Callisto

by Torsten Krol

  Like a TV show. A TV show is how it went. A TV show has got a script that gets wrote out on paper and they rehearse it and then do it with the cameras rolling. My getaway was a TV show. I started to sweat big time, could not stop my heart going budumbudumbudum as that one thought kept on spinning around until the dog caught hold of his tail and tasted it. It tasted like dog tail, the only real thing going on tonight, I could see it now. They had got together, those three, Lorraine and Larry and Vine, and put together a script to fool me. Or more likely it was Kraus and Deedle come up with the idea and roped Lorraine in first because they know I have got this sweet spot for her like I do, or did anyway, and she said the best way to fool me is to use the fact that I don’t like Andy Webb, who was most likely the next one brung into the plan and Andy brung in Larry Dayton because he already told me Larry is in big trouble about what he did . . .and they brung in Vine next with his bullshit story about wanting to take over Andy’s job when he gets fired for letting me escape . . .And there isn’t a single speck of anything real in the entire thing, it’s just a TV script they put together and worked out all the bugs till it’s a smooth story like on TV, and then they sprung it on me while my head was ripped with painkiller drugs so I can’t see how stupid it all is. How could they have expected me to fall for it once I got to thinking about it all? Did they think I was stupid or something?

  Well, there it was, the one thing that made it all hang together, the one thing nobody likes to admit about how people think about him. They thought I was stupid, every single one of them. They thought I’m so fucking stupid all they have to do is put together a bullshit TV script and spring me from the hospital ward like in Mission Impossible and set me up with a car nobody’ll miss for a week with a full gas tank . . .and let’s not forget the way Lorraine and Vine both told me more than once to go find my friends to be with in safety so the getaway succeeds in its mission . . .which is not to let me get away, it’s to follow me and find out where my terrorist buddies are holed up, most likely with Dean running the show. . . because why would they believe Dean is dead when I told them two different places he’s buried and he’s not in either one, so they figured that’s all bluff on my part to buy myself time in which to plan my big escape . . . but they know I’m not smart enough to get away on my own so they put their heads together and helped me out, knowing I’m too dumb to see how it’s all been arranged like a TV show. . .

  Except I did notice. And now, believe it or not, I started to cry about how dumb they think I am. This is a hard thing to say about the crying, but that is what I did, started crying because all those people think I’m so dumb. And what made it worse, I had to admit they’re right, I am dumb. I am a big dumb stupid idiot, that’s me, for covering up the way I killed Dean accidental, then for pretending to be him, then for getting sucked into the drug-pushing thing with Lorraine because I liked her and thought maybe she liked me, which I see now was the biggest dumb thing I thought, she always looked on me as a fool . . .and then for writing that dumb letter to Condi Rice, and letting them – whoever they are – steal the truck and turn it into a bomb . . .and last of all, being dumb enough not to see how they let me escape like putting a rat into a maze and watching him from above as he scuttles this way and that, up one skinny corridor and down another searching for the cheese, which is this terrorist cell they all think I belong to.

  Watching from above. They have got a tracking bug somewhere inside the car and are following me along I-70 in a FBI car with this little screen inside going blipblipblip as the little glowing dot gives out its signal. Or maybe overhead in a chopper. Or way overhead with spy satellites tracking me like Jim Ricker kidded me about. Maybe Jim Ricker is the real terrorist here, I don’t know because I am a big dumb idiot that should’ve kept going and not stayed one minute in Callisto, kept going to Manhattan, Kansas, and enlisted in the Army like I planned. But I walked through the wrong door when my car broke down and got swept up in Something Big that I still don’t understand how big it really is, and all those people tracking me and trying to fool me, they don’t know either, so there is plenty of ignorance to go round, which made me feel a little better and I quit crying and started to think like a normal man, which it is high time I got to be one of those.

