LIFTER

by Crawford Kilian

  “Can they still see us on radar?” Pat asked.

  “I doubt it. Once we got close to the ground, we blurred into the background.” At least I hoped we had; my respect for air force electronics had risen sharply in the last few minutes.

  The puddled car park looked just as it had when we’d left it. Half-expecting CIA agents to pop out from behind the trees, I unlocked Brunhilde and we got in. Pat looked at me and burst out laughing. I laughed, too. It’s not every day you get chased by a jet fighter, and escape.

  We spent the rest of the day exploring other trails in the hills, but minding our manners and giving the air force no reason to spend taxpayers’ dollars hunting us. On empty trails in the endless drizzle, we covered a lot of ground in long strides, occasionally lifting to inspect a hawk’s nest or to cross a creek. When the drizzle turned to steady rain we went back in the car and listened to tapes, and then we went home.

  About the time we got into town, Pat asked: “Are you serious about not telling anybody about lifting?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just worried about the harm it could do.”

  “Don’t. Worry about getting fat on the lasagna I’m going to make for dinner.”

  The rest of the afternoon was agreeably domestic: Pat and Melinda made acres of lasagna in the kitchen, while I vegetated with the evening paper.

  It wasn’t as full of stuff about the game, since it was a Sacramento paper, but it had a fairly long story about “Terry High’s startling rookie back.” I read it and went on to the real news, but not with much attention. Instead I sat there thinking about Al Suarez and Scott Smith, and wondering whether the pilot of the F-14 had actually seen us. If he had, had he told his bosses what he’d seen? If he had, was he now in a rubber room?

  Dinner was good, and we had a pleasant time until Pat said she was tired and could I take her home. So we took our usual route home, via Hillside Park, and Pat whipped off her brace again.

  “At this rate, you’re going to need something like a ski binding.”

  “This stupid thing’s days are numbered. Come on, let’s get out there and chase bats.”

  “And you sure it’s smart, Pat? I don’t want to dodge any more jets, and if we turn up on radar a couple more times, Bobby Gassaway will go into convulsions.”

  “How will they be able to tell? C’mon, don’t be a party pooper.”

  “Okay, okay.” So we left Brunhilde and walked up into a grove of trees. The rain had stopped at last, but it was wet underfoot and deserted as usual. Pat didn’t bother with a balaclava or anything; she just said “Shazam!” and took off straight up, leaving me to follow.

  I was nervous as hell, but that faded once I was off the ground. It was so good to lift, to soar up and see the city lights rotate below, and then to feel Pat’s hand in mine. We went up only about five hundred feet, and didn’t move away from the park; it was fun just to do somersaults and slow rolls, and I didn’t want to be too far from the car if the air force crashed the party again.

  After we’d been up a few minutes, I saw a car drive past the park, slow, and then do a U-turn into the car park. Probably some horny couple, I supposed, until it rolled under a street light and I recognised Jason Murphy’s white Trans Am. It parked right next to Brunhilde. Jason’s tape deck was blasting away, and it got even louder when the car doors opened and a couple of people got out.

  “Look,” I said quietly. “Jason.”

  “That fink. Did he recognise your car?”

  “He must have.” It was easy enough; how many old red VWs have a bumper sticker that asks: “Have You Hugged Your Nerd Today?”

  One of the two guys went to the trunk of the Trans Am and then came back to the other guy. I saw them swing their arms against Brunhilde’s windshield, and heard glass shatter.

  “Thoseᚓ”

  I nearly shouted out loud in rage and frustration. Jason and his Tricycle Rat friend smashed every window in Brunhilde while we watched, helpless. They probably would have gone on to slash her tires or even set her afire, but must have decided that the noise they were making would attract Pat and me out of the underbrush in time to identify them. So thirty seconds after the attack started, they were back in Jason’s car and peeling out of the car park, headed uphill onto Skyline road.

  “I’ll be right back,” I snarled, and shot downward, following the Trans Am.

