Red Thunder

With a smile that wasn’t pretty at all, Kelly asked to be co

“We intend to sue for damages when we return,” Kelly told Lou, and soon the news was being told to an audience of about two billion, planetwide. A camera crew showed the forced removal of the ba

When the media is looking at you that hard, people you hardly know show up. Dak’s mother showed up at the Blast-Off.

What better boost could one imagine for a singing career that had floundered for almost as long as Dak had been alive? It was as if the brother of a no-talent singer was suddenly elected President of the United States.

She didn’t try to fight her way through the crowds like Kelly’s mom had. She lingered there, with her perfect hair and makeup and teeth. She projected concern for her darling son. She was praying for Dak’s safety, and appearing nightly at the Riviera Room in Charleston, South Carolina.

[318] But by then the media had already started to grow some teeth. She had no good answer when asked why she hadn’t visited her son in twelve years, and she retreated into the Blast-Off. She emerged about fifteen minutes later, not nearly so eager to talk to reporters. But the next day she canceled her gig at the Riv and moved up to a club in Atlantic City. She never did try to talk to Dak. Must have slipped her mind… or maybe she had a pretty good idea of what Dak would say.

Much about Travis clearly had the media frustrated. Vast as his clan was, they were unable to locate a single person who would go on camera and talk. The biggest potential story there was obviously the guy with the white beard, painted on the side of the rocket ship, but no Broussard was talking about that except to say, off the record, that cousin Jubal was mildly retarded. Jubal was being kept hidden because things like this would upset him. Which was exactly what Travis had told them all to say.

But the juiciest story about Travis was that his ex-wife was one of the Ares Seven, en route to Mars in the Ares Seven.

The crew of the American ship held a press conference when we were about a day out from the Earth. They could barely conceal their irritation, though the public face they had obviously been told to put on was that if, if this ship existed, and was crewed by Americans, then we wish them the best of luck. After all, it doesn’t matter who gets there first, the important thing is that people are going to Mars.

Holly Broussard Oakley seemed baffled. It must have been nightmarish for her, a few weeks away from landing on Mars only to find that her ex-husband might be waiting for her when she arrived. We all felt sorry for her, even Travis.

But the worst for Travis was when they tried to bring his daughters into it. The question was immediately raised concerning how smart it had been to embark on a trip as hazardous as this while the mother, who had custody, was in a similar situation. A procession of talking heads discussed how traumatic it would be for the children to have both parents killed in outer space. School pictures of both children and live shots of the front door of Holly Oakley’s apartment building and the girls’ grandparents’ house were shown. Television people, [319] desperate for pictures, went so far as to pester neighbors as they came and went during the day. Being a reporter must be a very nasty job, if you have any human sympathy at all.

The story of Travis’s emergency landing in Africa was told many times, and also of his landing in Atlanta. Sources who would not be named hinted there was more to that story than met the eye, and the reporters kept digging. I hoped they wouldn’t find out, it wouldn’t help my mother’s peace of mind… but I knew by then it was best to be prepared for the worst.

The worst case was Alicia, of course. A father in prison at Raiford, for killing her mother? Terrific story. An old mug shot was dug up of a baffled-looking white man with unkempt hair and a cut lip, side by side with a picture of a smiling black woman. Court TV had covered the trial, so highlight tapes of that were shown, particularly the sentencing. About the only good news was that her dad had refused to talk to reporters.

At some point in all this TV watching I realized, with a bit of a shock, that I was the only one of us who wasn’t getting shafted in one way or the other. Of all of us, I was the only one who didn’t have “issues,” as the school counselor used to say, with one or more of my parents. The only problem I had with my dad was that he was dead.

No such luck. They dug up the story of how he had been killed, gut-shot during a drug deal gone wrong. A reporter brought it up during an interview with my mother, and it looked like they’d sandbagged her, that question coming out of left field, because she looked stu

“Oh, Betty,” Travis moaned when he saw it. “Never attack a reporter, no matter how richly he may deserve it.”

“Mom and her temper,” I said, feeling all flushed and sweaty. Kelly took my hand and squeezed it… then rolled an eleven and landed on Dak’s New York Avenue property, with a hotel. For once, Dak didn’t whoop as he raked in his money.

“Let’s lighten up, friends,” Travis said. “We all knew this was going to happen. And not a one of you has done anything to be ashamed of. So don’t be ashamed of the dark side of your families, okay? All families [320] have dark sides. Believe me, when we get back, all will be forgiven and forgotten.”

It wasn’t all rotten. Lots of the sidebar stories made us laugh.

In the days after the launch, they must have interviewed every student and teacher in every school any of us ever went to. Our peers were behind us, 1,000 percent. It started getting embarrassing, hearing them all say how smart we were, how nice we were, how we were always ready to help out anyone who needed help, and how good a friend we had been, to a lot of people who we barely remembered at all. It was like a berserko school shooting-”He always did seem a little weird, he had no friends, hell yes, we all figured he’d shoot up the school one day!”-only in reverse.

We all cheered when they got around to interviewing 2Loose. The dude was good. He instinctively knew how to manage the news, and he was perfectly willing to spend all day in front of a blowup of his artwork on Red Thunder, explaining it to all the viewing audience. And he conducted interviews only in his studio, where people could get a load of all his other work… which was for sale.

BUT THERE WAS more news than just the tabloid-style fluff. It reminded us that what we were up to here had serious consequences, was a lot more than just a jolly jaunt to another planet.

Agents Dallas and Lubbock showed up at the Blast-Off about four hours after we lifted off, along with four or five other agents and a few local cops. The cops didn’t look too happy, I felt they were strongly on our side. They were all admitted into the living room, which was already crowded with our friends… and a small, quiet man with a briefcase who had been sitting by himself in some of the previous shots. What followed might have been fu