Jay Lake - Rocket Science

“My barn.” Mr. Bellamy turned to his son. “Floyd, are there bandits hiding in my barn?”

“No, sir.” Floyd continued to smirk.

“They landed in your lower pasture in an airplane.”

“Son,” asked Mr. Bellamy gently, “what have you been doing that would make someone want to shoot at you?”

The voice in my ear said, “Don’t tell him.”

“What?” I asked.

Mr. Bellamy shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your hearing. Why are people shooting at you?”

“Do not tell him,” the aircraft said. “You are in danger.”

“No kidding,” I said.

Mr. Bellamy looked at Floyd. “Let’s get him back to the house. He’s been hit on the head, or worse.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, where Mr. Bellamy’s buckshot had cut me. I had started out the morning with a bandage there, but I’d lost it somewhere along the way.

“Do not send the others into danger in your place,” said the voice. “I have given great thought to your situation. You and your associate Flood must set things to right, then flee from what will certainly be unjust retribution.”

“Floyd,” I said. “His name is Floyd.”

Floyd took my arm. “I know who I am, Vern.” He walked me over to the Cadillac, talking over his shoulder to Mr. Bellamy. “He must be really shell-shocked, Daddy.”

“Floyd, yes,” said the voice. “Is that a Kymric name?”

“What’s Kymric?” I asked. I was feeling increasingly dazed.

“Kymric means Welsh,” boomed Mr. Bellamy’s voice. I wondered why he was talking to me from inside a tunnel.

“Welsh. Waliser . Yes, that is Kymric,” said the voice of my aircraft.

“I’m glad,” I mumbled. I had trouble seeing anything.

“I’m glad you’re glad,” said Floyd from somewhere else. “Vern, when was the last time you ate?”

Somehow I sat down on a very warm seat. Now Floyd’s voice echoed above me. “Daddy, he’s real sick.”

“Not Doctor Milliken,” said the voice.

“Not Doctor Milliken,” I said. It did seem like a bad idea. I remembered that my dad had some kind of problem with Doc Milliken. “Dad, what did Doc Milliken do to you?” I asked.

“What?” I couldn’t tell if Dad had answered, or if it was someone else using his voice. I took a ragged breath and found tears hiding in my eyes, straining to escape.

“It will be all right,” said three voices almost at once.

Iwas warm and comfortable, except for a whopping headache. The glow I could see even through my closed eyes must be the sun. I moved my hands to discover that I was under a quilt, in a bed. I had been asleep. Opening my eyes, I studied the room around me.

I was in Floyd’s room, at his parent’s house.

He’d had the same printed wallpaper of jumping trout as long as I’d known him — since we were both small boys. The fish were almost lost under the sloppy-built pine shelves that crowded the room. Sloppy, not because Floyd didn’t have the skills, but because he didn’t bother to take the time to do more than was absolutely necessary. When I built furniture, it was going to last.

We were different like that, he and I.

The room pointed up some of our other differences as well. Football trophies, a cracked bat from the regional playoffs our junior year, a nice rod-and-reel rig he’d won in drawing at a sporting goods store in Wichita. Just a few books, lurid pulps with bug-eyed monsters on the cover, amid piles of comics. Some of the comics looked fresh. Floyd had never been serious before, no reason to think he’d start now.

And I could swear I saw a brassiere peeking out from behind a model sailing ship. That reminded me of Midge, which made me blush all over again.

Looking outside to judge the angle of the sun, I figured it was late afternoon. I remembered the fight at the barn. I hadn’t lasted very long afterward, I guess, but I couldn’t possibly have slept all night and all day. This must still be Sunday. I threw back the covers and tried to stand up.

I seemed to have developed a bad tendency to stagger to the left, which at least put the banging dead weight on my good leg. I managed to make it to the dressing table, where I gripped the cold marble top and looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing a pair of Floyd’s pajamas, and I looked like I had recently won a bar fight.

It would have been my first. Heck, it was my first.

“Hey, Vernon old buddy,” I asked myself, “how are you doing?”

“Eh?” said a voice from the window.

It didn’t sound like the unseen voice of my aircraft. I felt a momentary surge of panic. Where was the radio handset? I looked around, then realized that Floyd would have known exactly what it was, and taken good care of it.

“Who’s there?” I called.

A grizzled face poked in from the open window. It was an old man, outside on the porch roof. With his close-cropped iron gray hair and deep-set wrinkles, he looked like he might have been chewing tobacco before Mr. Bellamy was born, but his eyes were ice chips — clear, cold and hard. “Random Garrett, son.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I replied automatically. “My name’s Vernon Dunham.”

Random smiled, though the expression never got past his lips. “I know who you are.”

Mr. Garrett seemed a decent enough old fellow, a bit hard, maybe, and I would bet he could outstare a goat. “I don’t mean to be rude, sir,” I said, disgusted at how shaky my voice sounded, “but what brings you out onto the roof?”

He waved a double-barreled shotgun almost as ancient as he was past the window. “Alonzo called the old gang together, said there was big trouble brewing. We’re a-guarding you, son.”

“Ah. I see.” I smiled back at him and sat down at the dressing table. Random Garrett took that for the end of our conversation and withdrew from the window.

I’d never known that Mr. Bellamy had a gang. I was tempted to take that literally, especially since seeing him move so fast at the boarding house fire. He wasn’t as sick as he let on to be, if I didn’t miss my guess. And why did I need protection? On quick reflection, that question seemed pretty foolish. Whether or not Mr. Bellamy knew anything about the rest of what was going on around Augusta these last few days, he and Floyd had found me in a state of near-collapse next to a bullet-riddled car.

My bladder expressed an urgent need for the chamber pot, but with Random Garrett standing around outside my window I felt shy, even about a little pissing. I was in my skivvies under the pajamas, so I found one of Floyd’s flannel bathrobes and wrapped it around me. The Bellamys didn’t heat the house, so there was a good bit of heavy, moth-eaten clothing in the wardrobe.

Between my bad leg and my newfound tendency to lurch, I didn’t feel confident about the trip down the stairs. Still, I figured the long walk to the outhouse was better than having old Mr. Garrett listening to my every move. So to speak.

I shuffled over to the door. As I put my hand on the handle to open it, I heard a steady chirping, like a cricket or a small bird. Only it was too regular, the kind of noise you might get from tone generator from an electronics test bench. I looked around the room carefully. The noise was coming from the vicinity of my pants.

The handset radio , I thought. Floyd had brought it up from the Cadillac and left it in here with me. And now my aircraft wanted to talk to me. The thought warmed my heart.

I stumbled over to the chair where my pants hung, carelessly tossed, and fished around under them until I found the thing. It was wrapped in my t-shirt. I noticed both the t-shirt and my work shirt were damp with fresh blood. I figured a bullet had grazed my scalp, which explained both the passing out and the headache. As soon as I touched the handset the chirping stopped. It felt warm and tingly, but nowhere near scorching like it had been in the car.