Red Thunder (3 page)

Dak pulled into one of the brightly lit authorization booths. Kelly
and I scrambled out of the bed and set Colonel Broussard on his feet.
He needed support, but he could stand. We shoved him into the narrow
backseat as the Pike computer checked some eighty or ninety
roadworthiness items every time you entered, from airbag sensors to
tire pressure. We hopped in behind him.

"Is this my car?" Broussard asked.

"Just take it easy, sir," Kelly said. "We'll have you home soon."

"Okay."

"If he barfs in my car, man..."

"Please state your destination," the computer said. Dak told it the
exit number, and the computer told him what the fare would be.

"Do not attempt to leave the vehicle while it is in motion." I heard the doors click as the computer locked them.

"Do not attempt to steer the vehicle until you are told it is safe."
I could see Dak idly spinning the disconnected steering wheel.

"Do not unbuckle your safety belts at any time. The next rest
wayside is thirty minutes away, so if you need to use the facilities,
press the REST button on your Autopike Control Console now."

"I'll just piss in a Mason jar," Dak said.

"Don't miss," said the computer. "You're due for an oil change in
five hundred miles. Your left front tire is showing some uneven wear.
And all that salt and sand isn't doing your undercarriage any good."

"That's what I said!" Colonel Broussard shouted.

"Bon voyage, Blue," said the voice, which I now suspected was not the Pike computer.
Blue Thunder
pulled quickly away from the booth as Dak muttered something about "Big
Brother." I looked over at the supervisor's tower and saw a guy waving
at us.

The only time I was on the Pike the scariest part was the initial
merge. The computer tucked us in between two semis with about three
inches clearance fore and aft, and did it at eighty miles per hour.
During rush hour they use every square inch of road available and the
door handles and bumpers almost touch. Some people can't bear to use
the Pike at all because of that. It's contrary to all your driving
instincts.

No problem like that tonight. Traffic was light in all lanes. Over
in the A lane there would be no traffic at all for a minute or two,
then a dozen cars would zip by bumper to bumper to take advantage of
drafting, like racing cars. They say in a few more years you'll be able
to travel from Miami to Maine like this, but as of now the Florida part
of the Pike only goes from Brevard to Jacksonville, by way of Orlando.

We'd hardly got up to Pike speed when it was time to get off again.
The computer eased us to the required dead stop at the booths, and Dak
engaged the manual controls. We rolled off the Pike and onto a main
east-west highway.

We were on that for about fifteen minutes and then turned off on a
smaller road. Then we took a shell road, deserted at this time of
night. Dak watched the Global Positioning Satellite screen, where a red
line was showing him the route over a maze of farm roads and hunting
trails. This was about as far off the beaten track as you could get in
this part of the world.

Off to our right we saw lights, the first ones in a while. When we
got there we saw it was one of those little five-pew Baptist churches
that dot the back roads from South Carolina to Texas. This one was a
double-wide trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was another
double-wide sitting a bit back in the trees. It was probably the
parsonage. You could tell which one was the church because somebody had
built a big steeple over it and taped some colored cellophane over the
windows. Somebody in there liked to paint. There were dozens of big
plywood signs with biblical verses and end-of-the-world warnings
lettered on them, and a lot of renderings of Bible stories done in
flaking house paint. It was all lit up with floods and strung with
colored Christmas lights. The whole place was surrounded by a high
chain-link fence and the grounds were littered with the usual number of
rusted-out cars and junked refrigerators and busted toilets you found
this deep into redneck country.

Kelly was tugging at my sleeve. "Look at that one," she said, laughing. I figured she meant the one that read:

YOU THINK GOD
IS JUST SOME BAGGY-ASS
OLD PECKERWOOD
IN A DIRTY SHEET?
THINK AGAIN, SINNER!

Dak took the next right and we rattled over a cattle guard and down
a long potholed driveway that took a few gentle curves through the
piney woods before it ended... in a basketball court.

There were lights on poles, but only one of them was working. There
were cracks in the concrete with grass growing in them. Neither of the
goals had a net.

