Numbers Don't Lie (6 page)

Sometimes, anyway. I jammed the joystick all the way forward again.

The LRV groaned forward again, and groaned on. I pointed it into the slot and ducked. I saw a shimmering light, and I felt the machine shudder. The front of the LRV poked through the shower curtain into the sunlight, and I followed, the sudden heat making my plastic bag swell.

The batteries groaned their last. I jumped down and began to pull on the front bumper. Through the plastic bag I could hear the kids screaming; or were they cheering? There was a loud crackling sound from behind the shower curtain. The LRV was only halfway through, and the front end was jumping up and down.

I tore the bag off my head and spit out the cotton, then took a deep breath and yelled, “Wu!”

I heard a hiss and a crackling; I could feel the ground shake under my feet. The pile of tires was slowly collapsing behind me; kids were slipping and sliding, trying to get away. I could hear glass breaking somewhere. I yelled, “Wu!”

The front of the LRV suddenly pulled free, throwing me (not to put too fine a point on it) flat on my ass.

The ground stopped shaking. The kids cheered.

Only the front of the LRV had come through. It was burned in half right behind the seat; cut through as if by a sloppy welder. The sour smell of electrical smoke was in the air. I took a deep breath and ducked toward the curtain, after Wu. But there was no curtain there, and no shed—only a pile of loose boards.

“Wu!” I yelled. But there he was, lying on the ground among the boards. He sat up and tore the bag off his head. He spit out his cotton and took a deep breath—and looked around and groaned.

The kids were all standing and cheering. (Kids love destruction.) Even Frankie looked pleased. But the old man wasn't; he came around the corner of the garage, looking fierce. “What the Hell's going on here?” he asked. “What happened to my shed?”

“Good question,” said Wu. He stood up and started tossing aside the boards that had been the shed. The shower curtain was under them, melted into a stiff plastic rag. Under it was a pile of ash and cinders—and that was all. No cave, no hole; no rear end of the LRV. No moon.

“The cave gets bigger and smaller every month,” said Frankie. “But it never did that, not since it first showed up.”

“When was that?” asked Wu.

“About six months ago.”

“What about my jumper cables?” said the old man.

 

* * *

 

We paid him for the jumper cables with the change from the pizza, and then called a wrecker to tow our half-LRV back to Park Slope. While we were waiting for the wrecker, I pulled Wu aside. “I hope we didn't put them out of business,” I said. I'm no bleeding heart liberal, but I was concerned.

“No, no,” he said. “The adjacency was about to drop into a lower neotopological orbit. We just helped it along a little. It's hard to figure without an almanac, but according to the tide table for June (which I'm glad now I bothered to memorize) the adjacency won't be here next month. Or the month after. It was just here for six months, like Frankie said. It was a temporary thing, cyclical as well as periodic.”

“Sort of like the Ice Ages.”

“Exactly. It always occurs somewhere in this hemisphere, but usually not in such a convenient location. It could be at the bottom of Lake Huron. Or in mid-air over the Great Plains, as one of those unexplained air bumps.”

“What about the other side of it?” I asked. “Is it always a landing site? Or was that just a coincidence?”

“Good question!” Wu picked up one of the paper plates left over from the pizza and started scrawling on it with a pencil stub. “If I take the mean lunar latitude of all six Apollo sites, and divide by the coefficient of . . .”

“It was just curiosity,” I said. “Here's the wrecker.”

 

* * *

 

We got the half-LRV towed for half-price (I did the negotiating), but we never did make our million dollars. Boeing was in Chapter Eleven; NASA was under a procurement freeze; the Air & Space Museum wasn't interested in anything that rolled.

“Maybe I should take it on the road,” Wu told me after several weeks of trying. “I could be a shopping-center attraction: ‘Half a Chinaman exhibits half a Lunar Roving Vehicle. Kids and adults half price.' ”

Wu's humor masked bitter disappointment. But he kept trying. The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) wouldn't accept his calls. General Motors wouldn't return them. Finally, the Huntsville Parks Department, which was considering putting together an Apollo Memorial, agreed to send their Assistant Administrator for Adult Recreation to have a look.

