Red Thunder (27 page)

"Oh, God," Kelly moaned, and squeezed my arm. Then she was up,
rushing to Alicia, and Jubal was, too. Travis and I were left to stare
at each other.

HER EARLIEST MEMORY was seeing her father hit her mother.

"Daddy was a taxi driver until he lost his license for one too many
traffic scrapes. Then he became a full-time drinker. Mom was a table
dancer, she made pretty good money without actually whoring. She was
very pretty, lots prettier than I am. She was black, did I tell you
that? Almost as light as me, though. Dad is white.

"I was fifteen. It got three paragraphs in the paper. There was
nothing really different about the fighting that night. I'd heard him a
thousand times, 'One of these days I'm gonna get my gun and blow you
away, sugah!' The only difference was he
did
get his gun that night, and he did blow her away.

"I was sitting on the porch. I came in the house, and he pointed the
gun at me and pulled the trigger. The bullet went right through here."
She pulled the waistband of her denim shorts down a few inches over her
left hip. There was a round scar there. "I hardly felt it, I was kind
of fat then; it was just a pawnshop .25, I'm surprised it fired at all.
Kind of fat? Hah! I was a pig, I weighed two hundred pounds.

"He fired at me three more times. I remember the hate in his eyes.
It wasn't just for me, he hated the whole world. He figured he'd just
destroy his piece of it.

"The gun didn't have any more bullets in it.

"He looked down at my mother, lying there, and he started to cry and
he put the gun to his head, like this, and he fired it three or four
more times. Forgot it was empty, I guess. Then he sat down and cradled
Mom's head in his lap.

" 'Better go call nine-one-one, sugah,' " he said. "That was the last words I ever heard him say.

"I didn't go to the trial. I've never visited him in jail, five
years now. He writes me letters, and I throw them away. The only thing
in the world that scares me, much, is the idea that he might live
through twenty-five years at Raiford. And that, friends, is the last
time I will talk about him to any of you. Travis, do you want to take
me up to Raiford to get his permission?"

"No, no, of course not," Travis said, mortified. "He's clearly lost any parental right he might have had."

"Thank you."

Travis looked down at the table, but not quick enough to miss the
glare Kelly gave him. Kelly knew this wasn't the time, she would never
bring up her problems in the face of Alicia's shattering story... but
her eyes told Travis this wasn't over.

MOM WENT TO the door with Travis and Jubal; there are
certain things you do, a certain politeness to be observed even with an
enemy. But she didn't offer to shake hands, and she most emphatically
did not open herself to a hug. Aunt Maria was in the kitchen cleaning
up, removing herself from the scene of anger so thick you could cut it
with a knife. And Jubal looked more in need of a hug than anyone I'd
ever seen. So I got up and hugged him. Then they left.

"I've got to get up in a few hours," Sam said. "I'm not going to say
any more until I've had some time to think it over. The food was
wonderful, Maria."

Maria bustled out of the kitchen with a Tupperware box.

"How would you know? You hardly ate any of it. Here, to take home."

Sam laughed, and took it.

"I'll go with you, Dad," Dak said. He showed me his crossed fingers as he followed his old man out the door.

"I'm going to see my mother," Kelly said to me.

Kelly's real mom was a delightful woman, by now over the shock and
shame of being kicked out of the house to make room for her husband's
girlfriend, who was once Miss Tennessee. She lived in a nice apartment,
cashed her nice alimony checks, and was studying to be a real estate
agent. Kelly spent more nights there than with her father, and possibly
even more than with me. I never added it up.

"You want me to come?"

"Not tonight, Manny. I need to talk some things over with her. And
don't worry, I'll keep all our secrets. Alicia, would you like to go
with me? I'd like it if you did."

Alicia had been looking at least as gloomy as Travis. Now she brightened a bit.

"I'd like that. Thanks."

Then it was only the three of us, and Maria quickly made herself scarce.

"I can't talk about any of this tonight, Manuel," Mom said.

