Rocket Garden

By Jack Bates

A trickle of sweat rolls down the side of Jacobs’ face. He actually feels the little bead pop out of his forehead. He knows it isn’t from the weather. Florida is experiencing one of its cold snaps. A balmy sixty-eight degrees. Maybe a little cooler there in Titusville. Cape Canaveral is an island off the east coast of the Sunshine State. Ocean air is always a few degrees cooler.

Jacobs is aware of all of this. He is on staff at Kennedy as a meteorologist. Twenty years of his life spent tracking weather patterns and storm systems in order to go thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the latest launch. The flip of his thumb could cost taxpayers millions. Twenty years of giving the go-ahead or delaying the launch and what does he have to show for it?

An inland, carriage house, condo. A hybrid car. A couple of melanoma scars on his face.

So why is he sweating?

There is a crunch of the pea-stone gravel spread around the base of the retired fuselages in the rocket garden. The machines stand upright like denizens worshipping the moon they never got to orbit. Jacobs peers around the towering Mercury stage rocket. A man approaches.

The Visitor Center has closed hours earlier. The last of the employees have driven away. Like the man walking in his direction, Jacobs has come back and gone around the building following a service walkway where tour buses line up to carry passengers out to the launch buildings. If the security cameras show anything they show a man in a custodial jacket pushing a garbage can on a dolly. Jacobs doubts the cameras show anything. There is no need for a live feed and thanks to a government shutdown, no one to view the tapes. If there were, the images captured every fifteen minutes are, for the most part, grainy. It seems crazy to Jacobs as the Center has cameras that can show a flake of dust on the moon but can’t detail a license plate of a car left in the parking lot. The rocket garden is well out of range of the roof-mounted eyes-in-the-sky.

Halfway across the gravel the figure stops. A small burst of light illuminates the figure’s face and Jacobs thinks, Oh no. Don’t call me.

Jacobs feels the vibration of his phone in his pants pocket. He doesn’t answer it. Instead, he puts a hand under the hem of the jacket and feels the handle of the gun he has tucked into the back of his pants.

Jacobs steps partially out from behind the Mercury stage rocket he’s hiding behind. The figure has his back to him. Jacobs moves lightly over the gravel. Twenty yards away he can hear ringing from the man’s phone before Jacobs hears his own prerecorded voice. The man on the phone turns this way and that. I could shoot him right now, Jacobs thinks. I could walk right up and put a bullet in the back of his head. The only problem with that is Jacobs isn’t sure the guy has the money on him.

“I’m right here, Bobby,” Jacobs says.

Bobby nearly drops the phone into the gravel.

“Jesus,” Bobby says. “You scared the freak out of me.”

“Why so jumpy?” Jacobs asks. If either of them should be jumpy it should be Jacobs. After all, he’s never contemplated murder before.

“If you saw the gator I nearly hit on the causeway, you’d be a little freaked out to.”

“Gators? They’re all over Florida.”

“I thought this one was a man lying in the road.”

“So you got out to check?”

“Hell no. I drove around it.” Bobby slaps a hand against his neck. It is too cold for mosquitoes but the guy is on edge. “I hate this state. I can’t wait to leave it.” He looks around the rocket garden. “Why we meeting here?”

“Look at the moon,” Jacobs says.

This perplexes Bobby. “Yeah. It’s the moon.”

True, it is spectacular. Full and bright. It peeks out behind the red bell atop the Mercury rocket. The lunar landscape’s detail is clear enough to see with the naked eye.

“Did you bring the money?” Jacobs asks.

“Did you bring the printouts?”

Jacobs reaches behind his back. The gun is still there. So is the creased manila envelope in his back pocket. He takes out the envelope stuffed with postcards.

“Right here,” Jacobs says.

“Money is back in my car,” Bobby says. “Let’s go get it.”

Jacobs studies the young rocket scientist. He senses Bobby wants the ordeal to be finished. Not yet thirty, Bobby Grissom—no relation that he knew of to the astronaut of the same last name—is the rocket man in charge of the Mars Environmental Exploration Project, or MEEP. His task? Search the Martian landscape for life-sustaining materials for future manned expeditions. Privately funded by a west coast computer billionaire, the pressure on the young guy’s shoulders must be massive. Like a G4 pull without ever leaving the planet. Desperate to show results, Bobby Grissom fudged his data.

Bumping into Jacobs the night he tried to sabotage his own project wasn’t helping his reputation.

“You coming?” Bobby asks.

“Hold on,” Jacobs says. “Just look at that moon.” Jacobs pulls a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on.

Bobby laughs. “You afraid of going blind looking at the moon?”

Jacobs ignores the question. He lowers his gaze from the moon to one of the illuminated launch pads. Just over a mile away, the night sky erupts in a flash of orange white. There is a rush of boiling orange and black clouds. The rumbling intensifies. Bobby stares stupidly at the sky. He is saying something but Jacobs doesn’t hear him. The thunder in the heavens drowns out the cry of the frightened birds, Bobby’s screams, and the gun’s shot.

