Emergency by Jack Hettinger
"Ever see this one?" Buzz asked Dee Dee. His mouth felt gluey, so he ran his tongue over his gums.
"Which one what?" Dee Dee was dozing. She ran her fingers through Fitz's coat. Fitz had settled down, so Dee Dee was relaxing, but she wanted to see the vet now! and she was trying not to show how upset she was, but an emergency clinic is supposed to be for emergencies, and you're supposed to deal with emergencies fast, right? Otherwise, they're not emergencies, right, and you can't go calling yourself an emergency clinic, right?
"Look, coffee." Buzz pointed his head at the receptionist's counter. There was a plastic urn and a stack of styrofoam cups, the kind his agency picketed stores for selling. A notecard in neatly blocked letters said FREE COFFEE.
"I'd pee all night," Dee Dee whispered. There was one other person in the waiting room, so she kept her voice low.
The waiting room was a box with stiff plastic seats, wrinkled magazines, a fluorescent fixture, the TV, and a counter where the receptionist appeared from time to time to say won't be too long now.
"We may be here all night," Buzz said. He tried to sound stoic about it. He had a philosophy. If you know it's going to happen and if you know you can't do anything about it and if it's not going to cause you that big a hassle, why not act cool? It makes a great story later and you won't feel like you're lying when you tell it. Buzz didn't like to lie. He'd do anything not to have to lie. So Buzz sized things up in the emergency room and decided to be stoic about it. It was like that demonstration where he met Dee Dee. There was nothing you could do about the cops and there was nothing you could do about the dogs, but you knew Dad's lawyer would have you out in the morning, and everybody else, especially the girls, were scared shitless, but the TV cameras were there and most of the marchers were white, so the cops weren't going to let the dogs loose, so he acted cool, and to this day when people talk about that demonstration, somebody'll say, Buzz, how could you be so cool, and Buzz just shrugs and gives them his Howdy Doody look and even Dee Dee says from time to time, I still don't see how you handled that scene because I thought they were going to let those dogs go any second.
Dee Dee didn't seem to hear him, so Buzz repeated that they just may be here all night.
"Like hell," Dee Dee whispered. "There's only this guy ahead of us." Now she was awake. Although she whispered, her voice had that special little edge Buzz didn't like to hear.
"I think they have a major emergency back there," Buzz said. Down the corridor past the receptionist's counter was a series of doors. Voices, some loud, vibrated against the door of the nearest room. Buzz couldn't make out any words because the fluorescent light above him hummed. Buzz was an incandescent person himself, the light was clearer, more penetrating. Buzz also noted two other cars besides theirs in the spaces out front. Since staff parked on the side where the signs said STAFF, there were obviously two people ahead of them, not one: the guy across from them, petting his dog, and a hypothetical somebody else. Basic logic. Plus, drying blood was splattered on the front of the counter. The dog the guy petted showed no signs of having been attacked. It coughed and wheezed.
"If Fitz isn't an emergency, then what are we doing here?" Dee Dee asked. "Look at him."
"Snoozing pretty good, I'd say." Buzz didn't say it as any kind of criticism. He was as concerned about Fitz as she was. He was simply a little calmer about it, that's all.
Dee Dee could get pretty worked up. Look how worked up she got at that demonstration, the one with the cops and the dogs and the TV cameras. Buzz and Dee Dee and their coalition were saving the country from the military-industrial complex which was tied in with the war which was tied in with civil rights. In those days everything was all tied in together. Now Buzz specialized in saving the earth from whatever was trying to destroy it in his catchment area, styrofoam cups, packing peanuts, flammable toys, chemical spills in Bear Grass Creek, people with rusted out mufflers, things like that. Dee Dee supported Buzz's work but she had energized herself in other career path options. But that day at the demonstration she got pretty worked up. No blue meanie was going to pat her down. She ended up flat on the ground with her neck under a billy club. Buzz had just met her, so according to his stoic code it was OK for him to stay stoic while the blue meanie squeezed her windpipe and patted her down. But they got to know each other a lot better that night.