"That's fine by me, Mom," I said, and kissed her cheek and skedaddled.

It felt mighty good to get out of that pressure cooker and back in my room.

NATURALLY, I COULDN'T sleep.

I wasn't the only one. After about an hour there was a knock on my door.

"Door's open," I called out, and sat up in the bed. Mom came in and sat beside me. We didn't say anything for a long time.

"Is there any way I can talk you out of this thing?" she asked.

I knew what her problem was. Sam Sinclair had said it, just before
leaving. "The way I'm seeing it, it's this, or something else. I like
to died when Dak got into racing dirt bikes, I got a thousand gray
hairs every time he fell off one. But I knew he could do it then, and
respect me, or wait till I couldn't do anything about it, and detest
me."

"Do you believe what Travis said?" Mom asked me now.

"Do you?"

"I want to, because if he's right, you're not going to Mars or anywhere else."

BY THE END Travis knew he wasn't going to be winning
any popularity contests, so he simply laid out the facts. "Here's how I
see it," Travis had said. "One, we can start out to build a
spaceship... and fail completely. I think this is pretty likely. I'm
not sure thirty engineers could do it.

"Two, we build a ship... and we're too late. The Chinese land, then
the Americans, and I have to start thinking of another way to attract
enough attention so no one government gets this thing.

"Three, we build a ship... and it ain't safe. I will swear to you
right here and now, by everything I hold holy, that I will never lift
that ship one inch off the ground unless I believe it can get us there
and back safely. Believe me, I'm not anxious to subject my worthless
old hide to danger any more than I'd risk your precious children. I
promise you right here that I would never agree to pilot that ship
unless I was willing to take my own daughters along with me. One is
six, the other is eight. Maybe you'll meet them someday." He glanced at
his watch. "In fact, I'll be leaving and you won't see me for a few
days, because my monthly visitation starts tomorrow and I'll be in New
Jersey, where they're staying with their grandparents while Mommy goes
to Mars.

"Then there's possibility number four. We build a ship. It's a good
ship. We go to Mars, we come back, we're heroes, we're rich and famous.
I've got no way of calculating what the likelihood of that is, but my
guess is it's one chance in a thousand that we ever even
get
to possibility number four.

"And that, Sam and Betty, is as honest as I can be." I waited for
it... but nobody brought up possibility five, and six, and seven, and
eight through eight thousand, which were all ways we could get killed
along the way. Nobody needed to. It was right out there, unsaid, bigger
than all of us.

"I DON'T KNOW if I've ever told you how much I've
always wished you'd outgrow this astronaut business," Mom said, in the
wee hours, the two of us alone in my room.

"You didn't have to. I could see that."

"When I was young, boys always wanted to be policemen, or firemen, or cowboys. Jet pilots. They usually gave it up later."

"I'm not going to give it up."

"I know that." She shivered. "I hate those things, those VStar
things. I'm always afraid they'll blow up. I have nightmares about them
falling down on us."

"They're pretty safe, Mom."

"Don't you start lying to me tonight, boy. Travis didn't lie, or I
don't think he did, so don't you start. I know they're not as dangerous
as I fear they are... but you can't tell me something like that is safe
as a hobbyhorse, either."

"Okay."

"After your father died, you were all I had to live for. I could
hardly bear to watch you cross the street. When you flew off on that
airplane, I just knew it was going to fall out of the sky."

She was talking about my one trip out of Florida, to spend a month
with my mother's parents in Minnesota. Mom had thought they might be
holding out an olive branch, but it turned out they still couldn't
stand their little spic grandson. It was a total disaster, and I was
never so glad to get any place as I was to get back home.

"Well," she finally sighed, "I'm still going to talk more to Sam
Sinclair about this... but what he said sure seems to sum it up. If it
wasn't this, it'd be something else, wouldn't it?"

"Probably so," I admitted. She put an arm around me and hugged tight.

"I love you, Mom."

"I love you, my only son. Stay alive for me, please."

"I'll try."

