spacious skies - 37. the crew

by american joe

part 37 of 40

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vince gray was just a guy. he had big dreams, but really he was just a guy. he was a soldier on a crew with four other guys - will evans, buddy barker, george tolliver, and charlie robinson, and one girl, zena parfrey. they were all just guys, and zena was just a girl - at least to all outward appearances. al hodgkins was the boss of the crew. what he said went. * the crew worked out of a back room on a back street on the outskirts of town. the word “work” might give a wrong impression. mostly they just waited around, because they did not know what they had been hired to do. when the time came, al hodgkins wpuld let them know. meanwhile, they were on call, under the eagle eye of al. they had all been down the road before - maybe charlie robinson not as much as the others - and knew the score. the score was zero to zero. none of them had phones on their persons, and there was no phone in the room - or so they had been told - and supposedly no phones at all in the building. theoretically, none of them even owned phones. if they wanted to call their aunts or mothers in russia or hawaii, they were supposed to use public phones if they could find one - and never talk on those phones about the job, even to say they had so far nothing to do on the job. there was a monitor in the room that played the same four movies over and over again. after the first few days nobody watched them except buddy barker, and he watched them with the sound off. george tolliver and charlie robinson carried on an endless conversation about their all time teams. it had begun the day they were first hired. will evans started it with george and george and charlie had kept it going. who’s on your all time team? my what? your all time team. all time team for what? football, basketball, what? no, no, like the dirty dozen or the magnificent seven, like that. you got to explain it to him, he hasn’t been around. right, see here’s the deal. we got to talking the other night about a team to fight the aliens. aliens? what aliens? when are we going to fight the aliens? i didn’t hear anything about aliens. no, we are just supposing. here, you explain it to him, you can explain it better than me. * al hodgkins tried to engage zena parfrey in conversation, but she did not seem vey interested in anything he had to say. will evans kept his own counsel, occasionally laughing out loud at something in his head. none of the others ever asked him what he was laughing at. vince gray also kept his own counsel, but without ever laughing or even smiling. next