Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  Cappy processed packages from all over the country, and sent out the same. And Otis suspected that Cappy used Claremont Lumber’s shipping as a cover. That he had contacts across the country, and that something (the rumor said drugs), went out, mixed in with invoices, samples, orders and returns. He couldn’t prove anything, but Cappy drove both a new Ford SUV and a Harley, lived in Riverview trailer park but wore enough gold chains to put down on a decent house.

  He purely stank of trouble. Otis knew the type as far back as high school: Cappy was one of those hard, dangerous bastards who would whisper things about your mother across the line, go out of their way to hurt you, to land on top of you or step on you, spear you across the knees sideways, taking strange and savage satisfaction from the music of snapping bones. Otis was wary of Cappy. Cappy was big, used to the whole world backing down from him. Otis didn’t back down, and that aroused some little primal knot of cells in the back of Cappy’s skull, something from the dark, cold days when cavemen fought to the death for the honor of screwing the shaman’s daughter.

  Cappy was dangerous, Cappy was with Ellie, and Ellie liked to push the edge. This was one pure-D rotating bastard of a situation: no matter which direction you viewed it from, it stank.

  Otis got his little tractor in gear, and trundled it up the row, hoping that he wouldn’t have to deal with Cap then. Or later, for that matter.

  For a long time, now, he’d had an itch that he and Cappy might come to conclusions one day. If that was so, it was so, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to help it along.

  * * *

  “What was that about?” Cap said.

  “Just talking,” Ellie said, too innocently. Her voice was studiedly little-girl, daddy why are you looking at me that way innocent. She sashayed away, deliberately exaggerating the roll of her hips as if trying to provoke him. Then she looked back over her shoulder to be sure he was watching, and threw Cappy a kiss.

  His thick lips curled into a heavy smile, but as soon as she was gone around the corner, Cappy’s face went flat and thoughtful, his bushy brows pushed together into a solid line.

  * * *

  Otis drove his rig up past the roll-up door into the dock, set the bale down with the delicacy of a mother laying her first born into the crib, and backed away.

  He parked the tractor in one of two parking slots marked out with parallel yellow lines, hopped out and began to fill out his clipboard. He liked the job, but sometimes had to be extra careful with the math. If he was a little better with the numbers, maybe he could think about going for an office job. It would be nice to get in out of the weather. He used to like the outdoor work, but lately, just the last couple of years, the pain in his back had become more than an occasional groaner. Now he had to be careful how he rolled out of bed, how he picked things up, or it would feel like someone was playing a blowtorch across his lower spine.

  This was one problem, he thought, that won’t improve with age.

  Maybe he could take some night school classes. Pat was always encouraging him, and telling him he could do it. That boy! Always filled with ideas, always figuring out ways to beat the world. Too young to know that you can’t. Otis knew this for a fact, but had to admit that when the boy said those things, Otis could almost believe it was possible to win. Just maybe it was.

  He was totaling up the last column when he heard Cappy and some of his friends approaching from the direction of the roll-up.

  Two of them. Not the bikers that hung around the trailer park. None of those assholes worked around here, although sometimes he saw them out at the shipping bay, after the supervisors were gone. He hunched that they were bagging more than sawdust.

  “Can I help you?” Otis asked casually. Cappy came closer. The man was big, big enough to give Otis just a little sour taste in the back of his throat. But Otis was a big man, too, and damned if he was going to give Cappy the satisfaction of seeing his fear.

  “I was thinking maybe I could help you,” Cappy said.

  Otis looked around. It was four in the afternoon, and the loading dock was quieter than usual. He had a feeling that just maybe nobody wanted to be around right now. There was a big old torsion wrench in the back of the Peterbilt, just behind the seat. He could see its handle from the corner of his eye, and that was a very comforting sight indeed.

  “And how is that?”

  “Just wanted you to know that any time you want to talk to Ellie, you find me and talk to me first.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Cap’s rage was palpable, like jagged fingernails drawn lightly across the back of Otis’s neck.

  “Let me do you another favor.”

