Down Jersey Drive-shaft

Chapter Seventeen: Scratching Metallic Skin

Blood stains are constellations forming Orion on the office floor. Benny sees stars sitting in Traveler Coursey's shell-shocked chair. He remains so for minutes, for hours. Insomnia is his closest pal, in a popularity contest against Mister Migraine. Migraine wins the gold medal, and brings a gift basket of neck pains and remorse. About the only thing he's accomplished is tacking on a new office door.

What was I thinking? The blues play on, Al Jolson like. He'd kill for some Chopin right now, but he never brought any tunes out of Pleasantville.

Some time earlier he received the word from Doctor Wentz:

"...the short of it is, Jack's dead, Coursey driven away to Salem Hospital, condition critical but the opportunity for full recovery high. I...did everything for Jack. But the gaping wounds and blood loss...if I wasn't distracted from Bay One by your, your, murderous rampage, this wouldn't have--!" Her hand ended the rant as it left quite the Bronx impression across the captain's face.

That talk had been much longer, and her own face actually lost a shade of gorgeous in the lengthy discussion. Medical terms. Death. Death. Grim Reaper. Part of Haskins' brain went on automatic acceptance, taking in casualty reports just like in the First War. The other half dwelt on the Traveler.

Heh. Sent the bum to the same Hell as...

Back to the present.

Thoughts rally before being scattered by superior forces, the new information of the current day. Wake up! Gotta get serious! Nurse Lyle's appearance triggered an avalanche in Benjamin Haskins earlier. It's a gentle snowfall now. Lifetime of pain vanished faster than a scared rabbit. Funny how things work.

War takes precedence. Shootings. Bobby drowning. Crying. Bloody fists. But, even here it's as much about the past as the present, déja vu. Can't dodge it. Can't decipher it either.

On the floor, a mess of government data calls to him from the red stars. In the fog of pain, Benny sees these papers for the first time, and wonders if they might be relevant.

Collecting each one adds years to Benny's life, but eventually he picks at them and flips across pages of the Traveler's red file, a shredded survivor of redacted nonsense and bloody butterfly smears. Benny creases pages, tries in vain to read what lies under black marker. Even the top secret file keeps secrets. Head throbs. But he gets enough to know that Coursey, and Special Technologies, has known too much for too long. This is not another file for building robots. A newspaper clipping clinches it:

DELAWARE SPIDERS LOST IN FERRY ACCIDENT

Larry got the year wrong, it's really from 1919, May 9th. Benny remembers it now, because it was local, one of the few things that year to distract his attention from more personal issues. The Spiders were a brand spanking new baseball club, one he liked. Sparky Doggett. Man, what a hitter! He could've went pro, Phillies for sure.
Their owner, Mickey Sills, wanted to get the First State into the Majors, for money, of course. Mick came out of Bridgeton, New Jersey, an old man from the early ball clubs before cushy gloves and litany of rules.

That meant he had played poor, retired poor.

He got some decent players for the Spiders, even a half Chinese catcher out of Newark (Choo? Chow? Brain hurts too much!), made small connections but never got them outside the Tri-State Area. Banging bats and heads upside walls. However, he did succeed in getting the Spiders well known on the Down Jersey side, playing against Negro League teams in Atlantic City and Camden. The club waltzed through Salem a few times.

That's where it went wrong. Packed on the ferry headed back to Delaware, the old ship fell victim to an explosion as it neared Pea Patch Island. The big boom put fine slices into the thick wall of Fort Delaware, but main detail was the Spiders were dead and gone. End of story.