The answer is yes or no when somebody gets to the place you’re standing guard. It happens fast, all the switching, but that’s the base, and everything else links to that.” “No shit? Sorry, I mean–” “No shit,” she said.
“Damn. How come nobody ever put it that way before?” “Because you’ve run into crummy teachers before. A good teacher uses terms a student can relate to, and she takes the time to learn what those terms are. When I was in college, I took a psych course. There was a story they told, about biased IQ tests for children. You know, you show a picture of a cup, and you show a saucer, a table, and a car, then you ask, what does the cup go with?” “Yeah?” “So in middle- and upper-class America, the kids with working brains all pick the saucer, because cups and saucers go together, right?” “Right.” “But in the poor parts of town, cups might go with tables, because they don’t have saucers. And among kids from homeless families, cup might go with car, because that’s where the family lives.” “Economic bias,” Fernandez said.
She nodded. He wasn’t a dummy, no matter what he said.
“Exactly. Same thing holds true for racial or religious or other kinds of cultural factors. So then everybody thinks these kids are stupid, and so they get a different level of teaching, when the real problem is on the other end, in the minds of the educators. Because they didn’t take into account the students’ knowledge as well as their own.” “I get it.” “There’s nothing wrong with your mind. All you need is a teacher who can put things in terms you already know how to relate to. You’re a soldier, find a soldier who knows computers, you can learn from him.” “Or her,” Fernandez said.
“Or her.” She looked at him.
“Are you asking me to teach you?” “I would be ever so grateful if you would,” he said.
Kept a straight face while saying it too.
She smiled.
“This isn’t some ploy to get next to me because you think I’m beautiful, is it, Fernandez?” “No, ma’am. You have knowledge I don’t have, and I’d like very much to learn it. This is part of my job and I’m not good at it. That bothers me. I don’t need to be Einstein, but I do want to understand as much of it as I need to understand.
I mean, yeah, you are beautiful, but what’s more important here is that you’re smart.” She blinked and looked at Fernandez in a new light. My God, if he was telling the truth, he admired her for her mind.
“We might be able to work some thing out. Come see me when the holidays are over.” “Yes, ma’am.” “And bag that. Call me Joanna.” “I’ll answer to just about anything, but my friends call me Sarge or Julio.” “Julio it is.” She grinned again. Ooh, wait until Maudie hears about this!
hapter 11 Thursday, December 23rd, 4:10 p.m. In the air over southern Ohio “Would you care for some thing to drink, sir?” Alex Michaels looked up from the in-flight magazine, from an article on the construction of the world’s tallest building, the new twin towers in Sri Lanka. The new structure would be, when finished, seventy feet taller than the second tallest building–which was also in Sri Lanka.
“Coke?” he said.
“Yes, sir.” The flight attendant handed him a plastic cup of ice and one of the new biodegradable plastic cans of Coke.
The can would keep for ten years, as long as it wasn’t opened, but once fresh air hit the inside, the plastic would start to degrade. In nine months, it would be a powdery, nontoxic residue that would completely dissolve under the first rain that hit it. Throw the can on the ground, and in a year it would be gone.
The flight attendant moved to the next row of seats. Michaels poured the soft drink into his cup, then sat and watched it fizz and foam. He was in business class, the equipment was one of the big Boeing 777’s, and he sat next to the wing door on the starboard side. He liked to get that seat when he could, next to the exit door. It always seemed that there was a little more room in the exit row, although that might have been his imagination. The main thing was, if there was trouble on the plane, he wanted to be in a position to do some thing.
He’d started asking for the exit row after a flight to Los Angeles when he’d seen an elderly man who might have weighed a hundred pounds sitting next to an emergency door.
Yeah, the guy might get a burst of adrenaline under stress, so he could pop that door right open if the wheels collapsed on landing or some such, but Michaels didn’t want to risk his life and the lives of the other passengers on that. Maybe the old guy would get a burst blood vessel instead. Then again, maybe the old guy was like Toni’s silat teacher, and there were hidden strengths there. Michaels knew he shouldn’t be so judgmental.
But still, better a fairly strong forty-year-old GS employee in front of that door than a seventy-year-old lightweight.
Better odds for all concerned.
Of course, he’d rather fly first class too. A couple of times, he had gotten agency upgrades on official business, and it was more comfortable, but he could never justify the expense when it came to personal flights. The way he figured it, the back of the plane got there at the same time as the front did, all things going as planned, and to cough up several hundred dollars extra for cloth napkins and complimentary champagne seemed excessive.
There was enough time for an in-flight movie before they got to Denver, where Michaels had to switch planes for Boise.
The airlines had gotten a lot better about not losing luggage, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
He had his single soft-side roller tucked into the overhead compartment, along with Susie’s main Christmas gift, a bandstvox synthesizer.
Apparently she had discovered a kind of music called tech nome to-funk, which was all the rage among the kids.
Michaels tastes ran to jazz fusion, classic rock, 40’s big band, or even longhaired classical. He hadn’t followed new-wave pop stuff for years.
He knew he was getting old when he read the news, saw the Billboard Top Ten list, and realized he didn’t recognize the names of any of the songs, or the artists who performed them.
Who could take seriously a song called “Mama Mustache Mama Sister,” by somebody who called himself “HeeBeeJeeBeeDeeBeeDoo?” Or “Bunk Bunk!” by “DogDurt”?
With the synthesizer, Susie could supposedly program herself into any group, then hear and see herself performing on stage with them. It seemed like an advanced toy for somebody her age, but it was what she wanted.
It had been a bitch to find one too. Apparently every other kid in the country had to have one of the things.
Fortunately, Toni had found one, so he could be a hero to his daughter.
Toni did that a lot, made him look good.
He looked at the screen built into the back of the seat in front of him, a screen that could be angled for viewing so that even if the person sitting in that row decided to lean back all the way, you could still see it. No. He didn’t feel like watching a movie, playing video VR, or monitoring the progress of his flight via a little animation of a jet flying along over a map.
It was nice just to sit with a magazine in his lap and gaze out at the cold ground below. Fortunately, the weather was clear, and the Ohio landscape below, much of it covered with snow, sparkled white in the setting sun.
It was going to be midnight. East Coast time, when he landed in Boise, assuming he made his connection and the flight went as scheduled. Ten p.m. in that part of Idaho. He had a rental car reserved at the airport, and a room booked at the Holiday Inn, not far from the house where his daughter and ex-wife lived. Where they had once all lived together.
There was a spare bedroom in the big old clunky two-story house, two if you counted the sewing room, but Megan hadn’t offered and he hadn’t asked. The armistice between Alex and his ex was uneasy. She was a sniper, quick to shoot and too accurate for his comfort. Better to have a safe house where he could hole up and gather his forces for the battle. There was a lot to be said for a nice quiet Holiday Inn, with room service and a double lock on the door.
He wondered how many other people thought about holidays in such a fashion? As an ugly guerrilla war to be waged quick and dirty and retreated from as soon as possible? Why did unhappy families gather, if it made them so miserable? A lot of people he knew would just as soon cancel the big holidays and keep their families at a safe distance…. In his case, however, the answer was easy: Susie.