Red Menace

by Lois Ruby

  It’s a blurry splash of images: snake bite, tourniquets, drowning, bleeding, shock. Panic rises in my own chest.

  Milgrim comes closer, Kluski right behind him. Milgrim locks his hands around Luke’s shoulders. “Easy does it, sir. Calm down, breathe shallow . . . ” He lowers Luke to the lawn chair. “Head down between your knees, sir. There, good. Pulse slowing, slowing. Steady. There you go, Corporal Everly. You’re out of the woods.”

  The two feds back down the driveway. I don’t move until I hear the car door slam. Down on my knees, I look into Luke’s hard eyes. “You doing better now?”

  He raises his head, nods slowly, and says, “They’re . . . leaving . . . me.”

  A wave of pure grief shudders through me. “I heard, Luke. Let’s go inside.”

  He falls asleep on the couch in the front room. I listen to him breathe until shadows darken the room, then head home.

  Chapter 25

  Friday, May 22

  The legal pit crew’s gone for the day, leaving a colossal mess of scummy cups, food wrappers and balled-up paper and paper airplanes all over the attic. Bubbie Sylvia just called; she’s still tearing through her boxes; no citizenship papers yet. She called the Chicago immigration office, where she remembers taking the oath of citizenship, but they have no record of it. Did she just imagine it? Was it a lie all along? Or did the FBI pull the records?

  Dad drags me into the john for the latest heated family discussion, already in progress. We return you now to your regularly scheduled program.

  He and I sit at the edge of the bathtub, while Mom perches on the toilet lid. Just your average American family terrorized by the FBI.

  I’m still shook up about Luke, but they’re caught up in their own stuff. It’s sweltering in here, and we don’t dare open the window. Bath water sloshing and banking off the tub hits my face with a refreshing mist almost as good as running through a sprinkler. We talk in whispers and hand signals and lip-reading.

  Dad buries his face in a towel that muffles his words. “Quincy thinks your mother should consider ducking the SISS hearing, and we take off for Mexico. Lots of expatriates south of the border.”

  “No!” I’ll bet nobody in Tijuana or Juarez plays baseball worth spit. Not thinking straight. There’s more at stake here than pop flies and peanuts and Cracker Jacks.

  “Mexico won’t work for us,” Mom says, to my relief. “It would be hard to make a decent wage teaching, and we could never come back across the border.”

  “There’s that other option.” I glance at the window casually, like it’s not something that’s been keeping me up at night and raising hives on my belly. “You could go underground, like Amy Lynn’s father did.” Somewhere nearby—not Mexico. Western Kansas? They’d never find us out there.

  “Sure, and what about the rest of you? I’d be miserable without you, and you’d miss my home cooking.”

  I can’t believe she’s still cracking jokes, still stubborn as a mule, at a time like this.

  Mom reaches over and pats my knee, which makes me feel babyish. “It’s a viable option. Better than deportation. But I still think I should face the committee.”

  Suddenly my chaotic family, the attic lawyers, Amy Lynn and her vanishing-act father, Wendy and Carrie, and Luke yowling and rolling down the driveway—the white-hot rage of it hits me so hard that I’m staggering and gasping for breath.

  “Calm down, Martin,” Dad says in that got-it-together voice I hate.

  “No! I won’t calm down! Have you thought about me? Either of you? Given a single thought to what’s good for ME? That’s what parents are supposed to do, in case you haven’t heard.”

  Mom’s face is blurred by my tears, but I can still see that I’ve hurt her more than the Carnivore or the FBI or the SISS guys or anybody could. She doesn’t say a word, just looks at me with her eyes swimming, her palm cupped to her lips. I should shut up. I can’t.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and take off for Guadalajara—or Warsaw, for all I care. Just leave me here to fend for myself!”

  Dad’s eyes are flaring; he frantically taps his lips with his index finger, but I don’t care if those creeps across the street in their pee-fermented car hear every rotten word I’m shouting.

  “Totally selfish, that’s what you are! It’s all about your principles, your conscience, your options. You keep talking about options and viable plans. Well, I got news for you. All of ’em stink!”

  I . . . can’t catch my breath . . . choking . . . gonna topple like a dead cottonwood . . . fall into the bathtub . . . drown . . . you can drown in two inches of water . . . mouth-to-mouth . . .

