Red Thunder

“Right there by the Coast Guard station?” I asked.

“That’s it.”

“Port,” Dak said.

“What’s that?”

“You don’t make a left turn in a boat. You steer to port.”

“Oh, the great admiral speaks,” Kelly muttered. She was not in a great mood.

“How high is the highway bridge?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll measure it later.”

“Wait a minute,” Alicia said. “Strickland Bay? As in Strickland Mercedes? As in… Kelly Strickland?”

“My family has lived in the area a long time,” Kelly said. Myself, I hadn’t even known that wide stretch of shallow water had a name.

“Mine, too,” Dak said. “Only we been fixin’ the cars your daddy been selling.”

“Has somebody got a problem with this?” Kelly asked, angrily. She looked at each of us. Nobody said anything. She sighed and shook her head.

“We got lucky here, people,” she said. “I looked at seventeen places [148] that were almost right, but then one thing or another didn’t work. No heavy lifting, no rail spur, crowded neighborhood, or way too expensive.”

“How much for this?” Alicia asked. Kelly named a figure that made me a little short of breath.

“So, doing the math,” I said, “we’re looking at six months at that rate, which-”

“Did I say month? That figure was per week.”

I needed a place to sit down. Talking about that much money makes me queasy.

“I can find you a dozen places much cheaper… but without the crane. Here’s the deal, folks. This place is in a legal limbo at the moment. The original developer went broke. There are lawsuits working their way through the courts. They can only rent month to month, which suits us down to the ground. There’s a group of investors who want to tear all this sh-… this stuff down and build a golf course.”

“Just what Florida needs,” Dak said. “Another golf course.”

“How’d you find it?” Alicia asked. Kelly gave us a small smile.

“In my father’s files. He’s the man behind the investors. He may or may not own this building, depending on how a judge rules on whether it was all done legally.”

“I thought your daddy sold cars,” Dak said.

“He’s thinking of getting involved more in land speculation.”

“Just what Florida needs,” I said. “Another land developer.” Kelly punched my arm, playfully, but with an edge to it this time. She really was feeling bad.

“So what do you say? Should I put down a deposit?”

“We’ll run it by Travis this evening,” I said.

“Travis. Right,” she said, bitterly.

No love currently lost between Kelly and Travis. And to think, no more than a week ago we were just like one big happy family…

16

NOTHING FURTHER WAS said the night of Travis’s return about Jubal’s plan to build him his own spaceship, him. Travis helped him bundle up his belongings, which now included a nice selection of original shell people by Aunt Maria. We stood together and waved good-bye as Travis drove out of the parking lot.

“I’m going to miss that Jubal,” Mom said.

Little did she know how soon she would change her mind about that.

A FEW DAYS went by. After all the togetherness while Jubal was staying with us, we four who were in on the big secret stayed apart, maybe taking a breather from each other. I only spoke to Kelly twice in that time, over the phone.

On the fourth day Travis called me.

“Jubal wants to talk to you,” he said. “He hates talking on the telephone, won’t do it unless it’s an emergency. Could you come over sometime this afternoon?”

[150] “Sure,” I said. “Things are ru

“Good enough. Thanks, Ma

I hurried through the rest of my chores and hopped on the Triumph. I figured it would be my last ride on the grand old masterpiece, so I opened it up a little, as much as I dared with the damned empty sidecar cramping my style.

TRAVIS WAS WAITING for me by the pool. He had a big pitcher of iced tea, and he poured me a glass without asking if I wanted one. I took a big drink, then sat down.

“Thanks for coming, Ma

“Sure. What’s the problem?”

“Jubal and his pipe dreams is the problem.”

“He said an American should be the first man on Mars.”

“He meant just what he said. And if those Ares Seven clowns aren’t up to the task, he’ll just go there himself.”

“Sounds nuts.”

He rubbed his unshaven chin with one hand.

“No, the nutty thing is, it might actually be possible. Outrageous, goofy beyond belief… but I can’t actually say it’s impossible. In fact, we’re going out tomorrow to the ’Glades to do a little testing on the Broussard drive, see just how possible it is.”

“Broussard drive?”

He gri

“Has Jubal done the math?”

“I don’t know. Jubal and me… well, we’re hardly speaking, Ma

I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

[151] “Ma

“Travis, I…”

“He says you’re his best friend, Ma

I FOUND JUBAL where Travis had said he would be, deep in the darkness of his laboratory in the prefab barn. He had made a big, primitive desk with sawhorses and a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. He was surrounded by stacks of downloaded books, printed out, two-hole punched, and bound together with string. It made me think of a child’s fortress, made of bricks of compacted snow, though I’d never had a chance to build such a thing. His high-speed printer was spitting out another book at about ten pages per second.

I saw his face before he saw me, and the expression there was one I’d never seen before. Jubal was mighty worried. Then he looked up, and the frown wrinkles vanished as he recognized me. He used a number two pencil with the eraser chewed off to mark his place in one of the Big Chief elementary school pads he used to take notes.

“Manuel Garcia, my fren’! I am so glad dat you see me! Entrez, entrez, come on in, chile, you wa

The next little while was taken up with the social pleasantries Jubal would no more think of dispensing with than he would eat a meal without saying a prayer. I told him we were all doing fine, that the business was ru

“Still got dat rifle I tell Ralph Shabazz I fix,” Jubal admitted. “You tell him Jubal been mighty busy dis week, hah?”

“I’ll do dat t’ing.” He laughed like he always did when I spoke a little Jubalese. He knew I wasn’t mocking him. He knew his accent was sometimes almost impossible for strangers to understand. He said he’d tried to shake it, speak like the people on the television, “Spit de crawdads outta my mouth an comb de swamp moss outta my hair,” as he put it. No luck.