Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  “Two bucks for the lot,” he grunted.

  “I want to trade them all for superhero comics,” I said. “Stuff with mutants who fly.”

  Cressie pushed his glasses up his nose. “Can you be more specific? Guy heroes or chicks? League or lone wolf? Mainstream or underground? Flying under their own power or with help from magic objects?”

  I lost track of my choices, so I said, “Flying girls would be the coolest, but I’ll take anything you think worthy, Cressie. You’re the expert.”

  Cressie liked to be sucked up to. Clearing his throat, he lifted the hinged counter in front of the cash register and wheezed his way down a narrow aisle of boxes stuffed with comics, all magic-markered with the word SUPER/FLY/ALL GENRES, tugging out issues at random.

  “Wonder Woman, The Blaze, Falcon Man, Notorious Nine, The Silver Surfer — and Agents of V.E.N.G.E.A.N.C.E. has a kickass chick crime fighter, the Contessina. Should we bother with Superman?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, I’m up on him. What about Webcrawler? He has radioactive blood, right?”

  “The guy doesn’t fly, though,” Cressie reminded me. “He crawls up buildings on titanium cobwebs. Big difference.”

  I picked up one of the old Wonder Woman issues. The cover showed her hanging in mid-air while bullets bounced off her bracelets.

  “She didn’t fly until 1960,” explained Cressie. “They keep screwing around with her origin story, giving her powers, taking them away again, making her an Amazon, then a Greek goddess — no one can make up their mind who Wonder Woman really is. Interesting story: some headshrinker invented her back in the war years, based on a chick he was screwing on the side who — get this — was also screwing his wife. A threesome, with Wonder Woman in the middle. Wild, huh? And here’s a fun fact, baby doll: the headshrinker was the inventor of guess what machine?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t even going to attempt a guess or I would’ve been standing there with Cressie all day. Once he started in with comic book trivia, there was no end to it.

  “The polygraph,” said Cressie triumphantly.

  “What?”

  “You know — the lie detector. Same guy who came up with Wonder Woman invented it.”

  I stared at Cressie. Unbelievable. The coincidence was too massive to ignore.

  “I’ll take one Falcon Man, one Agents of V.E.N.G.E.A.N.C.E., one Silver Surfer and as many Wonder Womans as I can get on trade,” I said.

  * * *

  I biked home with my stash and read them under my bed. I saw Cressie’s point about Wonder Woman: her origin story kept restarting, over and over again. Comic book time wasn’t so much fluid as rubbery, bouncing back and forth, up and down, like a superball. Do-overs were common: you could literally start a superhero’s life again in a different time, place or dimension. Costumes were reinvented as often as backstories.

  I waited until Mom went out on an errand, put on a pair of gardening gloves and my bathing suit for the full superhero effect and scaled the rose trellis on the front of the house, skinning my knees on the rough shingles as I pulled myself up onto the roof. I had no natural fear of heights, a genetic gift from my father who was born in an alpine village so steep that vertigo had been bred out of the population. From the roof, I watched my grandfather, Nonno Zinio, slowly tying vines to wires and wires to posts in the grape rows behind our house.

  I wondered: Would he see me transform into a comet and burn through the atmosphere like the Blaze? Grow a giant set of angel’s wings like Falcon Man? Or would the Trespasser arrive in the form of an angel and catch me in his arms? From my grandmother, I’d heard the legend of Beautiful Alda, who jumped off a tower to escape a besotted Roman soldier, only to be scooped up in mid-air by St. Michael the Archangel. Sadly, Beautiful Alda abused this divine favour by going all Evel Knievel and making a second jump to impress villagers willing to pay hard cash to see the spectacle. She plummeted to her death.

  I was still considering these possibilities when the tip of an extension ladder clanged against the eavestrough and the mouse-coloured topknot of my grandmother, Nonna Peppy, popped over the edge.

  “What the hell wrong witch you? You tryin’ to kill you’self, for Chrissake?” she shouted.

  Being a good and dutiful granddaughter, I considered telling Nonna the truth: that I was experimenting with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. But I knew what she would say: You too old to be playing with your imagination. I couldn’t tell Nonna about what Bum Bum and I were planning or she would have locked me in the root cellar. So I said, “I just want to be by myself.”

