Rhubarb Read online

  Martin had outfitted the gray-on-gray interior with a steering wheel cover, a back-supporting seat cushion, a cup holder stuck in place with double-sided foam tape, and a Garmin GPS unit he’d bought with his own money. Martin had tried to get a couple of different places to replace the AM/FM radio, but no one would touch it because he wasn’t the official owner of the vehicle, not even when he offered the guy at Radio Shack forty bucks. Instead, Martin had mounted a SiriusXM radio and speakers in a homemade plywood box, held together with various FastNCo. fasteners, that sat on the passenger seat. Martin had had to do a little tinkering with the truck’s electrical system to make it work, but he could disconnect it in four minutes flat if his district manager ever showed up.

  Martin rolled into the parking lot of the Brixton Co-op shortly after one o’clock and stopped along the side of the building where Lester liked vendors to park, under the Purina and Monsanto signs. Martin loaded his folding cart with a couple of boxes each of 425s and 10478s. Ranchers chewed through those by the pound to repair fences, and Lester always needed more.

  The doorbell jangled as Martin wheeled the cart through the door. Cheryl glanced up from her paperback behind an enormous mechanical register. She still wore her red hoodie, but she’d changed into jeans. Lester didn’t make her wear a nametag. “Hey there,” she said. “How was your run this morning?”

  “Pretty good,” said Martin. He would have liked to go into detail, but he doubted that the mile or so of sweat, panting, and fending off an unfenced blue heeler would impress. She picked up the phone on the pole and pressed a number. Across the store, on the second floor, Lester turned around at his desk, peered down, and waved through the window.

  “Martin Wells from FastNCo. is here,” Cheryl said when he answered his phone.

  On a rack next to the register, near a spinner of cowboy-themed greeting cards, hung a dozen varieties of Jeffrey’s candy. Martin imagined Jeffrey smarming over the counter, showing off his whitened teeth and bragging about his prowess at taekwondo. Martin exchanged another polite smile with Cheryl. Jeffrey probably would have had her agreeing to an evening down in Billings, maybe Red Lobster, a 3-D movie at the new Shiloh 14. He’d arrange a room for her at the Crowne Plaza. Martin told himself to stop it. She’d never agree to that. Not with someone like Jeffrey. Not with anyone. If she could be wined and dined, someone would have done it by now.

  Cheryl went back to her book, but Martin couldn’t see the cover. He hoped he hadn’t left anything weird in the room for her to find—yesterday’s underwear, an unflushed toilet, kinky hairs in the shower. He could never be sure whether Cheryl, Pam, or Vonnie would clean his room, so he always rinsed out the tub, double-checked for belongings, hung his towels, and took his food trash out to the can in the lobby. He didn’t want Cheryl finding out how many Pop-Tarts or Pringles he ate in the middle of the night. But he also worried that she’d find him too neat, oddly fastidious, or serial-killerish. So he always made sure to leave the bed a mess, and to toss the TV remote casually on the nightstand.

  Lester, so bowlegged he walked with a cane, had been running the store longer than Martin had been alive. He liked to think he was one of a kind, that he ran the tightest ship around, but to Martin, he was one of a score of rural old-timer retailers still running ahead of the actuarial odds as if too busy for a funeral. Lester had bigger fish to fry. “I got a few returns,” he said, leading Martin away from Cheryl. “Ronnie’s boy Mike came in here last week with a couple bolts, heads broke clean off. Says there weren’t no torque on ’em at all.”

  “I’ll take a look,” said Martin. “I’m sure we can get you a credit.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” said Lester.

  The FastNCo. setup took up more than a third of one aisle with its array of little drawers, each with a picture and a list of specs on a card on the front. A few bins near the floor contained high-volume products and a scoop on a chain. A set of shelves held the boxed items. Lester tapped a few drawers. “I ain’t moved none of these in a few months. Maybe you got something else we can put in there instead?”

  Martin agreed to figure something out, opened the first drawer, and unholstered his PDA and scanning wand.

