Orbital Decay (28 page)

I remember that the compartment was jammed almost to capacity. Most people were standing in a dense circle three layers deep around the table; the lucky few who had staked out seats had been there two hours before the game, and weren’t moving for love or money. I recall one surprise: Joni Lowenstein, the beautiful woman who usually worked Olympus’ communications station during the second shift on weekdays, she who had resisted the advances of every guy on Skycan, who hardly spoke to any beamjack anymore except as “Skycorp Command” over the comlink. She turned out to be a true blue-eyed Cards fan and managed to spirit herself into one of the few tableside seats to yell for her team throughout the game. The men present were too astonished to even think about making a pass at her.

I suspect Joni was there mainly to watch Shelly Smith play. That sours the memory a little, because Shelly’s blowing it at the bottom of the seventh was what lost the game for the Cards. It was a bad moment for the first female player on a major league baseball team, and I was surprised that Joni watched the game through to the bitter end.

The tri-vee tables were two of the few luxuries Skycorp had sent up to us. There was one in each rec room and they were blessings, nice Mitsubishi systems with stereo sound and overhead TV screens for the close-up shots. A holographic image projected on the tabletop showed the diamond and the outfields as a three-dimensional diorama painted in ghostly translucent light, the players as three-inch images running across the table. With a little imagination, one could imagine himself or herself up in the nosebleed section of Busch Stadium squinting down at the field. We had to keep the cats off the table, because it was so convincing to them that they would bat with their paws at the players on first and third base or go snatching after an outfielder running to intercept a pop fly.

It was a good game, which ended in tragic defeat for the Cardinals. The St. Louis team had started off strong with Cox and Bingham taking home in the first two innings and Caruso stealing home during a stumble by the Cubs’ Kelso, but by the end of the fifth the old Cards curse of early burnout set in when a rookie dropped a base hit, which the Cards screwed up in catching and thus let two Cubbies run home. Things got better for the Cubs and worse for the Cards after that, especially when the Cards coach sent in Ron Lucey as the relief pitcher. Lucey had been a promising rookie once, but his megabuck salary had sapped away his drive, and through the rest of the game he sent erratic pitches to the Cubs batters, who either ignored them or sent them slamming into the stadium’s outfield walls. The Cards fans in the west rec room became surly around that time; if there were any Cubs fans in the room, they either kept mum or had the wisdom to go over to the east rec room, where they were having a good time.

The killing blow in the seventh happened when one of Lucey’s weird pitches was clobbered by a Cub heavyweight named DiPaula, straight into right field. Shelly Smith ran to intercept it, stumbled at the last minute, let it drop, recovered, grabbed the ball and flung it at second base… too much too late, because by then DiPaula was rounding second and a schmuck named Lomax, who had made it to third base on luck alone, was prancing across home plate like a sixteen-year-old who had copped a feel on his first date. The error was compounded by the Cards’ second baseman missing Smith’s throw, which allowed DiPaula to run home a moment later. Shelly Smith crumpled to her knees and the Cubs took the lead, and the screams in the west rec room could be heard throughout the station.

Virgin Bruce, who had been sitting quietly in a chair behind first base throughout the last two innings, crumpled a near-beer can in his fist and chucked it across the table. It fell like an aluminum meteor on a Cubs player, passed through his ghostly miniature body, and bounced off the table. “Sonuvagod-damnbitch,” he snarled, getting up from his chair. “I can’t stand to watch anymore.” He pushed through the crowd and headed for the refrigerator. A few guys eyed his empty chair covetously, but no one made a move to claim it. You don’t tempt fate that way.

It was just as well that Bruce stayed away for the next two innings. Smith’s bad play was the end of the game for the Cards; the Cubs managed to repulse them from bringing any more men home for the rest of the game, and the final score was 4-3 in favor of Chicago. We let Asimov the cat onto the table to maul the 3-D image of Fred Bird as he pranced around the pitcher’s mound, and most of the crowd climbed up the ladder out of the rec room, probably bound for the east rec room to take their frustrations out on the Cubs fans there.

