Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

The small diner was filled with its usual clientele: long-haul truckers chowing down after sleeping over in their vehicles, local farmers taking a mid-morning break from their chores, a couple of longhair students from the nearby state university. He smelled bacon and fried potatoes, heard music from the little two-songs-for-a-quarter juke boxes above the window booths: Jimmy Buffett from the one occupied by a husband-and-wife trucker family, something godawful from the one taken over by the college kids. He unzipped his windbreaker, looked around…

“Hey, Bill!”

And there they were, sitting around two Formica-top tables pushed together at the far end of the room: the Old Farts Club in all their glory. Chet, Tom, Garrett… the regular gang, waving for him to come over and join them. A chair had been left open for him; if there was a better definition of friendship, Bill had never heard of it.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you all here today…” he began.

“Aw, shut up and sit down.” This from Chet, seated at the end of the table.

“We begin bombing in five minutes,” added Garrett.

The same opening lines, reiterated again and again over the last-seven? ten? fifteen?-years. Friendship is also the condition when your buddies tolerate your lame jokes long after they’ve ceased to be funny. Or perhaps it was only a requisite of growing old.

Bill took his seat, looked around. Everyone had a mug of coffee before him, but there were no plates on the table. Another unspoken rule of the Old Farts Club was that you ate when you were hungry; no one had to wait for the others to arrive. “Thought I was running late,” he observed, “but it looks like we all got here at the same time for once.”

“Nope. I’ve been here for a hour.” Chet nodded to Tom. “He’s been here almost as long as I have.”

“Almost an hour,” agreed Tom, studying the menu.

“I got here…” Garrett checked his watch. “Exactly forty-two minutes ago.” Garrett was like that. “We’re still waiting to order.”

“You mean, we’re waiting for someone to ask if we want to order,” Chet said.

“Yes, this is true.”

Puzzled, Bill glanced over his shoulder, scanned the room. The diner was no more or less busy than it ever was on a Friday morning; at least a third of the booths were vacant, and only a handful of people sat at the lunch counter. “So where’s our waitress?” he asked. “Who’s working today?”

Three men who had been nursing lukewarm coffee for the last half-hour or more looked at each other. “Joanne,” Chet murmured darkly. “But don’t bother to call for her. She’s in her own private sitcom.”

AS if taking a cue from an unseen director, Joanne suddenly appeared, walking backward through the swinging kitchen door, balancing a serving tray above her left shoulder. “Okay, all right!” she yelled as she turned around, loud enough to be heard over the dueling jukeboxes. “Just everyone hold their horses! I’m coming as fast as I can!”

In all the uncounted years he had been coming to Ray’s, all the many times Bill had observed Joanne at work, he had never before seen her shout at her customers. Joanne was born and raised in this town, and started working at Ray’s when she graduated from the county high school. The years had been rough on her-a low-paying job, a drunk husband who abandoned her after two years, a teenage son who dropped out of high school and was now seldom home-and long ago she had lost the looks and charm that had made her a one-time prom queen, but she was still, for guys like himself and the rest of the Old Farts, the little girl they had all watched grow up. If there were good ol’ boys, then she was a good ol’ gal.

Her uncustomary brashness drew his attention; the object hovering above her held it. A miniature helicopter purred about a foot above her head, its spinning rotors forming a translucent halo; as she walked past the lunch counter, it followed her into the dining room. Suspended beneath the rotors was a softball-size spheroid; a tiny, multijointed prong containing a binaural microphone protruded above three camera lenses that swiftly gimbaled back and forth.

“Oh, lordie,” he murmured. “Joanne’s got herself a flycam.”

“Is that what it’s called?” Like everyone else at the table, Tom was watching Joanne. “I knew they were called something, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“I call it a pain in the you-know-what.” Garrett picked up his cold coffee, took a sip, made a face. “What she’s doing with one here, I have no idea.”

Joanne sashayed to a pair of truck drivers sitting in a nearby booth, the flycam keeping pace with her from above. “All right,” she announced as she picked the plates off the tray and placed them on the table, “a western omelette with a side order of bacon, two scrambled eggs with sausage, a glass of orange juice and a glass of tomato juice. Will that be all?”

The drivers looked at the plates she had put before them. “Ma’am, I ordered a ham and bacon omelette,” one said quietly, “and I think my friend here asked for his eggs over-easy with ham.”

“And I didn’t ask for tomato juice, either,” added the other. “I wanted orange juice, too.”

“We-e-e-elll!” Joanne struck a pose, one hand on an out-thrust hip, the serving tray tucked under her other arm. “I suppose one of us made a mistake, didn’t we?”

“Yes, ma’am, I suppose one of us sure did.”

Joanne looked over her shoulder. “Ray!” she bellowed in the direction of the kitchen. “You made a mistake!” Then she pivoted on her heel, and raised her arms. “I swear,” she loudly proclaimed to no one in particular (except, perhaps, the flycam), “it ain’t my fault no one ’round here speaks English!”

Then she flounced away, her hips swinging with overdone suggestivity. The two drivers gaped at her. “I’m not paying for this!” one yelled at her. “This isn’t what I ordered!”

Joanne ignored them. She was already advancing on the two college kids sitting in the next booth. They stared at the flycam as it moved into position above their table. “What’ll you have, guys?”

One of the students pointed at the drone. “Uhh… hey, is that thing live?”

“Taped,” she said briskly, dropping her voice for the first time. “Just pretend it’s not there.” She raised her voice again. “So what’ll you have, kids?”

He gawked at the camera, absently combing back his hair with his fingers. The other student nervously looked back at his menu. “I… uh… can I have…?”

“Son, what were you smoking last night?”

Startled, he looked up at her. “What?”

“Oh, you were smoking what.” She beamed down at him. “That’s new to me. I’m just a poor country girl.”

“Huh? What are you…?”

“Look, dudes, let me rap with you, okay?” She lowered her order pad, bent over the table to look them in the eye. The flycam dropped a few inches closer, its cameras recording everything. “I was your age once, and yeah, I used to get pretty wild…” She took a deep breath. “But dope is just a bad trip, y’know what I’m saying? A thing is a terrible mind to…”

“Huh?”

“Aw, dammit.” She shook her head, glanced up at the flycam for a moment, then returned her attention to the students. “I mean, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and you’ve got your whole future ahead of you.”

“I… what?” Stammering with disbelief, the student glanced between Joanne and the hovering drone. “I… hey, lady, I don’t use drugs!”

“Neither of us do!” His companion peered up at the flycam. “Hey, we’re straight! I swear, We’re straight! Geez, we just came in here to get breakfast and…”