John Varley - Red Thunder

“Hurt me,” I said. Then we were kissing, and trying to wriggle out of our wet clothes at the same time. Wet jeans are the worst, and Kelly’s were pretty tight even when they were dry. It didn’t help that pretty soon we were laughing, then I’d gasp from a pain in my side and we’d try to be careful, and start laughing again. She was shivering, too, wet and cold. Finally we made it into the shower stall and turned on the hot water and made love there, she being careful not to touch my side, me not really caring.

We managed to get each other all soapy before one thing led to another again, and by the time that wave had crested we’d used up all Travis’s hot water.

“What are we going to wear?” she asked as we got out.

“Towels, I guess,” I said. “I’ll go see if Travis has anything.”

I wrapped a big towel around me. When I opened the door there was a pile of clean clothing there on the floor. I brought it in and held things up, one at a time. Two pairs of Bermuda shorts in Travis’s size, and two of Jubal’s tentlike Hawaiian shirts.

“Who gets the hula girls, and who gets the surfer dudes?” I asked her.

“Surfer dudes for me, dude,” she said, and I tossed the shirt to her.

[111] The shorts were a few inches too wide for me. The other pair were a tad tight in the hips and loose in the waist for Kelly. Both of us were almost swallowed by the shirts.

I heard a clothes dryer, found it at the end of the hall, and tossed our clothes in with Dak’s and Alicia’s, then found our way to the living room.

Alicia had a Band-Aid on her nose where it had been cut slightly, but it wasn’t broken. If any of us had been hit much harder than I had been by the picnic table we surely would have had some broken bones, but Alicia had hurt herself coming up beneath the table, not while we swirled through the air. Jubal and Kelly and Travis and Dak hadn’t been hurt at all.

“We got lucky,” Travis said. “I’m very sorry, ladies and gents, I didn’t know what sort of tiger’s tail I was twisting. My apologies.”

“It’s okay, Trav,” Dak said.

“No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all. I’m going to have to ask you all to just go home today. I don’t want anybody else around while me and Jubal sit down and figure out just what we’ve got here.”

“We aren’t afraid, Travis,” Kelly said, surprising me. She looked at the rest of us. “Well, we aren’t, are we?”

“Not me,” Dak said.

“I am afraid,” Travis said. “Not of blowing up my own old ass, but of hurting one of you children. I couldn’t live with that.”

“You couldn’t if we were children, which we are not,” Alicia said. “It’s Jubal’s gizmo. What do you think, Jubal?”

Everybody looked at him, and Jubal seemed to shrink.

“Oh, cher … I don’ know, me… I mean…” Alicia realized a decision like that was far beyond the man’s capabilities. She put her arm around his shoulder and whispered something in his ear, which seemed to cheer him up. He grinned at her.

“Jubal will go with his family, like always,” Travis said, not unkindly. “You can all come back tomorrow, and I’ll fill you in on what we’ve found out.”

“That’s cool,” Dak said. “Come on, folks, let’s hit the road before the morning rush hour starts.”

[112] “Not for another thirty minutes or so,” Alicia said, looking at her watch, which seemed to have survived the dunking.

“What, you like traffic, babe?” Dak asked her.

“No, I like my own dry clothes. I’m not going to be seen in public in Jubal’s shirt and Travis’s pants. I got my reputation to consider.”

I’D BEEN FALLINGbehind on my work at the Blast-Off, so I tore through piled-up chores that morning as well as I could with a bruised rib. I had the noon-to-six shift that day. I really should have taken Mom’s six-to-midnight, too, as she had covered for me twice that week… but I couldn’t. I fell asleep twice in the desk chair behind the reservation computer as it was.

At six, Kelly pulled into the lot at the wheel of a sexy little red Corvette. In addition to having the bitchin’est new cars in town, Strickland Mercedes gets the best trade-ins. Sometimes Kelly decides to test drive them for a day or two. What a hard life she has.

She hurried into the office. I could see she was as excited as me to get back to Rancho Broussard and see what Travis had found out. But Mom was there, too, so time had to be made for a hug and a kiss and a short chat. Mom approves of Kelly. Aside from being beautiful and rich, Kelly has been known to help us with some chores she has probably never had to do at her own house. How could a mother possibly object? So she pecked Kelly on the cheek and watched us climb into the red death machine, and waved as we pulled out of the lot.

[114] WE SPOTTED BLUE Thunder a quarter mile ahead of us soon after we got off the Pike. Kelly pressed the accelerator and we caught up with Dak without taxing the engine much. With a short toot on the horn, Kelly pulled past and then let the Corvette have its head for a bit. Blue Thunder was just a blue dot in the mirror when Kelly hit 90 mph.

We passed the jackleg backwoods church with all the signs again. There was a guy up on a ladder painting one of them. He was a little guy, in his seventies, dressed in paint-spattered overalls with no shirt. His bare arms looked incredibly scrawny, but I’ll bet he could have arm-wrestled me to death. I know this type of peckerwood, they work hard all their lives and why we don’t have guys like that lifting weights at the Olympics I’ll never know. There were a couple dozen open cans of what looked like interior latex sitting on the ground, all bright colors.

He was actually getting pretty good results. I’d sure seen worse roadside art, anyway. Nobody was ever likely to hang his stuff in a museum, but I liked it a lot better than that dude who slung paint at canvases and then sold his crap for thousands of dollars, and his stuff is hanging in museums.

He’d erected a few more four-by-eight slabs of grade-Z plywood, riddled with knotholes, and was creating new signs on them. He’d already altered some of his old ones.

“Looks like he’s had a new revelation,” Kelly said.

“Born again, again,” I suggested.

I saw Jesus several times on the signs, with a face as mournful as a basset hound. Blood was flowing from his thorny crown. He was on the cross in one picture, preaching on a mountaintop in another. And in a new one, he seemed to be coming down a ramp from a flying saucer. It looked like the one in The Day the Earth Stood Still . He probably saw that movie when he was twenty. A new sign read:

JESUS IS HERE

IN HIS FLYING SAWSER

[115] DO YOU HAVE YOUR

HEAVENLY HORDING PASS?

The sign he was working on read:

EZEKIEL SAW THE WHEE

He stopped his work and glared at us as we passed.

We turned the corner onto the Broussards’ private road… and Kelly slammed on the brakes. There was a heavy chain suspended between two posts, with a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging from it. We sat there looking at it for a while, then heard Blue Thunder sliding to a stop behind us. Kelly and I got out of the car. Alicia and Dak joined us at the chain.

“Looks like we’ve been stood up,” I said.

“And me with my brand new party dress,” Dak said. “Damn.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Dak kicked at the loose shell a few times, then once more, hard , for luck.

“Should we walk in?” Alicia wondered. “He did say he’d see us today.”