“Josh!” said Aristotle. “My boy! Where is it?”
We were almost back to Canvasburg. But I glanced around, just in case a stray detective happened to be nearby detecting. The coast was clear. I told Aristotle: Humboldt Draw.
“I’m going over the mountains tonight to send a telegram,” declared Aristotle. “To tell Walter Mendenhall. He’ll ride the train from Denver. He’ll bring Milton Katz, the great photographer. It’s gonna happen.”
“Aw, that’s just peachy!” burst out Luke in disgust. “I get thrown in jail, and swipe the key to all the guns, and Josh comes up with some story about a goat, and he’s the one you listen to?”
“I told you: no guns!” admonished Aristotle. “Now good-bye, son. I gotta go.”
“Let me come with you, Dad!” Luke begged. “This time, just once, let me?”
“You better not, Luke,” said Aristotle. “You stay here. They catch me doing this, they don’t put me in the jail, they put me under the jail.”
“Dad,” pleaded Luke. “I want to help.”
“Then you do what I tell you,” replied Aristotle, like dads say to their kids every day all over the world.
Aristotle sneaked away from camp as soon as the sun set. We heard gunshots on the mountain, but all we could do was hope it was Mr. Martinelli hunting or the detectives plugging tin cans with their pistols by moonlight.
Luke sat alone in his tent.
Since Aristotle was on his mission to telegraph the reporters, my dad went to mail the day’s letters and to bring back whatever replies had come to the Mercury post office. He came home with a crumpled box addressed to Preston. It appeared to be from Germantown, Pennsylvania.
“Who could’ve sent it?” speculated my mom. “I wonder if it’s dangerous.”
“Let’s see,” said Preston, chipper again after a warm night of infirmary blankets and a hot breakfast, ripping it open to find a dented old trumpet wrapped in a sweater.
By afternoon, Aristotle was still not back. To boost Luke’s spirits, Preston had learned to play “When the Saints Go Marching In,” clutching the trumpet in the ruins of his right hand, his left fingers smacking the valves open and shut faster than the human eye could follow. A message stuck to the horn had read, “For Aristotle’s young friend.” I guess Aristotle must’ve written somebody in Germantown to ask if they could spare an instrument playable by a kid with only seven fingers, and they’d sent this old trumpet.
Elijah Biggs materialized at the door of the tent. This was a first; he’d never been seen in Canvasburg before. Most of the time, he did his best to pretend it didn’t exist. “A trumpet,” he observed. “Now where, I wonder, did a trumpet come from?”
“Germantown, Pennsylvania,” shot back Luke.
“Really,” sniffed Biggs, glancing around as if he smelled something foul. “Somehow, you’ve persuaded the fine people of Germantown, Pennsylvania, to feel sorry for you. I wonder how?”
Preston stopped playing.
“I notice your father is nowhere to be found,” observed Biggs.
“That’s because right now he’s—”
And I’m pretty sure that Luke was within half a second of telling Biggs exactly where his father was and what he was up to—
So I said, “Fishing! Aristotle went fishing!”
A look of chagrin crossed Luke’s face as he realized he’d been about to reveal our plans to Biggs. Biggs looked amused.
“Well, then,” said Biggs smoothly to me, “I’ll just have to admire his catch when he gets back. Although what kind of a yellowbelly goes off fishing while his friends are in such trouble—”
Luke moved so fast, I never saw how his hands got around Biggs’s throat. It wasn’t easy to pry him loose, since he weighed about twice as much as I did and was as strong as most coal miners. Luckily, the sheriff and Biggs’s two flunkys were there to restrain him.
“I’m not going to press charges.” Biggs chuckled, straightening his pastel tie. “If you ask me, the boy’s got the right idea, fighting his own fights, even if he’s on the wrong side.”
Preston launched into “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which was a joke aimed at Elijah Biggs, since if you asked Preston, he was always misbehaving. Biggs must’ve gotten the joke, because he turned around and stalked back to his brick office in disgust.
