Red Thunder (4 page)

So try again. How about The System? It's always safe to blame the
system. It is politically fashionable, it makes you feel better about
yourself, and it is (at least partly) true. Did it really speak well
for the Department of Education that a guy like me who attended
regularly, did the work, and even graduated from Gus Grissom High
School in the top 5 percent... did it make sense that after twelve
years I wasn't up to entry level in the state university system?

No, it didn't make sense. The system really sucked, no getting
around it. But it sucked just as hard for some of my classmates who
were now going to school at Cornell and Princeton.

If it ain't the institution, and it ain't the money, then it's got
to be the color of your skin or the language you speak, right? It
has
to be racism.

I even mentioned it to my mother one day when I was feeling particularly put-upon and sour.
It must be because I'm Latino,
I griped. Well, half Cuban, anyway. When she had stopped laughing, she came close to getting angry.

"I hope I didn't raise a crybaby," she said. "Don't you ever blame your own shortcomings or anything else on racism...
not even if it's true
. When you see you are being discriminated against, you just make the best of it. You
deal
with it, or else you see racism every time you turn around and spend
your life moaning about it. And besides, you're hardly any more
brown-skinned than I am, and my Spanish is a heck of a lot better than
yours."

Which was the simple truth. I got most of my looks from her side of
the family, which was Italian. My hair is dark brown and curly. I
wouldn't look out of place wearing a yarmulke. Only around the eyes,
which are dark and deep-set and sometimes rather bruised looking, like
Jimmy Smits, do I resemble the pictures of my dad. Sad to say, the rest
of me doesn't look anything like Jimmy Smits, but I get by.

Like Jimmy Buffett said, it was my own damn fault.

In a mediocre system, the talented have no need to excel. I'm a fast
reader, I have a good memory, and I'm quick with figures. With those
qualifications, about the only way you could fail at Gus Grissom High
was to never go to class.

After twelve years of that kind of schooling, both Dak and I thought
we knew how to study. You go home, you read the material for tomorrow's
classes. Thirty minutes, an hour, tops. Then you've got the rest of the
evening and all weekends to do whatever you want.

In my case, doing whatever I wanted meant working about sixty hours
a week in our family business, the Blast-Off Motel. That is, it was
what I wanted if I also wanted to eat and have a roof over my head.

Dak and I got together to study in the hope of improving our
self-motivational skills, which were sadly lacking. Sometimes it
worked. If the weather outside wasn't just too damn gorgeous. If the
surf and the wind weren't just so perfect it would be a sin to spend
the day inside when you could be riding your windboard. If the college
girls from up north weren't too plentiful and beautiful stretched out
in scantily clad rows, trying to bake a Florida brown before spring
break was over...

ME AND MY family had what you'd call a love-hate
relationship with the Blast-Off Motel. Without it we'd all have been
looking for jobs instead of working in the family business. I've pushed
a vacuum cleaner the equivalent of twice around the Earth at the
equator. I know fifty things that can go wrong with a toilet and I know
how to fix most of them. I could pass the test for a Ph.D. in toilets.

Still, it's better than working for somebody else. I think.

Mom's grandparents built the motel and called it the Seabreeze. Cape
Canaveral was just a missile testing base then. Locals had been
enjoying the fireworks since the end of the Second World War, but
nobody else knew it was there, except race fans coming for Daytona 500,
and they ignored it.

Then Project Mercury brought a lot of attention to this sandy little
corner of Florida. There was a housing shortage, and many of the
workers and engineers who moved to the Merritt Island area were happy
to find a room of any kind. And back then the Seabreeze was a pretty
good place.

They renamed it the Blast-Off in honor of John Glenn's flight.
Grandpa didn't realize that real Canaveral people always called it
"liftoff," and by the time he did the big, expensive sign out front was
already installed. The little red neon rocket on the sign has been
taking off, practically nonstop, for over fifty years now.

