Red Thunder (7 page)

It was way too late to bring in a high-wheel brushcutter to deal
with Colonel Broussard's lawn. You'd need a fair-sized tractor to cut
most of it. Some places would need a bulldozer, just grade it flat and
start all over.

A path led from the pool patio through some grapefruit and lemon
trees to a lake with a pier jutting out. Tied to a pier was a small
wooden rowboat. There was fishing gear in the rowboat.

There was an aluminum boathouse, prefab like the big barn back at
the compound. I couldn't see what was inside it, but judging from the
boat trailer sitting on a small concrete boat ramp, it was a fairly
substantial craft.

Across the lake, maybe a couple miles away, I saw a few houses and
other docks. Probably some good catfish in the lake. Maybe bass. I
don't much see the point of bass when you can catch catfish.

Last year's crop of lemons were just dried rinds under the trees. It
could be a heck of a nice place if somebody cared for it a little, I
thought as I made my way back through the grove. But it would be a lot
of work.

Off to my left as I went back toward the house was the prefab barn
where the little chubby guy had been that night. The building sat on a
low hill... well, call it a gentle rise. Florida is a vertically
challenged state, and we natives tend to get way too enthusiastic about
anything that raises you ten feet off the landscape.

That barn was by far the best-kept thing I could see. I was about to
head back to Dak and Alicia—I could see them sitting on the
cushions of the lounge chair nuzzling each other, so I figured they'd
managed to work it out—when my eye was caught by a glint of light
on the ground in the direction of the barn. I'd probably never have
seen it at all if it hadn't been rolling slowly down the hill.

No, not rolling. It was blowing, like a soap bubble in the air. It
was hitting the blades of grass, but not bending them. In fact, for a
while I thought it
was
a soap bubble, and I watched it, waiting for it to pop. It never did, so I leaned over and picked it up.

It was a little bigger than a Ping-Pong ball but it had a silvery,
mirror surface like a Christmas tree ornament. It didn't seem to weigh
anything at all. I held it up, between my thumb and two fingers... and
almost lost it. It wanted to squirt right out of my grip.

I tried to toss it from one hand to the other, but it wouldn't do it. It was too light, it kept getting slowed down by the air.

I really liked the thing, right from the first, so I went to my
borrowed bike and put the bubble in my helmet... and changed my life
and a lot of other lives forever.

AS I REACHED the concrete patio Dak was shaking
charcoal from a sack into a big kettle barbecue. One of the sliding
screen doors to the house opened quickly, on a motorized track, and
Colonel Travis Broussard came out, holding a platter of raw steaks in
one hand and a cocktail in the other. He glanced at me, grinned, and
put the platter on the big picnic table. I shook his hand.

"You must be Manny," he said. "Dak's told me about you. Why don't
you go inside and grab something to drink out of the icebox? I got
nineteen kinds of imported beer and I don't check ID."

"A little early for me, but thanks." I went to the patio door, which got out of my way as I was reaching to slide it open.

"Never too early for Trav," Alicia said as the door closed behind
me. She was standing at a counter in the kitchen, looking out the
window at Dak and Travis. "Man's a big drinker. Look there, three
empties and they all still got dew on the outside." I saw the beer cans
next to a big refrigerator. I mean, a
huge
refrigerator, the
kind they use in convenience stores, with glass doors so you can pick
out what you want before you open the doors. Beer and soda, Gatorade,
fancy water, some bottles of white wine. Pretty much anything you'd
like in the way of something cool. Beside it was a restaurant-sized ice
maker and on shelves above that a real professional bartender's
selection of hard stuff, racks of clear stemware hanging from the
ceiling, other barware behind glass-doored cabinets. And on the other
side of that, another refrigerator and a huge freezer.

"Look at this," Alicia said with disgust. She opened a refrigerator
door and the big shelves were almost empty. A brown half head of
lettuce, a couple fuzzy gray tomatoes, half a chicken and some bones
drying out on a plate, a stick of oleo.

"And this." Inside the freezer were stacks and stacks of the same
kind of thick sirloins he had carried outside and plastic bags of
Ore-Ida frozen steak fries.