  “I’m coming, too. Don’t do anything stupid,” Pat said.

  Head down, with my fists in my pockets, I caught up quickly with Jason, who was taking the sharp curves on Skyline fairly carefully. I could hear his tape deck blaring with the same kind of idiotic noise that Pat’s roommate got off on. The car was the only one on the road, which was encouraging.

  Swinging into a feet-down position, I matched speed with the Trans Am and landed on its roof with a satisfying loud thump. The Vibram soles on my hiking boots put a respectable dent in the metal.

  But the best part was the simultaneous shrieks from Jason and his buddy and the car’s brakes. I slowed even faster than the car did, fell behind, then accelerated feet first into the Trans Am’s rear window. It was tougher than I’d expected, and didn’t shatter, but a couple of large cracks flashed out from under my boots. I went back onto the roof and did some flamenco dancing, drumming my heels until the whole roof was stamped in and mottled with boot prints.

  Jason had accelerated again after I hit the rear window, but now he hit the brakes and went into a long, screaming skid on the wet road. To one side was a steep hillside; to the other was an even steeper drop into a canyon; straight ahead was a hairpin turn. I lifted up some twenty or thirty feet and saw the Trans Am’s rear end smack into a telephone pole. The whole car whipped around and slammed nose-first, hard, into a shallow ditch on the uphill side. It’s headlights were still on, and enough light reflected from the hillside to show Jason and his half-wit buddy crawling out of the car.

  “Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!” Jason kept saying. “Omigod, my dad’ll kill me! Omigod! What was it? What was it?” His buddy just groaned.

  I hadn’t heard a male duet so beautiful since Tucker and Bjoerling’s “Au Fond du Temple Sacre” from The Pearl Fishers. When Jason’s wails rose to high C as he ran his paws over the dented roof of the Trans Am, I nearly burst into applause.

  Then his buddy leaned over the hood and said: “Hey, Jason, I don’t feel so good.”

  Jason stopped yelping and went over to him.

  “Jeezus, Brad, you’re bleeding!”

  “I think I hit the windshield. Jeez, it’s running down inside my shirt and all. Jason - I don’t feel so good.” And he threw up all over the hood.

  Pat was beside me, hovering in the dark. I turned to her, and suddenly I didn’t feel so great myself. “Let’s go,” I murmured. “I’ll phone for an ambulance.”

  Squinting through Brunhilde’s smashed windshield, I pulled into the car park of a 7-Eleven and found a public phone; I dialled 911 and reported an car accident on Skyline, then hung up without identifying myself. I got back in the car and drove Pat home; we didn’t talk much until we’d stopped outside her home.

  I turned off the ignition and sighed. “I think I scared myself silly up there.”

  Her hand was warm on my face. “Just be glad it wasn’t worse.”

  “It only shows that idiots shouldn’t be allowed to lift.”

  “You lost your temper, Rick, and I don’t blame you. After what those creeps did, they deserved what they got.”

  “They didn’t deserve to get killed, and they damn near were,” I answered thickly.

  “Don’t eat your heart out, Rick. Please. You got mad and you hit out at them, and we all learnt something. What do you want to do, turn yourself in to the cops for malicious mischief? Or flying without a licence?”

  I laughed. It sounded like somebody being garroted.

  “Go home and get some sleep,” Pat said. “We’ve had a rough day.” She gave me a kiss and swung out of the car. When she was halfway down the footpath
to her front door, I did a double take.

  “Hey!” I hissed.

  “What?”

  “You forgot your brace.”

  “Oops!” She popped back in and wrestled herself into it. “See you tomorrow?”

  “In the afternoon. Maybe around two or three. I’ve got to go to the hospital before that.”

  “What for?”

  “Pay a visit to Al Suarez.”

  Chapter 11

  “RICK - WHAT’S happened to your car?”

  Melinda was so upset she’d actually barged into my room. I opened my eyes and blinked at her while Marcus stood up and stretched beside the bed.

