by John Varley
I knew as well as anyone that we should have gone home and done a few hours of studying. But if we had, Dak would never have run over the ex-astronaut.
2
* * *
IT’S NOT STRICTLY legal to drive on the beach in Florida.
Okay, it’s against the law. Would you believe they used to have car races right out on the sand, not very far north of where we were that night, until they built the big track at Daytona? It’s true, I’ve seen the video. Now they worry about every quart of oil that might make its way into the Atlantic. I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, but if anyone thought Blue Thunder would leave so much as a drop on the clean sands of Cocoa Beach they didn’t know Dak very well. You could cook and eat your dinner right off the engine block, assuming Dak would ever let you do such a messy thing to his baby.
Dak would be spending hours tomorrow hosing off the worst of the salty sand. He would remove wheels and brakes and shocks to clean them with a toothbrush. If you think I’m kidding, you don’t know Dak.
Kelly and I hung on tight as Dak steered through the packed sand and foam, and every time he hit a wavelet spreading across the beach we’d get a fine salt spray in our faces. Looking down through the open moon roof I could hear the throbbing drums of some new South African group Alicia had discovered. I could see the dash lights, including the fuzzbuster unit I’d helped him install. It was supposed to alert us if [14] there was a cop transmitting anywhere within two miles. We knew the cops had seen us out there, we’d heard them talking about us. They were even pretty sure of who we were, and so far hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. They had to catch us first, and there wasn’t a police vehicle in the whole state of Florida that could keep up with Blue Thunder in the sand.
Kelly had one arm around my waist and one hand on the roll bar, and that felt great. I had my arm around her, too. The wind and the spray blew through her hair and she looked great in the moonlight. Dak was staying close to the water and far from the dunes, because the soft, rolling sands were where nighttime lovers liked to spread their blankets.
Life seemed just about perfect. And that’s when we ran over the guy.
He looked like a piece of driftwood when I first saw him. He was lying on his back looking up at the stars, or what few stars you could see with all the lights of Cocoa Beach behind us. I saw him turn his head and squint against the bright headlights.
Kelly saw him the same time I did, and she shouted something and started pounding on the roof. I looked down.
Alicia straightened up-
Dak glanced up at me-
Kelly hit the roof even harder-
Dak looked forward… mouthed an obscenity… slammed on the brakes.
Blue Thunder’s wheels locked and we began to skid sideways. Dak corrected. He had us straightened out again when we ran over the man’s legs.
We came to a stop. The truck’s engine died and for a moment there was only the sound of the surf. Then everyone started shouting at once.
I don’t remember what anyone said. It wasn’t anything terribly smart, I know that. We were scared.
Kelly and I jumped out of the pickup bed and hurried around to the side of the truck. Dak had his door open, but that seemed to be as far [15] as he could go. He had his arms over the steering wheel and his head buried in his arms. He was shaking.
Alicia hadn’t been able to get out over Dak, so she came around the front. Dak’s running-board lights dazzled our eyes so we couldn’t see in the darkness beneath them. Alicia shined her flashlight down at the sand, then made a little squeaking sound and backed up a few paces.
“We cut off his legs,” she whispered. Kelly turned around and made a gagging sound, then turned back. I knelt close to where Alicia was shining the flashlight beam.
I could see that the man’s legs ended a lot sooner than they should have. Blue Thunder had thrown up some big ridges of wet, heavy sand. I couldn’t see where his legs ended because the sand covered most of them below the knees.
But I saw his shoes easy enough. They were a good five feet away from his kneecaps and three feet away from the truck.
Dak stepped out of the cab, took one look at the disembodied feet, staggered into the surf and vomited.
I felt like doing the same… and then I realized what had happened. I went over to them and prodded one with my own shoe. It rolled over. There was no foot inside.
Alicia knelt and shined the light under the truck. Kelly knelt beside her and worked her hand down into loose sand.
