My job was over on the north side, in the industrial section of the city. For two hours every day, I worked as a stores clerk for Preuzer Electronics, a wholesaler supplying most of the high-tech firms in town. Willy Preuzer was a sharp old guy, a relic from the days of vacuum tubes, who’d stood by me when the cops ended my life of crime.
“Not because you’re a nice kid,” he said then. “Because you know you way around the warehouse better than anybody else, even me.”
That had been one of the nicest things anybody ever said to me.
Willy was alone in his tiny office when I came through the side door.
“Got a minute?” I asked.
“Sure, sure. What?”
“I want to build an electroencephalograph and hook it up to a biofeedback device.”
Willy was a stocky guy in a loud sport shirt; his bald scalp was mottled with sunburn that made the fringe of white hair look all the whiter. He looked up at me from under his bushy eyebrows.
“The biofeedback device is no problem. But the EEG is complicated.”
“I only want to pick up theta waves.”
“You got insomnia?”
Everybody was asking that question today. “No, just a project. We’ve got all the parts in stock, Willy. Could I borrow them to put one together, and then bring them back in a couple of weeks?”
“Hell, no. You can buy the parts wholesale. What d’you think this is, the public library? I’ll take the cost out of your salary. When you’re finished, I’ll buy the parts back for the usual prices I pay for used.”
I did some rapid calculations. At the very least, this was going to cost me a couple of hundred dollars - a lot more if it turned out I needed the EEG on a continuing basis and couldn’t return the parts. But in the glory days, I’d dropped two hundred a month on software alone sometimes; since then I’d had little reason to spend my pay, so I was relatively affluent.
“It’s a deal,” I said. “You can start taking the price out of my salary as of last week.”
“Deal,” he echoed, and stuck out a stubby hand. A shake was all the contract he needed. “Now get back to work. We got a bunch of orders for Waterby.”
I headed for the warehouse with a handful of order forms; a quick scan of the microfiche index reminded me of where some of the items were, the few whose location I hadn’t already memorised. As usual, the two hours went quickly. At six, one I was on my own time, I started filling my own mental shopping list, trundling up and down the aisles with a supermarket shopping cart that filled up rapidly.
“What do you need an EEG for, anyway?” Willy asked as he locked up the place for the night. He helped me lug my new acquisitions over to Brunhilde.
“It’s a school project.”
“A school project. You’re spending this much in high school, how you going to afford college?”
“That’s what my mother keeps saying. Thanks, Willy - see you tomorrow.”
Melinda was home, but busy in the kitchen: I got my gear up to my room without a lot of tedious “but-momming.” Marcus observed the whole business, but kept his mouth shut. The new stuff blended in with the old stuff - in fact, I knew I’d be able to cannibalise earlier gadgets for parts of the EEG. Then I washed up and went down to dinner.
“How was your day?” The daily debriefing was under way.
“Pretty good. We’re doing biofeedback in Gibbs’s class. He told me to build a biofeedback device.”
“Interesting,” she said, loyally but insincerely. “What’s it going to do?”
“Generate a light and a tone when I get my blood pressure where I want it.” I paused. “I’ve got a partner for the project.”
Melinda’s antennae picked up everything. “A girl? The giantess?”
“No, Melinda, it’s not Angela. A new girl named Pat Llewellyn.”
“She nice?”
“Kind of a bitch, actually, but she’s pretty smart.”
“Aw, Rick, you gallant devil, you sure can pick ‘em. Is this another of Gibbs’s lame duck?”
“What other kind does he have? Matter of fact, she is lame - she wears a brace on one leg.”
Melinda put a hand to her mouth, instantly contrite. “That was dumb of me. What’s her problem?”
“The leg is the least of it. Actually, she’s pretty nice under all the b.s. You’ll like her.”
Melinda hammed up the astounded-mother act, waving her napkin around. “Don’t tell me you’re bringing her home to meet me already!”
“I don’t have a choice, Melinda.”
