The Next Steel : Brian Nealon
“THE WATER'S BEAUTIFUL tonight,” King said. “Sheer green, even with the sun down.” He gestured to the low, pounding waves with a clink of his Scotch. Something his dad used to do, gesture like that, but with his requisite Jim Beam neat instead and a Salem gone to ash in the same hand. “Emerald Coast, all right. Marvelous water down here. I sure wish we'd brought you here when you were younger. Totally different from the Outer Banks or Myrtle Beach, right? Isn't it great? And look up! Great bright stars. Straight ahead there—marvelous.” King could be a little euphoric tonight, last night of the first vacation of his retirement.
Jim's childishly long blonde eyelashes were invisible in the twilight, and as the boy looked toward the Gulf, his eyes were still. He was being antisocial, being eighteen as Viv lately observed when their boy removed himself during family visits. Jim didn't flinch out of his meditation, but he'd probably heard the sliding door from the great room, Viv and the Florida cousins chatting and washing dishes, heard it sail shut and then King's flip-flops slapping the planks—Jim, yes, had braced himself.
“Scorpio,” Jim finally offered.
“Scorpius,” King said quickly. His eyes watered with the coming darkness. He hadn't seen these Gulf skies in over twenty-five years, sullied now by the buzzing fluorescents on the boardwalks of the condos on either side of the house. He could see the scorpion's image almost perfectly anyway, a lit line drawing. “They're just so bright down here! Dayton's always so washed out. Wish we'd brought the telescope.” He got caught up in his instructor self. “That big red star, Antares, heart of the scorpion,” he said, “and its tail curls to the left, ends with that bright star, the stinger. And somewhere in there is the X-1, a dead star that's crunched so far down it just sucks the life out of its twin. Almost like a black hole, almost sucks down light, for God's sake.”
“I know,” his son said flatly. “Is that all?”
King knew the boy didn't want to hear his old man's bullshit right now, but his old man needed to say something to him, and it would take some leading up to.
“What's that biblical line again? Would you hand your son a scorpion? Watch it, kid.” This wasn't helping. He had to start all over. “This is where I came to see the '70 solar eclipse—right here on this beach, in the springtime. Stayed here with the Florida clan.”
“Dad, you told me on the way down.”
“Damn thing only lasted about three minutes, but you could see the mountains of the moon against the sun, the diamond ring effect, and I got that beautiful shot of the corona. And that darkness was complete, kid. I mean even the crabs thought it was time for a night stroll, you know? You should've seen the collective oh shit of ten thousand sand crabs when it ended! Hopped back in their holes quick as damn whips.” King snorted into his glass.
King saw his cousins, whom he called the Spinsters to get a rise out of Viv, peer through the sliding door at him. They were kissing his wife, gathering their bags.
“Come on in and get a drink with me, Jim. Let's catch them before they leave.” During dinner the ladies had embarrassed Jim with their predictions of his success in the military, an idea he'd been actively fighting since high school, and the spinsters probably got a sense of it when the boy disappeared without excusing himself. The boy's a fragile one, King had told them. “Jimbo, come and say goodbye to Doris and Millie.”
Jim hadn't moved at all since King stepped out, and he obviously wasn't going to now. His body was completely slack against the deck rail, his face expressionless. “Man, what is the matter with you,” King said as he trotted to the door. Before he slid it shut, he called to Jim, “Don't take off anywhere, I've got something to say.” The boy said nothing.
#
King returned smiling, with another Scotch and water, fresh from the air conditioning and the glow of goodbyes. “You know, something else about this place is that it's not far from one of those Blue Book sightings they never solved; folks say there was a metallic right triangle flashing over Ocala, over there.” Jimbo used to love his Project Blue Book stories from the few weeks King spent at the main desk on the base before the program was scrapped in '69. Just bringing up a little science fiction—Hangar 18 at Wright-Patt or Area 51 or anything futuristic the force had developed—occasionally still worked. “A buddy of mine, Sammy Oglesby, came down to check it out. Sam always did sort of jump to conclusions—my bet is it was one of the flying wings we were testing in California. There could've been something secret going on here between the two big bases here, over the Gulf, even something like the old Dyna-Soar program. But old Sammy liked to party too much, you know, never checked anything out.” A cheer distracted him, came from a porch near them in the behemoth building to their left, a mass of Quikrete and wallboard and gold vinyl siding, the Sunchaise. King glared up two or three stories toward the sound.
“Is this what you were going to tell me? Another glory days story?”
