Anton's Odyssey Page 7

  The shirts played the skins, a pickup game. With reduced gravity, most of the tall boys could dunk without difficulty. Ellen played with the shirts. She was pretty scrappy and held her own when things got physical. Cotton tugged at my arm, bored of just watching. Reluctantly, I stopped ogling Ellen so that I could entertain my brother.

  Near the sides of the gym, kids were playing half court games or just practicing free throws and three pointers. I took a ball off the rack and tossed it to Cotton who dribbled it clumsily.

  “Over there,” I pointed. “That basket is completely free.”

  Our basket was probably meant for little kids and was much lower than regulation. Cotton had trouble making the adjustment to the low basket and reduced gravity. He shot high, tossing the ball completely over the backboard. I chased it down and toss it back. It took Cotton twelve attempts before he finally sunk a free throw.

  Cotton wanted to dunk, so I got on my hands and knees so Cotton could leap off my back and grab onto the rim. Even with the reduced gravity, my spine popped uncomfortably under Cotton’s weight.

  Mr. Fox gave two long blows on the whistle, suspending the full court game. He ran over to me and yelled, “How many times do I have to tell you kids not to hang on the rims. You bend one; we can’t exactly go to the store and buy a new one!”

  “Sorry,” I said meekly, “we’re new here and didn’t know.”

  Cotton let go of the rim and landed unharmed on his generously padded rear end.

  “Well, that’s no excuse,” Mr. Fox snapped. He turned away to resume his officiating. Ellen, who had watched Mr. Fox’s tantrum, gave me a dirty look.

  My brother and I resumed trying to shoot baskets. This time I shot free throws and Cotton caught rebounds. A stray ball bounced into our corner at the same time I threw a pathetically short air ball. Cotton found himself between the two bouncing balls and picked up the wrong one. It was an expensive ball made from real leather and not one of the cheap rubber ones that had the words “Magic Sky Daddy” stamped under the valve.

  “That’s my ball!” said a tall boy. The baby fat around his chin suggested he was about a year younger than I, two years older than Cotton. He wore a spotless white athletic training shirt, the kind that reflects heat back to the body when it’s cold out and dissipates thermal energy when it’s hot. I had always wanted one, but it cost more than my mother could make in a week (when she actually worked). The shirt wicked the sweat off the kid’s torso, and the exaggerated surface area of the protruding nano fibers caused the water to evaporate quickly. The escaping water vapor created the illusion of smoke, as if the kid were smoldering. Cotton ignored the kid and admired the beauty of the leather ball.

  “That’s my ball kid,” the smoky kid repeated. Cotton finally looked up.

  “Come on,” I said. “Give him his ball back.” Cotton tossed the ball lazily at the tall kid. It bounced short and wide. The kid had to chase it down.

  Cotton and I resumed shooting baskets, missing most of the time. The leather ball bounced back into our little court a second time. Again Cotton caught it and just stood there looking at it, fascinated.

  “Damn it kid, give me my ball back,” the tall kid shouted, “and throw it right this time.” Cotton completely ignored him, turning the ball over in his hands, taking in every minor detail of the magnificent basketball, the bumpy texture of the animal hide, the sunken lettering, the perfect roundness of the valve. The kid walked over and snatched the ball from Cotton’s hands. He tucked the ball under his arm.

  “I was just looking at it,” Cotton protested.

  “Well it’s not yours to look at, douchebag!” the kid snorted rudely.

  Cotton took a step forward, “I just wanted to see —” but the kid shoved him back with his free hand. Cotton kicked the kid in the shin, and the kid dropped the ball so he could grapple Cotton unencumbered. An obvious neophyte to scuffling, the kid tried to knock Cotton over by driving his shoulder into Cotton’s chest, a terrible mistake that negated his height advantage and placed his center of gravity quite literally in Cotton’s hands. Cotton grabbed the back of the kid’s expensive shirt and inverted it, pulled it up over the taller kid’s head. As the kid struggled, Cotton spun so that he was no longer supporting his opponent’s weight. Blind and off balance, the kid took a few quick steps but couldn’t control his forward momentum. He crashed head first into the bleachers. Other kids encircled the ensuing melee and began shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  Unharmed, the tall kid got back on his feet, but before he could fix his shirt, Mr. Fox had pushed his way through the circle of excited kids. Pointing at the door, he screamed at Cotton angrily, “Get out! Get out!” Purple veins bulged in his forehead.

