Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  “Do you want to lose that too?” she asked, still looking away from him.

  Having looked in the rear view mirror and seen Dicks’ attention roaming, Richards grumbled in the back seat. “Keep your eyes on the road, Dicks. And keep your hands on the damn wheel.”

  Dicks had both hands on the steering wheel again.

  They drove on in silence. It wasn’t long before Jeannie felt Dicks’ right hand sliding along her left thigh like a snake. Her fingernails sank into the back of his hand with furious strength, drawing five dark drops of blood.

  “You slut!” Dicks hissed, pulling his hand back. The car swerved slightly.

  “Stop fucking around up there!” Richards snapped. He knew Dicks liked to chase the skirts, but this was absurd. Dicks couldn’t keep his hands off this twat. “Leave her alone or we’ll swap places, you jackass. For the love of Christ!”

  Dicks’ eyes narrowed. Now he wanted to fuck her and kill her at the same time. He wanted to kill Richards and Hill too. Offing William Hill he could understand. But why was Richards getting up his ass so much? They’d worked together for years and now all he wanted to do was throttle the bastard until his sarcastic tongue stuck out of his mouth like a hard-on. Jesus! Where was this shit coming from?

  Jeannie was staring straight ahead, her breathing deep and slow. Stay calm, she thought. Don’t panic. Don’t hyperventilate. She could put up with a lot of things but she wasn’t going to let anyone touch her. No one. After Eicher, she’d had enough touching to last a lifetime.

  Will opened his eyes and winced, quite sure his head was going to split in two. His headache was intense. He felt like someone was reaming the back of his head with a jackhammer strap-on. His hands were cuffed behind him. He saw that he was seated behind the driver, with Richards on his left. He slowly moved his hands to a seam on the back of his jeans that hid a slender steel pick.

  Not even five minutes passed before Dicks made his next move. His right arm lashed out, his hand thrusting up under Jeannie’s uniform and into her panties. He grabbed a fistful of pubic hair and pulled on it. She squealed and it turned him on. Richards was bellowing in the back seat like an angry dad on a long road trip, but fuck it, he had to teach this bitch a lesson. He ripped his hand free and screamed, “There! How do you like that huh?” He shook his fist in the air between them. Then he paused and stared at his hand.

  The hair in his hand was such a pale shade of blonde it looked white, and it gleamed in the sunlight like strands of spun platinum. Dicks gaped. His voice was small. “You gotta be kidding me,” he said. Then the Taurus hit an object in the road.

  It was a tortoise. Not a very big tortoise, but big enough. It was sunning itself in the westbound lane of the empty highway. It sensed the car coming and it tucked its extremities into its shell.

  In the car Richards was still yelling, Dicks was staring at his hand, Jeannie was crying and cursing Dicks and Will was using the pick to unlock his handcuffs.

  The front left tire of the Taurus hit the shell of the tortoise at eighty miles an hour and rolled up over it like a speed bump. The shell should have exploded, should have been crushed, but it held fast and resisted the weight of the car in the same strange way an egg can resist breaking when placed in the center of one’s palm and squeezed. The tire was jolted, and the steering wheel slid out of Dicks’ grip.

  The Taurus rocked and went into a skid, sluing around so Dicks’ side of the car was facing the road ahead. The tortoise found its legs and began plodding off the highway, into the desert.

  A Page from the Past

  Westwood, Los Angeles, California, September 29, 1968

  The single-level ranch style house at the end of the quiet street was surrounded by a high whitewashed wooden fence. Inside the fence was another barrier from prying eyes, a wall of trimmed hedges and lush lemon trees.

  It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. In the center of the yard near a playhouse five year-old Jeannie Norman sat at a rickety card table surrounded by folding chairs. She was having a tea party, and she was delighted that Barbie had shown up in such a short skirt. It was a scandal! Pooh and Piglet were chatting together and ignoring everyone, but Chatty Cathy and Mr. Jones were horrified by Barbie’s attire. Chatty Cathy was speechless. Mr. Jones had mumbled to himself when Barbie had arrived, but now he just sat in his chair staring at the leggy blonde, his worn old rabbit ears flopping forward. Pooh threw an almond cookie at Mr. Jones. Barbie rolled her eyes and said something about boys being boys. Jeannie was going to give Pooh a stern talking to when the screen door at the back of the house opened and Lionel Eicher, now Arthur Norman, stepped into the yard.

