Blackjack Wayward

Chapter Seventeen

By early afternoon, I was deep into my project.

I’m a tinkerer by nature; I like to work with my hands, fix things, build things. So when I saw a half-buried engine, my first instinct was to dig it out, clean it as much as possible, and see if any of the parts were still functional.

The thing was rusted tight, almost into a single piece of forgotten metal. It took two hours to dig it out, and four more to take it apart; when I was done, I sat in a sea of corroded metal pieces, with just a few items – a trio of valves, and two manifold pins – to show for my work. The rest of the engine was useless.

Claire brought me lunch and dinner, leaving me to work in the hot, arid sun. Lunch was an arm-length hero sandwich, just how I like it, with lots of mustard, lettuce, and tomatoes. No mayo. I ate the whole thing despite my grimy, greasy hands, and downed the pitcher of ice-cold lemonade that she placed inside the picnic basket. Dinner was a half a tray of meat lasagna, covered in aluminum foil, with a loaf of garlic bread and a bottle of red wine. The first sip of the wine revealed it to be exquisite, stopping me in my tracks as I shoveled the pasta into my mouth. I checked the bottle and saw it was Chateau Margaux from 2000, a thousand-dollar bottle of wine, probably the best rated in the last few decades. To enjoy the wine, she had placed a big bowled wine glass in the folds of the picnic basket. I took the glass and gently poured the fine liquid, studying the appearance and color. I dug my nose into the glass, enraptured by the aroma and finally took a mouthful, letting it slap me around a little.

I was thinking of what a ridiculous figure I must’ve made, a big sweaty, sunburned surfer-looking dude, sitting in the sand taking an engine apart out of boredom. Covered in grease and sand, yet I was going through the fineries of enjoying a good glass of wine. Looking over to the shack, I saw Claire leaning against the railing of the door, watching me as she, too, enjoyed some wine. I must have seemed like a crazy person.

As I walked over to her, she smiled.

“You broke the car?” Claire said, motioning to the scattered parts.

“Took it apart,” I said, revealing the few good items I had scavenged in the palm of my hand. “Why didn’t you come eat with me?”

She shrugged, “You looked so busy. I didn’t want to bother. You look happy.”

“You’re not a bother,” I said, drinking the wine and refilling both glasses.

“You trying to build a car?”

“Just messing around, really. Tinkering.”

Claire looked past me, ignoring the wine, staring long into the distance.

“I could take you there,” she said. “Or make you a car. Anything you want.”

I laughed and pulled her close to me, noticing how fragile she looked. “That would be no fun. I like making stuff. Imagine if I could put together a car out of all the junk out here.” Claire pushed me off and went back inside, but I was somewhere else. I had a project, something to do, and after another moment, I forgot about her and all her fears and went to work.

I stayed up all night going from shed to shed, checking out every damaged structure for parts that could help me. I could sense Claire’s concern; I was restless, and she was worried I would throw our budding happiness away on some foolish quest. She worried that nothing she could do would contain my urge to build a car, take Haha back to civilization, find out what was happening in the world.

She was worried I would walk into the nearest bar and see Apogee on TV, desperate for my help, and I would run off like some goddamned fool. Well, I wasn’t a fool. I knew I had been played. I knew Apogee had lied to me. But it didn’t suit me to be in the dark, not knowing what Zundergrub’s plans were for me.

We had a shortwave radio and a phone line, but I was afraid to use anything that might draw any more attention to us. Other than that, we were incommunicado. Rabbit Flat was as remote as you could get in an already sparsely unpopulated part of the Australian Outback. We were over 200 miles from the nearest outpost like ours, 500 miles from Alice, the nearest town, and almost 700 miles from Darwin, the closest thing you could call to a city in this part of the country.

Transportation should have been easy with a witch on your side, able to open a portal to any part of the world, but Claire was quick to point out that it didn’t work that way. Pinpoint transportation was a time-consuming and expensive spell, though she would grow morose and change the subject when I would try to find out just what she meant by expensive. The portal she had opened to the Outback back in Utopia was as a result of something she had been working on for a long time, at great personal cost to her. The way she explained it to me was that we had traveled through the Earth itself in order to be undetectable, and this spot in Australia was on the diametrically opposite side of the world from where Utopia lay.

