Red Thunder

by John Varley

  Two weeks of baby-sitting-in spite of what Travis said-a 230-pound semiautistic genius second-grader with attention deficit disorder, or something very much like it.

  Oh, boy. I could hardly wait.

  IT WAS WELL past dark when we all finally managed to refuse another slice of pie and push away from the table. Travis wouldn’t hear of leaving the apartment until the dishes were washed and dried and put away, with his help. Mom and Maria wouldn’t hear of letting him help. I thought they might get into a very polite fistfight until Kelly and Alicia took him by the arms and hustled him out of the kitchen, which was crowded with only two people trying to work. So then Mom and Maria had to chase Kelly and Alicia out, too, and finally things could be cleaned.

  Travis decided he would help me at the front desk then, and watched over my shoulder as I checked in the late-night trade. We don’t rent to women we know are prostitutes, but we don’t know all of them. As [121] for the other couples who check in at ten and are gone by eleven, what are you gonna do? None of our business.

  A few minutes before midnight, when I was about to turn off the vacancy sign, I got called to one of the rooms with fresh towels, and when I got back Travis was checking in the last couple of the night. He was frowning at the computer screen, then slowly shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but we already have a ‘Tom Smith’ checked in. We don’t want to cause any confusion. But you could be Bob Smith, or Bill Smith.”

  The guy looked confused and I thought he might get angry, but his girlfriend or bar pickup got it, and laughed.

  “Bob will be fine, won’t it, Bob?”

  Bob put his cash down on the counter and Travis gave him a key and waved them out the door. Dak was there, and twisted the key in the lock, then sat down on the floor, unable to hold in his laughter anymore. Kelly came in and looked at him.

  “What’s his problem?”

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s get Travis out of here before he puts us out of business.”

  I’VE GOT TO admit, Travis really knew how to sweeten the pot.

  There was an old Triumph motorcycle in the back of the Hummer. We wrestled it out and set it on the ground, then pulled out an old sidecar. Travis showed me how to attach the sidecar to the bike.

  “All it really needs is some paint,” he said. “Runs like a top. Jubal is the world’s worst driver, don’t ask me why. Anyway, he loves to go for rides in this thing. He likes to go real fast. I trust you’ll keep it below about Mach one, not cause any sonic booms.”

  He showed me where to put the key, how to start it. He was right, the thing purred like a kitten. At that moment there probably wasn’t a happier man in Florida than me.

  Dak and Alicia, and Mom and Maria came out to see him off. Mom knew there was something going on we hadn’t told her about, but she kept quiet about it. Travis was paying his way and seemed to be good [122] people, so that was enough… for now. Mom shook his hand and Maria actually gave him a hug. Then Travis hugged Kelly and Alicia, climbed into his outrageous suburban assault vehicle, and pulled out on the almost deserted streets of Daytona.

  I looked up and saw Jubal standing at the second-floor railing in front of his room, watching Travis’s Hummer out of sight. He turned and went back inside.

  13

  * * *

  I SETTLED JUBAL into the room next to mine with a set of our best big towels, not the little scratchy ones nobody bothers to steal from the regular rooms. The television was one of our best ones, too. I showed him how to use the remote… feeling pretty silly halfway through the demonstration when I remembered this was the guy who turned remotes into magic wands with no batteries.

  He had brought a very old suitcase made out of thick cardboard, stuffed with Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts and lots of clean underwear with-I swear-JUBAL written on the elastic band in black felt tip. I wondered just how big a deal was this for Jubal, being away from Travis? Part of him was perpetually twelve, I kept reminding myself.

  I helped him stow his stuff away and headed back to my room, fifteen feet away. It had been a long and eventful night. I was dead on my feet.

  AN HOUR LATER I still hadn’t managed to get to sleep. I was thinking about too many things.

  Jubal, and the responsibility I had assumed for him.

  [124] Travis and his mysterious mission.

  The Squeezer, and all it might mean.

  Kelly, and why she had decided to drive home instead of spend the night.

  The Triumph, what it would be like to ride it tomorrow, where to go, whether or not Travis would sell, and if he’d take payments or if I should just offer to cut off my right arm and give him that.

