by John Barnes
My mom would have loved that place, John, and here I was tied up on its floor. I felt like such a failure at life.
“Now what do we do with him?” the smallest, female clown asked.
“Hey, this was as far as I thought of,” the big clown admitted. “Travis, are you uncomfortable? More than from just being tied up?”
“Can I squirm over to lie on my side?”
“Go ahead.”
So I did. “The problem is,” the big clown said, “we said no unnecessary killing before we started, and since we’re going to be basically on the same side with Xegon and Hale and all, eventually, I’d think killing a hired gun working for Hale would be a very bad idea and we shouldn’t do it.”
I liked the way he thought.
“But we can’t let him go,” one of the medium-size clowns said. He took out one of those long, thin, extra-nasty-smelling cigaroids and lit it, absently pulling off his big red nose. “At least not till we have some kind of a deal with everyone involved, all the good guys on board and on the same side.”
“Well, technically, we only need to talk to Hale,” the other medium clown said. They were very hard to tell apart. Both of them had that faint trace of res in their accents, as well. “But he’s not going to be very happy after Elvis killed that poor lady. And he’s not going to believe that we tried to tell that whiskey-bum idiot stink to be careful and not to shoot it into her neck. Hale will look at that and say it was on purpose. Even if he does believe it was an accident, he’s not going to be happy.”
“It was on purpose,” I said. “I was Gaudeamus-linked to him and he was mad at you for telling him not to.”
“Yeah, Lena said that too,” the big clown, who seemed to be the leader, said. “Let’s face it. Elvis is a total fuckup and we should never have brought him in at all.”
“We could let Hale have Elvis as a sign of good faith,” the female clown said.
“He’s our brother,” the big one objected.
“And a total fuckup,” the smoking clown said. “A stink total fuckup, that’s our brother. And now that he’s hurt, he’d be worth more traded off than he would on the team. In fact he was even before he got hurt. Every fuckup we’ve had was Elvis, at the root of it.”
“Fuck you, cousin, I hate it when you’re right,” the big clown said. “Okay, he still listens to me. I’ll square it with Elvis—which will take some squaring, since he’s gonna be up on a murder rap—which one of us calls Hale?”
“Um,” I said. “Considering you shot him, I don’t know if Hale is going to be in a forgiving mood. I kind of doubt it. Even if you do let him have Cheryl’s murderer, which he wants very much.”
Even through the makeup I could see them wince at “murderer,” which reminded me that it wasn’t smart to irritate them, but at the same time it was sort of reassuring that they didn’t like to hear the word.
After a long moment, the female clown said, “Hale’s been shot? Is he hurt bad?”
I stared at her. “Are you trying to tell me that you all didn’t do it?”
“If somebody did, it wasn’t us. Most likely it was the Glasgow organization. Did they come in with a lot of armed force?”
“I don’t know but they did it at the facility at Kirtland,” I said. “Who are the Glasgow organization?”
“Oh, man,” the big clown said, pulling off his round red nose. “Oh, man, man, man. Yeah, if you don’t even know who they are, you boys’ll get chewed up like what happens when the dog eats cat puke. We gotta make contact and get you on board with us right away; if we wait there won’t be much left of you. Is Hale hurt bad?”
“I’ve only talked to him on the phone since he got shot, not seen him. He sounded okay then, but not too all-fired cheerful. I’m supposed to meet him in Denver in about, oh, five and a half hours if it’s three o’clock A.M. right now.”
There was a very long pause.
“You know,” the big clown said, obviously still thinking, “if we do this right, we could meet with Hale, with Travis here present as a witness and/or hostage (which might not be a bad thing to have). If we deal right with Hale, then we can also hand over Elvis and get him locked up where he can’t fuck things up or get hurt himself. We’ve all said we wanted to get him some help, too. And if we do that we can get everybody on task on our side, because the fucking Glasgow people just whipped our ass for the, what, nth time in a row?” He scratched his head and flakes of clown white fell onto the sofa around him. “Of course we’ve pissed Hale off enough so that he might still show up with fifty soldiers and try to capture us. But I bet he won’t if he thinks it might endanger Travis. You know how he is, he looks after his people, hey?” He looked down at me. “Will you cooperate enough to get released? Neither you nor Hale will be hurt, I can promise you. We’ll even tell you who we are and let you see some of what we’re doing, before we go meet Hale. Is it a deal?”
