Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  Disgusted, Leroy turned off the radio.

  His sister and her boyfriend had quit for a while, so it was quieter in the place. Leroy lit a cigarette and thought of getting out of here as soon as he could.

  I mean, Bobby and the Bombers had a record, a real big-hole forty-five on WhamJam. It wasn't selling worth shit from ail Leroy heard, but that didn't matter. It was a record, and it was real, it wasn't just singing under some street lamp. Slim said they'd played it once on WABC, on the Hit-or-Flop show, and it was a flop, but people heard it. Rumor was the Bombers had gotten sixty-five dollars and a contract for the session. They'd had a couple of gigs at dances and such, when the regular band took a break. They sure as hell couldn't be making any money, or they wouldn't be singing against the Kool-Tones for free kicks.

  But they had a record out, and they were working.

  If only the Kool-Tones got work, got a record, went on tour. Leroy was just twelve, but he knew how hard they were working on their music. They'd practice on street corners, on the stoop, just walking, getting the notes down right—the moves, the facial expressions of all the groups they'd seen in movies and on Slim's mother's TV.

  There were so many places to be out there. There was a real world with people in it who weren't punching somebody for berries, or stealing the welfare and stuff. Just someplace open, someplace away from everything else.

  He flipped on the flashlight beside his cot, pulled it under the covers with him, and opened his favorite book. It was Edward J. Ruppelt's Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. His big brother John William, whom he had never seen, sent it to him from his Army post in California as soon as he found Leroy had run away and was living with his sister. John William also sent his sister part of his allotment every month.

  Leroy had read the book again and again. He knew it by heart already. He couldn't get a library card under his own name because the state might trace him that way. (They'd already been around asking his sister about him. She lied. But she too had run away from a foster home as soon as she was old enough, so they hadn't believed her and would be back.) So he'd had to boost all his books. Sometimes it took days, and newsstand people got mighty suspicious when you were black and hung around for a long time, waiting for the chance to kipe stuff. Usually they gave you the hairy eyeball until you went away.

  He owned twelve books on UFOs now, but the Ruppelt was still his favorite. Once he'd gotten a book by some guy named Truman or something, who wrote poetry inspired by the people from Venus. It was a little sad, too, the things people believed sometimes. So Leroy hadn't read any more books by people who claimed they'd been inside the flying saucers or met the Neptunians or such. He read only the ones that gave histories of the sightings and asked questions, like why was the Air Force covering up? Those books never told you what was in the UFOs, and that was good because you could imagine it for yourself.

  He wondered if any of the Del Vikings had seen flying saucers when they were in the Air Force with Zoot's cousin. Probably not, or Zoot would have told him about it. Leroy always tried to get the rest of the Kool-Tones interested in UFOs, but they all said they had their own problems, like girls and cigarette money. They'd go with him to see Invasion of the Saucermen or Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers at the movies, or watch The Thing on Slim's mother's TV on the Creature Feature, but that was about it.

  Leroy's favorite flying-saucer sighting was the Mantell case, in which a P-51 fighter plane, which was called the Mustang, chased a UFO over Kentucky and then crashed after it went off the Air Force radar. Some say Captain Mantell died of asphyxiation because he went to 20,000 feet and didn't have on an oxygen mask, but other books said he saw "something metallic and of tremendous size" and was going after it. Ruppelt thought it was a Skyhook balloon, but he couldn't be sure. Others said it was a real UFO and that Mantell had been shot down with Z-rays.

  It had made Leroy's skin crawl when he had first read it.

  But his mind went back to the Del Vikings. What had caused them to break up? What was it really like out there on the road? Was music getting so bad that good groups couldn't make a living at it anymore?

  Leroy turned off the flashlight and put the book away. He put out the cigarette, lit a cigar, went to the window, and looked up the airshaft. He leaned way back against the cool window and could barely see one star overhead. Just one star.

  He scratched himself and lay back down on the bed.

  For the first time, he was afraid about the contest tomorrow night.

  We got to be good, he said to himself. We got to be good.

  In the other room, the bed started squeaking again.