  There was a knock on my door and I jumped out of bed. Kelly? But before I got to the door I knew who I’d find there. Sure enough.

  Jubal was dressed in baggy yellow pajamas. His pillow was tucked under one arm, and he was dragging the bedspread behind him. All he needed was a teddy bear to look like one of those Norman Rockwell framed prints we used to sell in the store. He was looking down at the floor.

  “Cain’t sleep, me,” he mumbled.

  “Come on in, cher,” I said. Now he had me doing it.

  “I’m not usual a’scared,” he said. “Not by country noises, no. But I heered people’s voices goin’ by outside, and polices and fahr engines and aranalances and what-not…”

  I hadn’t heard a thing. It was a city boy, country boy thing, I guess. I’d never spent much time sleeping in the swamp. A bullfrog croaked, I’d probably wet my pants.

  “Yeah, it can be a hel-… a horrible racket, can’t it? We’ll get you squared away, I’ve got a king-size in here, it won’t be a problem.”

  “I kin sleep on da couch.”

  “Wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll shut that street-side glass door and turn the air on low, unless you think that’d be too-”

  “Nah, I be fine.” He looked at me for the first time. “Usually I sleep t’ru anyt’ing. I could fall asleep ’hind de altar, me, while de congregation be moanin’ an wailin’ an feelin’ de spirit. Wake up, fine a little ol’ rattlesnake curl up wit’ me.” He laughed, but sobered quickly. “Jus’ fo’ tonight, Manny. Jus’ fo’ tonight.”

  Then he knelt beside the bed and steepled his fingers and closed his eyes and began to pray very softly.

  When he was done he lay down and pulled the bedspread over him. [125] He was sound asleep in less than a minute. He didn’t snore, belch, whimper, or fart in his sleep as long as I was awake, unlike a few girls I could mention.

  The sun was coming up before I finally drifted off.

  THE SUN WAS high when I woke up. Too high. Way too high.

  I hadn’t slept until eleven in a long time for a simple reason. At seven Mom or Maria was always pounding on my door.

  I jumped up, remembered Jubal had come to my room in the night. But he wasn’t here now. He wouldn’t just wander off in a strange neighborhood, would he? I got a little angry thinking about it. He wasn’t a dog, damn it, that you had to leash or watch every minute. If he was that helpless… well, I hadn’t signed on for that. But I’d better go look.

  I found Jubal high on a ladder, leaning through the service hatch of our sign. Mom and Betty were down below, holding the ladder and looking nervous. When I joined them I heard a funny sound coming from inside the sign. It took me a moment to realize it was Jubal, humming and singing. The melody had a definite bayou flavor to it, and the words sounded like Cajun French.

  He eased himself out of the hole and held up a frayed length of thick electrical cable like a dead snake. He looked very happy.

  “Dis be de rascal, right here!” he boomed. “I’m real lucky dat you found me, yeah. Dis critter ’bout ready to cotch fire, you bet. Burn down de whole place, mebbe. Betty, you flick dat switch yonder, please ma’am.” He glanced over at me and smiled again. “Bonjour, monsieur sleepyhead! Sleep till de noontime, I declare!”

  “Did not,” I said. “It’s only elevenish
.”

  Mom threw the master switch and the sign came to life better than it had been in a few years. Most everything was working except for a few burned-out bulbs that I could replace in five minutes. One of the little neon rockets was cracked.

  “We get her recharge, seal her up again. Cheap. Betty, she say dere’s a place on de way over to Dak’s.”

  [126] I looked at Mom, and she nodded, maybe a bit reluctantly, meaning I was excused from working my butt off to make up for all the morning work I hadn’t done. I kissed her forehead, and then me and Jubal dragged the Triumph and sidecar out of the small room where we keep janitorial supplies, my tools, a small workbench, and cases of generic soda pop for the drink machine, which we own, and boxes of stuff for the snack machine, which we don’t. Jubal had spread some tools from his own toolbox on the worktable. He’d been busy all morning, it looked like.

  We got the ’sickle out of the workroom and spent about twenty minutes bolting the sidecar to the frame. Jubal had a mental checklist for that operation, and he went through it methodically, testing each bolt to be sure it was tight enough. A runaway sidecar might be a funny thing in the movies, but not in real life. Jubal was a careful man.

