Lost Boys Part 33

"Someone else can be my best friend," said DeAnne, "without ever being half as good a friend as you."

"Are you just trying to make me cry so I can't drive straight and I run us into a bridge abutment or something?" asked Jenny. "Now make sure none of your kids is standing behind the U-Haul or the car when we drive out." Jenny looked at the U-Haul in disgust. "They're a big enough company to transfer our family across the country and buy our stupid house, but they're not big enough that they can afford to pay for a real moving company. Tell Step to quit his lousy job, they're all thieves." Then Jenny kissed DeAnne on the cheek and they hugged each other and then Spike finally locked the house and got into the cab of the U-Haul with two of the kids as Jenny got into their nice car with the rest of the kids. DeAnne made sure that Stevie and Robbie and Elizabeth were in plain sight and nowhere near the cars, and then she waved and the Cowpers pulled out into the road.

She watched them out of sight and then felt the baby inside her do his stretching thing, pushing against her ribs until it hurt, until she thought she couldn't stand it anymore. She wanted to swat the baby, to yell at it, to demand that it stop hurting her, that it just leave her alone for a minute.

The baby pushed all the harder. He was probably responding to the grief hormones flowing through her body, the chemical anguish.

At last the pressure subsided and she could think of walking again. "Come on, kids. This isn't the Cowpers' house anymore, so we better go on home."

When she got home, there was the Cowpers' old beat-up Datsun B-210. The car that made her and Step a two-car family for the first time in their marriage. She walked up and touched it, examined it, the paint pitted and faded, the doors rusted through at running-board height. She caressed the car as if it were a horse that no one had been able to tame but her. Thank you for Jenny, she said. But why did you have to take her away from me so soon?

She stopped herself from thinking that way, and said, very clearly and definitely inside her mind, Thank you for Jenny. And then she forced herself to leave it at that, to go inside and concentrate on fixing lunch, which was long overdue.

There was a subst.i.tute mailman, so the mail didn't arrive till almost four o'clock. There was an envelope from Agamemnon, and inside was the check. The money that would catch them up on their payments on the house in Indiana. If the regular mailman hadn't been on vacation, she could have paid the Cowpers for the car before they left.

Oh, well. She'd make out the checks tomorrow and everything would be fine. Most of the money would be gone immediately, they were so far behind-and none of it could go to the IRS for their back taxes, so that still hung over their heads. Still, freedom was in sight.

But the next day when she sat down to write out the checks, she just couldn't bring herself to do it. It made her feel so stupid, to find it emotionally impossible to write the checks. Hadn't she and Step decided last night that they would definitely go ahead and pay the mortgage up to date?

Finally she wrote out a check for the amount of the oldest overdue mortgage payment, along with all the late fees that had accrued on that one payment. She put it in an envelope, piled the kids into the car, drove to the post office, and slipped the envelope into the box.

A month. That's all I'm doing, just paying for one month's delay before they foreclose. Why? It's stupid and dangerousthey'll probably still call the note; this one payment won't do anything at all. But I can't wipe out that five thousand dollars sitting in the bank. I can't bring it down to nothing because who knows when the next check will come?

10: Independence Day

This is what the Fletchers did on the Fourth of July: The 1st Ward had a flag-raising ceremony at dawn, along with a pancake breakfast. Step could think of about three thousand things he'd rather do than get up before dawn on the Monday morning of the only three-day weekend of the summer, but the elders quorum was cooking the pancakes and DeAnne was conducting the choir's singing of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Having a southern church choir sing that song was in itself remarkable enough to be worth getting up early just to hear it.

In the weeks since the Cowpers had moved, the choir leader, Mary Anne Lowe, had been cultivating DeAnne's friendship. To Step it seemed almost as if Sister Lowe had been waiting for Jenny to get out of the picture before she moved in, as if there were room for only one friend in DeAnne's life at a time. And maybe it was so. DeAnne didn't exactly have a surplus of time and energy. Still, it seemed to Step that this friendship was different from the friendship with Jenny. Where Jenny had seemed to revive DeAnne, to buoy her up, Mary Anne's ebullient energy only made DeAnne seem more tired. Most annoying to Step was the way that being friends with Mary Anne Lowe meant having more and more duties in the ward music program. Like conducting the choir for the sunrise flag raising and all those practices on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays getting ready for it.

When DeAnne had done compa.s.sionate service with Jenny, it almost always happened during the day, but the choir practices took place during the few hours that Step had home with DeAnne, with the family, and so he ended up either going to choir practice himself, as the only tenor, or staying home trying to tend the children while typing Hacker Snack code into the Commodore 64.

Even with Jenny gone, the compa.s.sionate service a.s.signments continued. Sister Bigelow was still on the phone with DeAnne a couple of times a week, so that Step would come home from work and find DeAnne ready to rush over to Sister Something-or-other's house with a salad or a ca.s.serole or a plate of biscuits and a tub of gravy and could Step please just watch the kids for an hour and maybe slice up the cuc.u.mbers for the salad?

