Deuces Down

  “I hope I don’t have to get out of this thing in a hurry,” I said, half-joking.

  “The pilot can blow the canopy for emergency egress,” Sampson said, his eyes bland and almost sleepy. I decided right then that I didn’t much like him. Maybe it was the air of truly unpredictable strangeness he radiated—his “wrong way” wild card, no doubt.

  As the team cleared out, my helmet radio squawked. “Pilot to Co-pilot,” Dearborn said, “that pistol grip tiller close to your right hand is your lifting mechanism. It is finely calibrated to connect with the center of mass of this vehicle. Touch it only when you do your lifting.”

  “Uh, roger,” I said, trying to sound astronautical.

  There was some chatter on the radio that did not directly concern me. Next to me, Tominbang practically bounced up and down like a restless child.

  Dearborn counted down to ignition, and pressed the start button. Flame shot out of the back of Quicksilver. In a cloud of debris, the pumpkin-seed vehicle started rolling down the runway. It rotated almost immediately, then headed straight up into the night sky . . .

  I felt some pressure, but not much more than on an airplane. For the first few moments, that is. The pressure kept building and building, and to my extreme discomfort, we rolled to our left and over on our backs. “Why are we doing this?” I said between clenched teeth.

  “Aerodynamics don’t apply here,” Dearborn said, almost cackling with glee. “It just lets our radio antennas communicate with the ground.”

  Then he said, “First waypoint, Co-pilot. Give her a little lift.”

  As I’ve said, annoyance is my perpetual state, and it quickly transitions to anger.

  We made a good test lift.

  Twenty minutes late we were back on the ground, hatch opened. As I walked away, weak in the knees, I looked back to see Quicksilver glowing like a campfire coal on the runway.

  A crowd surged toward us. Dearborn removed his helmet, he handed it to me. “Flies great, doesn’t she, Co-Pilot?”

  I couldn’t help agreeing.

  My elation was so profound that it wasn’t until an hour later, as the crowd finally thinned, as Quicksilver was towed back into the hangar, that I realized Dearborn was gone.

  And so was Eva-Lynne.

  He didn’t come home that night. I know, because I sat up until three.

  Maybe that’s why, when the phone rang at six A.M., I was willing to face—no, to welcome—my next challenge. “Yes, Mr. Skalko.”

  Mr. Warren Skalko gave no over sign of his power or his wealth. No flashy car. No expensive suits. No gold pinkie rings or necklaces. No thick-necked sideboys. (They were around, but you never saw them, unless you happened to realize that the occasional passing motorcyclist was probably one of them.) His golf game was average, and his bets were small—five-dollar Nassaus. Even his physical person was nondescript: at 50 he was of medium height, a little overweight, balding, his eyes swimming behind thick glasses. If you met him without knowing who he was, you would have thought yourself in the company of an accountant, and not one who handled large accounts.

  At one point, early in our relationship, I was silly enough to ask him why he did what he did, when he seemed to live so modestly.

  “I can’t help myself,” was his reply.

  He always made his own calls, too. “Cash, Warren Skalko here,” he chirped. “Sorry about the early hour. Wondering if you’d have time to get together later this morning, around eight, at the usual place.”

  Eight it was, at the driving range of a ratty municipal par-three in Lancaster. It was October now, and the desert nights were cold enough to leave frost on the fairways and greens. So the crowd at the driving range was sparse.

  Only Mr. Warren Skalko taking some swings with a seven-iron. “Tominbang tested his plane last night,” he announced the instant I was within earshot. (That was another Skalko trait: getting directly to the point.)

  I think my heart stopped for a good five seconds. Obviously Tominbang had a distant connection to Mr. Skalko. Less obvious was why Mr. Skalko would have any interest in his activities. Equally less obvious, but of much greater concern to me was whether Mr. Skalko was angry about my involvement. “Yes.”

  “Think it’s gonna work? This flying to the Moon?”

  I couldn’t help a reflexive smile. “I hope so.” It was, after all, my life.

