The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun (3 page)

The goodie said, “There you are, sonny. You’re next,” winked at Julian and went back to his own place in line.

The ticket seller, without looking up, intoned automatically, “Where to?”

Julian asked, “How much is it to W-W-Washington?”

Julian’s stammer was another tribute to the overwhelming eminence and importance of his father, who, as sales manager of the Dale Aircraft Company, president of the Rotary, and co-owner of the San Diego Bullets, the pro football team, was always holding meetings, being interviewed and having his picture in the papers.

The ticket seller replied, “One way, hundred and five, fifteen, and round trip, one ninety-nine, sixty. What’ll it be?”

Julian said, “One way, please,” and handed over six brand new twenty-dollar bills.

The ticket seller snapped the bills into his cash drawer, stamped the ticket and with the change, shoved it on to the counter and then, for the first time looking up, was startled to see no one there. Or, at least so it seemed for an instant until he observed the top of Julian’s head and half of his bespectacled eyes just showing over the counter. Ordinarily this would not have worried him since there was nothing in the table of organization of his company that forbade selling a ticket to anyone who could pay for it. But taken thus by surprise, he inquired, “Say, sonny, you all by yourself?”

Julian felt a cold surge of panic. Was this then so soon to be the end to the grand design? Adults lived by rules and regulations and laws and things that were mostly forbidden and one of them might be for a nine and a half, almost ten-year-old boy to travel unaccompanied.

The cowboy, the ill-smelling baddie, was standing, shifting and shuffling impatiently behind him. Julian looked about and saw the special policeman, but he was occupied talking to one of the pretty girls in the information booth and then he caught sight of the mother with the family.

Julian shook his head in negation and replied, “No, s-s-sir. Thank you.” He took his ticket and change and beneath the eyes of the ticket seller wandered quietly over and joined the group of children.

The curiosity of the ticket seller was satisfied, besides which Sam Wilks was at the window saying impatiently, “El Paso, one way and shake it up, will you.”

The ticket seller reacted to Wilks, “You’ve got all the time in the world, bud. Relax. El Paso, one way. Thirty-nine, fifteen.”

Julian wanted to talk to one of the boys and find out where they were going, but thought he had better not attract attention, at which point the mother went into her count again and when, having included Julian, she had reached the eighth finger, her countenance reflected such horror and incipient panic that Julian thought he had better go. He sauntered away, his last glimpse being of the woman at the finish of her recount and the look of relief on her face as she was able to stop at seven.

Marge and Bill were waiting beneath the electronic bulletin board for the bus to be called when Marge queried, “Why did you say El Paso, Bill?”

Bill replied, “I dunno. When he asked me I just couldn’t think. I had to say something. But we can get off any place that looks nice. It’ll be okay.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he asked, “What did you tell your mother?”

“I said I was staying with Dottie. You?”

Bill said, “I told ’em I was going fishing with Chuck and that we’d probably camp out.”

All the old fears and doubts came back to Marge and she said, “What we’re doing isn’t right, is it?”

It was what Bill needed to bolster up his own failing courage—opposition. The female eternally changing. He said, “Gosh, Marge, I thought we talked all that out, didn’t we? It’s all different today. Nobody really cares what you do. We both want to, don’t we? We both know each other. It isn’t like we just met or anything.”

Marge again was relieved to find what seemed like strength to her and whispered, “If you say so, Bill.”

The electric sign on the bulletin board blinked their departure time and the loudspeaker, from on high, confirmed, “Bus three nine six for Tucson, El Paso, Dallas, Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and Washington, DC, immediate boarding Gate Nine.”

Bill looked down upon the girl and felt stirred. He whispered, “All right, Marge?”

“All right, Bill.”

The portals of Gate Nine now acted like the aperture of a vacuum cleaner sucking in passengers from various parts of the waiting-room, twenty-nine assorted men, women, children, including the
dramatis personae
whose lives Julian was to alter.

