A Once Crowded Sky (20 page)

“Pastrami, rye, with the fruit salad and extra pickles for the gentleman. Chopped liver with a cup of cabbage for the lovely lady with the very good taste.” Jules’s back fusses with him as he places the food on the table.

This guy’s name was Chimera, and he could project illusions. The girl? His mother, maybe? “Anything else you need?” Jules asks. “Jose, some refills here. Diet, right?” Near the back of the restaurant, Jose leaves his rag on table nineteen and rushes toward the boss. Jose was one of Melancholy’s old flunkies, used to run around robbing jewelry stores in a fakakta “sad-face” mask before Jules got him a real job maybe a year ago.

“Thanks, Jules,” Chimera says, reaching for one of the four mustards before him. “Hey, you hear about Starry, Star-Knight’s kid? Hear they got him over at St. Mary’s.”

“Yeah, all tragedy. They’ve got him on the machine now, they say. God forbid, he might not make it. You know, Star-Knight helped put up the money for this place. I’ve got nothing but sympathy for that family.” Jose comes to the table and waits for God knows what. Jules indicates with his eyebrows that the boy maybe ought to get started? And Jose scoops up the drinks and heads back behind the counter.

“Hey, where’s your boy, Jules? Wasn’t he the one who took our order?” Chimera smears spicy-brown over his five-inch-deep sandwich.

“Please, don’t get me started.” His hands thrown wide, Jules uses the laughter as a cue to peel off and leave the two to their meal. If the kid’s not on the floor, it’s not so hard to figure out where he’ll be. Jules has already followed David’s father through all these same mistakes.

At the delivery entrance in the back alley, David’s enjoying a cigarette, his eyes too busy tracing a pair of long legs on the main avenue to notice his grandfather’s hand swooping down on the pink of the boy’s neck—
snap!

“What’s the deal, Pa?” David used to wear a red, white, and blue mask, and like his grandfather, he called himself Freedom Fighter. Like the two generations of Golds before him, the boy’d been able to manipulate the forces of chaos and order, sometimes healing wounds and sometimes causing them. Now though, he has to live with the sore neck.

“You don’t have a table to get to? You have all the time to sit out here doing nothing, while your eighty-three-year-old grandfather does the work for you?”

David flicks his cigarette into the alley. “All right, all right. Sorry, Pa, lost track.” The boy stands and heads back to his job. Really, Jules should be relieved. If it had been David’s father, he’d be out here doing the drugs, and this poor girl might have to fear for her life. Jules looks up for the
millionth time, thanks God for blessing him with such a good grandson, and reenters his deli.

From the back he sees them waiting on a plush bench next to a fake, planted fern. He tries to remember the new girl’s name, and he also tries to remember not to yell because she’s new. Quick as his bean legs can carry him, he shuffles over to the front door.

“Stacy,” Jules says.

“Penelope, sir.” Penelope, right. Like her mother, Doc Speed’s wife, poor girl.

“Penelope, I’m sorry, do you know who those two men are?” He doesn’t bother waiting for an answer. If she knows and she left them sitting, he’ll be upset; and if she doesn’t know altogether, he’ll be upset—why bother? “That’s PenUltimate, Ultimate’s coward of a partner, and that man with him is The Soldier of Freedom, greatest hero this country’s ever known—God knows what he’s doing with that schmuck. They don’t wait, dear. They sit wherever they like.”

Soldier looks over to Jules and waves at him; Jules does his best to be calm and manages to wave back. “Put them at table fourteen.” For a second, he considers letting David handle the order, but who’s he kidding, the boy’s not ready. “You don’t have to assign it. I’ll have it, okay?”

“Yes, Mr. Gold.”

“Thank you, you’re a good girl.” Jules grabs Jose, who’s getting Broadsword and his brothers some water. “Jose, clear fourteen, best you can. I’ll get these.” Jules takes the two glasses to the table, cracks a quick joke about his food compared to their native Britain’s, and heads over to table fourteen to supervise the cleaning effort. When Soldier and Pen arrive, he’s too busy trying to scrape up some hardened schmutz with his fingernail to even notice their approach.

