Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 2

  Nine years later I was standing on a soccer field, waiting for starting whistle, facing off against the team from the local Catholic High School.

  I’d come straight from a fight with my girl friend, something stupid had got me to accuse her of cheating on me. She’d denied it, but earlier that week her best friend had informed me that she had gone straight to one of my best friends after school for three days, a boy who went to this same Catholic School. I felt like I should have known! No one who said they loved someone like she claimed to love me really did. I’d really liked that girl, and here she was, cheating on me with one of my best friends.

  Be strong, I’d told myself. Fight for what is yours.

  The whistle blew, both sides charged. By this time I was pushing six feet and one hundred and eighty pounds, all of it farm muscle. I had this maneuver where I’d plant my foot on the ball a second before someone else would kick it, and they’d trip and fall. They made that maneuver illegal in my honor because you could break someone’s ankle doing that. Their center didn’t break his ankle but he snorted about a yard of sod as I blew past him for the goal, the crowd cheering.

  Give you one guess whom their goalie was.

  I drove down the field, took a check on the hip and forearmed another kid. Our schools were rivals so no one expected a clean game with All State coming up. I remember that kid grinning from the goal. He was short where I was tall, he was classic Italian with black hair and brown eyes and olive skin, I was more Irish fair-skinned and blue-eyed with blonde hair. We were different and we were the same – before he’d gone to Catholic he and I had played this game all year round, to the point where I could think of him being where I needed him, and he’d be there; where I’d sense that he was in a jam and my feet brought me there.

  I think that all of that just made it worse. How could he be seeing my girlfriend? How could she put the two of us in a position like this?

  In a corner, beneath the bleachers, a dark figure in an overcoat was watching the game. He stood out the way that someone who is trying too hard to blend in stands out. I caught him for a second out of the corner of my eye. Same overcoat, same wide-brimmed hat, same dark skin. He had some kind of long nose and his eyes seemed almost yellow to me, but I’m sure that’s just a trick of the light, or having sweat in my own eyes, or something. I looked at him, then I looked back at the ball, and once again my world turned red.

  I slammed past another defender, then I had a bead on the goalie. He grinned at me – I actually remember him smiling. For some reason I thought of the older Barnesly brother smiling when he had my GI Joe, thinking I could never get it back. That kid actually lost part of his ear that day, and I had nightmares about the fight for a month.

  It’s like something took my brain in its fist. The goalie turned larger than life – a monster in a green soccer uniform. I got within four feet of him at a dead run, right to the edge of the goalie’s box, and I kicked that ball as hard as I could.

  I didn’t try to get it past him, I drove the ball straight at his face. He could have had hands made of steel and he wouldn’t have been able to stop that ball with that much force behind it. It bent back his thumbs and forefingers and caught him square between the eyes. He did a back-flip and the ball actually got stuck in the net behind him. Our side of the field cheered and their side booed. The ref didn’t flag me – in retrospect he should have had me arrested.

  They had to rouse the kid with smelling salts, then he had to leave the game. I heard later that he was seeing double and it wouldn’t stop. I didn’t hear it from him. The Catholic school lost that game and so did I from another perspective, though I didn’t know it at the time. My friend never spoke to me again and his parents went broke trying to find a way to get his sight fixed. Last I heard he was selling men’s clothes because you can do that with bad eyesight.

  The guy in the trench coat stayed and watched the whole game. He never said a word to me. I went looking for him afterward and he was gone. No one remembered seeing him, either, which is strange because this was a high school game.

  As for my girlfriend – she became my former friend’s girlfriend. The girl who’d told me about her became mine. Turns out that she’d made the whole thing up. The two of them were seeing each other, but it was totally innocent. When I found that out, I spent a year cheating on her and getting her to take me back, so that I could cheat on her again. It became kind of a joke around the school, culminating in me taking someone else to prom when I graduated.

  It was a pretty crappy thing to do, and I’m ashamed of it, but there’s a part of me that keeps telling me she had it coming.