  Cotton complied, and I followed close behind, knowing that it was futile to point out to Mr. Fox that the kid in the fancy shirt was equally culpable. Cotton could care less about getting kicked out of the gym. He got kicked out of places on a weekly basis. In the passageway, he grinned.

  “I could have taken that guy easy if that teacher dude with the funky hairdo didn’t stop me,” Cotton declared.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “and he would have deserved it too.”

  “He was much bigger than me, but he didn’t seem very tough.”

  “I imagine a lot of the kids here talk tough but aren’t tough at all. They’re not at all like the kids from our old neighborhood.”

  Cotton smiled widely. He finally understood we would no longer have to live in fear of the goons and gangsters who terrorized our old neighborhood.

  “Be careful,” I warned. “Don’t go around starting scuffles just for the fun of it. Didn’t you see how Mr. Fox blamed you even though that other kid started it?”

  Cotton nodded. We had both accepted life wasn’t fair long ago. Without realizing it, we were pushing rules to the limits in a subconscious effort to figure out how to game the system.

  The door to the gym burst open behind us, and Hammond came running out.

  “Man, you totally took Charlie to school,” he said, beaming at Cotton and slapping him on the back with approval. “That kid totally deserves it too. Always walking around with his nose in the air, thinking he’s something special ‘cause his dad’s first mate.”

  Oh that’s not good, I thought, at least things didn’t get too far out of hand. Back home, I saw Cotton act like a gangster once when he was really upset. He stomp a kid’s head, and the guy’s teeth chipped as his face bounced off the pavement. If Cotton busted Charlie’s fine teeth, the first mate might very well turn the ship around for the sole purpose of evicting my family. Worse yet, the crew might shoot Cotton out the airlock and make it look like some sort of accident.

  “You guys going to sneak back in?” Hammond asked.

  “Probably not a good idea,” I said. “Mr. Fox will give us hell if he catches us.”

  “Well, I’m done lifting weights. You guys can hang out at my place.”

  Hammond’s living quarters were at least twice as big as ours. Neither of his parents were home. I asked him what his parents did, and he told me his mother worked in the mess hall as a cook. His father was a technician in the engine room.

  “He might even get rated able starman next voyage,” Hammond said, beaming with pride, “then he’d get a white jump suit, and we’d get to move into an even bigger place.”

  “How do the able starmen keep those white uniforms so clean?” I asked.

  “Some ships issue suits that are self-cleaning, coated in nano particles or something. We don’t have those here.” he said. “Although, sort of the point of the white clothing is to show that you don’t have to do the dirty work anymore. But on this ship, they always run with a bare minimum of crewmembers. My dad says it’s to save money. Even the able starmen have to do some of the nasty jobs sometimes. The suits look good now because we just picked up new ones back at port. Just wait a few months, even with regular laundry service they get all stained and start to turn grey. If a bunch of people
die, the crew can get stretched really thin, and the white suits get really nasty from all the extra work duties.”

  “People die out here?” I asked. There was a loud crash. Not interested in our conversation, Cotton attempted to amuse himself by stacking Hammond’s chairs end to end. The top chair had gotten away from him.

  “Your brother always like this?” Hammond asked, mildly annoyed.

  “Naw, he just gets into mischief when he’s bored. You got any comic books?” I asked. “We need something to keep him occupied.”

  “Yeah, good idea, I got some old ones from when I was a kid.” He stood up, and I followed him into his room. Hammond recovered a box from under his bed. “I got some skin mags too,” he said. “Wanna give your brother a skin mag?”

  “We better not,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Cotton had discovered girls yet. The results could be unpredictable.