When he was safely gone, Biggs’s men let Luke go.
To take Luke’s mind off his dad, and Biggs, and everything else, I said, “Let’s go to Bridey’s. She’s got a bushel of potatoes we need to bring down.”
But instead of lugging the bushel basket back home right away, Luke and I gazed down the mountain, at Canvasburg, where all our friends and family were sad, and hungry, and shot, and in wheelchairs, and sick, and angry.
And I looked the other way, and said, “What do you think is up there?”
“Don’t know,” replied Luke. “Never been.”
“We’ll get back quick,” I said, and with that, Luke and I scampered up the slope.
There was a trail between the desert rocks, left by deer or antelope, or maybe the forefathers of the Navajo who lived around there, and sometimes it got so steep we had to crawl. Things began to change as we got higher—the air thinned out and freshened on our faces and billowed in our shirts, and the heat from all the climbing evaporated right out of us and wafted up to the clouds.
Up. Up is great. Nobody had ever told me about Up. Once you start Up, there’s just no stopping. Sure, my lungs seemed to be turning to sawdust. Sure, it felt like somebody had strung barbed wire through my hamstrings and started tightening it with a crowbar. But—
“Feel okay?” shouted Luke over his shoulder, bounding up the incline like a mountain goat.
“Oh yeah,” I wheezed.
“Need to stop?” asked Luke.
“Oh no,” I gasped.
“’Cause my legs are kind of tired,” Luke allowed.
Mine weren’t just tired. They felt like they might have to be amputated. Luckily, the waves of dizziness washing over me took my mind off the pain. “Come on,” I shouted, sprinting past him toward the base of a granite cliff. “Look! The top is right here!”
Of course the top wasn’t right there. When we got over the lip of the cliff, the mountain just kept right on stretching away from us, onward and upward.
“What do you know about that?” mused Luke.
“What do you know is right,” I agreed, and kept on hiking. I was sure we’d get to the summit soon, because I’d never before seen anything I couldn’t walk across in ten minutes. They didn’t call Low Ridge, Mississippi, “Low Ridge” for nothing. It was three feet high. You could basically step right over it. This mountain went on for miles.
The desert stones became a meadow. The meadow changed to brush. The brush gave way to trees. The trees grew thicker. Streams began to flow all around us. Pine needles carpeted the ground.
“We’re in a forest,” I observed, staring at the pines, which were now almost as tall as the ones back in Mississippi. “In the desert.” Pines turned to oaks, and the oaks began to shed their leaves: yellow, red, and orange.
“If somebody shoots at you,” asked Luke philosophically, “shouldn’t you shoot back?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. Maybe, not long before, I’d have said yes without a doubt. But after listening to Aristotle, I wasn’t so sure. “I don’t think—maybe not.”
“But—if somebody kills somebody,” Luke went on, eyeing me sideways, “shouldn’t they have to pay?”
“Yes,” I said, because on this point I was clear.
“Shouldn’t we make them pay?” continued Luke, stopping to look at me. His eyes were imploring. “Because nobody else is going to.”
“We?” I repeated. “Us?” Luke turned away, and we climbed higher. The air bit. Our lungs burned. The tree branches above us thinned, and through them I spotted a blue so dark, I imagined I could see space behind it.
“We’re right!” said Luke, ignoring my questions as he
thought about his own. “They’re wrong!” Suddenly, we walked right out of the forest onto—bare rock—and then snow—and just like that, it was winter on Mount Hosta.
“Look,” I said. “The peak.” No more surprises. No more mountain hiding behind the mountain. This was it. Snow surrounded the stony summit. We could see sky on the left and the right and above us.
“We’re right,” persisted Luke, “so we’re supposed to win!”
“True,” I replied.
“But,” Luke went on, “how can we win if we don’t fight? My dad says no. He always says no.” Luke’s voice trailed off as we realized that, from the top of the mountain, we could see the earth in every direction. We stood on an island in the sky in silence.
