Red Thunder (22 page)

"Okay, I believe you. But what about all the other things we'd have to do? You really think we have time?"

"Don' know. Maybe not."

"This race is a little different, Travis," Kelly said. "This time
there's no choice as to whether we take it slow and careful. Lives are
at stake if we
don't
build the rocket."

"We can try it a step at a time," I said, and Kelly looked sharply
at me. "We can go test the rocket tomorrow, like you said. If it blows
up, well, that's that. But we tried." Kelly gave me a short, relieved
nod.

"Makes sense," Dak said. Alicia grabbed his hand.

"We do that t'ing tomorrow, Travis," Jubal said. "Jus' de test."

Travis looked at each of us in turn, and sighed.

"Just the test," he agreed. "Come on, I want to start in an hour."

IT TOOK AN hour and a half, but we got rolling by that
afternoon. I called home and told them I'd be out all night. Mom said
things were going smoothly, not to worry.

By nightfall we were passing through Miami.

WE TURNED EAST on the Tamiami Trail and drove on into the night. We were in three vehicles: Travis's Hummer,
Blue Thunder,
and a Ferrari demonstrator Kelly had chosen because it would piss off
her dad to find it gone all night and the next day. The thing would go
like a bomb, but what with the traffic we picked up around Palm Beach
we never got a chance to open her up. The long, low, infernal machine
seemed to be pouting most of the way.

It was one in the morning when we pulled into Everglades City, which
was an exaggeration if there ever was one. Most of the few hundred
inhabitants were snug in bed as we bounced over mud and shell roads
until we stopped in front of an old Airstream trailer set up on cinder
blocks. The porch light was on. Flowering plants hung from the awning
and from poles.

As Travis pulled the Hummer in beside the rusting hulk of a pickup
truck, a dog I later learned was a black-and-tan coonhound lifted his
head and bounded down the steps. Half a dozen more came out from under
the deck. The dogs didn't bark, but circled the vehicles nervously.
Travis held his hand out and the dominant male sniffed it, then started
running in circles, wagging his tail. On the other side of the Hummer
Jubal was getting out, laughing and tussling with two other dogs, who
were so happy to see him I thought they might have a little urinary
accident, but they didn't.

"I figure we stay in the car until we're introduced," Kelly said.

"Good plan."

The screen door flew open and a huge man came out, followed by a
woman almost as big. Not fat, either of them, just built large and
powerful. I could see immediately that the man was related to Jubal.
They had the same eyes and the same mouth. One of his many brothers?

He shouted something at the dogs and they all came to him and sat, quivering.

"Y'all can come out now," Travis called to us. "Let the dogs sniff
your hands and you'll be okay. They're hunting dogs, not guard dogs.
Cousin Caleb breeds the best black-and-tans in the state of Florida."

"Georgia and Mississip', too," the big guy bellowed. Then he had his
arms around Jubal and was pounding him on the back hard enough to kill
a normal man. Travis embraced the woman, then they switched and did it
all over again.

Introductions were made all around. Caleb was officially Celebration
Broussard, but like all but one of his brothers, he had simplified his
name "when Pappy went away." His wife was Grace. Behind the two of them
a boy—young man, really, about fourteen or fifteen—had come
out of the trailer and was introduced as Billy, their son.

"Lord have mercy!" Caleb shouted when all that was out of the way. "If that ain't the finest rig I ever
did
see. You do all that work yourself, Dak?" Dak allowed as how he had,
and the two of them talked pickup trucks while Billy's eyes went
straight to the red Ferrari... and the gorgeous woman who had been
driving it. The pimply-faced little jerk. He blushed when Kelly shook
his hand. Out here in Everglades City, he probably never saw a pretty
female except on television.

"Y'all been driving a long time," Grace said. "You must be real hungry."

"We had some ham sandwiches at a 7-Eleven," Travis said. "Don't put yourself out, we're fine."

Well,
I
wasn't all that fine, I was famished. But I was far too polite to say so.

It didn't matter. Grace would have stuffed food into our mouths with
a funnel, if that's what it took. Pretty soon we were sitting around a
big table groaning with fiery, rich, fattening Cajun food, and there's
no finer food in the world.

