Wild Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Randall hid his hand again. “Go on inside, Tacky,” he said, not unkindly. “Angelface had to go and see a man, but she told Des to keep your table open.”

  Tachyon nodded and let Randall open the door for him. Inside, he gave his coat and shoes to the girl in the checkroom, a joker with a trim little body whose feathered owl mask concealed whatever the wild card had done to her face. Then he pushed through the interior doors, his stockinged feet sliding with smooth familiarity over the mirrored floor. When he looked down, another Tachyon was staring back up at him, framed by his feet; a grossly fat Tachyon with a head like a beachball.

  Suspended from the mirrored ceiling, a crystal chandelier glittered with a hundred pinpoint lights, its reflections sparkling off the floor tiles and walls and mirrored alcoves, the silvered goblets and mugs, and even the waiters' trays. Some of the mirrors reflected true; the others were distorting mirrors, funhouse mirrors. When you looked over your shoulder in the Funhouse, you could never tell what you'd find looking back. It was the only establishment in Jokertown that attracted jokers and normals in equal numbers. In the Funhouse the normals could see themselves twisted and malformed, and giggle, and play at being jokers; and a joker, if he was very lucky, might glance in the right mirror and see himself as he once had been.

  “Your booth is waiting, Doctor Tachyon,” said Desmond, the maitre d'. Des was a large, florid man; his thick trunk, pink and wrinkled, curled around a wine list. He lifted it, and beckoned for Tachyon to follow with one of the fingers that dangled from its end. “Will you be having your usual brand of cognac tonight?”

  “Yes,” Tach said, wishing he had some money for a tip.

  That night he had his first drink for Blythe, as always, but his second was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  The rest were for himself.

  At the end of Hook Road, past the abandoned refinery and the import/export warehouses, past the railroad sidings with their forlorn red boxcars, beneath the highway underpass, past the empty lots full of weeds and garbage, past the huge soybean-oil tanks, Tom found his refuge. It was almost dark by the time he arrived, and the engine in the Merc was thumping ominously. But Joey would know what to do about that.

  The junkyard stood hard on the oily polluted waters of New York Bay. Behind a ten-foot-high chain link fence topped with three curly strands of barbed wire, a pack of junkyard dogs kept pace with his car, barking a raucous welcome that would have terrified anyone who knew the dogs less well. The sunset gave a strange bronze cast to the mountains of shattered, twisted, rusted automobiles, the acres of scrap metal, the hills and valleys of junk and trash. Finally Tom came to the wide double gate. On one side a metal sign warned TRESPASSERS KEEP OUT; on the other side another sign told them to BEWARE OF THE DOGS. The gate was chained and locked.

  Tom stopped and honked his horn.

  Just beyond the fence he could see the four-room shack that Joey called home. A huge sign was mounted on top of the corrugated tin roof, with yellow spotlights stuck up there to illuminate the letters. It said DI ANGELIS SCRAP METAL & AUTO PARTS. The paint was faded and blistered by two decades of sun and rain; the wood itself had cracked, and one of the spots had burned out. Next to the house was parked an ancient yellow dump truck, a tow truck, and Joey's pride and joy, a blood-red 1959 Cadillac coupe with tail fins like a shark and a monster of a hopped-up engine poking right up through its cutaway hood.

  Tom honked again. This time he gave it their special signal, tooting out the Here-he-comes-to-save-the-daaaay! theme from the Mighty Mouse cartoons they'd watched as kids.

  A square of yellow light spilled across the junkyard as Joey came out with a beer in either hand.

  They were nothing alike, him and Joey. They came from different stock, lived in different worlds, but they'd been best friends since the day of the third-grade pet show. That was the day he'd found out that turtles couldn't fly; the day he realized what he was, and what he could do.

  Stevie Bruder and Josh Jones had caught him out in the school-yard. They played catch with his turtles, tossing them back and forth while Tommy ran between them, red-faced and crying. When they got bored, they bounced them off the punchball square chalked on the wall. Stevie's German shepherd ate one. When Tommy tried to grab the dog, Stevie laid into him and left him on the ground with broken glasses and a split lip.

