and puts them in clear globes with water and plastic snow or glitter. Snowing in Florida? is usually the first thing the tourists say, but then a surprising number buy one.
Over the years we’ve made and sold dozens of different kinds of kitschy items like the snow globe and the shell people. I put out a plywood sandwich board every morning advertising souvenirs, lowest prices in town. It made the difference between staying open and filing for bankruptcy, sometimes.
Jubal was sitting on a folding chair at one end of the table, bent over [117] a “tree” of six plastic Blast-Off signs, all connected like the parts of a polystyrene airplane model kit before you break them off. He would frown intently at the sign, laboriously trace one of the letters with a fine paintbrush, then sit back to regard his work. He saw me looking at him and held up another tree he had finished.
“You ever made none of dese, Manuel?” he asked. About ten thousand, I thought.
“A few, Jubal. I’ve made a few.”
“I’m makin’ a dozen, me. You mama, she-”
“Betty,” Mom said, smiling at Jubal.
“You Betty, she give me dis one here.” He picked up a finished globe and shook it up, hard, then held it up and watched the snow swirl. “I never see no snow, me,” he said.
“One day, Jubal, one day,” Travis said. He was sitting between Mom and Aunt Maria’s empty chair, working on some unidentifiable shell sculpture. There was glue on his fingers and a small patch of his hair was standing straight up with silicone sealer in it. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
I suddenly felt feverish and a little sick to my stomach. I needed some fresh air. The closest way was through the kitchen.
Aunt Maria was in there, cooking up a huge pot of her famous picadillo. Nothing makes Maria happier than new mouths to feed, and I could tell from the empty jars on the stove that she was pulling out all the stops. Picadillo is basically just beef hash, but then you add olives and raisins and huevos estilo cubano and three or four kinds of peppers, pickled or fresh, all of them hot. We had it fairly often, but without all the trimmings and with cheaper cuts of meat than Maria was using today. I could smell her wonderful coconut bread baking in the oven.
No friend of mine could possibly enter Mom’s and Aunt Maria’s house without being offered food and invited to stay for dinner. Anything else was unthinkable. But the snack would be nachos and salsa and the dinner would usually be macaroni and cheese until they knew you better. The plantains and fritters and picadillo told me that Travis and Jubal had charmed them pretty quickly.
I hurried out the back of the kitchen, which led to the busy street [118] outside. I couldn’t seem to get a good breath, so I walked up and down the sidewalk for a bit, and finally started feeling better.
I watched from the street corner as our back door opened again and Travis stepped out. He was dressed a lot like Jubal today, with sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. He cupped his hands and lit one of the short, thin cigars he smoked every once in a while, then stood there with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, looking up at the Golden Manatee. For a moment, in profile, I could see the family resemblance with Jubal.
He caught sight of me, and ambled down the sidewalk.
“Bummer about the hotel,” he said, pointing at the Manatee.
“Lot of bummers around here,” I said.
“Shouldn’t let it get you down, though. Maria sent me out to get a few things. She said there was a good bodega around here somewhere…” He looked up and down the street.
“A few blocks inland,” I said. “I’ll take you.”
WE DIDN’T SAY anything for the first block. I could tell he was watching me.
“I like your family,” he said after a while.
“What there is of it,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Means my father is dead. My mother’s parents won’t speak to her because she married a spic. My dad and Maria’s family won’t speak to my mom because she’s a gringa and they blame her that my dad’s dead.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re better off not knowing assholes like that.”
“My dad’s family, the Garcias, could help us put the motel on a good financial footing, maybe help us sell it. Mom won’t hear of it, of course.”
“Goes without saying, Manny. That’s one of the reasons she’s good people. She won’t kiss anyone’s ass.”
“Instead, we turn our living room into a third-world sweatshop.”
Travis puffed a few times on his cigar, which had almost gone out.
“You got nothing to be ashamed of. It’s honest work.”
[119] “I just wish you had… maybe given me some warning…”
“So you could fold up the table and vacuum and dust? That’s what Betty said when I knocked on the door. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women would have said the same thing, whether they lived in a pigsty or a place as clean as yours. I’ll say it once more: Don’t be ashamed of them, or of your work, or of yourself.
“Happens to most of us, Manny,” Travis went on. “Rich or poor, we get ashamed of Mom and Dad and what they do, or how they talk, or how they don’t have any money or how they have too much money, the dirty capitalist pigs.
“The year I started school, my dad was out on strike. Money was very tight. You want humiliation, try showing up for the first day of first grade in a pair of Kmart sneakers with holes in the sides and have half the school calling you a barefoot coon-ass. I ran all the way home and cussed my daddy with every step.”
I mulled that over while we shopped, mostly for fresh fruits and vegetables. I could see Tia Maria was going to set out a Cubano feast we might all be a week recovering from. Tr
avis paid with a hundred-dollar bill, which Mr. Ortega, the greengrocer, held up to the light and examined suspiciously before making change. We packed most of the greens in a plastic bag, and the heavier stuff in Aunt Maria’s souvenir mesh shopping bag from the Bahamas, which Travis produced from his pocket.
We stopped on the sidewalk outside, and Travis got out his wallet again. He counted out thirty hundreds, folded them once, and held the money out to me. I made a move toward it, pure reflex, then backed off a step.
“What’s happening here, Manny, is I’m going to have to go off for a while. I haven’t learned much yet about the silver bubbles, but I know some people in various places who will give me an hour or two with some very large and expensive machines, and they won’t ask to see what I’m doing and they won’t blab about it later. I’ll be going to Huntsville, Houston, and Cal Tech, and maybe all the way up to Boston. I’ll be gone at least a week, maybe two weeks.
[120] “Now, Jubal ain’t a dog, and he ain’t a child, but I can’t leave him alone at the ranch for that long. Just can’t do it.
“So I arranged with your mother to get a room for Jubal at the Blastoff. He’ll do fine there, so long as he knows Maria and Betty are around somewhere. He’s okay with walking down to the Burger King by himself. I’m paying for his grub in advance. If y’all would take him to the movies a time or two, I’d really appreciate it.”
I wanted to grab him and shake him and shout out Take me with you! But I knew he wouldn’t, and I really couldn’t get away, either, with the extra burden of work Jubal’s presence was likely to bring about. So I took a deep breath and nodded, and Travis stuffed the money in my shirt pocket before I could stop him.
“Betty wouldn’t take the money in advance, so this is how we’ll do it. You give her the bread after I’ve eased on down the road. Okay?”
“O… okay,” I said.
“Good enough,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. I didn’t say anything.