Besides, I wanted to build a car. She had offered plenty of times, I have to grant her that, but I needed to be doing something, I needed a project to keep my mind busy. So I was left to my own devices, and I searched the outlying buildings for anything that would serve us. The shed had housed the outpost owner’s vehicles, some sort of 4-wheel drive, and the small motorcycle the woman had used. There were many parts in the dark and dusty enclosure, but the prize was a gutted out Toyota Land Cruiser, like the old ones from the Mutual of Omaha shows of the 70s.

“What do you think?” I asked Haha after reciting, part by part, what I had found in the shed. Of all the damaged vehicles we had encountered, this one showed the most promise of being the foundation upon which to build a new one. It was marginally superior to the others because the frame was undamaged, relatively straight, and mostly free of rust.

“Not good,” he responded. “How’s the engine?”

I reached over and popped the hood clamps to take a look. The engine block was missing.

“We need an engine,” I said. “And a trannie. It’s gutted.”

“And the tires?”

“Two rims and tires, but they’re flat,” I said. “The other wheels are missing.”

“Fuel tank?”

“Who are you talking to?” Claire asked, following me around the next morning, worried that I hadn’t slept all night. She shouted from her vantage point nearer to the shed, as the abandoned truck was in a field of high grass.

“To Haha,” I told her, lifting the truck on the two remaining tires, the front ones and peering into the back.

“Gone,” I said, noting the attachment brackets where the tank had once been.

“That’s not good,” Haha repeated.

“I can’t hear anyone,” she said.

“He’s here,” I said, but I could tell she was exasperated with me, unaccustomed to the awful smells of oil, gasoline, and grease from the shed, and from the haphazard construction of the place, and the hundreds of hanging tools and parts that made it seem like the little building swayed with the wind.

“Well, I don’t hear him.”

“You basically have a frame and axles, Blackjack. You have no drive train, no engine, and no fuel reservoir. You’re better off walking,” Haha said finally.

“It’s 500 miles, Haha. It would take us weeks. What about that tiller thing we saw in the shed, can we use that engine?”

“You can’t drive a truck with that little horsepower,” he said. “Walking would be faster.”

I moved back inside the shed, walking past Claire, whose glare could slice boulders.

“There’s at least four or five engines here,” I said. “Maybe more if those chainsaws are working.”

“Even if you had them all running and managed to chain them all to a jury-rigged drive train, I doubt you’d get more than five, ten miles per hour.”

I smiled. “Maybe. Maybe more.”

I turned the shed into a makeshift workshop, first clearing out a veritable mountain of garbage and useless junk, then going at the overgrown shrubbery and grass that sprouted from every corner and open space with a rusty pair of metal cutters that I’d sharpened.

The little outpost had just about everything needed for the project if you only knew where to look, and it wasn’t usually where you expected them to be kept. They kept spark plugs in the freezer, oil in the food pantry, wiring under the bed, and the actual tools in a satchel rather than the tool case, which was storage for dusty old fishing lures and fishing tackle. I reorganized the whole place, throwing out anything I wouldn’t need, adding them to the junk pile beside the shed.

Claire came in with bread, cheese, and wine, but otherwise left me to my devices. Like back on Shard World building the Retcon device, Haha and I were awful scary when we had a project. But he wasn’t his old ebullient self, lacking his accustomed and quite annoying wellspring of confidence. Instead, he was grouchy, negative, and contrary to every idea or concept I set forth. Instead of building everything to my specifications, as we had the Retcon device, I was doing everything, from concept to creation. He tossed around some excuse about being offline from his mainframe database, but maybe he was bitter that I didn’t really need him. Or maybe he didn’t like being useless.

When we were stranded on Shard World, he alone believed in me, trusted that I could replicate a machine I had studied for under a minute, in both appearance and function. And this was a complex Tesla device, modified by Dr. Retcon himself. Something built by two geniuses, and a particle accelerator to boot. Those devices utilized massive, room-sized super magnets to hurl tiny protons through the course of hundred-mile tracks at other elements to study the explosive emissions. Retcon had simplified the device, utilizing a highly efficient Tesla coil as a conduit for the hurled particle and as an accelerator by spinning it around the magnetized electrical charge, but building it from scratch took a special kind of imagination and engineering.

The more I thought of it, the more I realized that I had done most of the work back then, too. Sure, it was radical stuff compared to fixing a car, but I’d had Mr. Haha in full body and mind helping me out. With his internal furnace and the almost limitless ability to make materials for me, we built the device in just a few hours. Nonetheless, he had been offline as well, and everything came from me conceptually.

