Bombed Read online

“Exactly,” and Hank smiled. He did seem to be a nice man in spite of his big black boots and overabundance of pockets and tattoos. Smith didn’t seem as nice, but he was young. They were both young. The young were often impatient.

  “Let’s talk about the way they’re watching us over ribs,” said Hank. So Michael went with them to a black van and climbed into the backseat.

  There he started to change his mind again, but the van seemed to have a child lock on the door. So he pulled in his arms and tucked his hands between his legs. Annie often took him places in her car. He told himself he could go with his new friends to a good rib place and be all right.

  The ribs were in fact great, and they weren’t the sort of thing Annie would ever fix for him. He would never make them himself either, of course. His mother had sometimes cooked ribs, but she’d baked hers in the oven. These were smoky and slightly charred. He focused on the ribs and appreciated the fact that Hank and Smith had picked a booth that wasn’t near anybody else. He was trying to enjoy this outing. Dr. Kortge would want him to. Annie would probably too.

  Even though he hadn’t told her about it and still wished he had.

  He ate a lot of ribs, but he also found himself joining in the conversation, which was definitely the sort of thing Dr. Kortge would praise him for. But it was easy. These men talked about exactly the things he liked to read about. They talked about the new currency that was going to wipe out everybody’s savings. They talked about the Death Bureaus that were going to decide who got to have medical treatment and who had to die. They talked about J. Edgar Hoover and how he might still be masterminding the annihilation of freedom.

  “But I’m not sure I buy that one,” Michael said. “Even if his death was faked, like Jimmy Hoffa’s, or that CIA agent Lee Harvey Oswald? Hoover would be more than a hundred and fifteen by now.”

  “I didn’t mean he was actually running the FBI anymore,” said Hank. “It’s his legacy, what he set in motion.”

  “But I think they do fake deaths,” Michael said. “Like Timothy McVeigh? It just doesn’t make sense that he would let himself be killed and never tell anyone who he was working with. And there’s no way he did that alone, but they didn’t want to admit who was working with him. So I’ve always felt his death had to be just for show.”

  “Yeah, they did it themselves to demonize patriots,” said Smith.”

  “And to think they killed all those little kids,” said Hank.

  “Maybe they faked their deaths too,” Michael said. This particular topic, falsified deaths, was one of his favorites, and he’d always found it hard to believe anyone would want to kill those kids. “Sometimes I think even Jesus’s death was faked. That’s why they didn’t break his legs. He drank some of the wine, and it was drugged so he’d appear to be dead so they could take him to that cave.”

  “Uh,” said Hank.

  “Or maybe God substituted Judas Iscariot on the cross. Some Muslims are big on that one.”

  “Um,” said Smith.

  “And how can all those people keep seeing Elvis if he’s really dead?”

  Smith and Hank exchanged a look that made Michael think they weren’t big fans of Elvis. Or Jesus either possibly. He went back to his ribs.

  Then Hank said, “People are so gullible ever since they put that stuff in the water supply. No one questions anything anymore.”

  So Moscow did have that stuff in its water? Michael was too deep in barbecue sauce right then to ask.

  “And their thoughts have been simplified to the point that you can’t even get their attention,” said Smith. “You got to grab them by the throat.” He stretched a beefy arm across the table and made a thick fist.

  “Figuratively,” said Hank.

  Smith pulled back his fist.

  “But Smith is right,” Hank continued. “It takes a crisis to wake people up. Make them see what’s really happening.”

  Michael had been uncertain about the fist, but this he understood. He said, “Crisis is the driver of evolution.” He’d used exactly this phrase in one of his posts.

  “Right. That’s it exactly,” said Hank. “That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.” He braced his elbows on the table and leaned forward, grim and earnest. “People need a powerful statement now. They need a wake-up call.”

  “A crisis to drive evolution,” said Smith.

  “We were thinking of making that happen,” said Hank, “on the Fourth of July.”