  “Wasn’t sure you’d done the first one.”

  The edges of Cap’s mouth turned up in something that might have been intended as a smile. “Just a way of talking, bro. I’d suggest you listen. What say you and your boy stay out of my business. Healthier all around like that, don’t ya think?”

  “My boy?” Suddenly the lights seemed to dim, all of the sights and sounds on the loading dock focusing to a point. “What the hell does this have to do with Pat. You threatening my son?”

  What in the hell was this all about? He’d thought it was about Ellie, just typical hillbilly bullshit. But this was something else, originating from some other concern altogether. Cappy’s “business,” perhaps?

  Before it could go any further, one of the managers, a tall thin long-timer named Weatherby, climbed stiffly down off the dock. He may not have had any real clue what was going on, but he had to have the general idea.

  Cap sprouted a wide, watermelon-eating grin, and used a gravelly Rochester voice. “Never threatened your boy, there, Otis. I’s juss an avvocate of higher edjumacation. You remember what I said, now, Otis.” He gestured at the expanse of carefully stacked planks. “Hey! Real good job there. Mill’s proud of you, boy!”

  Weatherby watched the three of them stroll off, and then turned to regard Otis. Otis’s shoulders slumped, the tension draining from them as the danger retreated. “Everything all right here?”

  “Just fine,” Otis said, picking up his clipboard again. He hardly realized it, but his hand had found its way behind the seat, and was grasping the wrench as if he wanted to crush fingerprints into the handle.

  “You watch out for Cappy,” Weatherby said. “He’s a nasty customer. We know he’s not straight. One day we’ll catch him and be able to get him out of here.”

  “Until then, I’ve just got to watch my own ass.”

  “That’s about right.”

  Weatherby paused as if there was something more that he had to say, but then just shrugged, smiled faintly, and left.

  Otis sighed. It was hard to admit how scared he had been. Even more troubling was the fact that Otis knew himself too well to believe he could leave things at this. He was going to do something about his fear of Cappy. He had always done something about fear. Sometimes, too often, it was something he regretted later.

  This wasn’t over, not by a long shot.

  14

  JOURNAL ENTRY #2:

  Although genetic components of intelligence probably cannot be increased, there are biological aspects (nutritional, neurotransmitters, other ergogenics), and certainly conceptual aspects which can. Practice with a given family of tasks certainly decreases “fuzz,” and practice in so-called lateral thinking increases creativity. We are determined to increase functional efficiency, not to mire ourselves in a tired debate about whether intelligence, and/or the ability to measure it, exists at all. The ability to think “outside the box,” while avoiding a full breech of social walls, is another quality which can be taught environmentally. In order to implant such patterns, Aristotle must employ activities in all major sensory modes, not merely the visual/digital featured in 90%+ of standard IQ tests.…

  SATURDAY, MAY 19

  Traffic was still light along Ocean Way. Most of the traffic flowed west, and as more late sleepers rolled out of bed it would thicken as
weekenders headed to the beaches forty miles distant for an overdose of sand and sun. Spring was warming now, and when it didn’t rain, when the sun drove the clouds away, the days whispered promise of cookouts, vacations, toasty sand and endless body surfing.

  The morning was foggy, but that low mist would burn off soon, birthing an afternoon of miraculous clarity and warmth, one of those Northwest days that makes the long rainy season seem a fair price.

  Frankie, Patrick, Destiny and Shermie were kamakazing down Angel Avenue onto Ocean Way, touching their brakes as little as possible. No one wanted to be King Wuss.

  The light ahead turned red. They applied friction to wheels just in time to turn the dive-bombing descent into a controlled stop. Patrick gloried in the wind screaming past his hair, filling his world with the sense of being temporarily out of control, followed by a jolt of will and skill as he wrenched himself back into control. It was the sweetest and most exhilarating experience he knew.

  When they screeched to a halt, they were laughing. No one else took Claremont Hill at a dead roll in the fog. No one else dared.

  “Now that,” Frankie said, “was way twisted.”

