He checked the time on the kiosks Coke clock. His mother would be back from Boston by now, had to be, or else shed miss one of her favorite soaps. New hole in her head. She was crazy anyway, nothing wrong with the socket shed had since before he was born, but shed been whining for years about static and resolution and sensory bleedover, so shed finally swung the credit to go to Boston for some cheapass replacement. Kind of place where you dont even get an appointment for an operation. Walk in and they just slap it in your head... He knew her, yeah, how shed come through the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi, soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode, shed drool a little. About every twenty minutes shed man-age to remember to take a ladylike nip out of the bottle.
Shed always been that way, as long as he could remember her, gradually sliding deeper into her half-dozen synthetic jives, sequential simstim fantasies Bobby had had to hear about all his life. He still harbored creepy feelings that some of the characters she talked about were relatives of his, rich and beautiful aunts and uncles who might turn up one day if only he werent such a little shit. Maybe, he thought now, it had been true, in a way; shed jacked that shit straight through the pregnancy, because shed told him she had, so he, fetus Newmark, curled up in there, had reverberated to about a thousand hours of People of Importance and Atlanta. But he didnt like to think about being curled up in Marsha Newmarks belly. It made him feel sweaty and kind of sick
Marsha-momma. Only in the past year or so had Bobby come to understand the world well enough as he now saw it to wonder exactly how she still managed to make her way in it, marginal as that way had become, with her bottle and the socket ghosts to keep her company. Sometimes, when she was in a certain mood and had had the right number of nips, she still tried to tell him stories about his father. Hed known since age four that these were bullshit, because the details changed from time to time, but for years hed allowed himself a certain pleasure in them anyway.
He found a loading bay a few blocks west of Leons, screened from the street by a freshly painted blue dumpster, the new paint gleaming over pocked, dented steel. There was a single halogen tube slung above the bay. He found a comfortable ledge of concrete and sat down there, careful not to jar the Ono-Sendai. Sometimes you just had to wait. That was one of the things Two-a-Day had taught him.
The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of industrial scrap. Barrytown had its share of gray-legal manufacturers, part of the shadow economy the news faces liked to talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news faces. Biz. It was all just biz.
Moths strobed crooked orbits around the halogen tube. Bobby watched blankly as three kids, maybe ten at the oldest, scaled the blue wall of the dumpster with a length of dirty white nylon line and a makeshift grapple that might once have been part of a
coatrack. When the last one made it over the top, into the mess of plastic scrap, the line was drawn swiftly up. The scrap began to creak and rustle.
Just like me, Bobby thought, I used to do that shit, fill my room up with weird garbage Id find. One time Ling Warrens sister found most of somebodys arm, all wrapped in green plastic and done up with rubber bands.
Marsha-mommad get these two-hour fits of religion some-times, come into Bobbys room and sweep all his best garbage out and gum some God-awful self-adhesive hologram up over his bed. Maybe Jesus, maybe Hubbard, maybe Virgin Mary, it didnt much matter to her when the mood was on her. It used to piss Bobby off real good, until one day he was big enough to walk into the front room with a ballpeen hammer and cock it over the Hitachi; you touch my stuff again and Ill kill your friends, Mom, all of em. She never tried it again. But the stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt hed considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasnt one of them, so he didnt.
Now one of the dumpster kids popped up and conducted a slit-eyed survey of the immediate area, then ducked out of sight again. There was a clunking, scraping sound. Small white hands tipped a dented alloy canister up and over the edge, lowering it on the nylon line. Good score, Bobby thought; you could take the thing to a metal dealer and get a little for it. They lowered the thing to the pavement, about a meter from the soles of Bobbys boots; as it touched down, it happened to twist around, showing him the six horned symbol that stood for biohazard. Hey, fuck, he said, drawing his feet up reflexively.
One of them slid down the rope and steadied the canister. The other two followed. He saw that they were younger than hed thought.