Finitys end, p.50
Finity's End, page 50
part #7 of Company Wars Series
“I could eat the tables,” a cousin said as they joined the fast-moving line. Jeremy had a fruit bar with him. He was that desperate. Everyone’s eyes were shadowed, faces hollowed, older cousins’ skin showed wrinkles it didn’t ordinarily show. Everyone smelled of strong soap and had hair still damp.
Two choices, cheese loaf with sauce or souffle. They’d helped make the souffle the other side of Voyager and Fletcher decided to take a chance on that; Jeremy opted for the same, and they settled down in the mess hall for the pure pleasure of sitting in a chair. Vince and Linda joined them, having started from the mess hall door just when they’d sat down, and Jeremy nabbed extra desserts. Seats were at a premium. The mess hall couldn’t seat all of A deck at once. They wolfed down the second desserts, picked up, cleaned up, surrendered the seats to incoming cousins, and headed out and down the way they’d come.
“Can I borrow your fish tape?” Jeremy asked Linda as they walked.
“I thought you bought one,” Linda said.
“I put it back,” Jeremy said, and Fletcher thought that was odd: he thought he recalled Jeremy paying for it at the Aquarium gift shop. Jeremy had bought some tapes and a book, and he’d have sworn—
He saw trouble coming. Chad, and Sue, and Connor, from down the curve.
“Don’t say anything,” he said to his three juniors. “They’re out for trouble. Let them say anything they want.”
“They’re jerks,” Vince said.
The group approached, Sue passed, Chad passed—they were going to use their heads, Fletcher thought, and keep their mouths shut.
Then Connor shoved him, and he didn’t think. He elbowed back and spun around on his guard, facing Chad.
“You turn us in?” Chad asked. “You get us confined to quarters?”
“Wasn’t just you,” Fletcher retorted, and reminded himself he didn’t want this confrontation, and that Chad might be the leader and the appointed fighter in the group, but he didn’t conclude any longer that Chad was entirely the instigator. “We all got the order. You and I need to talk.” A cousin with her hands full needed by and they shifted closer together to let her by. Jeremy took the chance to get in the middle and to push at Fletcher’s arm.
“Fletcher. Come on. We’re still in yellow. They’ll lock us down for the next three years if you two fight, come on, cut it out.”
“Got your defender, do you?” Connor said, and shoved him a second time.
“Cut it!” Jeremy said, and Fletcher reached out and hauled him aside, firmly, without even feeling the effort or breaking eye contact with Chad.
“You and I,” Fletcher said, “have something to talk about.”
“I’m not interested in talk,” Chad said. “I’ll tell you exactly how it was. You came on board late, you didn’t like the scut jobs, you didn’t like taking orders, and you found a way to make trouble. For all we know, there never was any hisa stick.”
“Was, too!” Jeremy said. “I saw it.”
“All right,” Chad said. “There was. Doesn’t make any difference. Fletcher knows where it is. Fletcher always knew, because he put it there, and he’s going to bring down hell on our heads and be the offended party, and we give up our rec hours running around in the cold while he sits back and laughs.”
“That isn’t the way it is,” Fletcher said. “I don’t know who did it. That’s your problem. But I didn’t choose it.” Another couple of cousins wanted by, and then a third, fourth and fifth from the other direction. “We’re blocking traffic.”
“Yeah, run and hide,” Sue said. “Stationer boy’s too good to go search the skin, and get out in the cold…”
“You shut up!” Vince said, and kicked Connor. Connor lunged and Fletcher intercepted. “Let him alone,” Fletcher said.
And Linda kicked Connor. Hard.
Connor shoved to get free. And Chad shoved Connor aside, effortless as moving a door.
“I say you’re a liar,” Chad said, and Fletcher swung Jeremy and Linda out of range, mad and getting madder.
“Break it up!” an outside voice said. “You!”