Sure, DeAnne. And I'll finish Hacker Snack in December, about three months after we're bankrupt.

Then he'd feel bad about being so childishly resentful and he'd go ahead and do the things she had asked and, usually, more, so she'd get back and find dinner ready to eat, or the kids already bathed, or whatever else he figured he could accomplish to make her feel cared for and help her get some rest because, after all, wasn't she the one carrying their child? What right did he have to think that she somehow wasn't doing enough?

After the sunrise service and the pancakes, which tasted like they were cut from cardboard and went down like lead, the Fletchers came home and the kids began to fuss and fight with each other. Step solved the problem by sending them all back to bed, since they were obviously too tired to get along in human society; and then he took DeAnne by the arm and dragged her back to bed. Within fifteen minutes Robbie and Betsy were both asleep and so was DeAnne. Stevie, of course, stubbornly lay there in bed with his eyes open until Step walked in and quietly told him he could read if he wanted to. Finally Step went to bed and lay there feeling physically worn out and very sleepy. He continued to feel that way for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, until he gave up and went into the family room and slipped the Hacker Snack disk into the drive and turned on the computer.

It made the usual horrible grinding sound as it activated the disk drive-though it was not as bad as the metallic chewing noise the Commodore disk drive made-and then the familiar screen came up and Step began to move his little cartoon character, Rodney, with his nerdy gla.s.ses and perpetual melvin, through the maze of computer chips and hamburgers.

This is boring, thought Step. Not the first time, but each level is really just more of the same. You don't get that much pleasure out of the tenth time you play it.

The normal solution to this problem was to make each succeeding level so hard that you kept playing just to try to beat the machine and get your name on the vanity board. But for Step that wasn't enough. It had to be fun the first time, and yet the game had to be rich enough that at higher and higher levels better stuff happened, so that the game became its own reward.

What could he change without eating up too much memory? Well, it didn't have to be computer chips and burgers. He could work in other stuff-maybe different computer brands! Eating a VIC-20 and a Timex and an Apple II on the way to finally reaching an Atari and then maybe a mainframe or something.

If I'm going to do an evolutionary sequence like that, why not do evolution itself? Instead of starting with Rodney, I start with a salamander or something that climbs up out of primordial ooze and then at each level he becomes something else. A dinosaur. A mammal. A shrew, maybe. And then a chimp. And then h.o.m.o habilis, and then some big athletic-looking guy, and then finally, as the crowning pinnacle of evolution, the computer hacker, the nerd with gla.s.ses and a melvin! OK, that would be fun, but it would chew up disk s.p.a.ce, especially since he couldn't very well have dinosaurs collecting computer chips, so he'd have to change the thing they ate at every level. Leaves for the dinosaurs-and maybe salamanders, the guys from the previous level! And the shrews could eat dinosaur eggs. And the athletic guys could trample h.o.m.o habilis guys and leave them in a cartoony pile of arms and legs like Beetle Bailey after the sergeant gets through beating him up. And then Rodney could leave athletic guys behind him holding pink slips!

Would anybody get the joke? No, not pink slips, then. Too hard to show on the computer. No, they'll be left wearing Burger King uniforms!

That's it, that's it, he thought. It's still Hacker Snack, but it's a better game. This is going to blow Agamemnon away.

Step went into his office, pulled out a piece of paper, and began calculating how much memory the new graphics would eat up. He actually found himself wishing for the 128K of the IBM PC. Lousy as it was, the PC would still give him the room to do it right, with better animation and more levels. It could be a bigger game, with large mazes that extended off the screen. And what if I had 256K? He could forget character-based graphics and do smooth full-screen animations, like that pirate ship game he had seen Stevie playing.

What was the name of that game? He had looked for it once before, and never found it. Sometime he'd have to borrow Gallowgla.s.s's disa.s.sembler program and figure out how the programmer of that game had done it.

DeAnne came sleepily into his office. "I must have dozed off," she said.

"That was the idea," said Step.

"We have to get to the Eight Bits Inc. party, don't we?"

"It's an all-day picnic," said Step. "We can show up anytime."

"Well, the kids might want to stay and play awhile, and I imagine they'll be serving the food around noon, won't they?"

Step shrugged. "What time is it now?"

"Eleven."

"So what's the rush?"

"No rush," she said. "Do you know what they'll be serving at the picnic?"

"Hot dogs and stuff," said Step. "And fried chicken, I think. Good old magnanimous Ray is having it catered by Colonel Sanders and Oscar Mayer."

"Don't be snide," said DeAnne. "I think having a company picnic is a good idea."

"I'm sure it is," said Step. "I'm just tired."

