Wild Cards

  “No,” he protested. “All that food. I'll get sick.”

  “You have to eat. Even spacemen can't live on cognac alone.”

  “Please . . .”

  “If you want to drink, you'll eat,” she said brusquely. “That's the deal, remember?”

  The deal, yes. He remembered. Angelface provided him with rent money, food, and an unlimited bar tab, as much drink as he'd ever need to wash away his memories. All he had to do was eat and tell her stories. She loved to listen to him talk. He told her family anecdotes, lectured about Takisian customs, filled her with history and legends and romances, with tales of balls and intrigues and beauty far removed from the squalor of Jokertown.

  Sometimes, after closing, he would dance for her, tracing the ancient, intricate pavanes of Takis across the nightclub's mirrored floors while she watched and urged him on. Once, when both of them had drunk far too much wine, she talked him into demonstrating the Wedding Pattern, an erotic ballet that most Takisians danced but once, on their wedding night. That was the only time she had ever danced with him, echoing the steps, hesitantly at first, and then faster and faster, swaying and spinning across the floor until her bare feet were raw and cracked and left wet red smears upon the mirror tiles. In the Wedding Pattern, the dancing couple came together at the end, collapsing into a long triumphant embrace. But that was on Takis; here, when the moment came, she broke the pattern and shied away from him, and he was reminded once again that Takis was far away.

  Two years before, Desmond had found him unconscious and naked in a Jokertown alley. Someone had stolen his clothing while he slept, and he was fevered and delirious. Des had summoned help to carry him to the Funhouse. When he came to, he was lying on a cot in a back room, surrounded by beer kegs and wine racks. “Do you know what you were drinking?” Angelface had asked him when they'd brought him to her office. He hadn't known; all he recalled was that he'd needed a drink so badly it was an ache inside him, and the old black man in the alley had generously offered to share. “It's called Sterno,” Angelface told him. She had Des bring in a bottle of her finest brandy. “If a man wants to drink, that's his business, but at least you can kill yourself with a little class.” The brandy spread thin tendrils of warmth through his chest and stopped his hands from shaking. When he'd emptied the snifter, Tach had thanked her effusively, but she drew back when he tried to touch her. He asked her why. “I'll show you,” she had said, offering her hand. “Lightly,” she told him. His kiss had been the merest brush of his lips, not on the back of her hand but against the inside of her wrist, to feel her pulse, the life current inside her, because she was so very lovely, and kind, and because he wanted her.

  A moment later he'd watched with sick dismay as her skin darkened to purple and then black. Another one of mine, he'd thought.

  Yet somehow they had become friends. Not lovers, of course, except sometimes in his dreams; her capillaries ruptured at the slightest pressure, and to her hypersensitive nervous system even the lightest touch was painful. A gentle caress turned her black and blue; lovemaking would probably kill her. But friends, yes. She never asked him for anything he could not give, and so he could never fail her.

  Breakfast was served by a hunchbacked black woman named Ruth who had pale blue feathers instead of hair. “The man brought this for you this morning,” she told Angelface after she'd set the table, handing across a thick, square packet wrapped in brown paper. Angelface accepted it without comment while Tachyon drank his brandy-laced coffee and lifted knife and fork to stare with sick dismay at the implacable bacon and eggs.

  “Don't look so stricken,” Angelface said.

  “I don't think I've told you about the time the Network starship came to Takis, and what my great-grandmother Amurath had to say to the Ly'bahr envoy,” he began.

  “No,” she said. “Go on. I like your great-grandmother.”

  “That's one of us. She terrifies me,” Tachyon said, and launched into the story.

  Tom woke well before dawn, while Joey was snoring in the back room. He brewed a pot of coffee in a battered percolator and popped a Thomas English muffin into the toaster. While the coffee perked, he folded the hide-a-bed back into a couch. He covered his muffins with butter and strawberry preserves, and looked around for something to read. The comics beckoned.

  He remembered the day they'd saved them. Most had been his, originally, including the run of Jetboy he got from his dad. He'd loved those comics. And then one day in 1954 he'd come home from school and found them gone, a full bookcase and two orange crates of funny books vanished. His mother said some women from the PTA had come by to tell her what awful things comic books were. They'd shown her a copy of a book by a Dr. Wertham about how comics turned kids into juvenile delinquents and homos, and how they glorified aces and jokers, and so his mother had let them take Tom's collection. He screamed and yelled and threw a tantrum, but it did no good.