  From the FastNCo. procedural manual for area representatives:

  1. Make contact with the account holder. If the account has invoices outstanding, confirm that a payment plan has been established.

  2. At FastNCo. installation, take a general survey of the product presentation. Is the area tidy and organized? Is it free of competing products and easy for a customer to use?

  3. For each drawer:

  a. Scan product code into FASsys.

  b. Confirm that product matches PIC card. Remove inappropriate items and return items to their correct drawers.

  c. Weigh contents. (For products 1264-2350, hand count must be taken.)

  d. Record weight (or count).

  e. Restore product weight (or count) to specified inventory level for bin size.

  f. Confirm restoration of inventory with FASsys.

  4. For bulk products:

  a. Scan product code into FASsys. …

  Martin rose stiffly from neatening the hundred-count boxes of screws on the lower shelves and rubbed the small of his back. His early lunch had long abandoned him. Even Jeffrey’s no-brand candy sounded appetizing. Martin made a final check for loose product, hanging PIC cards, and general debris. He topped off the tray of paper sacks and hung a fresh pen on the string by the digital scale.

  “I suppose you need my signature,” Lester called from the end of the aisle, appearing as if he’d been watching Martin work. Which he probably had been.

  “The ol’ John Hancock,” said Martin. He’d printed out the long tape of the order on the little portable printer back in the truck. On his first visit, he’d tried to get Lester to sign on the PDA’s screen with the stylus and have an invoice emailed to him, but Lester had declared he’d be damned before he’d sign anything but paper.

  Lester scanned the three feet of receipt tape. “Six hundred and change. Sounds about right,” he said. He signed the bottom of the tape with his own pen on a nearby shelf. “I suppose you heard that fool on the radio last night.”

  “I did,” said Martin.

  “Well, don’t you go believin’ a word of it.” Lester traded the signed tape for a copy for his records. “Sure, Stamper built the truck stop after the war and made it a success, but he made the whole lot of us look like nincompoops—all that talk of aliens and flying saucers.”

  “So you’ve never seen anything strange?”

  “Bah,” said Lester, waving off the thought of it. “I only bring it up ’cause Cheryl doesn’t need the attention. She and her stepfather doin’ fine now.”

  “Churl?” Martin asked. “I mean, Cheryl?”

  Lester nodded gravely and lowered his voice. “Her mother used to work for Stamper at the diner. She got caught up in his tales. Right after Cheryl was born, she left Stewart and ran off to California with Cheryl’s real father, some deadbeat vagabond, traveling shyster salesman—no offense. She came back a couple years later, all messed up on drugs and who knows what, claiming she’d been abducted by Stamper’s aliens. A complete disgrace. God bless Stewart Campion. He settled in and raised Cheryl like she was his own. Now you see why I don’t want rumors getting started up again.”

  “No business of mine,” said Martin.

  “Good. Good. Where you off to now?”

  Martin tugged his emptied cart past the register as Cheryl cha-chinged up an order for a woman in mud-splattered boots. Who am I to her? Martin wondered. I’m the modern equivalent of the shyster who seduced her mother and ruined her life. I’m the guy she’s staying in Brixton to avoid. And what do I have to offer her that’s better than this? A one-bedroom apartment in the Billings Heights and twenty-four nights out of thirty out on the road? Plus, she had her stepfather to care for. Martin had heard that he was fighting cancer or something. He’d seen him in the co-op, ca
rrying an oxygen tank with a—what was it called?—a cannula cinched around his ears and under his nose.

  The doorbell jangled as Martin left, but Cheryl was busy punching numbers into the till. It was just as well.

  Chapter 3

  “You’re listening to the best of Beyond Insomnia with Lee Danvers on SiriusXM Channel 162. If you hear phone numbers in this rebroadcast, please do not call. Beyond Insomnia is broadcast live from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Sunday through Thursday and 10:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Friday and Saturday.”

