Steel Beach (50 page)

“Try the Moo Goo Gai Pan,” I said to Brenda, recalling her lack of experience at anything but traditional Lunarian food. “It’s a sort of—”

“I’ve had it,” she said. “I’ve learned a little since I saw you last. I’ve eaten Chinese, oh, half a dozen times.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Don’t they have a menu?”

“Foo doesn’t like them. He has a sort of psychological method of matching the food to the customer. He’ll have you spotted for a greenhorn, and he won’t bring you anything too challenging. I know how to handle him.”

“You don’t have to be so protective of me, Hildy.”

I reached over and touched her hand.

“I can see you’ve grown, Brenda. It’s in your face, and your bearing. But trust me on this one, hon. The Chinese eat some things you don’t even want to know about.”

Foo came back with bowls of rice and his famous hot-and-sour soup, and I dickered with him for a while, talking him out of Chow Mein for Brenda and convincing him I wanted the Hunan Beef again, even though I’d had it only three weeks ago. He bustled off to the kitchen, pausing to accept compliments from two of the other diners in the small room. There was a beautiful dragon embroidered on the back of his shirt.

“You go through this often?” Brenda asked.

“Every day. I like it, Brenda. Remember what you told me about having friends? I have friends here. I’m a part of the community.”

She nodded, and decided not to talk about it anymore. She tasted the soup, loved it, and we talked about that, and then moved into phase two of the reunion minuet, reminiscences about the good old days. Not that the days were that long ago—it was still less than a year since I’d first met her—but to me it seemed like a past life. We laughed about the Grand Flack in his little shrine and I got her howling by telling her about Walter’s buttons popping off his riverboat gambler vest, and she told me scandalous things about some of my former colleagues.

The food was set down before us and Brenda searched in vain for her fork. She saw me with the chopsticks, gamely picked hers up and promptly dropped a hunk of meat in her lap.

“Foo,” I called. “We need a fork over here.”

“No no no no,” he said, shuffling over and shaking a finger at us. “Very sorry, Hildy, but this
chinee
restaurant. No have fork.”

“I’m vely solly, too,” I said, putting my napkin on the table. “But no forkee, no eatee.” I started to get up.

He scowled at us, gestured for me to sit down, and hurried away.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Brenda whispered, leaning over the table. I shushed her, and we waited until Foo returned, elaborately polishing a silver fork, placing it carefully beside her plate.

“And Foo,” I said. “you can knock off the number-one-son bit. Brenda is a tourist, but she’s my friend, too.”

He looked sour for a moment, then smiled and relaxed.

“Okay, Hildy,” he said. “Watch that beef, now. I’ve got the fire department on red alert. Nice meeting you, Brenda.” She watched him into the kitchen, then picked up her fork and spoke around a mouthful of food.

“What I can’t understand is why people want to live that way.”

“What way it that?”

“You know. Acting silly. He could run a restaurant on the outside and not have to talk funny to do it.”

“He doesn’t have to talk funny to do it here, Brenda. The management doesn’t demand playacting, only costuming. He does it because it amuses him. Foo’s only half Chinese, for that matter. He told me he doesn’t look much more Oriental, without surgery, than I do. But he loves cooking and he’s good at it. And he likes it here.”

“I guess I just don’t get it.”

“Think of it as a twenty-four-hour-a-day costume party.”

“I still don’t…  I mean, what would drive someone to come live here? I get the feeling most of ’em couldn’t make it on…  ” She stopped, and turned red. “Sorry, Hildy.”

“No need to be. You’re not really wrong. A lot of people live in here because they couldn’t make it outside. Call them losers, if you want. Walking wounded, a lot of them. I like them. There’s not so much pressure in here. Others, they were doing okay outside, but they didn’t
like
it. They come and go, too; it’s not a life sentence. I know some people, they live here for a year or two to recharge their batteries. Sometimes it’s between careers.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“One thing you don’t do in here, Brenda, is ask people why they came. They volunteer it if they want.”

“I keep sticking my foot in my mouth.”

“Don’t worry about it, with me. I just thought I’d tell you, so you don’t ask anybody else. To answer your question…  I don’t know. I thought that at first. Now…  I don’t know.”

