Frontiers Unlimited

A story by Keith Croes

The clearing was across Locust Avenue behind the school in a thicket of skinny maples, birches, and elms. No locusts. Jeff had the words to an Edgar Winter song handwritten in blue ink on three-ring notebook paper and four bad photocopies. It was 7:30 on a mild October morning.

"...Wade...Kevin...Barry...and Dwight," he recited as he passed the copies around. People were scattered among the trees, standing, sitting, leaning, in small groups or alone, friends and others who had heard about the gathering or just happened along.

Holding the original up to his face with one hand, Jeff began singing into his fist. The voice put a handsome, grainy edge on perfect pitch. "We all neeeed.. .someone. . .we can buhleed on..." Dwight smacked the omnipresent drumsticks against a log, Kevin ba-dub, dub, dubbed the bass line, and Wade and Barry latched onto the harmony.

"Baby if you want to--" He strutted over the crackly leaves. "--you can buhleed on me..."

Skipping the last verse, he went right to the repeated, fading phrases: "Doin' all right, yeah!" The band followed. Whackity-whack, dub-da-dub-da-dub-dub . "Doin 'all right, yeah!" Dub-da-dub-da-dub-dub. "Doin' all right, yeah!" Whackity-whackity-whackity-whack whack. Applause flittered through the woods.

"Okay. All right." For the first time he was aware of the eyes around him--Barry, Wade, Dwight, and Kevin and eyes among the trees. Letter jackets with the orange W, the white edges of books tucked under arms, against hips, or in small stacks on the ground. Books wrapped in Williamstown Bulldog book covers. Soft talk and laughter. He gave the band a cocky tilt of his head. "Tonight we try it at Dwight's house."

What happened next was a wonder for its calm weirdness. The people around them dispersed in silent unison and Dwight handed him a joint. The crooked sliver dangled unlit from his mouth as he patted the pockets of his denim jacket for matches and suddenly Mr. Crowder, the fat principal, was standing in the clearing with them. His face was clean-shaven and steel-blue smooth in the sunny morning settling through the bare branches overhead. Impeccable in a charcoal suit, he looked like an undertaker.

"What are you doing?"

"Practicing a new song." The joint bobbed in Jeff's mouth. Their eyes locked hard and seamless for a moment.

"Follow me, boys." He turned and started down the path toward the street. They followed and Jeff lost the joint, just flipped it away into the brush as easy as that. And then he heard the voice again: You have to want it more than anything.

"What?"

The others looked at him blankly.

"He sure moves quiet for being so big," Dwight whispered. Tippity-tap on a passing tree trunk.

Mothers snatched their children back off the stone sidewalk and into the dirt street as he walked by, a tall man in an old brown coat too heavy for spring, old but expensive--a coat that would cost them a year's wages, two year's wages. An important man. Long strides, white cotton pantaloons tucked into high black boots. Curly black hair thick as wires tied back in a leather thong. A dark face stormy behind a coarse mustache and eyepatch. He turned down a side street, pausing to grab the horn of a ram and guide the animal out of his way.

His good eye caught the sign on the storefront above the open door and he walked in on hollow footfalls. At that instant he knew with the instinct of one who has spent most of his life alone that the store was empty. He turned to leave but heard a rustling behind a beaded curtain. "Hello?" He tugged the coat open wide at the shoulders, exposing the ruffled front of his blouse and the upper quarter of a hirsute chest.

"Yes, yes. Coming." The strange little man slipped through the beads with hardly a ripple. "Captain Soares!"

"Well?" He stood with his hands on his hips.

"All is ready. Where do you sail?"

"You speak Portuguese like a teacher." The eye studied the little man. "Macao."

A whistle. "South China. So far. So very far."

The party had been to celebrate the end of summer, the breaking up of the band, the fact that many of them would be going off to college. Jeff was drunk and high and he got home late. Slowly up the stairs of the split foyer. Here was the plan: stuff some food in his mouth and go to bed. Zeroing in on the refrigerator, guided by the little light under the range hood, he giggled and stumbled, shushed himself, reached out and grasped the refrigerator handle.

His mother was sitting on a stool at the snack bar several feet away. Her hand rested around one of the monogrammed highball glasses. In the dimness her face was a terrible mask that Jeff experienced as a physical recoil, a jolt of nausea. It was a caricature, a gargoyle, a surfacing of everything repugnant in the human female--the sick, sneering, grasping, twisted, lascivious, murdering bitch, the life-giver turned life-begrudger, the nurturer-creator turned inside out.

"A sneak--like your fucking father was. And a coward."

She was drunk. Drunk as only adults can get, possessed, a bitter ghoul in a cloud of scotch. At that moment he believed in Satan, that only the beast could etch such hate on the face of his mother. You have to want it more than anything. The voice was not his own. It was soft and perfect, yet foreign. He retreated to his bedroom. The next day he would leave for college and never return.