  Dad grabs me, but I tear away from him and holler, “THEY COULD EXECUTE YOU, MOM, LIKE THEY’RE DOING TO THE ROSENBERGS!”

  ♢

  When I open my eyes, I’m lying on the bathroom floor with an ice pack across my forehead. Mom rubs my arms. Furry-headed and dizzy, my first thought is, She’s not in Sing Sing with the Rosenbergs. Not on Death Row.

  The water’s splashing. We’re all soaked. Dad squats beside me. His shimmering face comes into focus like a reflection in a river. His voice echoes down a long tunnel: “Martin? Can you hear me?”

  Words form in my throat, but can’t pass my tongue, same as Luke. Two pairs of eyes loom over me.

  “Marty?” Mom’s voice. “You’re scaring me. Say something.”

  “Something,” I mutter, trying to sit up. “Sorry about—”

  Mom strokes my face. “It’s okay, Marty. It had to be said. You’re right, there are no good choices. But we’ll work it all out, I promise.”

  “How can you promise, Mom?”

  “Shh, just take it easy for now.”

  Like Luke, like Luke and Milgrim.

  They prop me up against the wall, one on each side. Now that those terrifying words—They could execute you, Mom—have finally broken free of my head I’m feeling some relief. The water’s still crashing against the tub walls and my head’s still spinning, but I’m starting to breathe like a regular person again. Like Luke.

  “Okay,” I say finally, “why not do the SISS thing? The lawyers have been prepping you round the clock. You’re ready for anything they sling your way.” I hope.

  If not, she can pull a Theo Sonfelter and disappear.

  We’re in a miserable bind no matter which way you slice it, but I’d rather put Dr. Rosalie in the game than bench her before it even starts.

  Chapter 26

  Friday, May 29 – Sunday, May 31

  I’ve had a week to recover from my freak-out, and now the day is here. Watching my eyes spin in the mirror, I’m thinking, why isn’t there a law against having to catch a train at four in the morning?

  Mom, Dad, me, Quincy, and Vic all jam our sleepy bodies and our luggage into the DeSoto. The guys in the Studebaker are elbowing each other awake. They’ll probably follow us to Newton, where we’ll catch the train—or even all the way to New York. Take a couple days’ vacation, I want to holler, ’cause there’s not much action on Oxbow Road while the menacing Rafners are on the loose.

  Every mile the sky gets brighter with a spectacular sunrise light show. We’re heading east into the sun, but I can’t look away as we chug-a-chug across the plains. I guess the Rosenbergs don’t get to fry their eyeballs; no sun in Sing Sing Prison.

  I hang out in the lounge car with Vic, watching lots of real estate streak by. It’s mostly wheat fields and tractor yards so far, and a few cows grazing and lapping at streams. What a boring life.

  No chance Vic will get interesting soon, so I keep thinking that every mile puts us that much closer to the Yankees game Mom promised me.

  By mid-morning we’ll hit Chicago, home of the White Sox, and then collect more train cars and a thousand miles, straight into Penn Station, New York City, USA. Yankees territory. Good thing about the Yanks: they don’t care who’s a pinko commie, as long as he hits homers or pitches lightning curves and fastballs.

  Last night I oiled my glove and t
ied it around a nice seasoned baseball so it’ll be ripe and ready for my first major league game, just in case Mantle hits a homer to me, or even a foul. A minute ago I showed the mitt to Vic. His idea of sports is two guys hunched over podiums arguing about which is worse, DDT sprayed on the lettuce crop that migrant workers pick, or wormy lettuce without DDT. We’re on our thousandth game of gin in the lounge car. At every stop more passengers board, most of them Rosenberg People heading for New York to join demonstrations against the execution. Twenty days left.

  Once the Rosenberg People hear that Mom is on her way to testify, presto, she’s a celeb, and they’re firing advice at her.

  A couple of nuns hover close. One says, “Be stalwart and steadfast.”

  The other grabs Mom’s hands and pumps them like she’s drawing water. “God will give you the strength to get through this ordeal. Remember the courage of Julius and Ethel as they walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

  Other Rosenberg People aren’t so gentle.: “Don’t give them any names,” one fiercely bearded man warns. “Swear on this bible.” He pulls Mom’s right hand on to a book so small that it’s got to be the Readers Digest condensed version.