“Fletcher!” Jeremy yelled, and he didn’t know why it was up to him to stop it: Chad took a swing at him, he blocked it, and got a blow in that thumped Chad into the far wall. Chad came off it at him, and Linda was yelling, Vince was. He’d stopped hearing what they were saying, until he heard Jeremy yelling at him, and until Jeremy was right in the middle of it, in danger of getting hurt.
“Chad didn’t do it!” Jeremy shouted, clinging to him, dragging at his arm with all his weight. “Chad didn’t do it, Fletcher! I did it!”
He stopped. Jeremy was still pulling at him. Bucklin had Chad backed off. It was only then that he realized it was JR who had pulled him back. And that Jeremy, all but in tears, was trying to tell him what didn’t make sense.
“What did you say?” JR asked Jeremy.
“I said I did it. I took it.”
“That’s not the truth,” Fletcher said. Jeremy was trying to divert them from a fight. Jeremy was scared of JR, was his immediate conclusion.
“It is the truth!” Jeremy cried, in what was becoming a crowd of cousins, young and old, in the corridor, all gathering around them. “I stole it, Fletcher, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“What did you mean?” JR asked; and Jeremy stammered out,
“I just took it. I was afraid they were going to do it, so I did it.”
“You’re serious.”
“I was just going to keep it safe, Fletcher. I was. I took it onto Mariner because I thought they were going to mess the cabin and they’d find it and something would happen to it, but somebody broke into my room in the sleepover and they got all my stuff, Fletcher!”
Everything made sense. The aquarium tape Jeremy turned out not to have. The music tapes. The last-minute dash to the dockside stores. The thief had made off with every purchase Jeremy had made at Mariner, Jeremy had broken records getting back to their cabin to create the scene he’d walked in on.
But he wasn’t sure yet he’d heard all the truth. Fletcher’s heart was pounding, from the fight, from Jeremy’s confession, from the witness of everyone around them. Silence had fallen in the corridor. And JR’s hold on him let up, JR seeming to sense that he had no immediate inclination to go for Chad, who hadn’t, after all, been at fault. Not, at least, in the theft.
“God,” Vince said, “that was really stupid, Jeremy!”
Jeremy didn’t say a thing.
“Somebody took it from your room in the Pioneer,” JR said.
“Yes, sir,” Jeremy said faintly.
“And why didn’t you own up to it?”
Jeremy had no answer for that one. He just stood there as if he wished he were anywhere else. And Fletcher believed it finally. The one person he’d trusted implicitly. The one whose word he’d have taken above all others.
Jeremy was a kid, when all was said and done, just a kid. He’d failed like a kid, just not facing what he’d done until it went way too far.
“Let him be,” Fletcher said with a bitter lump in his throat. “It’s lost. It doesn’t matter. Jeremy and I can work it out.”
“This ship has a schedule,” JR said. “And it’s no longer on my hands. Bucklin, you call it. It’s your decision.”
“Fletcher,” Bucklin said. “Jeremy? You want a change of quarters? Or are you going to work this out? I’m not having you hitting the kid.”
Anger said leave. Get out. Be alone. Alone was safe. Alone was always preferable.
But there was jump coming, and the loneliness of a single room, and a kid who’d—aside from a failure to come out with the truth—just failed to be an adult, that was all. The kid was just a kid, and expecting more than that, hell, he couldn’t expect it of himself.
He just felt lonely, was all. Hard-used, and now in the wrong with Chad and the rest, and cut off from his own age and in with kids who were, after all, just kids, who now were mad at Jeremy.
“I’ll keep him,” he said to Bucklin. “We’ll work it out.”
Lay too much on a kid’s shoulders? It was his mistake, not Jeremy’s, when it came down to it: it was all his mistake, and he was sorry to lose what he’d rather have kept, in the hisa artifact, but the greater loss was his faith in Jeremy.
“You don’t hit him,” Bucklin said.
“I have no such intention,” he said, and meant it, unequivocally. He knew where else things were set upside down, and where he’d gotten in wrong with people: he looked at Chad, said a grudging, “Sorry,” because someone once in his half dozen families had pounded basic fairness into his head. The mistake was his, that was all. It wasn’t Jeremy who’d picked a fight with Chad.