  In another reality, a dark being sat his throne atop a cold mountain, the wind whistling past him from nowhere to nowhere else.

  Before him, the god Anubis imagined an artifact that would change another world.

  Together they watched their blond protégé fail through the next part of his life. They watched him go to college on a soccer scholarship, and sent him a woman who would break his heart.

  When he loved the woman they took her away. When he rose up from the heartbreak, they crushed his academic dreams.

  When he didn’t become despondent over failing at college, they sent him a woman to love him with all of her heart, and they watched as he destroyed her.

  “He is heartless and cruel,” War commented.

  “As you required,” Anubis countered.

  “And you have done everything you could to beat him down, to make him fail?”

  “You know the truth of this,” Anubis informed him. “Other boys cannot beat him. Women who love him fill his heart with venom. Failure forced on him only encourages him to be more ruthless.”

  War nodded, much as he did not have a body. Unlike Anubis, who had form, War existed as a concept in reality, not a man or beast. His power was the force of his being.

  “I think one more test for this one,” War hissed, “to prove that he is, indeed, your invincible warrior. Then you must turn him to your cause.”

  Anubis nodded his lupine head. He knew what must be done.

  I flexed my right arm and, as expected, the bolt broke off in the engine block. God damn it!

  Bobby-the-idiot-boy, my Service Advisor, stood right there, too. I heard him suck air through his teeth. I shook my head and put the 12-mm Crescent wrench back in the toolbox, using my left.

  Naval Nuclear Power had taught me to put my tools back. Being ambidextrous let me use both hands. I was standing under the Chevy on the lift, smelling the good grease smell that comes with an engine.

  “Can you fix it?” Bobby asked.

  No, dumbass, we’ll have to buy this car from the owner now. What Bobby meant was, “Can you fix it in such a way that I can get out of telling the customer that there is a bolt broken off in his car.”

  “It’s in the block. Maybe I can drill it out, but odds are we’ll have to tap a helical. It’s a water pump bolt. If we can’t make it tight the water pump will leak.”

  Too much information for Bobby to process. I looked into his vacant green eyes and re-explained that there was a chance I could get the bolt out, but if not we would have to rethread a bigger hole into the engine’s block. Otherwise the water pump, which needs to make a good seal against the head, would leak. He waddled off to tell the customer what had happened and that we should be able to fix it.

  I shook my head and got an air drill out. A lot of people don’t realize it but a drill with a burring-bit, put in reverse, will often pull a broken bolt far enough out of the engine that you can put a vice-grip to it and get it out the rest of the way without damaging the threads. If that doesn’t work, with a steady hand you can drill a bit into the bolt, heat it and put a wrench to that, and loosen it enough so that you can back-drill the bolt out. With welding equipment available you could also weld a washer to the end of the broken stud and then weld a nut to the washer to achieve the same goal without the risk, but then you have to go get the welding equipment, and tha
t’s a pain in the ass.

  Only a Navy guy used to being a few hundred miles away from the nearest hardware store would think this way. The ship isn’t going to swing into a floating Ace Hardware if you can’t save a part.

  I could have shared all of this with Bobby, but he wouldn’t have understood it. Dealerships don’t like to hire mechanics to be Service Advisors - they tell the customers too much. That problem didn’t weigh too heavily on Bobby.

  “Randy come to the Service Manager’s office,” the loudspeaker announced. I put the drill back and swore under my breath, heading across the long, open garage to Wayne the Service Manager’s corner office. Freaking narc Bobby –he had covered his ass at my expense before. I had only been here six months and this made seven times that he hadn’t understood what he saw and told the Service Manager on me.

  Truth is: I’m a pretty good mechanic. Naval Nuclear Power School and Mechanic’s Apprenticeship School do a lot to teach the skills you need to fix machines. Most dealership mechanics, however, are really just parts-changers. I’m different and Bobby doesn’t like it because I take too long on the cars. They never come back with the same problem, though, so the Manager cut me slack.