"He certainly wasn't happy when I came to bed," Dee Dee said.
Buzz was dead asleep and Fitz was curled up next to him and Dee Dee had put on her Jefferson Airplane tee-shirt and brushed her hair and rubbed cream into her face and wished her skin wasn't getting so dry, then very very smoothly maneuvered into bed and right before she turns out her lamp up pops Fitz whining and yiping and hunching his back, none of which disturbed Buzz's slumbers, and Dee Dee took Fitz out in the yard but nothing doing, so back upstairs and he settles on the bed real cozy, so reach for the lamp and, damn it, the same thing, whining, yiping, hunching. She called the Emergency Clinic, which was a good thirty-five minutes from where they lived and which was the only one in the whole tri-state area if you could figure that out, and the voice said maybe it's impacted anal glands, which can be horribly painful--did you want to bring him in?
Now Dee Dee sat in the waiting room and watched the receptionist work the incoming calls. She wore one of those little headsets with a Q-tip speaker which freed her hands so she could read People and smile at Buzz and tell the person at the other end that maybe it's a bladder infection and that can be horribly painful--did you want to bring him in? That's who Dee Dee talked to, that's the voice that told Dee Dee maybe it's impacted anal glands. Not a vet, not a nurse, a receptionist, probably a co-op, the kind who, when you interviewed them, said they had some college. You can have some money, you can have some time, but how can you have some college? How could Dee Dee have been so dense not to know she was getting a receptionist's diagnosis over the phone? But she didn't realize it then. She was too worried about Fitz. The worst made sense. She shook Buzz awake and said they had to get Fitz to the Emergency Clinic right away. She was careful to use the voice Buzz never argued with, whatever it was she was saying. He could get pretty philosophic about the meaning of words and the substance of perceptions, like after the demonstration when she said she could hardly talk and maybe she should see a doctor and he said, Well, what do you mean by hardly, but he never got philosophic when she used the voice she used tonight, the voice that sounded like an old weed trimmer.
They were on the road in no time flat. Fitz had squirmed in her lap for the first five or ten minutes but had been napping ever since. Why shouldn't Fitz catch some zzz's? Buzz asked. It's the middle of the damn night. But Buzz didn't say that as any kind of criticism.
Fitz was their baby and he had looked uncomfortable and Buzz was as worried as Dee Dee, but he figured one of them had to act cool, which was usually his role anyway, so a touch of lightness couldn't hurt anything.
"Ever see this one? It's the one where these three guys have to crash-land their spaceship on a planet where they find a crashed spaceship exactly like theirs already there with a dead guy in the front compartment who looks exactly like one of them."
Dee Dee had been nodding and stroking Fitz but jerked up the way Fitz did when he spotted a rabbit in the yard.
"Remember that psych paper I wrote, you know, the class, where I cut all the time and still got an A?" Buzz said. "Buried anxieties of recognition in the cold war or some crap like that?"
Now the smartass crewman, having seen his dead self, wanders off and is walking down a dusty road and there are his daughter and his wife and his whole family having a backyard picnic and they're so glad to see him they're beside themselves. But the badmouth captain finds him and tells him to come back to the spaceship, and the smartass crewman says no way, and the badmouth captain says we'll see about that, and they roll around on the ground for a while, and the captain drags the crewman back to the spaceship--Buzz was sure it was their spaceship the badmouth captain dragged the smartass crewman back to, not the parallel universe spaceship, but you couldn't tell anyway because they'd both look the same but, wait, if it was the parallel universe spaceship the smartass crewman's parallel body would be there, which it wasn't--and wouldn't you know it, the second they set foot inside the spaceship they see the other crewman is missing. The other crewman was being played by an actor who played character roles all his career, so you saw him a lot but could never remember his name. For that matter Buzz couldn't remember the names of the badmouth captain and smartass crewman either. But he was sure they became stars later.
