The Phone Company
Page 12
“It’s certainly not a new idea,” Mrs. Keeler said. “Is that what life is to you, JJ? A video game?”
“No.” He stared at his phone, at her image onscreen. “Games are more real.” The revelation surprised him, upset him. Looking into Mrs. Keeler’s flat, soulless eyes, he realized it was real life that was the uncanny valley.
They continued the conversation, but it wasn’t long after that JJ cried.
He got out of therapy late, and it was already lunch. The Dick smirked at him as JJ sat down at the table with the sack lunch his dad always made.
“Where were you?” the Dick asked knowingly.
“Skipping class,” JJ said, because it was the most plausible explanation.
The Dick nodded, then did something on his phone.
“Dude,” Mini Mark said, but JJ kept his eyes on the Dick a moment. “I saw Barksdale wandering around Buttcrack Rock!”
“What?”
“Yeah! I tried to tame him with a bone, but he just kept eating and eating them. It’s like he refused to be my pet.”
“Meanwhile,” the Dick said, “I was making this.” He held up his phone, working his pudgy thumb on the volume rocker.
Immediately, JJ recognized the techno music and the weird robotic sound of the singer’s voice. The Dick had auto-tuned something. Not just anything. Part of JJ’s therapy session.
The Dick cracked up, and now JJ could hear the song playing elsewhere in the cafeteria, because, of course, the Dick had shared it with everyone. The name of the song was
Now several groups of people were laughing, and JJ looked around, confused by all the faces. His heartbeat blurred his vision until everyone kind of looked like the Dick, sounded like the Dick, except for Meg Disney, who was laughing as well, and he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t believe anyone was capable of violating him like this.
“Yes, JJ,” the Dick said, holding his trembling belly. “Please. Tell me more about that. Hahahaha! L-O-L!”
JJ swung at his face.
The Dick, eyes wide, jerked back and tipped over in his chair, so that JJ missed and nearly fell out of his own seat. He geared up to kick the Dick right in his piggy face, but then a heel crunched into JJ’s crotch, and he was doubling over, wind knocked out of him, an ache as heavy as a wrecking ball slamming into his gut.
“Kicked you square in the nuts!” the Dick said in his best Cartman voice, and now everyone in the room was laughing, jeering, and jumping on their chairs like monkeys as a teacher came hurrying through the crowd to stop the fight.
CHAPTER 11
Sarah kept her O’Donald’s uniform in her gym locker, so she could change after school before one of her friends drove her to work. This meant her gym clothes smelled like stale french fries, but it was better than everything in her main locker smelling oily and gross.
When she got to work, though, Sarah forgot all about asking her dad if she could spend the night.
The counter where she usually stood to take orders had been walled in. Approximately where Sarah’s face used to be, they had installed a big screen displaying order numbers. A tray piled with cheeseburgers and fries popped into a slot beneath the display, and one of the customer’s Tethers beeped.
“This is so cool!” the lady said. She grabbed her tray from the slot and took it back to her table, where her kids were waiting to tear into their burgers.
Sarah saw a few other customers selecting meal numbers right from a menu on their phones. She went into the back room, to the manager’s office.
“Sarah!” Randy said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head, like he usually did to cover his bald spot. “Isn’t this a pleasant surprise.”
“Where’s the register?” Sarah asked.
“You didn’t receive your pink slip?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t need cashiers. It’s all through the Tethers now. I thought you’d gotten notice.”
“So I’m fired.”
“Laid off,” Randy said.
Sarah threw her hat at him and stormed out of his office.
“I thought you’d be happy!” he called after her. “Way better customer service this way! You can use me as a reference!”
She bit down, trying not to cry before she made it out of the stink of fries.
* * *
“Again?” Aaron said over the earwig.
“Sheriff said to bring him something, I’m going to bring him something,” Bill phoned in.
He drove his cruiser past the chokecherry where he usually hid his jeep and climbed higher, toward Empty Mine. The original prospectors had called it that to keep people away from their mother lode.
“Hey, you think old Broken Lookout would give me a good fix on, uh . . .” Bill looked down at Marvin’s junkyard and said, “Planet Mars down there? I’m looking for a new angle to this thing.”
“Sorry, but I still don’t think Marvin Jones is capable of bombing a fly,” Aaron said.
“But turning a tour bus into a giant Molotov cocktail?”
“You don’t know that was him.”
Bill spit out his window into the woods, then rolled it up. “Oh, but I do know. You mean I can’t prove it yet.”
Bill glanced through an opening in the pines, saw the valley below and kept climbing. There was a little pullout right before the mine. He remembered there being an overlook, too. It would be perfect.
Bill had been keeping tabs on Marvin all week, whenever he wasn’t out on a call. The Martian had spent some of his time picketing at the various PCo sites. Marv still had a following, but his Pitchfork Mafia had begun to shrink.
It was usually like this with hot-button political issues. People rallied for a short period around a cause, serious about affecting real change, but then they got bored and played on their phones instead.