“I think so,” I said. “It beats lying here on the floor for the next several hours, and besides, I really gotta pee. My cell phone has Hale’s private cell number programmed—you can reach him there. Now can you allow me enough parole to let me get some relief, and then maybe we’ll talk in more detail?”
So they let me pee and even let me have a shower, and I persuaded them to call Hale and say they were going to release me to him, because I didn’t want to be the one who lured him into a trap; if they were going to trap him I preferred to be innocent bait, not part of the scheme. Getting to like that overbred fishface, I guess.
They set up a meeting at some roadside rest outside Denver, out east where there’s nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles, and they did all that while I got a long overdue deep nap on that sofa.
By the time I awakened, the sun was up, a very sulky Elvis was cuffed in a chair across the room from me, and they didn’t look like clowns anymore.
Of course I had seen the big one without clown makeup, but this time I got a little more leisure to look him over. He was still big, and with more light and less anxiety (I knew he was capable of pounding the shit out of me but he wouldn’t be doing it right then), I saw his face had a couple of small scars, and his arms were marked by old, fading, distorted tattoos. But he didn’t have the skin damage or the worn expression of a guy who’d had a drinking problem, or lived on the street, or any of that. Actually he looked pretty healthy and prosperous, for a guy in his early thirties, who had obviously been down some hard roads.
His belly was flatter than not, and he moved like, if he needed to, he could really move. “Kermit Irwin,” he said, sticking his hand out. I shook with him—if he wanted to be friendly, hey, I already knew how much it beat the alternative. “Professor of physics at Fort Lupton Lutheran College—in fact I’m the department—lead and only guitar in Skin2Skin, general purpose guy who can’t stay out of trouble. I am sorry about beating you up like that. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“No hard feelings unless I grow several inches and spend a while bodybuilding,” I said, and we shook.
The younger of the middle-sized clowns was obviously Kermit’s brother, with the same bronze-brown skin, and was smoking another one of those vile shitstrings that Hollywood always has the good sense to put in the mouths of villains. He was headed for pudgy already, despite being maybe twenty-four, and other than the fact that he was plastering his lungs with asphalt, looked healthy. He also looked angrier than the others, and was in process of finding his missing mirrorshades by pacing around, turning things over, and yelling at people that he couldn’t find them. He only kind of grunted and said, “Yeah, yeah,” when introductions were happening, so the other middle-sized clown said, “This is Jake Irwin. He’s our brother, lead singer, and, when he’s in a better mood, our best computationalist and programmer.”
“Uh, I seemed to be getting a little confused about who you guys are,” I said.
The older guy, who had been the other middle-sized clown, walked in, brushing his iron-gray hair, which fell to the middle
of his back—he was brushing and braiding it as we talked—and said, “Man. Oh man. Confused about who we are. You really want to be careful. If you get confused enough about who we Irwin brothers are, you might become an Irwin brother. Based on the fact that the people most confused on the subject always turn out to be Irwin brothers.”
He had that same over-emphasizing style you have, John, and your friend Melody does—another professor, sure as shit.
“Well, anyway, I’m Esau Irwin. I am also the twin of Elvis, who you beat up, and who is a jackass fuckup but our brother, so we always try to do something for him.”
“Hey, fuck you, hey,” Elvis said, from his chair.
“If you want to suck up to me tell me that we’re nothing alike. The three of us, together, are Skin2Skin, sort of a band. Jake sings lead, and Kermit plays guitar—”
“Or tries,” Kermit said.
