The Return: A Novel

by Michael Gruber

  She lit up her screen and brought up tables of various materials, strength vs. weight vs. cost, plus whether or not they could be used in 3-D, and made notes, then brought up her CAD/CAM and tried them in her designs. But none of them worked, which meant she would have to redesign from scratch, which meant she would not have a prototype ready by next Monday. Dr. Schuemacher would give her a sad, disappointed look and not say anything, which was worse in a way than if he’d been a ranter, and then go on to the next member of the team—Liu, maybe, whose design would be perfect.

  Liu let out a yell, jerked off her headset, and said something in Chinese, which by its tone was something her mother would not have liked to hear.

  “What does that mean?” asked Statch.

  Liu colored and rolled her eyes. “It means someone has mixed pubic hairs in the bean sprouts. You know, when something doesn’t work because of one detail? What do Americans say?”

  “A fly in the ointment? What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that the space allotted for this arm is too short. I could use a compound lever, but then the part would be too complex, a bull to assemble, yes?”

  “A bear to assemble,” Statch corrected automatically. She leaned over Liu’s shoulder and studied the vast screen. After less than a minute she saw the solution.

  “You could use two smaller arms, above and below. That would fit.”

  “Two arms? Can I do that?”

  “Sure. It’s 3-D manufacturing—material is a minor constraint. They’d have to be mirror reversed, but that’s a piece of cake.”

  “A piece of cake,” Liu repeated. “Yes, I see. Thank you, Statch!” She replaced her headset and applied her supernatural intelligence once again to the screen. Not too good outside the box was Liu, but matchless within its walls.

  “No problem,” said Statch, returning her attention to her own screen. She could solve other people’s problems with ease but not her own, story of her life—or, no, stupid, let’s not descend into despair, self-pity’s a mug’s game, pull up your socks and drive on. One of her father’s sayings, that. And another one: if you’re stuck, don’t pound on yourself; take a break, do something you like, and let your unconscious work out the solution. She’d tried that with her swimming, although swimming was yet another demand, not quite the same thing as a trashy novel or a walk in the woods.

  She pressed a key. A chime sounded and a new window appeared. “Call Dad,” she commanded. A pause, some warbling rings, and a machine voice told her that the cell-phone customer was not available. She waited for the voice-mail beep and asked her father to call her. She was about to add that she was getting worried but did not. In fact, she was worried. She’d been trying to reach him for three days, with no response. Of course, she knew how to track the location of a cell phone and had done so, but the last time Richard Marder’s phone had been turned on it was located in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and it was either still there or had been turned off since. She could not imagine what her father was doing down in that Gulf Coast city or why he had stayed dark since.

  She now decided it was time to use a program her father did not know about, which was not exactly a legal program either, but, like most technically adept people of her generation, she had a fairly shriveled idea of what privacy and legality meant. The program was an exploit of a defect in the credit-card-charge recording system of a major bank. She patched herself into her personal computer, brought up the program, ran it, and discovered that her father had not used his credit card this week. Moreover, there were no travel-related expenses—neither air tickets nor hotel reservations nor ground transport. She knew that Richard Marder never carried significant amounts of cash, so this meant either that he had another credit card she didn’t know about, had modified long-standing habits, or (impossibly) was out traveling without spending any money at all. It was easy and barely illegal to check for other credit cards in his name; she did so and found nothing.

  This was seriously disturbing. Statch had been spying on her father in this modest and caring way for some years and increasingly in the three years since her mother’s death. She’d heard of people going batty after the death of a spouse, spending money on weird stuff, getting involved with malignant people, and she wanted to keep tabs on what he was up to, especially since he was involved with at least one malignant person already. She had, of course, also tried to keep tabs on Patrick Francis Skelly, to no avail. According to the all-knowing Internet, such a person did not exist: no credit cards, no bank account, not even an email address.

  The possibility that her father had gone off with Skelly popped into mind. Her father had never gone off with Skelly before. Why should he start now? Skelly had been a presence throughout her childhood, an attender of parties, a giver of large, generally inappropriate presents. The family, her mother especially, had treated Skelly like an unruly but beloved dog; a dish was always full for him, but he was not to be taken seriously. The Marder kids had used him as a Dutch uncle, of the sort always good for forbidden pleasures—the R movie, the first sip of bourbon, the straight skinny on sex, on bad stuff kids were not supposed to know about, secret lesson in driving a car, age ten. The Marder kids had no uncles—Marder was an only child, and their mother was deeply estranged from her Mexican family—so Skelly was it in that necessary role. They knew he’d saved their father’s life in Vietnam and was thus responsible for their own existence, which conveyed a certain primal fascination, but they’d also picked up some of their father’s attitude toward the man—a slight diffidence, a vague boredom. Statch did not think her father would willingly spend more than a long evening with Patrick Skelly. So where was he?

  With a mumbling curse, she closed down the snooper program and scrubbed all traces that she had used it off the university system. She sent the latest version of her design to her laptop as a sort of promissory note. Perhaps she would work on it later after she … after she what? Got rid of this antsy feeling, this unease in her mind and limbs, after she determined where her father was and what he was doing.