When Mom's parents died in a car wreck she inherited a business
already halfway to bankruptcy. For the last twenty years she and Aunt
Maria, and me when I got old enough, have been trying to make a living
at it. Now it was probably too late.

The Blast-Off had been built so that all the rooms had an ocean
view. Technically they all still did. But we never had the gall to
actually claim that. If you looked far to the north or far to the south
from your Blast-Off balcony, you could see a bit of water and sand. But
straight ahead was the Golden Manatee resort, twenty stories of New
Florida opulence, directly across the four-lane highway from us.

Mom can hardly look at the Golden Manatee without spitting. Her father used to own the land the resort now sits on.

"He was dead set against 'building on sand,' " Mom would tell anyone who would listen. "He always felt
this
building was too close to the sea. He spent most of his life terrified
a hurricane would wash it away. So he never built over there. He sold
the land."

Now the Manatee wants to buy our land to use as a parking lot. But
they don't need it bad enough to offer us a decent price. We'd get just
about enough money to pay off our mortgage, and the next day we could
start looking for work in the exciting tourist service industry. That
is, as maids and waiters in somebody else's business. "Well, they can
just kiss my manatee," Mom said.

AFTER WE DELIVERED Travis Broussard to his odd little
friend, Dak dropped me off, alone, a little after midnight in the quiet
Blast-Off parking lot. Kelly had early appointments the next day, and
spending the night with me would have added to her driving time, so Dak
was taking her to her apartment. I wish she'd mentioned it before we
got to my place. Maybe I wouldn't have fooled around so much under the
blanket in the pickup bed. As it was, the first order of business was a
cold shower.

I live in room 201 at the Blast-Off. The way we're set up, the
owner's apartment is behind the office on the ground floor: living room
and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs. One of those used to be
mine until Aunt Maria moved in to help. I moved into 201, which has the
Toilet From Hell. I had worked on that damn thing a hundred times over
the years and never could stop it from screwing up about once a week.
Finally we decided we just wouldn't rent it anymore, as well as room
101, which had a collapsed ceiling from all the overflowing water
above. It's not as if we ever had to turn guests away for the lack of
those two rooms.

The sink and tub/shower still worked. When I needed the toilet I
used the one in room 101. I took out the twin beds and put in a
king-sized, brought in a big desk and a table and chairs and a sofa I
got for a few dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store.

The arrangement suited me. That is, I knew I could do a lot worse.
It took some of the sting out of still living with my family at age
twenty. I had my own door and could play music and come and go as I
pleased. If only I could take a leak without going outside and
downstairs I'd be content.

ONCE OUT OF the shower I turned on my computer, a
ten-year-old Dell laptop I'd picked up for twenty dollars. I went to
the NASA public website, selected "Hall of Astronauts," and typed in a
search for Travis Broussard.

"We're sorry, the search produced no results. Do you wish to try another search?"

"Damn right," I grumbled, and shut off the speech function.

I searched the whole site, and found numerous references to Colonel
Broussard. His flight record was there, beginning fifteen years ago
when he entered the astronaut corps as a rookie pilot trainee. He made
six flights sitting in the right-hand seat before becoming a full-time
senior pilot. Sounded pretty quick to me. I did an info scan and found
it was the fastest anyone had ever made the transition. Twelve years
ago Travis was NASA's fair-haired boy. I would have been eight years
old then.

His name was blue-lined, as were all astronaut names at the site.
Maybe this was a route to the bio. I clicked on the link, and got a
screen saying, "This page currently under construction." I clicked on
another name at random and was shown to an elaborate biography page,
with eight screens of text and a hundred NASA pics and snapshots of the
astronaut's professional and home life. I requested John Glenn's site,
and it was gigantic, thousands of stories going all the way back to
Life
magazine, albums of pictures, hours and hours and hours of video and film clips, whole movies from
The Right Stuff
to the Glenn bio-pic aired only last year.

Okay, it seemed that Broussard was the only one of several thousand
current and former and even dead spacers without a spot in the Hall of
Astronauts. How come?