Bill had started feeling some of that, too. Parking out here on these BLM roads to spy on the Martian? Perfectly legal, boring as hell.
“So what happens when you’re out in Timbuktu and a call comes in?” Aaron asked. “Say Marv sets off his fertilizer bomb at the school or something?”
She said it only because she hadn’t been around these parts five years ago; she’d been at MSU in Bozeman. Aaron should have known better, really. But she was right.
What if?
Five years ago Bill had been on this same dirt road hiding from everything when he’d gotten the call That Day. Janice, the middle school—everything had fallen apart, and he’d been miles up some mountain. Had he been closer, quicker to answer the call . . .
“Sorry,” Aaron said, finally realizing.
“No worries. You’re fired is all.”
“Har har.”
At the turnout, Bill parked his car and aligned his window with the opening in the pines. Not quite the angle he needed to see the junkyard. But if he walked downhill a hundred yards, if he got around this stand of trees, he’d find himself on a rockslide where he could see everything.
Bill grabbed his binoculars and his phone. On second thought, he grabbed the Montclairs. He never had returned them to Mrs. Disney. He needed them.
Out on the rocks, Bill found a good vantage point and took a seat on a log. He was too far away to see anything with his binoculars.
“You try your glasses yet?” Aaron asked. “They have a pretty intense zoom feature.”
Bill sighed. “Left ’em in the car.” The Dragnet glasses had been sitting in his passenger seat since he’d gotten them. Bill had started to think of them as his “silent partner.”
“Well, try your Tether,” Aaron said.
“These are pretty awesome binoculars, Aaron. I doubt my phone could do any better.”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve got this one app, it uses the front-facing camera. It’s kind of like a magnifying mirror. I can see the spider mites living in my pores.”
Bill had been messing with his own phone, too. He’d been downloading pretty harmless apps. Golf app. Tuner for his guitar. He’d noticed some other apps, like a radar gun, a Beastmaster app, a lie detector, even some sort of urine analysis app, but he already had bona fide law enforcement tools he trusted more. In this case, though, Bill was willing to try.
“What do you know?” he said, checking out the app store. “Spyglass app.”
“See?”
Bill downloaded and installed the program, but paused before opening it. The icon. A novelty pair of binoculars.
Shrugging it off, he opened the app and zoomed in on Marvin’s property.
“Wow,” he said, dizzied by the intense magnification. At first Bill couldn’t tell what he was looking at. He zoomed out and realized it was the compound eye of a wasp. The yellowjacket was huddled against a nest hidden in some junked refrigerators. “Wow,” he said again. “I can see everything.”
He scanned the dump, tracing the maze of appliances, looking over the cubes of scrap metal stacked and ready to be hauled off. He searched for fertilizer sacks, detonators, or anything suspicious. He could even zoom in on some of the reflections in the glass and see around corners.
There was an old moving van and some empty drums scattered around it. The red truck had disappeared, he noticed that.
Into his earwig Bill said, “I used to think how cool it would be, building a fort in the junkyard. You know, when I was a kid.”
“Gross,” Aaron said.
“No, think about it. You could bury a shipping container or something. Build a little tunnel to it beneath a bunch of bent-up old playgrounds. You could bury treasure, anything.”
“Playboys.”
“Betcher ass.”
Aaron giggled.
“That’s just my point. Marvin could be hiding anything.”
“Playgirls, even.”
“Hell yeah.”
Bill panned his phone. From here, he could see a different side of Marv’s summer houses, the four travel trailers parked in a square around a common deck. The Tango’s slide-out had been modified into a screened-in porch.
Marvin was sitting inside. He was threading something through his hands, some kind of string or . . .
Fuse? Bill thought, zooming in.
“Aaron, there any way to take photos with this app?”
“Probably. Look for a button. Why, you got something on him, or . . .?”
Bill frowned. “Damn it.”
“What?”
He sat back. “He’s just lacing some shoes.”
“Yeah,” Aaron said, “a misdemeanor at best.”
Bill picked at the sticker he’d stuck on the back of his phone, a Junior Deputy Sheriff star, the kind they gave to kids. After about another hour of spying, he said, “This log’s hurting my ass.”
He cut through the stand of pines on his way back up. It was easier going than the loose rock, which was reason enough. Later, though, Bill would wonder if he hadn’t taken this path subconsciously.
The black thing, tangled in some undergrowth, caught his eye about halfway up. Bill stepped over a few downed trees and pushed his way into the shrubs. They scratched at his hands and poked his side, but he reached out and grabbed the strap anyway.
“Sure are breathing hard,” Aaron said in his earpiece.
Bill shut his mouth and stared at what he’d pulled out of the brush.
“What’re you doing?”
“Nothing. Climbing. Look, I’ll call you back.”
“All r—”
Bill pressed the button on the earwig and continued to stare at the binoculars dangling in front of him from their black strap. Except they weren’t binoculars at all, not really.
“No way,” Bill said, unscrewing the lid of the novelty flask. He took a whiff. He had never known whiskey to go bad, just lose its taste. But, surely, in these conditions . . .