  Most of Hammond’s comics were in excellent shape without any wrinkles or creases. I asked if he had any damaged ones, and he found about three that didn’t have any collector value. He gave them to Cotton as a gift. Cotton was thrilled. He lay on his stomach in the middle of the floor and lost himself in the gory graphics.

  “So people get killed out here?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, happens all the time. Dad said because this ship is registered in Liberia and because we never stay in port for more than twenty-eight days, we aren’t subject to a safety inspection by the NSSA.”

  “NSSA?”

  “National Spacecraft Safety Administration. They make sure your cubane is in the right sort of canister and you got your radiation shielding in the right place. Technically we are supposed to follow NSSA regulations, but with no safety inspection at port, there’s no real enforcement. My dad told me about this guy in the engine room a few voyages back who got his jump suit caught on the flywheel of a zero friction kinetic energy reservoir. Ripped off his arm, and he bled to death. It was really nasty! Dad said if they followed NSSA regulations on machine guarding, the accident wouldn’t have happened.”

  “That’s really messed up!” I cried.

  “Yeah, and after that three other guys died in a cubane explosion. With four men down, the engine room was really shorthanded, so they made dad work twenty-twenty-tens.”

  “Twenty-twenty-tens?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “That’s when they make you work for twenty hours, rest for four fours, work for another twenty hours, rest for another four hours, and then work another ten hour shift.”

  “What happens after the ten hour shift?”

  “You crash hard for fourteen hours. When you wake up, you start over again with another twenty-hour shift. Dad always did all right, never did need much sleep, but this other guy, he couldn’t hack it and started taking fenes. Got all strung out and paranoid. Said he needed fresh air and shot himself out the airlock.”

  “That’s messed up!” I repeated. I had always associated fenes with people who lived in dilapidated shacks and had rotten teeth. I had no idea people used them in space. “How did he get the fenes?” I asked. “Do people sneak them aboard?”

  “I suppose some people might stash fenes in their luggage, but the truth is they got all the ingredients you need to make fenes right here on the ship. Dad said some of the chemicals they keep aren’t even used in space travel. It’s almost like they keep them around ‘cause they want you making fenes.”

  “Why would they want you to use fenes?” I asked. Fene users back home were always knifing each other.

  “Makes you work harder if you don’t get too strung out.”

  “Yeah but won’t the ship get in trouble.”

  “Naw, not really. Dad says as long as they do piss testing before we take off and they have written anti-drug rules, the ship can’t get in trouble. He said if you get injured while using fenes, the ship can even charge you to see the doc instead of letting you see him for free through workers’ compensation. And if you get killed while using fenes, the ship doesn’t have to pay your family your death benefit.”

  “That’s messed up!” I cried again.

  We left Hammond’s place around 19:00, hoping to get to the front of the line at the mess hall before the dinnertime rush. As we hurried down the passageways, Cotton huffed and puffed.

  “I’m getting fat and out of shape,” he admitted.

  “That’s what happens when you eat ten servings of meat a day,” I said insightfully.

  “Well not any more. I’m going to eat nothing but oatmeal three times a day ‘till I’m back down to sixty-five kilos.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that!” I said sarcastically. “You’re not going to lose any weight that way unless you cut out the salt and butter too!” Dr. Zanders would be proud of me, I thought.

  “Then I won’t add any salt and butter!”

  To my amazement, Cotton stuck to his diet for weeks and the kilos melted away. He didn’t exactly become trim, but was able to slim down to his pre-embarkation state of pudginess, which was a marked improvement. Most people, including our own mother, thought my brother was mentally subnormal, suffering from some sort of traumatic brain injury or congenital cognitive impairment. The truth, however, was that very few people were willing to look past Cotton’s grimy, unpolished surface. On occasion, my brother could pull off some amazing feats of willpower, which is why I suspected that deep down Cotton was actually pretty normal, maybe even gifted.

  Chapter 3: Stick Geek Allen

  Back on Earth, if you got suspended from school, they sent you home for a few days and you get to chill out and watch TV. I didn’t mind the punishment at all. In space, they had what they called in-house suspension, meaning you had to sit in the Information Technology Archives all by yourself and study, which was extremely tedious.