"Let's shoot some hoops, friends!" Dak called out. I had to laugh.
We all knew Dak's attitude about basketball. If you're black and you're
tall, he once told me, you better not learn to play b-ball unless
you're the next Michael Jordan. If they see you can shoot they'll never
bother to educate you. Dak pretended to be the most fumble-fingered
jerk since the game was invented, somewhere deep in Africa. "Don't
believe those white boys who say it came from here. How many white boys
you see playing NBA ball? I rest my case." Actually, the only time I
got him to play a little one-on-one at a deserted playground he wasn't
all that bad. My speed made up for his reach, so we were pretty evenly
matched. But I didn't make the first team at school.

The rest of the place hid in the darkness. On one side of the
clearing was a sprawling ranch-style house. It looked like the
plantings around it had gone wild, and in Florida that can mean very
wild indeed. Dak drove toward the house, but before we reached it we
came to a big, empty swimming pool.

Dak drove close and cut the engine. We listened to the crickets for
a while, then we all got out of the truck. Me and Kelly followed Alicia
to the edge of the pool. She shined the light down into it, then jumped
in surprise and gave a little squeak. Down there in the deep end,
sitting on a lot of dead leaves and empty cans, was an eight-foot
alligator. He turned his head, opened his mouth, and hissed at us.

"Whoever lives here, they're crazy," Kelly said. "Isn't it illegal, keeping an alligator like that?"

"Might be, but what's that?" Alicia said, and shined her light on a
thick electrical cord that went from under the gator and up the side of
the pool. "I think this is just one of those audio-whatsit things, like
at Disney World."

"Go down and check it out, will you, babe?" Dak said. "We'll wait up here."

"And get electrocuted, right? I see some water down there."

She shined her light over the house and patio. I let my eyes follow
the beam as it picked out a low diving board and groupings of lawn or
pool furniture, including a big umbrella and table thing that had blown
over.

The light traveled a little more, to one of those bolt-it-yourself
sheet metal buildings you can buy at Sears and put up in a few days, if
you have a concrete pad to set it on. There were four wide garage
doors, closed, and each of them had a light fixture over it but only
one was working. It was a large building, I'll bet you could put an ice
hockey rink in it. Several rusting vehicles sat off to one side, some
almost vanishing into the blackberry brambles. One of them was up on
blocks, and it looked like a Rolls-Royce except the back half was gone
and a pickup bed had been welded there.

"I don't think anybody's home," Kelly said. I didn't think so,
either. We heard nothing suggesting a human was near. The mosquitoes
had found us. We were all slapping at them, and I knew we couldn't just
leave him in one of those pool chairs over there. He'd be one big
skeeter bite in the morning.

"Where we gonna put the dude, then?" Dak asked.

Alicia reached in the open truck door and leaned on the horn, hard, for a good fifteen or twenty seconds.

Dak was about to honk again when a light came on above a door on the
side of the aluminum barn. The door opened, and a short, tubby figure
stepped out onto a small porch and stood there with his hands in his
pockets.

"You know a Travis Broussard?" Alicia shouted at him.

His shoulders sagged. He ran a hand over a partly bald head.

"Y'all know where he be?" he hollered back.

"He be in my truck," Dak yelled. "He be
passed out
in my truck. He maybe be about to
barf
in my truck when he wakes up. You want him?"

"I want him, me. Y'all wait a minute."

He closed the door and then one of the garage doors rolled about halfway up. The guy came through it, pushing a wheelbarrow.

By the time he reached us, I think we were all grinning, at least a little.

He wasn't much over five feet tall and plump, a right jolly old elf.
Trying to place him, I realized he looked a lot like a popular postcard
we sell in the office, mostly in December. It shows Santa Claus
stretched out poolside between two Hooters girls. He's wearing a loud
aloha shirt and tacky cut-off jeans and huarches and holding a
margarita and it says, "Deliver your
own
goddamn gifts this year!"