"Aren't you the nosy one?" I said. She frowned, then decided not to
take offense. I got a can of 7-Up out of the fridge and popped the top.

"It's been a least a month since anybody's had any vegetables here
other than French fries. There's cases of ketchup in one of those
cupboards, I guess some folks call that a vegetable. I don't see any
fruit at all. The only reason there's no dirty dishes in here is that
nobody uses any dishes except forks and steak knives." She tossed a
pair of plastic salad tongs into a matching plastic bowl and sighed. "I
told 'em I was coming in here to make a salad to go with the steaks.
I'll bet Mr.... sorry, I mean
Colonel
Broussard had a good laugh about that one."

I went over to a door I thought might be a pantry and pulled it
open. Sure enough. The room was bigger than room 201 at the Blast-Off
and there was enough food in it to feed a family of five for several
years. On the floor were sealed metal barrels of dry pasta, rice,
flour, sugar, stuff like that, safe from bugs and rats. On the shelves
above them were cans of just about everything, tuna and Spam, peaches
and pears, soups to nuts. All of it was covered with dust. I started
tossing cans to Alicia.

"Pinto beans, wax beans, green beans, garbanzos, lima beans, kidney
beans, black beans, aha! Even some pinquitos." She dropped the fourth
can while trying to catch the fifth, then another, and another, and we
were both laughing as I tossed her more cans. "Make him a three-bean
salad, why don't you? Or maybe a seven-bean."

"I can make something out of this he'll
hate
."

I wandered into the living room. It was fairly neat, but dusty and
stale smelling, with the occasional sweatshirt or pair of dirty socks
tossed on the floor.

"Still early stages," Alicia said from the door. "No puke that ain't
been mopped up. He still picks up stuff, when he trips over it."

"Maybe he's just sloppy."

She laughed. "Manny, this is a military guy. If he started out sloppy, you wouldn't be able to
bulldoze
through this place. He's gone downhill a
lot
since he was a spaceman. They don't let you clutter things up on a station. You know that."

She was right, I did.

"He probably doesn't even think he's an alcoholic," she said.

I turned back to the living room. There were a lot of framed photos
on the walls, mostly of him with famous people, including the one of
the President giving him his medal. I recognized some of the faces. One
section showed two young girl children. Daughters? No wife anywhere I
could see.

There were gaps on these walls, too, rectangles lighter than the
wall. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out pictures had once
hung there. Pictures of people the colonel didn't like anymore, was my
guess.

The one bare wall turned out not to be a wall at all, but an
eight-by-twelve-foot Sony Hi-Dee screen. The audio parts were hidden
behind a mahogany panel, and a dozen speakers hung from the ceiling.
Here was something very expensive that I could really appreciate. If he
had termites in the walls, they'd be deaf by now.

I looked around once more, taking it all in. How the rich live. I'd never had much chance to get a close look at it.

I figured I wouldn't have all that much trouble swapping lifestyles with him.

ALICIA CAME OUT of the kitchen with her big bean salad
in a bowl, Broussard trailing dubiously behind her. I followed them to
the patio, where Dak was just flipping the steaks, wearing a
grease-spattered apron. Broussard took over the grill.

"Dak tells me you run a hotel," he said.

"My family does. The Blast-Off down on—"

"Sure, I know it."

"Everybody knows the Blast-Off," Dak said. "It's a Florida
institution. Can't come to the Canaveral area and not send a Blast-Off
postcard back home."

"Sounds like a good business."

"The card business? It's okay." Yeah, I didn't say, and some weeks
we make almost as much money on those damn cards, and the knick-knacks
Mom and Maria make, as we make renting out rooms. Disgusting, when you
think about it.

"Well, you ever decide to get a new sign, let me bid on the old one.
One of the first things I saw in Florida that I liked. You know,
sometimes I could pick it out on the way up. Just look for the little
orange rocket blasting off."

"No kidding? That's... that's great." I looked at Dak and saw the
notion had tickled him, too. The crummy old Blast-Off, and an astronaut
looking down on it... or even just driving down the avenue, passing it,
feeling good for a moment.