  Eicher was quite sure he had succeeded with his plan to kidnap Jeannie and become her father. She retained few clear memories of her time in the Compound, and whatever confused glimpses of the past she had he was able to amend with a little clever misdirection. He would show her photos of another home within a white fence and a woman standing back from the camera wearing a kerchief and sunglasses. This was their first home, he often told her, and the woman was mommy, who died just after Jeannie was born. Whenever she asked about the place with the nurses and people with guns Eicher would laugh and say, “You have been watching far too much television young lady! Television and funny books! You remember more of them than you do of real life!”

  If the Compound was looking for them it wasn’t trying very hard. They had a home, Jeannie had a new school, and Eicher had a good job.

  Art Norman, Jeannie’s widower father, worked as an exterminator who specialized in cleaning out roach infested tenements in schwarzen areas such as Compton and Watts. He owned a van on which he had painted the words Mr. ZAP!!! I’ll ZAP Those Bugs DEAD!!! In a year or two he would be able to hire more workers and with luck, expand the business into a franchise. Then he could collect the profits and focus his attention on the study of his little blonde masterwork. For someone with his background, mixing cheap and lethal bug-killers was a snap. It was unfortunate that he had to work among American blacks, surely one of the most noxious of human castes, but the work paid well and his expenses were low.

  Thinking of his healthy distrust, not fear, he would never call it fear, of the black man made him smile. It was one of the many things he and Stern disagreed on, such as the final disposition of the Jews and the vision of a greater, stronger Germany. A great many people at the Compound had felt the same way as Eicher, realizing that it was not a shame or sin to have the grace and courage to say I believe the colored man to be an inferior who should be given every opportunity to succeed in life but not rise above his station. Wasn’t his work proof enough? Jeannie was white and sweet and good-hearted, and if she was occasionally antagonizing in her ignorance, that was just the woman in her.

  Eicher’s first clone, however, was not the good man, the lamb, the forgiving one he should have been. He was a dark-skinned child, the sight of which had genuinely startled Eicher as he helped deliver the baby from the surrogate mother, whom he euthanized afterward when her work was done. Black and black-hearted had been the child Eicher ushered into the world on that cold December day six years earlier. He had held the child in his hands and the child did not, would not cry. It simply lay still, eyeing him, and Eicher had shivered.

  That birth gave him more incentive than ever to use Edmund Stern’s fantastic gene-splicing techniques to literally cut and paste Jeannie’s DNA to his liking.

  He knew exactly how to give her shining, pale blonde hair, Aryan hair, and remove the natural curls from those perfect tresses. He knew how to give her a straight nose and perfect teeth. He knew how to adjust her height and weight, presuming she would enjoy proper nutrition and stay fit, and was even able to preordain that one leg should grow a half-inch shorter than the other so that the child, when she became a woman, would walk with a wiggle just like her predecessor. He had even experimented with strengthening her sexual attractiveness by boosting her ability to produce pheromones, but he wouldn’t know how successful he wa
s until the girl reached puberty.

  Eicher wanted Jeannie to be physically identical to her source, but mentally superior.

  He could not be completely sure that Jeannie Norman –he thought that a clever name— would not ultimately slide into madness and have to be committed or silenced like the blonde cocksucker, but he was quite sure Monroe’s problems had not been biochemical and was confident that there was no reason Jeannie should not become an outstanding young woman once provided with a good home life and a normal upbringing.

  She would have been the perfect carrot to dangle before that rutting stallion Kennedy. Of course somebody screwed the pooch, as one would say in American slang, and blew part of Kennedy’s head off when they should only have wounded him as a warning to refrain from enacting idealist fantasies.

  Now the former President was a simpleton and that ignorant cowboy Johnson was digging a deeper hole in Vietnam. The benefit of Johnson’s commitment to an insane, unwinnable war was that Eicher was forgotten for the time being, and the President’s only interest in the Compound concerned the android program.