“Wow,” he said. The bourbon smelled of sweet, nutty oak. It didn’t even have a metal tinge.
The nylon seal on the flask had remained intact, and Bill wondered if the dense overgrowth had sheltered the container from sun and snow. Maybe that accounted for the preservation.
Five years, he thought.
Bill’s hand shook as he dumped the bourbon out.
Five years.
Even the color looked great.
Back at the cruiser, he tossed his real binoculars into the passenger seat next to the Dragnet glasses, then sat behind the wheel, turning the empty flask over in his hand. He lit a Montclair.
Steve, he thought. Steve had given him the flask. Steve had given him a reason to fill it, and to throw it into the woods as well.
Bill hunched over and reached beneath his seat, holding up his cigarette. He pulled out his newer flask, just a regular stainless steel one. He’d been on the verge of pouring it out for months now, but hadn’t quite brought himself to that.
The Dragnet glasses stared at him.
“What?” he said, unscrewing the flask.
Then he turned the glasses around so they couldn’t watch.
* * *
The lie detector app finished downloading as Bill pulled into Meth Cook Estates. Crawling down the one-lane loop, he opened the app and got a sense for how it worked.
“My name’s Bill Biggs,” he said into the mic. A little idiot gauge registered in the green as
Usually, polygraph operators hooked suspects up to a variety of detectors. Altogether, the devices monitored blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity, which were then graphed out.
“No, I’ve never stolen money,” Bill said, and this time the idiot gauge registered
“Yes, I emptied the flask,” he said, thinking it would register green. Instead it prompted him to ask a follow-up question:
How in God’s name . . .
“The stainless steel one,” Bill said. The idiot gauge thought for a second before registering red. “Fine, the binocular flask then.”
This time it indicated green.
“Huh.”
The app recorded the entire conversation along with the graph. Bill could scrub the playhead back to review the results. The polygraph seemed accurate even with the Tether hidden in the breast pocket of his uniform.
Bill pulled up to Rat McCurdy’s house.
Rat sat in a chair on the trailer porch, taking a hit from a bong. His eyes shot wide when he saw the cruiser. Then, mullet flying, he ran off.
Bill jumped out of his cruiser. “Hey!” He strode over to the porch where Rat had dropped the bong and frowned at the smell. “Rat, would you stop?”
Rat had fled halfway into the field behind the trailer park. He stopped. Not because he wanted to. He’d twisted his ankle in a gopher hole. Rat cursed.
Bill slid his arm beneath the porch railing and grabbed the bong. He poked at the leafy brown matter in the bowl. “Rat, this ain’t even pot!”
“I know it ain’t pot!” Rat called back. “That ain’t why I’m running!”
“Then why?”
“It ain’t mine!”
“What isn’t yours?”
“The bon—the, uh, water pipe. It ain’t mine. Never seen it in my life!”
“Rat, I just saw you hitting off it. Besides, who gives a crap?”
Rat’s eyebrows arched and his chin doubled up as he cocked it back. “What?”
“It’s just a water pipe, Rat. For tobacco. Perfectly legal.”
“Really?”
“’Sides, this is just a social call.”
Rat’s eyes narrowed. “Then how come you’re wearing your whatchamacallit? Your suit?”
“I just got off work,” Bill said, knowing what the lie detector would have to say about that. “Seriously, look.” He went and reached under the seat of his car, pulling out a bottle. “Got any Coke?” he asked, holding up the Maker’s Mark.
* * *
“Neat,” Bill said. He waved away the ice.
“It ain’t for the drinks.” Rat sat at the little TV tray he’d set up between the chairs on the porch. He stuffed the bag of ice down his sock and sighed when it hit his ankle.
They sipped their bourbon and Coke.
“So,” Bill said, “how’s work?” He’d already hashed out a basic structure for this conversation. He knew he had to be careful; Rat’s eyes were as jaundiced as they were bloodshot.
“You sure this ain’t about what happened at the school?”
“Why you so worried about that, Rat?”
“I ain’t. Just surprised is all. You stopping by like this.”
“We used to drink together all the time in high school.”
“We were different.”
“Cheers to that,” Bill said, holding up his paper cup. It featured Hello Kitty with balloons, leftover from Candy McCurdy’s sixth birthday.
Rat didn’t toast with his Hello Kitty cup. Bill took a drink. He savored the bourbon for a second, thinking, sneaking peeks at Rat’s bald spot.
“Remember that time we were all at the quarry and you stole Janice Pendergraft’s clothes?” Bill asked.
“You mean Janice Gregory? Steve’s old lady?”
“Yeah.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Oh yeah, right.”
“That was Billy Warner,” Rat said, “I even told you that.”
“Right. Must have forgot.” Bill said it even though he knew Rat was lying. Rat had always lied about stealing Janice’s clothes, but Bill had seen him do it from up on the jumping rock. He asked now because he needed to set a baseline for the polygraph; he needed verifiable lies. “So you really thought water pipes were illegal, huh?”