Jay Lake - Rocket Science

“That would be you, Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus.

“Right, me. I’ll soar to heaven and take my place among the stars with you. Unfortunately, at the moment I’m in this outhouse with Mrs. Bellamy, who is well and truly stuck. I need to get away from here, and bring her help. If I manage to sneak down to the barn, how long will it take you to prep for takeoff?”

“Vernon!” she said.

“I can accomplish my atmospheric preflight sequencing in approximately two minutes.”

For someone who got their English from the gospel radio, Pegasus sure could talk like an operations manual. That made it easier for me to accept it as a machine.

“All right, Pegasus. I’ll get over there as fast as I can. You seem to know where I am all the time. As soon as you sense me coming, start your preflight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pegasus?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t call me sir.”

“Yes.”

I bent down over the pool again. “I’m going for help,” I told Mrs. Bellamy. “We can’t get you out, just the two of us, and your… husband’s… friends are out there. With guns.”

“Vernon Dunham, I know that. They had me locked up since yesterday in the root cellar, moved me out here when that policeman came.”

“Why?”

Her face set, impassive. “There’s some things you might be better not knowing, boy. I’m sorry. Just… get me help. Please?”

Squeezing her hand again, I turned to press my face against the outhouse door, down around knee-height, hopefully below where that old man on the roof would be likely to try shooting through the wood, and peeked out through the cracks. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. I would just have to brave it out. I figured I’d have to do it the ordinary way — open the door, walk out into the yard, and head for the barn. If Floyd or any of Mr. Bellamy’s gang stopped me, I would say that I was checking up on Floyd’s secret project.

The door creaked like an old leaf spring when I pushed it open. I stepped out into the dark yard, where there was just enough starlight to the bulk of the house, a few windows glowing from lanterns inside. I could see Floyd, too, standing right in front of me with one hand behind his back. He had a tense grin.

“Hey, Vernon.”

Had it been him that tied her up? Or one of those crazy old men with guns? “Uh, hello, Floyd.” I wished I were a better liar. Then maybe my voice wouldn’t have quavered so much.

“Spent a lot of time in the outhouse, I see. Thought I told you to use the chamber pot next time.”

I noticed the man on the roof had his rifle pointed at us.

“Not feeling too good,” I said, patting my stomach through the flannel bathrobe.

Floyd studied me, looking up and down, his eyes resting on my stained sleeve. “I see you’ve lost your candle. That’s a shame. Daddy told me to come apologize. We meant to dig a new trench and move the outhouse this morning, but what with the fire in town and your getting shot up, it just got away from us.”

“I didn’t notice anything unusual in there,” I said. Stupid, I told myself. I realized my breathing was faster, ragged, echoing like a drum between me and Floyd.

Floyd shook his head, sorrow and denial and indifference all together on his face as his smile quirked down to a little set of the lips. An expression I’d seen on Mr. Bellamy’s face. “Vern,” he said, “you never could lie worth a damn.” His eyes shone in the starlit darkness, tears or fear I couldn’t tell. He pulled his hand out from his back to show me a butcher knife, ten inches of sharp steel.

So he was in on it. Whatever ‘it’ was. He might as well have shoved his mother down that cesspit. For a moment, my eyes focused on the little hole at the upper corner of the blade. I shook my ahead, trying to clear the spell of the knife, and glanced up at the roof of the farmhouse. What would happen if I attacked Floyd and ran for the barn? The man on the roof was still watching us.

I looked back at Floyd, then glanced down at the ground. I didn’t want to meet my best friend’s eyes. Not now, not ever again. He laughed, a nervous chuckle that sounded forced. I felt a dim glimmer of hope at the fact that he felt the need to force it. Who was listening? Was Floyd laughing for his father? For Mr. Neville?

He whispered, “She was going to the Sheriff, Daddy said we had to stop her. We tied her up in the root cellar, but when Ollie come out here, we had to hide her better. Mr. Neville wanted to shoot her right then, but I couldn’t let him do that. Not my Mama !” Floyd was almost crying. “It was the best I could do, to save her. I had to leave her out there, to keep her away from Mr. Neville. What am I gonna do, Vern?” Then, more loudly, as he caught his breath. “I think you’d better come inside and have a little talk with Daddy.” Floyd waved me toward the kitchen door with the butcher knife.

“ Well, Vernon,” said Mr. Bellamy, slapping one hand against the pump of his shotgun. Mr. Neville sat next to him, in the same chair he’d had all evening, polishing the barrel of his pistol with one Mrs. Bellamy’s good napkins. Not that she had anything to say about it at this point.

I was flat terrified. Floyd was caught under their guns, just like me and Mrs. Bellamy, but he was trying to stay on their good side. Would he push me in the cess pit, too, to save me? Or worse? And the fact that Mr. Bellamy had finally gotten my name right after all this time was somehow all the more terrifying.

Mr. Bellamy leaned forward across the dining table. “What are we going to do with you?”

I could hear Floyd pace behind me. He still had that butcher knife. I just looked at Mr. Bellamy and shook my head.

“Is that ‘no?’” Mr. Bellamy looked at me like a roach he’d found in the flour tin. “Would that be, ‘I don’t know?’ Or maybe you’re saying ‘please don’t do anything at all to me, sir ?’”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. My throat was closing up, and it was hard to talk. The headache I’d woken up with earlier was back with a vengeance. I wondered how much it would hurt when they killed me. I prayed it would be a bullet in the head, while I wasn’t looking. I didn’t want to know.

“I see,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Well, Vernon, I got some bad news and some good news for you.”

My voice had gone to empty air. I had nothing to say anyway, so I just nodded. It felt as if I was on a string.

“The bad news is, we’re gonna have to kill you.” He smiled at me, a narrow-lipped ancestral echo of Floyd’s million-dollar grin. Mr. Bellamy must have been handsome once, back before the Spanish-American War. “The good news is, we can’t kill you quite yet. You still have to figure out how to fly our airplane.”

Pegasus. Mr. Bellamy had always known about Pegasus and Floyd’s little adventures in Belgium. It made me wonder how deep their planning had gone.

“It’s too bad you didn’t serve, Vern,” said Floyd from behind me. He sounded tense. Mr. Neville glanced up at him, glaring over my head. “A quick-witted fellow can get in on all kinds of money-making deals in Europe right now. There’s desperate people over there, angry, desperate people with a lot of cash money to throw around.”

It was too bad that Floyd didn’t get himself killed in the Battle of the Bulge , I thought. My decent, hard-working brother Ricky had to go die on some jungle trail in the Pacific while a cockroach like Floyd came back in one piece, loaded with cash. I couldn’t believe I’d ever cared for the little weasel, let alone spent most of my childhood with him.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Think of it as a motivational opportunity. You do your part fast, see, figure out how to fly that airplane. Then teach Floyd what he needs to know, we’ll kill you quick. Heck,” he said expansively, “I’ll let you pick how. Shotgun to the head, whatever. We’ve even got some rat poison.”