Petrogypsies (26 page)

Sonny struggled to his feet and marched right into Sprocket’s side. Me and Stevie held him for awhile until he got back to normal.

We practiced for the rest of the afternoon. Stevie stayed for dinner. The dactyls climbed back on top of Sprocket, who still didn’t object. Matter of fact, during dinner, he began to hum contentedly while they scratched around his top, every now and then picking at him with their beaks.

I nudged Steve. He looked at them, puzzled, then nodded. “They’re grooming him. They do that with each other all the time. It’s instinctive.”

“To do it with Drillers?”

“His hide is like theirs in some ways, leathery and tough. Maybe they figure he’s a big, ugly dactyl.”

“Ugly?” I said. “He’s an extremely handsome critter! Now, on the other hand, they are the ugliest—”

“Now, Henry Lee,” Star said. “Stevie is our guest.”

“Um. Yeah. Sorry. I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

“I guess so,” Stevie agreed. “I personally feel Sonny and Maureen are gorgeous birds.”

“Takes all kinds,” I muttered into my mashed potatoes.

* * *

The rest of the week was pleasant every which way. The weather stayed cool, with a short afternoon shower every day. Razer and Doc contributed to Stevie’s research. They took Sabrina and Razer’s current honey with them, to help them with the donation requirements, which Stevie had told them more about than he had me.

“Forewarned is foreskinned,” as Razer said. Doc and Sabrina and Razer’s honey thought it was humorous.

The Grand Prix competition started on Wednesday night, and we all tried to attend most of the performances. They were held in the Rebecca Matthews Memorial Amphitheatre on the east side of the campus. During the day we mostly hung around camp and rehearsed, since we were scheduled to perform Doc’s composition for the judges on Saturday night. Doc said we was getting closer to what he heard in his head when he wrote the music.

Star was a bunch of fun to be around, happy and bouncy and, well, romantic as all get-out, to be entirely truthful about the matter.

Friday afternoon, she vanished from the camp for a couple of hours. Doc had given us the afternoon off so we could be rested up for the competition. We’d do a final run-through Saturday afternoon. I laid a towel up top on Sprocket and worked on my tan for a while.

I was woken by a horde of kids playing Red Rover over by the tables that held the dinner dishes. Sometime while I slept I had got up the nerve to do what I had been avoiding all week.

I padded up Sprocket’s length and climbed down into Razer’s old room. He had been staying mostly aboard Munchkin since him and Spivey had gotten together, and I had been promoted to acting
segundo
. He’d moved some of his stuff aboard her, but had left most behind for the time being.

I looked around the mess that was his room and spotted his bookcase half-buried under a stack of dirty jumpsuits. Razer had not been famous for his housekeeping.

I thumbed through the books for almost an hour, getting more depressed and feeling stupider every minute. Symbolic logic. Differential calculus. Organic chemistry. Organizational structure theory. Transcendentals. Statistical analysis. I couldn’t understand a hundredth of the contents of the books. Hell, I couldn’t pronounce the titles of most of them. No way I was going to be able to learn this stuff.

Papa had been right. Tenth grade was about my speed. I’d always wondered a little if I was stupid, but on a farm it didn’t matter much, long as you were smarter than the pigs. And it hadn’t mattered on the crew while I was merely one of the hands. But I wasn’t going to make it as a
segundo
. I didn’t have the brains. I’d reached too high, and now I was going to have to humiliate myself by asking Doc to let me go back to my old job.

Hey, that ain’t too bad, I told myself. Being a hand on Sprocket’s crew is a hell of a lot better than most other things. No, it wouldn’t be too bad. I could handle it. I could handle being stupider than Doc and Razer and Sabrina. And Star.

As I was climbing back out of Razer’s room to get my towel, I looked up and made out Star’s figure against the setting sun coming towards us. I slid down Sprocket’s side and headed to her.

“Hi, babe,” I said. “I missed you. Where you been?” I tried to hug her, but she wasn’t cooperating.

“Can’t I go anywhere by myself without getting the third degree?” she snapped.

“Well, sure, I just meant—”

But she had already stalked off. I stood there with my mouth open while she disappeared into Lady Jane.

Doc and Sabrina had set up a card table and a couple of folding chairs under a nearby tree and were hunched over doing the bookkeeping for Sprocket and Lady Jane together.

Doc looked at me sympathetically.

“What’d I do?” I asked him. “All I said was I was happy to see her.”

Doc’s mouth twisted. “Yeah, that’s what it sounded like to me.”

“She’s got a lot on her mind right now, Henry Lee,” Sabrina said.

“Like what? If she’s got a problem I’d do anything I could to help.”

Sabrina didn’t reply.

“Cute buncha kids, ain’t they?” Doc said, nodding toward the mob playing Red Rover.

“Don’t change the subject,” I said. “If y’all know something—”

“All these kids around, you’d think you’d see more women that are with child. ‘Course, with some women, it ain’t all that visible. At least, not early on.”

Sabrina punched him on the shoulder. “Goddammit, Doc, you promised.”

I turned and headed toward Lady Jane’s mouth. Behind me I heard them cranking up for a good one.

“Well, hell, the way she’s been treatin’ the boy, ain’t hardly—”

“You just can’t keep your big trap shut, can you?”

* * *

I scratched on her curtain and she came to it.

“I wish you’d have told me you was pregnant, Star,” I said. So much for building up to things gradually.

She didn’t even get mad, just leaned on her bedstead and pulled a cheroot out of the dresser drawer. “Sabrina told you. She didn’t have any right to do that.”

“Nope, she didn’t do it. If her and you had your way, I’d still be stumblin’ around in the dark, blaming myself, not knowin’ how come half the time you act like I got hoof-and-mouth disease.”