  In the next moment it occurred to her that a single phone call might resolve both the dad problem and the tension, which she now identified as at least partly sexual in nature. Like many women of her generation and cast of mind, Statch had an engineering relationship to her own body and its requirements. She knew what she liked, she knew how to get it, and the only problem was getting it without entanglements—that is, with a minimum expenditure of emotional energy. Someday she would reset the program so as to enable marriage and children, but not just yet. It puzzled her when she heard women say there were no good men left, because she’d found plenty. She thought that what women of the educated classes meant when they said this was that there were no good upper-middle-class men making six figures who were not metrosexual wimps or work-obsessed assholes or gay persons. Possibly true, but Statch did not require her lovers to hold a degree from a good college, or even one from high school, or to work at high-status, big-bucks jobs. She demanded only a sense of humor, a nice body, a certain edge, a competence in the physical world, and that they liked her. Recent guys had included a chef, a stock-car racer, the stock-car racer’s chief mechanic, a Boston police detective, and a boatbuilder.

  She told her machine, “Call Mick.” This was the cop.

  * * *

  Marder decided to stop in Baton Rouge, believing that the Louisiana city might host craftsmen skilled at repairing bullet holes in vehicles, and so it proved. At Bob’s Body, out on Airline Highway, he waved thick wads of cash in the greasy little office, until the eponymous Bob got the idea: no insurance, no records, no taxes, double pay for a one-day job starting this minute.

  When that was settled, he dodged across the highway to a McDonald’s. The day was warm and would get warmer, the dense, white-skied sticky heat of the gulf south, a climate Marder particularly disliked. He didn’t mind heat as long as it was dry; he liked to bake, but boiling annoyed him. He felt he’d boiled enough in his life, in
both Vietnam and New York summers.

  He paused outside the restaurant and looked through the glass. Skelly always sat strategically in public places, and here had chosen a booth in a corner, with a good view of the street, back to the wall, close to the rear exit. Marder hung for a moment, slightly outside Skelly’s angle of view, and watched—silly, really, but being with Skelly tended to make one conspiratorial.

  Skelly was drinking iced tea and writing with a cheap ballpoint in a small notebook. Despite the heat, he was wearing a tan cotton jacket over his T-shirt, and he had his old Red Sox cap pulled down over his eyes, which were obscured by Vuarnet sunglasses. Holding the notebook with one hand, Skelly reached into an inside jacket pocket and, to Marder’s surprise, pulled out a telephone, a thick black thing with a pencil antenna. Marder walked in. Until he started this trip, he had not been in a fast-food joint since his kids were grown, and now, in the chill of the A/C, smelling the familiar slightly sickening odor of cheap food, he resolved not to do so again. He slid into the seat before Skelly could slip the phone back into his pocket.

  “I thought you didn’t own a cell phone, Skelly.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then what was that thing you just stuck in your pocket, a bagel? Your personal vibrator?”

  “That’s a sat phone.”

  “Really. Who were you talking to on it?”

  “A guy. What’s with Bubba across the way? He going to fix your truck? Not that I thought it needed fixing. I thought the bullet holes took some of the respectable old-fart asshole shine off the thing, added a little street cred.”

  “We don’t need street cred where we’re going. We want to be invisible.”

  “Yeah, I sort of got that part. You mind telling me why?”

  “Asks the most invisible man in America. It’s simple. I don’t want to be bothered. I want time for peaceful contemplation in my Mexican hideaway. Why is that hard for you to understand?”

  “Because it’s complete bullshit. You’re armed to the teeth, you’re paying cash, you got your cell switched off. This tells me you’re on the run from something. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help.”

  “I appreciate that, Patrick, and let me assure you, in all sincerity, that there is nothing I am fleeing from or hiding from. Like you, I’m an aging man entitled to a few eccentricities, of which this trip is one. I didn’t invite you along, but now that you’re here I’d like you to respect my wish for a certain anonymity. Tell me one thing—are you packing heat this fine morning?”

  “What, you mean guns? Hell, no!” Slight pause. “Just the Sig is all.”

  “Oh, wonderful. I’m really looking forward to spending my … my vacation in some southern jail.” Marder had almost said “last days” but checked himself in time.

  “Right, so this is why you haven’t said twelve fucking words to me since those guys jumped us in that roadhouse in Buttfuck, Georgia? Because you’re scared I’ll disturb your contemplation?”

  “Jumped us? Jumped us? You walked into a biker bar and provoked a violent confrontation, from which I had to rescue you with a firearm, after which you destroyed maybe a quarter-million bucks’ worth of—”

  “First of all, who’re you talking to? Your grandmother? ‘Rescue’ was not the operative word, my friend. Interference I’ll give you; escalation, yes. If you’d kept that cannon in your jeans, in three minutes every one of those Confederate assholes would’ve been shit out of action. You’ve seen me do it.”

  “I have. When you were twenty-three, when you were thirty—”

  “What’re you saying? I’m past it? I’m fucked?”

  Skelly’s voice had risen to the combat decibel range, suitable for good communications over small-arms fire, and the usual mix of Mickey D patrons was staring at them, some with avid interest, some with fear. A chubby youth in a white shirt with a plastic name tag on it had eased his cell phone out.

