Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (30 page)

“You found us!” Colonel swung gut first round a couch and an assortment of comfortable chairs—an old, overstuffed armchair, a plush loveseat, a La-Z-Boy—arranged in a semicircle facing the platform. “We were about to send out a search party.”

Despite its tidiness, the basement had a musty smell, as if the carpet had been soaked and improperly dried. Paul worried it might squish under his feet and fill his sandals with brackish water.

Colonel swung his hand in a wide circle and met Paul’s in a crushing grip; his bulging forearm was thickly carpeted with
steel-gray hair. “She’s a firecracker.” He winked towards Callie, his breath a haze of Rémy Martin. “I can see already that she’s going to be the life of the party. Drink?”

Behind the bar, Colonel made up a scotch and water for Paul, while Paul worked his fingers to restore his circulation and watched Callie introducing herself at the far end of the room. As Yasumi chaperoned, Callie shook hands all around, even with Olivia. She was glowing from within, like one of the paper lanterns outside, and Paul could tell, with a mixture of embarrassment and tenderness, that Callie was prepared to enjoy herself, that she meant to be a little loud and flirty this evening. She was swinging her shoulders and shaking hands vigorously with a flushed Bob Wier, who looked like Pat Boone in a pullover, slacks, and penny loafers without socks.

“What can I fix your lady?” asked Colonel. “She looks like a Wild Turkey gal to me.”

“Sure,” said Paul. J.J. eyed Callie hungrily from the La-Z-Boy, where he reclined in a pair of sharply pressed trousers, a blue, double-breasted blazer, and a fiery red ascot. A pair of narrow Italian-style loafers were propped on the chair’s footrest, and he held a martini at a dangerous angle, the skewered olive threatening to pitch over the lip of the glass. He looked like a surly adolescent masquerading as Dean Martin. Olivia sat by herself at the corner of the couch, perched right on the edge, her legs tightly crossed, improbably attractive in a tight pink top and a pair of capri pants that showed off her firm cheerleader calves. She cradled a drink in both hands and directed her sour expression particularly at Callie. She looked like a prom queen in mufti, forced to socialize below her station.

Colonel gestured at the food and said, “Fix yourself a plate.” Then he handed Paul his scotch and a tall whisky for Callie, and he came around the bar and gave Paul a manly squeeze around the shoulders. “Better fix her one, too, huh?” he added, in a lubricious murmur. “Bet she has an appetite, am I right?”

He sailed off, carrying his own drink, and Paul crept after him, trying to look invisible.

“Gang’s all here!” announced Colonel. “It’s showtime!”

“Oh, goody!” said Yasumi, clapping her hands.

“Everybody topped up?” asked Colonel.

J.J. blearily waved his glass in the air.

“Outstanding!” said Colonel, hopping up onto the platform.

Callie took her drink from Paul, and she smoothed her skirt and sat on the loveseat, tugging Paul down next to her. Immediately Yasumi bent to whisper something in her ear, and Callie blushed and stammered, “Oh gosh, sure. I didn’t know.” She stood and pulled Paul up with her, leading him to the couch.

“The loveseat’s reserved,” she murmured to Paul, who was alarmed to find himself in the middle of the couch, with Callie hotly clutching his hand on the left and Olivia stiffly ignoring him on his right. Callie sniffed her drink, then squeezed his hand and leaned against him.

“Wild Turkey,” she whispered happily. “How did you know?”

Yasumi kicked off her track shoes and curled up on the love-seat with her feet under her. Bob Wier settled into the overstuffed armchair, holding a can of Sprite with the tips of his fingers. His wide, fixed smile was belied by his eyes, which looked as if he expected someone to sneak up behind him.

On the platform, Colonel moved to center stage and cleared his throat into a hand microphone, and out of the speakers came a seismic rumble that resonated in Paul’s chest and rattled the bottles behind the bar. Yasumi theatrically clapped her hands over her ears and shouted, “Too damn loud!” Colonel adjusted a knob on a console to his right and cleared his throat again; the rumble wound down to a tremor. Yasumi gave him two thumbs-up. Colonel sipped his drink and lifted the microphone.