  They would have done worse, except for Junkyard Joey, a scrawny kid with shaggy black hair, two years older than his classmates, but he'd already been left back twice, couldn't hardly read, and they always said he smelled bad on account of his father, Dom, owned the junkyard. Joey wasn't as big as Stevie Bruder, but he didn't care, that day or any day. He just grabbed Stevie by the back of his shirt and yanked him around and kicked him in the balls. Then he kicked the dog too, and he would have kicked Josh Jones, except Josh ran away. As he fled, a dead turtle floated off the ground and flew across the schoolyard to smack him in the back of his fat red neck.

  Joey had seen it happen. “How'd you do that?” he said, astonished. Until that moment, even Tommy hadn't realized that he was the reason his turtles could fly.

  It became their shared secret, the glue that held their odd friendship together. Tommy helped Joey with his homework and quizzed him for tests. Joey became Tommy's protector against the random brutality of playground and schoolyard. Tommy read comic books to Joey, until Joey's own reading got so much better that he didn't need Tommy. Dom, a grizzled man with salt-and-pepper hair, a beer belly, and a gentle heart, was proud of that; he couldn't read himself, not even Italian. The friendship lasted through grammar school and high school and Joey's dropping out. It survived their discovery of girls, weathered the death of Dom DiAngelis and Tom's family moving off to Perth Amboy. Joey DiAngelis was still the only one who knew what Tom was.

  Joey popped the cap on another Rheingold with the church key that hung around his neck. Under his sleeveless white undershirt a beer belly like his father's was growing. “You're too fucking smart to be doing shitwork in a TV repair shop,” he was saying.

  “It's a job,” Tom said. “I did it last summer, I can do it full time. It's not important what kind of job I have. What's important is what I do with my, uh, talent.”

  “Talent?” Joey mocked.

  “You know what I mean, you dumb wop.” Tom set his empty bottle down on the top of the orange crate next to the armchair. Most of Joey's furnishings weren't what you'd call lavish; he scavenged them from the junkyard. “I been thinking about what Jetboy said at the end, trying to think what it meant. I figure he was saying that there were things he hadn't done yet. Well, shit, I haven't done anything. All the way back I asked what I could do for the country, y'know? Well, fuck, we both know the answer to that one.”

  Joey rocked back in his chair, sucking on his Rheingold and shaking his head. Behind him, the wall was lined with the bookshelves that Dom had built for the kids almost ten years ago. The bottom row was all men's magazines. The rest were comic books. Their comic books. Supermans and Batmans, Action Comics and Detective, the Classics Illustrateds that Joey had mined for all his book reports, horror comics and crime comics and air-war comics, and best of all, their treasure—an almost complete run of Jetboy Comics.

  Joey saw what he was looking at. “Don't even think it,” he said, “you're no fuckin' Jetboy, Tuds.”

  “No,” said Tom, “I'm more than he was. I'm—”

  “A dork,” Joey suggested.

  “An ace,” he said gravely. “Like the Four Aces.”

  “They were a colored doo-wop group, weren't they?”

  Tom flushed. “You dumb wop, they weren't singers, they—”

  Joey cut him off with a sharp gesture. “I know who the fuck they were, Tuds. Gimme a break. They were dumb shits, like you. They all went to jail or got shot or something, didn't they? Except for the fuckin' snitch, whatsisname.” He snapped his fingers. “You know, the guy in Tarzan.”

  “Jack Braun,” Tom said. He'd done a term paper on the Four Aces on
ce, “And I bet there are others, hiding out there. Like me. I've been hiding. But no more.”

  “So you figure you're going to go to the Bayonne Times and give a fucking show? You asshole. You might as well tell 'em you're a commie. They'll make you move to Jokertown and they'll break all the goddamned windows in your dad's house. They might even draft you, asswipe.”

  “No,” said Tom. “I've got it scoped out. The Four Aces were easy targets. I'm not going to let them know who I am or where I live.” He used the beer bottle in his hand to gesture vaguely at the bookshelves. “I'm going to keep my name secret. Like in the comics.”

  Joey laughed out loud. “Fuckin' A. You gonna wear longjohns too, you dumb shit?”

  “God damn it,” Tom said. He was getting pissed off. “Shut the fuck up.” Joey just sat there, rocking and laughing. “Come on, big mouth,” Tom snapped, rising. “Get off your fat ass and come outside, and I'll show just how dumb I am. C'mon, you know so damned much.”