  *

  As soon as Annie and her uncle had both left the house, Fleep started agitating to go inside and look for the gold.

  “Are you crazy?” Buzzard said. By then he was crashing hard from the lack of cocaine. All he wanted was to go home, extract himself from this strait-jacket of a car, and crawl into his sagging but king-sized bed.

  “I told you, I’m desperate,” said Fleep. “I’m not going to jail.”

  “You break down the door and some alarm goes off in the nearest cop shop, guess what? You go to jail.”

  “We don’t know there’s an alarm.”

  “We don’t know there isn’t! I thought we were going to just watch for a while, figure things out.” Buzzard said this even though he realized it meant spending more time in this car. But now that they were out of blow and he hadn’t slept for two days, he suspected he could sleep anywhere, even twisted up in here.

  “We just need another story,” said Fleep. “We were working on the sprinkler system before.”

  “We were?”

  “But that got us only into the backyard. To get inside we’ve got to be . . . painters. That’s it. As bad as the outside looks, I bet the inside needs paint too.” Fleep reached into the so-called backseat and tossed Buzzard’s coveralls to him.

  “I’m not squeezing my balls into those things again,” Buzzard said.

  Fleep was already working his feet into the leg holes of his. The guy was relentless.

  “If we were painters,” Buzzard pointed out, “they’d be expecting us. They would’ve turned off the alarm. They would’ve given us a key. Plus I bet we’d have paint.”

  “If we leave to get paint, the uncle might come home while we’re gone and we wouldn’t know since he didn’t take a car.” Fleep said this as if he’d thought this through in a perfectly logical way, but even he didn’t have enough room to put on those coveralls inside this car without bonking the steering wheel. The horn honked.

  “Very incognito,” Buzzard said.

  Fleep ignored this and kept on struggling with the pant legs, hitting the horn a couple more times. Buzzard looked at his own coveralls and his thick legs knotted under the dash. “I’ll wait here. And when the cops show up, I’m walking away like I never knew you.”

  Fleep ignored this too. But just then the white GMC cargo van that Buzzard had noticed parked a little way down the street, the one that always had the two coffee guzzlers in it, came toward them and turned into Annie’s uncle’s driveway.

  This got Fleep’s attention. “What the hell?”

  Four guys got out of it. They were wearing coveralls.

  They started unloading buckets of paint and ladders and such. Fleep looked stunned, in fact paralyzed. Buzzard just found it amusing. Apparently the inside of the house did need paint. But when those guys started carrying their ladders and paint in through the breezeway door, Fleep began thrashing away at his coveralls again. “This is perfect!” he said.

  “Right,” said Buzzard. “We get to go home and go to bed.”

  “No. Don’t you see? It’s like you said, these guys were expected. The door’s open. If there’s an alarm, it’s off.”

  “Handy for them.”

  “I’m joining the crew.”

  “Huh?”

  Fleep kept wrestling with his coveralls until, amazingly, he had both legs and one arm in the things.

  “You don’t think they’re going to notice you’re not one of them?” Buzzard said.

  “It’s a big company. I just got hired.”

 
“It’s only four guys.”

  “But it’s a bigger company than that, and things can get confusing in a big company. Just look at the van.”

  Sure enough there was a sign on the side of the van: “Acme Construction.” That could be a big company. But the weird thing was that Buzzard didn’t remember seeing a sign on that van. So it wasn’t the same van? But he’d just seen it pull out from where it had been parked.

  He definitely needed sleep.

  Fleep got out of the car just as the last of the painting crew disappeared into the house. Buzzard watched him get his last arm into the coveralls and adjust the crotch, pleased to find the thing squeezed his balls too. Fleep finally got it adjusted and zipped up. He started for the door, bent over, looking left and right, acting exactly like someone who was trying to sneak into something.

