Skeleton Crew (45 page)

He caught himself on the edge of toppling over and brought his fist into his nose again, screaming at the pain.

The black thing arrowed at the raft immediately and squeezed underneath—it could hear, perhaps, or sense ... or
something.

Randy waited.

This time it was forty-five minutes before it came out.

His mind slowly orbited in the growing light.

 

(Route 66 remember
the Corvette George Maharis in the Corvette Martin Milner in the Corvette do you love the Corvette

 

afternoon.

Randy was crying.

He was crying because something new had been added now—every time he tried to sit down, the thing slid under the raft. It wasn’t entirely stupid, then; it had either sensed or figured out that it could get at him while he was sitting down.

“Go away,” Randy wept at the great black mole floating on the water. Fifty yards away, mockingly close, a squirrel was scampering back and forth on the hood of Deke’s Camaro.

“Go away, please, go anywhere, but leave me alone. I don’t love you.”

The thing didn’t move. Colors began to swirl across its visible surface.

Randy tore his eyes away and looked at the beach, looked for rescue, but there was no one there, no one at all. His jeans still lay there, one leg inside out, the white lining of one pocket showing. They no longer looked to him as if someone was going to pick them up. They looked like relics.

He thought:
If I had a gun, I would kill myself now.

He stood on the raft.

The sun went down.

Three hours later, the moon came up.

Not long after that, the loons began to scream.

Not long after
that,
Randy turned and looked at the black thing on the water. He could not kill himself, but perhaps the thing could fix it so there was no pain; perhaps that was what the colors were for.

He looked for it and it was there, floating, riding the waves.

“Sing with me,” Randy croaked. “I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers ... I don’t have to worry ’bout teachers ... I’m so glad that school is out ... I am gonna ... sing and shout.”

The colors began to form and twist. This time Randy did not look away.

He whispered, “Do you love?”

Somewhere, far across the empty lake, a loon screamed.

A
t first glance it looked like a Wang word processor—it had a Wang keyboard and a Wang casing. It was only on second glance that Richard Hagstrom saw that the casing had been split open (and not gently, either; it looked to him as if the job had been done with a hacksaw blade) to admit a slightly larger IBM cathode tube. The archive discs which had come with this odd mongrel were not floppy at all; they were as hard as the 45’s Richard had listened to as a kid.

“What in the name of
God
is that?” Lina asked as he and Mr. Nordhoff lugged it over to his study piece by piece. Mr. Nordhoff had lived next door to Richard Hagstrom’s brother’s family ... Roger, Belinda, and their boy, Jonathan.

“Something Jon built,” Richard said. “Meant for me to have it, Mr. Nordhoff says. It looks like a word processor.”

“Oh yeah,” Nordhoff said. He would not see his sixties again and he was badly out of breath. “That’s what he said it was, the poor kid ... think we could set it down for a minute, Mr. Hagstrom? I’m pooped.”

“You bet,” Richard said, and then called to his son, Seth, who was tooling odd, atonal chords out of his Fender guitar downstairs—the room Richard had envisioned as a “family room” when he had first paneled it had become his son’s “rehearsal hall” instead.

“Seth!” he yelled. “Come give us a hand!”

Downstairs, Seth just went on warping chords out of the Fender. Richard looked at Mr. Nordhoff and shrugged, ashamed and unable to hide it. Nordhoff shrugged back as if to say
Kids! Who expects anything better from them these days?
Except they both knew that Jon—poor doomed Jon Hagstrom, his crazy brother’s son—had been better.

“You were good to help me with this,” Richard said.

Nordhoff shrugged. “What else has an old man got to do with his time? And I guess it was the least I could do for Jonny. He used to cut my lawn gratis, do you know that? I wanted to pay him, but the kid wouldn’t take it. He was quite a boy.” Nordhoff was still out of breath. “Do you think I could have a glass of water, Mr. Hagstrom?”

“You bet.” He got it himself when his wife didn’t move from the kitchen table, where she was reading a bodice-ripper paperback and eating a Twinkie. “Seth!” he yelled again. “Come on up here and help us, okay?”

But Seth just went on playing muffled and rather sour bar chords on the Fender for which Richard was still paying.

 

He invited Nordhoff to stay for supper, but Nordhoff refused politely. Richard nodded, embarrassed again but perhaps hiding it a little better this time.
What’s a nice guy like you doing with a family like that?
his friend Bernie Epstein had asked him once, and Richard had only been able to shake his head, feeling the same dull embarrassment he was feeling now. He was a nice guy. And yet somehow this was what he had come out with—an overweight, sullen wife who felt cheated out of the good things in life, who felt that she had backed the losing horse (but who would never come right out and say so), and an uncommunicative fifteen-year-old son who was doing marginal work in the same school where Richard taught ... a son who played weird chords on the guitar morning, noon and night (mostly night) and who seemed to think that would somehow be enough to get him through.

“Well, what about a beer?” Richard asked. He was reluctant to let Nordhoff go—he wanted to hear more about Jon.

“A beer would taste awful good,” Nordhoff said, and Richard nodded gratefully.

“Fine,” he said, and went back to get them a couple of Buds.

His study was in a small shedlike building that stood apart from the house—like the family room, he had fixed it up himself. But unlike the family room, this was a place he thought of as his own—a place where he could shut out the stranger he had married and the stranger she had given birth to.