  Joey DiAngelis got to his feet. “This I gotta see.”

  Outside, Tom waited impatiently, shifting his weight from foot to foot, breath steaming in the cold November air, while Joey went to the big metal box on the side of the house and threw a switch. High atop their poles, the junkyard lights blazed to life. The dogs gathered around, sniffing, and followed them when they began to walk. Joey had a beer bottle poking out of a pocket of his black leather jacket.

  It was only a junkyard, full of garbage and scrap metal and wrecked cars, but tonight it seemed as magical as when Tommy was ten. On a rise overlooking the black waters of New York Bay, an ancient white Packard loomed like a ghostly fort. That was just what it had been, when Joey and he had been kids; their sanctum, their stronghold, their cavalry outpost and space station and castle rolled all in one. It shone in the moonlight, and the waters beyond were full of promise as they lapped against the shore. Darkness and shadows lay heavy in the yard, changing the piles of trash and metal into mysterious black hills, with a maze of gray alleys between them. Tom led them into that labyrinth, past the big trash heap where they'd played king-of-the-mountain and dueled with scrap-iron swords, past the treasure troves where they'd found so many busted toys and hunks of colored glass and deposit bottles, and once even a whole cardboard carton full of comic books.

  They walked between rows of twisted, rusty cars stacked one on another; Fords and Chevys, Hudsons and DeSotos, a Corvette with a shattered accordion hood, a litter of dead Beetles, a dignified black hearse as dead as the passengers it had carried. Tom looked at them all carefully. Finally he stopped. “That one,” he said, pointing to the remains of a gutted old Studebaker Hawk. Its engine was gone, as were its tires; the windshield was a spiderweb of broken glass, and even in the darkness they could see where rust had chewed away at the fenders and side panels. “Not worth anything, right?”

  Joey opened his beer. “Go ahead, it's all yours.”

  Tom took a deep breath and faced the car. His hands became fists at his side. He stared hard, concentrating. The car rocked slightly. Its front grill lifted an unsteady couple of inches from the ground.

  “Whooo-eeee,” Joey said derisively, punching Tom lightly in the shoulder. The Studebaker dropped with a clang, and a bumper fell off. “Shit, I'm impressed,” Joey said.

  “Damn it, keep quiet and leave me alone,” Tom said. “I can do it, I'll show you, just shut your fuckin' mouth for a minute. I've been practicing. You don't know the things I can do.”

  “Won't say a fuckin' word,” Joey promised, grinning. He took a swig of his beer.

  Tom turned back to the Studebaker. He tried to blot out everything, forget about Joey, the dogs, the junkyard; the Studebaker filled his world. His stomach was a hard little ball. He told it to relax, took several deep breaths, let his fists uncurl. Come on, come on, take it easy, don't get upset, do it, you've done more than this, this is easy, easy.

  The car rose slowly, drifting upward in a shower of rust. Tom turned it around and around, faster and faster. Then, with a triumphant smile, Tom threw it fifty feet across the junkyard. It crashed into a stack of dead Chevys and brought the whole thing down in an avalanche of metal.

  Joey finished his Rheingold. “Not bad. A few years ago, you could barely lift me over a fence.”

  “I'm getting stronger all the time,” Tom said.

  Joey DiAngelis nodded, and tossed his empty bottle to the side. “Good” he said, “then you won't have any problem with me, willya?” He gave Tom a hard push with both hands.

  Tom staggered back a step, frowning. “Cut it out, Joey.”

  “Make me,” Joey said. He shoved him again, harder. This time Tom almost lost his footing.

  “Damn it, stop it,” Tom said. “It's not funny, Joey.”

  “No?” Joey said. He grinned. “I think it's fuckin' hilarious. But hey, you can stop me, can't you? Use your damn power.” He moved right up in Tom's face and slapped him lightly across the cheek. “Stop me, ace,” he said. He slapped him harder. “C'mon, Jetboy, stop me.” The third slap was the hardest yet. “Let's go, supes, whatcha waitin' for?” The fourth blow had a sharp sting; the fifth snapped Tom's head half around. Joey stopped smiling; Tom could smell the beer on his breath.

