Merriton

“So, you trust your wife with that Chinaman?” Elvis and Randy were on their way back from the big city up north with the precious power supply on the seat between them. The tone of Elvis’ voice was conversational, despite raising Randy’s hackles. “Kevin is an American. He was born here.” Elvis shook his head, “That’s not what I asked you, boy. You trust your wife with ‘im?” Randy shook his head and gave up trying to explain how offensive Elvis’ statement was.

“I trust Sierra with any man. I wouldn’t have married her if I didn’t. And Kevin… I’d trust him with my life.” The truck cruised down the two lane road between Emigration and Merriton. It was just the noise of the road for a mile or so before Elvis spoke again. “Guess I thought marriage was different in big cities. We see alotta angry people who come here to try and fix things. Ain’t never seen a ski trip fix a marriage… left all their tools at home, I guess…”

It was quiet for a few more miles until Elvis slowed the truck. “Well, looky here.” He pulled the truck alongside a teenaged boy walking along the road. “Roll down the window, willya?” Randy rolled down the window and Elvis screamed past him at the boy, “Pudgy James! Get your fat butt into this truck! I gotchyer power supply here!” The boy looked at Randy in the passenger side of the truck, “You Randy?” he asked. Randy nodded and opened the door, scooting closer to Elvis so the boy could jump in. Elvis started pulling back onto the road the second Pudgy shut the door.

“‘Member when those Radio Shack guys laughed me out of the store? Turns out they don’t even got it. Randy, here, found a place Up North where we could get one, though.” Pudgy shook his head. “They wouldn’t have been so rude to you if you hadn’t brought in the whole computer.” Elvis shook his head. “How’m I supposed to get a part for it without bringin’ it in?” Pudgy watched the road fly by. “You just bring in the part number like I told you.”

The three of them tumbled out of the truck when they got to Elvis’ house. “I got some chores to do. Can you two work on that without me?” Randy and Pudgy nodded and Pudgy lead the way to the kitchen. Vesta had removed the yarn samples, so all that remained on the table was the gutted computer in the empty kitchen. Randy pulled his soldering iron out of his toolbox and unwound the cord. “Do you want to do the soldering? My hands are kind of shaky.” Pudgy looked at him in awe. “I’ve never soldered anything in my life.” Randy nodded and plugged in the iron.

The smell of melting tin and lead filled the kitchen while Randy carefully removed the damaged capacitor and connector for the power supply. “I know who you are,” Pudgy whispered. Randy mumbled, “You do? Tell me. I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Pudgy looked at him and pulled away from the work. The flashlight that he had been holding went into his lap with his hands. Randy looked up. “What?” Pudgy replied, “Listen, man. If you’ve just come here to put a bullet in your head, then do it in San Francisco. We don’t need any more suicidals here. We’ve had enough.”

Randy held his soldering iron over the motherboard. It shook slightly and he looked at his hand before putting the iron in its holder. Pudgy continued, “Okay, don’t be mad at me, okay? June’s real upset about the last guy she sold the Bowen house to. She told me your name and Sierra’s name and told me to see what I could find, so I Googled you. Listen, I haven’t told them who you really are.” Randy shook his head. “Who I ‘really’ am? What do you mean?”

Pudgy held up his hands and the beam of the flashlight flitted around the room, catching Randy’s eye. “Dude! You’re Random McCain! You’re a freakin’ legend. You invented the McCain Random Number Generator and then you went on to code Zerbitz all by yourself and sold it for 653 MILLION dollars. Then out of the blue, you quit! The terms of your contract said you could have quit a while ago, but you stayed so everyone thought you were in it for the long haul and then out of the blue, WHAM! You quit! Now, you show up in Merriton and buy the BOWEN house. You haven’t written a post in either of your blogs for two months. You haven’t posted photos to Flickr for three. The only reason I was able to piece together your last few months at all is from Tso’s blog. If that’s not a recipe for a bullet in the brainpan, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s not called the McCain Random Number Generator.” Randy stared at the hot soldering iron. Pudgy stood up and looked around to see if Vesta was nearby. “You think I don’t know that?! That’s NOT what we’re talkin’ about here!” They were quiet for a moment. “Doesn’t matter what they named it. Everyone still calls it the MRNG. It’s too bad you got hosed on that one.” Randy picked up the soldering iron. “Could you give me some light here?”

