Trophy Grove Page 19

  Chapter 14 – No Appetite for Pageant Queens

  “Listen, Zane. It’s Harold calling again. We’re all real excited back at the home office to see the copy you’re no doubt soon going to be sending us from the Gamma Block Sunscreen bikini pageant out there on the Luminous Moon resorts. All the boys in the office would sacrifice their yearly salaries for seat at those stages. I’m sure you’re having one hell of a time, just like in the old days. Everyone’s dying to read what you come up with. Just don’t keep all the depressed masses waiting too long, Zane.”

  I’m staring all bug-eyed at the ceiling of my hotel room as my editor leaves still another message on my interplanetary phone inquiring about my status on the Luminous Moon. He doesn’t have the balls anymore to push too hard. Everyone back on Earth is desperate for all the stories I can sell them since my piece about Teddy Jackson’s expedition upon Tybalt went through the atmosphere and made Harold Higgins and myself very wealthy men. Harold knows he can’t test me too much and risk giving me a reason to go knocking on the office doors of any of his competitors. Poor Harold still thinks I’ve got the least bit of desire to write anymore, and he’s likely losing sleep over the thought of my prose going to some other tabloid, though I’ve already made him so much coin. Harold won’t dare send some rookie reporter all the way out to the Luminous Moon resorts to salvage whatever story he can about the Gamma Block Sunscreen bikini contest. Harold knows that his chances of ever receiving a story from me have turned very slim in this second week beyond the copy’s deadline, but he won’t fuel a scandal by putting my name on some rube’s attempts to emulate my style. I’m too eccentric for that. I’ve got a real problem with the drugs, drink and, most of all, the fear. But no one writes like me.

  I suppose I’ve put old Harold Higgins in a bad spot. Truth is, I didn’t even bother attending the Gamma Block Sunscreen bikini extravaganza the Luminous Moon resorts host each year for the benefit of the skin tabloid and virtual pleasure pot industry. I didn’t so much as bother to watch the live broadcast of the pageant the resorts beam onto every glowing monitor screen. I just don’t have any appetite for curves and trophies anymore.

  What I do have an appetite for is the pure speedball perfume so readily available everywhere on the Luminous Moon resorts, a world that thrives on putting every thrill, regardless of legality, within a visitor’s reach. I don’t want to throw any of the eye powder from the monks of the Ark Levant into my face, because the only visions that drug now delivers me are tainted by an orange tint I first spied in Tybalt’s grove. I don’t dare sip the bourbon, because the good, old strong stuff too easily sends me into dreams crowded with nightmares. So I go all in with the speedball perfume, and I spray it really thick onto my cheeks and chest so that the fumes flow nice and easy into my nostrils and keep my heart racing on the brink of explosion until my bed sheets are soaked in sweat. Thanks to that speedball perfume, I haven’t slept in five days.

  A knock on my resort door nearly sends me into cardiac arrest, and I leap beneath my bed for cover.

  “What do you want?” I scream at the door, my words racing as result of my perfume high.

  Another slow and kind voice of the resorts’ many servants answers. “Special delivery, Mr. Thomas.”

  “Leave it at the door!”

  “Afraid I can’t do that this time,” the voice returns. “It’s a special package sent from a Mr. Higgins. I can’t leave until I get your signature, Mr. Thomas.”

  “You’re going to be standing at the door for a very long time.”

  “I’ve also got a new bottle of that perfume you’ve been enjoying, Mr. Thomas.”

  I can’t resist that offer, and so I come out from beneath the bed and unlock my resort room’s door to find another one of the busboys dressed in the standard crimson and red monkey suit grinning at me.

  “It really is you,” the young man stares at my face, and I doubt he notices how swollen and irritated my eyes have turned on account of all the speedball perfume, or how my face sports the shadow and stubble of a week-old beard.

  “It’s the true me. Zane Thomas in the flesh.”

  I grab at the bottle of perfume the busboy holds, but the young man hides it behind his back before my hands, shaking from so much of the drug, can clutch the offering. Instead, the busboy hands me a large envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “According to the special delivery ticket, the envelope holds the first photographs printed of the Gamma Block Suncreen bikini finalists,” answers the busboy. “I wasn’t sure if I could make it all the way to your room without breaking upon that envelope’s seal and peeking at all those pictures. No one but the photographers and the pageant organizers have so much as glanced at those photos. All those pictures must be incredible. The girls keep getting hotter and hotter with every year of the pageant.”

  My shoulders slump as I accept the envelope. I’m sure Harold Higgins has a good idea that I didn’t bother to attend the bikini pageant. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he’s been checking up on my activities since I arrived at the Luminous Moon. It wouldn’t surprise me if Harold’s invested a tiny fraction of his massive fortune to grease the gears so that the busboy dressed in crimson and gold who stands in front of me delivers those photographs so much of the settled galaxy is anxious to see. Harold’s hoping that those glossy photographs will get my words flowing onto the page, that they’ll be enough of a motivation to cover pageant with another bestseller. Harold certainly knows my absence from the festivities will do nothing to decrease my chances for success. He knows that I don’t have to report the truth, and that he doesn’t need to publish it. Harold knows he only needs to give his hungry subscribers what they want to hear.