Back to his flight record. He was listed as chief pilot for seventy
launches. There was a blue link after the date of his last mission, and
once again, clicking it took me nowhere. More links, on Flights 67, 60,
and 53, all leading nowhere. Another dead end on a link way back on
Flight 21. But there was mention of a commendation. I noted the date of
his twenty-first flight and opened a window for the
Miami Herald.

I had the newspaper search that day and came up with a six-paragraph
story on page three, complete with a picture of a smiling Travis
Broussard, quite a bit younger, shaking hands with... my, oh my, that
was the President of the United States.

The story read, in part:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) In a brief ceremony in the west
wing of the White House, President Ventura awarded Astronaut Chief
Pilot Travis Broussard with the Alan Shepard Medal of Valor for his
actions on the third of this month in guiding a crippled VStar Mark II
to an emergency landing at a backup airfield in Africa, saving the
lives of the crew of three and seven passengers.

Broussard had been promoted to the rank of Astronaut Colonel the previous day at the Pentagon.

I was getting frustrated. A big hero like Travis, and at the NASA
site he was the little astronaut who wasn't there. Absolutely nothing
to be learned beyond the fact that yes, he had been an astronaut, had
flown the VStar, and yes, he won a medal.

So I went to SpaceScuttlebutt.com, where a lot of spaceheads hang
out, found a room with a few familiar handles in it, and posted:

Broussard, Travis...?

Pretty soon this bounced back:

No such FUBAR. Un-person. Shame on you.

FUBAR meant Fouled Up Beyond All Repair. I sent:

Y no bio?

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

Funny guy. I was about to come back when he posted another line:

Spacemanny? Dat you?

Unfortunately, it was. I'd made that my web handle years ago, before
it started sounding so dorky. Now it would be too much bother to change
it.

Y.

A three-by-three window opened and I saw the head and shoulders of a
very, very fat man about my mother's age. He had to weigh in at five
hundred pounds. SpaceScuttlebutt.com was as close as he'd ever get to
space and he knew it. He lived his spacegoing fantasies online, and his
knowledge was encyclopedic. I had no idea where he lived or what his
real name was, but his handle was Piginspace. A man with no illusions.
I was lucky to have run into him.

"Broussard-san heap big bad medicine, Spacemanny," he said through
the tiny built-in speaker on my antique laptop. "Bad juju. Say his name
at Kennedy, you must leave the room, spin around twice, and spit."

He talked like that sometimes. He enjoyed having information someone
else was looking for, and sometimes made you jump through hoops to get
it. But not this time.

"I see he got a medal for an emergency landing. What do you know about that?"

"Everything, my lad, the Pig knows everything. Knows all, tells...
well, whatever he feels young minds can safely handle. Short version...
it was early days in the second generation of the VStar program. The
Mark II had just received its spaceworthiness certificate from NASA.
Some of the jockeys felt there were a few bugs still to be worked out,
but the mandarins decreed it should be pressed into service most
tickety-boo."

The VStar II
California
was less than an hour away from its
de-orbit burn when there was an explosion followed by a fire. The cabin
began to fill with smoke. Much of the cockpit electronics went down.

Travis, working from what NASA called "hard copies"—tech
manuals and maps—and with only minimal help from his crashing
computers, fired the de-orbit engines within three minutes of the
explosion.

There were three airfields designated by NASA as "trans-Atlantic
abort" sites, at Moron, Spain; Banjul, The Gambia; and Ben Guenir,
Morocco. None of them had ever been used, and in fact there was nothing
to recommend them other than a runway long enough for the old Shuttle's
landing rollout. For that purpose, Cairo would have been a better
choice, and Travis looked at it briefly, but it was too far north of
his path.

Moron, Banjul, and Ben Guenir were already almost beneath him.
Impossible to turn and glide back with the VStar's steep angle of
descent.

Johannesburg was too far south. Nairobi was too far east.