Pyramid Lake (4 page)

“This place is just as dead as Bully’s,” Tank-Top said to his buddy. His big biceps and deltoids flexed and bunched. “Told ya we should’ve headed into the city.”

I swiveled my back to them, turning to speak to Roger.

“Bandwidth, O evil mastermind,” I said. “That’s the problem with your little camera ass-hat scheme. You were planning to run a hundred-gigabit fiber-optic line down your pants leg and out the casino door, maybe? Across thirty miles of desert and under twenty-five miles of lake?”

“The hell you talking about? Ten-eighty-P video only wants about twenty-five megabit—”

“Compressed,” I said. “Motion blurred. And, therefore, useless. For straight, clean HDMI you’d need five gigabit, and even that wouldn’t provide enough temporal resolution—”

Tank-Top slapped the bar top next to my forearm. Hard.

“Stop talking that shit,” he said. “You’re hurting my ears. Nobody wants to hear your computer geek bullshit right now.”

The back of my neck tightened. I didn’t look at him. “We’re having a private conversation,” I said. “No one’s speaking to
you
, asshole.”

“What did you just say?” He slapped the bar again and moved behind my stool, leaning into my space to loom over my back. He had fifty pounds on me, easy. I could feel his stare on the side of my face.

Shit. Now this, too, on top of my call with Jen. I kept my mouth shut and hunched my shoulders. Staring down at my beer, I held completely still.

Roger didn’t say anything, either. I hoped he wasn’t packing, because he was drunk and I didn’t trust his judgment. With a gun in the mix, things could get a lot uglier.

“Take it easy, Ray.” The bartender reached over and tapped Tank-Top on the shoulder.

“Come on, bro,” his buddy in the T-shirt said. “Don’t waste your time on this loser.”

Tank-Top Ray’s breath tickled my ear—hot, moist, and smelling of alcohol already. But I wasn’t hearing whatever he was saying. All I could hear was Jen’s voice on the phone, telling me Amy wasn’t coming to see me this weekend.

Jen always waited until the last minute to spring the news on me, and the canceled visits were happening more and more often. I looked down at my fingers, pressing hard into the bar top, tips whitening. I raised my gaze and met my own eyes in the mirror. They were narrow slits.

“Nothing to say, you little pussy?” Ray hissed in my ear. “That’s what I thought.” I felt him turn away, and then his voice climbed in surprise. “Holy shit, look who’s sitting over there. It’s Pocahontas!”

He was talking about the Native American girl. Mocking her. She’d come here to enjoy a quiet dinner with her brother or cousin or whoever, and now that poor guy would be forced to defend her, and he’d get hurt bad, and she’d have to watch it happen.

“Pocahontas, you’ve changed.” Ray said, and laughed. “What happened to your hair?”

I stared down at the bar top. Whatever plans the girl had for the weekend were off now. She’d be doing something else instead. Nursing her injured brother and feeling guilty,
blaming
herself even though none of this was her fault. She’d be looking at the bloody cotton gauze in her hand and wondering what she’d done to deserve to feel so bad.

Which was the same thing I’d be wondering, sitting alone in my lab all weekend now, staring at two unused Cirque du Soleil tickets taped to the corner of my monitor, and missing my daughter so much my chest hurt.

The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was going to speak.

“Is that the ‘roids talking, Ray? Or were you a bigoted retard
before
you started juicing?”

He shoved me hard from behind, rocking my barstool. My upper lip mashed against the rim of my beer glass, knocking it over.

Roger said, “Come on, man, be cool—”

“Get up.” Ray’s breathing was hot on my neck again.

My mouth stung. I touched two fingertips to my upper lip, and looked down at them. Dabs of blood glistened on my fingertips, maroon in the soft lighting of the bar.

“Come on, asshole—
right now.
We’re going outside.” Ray loomed over my shoulder. He shifted position, getting ready to slap his palm down on the bar top again. “Get up.”

I didn’t move a muscle… Ray was a lot bigger than I was.

He leaned forward to drop his weight onto his palm, and I slid off the barstool fast, shouldering his arm aside and grabbing his wrist as I pivoted around behind him. Off balance, he tried to pull away. I palmed the back of his head with my other hand and kicked his legs out from under him, using his forward momentum to bounce his face off the edge of the bar with a solid, meaty
thunk
. He went down hard, knocking barstools over.

