And I took another step forward. The customer in front of the customer in front of me-a busy-looking woman of 35, almost certainly a real estate professional-suddenly launched a complicated series of orders at Eva-Lynne, no doubt nosh for some morning meeting. I was trapped.
“I’m listening,” I said to Tominbang. If you saw me, medium height, overweight, glasses, you would not be intimidated. But I had had a good couple of months lifting various items for Mr. Warren Skalko of Lancaster, Las Vegas, and other municipalities, so I felt smug. I could not imagine why this foreign man would be talking to me; more precisely, I suspected that any association between us was not going to make me rich. (This turned out to be painfully true.)
“Mr. Warren Skalko recommends you to me,” Tominbang said.
I lost probably a third of my attitude at the mention of my mentor. “I’m always happy to meet a friend of Mr. Skalko’s,” I said, summoning as much enthusiasm as I could. Just to be safe. “Where do you know him from?” Mr. Skalko had several sorts of associates, some from his noted (and legitimate) charity work, others from his country club, and a few from being what that same popular press called “the crime lord of the southwest.”
“We were introduced on the first tee at Riviera,” Tominbang said, naming Mr. Skalko’s Los Angeles country club, and nicely slipping into the second category of Skalko associates. “He mentioned your specific abilities as a mass transporter-”
He was interrupted by a commotion not five feet away. Real Estate Woman was giving my beloved Eva-Lynne a hard time. “What the hell do you expect me to do? Carry it all by myself?”
The customer in front of me, sensing a longer-than-usual wait for bad coffee, shook his head and departed. At that moment I caught Eva-Lynne’s eye-and was struck by something I’d never seen there before.
Panic.
She was trying to maneuver a heavy, unbalanced load of hot coffees and pastry-enough food for a group of a dozen longshoreman, I judged-while behind her a coffee machine somehow managed to boil over and one of the bakers chattered in her ear. Big bad Fran was busy elsewhere. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, “Just give me a-”
“Let me help,” I said, surprising myself as I edged past the annoying Real Estate Woman and placed a hand on Eva-Lynne’s shoulder. This is how my lifting works: physical touch, with mass-to-be-moved proportional to the strength of my grip. The trigger is emotion, and anger or even general annoyance (my usual state), is the most reliable.
You can bet I was gentle. I didn’t want hot coffee spewing all over us. Sure enough, the load lightened just enough so that Eva-Lynne didn’t have to worry about it. One lovely eyebrow arched in surprise. “Out to your car?” I said to the Annoying Real Estate Woman.
“No, why don’t you just carry it over to Joshua Street for me.” Ordinarily I have little patience for sarcasm, but being in actual physical contact with Eva-Lynne had a mellowing effect.
“Let me help,” I whispered to Eva-Lynne, since I had to remain in physical contact to keep lifting. And we glided outside into the gravel parking like a Kern County version of Fred and Ginger.
“Thank you,” Eva-Lynne told me, once the order was safely deposited on the front seat of a new 1969 Ford LTD, and Annoying Real Estate Woman had departed. “I really appreciate it.” Her nose sort of crinkled, and she smiled. “Your name is Cash, isn’t it?”
At last! I’d made it across the barrier, from vaguely familiar five-day-a-week morning customer to friend-with-a-name! Who knew where this could lead! I was just about to extend my hand when Fran appeared in the doorway. “Eva-Lynne, we have customers!”
“Back to the grind,” she said, heading back inside. I followed.
In those brief-but-glorious moments of personal contact, I had forgotten about Tominbang. “You are a gentleman, Mr. Mitchell.”
“Not really,” I said, and I wasn’t just being modest. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Ah, my project,” he said, lighting up like a Mojave dawn. “I am thinking of making a flight to the Moon.”
Nothing less could have torn me away from Eva-Lynne. (And even then, it was close.)
Mr. Tominbang’s late model El Dorado was parked outside, right next to my ’66 Mustang (the fruit of my first lifting jobs for Mr. Skalko, a shipment of color televisions that somehow fell off their truck). There was some discussion as to whether I would ride with Tominbang (“Where are we going, exactly?”) or he with me, until we compromised on having me follow him. That was a relief: if I’d left the Mustang for, say, two hours, the next place I would have seen it would have been as pieces in one of the Mr. Skalko’s other subsidiaries, the Palmdale chop shop.
Tominbang headed north, then west on Highway 58, toward the nether reaches of greater Mojave. This was strange territory for me: I live south of Palmdale, which is itself south of Mojave, in my little rat shack on the slope above Pearblossom Highway. I only found myself frequenting Haugen’s Bakery on Highway 14 thanks to visits to one of Mr. Skalko’s hideouts-excuse me, residences.
No sooner had we cleared the collection of shacks, trailers and used auto parts lots that is Mojave than I developed second thoughts. Maybe it was the wind, which was blowing hard enough to nudge the Mustang off the centerline. (Did you know that Tehachapi is the windiest municipality in the continental US?) Maybe it was hearing Scott McKenzie singing, “If You’re Going to Jokertown” for the hundredth time in a week, with its lyrics about taking that longshot when you see it. (A guy like me doesn’t have many opportunities with a girl like Eva-Lynne.)
Maybe it was thinking about what Mr. Tominbang said. A flight to the Moon?
I was seven years old when the wild card turned, so aliens from another planet were as real to me as Rin Tin Tin or my Fourth grade teacher. My older brother, Brad, used to force me to play Buck Rogers with him-the times we weren’t playing Wake Island, that is. We fought marsh creatures on Venus, dust dragons on Mars, and even some weird rock beings on the Moon.
Brad wanted to explore space when he grew up. Who cared that the Takisians had been there first? Human beings would go further, faster! He read all the Tak World novels, which he then passed down to me. (I read them, too, but under duress.)
More practically, he went to college at Purdue, got his engineering degree in ’61, then joined the Air Force. This was not long after the X-11A fiasco; I remember him telling me that the US was edging back into the space business-but in secret. He had heard rumors of new students being recruited out of Purdue.
Brad went off to Vietnam and disappeared over Haiphong in January 1964. He was still listed as Missing in Action. And America ’s “secret” space program? For all I knew that day, we could have had a fleet of flying saucers bombing Haiphong, maybe, or spying on all the freaks in Berkeley.
They sure weren’t flying to the Moon.
We were now so far into the wilderness that my radio reception was fading: there was mention of a riot at some rock concert in California. There were always riots in the news that year. I wouldn’t have bothered to pay attention, but it said the Hell’s Angels were involved. I knew the local Angels: they also did some jobs for Mr. Skalko. When I changed channels, all I got was country and western crap, or preachers, so I switched it off.
Besides, Tominbang’s car was turning onto a dirt road leading to a pair of distant hangars at Tehachapi-Kern Regional Airport. We had passed up a perfectly good asphalt road that led to a perfectly good administration building and tower. I made a note to send Tominbang a bill for any damage to the Mustang’s undercarriage.
The wind was still blowing when we got out. Tominbang’s tie flapped noisily. I wedged dust out of the corner of my eye as my guide fumbled a key out of his pocket and spent an unnecessary amount of time trying to open a padlock.