  “Oh, you’d be all right. That Dearborn fella, he’s got the luck.” Swish. Mr. Skalko launched a shot down the range. “But I’m not sure I like this deal,” he said.

  This was not code for a stronger emotion. Mr. Skalko was a direct man: if he really hated Tominbang’s project, he would have said exactly that.

  “I’m not sure of the value, either,” I said.

  “Why are you doing it? The money?” Mr. Skalko knew everything he needed to know about my money problems.

  “Yes,” I said, then adding, because he would know, anyway. “And a girl.”

  “Ah. That’s even worse.” Swish went the club. “When is the big day?”

  “We’re scheduled to take off in two weeks.”

  Mr. Skalko examined the seven iron, and then, apparently deciding, he had had enough fun at the driving range, slid it back into his golf bag. “Tell you what,” he said, “give me a call when it looks as though you’re ready to go. No later than the day before, at the usual number.” He sighed and looked around at the country-side. “I need to think about what this means.”

  There was never any doubt that I would agree to do whatever Mr. Skalko wanted.

  It was only after putting miles between my car and Mr. Skalko that I began to feel troubled by my new status as a spy inside Tominbang’s project. My heart began to beat faster, my breathing grew ragged. It was as if I had just run a mile.

  I would have been alarmed, but I had learned to expect this reaction. All I could do was pull off at the first auto salvage yard I came to.

  Here were hundreds of Fords, Chevys, Buicks, complete with tailfins and chrome, all suitable for my brand of lifting.

  I started at the end of one row and lifted seven in a row, flipping each car onto its hood with a loud bang!. Not only was it noisy, it was dusty. But by the time I had reached the end of the row, my heart rate had returned to normal. And my emotions were spent.

  I drove past Haugen’s Bakery (I no longer had reason to stop), then directly to the hangar, where I almost welcomed the sight of Eva-Lynne tottering in, giggling, wearing yesterday’s dress, and on Dearborn’s arm.

  My father used to tell me I had no spine, an unfortunate phrase, given that it literally applied to at least two of my joker playmates. Perhaps that’s why I gave his judgment so little credence for so long.

  But various mistakes in my life, beginning with flunking out of Harvey Mudd followed closely by a disastrous marriage, which led to excessive gambling and debts, and thence an unsolicited association with Mr. Warren Skalko, had convinced me of the truth of my father’s evaluation.

  I had been a coward. Or, if you find that too harsh, I had never faced a challenge, either professionally or personally. Case number one, Eva-Lynne, now lost to a man who embraced challenges, or, if necessary, created them.

  Case number two—the flight to the Moon. Some time between Dearborn’s walkout in his silver suit, and my “workout” at the auto salvage yard, I decided that this was the one challenge I had to face.

  When I reached Tehachapi-Kern, I avoided any chance of contact with Eva-Lynne, and immediately searched out a technician named Sobel, who had left messages for me for at least a week.

  He turned out to be some sort of aquatic joker who actually had to wear a bowl-like helmet filled with water, as well as a bubbling device which regularly uttered a disturbing noise like a baby’s cry. “Wouldn’t you be happier in the sea?” I asked him.

  “Never learned to swim,” he said, completely deadpan. (Well, they do call them jokers.) “Actually, I signed up when Tominbang hired a friend of mine. Who wouldn’t want to be part of t
he first flight to the Moon?”

  Which made me feel bad that I had ignored his messages. When I learned that he was the specialist in charge of space suits, that he had wanted me to come in for fit checks for a suit of my own, I felt even worse.

  Fortunately, we got to work, and within two hours I learned more about the operational aspects of the flight to the Moon than I had in three weeks. The silver suit, made mostly of heavy rubber, was one of half a dozen originally developed for the X-11A program a decade past, acquired, no doubt, through some shady contact of Tominbang’s. “We’re adding special boots, a white coverall and a special helmet visor for use on the lunar surface.”

  “I’ll be out on the surface?”

