Time Travel Omnibus, page 1107
“What was that?”
Joey looks in the mirror. “You just dragged a Scamper out of its parking space. Knocked off my moped wheel too.”
“Great. Is that him way back there?”
Joey looks. He has a fine view of the bikes and the SUCs behind them. And there’s Pony-tail, on a moped, two blocks behind and gaining.
Ahead a few blocks, Split Second becomes one-way. One way the wrong way: uptown. Most southbound traffic turns west on 31st. 31st can get clogged so Joey says, “Turn here.”
“On 35th? It’s an alley!”
“You’ll fit.”
She doesn’t. She turns too tight, taking out the signal pole then hitting the Kwik Shoppe grocery on the near corner, bringing down bricks onto a display of half-price cucumbers. The Yacht stops. “Shit!” She puts it into reverse, then into 4WD, but gets only grinding and more bricks. “We’re stuck!”
“Let’s go on my bike!”
Joey’s out of the Yacht. He gets on the twelve speed. He sees the Yacht is blocking the alley. “Get out this side!”
Pony-tail has reached the corner. She’s out, climbing onto the handlebars.
Pony-tail jumps off his moped. He starts to climb onto the hood of the Yacht.
“Wait!” she says before Joey starts pedaling.
She throws a wad of bills at the mustached man in a grocer’s apron who’s just come out of the Kwik Shoppe crying.
They don’t lose Pony-tail until 33rd and Eon. The guy’s fit in the 30s, a runner, and with the woman sitting on Joey’s handlebars, it’s hard for Joey to get the bike up to speed.
But at Eon, Joey runs the red light, the Predator pulling a mobile Farmer’s Market uptown honking at him. And seeing Pony-tail stop at the red light, as if obeying traffic signals might earn him points towards Uppiehood, Joey gets inspired. “Let’s ride the Market!”
The Farmer’s Market is a flat trailer, a third the length of a city block, with a greenhouse atop it. It moves less than a mile an hour. Still in the intersection, greenhouse full of dead cornstalks between them and Pony-tail, they climb onto the trailer near its rear wheels, the woman first, Joey handing her the bike.
Then through an access door into the greenhouse itself.
“Keep low,” Joey says. They crawl across the furrowed mulch, toward a pile of cornstalks and debris from the last planting cycle. It’s humid and warm but all Joey can think about is the fine shape of her gray-skirted buttocks before him.
Recorded thunder crackles from speakers. Cold water from overhead sprinklers douses them. “Shit,” she says, when the rain has stopped and they are sitting close to the cornstalks. “Look at me.”
Her skirt is muddy, her nylons streaked with grease, and her wet blouse clings to her so that Joey can see the shape of her breasts. The automatic rain has raised a sweet smell of manure but also, from her body, a heady mix of perfume and perspiration and wet hair. Joey is aroused. “I think you’re beautiful.”
“Why is that guy after you?” she asks.
“He’s a bounder.”
“You did something to him.”
All at once, shoots break through the mulch, like an array of green swordpoints thrust upward from below. One pokes Joey in the butt. He slides off the shoot towards her, but as he moves to embrace her, he catches his backpack on a sharp broken cornstalk. “Oops!” He’s stuck. “Don’t want to break it!”
“Break what?” she asks.
He pulls his arms out of the straps. “The mod—the floppy—the disks.”
Before he can stop her, she has the pack down from the cornstalk. She opens it. “I thought so.”
“I can explain,” Joey says. “I wanted to help you.”
“My car is wrecked. I’ve lost my job. I’m sitting in manure. I don’t need your explanations.” With her hair brown, her blue eyes are startling. “Let’s do things my way now.”
“Okay.”
She takes putty and a utility knife out of her purse. She begins to work on the Ghengis Khar.
As the rows of plants individuate, tomatoes where they sit, stalks of corn in four other rows, Joey wonders how he’s going to get the model to Tick-Tock Square.
And he wonders if he has any chance of getting laid.