  So I am being tracked. Going nowhere. In the movies the guy in the car with the bug finds it and puts it on another car that goes in a different direction and fools the bad guys following the bug with their blipscreen. Maybe the bug is tucked away in a wheel well nice and convenient, or it could be stuck anywhere inside the car where I can’t find it even if I pulled the whole thing apart, those things are small. The speed and caffeine had took hold very nicely and my brain fizzed with all kinds of things I might do to get out of this Bad Situation, but as soon as one of these popped into my skull it got smacked down again for being totally stupid and unworkable. And I was hungry again too, seeing as I was too upset to eat that evening meal on account of the big surprise about Dean not being buried near the cottonwoods anymore. So now I’m starving hungry on top of everything else, but this was a problem easy to take care of at the next big gas station and truck stop which is only another ten miles to go this sign tells me –Brubaker’s All-Niter, We Never Close.

  I pulled off the interstate and parked with all the other cars, a fair number even at this hour of the morning. Over on the other side of the gas station/diner with the big neon Brubaker’s sign there’s a dozen or so eighteen-wheelers lined up neat in rows with their diesels grumbling while the drivers are inside chowing down or even taking a shower, Brubaker’s has got this service also a sign tells me, but I’m only interested in food right now.

  I went in and the bright lights hurt my eyes for a moment then I got used to it. I went and found a booth to sit in alone and private, orange vinyl, then a waitress come along looking perky even if it’s way past 3 am now and asks what I want. I ordered a double cheeseburger plus fries and a large Coke, plus coffee to keep my mind working overtime on a way out of this situation I am in. Only a smart plan is going to save me now, and I’m not exactly sure how smart I am even if I figured out I’m a runaway rat with a bug up my ass. But I had made up my mind on one thing – I would never again shed a tear for how dumb I am, this is not my fault, just the way I was born and nothing to do with me you might say, and anyway I’m not so dumb as everyone thinks, so there you go. From now on I would use every bit of smart in me to figure out a way to stay free.

  The food got brung out and I ate like a starving man, which I am, but not anymore after I got through eating everything and was drinking down the last of the Coke. I used the bathroom and had them give me another tall coffee to go, which I carried out to the car and already I’m asking myself if I should keep going west or maybe go north, not that it made any difference to me.

  I’m standing there with the key in my hand asking myself this when I noticed a guy over by the exit with a piece of cardboard in his hand wanting to be given a lift. I went on over and the cardboard has got DENVER wrote on it in big letters. It is just a young guy, maybe eighteen, and my mind with the new smart part took over my mouth.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he says back.

  “I can get you to Denver.”

  “Okay, great.” He looked real pleased, probably not hopeful of getting a ride until I come along. He was dressed kind of shabby which most people will not allow in their car, but I would, even if it’s not my car.

  “This way,” I said, and we started walking over to the Honda. “You’ll have to do all the driving, is that okay?”

  “Sure, I’m a good driver.”

  “Can I see your license just to be sure?”

  He dug it out of his jeans and showed me. Wendell Richard Aymes dob 23-6-89.

  “Okay,” I said, “this is the situation. This is not my car, it belongs to a friend, uh, Feenie Myers.” I used Feenie’s name because it’s hard to make up a name on the spot that sounds real, otherwise I would’ve come up with something like
Susan Smith or whatever. “Feenie goes to college in Durango, so this is her parents’ address I’m giving you, okay? Uh, 1286 Newton Drive in Lakewood, that’s in Denver.”

  “I know, I’m a Denverite.”

  “Well, good. Now Feenie is expecting this car back tomorrow, only I’ve got this situation here with one of the lady cooks over there in Brubaker’s. She wants me to stay over, you know, and she’s real pretty, but then I’ve got to get Feenie’s car back to her like I promised, which I’m a man of my word about stuff like that.”

  “You want me to drive the car to Denver?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Without you in it?”

  “That’s it exactly. I’ll hitch a ride maybe tomorrow or the day after, depending, but meantime Feenie gets her car back and I didn’t break my promise, that’s important.”

  “You’d trust me to do that?”