When he got to us he set the wheelbarrow down. His forearms were
huge, like Popeye's. He was smiling, which made the creases in his face
deeper. You could tell he smiled a lot. He made odd little bowing
movements toward us, didn't see it when Dak started to offer his hand.
He was twisting the hem of his tentlike shirt so hard I wondered why
the hula-hula girls weren't screaming. From all the wrinkles I could
see he twisted that shirt a lot.

He looked into the pickup. He stroked his snow-white beard for a
bit, then reached in and grabbed Colonel Broussard's arm and was about
to swing him up in a fireman's carry when Dak stepped up beside him.

"Here, man, we'll give you a hand," Dak said. The little guy looked
confused, then did a few more bows in our direction. So Dak and I each
grabbed a leg and we carried him. We arranged the limp carcass with his
arms and legs hanging out of the wheelbarrow. He was still sleeping
peacefully.

The elf stood there a moment, twisting the shirt again. I noticed he
seldom looked into our eyes, but then his eyes hardly ever settled on
anything.

"T'ank y'all," he said. "I owes y'all one, me."

Dak started some sort of aw-shucks routine, but it was wasted. The
guy grabbed the handles of the barrow and almost trotted away from us.
Broussard's arms and legs bumped up and down.

We all looked at each other, and Alicia had her fist at her mouth,
biting hard on the knuckles. She held it as long as she could, till the
guy was almost to the barn door, then she exploded in laughter.

"What a weird little man," Kelly said, and she started laughing,
too. It didn't take long for me to join in. Dak looked at all of us and
shook his head.

"Yeah, right. 'I owes y'all one, me.' Like we'll ever see him again."

"Did you notice there was no dirt or anything in the wheelbarrow? Like it never had anything in it."

"Colonel Broussard's personal rickshaw," Kelly said.

"Yeah, every Saturday night he gets a ride home in the barrow."

"Huh! More than every Saturday night," Alicia assured us. "The guy
looked like a stone alcoholic to me." Alicia would know, I figured.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Kelly suggested.

So we all climbed back in
Blue Thunder
and bounced back to
the highway, retracing our route except for the part on the Autopike.
Dak didn't seem to be in a hurry to get home, and neither was I.
There's an amazing number of things two people can do under a blanket
in the back of a truck, and Kelly and I tried most of them. I didn't
think of Broussard or his odd little friend all the way back home, and
after a few days I'd almost forgotten about them.

IT WAS OUR interest in going into space that had
brought me and Dak together. We went to different high schools but not
long after getting our diplomas we came to the same realization. The
Florida public schools had not prepared either of us for a career in
science or engineering. It had not even prepared us to pass the
entrance exam for a good college. We had a lot of catching up to do.

But a self-motivated student can earn anything up to and including a
doctorate on the University of the Internet just by logging on and
sitting in on virtual classes. No books, no tuition, no housing costs.
Not that a dot-com doctorate was ever likely to rival a degree from
Harvard, but you couldn't beat the price. I encountered Dak there, in a
remedial math class. In a chat room after classes we found out we both
had an obsession with finding a career in space, and we lived only a
few miles apart. So we got together to study and soon were spending a
lot of our spare time together.

I'm smart, but I'm not a genius. I found high school easy, it never
challenged me much. I didn't work very hard. It came as a big shock
that I didn't do well on the SATs.

So whose fault was it that I was now slopping out toilets and making
beds, trying hard to catch up, instead of looking forward to my
sophomore year at Florida, or State? What was to blame here?

Well, how about poverty?

Practically anybody can plead poverty these days when it comes to
higher education. There are only three types of people who get into a
school like Yale: the children of the wealthy, students on full
scholarship, and those willing to accept student loans that can take
the rest of your life to repay.

My family—Mom, my aunt Maria, and myself—owns property
near the beach, and that is supposed to be a gold mine. But that
property happens to be a battered, leaky, cracked and patched motel
built in 1959, and every month we're less sure we can hang on to it for
another year. After taxes and upkeep, the wages we pay ourselves put us
well
below the poverty line. So there's no doubt about it. We are poor. But that had nothing to do with my not studying hard enough.