The other person in the waiting room was an older man in bermudas and a tanktop. He had fuzzy little curls of hair all over his legs. Buzz and Dee Dee were both well educated, tolerant people, so Buzz did not ordinarily notice a person's color or hair, but when Buzz looked carefully at the man's dog, which sat dutifully on the floor and wheezed, his notion that only a black guy would have a dog like this skipped past his quality control checkpoint before he could nail it. Still, ugly as the dog was, she seemed to love the man, and the man loved her because he talked to her softly and patted her withers. The man politely asked the receptionist from time to time when the doctor would be available, and the receptionist said it wouldn't be too long now, they had an emergency--a cocker bitch bit this dog next door and that's what all the blood everywhere was from. Normally they clean it up right away, but they were short-handed tonight and thank God it wasn't one of those nights. For two-fifteen a.m. Sunday morning it was pretty quiet.
"Like I said on the phone, her breathing is awful rough. She can't be comfortable. Look at her." The man reached down and stroked the dog's neck but she didn't seem eased. She looked up at him and moved her head from side to side and wheezed.
The dog had a horrible underbite and a thin coat. Buzz wouldn't call her mangy because she seemed clean and well brushed but she looked like a crate of spare parts from every breed in the universe, spidery legs, big paws, wide back, thin withers, short muzzle, fat nose, prick ears, long flews. Buzz thought about it: this guy loved his dog. He must have loved his dog, she was old and sick and ugly and it was late. Fitz was two and acted like a puppy. But Fitz wasn't acting like a puppy now. Fitz was sleeping like a log in Dee Dee's lap.
A nurse came out and told the man maybe they should take the dog's vital signs now. Buzz and Dee Dee were alone in the waiting room.
"It's not a parallel universe," Buzz yawned. His eyes were puffy, but he knew this one by heart, so whenever his head drooped and he raised up a couple seconds or a minute or two later, he easily patched in whatever he thought was missing. "That was the captain's initial hypothesis because what else could you think when you saw a duplicate of your own spaceship wrecked, plus a duplicate of one of your crewmen dead on the same planet where you had to crash-land?"
Dee Dee said mmm, but now she was following the action closely for herself. She wasn't sure but maybe what was on TV now was some kind of parallel universe: there was a string of Mad Marvin ads for his big lot of Deja VW's at low low prices and a couple shots of Taffy wiggling in and out of an acid green VW bug and then a hot coral VW microbus and in the background you could hear "Alice's Restaurant," and except for the exotic colors and Taffy's skintight leopard-skin jumpsuit, it was the same gala special sale Mad Marvin had been running for decades.
Now she remembered.
Now Mad Marvin said everything was priced to go during this week's big big nostalgia jubilee.
Now the captain and the smartass crewman he had rescued find the other guy who had wandered off and he's with his Mom and Dad on the porch of their home and they have been waiting for him to come back from space and he's as happy to see them as they are to see him, but the captain and the smartass crewman have to drag him back and he screams, but the captain says these people aren't who you think they are and let's just get back to the ship and talk about it.
"Did they always last an hour?" Dee Dee asked.
"Yeah, so it's just getting complicated now."
"I remember them only going a half hour."
"No, you could make a pizza from scratch and cook it and still not miss much. I remember them always being an hour."
"Why do I remember them being a half hour?"
"I don't know. A glitch in the old space-time continuum?"
"Maybe it's all these ads now. There're a lot of ads. It's more ads than show."
Dee Dee stroked Fitz, who was in dreamland, and now she was sure that this was the episode that was on when she let Tommy come over that night her parents went to Aunt Betty's funeral. They felt she better stay home and take her finals because she had to leave for the Peace Corps next week. Aunt Betty would understand. Sometimes it just worked out like that. She was in a better place. It didn't matter if Dee Dee missed a ceremony. She'd be there in spirit.
