Red Thunder Read online

  “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 [24] 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.

  [25] 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.

  4

  * * *

  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-corn 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 [27] 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.

  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 [28] 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 [29] 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 [30] 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.

  * * *

  [31] 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 m
ovies 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 [32] 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?