“Okay, forget the nicey-nice. Listen.” He waited until Jim had turned his head to him. “Class of ’98, and now you’ve hit the big time. You're starting off next year in a tough program, and I want you to be great. I mean that. Just don't do this because you think I want you to. You know, follow in Dad's footsteps or something.”
King caught a wince in the crow's feet starting at the corners of Jim's eyes. “It's not like I'm enlisting in the Air Force,” Jim said.
“I know that. I just want what's right for you. I mean, is engineering right? You're a lot smarter than I was, and you'll be able to do whatever you want. Do you really want to be holed up in some lab? You know what I did for most of my thirty years. Nothing. It was all throwaway.” He'd mixed, woven, concocted composites of ceramics and plastics and carbon spun into thread, baked until blackened—and then once, by alchemy, he'd found the balance of lightness and strength that held up to all the specs. The next steel. “And what I did will be replaced tomorrow by something a hundred times better. Once you do find something useful, everyone's gunning for you. It's cutthroat, Jimmy.” But his composite was in the skins of the newest fighters and in the ace of the force, the longest-range, lightest, stealthiest bomber class ever made.
Jim flashed his eyes. “You just want what you think's right for me. What do you know about engineering anymore? You sat behind a desk getting promoted for the last ten years. And I'm not doing anything military, Dad.” He looked away. “You know what I think. I want to make something good for people, not help kill them all off.”
Deflated, King nodded deeply to his superior little shit, winking and tipping his drink to him. The ice was completely melted. “Righty-oh.”
Jim hunched forward on the rail and resumed his vigil over the water. “At least you weren't trying to start one of your vacation sex talks again.”
King smiled, took a drink, a little dissatisfied with the turn. “That was when? Once, I think, when we were in Myrtle Beach.”
“I already had one with Mom today anyway,” Jim said. “Very interesting.”
“Well, you remember what your granddad used to say to me about sex. The only thing he ever needed to say. Your brain isn't in your stinger, right?”
“He called it a pecker.”
“I know. That was a joke. It was a joke and you were supposed to laugh. Come on, kid—” Jim didn't tickle at all, so King positioned himself at the boy's backside for a sidelong pinch, which Jim evaded with a spin.
“Man, quit. I asked Mom how come you still have sex and never had any more kids.”
King gave a high whistle. Poor Viv. Got herself in a bind this time. “There's this thing I've been meaning to tell you about since our last little talk, and it's called menopause—” He burst out in a dry, heaving laugh, and bowed over toward Jim.
“Shut up, Dad. It means something to me.”
This was the problem with bringing Jim out. When it happened, it was all the way, and never what you expected. Pandora's box. King took a big gulp of his watery Scotch and coughed. “And what did she say?”
“She said you got a vasectomy after she had me.”
So Viv took it on herself, he thought. “Did she say anything else?”
Jim paused. “Something about teachings versus laws.”
“Swell.” He looked back through the glass door—dark now, TV going. “You and Mom had a real heart to heart, didn't you.” King swung his arms into a loose embrace with himself. “Mother and son,” he loudly pronounced, saliva bubbling between his lips.
Jim matched his father's shout. “It's not right.”
“Damn right, Jimbo. Damn right. What a good little Catholic schoolboy you are! You're about—” He leaned into Jim, who was at least still facing him, brought his hand up with a jolt, his index finger and thumb held in a pinch, and with a heavy exhale said, “I say about—halfway the fuck there, kid.”
Jim looked like he'd been punched in the sternum—and King knew he was in control again, that the boy could have nothing to say or do about it. “Listen. Did Adam and Eve talk to a little snake? Fuck no. Did Noah take all the animals in all the world on a little boat? Fuck no.” King swang an arm out theatrically. “Did Jesus ever say moms and dads can't have a little fun if they don't want kids every time?” He flailed both of his arms, tossing the remainder of the drink. “Who made all that up? Human beings, kid. Fucking human beings who make mistakes. Take it all with a grain of salt. It's called living for the spirit of the law! And I can even tell you an example that I know your mother wouldn't tell you, Jimbo. So I'll tell you.”
“Dad.”
“Your mom and I met just as we were graduating from Dayton, you know. We went out, and after a few dates, something snapped—June the twenty-first, 1970, that was it, we were googoo eyes all night. It was sultry, sticky hot. And when we got back to her folks' house from the movie or wherever we made out that night, we were so hot and horny we dropped on the back lawn and did it right there under her parents' window. I don't know how I got my pants down that fast.”
“I really don't need to hear this.”
