AbrakaPOW

by Isaiah Campbell

  Max began to suffocate on the darkness as she felt around on her foot for the wound inflicted by the nail. She found the spot, sticky from the blood, and held the toe tightly. She sat on the step and did everything she could not to cry.

  Just when she thought she might lose that battle, the door over her head creaked and a beam of pale moonlight hit her in the eyes.

  She jumped up as the door was opened.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you heard me,” she said to the thin silhouette that moved into the opening. “Is that you, Mom?”

  Lightning flashed and revealed her rescuer.

  It was the pale old woman who lived down the road. Her eyes were hidden in dark shadows on her face. Her hair was matted down from the rain. Her robe was soaked to her bony body.

  Max finally screamed.

  The woman disappeared.

  Max ran up the steps and looked around the yard, but she couldn’t see the woman anywhere. Nor could she find Major Larousse’s boots.

  Max debated chasing after the woman barefoot, but she was fairly certain that would mean getting an infection in her toe, so instead she limped through the mud back to the house.

  She washed her feet in the tub and then scrubbed the mud off the floor that she’d tracked inside. Finally, just as the storm passed, she crawled back into her bed. Houdini, sensing that she needed some tender loving care, joined her and decided the most comfortable sleeping position was on her head.

  And, because he was correct, she didn’t move him away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I don’t believe in ghosts. But if I did, I’d believe in that one.”

  —Max’s diary, Saturday, March 18, 1944

  Yimakh shemam,” Shoji said while he drew on a piece of draft paper. “What do you think it means?”

  “I’m not sure,” Max said. “I know I’ve heard my Grandma Schauder say it about Hitler, so I imagine nothing good. If only there was someplace we could look it up.”

  They both laughed and then were promptly shushed by the librarian on duty at the Abilene Public Library. Shoji moved the ruler on the map of the area he was examining, measured the distance between Abilene and Sweetwater, and then made the dots on the draft paper to indicate the towns.

  “Okay, do you have the Sweetwater book?” Shoji asked.

  Max ran her finger down the stack of phonebooks in front of her, found the book for Sweetwater, and pulled it out of the stack. “What are we looking for in Sweetwater?”

  “Hardware store, just like in Coleman,” he said.

  She started looking through the pages. “How far away is Sweetwater?”

  “About forty-five miles,” he said.

  She shook her head. “That’s a long way to go for nails.”

  “You’re the one who insisted we do this exactly as Felix told us to,” he said.

  “I know, I know. And he’s right, a real magician gets each piece of equipment from a different place so nobody can figure out the trick.” She found a hardware store called Wood’s Wood. She pushed the book over to Shoji. He wrote the address on the map. “Still, it’s a long way to go for nails.”

  Shoji kept working meticulously on the map and Max grew more and more bored, which was quite the opposite of how she’d always thought she’d feel when preparing for the biggest show of her life. She noticed the blueprint Felix had drawn peeking out from the bottom of the stack of papers in front of Shoji. She reached over and slid the blueprint out into view.

  Shoji slapped his hand on top to keep it in place. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to see the design. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve barely even looked at it since you got it from Felix.”

  “It’s just a whole bunch of construction lingo,” Shoji said. “You won’t really understand it.”

  Max tried to let the obvious derogation in his comment slide. “Okay, so what? Can I see it please?”

  He looked her in the eyes, shook his head, and slid the blueprint back under the stack. “We’re really busy with this right now, remember? I don’t have time to explain everything to you. Besides, I barely understand it all myself.” He returned his attention to the map before him, blissfully unaware that Max was briefly considering committing homicide in the middle of the library.

  Thankfully, for both their sakes, Eric and Carl emerged from an aisle of books and set the spoils of their quest on top of the map Shoji was using as reference. Max chose the high road as Shoji grumbled and pushed the books out of the way.

  “Hey, I thought you’d want to add the rail lines in before you got too far with all the towns and stuff,” Eric said.

  “Why would we put those on the map?” Shoji asked as he remeasured the distance between Abilene and Merkel.

  “You said he wanted as much information as we could find. And the railroads are a pretty big thing to leave off.”

  Carl pulled a piece of notebook paper from his back pocket. “Yeah, I got the addresses of the biggest ranches in the area, too. At least, the ones me and Pa deliver feed to.”

  Shoji grunted. “We don’t need the ranches. What will we do with the ranches?”

  Carl paused for a minute, then tentatively set the paper in front of Shoji. “It took me all morning to make that list.”

  Shoji sighed and started finding the locations from Carl’s list on the map.

  Max thought for a moment about going and finding a biography or a book of magic tricks to pass the time and improve her mood while Shoji did his cartographical magic, but then Lola came and sat down beside her. She dropped a German-English dictionary on the table.

  “Yimakh shemam isn’t German,” she said. “It’s also not French, Spanish, or Russian.”

  “Okay?” Max didn’t understand why Lola was fixating on the phrase. Did it really matter what it meant? Did that make it any less horrifying that someone invaded the storm cellar and painted it on the wall?

  “So I don’t know how to find out what it means,” Lola said.

  “I don’t either,” Max said.

