Fast Backward

by David Patneaude

  I tell her good morning, but she doesn’t respond. Her focus is on the map of Europe tacked to the kitchen wall. Soon she’ll have all the maps carved indelibly in her brain.

  Finally, radiating frustration, she tears herself away and gets dressed. We ride to the shack, say hello to Leo, and hurry through the route in record time for a Sunday, despite the fat papers and a further increase in camp traffic. The news from Europe has raised the stakes again.

  When we get home the Army car is gone and there’s a note from Pete on the kitchen table:

  Bobby and Future Girl—Turn on the radio. Hitler has given the rest of the world an ultimatum. Churchill has already responded. Truman will speak to the nation at eight a.m.

  General Groves called just after you left for your route. We’re leaving for Kirtland now, but should be back by this afternoon.

  You’re the best!

  Pete

  After we switch on the radio, the newsman goes on and on about demands and summarizes the mad man’s ultimatum: Withdraw from continental Europe and its surrounding waters; cease all bombing; halt aggression against Japan.

  And last but definitely not least: Surrender. Cede all political power to the two remaining Axis countries. If not, beginning in three days, more bombs will be detonated. More lives, civilian and military, will be lost. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. The bombing will not cease.

  “No!” Cocoa says. She’s back to studying her maps.

  The newsman continues. Churchill responded in less than an hour. His speech was short but to the point. “Vermin do not make demands. Vermin are hunted down and trapped and exterminated. We will never fear your threats nor accede to your so-called ultimatums. Never. The Allied forces will fight on, for the good of our countries and the world.”

  “The fight went on,” Cocoa says, “but it was futile.”

  “We’re going to change that. Right?”

  “Right,” she says, forcing a smile.

  “You’ve already changed things,” I remind her. And myself.

  “Only a start, Robert.”

  At eight o’clock President Truman comes on the air. His voice isn’t as commanding as President Roosevelt’s, his words aren’t as eloquent as Prime Minister Churchill’s, but when he sums up his address, his meaning is clear. “We will never surrender. Hitler and Hirohito and the rest of the scum of the world can go to hell.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Monday, August 6

  The kitchen light is on when I get up Monday morning. Cocoa is again studying the map of Europe, but this time when I say good morning, she says good morning back, and there’s a light in her eyes. We’re down to two days on Hitler’s ultimatum, but there’s a light.

  “What?” I say.

  “England,” she says. “I remember. England is next.”

  A few minutes later we’re all at the table. Lolly circles us. His morning routine hasn’t been routine.

  “Cocoa?” Captain Nelson says. “You’ve got something?” His dark hair is short but, fresh out of bed, it’s sticking out in several directions. Cocoa dips her fingers in her glass of water and pats it down. He doesn’t object. Anything for the precious goose. I feel a twinge of something I suppose is jealousy. Has she ever tried to fix my unruly hair?

  “England,” she says. “After Hitler’s ultimatum and the responses from Churchill and Truman, I recalled that Hitler has a hard-on for Churchill. England has been a thorn in Hitler’s side since the start of the war. Resisting invasion. Outfighting the famed Luftwaffe. Bringing in Canada and America. Bombing Germany.”

  “When?” Pete says.

  “He’s not lying about the timing of his next strike. His forecast of three days is correct.” She glances at the calendar. “Two.”

  “Do you recall the city?” The captain is up and moving toward the phone. “How the bomb is delivered?”

  She shakes her head. “I would say London, but that’s little more than a guess. Likewise, for how the bomb arrives. I don’t remember. Maybe I never knew.”

  “Good enough,” Captain Jack says, self-consciously running his hand through his hair.

  After failing to reach General Groves at his office, the captain finds him at his quarters. At the end of their conversation, Cocoa gets an invitation to talk.

  “Hello,” she says when the captain hands her the phone. There’s a timid note in her voice that’s new to me. But this is General Groves. “Thank you. I wish I could remember more.” She pauses. “Yes, the maps helped. They helped me recall that England was—is—a target. Now I am hoping they vill provide some insight on the bomb-making plant.”

