John Varley - Red Thunder

“You think so?” Dak said. “I think the chain is pretty clear.” He showed us the shiny new-and very heavy-duty-padlock. “They’re avoiding us. We get to the house, nobody’s gonna answer the door.”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

WHEN WE GOTback to the Blast-Off the parking lot was almost full of the kind of twenty-year-old vehicles normal for the early evening, with a smattering of even older rattletraps that would be classics if they weren’t so rusted out. And parked close to the office in the yellow-striped “Manager” spot was a low, wide, brawny civilian version of the military HumVee, or Hummer. It was black and red, and looked as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor.

“Gotta be Travis,” Kelly said.

Dak and I paused for a moment to admire the thing, so we were a [116] few steps behind Alicia and Kelly as they ducked around the front desk and into the apartment behind. There was a great smell coming from back there, and laughter.

Jubal, Travis, and my mom were sitting around the worktable in the living room. Aunt Maria was just coming through the kitchen door with a steaming tray full of fried plantains and conch fritters. She set it on the table and scooped up a big bowl with tortilla chips at the bottom and another bowl that had held some of her famous homemade salsa, and headed back into the kitchen.

“Smells mighty good, Maria.” Travis ate a plantain from the tray.

“Real good, ma’am,” Jubal said, munching one. There was a salsa stain in his beard and another on his shirt.

The worktable is just an ordinary ten-foot folding cafeteria table. It’s usually covered with junk, knickknacks in various stages of assembly.

Aunt Maria is artistic. She had tried her hand at hundreds of kinds of handmade souvenirs until she found the best money-maker, which was shell sculpture. She made little tableaux of shell people, mostly with clam shells but with small cone and spiral shells and bits of coral and other stuff, stuck together with glue and clear silicone. She made shell families standing before shell houses, shell golfers swinging bobby-pin irons, shell surfers on oyster-shell boards hanging ten on shell waves, shell dogs peeing on shell fire hydrants. Some of her larger scenes were based on abalone shells, or conch shells sawed open. No two creations were alike, and we sold a lot of them.

My mother is not so artistic. While Aunt Maria glues her shells together, Mom paints four-inch plastic replicas of the Blast-Off Motel sign, mounts them on bases, and puts them in clear globes with water and plastic snow or glitter. Snowing in Florida? is usually the first thing the tourists say, but then a surprising number buy one.

Over the years we’ve made and sold dozens of different kinds of kitschy items like the snow globe and the shell people. I put out a plywood sandwich board every morning advertising souvenirs, lowest prices in town. It made the difference between staying open and filing for bankruptcy, sometimes.

Jubal was sitting on a folding chair at one end of the table, bent over [117] a “tree” of six plastic Blast-Off signs, all connected like the parts of a polystyrene airplane model kit before you break them off. He would frown intently at the sign, laboriously trace one of the letters with a fine paintbrush, then sit back to regard his work. He saw me looking at him and held up another tree he had finished.

“You ever made none of dese, Manuel?” he asked. About ten thousand , I thought.

“A few, Jubal. I’ve made a few.”

“I’m makin’ a dozen, me. You mama, she-”

“Betty,” Mom said, smiling at Jubal.

“You Betty, she give me dis one here.” He picked up a finished globe and shook it up, hard, then held it up and watched the snow swirl. “I never see no snow, me,” he said.

“One day, Jubal, one day,” Travis said. He was sitting between Mom and Aunt Maria’s empty chair, working on some unidentifiable shell sculpture. There was glue on his fingers and a small patch of his hair was standing straight up with silicone sealer in it. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

I suddenly felt feverish and a little sick to my stomach. I needed some fresh air. The closest way was through the kitchen.

Aunt Maria was in there, cooking up a huge pot of her famous picadillo. Nothing makes Maria happier than new mouths to feed, and I could tell from the empty jars on the stove that she was pulling out all the stops. Picadillo is basically just beef hash, but then you add olives and raisins and huevos estilo cubano and three or four kinds of peppers, pickled or fresh, all of them hot. We had it fairly often, but without all the trimmings and with cheaper cuts of meat than Maria was using today. I could smell her wonderful coconut bread baking in the oven.

No friend of mine could possibly enter Mom’s and Aunt Maria’s house without being offered food and invited to stay for dinner. Anything else was unthinkable. But the snack would be nachos and salsa and the dinner would usually be macaroni and cheese until they knew you better. The plantains and fritters and picadillo told me that Travis and Jubal had charmed them pretty quickly.

I hurried out the back of the kitchen, which led to the busy street [118] outside. I couldn’t seem to get a good breath, so I walked up and down the sidewalk for a bit, and finally started feeling better.

I watched from the street corner as our back door opened again and Travis stepped out. He was dressed a lot like Jubal today, with sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. He cupped his hands and lit one of the short, thin cigars he smoked every once in a while, then stood there with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, looking up at the Golden Manatee. For a moment, in profile, I could see the family resemblance with Jubal.

He caught sight of me, and ambled down the sidewalk.

“Bummer about the hotel,” he said, pointing at the Manatee.

“Lot of bummers around here,” I said.

“Shouldn’t let it get you down, though. Maria sent me out to get a few things. She said there was a good bodega around here somewhere…” He looked up and down the street.

“A few blocks inland,” I said. “I’ll take you.”

WE DIDN’T SAYanything for the first block. I could tell he was watching me.

“I like your family,” he said after a while.

“What there is of it,” I said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Means my father is dead. My mother’s parents won’t speak to her because she married a spic. My dad and Maria’s family won’t speak to my mom because she’s a gringa and they blame her that my dad’s dead.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re better off not knowing assholes like that.”

“My dad’s family, the Garcias, could help us put the motel on a good financial footing, maybe help us sell it. Mom won’t hear of it, of course.”

“Goes without saying, Manny. That’s one of the reasons she’s good people. She won’t kiss anyone’s ass.”

“Instead, we turn our living room into a third-world sweatshop.”

Travis puffed a few times on his cigar, which had almost gone out.

“You got nothing to be ashamed of. It’s honest work.”

[119] “I just wish you had… maybe given me some warning…”

“So you could fold up the table and vacuum and dust? That’s what Betty said when I knocked on the door. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women would have said the same thing, whether they lived in a pigsty or a place as clean as yours. I’ll say it once more: Don’t be ashamed of them, or of your work, or of yourself.

“Happens to most of us, Manny,” Travis went on. “Rich or poor, we get ashamed of Mom and Dad and what they do, or how they talk, or how they don’t have any money or how they have too much money, the dirty capitalist pigs.