The spurs clinked with the footsteps on the damp boards of the sidewalk. The man stopped before the sign: FRONTIERS UNLIMITED. The smell of earth was everywhere. He pushed open the door, which squeaked on springy hinges.

"Hello?"

No one. He started to leave, then heard a noise in the back of the shop.

"Hello?"

"Yes. Yes."

He strode to the counter, his clomping boots leaving clumps of mud mixed with straw. A little man appeared, and he touched his hat.

"Sorry about that."

The little man shook his head. "No matter."

"I, uh--" The hat came down to the waist. "--need some men."

"Quite, quite..." The little man fidgeted with something below the counter.

"We're going west..."

"From Wichita to where?"

"West. Oregon, maybe."

"What kind of men do you need?"

"Men. The kind that don't mind dyin'."

"You mean the kind that wants to live?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that's what I mean."

He and Patty had shared a statistics course in their freshman year. It gave him something to talk about, a handle, and they ended up leaving the bar together for his apartment. He stopped next to a ring of boulders on the landscaped lawn near the parking lot and they leaned against one of the huge stones.

She opened her mouth to him, parted her cool lips and let him flick against her warm, lively tongue. He could taste the beer.

"Let's go inside," she said.

"Sure." He stared up at the full moon and was filled with a longing so deep that Patty became the stranger that she was. There was no bringing her back, no pretending she was anything different. He owed her nothing. "Do you believe in God?" he said. And then came a sound, a groan that started in the earth and exited his mouth.

He scrambled up on the rock behind them and began to leap from rock to rock, five rocks of different sizes and shapes, one after another until he was running, leaping, frighteningly sure-footed. One after another in a circle, Patty dumbstruck, her hand to her face, and he heard himself crying to the high clouds around the moon. "I want it all," he was saying. "I want it all."

The machine considered flattening out and sliding beneath the lowest photodetector but decided against it. It had no reason to camouflage its presence from those with whom it would soon be discussing its purpose. Since its capabilities were well-known, a direct approach might even be seen as an aggressive act and prove to be of some benefit. So it swept into the retail compartment and stopped in front of the counter.

A flashing orange light nibbled the perimeter of a slightly open hatch at one side of the room and a soft, high-pitched chirping began. The compartment was deserted. And then it wasn't. The machine logged this unprecedented phenomenon with a hasty, nervous access of new memory, then chose to adopt a mien of ambiguous equanimity.

"Coming!" The noise and the flashing ceased and a little man squeezed through the hatch and shuffled quickly to the counter. "Yes?"

"Frontiers Unlimited?"

"Yes."

"I am sent by the Triamnian project to negotiate terms?"

The man made a chittering sound--a laugh, perhaps?--and shook his head. "You know my terms. It's not easy finding colonists of this type."

A laugh was bad. The machine took in pulse rate, respiration, facial expression, stance and body movement. "Your terms are acceptable."

"Quite."

Through the transparent panel in the back of the room Mars was a red crescent.

They were all there in Watson Hall--at least a hundred of the Fortune 500. Jeff wandered from table to table with a clutch of resumes in a canvas rucksack, talking to men and women only slightly older than himself, all presenting the same glib amiability. None of them more than a company-paid airline ticket away from a condo in some major city, Brie and sushi in the fridge, and a dirty bathroom. No kids.

"You're a business major?"

Jeff was standing before a counter. He had been thinking of his father, an executive for a utility company. He had been thinking of his father's funeral, of the undertaker who stood in his dark suit at the gravesite, sucking in the morning light, placing his clean-shaven pall over the scattered marble slabs, the open pit, the smell of earth. A fat man in a charcoal suit. "Uh, yeah."

"And you're wondering about going on for your MBA?"

He looked around. "Yeah." The gymnasium seemed to have gone dim. It was quiet. He looked at the little man behind the counter. "I haven't made up my mind yet. Just testing the waters, you know?"

"Sit down."

He glanced at the sign--FRONTIERS UNLIMITED--walked around the counter and sat on one of the three folding chairs. "So--" He placed the rucksack on the floor. "--never heard of you. What do you do and how much do you pay?"

"We pay whatever the market will bear for people who will go anywhere on guts and faith. Just to go. Just to see beyond the horizon."

He swallowed. The voice was perfect, like a teacher's. "What are the qualifications?"

"You have to want it more than anything."

The hard edges of the world behind the counter softened and swam. "My father--"

"--committed suicide." The little man shrugged, as easy as that. "We don't interview everyone. And we only allow one interview. Your father turned us down. There was nothing I could do."

"This is my interview?"

The little man nodded.

Jeff took aim and kicked his rucksack back into the shadowy hallway that led past the bleachers to the men's locker room.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com