“Julie, good to see you.” Soldier takes Jules’s hand in his, just as he had done in ’41, the day he set Jules free. Because the power of that first grip will never leave his fingers, Jules notices how much strength Soldier’s lost since.

“How’s it going, Mr. Gold,” Pen says as he slips into the booth.

“How am I doing? Eh, business is good. Health is good. Wife’s health is very good, thank God. My grandson is now working here. Who can complain?”

They swap a few more pleasantries before Jules interrupts to remind
them they came here for good food not to share old stories with an old man. Soldier orders a burger and fries, and Pen scolds him for going generic at the “best deli in Arcadia.” Soldier shrugs, and Pen asks for corn beef, rye, with slaw.

Jules tries to turn away, but he’s stopped by Soldier, who puts his hand on the older man’s hip. “I’m sorry about your boy,” Soldier says. “I ain’t talked to you since, and I’m sorry.”

Jules cocks his head to the right. “Eh, he has his life like that and he should expect to live forever? Feel sorry for the villains with a chance of reforming, that’s what I say. My son, The Terrorist, he wasn’t coming back.”

“Still,” Soldier says, “Julie, Freedom Fighter, I’m sorry.”

Jules smiles, turns to Pen. “You see, this is a good man you’ve got here. A real hero. Saved me, I can tell you that. Maybe it’s not too late for you, eh? Maybe you could learn some? Not that you haven’t been around real heroes before . . .” With a wave of his hand, Jules cuts himself off. In his younger years he was better able to control himself around the customers. The kid was here to eat; he should eat. “But what could that matter now? What matters now is the food, let me get you the food, eh?” Jules swipes some dust from the side of the table and walks away.

Back at the counter, Jules pins the order up on the creaking spinner rack for Burn to take and dole out to the rest of the kitchen staff, some of whom used to work for El Meurte’s crew before he died, shooting himself in the head, just as Jules’s boy’d done.

“Burn, this order has the priority, okay?”

Burn walks up and checks over the scribble on the tab. After a while of squinting at the rutted letters, he yanks the paper and stuffs it in his breast pocket. “Yeah, yeah. All right, I got it.” Burn scratches at the gloves on his hands that cover up the bandages from his little hospital adventure. “Y’know, Soldier, I get that. But that’s PenUltimate with him, right? I mean, what’s that little shit doing here?”

“Ah, let him be. If he’s with Soldier, he’s all right. And I’m serious, no funny stuff in the food, not at my place of business.”

“I hear you,” Burn says before yelling something in Spanish to the back of the kitchen.

“Least not while he’s with Soldier,” Jules adds as Burn walks away.

Jules leans on the counter, looks back at Pen. A coward through and
through. But, really, who is Jules to judge anyone? His life was so perfect and moral?

In the war, when he was a prisoner, a Nazi guinea pig hung from a wire, Jules had made a pact with God. He had yelled out, begged God for power, for freedom to hurt these bastards; and Jules vowed that if God gave him that, Jules would forsake everything, even his greatest wish: his son’s happiness. And the pact was accepted. And he was freed. And the experimenting the Nazis had done on him had changed him, blessed him with the ability to bring plenty of hurt.

After the war, he left that life and started this deli, scratched his way up, the real American Dream. But the connections he’d made before—fighting with a costume taken almost thread for thread from The Soldier of Freedom—helped him find a customer base in all these new gamers, who considered him a sort of pulp hero. And they helped him too on the dozens of times he’d have to track down his boy after Ian’d committed some other sad monstrosity. Always another thing with that boy, another cause; never satisfied that boy, never content with anything.

When The Blue came, Jules didn’t have any quarrel with it. What’s an old man to do with all that power anyway? Fix his arthritis for the fiftieth time? He felt maybe pity for his grandson, for poor David, but the kid took it okay. He had only just started playing the game, trying maybe to undo what his father had done, to make up for all that misery caused by such a miserable man.

So grandfather and grandson faced The Blue together, arms around each other. The kid stood strong, and Jules had never been more proud of anyone. His dad gone less than a few days, faced with losing the thing that made him special—and he bears it like a hero, like his grandfather maybe. Along with Soldier’s grip, the imprint of David’s arm on his shoulder will never leave Jules. Never.