“Good evening, colleagues,” he said, his voice bounding off the plywood all around. “Good evening, ladies. Welcome to Casa Pentoon. For those of you who’ve never joined us before,” Colonel intoned, “what we’re working with here is the Murakami MeisterSinger 9.1, a professional, Japanese karaoke machine.” He placed a paternal hand on the matte black console to his right. “You can’t get them here in the States. Hell, even
in Japan you can’t even get one for home use. This mean, song-slinging son of a bitch comes with six thousand songs already stored up.” He tightened his grip on the corner of the console, as if he were ruffling its hair. “You heard me right, compadres. Six
thousand
songs. If it’s got lyrics and a melody, it’s in here.”

From the depths of his chair, J.J. shakily saluted the mighty MeisterSinger with his glass. Yasumi clasped her hands tightly before her, her eyes wide with devotion. Even Callie, pressed to Paul’s side, looked flushed and happy.

“Of course, this puppy’s got a few custom
modifications
of my own design.” Colonel paused to sip his drink. “Some of y’all know what I’m talking about,” he added, to knowing laughter from J.J., Bob Wier, and Yasumi, “while the rest of you have some surprises in store.”

“Patton!” shouted J.J.

“Shh!” hissed Yasumi, with a sharp glance at the La-Z-Boy.

Colonel dipped his head modestly and lifted his drink. “I’m not promising anything,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

Yasumi cupped her mouth as if she were shouting across a stadium and said loudly, “Sit down!”

Colonel raised his glass. “We who are about to sing, salute you,” he said. “Let the games begin.” He stepped to the controls and flicked some switches; a row of little red lights on the console streaked to its fullest extent, then subsided. The projection screen behind him flickered to life, showing a soft-focus view of a garden, a slow-motion shower of cherry petals. As “Sukiyaki” oozed through the speakers and the row of red lights pulsed, Colonel worked a dimmer switch that lowered the lights in the basement. He bent to a little microphone in the console.

“Who’d like to go first?” he breathed, his jowls devilishly limned by the red lights.

To Paul’s horror, Callie shifted eagerly on the couch next to him, unlocking her grip on his fingers to slowly raise her hand. But before Paul could snatch her arm down, Yasumi had shot to her feet.

“I go first,” she said. “Break the ice.” She leaped barefoot onto the platform and seized the microphone. “You know what
I want to hear,” she said, and Colonel gazed into a little monitor next to the console and worked a touch pad. Then he gave his wife a kiss, stepped down off the platform, and settled heavily on the loveseat, spreading his orangutan arms wide. A throbbing eighties beat pounded from the speakers, and on screen appeared a twenty-year-old work-out video, showing ripe young women in tights and leg warmers and headbands, swinging their asses and pumping their arms. The words to the song crawled across the bottom of the screen in purple letters.

“ ‘Let’s get
phys-i-cal, phys-i-cal,’
” sang Yasumi, only half an octave below a tuneless Yoko Ono screech, “ ‘I wanna get
phys-i-cal, phys-i-cal.’
” She bounced up and down on her toes, punching the air for emphasis. “ ‘Let me hear your body
talk
, body
talk.’ ”

Paul tried to catch Callie’s eye, but she was rapt, her eyes alight, her lips mouthing the words. She drank deep from her Wild Turkey, then she saluted Yasumi with her glass and gave a hearty Oklahoma yell. Paul caught Olivia watching Callie, and he glared at her to make her look away. A moment later he glanced at her again, and Olivia sat forward with her legs tightly crossed. Her lips were pursed and she had a bemused light in her eye, but her toe was swinging to the beat.

Paul sagged back against the couch and downed half his scotch. Somebody please, he thought, kill me now.

F
ORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER
Paul was drunk and singing his second song. This one he got to pick himself, and he was trying to keep up with a syncopated arrangement of “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” His first song, half an hour earlier, had been selected by Colonel, and Paul had hunched over the microphone and mumbled the theme song from
Branded
, while on the screen behind him the words crawled below the craggy, bleached-out visage of Chuck Connors.

“ ‘What do you do when you’re branded,’ ” he had droned tunelessly, “ ‘and you know you’re a man?’ ”

Now, however, he managed a rhythmic little sway that had more to do with Glenlivet than with the song. He tried to hang back from the beat for a more sexy delivery, but he lost the thread of the crawl and tried to catch up, stumbling over the words.

“ ‘I never cared much for moonlit skies,’ ” he crooned, “ ‘I never cared much for . . .’ No, wait. ‘I never winked back at . . .’ Oh shit. Can we back this thing up?”