  “At the moment, only Dearborn and Tominbang are scheduled to walk on the Moon. They will erect the relay station. But if they have trouble, you will have to help them.” Somewhat ashamedly, I found myself hoping they would: why go all the way to the Moon and not walk on it?

  I bent myself into various shapes in order to get my head through the helmet ring. Then I was zipped tight, and immediately began to perspire. I could not stand up straight, either. “You’ll be sitting most of the time,” Sobel said, taking some measurements, like a tailor, then helping me out of the garment. “You’ll either be hooked up to Quicksilver’s cooling system, or to a backpack.”

  Then a more practical question arose. “What about sanitary facilities?”

  Sobel smiled and held up a metal bottle and tube. “Standard USAF catheter.”

  “And what about . . . other functions?”

  “You’ll be on a low residue diet for the last few days prior to the flight.”

  “How long will I be in this thing?”

  “Two days, tops.”

  That was some relief.

  When I returned to my office, I found Bacchus leering all over an alarmed Eva-Lynne. (I couldn’t help noticing that she had, indeed, changed clothes from the previous night.) “I’ll be with you in a minute, Doctor,” I told this sex-crazed joker. “Eva-Lynne, I need to talk to you in private.”

  As I closed the door, she said, “Thank God. I’ve met some aggressive men in my life—” I could only imagine. “—but he is by far the worst. I don’t even like having him breathe on me.”

  “Sorry. I should have warned you.”

  “I’m not sure a warning would have done much good. I probably wouldn’t have believed you.” She favored me with the same smile that had so bewitched me that first time I saw her. “But it’s very sweet of you to protect me.”

  Seeing that she was about to leave, I cleared my throat and prepared to subject myself to bad news. “Speaking of protection, did you get home all right last night?”

  She whirled to face me, and I saw a look on her lovely face that I had never seen before. One lovely golden eyebrow rose slightly. The effect was far more womanly, if that’s the word. Knowing. “Let’s just say, I got where I was supposed to get.”

  I must have blushed. I certainly had no idea what to say. And I never, in fact, got the chance to respond, because Eva-Lynne prevented it. She took me by the hand and said, “You know, Cash, I think you and I need to have a picnic.”

  My protest was truly feeble. “There’s nowhere to eat.” Most of Tominbang’s team packed lunches, or ate the offerings of the tiny cafeteria over at the airport.

  “Don’t be silly, Cash. It’s not about food.”

  “I hope you weren’t under the impression I was a virgin,” she said, once we’d reached our picnic grounds, a flat area halfway up the hill a hundred yards beyond the fence which ringed Tominbang’s hangar complex. In one last stab at being a masculine provider, I had bought two bottles of Dr. Pepper from the building’s vending machine as we walked out.

  “No,” I said, telling the truth. This was, after all, 1968. Virginity had ceased to be in fashion about the time of my sophomore year at Harvey Mudd some years earlier. I had been married, and had been in several shorter sexual relationships myself, so I should have been beyond the adolescent fear that my sexual skills would not measure up, so to speak.

  “But you were hoping I wasn’t a slut,” Eva-Lynne said, articulating my next thought before I could. My blush confirmed her statement.

  She exhaled. “Have you ever heard of Diamond Butte, Arizona?” she said.

  “Should I?”

  “No reason. When I get through telling you about it, you’ll probably wish you still hadn’t heard it.” Diamond Butte, she explained, was a tiny town in the northwestern corner of Arizona a few miles south of Utah. “It’s cut off from the rest of Arizona by the Grand Canyon, but technically not in Utah. It’s kind of like—what’s that television show? The Twilight Zone. Nobody knows which set of laws to apply, because no one’s there to enforce them.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Nobody enforces either set.”

  “Right.” She grimaced. “Which is why, for years, most of the people in the area were polygamists. My family, for example. My mother was my father’s seventh wife. I had twenty brothers and sisters. And I was literally sold to a man—my future husband—when I was fourteen. I became his eleventh wife when I was sixteen.”

  “And that’s what you ran away from?” I said, hoping that was the end of the story.