“I was in fucking love, you know? And it was our first time, both of us on fire and not knowing what the hell we were doing, but we figured things out pretty quick. So there we are like animals in the grass, and I look up—and see the Virgin Mary throwing her hands up in complete disbelief. I mean, shit! I really freaked, you know? But somehow the animal in you takes over. I just kept at it, and after all I realized it was only a statue in their little rock grotto. But God, it was great, and we both loved it, first time or not. And neither of us was ashamed of it. And you know what? We were in love and stayed in love and got married. And we had you, and yes, now I'm shooting blanks. You see?” He opened his arms again, as if to rush and embrace Jim, but stepped back a few uneven paces. “See? And here we are, the—” But he'd already stepped off the deck, realized what was happening too slowly. He curled over himself in space, hit a couple of steps with his back, pitched, and sprawled out in the blackness under a stilt of the deck, cheek in the sand and burs, amid broken stalks of sea oats. Male and female laughter clattered and bounced under the house from other porches, under the pound of the surf.
#
He'd made it to the bed, relieved to have made it, accepting of death if it would just come now.
“Lay flat,” said Viv as she eased herself next to him on this foreign bed—not a trace of reproval or hurt in her voice.
He grunted while pain shot and pulsed and buzzed in him. “I really fucked up, Viv,” he said thickly.
“How are you going to handle working like this Monday? You can't go in.”
“It's a business. I have to be there. Jesus, I should be there now. But I just really fucked up tonight.”
“We're still alive.” She propped herself close to him, laying on her side. “You learned something, I hope. I did.” Her face was just against his stubbly cheek. They often fell asleep kissing or making love on their sides, fully facing each other, and she paid for it with chafed cheeks and chin. When he'd get home before Jim, she would rush up to embrace King at the front door, in one of his ragged V-neck tee shirts she wore during her after-school naps, sleepy-eyed and smiling so her cheeks made her eyes into slits. They had never outgrown it, their childishness, and he loved that—that he couldn't wait to get into bed with her at the age of fifty-three.
“Yeah, I learned. Learned two Scotches, that's it.”
“I learned something about Jim, anyway. I'm not sure if he was ready for any of that history.”
He lay still, trying to conquer the pains the aspirin couldn't. “There's just no middle for him. Good old Knee-jerk Jimmy. He thinks we have to be all or nothing.”
Viveka snaked her hand to his belly, pushing her fanned fingers up his chest, through his silver hairs up to his collarbone, over and around each breast in growing circles. “I like our gray areas,” she smiled onto his lips. He chuckled at this, coughed painfully, but settled, brought his breathing in time with hers, slow and assured as the waves sounding through the closed window.
#
King awoke well before Viv, early the next morning, as he had all week, to watch the natural passage of things from the deck, to see the sun rise over the curve of the water and snuff out the boardwalk lights. But this time, between dozes, and just before the first sunlight collected on the horizon and renewed the gray beach and waves, King saw something splash and sputter out of the tide. A massive dark body, a turtle nearly a meter long, had dragged itself onto the crest of the beach. It flashed what looked like long pale wings that glittered with wet and grit and hacked at the sand to turn itself around. The primordial thing shoveled out its pit, deposited its leathery clutch of eggs, buried it, and unceremoniously lugged itself back into the crashing Gulf.
#
Just before noon King directed his son in packing the Econoline, which Jim did silently and willingly—coolers first, then the bags, just so. As Jim sprang to retrieve sacks, the canvas umbrellas, the lounge chairs, King grew sick of his pitying glances and walked painfully from the open carport under the house through the deck stilts to the beach. He rubbed his bruised kidneys with his palms, arms swept behind him. Pity! The little shit brought him to it last night, upsetting everyone. Jim had got his confessions all around—was he satisfied?
The beach was steadily filling with fresh vacationers. A little leisurely to be leaving this late for Dayton, if they were going to make it in one shot. But he was wounded, he'd forgive himself some time, maybe stop at a hotel if it got too tough on the road tonight. He'd let Viv sleep off last night—avoid her driving—and Jim would have to kiss more ass than loading the van without being asked if he wanted to drive.
A pack of children charged up his section of beach, chasing after an older boy who towed a wide-winged black plastic kite. Its saw-toothed aft edge flapped loudly, and it reeled with the wind in feints and dives.
“Looks like your baby, Dad.”
King stifled a yip of surprise, tried to keep a disaffected expression. “Yeah, but it sure doesn't fly like her. And it makes way too much noise.”
There hadn't been any irony or anger in Jim's voice. His son still stared at the reeling kite, perhaps with admiration. “You going to see it next week? It's at the air show again.”