  “Inna bathing suit, this time-a-year? Onna roof? Get the hell down, now,” she ordered in an accent that was pure New York Lower East Side, even after all these years in Shipman’s Corners.

  Following Nonna Peppy down the ladder, I could hear the unbloodied rose bushes grumbling their disappointment: why hadn’t I jumped? Roses are bloodthirsty plants, especially in fall when the leaves drop off, leaving nothing but thorns and creepers. I let Nonna wrap her shawl around my shoulders and propel me into her house, on the opposite side of our house from the Donatos.

  In the kitchen, Pepé the Seventh, stretched out on the scrubbed linoleum floor, greeted me with a thumping tail and a yeasty stench. Nonna Peppy was nicknamed for her dog — or rather, generations of dogs — all named Pepé, for a Cuban bandleader whom she’d heard once in a dance club in New York, where she had lived for ten years before returning to Italy to marry Nonno Zinio. As soon as one Pepé died, Nonna would grieve for a day or two, go straight to the pound and pick out another. “Life’s short and you gotta get right back on the horse” was her philosophy. Pepés One through Six were small, irritable mixed-breeds that barked a lot and were too stupid to be housetrained. Pepé the Seventh was the best of the bunch, an amiable retriever with an ear infection that made him stink like rancid fish.

  Nonna sat me at the table and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “I got some beautiful Calabrian crusty bread, lovely cheese, Genoa salami, maybe some anisette cookies?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, but she was already filling the table in front of me. I made a capicollo and cheese sandwich while she spooned Nescafé into mugs and put the kettle on. While we waited for the water to boil, she leaned back against the counter with her arms crossed, frowning at me.

  “What the hell’s wrong witch you, cara?” she wanted to know. “You’re not yourself.”

  I shrugged and scratched the ears of Pepé the Seventh, his smelly head in my lap.

  “C’mon, dimmi. Talk to me. What’s make you so sad?”

  “Bunch of things,” I mumbled around a mouthful of food.

  “Okay, big deal, you got troubles. How many? Count for me.”

  “Three,” I answered.

  Nonna snorted. “Three’s nothing. Three’s what I got on a good day. Your Nonno Zin, he got about three an hour, thanks to the damn arthritis and the cancer. What’s the first one?”

  “Dad.”

  Nonna Peppy nodded and rubbed my arm. She already knew about Dad.

  Ever since the Z-Lands, he seemed as deflated as the back tire on the Country Squire. He stuck with the same story Mom had told us — that he’d managed to change the tire and drive to the plant, where he’d become trapped in a decontamination stall for about six hours. But his story didn’t pass the sniff test, not even for a twelve-year-old tap dancing–school dropout. Why hadn’t we seen him driving past us? Why hadn’t someone at ShipCo found him sooner? But most of all, when Mom was grocery shopping and Linda at a volleyball-team tryout, why had a ShipCo employee rung our doorbell and asked for Dad, then waited at attention while Dad piled his ShipCo manager’s cap and plaid tie and dress uniform in the employee’s arms? Ever since then, Dad had gone to work wearing the solid blue burst-away bow tie of a mid-level officer.

  “Okay, so you worryin’ about Dad. Me too.
Your mom, too, you don’t think she’s worried?” said Nonna Peppy. “Second trouble is what?”

  “Linda,” I said.

  Nonna Peppy sighed and fiddled with one of the anisette cookies, breaking it into a little heart-shaped mound of crumbs. Linda, too, had changed after the Z-Lands, turning distant and surly and a little disgusting, accidentally-on-purpose leaving soiled industrial-sized sanitary napkins on the bathroom floor, like ketchup-splattered serviettes from the A&W.

  Nonna didn’t ask me about my third trouble. I wouldn’t have told her anyway. I’d learned that sharing secrets could be dangerous, and I wasn’t about to explain Kendal’s situation. Anyway, we never got past Linda, which wasn’t a surprise.