Jacobs watches the vapor trail extending behind the rocket’s engines as if it is pushing the rocket free of the earth’s gravitational pull. Aboard the payload is one of Bobby Grissom’s dummy test probes, bound for the moon for a trial run. A month from now it will be all over the news that Robert Grissom’s grand plan to find a life-sustaining environment on Mars was nothing more than a sham. It will explain why on the night after the test launch of his probe his body is found in the rocket garden. Why he is holding the gun he used to blow his brains out. Why a half a million dollars of the billionaire’s money is missing from the research account. Someone is bound to point out the irony between working with projectiles and using one to end his life.

Jacobs tucks the gun into Bobby’s hand. He reaches into Bobby’s pocket for the car keys and what else does he find? Bobby has brought his own gun along. Little snub nose .22. Mommy’s Little Helper. Jacobs wonders why Bobby didn’t pull it on him to begin with. Maybe the guy had planned to off himself for real. He puts the gun into the pocket of the custodian’s jacket.

There are two cars out front. Jacobs goes to the one that isn’t his. He uses the key fob to unlock the car. The taillights flash and then the dome light goes on as the driver’s side door swings open. A thin, young woman gets out of the car. Jacobs stops walking.

“Where’s Bobby?” the woman asks.

“He’s back there,” Jacobs says. He turns and points at the tops of the rockets rising over the Visitor Center roof. “Watching the launch of his probe.” When he turns back to the woman, she is holding a large, heavy, gun on him. Instinctively Jacobs reaches behind him for his gun. All he feels is the small of his back. His shirt is damp.

“Bobby said you might try something like this,” the woman says. She brings her other hand up to her gun holding hand. She is trying to steady herself. “He brought me along in case you tried something at the car. But I guess you did what you did back there.”

Jacobs watches her. He has seen her around the labs. Probably a research assistant. Late nights, shared vision, all the chemicals churning in their young bodies.

“You knew the probe was a bust, didn’t you?” Jacobs asks.

“It was never going to work. Bobby knew it was only so long before his scam was discovered. He wanted to get out of town before the launch, but then you told him you knew he was up to something. I kept asking him how a guy who watches clouds could have figured out what he was doing, but he said it didn’t matter because you had proof of his tampering.”

She lowers one of her hands and flexes her fingers. Jacobs takes a step forward. The woman brings her hands together again. The gun points at Jacobs’ chest. He stops.

“Not so fast, honey,” she says. “Tell me what you know.”

Jacobs shrugs and slips his hands into the pockets of the custodian jacket. “All I know,” Jacobs says “was he was here late one night and he saw me. When he asked me about what I saw, I told him I saw him. A few days later I said there were shots from the security cameras with him in them and I had accessed them while I was monitoring a couple of low depressions coming up from the Keys.”

“What do you really know?”

“That the guy had a guilty conscious. Or a greedy conscious. He was ready to give me half a million dollars to shut up, so he must have been sitting on a helluva a lot more.”

The woman laughs. “You’d be surprised.” She pats the trunk of the car.

“He never planned on giving me my cut, did he?” Jacobs asked.

“I think you knew that. That’s why he’s back there and you’re out here.”

“We could split it,” Jacobs says. “You go your way and I go mine.”

“Sorry, hon. I can’t risk it.”

She steadies the gun a second time but Jacob fires the .22 from his pocket before she can squeeze the trigger. The bullet tears open the fabric of the jacket and bores into her chest like the MEEP rocket hitting the lunar surface. She flops over backwards on the trunk and slides off to the pavement. Her hands twitch and then she lays still.

Jacobs opens the trunk. There are three duffle bags in the trunk and each is filled with bundles of cash. He transfers them to his car. Sweats beads once more on his forehead as he lifts the heavy bags one at a time. When he is done with the money bags, he drags the woman into the passenger seat of the other car. By now he is drenched in sweat. He takes off the jacket and rolls it into a ball he tosses in to the backseat of Bobby’s car. He keeps her large gun and drops the .22 into the back seat after he wipes the small gun clean.

Jacobs drives Bobby’s car to the causeway. The ditches are deep and full of water. He lowers the windows and rolls the car off the road. Gators along the space center’s roads are large for a reason.

They like to eat.

Jacobs walks the two miles back to the Visitor Center parking lot. Off to his left the lights of the launch building are shutting down. He looks to the sky he knows better than any person on the planet. It’s as clear as his future. The MEEP rocket is just a flickering dot that doesn’t seem to be moving any closer to the full, bright moon. He uses it as a beacon to lead him back to the rocket garden until at last, like the two rocket scientists who weren’t all that bright after all, it blinks out and dies.