It was the same episode all right. Dee Dee was sure of it when the captain and the one crewman got the other crewman away from his Mom and Pop on the porch because that's the last thing she remembered seeing over Tommy's shoulder before they stretched out on the couch, and she still wondered why she let him do it or try to, because she didn't know him very well, in fact not that well at all, but girls were supposed to say yes to guys who said no, but Tommy had said yes and his head was fuzzy as a brush and Monday he was leaving, but Dee Dee said yes anyway. She was mad as hell at him afterwards, if you could say afterwards, because technically there was hardly a before, but she didn't show it because he must have felt bad enough as it was because he couldn't do it, probably because he'd never done it or maybe he couldn't get the war off his mind, but she said he was only overly excited because who wouldn't be? She told Tommy she was nervous too because she was going off to Togo where they warned her nobody does anything on time. But that didn't seem to make Tommy feel any better. Tommy didn't have much to say because what can a boy say when at the height of his sexual powers he's limp as all get-out, or so Tommy tried to laugh it off, or so she remembered, or so she imagined herself remembering, because you can't hide that hurt look in your eyes. She couldn't have hid that look if it was her who had gone limp, and she knew Tommy wasn't any different. There she was oohing at every stroke when he might as well have been stacking cans for all the passion he showed, but it was a warm night and she liked the way Tommy's skin smelled clean but not soapy, and his tickly hair was sorta cute and a nice change for once and she wouldn't mind, actually she was kind of interested in him, but talk about limp, that boy was limp, and she was mad enough to bite his head off, because if she was willing to let herself go like this, the least he could do was be sure he could take care of his end of it, so now she knew her girlfriends were right when they said men were more trouble than they were worth, but Tommy looked so sad so sad and his baby blues were wide and moist and his teeth were perfect, and that's what got Dee Dee most about Tommy, that's why she let him go ahead, his teeth were perfect neat little tiles, not a chip anywhere, and he'd played baseball and football and been through basic training and also had no bumps on his skin, but if she made a big deal about bumps then ninety-eight percent of the male population would have to wait in drydock until they were fifty as far as she was concerned, but Tommy looked so sad, like a lost puppy, so she didn't pull her jeans back up right away but just kept her arms and legs around him and smelled his skin.
"It wasn't this one."
"It wasn't?" Dee Dee said.
Buzz shook his head. "Nope, I did my paper on another episode, the one where this guy is sure he's met somebody from outer space. This one doesn't have anything to do with buried anxieties of recognition in the cold war. The other sure did. This chump is sure he's met somebody from outer space but the only guy he can convince is some guy in a bar he buys a beer for. They start talking, but the guy in the bar is also from outer space, though we don't know it yet, and he says we better go someplace and talk this whole thing over because you're having hallucinations. So the chump says we can go back to my house, my wife will cook us some steaks, and the other guy says OK, and this other guy, the guy who's really from outer space but we don't know it yet, tries and tries but he can't talk the chump out of believing he's met somebody from outer space, so after dinner the guy who's really from outer space but we don't know it yet says, `You really need some help, let's go over to my office and we'll decide on a plan.' The chump is so relieved somebody believes him he says, `Honey, I'll be back in an hour.' You can guess what happens."
"Mmm."
"Know why I remember?"
"No."
"Because the night I was watching the one we're watching now was the night Connie shot me down."
"Connie?"
"Man, was I wrecked."
Now the captain is beginning to add one and one and he finds a newspaper clipping that says the smartass crewman's family was wiped out in an accident, and the clipping is dated well before now, so, if the family was dead before the crew took off on their mission, the family must be some kind of illusion that creatures from outer space have created to trap them.
"Connie?" Dee Dee had to say something so she wouldn't say what she felt like saying, namely, what kind of butthole tells his wife about other girls twenty-five years later?
"We were in the rec room watching this episode, and Mom had said I could bring somebody with us up to the cabin if their parents said it was OK and, boy, I had the hots for Connie. I mean, it was a long time ago, before we got to know each other very well and you were headed for the Peace Corps anyway. I had asked her out a lot but she was always dating somebody else and said it wouldn't be right, but you know what it said over the entrance to the chemistry lab, `Constancy of purpose is the secret of success.' So after a decent interval I'd ask her again, get another no, and wait. Then out of the blue she asked me to some guy's party who was going to Canada the next day. She asked me. We left the party early because everybody was so totally stoned she was worried the neighbors would call the cops and she was the student government president, so we went back to my house." Buzz shook his head. He wanted to say something like ah the follies of youth or gee were we really ever that young, but it might sound kind of pompous or evasive, and Dee Dee didn't look like she was in the mood for that. In fact, he didn't know what she looked like she was in the mood for. "So we made a pizza or something and while it cooked we watched this Twilight Zone, and I said something dopey like we were going down to our cabin at the lake for a week and if she'd like to, would she like to come along? It was crazy. I knew from the second I opened my mouth getting her home to make pizza was about as far as my luck was ever going to go. She scoots away from me a couple feet, I mean, we weren't close to start with, and I thought she was going to laugh like that guy did at the start of the show when he gives the captain this look, but all she says is, `What would Tommy think?'"