  “Welcome back, Waker Nation. Lee Danvers coming from the BI Bunker somewhere out there. It’s been a strange show so far. Not at all what I had planned. Stepped out during the last break to see if it was a full moon. Feels like one of those nights. To fill you in, this strangeness started when I took a call from Frank in Joplin, Missouri, who announced that his name is not really Frank, but Tootex, and he’s a visitor from a civilization in the Rigel Cluster, an observer of our planet, and he has been compelled to break cover to warn us about the self-destructive path we’re taking as a species. An interesting conversation, to say the least. And he’s informed us that there are many other visitors on Earth right now. So I’ve tossed my plans for tonight’s show out the window and have opened the phone lines to visitors only. Any and all aliens, extraterrestrials, dimensional travelers, and time travelers are asked to call. We have a lot of questions for you. But be prepared. I want to know exactly where you’re from, how you arrived here, and the true purpose of your visit. 1-800-555-WAKE.

  “We’ll go right to it. El Cajon, California, you’re Beyond Insomnia.”

  “Hello, am I on?”

  “You’re on, caller.”

  “Oh, cool…”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dennis. At least that’s my Earth name.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “A planet in the Pleiades. It’s called Klipthon.”

  “Klipthon?”

  “It’s hard to say it right with a human mouth.”

  “You’re not human?”

  “I have a human form. But my people are more like lobsters.”

  “Lobsters.”

  “You could learn a lot from the lobsters here on your own planet.”

  “So how did you get to Earth, Dennis?”

  “A ship.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

  “It has a muto-fission drive.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  “It’s powered by mutating living fissionable matter. We breed it on Klipthon for ship fuel and to provide energy to our planet.”

  “Okay, we’ll go along with you on that one for now. Is that why you’ve come? To bring us this remarkable source of energy?”

  “No. We’re breeding you humans as food.”

  “Oh, my. That’s not very nice, Dennis. You know that we humans don’t take being eaten lightly. How many of you Klipthonians are here?”

  “It’s only me for now.”

  “One Klipthonian?”

  “When there are ten billion of you, the harvest will begin.”

  “And if we resist?”

  “Resistance is futile.”

  “Uh-huh. It’s my opinion that Jonathan Archer was undoubtedly the best captain of any Enterprise.”

  “You’re crazy, Lee. Archer and his cheese-farting beagle aren’t fit to lick Picard’s boo…”

  “And goodbye, Dennis. Nice try. Little Rock, you’re Beyond Insomnia.”

  “Hi, Lee, this is Naomini. And my home world is actually in another galaxy. It’s called Monhonia, and we are descendants of what you would call Atlanteans.”

  “As in people from Atlantis?”

  “Yes, that’s right. They left Earth almost fifteen thousand years ago and resettled on Monhonia. But before that they lived in a different galaxy.”

  “So how do you travel between galaxies?”

  “Reincarnation, Lee. It’s the only way. These other callers claiming they have ships are lying to you.”

  “So you have to die, and then what?”

  “Focusing crystals guide our souls to their next life. It’s so beautiful.”

  “You were born human?”

  “When I turned twenty-four, I became aware of my nature.”

  “It’s a one-way trip then? Or do you have a focusing crystal here on Earth to guide you back to your home world?”

  “We have a few crystals here.”

  “So there are more of you?”

  “I think there’s a few hundred of us, Lee. But most of us are pretty reclusive. I’ve never met any others, but I can feel them.”

  “And what are you doing in Little Rock? What’s your purpose for being on Earth?”

  “When our culture left, we accidently tore a hole in Gaia’s soul, allowing evil to take hold. It’s irreparable, but we meditate every day to keep evil from completely destroying all life here.”

  “Let me be the first to thank you for doing that.”

  “You’re kind to say so, but it’s what I was born to do.”

  “Are you married? Do you have children?”

  “Two beautiful little girls. I’m very blessed.”

  “Are they Atlanteans also, or Monhonians?”

  “No, they’re human. I’m the only one in my family.”

  “You say you can feel the others. Is there anyone we might be familiar with who is also a Monhonian?”

  “I’ve never met her, but I’m pretty sure Angelina Jolie is one of us.”

