I had joined the Air Force for many reasons. Without the money to finish my degree, I needed a trade, and they’d promised to teach me electronics, the one promise they’d actually kept. Mostly, though, I’d wanted have some adventures while I was still young, to spread my wings a little, and see a bit of the world.
Instead, they’d stuffed me under a mountain for the duration.
More than anything else, I’d wanted to do something . . . significant. To do something important for my country, and maybe even for the world.
But there’s nothing glorious about fixing machinery, especially when the stuff almost never broke down. Ninety percent of my actual work time had been spent cleaning floors, dusting equipment, and trying to look busy. Most of the rest of it was spent filling out paperwork, an occupation that took six times longer that the actual repair work did.
Mostly, I just sat there at a grey metal desk. The lighting was cool, efficient fluorescent. The temperature was kept at a constant 70.4 degrees fahrenheit. The relative humidity was at 48.6 percent The floors and ceilings were white. The walls were beige. The equipment was a uniform dove grey, with small, unblinking colored lights.
The silence was deafening.
You sat there for eight hours every day, forbidden to read anything but technical manuals, staring at the walls and waiting for someone up in the cab to tell the heavy bombers and all the land-based missiles to go and blow up the world.
Off duty, you drank a lot, but it didn’t help all that much.
My outfit had a suicide rate that was higher than the casualty rate of most combat outfits in time of war. And it wasn’t just the young kids who “took the pipe.” Old, balding sergeants would somehow get sort of listless, and then you’d hear, unofficially, that they’d put a bullet behind their ear. You never heard a word officially, of course, not even a notification of the funeral service. It didn’t fit the public image the Air Force wanted everybody to believe in.
Soon, you learned to hate the bastards.
The hate I’d felt for years for the organization that had kept me in useless bondage had become a bigger part of my life than I had imagined, and now that those bonds were finally parted, I was left with a vast hollowness inside of me.
I’d sold off almost everything I owned except my camping gear. Even my uniforms were gone, which wasn’t precisely legal since I was still supposed to be a member of the inactive reserves. But I didn’t have any family or anyplace to send that junk for storage, so if I couldn’t fit it into my saddlebags, I couldn’t see keeping it.
I really didn’t know what I wanted, but I had a strong handle on some negatives. Like I never wanted to see another officer again in my life. Mostly, I needed to get way far away from petty rules and silly regulations and people who outranked me, which in the Air Force was just about everybody.
I wasn’t the kind who got promoted.
My BMW sort of automatically took me to the Mass Pike and just as naturally pointed west, which was fine. There isn’t much east of Massachusetts that you can get to on a bike.
Well. My motorcycle was paid for. My savings and accumulated leave added up to just under $2,000.00. It was springtime and figured I could live for six months without the need to reconnect myself to society. Then, maybe I’d go back and finish my degree. Or maybe not.
The Mass Pike dumped me onto the New York Thruway and a green-and-white sign read “Rochester—231 Miles.”
That got me thinking about Jim Hasenpfeffer, since he was working on his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and this naturally got me thinking about Ian McTavish as well.
CHAPTER TWO
An Old Friend
Actually, we never did have much in common.
Take religion.
Now, I was a defrocked altar boy whose convictions varied between my normal atheism to militant Agnosticism when I’m argued into a corner. Militant agnostics say that they don’t know anything about God, and you don’t either, dammit!
Ian was sort of conventional about religion. He always went to church on Sunday, but he never much talked about it. I think he was about the only Christian I’d ever met who was capable of being polite about religion. Or at least he was always annoyingly polite with me.
And nobody ever had the slightest idea of what—if anything—Hasenpfeffer believed in. He had this talent for sidestepping whatever he felt wouldn’t be personally rewarding.
Or take women.
I always tried like hell, but never got anywhere with them. Or even when I did score, they usually didn’t want to see me again the next day.
I’m pretty sure that Ian knew that women were necessary for the continuation of the species, but he acted as though they were something that a rational man shouldn’t waste his time on.
Like, once I brought these two girls home because I didn’t know what else to do with them. They’d been hitchhiking in Detroit, a profoundly unsafe procedure. They were very young, very pretty, and very stoned on God knew what. Ian was sitting in an easy chair, reading my Scientific American, when one of them latched onto his leg. She was kneeling at his feet, babbling something about running barefoot through the forest together, and sliding down rainbows.
Ian looked down from his article, said “Rainbows lack structural integrity,” and went back to reading. He wasn’t queer. Just sort of indifferent.
Hasenpfeffer always seemed to have a woman within arm’s reach. Even baching it with us, I don’t think he ever slept alone. They seemed to follow him like flies going after shit.
Or, take politics.
Back then, I was an awfully liberal Libertarian and Ian was a conservative Republican. I’m not sure, but I think Hasenpfeffer was pretty left wing.
Or take partying. I like to drink and sing a lot. Ian was an absolute teetotaler about all drugs beyond coffee. And Hasenpfeffer did moderate amounts of everything.
Or take sports. Or hobbies. Or damn nearly anything.
Hell, I’m six foot six and Ian was five one with his elevator shoes on.
Yet when we met in the freshman registration line at U of M, we hit it off pretty quick. Hasenpfeffer had found this huge three-bedroom apartment and was looking for two people to share expenses.
We moved in that day. Oh, it was a fourth-floor walkup and the six-foot ceilings were—for me—an absolute pain, but it was cheap and that was the deciding factor. None of us had a family to fall back on for money.
I guess we did have something in common. We were all orphans.
Ian pulled a straight four point and had no difficulty in keeping his church scholarship. Hasenpfeffer had this talent for pulling dollars out of all sorts of organizations. But I was only an average student and I wasn’t much good at filling out forms and begging.
I’d used up a small inheritance by the end of my junior year, and joining the Air Farce seemed like a better shot than getting drafted into the Army. They put me through a year of electronics school and then had me spend three years pretending to fix computers under this mountain in Massachusetts. They’d never even let me ride on a military airplane. . . .
Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made a right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.
The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for eight weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large groups of people working earnestly together to do something that stupid.
The arithmetic average of the number of streets coming into an intersection is probably somewhere around four, but the modal number is three, with the next most likely number being five and after that seven. The whole town is like a quilt made by crazy old ladies out of random polygons. There’s even one frightening crossroads called ‘Twelve Points.” No shit.
Right downtown, doubtless by accident, there are these two streets that cross at almost right angles, although one of them changes its name in the process. This oddity so astounded the locals that they built this big office structure there and called it “The Four Corners Building.”
I passed it seven times trying to find Hasenpfeffer’s address, and it was pretty late when I finally got there.
I recognized it right off when I saw it. It was exactly the sort of place he had to live in. It was an ancient clapboard mansion that had long ago been converted into housing for the perpetually poor class, students. It was painted barn red and had a yellow external staircase with fully eleven odd-angle turns in it that led up to the sixth-floor attic. I didn’t have to read the mailboxes to know that Hasenpfeffer had to live on top. He was home, and—A Wonderment!—was actually alone, bereft of all female accompaniment.