She arrived on the day my divorce became final. Wu and I met her in the garage, where I had been living while Diane and I were waiting to sell the house. Her eyes were big and blue-green, like Frankie's. She measured the LRV and shook her head. “It's like a dollar bill,” she said.

“How's that?” Wu asked. He looked depressed. Or maybe skeptical. It was getting hard to tell the difference.

“If you have over half, it's worth a whole dollar. If you have less than half, it's worth nothing. You have slightly less than half of the LRV here, which means that it is worthless. What'll you take for that old P1800, though? Isn't that the one that was assembled in England?”

Which is how I met Candy. But that's another story.

 

 

* * *

 

We closed on the house two days later. Since the garage went with it, I helped Wu move the half-LRV to his back yard, where it sits to this day. It was lighter than any motorcycle. We moved the P1800 (which had plates) onto the street, and on Saturday morning, I went to get the interior for it. Just as Wu had predicted, the Hole was easy to find now that it was no longer linked with the adjacency. I didn't even have to stop at
Boulevard Imports
. I just turned off Conduit onto a likely looking street, and there it was.

The old man would hardly speak to me, but Frankie was understanding. “Your partner came out and gave me this,” he said. He showed me a yellow legal pad, on which was scrawled:

 

 

“He told me this explains it all, I guess.”

Frankie had stacked the boards of the shed against the garage. There was a cindery bare spot where the shed door had been; the cinders had that sour moon smell. “I was sick and tired of the tire disposal business, anyway,” Frankie confided in a whisper.

The old man came around the corner of the garage. “What happened to your buddy?” he asked.

“He's going to school on Saturday mornings,” I said. Wu was studying to be a meteorologist. I was never sure if that was weather or shooting stars. Anyway, he had quit the law.

“Good riddance,” said the old man.

 

* * *

 

The old man charged me sixty-five dollars for the interior panels, knobs, handles, and trim. I had no choice but to pay up. I had the money, since I had sold Diane my half of the furniture. I was ready to start my new life. I didn't want to own anything that wouldn't fit into the tiny, heart-shaped trunk of the P1800.

That night, Wu helped me put in the seats, then the panels, knobs, and handles. We finished at midnight and it didn't look bad, even though I knew the colors would look weird in the daylight—blue and white in a red car. Wu was grinning that mad grin again; it was the first time I had seen it since the Moon. He pointed over the rooftops to the east (toward Howard Beach, as a matter of fact). The Moon was rising. I was glad to see it looking so—far away.

Wu's wife brought us some leftover wedding cake. I gave him the keys to the 145 and he gave me the keys to the P1800. “Guess we're about even,” I said. I put out my hand, but Wu slapped it aside and gave me a hug instead, lifting me off the ground. Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu.

I followed the full Moon all the way to Alabama.

 

 

 

The Edge of the Universe

 

 

T
HE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE I HAVE NOTICED SO FAR
between the north and the South (they insist on capitalizing it) is the vacant lot; or maybe I should say, the Vacant Lot. Vacant lots in Brooklyn are grim, unappealing stretches of rubble grown over with nameless malevolent, malodorous plants; littered with roach-spotted household junk; and inhabited by scabrous, scrofulous, scurrying things you wouldn't want to look at unless it were out of the corner of an eye, in passing. Vacant lots here in Alabama, even in downtown Huntsville where I live and work (if study can be called work, and if what I do can be called study), are like miniature Euell Gibbon memorials of rustic runaway edibles and roadside ornamentals—dock and pigweed, thistle and cane, poke and honeysuckle, ragweed and wisteria—in which the odd overturned grocery cart or transmission bellhousing, the occasional sprung mattress or dead dog, the tire half-filled with black water, is an added attraction: a seasoning, you might say, that adds to rather than detracts from the charm of the flora. You would never cut through a vacant lot in Brooklyn unless you were being chased by a scarier than usual thug; in Alabama I cut across the same corner lot every day on my way from Whipper Will's
law
office, where I slept and studied for the bar, to Hoppy's Good Gulf where I had my own key to the men's room. I actually looked forward to my sojourns across the path and through the weeds. It was my closest regular contact with nature; or maybe I should say, Nature.