  How do you like this? It turns out to be a bound copy of the Constitution, which Mom’s always quoting like she wrote it herself.

  She pulls her hand back and looks that man in the eye. “If I got into this morass by refusing to sign a loyalty oath, I must also refuse to swear on your bible, as much as I uphold its truths, my friend.”

  Vic slaps cards down on the table. “That mother of yours is one stubborn lady.”

  After dinner, which is all stiff white tablecloths and silvery plates, Mom and Dad turn in to get her cranked up for the hearing, or calmed down, or whatever it takes.

  A girl named Janine lures us into a songfest with a new kind of candy bar called Rocky Road. One bite of that soft chocolate-covered marshmallow, and I’m hooked. I could eat thirty of ’em and probably puke all the way to New York.

  Janine asks, “You know any union songs?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any Weavers? Guthrie? Any Paul Robeson?”

  “Uh-uh.” Communists all, that’s what the newspapers say, and Milgrim and Dimple Chin would be the first to second that motion.

  “That’s all right. You’ll catch on!” In a minute we’re singing in rounds, Wim-o-weh, o-wim-o-weh , wim-o-weh, o-wim-o-weh . . . in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight . . .

  It doesn’t seem like a commie song, and neither does “If I Had a Hammer.” I snarf another Rocky Road.

  Who’d guess it? Vic turns out to be a ham. He’s loosened his tie and he’s standing on a table warbling “Good night Irene, good night Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams . . .”

  After all that wild singing, someone flips a switch. Suddenly it’s all about the Rosenbergs.

  “Framed, clear and simple!” a pony-tailed woman from Seattle yells, “and nobody cares.”

  “Nobody?” some guy shoots back. “There are ten thousand people in D.C. right now demonstrating against this gross miscarriage of justice. There are Rosenberg Committees in every city in America and half the countries of the world! Whaddaya mean nobody?”

  “That low-down stoolpigeon, David Greenglass, how could he send his sister to the chair to save his own neck?”

  “. . . the fact that the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death by one judge and no jury, why, it’s unconscionable.”

  “. . . and a Jewish judge, at that,” says a man with a black yarmulke on his head.

  Judge Kaufman is Jewish? Like Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg? Like us? How could he do it to one of his own? Oh, yeah, as Dad once said, “Justice is blind,” to which Mom added, “Deaf and dumb, too, in this case.”

  They’re all shouting and crying and pounding each other on the back, when a man who’d been sitting quietly in the corner suddenly tosses his newspaper across the room and launches into his tirade: “I’ve heard enough of this commie-kissing claptrap. Youse each one oughta be deported to the Soviet Union and kicked by the seat of your pants into one of them Russian labor camps to rot your pinko hide for the next fifty years. Matter of fact, you can all just march alongside your traitorous Jew-martyrs, and I hope, come June 18, they’re fried as crisp as cheap bacon.”

  I knock over a chair leaping to my feet. I’m gonna punch the guy’s lights out! Me, who’s never even been in a schoolyard fight.

  Vic clenches my arm, shaking his head frantically. Any other group would pounce on the creep and beat him bloody. Not the Rosenberg People. They’re all about nonviolence and justice and free speech. So they let him rant his hatred and stomp out of the lounge car on his own two feet, leaving us in stunned silence.

  The Seattle woman picks up his newspaper and rips it to shreds. That’s as violent as this crowd gets.

  Later, tucked between the tight, starched-stiff sheets of my bunk, I try to lose that man’s vicious words behind a mess of baseball stats, which, for the first time in my life, doesn’t work. The clatter of the train rattling along the tracks reminds me that we’re getting closer to New York and Mom’s hearing.

  And the scary truth is, Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg are rounding third and heading toward home, only they’re going to be tagged out. Game over.

  The old question resurfaces. What if they frame Mom just like the Rosenbergs, and she goes to trial and they pin a bunch of lies on her, and she gets sentenced to death by electrocution? Fear grabs me and shakes me like a tree in a tornado.

