Jetboy was a hero. And what was he? Nothing. A wimp, a chickenshit. A fuck of a lot of good his wild card power did anybody. It was useless, just like him.
Dispiritedly, he shrugged into his coat and went outside. The junkyard looked raw and ugly in the dawn, and a cold wind was blowing. A few hundred yards to the east, the bay was green and choppy. Tom climbed up to the old Packard on its little hill. The door creaked when he yanked it open. Inside, the seats were cracked and smelled of rot, but at least he was out of that wind. Tom slouched back with his knees up against the dash, staring out at sunrise. He sat unmoving for a long time; across the yard, hubcaps and old tires floated up in the air and went screaming off to splash into the choppy green waters of New York Bay. He could see the Statue of Liberty on her island, and the hazy outlines of the towers of Manhattan off to the northeast.
It was nearly seven-thirty, his limbs were stiff, and he’d lost count of the number of hubcaps he’d flung, when Tom Tudbury sat up with a strange expression on his face. The icebox he’d been juggling forty feet from the ground came down with a crash. He ran his fingers through his hair and lifted the icebox again, moved it over twenty yards or so, and dropped it right on Joey’s corrugated tin roof. Then he did the same with a tire, a twisted bicycle, six hubcaps, and a little red wagon.
The door to the house flew open with a bang, and Joey came charging out into the cold wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. He looked real pissed. Tom snatched his bare feet, pulled them out from under him, and dumped him on his butt, hard. Joey cursed.
Tom grabbed him and yanked him into the air, upside down. “Where the fuck are you, Tudbury?” Joey screamed. “Cut it out, you dork. Lemme down.”
Tom imagined two huge invisible hands, and tossed Joey from one to the other. “When I get down, I’m going to punch you so fuckin’ hard you’ll eat through a straw for the rest of your life,” Joey promised.
The crank was stiff from years of disuse, but Tom finally managed to roll down the Packard’s window. He stuck his head out. “Hiya, kids, hiya, hiya, hiya,” he croaked, chortling.
Suspended twelve feet from the ground, Joey dangled and made a fist. “I’ll pluck your fuckin’ magic twanger, shithead,” he shouted. Tom yanked off his boxer shorts and hung them from a telephone pole. “You’re gonna die, Tudbury,” Joey said.
Tom took a big breath and set Joey on the ground, very gently. The moment of truth. Joey came running at him, screaming obscenities. Tom closed his eyes, put his hands on the steering wheel, and lifted.
The Packard shifted beneath him. Sweat dotted his brow. He shut out the world, concentrated, counted to ten, slowly, backward.
When he finally opened his eyes, half expecting to see Joey’s fist smashing into his nose, there was nothing to behold but a seagull perched on the hood of the Packard, its head cocked as it peered through the cracked windshield. He was floating. He was flying.
Tom stuck his head out of the window. Joey stood twenty feet below him, glaring, hands on his hips and a disgusted look on his face. “Now,” Tom yelled down, smiling, “what was it you were saying last night?”
“I hope you can stay up there all day, you son of a bitch,” Joey said. He made an ineffectual fist, and waved it. Lank black hair fell across his eyes. “Ah, shit, what does this prove? If I had a gun, you’d still be dead meat.”
“If you had a gun, I wouldn’t be sticking my head out the window,” Tom said. “In fact, it’d be better if I didn’t have a window.” He considered that for a second, but it was hard to think while he was up here. The Packard was heavy. “I’m coming down,” he said to Joey. “You, uh, you calmed down?”
Joey grinned. “Try me and see, Tuds.”
“Move out of the way. I don’t want to squash you with this damn thing.”
Joey shuffled to one side, bare-ass and goose-pimpled, and Tom let the Packard settle as gently as an autumn leaf on a still day. He had the door half open when Joey reached in, grabbed him, yanked him up, and pushed him back against the side of the car, his other hand cocked into a fist. “I oughtta—” he began. Then he shook his head, snorted, and punched Tom lightly in the shoulder. “Gimme back my fuckin’ drawers, ace,” he said.
Back inside the house, Tom reheated the leftover coffee. “I’ll need you to do the work,” he said as he made himself some scrambled eggs and ham and a couple more English muffins. Using his teke always gave him quite an appetite. “You took auto shop and welding and all that shit. I’ll do the wiring.”
“Wiring?” Joey said, warming his hands over his cup. “What the fuck for?”
“The lights and the TV cameras. I don’t want any windows people can shoot through. I know where we can get some cameras cheap, and you got lots of old sets around here, I’ll just fix them up.” He sat down and attacked his eggs wolfishly. “I’ll need loudspeakers too. Some kind of PA system. A generator. Wonder if I’ll have room for a refrigerator in there?”
“That Packard’s a big motherfucker,” Joey said. “Take out the seats and you’ll have room for three of the fuckers.”
“Not the Packard,” Tom said. “I’ll find a lighter car. We can cover up the windows with old body panels or something.”
Joey pushed hair out of his eyes. “Fuck the body panels. I got armor plate. From the war. They scrapped a bunch of ships at the Navy base in ’46 and ’47, and Dom put in a bid for the metal, and bought us twenty goddamn tons. Fuckin’ waste a money—who the fuck wants to buy battleship armor? I still got it all, sitting way out back rusting. You need a fuckin’ sixteen-inch gun to punch through that shit, Tuds. You’ll be safe as—fuck, I dunno. Safe, anyhow.”
Tom knew. “Safe,” he said loudly, “as a turtle in its shell!”
Only ten shopping days were left until Christmas, and Tach sat in one of the window alcoves, nursing an Irish coffee against the December cold and gazing through the one-way glass at the Bowery. The Funhouse wouldn’t open for another hour yet, but the back door was always unlocked for Angelface’s friends. Up on stage, a pair of joker jugglers who called themselves Cosmos and Chaos were tossing bowling balls around. Cosmos floated three feet above the stage in the lotus position, his eyeless face serene. He was totally blind, but he never missed a beat or dropped a ball. His partner, six-armed Chaos, capered around like a lunatic, chortling and telling bad jokes and keeping a cascade of flaming clubs going behind his back with two arms while the other four flung bowling balls at Cosmos. Tach spared them only a glance. As talented as they were, their deformities pained him.
Mal slid into his booth. “How many of those you had?” the bouncer demanded, glaring at the Irish coffee. The tendrils that hung from his lower lip expanded and contracted in a blind wormlike pulsing, and his huge, malformed blue-black jaw gave his face a look of belligerent contempt.
“I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”
“You’re no damn use at all, are you?”