  “Sure, because if you steal the car or crash it or whatever, I’ve got your name and driver’s license number. You got a pen I can write it down?”

  He dug in his rucksack and brung out pen and paper which I wrote down the details of his license and also Feenie’s parents’ fake address for him, then I give him the keys and a hundred dollars for his trouble. Wendell was so excited about driving himself all the way home to Denver he’s grinning like a game show winner.

  “Hey, thanks, man. I’m a responsible driver, I won’t wreck it. Good luck with your girlfriend.”

  “Thanks. Now don’t go over the speed limit, okay? The Highway Patrol, they won’t believe I handed you the keys like this and then we’re both in trouble.”

  “I’ll keep it under the limit, depend on that. Hey, thanks again, this is the best thing that happened in a long time.”

  “Okay then.”

  He got in and started her up, then headed for the exit with a wave through the window. When he got out of the parking lot he aimed for the interstate ramp and then he’s gone from sight, blipblipbliping his way across Kansas and Colorado with the trackers following along behind like fish on a line. It felt good to know I fooled them with the smart intelligence they don’t know I have got, which I used to think up the next part of the plan, which is go over to the truck parking area and wait for a driver to come out.

  That part only took ten minutes or so in which I drunk down my coffee, and here comes a trucker with a beard halfway to his waist which has got this fat gut hanging over a rodeo belt and a big cowboy hat with a bunch of fancy feathers in front of it. I kind of stood up straight to let him know I want to talk to him but soon as he’s in talking distance he says, “I don’t take no riders ever, my policy.”

  “Okay,” I said, because what else could I say.

  He marched on past me in these high-heeled cowboy boots and goes to a big rig, orange I think but it’s hard to say what’s a real color under the sodium lamps they have got on poles out there. He opens it up and sets his boot on the first step, then he turned back to me and says, “Okay, get in.”

  I went around to the other door and climbed up into that cab like a mountaineer and got settled in this big captain’s chair with armrests. The driver is sat way over there on the other side of the cab getting comfy, then he puts her in gear and we started rolling slow across the asphalt to the exit which he eased us through and then across to the interstate ramp. The truck climbed up onto the highway and he run up through the gears like a piano player, real sure of what he’s doing, and pretty soon we’re going back east toward Callisto, which give me a nervous feeling but you know, they would not think I’m doing this so maybe it’s for the best. He might take me as far east as St Louis, which is about as far as my plan was planned for the moment. I was hoping the next stage would come to me around daybreak.

  “What’s your story?” the driver asks me.

  “I’m going home to St Louis,” I said. “Then I’m joining the Army.”

  “Why?”

  “They need men. They’re begging for men, even paying a bonus.”

  “Better be a big one,” he says.

  “Big enough.”

  “What part of St Louis?”

  I thought about that for two seconds. “East St Louis.”

  “Man, now I know why you want into the Army. That’s a hole.”

  “Uhuh.”

  “That place has got a reputation. Drugs, domestic violence, crime, gangbangers, you name it they got it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone should drop a bomb on East St Louis.”

  “That might work.”

  He laughed and told me his name is Gene. I told him I’m Wendell. It rolled right off of my tongue, a fib on wheels. I didn’t care that I’m lying, so this must be the New Me coming out, so there’s no arguing about it inside me, Truth versus Lies, I just didn’t care about that anymore, only about getting away.

  “That’s a dangerous job, the Army.”

  “Someone’s got to do it.”

  “My daughter, she rides around on planes with a gun in her armpit.”

  “She’s a hijacker?”

  He snorted. “She’s there to stop hijackers. Federal Air Marshal. Those terrorists don’t expect a woman to be packing, so that’s her advantage. The money’s real good but I worry about her. My boy too, he’s working in freelance security over there in Iraq, goes to sleep with a machine gun under the pillow. Great wages, though.”

  “The world is a bad place.”

  “Got that right. Hear about that bomb close to here, that huge fucker that’s big enough to take out a city block?”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Some stupid terrorist bomber probably blew himself up, they do that sometimes. They should do it more often.”