He watches her finish altering the model. She’s already filled the blade holes and cut away the lever and spring for the APS blades. Now with her knife she levers out the units themselves. Even with the tomato plant sending vines around her ankles, her hand is steady, her motions sure. Joey feels the same admiration he’d have for a bike babe who’d trimmed her delivery time by car-roofing down a busy street. There are too many reasons to love her. He watches green buds turn into green fruit. “You know,” he says, “if we go hide at the BDL office, it will be easier getting uptown tonight.”
“I don’t care about easy. I care about fast.”
“I can bike you uptown in fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t need your help. I have my car.”
“Your car’s stuck,” Joey says.
“I’ll get it towed.”
Three Downsters carrying baskets enter via the forward access door. At that end of the greenhouse, the corn is full-height, the tomatoes fat and red. Harvest time.
“Hard to get a tow truck downtown,” Joey says.
“I’ll take my chances.” She’s up, model in hand. One Downster notices her but she ignores him. “I’ll see you around.”
“At least let me escort you back to your Yacht.”
She shrugs, not dismissing him, but not encouraging him either. He pulls off a half-ripened tomato then follows her, trampling over the vines, pushing through the corn. They emerge from the greenhouse as the Farmer’s Market pulls into its parking area north of 34th Avenue. Uppies are waiting there to shop, but there’s no sign of Pony-tail.
On the street, four-story redbrick rowhouses, Joey’s pedaling his bike in its lowest gear, while she walks beside him. She won’t ride with him but seems less angry. “So why did you lie to me?”
“Because I like you. I wanted to be with you longer.”
She half-smiles. Then: “Damn.”
They’ve just turned onto 35th. The Yacht’s surrounded by a crowd. Moped cops are cordoning off the area with yellow crime scene tape.
“I’m not in trouble?” she asks. “They’re not going to blame me?”
Joey doesn’t know. He wants to jump off the bike and reassure her with a hug. Instead he says: “Give me the model. I’ll take it to the cops and turn myself in.”
“How gallant,” she says. Her voice is sarcastic but her eyelashes sparkle with tears. She turns away and wipes her face then looks at Joey and, after taking a deep breath, says, “Let me get on your bike.”
“You want to go uptown?”
“Let’s go further downtown first.”
And south on Century Boulevard, the model making her purse bulge, Joey embarrassed by a hard-on but puzzled too. “Why south?” he asks, raising his voice because he is pedaling fast enough that the air pushes back her hair.
“I want to shop!”
“For what?”
“You’ll see!”
Puzzling him further because even slumming Uppies shop in the 30s.
He worries the sight of the cop mopeds has unhinged her.
But how can you worry much downtown? They reach the 20s and the streets get narrow, so narrow that the Avenues are impassable by the smallest car or SUC, and even on the Boulevards cars are discouraged strongly. They pass a Scamper retreating uptown, chunks of rotten vegetables adhering like ornaments to its hood, wipers smearing the fecal matter dumped upon the windshield. Joey shouts, “It’ll wash off!” to the anxious driver. There are flowers in the building windows, and guys playing flutes for pennies, and women on ten speeds with crepe paper streamers in their hair. Everyone is strong and young and healthy. They cheer Joey like he’s brought back a prize. A guy drinking smuggled Uptown beer toasts them as they pass. A woman walking a wire strung above them across the street calls out, “I love your shoes!” and she, the model-builder, takes off her black business pumps and tosses them at the wire-walking woman, who catches one.
“Hey!” Joey says.
They reach 24th Avenue, Tick-Tock Square, and Joey stops.
“The BDL is in that building,” he says, pointing at the stone building with Gothic arches across the square. “Do you want to come up and show them the model?”
She studies the many guys sitting on blankets, selling cutlery and worn jackets and action figures from TV shows. “I want to shop.”
“You can shop later. Why not come up first? They’d really like to see the model.”
“I want to shop.”
“Okay.” She’s so beautiful that Joey finds it hard not to stare at her face. “Do you still want to take the model uptown?”