  The PTA had gathered up comic books from every kid in school. They were going to burn them all Saturday, in the schoolyard. It was happening all over the country; there was even talk of a law banning comic books, or at least the kinds about horror and crime and people with strange powers.

  Wertham and the PTA turned out to be right: that Friday night, on account of comic books, Tommy Tudbury and Joey DiAngelis became criminals.

  Tom was nine; Joey was eleven, but he'd been driving his pop's truck since he was seven. In the middle of the night, he swiped the truck and Tom snuck out to meet him. When they got to the school, Joey jimmied open a window, and Tom climbed on his shoulders and looked into the dark classroom and concentrated and grabbed the carton with his collection in it and lifted it up and floated it out into the bed of the truck. Then he snatched four or five other cartons for good measure. The PTA never noticed; they still had plenty to burn. If Dom DiAngelis wondered where all the comics had come from, he never said a word; he just built the shelves to hold them, proud as punch of his son who could read. From that day on, it was their collection, jointly.

  Setting his coffee and muffin on the orange crate, Tom went to the bookcase and took down a couple of issues of Jetboy Comics. He reread them as he ate, Jetboy on Dinosaur Island, Jetboy and the Fourth Reich, and his favorite, the final issue, the true one, Jetboy and the Aliens, Inside the cover, the title was “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway.” Tom read it twice as he sipped his cooling coffee. He lingered over some of the best panels. On the last page, they had a picture of the alien, Tachyon, weeping. Tom didn't know if that had happened or not. He closed the comic book and finished his English muffin. For a long time he sat there thinking.

  Jetboy was a hero. And what was he? Nothing. A wimp, a chickenshit. A fuck of a lot of good his wild card power did anybody. It was useless, just like him.

  Dispiritedly, he shrugged into his coat and went outside. The junkyard looked raw and ugly in the dawn, and a cold wind was blowing. A few hundred yards to the east, the bay was green and choppy. Tom climbed up to the old Packard on its little hill. The door creaked when he yanked it open. Inside, the seats were cracked and smelled of rot, but at least he was out of that wind. Tom slouched back with his knees up against the dash, staring out at sunrise. He sat unmoving for a long time; across the yard, hubcaps and old tires floated up in the air and went screaming off to splash into the choppy green waters of New York Bay. He could see the Statue of Liberty on her island, and the hazy outlines of the towers of Manhattan off to the northeast.

  It was nearly seven-thirty, his limbs were stiff, and he'd lost count of the number of hubcaps he'd flung, when Tom Tudbury sat up with a strange expression on his face. The icebox he'd been juggling forty feet from the ground came down with a crash. He ran his fingers through his hair and lifted the icebox again, moved it over twenty yards or so, and dropped it right on Joey's corrugated tin roof. Then he did the same with a tire, a twisted bicycle, six hubcaps, and a little red wagon.

  The door to the house flew open with a bang, and Joey came charging out into the co
ld wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. He looked real pissed. Tom snatched his bare feet, pulled them out from under him, and dumped him on his butt, hard. Joey cursed.

  Tom grabbed him and yanked him into the air, upside down. “Where the fuck are you, Tudbury?” Joey screamed. “Cut it out, you dork. Lemme down.”

  Tom imagined two huge invisible hands, and tossed Joey from one to the other. “When I get down, I'm going to punch you so fuckin' hard you'll eat through a straw for the rest of your life,” Joey promised.

  The crank was stiff from years of disuse, but Tom finally managed to roll down the Packard's window. He stuck his head out. “Hiya kids, hiya, hiya, hiya,” he croaked, chortling.

  Suspended twelve feet from the ground, Joey dangled and made a fist. “I'll pluck your fuckin' magic twanger, shithead,” he shouted. Tom yanked off his boxer shorts and hung them from a telephone pole. “You're gonna die, Tudbury,” Joey said.

  Tom took a big breath and set Joey on the ground, very gently. The moment of truth. Joey came running at him, screaming obscenities. Tom closed his eyes, put his hands on the steering wheel, and lifted. The Packard shifted beneath him. Sweat dotted his brow. He shut out the world, concentrated, counted to ten, slowly, backward.

