“You must be Manny,” he said. “Dak’s told me about you. Why don’t you go inside and grab something to drink out of the icebox? I got nineteen kinds of imported beer and I don’t check ID.”
“A little early for me, but thanks.” I went to the patio door, which got out of my way as I was reaching to slide it open.
“Never too early for Trav,” Alicia said as the door closed behind me. She was standing at a counter in the kitchen, looking out the window at Dak and Travis. “Man’s a big drinker. Look there, three empties and they all still got dew on the outside.” I saw the beer cans next to a big refrigerator. I mean, a huge refrigerator, the kind they use in convenience stores, with glass doors so you can pick out what you want before you open the doors. Beer and soda, Gatorade, fancy water, some bottles of white wine. Pretty much anything you’d like in the way of [52] something cool. Beside it was a restaurant-sized ice maker and on shelves above that a real professional bartender’s selection of hard stuff, racks of clear stemware hanging from the ceiling, other barware behind glass-doored cabinets. And on the other side of that, another refrigerator and a huge freezer.
“Look at this,” Alicia said with disgust. She opened a refrigerator door and the big shelves were almost empty. A brown half head of lettuce, a couple fuzzy gray tomatoes, half a chicken and some bones drying out on a plate, a stick of oleo.
“And this.” Inside the freezer were stacks and stacks of the same kind of thick sirloins he had carried outside and plastic bags of Ore-Ida frozen steak fries.
“Aren’t you the nosy one?” I said. She frowned, then decided not to take offense. I got a can of 7-Up out of the fridge and popped the top.
“It’s been a least a month since anybody’s had any vegetables here other than French fries. There’s cases of ketchup in one of those cupboards, I guess some folks call that a vegetable. I don’t see any fruit at all. The only reason there’s no dirty dishes in here is that nobody uses any dishes except forks and steak knives.” She tossed a pair of plastic salad tongs into a matching plastic bowl and sighed. “I told ’em I was coming in here to make a salad to go with the steaks. I’ll bet Mr… sorry, I mean Colonel Broussard had a good laugh about that one.”
I went over to a door I thought might be a pantry and pulled it open. Sure enough. The room was bigger than room 201 at the Blast-Off and there was enough food in it to feed a family of five for several years. On the floor were sealed metal barrels of dry pasta, rice, flour, sugar, stuff like that, safe from bugs and rats. On the shelves above them were cans of just about everything, tuna and Spam, peaches and pears, soups to nuts. All of it was covered with dust. I started tossing cans to Alicia.
“Pinto beans, wax beans, green beans, garbanzos, lima beans, kidney beans, black beans, aha! Even some pinquitos.” She dropped the fourth can while trying to catch the fifth, then another, and another, and we were both laughing as I tossed her more cans. “Make him a three-bean salad, why don’t you? Or maybe a seven-bean.”
“I can make something out of this he’ll hate.”
[53] I wandered into the living room. It was fairly neat, but dusty and stale smelling, with the occasional sweatshirt or pair of dirty socks tossed on the floor.
“Still early stages,” Alicia said from the door. “No puke that ain’t been mopped up. He still picks up stuff, when he trips over it.”
“Maybe he’s just sloppy.”
She laughed. “Manny, this is a military guy. If he started out sloppy, you wouldn’t be able to bulldoze through this place. He’s gone downhill a lot since he was a spaceman. They don’t let you clutter things up on a station. You know that.”
She was right, I did.
“He probably doesn’t even think he’s an alcoholic,” she said.
I turned back to the living room. There were a lot of framed photos on the walls, mostly of him with famous people, including the one of the President giving him his medal. I recognized some of the faces. One section showed two young girl children. Daughters? No wife anywhere I could see.
There were gaps on these walls, too, rectangles lighter than the wall. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out pictures had once hung there. Pictures of people the colonel didn’t like anymore, was my guess.
The one bare wall turned out not to be a wall at all, but an eight-by-twelve-foot Sony Hi-Dee screen. The audio parts were hidden behind a mahogany panel, and a dozen speakers hung from the ceiling. Here was something very expensive that I could really appreciate. If he had termites in the walls, they’d be deaf by now.
I looked around once more, taking it all in. How the rich live. I’d never had much chance to get a close look at it.
I figured I wouldn’t have all that much trouble swapping lifestyles with him.
ALICIA CAME OUT of the kitchen with her big bean salad in a bowl, Broussard trailing dubiously behind her. I followed them to the patio, where Dak was just flipping the steaks, wearing a grease-spattered apron. Broussard took over the grill.
[54] “Dak tells me you run a hotel,” he said.
“My family does. The Blast-Off down on-”
“Sure, I know it.”
“Everybody knows the Blast-Off,” Dak said. “It’s a Florida institution. Can’t come to the Canaveral area and not send a Blast-Off postcard back home.”
“Sounds like a good business.”
“The card business? It’s okay.” Yeah, I didn’t say, and some weeks we make almost as much money on those damn cards, and the knick-knacks Mom and Maria make, as we make renting out rooms. Disgusting, when you think about it.
“Well, you ever decide to get a new sign, let me bid on the old one. One of the first things I saw in Florida that I liked. You know, sometimes I could pick it out on the way up. Just look for the little orange rocket blasting off.”
“No kidding? That’s… that’s great.” I looked at Dak and saw the notion had tickled him, too. The crummy old Blast-Off, and an astronaut looking down on it… or even just driving down the avenue, passing it, feeling good for a moment.
“I’ll keep that in mind, Colonel Broussard,” I said.
“Just Travis, okay? You guys saw me falling-down, snot-slingin’ drunk. I figure y’all have to swallow hard to call me Colonel.”
Nobody had anything to say to that, but the awkward silence passed pretty quick. Travis went back into the kitchen to get the cardboard bucket of fries he’d popped into the microwave. He came back with forks and knives and paper plates.
He cut into one of the steaks, peered inside, and looked up.
“Who likes ’em so rare they’re still chewin’ their cud?”
Alicia and Travis did. Dak and I said medium rare would do. That left one on the grill, and Travis pushed a button on the outside wall before he sat at the table. Beyond the empty pool the barn door opened and the short, roly-poly guy came out. Travis heaped fries on all five plates.
“Jubal, these are friends of Dak. Alicia, and Manny. Y’all, this is my cousin Jubilation. Everybody calls him Jubal.”
[55] Jubal nodded awkwardly, bowed his head, then looked up again.
“Travis, would you offer a blessin’ over dis here food?”
“Shouldn’t we wait till your steak gets here, Jube?”
“You kin bless it from ovah here, you.”
And by golly we all bowed our heads and Travis offered a short prayer. When it was over, Jubal tied a big cloth napkin around his neck and dug in to the plate of fries. When his steak arrived, mostly black on the outside, and not much better on the inside, he ate that in record time, then shuffled off to the barn again.
“Don’t take offense,” Travis told us. “Jubal never caught on to polite manners. He’s just never seen the use of saying good-bye… saying a lot of things, actually. But I’ve got him pretty well used to ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ ”