Pinball Page 2

  They had paid off the house when Steven got his advance upon publication of Montana Moon, so there was no mortgage payment to be concerned about, but there were plenty of other bills to deal with. The utilities could get sky-high during the frosty Montana winters as well as during the hot, arid summers. There was an unpaid hospital bill from when Lynne had had her appendix out the year before — which is what the phone call had been about — and a fairly sizable car payment as well.

  Now, where had he left off? “Back to work, dammit,” he snapped. He cracked a mental whip at himself — I’m a Gemini, I can do that, he thought — and stared at the keyboard.

  As the dramatic theme music of his life began to play, Arthur Ball opened his eyes and groaned. The music was merely his clock radio which was blaring, and it was six a.m. His pathetic little life had begun its next chapter, and

  Staring at the words on the screen, he discovered that he was unimpressed — no, make that extremely unimpressed — with what he had written. If I were writing on paper, he thought, I’d crumple it and take a shot at the trash can-slash-basketball goal. As it was, he held down the backspace key and relegated Arthur Ball to the bit bucket.

  Okay, Steve, what the hell are you going to write about? The melody of “The Book Report” from You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown entered his brain and began dancing around like a group of college drama geeks impersonating a bunch of precocious second graders. “A book report on Peter Rabbit…” He smiled to himself, despite his frustration. He sang out of tune: “How can they expect us to write a novel of any quality in just ninety days? How can they conspire to make life so miserable, and so effectively, in so many ways?” How appropriate was that? Ah, well.

  Now there was a knock at the door. What the hell, he thought. No one ever came to their door. They lived just outside the booming metropolis of Three Forks, Montana, population 1,900. Steven was fond of saying, “We live right in the middle of Fricking, Nowhere. You ever been there? Let me tell ya, it’s nice.” If it’s a Jehovah’s Witness, he thought, I swear to God I’m gonna go find something sharp and pointed.

  But it wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, or a pair of Mormons on bicycles, or even the local Baptists out on visitation. It was the UPS delivery guy. Steven had ordered half a dozen sets of guitar strings the week before from an online supplier. He scribbled his John Hancock for the package and headed back to his office, tempted momentarily to take the time to change the strings on his beat-up Telecaster, but he exercised self-control and sat back down at the computer. Now can I get back to writing? Please?

  There was a box of donuts on the kitchen table. Maybe if he ate one — or a few — it’d give him that little spark he needed to get going. He went into the kitchen and took the whole box back to his desk. There were the little powdered sugar ones and the chocolate ones… Mmm. Good. Sugar rush.

  He sat staring at the screen, mentally juggling plot ideas. Soon he felt his eyelids beginning to droop. Should have had… coffee… with the…

  Chapter 3

  Oh, my God, Steven thought. What was that sound? There was the sound of grinding gears, as if a piece of heavy road equipment was outside — or Mecha-Godzilla. But they lived nowhere near Tokyo, although their two oldest daughters desperately wanted to live there. To Steven, it sounded as if someone were digging up a sewer line. I’ll go peek out the window and see what’s going on, he decided.

  It wasn’t Mecha-Godzilla, but much to Steven’s amazement, it was some kind of huge monster machine. It appeared to be devouring the ground right down to the bedrock and was headed right for the house. He stared in shock. What am I gonna do? I don’t have a car — Lynne had taken it to work — and I can’t possibly run fast enough to escape this thing. It looks as if it’s gonna swallow the entire house, one bite at a time!

  He awoke with a start after having nodded off and realized that the roaring was the sound of the washing machine, out of balance during its spin cycle. He stomped into the laundry room, rearranged the bunched clothes in the washer, and restarted it.

  Fuck it. Now he really did need that cup of coffee. He wandered into the kitchen, hoping that his wife Lynne had left him some java this morning when she left for work, but the carafe was empty. He looked in their sparsely stocked refrigerator, mildly irritated and significantly hungry, and scrounged up the ingredients for a pretty decent little sandwich. Sliced tomatoes, a couple of slices of Cheddar cheese, Miracle Whip and a piece of sad looking lettuce on white bread. He slapped it together and inhaled half of it before he arrived back at the computer. It might not be a breakfast sandwich, but it was still very good. Wow, he thought, I was even hungrier than I realized. Maybe I’ll be able to write now.