"Why didn't you sleep?"

"I tried," said Step. "And then I got to thinking."

"Oh, that's a mistake. I gave it up years ago.'

"Well, I'll finish this later," he said. "Let's get the kids ready and head out before the temperature gets up to a hundred. The humidity is already at a hundred percent by now, I'm sure."

"You're just a desert boy, Step."

"I'm not used to sweating and having it not evaporate until the next day." He turned off the computer and got up from the chair and stretched. "Now I think I could sleep."

"Well, then, go lie down," said DeAnne. "We'll go later in the day."

"No, let's go now and get it over with. At some point we'll see d.i.c.ky in a bathing suit and then we'll throw up the pancakes from this morning and we'll all feel much better."

Robbie and Betsy woke up sluggish, as much from the pancakes as from their nap, and it was almost one o'clock before they got to the picnic. Eight Bits Inc. had rented UNC-Steuben's private lake, and there were about a hundred people in the water or milling around on sh.o.r.e. The food was being served under a canopy, and they headed there from the car. Ray Keene himself was nowhere to be seen-he had been getting more and more reclusive over the past few months, and some of the programmers had started referring to him as Howard Keene, in reference to Howard Hughes. But Keene's wife was there, and their five-year-old daughter, and every other employee of Eight Bits Inc. had shown up. They knew this because d.i.c.ky greeted them by the condiment table with the cheery announcement, "At last, the Fletchers? Finally we have a hundred percent."

"I didn't know we were taking attendance," said Step with equal cheer. "I would have brought a note from my mom." And then he and DeAnne concentrated on getting hot dogs into the kids.

Afterward, since they couldn't swim, Step took the boys over to where people were playing games-horseshoes and lawn darts. After a few moments of watching, though, Step concluded that these were no safer than sending nonswimmers into the lake-the lawn darts were being thrown by careless, unsupervised children, and the horseshoes were dominated by adults, mostly from the business end of Eight Bits Inc., including Cowboy Bob, and the iron shoes were whizzing through the air with enough velocity to break a child's head open. Stevie, of course, was quite careful, but Robbie had a way of getting excited and running straight toward his goal without noticing things like darts and iron shoes flying through the air. So Step kept a firm grip on Robbie's hand and soon led both boys away from the games.

Which left precious little for them to do. Well, fine, thought Step. I'll go collect DeAnne and Betsy and we'll head on out of here. After all, attendance has now been taken and we won't be missed.

Step saw DeAnne standing near the food canopy, talking to Mrs. Keene, who had lit up a cigarette and was now puffing away as she talked. Even outdoors with a slight breeze, Step knew that the cigarette smoke would quickly make DeAnne sick and lightheaded, hardly a good thing for a pregnant woman in the afternoon heat. So, with Stevie and Robbie in tow, Step headed over and broke into the conversation.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Keene, but DeAnne's probably just to shy to tell you that cigarette smoke really makes her ill. If she weren't pregnant, it wouldn't be a problem outdoors like this, but-"

"Oh, that's just fine," said Mrs. Keene pleasantly. "I was hardly smoking it anyway." She dropped the cigarette to the ground and twisted her foot on it. "You should have said something, you sweet girl, I just didn't even think, I smoked right through my own pregnancy with Allison and so I forget that some people just need to have fresh air all the time."

"It really wasn't bothering me outside in the breeze like this," said DeAnne.

"Oh, heavens, girl, I'm the boss's wife, you think I don't know that? But just between you and me, I'm not half so impressed with Ray as Ray is, and Ray isn't all that impressed with me, so kissing up to me won't help anybody keep on his good side anyway!" She chuckled, a low, throaty smoker's laugh.

Mrs. Keene was charming and funny and nice, but also dangerously disloyal. Was the marriage in trouble? That would be no surprise, really, given the kind of autocratic, secretive man Ray Keene was becoming; the joke in the Pit was that Ray kept secrets so well that his wife had to hire a private investigator to find out where he kept his d.i.c.k. But if the marriage was in trouble, Mrs. Keene could be a walking kiss of death, bestowing herself on selected employees and then leaving them behind without a thought of the consequences. Somebody was bound to be keeping track of whom she talked to.

"Dad," said Robbie.

Step turned away from the conversation. Robbie was excited about something. Behind him a little girl was standing in front of a clump of other little kids. "Allison wants me to go on the raft with them! Can I go, Dad?"

"No," said Step. "You know you can't go on the water, Robbie. You can't swim."

The little girl stepped forward and, in a voice that was accustomed to getting results, said, "He can so go. My daddy said it was perfectly safe."

"Then that means you can go," said Step. "But Robbie cannot go, because his daddy says that it is not safe."

"Well my daddy is the boss of this company and what he says goes!"