  When he finally opened his eyes, half expecting to see Joey's fist smashing into his nose, there was nothing to behold but a seagull perched on the hood of the Packard, its head cocked as it peered through the cracked windshield. He was floating. He was flying.

  Tom stuck his head out of the window. Joey stood twenty feet below him, glaring, hands on his hips and a disgusted look on his face. “Now,” Tom yelled down, smiling, “what was it you were saying last night?”

  “I hope you can stay up there all day, you son of a bitch,” Joey said. He made an ineffectual fist, and waved it. Lank black hair fell across his eyes. “Ah, shit, what does this prove? If I had a gun, you'd still be dead meat.”

  “If you had a gun, I wouldn't be sticking my head out the window,” Tom said. “In fact, it'd be better if I didn't have a window.” He considered that for a second, but it was hard to think while he was up here. The Packard was heavy. “I'm coming down,” he said to Joey. “You, uh, you calmed down?”

  Joey grinned. “Try me and see, Tuds.”

  “Move out of the way. I don't want to squash you with this damn thing.”

  Joey shuffled to one side, bare-ass and goose-pimpled, and Tom let the Packard settle as gently as an autumn leaf on a still day. He had the door half open when Joey reached in, grabbed him, yanked him up, and pushed him back against the side of the car, his other hand cocked into a fist. “I oughtta—” he began. Then he shook his head, snorted, and punched Tom lightly in the shoulder. “Gimme back my fuckin' drawers, ace,” he said.

  Back inside the house, Tom reheated the leftover coffee. “I'll need you to do the work,” he said as he made himself some scrambled eggs and ham and a couple more English muffins. Using his teke always gave him quite an appetite. “You took auto shop and welding and all that shit. I'll do the wiring.”

  “Wiring?” Joey said, warming his hands over his cup. “What the fuck for?”

  “The lights and the TV cameras. I don't want any windows people can shoot through. I know where we can get some cameras cheap, and you got lots of old sets around here, I'll just fix them up.” He sat down and attacked his eggs wolfishly. “I'll need loudspeakers too. Some kind of PA system. A generator. Wonder if I'll have room for a refrigerator in there?”

  “That Packard's a big motherfucker,” Joey said. “Take out the seats and you'll have room for three of the fuckers.”

  “Not the Packard,” Tom said. “I'll find a lighter car. We can cover up the windows with old body panels or something.”

  Joey pushed hair out of his eyes. “Fuck the body panels. I got armor plate. From the war. They scrapped a bunch of ships at the Navy base in '46 and '47, and Dom put in a bid for the metal, and bought us twenty goddamn tons. Fuckin' waste a money—who the fuck wants to buy battleship armor? I still got it all, sitting way out back rusting. You need a fuckin' sixteen-inch gun to punch through that shit, Tuds. You'll be safe as—fuck, I dunno. Safe, anyhow.”

  Tom knew. “Safe,” he said loudly, “as a turtle in its shell!”

  Only ten shopping days were left until Christmas, and Tach sat in one of the window alcoves, nursing an Irish coffee against the December cold and gazing through the one-way glass at the Bowery. The Funhouse wouldn't open for another hour yet, but the back door was always unlocked for Angelface's friends. Up on stage, a pair of joker jugglers who called themselves Cosmos and Chaos were tossing bowling balls around. Cosmos floated three feet above the stage in the lotus position, his eyeless face serene. He was totally blind, but he never missed a beat or dropped a ball. His partner, six-armed Chaos, capered around like a lunatic, chortling and telling bad jokes and keeping a cascade of flaming clubs going behind his back with two arms while the other four flung bowling balls at Cosmos. Tach spared them only a glance. As talented as they were, their deformities pained him.

  Mal slid into his booth. “How many of those you had?” the bouncer demanded, glaring at the Irish coffee. The tendrils that hung from his lower lip expanded and contracted in a blind wormlike pulsing, and his huge, malformed blue-black jaw gave his face a look of belligerent contempt.

  “I don't see that it's any of your business.”

  “You're no damn use at all, are you?”

  “I never claimed I was.”

  Mal grunted. “You're worth 'bout as much as a sack of shit. I don't see why the hell Angel needs no damn pantywaist spaceman hanging 'round the place sopping up her booze . . .”