  Until now.

  “We have to talk, Randy,” Wayne said as he closed his office door. Bobby watched nervously outside through the huge glass window that Wayne cleaned every day. Bright sunshine shone through it now, hot on my skin and my red polo shirt. I could smell the ammonia cleaner.

  “About a broken bolt?” I asked him. Wayne was a former mechanic himself. He was a smaller, darker version of me, with one of those moustaches that are common among old-style Italians. He had a temper but he usually didn’t flip out over stuff like this. Bolts break, there isn’t a lot you can do but fix them. It’s part of the job. If Bobby were better he could have sold this to the owner.

  “No, not about the bolt,” he said. I looked into his eyes and knew right then where this would go, and that I was fired. He said, “Sit down,” and I sat.

  I sighed. Freaking Navy catching up with me again. Never stops, ever.

  “Randy Morden, 22, former Navy Nuclear Technician, Machinist Mate Second Class, Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist,” he read to me from my personnel file, as if I didn’t already know it. “Dishonorably discharged, U.S. Navy, for assault on an officer.”

  He looked up from the page he held, his brown eyes meeting mine.

  “You didn’t mention your Navy career, Randy,” he said.

  “So you ran my social,” I countered.

  Wayne slapped my personnel folder down on his desk. “Hell, yeah, we ran it, we have to run it! You think we don’t run a criminal check on everyone here? You could be a car thief, Randy.”

  “I’m no thief.”

  “No, but you were dishonorably discharged from the Navy last year.”

  “Not for stealing.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Randy – the company has a policy. No dishonorable discharges."

  “That is such bullshit, Wayne. I am one of the best mechanics in here – “

  “No, Randy, you aren’t,” Wayne looked me right in the eye. “You’re slow and you care too much. I kept you because you work a full day and don’t have any come-backs, but you’ll never do better than $2,000 a month in here.”

  “Not now, anyway.”

  “No, not now,” Wayne agreed. “Effective immediately, you are terminated, Randy. You can pick up your paycheck in two weeks – “

  “Two weeks? Payday is Friday, in two days.”

  Wayne shook his head. “Policy – we hold the paycheck against any of your work that comes back – the state says we can hold it for two weeks and we do.”

  I stood. I wanted to hit him so bad I could taste it, but it wasn’t his fault. Besides, my temper is what put me in this mess.

  I am six foot, two inches tall, weigh two hundred forty pounds and can bench my weight. I have blond hair past my ears and blue eyes. In the Navy they called me “The Viking.” I have a bad temper, and everyone who knows me knows that. I am not proud of it but I’m not afraid of it, either. A man has to stand up for himself in this world.

  So when a Nuclear-unqualified ensign tried to operate a set of valves on my watch, I yelled at him. I shouldn’t have done that, but if he had operated the valves, he would have released radioactive liquid waste into San Diego harbor. He didn’t know that, but he did know better than to operate a valve on someone else’s watch.

  But I yelled at him, and ensigns are very self-conscious, especially when they are really new. He wanted to set a precedent, so he ignored me, and I smacked his hand away from the valve.

  No one would have said a damn thing about that. Part of my job is to guard my watch – in fact, he got a record entry into his fitness evaluation for trying to operate the valves. However, he didn’t like having his hand smacked, so he shoved me.

  I flattened him. With an eighty-pound weight advantage one punch broke his jaw. Coincidentally he cracked his skull and got a concussion when his head hit the metal decking. He had to wear a head brace for two months, I’m told.

  I wasn’t around to see it – I went to court martial. There is a thing called “non-judicial punishment,” or “Captain’s Mast,” where the Captain can just hand out punishment. He would have taken some of my pay for a couple months and dropped me down a pay grade that I could have gotten back in a year. But all I could hear in my mind was “stand up and fight for yourself,” so I insisted on court martial.