  Lola sat back and watched Max’s face, which made Max squirm more than she ever usually did.

  “What happened after you found the words?” Lola asked.

  “I told you. I went back to my room and went to bed.”

  “I know that’s what you told us. I’m asking you what happened.”

  Max tensed up in her chair. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “No, I’m not. But your eyes are.”

  “Well, my eyes are lying about me lying.”

  “Hmmm.” Lola picked the dictionary back up. “Maybe it starts with a J.”

  Max felt her cheeks burning from anger, but hoped she was hiding it well. One look at Eric and Carl, who were staring at her and Lola like people watching two tigers circling each other at the zoo, informed her that her face truly was the most honest member of her being. She stuck her tongue out at them to divert their gaze.

  Eric laughed. “Hey, let’s maintain the peace in here, okay?” He fished a pack of gum out of his pocket, took a stick for himself, and held it out to Max. “Spearmint?” He shook the pack at her.

  She sighed and took a stick. “Sorry, spending a Saturday at the library isn’t my idea of fun.” She unwrapped the gum and popped it in her mouth.

  “Me neither,” Lola said. “Heck, I’ve lived in Abilene my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever come in here once.”

  Max started to respond, but then realized Eric was watching her intently, stifling giggles. After three chews on the gum, she knew why.

  She turned and spat the gum on the floor. “Oh my gosh, what is that? It tastes like . . . like glue or something.”

  “Yes!” Eric jumped up and punched the air. “That’s how we prank in Ohio, kids.”

  Shoji hid his mouth behind his hand so Max wouldn’t see how full of glee he was at the sight of her scraping white gunk off her tongue.

  “Eric!” Lola scolded. “What was that?”

  “Wallpaper clea
ner,” he said, full of his own genius. “My mom used it with her Kindergarteners in Cincinnati for crafts. You can make it look like just about anything.”

  “Is it poison?” Carl asked, looking very concerned.

  “Nah, I used to eat it all the time,” he said. “See, while you guys are working on this little magic show, I’m going to be pranking Judy like nobody has ever pranked before. Because I’m the true prankster around here.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Max said, doubled over in the chair.

  Lola jumped up and helped Max stand. “Let’s go to the bathroom and get you some water.” She shot Eric a glare of death. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “That’s the mantra of a good prankster, right?”

  Nobody supported his statement.

  Lola led Max over to the bathrooms, but when they were out of the other Gremlins’ sight, Max grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out the front door and around to the side of the building, behind a large bush that hid them from everyone’s view.

  “Are you going to throw up out here?” Lola asked.

  “You were right,” Max said, fully recovered from her imaginary bout of nausea. “There is more to the story.”

  Lola looked both pleased and perplexed. “So you aren’t feeling sick?”

  “No, it didn’t taste that bad, actually.” Max checked around the bush. “But I need to ask you something.”

  “Okay?”

  “You’ve lived here your whole life, right?”

  Lola nodded.

  “Have you ever heard anything about the house at the end of my street?” Max hoped that she hadn’t, that it was all just a self-imposed illusion, fueled by Margaret’s idiocy and skittishness.

  “The haunted house?” Lola asked.

  Max’s stomach sank. “Are you serious?”

  “That’s the one you’re talking about?” Lola dropped her volume. “People say it’s haunted, yeah.”

  “Why do they say that?”

  “You know how those things are. Rickety old house, overgrown yard, abandoned for forever. It’s just what people say.”

  “Abandoned?” Max felt herself get a leftover chill from the night before. “Nobody lives there?”

  “As long as I can remember, no.”

  Max suddenly had to catch her breath. “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t keep a population record or anything, so no, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty close to sure. Why?”

  Max spilled the full story of what Margaret had said, and the face in the window, and the same lady standing at the top of the stairs in the rain.

  “Wow, that’s spooky,” Lola said at the end of the tale. “Is there such a thing as devil-worshipping Jews?”

  Max shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  Lola stared down at her feet, lost in thought for a moment, then snapped her gaze back to Max. “Yimakh shemam. That sounds Jewish, right?”

  “Hebrew? Yeah, I guess. Like I said, my grandma Schauder said it about Hitler, so it’d make since if it was.”

  Without another word, Lola took Max back into the library and they found a Hebrew-English dictionary.

  “Well, I can’t read Jewish, so unless you can . . .” Lola said.

  “Hebrew, and I can read the alphabet.”

  “Why can you read the alphabet?”

  “My grandma has things she finds important,” Max said. She moved through the dictionary until she found the entry in question. “Here it is.”

  “It’s a curse?” Lola said after reading the entry.

  “Looks like it. ‘May their name be forgotten.’ Makes sense that Grandma’d say it about the Nazis, then.”

  “Yeah,” Lola said, a look of growing anxiousness in her eye. “But why would anyone say it about you?”

  Max looked through the shelf at Shoji, Eric, and Carl, who were looking at the blueprint together now that they were free from the painfully stupid eyes of the weaker sex, and let out a sigh. “Probably because they’re just stating the facts. At the rate I’m going, nobody’s going to remember my name. Ever.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “The show is only a week away and I already have butterflies. This is a good thing, I think, because don’t most butterflies only live for a week?”