The more I worked, the quieter he got, and I figured he was just resigned to his fate as a cranky pile of wires and diodes embedded under the skin of my wrist. Haha had few ideas to contribute conceptually and even less to actually aid me in building the car.

The job at hand was quite unique. Rebuilding an engine was a simple affair, but building an engine out of several jury-rigged ones was not. They all had to be fitted to drive a crankshaft, and since there was different horsepower and torque coming from each engine, I had to invent a multi-tiered clutching device that allowed them all to contribute to the cause. That’s what eventually soured me on the idea of using several engines, having to design and create such a complicated piece of equipment. Given my old lab, tools, and machinery, such a thing would have been almost easy, but out here in the remote desert, it would take me days, even weeks to make it from scratch. Instead, I concentrated on using the most powerful engine I could find in the outpost, the water pump. It was a Burke two-stroke, air-cooled engine, used to spin a hand pump and draw water from a deep artesian well. The benefit of a Burke was that I wouldn’t necessarily need a crankshaft, which I was missing, nor a connecting rod, which I doubt I’d be able to build without a furnace. It would attach to the driveshaft via a Scotch yoke and that’s how it transduced linear to circular motion. The parts to make the whole thing were lying around the shed, waiting for me to find, modify, and construct.

I lost myself in the project, tooling and hammering away, soldering and rebuilding an engine to drive us back to civilization.

That night, Claire sat in a chair a hundred yards away from the shack we called home. She smoked cigarettes and drank wine, though where she had found the smokes, I had no idea. I came over to her, looking forward to a shower and shave, but she didn’t even acknowledge me beside her.

“Hey,” I said, hoping to rouse her.

Claire studied me with glazed eyes and took a long swing of her wine. The bottle was almost empty.

“You okay?” I asked.

She blinked a few times and forced a smile.

“How is your work coming along?”

I rubbed my sweaty scalp, suddenly feeling filthy next to her.

“It’s almost done,” I said. “The engine is functional, but I need to test it out. Then I have to finish the drive shaft.”

“You should get some sleep,” she said, shifting in her chair.

“Nah, it won’t take too long. If I had my old tools, I would’ve finished already, you know? But with the junk I have ... I don’t know. I’m tired,” I yawned, “but I want to push it. At my present pace, I’ll finish by tomorrow morning for sure.”

She nodded.

“The hardest part was the damned fuel line. I couldn’t find anything that would provide enough pressure, and stay strong enough to hold the fuel. All the ones that I could find were old and brittle.” I stopped, noticing that she couldn’t care less about what I was saying. “You a little drunk?”

Her head snapped to me, her eyes daggers boring through my skin. “I’m drinking wine,” she said, as if that were enough to explain it.

“I mean, you’re not very chatty.”

Those milky brown eyes studied me from head to toe, and a little grin slowly worked its way into her face.

“You know, you smell like a killed cow,” she said.

“Killed cow?”

She nodded, preening a loose strand of hair that danced in her long eyelashes.

“Dead cow,” I corrected, laughing.

“Yes, this,” she said, drinking more wine. “Very dead.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll go shower. Just wanted to update you.”

I stood and strolled off, figuring she preferred to be by herself, drinking away her fears that I was going to reach civilization and go off running after Apogee.

“Hey, cow,” she said, standing and walking toward me.

I stopped and smiled.

“I made you a gift,” she said coming up to me, cradling the wine in the glass.

“Oh really?”

“It’s how you see yourself in your dreams,” she said, walking past me and drawing a long swallow of wine. “Come on.”

She led me to the shack and opened the door, sweeping her free hand like a game show hostess at what lay on and beside the bed.

It was my old suit. My clothes, the full Blackjack uniform, including the cowl and cloak. It was simple stuff, but it was my look. She was right: just seeing it made me feel at home again. A black t-shirt, dark green/gray combat pants, and my boots. And it was them, not a simulacrum, not a magical construct. I studied the marred leather, replete with scratches from every scrape I had gotten into from the forests of Germany to the plains of Shard World. They were buffed and polished, but the miles they had carried me bore through and the leather barely shone.

“I cleaned them for you,” she said watching me pick one up and check the secret compartments one by one, finding them empty.

“They must have taken all the toys,” I said wistfully.

“Where were they?” she asked, but that was exactly what I was wondering.

“You conjured them,” I gestured to her.