  One night, when a show Linda and I were watching was interrupted by an emergency broadcast from the White House, with President Robert Kennedy telling us we were going to DEFCON 2 because of yet another missile crisis — the third in as many years — Linda stood up suddenly and stomped to our room, with me following.

  I sat on my bed and watched her push open our bedroom window, then start to work at the edge of the screen with a metal nail file, as if she were trying to break out of prison. She jabbed at the screen in a sort of desperate panic that infected me, too.

  “Linda, what-are-you-doing-what-are-you-doing-what-are-you-doing?” I whimpered like a frightened cat.

  “You know what DEFCON two means?”

  I shook my head.

  She took a long breath. “It means . . . nothing. Nothing left. Some people just disintegrate and their shadows are left behind. Some people live and think they’re okay, but then their skin starts peeling off. Like scalding the skin off a tomato. Understand?”

  Linda stuck her hand down the front of her blouse and pulled out her scapular medal of Our Lady of Lourdes. She unclipped it and poured the thin gold chain into my palm, closing my fingers around it.

  “Keep this for me. If I don’t come back, it’s yours.”

  She eased the screen out of the window and slipped it under her bed, then grabbed a comforter and stuffed it under her sheets, patting and shaping it like playdough.

  Getting down on her tummy on the window ledge, she pivoted her body like a gymnast on a balance beam. It was a short drop to the narrow strip of grass; I heard the soft plop of her body hitting the ground.

  The window looked obscenely naked without its screen. I went to the ledge and looked down at my stranger-sister, my stomach flipping like a pancake. Linda’s eyes, as large and dark as mine, looked up at me.

  “You aren’t going to tattle, are you? This could be my last chance.”

  “Last chance for what?”

  But she was already gone. I could hear the sound of her body pushing through a gap in the bushes.

  I pulled down the window, not quite closing it, leaving a Peter Pan–sized space so that Linda could Tinkerbell her way back into the room. Eventually, I went to bed and dropped off into a dream about Ethel Mertz and Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy working at a long conveyor belt covered in bullet-shaped bombs. They held mallets and tapped each one on the nose. When one finally exploded, blood spurted everywhere, like the juice from an overripe tomato.

  WAHHHHHH! wailed Lucy. An unseen audience was laughing, just like on TV.

  The next morning, I opened my eyes to see Linda curled tightly in her quilt, her tennis shoes tossed telltale beneath the window. She smelled like cats after a rainstorm. I pulled myself over the side of the bed, found slippers and scuffed into the kitchen. Dad, making coffee, was listening to Bobby Kennedy on the radio, talking about how we had prevailed once again. Dad was late leaving for work that morning, lingering over his coffee while he smoked a cigarette, something he’d stopped doing when I was a little kid but had recently taken up again. I poured a bowl of Frosted Flakes and drowned it in milk, the radio gone to music.

  When I got back to our room, Linda had disappeared. I had a moment of worry until I heard water running in the bathroom. I went to the door and lay on the floor, pressing my eye against the gap. I could just make out Linda’s bare toes. She must have been sitting on the toilet.

  “Linda!”

  A heavy sigh from inside the bathroom. “What is it?”

  “President Kennedy says we’re not gonna die.”

  There was a long pause before Linda’s voice floated out to me from under the door: “Not today, but soon, Billy says.” Followed by the sound of the toilet flushing.

  two

  There Be Dragons

  Bum Bum and I huddled together behind the half-built wall of a house out of view of the schoolyard. Lunch break was the best time to discuss our breakout plans, but I’d noticed the teachers watching us. Probably wondering what a nice girl like Debbie was doing with a loser from Z Street who occasionally showed up for class in his mother’s clothes. Exceptionals and Normals didn’t mix at St. Dismas Middle School.

  That day, Bum Bum was in a pair of turquoise capris. We were sharing a cigarette — my first.

  I coughed. I felt lightheaded in a not unpleasant way. “Bad news. I haven’t found a way to fly over the wall,” I told him.

  Bum Bum plucked the Export A out of my fingers and took a long drag.

  “Who said anything about flying?”

  “You did.”

  “Jesus, I was just kidding. I meant climbing. We could probably manage it with a thirty-foot extension ladder.”

