“Maybe so. I’m not so sure about through and through, even now, but maybe. The thing is, he wasn’t always this way. As a matter of fact, he used to be one of my favorite people in the world.”
My heart stopped whirring. My heart just plain stopped.
“Wait!” Charlie squawked. “You know him?”
“When I was your age,” said Grandpa Joshua quietly, “Lucas Biggs was my best friend.”
Charlie and I just stared at him.
“Are you maybe confusing him with someone else?” I asked, finally, in a small voice. What if Grandpa Joshua’s memory was going? He was old, after all. If his mind was getting foggy with old age, how would he possibly help me?
But his answer was steady as a rock: “No.”
“But how could somebody like Judge Biggs be friends with somebody like you?” I asked.
“The history of our town,” said Grandpa Joshua, “is full of twists like that.”
Charlie, who was almost never rude, especially to adults, burst out with “Oh, come on! A history lesson? We don’t have time! And anyway, we all know the history of Victory. The Canvasburg Uprising, that miner—I forget his name—who sold everyone out and killed that guy, the—”
“Maybe you know some of the story,” interrupted Grandpa Joshua, as heated up as I’d ever seen him. “Maybe you learned a version of it in history class. But there’s more to it, so much more that you might want to reconsider everything you ever believed about Victory, Arizona.”
Fine. But how in the wide world did this have anything to do with my dad? I itched with impatience, but then I happened to get a look at Grandpa Joshua’s face. His usually kind brown eyes were fierce and sad and full of something I couldn’t name, maybe with his version of history, the one he’d carried around all this time, maybe with the truth that would set my dad free. I did my best to shove my impatience away.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell us. Please.”
“There are a lot of ways to break a person,” began Grandpa Joshua. “And Victory Fuels had a pretty good handle on all of them. People’s spirits they broke in the cruelest way: by first lifting them up, by making their workers, folks who’d traveled hundreds of miles for a new life, at first believe that they’d found one. But at some point, usually pretty early on, those families, mine included, would wake up and realize that while they’d been enjoying their decent house and their three meals a day, a trap had fallen smack down around them.
“The Victory Mine broke bodies, too,” he continued.
There was a tiny, sorrowful catch in his voice, and that’s when Grandpa Joshua’s story stopped being a history lesson and started being a story about real people, and even though I was dying for him to get to the part in it where my dad gets saved, I knew I had to listen to every word of what came next.
Josh
1938
EIGHT HOURS AFTER THE MINE collapsed, when Aristotle Agrippa and his rescue party finally carried my dad out, two of his ribs were broken and he had a fear of the dark that haunted him the rest of his life, but he was alive, and the very next day he went back to work. Mr. Alexandropoulos, whose life Dad had saved by running deeper into the shaft when he should’ve run the other way, was not so lucky. His backbone had cracked and he would never walk again.
So Elijah Biggs, the boss of the mine, fired him as he lay in his infirmary bed, then marched over to his house dressed in an expensive suit the color of sherbet and threw his family into the street. He even helped carry out a lamp and a few dishes.
“The Victory Corporation isn’t a charity!” Biggs informed the angry mob of miners that gathered in the yard to protest. It had already footed the bill for his infirmary stay and would probably never see that money again. And now, how could Mr. Alexandropoulos work in the mine if he was in a wheelchair? And how could he live in a Victory house if he didn’t work in the mine?
The crowd rippled, eddied, and murmured in anger. The two hulking “associates” in cheap suits who accompanied Biggs everywhere stood on his right and his left glowering, daring anybody to complain. Folks turned around to slink home. Biggs smirked in triumph. But Aristotle Agrippa, strong and straight, made his way through the crowd, and as we closed ranks behind him, we stood taller, and nobody felt like retreating anymore.
When Aristotle got to the Alexandropouloses’ front porch, face-to-face with Biggs, he said, “You got to stop this.” Everything and everybody fell silent. Even the thugs who passed for Biggs’s bodyguards put civil expressions on their flat faces to listen.
“You,” spluttered Biggs, “can’t tell me to stop!”
“We can tell you what’s right,” replied Aristotle simply. “And what’s right is, you got to stop.”
Biggs turned to his stooges and muttered, “Fix this.” They shuffled their feet and glanced at each other and didn’t do it right away, because Aristotle stood there looking like something his forefathers in Athens might’ve carved from marble and set up in the town square, something you didn’t necessarily want to ball up your fist and punch.
“No,” said Aristotle, never taking his clear gray eyes off Biggs. “You take care of this.”
“I just did,” taunted Biggs, pointing at the Alexandropouloses’ possessions in the street.
“If you gonna do this to Mrs. Alexandropoulos,” Aristotle informed Biggs, “better do it to me, too.”
“What?” snapped Biggs.
“I ain’t gonna work for you,” declared Aristotle.
“Then you just lost your house,” barked Biggs.
“I know,” said Aristotle.
My dad limped forward right away and said, “I quit, too.”
And then and there, the whole crowd quit in protest, right down to the guy who oiled the elevator cable.
“Who—who’s going to work the mine?” stammered Biggs.
“We will,” answered Aristotle, “after you do what’s right.”
And so we found ourselves in a camp on the edge of town that became known affectionately as “Canvasburg” because of the huge old army tents from the Great War Mr. Darley’s veteran friends had donated for us to live in. Across town, the Victory Mine sat empty, earning not a penny. Biggs tried hiring replacements, a bunch of unemployed farmhands from Colorado, but they had no idea what they were doing and only managed to derail the mine train, start a fire in the elevator, and flood a quarter mile of tunnel, all without bringing out a single lump of coal. Soon, word went around that Biggs was up to his eyeballs in hot water with his boss in New York because he was losing money so fast.
The homemade tank showed up right after this rumor started.
It wasn’t much to look at. Just an old Model T with leaky tires, manhole covers welded all over like armor, and a machine gun bolted to the floor where the backseat used to be. It lumbered stupidly around the edges of our camp like an eyeless crab searching for prey at the bottom of the ocean. Biggs claimed it was manned by “detectives” protecting the upstanding people in the brick homes of Victory from us hooligans down in Canvasburg.
All the mining families met in an open spot amid the tents to decide what to do about it.
Mr. Martinelli stood up and said, “I got a hunting rifle!”
A murmur went through the crowd at the mention of a gun.
Aristotle rose slowly in the firelight, and from where I sat, he loomed even larger against the sky than the Victory V. Quietly, as the Model T motor coughed in the darkness and the creepy machine nosed around our camp, he said, “No guns. I seen what guns do. In the Great War.”
“But they started it,” challenged a voice from the crowd. “They brought the tank. They want to fight. It’s only fair if we—”
“We gonna fight,” Aristotle replied, as the whole crowd strained to catch every word. “But not like that.”
“Then how?” demanded the voice. A voice I recognized. Luke’s.
“There’s good people out there,” said Aristotle, staring across the dark desert as if he could actually see them. �
�I know them. We gonna tell them what’s happening. They help us.”
“We should give Victory a taste of their own medicine!” persisted Luke.
“Maybe, son,” replied Mr. Martinelli, nodding thoughtfully at Aristotle as he sat down again, “but maybe not yet.”
The next morning I heard a “pock” on the side of my family’s tent. I thought Luke was out front tossing acorns for a joke. Then I noticed a brand-new hole letting in sunlight, a hole the size of a bumblebee. I saw another one just like it in the far wall. For a few seconds, Mom and Dad and I stared at the dust motes swirling through the pencil-thin sunbeam. Preston sat frozen on his piano stool. Aristotle and Luke, who had come over like they did just about every morning to give my mother wildflowers they’d found by Honey Brook, froze in their tracks. The report of a gun echoed into silence among the hills.
And for a moment, even though it had two bullet holes in it, our tent still did its best to be our home.
There was the iron stove my mother cooked on, in the corner, cooling after breakfast. There were the pictures of our grandparents on the upright piano my dad had salvaged from a boarded-up church on the far side of the mountains in Mercury, New Mexico, so Preston could practice for his teacher, Mrs. Tasso. It still rang from the last note of the last scale Preston had played.
There was the bookshelf with the collected works of Charles Dickens on it we’d scavenged from beside the curb on trash day in the brick part of town.
There was my bed. Came from the same place. And in a corner, a bicycle we’d dug out of the dump. At least it was my bicycle that day. Luke and I shared it—we each kept it twenty-four hours and then it went next door.
For a few moments, it seemed like the stove and the bicycle and the piano and the other things we’d collected to fill up our cloth home would win. It seemed like that hole had never appeared, like the gunshot had never sounded.
“What . . .” Preston held up his right hand in wonder. His eyes were wide and his mouth made a perfect O of surprise. Three of his fingers were gone.
Then the machine gunner pulled hard on his trigger and we heard the yammer of his weapon as it cut our tents to confetti.
A bullet caught my mother in the leg and toppled her.
“Down! Down! Everybody down!” shouted Aristotle, pressing Luke and me flat on the floor of our tent. “The stove!” he said to my dad, who dragged Preston to it and shoved him under and turned around and did the same with Mom. They fit, but barely.
In the meantime, Aristotle grabbed the piano and shoved it onto its face. Beneath the keyboard, he hid Luke and me from the flying bullets.
“Stay, boys,” ordered Aristotle. “Josh’s dad and me, we going around to hide people behind all the stoves and iceboxes.”
“No!” argued Luke. “Get Mr. Martinelli’s gun. We have to stop those guys!”
“Be still, Luke!” barked Aristotle. To my dad, he said, “Frederic. Let’s go.” I think he knew, after my dad had risked his life to save Mr. Alexandropoulos in the mine shaft, that he was brave enough to do what they were about to do.
As soon as their shadows disappeared, Luke bolted from under the piano. Outside, the gunfire had slowed to short, jumbled bursts. “Luke!” I hollered as he scuttled, head low, around the corner of the tent and headed for the Martinellis’. He didn’t listen, so I chased him. The gunshots seemed to have moved farther off.
I could hear a baby wailing and someone was shouting for her family members in panic. A thin tendril of smoke drifted up from our left, but above it all, the sunlight blazed and the air was crystal clear.
Inside her tent, Mrs. Martinelli lay on the floor, unhurt. Beneath her, protected by her bulk, lay her four kids. “Where’s Mr. Martinelli?” asked Luke. “Where’s his gun?”
“He took it,” panted Mrs. Martinelli. “He’s up in the mountains hunting for dinner!”
“For crying out loud!” shouted Luke. “What are we going to do?”
“Find something heavy,” I replied, scanning the tent, “to shelter the Martinellis.” Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to own a stove. But they had dug a fireplace right in the middle of their floor, under a hole in the canvas roof that let smoke out. It was at least two feet deep and three feet across.
Four rounds spattered across the floor, kicking up dust and bits of gravel, followed by four burps from the machine gun. Bullets, I was learning, travel faster than the sound of the gun that fires them.
“Get in!” I shouted, surprised at how steady I sounded as I picked myself up off the floor. It occurred to me that if I got killed, I’d never hear the shot that did me in.
But mostly I thought: Is everybody safe?
Mrs. Martinelli tossed her kids into their cooking pit like sacks of salt and leaped in behind them. Luke was already out the door, but when I tried to crab-walk after him, I felt a tug. Mrs. Martinelli, reaching over the lip of her hiding place, had me by the ear. “Climb in here, you little fool!” she screeched.
“No,” I said. “I have to help.”
Her free hand happened to land on an iron frying pan lying nearby.
“Luke’s out there,” I protested, frantically trying to wriggle free of her grasp before she dragged me into the pit.
Mrs. Martinelli drew her skillet back. Just as she cocked her elbow to clock me, a slug zinged off it. She dropped the frying pan like it had just come off a red-hot stove, and I made my escape, leaving her to the safety of their accidental foxhole.