  “I got vandalised last night,” I mumbled.

  “What? How?”

  “I took Pat home and then I went up to Hillside Park and went for a walk. When I got back, somebody’d broken all the windows.”

  “My God. What on earth possessed you to go for a walk in the park in the middle of the night when it’s freezing out?”

  I rolled out of bed and pulled on my jeans. “Well, it’s been kind of a wild week, Melinda. I just needed a little time to think about things.”

  “What’s wrong with thinking right here at home? You think here, nobody’s going to break your windows while you’re doing it. Hillside Park is no place to be after dark.”

  “So I’ve learnt.”

  “Well, you’ll have to call the insurance people and get it all cleared up. That car’s your responsibility, you know.” She shook her head. “What a bummer. Well, come on down and have some breakfast.”

  Pulling on my favourite red-and-black checked flannel shirt, I trudged downstairs. The kitchen smelled good: Melinda was baking blueberry muffins. She grilled me some more about the car, but I’d worked out my story and stuck to it.

  “What a bummer,” she repeated. “I’d sure like to get my hands on the jerk who did it. When I looked out this morning and saw it like that, I couldn’t believe my eyes. God, I hate that kind of pointless violence.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “You’re taking it a lot more calmly than I thought you would.”

  “You should’ve seen me last night.”

  I ate my breakfast and looked out at the grey sky. A jet boomed past overhead. The weather looked raw and chilly.

  “What are you up to today? Pat coming over?”

  “Later. I have to go out and see Al Suarez this morning. The guy I put in the hospital.”

  “Oh. That’s really nice of you, Rick. But you didn’t really put him in the hospital, you know. That was just the breaks.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  After breakfast I did a lot of chores and then took Marcus for a long walk. I’d neglected him lately, but he didn’t hold a grudge. We went up Las Estacas Street to where it ended on the edge of a little canyon, and then went up the canyon into the pine scrub that dotted the dull brown hillside. Marcus bounded back and forth, running ahead and then racing back to make sure I was okay, so he ended up covering four times the distance I did.

  It was a steep climb, and the slope was muddy after the rain; before long my legs were aching, and I was puffing. Walking was hard work. No one was around - I couldn’t even see any houses - but I resisted the urge to lift. It wasn’t easy.

  When we got back, I showered and dressed in more presentable clothes: blue slacks, a blue-and-white striped shirt, my best Harris tweed sport coat. Then I went out to poor Brunhilde and drove to the hospital. The windshield had two quarter-sized holes in it, surrounded by spider-webbed cracks, which made it both hard to see and pretty cold.

  Never having been in the hospital before, I took awhile to find Al Suarez. The place depressed me. It was full of people on crutches, people in wheelchairs, people lying in bed staring at TV or the ceiling. Finally I found him, in a ward with six other people, all old men. He was sitting up, his bed cranked up under his back, and he was reading a murder mystery. He looked bigger in bed than he had on the field, with huge broad shoulders, and knuckly hands. He was wearing a neck brace, and his chest, under a hospital bathrobe, was taped.

  “Hi,” I said, stopping at the foot of the bed. “I’m Rick Stevenson. Number 77, remember? How are you?”

  He looked surprised to see me, but he wasn’t angry.

  “Uh, okay, I guess. Well, not exactly, but I’m feeling better than I did yesterday.” He waved me to a chair beside his bed, and shook my hand as I sat down. “Thanks for coming. Hey, you got a lot of coverage in the paper.”

  “Yeah. This town has a thing about football. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “Well, you really hit me a good one.” He pointed to his chest. “You know I got three cracked ribs?”

  “Oh no! I’m really sorry.”

  “Lot of internal bleeding, too, but they got that stopped. If it wasn’t for that, they’d’ve sent me home already. But they’re scared I’m going to start bleedin’ again.”

  “Boy, I sure hope not.”