  “I don’t think I’d argue with that. Thanks for calling, Naomini, and thanks to all your people for holding the soul of our planet together. More wake-up calls after this break.”

  ~ * * * ~

  Martin tucked his phone between his cheek and shoulder and opened his freezer. The cool air felt good. He’d spent the afternoon loading a new shipment into his storage unit and restocking the truck. He’d rather be in the shower than talking to Rick, but when Rick called, Rick—the FastNCo. district manager for the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies—must be talked to.

  “Got to talk to you about your expense reports,” said Rick. “Now, I’m talking to everyone, not just you. But the fact is you’ve got one of the highest sales volume to expense ratios, not just in my district, but in the whole company.”

  “I’ve also got one of the lowest-density territories in the country,” said Martin. “We’ve discussed this. Other reps get three, four, accounts in one town, with towns a half-hour apart. I get one account per town, towns two hours apart. It’s simple math.”

  “I know, I know,” said Rick. “But management’s coming down on everyone…” Martin dug a box of DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizza out of the freezer and shut the door with his elbow. He tore off the perforated strip and shook the disc onto his counter. “…wanting to cut overnight stays by forty to fifty percent across the board.”

  “Impossible,” said Martin, setting the oven for 400 degrees. He ripped open the plastic wrapper. His cookie sheet was still in the sink from his last meal at home. He gave it a quick wipe with a paper towel. “They can’t reasonably expect me to drive home every night, or even half the nights. If I’m lucky I get to three, maybe four, accounts in a day outside the Billings, Bozeman, and Great Falls areas. If I have to start out from home every day, that number drops to one, maybe two. It can’t be done. Perhaps back East they don’t understand that this is a huge state. Can we explain that a town like Plentywood is a seven-hour drive from Billings?” He slammed the oven on his pizza.

  “I’m sure we can trim some fat. I’m reviewing your March expenses now. You spent three nights at the Brixton Inn, but you only called on the Brixton Co-op once.”

  “It’s a junction town, Rick. It’s a central starting place to cover a lot of the northern and eastern part of the state. It’s also about half the price of places in Great Falls. Don’t the money guys take that into consideration?”

  “I don’t know wha
t to tell you, Marty,” Rick said. Martin cringed. Rick was the only person in the world who called him “Marty.” “Something needs to give.”

  How about the fact that if I drove a big rig, I’d be violating federal law with the hours I put out on the road for you and FastNCo.? It might not be constructive to say that out loud.

  “Any cutback means I get into accounts less frequently. I’m already pushing it to stay on a forty-day cycle,” Martin said.

  “If a few more of your accounts would commit to the Triple-P installation, maybe we could stretch that out to a fifty- or even sixty-day rotation.” The Premiere Product Partner rack took up ten more linear feet and pushed six inches deeper into the aisle than the traditional unit.

  “I hard sold it to everyone,” Martin lied. He hadn’t even bothered to mention it to most of his accounts. “But these are small stores. Tight aisles. They can’t give up any more floor space.”

  “Do you have your expense reports handy?” asked Rick.

  When Rick had been finally, albeit temporarily, placated, Martin closed his laptop, stripped off his damp, stiff clothes, and got in the shower. A few minutes later, he heard the beeping.

  Smoke billowed out of the oven. Water dripped on the linoleum. He had to let his towel go to use both hands to take the battery out of the smoke detector. After he got dressed and opened some windows, he dumped the charred pizza in the trash and dropped the trash in the Dumpster on his way to Sonic, or maybe Wendy’s. No, Sonic had those giant slushes.

  ~ * * * ~

  “Randy Coburn is a physicist and author who worked with JPL on the Voyager missions and has consulted with NASA on several projects, but he’s known internationally for his recent research on the Nazca Lines of Peru. Welcome, Randy Coburn, to Beyond Insomnia.”

  “Thank you, Lee. It’s an honor to be on the show.”

  “I had the pleasure to introduce you at this year’s WakerCon. And we had a great response from your talk there. So it’s great to have you on now, and I hope we can get you back to WakerCon next year in Cincinnati.”