  On the way back, he raided the bowl of leftover Halloween candy. Living far out in the boonies as they did, they normally didn’t get very many trick-or-treaters; most years the only ghouls and goblins that came to their door were when Lynne’s cousins brought their preschoolers, dressing them up as ballerinas, pirates, flowers and the like. This year two of the little ones were in matching Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes — they were so cute!

  At any rate, the Denvers’ candy to creature ratio was significantly out of balance, so now, a few days post-Halloween, after his wife and the kids had grazed on leftover candy for several nights, the bowl was full of little packages of malted milk balls, which no one in the house much cared for. However, Steven dug down into the bowl with the practiced eye of a candy miner of many years’ experience and managed to strike paydirt. There were a few miniature Hershey and Krackel bars at the bottom of the bowl, like a vein of gold beneath a hundred feet of rock layers. Ooh, he thought, there’s a dark chocolate one.

  Back to work. He queued up The Ramones on his mp3 player. Hey, ho, let’s go! Hmm. He still heard that strange noise outside. Maybe he hadn’t been dreaming after all, because the washer had already stopped. He switched the music player from the speakers to his earbuds, clipped the player to his waistband — after all, what is life without the proper incidental music? — and strutted outside to see what was up.

  He was shocked to see that the hulking mechanical monster that he had thought merely a dream was apparently quite real.

  “What the hell do you want?” he shouted as he caught sight of the thing. It resembled a twelve foot tall mechanical bird. Steven hesitated at first, then, his courage bolstered by Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy’s three chord punkiness as they segued into Gimme gimme shock treatment, strode to confront it.

  Mecha-House Eater looked down at him with a gleaming red metallic leer, and he read a silent message in its solitary eye: I have come to devour you and everything you own. He was a little taken aback. Well, shit. I was hoping for a polite “Oh, sorry. I must have the wrong address.”

  Instead, Mecha-House Eater — ah, forget that, it was too much of a mouthful; from here on out he’d simply refer to it as BirdBrain — bent its head, its titanium steel beak opening wide like that of a hungry bird of prey. He sidestepped as his mp3 player segued to Jim Morrison singing about breaking on through to the other side.

  BirdBrain paused for a second, cocking its head, and he thought he saw a fleeting expression in its robotic features that seemed to say, “Hey, you have good taste in music, dude.”

  While it pleased him to have his taste appreciated, it didn’t seem to change the fact that BirdBrain obviously intended to have a taste of him. Its huge head was still bending toward him, and now he was running. He headed for the apple trees at the side of the house, their fruity payload mostly lying on the ground, worm-devoured and rotting. He picked up a handful of apples — they were still semi-frozen from the frigid weather they’d had the last few days — and began to lob the rotting red spheres at BirdBrain’s single red Plexiglas eye. They splattered harmlessly against it, but after a few hits, the lens, which was at least a foot wide, began to accumulate a pulpy coating of sticky brownish apple residue.

  By now the music was blasting Powerman 5000 singing about droppin
g the bombshell. Steven noticed that the construction of BirdBrain’s mechanical legs was such that the struts that formed its metallic calves had gaps between two parallel rods, much like the tibia and fibula in a human skeleton. He grabbed up a narrow branch that had fallen from the apple tree and dashed in close to BirdBrain’s feet, hoping that its vision was sufficiently obscured, and deftly slid the tree branch into the opening in its left calf, aiming it across at the corresponding opening on the right. He missed the first time, as BirdBrain was still groping blindly, but the second time he scored, and he ran behind the creature toward the front porch of the house and turned expectantly, waiting to see the results. It didn’t take long.

  The thing finally decided he must not be within biting distance and turned to search elsewhere, trying to turn to look behind itself, but the tree branch running between its ankles tripped it up and it fell to the ground with a crash, landing on its side, unable to get to its mechanical feet. It scrambled around trying to get free, its electronic brain not knowing what to make of this situation.

  The soundtrack continued on to Nazareth singing about how you are now messing with a son of a bitch. Steven muttered to himself, “Indeed, BirdBrain, you have no idea who you’re fucking with here.”

  He clutched another fallen branch, a thicker one this time, about the weight and size of a Louisville Slugger, and proceeded to beat the ever-loving shit out of BirdBrain’s head, starting with its pulp-covered red Plexiglas eye. He didn’t stop until there was a satisfying sizzle and flames began to roll out of its metallic cranium. For good measure he caved in its chest cavity as well and was amply rewarded by seeing all the lights that studded its mechanical body abruptly go dark.

  He stood, his heart pounding, feeling the blood pulsing in his arms and legs. It reminded him of past experiences he’d had in some of the greatest video games he’d played over the last twenty years or so.

  “That’s for interrupting me during the writing process, you tinfoil motherfucker,” he muttered. Then he went back inside and proceeded to type the entire story of the encounter into the computer, just as it happened, unedited and unvarnished.

  He briefly stopped to wonder how he would explain the mechanical carcass that was lying next to the driveway when his wife got home; he decided that he would just tell the truth. “It came out of nowhere, intending to eat the house. The damn thing was interrupting my writing, so I killed it.” That was straightforward and simple enough. Any writer worth the title would have done the same thing; of that he was quite certain. As some obscure Roman writer probably said once upon a time, Operor non rumpo meus stilus, loosely translated as “Don’t fuck with my writing, beeyotch.”

  Chapter 4

  Steven was enjoying the melodic strains of the late LeRoi Moore on sax as the Dave Matthews Band performed their version of All Along the Watchtower when the next obstacle arrived.

  He ran out of ice.

  Oh, my god, he thought. Global warming notwithstanding, this is fucking tragic. He could hardly write without a constant supply of ice to crunch on, preferably with the taste of root beer clinging to it.

  Steven sat, realizing that he had eaten the available ice more quickly than the freezer was capable of making more. He was bleary-eyed, with an expression on his face like that of the lost sinner on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel who just realized that he has been condemned to eternity in hell. Fortunately, this wasn’t eternity, just another hour or so. In fact, he thought, I might be able to go harvest some ice off the tops of the ice trays where it’s already begun to freeze. He sat for a few more minutes, contemplating this possibility, before he realized how ridiculous it was.

  Just then, as the mp3 player moved on to Men At Work singing Who Can It Be Now?, the doorbell rang again. For a moment he sat in amazement at this synchronicity, and then whoever it was rang again, breaking him out of his mental prison. Someone at the door, twice in a single day? This had to be some kind of record for the Denver household.

  Steven opened the door and was surprised to discover that no one was there. He looked down to find that someone had left a basket on the doorstep, with a bundle of blankets wrapped up inside it. Puzzled, he picked up the basket — it was surprisingly heavy — and carried it into the house. Oh, my god, he thought, someone has left us a baby in a basket. But when he unwrapped the blankets, there was no baby, only a twelve pound smoked ham.

  He was puzzled, but also grateful. He couldn’t make a sandwich out of an infant, after all. At least not legally, he laughed to himself.

  Steven was too busy to take time out to eat now, though. He still had at least 3300 words to write to catch up to his quota for the past two days.

  Just then, Lynne arrived home from work, followed shortly afterward by the kids arriving home from school. He loved them all dearly, but at this point they were more distractions from the SERIOUS BUSINESS OF WRITING. He gazed at Lynne. Even as long as they had been married — some eighteen years now — Steven was still filled with joy and a sense of pride every time he thought of the fact that she had chosen to spend her life with him.

  Lynne asked about the mess outside. Steven explained the attack by BirdBrain as best he could, which she, surprisingly, took in stride. Together they instructed the kids to see if they could disassemble the thing and take the pieces out to the trash can, as Steven figured that the titanium steel skeleton would take years to rust away, if it ever did. The kids ran off to indulge their appetite for destruction as Steven looked through the day’s mail. Bills, bills, free sample of doggie treats, alumni magazine, bills. Oh, well. No one had sent them a large check today to change their lives. Perhaps it would come tomorrow.