  Eva-Lynne ignored me. “It was bad. Polygamy may work for some. I think my family generally got along. But Roderick, my husband, was a bastard. I think he would rather have beaten us rather than slept with us.

  “All of us tried to run off at one time or another. We all got caught and taken back, and it would be even worse.

  “Finally one of the other men in the town heard what was going on, and challenged Roderick. But Roderick killed him and took his wives for his own.

  “Which left him free to get rid of us. He sold us to the Gambiones, Cash. They dragged us off to New York, Jokertown, where they had a brothel just for jokers.” Her voice had grown quieter as she spoke. By this time there were tears rolling down her cheeks. For her sake and mine, I wanted to her to stop. But no. “I spent three years there.” Now her smile was savage. “I was very popular with the clientele.

  “Eventually one of the girls died; a joker killed her. The Gambiones had to lie low for a few weeks; they shipped most of to San Francisco.

  “I’d saved a little money.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, in the smallest possible voice, “I used my charms. And I got out. You wanted to know how someone who looks like me winds up in Mojave? That’s why.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I’m glad. But now you know. And now you have good reason not to fall in love with me.”

  I mumbled something. “What was that?” she said.

  “My mother used to say, even after the wild card: ‘love trumps all’.”

  Eva-Lynne gave a short, sharp laugh. “I’ll tell you what—

  She was interrupted by the blare of a warning siren, the same one used the night of the flight test. We both jumped at the sound, and she said, “We’d better get back.”

  As we started down the hill, I let Eva-Lynne lead the way, thrilling to her every step and sway. In spite of the revelation of her sordid or, at least, troubling past, I loved her more hopelessly than ever.

  As we reached the hangar, we saw that Quicksilver had been rolled into the open. Eva-Lynne took my hand and said, “I can’t believe you’re going to ride that thing all the way to the Moon.”

  “And, hopefully, back again,” I said. She laughed. For a moment, everything seemed possible.

  Then Kakfa scuttled up to us. “Need to talk,” he hissed. Or perhaps spat would be a better word. He looked directly at Eva-Lynne. “Alone.”

  She took her dismissal with grace, and headed back to the office.

  “We’re launching tonight,” Kafka said.

  “Tonight? Since when?”

  When Kafka got agitated, he began to scuttle back and forth, like a roach in a jar. “Tominbang’s orders. He says there are ‘problems’.”

  “W
hat kind of problems?”

  “I don’t know,” Kafka hissed. “But we go tonight!”

  I had prepared myself to make the call to Mr. Skalko. I had not expected to do it so soon.

  “Tominbang’s in a lot of trouble,” Al Dearborn told me a few moments later. Tominbang had failed to appear for a lunch meeting. Instead he had telephoned, and wound up telling Dearborn his sad story: he had not been using his own money for the Quicksilver-to-the-Moon program. Instead, he had dipped into funds belonging to others, apparently in the hopes that profits from the first Moon flight would allow him to pay back his unwitting “investors” before they realized they’d been robbed.

  But one of the parties found out. “Some guy named Warren Skalko. Ever heard of him?”

  “Yes,” I said. In order to keep Dearborn from pressing further (since I doubted I could lie to him), I added, “he’s the local godfather. Bad news.”

  The bad news explained the flurry of activity in the hangar. Jokers and deuces were shredding papers; a burn barrel out back was a-flame. Every few moments, a car would launch itself out of the parking lot in a spray of gravel. “You’d think we were about to be bombed,” I said to Dearborn.

  “From what Tominbang said, that’s a distinct possibility.”

  “How can we launch tonight if he’s not here?”

  “He’s not making the trip.”

  “Given the situation, I’m not sure I’m making the trip.” In fact, I was, at that moment, quite and sure I wasn’t. I was two minutes away from making a hasty departure from Tehachapi-Kern.

  “Well, Cash, as you know: without you, there is no flight to the Moon.” He smiled to take the edge off what was clearly a threat: “I’d hate to have to kidnap you.”