  “Wanna pump back up, try it again?” Destiny’s eyes sparkled.

  “Almost, but not quite.” Shermie was shaking, the adrenaline dump nearly overpowering him. He regarded Patrick with shrewd eyes. “You know, I was watching Charlene last night, and I’m telling you that she wanted to slow dance with you.”

  “God,” Patrick said. “You are so full of crap.”

  “You were just scared,” Shermie insisted.

  Destiny was curious now. “Scared of what?”

  Frankie barked laughter. “Scared he’d get a boner half a meter long.”

  Destiny grimaced. “God,” she said. “Barf much? You are disgusting, Frankie.”

  “Thankyaverramuch,” Frankie said, his lip in an Elvis twist.

  They slid down the street. Morning mist still hung low to the pavement. They had an odd sense of owning the world, of moving through a landscape that was theirs alone.

  They talked comfortably, and with little speculation on the possibilities of the coming day. Perhaps there would be adventure of some kind. Perhaps a game, or a movie, or maybe they would just spend the time together relaxing, enjoying the companionable silence. Without verbal discussion, they had somehow come to an agreement that they would spend the day in each other’s company. For all of their complaining about Frankie, he was one of Us, not one of the Others, the rest of the world. The ones who didn’t, couldn’t understand.

  They rolled their bikes east along Ocean Way for a couple of blocks, pedaling their bikes as slowly as possible, enjoying the fog and the company, when Patrick suddenly pulled up short. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What the hell happened here?”

  They had just rolled past the Atomic Burrito stand, and were looking back at the Inside Edge coffee shop.

  Destiny let her breath out in a long steam-kettle sigh. The front of the shop was smashed. It couldn’t be easily seen from the street: you had to be rolling or walking down the sidewalk, and until now, there had been too much fog and too few pedestrians.

  But they could see it, and they understood the implications just fine. One at a time, they hopped off their bikes, walked down the driveway to the window, and peered inside.

  “Jeez,” Frankie said. “Who did that?”

  Patrick put his kickstand down. “What happened here?”

  Hermie Shermie was shaking again, as if the previous adrenaline hadn’t worn off. “We don’t want to be here, guys. We don’t want to be anywhere around here.”

  “Man,” Frankie said. Patrick couldn’t help but notice the excitement in his voice. “Somebody really trashed the place.”

  They stepped through the door carefully—the coffee shop’s glass door was broken. Ignoring the voice of reason, let alone the accumulated wisdom of countless Nick At Night reruns of Dragnet and Adam-12, Patrick reached through the front door’s broken glass and opened the door from the inside.

  Destiny was not happy at all. “Oh, man—guys—you shouldn’t be in there. Somebody is going to see…”

  Frankie was openly scornful. “Nobody saw all night, did they?”

  Patrick seemed almost in a trance. He walked in, looking at the broken chairs, the paint-splashed walls, the defaced counters, the torn books, but gave them only a cursory glance. His eyes were immediately drawn to something that seemed out of place in the middle of the trash-strewn floor.

  It was a plain red house brick, weathered, cracked. It might have been pulled out of someone’s garden wall. A sheet of white paper was folded around it, fastened with a rubber band.

  “Look, man,” he said, and picked it up. He popped the rubber band off and slid the note free.

  Frankie snatched it from his hand, and began reading aloud. His forehead crinkled. “‘You assholes want to settle this? Meet us under the bridge at midnight.’”

  “Is that corny, or what?” he said, but handed the note to Hermie. One at a time, they all read it, and then stared at each other.

  Patrick was the first to speak. “This can’t be happening,” he said.

  Frankie looked disgusted with him. “Oh, it’s happening, all right.”

  Destiny nudged a piece of broken glass with her toe. “Will Rowan call the cops?”

  “I don’t know,” Patrick said. “If they do, bet you that whoever did this—”

  “You know who did this,” Frankie said. “It’s Happy Cappy and the Fuckwads.”

  “You’re just guessing,” Shermie said.

  “Hell I am. Those assholes will know if Rowan calls the cops, all right.”