They were quiet until Randy was able to get the capacitor and power supply connector safely disconnected from the motherboard. “How did you know the terms of the contract? They were undisclosed.” Randy pulled the power supply out of the plastic bag and held it over the motherboard, trying to find out how to connect it properly. The shape of the unit was different, but it was smaller, so it would easily fit. Pudgy held the flashlight over the motherboard. “Smoking Gun had a scan of it.” Randy looked up. “Kevin keeps bugging me about how much I got from the deal. How’d you find it.” Pudgy shook his head. “It’s not there anymore. I had to find it in the WayBack Machine. Google’s cache didn’t even have it.”

“So, if you didn’t tell them who I ‘really’ am, what did you tell them?” Randy procrastinated soldering in the new unit. Removing was easy, but adding was hard. Pudgy shrugged, “I told them you made some money on the Internet. That was enough for them to stop thinking you’re a rich kid. It helps if they think you earned your money yourself. We get a lot of rich kids that ski here and think that it would be great if they had a cabin here so they could ski all the time. We hate those guys… You gonna put this thing in or what?” Randy nodded and pulled out the coil of solder while Pudgy continued, “I told them that you’re pretty depressed and that we probably should keep an eye on you. I don’t know why they took my word for it. It’s not like I’m a psychiatrist. Sometimes, I think they think the Internet is some kind of god or something.”

Randy soldered in the first connection and took a deep breath, sucking in the toxic fumes. “You did a good job researching, actually. I’m pretty impressed. I’m not going to call you Pudgy, though. What’s your real name?” Pudgy shook his head. “No, you can call me Pudgy. Everyone does…” Randy looked him in the eye. “I can tell by the tone of your voice that you don’t like the name. I’m NOT going to call you that. What do you call yourself online?” Pudgy pulled back, “Online?” Randy pointed to the motherboard. “I need some light.” Pudgy readjusted the flashlight. “Online I have too many names.” Randy started soldering the second connection. “You play Warcraft?” Pudgy shrugged. “I guess… I kind of have a hard time getting into that stuff. It feels like I’m wasting time.”

Randy nodded. “Yeah, me too. Joi keeps trying to get me into it, but I just can’t bother with it. Sometimes he has these eight-hour campaigns with hundreds of people in his guild. I guess I’m glad he’s spending all his time there. He doesn’t have as much time to compete with me in the real world.” The two of them laughed. “You got a MySpace page?” Pudgy snorted, “MySpace is for kids.” Randy looked up, “I have a MySpace page.” Pudgy shook his head, “Yeah, and all it does is link to your real blog.” Randy laughed, “True… Listen, I’m not going to call you Pudgy. I’ll make up a name for you if you won’t give me one… I’ll call you SupaSnoop or something.” Pudgy shook his head, “No, then they’ll know I told you. You’re not supposed to know that everybody knows who you are and that we’re already worried about you.” Randy finished the soldering. “Then give me a GOOD name.”

“My real name is Wilford. I’d rather have you call me Pudgy than Wilford.” Randy put the soldering iron in its holder and unplugged it. “Understood, but I’m going to call you SupaSnoop if you don’t give me a better name than that.” Pudgy shook his head. “I don’t care what you call me. It doesn’t change who I am.” Randy wrapped the remaining solder around itself. “You just don’t seem like a Pudgy to me. Sure, you’re a big guy, but you don’t seem like a Pudgy. You seem more like a Tank… Tank James. What do you think about that?”

The boy sat at the kitchen table. The flashlight was still lit and made a faint blue circle on the ceiling. “Tank?” Randy smiled at him, “Yeah, Tank.”