The Wormters Read online

as you should.

  I stared at his hand for a moment before I reached out with my right hand and shook it awkwardly.

  “I met you at-”

  “Yes, the flea market,” he said as he walked past me into the living room and waited, ready to sit down on my couch. “May I?” he asked, and hovered.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, breaking the trance in which I had been caught.

  “You, sir, selflessly came to the aid of a fellow human being yesterday and today you will begin to reap the benefits of said act.” He slid two long tubes from his pea coat, fumbling them with his injured hand before holding them up. “Blueprints.” He set one tube on the couch beside him and opened the other, sliding the rolled contents into his good hand. He dropped the empty vessel at his feet and unrolled his blueprint on my table. “I studied subatomic structures and molecular engineering at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology until they kicked me out for being “excitable.” He did the quotes in the air thing with his gloved hand as he said it. “Then I was employed by a government think tank that specialized in interpreting global crisis and preparing accordingly. Regardless of what anybody says, I was the one that chose to leave that over-rated, overcautious band of hippies. Anyway, these drawings and writings show the cost efficient description and method, chemical breakdown, and procedural direction for turning used tires back into perfectly good rubber for manufacturing goods.”

  “Don’t we already recycle the rubber from tires?”

  “We pretend that it is barely cost efficient to do so, so that certain parties can collect billions of dollars a year to dispose of them. Tires can be recycled more efficiently than aluminum. Do you have to pay anyone to take your aluminum cans?”

  I shook my head.

  “How about gold or silver?”

  I shook my head again.

  “There are presently five governments attempting to discover my whereabouts so that they can obtain these two documents. Those governments have been unable to track me because I travel light and hide in plain sight, precisely where they never think to look – oh, and I wear a protective spray that I invented that makes the satellites unable to pick up my image. Our government can do all kinds of things from those satellites. They even have laser guns out in space that are synched up with the satellites so that they can zap you with their kill ray from way above the earth. If they had their chance that’s just what they’d do to me. I’m considered to be too dangerous to be allowed to live. Can you imagine titling anyone that way? Turnabout is fair play, as they say. I can also hack into the government’s satellites and watch them like they watch you. I’m always one step ahead of them.”

  He had the gleam in his eyes that God reserves for those that are two hundred percent insane, a warning as hard to miss as a neon sign.

  “This is the other invention that they’re interested in stealing. He held up the other tube that had been lying on the floor. The formula and instruction for a hybrid steel that is molecularly bonded using an electromagnet field and rapidly changing temperatures that produces a product that is fifty fold in durability of that of the existing products. You can look at these blueprints more closely if you want but it might just be a bunch of mumbly jumbly to you.” He dropped the second tube beside him on the couch without bothering to open it. “What was the first thing that you noticed about me when you laid eyes on me at the flea market?”

  “Your broken finger.”

  “No. Something prominent.”

  “The broken finger.”

  “No. It was my round face. No one can achieve the highest position of power in this country when they have a round face. Were you aware of that?”

  “You mean to be the president?”

  He paused for a moment, wincing, as though my question was dumb enough to cause him pain. It passed and he proceeded.

  “Consider Karl Rove, Jeff.”

  “The Architect?”

  “Yes. George W’s right hand man. He was obviously smarter than the President but he was not in charge. Why do you suppose?”

  “Unlike Karl Rove’s family, the Bush family had a long time association with politics and a boatload of money to back George JR.”

  “One might be prone to assume the obvious but no. George has an angular face like his father while Karl’s face is as round as a balloon. Do you know why the people of this nation never want to see a round faced man at the helm, Jeff?”

  “No.”

  “Because subconsciously they see a round faced man as a baby. Nobody wants a baby running things. Babies do silly things that don’t make sense to grownups. Even shit their pants.”

  “I don’t think that babies soil themselves because they are being silly.”

  “You’re getting away from the point, Jeff.”

  “Which is?”

