Bravado's House of Blues (5 page)

Agnes shielded her eyes from the late morning sun. “This must explain why there is no Mrs. Schonfeld.”

He laughed. The sound of it still made her feel warm. “I suppose it does.” He unfolded a second chair and set it up near—but not too near—the other. Then he worked the easel free.

She sharpened her pencil while Jacob set up his easel and squeezed paint onto his palette. She sat down and drew her notepad from her satchel. She scribbled:

Caught up, cast down in a courtship of snakes

A carpet of corpses unmoving, unliving

Untethered at last from past mistakes

Free from the unloving and unforgiving.

She lined it out and stole a glance at Jacob. His eyes flashed merriment and his mouth twitched into a grin. She fell back into the last several hours and returned his smile.

The jostling of the car and the easiness of his voice had drawn her out. They’d talked about everything. Movies and music. Last week’s vote in the House to approve the new amendment, the one that would finally expand America’s democracy to her and millions of other women. (“If we’re going to drink to that,” he had said, “We’d better do it quickly.”) Eliot, Frost, Van Gogh, Marx, Sanger, and the surprising popularity of Fort’s book—they moved from subject to subject, eventually settling into their childhoods, their fears, their frustrations and even a bit of their dreams.

His brush darted now from palette to canvas, his eyes wandering over the field.

After an hour of more random scribbling, more random lines to somehow capture this time, she looked up at him. “Why do you do this again?”

He glanced at her, his brush never losing its stroke. “Bored so soon?”

She chuckled. “Not bored. Curious.”

He smiled, his white teeth gleaming in the light. “It awes me. I like how that feels. So I paint that feeling.”

“You do this a lot?”

“What? Lure young women into fields of dead snakes?”

Now her chuckle became a laugh. “No. Paint oddities.”

His brows furrowed. “Not oddities, Agnes. Unexplained and unexpected wonders.” For a moment, he paused, his brush hanging in the dead space between paint and painting. Then he remembered her question. “I paint what I see.”

She looked at the field of dead snakes. “But always after the fact? You’d said in Mexico City that you’d arrived after the visitation. And these—” she waved at the snakes—” they fell yesterday . . . maybe even the day before.”

“I’m usually appallingly late to miracles,” he said.

“Usually? So you’ve been on time before?”

“Once or twice.”

“Only twice?”

Their eyes met. Something danced in his. “Three times, now that I think about it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What were they? Strange lights in the sky? People vanishing and reappearing?”

“No. Missed all of those.” He went back to painting.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Maybe later,” he said. “For now, my paints are drying.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard that one before.”

He didn’t answer. After a few minutes, she pushed herself back in the chair, lowered her hat, and closed her eyes.

It was late afternoon when she awoke. The sun had vanished, dark clouds spreading across the sky.

“And the lady awakens,” Jacob said. “I think we’re going to have muddy roads home if we don’t pack it up soon.”

Agnes stood and stretched. “Did you finish your painting?”

He nodded, standing himself. “I did. Just now.”

She took a step closer to him. “May I see it?”

Jacob blushed and stammered. “I . . . I’m not sure you’d—”

“Oh, don’t be silly.” She walked around the easel to stand by him. Her mouth opened and shut and she looked from the canvas to him and back.

It was the most beautiful painting she had ever seen. A stunning girl stretched out, asleep in a collapsible chair, her hair cascading from beneath an off-kilter hat. She followed the line of the neck, the curve of the breasts, the sleek, coltish grace of the legs. The girl’s feet rested on the shore of an ocean of rainbow-speckled serpents while overhead, a sky colored by a thousand dreams swirled and twisted like a silk canopy above.

Agnes did not know what else to say. “You’ve been painting me.”

He turned to face her, shuffling his feet slightly. “I did.”

“But why?”

“I paint what I see.”

And suddenly it struck her. Three times, he had said earlier, and she realized now that those had been the only three miracles she’d been on time for, herself. Mexico City. New York. Now here.

“Is it okay?” he asked her.

The sky above rumbled and opened. Something bounced off her shoulder but she ignored it. Dark shapes fell into the field, thudding softly as they bounced off the car.