She looked at the cheroot and sucked on it for a minute, but didn’t move to light it. “I only found out for sure today. Guess I oughta give these up for the time bein’,” she said. “The doctor says—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I ain’t sure it’s any of your business.”

“Any of my business? It damn well is my business!”

Then I had a thought on how it might not be my busines, after all.

“Is the baby maybe not mine? Is that what this whole deal is about? Well, I don’t care whose it is, I’ll still care about it like it was mine.” Could be some other fella that got her in the family way, and she was gonna choose him? I didn’t like that thought at all. “Whoever the other fella is, if there is one, he won’t make a better papa than me,” I said. “He won’t care for y’all as good as me. I swear to God—”

“You’re the daddy, Henry Lee,” she said in a low voice. “That’s one thing I know for sure.”

To be honest, I was relieved to hear that. I wasn’t lying when I said I would have loved it like my own, but this way would be easier and better. “Well, what is the problem, then? We get married and settle down.”

“You never mentioned getting married before this, Henry Lee.”

“Well—this changes things. It ain’t just us we have to think about now. You’re gonna need somebody to help take care of you and the baby.”

She crumpled the cigar in her hand. “Don’t you say that, don’t you even think it! I ain’t some empty-headed milk cow of a farmgirl, lookin’ to put a shotgun to some man’s back. I wouldn’t have a man that just wanted to marry me ‘cause he thought he had to take care of me. I can take care of myself pretty damn well already!”

“Well, goddammit, that ain’t why I said it! I personally would be extremely honored if you would marry me!” I shouted. I always was the romantic type.

She smiled and I smiled back, and it was okay for a half a second. Then she turned away. I sat on the bed and laid a hand on her leg. “Aw, come on, Star. We can work it out.”

“That’s the problem,” she sobbed. “I don’t know if I want to work it out.”

“Huh?”

“I’m twenty-two years old, Henry Lee. I don’t want to settle down and be somebody’s wife. I don’t want it a bit. We been seeing each other for almost two years, which is the longest in my life. I been getting with you like Sabrina is with Doc. That’s fine for them, hell, they must be thirty-five or forty years old.”

“But you’re pregnant!”

“So? Maybe I won’t stay that way.” She popped the stump of the cheroot back in her mouth and sucked on it furiously.

It took me a few seconds to realize what she meant. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“It’s my body, Henry Lee.”

“This is our
baby
you’re talking about!”

“No! It’s a bunch of cells in my body that may become a baby in time.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes, I do.” She looked at me levelly. “I had an abortion when I was seventeen, Henry Lee. It wasn’t the best experience of my life, but it wasn’t the worst, either. I survived it.”

“But the baby didn’t.”

She turned white. “Oh, damn, Henry Lee. That was a low one. I think you better leave now.”

“
Nosir
. If we’re gonna stay together, you can’t go killing our baby.”

Then she was at me, crying and hitting me hard with balled fists. “Leave me alone, Henry Lee! Get out of here!” She shoved me into Lady Jane’s corridor and against the far wall. “Get away from me!”

“Goddammit!” I roared. “I want to do the right thing for you and the baby! You can’t do this!”

She backed away from me, every muscle in her body tense. “Fuck you! I never said you could run my life for me.”

Then she disappeared into her room. Lady Jane wouldn’t open the curtain again no matter how much I pounded on her.

* * *

The bleachers were empty, except for several couples smooching and hugging on the top row. A dozen people wandered around between the Driller and the mechanical rig, not doing much of anything. The mechanical rig was idle. I asked one of the guys over by the drilling floor, and he said they were having to replace a part before they could resume making hole. I sat on the bottom row of the bleachers and stared off at the horizon, listening to the Driller hum while he worked. I had brought my ax and the Pignose with me. I played quietly along with the Driller.

After a while, somebody sat down beside me and shoved a sack-covered bottle at me. I didn’t even bother to see who it was, just tilted the bottle up and took a slug.

“Life sucks hard vacuum, sometime,” Stevie said when I handed back the bottle.

“Yeah.”

“You walk over here all the way from the camp?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You in as rotten a mood as you look to be?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Me, too. How about we get so drunk we fall down and bark like dogs?”

“Sounds like a great idea to me.”

* * *

We left Stevie’s apartment, a block from campus, with a quart apiece. By the time we found ourselves on the roof of the Vet Building, each bottle was about half empty. An optimist would have said they were half full, but neither me nor Stevie were optimists at the time.

Stevie lurched over to the big chicken-wire cage that the dactyls lived in. They rustled and ruffled their feathers and made clicking chuckles when they recognized him. Sonny hopped down from his perch and waddled over and stuck his beak through the mesh.

“These are my babies, Henry Lee,” Stevie said mournfully. He reached in and scratched the back of Sonny’s head. “I helped make ’em out of spare parts. Helped breathe life into ’em. They love me. Nobody else loves me, but they do.”

“Aw, Stevie, they ain’t the only ones love you.” I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, because nobody loved me neither, so maybe I didn’t sound real convincing.

“Yes, they are,” Stevie said. “Only ones in the world.”

“Aw, I bet … I bet your momma and poppa love you.” I leaned against the wall and slowly slid down until I was sitting. I pulled the bottle up and took some more medicine.

“I’m a orphan,” he said. “Left on a doorstep, like in a bad movie.” He took some more medicine, too. “Even my momma and daddy didn’t love me.” He hiccupped sadly.

Maureen saw how upset he was and came over and started licking his wrist with her purple tongue while he stroked Sonny.

“Nope, nobody but these stupid birds love me. An’ I love ’em back. Done my best to take care of ’em.” He put down his bottle and started stroking Maureen’s ruff. Then he pulled back, picked up his bottle, and stumbled over to stand in front of me.

“You remember Billy Bob calling me the Herring?”