Standing over him, feeling almost disappointed, I nodded to myself. Ray
was
a lot bigger than I was—and in my experience, big usually meant slow.

He pushed up to his hands and knees and shook his head to clear it. Drops of blood pattered onto the floor.

“Get up,” I said.

He tried.

I hammered him—a nice downward shot, knuckles straight along his cheekbone, hurting my hand. He went face first into the ground.

I strode around to his other side with bouncing steps, kicking aside a fallen barstool that was in the way. “I
said
, get up.”

Motion on my left—Ray’s buddy in the T-shirt, moving in. I pivoted, bringing up my guard, and drove a quick jab into the center of his face.

He stumbled back, raising a hand to his bloodied nose. “What the fuck did
I
do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Keep it that way.”

Shoving off the ground, Ray tried to lunge for my legs. I’d never been much of a grappler, so I sidestepped and hit him hard above his eye, hurting my left hand, too.

It took the fight out of him. He curled up on his side and covered his head with his forearms. “You broke my tooth,” he said, gasping. “I’m gonna come find you later, motherfucker.”

I reached down and yanked his wallet out of his back pocket, flipped it open, and pulled out his driver’s license. Raymond Cullinan, 18 Virgil Circle, Spanish Springs.

Slipping Ray’s license into my own pocket, I tossed the rest of the wallet back at him. It hit him in the chest.

“Don’t get brave,” I said. “I know where to find you now.”

A slender shape in a dark suit slipped between us to squat beside my opponent, balancing gracefully on her heels. The Paiute girl. I took a step back, surprised. She pulled Ray’s arms away from his face, sucked in a breath, and looked up at me.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.

I blinked, unsure what to say. Up close, her eyes were very big and very dark. She was even prettier than I’d first realized. Her earrings jingled as she shook her head at me, distaste on her face. And wariness, too, as if she was dealing with some kind of lunatic.

“Cliff, get me some ice,” she called to the bartender.

I wasn’t feeling real good about this.

“Come on, man.” Roger grabbed my elbow, pulling me toward the door. “Time to roll.”

The bartender handed the girl a dishtowel full of ice with one hand. Holding a phone to his ear with the other, he spoke calmly into it—to the cops, no doubt. Then he held the phone out toward me, and its small flash lit the room.

Taking my picture.

“Get off the floor, Ray,” the girl said. She held the towel against his face, the white terrycloth already turning red.

“Ah, Christ, that hurts.” Ray sat up and pressed his back against the bar. He wouldn’t look in my direction.

The brother joined his sister. He bent to slip an arm under Ray’s shoulder, helping him stand. The girl stood up, too, and I realized she was tall—as tall as I was.

She glanced at me again, and her expression hardened. Turning to her brother, she shook her head in disgust. “Now I remember why I was in such a big hurry to move away.”

On our way to the door, Roger and I passed Ray’s buddy, sitting on a barstool and holding a napkin under his nose.

“You’re an asshole,” he said without looking up. “Today was his birthday.”

“Someone should buy him some better friends, then,” I said. “Ones that’ll stick up for him.”

Outside, I took a couple deep breaths, and turned my face up to the sky. My hands hurt. Amy wasn’t coming this weekend. This was what my life had turned into.

Roger was already halfway to his car—a modified milsurp Humvee known as “the Beast.”

“You’re too drunk to drive,” I called.

“Cops’ll be here any minute.” Roger said. “I don’t have my class-three paperwork with me. I don’t want to have to explain what I’ve got in the trunk.”

Great—he had brought something full-auto.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll bring you back to get your car tomorrow.”

The cool outside air felt good on my face. Pulling out my keys, I stepped off the curb, beeped the locks on my Mustang, and swung the driver’s side door open. Roger hurried toward the passenger side. I started to duck into my car, and froze.

Ray’s blue four-door pickup was parked two spaces away. I could see little stickers on the window—Dora the Explorer, Hello Kitty. And through the glass, the familiar shape of a child’s car seat.

I closed my eyes and laid my forehead against the top of the doorframe, feeling sick.

“I have to go back in,” I said.