  The great black and chrome beast rattled to life immediately when I hit the starter. It trembled beneath me, ready to go. Jubal squeezed himself down into the sidecar and put on his plain black helmet. I put my own helmet on.

  “Want me one like dat, yes sir,” Jubal said. My motorcycle helmet is one of the finest things I own. Ironic for a guy who doesn’t even own a car, much less a cycle, I guess. It was painted by Henry “2Loose” La Beck, king of the Daytona taggers.

  It only took me a few blocks to get the hang of handling it. With a sidecar, you have to lean differently. Jubal gave me a few pointers without making me nervous or being a side-seat driver.

  I pulled into Dak’s dad’s parking lot the king of all I surveyed. Mr. Sinclair looked at the Triumph with lust in his eyes. He had been a member of a club when he was a young man. He rode a Harley back then, but he had told me how much he liked the Triumph. Most of what I knew about cycles I had learned from him.

  He greeted Jubal warmly and helped pull him out of his seat. We went over the bike thoroughly and spent a few hours with toothbrushes and soapy water and wax. That spruced it up quite a bit. The frame and tank would need repainting sometime soon, but we’d have [127] to take it apart to do that, and I didn’t have the time, if I was going to get any use out of it before Travis came back.

  “Think about this for the tank,” Mr. Sinclair said. “Deep, midnight blue, with a little flake in it so’s it sparkles. Five or six coats ought to do it. Come on in here, let me show you what I’m talking about.” He showed us several books in his office. It was plain that he’d love to do the work just for the cost of the paint.

  IT TOOK TRAVIS the full two weeks he had mentioned as an outside estimate, and a few days beyond that. It was one of the best two and a half weeks I’d ever spent.

  Jubal had the energy of ten men, and the know-how of a couple dozen. He could fix anything he could reach and take apart. Things around the Blast-Off that hadn’t worked since John Glenn was in orbit just magically started working again. I’d ask Jubal about it, and he’d say he just saw it wasn’t working and took a few minutes to fix it. He found it hard to walk past something that wasn’t working, or sometimes even something that wasn’t working as well as it should.

  Dak’s dad had a name for it, sort of. He watched Jubal work on a few car engines at the garage and pronounced Jubal a “natural born grease monkey.”

  “Some people got perfect pitch,” he said. “Some folks never get lost. Some got what they call a ‘green thumb.’ And some just understand engines.”

  But being a grease monkey doesn’t begin to describe Jubal’s skills. He fixed three annoying glitches in my old computer that I’d been working around for months, and did it in fifteen minutes. He fixed plumbing and wiring. He fixed small appliances, and three televisions sitting in a storage room because I’d been too lazy to throw them out. He even fixed the toilet in room 201.

  I watched him working on the televisions, and I can’t say how he did it. It was eerie, like watching a faith healer. Jubal would take it apart, stare at it, trace pathways in the air with his fingers, all the time [128] humming music that I later figured out were hymns. He touched his tester wires here and there, and next thing I knew he was snipping a transistor off a circuit board. Then he whipped out his pocket computer-the absolute most up-to-the-minute model, thousands of times bigger and smarter than mine-and pretty soon he’d located a place in Kansas or Oregon or South Africa where you could get that transistor for a few pennies plus postage. A few days later it would arrive, and he would solder it in place… and the television worked.

  TRAVIS HAD EMPHASIZED Jubal’s social anxieties, and it was true, when Jubal was around people he didn’t know he muttered, hung back, never made eye contact, and just generally seemed to want to be somewhere else. But after he’d had a little time to take your measure he could loosen up quite a bit, and when he regarded you as “family,” which could take as little as a microsecond with Alicia to a couple of days with me and Dak… then all bets were off. With his family Jubal liked to laugh, and sing and dance and generally have what he called a “fais do-do,” which is Cajun for party, I think.

  He changed my family a lot in two weeks.

  For the first few days we kept the television on during dinner. But everyone was laughing and talking so much that by the third day we just forgot about watching or listening to it. Kelly, Dak, and Alicia started eating the evening meal with us as often as not, and we even got Sam Sinclair, Dak’s Dad, to join us a couple of times.