Jubal was on my right, and he jabbed me with an elbow. He had a
twinkle in his eye and was practically wriggling with suppressed joy.

"Watch dis, Manny," he said, then bowed his head, but looked up under his brow.

"Would somebody say grace?" Jubal asked.

"Grace," Travis said.

"Yes?" Grace said.

Jubal giggled, and soon we were all laughing. Not much of a joke, I
guess you had to be there. Jubal could be so childlike and innocent,
and when he laughed it was almost impossible not to laugh with him.

"...and tell my peckerwood little brother not to let another five years go by 'fore he visits us again," Caleb finished.

"Amen," Jubal said, with feeling. Travis nodded, looking a bit
guilty. Well, he should have been, if the brothers hadn't seen each
other in that long.

Then we all dug in.

I'd already demolished a plateful before I realized the big table was actually
too
big. Too big for the trailer, anyway. I saw then that Caleb and Grace
had added on to the rig, tearing out one side, welding a second trailer
to the one out front and then adding a structure on behind that. No
telling what all was back there. Welding was one of Caleb's many
professions, along with carpentry and plumbing and "anything needs
doing around here." It looked like very good work to me, not the sort
of redneck chaos I'd expected when we pulled up in front.

When we had each turned down a third invitation to eat more, Grace
got up and called me and Kelly and Dak and Alicia to the doorway
leading further into the trailer-building. We found ourselves in a
narrow hallway with doors on each side.

"We'd all love to sit around and chat with y'all all night," she
said, "but Travis says he wants to get an early start, so I figure
y'all better catch a little rest. When Travis says early, he means
early.
"

It turned out all the doors were bedrooms. Grace opened a door and
beckoned. On the other side was a room clearly belonging to a girl.
From the rock star posters on the wall my guess was she would be twelve
or thirteen. The room was immaculate, and smelled slightly of a floral
air freshener. There were towels and washcloths neatly folded on the
double bed.

"This is Dottie's room," Grace said. "She's my eleven-year-old. The bathroom's down at the end of the hall."

"Oh, Grace," Kelly said, "we don't want to put your daughter out of her room. We'll be all right just to—"

"Don't you worry about Dottie, honey. She's stayin' over, slumber
partyin' with friends, and I'm sure they're havin' a ball. Probably all
still awake. Y'all get some rest now, hear?"

She closed the door, and Kelly leaned close to my ear and spoke softly.

"I should have known nobody in the Broussard family would have only
one child," she said. We tried to laugh quietly since the walls were
thin. It turned out there were eight bedrooms in the rear extension,
one for each child, with Caleb and Grace's bedroom in the original
trailer. "Just added a room on every time a new one was born," Travis
told us later.

We sat on the bed and fooled around a little, then admitted to each
other that we were worn out from the long drive. We got into bed, and I
was asleep instantly.

BREAKFAST WAS RUSHED. Travis kept us all moving. Me
and Dak and Kelly were bleary-eyed, Dak muttering that if he never saw
another crawfish it'd be too soon as he carefully sipped at a glass of
milk. Alicia was one of those hateful people who woke up with a spring
in her step and a song in her heart. She hummed as she made one of her
horrible concoctions in Grace's blender, adding who-knows-what that
she'd brought along herself to whatever fruit Grace had handy, then
even got Grace to taste it. Grace was either an accomplished liar or
she actually dug the stuff.

Travis and Jubal had been up all night and didn't look the worse for
wear. They each downed cups of strong coffee while I nibbled on the
buttered toast Grace had made when she couldn't persuade me to let her
get out her skillet. We all drank lots of coffee.

I got in
Blue Thunder
and Kelly sat in the back of the
Hummer with Jubal. That was Kelly's idea. We'd decided we didn't want
to leave the two of them alone unnecessarily or they might cut us out
of the spaceship project. I didn't know what Kelly could do to prevent
that, but if someone could, she was the one.