  Marder stood up abruptly. “Yes, you’re a superannuated bag of gas. To prove it, we’re going to call a cab, find a pool hall, and I’ll whip your ass in nine ball while we wait for Bob to fix my proletarian vehicle.”

  “In your dreams,” said Skelly.

  * * *

  Marder was actually a somewhat better pool player than Skelly was, but Skelly had won the majority of the games they’d played over the years, simply because he wanted to win more than Marder did. They played a match of eleven games, win by two, and Marder dragged the thing out to twenty-three games, enjoying Skelly’s increasing discomfort, before easing off and throwing the last game, enjoying also the boyish triumph on his friend’s face. Not a competitive guy, Marder, although he wondered sometimes whether his remaining life might present him with some combat worth giving his all for. It’d be interesting if that happened.

  There was a seafood joint a little ways down the highway, so they walked over and had a meal, Cajun-style seafoods, rich and spicy. When they’d finished, Marder said, “Why don’t you call Bob and see if the truck’s done. He said five-thirty.”

  Skelly obligingly took out his costly brick and made the call, then called a cab. Bob turned out to be an artist with Bondo and paint. The holes were all neatly patched and the glass had been either plugged or replaced. Bob didn’t ask questions about whatever had caused the bullet holes, nor did he comment when he observed Skelly attaching Louisiana license plates to the Ford.

  Marder did, however.

  “May I ask what the fuck?”

  “Yeah, well, a little insurance. As you pointed out, we may have damaged some fascist motor vehicles back there and started a fire and so forth. I thought maybe the word might’ve filtered through to the police.”

  “Where did you get the plates?”

  “Some guy I know.”

  “Some guy? What guy?”

  “A guy who sells phony plates. It’s a need-to-know thing, Marder. Leave it lie. The papers’re all in the glove, your name and everything. So, are we rolling or what?”

  * * *

  After that, interminable Texas. Marder drove through the night, sometimes straying off the interstate to find a place to eat that wasn’t a chain and finding some good little places: once a Chinese restaurant that, incredibly, made delicious egg rolls from scratch, another with biscuits from heaven. The food gradually became more Mexican-ish as they headed west from San Antonio but never became really Mexican. Marder found that he had a hunger for the food that his wife used to make, the food of her native soil, the place where he was going.

  The country had changed since the last time he’d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings: GO COUGARS! GO HAWKS! GO REBELS! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.

  Marder thought of himself as a patriot, but, like many men his age, he was a patriot of a nation that seemed no longer to exist. Modernity had failed, obviously, and now he was going into a country that modernity had failed even more spectacularly; all the bright ideas of the imported religion, of the imported economics, of the imported revolution, of industrialization, of education, of freedom even, had all failed or had been attempted in such a warped fashion that they could not work, could not change the immemorial nature of that land and its people. What remained was the strange country, inexplicable, that he did not understand but that he loved, as he had not understood b
ut had loved his wife.

  The land rose. Marder had left the interstate and was now climbing into the Davis Mountains on a state road. He had forgotten that Texas had mountains, but here they were, damp, cool, verdant, with trickling rocky streams, smelling of pine and sage. They passed through a state park and Marder pulled off the road at an overlook.

  “Nice country,” said Skelly, who was sitting in the passenger seat, unusually, for he typically spent the daylight hours back in the camper, sleeping and doing various bits of business that required the use of his special laptop and his special phone. He also claimed it embarrassed him to watch Marder drive.

  “Wasted on Texas, of course,” he added. He lit another cigarette and held it out the window between drags, which was the acme of consideration for him. The cigarettes came out of a Marlboro pack, but they were unfiltered, hand-rolled, and laced with hash oil.

  “You don’t like Texas?”

  “No. But I don’t like any of the states. To be honest, I’ve never been in North Dakota, so it could be an exception and not full of stupid, fat, arrogant, ignorant, money-grubbing, whining, hypocritical American assholes.”

  “Come on, Skelly, we’re not that bad.”

  “Yes, we are: fat, doped up, and dangerous. Did you see that parody poster? Picture of some nice country like this here and the caption goes, ‘America! It’s more than bombs and fat people.’ Actually, not.”

  “We’ve had this conversation before.”

  “Yes, we have, and you always lose. I’m going for a run. You want to come along, fat boy?”

  “I am height and weight proportional for my age.”

  “You’re soft as cream cheese. And don’t think you’re going to ditch me, ’cause I got the keys.”

  Marder watched the man trot down the road with his usual effortless lope.

  * * *

  He recalled now the first time he’d seen it and how much he had hated Skelly then. The three of them—Marder, Hayden, and Lascaglia—set off just after dawn one morning in 1969, in the dry season, in a helicopter with the gear and hopes of Iron Tuna aboard, one of a dozen such little teams of volunteer air force technicans. They’d trained on the equipment for three weeks, and now they were off to the Special Forces base camp for jungle training. Not one of them had ever been in a helicopter before or in a jungle. They were headed toward a Special Forces base called Bronco One.