  After, there was no telling what we might do. I took Jubal to Rancho Broussard to pick up his record collection, which was about fifty vinyl 33-1/3, and his old turntable. All of it was Cajun dance tunes, music from way back in the bayou. Jubal loved to dance to this music, and to sing along. He was a good singer and an enthusiastic dancer, alternating between his “four young ladies,” or just dancing by himself.

  Or sometimes we got the Monopoly board out. Jubal had never played but he told us how he’d learned to do his “numberin’ ” using that kind of money. He picked it up easily enough, and he loved it. He was ruthless, and won more often than not. He took the little racing [129] car from the very first, and I never told him that was traditionally my piece. And Mom says I’ve got a lot of maturing to do. I wanted the little racing car, that car was mine, but I let our guest have it. Is that mature, or what?

  I remember at the first game, when Kelly was putting a hotel on Pacific Avenue, he asked, “Why the Blas’-Off Hotel ain’t on dis board, hah?” He suggested we rename Park Place or Boardwalk.

  “Park Place is more like the Golden Manatee across the street, cher,” Mom said. “The Blast-Off, when they built it, might have been on one of the red properties, Illinois Avenue maybe, or New York at the worst. Now we’re a lot closer to ‘Go.’ ”

  Then we started arguing about what space the Blast-Off should be on.

  “Oriental,” I said. “One step above the roach motel on Baltic.”

  “Hel-… uh, pooh!” Dak said. “Baltic, that’s a SRO, a ‘single room occupancy’ joint, bathroom down the hall. Oriental, that’s where the desk clerk sits in a booth behind bulletproof glass. The ol’ B-O Motel, I figure we’re on Saint Charles Avenue. Which, incidentally, give me two houses on Saint Charles. Next time around, Manny, those houses gonna wipe you out!”

  Probably. I didn’t tell Dak that we’d seriously considered installing one of those Plexiglas booths. After the second time you’re held up by some wild-eyed angel duster I think anyone would. We’d been robbed four times since I’ve been old enough to remember. Mom shot the first one, right in the gun hand, just like in an old cowboy movie. After that, the police and me persuaded her to just hand over the money. It wasn’t enough to die for, or even to kill for. Nobody eve
r ran out of our office rich.

  One amazing thing was that, with Jubal around, we all had more free time. It got to where there sometimes wasn’t anything really urgent to do by the afternoon, so Jubal and I would go for a ride. Mostly we went up and down the beach, because Jubal loved the ocean. We got to be a regular sight. Many a tourist snapped our picture as we roared by, Jubal in his loud shirts and dark sunglasses and white beard and sunburned nose smiling and waving to everyone we passed.

  [130] Other afternoons, with Jubal around to help out, Mom and Maria got to go out together for some fun. Mom said she’d pretty much forgotten how.

  Mom hit the roof when I gave her the money Travis had pressed on me.

  “I told him his credit was good with us, but he gave me his plastic anyway,” she hissed at me after I gave her the roll of hundreds. Mom doesn’t like shouting, but she can make a hiss carry a city block. “You know Jubal’s room won’t come to anything like this much. He could stay four months on this.”

  “Travis said it was for food, too.”

  She drew herself up and glared at me.

  “We don’t run a restaurant here, Manuel. Jubal is a friend. He’s welcome at our table at any time. You don’t charge your friends for food.”

  I knew that. I could only shrug.

  “It’s just crazy,” she muttered. “The way that man works. We should be paying him. In fact, I offered to, but he wouldn’t take it. Unlike my spineless son.”

  I wasn’t going to sit still for that, but she relented and apologized to me. Then she went away muttering about how she’d stuff it up… well, she’d be sure he took it. I decided to make myself scarce for that little scene.

  I’m not so sure about the food business, it just seems like common courtesy to pay for your suppers if you’re staying a while. But Mom’s biggest fear was to be thought of as common. She had that prickly pride some chronically poor folks get… actually, far too few of them, in my experience, but some. She was quick to take offense at any suggestion she couldn’t get by on her own, or pull her own weight, and never, never ask for a handout, nor accept charity.