And Nostalgia, too.

One of the odd items of junk in the lot was a beaded seat cushion, of the kind much favored by New York cab drivers (particularly those from East Pakistan) back in the late 1980s, and still seen occasionally. This one had known better days, and all that was left were fifty or so large wooden beads strung together by twisted neoprene line in a rough sketch, as it were, of a seat; but it was enough to make it recognizable and to give me a warm hit of the Big Apple when I saw it two or three times a day. It was like hearing a horn honk or smelling a bagel. It lay half-on and half-off the narrow red dirt path that was my route to Hoppy's Good Gulf. I watched it gradually disintegrate, becoming every week a little less recognizable, but still familiar, like a neighborhood (or a friend) in decline. I looked forward to stepping over it several times a day, for much as I loved Candy (still do—we're almost Mr. and Mrs. now!), and was getting to
like
(at least) Alabama, I missed New York. We Brooklynites are urban animals, and what could be less urban than these faded little red brick Southern “downtowns,” deserted by both people and cars? I suspect they were always somewhat sad and empty, but nowadays they are sadder and emptier than ever. Like most American towns, north
and
South, Huntsville has seen its life blood flow from the old downtown to the Bypass; from the still, dark heart to the tingling, neon-lit, encircling skin of strip malls and fast food restaurants and convenience stores and discount centers.

Not that I'm complaining. Dead as it was, downtown suited me better than the Bypass, which is no place for a man on foot, which is what I was then: which is a whole other story, but one that might as well be told here, since it, too, is about Whipper Will, about an Edge (of town, not the Universe)—

And about a U-turn.

When I moved down here from Brooklyn to be with Candy, I had sold her the Volvo P1800 I acquired from my best friend Wilson Wu in return for helping him bring the LRV (Lunar Roving Vehicle) back from the Moon (which is also a whole other story, and one that I've told in “
The Hole in the Hole
”). I helped Candy maintain the car not only because I was her boyfriend—her soon-to-be-fiancé, in fact—but because the P1800, Volvo's first and only true sports car, is a rare classic with precious idiosyncrasies that not even a Southern shade tree mechanic (and the breed has no greater admirer than I) can be expected to understand. The carburetors, for example. The Volvo's twin slide-type SUs begin to leak air after a few hundred thousand miles, and according to Wu (and he showed me the math on this—of course!), the only way to get them in synch, especially after a move to another climate, is to run the Volvo up to 4725 rpm in third gear on a four- to six-percent grade on a day approaching the local humidic mean (temperature not a factor), and lean them out in eighth-turn stages, alternating between one and the other, until the exhaust note makes a twelve-inch tinfoil pie plate wedged between the frame and the transmission case sing the note A. I don't have perfect pitch but I was able to borrow one of those little C-cell powered guitar tuners, and there is a long six-percent grade on the old four-lane at the north edge of Huntsville, where it crosses the city limits and heads around the shoulder of Squirrel Ridge, the thirteen-hundred-foot Appalachian remnant that dominates the northern half of the county. Since Wu's procedure requires several passes, I went early on a Sunday morning when I knew the city cops would all be in church, and (my first mistake) used the
NO U-TURN; FOR POLICE ONLY
cut-across just past the city limits to shorten my way back down. I was finished, and getting ready to take the car back into town and pick up Candy at church (Methodist) when the ash-gray “smokey” dove out of the sun, as it were, and pounced.