  But when he came up beside the van parked in the driveway, he stopped. Apparently there was still someone in it, and that person was talking to him. Buzzard watched Fleep wave his hands like he was in a big hurry, maybe trying to tell the guy he was late for work but now eager to be on the job. This went on for a while, long enough for Buzzard finally to figure out how to make his seat recline, which was a big improvement.

  Then Fleep was back. “I don’t believe it!” he said slamming the door, which jarred Buzzard out of what had almost become sleep. “They’re not painters at all!”

  “Argh,” Buzzard grunted.

  “Those guys are looking for the gold!”

  Buzzard sort of mumbled, “Great minds think alike.”

  “It’s worse than that. They’re some kind of cops. That old fart, Annie’s uncle, he bought that gold because he’s one of those survivalists. One of those end-of-the-world guys. Guys like that, they don’t believe in paying their taxes. Those painters are IRS!”

  Buzzard opened his eyes. His nap was ruined anyway. “Something has seriously messed up your brain. Maybe some toxic impurities in the cocaine?”

  “It’s true. We gotta get out of here.”

  “Okay.” Suddenly Buzzard didn’t care how loony Fleep was. If his delusions meant they got to go home, that was good.

  He flipped his seat back up, almost accordion pleating himself in his eagerness, and Fleep pulled away from the curb, calling on far more horsepower than needed. “Yeah, things are too hot for us to stay here,” said Fleep. “The guy in that van, he tried to hide it from me, but there’s a bunch of electronics in there. And he has a gun!”

  Chapter 10

  When Annie got home, she set her new albums on top of the stereo cabinet and just stood there for a while. She went back out to her car for the groceries and put them away. She still didn’t feel like listening to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Joe Ely, or even Towns Van Zandt—and normally she would put on any music she’d just bought and play it over and over until it had become a part of her.

  She went looking for Uncle Michael.

  The house was quiet, no machinery running in the basement. He wasn’t at his computer. He wasn’t napping on his bed either, but Lisa was sleeping there. The cat opened one eye when Annie came in, then turned her head upside down to offer the soft white fur under her chin. Annie couldn’t resist that fluffy white patch. She sat on the bed and rubbed Lisa, the softness of her chin and underbelly, then the firmer orange and black of her back and the silk of her ears. That seemed to help.

  Helped what?

  She wasn’t concerned that Michael didn’t seem to be home. He did go out sometimes. Sometimes he just liked to go for a walk.

  She was worried about Russ and Char. Of course, she was worried about them.

  Or maybe some part of her actually believed this guy Wes was going to book her into such large venues she would suddenly have hundreds of thousands of fans. So she was excited. That had to be it.

  Just because some good-looking guy seemed to be coming onto her and then clearly said no, his only interest in her was business, that couldn’t be what was making her feel she needed to jump on her bike and push it to a hundred and ten. To be upset by something like that—when she’d given up on men, right?—and she’d been doing just fine without one—that would be absurd.

  Lisa began to come more awake and get feisty. Annie had to extricate her hand.

  But then she was restless again.

  The house was so quiet it was unlikely her uncle was in the basement, but she decided to look down there. And there he was.

  The beautiful board still lay on his work table, and he was staring at it. Probably imagining a guitar laid across its bands of brown and gray, the black outline of the mountain range curving through it like an inlay. Annie knew how important it was not to be interrupted when you were doing that sort of thing—imagining, trying to create something. She tried to stay quiet.

  But she was too restless. After a while she said, “Hey.”

  He didn’t look up.

  “I got some new records.” He’d never learned to play an instrument, but he liked music. He liked to hear her new records.

  He still didn’t look up.

  “Are you getting ready to cut into this?” She might be fatally disrupting his artistic vision. She felt bad about that, but talking to him was making her feel better, less tight or jangled or something—but not disappointed about Wes, it couldn’t be that.

  Michael shook his head no. Which made her feel even better. Now she was engaged in a conversation, sort of.