She shrugged.

“Well, last I remember, I was wearing them at Hashima Island. I woke up later in the hospital in the Sentinel’s Watchtower in orbit, while they were rebuilding my hand and face.” I paused, rubbing the bones I had shattered in my right hand bringing down the walls of Retcon’s fortress. “But you got them, right? I mean, how’d you get them if you didn’t even know where they were?”

“Magic,” she smiled and came beside me.

Wrapped in a bundle beside the clothing were the shoulder and waist harnesses, the repurposed thigh gun holsters I used to house more gadgets and toys, and lying on the bed, straddling my old waist-mounted arrow bag, was my original bow.

I had made the thing from a combination of yew and elm wood, using the same basic method they had used since the middle ages, with some slight modifications to the glues to make the bonding power stronger and faster-drying. It was polished and perfect, like it had been the day the lacquer had dried.

“This thing got scorched back in L.A.,” I said, bewildered, holding the bow like a child. “But how?” I started to ask but checked myself. “Yeah, magic.”

She raised a sultry eyebrow and sat on the bed beside the clothes and gear, watching me checking everything like a child on Christmas morning.

The boots were functional, including the rocket packs, though the fuel reservoirs were both drained and none of the diesel tanks that we had access to in the outpost had the punch of my own special kerosene/jet fuel formula. The diesel wouldn’t even get me off the ground and would probably muck up the fuel injection system.

“You wouldn’t happen to be able to get your hands on this particle accelerator that I built back in Shard World, huh?” I joked, but she barely smiled.

“Kidding,” I said, taking my clothes off.

“No thank you or nothing,” she said, though it wasn’t a question.

“I’m going to thank you after I clean up,” I told her, flashing a wink, but I noticed from her cold expression my charm had little effect on her.

I fired up the cold water and threw myself into the tub, scrubbing the grime, dirt, and smeared scum off my skin. The water that rushed off my body and down the tub was black and milky, partly oil, grease, and lubricants from engine parts, partly dust and silt, all intermingled with my sweat in an odorous milkshake. I rubbed my back when I suddenly felt her hands on my shoulder, making me flinch.

“Shhh,” she cooed, taking the soap and rag from my hands and washing my shoulders and back. I turned as she took her first step into the tub, already nude, and settled behind me, her little body contorted in the tiny space I left her. She tucked her knees behind my buttocks and continued her massaging wash, rubbing my neck and the back of my head as she inched forward, her thin body touching mine from time to time.

“I’m sorry if I’m being a selfish a*shole,” I said, her caressing touch relaxing my whole body. She pressed me forward, bending my upper body toward the faucet and kissing the back of my neck with a soft, breathless touch that tingled across my back. She rubbed my shoulders, digging her fingers into my deltoids and bringing her hands forward against my pectorals. Her touch was tender, arousing all my senses, and she pressed her body tight against mine. Feeling her small breasts, her soft midsection, and her pelvis against my back was like a rush of blood to the skin, a warming counter to the cold water.

I turned to face her, smiling, but she was somber, almost morose, and to keep me from noticing or asking about it, she came closer and kissed me.

Her hands came up to cradle my face, making her the center of my world, her brown and green-flecked eyes the sun in my sky. The gentle caress of her body against mine was in stark contrast to everything we had experienced to this moment, to everything that had passed so far.

We kissed, and I twisted to move above her as she opened her legs to me. I guided myself inside her, pressing her back and using my feet against the other side of the tub to push deep inside her. Instead of goading me on as she had before, using her nails and teeth as weapons, as spurs to drive me faster and faster, this time her touch was gentle, her nature constrained. I have never made love like that before in my life.

Afterward, we dried off and continued onto the bed, our love gentle and measured, restrained and amazing, and it seemed to last forever. Her legs coiled around me, and for a moment I feared that this was the end, that she would conduct some sort of final incantation, swallowing all my life essence and leaving me an empty husk, as she had perhaps hundreds of lovers across the ages. But that fear left a little with every touch, with every caress. Feeling her small body beneath me, quivering in pleasure, swept those worries aside.

When we were done, I held her in my arms, afraid to ruin the moment with words, even when she wept, her tears pooling in my arm. Eventually, she fell asleep in my arms, and I let myself fade, unwilling to let go of her.

I don’t know if it was a dream or not, but a breathless voice flew past me like a shadow in the wind as I succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep.

“I love you.”