She looked at me for a while, then at my plate. She gestured with her fork.

“That looks good. Mind if I have a bite?”

I let her, then got up myself to get her a glass of water from the back. Foo’s Hunan Beef is the only thing in Texas that can rival my five-alarm chili.

“So Walter screamed and hollered about you for two or three days,” Brenda said. “We all tried to stay out of his way, but he’d come storming through the newsroom shouting about one thing or another, and we all knew what he was really mad about was you.”

“The newsroom? That sounds serious.”

“It got worse than that.”

We had finished our meal and ordered two beers and Brenda had regaled me with more stories about her exploits in the journalistic wars. She certainly led an exciting life. I didn’t have many stories to tell in return, just amusing little fillers about funny things this or that pupil had said in class or the tale of Mayor Dillon stumbling out of the Alamo and into the horse trough early one morning. Her eyes glazed a little at these times but she kept smiling gamely. Mostly I shut up and let her rattle on.

“He started calling us in one at a time,” she said, emptying her beer glass and shaking her head when Foo started over with the pitcher. “He always said it was about something else, but it always got back to you and what a rotten thing you’d done to him and did we have any ideas on how to get you back. He’d always be depressed when we left. We all started making up excuses to get out of those sessions.

“Then he got to where he’d bite your head off if your name was mentioned in his presence. So we all stopped talking about you to him. That’s where it stands now.”

“I’d been thinking about dropping in on him,” I said. “Old time’s sake, you know.”

She frowned. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, yet. Give it a few more months. Unless you plan to go back on the job.” She raised her eyebrows and I shook my head, and she said no more about what I’d been presuming was the purpose of her trip.

Foo brought a little tray with fortune cookies and the check. Brenda opened hers while I was putting money on the tray.

“ ‘A new love will brighten your life,’ ” she read. She looked up at me and smiled. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t have time for it. Aren’t you going to open yours?”

“Foo writes them, Brenda. What that one means is he wants to make pecker tracks on your mustache brush.”

“What?”

“He finds you sexually attractive and would like to have intercourse.”

She looked at me in disbelief, then picked up my fortune cookie and broke it open. She glanced at the message and then stood. Foo came hurrying over and helped us out of our chairs and handed us our hats and bowed us all the way to the door.

Outside, Brenda glanced at her thumbnail.

“I’ll have to get going now, Hildy, but—” She slapped herself on the forehead. “I almost forgot the main reason I came to see you. What are your plans for the Bicentennial?”

“The…  that’s right, that’s coming up in…  ”

“Four days. It’s only the biggest story for the last two weeks.”

“We don’t follow the news much in here. Let’s see, I heard the Baptist Church is planning some sort of barbecue and there’s going to be a street fair. Fireworks after dark. People should be coming from miles around. Ought to be fun. You want to come?”

“Frankly, Hildy, I’d rather watch cement dry. Not to mention having to wear these damn clothes.” She hitched at her crotch. “And I’ll bet these are comfortable compared to the stuff you’re wearing.”

“You don’t know the half of it. But you get used to things. I don’t mind it anymore.”

“Live and let live. Anyway, Liz and I, and maybe Cricket, were thinking of having a picnic and camping out before the big show in Armstrong Park. They’re having some
real
fireworks there.”

“I don’t think I could face the crowds, Brenda.”

“That’s okay, Liz knows the pyrotechs and she can get us a pass into the safety zone, out around Delambre. It ought to be a great view from there. It’ll be fun; what’d’ya say?”

I hesitated. In truth, it
did
sound like fun, but I was increasingly reluctant to leave the safe haven of the disneyland these days.

“Of course, some of those shells are going to be mighty big,” she nudged. “It might be dangerous.”

I punched her on the shoulder. “I’ll bring some fried chicken,” I said, and then I hugged her again. She was starting off when I called her name.

“You’re going to make me ask you, aren’t you?” I said.

“Ask me what?”

“What it said in the goddamn fortune cookie.”

“Oh, that’s a funny thing,” she said with a smile. “Yours said exactly the same thing mine did.”