  —Max’s diary, Wednesday, March 22, 1944

  The corner behind the supply hut had served as Max, Shoji, and Felix’s meeting place since Monday. They probably would have found a more discreet location if they’d had more time to look, but Monday also happened to be the day Major Larousse finally told Max when the big show was going to take place: Tuesday, March 28.

  This meant that they had to put the entire show together and perfect it in one week.

  “Now, where did you say Carl purchased the crossbeams?” Felix asked, holding a napkin on which he’d copied the map Shoji had made.

  “At the hardware store in Baird,” Shoji said, pointing to the dot just to the east of Abilene.

  “And they’re strong?”

  “They held up under me and Eric standing on them, so I think so.”

  “Good.”

  Max was, of course, just as interested in the structural integrity of the Vanishing Box as Felix and Shoji, if not more so; but her input was less than welcomed every time she’s offered it, so she stopped bothering. Instead, she chose to focus on a detail about the show that had as yet been unaddressed, and it was a fairly big one.

  “When are we going to rehearse?” she asked.

  “What about the hinges?” Felix asked, either not hearing what she’d said or not believing it was directed at him.

  “He got those in Clyde.”

  “Excellent.”

  Max cleared her throat. “I said, ‘When are we going to rehearse?’” Even the men walking on the other side of the street heard her that time.

  “And he went to a different lumberyard for the door, correct?” Felix might as well have been standing on a different continent for how much he could apparently hear her voice.

  Shoji shot her a look. “Uh, yeah, up in Anson.”

  “I thought he was going to go to Albany.”

  “They were all out in Albany.”

  “Hmm. I suppose that will do.” Felix rubbed his mustache. “But we already purchased brackets in Anson, so—”

  A rock flew into Felix’s chest. He looked over at Max, who was primed to pitch another.

  “Yes, fräulein?”

  “When are we going to rehearse the trick? All the best equipment in the world can’t make up for poor preparation. And I really don’t want to look stupid on that stage.”

  Felix blinked at her. “You have not been rehearsing? I have rehearsed every day.”

  “You have?” She tried to keep from screaming in frustration. “What good does it do if you rehearse without me?”

  “There is no other way to rehearse this illusion,” he said. “I assumed you knew that.”

  She rubbed her temples. “I don’t know what you think you know about magic or performance, but you don’t rehearse a two-person act separately. “

  “Yes, you are correct,” he said. “But this is not a two-person act. This is a one-person act with a volunteer from the audience.”

  “It’s still the same thing.”

  “No. How will I truly act unsuspecting if I am prepared for what you will do? If it is to be believed, we must both be convinced of our roles. So you must rehearse your part, and I will rehearse mine.”

  Felix, Max was learning, had a bad habit of being infuriatingly correct in most every situation. She appreciated this less and less as he exhibited it more and more frequently.

  After a few more minutes of observation, Max determined that Felix and Shoji intended to go over every single detail regarding the building of the apparatus, and over none of the details regarding the actual performance of the trick. Believing, quite correctly, that there were better things she could do with her time, she walked away unannounced and aimed herse
lf toward the PX, from which she could faintly discern a frosty bottle of Coca-Cola calling her name.

  It was not surprising, considering all of the prisoners were out finishing their daily projects before dinner, but completely unsettling when she turned a corner and walked directly into a conversation between Blaz and his two menacing friends. The instant she realized the company she was unfortunately keeping, she turned to walk, or rather run, in the opposite direction.

  Blaz dashed to block her exit.

  “Look, I haven’t told anyone about what happened the other night,” she started.

  “Schweig,” he said, which was the German way of telling someone to shut up. He winced and held up a finger. “Apologies. What I mean is, do not speak of that. There is no need. My conduct was . . . uh . . . what is the word?”

  “Stupid?” she offered. “Idiotic? You ought to be thrown in a small box and left out in the sun for it? That’s more than one word, but it seems appropriate.”

  The left corner of his mouth threatened to smile. “You American girls are no petunias, are you? I believe the word I sought was ‘shameful.’ Particularly now that I know what you are attempting to do for us.”

  She glanced over at his two friends, who were busy examining a napkin. A napkin that was exactly like the one Felix and Shoji were pouring over back at the supply shed. She couldn’t see what was written on it, but the imaginative part of her brain couldn’t help but suggest that it was the same map, as well. Of course, that was impossible. And pointless. What use would they have for a map of west Texas?

  She turned her attention back to Blaz. “You mean the show? Yeah, I’m the Bob Hope for Nazi prisoners.”

  Blaz scrunched his forehead in puzzlement.

  “Bob Hope,” she said. “He does shows for the troops. It’s a joke.”

  “Ah,” he said with a relieved smile. “Then there are no hard feelings between us. We can joke with each other.”

  “As long as you move aside so I can get a safe distance away from you, there’s no hard feelings whatsoever.”

  He bowed and stepped around her.

  She tried very hard not to run as she hurried over to the PX. Once she was inside, she grabbed hold of a shelf to steady her swimming head.