When Caleb started his pickup it shuddered hard enough to rain
flakes of rust down on the dirt. He put it in gear and started out...
and the whole tailpipe and muffler and cat converter assembly fell off.
Caleb sprang out of the truck, grabbed the pipe, and tossed it on the
side of the road.

"Dak, that is the sorriest truck I ever saw that could actually move," I said.

"He done used it hard, all right," Dak said. "Especially when you consider it's only four years old."

I looked again, and saw he was right.

"Running through salt water, carrying heavy loads down roads ain't
much more than deer tracks... it takes it out of a vehicle. But don't
be fooled. That engine is excellent, he's got good struts and good
rubber, heavy-duty power train. Caleb just don't give much of a... flip
what the thing looks like."

We got under way as the sun was just breaking over the eastern
horizon. I hoped we weren't trying to sneak up on anybody, since
Caleb's truck with no muffler was now about as loud as an armored
invasion.

We had left the Ferrari at the Broussards' and I could soon see why.
That Italian terminator would have high-centered out within the first
quarter mile as we bounced over a deeply rutted road into the swamp.
Actually,
further
into the swamp, as daylight had made it clear that Caleb and Grace's place was already well into it.

"Don't worry about your car none, Kelly," Caleb had told her as he
climbed into the cab of the pickup. "Anybody looks at that whiz-banger
crooked, Billy'll wrap a gun barrel round his fool head. Slept out here
on the porch last night with a shotgun 'crost his lap. Lucky thing a
dog didn't bark or he'd of blowed off a toe."

Much of the vastness of the Florida Everglades is roadless,
trackless, "where the hand of man has never set foot," as the saying
goes. The Jeep tracks that lead into it, like the one we'd used to
reach the Broussard abode, tended to peter out in a few miles. Then,
here and there, the passage of a few four-wheel-drive vehicles a week
has made some informal routes along what little ground isn't four feet
deep in quicksand or gumbo mud. Some of them are indicated on maps,
others aren't. But we didn't need any maps with Caleb leading the way.
He knew them all, or claimed to.

This was not the Florida I knew. I could identify some of the plants
from seeing tamer versions in people's yards or in city parks. They
grew differently out here. But I'm a city boy, don't know much about
plants even in town.

Don't know much about birds, either, but this was the place to come
if you wanted to learn. I never saw so many birds. They'd explode from
the reeds and moss-hung trees when they heard us coming. Big birds,
little birds, great big flocks of black birds, thousands of egrets or
cranes or something like that who just stood there and watched us go by.

Me and Alicia both craned our necks the first time Dak pointed out a
big old alligator sunning himself beside a ditch. We watched him glide
powerfully into the water and vanish up to his eye sockets. Wow!

Two miles later it was here a gator, there a gator, everywhere an
alligator. Ho-hum. We actually had to wait for one to get out of the
road in front of us. The gator probably thought of it as a gator
track... and he'd be right. He was here first, he'd watched the
dinosaurs come and go, and maybe he'd be here still once this critter
calling itself "humanity" killed itself off.

They say the Everglades are in trouble, what with the water being
siphoned off up north, Miami advancing from the east, pesticides,
global warming, I don't know what all. And I believe them. But just
driving through for the first time, I was in awe at the sheer numbers
of the wildlife we saw.

Unfortunately, among that wildlife you had to count the mosquitoes.

Billions of mosquitoes.

Now we knew why Caleb had tossed a big plastic bottle of Off! on the front seat of
Blue Thunder.
We coated ourselves with the stuff, Alicia slathering it on Dak as he drove.
Blue Thunder
didn't have an air conditioner—one of the few vehicles in Florida
without one—but it wouldn't have mattered, because we all knew
we'd be out in the open soon enough, whenever Caleb got where he was
taking us.

The repellent helped, but about one in a hundred of those critters
seemed to think Off! was just there to oil up their bloodsucker, make
it easier to slide it into the skin. It appears we're breeding a
better, stronger skeeter out there in the swamps, and when their kids
grow up, look out!

OUR DESTINATION TURNED out to be the rotting remains
of a dock, smack in the middle of nowhere. I know, because somebody had
put up a sign: MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. Redneck humor, I guess. The sign was
about to fall over.