From the loveseat, with his wife wrapped around him like a squid, Colonel roared with laughter. Bob Wier nodded encouragingly from the chair where he perched with the same can of Sprite he’d had all evening. He’d sung only once, clutching the microphone and lifting his watery eyes to the suspended ceiling and singing, “ ‘If I give my soul to Jesus, will she take me back again?’ ” in an unsteady tenor. “I’d like to dedicate this song to my wife, and to my kids, Brian, Bitsy, and Bob, Jr.,” he’d said during the intro, with a catch in his throat.

“Where’s his wife?” Callie had asked, already half drunk. “Why ain’t she here?” Paul pulled her close and whispered in her ear, “I’ll tell you later.”

After Bob Wier, J.J. had charged the stage, stumbling over the edge of the platform. He’d moved his martini glass in a circle and slurred into the microphone, “How’d all you people get in my room?” Then he hogged the machine for three songs in a row—“Summer Wind,” “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” and “Mack the Knife,” which he performed complete with finger snaps and Bobby Darin ejaculations—“Hut! Hut! Hut!” When it was Olivia’s turn, she had whispered her request to Colonel, who mounted the platform to work the console. As three Gilbert and Sullivan geishas appeared on the screen behind her, Olivia stiffened her backbone, put one foot forward, and, holding the mike with both hands, warbled a well-drilled rendition of “Three Little Maids from School Are We,” hitting each word with sharpshooter precision.

After that, Colonel had chugged through “The Gambler” in a growly baritone, but the star of the evening so far had been Callie. Colonel had insisted on picking Callie’s song, but she rose to the challenge, planting her bare feet wide on the stage, gripping the mike as if her life depended on it, and belting out “Me and Bobby Mcgee” in a smoky, sultry alt-country drawl. Well into his second scotch—or was it his third?—Paul got a little aroused watching her. She shook her head and cocked her hip and balled up her fist for emphasis, and during the end of the song, during all the “na-na-na-na”s, she did a sexy little dance in place with her eyes closed, and Paul’s heart lifted like
a party balloon. Afterwards she blushed bright red and peeked through her hands as J.J. hooted and Colonel slammed his hands together and Yasumi jumped up and gave her a hug. Bob Wier clapped politely, while Olivia didn’t clap at all, watching evenly from her end of the couch with her chin propped between thumb and forefinger.

After that, Colonel had suggested a break, but Paul had lurched onto the platform and insisted on doing another song, partly to out–Bobby Darin J.J. and partly to catch up to Callie. He slurred his words and giggled and lost track of the lyric, but towards the end he finally got the hang of it—“ ‘Now that your lips are burning mine, I-I-I-I-I’m beginnin’, dah dah dah dah
dah
, to
see
the light’ ”—and Callie bit her lip and leaned towards him, her eyes alight. Then the song ended, and Paul bent at the waist in a floppy bow. The room erupted in applause; even Olivia clapped. Callie gave another Oklahoma holler, and J.J., who had passed out in the recliner—head tipped back, mouth wide open—lurched awake in the La-Z-Boy, crying, “Patton?” Paul staggered from the platform, and Callie wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the ear.

“Take five, folks!” Colonel announced, pushing himself up from the loveseat. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

Paul had no memory of disentangling from Callie, but he found himself being escorted down the carpet by Colonel towards the door in the partition at the far end of the room. Behind him he heard Yasumi saying something, though he couldn’t tell what, and he heard Callie laughing loudly. Colonel clutched him round the shoulders, half leading Paul, half holding him up, and he let go when they got to the door so he could dig in his pocket for the key. The next thing Paul knew he was sitting in a stiff, straight-backed chair in a cramped little office, still clutching his glass, and Colonel was closing the door. The office was windowless and dank, lined with gray metal shelves full of books and papers and videocassettes; the only light came from a humming fluorescent desk lamp on the rigorously ordered blacktop of a huge old Steelcase desk. Colonel
placed his hand, one, two, three, on three tall, neatly stacked piles of manuscript on the desk.

“The others don’t even know I’m working on this,” Colonel said, settling into a creaking wooden office chair. “They wouldn’t understand.”

Paul craned his neck from his seat and saw that each stack had a title page, “Volume I,” “Volume II,” and “Volume III.”

“It takes a person of some sophistication and erudition,” Colonel went on, “to appreciate what I’m doing here. Not everybody would see the point of an epic poem about my Vietnam service.”

Each stack was at least a foot high. There must be thousands of pages, Paul thought in his Glenlivet haze. Oh dear God, what if he asks me to read it?