  “She doesn't. I told her that.”

  “You can't tell that woman nothin',” Mal agreed. He made a fist. A very large fist. Before the Day of the Wild Card, he'd been the eighth-ranked heavyweight contender. Afterward, he had climbed as high as third . . . until they'd banned wild cards from professional sports, and wiped out his dreams in a stroke. The measure was aimed at aces, they said, to keep the games competitive, but there had been no exceptions made for jokers. Mal was older now, sparse hair turned iron gray, but he still looked strong enough to break Floyd Patterson over his knee and mean enough to stare down Sonny Liston. “Look at that,” he growled in disgust, glaring out the window. Tiny was outside in his chair. “What the hell is he doing here? I told him not to come by here no more.” Mal started for the door.

  “Can't you just leave him alone?” Tachyon called after him. “He's harmless.”

  “Harmless?” Mal rounded on him. “His screamin' scares off all the fuckin' tourists, and who the hell's gonna pay for all your free booze?”

  But then the door pushed open, and Desmond stood there, overcoat folded over one arm, his trunk half-raised. “Let him be, Mal,” the maitre d' said wearily. “Go on, now.” Muttering, Mal stalked off. Desmond came over and seated himself in Tachyon's booth. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said.

  Tachyon nodded and finished his drink. The whiskey had all gone to the bottom of the cup, and it warmed him on the way down. He found himself staring at the face in the mirrored tabletop: a worn, dissipated, coarse face, eyes reddened and puffy, long red hair tangled and greasy, features distorted by alcoholic bloat. That wasn't him, that couldn't be him, he was handsome, clean-featured, distinguished, his face was—

  Desmond's trunk snaked out, its fingers locking around his wrist roughly, yanking him forward. “You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?” Des said, his voice low and urgent with anger. Blearily, Tach realized that Desmond had been talking to him. He began to mutter apologies.

  “Never mind about that,” Des said, releasing his grip. “Listen to me. I was asking for your help, Doctor. I may be a joker, but I'm not an uneducated man. I've read about you. You have certain—abilities, let us say.”

  “No,” Tach interrupted. “Not the way you're thinking.”

  “Your powers are quite well doc
umented,” Des said.

  “I don't . . .” Tach began awkwardly. He spread his hands. “That was then. I've lost—I mean, I can't, not anymore.” He stared down at his own wasted features, wanting to look Des in the eye, to make him understand, but unable to bear the sight of the joker's deformity.

  “You mean you won't,” Des said. He stood up. “I thought that if I spoke to you before we opened, I might actually find you sober. I see I was mistaken. Forget everything I said.”

  “I'd help you if I could,” Tach began to say.

  “I wasn't asking for me,” Des said sharply.

  When he was gone, Tachyon went to the long silver-chrome bar and got down a full bottle of cognac. The first glass made him feel better; the second stopped his hands from shaking. By the third he had begun to weep. Mal came over and looked down at him in disgust. “Never knew no man cried as much as you do,” he said, thrusting a dirty handkerchief at Tachyon roughly before he left to help them open.

  He had been aloft for four and a half hours when the news of the fire came crackling over the police-band radio down by his right foot. Not very far aloft, true, only about six feet from the ground, but that was enough—six feet or sixty, it didn't make all that much difference, Tom had found. Four and a half hours, and he didn't feel the least bit tired yet. In fact, he felt sensational.

  He was strapped securely into a bucket seat Joey had pulled from a mashed-up Triumph TR–3 and mounted on a low pivot right in the center of the VW. The only light was the wan phosphor glow from an array of mismatched television screens that surrounded him on all sides. Between the cameras and their tracking motors, the generator, the ventilation system, the sound equipment, the control panels, the spare box of vacuum tubes, and the little refrigerator, he hardly had space to swing around. But that was okay. Tom was more a claus-trophile than a claustrophobe anyway; he liked it in here. Around the exterior of the gutted Beetle, Joey had mounted two overlapping layers of thick battleship armor. It was better than a goddamned tank. Joey had already pinged a few shots off it with the Luger that Dom had taken off a German officer during the war. A lucky shot might be able to take out one of his cameras or lights, but there was no way to get to Tom himself inside the shell. He was better than safe, he was invulnerable, and when he felt this secure and sure of himself, there was no limit on what he might be able to do.