“Meaning - oh God, am I going to be a grandmother already?”
“Oh, give me a break,” I whined. “She lives in a group home, so she’s coming over here to help me build the gadget.”
“Fair enough. When?”
“I don’t know. Maybe tonight?”
“Rick, the place is a total mess! How could you inviteᚓ”
“Hey, the place looks fine. Just relax, okay?”
Well, she growled a bit more, but the prospect of having me bring a girl home was too enticing. I washed the dishes while Melinda chased Marcus out of all his favourite flopping places with a vacuum cleaner. It was a doomed effort: Marcus inevitably ended up in a freshly vacuumed spot where he promptly shed half a bushel of wiry black hairs.
Pat called me just after seven-thirty, and about all she said was: “Come and get me, please.” From the uproar in the background - loud rock plus a couple of girls screaming at each other - I could understand why she didn’t feel like curling up at home with a good book.
Marcus came with me; he was glad to get away from the vacuum cleaner. We drove over to Pat’s place with Marcus sitting up in the back seat, his nose stuck out the window just behind me.
The house was a rambling ranch-style suburban nothing, on a neglected lot behind some eucalyptus trees. Rock music was audible from the street, thumping so hard my sternum started to vibrate when I got to the front porch. I had to press the doorbell several times before anyone heard me. A short, slender, harassed-looking man opened the door; he was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and an amazing, bushy hairdo.
“Hello, I’m Rick Stevenson. I’m here for Pat.”
“Oh, right. The science project, right. Pat! Would somebody turn down - Pat!”
She materialised behind him, wearing a UCLA sweatshirt and bellbottom jeans that concealed her brace. She carried a notebook - more for looks, I suspected, than for use.
“Okay, be back by 10:30 sharp, okay?” Morty said.
“Sure,” said Pat. “See you then, Morty. Thanks.”
We walked out to the car. “That place is going to drive me insane,” she said between clenched jaws. “It’s just nonstop. Screaming, tantrums, the music, Morty and Joan - oh, what a great dog!”
Marcus gave her an energetic sniff-over as she settled into her seat; she rubbed his ears, and he tried to crawl into her lap.
“He’s gorgeous. I love Labs. What’s his name?”
“Marcus Aurelius.”
“The philosopher king?”
“We were hoping for just another calm, cool stoic. It didn’t work out that way.”
I nearly burst out laughing when we got home. Melinda had oiled and dusted all the furniture, and changed into elegant blue slacks and a cream silk blouse. If Pat felt taken aback by the sight of such an elegant matron, she didn’t show it. I’d been right: they liked each other on sight. With Marcus escorting them, Melinda gave Pat the grand tour, with detailed technical analysis of all the remodelling she’d done to the house and special emphasis on the study and the computer. They were just getting into a cosy girlish discussion of architecture as a profession when I intervened.
“Let me show you what we have to do tonight,” I said.
“Sure,” said Pat, but I still have to wait for another burst of “thank-yous” and “delighted-to-meet-yous” before we got upstairs.
Pat shook her head when she saw the high-tech chaos of my room. “I sure hope yo
u know where everything is,” she said. “If I put something down in here, I’d never find it again.”
“No problem,” I assure her.
“Where do we start?”
“We’re starting with the biofeedback device. Gibbs gave me a schematic; it can be hooked up to a sphygmomanometer at school, or whatever.”
“Or whatever?”
“Well, I‘m planning to use it for something else as well. I’ve got the stuff to build an electroencephalograph.”
“This is part of the project, too?”
“No, this is a personal project. You don’t have to get involved in that part of it if you don’t want to.”
Her curiosity was piqued. “What’s all this about? You’ve got a shifty look all of a sudden.”
Dramatic pause. “I want to create theta waves.”
“Explain.”
“Well, the brain produces different kinds of waves, right? Alpha waves are usually associated with relaxation, meditation, all that kind of stuff. Some people buy biofeedback devices because alpha waves can also reflect a kind of high.”