I couldn't remember ever seeing my mother cry, and she didn't cry then, either. But she had to hurry to the door.

When she opened it Maria was standing there, not even pretending she
hadn't been listening. We both heard Mom's quick steps on the stairs
going down, then Maria leaned in the door and spoke softly.

"When I was eight and your father six," she said, "we and seven
other family members came over on a raft no bigger than my kitchen.
Seven days we floated, with no food, the last two days without water.
Your family is tough, Manuelito, we're survivors. Mars will be a piece
of cake, eh?" She winked at me.

"I am so proud of you. Your father would be proud of you. And your mother will be proud of you, too. Now go to sleep."

" 'Night,
Tía María
."

SO WE HAD the go-ahead to build us a spaceship.

Hooray!

So we buckled down to work...

And nothing happened.

Nothing seemed to happen, for a while, anyway. Our biggest
accomplishment during that early period was Kelly's searching for and
finding the ideal industrial facility where we could put the thing
together and not be bothered too much.

But the first step of a project like this was planning. We didn't
know quite where to begin. In fact, for the first three days or so, Dak
and I felt the whole load of this insane idea fall squarely on our
backs, and we were terrified. Because Travis said that, at the
beginning, this was our ship to design, and he'd consult, he'd help,
he'd move mountains if he could... but getting started was up to us.

Actually there was what you might call a
pre
-preliminary stage. There were legal and financial questions to settle.

Legal? Are you seriously suggesting we bring
lawyers
into
this, Travis? Dak and Alicia and I were appalled. Jubal just stayed out
of it, content to let Travis, his loco parent, handle his affairs. Only
Kelly saw the wisdom in it. Count on the rich girl to understand.

"Believe me, sweetness," she told me one night, "the best way to
turn dear friends into deadly enemies is to have a handshake deal on an
enterprise as complicated and potentially profitable as this one is. We
don't need to spell out every penny, but we need to outline the shape
of the thing, the broad strokes."

I certainly wasn't going to argue. It was her fifty million pennies,
and fifty million from Jubal, that made the thing possible in the first
place. Myself, I'd have been happy to work for union wages and let the
two of them split all the profits, if any.

In the end, Dak and Alicia and I had to lobby hard against her first
proposal, which was a simple division of any profits into six equal
shares.

"Not fair, not fair at all," Dak said, and Alicia and I backed him
up. "No way you two dudes put up all the money and don't get back but a
sixth."

Eventually, after some dickering, Travis came up with a compromise.
Kelly would get twenty-five percent, Jubal twenty-five, and the other
fifty percent would be split three ways between me, Dak, and Alicia.

"What about you?" I asked him.

"My share is in Jubal's, as always."

Before we even got to the money part we had formed a corporation so
things could be settled by voting. That was complicated enough in and
of itself, even with Travis's lawyer helping smooth the way. We were
officially the Red Thunder Corporation.

I started to think that, after this, the engineering part would seem simple.

SHORTLY AFTER TRAVIS returned from visiting his daughters he and Jubal left for two weeks of testing the Squeezer.

"This time we'll talk it over first," he had said. "If I'd had us
put our heads together before I dragged you all out into the swamp we
might not be looking over our shoulders for secret agents now. And by
the way, if any of you see me running off like that again, I want you
to bring it up, okay?"

What he proposed was to go on the road with Jubal and test more toy rockets.

"They saw something take off from the Everglades. I know a place we
can do static testing quietly. But since it's no longer possible to
retain total secrecy, my thinking is that it would do us a lot of good
if we kept them looking... in the wrong places. What if they detect
another launch, but from North Dakota? Then another in Texas, and then
one in Nevada. My feeling is, if they have to look all over the
country, it will spread them too thin to do much good. Comments?"

"More launches will make them more interested," Alicia had said.
"Maybe if we just leave it alone, they'll think the Everglades test
was... I don't know, a faulty radar or something."

"Good point. But this bogey would have appeared on multiple screens.
I think they'll be looking hard, and they'll keep on looking, whether
it's one launch or a dozen."