"Tommy?"
"That's what I thought. So, you know me, I say something cool like Tommy who and she said Tommy the guy she was dating who was busy with his family tonight. She said she went to Bill's party because Bill was going to Canada and she might not ever see him again, but if Tommy hadn't had to be with his family, she would have been with him and skipped Bill's, but she still really really appreciated me taking her to Bill's, don't get her wrong. And she really did like me, but Tommy was going to Vietnam next week and he wanted to be with his family that night for something, and she liked me, just not like that. She could've smacked me in the head with a hammer and I wouldn't have been more stunned."
"Gosh."
Buzz felt a weight leave his shoulders. He thought this one could have gone either way--warm fuzzy or thermonuclear--because as soon as he opened his mouth, he thought what have I got myself into now, because sometimes it was like Dee Dee wrote the book on touchy. He was only recalling a stupid incident, but once he started telling something, he kept going and said what he meant to say. That was Buzz's code, finish what you start, that's the kind of person he was. He didn't fake stuff. But it could rub Dee Dee the wrong way sometimes. He didn't say he couldn't be a jerk on occasion, but give him a little credit for not being a fake.
"You understand?" Buzz asked. "You were starting to look funny."
"It was a wild time."
"I guess." Buzz rubbed Fitz's ears flat. They sprang back up. He opened his eyes and looked around the waiting room and closed them again.
Now the two crewmen sit the captain down to tell him the bad news. This was the part Buzz remembered most painfully. Connie had said she liked him, just not like that, and she sort of smiled at him and there was a Mad Marvin commercial about his brand new shipment of VW's and then, thank God, the last segment started, so he had something else to talk about and he told Connie I bet you'll never guess how it ends and she said she didn't have a clue, so Buzz said don't you catch all the hints?
The captain says OK, so maybe my parallel universe hypothesis is wrong, but I get it now, we're really being tricked by creatures from outer space. The two crewmen say sorry, the bad news is we're all dead--you're dead, we're dead, our families are dead, everybody's dead. Everybody. That's the deal, Captain, we're all dead, you just have to accept it. No way, the captain says. It's just lucky that in between saving them, he had the time to repair the ship, so now he orders them to get ready to blast off. See, it's not really our families we're leaving behind, the captain says. Looks like we've slipped into some kind of time seam, some kind of opening to the past. Space can be funny like that, the captain says, and if we blast off, we'll be able to get back to the present and continue with our mission so this is a direct order--blast off. Well what do two dead spacemen do when their dead captain can't accept being dead? They obey orders. They don't have any choice. So the ship blasts off and whirls back into space. Then comes the voice that lets us know these guys were really modern day Flying Dutchmen who were doomed to sail space forever. But that's how it is in the place called the twilight zone.
"We didn't really watch this crap, did we?"
"It's not that bad," Dee Dee said.
"It's crap."
"I kinda liked it."
After a couple Mad Marvin ads about his Deja VW sale and his trademark warning to keep your hands off Taffy because she was his, "Bods" came on, the get-down, tell-it-like-it-is show where hardbodies meet hardbodies and let it all hang out. John Michael Crawford's first toothy question for Ramrod was what do you think of Laney's butt?
The man came back to the waiting room with his ugly dog, who was breathing easier, and the receptionist apologized for not having a nurse take her vital signs earlier, but they had been so busy with the emergency, she didn't think about it.
"The new dosage seems to be working," he said.