King knew the moment one of his bombers entered Dayton airspace. It made his head pulse like weather, but at a fearsome magnitude, to the point of collapsing his skull. “Ah, the air show. We shall see.”
Jim turned and looked at his father squarely. “I'm definitely going this year—I hear it moves like a UFO. And I want to finally see what this killer can do.”
#
Jim was restored to himself, his normal kinetics, as they drove out of the strand with the nearly twelve-hour trip before them. He read through the last few street signs they saw in the town in full dead-pan: “Now leaving Destin, Florida.” And for minutes he talked out the best routes he could devise from the road atlas, none of which were on the Triple-A planner King followed.
“Atlases don't show construction, Jim. Nice try.”
“Thanks for your help, though, Jim,” his mother added, looking at King.
After nearly an hour, Jim sounded off again. “Eglin Air Force Base, two miles. That's like Myrtle Beach. Wonder why the airheads build their bases so close to the good beaches,” he jabbed, “huh, Dad?”
“Is that the peanut gallery back there again?” Because they know a good thing when it's not their money, King snickered silently. “The base in Myrtle Beach is closed down, Jimbo.” His boy's real anarchic streak always thrilled him—free of loyalty or responsibility, and so different from his blind religion. King could imagine what Jim was doing with what old Dad loosed on him last night—Give in on the little rules, and what goes next, Dad? You can tear it all the way down to not believing in God from there. And then throw it all out.
But King remembered the glimmer from the beach earlier. “Did you see the sea turtle come out onto the beach this morning, Jim? Dropping eggs, I guess.” Jim had taught natural history classes as a summer job, always knowing the names of birds by their calls or trees by leaf-shapes. It was his first summer away from it; he'd said he needed to clear his head, live off an allowance for the summer.
“Seventy percent of all turtles in the world have some kind of VD,” Jim said. “Probably because those sex-starved males just jump the first lady turtle they see.”
“Wow. That's cute, Jimbo.”
“I know all about nature, Colonel.”
King locked eyes with him in the rearview mirror until Jim looked away. “A whip, Viv. Our man here's a real whip.” An air concussion caught the boxy van as King passed a truck, and he swerved violently to correct.
Jim clawed at the base of his bench seat to keep balance. “God, man! Why didn't we just fly down here?”
#
They’d found a church off the highway at Lexington. The three raised themselves from the wooden kneeler in relative unison with the others, but Jim wouldn’t say the Apostle’s Creed for the first time King could remember, wouldn’t even mumble or pretend. Still mad a day and 650 miles later. The boy wouldn’t take his hand at the Our Father, either, as he had at this moment of Mass since he was a child. King took his hand and squeezed, and Viv did too on Jim’s other side, but the boy refused to respond. He may have said And lead us not into temptation, but that was all.
#
Retired Air Force Colonel King Kaber returned to Wright-Patterson the following Monday. The guards gracefully waved him in; he greeted everyone on his floor—beamed with the continued attention from these men who loved his stories and freewheeling way, who still called him Boss—met with his nervous successor, soothed the man with his familiar laugh, and signed a contract for testing new composites, as he'd planned months ago when he was offered early retirement. It was no decision, really; Jim had school, scholarships or not, and Viv's teaching at Dayton Catholic and his retirement weren't going to cut it. Easy as anything. This new group chief, one of his old civilian guys, said he was glad he'd stayed on, needed someone with King's expertise. King told him his tie suited him well.
His empty new cubicle was rigged in the computer room, which had a constant fifty-five-degree gale piped in by a unit he had ordered just last year. Now he shivered almost constantly in the room; maybe he'd get some nerve disease. The computer system he'd bought the cooling unit for wasn't even worth the price of the blower anymore—it was now meandering, inefficient, obsolete. Each day that week was pitiful. He filled out job requests, played solitaire on his terminal. Most often he hid behind his portable walls to avoid the young gunners who'd come into the room to pull their test results from the community printer; they used lasers and computer modeling to perfect their structure designs before sending anything to an oven or a lab.
During that week King ate lunch down the road at Huffman Prairie so he could watch the planes come in for the air show—first time he could remember doing it. His baby would come in last, Friday afternoon, after the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds. He didn't bother coming to the base that day—all the engineers were out at the airstrips anyway, admiring the stealth fighter or the F-15s, gems of the Gulf War, tested in battle. He came out to the spot he favored—just under the high ridge where the Wright brothers had launched their first kites and gliders, where they'd learned to fly, became the first fliers before becoming the first pilots.