  “How can you be sure?” Shermie said again.

  “Haven’t you ever watched television?” Destiny asked. “If these guys are selling serious drugs, you think they don’t have a connection in the local cops, someone to tell them when a bust is going down? They obviously knew how to shut the burglar alarm off. They don’t want an audience. This is personal.” No one argued. They had all watched too many cop and detective shows to disagree.

  Potheads Rowan and Pork might be, but Patrick had too many memories, good memories, of afternoons in the shop, hot cocoa, of gentle ribbing with some harmless folks whose business just happened to overlap with the most vicious bastards in town.

  “Probably won’t call the cops anyway,” he said slowly. “I think this thing has been heading to a showdown for months. This is it. Pork doesn’t want the cops in his business.”

  Hermie made a sound like someone sucking at a joint. And Destiny gave him the nastiest look imaginable.

  “Somebody’s going to get killed,” she said.

  Frankie seemed lost deep in thought, so deep that they seemed a bit surprised when he roused himself and said: “I hope so.”

  They looked at him, holding the brick in his hand. The beginning of a cold, cruel smile curled his lip. Patrick was the first to reconstruct Frankie’s thought process, and the light burst behind his eyes like an exploding star.

  15

  JOURNAL ENTRY #4:

  Determining the goal is one step. Proposing a means to achieve it is another. But there is also the necessity to correlate results, and publish for replication. Due to the proposed double-blind nature of the initial experiment, it was initially feared that it would be problematic to gather the data without raising suspicion. But since all preschool computer systems were enabled for automatic downloading of updates, it was also possible to upload results, keyed to the individual child. Dosages of ergogenics could be computed by standardizing the percentage or weight of mixture per snack, and tracking the amounts of each snack consumed. Simple evaluations disguised as general achievement or progress tests gave further insight. All in all, Aristotle proceeded more rapidly than we had hoped, and more positively than we could have dreamed.

  Then, of course, there was the unfortunate event in Washington State. Although an isolated instance, safety suggested that Ari
stotle be suspended until a full evaluation could be completed.…

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

  The two men had landed at San Jose International Airport an hour earlier. One of them was white, the other black with very white hair. Aside from that, they might have been brothers. Both were in their fifties, both very fit; neither betrayed much emotion. The black man presented a credit card issued in a name that was not his own, and rented a Camaro. They took the 880 north to the 580 East, cutting across Hayward and Castro Valley, through rolling green hills.

  They took the Vasco Road off-ramp north up to May School Road, passing a Texaco and Mobil gas station, a Denny’s, a few private homes, and then finally reaching a smaller, privately maintained road.

  A sign to the right read: ADVANCED SYSTEMS. A key card in the slot of an electronic reader opened the gate. They drove a few hundred yards along a twisting gravel path to a pleasant green building with broad windows looking out onto a featureless expanse of hills.

  The white man pressed a button on the main door, and announced himself, saying: “Martin Schott.” The black man said: “Mr. Wisher.” These were their real names. In addition to their other, more specialized skills, both men held college degrees: Wisher a Masters in Psychology, Schott a B.S. in Political Science. Familiarity with organizational structures and the specialized jargon of an establishment like Advanced Systems had made them ideal for this assignment.

  The door opened, and they were welcomed into a foyer without a receptionist’s desk. A broad, smiling, pale man with a deeply receding hairline greeted them. “Mr. Schott! Mr. Wisher! How good to meet you at last.”

  “Dr. Dronet,” Wisher said, and extended his hand. His face was smiling, but behind his sunglasses, his eyes were flat.

  Dronet led them through narrow halls back to a conference room looking out through one of the broadest picture windows, onto the valley and the freeway running through it. There were five people in the conference room at the moment: three men, two women. All of them were dressed for comfort, except one man who stood, his bald pate glistening in the overhead light. He wore a cheap, shiny J.C. Penney suit, although everyone in the room knew that he could have afforded much better. That was just Jorgenson’s way, and he was brilliant enough for his eccentricities to offend no one.