She pulled up a bare foot, holding it by the little piggy that stayed home, or maybe the one who had roast beef. A leg came up with it, perfectly well attached to the foot. There weren’t even any tread marks on it.
First you feel a wave of relief. Then you get angry. I wanted to kick him. What sort of jerk lies in the surf line in the dark?
But I could almost hear my mother’s voice. Oh, yeah? What kind of jerk goes joyriding on the beach in the dark? Okay, Mom. You’re right, as usual.
“Let’s get him out of there,” I said, and grabbed a foot. Dak took the other and we slid him out, where he squinted up into Alicia’s light.
“This salt water ain’t doing your undercarriage any good, hon,” he said.
[16] “It’s my undercarriage,” Dak said.
“Whatever,” the guy said, and belched. Then he sort of passed out.
I say “sort of” because he never went to sleep. He passed into an alcoholic fog where he wasn’t really connecting with what was happening. He was docile as a baby, and in the morning he wouldn’t remember a thing. Right now he’d blow a perfect ten on the lush-o-meter.
There’s a good chance we saved his life. The tide could have easily taken him out to sea where he’d drown without ever waking up.
“What’s your name, dude?” Dak was asking him.
“This dude is down for the count, my friend,” I said. “We’d better get him out of here before the crabs eat him.”
“Drag him back in the dunes?” Alicia suggested.
“Worse than crabs back in the dunes,” Dak said. “Passed-out guy could get raped back there in the dunes.”
“He’d never know it,” Alicia said.
“Maybe a certain soreness in the morning…” Dak rubbed his ass, and we all laughed. Okay, so it wasn’t so funny. I felt a little silly with relief. You think about it, you realize how your whole life can change in two seconds. We could have been gathered around a dead or dying man.
Kelly might almost have been reading my thoughts.
“We nearly killed him, don’t you think we ought to try to take him home?”
“And have him blow chunks all over my upholstery? Let him fight off the fairies his own self.”
“Gin doesn’t come in chunks,” Alicia said. She showed us an empty bottle of Tanqueray she had stumbled over.
“Yeah? Say he ate one of those World Famous Astroburgers an hour ago.” Dak nodded toward the bar in the distance.
“Pretty good gin for a wino.”
“He’s not a wino. He hasn’t been sleeping in back alleys. Look at his clothes.”
It was true, the sneakers sold for well over a hundred dollars a pair, and they looked new. The shirt and pants were expensive labels, too.
[17] “And he don’t drink wine, either,” Dak said. “So what’s that make him? A gin-o? Whatever, it don’t make his vomit any sweeter.”
“So, we gonna take him home or not?”
“Where’s home?” Kelly asked.
We all looked down at him again. He was still smiling, humming something I didn’t recognize. A wavelet hit him and eddied around our feet, then sucked a little deeper hole under him as it ran back out. That must have been how his legs got buried. An hour from now he’d be under the sand, somebody else’s problem. But none of us wanted that.
So I reached down and grabbed the side of his pants and pulled him up a bit, then fished his wallet out of his hip pocket.
It was hand-tooled
leather and fairly thick. The first thing I saw was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill sticking out. I opened it and pulled out a wad of cash. I thrust it out to Dak, who looked startled and took it. He counted it.
“Eight hundred big ones,” he said.
“So take out a taxi fee and let’s get him home.”
He handed the cash back to me. “What’s eating you, anyway?”
I didn’t really know. Part of it was that I sure could have used the money. Who would know? Certainly not this whacked-out jerk, lying there pissed out of his mind.
You’d know, Manuel, Mom said. She had this annoying habit of speaking just as loudly when she wasn’t there as when she was.
“We’ll just dump him in the back,” I said. “I’ll ride with him. He barfs, I’ll clean it up.” Dak waved it away, and I looked at the wallet again. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, all platinum, all made out to one Travis Broussard.
“Cajun,” Kelly said, peering over my shoulder.
“Huh?”