"I'll keep that in mind, Colonel Broussard," I said.

"Just Travis, okay? You guys saw me falling-down, snot-slingin' drunk. I figure y'all have to swallow hard to call me Colonel."

Nobody had anything to say to that, but the awkward silence passed
pretty quick. Travis went back into the kitchen to get the cardboard
bucket of fries he'd popped into the microwave. He came back with forks
and knives and paper plates.

He cut into one of the steaks, peered inside, and looked up.

"Who likes 'em so rare they're still chewin' their cud?"

Alicia and Travis did. Dak and I said medium rare would do. That
left one on the grill, and Travis pushed a button on the outside wall
before he sat at the table. Beyond the empty pool the barn door opened
and the short, roly-poly guy came out. Travis heaped fries on all five
plates.

"Jubal, these are friends of Dak. Alicia, and Manny. Y'all, this is my cousin Jubilation. Everybody calls him Jubal."

Jubal nodded awkwardly, bowed his head, then looked up again.

"Travis, would you offer a blessin' over dis here food?"

"Shouldn't we wait till your steak gets here, Jube?"

"You kin bless it from ovah here, you."

And by golly we all bowed our heads and Travis offered a short
prayer. When it was over, Jubal tied a big cloth napkin around his neck
and dug in to the plate of fries. When his steak arrived, mostly black
on the outside, and not much better on the inside, he ate that in
record time, then shuffled off to the barn again.

"Don't take offense," Travis told us. "Jubal never caught on to
polite manners. He's just never seen the use of saying good-bye...
saying a lot of things, actually. But I've got him pretty well used to
'please' and 'thank you.' "

I couldn't tell if he was pulling our legs or not.

"What's he do out there in that barn?" Dak asked.

"Invents stuff. Allows me to go on living in the style I don't
deserve but have become accustomed to without having to go out and look
for work."

This time all three of us waited for the punch line, but there
wasn't one. Well, it was his house and his food. He could tell us as
much or as little as he wanted.

I ATE MORE steak than I should have. I don't get
top-quality sirloin that often, and I figured I'd make up a little for
feasts I'd missed out on, growing up. In other words, I made a pig out
of myself. But I wasn't the only one. We all sat around for a while,
picking our teeth, trying to keep the belching down to a level that
wouldn't frighten the swamp creatures.

Then Dak asked Travis to tell that story he'd told Dak the other
day, you know the one, about what you did to that senator from Utah who
finagled himself aboard the yearly "inspection" junket to International
Peace and Cooperation Station... and Travis said that was no senator
from Utah, that was a congressman from Oregon, and besides, he has
recovered by now, though he walks with a slight limp and jumps at loud
noises, and besides, it wasn't me, and if you ever say it was I'll have
your ass in court for libel. We all laughed, and Travis said that
called for another beer, and I decided I could safely have one, and he
was off to the races.

Travis was a terrific storyteller. The great thing was, though they might not have been strictly, 100 percent
true,
they were all based on fact. And that was good enough for me, because
they were stories of space, and of rocket piloting, of guys and girls
actually getting out there and
doing
it. Kissing the sky.

When Travis got off a really good one, one of us would reach for the
remote unit attached to the mechanical pool alligator by a cable, and
start pressing the buttons. The phony reptile would rear up, thrash his
tail, and let fly with a roar that sounded more like a grizzly bear to
me—not that I know a grizzly bear from Yogi Bear, but I have
heard pissed-off gators a time or two.

The rubber alligator was a story in itself. One of Travis's friends
used to work as a mechanical animator at Disney World. Travis invested
with the man when he left Disney and tried to start his own studio. The
alligator was for a place called Gatorland. The day before it was about
to open, some radical animal rights group, Free the Animals or
something like that, broke in and let all the real gators go.

Gatorland wasn't exactly in the swamp, it was in a suburb of Tampa.
In half an hour nine of the freed gators had been hit by cars when they
tried to cross a freeway. Several people were injured in the crashes,
and all the alligators were killed. Others had to be pulled from
backyard swimming pools and rounded up on downtown streets, and some
had to be shot. Later, a dozen neighborhood dogs and cats could not be
found.