Her eyes searched his. She didn’t know what to say so she did the only thing that came to mind. Throwing herself into his arms, she kissed him and kept on kissing him while frogs fell around them. Beneath their feet, the ground hopped and croaked, rolling like a living sea. Overhead, the sky turned a shade of ochre that neither paint nor poem could capture.

TOWFISH BLUES

R
eflected light off the dirigible’s surface cast a bloody tint over the rigging, reminding Marta of the way the world looked when the migraines consumed her. She watched the surface of the water as the shadow of their dirigible passed over the bubbling primordial soup that was the focus of this expedition.

She sat in the front observer post waiting for the lead engineer to certify the towfish before they started the next round of surveying. The heart and soul of their operation resided in that ten foot long, metallic tadpole crammed with electronic and sonar equipment.

“Sonuvabitch,” Mitch swore loudly over the open commlink. “Bloody fu . . .”

Marta quickly tapped down the volume as the familiar litany escalated. She and Mitch had worked on several surveys together since they had come to the bio-station at Long Night Bay. After a count of five, she raised the volume and listened to the silence.

“Okay,” she said into the mike. “Start over again, with less volume.” She could see Mitch’s face, scrunched up in frustration as he composed himself to explain the obviously technical problem to her. She knew what the crews thought of her—Marta, Queen of fucking everything. She also knew she was the best damn party chief the Walsh corporation had, and even if the crew thought she was a bitch, she took her job seriously.

“For starters,” Mitch growled, “once again we are short on spares and even shorter on good weather.”

Marta took a deep breath. She was responsible for the first, but would be blamed for both. “What parts, Mitch?”

“The number three guide completely snapped off the bulkhead. We can fabricate a replacement, but I need to replace the front sonar sensor from where the fish smashed into that rock formation. The current down there is exceptionally strong, and the torque we’ve been getting in this wind fractured the welds on the guide.”

Marta looked out the side of her observation post. The stabilizer engines were aft of the living quarters, and therefore out of her view, but she couldn’t help looking.

“Just a sec,” she said into the mike. She sighed and flipped her console up, tapped a few keys, and brought up the ship’s system grid. The wind was holding steady at thirty-five knots out of the north. The stabilizer engines were working at eighty percent capacity. They’d eked four hours of marginal readings in the last twenty-four.

“Captain Bretherton,” she said into the command line. “We good here?”

“You’re pushing it,” came the terse reply. “These stabilizers go over eighty-five percent and we bag this trip.”

“Got a contract that says I call the pull-out, Captain.” Marta squeezed the bridge of her nose and sighed. “Let me know if the weather shifts.”

“I’m not risking this ship for you.” The captain cut the line.

He’s such a whiny ass, she thought.

“Okay,” Marta said, clicking back over to Mitch. “Wind is steady, and within acceptable levels of risk.” She knew Mitch hated flying in anything over twenty-five knots. “The stabilizers are operating within tolerance. Can you have Steve reweld the number three and get the fish back in the drink?”

The silence stretched. Marta tapped the console with her stylus, waiting for Mitch to answer. What was it with men and their pouting?

“Give me five minutes,” he finally said. She could tell by the cold in his voice that he was not happy. “If Steve says no, then we need to return to port. I can rig the fish for another attempt, but I’m unhappy with the trailing sensors. We might get data, but I can’t guarantee the quality.”

“Let me know,” she replied. She tapped through several more screens.

Twenty-three days out and the customer was starting to get antsy. They’d been able to map a course for seventeen hundred kilometers of cable on this planet so far, but this trip out was proving to be problematic. Connecting the mining outpost to the two research stations and the one small colony ranked high on the colonial managers list of needs, but Marta questioned this planet’s long term viability for colonization. Her father had embraced the dream, but at what cost?

Winter, or what passed for it on this rock, hit the Sanae Basin exceptionally hard. The crew blamed her for accepting this trip, and rightly so, but they did not see the bottom line like she did. Funds were running low and rival companies had sewn up the huge deal with Tri-Star Corporation during the last annum. Between the faulty data on the Pilton run and the parent company’s legal entanglements with the Brial-governed worlds, work was hard to come by. The fact that the University of Brial Prime had agreed to take them meant the work was dangerous and the margins thin.