  “You. “You have an angular face, Jeff. I noticed it right away upon our first meeting.”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yes, yesterday.” He took the blueprint and other papers from the table and returned them to the tube. Then he held up both tubes. “I have the brains to run our partnership and you and your angular face would make the perfect puppet for public consumption. What do you say?”

  “A job as a puppet. Well, I am out of work at the moment.”

  “Then it’s a deal. I’ve got business in India and a couple of other countries before we can really get started but I’ll be in contact from time to time, laying low, protecting our interests from the shadows. From this point forth I’ve got your back.” He headed for the door but turned and walked back toward me. I stood up. He put both hands on my shoulders and looked at me earnestly. “I think that I mentioned before that I don’t carry currency on me, the danger, the germs, the diversion from more important thought that it causes. Do you think that I could get a couple of bucks for bus fare and to grab a sandwich on the way? I promise that I’ll repay you from our future profits.”

  I nodded and gave him the ones from my wallet. I took a deep breath as soon as he was out of my sight.

  I put the house on the market, found a trailer for rent in the paper, and called my brother Joe to help me move out the very next day.

  My first night at Pyle’s I sat on the deck attached to the side of my trailer drinking a beer and watching two strippers roll around punching each other in front of LA BIRDS while a mob of patrons cheered them on. A thirty something bleach-blond in a pair of cutoffs and a Packers t-shirt sauntered up and knocked on the railing of the deck.

  “Who is it?’ I called out, as if I were inside the trailer.

  “It’s me. Your neighbor Jenny, and I’m really thirsty. Can I come in?”

  I waved her up and she stepped on to the deck and grabbed a beer from the cooler before sitting in the other lawn chair.

  “Just relaxing, watching the wildlife out here in the woods tonight?”

  “I am. The dark haired girl has been on the bottom for the majority of the fight but the tall redhead looks as though she may be tuckering out a bit. Keep an eye on the dark haired girl. You’ll see. Fights are won with endurance.”

  The two girls continued to roll back and forth while the people from LA BIRDS hooted and hollered.

  Suddenly the redhead, now on the bottom, searching the ground for a rock with her hand, found it, and smacked the dark haired girl in the head. The dark haired girl stopped struggling and toppled from her. The redhead got up from the ground, adjusted her boots and halter top, and returned to the bar.

  “Fights are won with rocks,” corrected Jenny, and tipped her beer to me. The mob left the girl lying there near the entrance to the parking lot and filtered back into the club. “Somebody better come out and drag the body off to the side before a car hits it. Hate to see her screw up a perfectly good alignment.”

  “You’re obviously a very considerate person, Jenny.”

  “I think about other people.”

  “I’m going to go check on her,” I said, getting up and walking toward LA BIRDS. “Yo
u go inside and call the cops and an ambulance,” I yelled over my shoulder as I started to jog. Before I got half way there the dark haired girl got up, pulled her short skirt back down so that it covered her panties, flipped open a tiny mirror that she seemingly produced out of thin air, messed with her makeup, and then spotted me coming. She slipped the mirror under her skirt and then she gave me the finger with both hands before walking back into the club. I ambled back to my deck and sat down again, slightly dejected.

  “You didn’t call the cops, did you, Jenny?”

  “I’m a native. I know this jungle.”

  “We should still do something about what just happened.”

  “The sensitive type,” she said, and smirked.”There’s nothing to do. It was sweet of you to see if she was still breathing.” She got up from the chair and started walking away. “Thanks for the beer, neighbor,” she said as she disappeared.

  The next day I applied for a job at the nearby taco plant. The sign above the plant read BELL TACO TACO PLANT. While I filled out an application I asked the receptionist why the sign didn’t just read BELL TACO PLANT. She explained that Bell Taco was the name of the company and that this was the taco plant as opposed to their shipping station down the road where the sign read BELL TACO SHIPPING STATION. After I was hired I learned that all of the locals had wondered the same thing at one point, which earned the plant the nickname Taco Taco.

  After a couple of months at the taco plant I got real comfortable. At first I was awkward, breaking as