The special policeman wandered over and stood casually by the gate. Sam Wilks was the first one through, one hand tucked inside his leather jacket. The next few seconds would tell one way or the other. But the Special now merely glanced at him, reflecting the disfavour he had registered earlier. He was obviously a cowpoke out of a job and on the bum. Wilks passed through the gate and removed his hand from inside his coat. Then his description had not yet been broadcast. But it might be at any moment. They would probably be looking for him at the border at Tijuana, but once on the bus he could still pull it off.

Allon had pushed to where he was right behind the colonel and the colonel knew it. Now it would be difficult for Sisson to accomplish his mission. This sort of business was not his scene and he wondered and worried how he was to go about it.

Marge and Bill played the honeymoon couple to perfection. Bill had his arm about her waist and Marge glanced shyly down at the wedding ring.

Frank Marshall went through with a jaunty swing of his shoulders. So long, California, hello, Washington. Here comes Marshall.

Milo Balzare carried his instrument case hugged to his chest as though it were a baby.

Julian hung back. The special policeman and the gateman frightened him. What would happen when he produced his ticket? And always at the back of his head had been the worry that sometimes as she did in the night, his mother might have gone into his room to see whether he was all right, found him missing and given the alarm. His fears were unrealized. The big fat cop smiled pleasantly at him, the gateman punched his ticket and as he had done already two dozen times, repeated, “Watch your step. All aboard, please.”

The bus was clean and shiny and smelled of new car, plastic, metal and polish. Where one entered at the front door was a kind of a well with eight seats, four on each side behind the driver and looking out through the front windshield. From them there would be a wonderful view of rolling up the carpet of the road ahead, but because Julian had not pushed to the fore, these seats were already taken. Then there were three steps up into the main body of the bus where the seats, two on each side, were divided by a central aisle and, of course, all the up front ones, too, were occupied. The baddie was in one of them in the very front row and Julian wrinkled his nose as he caught the odour. A few seats behind he recognized the man who had forgotten his briefcase. Julian had to keep on down the aisle to look for an empty seat. He came upon the young man, the goodie who had performed the strange action of protecting Julian’s place in line. He was sitting on the aisle and Julian wished he might be next to him but the window seat already had a passenger. The goodie was absorbed in his paperback and didn’t even notice him. But, across from him there was an empty seat next to a man sitting by the window. The man was well dressed and looked clean.

Julian asked politely, “Can I sit here?”

Clyde Gresham turned to examine Julian. He said, “What? Why sure, sonny, make yourself at home. Here, how would you like to sit by the window so that you can look out?” He got up and stepped into the aisle so that Julian could squeeze past him. “Let me take your bag.” He stowed it away as Julian settled into the window seat and Gresham occupied the other. His voice was filled with paternal oiliness as he asked, “There, how’s that?”

Julian replied, “G-g-great. Thanks.”

Gresham gave Julian a benevolent smile. “Not at all, not at all.” He was unaware that the young man across the way had momentarily lowered the book in which he was engaged and was looking at him and that look was not exactly pleasant. Gresham was smiling down at Julian with the warm fondness of one who seemed to like children.

Looking towards the front of the bus, Julian saw a man in the uniform of a bus dispatcher appear to make a last-minute check of the passengers. The driver was already at his wheel. Julian suddenly thought, was he being looked for? Alarmed, he slouched down in his seat but the dispatcher’s practised eye had taken in the number of seats occupied, which tallied with the ticket count, and was satisfied. It was all over in a second and the only one who had noticed was Frank Marshall who had dropped his book again to steal another look at Clyde Gresham and had observed Julian’s action, and he wondered. And after he had thought that there was nothing all that extraordinary in these times about a kid that age travelling by himself, he also thought that nobody ever got hurt minding his own business, and, returning to his book, let Miss Christie set her hook into him more firmly.

The dispatcher gave the driver the thumbs-up sign and left the bus, and the latter, working his lever, slid the hydraulic doors shut. He then picked up one of two microphones, the one communicating with the headquarters of the company, the other being for talking to his passengers, and speaking into it, said, “Three nine six, three nine six leaving San Diego on time. On time out of San Diego. 3.10 a.m.”