“It’s all ours!” I finally said. “Our mountain. Our desert. Our forests and our rivers. The whole world.”
“And we’re the kings of it all,” crowed Luke.
“And we can change it,” I continued.
“You and me,” said Luke excitedly. “We really could, Josh. I know it!” Then he looked at me curiously. “But how?”
“Your dad, Luke,” I said. “He knows a lot—maybe he’s trying to show us. I think if we listen to him, he could teach us how.”
And that is where I lost Luke Agrippa.
“He’s not as smart as people think,” muttered Luke, staring at something far away that I couldn’t see. “I don’t even understand what he’s talking about sometimes. How are we supposed to take away the occasion of all wars? What does that mean?”
I fell silent, because I didn’t know. Behind us, over a mountain range so far west it might have been in California, the sun disappeared, leaving only a fading glow above us. “The light is going!” I cried. “We gotta get home!”
“I guess we do,” agreed Luke quietly, disappointed that I couldn’t answer his questions.
I sort of figured going down would be faster than climbing up, and it was. I also figured going down would be easier, and there’s where I was mistaken. Sadly. When you’re pelting down the side of a mountain, those rocks come at you fast. I spent as much time sliding on my face as running, and Luke was bleeding from both knees and both elbows by the time we got back to the tree line. When we dropped out of the forest, the sun had completely set. We grabbed Bridey’s potatoes and kept running. We had only stars to see by.
And before we got back to camp, Aristotle had already sneaked in with Walter Mendenhall and Milton Katz. Milton Katz, eluding the detectives, snapped a photo of the Model T, which people had a hard time believing was real when they saw it in the Weekly World Worker. But he also snapped a picture of Preston, standing in front of our tent, blowing taps on his trumpet at dusk. Of course in the photo you couldn’t tell he was playing taps, but then again, you kind of could, and something about Preston standing straight as a soldier holding the dented horn with his ruined hand caught everybody’s eye, because that picture ended up in the New York Times, and millions of people saw it.
Margaret
2014
I HALF EXPECTED CHARLIE TO show up at my door a few minutes after I left, asking about the little time-travel bombshell Grandpa Joshua had dropped, but only half expected or maybe less than that. Maybe a quarter expected. Charlie would have been as perplexed, curious, and worried as the next guy, but he knew me, knew how I liked being alone for a while after something big and scary happened to me, even back when the biggest, scariest things were a C on a math test or a missed goal in a field hockey game. But even Charlie can’t be patient forever, so that night at midnight, when I heard the pathetically bad mourning dove call outside my window, I was ready for it.
When I got to The Octagon, Charlie was lying on his back, gazing at the sky. I plopped down a few feet away. The stars beamed, calm and faraway and normal, but I felt weirdly shy around them now, like they were a person I couldn’t quite look in the eye. So I rolled sideways to look at Charlie and propped myself up on my elbow. My head felt heavy as a bowling ball, like it was too full of stuff, which of course it was.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, still staring skyward.
“Hey, remember how we watched the Perseid meteor shower last summer?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember how I counted, like, five times as many falling stars as you did?”
“Nope. And they aren’t stars, genius.”
“It’s a figure of speech, genius.”
It was amazing, that night, the points of light sliding down the sky like raindrops down a car window. Even though we knew better, there was no way not to expect them to fall on us in flurries, to get snagged in the tree branches, to clatter onto The Octagon and lie glowing in the long grass of the field; that’s how personal it all seemed, how close and just for us.
I let myself slip back to that night, not like a time traveler, just like a regular girl, remembering. Then I flopped back down on my back, shut my eyes, and started to talk. I gave him everything, the whole spiel, mixed metaphors and all. The garden hose, the flip book, the holes blinking like eyes, and it wasn’t until I was finished that I realized what I’d just done, how big it was, how risky. I’d just given Charlie the unbelievable and asked him to believe it. I’d just told him I had the ability to travel through time.