  After the birth of the dark one, Lionel had taken the child to the Compound infirmary from which it had soon disappeared. No one, not even Stern, would ever admit that they had taken the child. To this day Eicher hoped that the child was long dead.

  This time, he would make no mistakes!

  And now, looking at Jeannie as she fussed with dolls and wallowed in girlish play when she should be studying, learning, exploring, and denying the ever-present threats of ignorance and sloth and madness that slumbered in her über-slut genes, Eicher felt a growing rage. He would not lose this one! She was all he had left. If he could make something of her, something outstanding, exceptional, he could prove to the Compound and perhaps the current President that his work had value after all.

  Those damned dolls!

  “Jeannie!”

  He saw her flinch at the sound of his voice. That was good. He needed control. Absolute control at all times.

  She peeked over her shoulder as he approached, an almost inappropriately pretty child in green dungarees and a white blouse. Her eyes were wide and blue with striking clarity, the sclera as white as snow, the irises catching the sunlight and holding it like exotic glass. Her nearly white hair tumbled to her shoulders in natural waves, each strand as fine as silk.

  If Eicher had the eyes of a father instead of the cold, probing eyes of a scientist he would have realized from the tense set of her shoulders that he was less an authority figure than a source of intense fear.

  “Jeannie,” Eicher said, stepping around the table to face her, “why aren’t you studying your school lessons?”

  Jeannie looked alarmed. Eicher assumed the expression on her face showed he had caught her cheating him. In reality she was simply surprised by his question. “I did my reading on Friday night. I showed you the whole chapter of my book, the one I finished.”

  Eicher had enrolled Jeannie in the expensive but worthwhile Muller Academy. It was run by an overbearing pig of a woman from Berlin. Their mothers had been schoolmates. That old connection and the woman’s instant, unsettling attraction to Eicher made it easy for him to enroll Jeannie in the private Westwood school not far from the cemetery where the desiccated remains of Jeannie’s mother and twin were slowly turning to dust, a fact that amused Eicher to no end. He had met with the Muller woman and let her carry on a pathetic display of flirting, hovering over him and thrusting out her bosom in what she most likely thought of as an alluring manner. To Eicher however, the sight of that fleshy bulwark swinging toward his head had filled him with terror and revulsion, he felt as if he were on the bow of the Titanic watching the unstoppable approach of the iceberg that would deal it a crushing blow. Muller was obnoxious, and she smelled like a whore, but her private school took girls from ages four to twenty and prepared them for the best institutions of higher learning.

  It was the perfect place for Jeannie. Her contacts were limited. Most of the girls in attendance came from privileged, malfunctioning families which made Jeannie’s situation look almost normal. Since Eicher had explained to the pig-woman Muller that Jeannie had a history of mental problems, providing convincingly faked photostats of treatment records, the school kept a close eye on the girl, ferrying her by autobus between the prison of her home and the confines of her school.

  “Jeannie,” Eicher said, his impatience growing. “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted you to read extra chapters in your textbooks so you stay ahead of the class? You want to be smart don’t you? You don’t want your daddy to be disappointed, do you?”

  Jeannie felt cheated. She knew that other girls in her class didn’t have to read ahead like she had to, but still he, for that was how she thought of Eicher now, not as her father but as a threatening, uncaring he, he pushed her and pushed her to do more and more. It wasn’t fair.

  “You aren’t my daddy,” she whispered.

  Eicher raised his eyebrows, his anger building. “Oh? Und why do you say that?”

  “My real daddy would love me. He wouldn’t be bad to me like you are. You aren’t nice. I hate you. You aren’t my daddy. You stole me from my real daddy.”

  With an enraged grin Eicher said, “I’m all the daddy you’ll ever have, kleine Zahl vier. You are all alone in this big, big world except for me.” He reached down, plucking the Chatty Cathy and Barbie dolls out of their seats. He grabbed Pooh by the nose and Mr. Jones by an ear and tucked them all under one arm. “You will stop playing with these damnable dolls, go into the house, and continue your reading.”

  Jeannie stared at him in tears and then ran into the house to her room.