  Another pause. “I am eating more than ever. Sleeping well, when my thoughts don’t needle me too much. Fresh air and exercise, too. Robert and I ride to the base camp every morning to do his newspaper route.”

  More listening. “You’re welcome.” She hands the phone to the captain.

  The rest of Captain Nelson’s conversation with the general consists mostly of yes-sirs. He hangs up. “He told me you deserve another outing, Cocoa. Can you think of anything?”

  “I think Big Muddy misses me,” she says without hesitating.

  “I’m sure she does,” Pete says. “We’ll get you there for sure. But why don’t you and Robert try to come up with something bigger, too?”

  We spend the rest of the morning thinking about possibilities while we have breakfast and do chores and the captain has more conversations with General Groves. After each of them he tells us what they’ve discussed, hoping, I suppose, to dislodge something in Cocoa’s brain.

  “They’re figuring on London,” he says after the most recent call, “while also fortifying defenses at other major ports. Because Germany’s surface ships would be easy targets, and the Luftwaffe is skeletal, they believe another U-boat may be the means. But, just in case, the RAF and Army Air Force will have extra patrols in the air.”

  The captain’s reports don’t free any of Cocoa’s memories. After lunch, I talk her into taking a walk. Pete and the captain have promised us a visit to Big Muddy once the day cools.

  We head out of the yard and into its vast surroundings. The sounds and smells change. Heat rises from the sand. We enter a maze of sagebrush, cactus, yucca, mesquite, burrows of small critters. Whenever we near a low-growing plant or collection of plants that might provide a hiding spot for a snake, I scan for shapes, patterns, shadows, coils, rattles, movement. The desert has its own dangers.

  “It makes me feel small, Robert,” Cocoa says, staring into the blue above us, at its puffy white clouds. “You should look up sometimes.”

  “And you should look down. A rattlesnake would like to latch onto one of those skinny ankles of yours.”

  “I have seen worse than rattlesnakes,” she says.

  “I feel sorry for you. But a diamondback won’t care what you’ve seen.”

  We keep going, heading west, parallel to the mountains. Getting some peace and quiet. Some room for Cocoa to breathe and shed a little of the load. She looks down occasionally but spends most of her time gazing at the sky, the hills, white-winged doves and red-tailed hawks and meadowlarks taking flight at our approach. Like she can’t believe any of it.

  We pause and share a drink from my canteen. I let her go first, which allows me to think about her lips touching the cool metal barely an instant before mine.

  I peer back toward the house, but it’s gone from view. We could be a hundred miles from here. We could be a hundred years in the past.

  But not a hundred years in the future. Not in Cocoa’s world. In Cocoa’s world, there would be no plants. There would be no blue sky. The clouds would be dark and poisonous. A writhing knot of snakes.

  We’ve been quiet. A pocket gopher slips out of its burrow ten feet away, sits up, and gives us a once-over. It lets Cocoa get within five feet before it scurries back to its front porch.

  “Not as friendly as Big Muddy,” I say, thinking about our late afternoon appointment with the kindly mare, and
the captain telling us to come up with a bigger sort of outing also.

  “Just shy,” Cocoa says. She crouches, making herself smaller, but the gopher takes the movement as a threat. It scrambles into the opening, which looks exactly like a miniature cave, and disappears into the black.

  The shadowy hollow sparks a memory. Something Pete once told me. “Have you ever been inside a cave, Cocoa?”

  She sheds her disappointment at the exit of her little friend. “A cave?”

  “Pete discovered one near Carlsbad when I was little—five or six. He says it looked like nobody else had ever been there. He kept its location a secret, but he told me he’d take me to see it when I was older. By the time I was older, though, he was off fighting the war.”

  “Carlsbad?”

  “A town—four or five hours east of here. But Captain Jack wants you to pick out something extra special to do. And Pete said it was amazing. Stalagmites, stalactites, pools, all that stuff.”

  “I’ve seen photos of those things. I’d like to visit this cave, Robert.”