  I remembered Nonna Peppy popping over the edge of the roof. “We’ve got one. But I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to get it on the car.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “But won’t the guards see us going over the fence?”

  Bum Bum blew smoke in the air, thoughtfully aiming the stream away from my face. “It’s starting to get dark early. We’ll do it under cover of night.”

  “But BB —”

  He hugged my shoulder. “Relax. Sometimes you just got to make stuff up as you go along. What’s that word?”

  “Improvise,” I said.

  “Yeah, like that. Just be ready and I’ll find you when the time comes.”

  We left the construction site and took separate routes back to the schoolyard.

  * * *

  I was so distracted, waiting for a sign from Bum Bum, that I let my thirteenth birthday pass in early October without much fuss, except for a store-bought white cake and watered down wine at Nonna Peppy and Nonno Zin’s house. Even Halloween snuck up on me like a wolverine following an unsuspecting hunter in a Disney live-action short. The Donatos, Sandy and I decided that we weren’t too old for one last trick-or-treat. Afterwards, we could drop into a party at the candy store at the boundary of Tesla and Fermi, thrown by the junior volleyball team at St. Dismas Collegiate, where Linda was a star blocker.

  I hadn’t bothered to think about what to wear. Dad drove me to the five-and-dime at the plaza to browse the picked-over plastic costumes. The Donato twins had snapped up the last of the fairy princesses, of course; the boys on the street got all the soldiers, hobos, pirates and gangsters, their scars and five o’clock shadows applied with burnt cork and eyebrow pencil, as if disguised as their future selves. I had to settle for being a circus clown in the flimsy plastic mask of a white-faced, red-nosed, orange-haired man and a suit printed on a slipcover big enough to pull over a winter coat. Linda planned to dress as a witch — appropriate, given the vile mood she’d been in.

  One night as I lay on my bed, Linda sat at her desk, chewing the end of a pencil and mulling over math questions. She was hiding something; I was sure of it.

  Exhibit A: while I pretended to sleep, she had popped open the window screen two more times, dropping over the sill like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. When Dad finally got around to putting up the storm windows, the midnight adventures ended and her mood darkened even further.

  Exhibit B: the strange things hidden under the white pant
ies and navy knee socks in her underwear drawer. With plenty of time to snoop while she was at school, I examined astonishing black lace brassieres with the price tags still attached, bottles of dime-store perfume and bikini panties printed with cartoon devils spelling the days of the week with flaming pitchforks.

  Exhibit C: a stapled booklet printed on cheap paper called the Manifesto of the Youth Anarchist Movement (Canusa Cell). In it, I learned that the older generation (and in particular the military industrial complex, which you can pretty much bet was another way of saying ShipCo) was using what they called “surplus youth” for experimentation and the advancement of the space program. After the last war, people had too many babies for the country to support, and this was a way for ShipCo to put some of the poorer ones to practical use. Referring to the dog the Soviets sent up in Sputnik 2, the booklet read, We are a generation of human Laikas, bred to test the space technology of the twentieth century. It made me quietly glad to be a girl, unfit for space flight, according to the YAM Manifesto. My only role in the World of Tomorrow, it said, was as a breeder for future Laikas.

  * * *

  On Halloween night, the temperature plunged. Freezing rain battered Shipman’s Corners, coating our windows with a thin scrim of ice.

  I put on my clown mask, pulled on my winter coat and toque and squeezed on the plastic Bozo slipcase. I looked like an orange-and-white sausage bursting its skin.

  Linda, sleek in a tight black turtleneck and slacks, stuck a cone-shaped bristol board witch’s hat on her head and waited at the door, her black-lined eyes scanning the street as she gnawed her thumb. At the sound of a honk, she yelled “That’s Tricia” and skittered down the slick front walk to a green and white Corvair. Standing at the door in my Bozo mask, I watched the car swallow her up.

  The Donato twins came to pick me up in their pink princess dresses, plastic tiaras and majorette boots; Mrs. Donato had run up fluffy white jackets to wear over top so that the effect wouldn’t be ruined by winter coats. Sandy arrived in her folkloric dance outfit: a full red and white skirt, red boots over heavy wool leggings and a crown of flowers stitched to a toque.