by David Coy
“Well . . . ”
“Deep subject . . . ”
“Ha, ha.”
“I guess I’d better hit the road.”
“Yeah. Thanks again for driving.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Linda got out of the car and hitched her heavy purse up onto her shoulder. She was aware that the car’s engine had not started by the time she got to the front door. When she finally heard the engine start, she was sorry she hadn’t asked George if he might want some coffee or something before he left. She turned around and waved at the car as it backed out of the drive, but she wasn’t sure George saw her.
She walked straight to the bedroom and flopped on the bed. All things begin and end here, she thought. Right here in this
bed.
She’d fallen in love with Phil in this bed, mourned his passing in it and now she’d resigned herself—come to grips with Phil’s death—right on this bed. She rubbed her face with her hands and groaned defiantly.
Hunger hit her like a wave she hadn’t seen.
A hamburger, she thought. Nice summer night. A big-assed barbecued hamburger is what I want—with lettuce, tomato—and onion—a thick slice of white onion on it.
She got up and before she got to the kitchen, she’d done an inventory for the components of this amazing burger and was very pleased with the results.
When the door bell rang, she thought it was her neighbor, Hugh, come to borrow the lawn mower.
She was quite shocked when she opened the door and saw George Greenbaum standing there with a broad smile and two big bags from Burger King.
Linda looked at the bags. “Those burgers got onions on ‘em?” she asked.
“You bet,” he said.
* * *
Tom had a special hiding place for his good stuff. The floor of his hole had a depression in it about two feet long, and a foot wide. Not big, but it did the job. He kept one of his sleeping bags over it and slept on the other one. It wasn’t the most secure place, but it kept spying eyes off his stuff. You couldn’t trust anybody nowadays. Gilbert knew about the hidey-hole but stayed out of it. At least Tom had never caught him snooping in it. He didn’t think Gilbert would steal from him, but you never knew.
Thieves are everywhere and you never know who’s one of ‘em.
The worst time was in Missouri one summer when a partner stole his backpack and everything in it after he’d set Tom up by sending him on a wild goose chase saying he’d just seen about two hundred pounds of canned goods in a dumpster behind Slater Brothers grocery. He even had about fifteen cans of peaches in a box to prove it.
“Go get yourself some,” the sonofabitch had said. “Hell, I’ll watch your things.”
The dumpster had about two hundred pounds of garbage in it, but no canned goods. When Tom got back the pack and his partner were gone. The pack had all his extra clothes—including a pair of good boots he was saving for winter—and all his trading things in it: a clock, two or three knives, a bunch of rings, shoe laces in the pack, some watches—always a favorite—and a whole carton of cigarettes he bought from a fat guy in Kansas for five dollars. He could do without most of it, but the worst part was the money he had stashed down in one of the pockets. He’d had better than eighty dollars in there. He could live for a long time on eighty dollars.
He’d had to start over from square one and the first couple of weeks were hard. He’d had to get himself arrested for vagrancy after two or three days just to eat and he hated to do that. They only keep you in jail for forty-eight hours for vagrancy, and there was a good chance you’d get hurt in jail. He panhandled himself back up and found a good place to camp in a bunch of trees off the freeway downtown that nobody else was in. There was plenty of cardboard around in the alleys, and he made a tent out of it that kept him dry enough. He stayed there and worked that area for the rest of the summer. It was a damn good thing it was summer time. It’d taken him a full year or more to get all that stuff together in one place and he swore he’d catch the sonofabitch someday and get even, but he knew the chances of that were zero. It was a big country.
He futzed around with the watches in the hidey-hole, picking each one up in turn and holding it. He polished the face of his favorite with his shirt tail—one of them ones with about a hundred controls on it. He opened the solar calculator and pressed at the soft keys with his thumb a few times.
He didn’t think it worked, but it was nice anyways. The key ring was a nice something, too. It had a leather thing and said “porch” on it. He didn’t know what he’d ever do with the keys, but the Mexican guy he’d got it from said he could have the car and laughed when he handed the keys to Tom. Tom knew he’d never find the car. He wasn’t stupid. It was the key ring he wanted. The guy died later.