“But that’s not the kind you were talking about.”
“Nope. Beta waves are what we produce when we’re concentrating on something. Theta waves show up when we’re almost asleep, or in a kind of trance.”
“So why’d you want to zonk yourself out?”
This was the part I’d have to be careful about. Pat’s crap detector was set on a hair trigger. “You can get some remarkable ideas when you’re in a theta state. I’ve read a lot about it, and I’ve found I get a lot of good ideas when I’m going to sleep, or waking up. So I want to see if I can induce the state most often.”
“But this isn’t part of the project.”
“Gibbs doesn’t like the idea of fooling around with the brain.”
“I don’t think I do, either.”
“Fine,” I said agreeably. “Just the biofeedback device then. I’ll do the EEG on my own.”
“Okay. Let’s see the schematic.”
The evening went quickly. Pat learnt fast and asked good questions. By a little after ten we had the main components in place; a few more hours and we’d have a working device. I found it odd but nice to work with a partner instead of on my own. Melinda wandered in from time to time (I ostentatiously left the door open), and we all chatted as we worked. It was a pretty agreeable evening.
The only problem was that I was dying to tell Pat and Melinda why I really wanted to build the EEG, and I knew I couldn’t; they’d both think I’d gone completely loopy. They - and I - would just have to wait until I could demonstrate lifting. That might be forever.
I got Pat home just before ten-thirty; the rock music had quieted down a little, but it still sounded bad. Pat only shrugged.
“You got me out of the worst of it. Thanks.”
Feeling like a zero-defects idiot, I leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She looked at me and grinned.
“You can do better than that.”
She was right.
Chapter 5
IF YOU’RE HOPING for some steamy sex scenes, eat your heart out. Why should I embarrass Pat (and myself) just to give you some vicarious jollies? Besides, you’d be much better off going out for some jollies of your very own.
What I will tell you about the next few days is that they were a lot of fun. We built the biofeedback device in three or four nights, and spent a Saturday testing it. It worked like a charm, with a sphygmomanometer borrowed from Gibbs.
Pat and Melinda got along almost too well. By the end of the week Pat was coming straight home with me and spending her afternoons in the study with Melinda, fooling around with her IBM PC and helping make dinner. Toiling away in Willy Preuzer’s salt mines, I might have felt resentful except that I was coming home and pigging out on homemade pizza, spaghetti carbonara, and lasagna.
“I had a foster mother last year who was into Italian cooking,” she told us. “If I could just get the right families, I could learn to cook anything.”
Morty and Joan seemed relieved to have her off their hands: they could spend more time with the other girls, and from what I saw of them, they needed all the help they could get. After a couple of phone calls from Melinda, Morty decided we were safe enough for Pat to stay with us until midnight, at least on weekends.
That meant more time to work on the EEG; as I’d hoped, Pat carried right through onto it. A whole week’s work had to be redone when I made a stupid mistake in wiring, but by then Pat was so efficient we took only two nights to repair the damage.
We talked a lot. She told me about her family: a mother who died young, a father who farmed her out to grandparents while he drifted from job to job and then into a marriage with a woman with children of her own. They tried a blended family; it didn’t work. Pat hated her stepmother and stepsisters, and her father didn’t help matters.
“He’d just get drunk. So Eleanor and I would fight until we couldn’t see straight. Finally she told Dad it was her or me. My granddad was dead, and my grandma was in a nursing home, so I ended up in a foster home as a problem child.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Thirteen.”
“How many foster homes were you in?”
“Six. Can you believe it? I was a real drag in most of them. When I turned sixteen this summer, they figured I might do better in a group home, so here I am.”
We were working in my room, with the EEG in its early stages scattered all around us. I don’t know which bothered me more, what she’d said or the calm way she’d said it. I guess whatever happens to us when we’re kids seems natural, so we take it for granted even if we don’t like it. But it sounded weird to me. I’d lived in Santa Teresa all my life, and in this house for the last ten years. I didn’t have a father, but school was crawling with kids from single-parent families; at least I had a mother who hadn’t died on me, or thrown me out of the house at thirteen.
