Skeleton Crew

  "It ate Deke," she whispered.

  "Yes."

  "What is it?"

  "I don't know."

  "I'm cold."

  "Me too."

  "Hold me, then."

  "I've held you enough."

  She subsided.

  Sitting down was heaven; not having to watch the thing was bliss. He watched LaVerne instead, making sure that her eyes kept shifting away from the thing on the water.

  "What are we going to do, Randy?"

  He thought.

  "Wait," he said.

  At the end of fifteen minutes he stood up and let her first sit and then lie down for half an hour. Then he got her on her feet again and she stood for fifteen minutes. They went back and forth. At a quarter of ten, a cold rind of moon rose and beat a path across the water. At ten-thirty, a shrill, lonely cry rose, echoing across the water, and LaVerne shrieked.

  "Shut up," he said. "It's just a loon."

  "I'm freezing, Randy--I'm numb all over."

  "I can't do anything about it."

  "Hold me," she said. "You've got to. We'll hold each other. We can both sit down and watch it together."

  He debated, but the cold sinking into his own flesh was now bone-deep, and that decided him. "Okay."

  They sat together, arms wrapped around each other, and something happened--natural or perverse, it happened. He felt himself stiffening. One of his hands found her breast, cupped in damp nylon, and squeezed. She made a sighing noise, and her hand stole to the crotch of his underpants.

  He slid his other hand down and found a place where there was some heat. He pushed her down on her back.

  "No," she said, but the hand in his crotch began to move faster.

  "I can see it," he said. His heartbeat had sped up again, pushing blood faster, pushing warmth toward the surface of his chilled bare skin. "I can watch it."

  She murmured something, and he felt elastic slide down his hips to his upper thighs. He watched it. He slid upward, forward, into her. Warmth. God, she was warm there, at least. She made a guttural noise and her fingers grabbed at his cold, clenched buttocks.

  He watched it. It wasn't moving. He watched it. He watched it closely. The tactile sensations were incredible, fantastic. He was not experienced, but neither was he a virgin; he had made love with three girls and it had never been like this. She moaned and began to lift her hips. The raft rocked gently, like the world's hardest waterbed. The barrels underneath murmured hollowly.

  He watched it. The colors began to swirl--slowly now, sensuously, not threatening; he watched it and he watched the colors. His eyes were wide. The colors were in his eyes. He wasn't cold now; he was hot now, hot the way you got your first day back on the beach in early June, when you could feel the sun tightening your winter-white skin, reddening it, giving it some

  (colors)

  color, some tint. First day at the beach, first day of summer, drag out the Beach Boys oldies, drag out the Ramones. The Ramones were telling you that Sheena is a punk rocker, the Ramones were telling you that you can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach, the sand, the beach, the colors

  (moving it's starting to move)

  and the feel of summer, the texture; Gary U.S. Bonds, school is out and I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers, girls in bikinis on the beach, the beach, the beach, oh do you love do you love

  (love)

  the beach do you love

  (love I love)

  firm breasts fragrant with Coppertone oil, and if the bottom of the bikini was small enough you might see some

  (hair her hair HER HAIR IS IN THE OH GOD IN THE WATER HER HAIR)

  He pulled back suddenly, trying to pull her up, but the thing moved with oily speed and tangled itself in her hair like a webbing of thick black glue and when he pulled her up she was already screaming and she was heavy with it; it came out of the water in a twisting, gruesome membrane that rolled with flaring nuclear colors--scarlet-vermilion, flaring emerald, sullen ocher.

  It flowed down over LaVerne's face in a tide, obliterating it.

  Her feet kicked and drummed. The thing twisted and moved where her face had been. Blood ran down her neck in streams. Screaming, not hearing himself scream, Randy ran at her, put his foot against her hip, and shoved. She went flopping and tumbling over the side, her legs like alabaster in the moonlight. For a few endless moments the water frothed and splashed against the side of the raft, as if someone had hooked the world's largest bass in there and it was fighting like hell.

  Randy screamed. He screamed. And then, for variety, he screamed some more.

  Some half an hour later, long after the frantic splashing and struggling had ended, the loons began to scream back.

  That night was forever.

  The sky began to lighten in the east around a quarter to five, and he felt a sluggish rise in his spirit. It was momentary; as false as the dawn. He stood on the boards, his eyes half closed, his chin on his chest. He had been sitting on the boards until an hour ago, and had been suddenly awakened--without even knowing until then that he had fallen asleep, that was the scary part--by that unspeakable hissing-canvas sound. He leaped to his feet bare seconds before the blackness began to suck eagerly for him between the boards. His breath whined in and out; he bit at his lip, making it bleed.

  Asleep, you were asleep, you asshole!

  The thing had oozed out from under again half an hour later, but he hadn't sat down again. He was afraid to sit down, afraid he would go to sleep and that this time his mind wouldn't trip him awake in time.

  His feet were still planted squarely on the boards as a stronger light, real dawn this time, filled the east and the first morning birds began to sing. The sun came up, and by six o'clock the day was bright enough for him to be able to see the beach. Deke's Camaro, bright yellow, was right where Deke had parked it, nose in to the pole fence. A bright litter of shirts and sweaters and four pairs of jeans were twisted into little shapes along the beach. The sight of them filled him with fresh horror when he thought his capacity for horror must surely be exhausted. He could see his jeans, one leg pulled inside out, the pocket showing. His jeans looked so safe lying there on the sand; just waiting for him to come along and pull the inside-out leg back through so it was right, grasping the pocket as he did so the change wouldn't fall out. He could almost feel them whispering up his legs, could feel himself buttoning the brass button above the fly--

  (do you love yes I love)

  He looked left and there it was, black, round as a checker, floating lightly. Colors began to swirl across its hide and he looked away quickly.

  "Go home," he croaked. "Go home or go to California and find a Roger Corman movie to audition for."

  A plane droned somewhere far away, and he fell into a dozing fantasy: We are reported missing, the four of us. The search spreads outward from Horlicks. A farmer remembers being passed by a yellow Camaro "going like a bat out of hell." The search centers in the Cascade Lake area. Private pilots volunteer to do a quick aerial search, and one guy, buzzing the lake in his Beechcraft Twin Bonanza, sees a kid standing naked on the raft, one kid, one survivor, one--

  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.

  (do you love yes I love rooting for the Yankees and Catfish do you love the Catfish yes I love the

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

  (yes I love the Corvette

  (I love do you love

  (so hot the sun is like a burning glass it was in her hair and it's the light I remember best the light the summer light

  (the summer light of)


  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.

  (you do you do love me)

  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.

  (do you do you do you love)

  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.

  Word Processor of the Gods

  At 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."