He saved the phone for last. He opened it up gently and touched the keys then placed the phone up to his ear and said “Hello.” He laughed silently and looked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was in the chamber. “Hello,” he said again. That cracked him up and he laughed again without making a sound. He pressed the little button called “PWR” and a second later the phone startled him with a chime and some letters showed up on the screen. One of the big words said “Ready.” A little line of somethings started to move back and forth like steps then disappeared.
He turned the power off, folded it back up and put it in the hole. He didn’t want it to make any other noises and draw spies. He covered the stuff up with the sleeping bag and was smoothing it out when Gilbert’s voice surprised him.
“Do you have something new in there?” Gilbert asked, coming in.
“Sure do and keep out of it,” Tom said. “It’s mine.” He kept smoothing the sleeping bag over the pit, even if Gilbert did know where it was.
“That sounds like a threat,” Gilbert said and swallowed with his mouth open.
“Yeah, that’s right—I’m threaten’n you,” Tom said with his stolen pack still fresh on his mind. “Stay away from my stuff if you know what’s good for you. I told you before.”
“Secrets are evil things.”
“Too goddamned bad.”
The word “goddamn” filled the air around Gilbert’s nose with the smell of sewage.
“You shouldn’t use those words.”
“That’s too goddamned bad, too. If you don’t like it you
can leave. Stay away from my damned stuff.”
Gilbert just turned his head away and waited for Tom to say that he was sorry for using dirty words. He didn’t. That’s when Gilbert knew that Tom was evil, too. He had secrets and was trying to protect, them and he used dirty words. He opened his Bible and looked at the pages. He could feel Tom looking at him and kept his face blank. Tom would never be able to tell that he was planning to see just what he had in that hiding place. He wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and middle finger then fanned the air slowly with his hand to clear the bad smell.
Tom laid down and turned his back to Gilbert. Let him read his Bible, he thought. Crazy damn dummy.
Inspired ideas were virtual strangers to Tom Moon, but he’d had a few close approximations. In Pittsburgh one cold, fall season, he’d thought it would be a good idea to put electric heaters in park benches so people could warm up their asses on a chilly day. In L.A., during a pounding winter storm one year, he wondered if he could keep his feet dry by wrapping them in plastic bags. It worked for a while.
One hundred miles up, in the belly of an alien starship, he wondered if the cellular phone he had stashed under his sleeping bag would work from there.
Maybe we could call the cops, he thought. Phil or Mary would know.
He pulled back the sleeping bag and slipped the phone into the loose front pocket of his pants, all the time keeping it hidden from Gilbert. Gilbert seemed so involved with his Bible, Tom didn’t think he’d even look up, but he did when Tom walked by.
Got it hid in my pocket, you dummy, Tom thought.
Phil lived two or three holes down
and, Tom could have covered the distance in a few seconds if it wasn’t for the two big bastards standing in front of Phil’s chamber.
He saw Mary standing a few yards down the tube with her arms crossed, watching.
He moved up against the wall and tried to look as passive and non-threatening as possible. That was always a good policy when a big bastard was in the tube.
Phil had heard the whistling sound and knew they’d come for him. His heart pounded in his chest when he heard it as if someone had turned the speed up on it with a dial. He stepped out of the hole and looked up at the face of the goon. The head seemed to grow out of the massive trunk like a grotesque tumor. The face was so hideously swollen it wouldn’t have been recognizable as human if it wasn’t for the eyes at the bottom of the fleshy eye sockets. He felt overwhelmed by the thing’s physical mass. He turned in the direction of the exit seam, but couldn’t quite get his feet to move. The goon nudged him down the tube with the back of its hand, and it felt like he’d been bumped by a car. The urge to flee, to run full speed from the big bastard nearly overcame him, but there was nowhere to run. The fight or flight reflex swung like a pendulum, and he had the impulse to turn on the bastard and throw his fist into its mushy face. He would have done it if he hadn’t been sure it would kill him right then and there.