Chad wasn’t mollified. He saw it in Chad’s frown, and knew it wasn’t that easily over.
“All right, get your minds on business,” Bucklin said. “A month the other side of this place maybe you’ll have cooled down and we can settle things. Honor of the ship, cousins. We’re family, before all else, faults, flaws, and stupid moves and all; and we’ve got jobs to do.”
By now the crowd in the corridor was at least twenty onlookers. There were quiet murmurs, people excusing themselves past.
“We have”—Bucklin consulted his watch—“thirty-two minutes to take hold.”
JR. said nothing. Chad and his company exchanged dark glances. Fletcher ignored the looks and gathered up his own junior company, going on to their cabin, Vince and Linda trailing them. He tried all the while to think what he ought to say, or do, and didn’t find any quick fix. None at all.
“Just everybody calm down,” was all he could find to say when they reached the door of his and Jeremy’s quarters. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right We’ll talk about it when we get where we’re going.”
“We didn’t know about it!” Vince protested, and so did Linda.
“They didn’t,” Jeremy said
“It was a mistake,” he found himself saying, past all the bitterness he felt, a too-young bitterness of his own that he spotted rising up ready to fight the world. And that he was determined to sit on hard. “Figure it out. It’s not something that can’t be fixed. It’s just not going to happen in two happy words, here. I’m upset. Damn right I’m upset. Chad’s upset. Sue and Connor are upset and all the crew who froze their fingers and toes off trying to find what wasn’t on this ship in the first place are upset, and in the meantime I look like a fool. A handful of words could have solved this.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said.
“About time.”
“He didn’t tell us,” Vince said.
“You let him and me settle it. Meanwhile we’ve got thirty minutes before we’ve got to be in bunks and safed down. We’re going to get to Esperance, we’re going to have our liberty if they don’t lock us down, and we’re all four of us going to go out on dockside and have a good time. We’re not going to remember the stick, except as something we’re not going to do again, and if we make mistakes we’re going to own up to them before they compound into a screwup that has us all in a mess. Do we agree on that?”
“Yessir.” It was almost in unison, from Jeremy, too.
Earnest kids. Kids trying to agree to what they, being kids, didn’t half understand had happened, except that Jeremy was wound tight with hurt and guilt, and if he could have gotten to anyone on the ship right this minute he thought he’d wish for no-nonsense Madelaine.
“To quarters,” he said. “Do right. Stay out of trouble. Give me one easy half hour. All right?”
“Yessir,” faintly, from Linda and Vince. He took Jeremy inside, and shut the door.
Jeremy got up on his bunk, squatting against the wall, arms tucked tight, staring back at him.
Jeremy stared, and he stared back, seeing in that tight-clenched jaw a self-protection he’d felt in his own gut, all too many times.
Puncture that self-sufficiency? He could. And he declined to.
“Bad mistake,” he said to Jeremy, short and sweet. “That’s all I’ve got to say right now.”
Jeremy ducked his head against his arms.
“Don’t sulk.”
Back went the head, so fast the hair flew. “I’m not sulking! I’m upset! You’re going at me like I meant some skuz to steal it!”
“Forget the stick! You don’t like Chad, right? You wanted me to beat up Chad, so I could look like a fool, and it’d all just go away if you kept quiet and you wouldn’t be at fault. That stinks, kid, that behavior stinks. You used me!”
“Did not!”
“Add it up and tell me I’m wrong!”
Lips were bitten white. “I didn’t want you to beat up Chad.”
“So what did you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, do better! Do better. You know what you were supposed to have done.”
“Yeah.”
“So why didn’t you tell me the truth, for God’s sake?”
“Because I didn’t want you to leave!”
“How long did you think you were going to keep it up? Your whole life?”
“I don’t know!” Jeremy cried. “I just thought maybe later it wouldn’t matter.”
He let that thought sit in silence for a moment. “Didn’t work real well,” he said. “Did it?”
“Didn’t,” Jeremy muttered, head hanging. Jeremy swiped his hair back with both hands. “I was scared, all right? I thought you’d beat hell out of me.”