I went around the corner of Old Spanish Trail, past the sheriff’s office and the jailhouse and came to a small shop with a plate glass window and gold leaf lettering that read
The New Austin Texian
. I opened the front door of West Texas’ finest—and only—twice-weekly newspaper without knocking, then through the swinging gate that separated the newsroom from the public area where subscriptions were sold and classified ads taken, pulled out the swivel chair from the big wooden cubbyhole desk, and sat down.

And why shouldn’t I? I was the editor, publisher, and chief reporter for the
Texian
, which had been serving West Texas proudly for almost six months. So Walter was right, in the end; I really couldn’t stay out of the news game.

We published like clockwork, every Wednesday and Saturday, sometimes as many as four pages. Through hard work, astute reporting, trenchant editorials, and the fact that we were the only paper in the disney, we’d built circulation to almost a thousand copies per edition. Watch us grow!

The
Texian
existed because I’d run out of things to do during the long afternoons. Madness might still be lurking, and it seemed better to keep busy. Who could tell if it helped?

While the impetus for the paper was fear of suicide, its midwife had been a loan from the bank in Lonesome Dove, which I figured to have paid off shortly after the Tricentennial. At a penny a copy it was going to take a while. If not for my salary as a teacher I’d have trouble keeping beans on the table without dipping into my outside-world savings, which I was determined not to do.

The loan had paid for the office rent, the desk with sticky drawers built by a journeyman carpenter over in Whiz-bang (buy Texan, you all!), supplies from—where else?—Pennsylvania, and it paid the salaries of my two employees at first, until I started turning enough revenue. It also paid for the press itself, through a clever deal worked out by Freddie the Ferret, our local pettifogger, who had ferreted out a little-known by-law of the Antiquities Board and then bamboozled them into calling the
Texian
a “cultural asset,” eligible for some breaks under the arcane accounting used to convert Texas play money into real Lunarian gelt. Those clever Dutchmen in the Keystone Disney could have built the press, but at a price roughly equal to the Gross Disneyland Product of West Texas for the next five years.

So instead technology sprang to the rescue. The very day the ruling came through I was the proud owner of a cast-iron-and-brass reproduction of a 1885 Model Columbian Handpress, one of the most outrageous machines ever built, surmounted by a proud American Eagle, authentic right down to the patent numbers stamped into its frame. It took less time to build it than to truck it to my door and muscle it into place. Ain’t modern science wonderful?

“Afternoon, Hildy,” said Huck, my pressman. He was a gawky youth, about nineteen, good with his hands and not particularly bright. He’d spent most of his life here and had no desire to leave. He was wonderfully anxious to learn a trade so useless it would fit him for no other life. He worked like a donkey far into Tuesday and Friday nights to get the morning edition set and printed, then jumped on his horse and rode to Lonesome Dove and Whiz-bang to deliver them before dawn. He couldn’t read, but could set type at three times my poor speed, and was always covered in ink up to his elbows. He only became fumble-fingered in the presence of my other employee, Miss Charity, who could read just about anything but the lovelorn expression on Huck’s face. Ah, the joys of office romance.

“I got that Bicentennial schedule set, Hildy,” he said. “Did you want that on the front page?”

“Left hand column, I think, Huck.”

“That’s where I put her, all right.”

“Let’s see it.”

He brought me a test sheet, still smelling of printer’s ink, one of the sweetest smells in the world. I looked at the flag/colophon and folio line:

[missing graphic - anybody care to scan it?]

As always, I felt a tug of pride at the sight of it. I never changed the weather forecast; it seemed a reasonable prediction even when it turned out to be wrong. The date was always the same because you couldn’t put the real date on it, and because March 6 suited me. Nobody seemed to mind.

Huck had faithfully set the schedule of events for the upcoming celebration along the left margin, leaving room for a head, a bank, and a bar line, in keeping with the old style I’d established. We both pored over it, not reading but looking for letters that printed too light or dark, or blots from too much inking, a problem we were slowly licking. Only then did I study it for visual effect and we agreed the new boldface font looked good. Finally, third time through, I actually read it. And god help you if you misspelt a word; Huck would set it as is.