He resigned himself to the coming ordeal and bumped along as the big bastard nudged him. Let him push me, he thought. I’ll not give in utterly.
“It ends!” Mary yelled at him. “It always ends!”
Phil turned around and licked his dry lips and nodded. The goon nudged him again and nearly knocked him down.
Tom watched as the goons marched Phil toward the exit seam. When they’d left, and the seam had closed, Tom looked over at Mary and raised his hand in a “hello.”
Aw, Jeez, she thought. Go away.
She turned and walked casually back toward her hole. She was almost there when she felt Tom’s presence close to her back, his usual approach angle. Just a step or two from the opening, she felt his tough, dry knuckles tap her arm.
“Wanna see sumpun’?” he asked.
Mary turned around with one eyebrow raised. If you flash me I’ll cut it off, she thought.
“What?” she said.
He produced the phone from his pocket and handed it to her in fast motion, then crossed his arms and waited with a self-satisfied smile on his face, like a kid who’d found a dollar.
“That’s a cellulerc phone,” he said.
Mary held the phone for a moment then opened it. “Cellular phone. Where did you . . . uh . . . where did you get this?”
“Dump.”
She took a closer look at the phone. Her mind began to race. “Are the . . . uh . . . the whatchamacallits . . . the batteries charged.”
“Yeah.” He pointed to the power button with his finger close to it. “You push that one right there . . . ” Mary pushed his hand away. “ . . . and you’ll see it’s got a battery.”
“I can work it,” she said. It was an old model and nothing fancy. It had a retractable antenna. She pulled out the antenna and pressed the power button. The phone chimed a note. She read the “Ready” message and grinned, but lost it when she watched the signal strength indicator jump up just one notch then go to zero. No signal.
She turned the power off immediately to conserve it.
Her mind went into high gear. No obstructions. Just what? . . . a hundred miles of space then ten miles or so of air.
“How high are we? Never mind. I want this. I’m claiming it. We might be able to make it work.”
Tom had been pleased Mary was so interested in his toy, but he frowned when she said that. He hadn’t planned on giving it up forever.
“Can I have it back later.”
“Oh, sure . . . ” she said absently.
What the hell was it, she thought, trying to remember from one of her electronics classes. Radio signals. Signal strength. Aperture. What was it about aperture? The bigger the aperture the better the reception, that was it. Reception aperture was relative— no fixed. I can’t remember. A three watt radio signal was always three watts of total energy. A sphere of energy—that was it. The radio signal went out like a sphere of infinite dimension like an expanding balloon. The bigger the reception aperture, the antenna, the farther you could be from the source and still get an acceptable signal. That’s why satellite dishes worked—they had big apertures. The bigger the balloon, the thinner its skin. The same for a radio signal. You just spread the three watts thinner the farther the receptor was from the transmission. But the signal didn’t have to expand in all directions like a balloon. That’s the key. The transmission could be focused, directed, so less of the signal energy was wasted behind you or to the sides. Focus the signal and you didn’t have to increase the aperture on the other end. Focus the signal and you could send it longer distances.
“Go find me some aluminum foil,” she said.
“Tin foil?”
“Yeah. Tin foil, I mean. I’ve seen some in the dump. In fact Ned has some. He used to make those . . . um . . . origami like crap with it. Go see if he has some left.”
That was it, she thought. I can focus the signal and send it down to the cellular system and simultaneously increase the reception aperture for the signal coming from the ground with an aluminum foil dish with this wire antenna in the center or attached somehow. The distance should be nothing, especially through space and a little air. If this thing we’re in is transparent to radio like I think it is, we can call the fucking Pentagon.
“Well, go!” she said. “He’s got a whole damned roll of it!”
Tom marched off in the direction of Ned’s chamber. He had no idea why she wanted tin foil, but he was glad to do it.
“Hey, wait a minute,” she said.
Tom turned around in mid-step. She looked at the dumb bastard standing there, waiting like a stray dog. “Thanks,” she said. “This is important.”