  The Hellbenders arrived early to check out the turf. They'd been there ten minutes when the Purple Monsters showed up. There was handshaking all around, talk a little while, then they moved off into two separate groups. A few civilians came by to make sure this was the place they'd heard about.

  "Park your cars out of sight, if you got 'em," said Lucius. "We don't want the cops to think anything's going on here."

  Vinnie strut-walked over to Lucius.

  "This crowd's gonna be bigger than I thought. I can tell."

  "People come to see somebody drink some piss. You know, give the public what it wants…" Lucius smiled.

  "I guess so. I got this weird feelin', though. Like, you know, if your mother tells you she dreamed about her aunt, like right before she died and all?"

  "I know what feelin' you mean, but I ain't got it," said Lucius.

  "Who you got doing the electrics?"

  "Guy named Sparks. He was the one lit up Choton Field."

  At Choton Field the year before, two gangs wanted to fight under the lights. So they went to a high-school football stadium. Somebody got all the lights and the P.A. on without going into the control booth.

  Cops drove by less than fifty feet away, thinking there was a practice scrimmage going on, while down on the field guys were turning one another into bloody strings. Somebody was on the P.A. giving a play-by-play. From the outside it sounded cool. From the inside, it looked like a pizza with all the topping ripped off it.

  "Oh," said Vinnie. "Good man."

  He used to work for Con Ed, and he still had his I.D. card. Who was going to mess with Consolidated Edison? He drove an old, gray pickup with a smudge on the side that had once been a power-company emblem. The truck was filled to the brim with cables, wires, boots, wrenches, tape, torches, work lights, and rope.

  "Light man's here!" said somebody.

  Lucius shook hands with him and told him what they wanted. He nodded.

  The crowd was getting larger, groups and clots of people drifting in, though the music wasn't supposed to start for another hour. Word traveled fast.

  Sparks attached a transformer and breakers to a huge, thick cable.

  Then he got out his climbing spikes and went up a pole like a monkey, the heavy chunk-chunk drifting down to the crowd every time he flexed his knees. His tool belt slapped against his sides.

  He had one of the guys in the Purple Monsters throw him up the end of the inch-thick electrical cable.

  The sun had just gone down, and Sparks was a silhouette against the purpling sky that poked between the buildings.

  A few stars were showing in the eastern sky. Lights were on all through the autumn buildings. Thanksgiving was in a few weeks, then Christmas.

  The shopping season was already in full swing, and the streets would be bathed in neon, in holiday colors. The city stood up like big, black fingers all around them.

  Sparks did something to the breakdown box on the pole.

  There was an immense blue scream of light that stopped everybody's heart.

  New York City went dark.

  "Fucking wow!"

  A raggedy-assed cheer of wonder ran through the crowd.

  There were crashes, and car horns began to honk all over town.

  "Uh, Lucius," Sparks yelled down the pole after a few minutes. "Have the guys go steal me about thirty autom
obile batteries."

  The Purple Monsters ran off in twenty different directions.

  "Ahhhyyyhhyyh," said Vinnie, spitting a toothpick out of his mouth. "The Monsters get to have all the fun."

  It was 5:27 P.M. on November 9, 1965. At the Ossining changing station a guy named Jim was talking to a guy named Jack.

  Then the trouble phone rang. Jim checked all his dials before he picked it up.

  He listened, then hung up.

  "There's an outage all down the line. They're going to switch the two hundred K's over to the Buffalo net and reroute them back through here. Check all the load levels. Everything's out from Schenectady to Jersey City."

  When everything looked ready, Jack signaled to Jim.

  Jim called headquarters, and they watched the needles jump on the dials.

  Everything went black.

  Almost everything.

  Jack hit all the switches for backup relays, and nothing happened.

  Almost nothing.

  Jim hit the emergency battery work lights. They flicked and went out.

  "What the hell?" .asked Jack.

  He looked out the window.

  Something large and bright moved across a nearby reservoir and toward the changing station.

  "Holy Mother of Christ!" he said.

  Jim and Jack went outside.

  The large bright thing moved along the lines toward the station. The power cables bulged toward the bottom of the thing, whipping up and down, making the stanchions sway. The station and the reservoir were bathed in a blue glow as the thing went over. Then it took off quickly toward Manhattan, down the straining lines, leaving them in complete darkness.