  But then she realized if he wasn’t getting ready to cut into this board, his silence was due to something else. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  His shoulders went up and then down, which might have been a yes.

  “Is it one of those blogs? Has someone convinced you something bad is going to happen to you? Maybe you should quit reading those things. You know, most of that stuff is a crock.”

  He just turned and walked by her, still without meeting her eyes, and went upstairs. She followed him, but he went into his bedroom and closed the door.

  Now this no longer looked anything like his usual artistic process. In fact, it looked more like the old days when she would visit her grandmother and he would be here, but he wouldn’t be here the way most people are, as if he lived in some other dimension and only once in a while did it intersect with the one where she, her grandmother, and everybody else lived. Her grandmother had had a remarkable ability to wait for and enjoy those rare moments with him.

  “I’m going to fix lasagna,” Annie said to his closed door. He loved lasagna.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “It’ll take a couple of hours. You’ll be hungry then.”

  “I had a huge lunch.”

  “You had a huge . . .?” There was no way he’d had more than a sandwich for lunch. Was he having such a complete relapse that he was hallucinating again?

  Surely this was only a minor setback. He would come out of his room when he smelled the lasagna, and he would smile, and maybe over the lasagna they could talk about those silly blogs, and she would be able to figure out what had upset him.

  At least he’d made her quit thinking about that booker Wes. She put on Towns Van Zandt.

  *

  Michael pulled Lisa onto his chest. She licked at his neck, and he listened to the music. It was sad but beautiful, and muted by his closed door, like a lake seen through drizzling rain. It made him feel a little better, and he could tell Annie was worried about him, so when she told him dinner was ready, he came out of his room and ate some of the lasagna. He didn’t want her to worry, and he did like lasagna.

  But he still didn’t feel like talking much, and once he’d assured her none of his blogs had said anything any more upsetting than usual, she didn’t seem to want to talk much either. She was probably tired from her tour.

  She stayed quiet all weekend. She listened to music or spent time in her room. He could hear her playing a guitar up there. He liked to think it was one of his. But he could hear it only faintly because she kept the volume way down. That was how she
liked to compose, almost silently.

  This was good. He needed quiet to think.

  Annie had asked if he believed what he read on the Internet, but it wasn’t like that, the way the ideas sat in his head. He knew the problems on the Internet weren’t the same as when Lisa got an abscess and all she would do was lick it, and it kept getting bigger and wouldn’t heal, not until he took her to the vet. Which hadn’t been easy since Annie had been gone, and this was after something had gone wrong with his car, so he’d had to carry Lisa in her carrier, which she didn’t like at all, a couple of miles to where the vet he trusted had her office on a very busy street.

  The problems on the Internet weren’t even like when the power went out because of an ice storm, and the house got cold, so he’d built a fire in the fireplace, but since it hadn’t been used for years, it smoked the whole house. So then he’d been opening windows, which had made the house even colder, and Annie had been off in Austin or New Orleans, somewhere warm far away.

  Now Annie was here, and Lisa was fine, and he was opening windows only because it was so nice outside.

  No, the Internet problems were different but intriguing. Why did Building 7 fall down when it wasn’t hit by a plane? What were they hiding in Area 51? And why was all the stuff you saw on TV, including the news and everything the politicians said, so jerky and disjointed that it did seem no one wanted you to understand? He could spend hours speculating about these things. They seemed to confirm how he saw the world—not as frightening as it used to feel back when he was younger, yet still not right, dangerously out of balance. But not until he’d met Hank and Smith had he ever thought about doing anything about these things.

  *

  Then it was Monday, and Michael was going to have lunch with his new friends again.

  Annie had gone to the barn to practice with her band, so, just like the other time, he didn’t have to tell her where he was going, and again this felt wrong. Hank and Smith met him near the dumpsters again, and he rode with them in their black van to a Thai restaurant this time, which seemed a little odd. Ribs seemed to fit these men better, but Michael loved Thai food.