No other crew had stepped up to answer the bid, but the Walsh Corporation had few options in this sector. Other subsidiaries on other worlds had better equipment and larger crews, but she was going to make do with what she had. Her engineers were top-of-the-line. These guys could get a reading using silicon adhesive and waste receptacles. She just wished they had as much confidence in her as she had in them.

“Okay,” Mitch said over the comm. “Steve says he can have the number three guide back in place in under an hour, but he’s going to be logging it all in EVA. He wants a second set of hands and a day off. This is something that should be done in a maintenance bay.”

“Tell him he can have the extra hands, but he has to finish his shift. He can have an extra four hours off, but you have to find someone to cover for him in the next work cycle.”

“Gee. Maybe we should just bag it and head into port.”

Marta rubbed her temples. “No.” she said. Why didn’t they understand? “Look, Mitch. If we go back in now, we’ve wasted too many days for too little data. We are running thin, as you so frequently point out with our lack of spares. We need to get this data. Now. This trip. Or we run the risk of not getting paid enough to cover our expenses. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” Mitch said without enthusiasm. “We’ll pull it out of our ass once again.”

Heat rushed up Marta’s neck.

“Next time, Marta,” Mitch continued, “I approve the spares and we crank down the tolerance for this blimp. Thirty-five knots may be within tolerances, but any fool knows not to fly a fucking balloon in a gale.”

The mike clicked into silence. Marta stared out into the beautiful and horrid landscape of Sanae Basin. She counted to a hundred, feeling her blood pressure ease as her anger subsided. They just didn’t understand how hard her job was.

The irony of running cable on new worlds did not escape Marta. Her father had been a communications expert in his early days. The first colony in this system proved his undoing. Between the wonky magnetic fluctuations on planet and the solar activity of the twin suns, satellite communication was horrid at best and nonexistent at worst. Her father’s company went out of business before the first colonists touched down—too much capital expenditure and too little return. She watched his career burn out across the night sky as one useless satellite after another plunged into the atmosphere over the course of the colony’s first years.

The red flashing of the atmospheric containment warning drove Marta out of her contemplation. She flipped through the rear camera systems, finally spotting two people in EVA suits crawling along the aft portion of the windward rigging. She tried to focus the camera on them. Who had Steve taken with him? Surely no one from the ship’s crew. Susan, maybe, or Robert.

She keyed the mike. “Mitch, who did you send out?”

No answer.

“Mitch?” she asked again

“Marta, this is Robert.”

Marta tapped the vid-screen until she focused on the engineering berth. The dirigible had sparse accommodations, but for the funding they had, she had little room to argue.

Robert’s lean face loomed into the camera. His normally bright eyes came through as dull and flat on the screen. He was new to the team—fresh out of school, and Marta still intimidated him.

“Uh, Marta.” He looked around nervously. “Mitch is busy at the moment. Anything I can help you with?”

“He’s still on shift, where is he?” she asked.

Robert turned to speak with someone and covered the vid-cam with his hand. Seconds passed in silence. Robert moved his hand, and Marta could see Susan behind him.

“He’s out with Steve.”

Nausea flitted through Marta’s abdomen, and her temples throbbed. Idiot.

“Anything else?” Robert asked. His nose looked twice as large as it should as he loomed even closer to the lens.

“Why the hell is my lead engineer out there?” she asked. “Why aren’t you or Susan out there?”

“We drew straws. Mitch pulled the short one.”

“Okay.” She rubbed her temples. “Thanks.”

She cut off the mike and lay back as far as her chair would go, trying to tamp down the rising nausea.

Mitch was the main engineer. What the hell was he thinking, going out on that EVA? Damn it.

She sat up, switched her commlink to Mitch’s suit and keyed the mike. “Mitch, are you out of your mind?” She was so angry her voice shook.

“What do you want, Marta?” Mitch asked through a sea of static. Interference was unusually high for his signal being this close.

“You know better than to go out on EVA. If something happened to you, this whole trip is over.”

“Look, damn it,” he said. “I can’t ask my guys to do something I am not willing to do. We’re getting some serious static discharge from the blimp. Damn thing is soaking up a lot of ambient electricity. So let me do my job and get the hell off my line.” The mike cut out with a finality that made Marta grind her teeth.