  Tom tried to grab his hand, but Joey was too strong, too fast; he evaded Tom's grasp and landed another slap. “You wanna box, ace? I'll turn you into fuckin' dogmeat. Dork. Asshole.” The slap almost tore Tom's head off, and brought stinging tears to his eyes. “Stop me, jagoff,” Joey screamed. He closed his hand, and buried his fist in Tom's stomach so hard it doubled him over and took his breath away.

  Tom tried to summon his concentration, to grab and push, but it was the schoolyard all over again, Joey was everywhere, fists raining down on him, and it was all he could do to get his hands up and try to block the blows, and it was no good anyway, Joey was much stronger, he pounded him, pushed him, screaming all the while, and Tom couldn't think, couldn't focus, couldn't do anything but hurt, and he was retreating, staggering back, and Joey came after him, fists cocked, and caught him with an uppercut that landed right on his mouth with a crack that made his teeth hurt. All of a sudden Tom was lying on his back on the ground, with a mouth full of blood.

  Joey stood over him frowning. “Fuck,” he said.” I didn't mean to bust your lip.” He reached down, took Tom by the hand, and yanked him roughly to his feet.

  Tom wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. There was blood on the front of his shirt too. “Look at me, I'm all messed up,” he said with disgust. He glared at Joey. “That wasn't fair. You can't expect me to do anything when you're pounding on me, damn it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Joey said, “And while you're concentrating and squinting your eyes, you figure the fuckin' bad guys are just gonna leave you alone, right?” He clapped Tom across the back. “They'll knock out all your fuckin' teeth. That's if you're lucky, if they don't just shoot you. You ain't no Jetboy, Tuds.” He shivered. “C'mon. It's fuckin' cold out here.”

  When he woke in warm darkness, Tach remembered only a little of the binge, but that was how he liked it. He struggled to sit up. The sheets he was lying on were satin, smooth and sensual, and beneath the odor of stale vomit he could still smell a faint trace of some flowery perfume.

  Unsteady, he tossed off the bedclothes and pulled himself to the edge of the four-poster bed. The floor beneath his bare feet was carpeted. He was naked, the air uncomfortably warm on his bare skin. He reached out a hand, found the light switch, and whimpered a little at the brightness. The room was pink-and-white clutter with Victorian furnishings and thick, soundproofed walls. An oil painting of John F. Kennedy smiled down from above the hearth; in one corner stood a three-foot-tall plaster statue of the Virgin Mary.

  Angelface was seated in a pink wingback chair by the cold fireplace, blinking at him sleepily and covering her yawn with the back of her hand.

  Tach felt sick and ashamed. “I put you out of your own bed again, didn't I?” he said.

  “It's a
ll right,” she replied. Her feet were resting on a tiny foot- stool. Her soles were ugly and bruised, black and swollen despite the special padded shoes she wore. Otherwise she was lovely. Unbound, her black hair fell to her waist, and her skin had a flushed, radiant quality to it, a warm glow of life. Her eyes were dark and liquid, but the most amazing thing, the thing that never failed to astonish Tachyon, was the warmth in them, the affection he felt so unworthy of. With all he had done to her, and to all the rest of them, somehow this woman called Angelface forgave, and cared.

  Tach raised a hand to his temple. Someone with a buzzsaw was trying to remove the back of his skull. “My head,” he groaned. “At your prices, the least you could do is take the resins and poisons out of the drinks you sell. On Takis, we—”

  “I know,” Angelface said. “On Takis you've bred hangovers out of your wines. You told me that one already.”

  Tachyon gave her a weary smile. She looked impossibly fresh, wearing nothing but a short satin tunic that left her legs bare to the thigh. It was a deep, wine red, lovely against her skin. But when she rose, he glimpsed the side of her face, where her cheek had rested against the chair as she slept. The bruise was darkening already, a purple blossom on her cheek. “Angel . . .” he began.

  “It's nothing,” she said. She pushed her hair forward to cover the blemish. “Your clothes were filthy. Mal took them out to be cleaned. So you're my prisoner for a while.”

  “How long have I slept?” Tachyon asked.

  “All day,” Angelface replied. “Don't worry about it. Once I had a customer get so drunk he slept for five months.” She sat down at her dressing table, lifted a phone, and ordered breakfast: toast and tea for herself, eggs and bacon and strong coffee with brandy for Tachyon. With aspirin on the side.