About halfway through his rounds, Jules watches the focus of the customers shift to the entrance—when someone’s been toiling as long in one place as Jules, it’s not so hard to notice such a thing—and Jules follows his patrons’ lifting heads and sees her: Mashallah, the gift of God. If he were maybe a few years younger (and a dab less married), he’d have loved to have courted a girl like that, the type who takes the attention of everyone near her, as if it all belonged to her—as if she had only lent it out for a while and was now asking for it back.

He knows her of course; Jules knows everyone. They’ve spent some lovely evenings kindly arguing over Palestine while he enjoyed a bottle of wine, or three. Whether she, the good Muslim, also had a sip, or three, well, Jules would never tell.

For a second time, Jules rushes to the entrance to cut off the new girl, Brittany maybe? Who can keep track?

“My Mashallah,” he says. “I haven’t seen you in too long, too long! How radiant you are! You must stop in more often, eh? But what do you need with this talk, just coming in here? What can I do for you, darling?”

Mashallah barely seems to notice him as she looks around the restaurant. “Hi . . . oh, hi, I . . . I am here for—oh, I see them. Thank you.” Mashallah smiles slightly at Jules and walks past him, up to Pen and Soldier.

Jules fights the urge to follow her and listen in. He knows a biselleh of the history between these two and he wouldn’t mind hearing what this is all about. But who is he to interfere? “Bethany,” he says to the new girl, “get another menu to their table, fast as possible.”

Crack.

Food and glass are everywhere. And pieces of plates. And silverware. Every time Jules can get an eye open, can use his own spit to wipe the plaster from his eye, he sees them everywhere: food, glass, plates, silverware—on every surface, every man.

Something’s come into his diner. Someone’s blown up his diner. Put a bomb just on the other side of Pen and Soldier. It’s not so hard to tell; Jules has set off a few bombs of his own, seen his son off more, and he knows well enough.

Pen reacts first. He places his hands flat against the bottom of his table and wrenches it free from the bolts Jules screwed in some thirty-odd years ago. A studded screech of metal squeals from the floor as Pen pivots his body outward, one hand above the other, and tips the table toward the main aisle, placing it between Mashallah and the next attack from above.

Crack.

Some piece of something crashes through the wall, crashes into Pen’s table, knocking him to one knee, shattering his little shield. Pen discards the wooden husk and sprints forward toward the center of where the blast hit, where Jules’s customers are dying beneath tables and plates
and silverware. Behind Pen, Soldier grabs Mashallah and starts to drag her in Jules’s direction, away from the debris. Not shockingly, she doesn’t take this so well and starts pounding on him with small fists. Jules shouts out something, but does anyone listen?

Crack.

Another explosion blasts from the floor in front of Pen, but the boy merely jumps over this newest attack, flips in the air, and lands next to Chimera, who is screaming, his chest caught under a hunk of wall Jules painted with his own hands. Pen reaches under it, yanks it up, putting a few inches between the man and the mess.

With no hesitation at all, Burn jumps the counter and joins Pen at the center of all the commotion. While Pen holds the wall aloft, Burn moves Chimera out from under it, freeing him just as another crack goes off, another piece of the diner drives inward toward anyone it can find.

Burn is a good man. This restaurant’s been his home through some hard times, and Jules’d always tried to do right by him. Still, Jules wouldn’t have expected this, for Burn to react the way he does, thrusting himself into this. But then he remembers the hospital, Burn’s confession of how he’d run when Doc Speed stayed. God, is anyone not trying to come back?

Another crack, another piece of wall slashing through the air, coming right at Burn and Pen, and Pen flips, puts his feet through it, shatters it, but it’s not enough. A hunk of plaster whizzes past Pen, gnashes into Burn’s head, and the big man falls back into a sudden cloud of blood.

Jules cries out, and his own voice, so rusted now, wakes him from his temporary stupor. He looks around, sees his customers as frozen as he is, stuck watching these folks playing again, all his customers, watching, waiting to be saved. Another crack comes, reminds Jules he’s seen this waiting before, seen those in need before, all these poor people wanting a hero.