“Of course. Why?”
“It’s going to be a problem if I go to the BDL with nothing to show.”
She says nothing, but her nose lines deepen.
Joey walks the bike a couple of feet, feels beneath his heel the place where concrete ends and cobblestone begins, feels also the reckless strength that surges through him whenever he goes this far downtown. “It’s yours. I shouldn’t have even asked. But maybe you can let me have the toothpick blades.”
“For the BDL?”
“Yeah.”
She gives him the two APS units along with the springs and lever.
Joey kisses her on the lips.
She doesn’t return the kiss but her nose lines soften momentarily.
“Wait for me,” he says.
“What the fuck is this, dude?”
Wayne, shaved head, beady eyes, black goatee to his shirtless well-muscled chest, holds an APS unit in his palm. He sits cross-legged on a battered wooden desk, which is pushed against an arch-shaped stained-glass window.
“It’s the weapon, from the model.”
“What good is it to me?”
“It’s a blade,” Joey says. “Build your fenders.”
“I can’t design shit based off just this. Where’s the rest of it?”
“I gave it back.”
“To her?” Wayne thumps the window with his elbow. “I saw you with the smog queen.”
“She’s the artist. She built the model and broke off the blades and that’s how they’re going to build it now.”
“She told you that?”
“She says if she stands up to Carla Dakota, other people will follow.”
“You believe her? She’s delusional, dude. She’s got killer cars on her conscience and that’s made her crack. And she’s mindfucked you, too.” He snaps the toothpick blades in half. “You’ve been uptown too much. You’re trusting a slumming Uppie just because she looks good in a skirt. You’ve forgot what it’s about.”
Joey glances at the tall dusty corridor leading to his bedroom. “And you’ve been sitting on your ass too long to have any perspective.”
“Perspective?” Wayne opens a manila folder off the desk. “How’s this for perspective? 46th and Eon, bike babe crushed dead by a Universal. 51st and Split-Second, pedestrian flattened by a Predator. 60th and Century, office temp hit by a Pillager running a red light. Broken leg and pelvis. And that’s just this week. You want some more perspective, dude?”
“I know that crap. That’s why I took the model.”
“And that’s why you’re going to go down there and get it back from the bitch!”
He throws the toothpicks at Joey and they bounce off his chest.
“Fuck you, dude.” No sex, no model, and now attitude from Wayne. Joey wants to punch him but he makes himself walk to the door. “She’s doing more for us than you ever have.”
Joey’s so angry that he doesn’t recognize the woman until she pushes the bike up to him. “You okay?” she asks.
He stares at her. She’s wearing a blue stocking cap and a hideous knee-length sweater striped purple and yellow. “Yeah, I’m fine. You found what you were shopping for?”
“No. My clothes were too big, so I bought this. But there’s something else I need.”
“Maybe you can find it uptown.”
“No.” Her brows are knit. “Take me down. To kidtown.”
On Eon, south of 17th, his butt aching from the cobblestones, watching the grease stain across one of her calves, his anger vanishes, his horniness returns. “Hey!” he says to her. “Let’s have lunch!”
He points at the plaster-and-adobe two story building midblock. Not only does a kid sell you sandwiches and soda-pop, but there’s a bedroom in the back you can rent for a quarter.
“I want to go further,” she says.
“Whatever.” He wants to please her. He just hopes she doesn’t want to go south of 10th, because sometimes even Downsters playing kid forget themselves and don’t come back.
“Why don’t they fix the buildings?”
They go past some sort of temple, with stone columns like at the mid-town Exchange Building, but the wooden roof collapsed. Pigeons coo from the wreckage. “Kids don’t come downtown to do work.”
The 14th Avenue Exchange is two long rows of bike racks, run by a girl in an ankle-length black sweater and with a shaved head just sprouting yellow fuzz.
For the 12 speed, they get two little bikes.