  Harold Higgins should also know better than to bother sending a busboy with an envelope of skin pics and a bottle of whatever drug is currently gripping me to my hotel door. I told Harold I was finished with the entire tabloid business when I finally gave him the fictional account of my safari on Tybalt with Teddy and Marlena Jackson that he wanted. I promised Harold I wouldn’t write another feature for him after he made me burn all those pages upon which I tried to scribe the truth of the grove that devoured our hunting party. Dr. Amberson was correct. In the end, I wrote the story all those hungry subscribers wanted. In the end, I wrote a fantasy about a paradise that doesn’t exist. In the end, I didn’t write a single word about the grove’s appetite for faces. In the end, I simply created a fictional story that would assure every reader that his or her assumption and belief concerning Tybalt had always, of course, been true. And in the end, I was made a very wealthy man for doing so.

  I scribble a laugh of a signature on the delivery form the busboy gives me, but I grunt when the busboy hesitates to give me that bottle of perfume.

  “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Thomas, but I was hoping you might sign something else for me,” smiles the busboy. “I’m your biggest fan. I’ve been following you long before you wrote your masterpiece about Tybalt. I’ve ready everything you’ve ever penned about mudders. I even write a little myself. I was hoping you might sign this for me.”

  The busboy pulls a canister out from his sleeve and unrolls a glossy poster printed with a stylish graphic of Tybalt’s landscape. It’s another mass-produced piece the League commissioned to promote human settlement upon Tybalt. I’ve counted hundreds of different such posters pinned in all the space docks and drinking halls since my return from the grove; and though each poster is a wonderful specimen of type, color and line, none convey an ounce of the truth I know from my experience walking within that grove. An orange jungle fills the background of the poster the busboy offers to me. Tall tents, like the ones Teddy hauled upon his ill-fated safari, rise in the foreground, where men and women sit around campfires to play guitars and sip from mugs of coffee and hot chocolate. The grove that rises behind them looks no more harmful than a Christmas tree decorated with twinkling lights and reflective bulbs.

  “You got a pen
you want me to use on this?”

  The busboy removes his cap and pulls out a marker. “Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Thomas. You can’t guess how much this means to me. You see, I’m hopping out to Tybalt next week. I’ve saved everything I’ve made while wearing this monkey outfit to build a home on Tybalt.”

  I grunt. “So you got anything you want me to say?”

  The busboy winks. “Oh, I rambling. I’m keeping you from the story you must be working on about the bikini pageant. Say ‘To Glenn. Here’s to finding your paradise.’”

  My hand shakes from all the speedball perfume as I scribble the words as neatly as I can across the poster’s orange grove. It’s foolish to think that retreating from my falsehoods is going to do anyone any ounce of good now. It’s too late. It was too late the moment I handed my fantasy over to Harold Higgins. That busboy is going to drift out to Tybalt to meet whatever the grove has planned for him, no matter how hard I might try to convince him that what I wrote was just a lie. That busboy’s not going to consider any evidence I might have to prove that the grove is a monster. Guilt can be a corrosive poison even within a bestselling journalist, and so I tell myself that the busboy has it coming to him for holding back a junkie’s drug for the sake of collecting a silly signature.

  “Good luck,” I mumble as the busboy takes back his poster and pen and finally hands me that bottle of speedball perfume.

  “Thank you. Thank you.” The busboy stammers. “I’m going to frame this poster real nice over the mantle of the cottage I plan to build on Tybalt. I’m going to take really good care of it so my grandchildren can see how I once met the great Zane Thomas. Is it true what they say about Tybalt? Is it true that the world was so perfect when the obliterators found it that they didn’t have to do a thing to the world?”

  I nod. “It’s all true.”

  I take a step back into my resort room and slam the door in the busboy’s face. Humanity’s launching a thousand rockets a month to keep up with the passenger demand to arrive upon Tybalt. The grove’s going to have all the faces its hunger can devour.

  But I doubt anyone will notice until it’s too late. Perhaps a person might one-day knock on my door to try to hold me accountable for the fantasy I helped spread about that terrible world. But I won’t hold my breath. In the meanwhile, I’m going to hole myself up on one resort moon or pirate planet after another and breath as deeply as my racing heart will permit of the speedball perfume so that I will rarely have to dream of Marlena Jackson’s beautiful face, and of the grove that holds it.

  * * * * *

  About the Writer

  Brian S. Wheeler calls Hillsboro, Illinois home, a town of roughly 6,000 in the middle of the flatland. He grew up in Carlyle, Illinois, a community less than an hour away from Hillsboro, where he spent a good amount of his childhood playing wiffle ball and tinkering on his computer. The rural Midwest inspires much of Brian's work, and he hopes any connections readers might make between his fiction and the places and people he has had the pleasure to know are positive.

  Brian earned a degree in English from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He has taught high school English and courses in composition and creative writing. Imagination has been one of Brian's steadfast companions since childhood, and he dreams of creating worlds filled with inspiration and characters touched by magic.

  When not writing, Brian does his best to keep organized, to get a little exercise, or to try to train good German Shepherd dogs. He remains an avid reader. More information regarding Brian S. Wheeler, his novels, and his short stories can be found by visiting his website at www.flatlandfiction.com.