I sneaked a peek at him. In the dark, I could just see his face as he looked down at the tops of his own knees, his eyebrows lowered in a way that meant he was thinking something through. I lay there, hearing my pulse in my ears, waiting to find out if my best friend thought I was a liar or a lunatic, to find out whether he was still my best friend at all. I’d never felt so lonely in my life.
Finally, Charlie said, “What if you just go back and stop the people who really burned down the lab? I mean, we know the date and more or less the time. Wouldn’t that be simpler than jumping all the way back to 1938?”
For a few seconds, I was too relieved to speak. Maybe I can do this, I thought. If Charlie and I are in it together, I just might be able to pull it off. If I hadn’t known it would have embarrassed him to death, I would’ve cried or hugged Charlie. Or both.
Instead, I swallowed hard and said, “You can’t travel in your own lifetime. That’s what my dad told me. Two yous can’t be together in a single now.”
“That’s good,” said Charlie with a snort. “One you is plenty.”
I punched him in the shoulder.
He ignored me, scrambled to a sitting position, and went on, getting excited, “So the next question is: when should you jump to? Grandpa Joshua seemed to be saying that if we stopped the murder in the hunting lodge, that would do the trick. But what if we stopped the whole Canvasburg massacre? What if we stole the guards’ guns or stopped the kid from throwing the rock, if he really did throw one? We could save a lot of lives that way, right? Including Aristotle’s. I mean, I guess that would save Aristotle, right?”
I liked the way he said “we,” but I realized it was time to tell Charlie the next bit of information about time travel, the big, the vague, the spooky, the hard-to-get-your-mind-around-just-take-it-on-faith part (as if all the rest had been so easy to get your mind around). The part about the forces of history.
“I know, Charlie,” I said, and at the sound of his name, he snapped his head up to look at me. Like most people who talked to each other all the time and didn’t live on a movie screen, we only used each other’s names in conversation when something big was coming up.
“It would be great to think big, to try to save everyone we can, to change all the bad stuff,” I went on, gearing up to tell Charlie the spooky part but also wanting to put it off as long as possible, “but here’s the thing, and I know this sounds kind of strange, but everyone says it, my dad, Uncle Joe, all of them, it’s the reason for the forswearing, or, like one of the reasons, the main one probably, I mean there’s also something in there about staying humble, not getting too full of ourselves and treating the quirk like a gift so that we start to think we’re a bunch of superheroes or wh
atever—”
I stopped for breath.
“Just say it already,” said Charlie, “whatever it is.”
I sat up.
“History resists,” I told him.
“Oh yeah, you said that yesterday. What’s it mean?”
“History doesn’t want to be messed with. It pushes back when you try.”
“Pushes how?”
I sighed.
“Well, that’s where people get a little hazy on the details. I mean, my family’s been forswearing for a really long time, so maybe no one knows for sure, but what everyone’s pretty clear on is that history resists.”
“So,” Charlie ventured, quietly, “maybe it’s not going to work, you changing history to save your dad?”
It had to work. It had to, it had to, it had to.
“I don’t know,” I said.
We sat there, deflated. I don’t know what was going on inside Charlie’s head, but what I was doing was searching for a reason, any reason but preferably a good one, to hope. Then it hit me.
“But here’s the thing,” I said. “If it were impossible, why would we be able to travel at all? If history were that strong, wouldn’t it stop us?”
Charlie looked at me, nodding. “Maybe. And ‘resists’ isn’t exactly the same thing as ‘prevents,’ is it?”
“No way!”
“Okay, so it’s worth a try.”
“Definitely! But maybe what we should do is think small, just try to change one thing. I mean, no one really knows what triggered the massacre, so let’s focus on the murder in the hunting lodge. We know the time and place. We can guess what happened.”
Charlie nodded again and said, “It’s small and contained and doesn’t involve that many people—unlike, say, the massacre itself. Maybe if we don’t get too ambitious and just really limit the change you make, history won’t . . .”
“Notice?” I supplied. “Interfere? Get too mad?”
Saving Lucas Biggs Page 8