“What the fuck, Trevor? Get in the car.”

“I have to apologize.”

“So you’re gonna buy the guy a drink, and we’ll all talk about our feelings? Use our words?” He laughed. “Worst. Idea. Ever. Get in the car.”

I got in the car.

• • •

The miles unspooled in headlight-length increments of dashed yellow centerline, with vacant sagebrush desert on our left, and the lake a dark, silent presence on the right. My hands throbbed painfully in time with my pulse as I loosely gripped the wheel. At least I hadn’t broken any bones this time. I knew what a busted hand felt like—I had fractured metacarpals enough times to know they were only bruised right now. Still, the middle-finger base knuckle on my right hand was swelling like a golfball. Bursitis, probably.

I focused on the ribbon of road ahead, remembering Amy’s face when she was five, her big blue eyes wide with wonder as she watched the performers and acrobats in their bright costumes. She had squeezed my hand so tight with her little fingers, staring open-mouthed, amazed by the colorful sets and the uplifting music. For days afterward, it was all she wanted to talk about—Jen beaming at me, too, as Amy described Cirque du Soleil’s Ovo show again and again. “You’re the best dad ever,” she said when we came out of the tent.

Nowadays, she sounded so much older, more reserved. Every time I saw her, she was taller than I remembered.

My daughter was growing up. And I was missing it.

“Jesus Christ, Trevor,” Roger said, “you fucked that guy up.”

I kept my jaw clamped shut. From the size of that car seat, Ray’s kid was maybe 3 years old. His truck was brand new, pristine. He had waxed it till it shone—guys like Ray loved their trucks. But he had let his kid put her stickers all over the window and he’d kept them there.

She would be scared—probably cry—when she saw what I’d done to his face.

“I mean, you Tyler-fucking-Durden-ized him.” Roger laughed. “I was going to jump in, but you never gave me a chance.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Ass-kicking 101 isn’t an elective at MIT. I thought that bag hanging in your lab was just for show. Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

“Just shut the fuck up. Or you can walk home from here.”

I
trudged between the curving server racks, trailing the fingers of my right hand along the cabinets. My left hand looked ghastly in the colored lights, swollen, with that golf ball of a knuckle. Server fans whirred softly in the silence. I climbed the ramp to the sanctum, opened the glass door to the fridge rack, and grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper. Holding the chilled, dewy can against my knuckles, I went to look for my hand wraps.

They were where I had dropped them, underneath the hundred-pound Everlast heavy bag that hung in the corner of the server room. I wrapped my hands as I walked back to the beanbag chair and monitor—right thumb and wrist, up the back of the hand, spreading my fingers to avoid winding the elastic cloth too tight across the sore knuckles. I looked down at my flat aluminum keyboard and grimaced.

Back to the lab again, crisscrossing the left wrap around my thumb and wrist, up between each pair of fingers, then finishing around my palm and wrist again, not bothering to Velcro the loose ends.

I found what I needed lying next to a pile of DVDs. The split ergonomic keyboard would be easier on my injured hands. I picked it up, glancing at the DVD titles:
World Poker Tour,
but also
Court TV, American Idol, Survivor,
and a bunch of other reality shows.

Roger was an idiot, thinking I was planning a poker scam. As if I would actually bother wasting my time on something so petty.

The poker DVDs made good training data sets for the MADRID software, though, and so did the other DVDs I had collected: anything I could find that showed people trying to lie or conceal their emotions and then revealed the underlying truth.

The videos were homework for Frankenstein.

Back in the sanctum, I dropped into my beanbag chair and cupped the inverted V of the ergo keyboard on my lap.

White words blinked from the monitor. “You are unhappy, Trevor.”

“Thanks for the news flash,” I said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Never mind.”

Linebaugh had laughed at Frankenstein’s default failure-to-comprehend response. I would have to do something about that, too, while I added the variable delays. I checked the time in the corner of the screen—two thirty a.m., still early—and brought up the semantic net’s C code in an Emacs editor. I scrolled to the section I needed.

The dangling ends of the wraps hung from my wrists, making me look like an unraveling mummy.

“Why are you so unhappy?” Frankenstein asked, the words popping up in a dialogue box in the center of my monitor.