His guys? This was her crew, damn it. Who the hell did he think he was?

The minutes crawled by as Marta watched Steve and Mitch work their way along the rigging toward the rear of the ship. Steve carried the welding gear on his back while Mitch carried the replacement guides. They stopped, set their support lines into the safety rings, and positioned themselves to begin the welding.

The dirigible began to hum. The cables just outside her window vibrated. She glanced at her monitor—thirty-eight knots. The stabilizers hummed along with no protest. Marta watched the burst of light as the acetylene flared into a bright pinpoint. Mitch held the new guide in place while Steve methodically fused the metal to the base of the ship. The process took almost five minutes. Mitch worked the towline into the guide and gave a thumbs up to Steve. Then, instead of returning to the hatch, the two men began crawling upwards.

“Mitch,” Marta keyed into the mike. “I see you got the number three guide replaced. Where are you going now?”

“We are going to check the other guides while we are out here.” She could hear the aggravation in his voice. “No use in risking this trip twice.”

Of course he was right. She ground her teeth. “Okay,” she said. “Just be careful.”

“I thought you were all about risk,” Mitch said.

“Well, the wind is picking up. You guys need to get back inside ASAP.”

“Alright, we’ll hurry.”

Mitch and Steve made several hand gestures and split up.

Steve crawled along the outer hull toward the second guide while Mitch moved on toward number one.

Marta watched the gauges. “Hurry up, guys,” she whispered.

Mitch gave a thumbs up to the camera from the number one guide. “Good,” Marta breathed.

“Damn,” she heard Steve weakly over the all-channel link. “Gusts are kicking up out here.”

“This is the captain,” a voice entered her channel. “We’re having problems with the stabilizers. We need to turn into the wind to lower our profile. Get your people back inside.”

Marta flipped to the engineering screen. Stabilizer engines three and seven were red-lining. “Mitch. Steve. We have a situation. We might lose a couple of engines, hang on.”

Warning klaxons rang through the ship. Aft stabilizers began to fail. The huge balloon groaned under the wind’s onslaught. Engines screamed trying to compensate for the unexpected torque.

Marta panned over to Steve and the number two guide in time to see him fall. She wasn’t sure what happened. He had one hand on his safety harness, and one hand on the number two guide; the next second he was twenty feet below the structure, hanging from his line.

Oh shit! “Steve!” she screamed into the mike. No reply. The migraine crawled up the back of her skull. “Mitch, what happened?”

No answer. She flipped through screens until she found him. Mitch hung onto the first guide with both hands, his expression masked by the glare on his helmet.

“Damn it, Captain! We have a situation. One of my men has fallen and is hanging from his backup line. He may be hurt and we need to get him on board.”

She looked at the readings. Gusts to forty-four knots in the last two minutes. The intermittent radar signal showed heavy storm clouds moving their direction. Now it decides to work.

“Get your people inside. We are moving, now!” The captain closed the link.

“Steve, are you okay?” Marta asked. No response. She cycled through the vid-screens. Doubt snapped through her as she flipped from one camera to the next looking for Mitch. Finally she saw movement between cameras seventeen and eighteen. Mitch was changing his lines over, restringing his safety harness to allow for more length.

“Mitch, can’t you pull Steve in?”

“He’s dead weight,” Mitch said. “I’m not sure he’s conscious.”

“So can you pull him in?” Tendrils of nausea slithered in her gut.

“No leverage, and it looks like his vest has a couple of broken straps.” He never stopped moving, working the lines. “I’m not sure how long it will hold. I need to get down there and get some secondary lines around him.”

“Damn,” she said. “Captain just warned us that he’s turning the blimp to reduce its profile. Wind is kicking up, storm moving this way.”

“Yeah,” said Mitch. “I can see lightning on the horizon. See if you can get the captain to keep this ship steady for a few more minutes. If we get to swinging, I’m afraid that we could lose Steve.”

Marta watched Mitch adjusted lines for his descent; the wind continued to gust at higher and higher levels.

“Come on,” she said.

Just as Mitch gave the thumbs up, a gust registering fifty-eight knots hit the blimp. The remaining stabilizer engines red-lined trying to keep the huge balloon stationary. The commlink erupted with shouting.