  “You and me both, man. Man, that was scary. I never peed red before. Listen, let me ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  “On that play, you know? You had plenty of room to get around me, ‘specially you being so fast and all. But you just came straight for me, like you wanted to take me out. Is that what you really wanted to do? Just put me outa the game?”

  “Oh no, no - I really didn’t. I just - I knew you guys were going to really go after me unless I showed I could go after you, you know?”

  He could understand that. “Took a lot of guts, man. So you were just trying to psych us out, huh?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, I guess it worked. Some of the guys from the team were in yesterday and geez, they were really down about it. They got kind of scared of you, you know?”

  He didn’t realise how bizarre that sounded: great big jocks scared of Supernerd. “Well, uh, that was the idea,” I said. I didn’t say whose idea.

  “Yeah, well, we ever play again, we’ll put your arse in a sling right away.”

  “I ever play you again, I’ll be moving so fast you won’t even see my arse.”

  He started laughing, but it turned to a choked growl and a grimace. “Geez, these ribs really hurt.”

  “But only when you laugh?”

  “Yeah. Too bad I got a great sense of humour.”

  “What’s the neck brace for?”

  “Whiplash.”

  “Whiplash?”

  “Can you believe it? I must’ve been asleep when you came at me.”

  We talked for a few minutes, but I wasn’t really paying attentioin. A little more oomph in the Effect on Friday night, and this nice big guy might now be lying in a funeral home in San Cristobal, with a broken neck or a burst aorta or who knew what, and on Monday morning his family would bury him. I would have a couple of broken ribs instead of just a few bruises, and I wouldn’t be cracking jokes. I’d probably be talking to cops who figured I was zonked out on steriods or something.

  Finally I left. Al shook my hand and thanked me for coming by; I said I’d try to make it back in a day or two. Then I crept out of the hospital, feeling terrible.

  The insurance guy came around just as Melinda and I were finishing lunch; he wasn’t annoyed at having to work on a Sunday, and even accepted a corned beef on rye. Still eating, he walked back out to the footpath with me and examined Brunhilde.

  “Seen worse,” he commented. “Usually they pick expensive cars. Mercedes, Porsches, something they can’t even dream of having. Guess they figured your car’d do for practice.” He filled out a form and gave me the carbon. “Better file an accident report with the police. Otherwise you’ll have a tough time getting the repairs done.”

  So I took poor Brunhilde downtown to the cop shop and filled out a long form. The cop who came outside with me to confirm the damage seemed depressed.

  “What a shame, after that great game you played Friday. Vandalism, it’s the curse of the twentieth century. Nothing’s sacred a
ny more, not even a person’s personal automobile. No one respects property rights. Another five years and we’ll be living under communism, if the dope dealers don’t take over first.”

  By now I was feeling so down I was grateful even for sympathy from a lunatic policeman. I cheered up a little more when I picked up Pat, who was feeling fine. When she learnt I hadn’t done my homework in days, she declared a state of siege.

  “We’re going to get you caught up by dinnertime, or you get no dinner and Melinda and I will pig out.”

  “Hey, what’s with the threats?”

  “I’m not going to risk my reputation by going around with some rangitang jock who flunks everything.”

  “If I hear one more reference to athletics today,” I growled, “I’ll show you real rangitang.”

  “Now who’s into threats?” And she lent over and kissed me.

  “If you insisted on smelling that good, you’re going to have to keep your distance.”

  My slowly rising spirits lost what little Effect they had when I got home and Melinda, working in the study, said Bobby Gassaway had called and would I phone him back. I did.

  “Hey,” said Gassaway, “they saw some more UFOs Friday and yesterday. Know anything about ‘em?”

  “Not until you tell me.”

  “You sure? You’re not doing any kites or model airplanes or hot-air balloons or anything?”

  “Gimme a break, Gassaway.”

  “The finger of suspicion points to you, Stevenson,” he said in mock-portentous tones. “I think you’re running some heavy hoax, and the air force is getting annoyed about it.”

  “Gassaway, there is no hoax.”

  “How do you know?”