They ride on dirt streets between little buildings that look like beehives. Joey likes the sparkly red banana seat his bike has, though he doesn’t actually sit on it until 12th. His legs are too long until then.
“Watch this,” Joey says just past 11th. He does a wheelie. It’s a fine one, lasting seconds, rear wheel following the bike tire rut in the road. But when he comes down, his helmet falls over his eyes. “Hey!”
He stops. She’s giggling at him. He takes the helmet off and throws it disdainfully to the ground. But he’s glad to see her smile. Her teeth are white as dinner plates.
She picks up the helmet, then attaches it to her purse. He realizes she’s taller than him now.
Joey wants to entertain her.
He tells jokes, he rides no-hands, he puts on a floppy straw hat with a hole in its top. At a house that is nothing but a brick foundation, a low wall around chest-high bushes, he captures a small tan lizard. He puts it into his mouth and pretends to chew and swallow it. “Gross!” she says. As she looks away, he spits it out. He tastes something sour-yucky. The lizard peed inside his mouth.
Just down the block is one of the beehive houses. It’s crumpled on one side but has a smooth slope on the other. At the bottom of the slope, there’s dirt piled up in a big half-pipe shape.
“Whoa!” he says.
Kids have ridden this house before.
He hikes up the crumpled side, part-rolling, part-carrying the bike.
To his surprise she follows him, bringing her bike.
He climbs on his bike, looks at her. She’s pale, unsmiling, nose-lines deep.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says.
She stares at him. “I want to.”
“Cool. Just wait till I’m out of the way.”
He does the beehive. It’s steeper than he’d thought, and he panics at the start, but then his body takes control. Wind in the face, joy of speed and weightlessness, crackle of plaster beneath his tires, then he’s on the dirt. He veers up the half-pipe, slows, turns and coasts back down to a stop.
She comes down as slow as she can. Braking, coasting, braking, so slow he’s sure she’s going to fall. But the fall doesn’t happen until she reaches the half pipe. She loses her momentum, teeters, then falls onto her side.
“Are you okay?”
He’s expecting terror. But she’s giggling, and the nose-lines are almost gone. “Let’s just go a little further downtown.”
He’ll do anything she wants.
Eon ends north of the 6th Avenue ziggy-rat.
Joey’s heart goes thump-thump. He’s never been south so far, never seen the ziggy-rat so close. Hills of rubble at its base. The ziggy-rat itself is as tall as the VLM building. It’s built of gray bricks stuck together with green mortar. It’s got a long staircase out front that seems to touch the sky.
He’s inspired. “Let’s climb it.”
“And ride down?” she asks.
“Yeah!”
She grins. She’s missing her top front two teeth.
They walk their bikes across the little hills, which are made of bricks too, only pieces. They walk carefully, because the bricks shift beneath their weight. On top of one hill there’s a crushed soda-pop can. When Joey kicks it his shoe comes off.
He ties the shoe back on as tight as he can.
They start up the ziggy-rat. The sun is bright in a glaring blue sky. The staircase bricks warm his feet and make them sweaty so he slides in his big shoes. He’s soon breathing hard, arms hurting from holding the bike. He wants to rest, but would be embarrassed to rest before the girl does. Halfway up the staircase there’s something metal in the shadow of the staircase wall. When he gets there, he’ll rest.
The girl’s bike makes a ka-chink each time she raises it a step. The ka-chinks get slower and then they stop.
She leans her bike against the wall.
“You don’t want to ride down the ziggy-rat?”
“I’ll help you with your bike.” Her face is red. “And you say, zigg-oo-rat.”
“Uppsies say,” he says, irritated. But he lets her hold one handlebar, while he holds the other and the seat. His irritation passes. He keeps looking at her. Her face is cute. Sweat sticks a strand of hair to her cheek. He wants to brush it back but touching her would be weird since she’s a girl.
The metal thing’s a rusty bike with training wheels, atop some clothes and sticks. He doesn’t stop. “What’s that?” she says.
“Training wheels!” he says.
“No, below it.”
“I don’t know.”