Step remembered the three precious pieces of paper in DeAnne's filing cabinet at home-his employment agreement, the contract from Agamemnon, and Ray's memo stating his intention not to support the IBM PC-and his smile broadened. "Well, little girl, your daddy may be the boss of this company, but he is not the boss of my family, and so when it comes to the safety of my children, what he says matters about as much as a mouse fart."

The other children delighted in this-the one topic guaranteed to make little kids laugh is flatulence. But Allison was not amused. "I'll tell my daddy what you said!"

"By all means," said Step. "He'll be proud to know that his little girl thinks she can boss around grown men. He's doing a fine job of raising you."

Allison was young enough not to realize she was not being complimented. "Well, thank you," she said. "I forgive you and I won't tell. Now come on, Robbie."

"You missed the point, little girl," said Step. "Robbie is not going on the raft. This is because I love Robbie and don't want him to fall into the lake and drown. But I can't wait for you to go on the raft. So please, hurry up, the lake is waiting for you."

Allison looked confused for a moment, and then stuck her tongue out at Robbie and led her little troop of friends off toward the water.

"She stuck her tongue out at me, Daddy," said Robbie.

"And it made her look really ugly and stupid, didn't it?" said Step.

When he turned back to DeAnne and Mrs. Keene, however, he was chagrined to realize that they had apparently been listening to the whole exchange. Mrs. Keene at once put him at ease by winking and saying, "She's got so much of her father in her, wouldn't you say?"

"I wouldn't know," said Step. "I haven't seen Ray in months."

"Well, you haven't missed much," said Mrs. Keene. "You must be independently wealthy or something, because it's plain that you don't give a rat's a.s.s whether you keep your job. I like that in a man." Then she grinned at DeAnne. "I'm flirting with your husband, Mrs. Fletcher, but don't pay any attention to it, because I'm just a little bit drunk. My rule is no more than one martini-per hour." She laughed in delight. "Not really, of course," she said. "What I'm drunk on is the fact that I can look around this whole group of people, more than a hundred of them now, and I can be absolutely certain deep in my soul that every single one of them hates Ray Keene. You don't mind my telling you this, do you?"

"Actually" said DeAnne, "we really need to be going."

"Oh, I'm not surprised," said Mrs. Keene. "I need to be going myself."

"Where's Stevie?" asked DeAnne.

"Right over there," said Step, pointing to the tree where Stevie was leaning, watching the activities on the water. "Where's Betsy?"

"Oh, that young fellow who used to drive you home a lot is taking her for a walk."

"Gla.s.s?" he asked. "Gallowgla.s.s?"

"No, he said his name was Roland McIntyre."

"That's Gla.s.s," said Step. He cursed himself for not having warned DeAnne, not having told her that she must not let Betsy out of her sight for a moment, and she must be especially certain not to let Roland McIntyre, alias Saladin Gallowgla.s.s, so much as touch a hair of Betsy's head. "Where did he take her? How long ago "Oh, while I was talking to Mrs. Keene here. He took her off that way, up that hill."

Vaguely in the direction of the parking lot. Or the woods just to the left of the cars. In any event, the very area where n.o.body else was gathered.

"Is something wrong?" said Mrs. Keene.

"I hope not," said Step. "Here's Robbie." He put Robbie's hand in DeAnne's. "Don't let anybody take him or Stevie for a walk, please."

DeAnne clearly caught from Step's air of urgency the fact that she had done something very wrong by letting Gla.s.s take Betsy. "Step, I'm sorry, I figured he was a friend, I saw him drop you off so often..."

He didn't stay for the rest of her apology. He wasn't much of a runner, and he was badly out of shape, but he still had breath enough when he got up by the parking lot to call out Betsy's name, then Gla.s.s's.

"Over here, Step!" called Gla.s.s.

Now Step could see him, standing behind a car at the far edge of the lot, beside an overgrown pasture. "Do you have Betsy with you?"

"Of course," said Gla.s.s. "Your wife said I could take her for a walk."

Step was halfway across the parking lot. Now his run up the hill was catching up with him-he was panting, and he hadn't enough breath for speech.

"I think she might be wet," said Gla.s.s. "I was just checking. I didn't know which car was yours, though."

At last Step was around behind the car and there was Betsy, holding hands with Gla.s.s. Her diaper was still on and she was waving a dandelion fuzzball, trying to get the last of the seeds to fall off. Step finally had breath to speak. "DeAnne said you could take her on a walk, not fiddle with her diaper, Gla.s.s."

"Well, I didn't think you'd want your daughter walking around getting diaper rash," said Gla.s.s.

Step scooped Betsy up into his arms and stood there looking Gla.s.s in the eye. "I don't know how to put this delicately, Gla.s.s, so I won't try. I like you, as a programmer, as a friend. But don't you ever, ever touch any of my children as long as you live. Because if I ever catch you alone with one of my kids again, then that will be as long as you live."