Red Thunder

THEN, ON THE fourth day of the test, twenty-four hours to go, trouble came at us from an entirely unexpected direction. “Like it always does,” as Travis never tired of reminding us.

The phone rang. I picked it up, and it was Travis.

“Y’all have to come out now,” he said. “I just got a call from your mother-”

“My… what’s wrong? Is she-”

“She’s fine, Ma

We met Travis at the bottom of the ramp. He wouldn’t discuss the problem, just told us all to pile into the Hummer, and he took off for the motel.

Everybody was gathered in room 101 when we got there. Mom, Maria, Caleb, Salty, Grace, Billy… and somebody I’d never seen [287] before, sitting on a chair at the far end of the room. He was short and chubby, red-faced, mostly bald. He wore a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and it was soaking. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t look happy.

“You!” Kelly shouted as soon as she saw him.

“In the flesh, Kitten,” the guy said, with a mean smile.

Mom had handed Travis a business card when we arrived. It said:

SEAMUS LAWRENCE

“Seamus the Shamus”

Private Detective

There were phone, fax, and e-mail numbers in the lower left corner.

“He’s a private detective,” Kelly told us. “My father has had him tailing me, off and on, since I was fourteen. Goddamn you, Lawrence!”

“Is that any way to talk to an old friend?” He was trying to be glib, but he had to be intimidated by the hostile faces pressing in on him. He took a puff on his cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, shrugged, knocked the ash off onto the floor. I moved over closer to Mom. She was holding her.22 target pistol at her side.

“Is that a bullet hole in his shirt?” I asked her. He must have heard me.

“She shot at me!” he said, and he couldn’t quite keep the fear out of his voice.

“If I’d shot at you, Mister Private Dick, I’d of hit you. I shot at that parrot’s eye. I can put a round through your eye, too, if you give me any more trouble.”

He looked down and sure enough, the bullet had gone through a loose fold of cloth, precisely through the eye of a red and blue macaw. This evidence of her accuracy didn’t seem to reassure him… and it shouldn’t have. Mom was capable of putting a real, nonlethal but very painful hurtin’ on him with that little popgun.

“He came in an hour ago,” she told us, “handed me that silly card, and said we had to talk about some people was pla

“Unbelievable!” Travis said.

[288] “Said to get Kelly here, pronto. Said for a hundred grand-that’s what he said, ‘a hundred grand’-somebody’s daddy didn’t have to find out about it.”

“After all these years, you’d sell out my father?” Kelly sounded scandalized.

“He’s sort of pissed,” Lawrence said, defensively. “On account of I ain’t been able to dig up dirt on your sp-… on your boyfriend there.”

“It was real smart of you not to finish that word, Mr. Lawrence,” Mom said, and you could feel the tension in her trigger finger when she said it. Lawrence sure felt it; he couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, slapping dangerously against Mom’s thigh.

“Unbelievable,” Travis said again.

“What do you mean, Travis?” Alicia asked.

“Unbelievable anybody could be so stupid!” He looked around at us. “Don’t you see it? Your dad got a tour of Red Thunder just a few days ago, and the thought never entered his mind that it could fly. Because your dad is smart, whatever else he is. He knows a spaceship has to have a big, big engine to take off. Anybody with any sense takes a look at Red Thunder, they know instantly it couldn’t be a real spaceship. Hell, I could have given those FBI agents the tour, and they’d never have guessed, either.”

“But it can fly,” Dak pointed out.

“Exactly! But to believe it can fly, you have to either postulate an entirely new technology, or be so stupid, be so totally clueless as to how things work… it’s beautiful when you think of it. He’s so dumb he stumbled onto the truth.”

“Hey,” Lawrence said, but it was halfhearted.

“I got a rule,” Travis said. “I’ve never had to use it so far in my life, but I think it’s a good rule. Never pay ransoms or blackmail.”

“I like that rule, too,” Mom said.

Travis had his back to the prisoner, and we all saw him wink.

“Then I guess we gotta kill him.”

For a moment I thought he’d gone too far, the guy looked like he might have a heart attack. He started babbling about how he’d go away, [289] forever, forget about the whole thing, he’d leave town, he’d leave the state. He’d do anything.

We all watched him until he ran down.

“Maybe we don’t have to, Travis,” Caleb said. “All we gotta do is hold his sorry ass for twenty-four hours, then what can he do?”

“That’s kidnapping!” Lawrence said, then realized what the alternative was. He babbled again about how he’d be happy to stay here, he wouldn’t cause any trouble.

Travis went outside and everybody but Caleb followed him. Kelly spoke first.

“Travis, he’s a drunk, he… oh, sorry.”

“No offense taken. I was thinking the same thing. Get him liquored up. Alicia, you got anything in that drug cabinet we could use as a Mickey Fi

“A what?”

“Something to knock him out for a while.”

“Oh, sure. No problem.”

“Okay. Caleb can watch him. He won’t need a gun, Betty, Caleb could take that pathetic loser apart with his bare hands. Give him all the booze he can drink, pop some pills in it. Dump him in an alley someplace, later. What’s he go

“That’s what we’ll do, Travis,” she said. “He really burned me up. No way I was going to let the likes of him stop y’all.”

“Mom!” I said.

“You know I’d be happier if you didn’t go, Ma

I gave her a big hug.

AND SO WE returned to the warehouse, with one more night and a day to spend inside. 2Loose had erected scaffolds around the ship and hung tarps around it.

We climbed the ramp and sealed the outer air-lock door, cycled the lock, entered the ship interior. The Monopoly game was as we’d left it. [290] Other than our cans of Coke having grown warm, it was as if we’d never been gone.

TRAVIS DIDN’T THROW us any more emergencies.

“I feel dirty,” he told us over the phone. “It’s so easy to humiliate a man, especially when he’s down. So easy. I’m not proud of it.”

“That’s something,” Dak said. “You don’t take pleasure in it.”

“But I did, when it was happening.”

“So did I,” Kelly said. “Anyway, it had to be done.”

“Jubal wants to know if he can stay with y’all for a while,” Travis said.

“What, he has to ask?” Alicia said. “Send him in.”

So Jubal joined the Monopoly game for an hour. He seemed unusually quiet, sweating a lot, very nervous. I hoped it was just opening night jitters, anticipation. I know I was feeling it. He couldn’t be worried about the trip. Could he?

We slept, we woke up, and we sweated out the last hours until six P.M., when we swung the door open and came down the ramp. Mom was there, and Jubal, and Grace, and Salty, and Maria, and Sam. There was a big flat cake with a little model of the ship standing on it, and the logo of Red Thunder spelled out in red icing. Maria, who had baked it, cut it and we all had a piece.

“Where’d you get the model?” I asked.

“Oh, we got ten thousand of ’em,” Mom said. “Didn’t Kelly tell you? We’re going to merchandise the hell out of this trip.” I looked at Kelly.

“Well, I’ve got to have something to keep me busy while y’all are gone, okay?”