The man's face was sagging, but Buzz knew he was mad because the first thing you do when somebody comes into an emergency clinic is check the vital signs. But he wanted to be a nice guy, Buzz figured. Everybody wants to be a nice guy. Buzz wanted to be a nice guy, too.
"What kind of dog is she?" Buzz asked.
"Just a mutt." The man rubbed his eyes. "Getting on, too. Don't like all this excitement, do you, girl?"
"You can come back now," the receptionist said to Dee Dee and Buzz.
The examination room was a smaller box with stiffer plastic chairs and a formica table that stuck out of the wall. Fitz wiggled out of Dee Dee's lap and sniffed around the floor and got interested in a bug.
"Won't be long now," Buzz said.
He set his watch to beep every five minutes, but after a lot of beeps Dee Dee said did he have to do that and he said he better stretch his legs out in the parking lot, but he really wanted to check the waiting room to see if anybody with a real emergency had got in front of them, but it was empty except for the man with the ugly dog, and nobody was at the receptionist's counter, so he walked out into the parking lot, which he thought was maybe not too smart when you think about it. There were a lot of big shrubs people could hide behind, and none of the other businesses on the strip were open, and the big light where he bounced on one leg, then another, was burnt out and only made a weird hum.
Buzz told the receptionist he hoped it wouldn't be long because they had a long drive back and he was pretty much done in as it was, and she said it wouldn't be long now, and she looked pleasant enough, and he said he wasn't trying to be pushy but he didn't think they had a big problem that would take a lot of time so was there some way somebody could take Fitz's vital signs--he didn't know how much longer he could go, he was running on empty.
The man with the ugly dog was on the phone telling somebody not to worry, he'd be home soon. All the vet had to do was give Ripper a final check to make sure the new dosage was kicking in. He didn't want to take any chances, but he didn't think there was anything to worry about, so go back to sleep, it'd be OK.
"She worries about Ripper more than me," the man told Buzz.
"You're lucky you got her."
"She's a good dog."
"Her name is Ripper? Looks pretty sweet to me."
"Well, she's done her share of ventilating the upholstery over the years, but we don't have people over much."
"You're a lucky girl, Ripper," Buzz said, crouching. She moaned like Fitz and he rubbed the underside of her chin.
"Too bad they don't have nine lives," the man said.
"Too bad we don't either."
"I heard that."
"Good luck, Ripper."
"Say goodbye, Ripper."
It was strange and peaceful in the waiting room. It was quiet. Why was it so quiet? They had had a nice quiet talk. Buzz felt he could last a little while longer but he was drained; he hadn't lied to the receptionist. He prided himself on that.
Fitz was in Dee Dee's lap. The nurse had come in, Dee Dee said, and checked her over, then the vet came in and checked her over, and then the nurse came back and took a fecal sample because the anal glands were fine but it could be worms.
"Worms?"
"That's what I tried to tell them," Dee Dee said. Her face was bloodless, she didn't have much left either. Fitz was trying to find the bug. "How often we go to the vet, once, twice a month? Fitz is the most checked dog in the universe. Worms?"
"At least it's good news. It's not impacted anal glands."
"Let's just see what they say about the fecal sample, then get home. The vet said it'll be twenty minutes."
"That other guy, the guy out there, he turned the TV off." Buzz didn't know why he said that, it simply popped into his head--that's why they had had such a nice quiet talk. Extraordinary, turning off a TV in a waiting room. He sort of admired the guy. It was kind of like a protest, turning off the TV.
Dee Dee looked at Buzz. She had been thinking of Tommy as he lay on her afterwards. Technically there was no afterwards since there hadn't been much of a before, but maybe that's all it was supposed to be and it wasn't so bad anyway, and, besides, she was amazed how light, how feathery Tommy felt on her. They fit together nicely. Poor limp Tommy melted all over her. She couldn't help feeling sorry for the guy. It was almost funny. It didn't matter if he was limp.
"You know that guy I was telling you about?" Buzz said.
"The guy in the waiting room?"
"No, the guy who was going to Canada."