That left a few people sitting around the now empty tri-vee table: Joni, Dave Chang, Mike Webb, Claude Hooker, and myself. I had pulled out my Tandy PC and unfolded the screen, preparing to finish the chapter of
Ragnarok Night
I had been suffering over for the past week, but somehow a bull session got started and I didn’t get more than a line written. A few minutes later Virgin Bruce, who was getting over his apoplexy from watching his team lose, came back to the table and sat down in a vacant chair.

Somehow—and don’t ask me how; you know the way bull sessions tend to go—the subject drifted to home towns. I remember Mike Webb telling a long story about his juvenile delinquency down South, and Chang telling some anecdotal tale about a Chinese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown which used to serve up cat as an entree, which didn’t amuse Joni, who was stroking Asimov in her lap. Everyone seemed to take turns in relating their favorite tall tales except for Popeye, who as usual was reticent about his past. We didn’t push him on it; there was something dark and ugly in Hooker’s past, and the beamjack was within his rights to be secretive about it. The unwritten rule and all that.

However, that didn’t stop Joni from turning to Virgin Bruce, who was seated to her right, and saying, “Bruce, you grew up in St. Louis, didn’t you?”

I could see Bruce shift uncomfortably in his seat. He was being put on the spot. Any guy who would have tried to pry something out of Neiman about his past probably would have been told to go to hell. However, Joni was the best-looking of the few women aboard Skycan, and Bruce had been pursuing her since anyone could remember. Lowenstein had always been cold to our resident ex-biker, calling him a greaseball and a motorhead and so forth, but now here was a rare circumstance—probably arising from the fact that they appeared to have at least one thing in common, both being Cards fans—in which she was actually addressing him in a civil tone. The only problem was that she was subtly asking him to talk about the one thing Bruce
never
talked about: what he had done before becoming a beamjack. She was breaking the rules, but how could Bruce cry foul, when it was his first, and perhaps only, chance to win some points with the object of his desire?

Virgin Bruce looked down at his hands and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I used to be from there,” he said. “Outside of it, actually. Little town called Wentzville, right outside the county line.”

“You were with a bike gang there, weren’t you?” Joni prodded.

“Uh-huh,” he replied slowly, and paused. “Satan’s Exiles. I used to ride with Satan’s Exiles.”

Joni nodded. “I heard of them,” she said. “I went to college at Washington University.” She pointed at the tattoo on his left bicep, the dagger stuck through a heart, with the words “Virgin Bruce” written underneath. “Is that where you got the tattoo?”

“Uh-huh,” he said without looking at her.

Joni leaned forward in her chair towards Bruce. “How did you get the name?” she asked teasingly. “Are you a virgin?”

Oh, my God, I thought. I glanced around the table and saw that everyone’s eyes were as wide as mine. If there was ever a question which was guaranteed a punch in the mouth from Bruce, it was that one, as a few unsuspecting green crew members had learned in the past. “Lowenstein, you like to live dangerously, don’t you?” I murmured. Someone had to warn the poor girl, after all.

To my surprise, Virgin Bruce shot me a dirty look. “Clam it, Sloane,” he said in that calm but ever-so-deadly voice he used to intimidate people aboard Skycan. Then he smiled and looked back at Joni. “You want to find out for yourself, babe?” he replied in a soft, challenging tone.

Now I thought it was Joni who was going to punch
him
in the mouth. She turned beet red for a moment. But then she apparently decided to up the ante in this psychological poker game. She shook back her blond hair, leaned back in her chair, and lifted her long legs to place them across each other
in his lap.

“Tell me about it, Brucie,” she said. “Tell me your life story, and we’ll see about that.”

For a moment the beamjack and the communications officer stared at each other, while the rest of us tried to make up our minds whether to move our chairs closer or duck for cover under the table. To this day I still haven’t decided if Joni Lowenstein really knew what she was doing, playing with fire like that. Maybe she was just bored like the rest of us and was looking for amusement. Or maybe she secretly had the hots for Bruce after all—as Tom Rush once said in a song, ladies love outlaws—and wanted Virgin Bruce to do something to prove himself to her.

Whatever her motivation was, it worked. Bruce clasped his hands together and rested them on Joni’s ankles—she didn’t move her legs—and began to talk about himself.