She wasn’t sure it could save their lives, but the idea of being able to touch the Earth, to talk to it, filled her with a flush of hope. They might actually be able to call down and tell someone what was happening here—if they could get anybody to believe it. And all because of Tom. He’d given the phone over with a smile.
“I mean it,” she said.
“I don’t mind so much,” Tom said.
Under his musk-scented exterior, he’s a child, Mary thought.
She looked at his silly grin; and in spite of herself, her heart went out to him in a gush of sympathy.
“Hey,” she said, and before she knew it, she’d stepped up and wrapped her arms around him in a big hug. What she felt wasn’t the street-hardened drifter she thought she’d feel, but a skinny kid in need of a bath.
He still had the smile on his face when he walked briskly past Gilbert on his way to Ned’s. Gilbert stood there with his mouth drawn tight. When Tom walked by and smiled close to his face, Gilbert held his hand up like a mild priest to halt him.
“What are you going to do with that?” Gilbert asked, nodding in Mary’s direction.
Tom was on a mission with no time to talk, but he couldn’t resist telling it. “Mary thinks we can call Earth with that, that’s what.”
Living on the streets, on life’s outer fringes, had honed some of Tom’s perceptions to a sharp edge, and one was the ability to sense whether or not another man was capable of causing you physical harm. Gilbert had spent his life avoiding rough stuff with the diligence most men avoid stepping in shit. When Gilbert violently grabbed his arm to stop him, Tom almost laughed out loud.
“Let go, buster,” Tom said. “I mean it.”
“What do you mean call Earth?”
Tom shook loose with a quick snap of his sinewy arm and Gilbert’s hand, getting no further direction from him, hung delicately in the air like a mannequin’s.
“I said she thinks she can call Earth with the damned phone, you egghead.”
“That’s not a good idea.” G
ilbert swallowed with his mouth open so hard he showed his teeth.
“Why’s at?” Tom asked.
Gilbert just stared.
“You crazy damn dummy,” Tom said and turned away from him.
“I said no!” Gilbert said.
“Nobody much gives a poop what you think now, do they?” Tom said and turned his back on him a second time.
The little knife had a blade on it no longer than a little girl’s finger, but being quite ignorant about what could kill and what would merely infuriate, he stabbed Tom Moon in the back of the neck with the sharp little blade with a fast little downward stab. Tom spun so fast he tore the knife from Gilbert’s pansy-like grip leaving it stuck in his wiry neck. When Tom reached up and gently touched the handle, he knew instantly it was the little sissy’s knife Gilbert carried.
Tom had been stabbed and cut before—three times to be exact and all three times the knives had been big enough to kill. Those attacks had toughened him to the idea of cuts and knives long before he’d ever been subjected to the ordeal the aliens had put him through. By comparison to all that, the little knife stuck in his neck was almost funny except it stung a bit. He took hold of the plastic handle and tugged it out. He felt the blood follow in a little warm stream down under his shirt. He held the knife up under Gilbert’s nose with two fingers.
“I’d ‘a cut your ears off with this here knife, you sonofa- bitch.”
Gilbert’s rage had flashed then vanished when the blade struck and he could only stare at the ghost and wonder why Tom wasn’t dead. He’s dead, but his evil holds him up like a frame, he thought sluggishly.
Tom set his mouth so tight, his whole face scrunched up and he inched the knife closer to Gilbert’s nose.
“You think I ain’t been cut enough already. You think I can’t take a cuttin’ from you, too. Looky here.” He tore open his shirt so Gilbert could see the map of scars across his wiry torso. He pointed to a big wide one among the hair-like scars on his abdomen. “See ‘at ‘un?” He turned around, lifted his shirt and his fingers found the shiny, raised evidence of another attack above his right kidney. “See ‘at ‘un?” The rounded tips of his nail-chewed fingers worked the scar briefly. He pulled up his left sleeve and showed Gilbert the long, ragged scar on his forearm and he rubbed along it with his dry, nubby forefinger. “Nother’n, too.” He turned around, bent his head and felt at the new little hole he knew was in his neck. “I know it’s there somewhere. Is ‘at it? Aw, shit, you can’t even see yours,” he said with a snort.