  I was sentenced to in-house suspension despite what I considered at the time to be severe mitigating circumstances. Franklin, the smart 6th grade kid in 7th grade math, started tormenting me as early as the second day of school. Initially, he would just call me “stupid” when the teacher wasn’t looking, and that I could ignore. Kicking the ass of a kid that small poses no real challenge, isn’t very fun, and generally loses you respect from your peers.

  The third day of class, Mrs. Hallisworth put a problem on the vid and asked me to stand up and solve it in front of everyone. The problem was “n+1=3, what is n?” I told her I didn’t know the answer, and she said, “If you did your homework last night you would?”

  “Ma’am I didn’t do my homework last night,” I said.

  She was taken aback, almost like no one every admitted to not doing their homework before. She asked me to guess, so I guessed, “n equals 1.”

  “So one and one are three, Anton?” she asked, and everyone in the class started snickering.

  “No ma’am,” I said, “one and one are two.”

  “Perhaps, Anton, you should be more diligent about doing your homework from now on.”

  I said I would, and Mrs. Hallisworth told me to return to my seat. As I sat down, Franklin turned his head and whispered the words, “You’re an ignoramus.” I shook my fist at him, but he looked rather un-intimidated.

  Every time I got a question wrong, which was anytime Mrs. Hallisworth asked me a question, Franklin would insult my intelligence. I tried warning him with death threats after class, but they only seemed to embolden him.

  By the time Cotton had lost his weight, Franklin was no longer whispering insults but rather saying them aloud for the rest of the class to hear. Sometimes Mrs. Hallisworth would try to punish Franklin by making him solve the next problem. He invariable got the question right, though, which only made me more angry.

  By the time the ship stopped accelerating, and we cut off our electrostatic ion thrusters, Franklin started adding, “your brother is stupid,” to his more routine insults. To make matters worse, Franklin always got 100% on his quizzes. I hoped they would promote him to eighth grade math, but I had no such luck. Emboldened by Franklin’s bravado, some
of the other puny kids who sat nearby started whispering insults at me as well.

  The day after the ship suffered its first work-place death, some poor sap in an orange jumpsuit fell down a hatch in the engine room and landed on his head, Franklin pushed his insults to a limit I could no longer ignore. As we reviewed for an upcoming exam, I butchered another math problem. To my horror, just as I put my foot in my mouth and answered terribly wrong, I realized it was the same equation I had missed weeks before, “n+1=3, what is n?” The class was in uproar, hooting and hollering at how dumb I was. Mrs. Hallisworth yelled at the class to settle down. With a sigh, she asked me to return to my seat. Franklin turned and said softly, “I hear your mother is even more stupid than you!”

  A kid can fail to do his homework. He can turn a blind eye when his brother doesn’t do his homework, but he cannot choose his mother. It was bad enough a total prick like Bob the steward could push my mother around, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let a bunch of puny kids do the same. Incensed, I decided at that moment I would no longer tolerate Franklin’s flapping lips and venomous tongue.

  Five minute later, Franklin turned his head to say, “your momma’s a whore,” an escalation of his insults so obvious, even I saw it coming. I timed my jab to coincide with Franklin’s silent “w,” smacking him in the mouth when he lips were open. Even if Franklin hadn’t fallen out of his chair and cried like a little girl, I still would have gotten caught because I had neglected to wait until Mrs. Hallisworth had turned her back.

  “Anthony, did you just punch Franklin in the face?” she asked.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  After stammering, at a complete loss for words, she dismissed me to see Mr. Yongscolder. Mr. Yongscolder was pissed and called me a bully for punching a kid four years younger. He turned red and started sweating and even looked kind of pale and sick. I wanted to tell Mr. Yongscolder that I had demonstrated considerable restraint by waiting several weeks for Franklin’s insults to escalate and that, in a sense, Franklin was the one acting like a bully, but I was concerned by the way Mr. Yongscolder was clutching his chest. I decided anything I said would only make matters worse, and sat silently as Mr. Yongscolder passed down a sentence of ten days in-house suspension.