It wasn’t his whole life story, of course; he skipped the Charles Dickens routine of starting with his childhood, and picked up the story with him being a helicopter pilot in Nicaragua, mainly flying as an ambulance pilot supporting the 514th Medical Company. He left the service with a Purple Heart and a couple of citations for bravery under fire, and went back to his home state of Missouri, no longer the green, innocent eighteen-year-old kid who had been drafted shortly after leaving high school.

He didn’t say how he fell in with the Satan’s Exiles except that he had been riding motorcycles all his life. “A lot of the guys in the outfit were Vets also,” he said, “and after getting back from Central America I wasn’t ready to put on a suit and tie, go work for an insurance company, y’know, act like nothing had happened. I used to wake up nights, still flying in with rockets zinging all around the cockpit. I needed something more real than a desk and a home in the suburbs and ten kids, if you know what I mean.”

By his account, the Exiles were relatively tame for a bike club. Although they had all the regalia and attitudes of a “one-percenter” group—their colors on the back of leather vests, the customized Harley Davidsons, the crazy women who hung around with them, and the disdain for helmet laws—they weren’t in the hard-core class of the Outlaws or the Hell’s Angels. “I mean, we weren’t pseudo-bikers either, like the weekend bikers who had straight jobs Monday through Friday and wore Nazi helmets Saturday and Sunday,” he said with a sneer, “but we weren’t into the badass stuff that the big groups did.”

Joni had to prod him some more before he finally told how he got his handle of Virgin Bruce. He seemed reluctant to let that loose. “It was during the initiation,” he said at last. “One of the things we had to do was go out to this whorehouse which operated in Callaway County off 1-70. There were lots of nice chicks there, y’know, and some of the boys who weren’t hitched seriously to their old ladies would hit the place frequently. But there was this one fat old lady, the one who ran the place. Her name was Cecilia, and man, she had a face that could stop a clock. Never bathed either. She was bad news, man…”

“Let me guess,” Popeye said. “You had to lay her, right?”

“Uh-huh. But with all the gang watching.” Everyone laughed, and Bruce shook his head. “Oh, man, it was
bad
,” he said ruefully. “The boys would get you drunk and stoned downstairs first, with all these good-looking women with hardly any clothes on walking around acting like they were waiting for you, y’know, and the boys would be promising that all you had to do was satisfy this
one
woman, right? And then, when you were about ready to pass out, they’d march you upstairs to this little bedroom and open the door, and there
she
was, lying on a bed which looked like it was ready to break under her. ‘There she is, Bruce!’ they yelled. ‘Go for it! She’s all yours!’”

I laughed, and so did the rest of the guys sitting around the table, but I glanced over at Joni and noticed that she wasn’t smiling. She gazed at Virgin Bruce with an expression that suggested she was not at all amused. However, she didn’t remove her feet from his lap, and she didn’t say what was on her mind at that moment. As if I couldn’t guess. No one else seemed to notice, however. Least of all Bruce, who kept on with his story.

“So the whole gang, y’know, is standing around watching and drinking beer, and what can you do, man? I got nekkid and climbed on top and started to do my best, right? And I got to admit, she was pretty good, as long as I kept my eyes shut…” That brought on more laughter, except from Joni, who at least smiled. “And there she was, stroking my ass and breathin’ in my face, and I could tell what she had eaten for dinner that night….” Laughter. “And then she… she…”

He stopped and took a deep breath. “
What
?” Chang howled. “Tell me, you sonuvabitch, or I’ll break this goddamn chair over your head!”

Virgin Bruce looked down at the tabletop for a moment. “She said, ‘Oh, Bruce!’” He turned his voice into a feminine, breathy snarl. “‘Ohhh, Bruce! You make me feel… like… like a
virgin
again!’”

It was then that we saw Popeye Hooker do something we had never seen before. We watched him crack up and lose it. Or at least I did; the rest of the guys, and Joni as well, were busy losing their own cools. Popeye split his so badly that he fell over backwards, keeled over in his chair, hitting the deck so hard that the wind got knocked out of him. “Virgin… virgin… virgin…” he gasped.

It took a few minutes for any of us to recover ourselves. “So, ah, the name stuck,” Dave Chang said at last, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Yeah, it did,” Virgin Bruce said, red-faced. “That became my handle. The next day they took me to a tattoo parlor in St. Louis and had it put on my arm.” He lifted his left bicep to show us. “And that’s how I got in the gang.”