  He decided to simply tell the story of his day, just as it played out, bizarre as it might sound. Lynne wanted to know who would have left a twelve pound ham on their doorstep. Steven replied that he had no idea, but that it had to be considered impolite to look a gift ham in the mouth, or whatever the correct expression might be.

  Steven listened to the children bickering in the other part of the house; there was their son Samuel, eleven, whom Steven often called his partner in crime. The two males tried in vain to stay afloat in the sea of estrogen produced by Lynne and the three girls.

  He liked to call Samuel “Samwise” after the character in Lord of the Rings because he was always looking at things in the most innovative fashion imaginable. Steven knew that it had to be difficult to be the only boy in the family, separated from the females by gender and from his father by thirty years of experience.

  The three girls didn’t always get along, as nearly a decade separated the youngest and the oldest, and yet they had a tendency to band together when it came to the ongoing campaign of Girls vs. Sam.

  The oldest, Nicolette, was seventeen and the epitome of fashion-obsessed. Next came artist and gamer Dakota, 14, followed by Samuel and then ten-year-old Lianne.

  Steven smiled, thinking that no matter how annoying the children’s disagreements could be, they were only going to be children for a short time, and he needed to enjoy it while he could.

  He decided that he needed to simply get back to work, buckle down and fill those blank pages with something. This brought to mind the strains of what Steven believed was the late George Harrison’s finest song: Something in the way she moves / Affects me like no other lover…

  Why must everything be one long stream of consciousness rant, he smiled to himself, or as Patti Smith wrote, “Why must we pray screaming? Why must not death be redefined?” Why does everything I write remind me of something else?

  He poured his soul into the keyboard, smirking as he thought I hope it’s truly as spillproof as they advertised. It had fallen silent in the other room; had the kids fallen asleep, or clawed each other to pieces? I’ll never know, he decided, as I am condemned to sit at this keyboard for all eternity, or at least until I reach 100,000 words, which at the rate I’m going should take no more than a couple of centuries.

  He took a moment away from the
computer to look outside, anxious to see whether the children were disposing of BirdBrain as per his instructions. He discovered that while they were indeed disassembling it, they were not placing the remains in the trash, but instead were constructing a fort with its titanium limbs. The crushed remains of its massive head formed the roof of their shelter. At least it’s serving a purpose, he thought to himself, in the same way that the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo.

  The sun was beginning to fade now, hiding behind an increasingly grey bank of clouds in the west. As the light dimmed, his resolve began to wane as well. He consulted the word count in his word processing program and discovered that he was less than a quarter of the way to his daily goal. He gritted his teeth and sprinkled adjectives and adverbs liberally, mixing well. Now he was getting there.

  He fired up his mp3 player again and set it on random. Here we are, born to be kings, we’re the princes of the universe, sang Freddy Mercury and his royal band mates.

  He heard a clash of metal from the next room. The kids had come in from outside, and as if on cue, Samwise seemed to have decided that he was one of the Immortals and was slashing the air with the replica sword he’d gotten for his birthday as the girls looked on in a mixture of awe and annoyance. Damn the Highlander and his ilk, anyway. They were a bad influence, albeit quite cool.

  A lamp shattered into a hundred pieces as the blade of his sword sliced into it, a bolt of electricity arcing into the air as the bulb shattered, knocking Samuel on his eleven-year-old butt. A cheer went up — it was pretty spectacular, after all. Sam got up, shaken but OK, and resumed the battle. There can, as they say, be only one.

  Just then, Lynne walked in. She had taken the opportunity to run to the store and pick up a few things. As soon as she made her entrance, the sword was quickly sheathed. “He broke the lamp!” “No, I didn’t, she did!” Yeah, apart from the slight smell of ozone that the electric arc had left behind, it was pretty much business as usual at the Denver household.