“Did I give you that impression? Did I ever give you that impression?”
Jeremy shook his head and didn’t look at him.
“I thought the story was you were having a good time. Best time in your life. Was that it? Just having such a great time we can’t be bothered with telling me the damn truth, is that the way things were?”
“I didn’t want to spoil it!” Jeremy’s voice broke, somewhere between twelve-year-old temper and tears. “I didn’t want to lose you, Fletcher. I didn’t want it to go bad, and I didn’t know how mad you’d be and I didn’t know you’d beat up on Chad, and I didn’t know they’d search the whole ship for it!”
Fletcher flung himself down to sit on the rumpled bed.
“I didn’t know,” Jeremy said in a small voice. “I just didn’t know.”
Fletcher let go a long breath, thinking of what he’d lost, what he’d thought, who it was now that he had to blame. The kid. A kid. A kid who’d latched onto him and who sat there now trying to keep the quiver out of his chin, trying to be tough and take the damage, and not to be, bottom line, destroyed by this, any more than by a dozen other rough knocks. He didn’t see the expression; he felt it from inside, he dredged it up from memory, he felt it swell up in his chest so that he didn’t know whether he was, himself, the kid that was robbed or the kid on the outs with Vince, and Linda, and him, and just about everyone of his acquaintance.
Jeremy couldn’t change families. They couldn’t get tired of him and send him back for the new, nicer kid.
Jeremy couldn’t run away. He shared the same quarters, and Jeremy was always on the ship, always would be.
The history Jeremy piled up on himself wouldn’t go away, either. No more than people on this ship forgot the last Fletcher, shutting the airlock, and bleeding on the deck.
Jeremy was in one heavy lot of trouble for a twelve-year-old.
And he, Fletcher, simply Fletcher, was in one hell of a lot of pain of his own. Personal pain, that had more to do with things before this ship than on this ship.
What Jeremy had shaken out of him had nothing to do with Jeremy.
He stared at Jeremy, just stared.
“You said you weren’t going to give me hell,” Jeremy protested.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to give you hell. I said I wasn’t going to throw you out of here.”
“It’s my cabin!”
“Oh, now we’re tough, are we?” If he invited Jeremy to ask him to leave, Jeremy would ask him to leave. Jeremy had to. It was the nature of the kid. It was the stainless steel barricade a kid built when he had to be by himself.
“Jeremy.” Fletcher leaned forward on his bunk, opposite, arms on his knees. “Let me tell you. That stick’s sacred to the hisa, not because of what it is, but because it is. It’s like a wish. And what I wish, Jeremy, is for you to make things right with JR, and I will with Chad, because I was wrong. You may have set it up, but I was wrong. And I’ve got to set it straight, and you have to. That’s what you do. You don’t have to beat yourself bloody about a mistake. The real mistake was in not coming to me when it happened and saying so.”
“We were having a good time!” Jeremy said, as if that excused everything.
But it wasn’t in any respect that shallow. He remembered Jeremy that last day, when Jeremy had had the upset stomach.
Bet that he had. The kid had been scared sick with what had happened. And trying, because the kid had been trying to please everybody and keep his personal house of cards from caving in, to just get past it and hope the heat would die down.
House of cards, hell. He’d made it a castle. He’d showed up, taken the kids on a fantasy holiday; he’d cared about the ship’s three precious afterthoughts.
He knew. He knew what kind of desperate compromises with reality a kid would make, to keep things from blowing up, in loud tempers, and shouting, and a situation becoming untenable. That was what knotted up his own gut. Remembering.
“It wouldn’t have made me leave,” he said to Jeremy.
“Yes, it would,” Jeremy said. And he honestly didn’t know whether Jeremy had judged right or wrong, because he was a kid as capable as Jeremy of inviting down on himself the very solitude he found so painful—the solitude he’d ventured out of finally only for Melody and Patch.
And been tossed out of by Satin. To save Melody, Patch and himself.
Maybe the stick had a power about it after all.