  “Let’s go tell the fellows you’ve made a choice.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Tuesday, August 7

  We leave after breakfast. A four-hour drive, according to Pete. Last night he spent an hour studying a map and estimating distances between places—landmarks, hills and valleys and creeks, dirt roads—that he’d penciled in. After all the time and turmoil, I wonder about his calculations.

  Next to me in the back seat, Cocoa studies the map while Lolly hogs the window on the other side. Cocoa’s our official navigator, but so far we’re traveling regular roads—desert and mountains and desert again—and Pete’s choices are obvious.

  When I’m not stealthily watching Cocoa, I gaze out the windows and think about Mom and Dad and wonder about their surroundings. Dad has shown me photos of the Japanese American camps: plywood and tarpaper barracks, barbed wire, kids playing in the dirt, sentries with rifles aimed in, not out. But what do he and Mom see when they look beyond the fences and sentry towers?

  With a name like Gila River, it’s not hard to imagine: Rough. Hostile. Venomous.

  Cocoa knows monsters, but does she know Gila monsters?

  We pass an intersection with Highway 13 on our left.

  “In about five miles we cross a river,” Cocoa says, studying Pete’s notes. “After that, go another mile or two to a dirt road marked by an old juniper tree. Take a right there.”

  “Thanks, Future Girl,” he says.

  “Enjoying yourself so far?” the captain asks her. He’s been quiet, reading notes, writing his own. A busy guy, but he has one main focus—Cocoa.

  “The world is so remarkable,” she says.

  “Wait till you see the cave,” Pete says.

  A bridge takes us across a shallow river. Two minutes later a gnarled juniper appears. Pete turns onto a two-track dirt road. We buck and bounce until the car settles into the ruts.

  “Two miles,” Cocoa says. “Mushroom-shaped boulder on the left. Livestock path behind it. Drivable for a mile, until we reach a creek. Park and walk. Follow the creek bed uphill.”

  “To a canyon,” Pete says. “You’re gonna be impressed. Both of you.” He glances at Captain Nelson. “All of you.”

  The mushroom-shaped boulder is unmistakable. I picture a huge cloud, rising, blooming. We turn and follow the path. The car growls uphill to the banks of a creek.

  We park and drink water from our canteens. From the trunk, Pete takes out a rope, a compass, a first aid kit, four flashlights, a box of batteries, and a knapsack full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches weighted down with oranges at the bottom. He and the captain divvy everything up, and then we’re off, following the creek upstream.

  Lolly lopes ahead of us, peeing on everything, then returns to trot alongside Cocoa. I remember when he was my dog.

  I can feel the altitude. And the heat. Like Pete and the captain, I’m in shorts and a T-shirt, but after five minutes I’m sweating. Ahead of me, Cocoa, wearing shorts and a thin blue blouse, seems to have no trouble keeping up. But her breathing sounds ragged.

  There’s little conversation. We save our breath. Soon the opening of a canyon looms on our left, and Pete veers in that direction.

  We go up, down, around, through shadow and out, and then, for a half mile or more, down. The canyon floor is littered with rubble from the surrounding cliffs. The air cools.

  “Feel that?” Pete says. He leads us around a bend and down through more rubble. The temperature continues to drop. The only sound is Lolly’s panting.

  Standing against the base of the cliff is a pillar-like rock, buried deep. About fifteen feet of it protrudes from the ground. From somewhere nearby comes a stream of cold air. And the stench of an extra-tangy variety of chicken shit.

  Lolly sniffs along the pillar’s base. When he disappears behind it, we follow. In the shadows there’s a thorny bush, eight or nine feet tall, guarding an opening where cliff face meets ground. It’s maybe four feet high, three wide. Beyond it is blackness. I think of the pocket gopher scrambling into its hole.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Pete says. “Even this acacia was here. Smaller, of course. I got a few scratches from it. So be careful.”

  He checks his flashlight, the rest of us check ours, and we follow him in, ducking and duck-walking. As we move ahead and down, the ceiling gets taller. We can stand.

  “What is the stink?” Cocoa says.

  “You’ll see soon,” Pete says. Ahead of us, the beam of his flashlight fades into nothingness.