"What guy who was going to Canada?" Dee Dee asked.
"Bill, the one who was giving the party Connie asked me to take her to because her boyfriend Tommy had to be with his family that night. The draft dodger."
Dee Dee was too tired to ask how they got back to him.
"He never went to Canada."
"Oh?"
"The party got wilder after we left. That's what I heard. I ran into somebody last year. He remembered it after all this time. Said it was a hell of party. Anyway, he said the guy's big brother showed up unexpectedly and somebody at the party, not knowing the new guy was the big brother, mentions Bill's big plans for Canada, and the big brother says oh and finds little brother and takes him off to one side, at least this was how it was told to me, takes him off to one side and says I hope you enjoy the party because tomorrow you're doing your duty and that's it."
"That's what I call letting people make up their own minds."
"The forces of reaction."
"Probably wasn't that complex. Probably always bossed him around."
"I'm glad it's all over. That whole time was a drag. Wall to wall tension."
"I don't remember you being very tense."
"I had my deferment."
"I don't even remember you being very tense about civil rights."
"Of course I was. Still am. Why do you think I do what I do?"
"Ecology isn't civil rights."
"The whole thing is one package, Ms. Software Expert."
"Where do you think that fecal sample is?"
"Kind of ironic." Buzz bowed his head. He didn't feel particularly sad about it. It just seemed like he ought to bow his head. So he bowed his head. "The guy was killed."
"He was?"
"Yeah."
"In Vietnam?"
"Just as his troop plane was landing. Boom, welcome to the war. Never even set foot in the place."
"Then his big brother must have felt like a total shit," Dee Dee said. She didn't know anybody who died in the war, but it made her hot that somebody would bulldoze another person's conscience. Real hot. "I hope he feels like a shit every day for the rest of his life."
"Not that guy--Tommy, the guy Connie was dating."
"What?"
"The guy Connie was dating, Tommy, that's who I heard got killed."
"When did you hear that?"
"I don't know, a long time ago. Does it matter?"
"If you're talking about it, it should, shouldn't it? What if you got it wrong? He could be alive but you're saying he's dead."
"Slow down. All I remember is I was talking to somebody a long time ago and I said whatever happened to Connie and they said still in mourning. I said who for and they said for this guy she was dating and then they told me what I told you. Boom, right as the plane was landing."
"You said she was always dating somebody."
"Yeah."
"So it could have been a lot of guys."
"They said it was a Tommy somebody and it sounded like it was about that time."
Dee Dee knew it couldn't have been her Tommy. There were a lot of boys named Tommy. She could ask her friend Mary Alice who kept track of everything, but Mary Alice was at a software convention and wouldn't be back until next week. He was a cute boy. He didn't even take his shirt off, like he was in a rush in case her parents got home early, but she told him they had all the time in the world, so he said something like, "Well, in that case, here goes."
It was the Twilight Zone where the crew of a U.S. spaceship has to make an emergency landing, and it basically looks like the flying saucer in "The Day The Earth Stood Still," but in those days, Buzz remembered, you didn't pay much attention to special effects because special effects was in its infancy, and anyway the crew has to make this emergency landing and they basically crash but nobody's hurt, though the captain, who later starred in some major movies, says some pretty sharp words to one of his two crewmen, like don't you sass me, bud, and that guy, who became a star in some big movies too, plus a couple TV series, gives him his trademark super smartass sneer and says something like oh yeah, right, Captain, and then the three U.S. spacemen leave their ship and, what a break, the planet has exactly the right atmosphere and, before the first commercial, they come across (would you believe it?) exactly the same kind of spaceship they were in, and guess what's inside--a dead body that exactly matches the smartass crewman. The commercial said no money down and ninety-nine dollars a month puts you in an almost new pre-owned sports job like this cute little number, but you supply your own bimbo--Taffy here (Taffy was wearing a skintight leopard-skin jumpsuit), Taffy here was Mad Marvin's so don't get any ideas when you drop by Mad Marvin's open all day all night rain or shine ha ha.
...................... 
All contents copyright © 1996, The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.