Outside, I found Luke dragging Ed Kowalski toward his tent. Ed had been shot in both feet. I took one arm and Luke took the other, and we managed to get Ed inside. They say reading is good for you. Turned out, it sure was good for Ed. He and his brothers had a tin steamer trunk full of old detective novels they’d read over the years. That thing was three feet high and four feet thick and jammed solid with cheap novels. It stopped slugs better than armor plate. By now, we knew exactly where the tank was firing from—on the side of a hill due east of Canvasburg—and Luke and I hid Ed behind his books and crouched there with him.
The sound of whimpering came from nearby. “The Tiklas kids,” moaned Ed. “Next door.” Luke and I looked at each other. Neither of us said a word. We slithered under the wall of Ed’s tent and then under the wall of the Tiklases’.
“An icebox!” shouted Luke. We pushed it over on its side and stuck the Tiklas kids behind it. A burst of fire riddled the radio by my elbow, and then the shots drifted up into the branches of a tree outside. “They’re not even aiming,” muttered Luke, watching the stream of gunfire wander off into the desert outside the door. “They’re shooting from the hill in front of camp, but they’re just taking potshots.”
“Hundreds of potshots,” I added.
Luke threw back his head and, at the top of his lungs, shouted to the whole camp: “They’re firing from the hill to the east! Get behind something heavy! You’ll be safe!”
“A stove. An icebox. A piano,” I hollered.
From nearby, I heard somebody take up the call and pass it down the rows of tents. The message made its way around camp. Then silence fell.
“Luke? Everybody’s safe?” I whispered.
“Maybe,” said Luke cautiously.
“Help,” came a voice. “Help me.”
“Mrs. Tasso?” I called.
“I can’t move!” she wailed. Mrs. Tasso was eighty-nine years old and frail as a sparrow.
“Her tent is three rows away,” I said. As I thought about running through the open to get there, all the fear I hadn’t had a chance to pay attention to before suddenly rose inside me like a black tide.
“We better go now, before they start shooting again,” said Luke.
In the clear sunlight of the morning, it was plain what Luke and I had to do—and that we’d do it together.
We bolted for Mrs. Tasso’s tent.
We found her crouched in the middle of her floor. “Where’s Mr. Tasso?” I asked.
“He’s up in the hills fishing in Honey Br
ook,” she said.
Instead of knocking over her old piano for shelter, Luke laid hold of a giant oak cupboard and yanked it onto its face. A cascade of crockery poured out, along with a pistol. We got Mrs. Tasso hunkered down in the remains of her dinner dishes, and Luke snatched the gun and bolted.
I followed through thickening smoke and found him struggling with his father behind an old coal hopper at the edge of Canvasburg, fifty yards from where the tank sat parked and silent. Just as I got there, Aristotle took the gun.
“. . . they can’t do that!” Luke cried as I crab-walked up. “It’s not right! We have to show them!”
“You get yourself shot, my brave Luke, and that don’t help nobody!” Aristotle rejoined, restraining him.
“Come on, Luke,” I chimed in. “Those aren’t playground bullies! They’re crazy! And they have a machine gun!”
“What should we do then?” retorted Luke. “Just hide here and take it?”
Aristotle looked at the gun in his hand with resignation in his eyes. My dad, at that moment, came scrambling up. “I think everybody’s covered,” he said. “I don’t think they can hit anybody unless they move the tank.”
Aristotle opened the chamber of the pistol. I could tell it was something he’d done before. “Empty,” he said, dropping it on the ground like he was relieved to be rid of it. “Okay.”
And with that, he took off running in a giant sweep toward the tank. Nobody inside seemed to notice. “They don’t see him,” observed my dad. “They’ve been firing blind this whole time. They didn’t leave any way to aim when they built that ridiculous thing.”
“Did Aristotle know that before he ran off?” I asked. My dad shrugged.
Luke watched, his fists clenched, shaking. I saw him wipe away a tear. “Be careful, Daddy,” he whispered. “And get ’em!”
Aristotle had circled all the way around behind the tank and scaled the back. Frantically, we watched the nose of the machine gun swivel in his direction, but it couldn’t turn far enough. “They can’t point their gun backward,” muttered my dad.
Saving Lucas Biggs Page 4