  We keep descending. The temperature keeps falling. If it was ninety outside, it’s now seventy. The passageway widens. Another opening appears on our right, and Pete chalks an X next to it on the rock.

  The walls and ceiling continue to recede. We continue to move down. It’s colder. Sixty.

  The path winds to the right, drops steeply. “Flashlights off,” Pete says. His is the lone light as we keep going. At one point, he slows and I bump into Cocoa’s butt. She doesn’t complain.

  The smell is thick enough to slice. Lolly’s toenails click. All around us is echoing blackness. Out of it comes the sound of falling water.

  Finally, Pete stops. “Turn ’em back on,” he says.

  We do. For an instant, I’m alarmed. We’re in a giant open area. In front of us are figures, stretching from the floor to wherever the ceiling might be. Monsters?

  No. Rock formations. Stalagmites.

  We raise our flashlights. High above us, hanging from the ceiling, are more formations—stalactites. Some reach down to meet the stalagmites, forming pillars, relics from an ancient Greek temple. I sense movement. Fluttering. I move my flashlight beam across the ceiling. Unfolding. Folding. Wings. Glimmer. Eyes.

  “Bats,” I say. “Thousands.” Lolly whines. His nose must be clogged with the smells.

  “At least,” Pete says. Near us, near the wall, the ground is mostly unblemished rock and sand. But a few feet away, where the overhead concentration of flying mammals begins, it’s covered with a thick carpet of bat shit, a zillion years’ worth.

  We sweep our beams around the giant space—walls, ceiling, columns, floor. I decide Pete’s right. There’s no sign of anyone else. Ever. The thought is overwhelming to me, and maybe to Cocoa, too. She’s gone quiet. I aim my flashlight at her face for a moment, but I can’t read anything. She flashes me a distracted smile.

  “In San Francisco we have hills,” Captain Nelson says. “Bridges and fog. Nothing like this fairy tale place. Magic, dwarves, goblins.”

  I know what he means. “The Hobbit,” I say, picturing Smaug the dragon and a cavernous room full of gold and jewels. And bones, human or near-human.

  “Exactly,” the captain says. Cocoa adds nothing. Wouldn’t they have The Hobbit in her future library? Or would Hitler have banned it? Would he have seen himself in its monsters and monstrous ambitions?

  “Ready to move on?” Pete says.

  He and the captain start o
ff. But Cocoa stays, slowly playing her flashlight beam off the walls and ceiling and rock formations and finally the ground. Lolly doesn’t budge. Neither do I.

  “Something wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Water?” I hold out my canteen, and she takes a drink. I follow, imagining again. An almost-kiss. Ahead of us, two flashlights halt.

  “We spoke of déjà vu once, Robert,” she says. “In the barn. When I barely knew you.”

  “I remember. It happens to me sometimes.”

  “I’m having that feeling again.”

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

  “More than that,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  She doesn’t answer. We move ahead, catch up to Pete and the captain, and continue walking. The water sounds grow louder. The air dampens. My skin erupts with goosebumps, and when Cocoa reaches back to take my hand, my goosebumps multiply.

  We enter a wide tunnel that eventually opens into another room that’s half as big as the one we just left. Here are more rock formations and another ceiling carpeted with bats. When Pete aims his flashlight at a wall, a waterfall appears.

  Winding through stalagmites, treading on centuries-old layers of petrified bat shit, we approach a circular pool where the falls splash down. We look into its clear depths and I imagine a lost ring, and Gollum, lurking in the shadows.

  “I wouldn’t drink it,” Pete says. “Not with bat city overhead.”

  “Do they ever leave?” I say. Lolly ignores Pete’s warning, His lapping sounds echo off the walls.

  “Dusk,” Pete says. “I was just outside the entrance. It was like a signal sounded and a river of them came pouring out.”

  Cocoa’s silent, and Captain Jack notices. “What do you think, Future Girl?”

  “I don’t think,” she says. “I know. I know where the Nazis are making their bombs.”

  For a moment, nobody says anything. Then the captain reacts. “Where?”