  Jim and Jack went back into the plant and ate their lunches.

  Not even the phone worked anymore.

  It was really black by the time Sparks got his gear set up. Everybody in the crowd was talking about the darkness of the city and the sky. You could see all over the place, everywhere you looked.

  There was very little noise from the city around the loading area.

  Somebody had a radio on. There were a few Jersey and Pennsy stations on. One of them went off while they listened.

  In the darkness, Sparks worked by the lights of his old truck. What he had in front of him resembled something from an alchemy or magnetism treatise written early in the eighteenth century. Twenty or so car batteries were hooked up in series with jumper cables. He'd tied those in with amps, mikes, transformers, a light board, and lights on the dock area.

  "Stand clear!" he yelled. He bent down with the last set of cables and stuck an alligator clamp on a battery spot.

  There was a screeching blue jag of light and a frying noise. The lights flickered and came on, and the amps whined louder and louder.

  The crowd, numbering around five hundred, gave out with prolonged huzzahs and applause.

  "Test test test," said Lucius. Everybody held their hands over their ears.

  "Turn that fucker down," said Vinnie. Sparks did. Then he waved to the crowd, got into his old truck, turned the lights off, and drove into the night.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, the Purple Monsters…" said Lucius, to wild applause, and Vinnie leaned into the mike, "and the Hellbenders," more applause, then back to Lucius, "would like to welcome you to the first annual piss-off—I mean, sing-off—between our own Bobby and the Bombers," cheers, "and the challengers," said Vinnie, "the Kool-Tones!" More applause.

  "They'll do two sets, folks," said Lucius, "taking turns. And at the end, the unlucky group, gauged by your lack of applause, will win a prize!" The crowd went wild.

  The lights dimmed out. "And now," came Vinnie's voice from the still blackness of the loading dock, "for your listening pleasure, Bobby and the Bombers!"

  "Yayyyyyyyyyy!"

  The lights, virtually the only lights in the city except for those that were being run by emergency generators, came up, and there they were.

  Imagine frosted, polished elegance being thrust on the unwilling shoulders of a sixteen-year-old.

  They had on bluejackets, matching pants, ruffled shirts, black ties, cuff links, tie tacks, shoes like obsidian mortar trowels. They were all black boys, and from the first note, you knew they were born to sing:

  "Bah bah," sang Letus the bassman, "doo-doo duh-duh doo-ahh, duh-doo-dee-doot," sang the two tenors, Lennie and Gonk, and then Bobby and Fred began trading verses of the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby," while the tenors wailed and Letus carried the whole with his bass.

  Then the lights went down and came up again as Lucius said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Kool-Tones!"

  It was magic of a grubby kind.

  The Kool-Tones shuffled on, arms pumping in best Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers fashion, and they ran in place as the hand-clapping got louder and louder and they leaned into the mikes.

  They were dressed in waiters' red cloth jackets the Hellbenders had stolen from a laundry service for them that morning. They wore narrow black ties, except Leroy who had on a big, thick, red bow tie he'd copped from his sister's boyfriend.

  Then Cornelius leaned over his mike and: "Doook doook doook doookov," and Ray and Zoot joined with "dook dook dook dookov," into Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl," with Leroy smiling and doing all of Chandler's hand moves. Slim chugged away the "iiiiiiiiiyiyiyiyiiiii's" in the background in runs that made the crowd's blood cold, and the lights went down. Then the Bombers were back, and in contrast to the up-tempo ending of "Duke of Earl" they started with a sweet tenor a cappella line and then: "woo-radad-da-dat, woo-radad-da-dat," of Shep and the Limelites' "Daddy's Home."

  The Kool-Tones jumped back into the light. This time Cornelius started it off with "Bomp-a-pa-bomp, bomp-pa-pa-bomp, dang-a-dang-dang, ding-a-dong-ding," and into the Marcels' "Blue Moon," not just a hit but a mere monster back in 1961. And they ran through the song, Slim taking the lead, and the crowd began to yell like mad halfway through. And Leroy—smiling, singing, rocking back and forth, doing James Brown tantrum-steps in front of the mike—knew, could feel, that they had them, that no matter what, they were going to win. And he ended with his whining part and Cornelius went "Bomp-ba-ba-bomp-ba-bom," and paused and then deeper, "booo mooo."