  But suddenly, rattling down the track, an odd change comes over me, as if I’ve turned a corner into a space cadet’s parallel universe. Just like this train’s coal turns to steam, that fear that’s been gripping me is converted to . . . I don’t know what to call this, how I’m feeling. It has to do with Mom’s conscience about what’s right and what’s wrong, and Dad’s determination to stand by her even though he’s mad that her loyalty oath thing got us into this big, fat black hole.

  The thing is, I’m them; they’re me, their only kid. For sure, I can be spitting mad at them, but I’m also proud of the way they stick to their principles and stick by each other.

  Pride, yeah, that’s what I’m feeling. We’re Team Rafner.

  Chapter 27

  Tuesday, June 2 – Wednesday, June 3

  June. Before this month’s out, the Rosenbergs will be dead. But I gotta shove that aside, because here I am in da Bronx, following the swarm into the ball park. Never saw so many people in one place. I swear, everybody who’s not in London packing the stands for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth is right here, in Yankee Stadium. Feels like one of those fuzzy dream scenes in the movies, where some actor twirls dizzily and walks on air instead of solid, gritty ground.

  I’m sure the Mick can smell that Marty Rafner’s in the ballpark, even though we’re in cheap seats about two miles up from leftfield. But hey, you get a bird’s eye view of the whole field.

  It’s okay if he’s off his game. He doesn’t have to hit a homer for me. But when Mickey strikes out his first at-bat, my heart sinks to the beer-puddled ground already paved with peanut shells.

  The game’s lost on my parents. Every so often Mom lifts her head out of the book she’s reading and asks a ridiculous question, such as “How can you tell who’s who when they’re all wearing caps?”

  Dad’s brow is wrinkled as he watches every pitch, every play so seriously and tries to clap and cheer at the right times, but he’s always a beat off. He even slugs back a beer like one of the guys and forgets to wipe the foam off his lip. He ends up studying the program as if Casey Stengel is gonna give him a pop quiz before they’ll let us out of the ballpark.

  I’m pinching myself to be sure it’s not all a dream. Joe Dobson’s pitching for the White Sox, and he’s not half bad, I gotta admit, until he hurls one that the Mick cracks loud and solid into left field and squeezes out a double. Incredible!

  For a few hours, I forget about the Rosenbergs and about Mom faci
ng snipers at the hearing tomorrow. For this one hot, sticky, sunburnt, Yankee Stadium afternoon, everything is peachy perfect. It’s neck-and-neck all nine innings, until the Yankees pull a win out on a steal by Yogi Berra in the bottom of the tenth, and the Sox don’t have another chance to bite the Yankees’ rears. Sweet victory!

  In my knapsack are two baseball cards: a Mantle rookie and a 1949 Rizzuto. What are my chances of getting one of the cards autographed? Fans pour onto the field before I can leap down from the nosebleed stands. The Mick is swarmed, six circles deep, but maybe I can get to Phil Rizzuto, who’s open, compared to Mantle.

  I slip the mint-condition card out of the cellophane protector and wave it over the heads of a lot of other kids. “Mr. Rizzuto? Hey, Scooter, over here!”

  He glances up from signing a ball and makes eye contact. I push my way toward him, elbowing every other baseball fanatic out of the way. “Sir, can you sign this for my friend? He’s a Korean War vet, and you’re tops with him.” I hand Rizzuto the card and a piece of paper with Luke’s name on it.

  The man has class. He’s a lot older than Mantle, but he flashes a boyish grin and signs:

  For Luke Everly,

  Your country’s proud of you.

  Phil (Scooter) Rizzuto 6/2/53

  You gotta love the guy. I’m plenty satisfied, though I never even get close enough to Mickey Mantle to smell the sweat dripping off his chin.

  ♢

  The three of us are staying in one hotel room to save money. The three-hundred-dollar windfall from the friends is nearly gone on train tickets and meals and this hotel. Believe me, this isn’t the Ritz, but at least the toilet flushes and we each get a bite-sized bar of Ivory soap, free.

  I bunk on the lumpy hide-a-bed couch. We’re all pretty restless, and once I woke up and found Mom not exactly sleepwalking, but pacing the room, which, as Bubbie Sylvia would say, is so small that you have to go outside to change your mind.