When Mom’s parents died in a car wreck she inherited a business already halfway to bankruptcy. For the last twenty years she and Aunt Maria, and me when I got old enough, have been trying to make a living at it. Now it was probably too late.
The Blast-Off had been built so that all the rooms had an ocean view. Technically they all still did. But we never had the gall to actually claim that. If you looked far to the north or far to the south from your Blast-Off balcony, you could see a bit of water and sand. But straight ahead was the Golden Manatee resort, twenty stories of New Florida opulence, directly across the four-lane highway from us.
Mom can hardly look at the Golden Manatee without spitting. Her father used to own the land the resort now sits on.
“He was dead set against ‘building on sand,’ ” Mom would tell anyone who would listen. “He always felt this building was too close to the sea. He spent most of his life terrified a hurricane would wash it away. So he never built over there. He sold the land.”
Now the Manatee wants to buy our land to use as a parking lot. But [30] they don’t need it bad enough to offer us a decent price. We’d get just about enough money to pay off our mortgage, and the next day we could start looking for work in the exciting tourist service industry. That is, as maids and waiters in somebody else’s business. “Well, they can just kiss my manatee,” Mom said.
AFTER WE DELIVERED Travis Broussard to his odd little friend, Dak dropped me off, alone, a little after midnight in the quiet Blast-Off parking lot. Kelly had early appointments the next day, and spending the night with me would have added to her driving time, so Dak was taking her to her apartment. I wish she’d mentioned it before we got to my place. Maybe I wouldn’t have fooled around so much under the blanket in the pickup bed. As it was, the first order of business was a cold shower.
I live in room 201 at the Blast-Off. The way we’re set up, the owner’s apartment is behind the office on the ground floor: living room and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs. One of those used to be mine until Aunt Maria moved in to help. I moved into 201, which has the Toilet From Hell. I had worked on that damn thing a hundred times over the years and never could stop it from screwing up about once a week. Finally we decided we just wouldn’t rent it anymore, as well as room 101, which had a collapsed ceiling from all the overflowing water above. It’s not as if we ever had to turn guests away for the lack of those two rooms.
The sink and tub/shower still worked. When I needed the toilet I used the one in room 101. I took out the twin beds and put in a king-sized, brought in a big desk and a table and chairs and a sofa I got for a few dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store.
The arrangement suited me. That is, I knew I could do a lot worse. It took some of the sting out of still living with my family at age twenty. I had my own door and could play music and come and go as I pleased. If only I could take a leak without going outside and downstairs I’d be content.
[31] ONCE OUT OF the shower I turned on my computer, a ten-year-old Dell laptop I’d picked up for twenty dollars. I went to the NASA public website, selected “Hall of Astronauts,” and typed in a search for Travis Broussard.
“We’re sorry, the search produced no results. Do you wish to try another search?”
“Damn right,” I grumbled, and shut off the speech function.
I searched the whole site, and found numerous references to Colonel Broussard. His flight record was there, beginning fifteen years ago when he entered the astronaut corps as a rookie pilot trainee. He made six flights sitting in the right-hand seat before becoming a full-time senior pilot. Sounded pretty quick to me. I did an info scan and found it was the fastest anyone had ever made the transition. Twelve years ago Travis was NASA’s fair-haired boy. I would have been eight years old then.
His name was blue-lined, as were all astronaut names at the site. Maybe this was a route to the bio. I clicked on the link, and got a screen saying, “This page currently under construction.” I clicked on another name at random and was shown to an elaborate biography page, with eight screens of text and a hundred NASA pics and snapshots of the astronaut’s professional and home life. I requested John Glenn’s site, and it was gigantic, thousands of stories going all the way back to Life magazine, albums of pictures, hours and hours and hours of video and film clips, whole movies from The Right Stuff to the Glenn bio-pic aired only last year.
Okay, it seemed that Broussard was the only one of several thousand current and former and even dead spacers without a spot in the Hall of Astronauts. How come?
Back to his flight record. He was listed as chief pilot for seventy launches. There was a blue link after the date of his last mission, and once again, clicking it took me nowhere. More links, on Flights 67, 60, and 53, all leading nowhere. Another dead end on a link way back on [32] Flight 21. But there was mention of a commendation. I noted the date of his twenty-first flight and opened a window for the Miami Herald.
I had the newspaper search that day and came up with a six-paragraph story on page three, complete with a picture of a smiling Travis Broussard, quite a bit younger, shaking hands with… my, oh my, that was the President of the United States.
The story read, in part:
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) In a brief ceremony in the west wing of the White House, President Ventura awarded Astronaut Chief Pilot Travis Broussard with the Alan Shepard Medal of Valor for his actions on the third of this month in guiding a crippled VStar Mark II to an emergency landing at a backup airfield in Africa, saving the lives of the crew of three and seven passengers.
Broussard had been promoted to the rank of Astronaut Colonel the previous day at the Pentagon.
I was getting frustrated. A big hero like Travis, and at the NASA site he was the little astronaut who wasn’t there. Absolutely nothing to be learned beyond the fact that yes, he had been an astronaut, had flown the VStar, and yes, he won a medal.
So I went to SpaceScuttlebutt.com, where a lot of spaceheads hang out, found a room with a few familiar handles in it, and posted:
Broussard, Travis…?
Pretty soon this bounced back:
No such FUBAR. Un-person. Shame on you.
FUBAR meant Fouled Up Beyond All Repair. I sent:
Y no bio?
I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.
Funny guy. I was about to come back when he posted another line:
Spacemanny? Dat you?
Unfortunately, it was. I’d made that my web handle years ago, before it started sounding so dorky. Now it would be too much bother to change it.
Y.
[33] A three-by-three window opened and I saw the head and shoulders of a very, very fat man about my mother’s age. He had to weigh in at five hundred pounds. SpaceScuttlebutt.com was as close as he’d ever get to space and he knew it. He lived his spacegoing fantasies online, and his knowledge was encyclopedic. I had no idea where he lived or what his real name was, but his handle was Piginspace. A man with no illusions. I was lucky to have run into him.
“Broussard-san heap big bad medicine, Spacemanny,” he said through the tiny built-in speaker on my antique laptop. “Bad juju. Say his name at Kennedy, you must leave the room, spin around twice, and spit.”
He talked like that sometimes. He enjoyed having information someone else was looking for, and sometimes made you jump through hoops to get it. But not this time.
“I see he got a medal for an emergency landing. What do you know about that?”