  In court martial the ensign swore that he never touched me. The idea that he would straight-out lie had never crossed my mind. He said that he had operated the valve and I hit him. They found me guilty and dishonorably discharged me from the Navy for assault on an officer. Busted to E-1 so that I could only get a couple bucks a week from unemployment.

  And the day I left the ship, with my chief and my division officer walking me off, I saw the Captain, and I looked him right in the eye and said, “You know I didn’t hit him like he said. You know that I don’t deserve what I got.”

  And he looked me right back in the eye, and he said, “Yes, I do – and I know for a fact that candy-ass lied. But you had to take on the whole Navy over it, and guess what? The whole Navy won. Big surprise, Morden – now go live the rest of the life you just screwed up.”

  I didn’t hit the Captain because he was right and I was wrong. I didn’t hit Wayne for the same reason. If it were up to him, he would have given me cash on the spot. But he had a job to do, and now I didn’t.

  I wouldn’t let that sort of thing beat me. If I knew nothing else, I knew that. There is always something bad out there about to happen. A man can run and hide or he can face it with only himself to blame.

  I went behind the garage and got my beat-to-hell pickup truck. Only my working here had kept it alive. It occurred to me that I had almost put a new manifold gasket on it during lunch. Good thing I didn’t, I would be pushing it home now. I brought the truck to my workspace and started loading my tools into the bed.

  Brad, the shop senior mechanic, walked over, wiping his hands with a pink rag. He was about 32, tall and angular with a short beard and curly, red hair – kind of like a rusty, wire brush with glasses. He had tried to get close to me here, inviting me out after work for a beer or to his house for a barbecue. I think I had been waiting for this day and I had kept him at arm’s length.

  “He canned ya, huh?”

  I just kept loading my tools. Someone already had a drill to that bolt in the engine block. It wasn’t my job anymore so I didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah,” I said when he didn’t walk away.

  “Not over that?” he asked, pointing out the engine with his jaw.

  “Nah,” I said. “Past history catching up with me.”

  “Oh? You get busted or something?”

  “Dishonorable discharge.”

  “I didn’t know you were in. What branch?”

  “Fucking Navy.”

  “Ah – where
are you going to go now?”

  “Dunno – they won’t pay me.”

  “Not for two weeks – you won’t get all of it, either.”

  I looked at him. “No?”

  “Nah. They will pay him out of your pay to tap that helical, plus anything else you didn’t finish – if you’re lucky you’ll get half.”

  “Guess I’ll be sleeping in this truck, then, because I won’t make rent.”

  “Got family you can go to?”

  “Nah.”

  “Nah, you don’t have family, or nah, you won’t go.”

  I looked at him again. “You writing a book? Leave that chapter out, huh?”

  Brad narrowed his eyes. “Look, you know they’ll call every garage in town about you, right?”

  I knew they did that, but I didn’t say anything. The garages here were pretty tight, especially the dealerships. I might be able to get a job at an off-road place, but they don’t have a lot of work and they don’t really pay much.

  “So, if you want to sell me those tools, I’ll buy them from you. You have a lot of stuff that I broke and never replaced.”

  I looked at my toolbox. When I got out and found out that no one decent would hire a DHD, I worked construction. It paid pretty well in season, all under the table, and I made enough to buy these tools at a pawnshop. When it got too cold to do construction I came here. I would be going back to construction now. They were hiring. I’m big, and they like big guys.

  I didn’t want to do construction, I wanted to fix things. I wanted to create with my hands and my mind. I wanted to use tools.

  I wanted to sleep indoors too.

  “How much?”

  “Four hundred.”

  “Cost me six.”

  “Worth two.”

  I sighed. “Probably. Cash?”

  Brad had the money on him – which meant that Wayne had told Brad before me. It didn’t surprise me; he likely had to make sure I didn’t bust up the place. Mechanics did that, sometimes. It also didn’t surprise me that they hadn’t let me near the cars I had started, either. Too good a chance I would break them all for spite.