The brace was thanks to a congenital hip defect that left her leg too weak to support her.
“It hurts,” she told me on a drizzly Sunday. “But I guess I’m used to it. The brace is a nuisance, but it sure beats crawling around on my belly like a reptile.” Then she changed the subject.
Sometimes I talked about myself, but I didn’t think I was very interesting except for one thing that I couldn’t talk about at all, at least just yet. It was more fun to compare tastes in music (hers was more highbrow than mine, but neither of us could stand rock) and books (she got a kick out of historical novels; I liked science fiction). Once or twice, when we went out to rent a movie at the video shop, we got into half-serious squabbles that ended in Monty Python as a compromise.
Okay, it was not your typical teen romance. No polite small talk with parents, no cruising the main drag in a Trans Am, no sock hops, no substance abuse. Just a couple of misfits messing around with soldering irons.
In school, I noticed Gibbs was relaxing a lot, getting positively mellow, and realised it was partly because I was being less of a pain in the arse than usual. The Awkward Squad accepted Pat without much fuss, and I even had to give up an occasional evening with her because she’d been invited to Angela’s (That was a sight! Pat barely reached Angela’s shoulder.)
It wasn’t all sweetness and light. One morning, I’d picked Pat up and driven her to school, and we were passing through The Pit. Jason Murphy and his buddies were there, playing grab-arse and showing off their biceps tattoos. He saw us coming and started walking around in circles, doing an exaggerated limp and then falling against one of his friends.
“Oh, Ricky,” he cooed in a falsetto, “what would I ever do without you, you big strong stud you?”
“Jason, get professional help,” I said. Dumb. He’d gotten a rise out of me, and now he’d try for more.
“Professional help. I don’t need no help. Hey, tell me, when you two are gettin’ it on, where’s the brace go?”
My basement tenant came up the stairs in two jumps,
kicking open the door and slavering for blood. I felt myself shuddering; my peripheral vision vanished, so I seemed to be looking down a long tunnel at Jason’s smirking face. I have a memory of yelling something, but I have no idea what it was. I took a swing at Jason; he blocked it easily, and the next thing I knew something smashed into my cheek. I staggered back, and saw Pat on the edge of my narrowed vision. She’d reversed her cane, and was holding it near the rubber tip. Jason, ignoring her, was coming toward me, his narrowed eyes fixed on my face.
Pat swung her cane like a croquet mallet, cracking Jason’s shin. The change in his expression, from ferocity to surprise, was so sudden I burst out laughing. He yelped and hopped grabbing his shin with both hands. That was when Pat hooked the handle of the cane around his other ankle and threw him on his arse.
The other denizens of The Pit started cheering and whistling. Jason’s goony friends just gaped at their glorious leader. Pat limped over to Jason and looked down at him.
“You hemorrhoid, you’re damn lucky you’ve still got those ugly front teeth. You watch your manners, and stay away from us.”
One of the regulars in The Pit, a big blowsy girl, laughed hoarsely. “Right on, sister! Jason, after this you pick on somebody your own size - like a cockroach.”
“Come on,” I muttered, taking Pat’s arm. The monster was back in the basement; I was still shaking, but not the same way. Pat obeyed reluctantly, and I could feel her arm quivering, too. We were both out of our skulls on adrenaline.
Once we were in the main building, Pat started a breathy giggle. “My God, Rick, that felt good! I wish I’d hit him again.”
I stared at her, and saw a bright fierceness in her eyes, something like the anger she’d shown her first day in class, but this time it was happy.
“For God’s sake,” I protested. “You could get arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. And now you’ve made an enemy out of the biggest jerk in the school.”
“He’s made an enemy out of me,” Pat retorted. I’m not scared of him. Besides, what are you bitching at me for? You started it.”
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