  “Uhuh.”

  “You can’t reason with some religious nut thinks he’s doing it for Allah.”

  “Nope.”

  “Can’t stop ’em either, just gotta kill ’em off one by one till the problem goes away and we can get back to normal.”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t get Americans flying planes into skyscrapers and planting bombs to kill innocent people, that’s strictly a Muslim thing, crazy fuckers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Happened just a little ways down the road here, Callisto. They still can’t find that ringleader, though, that Dean Lowry guy. What kind of an American does he think he is, doing shit like that? When they catch him they should waste him right there in whatever hole in the ground he lives, save the taxpayer some money for a trial. Shoulda done the same for Saddam. Everyone knows who’s guilty and who’s not. Trials, they just drag it out and make folks feel bad watching some asshole in a nice clean jail cell when he oughta be burning in Hell.”

  “I guess you’ll be voting for Senator Ketchum then.”

  “Ordinarily I don’t discuss politics, can’t stand those guys, but the senator, he’s got a hard line I can relate to. The other bunch, they talk the talk but they don’t walk the walk, you know, like their heart isn’t really in it and they’d prefer to pussyfoot around the problem, bring in the fucking UN and talk some more. Screw that. If someone shoots at me I shoot right back, never mind no asking why he did that and what’s it all about. Ketchum, he’ll blow them terrorist bastards back to Arabia where they belong. You know what I think every time I fill up the tanks on my baby here? I think how I’d be paying half as much if those terrorist assholes didn’t exist. Don’t get me started on that subject. My daughter, I put her through college, she’s real smart, and the job with the best pay she can find is packing a gun on airplanes, just flying around waiting for some shithead to start waving a knife and screaming about how he’s gonna kill everyone for the glory of fucking Allah. You know what I’m talking about or you wouldn’t be going in the Army.”

  “I sure do.”

  “I’d join up myself if I was twenty years younger. The Army, they shouldn’t have to be offering bonuses just to join. Young guys should be trampling on each other to join up and do some good in the wor
ld. I wouldn’t have thought that way five, six years ago, but it’s a different world nowadays. Your folks backing you on this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good people.”

  “Uhuh, my dad especially. He wanted me to get into professional football but when I said I’m joining the Army he said he’s proud.”

  “Well, he should be. My kids, they make me proud. Their mother run off a long time ago.”

  I tried to think of something I could say about that, but nothing come to me and Gene seemed like he talked enough anyway, there was just some things he wanted off his chest and after he did that he’s happy just to drive. Time rolled along and sooner than I expected here comes the sign that says Callisto Next Two Exits.

  “There’s some guy in hospital here,” says Gene, talkative again. “The one that got blown up in that big blast. There’s speculation I heard he’s one of them himself, maybe a bombmaker went and got his wires crossed, something like that. They’ll squeeze that sucker till he talks.”

  “Maybe he was just there accidental.”

  “Sure, and maybe I could teach my dog to drive a truck. They’ll get it out of him all right, only when they do they won’t broadcast it around for fear of scaring off the rest of them. I bet they’re already building a new bomb. They don’t ever give up, that kind.”

  Hearing him talk that way made me realize how it’s going to be impossible to prove I had nothing to do with any terrorists, or that Dean had nothing to do with that kind either, only regular drug pushers, nothing religious with bombs and so forth. Kraus and Deedle, they didn’t believe me, and Lorraine didn’t at the end there, even helped them set me up for a big escape that’ll lead them to the terrorists that don’t even exist. Except who made Dean’s truck into a bomb if they weren’t terrorists? If it was a rival drug gang or whatever they would’ve taken out Dean nice and quiet with a gun, not gone and planted a bomb that made the news nationwide and around the world. It just does not make sense, and I could see why the FBI thinks there’s something terroristic going on in Kansas, and maybe there is, but I would not have Clue Number One about any of that, I’m just a guy that his car broke down on the wrong road, only now nobody will believe me so I am fresh out of luck with regard to this.