“The name,” she explained. “There’s some Cajun families from the Florida panhandle, I think.” I didn’t know what difference that made, unless he lived in the panhandle. That would be too far to drive him. I found the driver’s license, and as I pulled it from its pocket another card fell to the sand. Alicia picked it up. I pointed out the address on the license to Dak and Kelly.
[18] “Is that far from here?”
“Forty-five minutes, maybe half an hour this time of night. Out in the boonies, though. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll take the dude. Won’t even charge him for my gasoline.”
Alicia whistled under her breath. “Look at this,” she said. “The guy’s an astronaut.”
“Let me see that,” Dak said, and grabbed the card. Then Alicia played keep-away with her flashlight for a moment until Dak and I overpowered her.
“This expired three years ago,” Dak said. But before that it had been a gate pass to the Kennedy Space Center, and identified Broussard as a colonel and a chief pilot in the NASA VentureStar program.
3
* * *
THE QUICKEST WAY from the beach to Rancho Broussard involved twenty miles or so on the Florida Autopike. Dak eased Blue Thunder onto the ramp and allowed the Pike computer to interrogate his precious baby. There are several things about the Autopike that just rub Dak the wrong way. The most basic is simply that he hates to surrender control of his rig. “You go driving, you should have at least one hand on the wheel, like God intended.”
I didn’t argue with him on that one. There was still something profoundly creepy about cars that steered themselves, at least to folks like me and my mother. We could barely afford the thirty-year-old Mercury that Dak and I were always rescuing from a one-way trip to the junkyard. That Merk was not Pike-adaptable without spending about ten times what the old wreck was worth. Poor folks like us ride the Autopike about as often as we take the ballistic Orient Express to Tokyo.
The other thing Dak hates about the Pike is… well, let’s face it, nobody likes to get passed, right? Nobody our age, anyway, and for sure nobody driving a rig as gaudy as Blue Thunder. But ol’ Blue was built for power, not for speed. We were banished into the D lane, the outer one for vehicles that cruise at about eighty-five or ninety. What [20] we call the “blue hair” lane, for all the old ladies in their well-preserved Caddies and Buicks. Now you can see them by the thousands in the D lane, going places they were too timid to drive to before the Pike opened. It’s a drag to be tucked in among them while you watch the soccer moms in their minivans pass you in the last lanes.
Dak pulled into one of the brightly lit authorization booths. Kelly and I scrambled out of the bed and set Colonel Broussard on his feet. He needed support, but he could stand. We shoved him into the narrow backseat as the Pike computer checked some eighty or ninety roadworthiness items every time you entered, from airbag sensors to tire pressure. We hopped in behind him.
“Is this my car?” Broussard asked.
“Just take it easy, sir,” Kelly said. “We’ll have you home soon.”
“Okay.”
“If he barfs in my car, man…”
“Please state your destination,” the computer said. Dak told it the exit number, and the computer told him what the fare would be.
“Do not attempt to leave the vehicle while it is in motion.” I heard the doors click as the computer locked them.
“Do not attempt to steer the vehicle until you are told it is safe.” I could see Dak idly spinning the disconnected steering wheel.
“Do not unbuckle your safety belts at any time. The next rest wayside is thirty minutes away, so if you need to use the facilities, press the rest button on your Autopike Control Console now.”
“I’ll just piss in a Mason jar,” Dak said.
“Don’t miss,” said the computer. “You’re due for an oil change in five hundred miles. Your left front tire is showing some uneven wear. And all that salt and sand isn’t doing your undercarriage any good.”
“That’s what I said!” Colonel Broussard shouted.
“Bon voyage, Blue,” said the voice, which I now suspected was not the Pike computer. Blue Thunder pulled quickly away from the booth as Dak muttered something about “Big Brother.” I looked over at the supervisor’s tower and saw a guy waving at us.