He didn't think at all about his son that Friday; instead, his baby. When the first one died, the only one to die, in 1988—the two pilots, too—its entire body matrix came apart. His matrix, his invention. The cruising plane had slammed headlong into a wall of Canada geese just taking off. It was flying in stealth, silently skimming a rocky corridor at eight hundred miles an hour, and when it came upon the twenty birds, they punctured the cockpit windows, and crunched swaths of the fuselage and wings, and disintegrated the composite turbofans in the engines. It went down at the foot of a forest in New Mexico, and the people who heard or saw it hit said what he had feared—the entire plane had shattered. There was a thunderous ripping sound—like the rending of the Temple cloth at the moment of Christ's death in the old gospel stories, King imagined, but with snapping and something like breaking glass. Nothing was salvageable. Despite their strength and agility, and the fact that two of them could, in their first real test, in some future war, replace 72 accomplices—support and attack craft—when fully laden, and that they were the first truly untraceable, silent nuclear warhead delivery system—despite all this, his baby bombers were fragile. And soon someone would fix the problem, and the world would move on to new babies.
He thought this while taking in the paradox of middle July in this park—the Huffman cottonwoods in full production of seed, their wisps sinking in the sunlight, collecting in cracks of pavement, along the gutter, and between the grass blades as dry, airy summer snow. The time that the trees kept in this way was loose and grand, and it almost made him forget the fighters and cargo planes and older bombers streaking overhead toward the Wrights' ridge and the base. But in the afternoon he recognized the muffled buzz of his bomber's engines, and knew he didn't want to see it. He snapped himself up with a twinge, loped to his car, and drove home, eyes set on the road. That was enough for today. He felt old, his back hurt.
#
Jim left early for the air show with a new girl, someone from his and King's alma mater, John Carroll High. She was dark-haired, well-scrubbed, and probably named Chastity. Jim smirked as he left the house behind the girl, saying, “See y'all there, right?” in his best Florida cousins lilt. Maybe Jim thought old Dad wouldn't go, since he'd seen it so many times in tests. Clinton was supposed to be there, too, and many of the retireds King knew were staying away to protest his most recent debasements, semen stains and late-night phone sex and perjury. But Jim was going.
“My God, King,” Viv laughed. “Guess you'd better.”
He and Viv got there around the time the bomber was slated, walked onto the main field arm in arm, strong, together. Jim and his girlfriend were probably up at the front line, so King and Viv worked their way in that direction, away from the easterly blast of the afternoon sun. They scanned for the plane as they walked, and it was flying at a higher altitude than he expected when it did come into view. Kitty Hawk was traveling through angular phases, a celestial body in the physics of another universe—a sliver, a wedge, and then a flat black diamond against the white cirrus and crossed vapor trails. The craft rapidly descended toward them now, mighty and unquestionable, able to incinerate, he knew, anything as small as him, precisely, cheaply and easily. It would make a video of the kill as proof to be shown off at press conferences.
Viv sighted Jim and pulled King along—he was transfixed by the B-2. The plane pinwheeled with a surprise bit of acrobatics into a wide bank, centering on their field. But Viv yanked again at King, pushed him ahead of her. He spotted Jim by his white blonde burr cut, tiptoed between blankets and then the droves of kids crowding up to the temporary gate. Jim hadn't noticed him yet; he and the lovely girl were holding hands, swinging them, and as King looked over his son's shoulder he realized that the pilots were setting up to buzz the crowd.
It came down very low over the main runway, seventy feet wide and half as long, almost organic, with dun skin that had only a vague sheen, scaled and smooth, like a reptile's. Its wings looked stretched and supple, poised for a beat, and its horizontal tailflap twitched. It was a careening abomination, its intakes jaws and its nose a hooked beak, and as it bore down on them, it roared—invincible. The beast's belly was over them at once, should have crushed them with the rumble of stampeding armies and collapsing stars, but the engines only sounded a low warbling hum, and no one shouted or made any move—it had sucked up all of their senses for that second of dark, and King grabbed his son, held tight, clenched too long after its shadow passed over.
“Dad—” Jim tugged at his father's arms and said again, “Dad.”
Brian Nealon received the 1999 Sinclair Award for Fiction Writing for "The Next Steel" from Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in Literature/Creative Writing. He taught high school English in Dayton, Ohio for nearly a decade, and recently completed an enjoyable two-year teaching stint in a small town of four million in eastern China. Brian now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he writes, catches up on junk food he's missed, and plots his next move.