  Eicher was pleased with his work. He felt that things were progressing as they should.

  He didn’t have the slightest idea that in uprooting her from the Compound and filling her with insecurities about herself and doubts about her father’s identity he was laying the groundwork for the same neuroses that plagued the hated blonde all her life.

  The next day after school Jeannie went looking for her dolls. They had disappeared and she had to spend the first night in a long time without Mr. Jones, who was her favorite.

  Eicher was in the den listening to classical music and reading the Los Angeles Times. He muttered obscenities under his breath as he read that Apollo 7 would launch in a few weeks, the first manned Apollo mission. It would be followed in December by Apollo 8, the first manned flight around the moon. “This would not happen without fucking German genius.”

  In the garage Jeannie discovered a garbage can with a funny burned smell. She tipped it over and saw a pile of ash and a few tiny metal parts. There were burned buttons and a scum of pink plastic the same color as Barbie’s skin. It took her a long time to realize that she was looking at the remains of her melted and incinerated dolls. Behind the can were tufts of stuffing, a sleeve from Barbie’s blouse, and one of Mr. Jones’ puffy, floppy ears.

  He tore them apart, Jeannie thought. He tore my dolls apart and then burned them.

  She stood in the garage for some time, her eyes as blank as a pane of window glass. Then she picked up Mr. Jones’ remains. She went to her room and ignored Eicher’s calls to dinner. She curled up in bed and hugged the dirty, stuffed rabbit ear to her chest. She eventually drifted off to sleep, still crying.

  Jeannie tried to hide Mr. Jones ear, sleeping with it at night and finding a secret spot for it during the day, but Eicher, who went through her room each day while she was at school, found the ear before the week was out and disposed of it, too.

  7

  Love Happy

  Moving fast, the Taurus slid onto the right-hand shoulder of the road, flipped once, and came to rest on its left side. As they had been rolling Will had braced his feet and slammed his clasped fists into the back of Richards’ neck. The car settled onto its side and Richards’ dead weight crushed Will against the door on his left.

  Jeannie also dropped to the driver’s side of the car, falling onto Dicks.
In trying to break her fall she elbowed him hard in the jaw. Two of Dicks’ right molars shattered when Jeannie’s elbow hit his jaw. The shards of his teeth gouged Jeannie’s elbow after slicing open his cheek, leaving a gaping hole in the side of his face. As Jeannie tried to scramble off of him one of her shoes pressed against Dicks’ face, breaking his nose and bringing another gusher of blood.

  “Geethuth! Geethuth Cwytht!” Dicks lisped through his ruined face. He sounded delirious. “Fugguh bit-th! Ah fugguh kih yuh!”

  Dicks was trapped behind the wheel by his safety belt. Jeannie planted one foot on his neck and one on his shoulder as she reached up and tried to force the passenger door open. It was stuck. She rolled down the window. Dicks was unable to breathe and he passed out. Jeannie climbed out of the car.

  Will thought he was going to suffocate with Richards’ bulk on him. Then the ruins of the shattered rear window were removed and Will was able to suck in a little fresh air. He looked up and saw Jeannie standing over him. She reached into the car and grabbed one of Richards’ sleeves, tugging until she had a good grip on his right arm. Then she pulled as hard as she could.

  Will winced when he heard the moist pop of Richards’ shoulder dislocating. The weight on him eased a bit and he began pushing up and back until Richards flopped onto the ground beside the car. Will climbed free of the Taurus and saw Richards lying at his feet, one arm raised as if he had dropped dead while hailing a cab.

  Jeannie caught her breath. “That guy was heavy.” Then she looked at her left wrist and said, “Darn. I lost my watch.”

  Will retrieved three weapons from the car, including his Springfield. He turned to Jeannie, nearly bumping against her.

  They looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed like a long time. He had a curious frown on his face.

  Will spoke softly. “Are you okay?”

  The sound of his voice gave Jeannie an unexpected thrill that resulted in a very sexual physical tingle. Her face burned and she looked away. Jeannie’s face was flushed, and she took an unsteady step backwards. Will took her arm and she felt another warm electric jolt.