Lina did not, of course, approve of him having his own place, but she had not been able to stop it—it was one of the few little victories he had managed over her. He supposed that in a way she
had
backed a losing horse—when they had gotten married sixteen years before, they had both believed he would write wonderful, lucrative novels and they would both soon be driving around in Mercedes-Benzes. But the one novel he had published had not been lucrative, and the critics had been quick to point out that it wasn’t very wonderful, either. Lina had seen things the critics’ way, and that had been the beginning of their drifting apart.

So the high school teaching job which both of them had seen as only a stepping-stone on their way to fame, glory, and riches, had now been their major source of income for the last fifteen years—one helluva long stepping-stone, he sometimes thought. But he had never quite let go of his dream. He wrote short stories and the occasional article. He was a member in good standing of the Authors Guild. He brought in about $5,000 in additional income with his typewriter each year, and no matter how much Lina might grouse about it, that rated him his own study ... especially since she refused to work.

“You’ve got a nice place here,” Nordhoff said, looking around the small room with the mixture of old-fashioned prints on the walls. The mongrel word processor sat on the desk with the CPU tucked underneath. Richard’s old Olivetti electric had been put aside for the time being on top of one of the filing cabinets.

“It serves the purpose,” Richard said. He nodded at the word processor. “You don’t suppose that thing really works, do you? Jon was only fourteen.”

“Looks funny, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does,” Richard agreed.

Nordhoff laughed. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “I peeked down into the back of the video unit. Some of the wires are stamped IBM, and some are stamped Radio Shack. There’s most of a Western Electric telephone in there. And believe it or not, there’s a small motor from an Erector Set.” He sipped his beer and said in a kind of afterthought: “Fifteen. He just turned fifteen. A couple of days before the accident.” He paused and said it again, looking down at his bottle of beer. “Fifteen.” He didn’t say it loudly.

“Erector
Set?” Richard blinked at the old man.

“That’s right. Erector Set puts out an electric model kit. Jon had one of them, since he was ... oh, maybe six. I gave it to him for Christmas one year. He was crazy for gadgets even then. Any kind of gadget would do him, and did that little box of Erector Set motors tickle him? I guess it did. He kept it for almost ten years. Not many kids do that, Mr. Hagstrom.”

“No,” Richard said, thinking of the boxes of Seth’s toys he had lugged out over the years—discarded, forgotten, or wantonly broken. He glanced at the word processor. “It doesn’t work, then.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that until you try it,” Nordhoff said. “The kid was damn near an electrical genius.”

“That’s sort of pushing it, I think. I know he was good with gadgets, and he won the State Science Fair when he was in the sixth grade—”

“Competing against kids who were much older—high school seniors some of them,” Nordhoff said. “Or that’s what his mother said.”

“It’s true. We were all very proud of him.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Richard had been proud, and Jon’s mother had been proud; the boy’s father didn’t give a shit at all. “But Science Fair projects and building your very own hybrid word-cruncher—” He shrugged.

Nordhoff set his beer down. “There was a kid back in the fifties,” he said, “who made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and about five dollars’ worth of electrical equipment. Jon told me about that. And he said there was a kid out in some hick town in New Mexico who discovered tachyons—negative particles that are supposed to travel backwards through time—in 1954. A kid in Waterbury, Connecticut—eleven years old—who made a pipe-bomb out of the celluloid he scraped off the backs of a deck of playing cards. He blew up an empty doghouse with it. Kids’re funny sometimes. The supersmart ones in particular. You might be surprised.”

“Maybe. Maybe I will be. ”

“He was a fine boy, regardless.”

“You loved him a little, didn’t you?”

“Mr. Hagstrom,” Nordhoff said, “I loved him a lot. He was a genuinely all-right kid.”

And Richard thought how strange it was—his brother, who had been an utter shit since the age of six, had gotten a fine woman and a fine bright son. He himself, who had always tried to be gentle and good (whatever “good” meant in this crazy world), had married Lina, who had developed into a silent, piggy woman, and had gotten Seth by her. Looking at Nordhoff’s honest, tired face, he found himself wondering exactly how that had happened and how much of it had been his own fault, a natural result of his own quiet weakness.

“Yes,” Richard said. “He was, wasn’t he?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if it worked,” Nordhoff said. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

 

After Nordhoff had gone, Richard Hagstrom plugged the word processor in and turned it on. There was a hum, and he waited to see if the letters IBM would come up on the face of the screen. They did not. Instead, eerily, like a voice from the grave, these words swam up, green ghosts, from the darkness:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! JON.

“Christ,” Richard whispered, sitting down hard. The accident that had killed his brother, his wife, and their son had happened two weeks before—they had been coming back from some sort of day trip and Roger had been drunk. Being drunk was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Roger Hagstrom. But this time his luck had simply run out and he had driven his dusty old van off the edge of a ninety-foot drop. It had crashed and burned.
Jon was fourteen
—
no, fifteen. Just turned fijteen a couple of days before the accident, the old man said. Another three years and he would have gotten free of that hulking, stupid bear. His birthday
...
and mine coming up soon.

A week from today. The word processor had been Jon’s birthday present for him.

That made it worse, somehow. Richard could not have said precisely how, or why, but it did. He reached out to turn off the screen and then withdrew his hand.