The only time I was on the Pike the scariest part was the initial merge. The computer tucked us in between two semis with about three [21] inches clearance fore and aft, and did it at eighty miles per hour. During rush hour they use every square inch of road available and the door handles and bumpers almost touch. Some people can’t bear to use the Pike at all because of that. It’s contrary to all your driving instincts.
No problem like that tonight. Traffic was light in all lanes. Over in the A lane there would be no traffic at all for a minute or two, then a dozen cars would zip by bumper to bumper to take advantage of drafting, like racing cars. They say in a few more years you’ll be able to travel from Miami to Maine like this, but as of now the Florida part of the Pike only goes from Brevard to Jacksonville, by way of Orlando.
We’d hardly got up to Pike speed when it was time to get off again. The computer eased us to the required dead stop at the booths, and Dak engaged the manual controls. We rolled off the Pike and onto a main east-west highway.
We were on that for about fifteen minutes and then turned off on a smaller road. Then we took a shell road, deserted at this time of night. Dak watched the Global Positioning Satellite screen, where a red line was showing him the route over a maze of farm roads and hunting trails. This was about as far off the beaten track as you could get in this part of the world.
Off to our right we saw lights, the first ones in a while. When we got there we saw it was one of those little five-pew Baptist churches that dot the back roads from South Carolina to Texas. This one was a double-wide trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was another double-wide sitting a bit back in the trees. It was probably the parsonage. You could tell which one was the church because somebody had built a big steeple over it and taped some colored cellophane over the windows. Somebody in there liked to paint. There were dozens of big plywood signs with biblical verses and end-of-the-world warnings lettered on them, and a lot of renderings of Bible stories done in flaking house paint. It was all lit up with floods and strung with colored Christmas lights. The whole place was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and the grounds were littered with the usual number of rusted-out cars and junked refrigerators and busted toilets you found this deep into redneck country.
[22] Kelly was tugging at my sleeve. “Look at that one,” she said, laughing. I figured she meant the one that read
YOU THINK GOD
IS JUST SOME BAGGY-ASS
OLD PECKERWOOD
IN A DIRTY SHEET?
THINK AGAIN, SINNER!
Dak took the next right and we rattled over a cattle guard and down a long potholed driveway that took a few gentle curves through the pine
y woods before it ended… in a basketball court.
There were lights on poles, but only one of them was working. There were cracks in the concrete with grass growing in them. Neither of the goals had a net.
“Let’s shoot some hoops, friends!” Dak called out. I had to laugh. We all knew Dak’s attitude about basketball. If you’re black and you’re tall, he once told me, you better not learn to play b-ball unless you’re the next Michael Jordan. If they see you can shoot they’ll never bother to educate you. Dak pretended to be the most fumble-fingered jerk since the game was invented, somewhere deep in Africa. “Don’t believe those white boys who say it came from here. How many white boys you see playing NBA ball? I rest my case.” Actually, the only time I got him to play a little one-on-one at a deserted playground he wasn’t all that bad. My speed made up for his reach, so we were pretty evenly matched. But I didn’t make the first team at school.
The rest of the place hid in the darkness. On one side of the clearing was a sprawling ranch-style house. It looked like the plantings around it had gone wild, and in Florida that can mean very wild indeed. Dak drove toward the house, but before we reached it we came to a big, empty swimming pool.
Dak drove close and cut the engine. We listened to the crickets for a while, then we all got out of the truck. Me and Kelly followed Alicia to the edge of the pool. She shined the light down into it, then jumped [23] in surprise and gave a little squeak. Down there in the deep end, sitting on a lot of dead leaves and empty cans, was an eight-foot alligator. He turned his head, opened his mouth, and hissed at us.
“Whoever lives here, they’re crazy,” Kelly said. “Isn’t it illegal, keeping an alligator like that?”
“Might be, but what’s that?” Alicia said, and shined her light on a thick electrical cord that went from under the gator and up the side of the pool. “I think this is just one of those audio-whatsit things, like at Disney World.”
