“I like that rule, too,” Mom said.
Travis had his back to the prisoner, and we all saw him wink.
“Then I guess we gotta kill him.”
For a moment I thought he’d gone too far, the guy looked like he might have a heart attack. He started babbling about how he’d go away, [289] forever, forget about the whole thing, he’d leave town, he’d leave the state. He’d do anything.
We all watched him until he ran down.
“Maybe we don’t have to, Travis,” Caleb said. “All we gotta do is hold his sorry ass for twenty-four hours, then what can he do?”
“That’s kidnapping!” Lawrence said, then realized what the alternative was. He babbled again about how he’d be happy to stay here, he wouldn’t cause any trouble.
Travis went outside and everybody but Caleb followed him. Kelly spoke first.
“Travis, he’s a drunk, he… oh, sorry.”
“No offense taken. I was thinking the same thing. Get him liquored up. Alicia, you got anything in that drug cabinet we could use as a Mickey Finn?”
“A what?”
“Something to knock him out for a while.”
“Oh, sure. No problem.”
“Okay. Caleb can watch him. He won’t need a gun, Betty, Caleb could take that pathetic loser apart with his bare hands. Give him all the booze he can drink, pop some pills in it. Dump him in an alley someplace, later. What’s he gonna do? It’ll be his word against all of us.”
“That’s what we’ll do, Travis,” she said. “He really burned me up. No way I was going to let the likes of him stop y’all.”
“Mom!” I said.
“You know I’d be happier if you didn’t go, Manny. But not this way.”
I gave her a big hug.
AND SO WE returned to the warehouse, with one more night and a day to spend inside. 2Loose had erected scaffolds around the ship and hung tarps around it.
We climbed the ramp and sealed the outer air-lock door, cycled the lock, entered the ship interior. The Monopoly game was as we’d left it. [290] Other than our cans of Coke having grown warm, it was as if we’d never been gone.
TRAVIS DIDN’T THROW us any more emergencies.
“I feel dirty,” he told us over the phone. “It’s so easy to humiliate a man, especially when he’s down. So easy. I’m not proud of it.”
“That’s something,” Dak said. “You don’t take pleasure in it.”
“But I did, when it was happening.”
“So did I,” Kelly said. “Anyway, it had to be done.”
“Jubal wants to know if he can stay with y’all for a while,” Travis said.
“What, he has to ask?” Alicia said. “Send him in.”
So Jubal joined the Monopoly game for an hour. He seemed unusually quiet, sweating a lot, very nervous. I hoped it was just opening night jitters, anticipation. I know I was feeling it. He couldn’t be worried about the trip. Could he?
We slept, we woke up, and we sweated out the last hours until six P.M., when we swung the door open and came down the ramp. Mom was there, and Jubal, and Grace, and Salty, and Maria, and Sam. There was a big flat cake with a little model of the ship standing on it, and the logo of Red Thunder spelled out in red icing. Maria, who had baked it, cut it and we all had a piece.
“Where’d you get the model?” I asked.
“Oh, we got ten thousand of ’em,” Mom said. “Didn’t Kelly tell you? We’re going to merchandise the hell out of this trip.” I looked at Kelly.
“Well, I’ve got to have something to keep me busy while y’all are gone, okay?”
“Fine with me, Kelly,” I said.
Then 2Loose gave us a tour of his masterwork. All the scaffolding and canvas had come down while we slept, and his masterpiece rose high in the air before us.
He had rendered the Six Days of Creation, from Genesis.
The first tank depicted the dividing of the light from the darkness, and I had almost been prophetic. God wasn’t in a low-rider, he was [291] doing a wheelie on a big Harley, and the Light was coming out of one tailpipe and the Darkness from the other. Shapes loomed in the big white and black clouds.
Tank two, the creation of the Firmament, which means Heaven, I think. How would a Cuban/French-Canadian maniac render Heaven? With lots of gold and lots of blue, and angels partying to boom boxes on Miami Beach.
On the third day God separated the waters from the dry land. Raging seas, towering mountains. “Let the Earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit after his kind…” He showed all that, and in the foreground was a brightly colored jungle.
Tank four, the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars. That may have been the most gorgeous panel of the six, stars whirling and exploding, the sun high above all.
Fifth day, creation of animals. Great whales, winged fowl, plus a lot of animals Noah must have forgotten to bring along on the ark.
And on the sixth day… created He the crew of the Red Thunder. That’s right, the six of us-2Loose not knowing Kelly wasn’t going, not knowing, in fact, that any of us were going, but one look at the last picture and you knew some vibe from our crazy little ship had touched his artist’s heart and told him the truth.
We were standing together, smiling, wearing our brown leather bomber jackets. Travis in the back, a hand on Kelly’s and Alicia’s shoulders, Jubal in a place of honor down in front of us.
“My goodness,” Alicia said. “This is really… something.”
“Do y’all like it?” 2Loose asked anxiously.
“You done good, amigo,” Travis said, slapping him on the back.
“We got our money’s worth,” Kelly said.
“What, you paid for this?” Travis asked.
“Shut up, Travis. It was my money, okay?”
Then it came time for somebody to smash a bottle of champagne over her… well, she’d have to sit in a cherry-picker to hit Red Thunder’s bow, so we settled for one of the landing struts.
Travis handed the bottle to Kelly, who looked surprised. But she took it.
[292] “I christen thee, Red Thunder,” she said, and choked up. She cleared her throat. “Bless all who sail in her.” She swung the bottle, hard, and we all applauded.
“And I think that’ll be my exit line, my friends,” she said. “I won’t be at the launch in the morning. I don’t think I could stand it.”
My throat was burning as I tried to hold back the tears. No one had anything to say, but Mom put her arms around Kelly and hugged her tight. Jubal went to her and hugged her, too. Then Kelly came to me, and we kissed. Her eyes were full of tears, which she blinked away.
“Come back,” she said.
“I will.”
And she turned and headed for the door, never looking back, just raising one hand in a small wave as she left.
The three of us were glaring at Travis, and he looked back at us defiantly.
“Okay, I’m the bad guy. What was I to do? You all heard my reasons.”
“Nothing, Travis, nothing,” Mom said. “You did what you had to do.”
I was still far from sure of that. And about 49 percent of me wanted to run after her, tell her I wasn’t going unless she went… but I didn’t think she’d respect me for it. I had to take her at her word, and she had said go.
“Now everybody get some sleep,” Travis said. “Bright and early tomorrow morning we lift off. Nothing short of a hurricane’s going to stop us now.”
I’d grown so superstitious about the project that I actually checked the weather report, though it was too early in the year for hurricanes. Sure enough, none was in sight.
And I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.
But I slept.
PART THREE
26
“JUBAL WON’T BE going with us,” Travis said. I had just taken a bite of a Krispy Kreme, and suddenly I didn’t want it.
It was four-thirty A.M. Dak and Alicia and Travis and me were sitting around a table that was looking very empty without Kelly and Jubal. The big doors leading out to the dock were open now, for the first time. Red Thunder was hooked to the overhead crane, and the leased barge was tied to the dock.