“—because you can’t have a band without a guitar, and I work an electronic drum-and-vibe-driven synthesizer that Kermit and I whacked together for fun one weekend. Whenever Elvis is sober we put him out front with an old drum, unamplified, and he helps the white middle-class kids in the dreads feel all tribal and native and Earthy-Earth and stuff, and we play so goddam loud that, thank god, nobody ever hears him.”
“Hey,” Elvis said. “Hey. I’m the only real Indian in the band. I am the only real Indian. How you like that?”
No need for Esau to tell me he was a professor, he also had that riding-over-hecklers thing that you and Melody and all your colleagues have, John, and he had it perfect. He just kept going. “Kermit and I are PhDs, him in physics, me in math, and if it weren’t for having to save the world, we’d both be reasonably happy professors at godforsaken little dumps that they pass off for colleges.”
“Fuckin’ apples, there’s only one skin in the room.”
“Jake will get his Ph.D. as soon as we get the world saved, I think.”
I was about to ask about that flying saucer, which struck me as being the one little detail that somehow seemed out of place—you know how us detectives watch out for details that are out of place, John, I’m sure you watch movies. But before I could ask, the voice of the female clown—a soft little-girl Memphis drawl—said, “And I’m Jenapha Lee. I’m the manager, agent, and accomplice for Skin2Skin.”
I turned around and—oh, Lord, John. There’s words like “thunderstruck” and “smitten” and they don’t half cover what this was. She had that kind of mixed-blonde hair that grows in ash-blonde and finishes out, if it gets some sun, pale gold, and it rippled and tangled all the way down to her waist, like she’d been painted into existence by a pre-Raphaelite. She had a sweet little snub nose and huge green eyes (they turned out to be contacts, but at the time it just grabbed me), and she was just fat enough, like somebody had sat down and designed the woman that would most turn me on in the world, a comfy tummy roll that would feel so good against me but never get in the way, and big old sagging full tits, John, I mean, the girl had tits, and thighs that were made to be pillows—oh, all right, sure, on with the story. Anyway, she also had thin little pursey lips, the kind that twist all over the place when she’s being ironic, and she was working them now, saying, “I keep trying to get these guys out of the saving the world business to concentrate on music and getting somewhere. I don’t have much luck.”
Mentally I checked. My mouth wasn’t hanging open. I was doing about as well as I could.
She was wearing a soft white dress, one of those clingy-stretchy things that the catalogs are full of, and heeled sandals, and her toenails were freshly done in baby-pink—
Oh, all right, John, but I don’t see why there can’t be some interesting stuff in the story, besides all these facts.
“It’s just that you know we don’t share tastes in female bodies—”
“You munchkin-molesting leprechaun-jumper,” Travis said.
“Well, we don’t. I don’t wish every woman in the world was drawn by R. Crumb. And I also know that once you start talking about someone to your taste, it runs a while. And I want to hear more of this story. Now, Esau Irwin?” I asked. “Wait a minute. I know Esau Irwin. He teaches math at Durango—Fort Lewis College.”
“Well, yep, he’s real,” Travis said. “You didn’t think I was making all this stuff up, did you? Everybody else in the story is real, too.”
By now we’d walked back to my house and were hanging out in the living room, Corner securely curled up in Travis’s lap and obviously intending to stay there forever. I’d made up a pot of coffee but neither of us had touched it yet.
“Now, look,” I said. “Your average three brothers with math talent—even three brothers right off the res—what nation are they, anyway?”
“Well, I was wrong about them being right off the res. They grew up in Great Falls. Their mom was kind of unwelcome with the relatives, because she shacked up for twenty-five years with an East Indian—an engineer from India that had a little business in precision machining—has to have been one of the very few Indian-Indian marriages and god knows how all that worked out. She had twins, then Kermit twelve years later, then Jake almost ten years after that, so I gotta say, they were well-spaced from a paying-for-college standpoint, but that’s sure a big chunk of your life. So far apart in age, though, that they basically raised each other, after she got the twins raised. Then that engineer died, right after Jake was born, and she died when he was about ten, and there you have it.
“The boys got tough like her, and smart like him, and raised each other. They fought their way through all the Indians that would pick on them because they were breeds, and through all the black and white kids who didn’t know what they were but it was different and they knew they didn’t like that, and they never did have any contact with their dad’s family, and here they are, the best combination genius scientific team and suck-dog awful tech-punk band since Buckaroo Banzai, or at least the best Indian-Indian one to come out of Montana in the last ten years. If you want them to be the best (as a band) the one thing you’ve got to do is figure out some definition for which they’re the only. Because if there are two bands in a category, and one of them is Skin2Skin, you can trust me, the other one will be better.” Travis shifted his lap as Corner stretched and yawned; he rubbed the big idiot cat’s head, and the cat settled back into bliss. “See, your cat knows the truth when he hears it.”
“I’m just glad he has you to climb instead of the Christmas tree,” I said.
“I wouldn’t think this beached whale of a cat would move any more than between the couch and the food dish.”
“He likes the tree,” I said. “He likes to whack the balls.”
Travis looked down at him; the cat looked up blurrily. “Do not think of me as a tree substitute, hairball.”
Corner purred, curled, and went to sleep.
“Look,” I said. “I know that this area is crawling with flying saucer stuff. Especially over Cochetopa Pass and down into the San Luis Valley. There’ve been sightings there for decades. But that’s also the La Veta Military Operations Area, and they test all kinds of military aircraft, including the ones we test for our allies, down there. And I know lots of people who have seen lots of things. One buddy of mine looked up from a deer blind once and saw nothing but metal—a saucer, maybe three hundred feet across, sitting less than fifty feet above him. He got out of the blind, waved, gestured at his blind and his setup to tell them they were spoiling the hunting. Maybe they got it, maybe they hadn’t known he was there and were supposed to avoid being seen, who knows, but they went from silently hovering at fifty feet to a dot in the sky—just as silently—in half a minute, then shot over the horizon. But that saucer had a great big USAF painted on its underside. Did those three guys build their saucer in the garage or something?”
“Naw, it was a lot easier to accept once I realized it was the standard model Air Force Boeing SR-8. Basic utility, training, or search-and-rescue saucer. There’s two squadrons of them flying out of Twining
AFB down in Kennedy County, Texas.”
“I never heard of Twining—”
“And it will be at least another five years before anyone does, but it’s been there since they set it up to play with captured foo-fighters in 1946. Anyway, the Irwins, plus Lena Logan and Jenapha Lee, are Negon Corporation, which has a research facility there, and they have some borrowing privileges when they need them.”
“The only SR I ever heard of is the SR-71—”
“Oh, yeah, I built one of those models when I was a kid, too. They’re cool-looking but not good for much; they go fast and high but they’re not steady enough to make good camera platforms and anyway they’d be too easy to intercept. Basically the SR-71 Blackbirds supply the alibi for photos that obviously can’t have come from a satellite, by going out over the ocean, turning around, and coming back. So they named that big fast plane the SR-71 because it helps to confuse the other side about what they are—like the way the British called armored fighting machines ‘tanks’ and radar ‘carrots,’ or we called the atomic bomb project the ‘Manhattan Engineering District,’ it’s not just a code word, it actually helps to throw the other side off; there were German pilots pounding down beta-carotene and German spies crawling around Manhattan, which helped to keep them out of trouble. So they named it the SR-71 because that way, if a photo or a radio intercept accidentally got loose with ‘from AF SR something’ on it, people would assume it was a high-altitude reconnaissance plane.
“But actually SR is the Air Force designation for a flying saucer, like FB for fighter-bomber. All those supposed SR-71 photographs they always wave around in the media, whenever they’re trying to get money for a war with the Raghead of the Week?—those are all actually taken by saucers.”
“I notice you don’t say UFO.”
“UFOs are Unidentified, by-def, old son. Some UFOs are saucers but most are other shapes. But this is getting ahead of the story.”