In the huge dispatcher’s office of the bus company centred in Oklahoma City where a constant check was kept on all buses on the road, an operator heard the radio message in his earphones and spoke into his own chest microphone as he noted the time and the number on a pad, “Okay, three nine six. Take it away, Mike. Gimme a call from Yuma.”

The bus driver returned his microphone to the hook, picked up the one for interior communication and said, “Okay, folks, settle back. We’re off.” He trod on his clutch, dropped smoothly into gear and moved his bus off into the night.

C H A P T E R
3

T
he bus passed through the business district of San Diego, thence out past the factories and finally into the dark countryside eerily lit by a waning moon, which threw its varying patterns of lights and shadows on the window through which Julian peered, still buoyed up by the excitement of his successful escape. The most difficult part, perhaps, of his project had been realized. There was no way for his family to stop him now.

Thinking back about them he saw them, curiously, as actors in an old-fashioned silent film moving jerkily and hysterically about in the wake of his defection.

If the impressions that parents actually made upon their children could be fully expressed by them, adults would be appalled by not only the penetration, but the distortion. Size has a great deal to do with it, plus the fact that a child’s world knows no boundaries and may consist largely of fantasies and exaggerations.

There had been a spate of revivals of old-fashioned silent movies complete with piano and drum accompaniment the past few months on television, and the films had become a cult amongst the young. The interplay of light and shade upon the bus turned it in Julian’s mind into the picture tube. His imagination kindled rapidly and it was in those terms that Julian now reviewed the events leading up to his present situation. The dialogue he saw in the form of sub-titles flashing across the screen.

The fact of the matter was that Aldrin West was over-worked and over-harassed by the demands of the era with insufficient time to devote to all his interests, as well as his family. Still, with all these handicaps he tried to be a reasonably good father. But that was not the way Julian saw it. Ellen West, his mother, tended to over-react and over-protect Julian which completed his thoughts as to his family. He felt neglected by the one and smothered by the other.

The film began with Julian watching himself enter his father’s study where Aldrin West was seen clad in striped trousers and cutaway coat at his desk heaped with papers, and speaking into two telephones at the same time. The striped trousers and cutaway, of course, were no part of West’s wardrobe that Julian had ever seen but that was how important businessmen in the silent movies were always dressed. In the film Julian was clutching the diagram of his invention and he now filled the bus window with the first speech title.

“
DAD, CAN I SPEAK TO YOU
?”

Even at his desk his father loomed large and menacingly over him. To children all grown-ups must be either friendly giants or ogres. Mr. West hung up the two receivers and glared at him. “
WELL, WHAT DO YOU WANT
?”

Julian held out his diagram, “
LOOK, DAD, I HAVE INVENTED A BUBBLE GUN.
”

Julian’s movie was going well and he showed some technical knowledge for he now saw a close-up of his father’s face looking down angrily and laughing sarcastically. “
HA-HA. WHAT GOOD IS THAT
?”

Julian cut in his own face in close-up too. “
I WILL MAKE A LOT OF MONEY WITH IT.
”

In the silence everyone seemed to move rather jerkily and there was no mistaking the emotions of a character, so Julian’s father first clapped a hand to his brow and then tore his hair, “
OH, FOR GOD
’
S SAKE, CAN
’
T YOU SEE I
’
M BUSY
?”

In Julian’s mind the piano and drum hotted up here, “
BUT LOOK, DAD, I
’
M GOING TO MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS.
”

To a crashing of chords and a long drum roll Mr. West arose and pointed dramatically to the door, “
WELL THEN, COME BACK WHEN YOU
’
VE GOT THE MILLION DOLLARS AND STOP BOTHERING ME NOW.
”

Crestfallen, Julian watched himself creep from the room. He also knew how and when to use a dissolve. He dissolved now to a title reading, “
JULIAN
’
S BEDROOM—MORNING
”.

He listened with satisfaction to the excitement music (deedle deedle dum, deedle deedle dum, deedle, deedle, deedle, deedle, deedle deedle dum) as his mother entered in her dressing-gown and then as she saw the bed unslept in and the note pinned to the pillow, registered anguish, fright and despair. Julian was not quite certain how to get the latter across in addition to her waving her arms about and so he used a title, “
SCREAM
!”