  The lights came, up and Bobby and the Bombers hit the stage. At first Leroy, sweating, didn't realize what they were doing, because the Bombers, for the first few seconds, made this churning rinky-tink sound with the high voices. The bass, Letus, did this grindy sound with his throat. Then the Bombers did the only thing that could save them, a white boy's song, Bobby launching into Del Shannon's "Runaway," with both feet hitting the stage at once. Leroy thought he could taste that urine already.

  The other Kool-Tones were transfixed by what was about to happen.

  "They can't do that, man," said Leroy. "They're gonna cop out."

  "That's impossible. Nobody can do it." But when the Bombers got to the break, this guy Fred stepped out to the mike and went: "Eee-de-ee-dee-eedle-eee-eee, eee-deee-eedle-deeee, eedle-dee-eedle-dee-dee-dee, eewheetle-eeedle-dee-deedle-dee-eeeeee," in a spitting falsetto, half mechanical, half Martian cattle call—the organ break of "Runaway," done with the human voice.

  The crowd was on its feet screaming, and the rest of the song was lost in stamping and cheers. When the Kool-Tones jumped out for the last song of the first set, there were some boos and yells for the Bombers to come back, but then Zoot started talking about his girl putting him down because he couldn't shake 'em down, but how now he was back to let her know… They all jumped in the air and came down on the first line of "Do You Love Me?" by the Contours, and they gained some of the crowd back. But they finished a little wimpy, and then the lights went down and an absolutely black night descended. The stars were shining over New York City for the first time since World War II, and Vinnie said, "Ten minutes, folks!" and guys went over to piss against the walls or add to the consolation-prize bottles.

  It was like halftime in the locker room with the score Green Bay 146, You 0.

  "A cheap tri
ck," said Zoot. "We don't do shit like that."

  Leroy sighed. "We're gonna have to," he said. He drank from a Coke bottle one of the Purple Monsters had given him. "We're gonna have to do something."

  "We're gonna have to drink pee-pee, and then Vinnie's gonna de-nut us, is what's gonna happen."

  "No, he's not," said Cornelius.

  "Oh, yeah?" asked Zoot. "Then what's that in the bottle in the clubhouse?"

  "Pig's balls," said Cornelius. "They got 'em from a slaughterhouse."

  "How do you know?"

  "I just know," said Cornelius, tiredly. "Now let's just get this over with so we can go vomit all night."

  "I don't want to hear any talk like that," said Leroy. "We're gonna go through with this and give it our best, just like we planned, and if that ain't good enough, well, it just ain't good enough."

  "No matter what we do, ain't gonna be good enough."

  "Come on, Ray, man!"

  "I'll do my best, but my heart ain't in it."

  They lay against the loading dock. They heard laughter from the place where Bobby and the Bombers rested.

  "Shit, it's dark!" said Slim.

  "It ain't just us, just the city," said Zoot. "It's the whole goddamn U.S."

  "It's just the whole East Coast," said Ray. "I heard on the radio. Part of Canada, too."

  "What is it?"

  "Nobody knows."

  "Hey, Leroy," said Cornelius. "Maybe it's those Martians you're, always talking about."

  Leroy felt a chill up his spine.

  "Nah," said Slim. "It was that guy Sparks. He shorted out the whole East Coast up that pole there."

  "Do you really believe that?" asked Zoot.

  "I don't know what I believe anymore."

  "I believe," said Lucius, coming out of nowhere with an evil grin on his face, "that it's show time."

  They came to the stage running, and the lights came up, and Cornelius leaned on his voice and: "Rabbalabbalabba ging gong, rabbalabbalabba ging gong," and the others' went "wooooooooooo" in the Edsels' "Rama Lama Ding Dong." They finished and the Bombers jumped into the lights and went into: "Domm dom domm dom doobedoo, dom domm dom dobedoodbeedomm, wah-wahwahwahhh," of the Del Vikings' "Come Go With Me."