by Pete Hautman
Pressing his injured hands together, Tucker stared fiercely into the disk. All he could do now was hope. If the ladder had reached Kosh in time, he should come popping out of the disk any second. But if the towers had already collapsed, the ladder would materialize in midair and fall onto a pile of burning, smoking wreckage.
He backed away, making room for Kosh’s arrival.
He waited.
After a few minutes, he sat down, trying not to think about the pain in his hands.
If only Kosh would hurry.
Tucker thought about all those people, the unseen thousands within the tower. He had been a toddler back then. He had no real memories of the disaster. It had always seemed like a piece of history to him, as distant as World War II or Elvis Presley. When he had watched videos of the attack it hadn’t felt much different from watching movies where things get blown up every ten minutes. Not real. But now it was a part of him forever. Because he had been there.
He had never felt so alone, not even when his parents had left him.
Tucker stayed on the roof until the sun was low in the sky and all hope had drained away. He had been too late, too slow. The towers had collapsed. Kosh was dead.
As he climbed down the side of the barn, gripping the iron rungs gingerly with his torn palms, a vast, poisonous emptiness filled his gut. Each rung seemed to make Kosh’s death more certain, more real. He had failed. If only he had not dropped the ladder. If he had been stronger. Faster.
Tucker was squatting at the hose spigot, running cool water over his injured hands, when he heard the rumble of an approaching motorcycle. He looked up and saw a Harley coming up the driveway. Kosh!
He forgot about his injured hands and ran to meet him. Kosh pulled up, put down his kickstand, dismounted, and took off his helmet. Tucker threw his arms around his uncle, then immediately realized what he was doing, let go, and backed off a few steps. Kosh stood gaping at him.
“You okay, kid? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Tucker’s mouth was moving, but no sound came out.
Kosh leaned in close and sniffed. “What did you burn down this time?”
“Where . . . ?” Tucker shook his head, staring at Kosh, trying to make sense of the impossible. Kosh’s eyebrows were missing again, and his nose had returned to its flattened, off-center appearance. “Where’d you come from?”
“I told you. I was up in Eau Claire,” Kosh said. “You sure you’re — wait a sec.” He leaned in to take another sniff, stepped back, and looked up at the barn roof. “You’ve been up there, haven’t you?”
Tucker nodded.
“I knew it.” He grabbed Tucker by the shoulders and locked eyes with him. “Tell me where you were,” he said in a tight voice.
“I was . . . I was with you.”
“Where?”
“At the — on the — up on the top of the tower —”
Kosh released him and threw up his arms and looked skyward. “Praise God, I’m not crazy after all. It really happened!” He looked at Tucker. “World Trade Center, right?”
Tucker nodded.
“Nine eleven?”
“Yeah.”
“Man! I thought it was a dream!” Kosh was walking in tight circles, waving his arms and talking fast. “But it was so real, everything! The smoke . . . I was coughing for days. The doctors told me it was the fall. The fall? Falling off a barn doesn’t make you smell like burning jet fuel, now, does it? I can’t believe this.”
He slapped Tucker on the back, sending him staggering. Tucker fell onto his hands and let fly a howl of pain.
“What did you do to your hands? Let me have a look. Ouch! C’mon inside. Let’s get you bandaged up, okay?”
Kosh didn’t stop talking the whole time he was cleaning and bandaging Tucker’s palms. “Thought it was bees at first,” he said. “I was just finishing putting up the weather vane and heard this buzzing behind me. I turned around and looked, but I didn’t see anything except maybe a little waviness in the air, like heat rising off a hot highway, you know? Then I felt this weird reverse wind, like instead of blowing against me it was sucking at me. And then — bam — I’m on the tower. Thought I was having a psychotic episode. Then I ran into you —’course, I didn’t know you at the time — and I was sure of it. The psychotic episode, I mean.”
“I sent you a ladder.”
“You sure did! I remember you were on my shoulders, and then the second plane hit, and you were gone, and the smoke — so much smoke — and the heat coming up over the edge, and I’m thinking it’s the end.” He paused. “Then I hear this clatter and I see this stepladder lying on the deck, like it’d been there all along.”
“Your ladder. That’s how I tore up my hands.”
Kosh finished wrapping Tucker’s right hand. “How does that feel?”
“Better.”
“Good.” Kosh sat back. “The weird thing is, back in 2001, my stepladder was this rickety old wooden job. I just bought the aluminum one last year. Anyway, I set that ladder up and climbed up it and next thing I knew I was rolling down the barn roof.” He put a finger to his nose. “That’s how I got this nose. Broke my collarbone and a couple ribs, too. Then I made the mistake of telling the docs what happened. Psychotic break brought on by post-traumatic stress, they said. I spent a month in the psych ward, trying to convince them I wasn’t some kind of dangerous lunatic.”
“A month? But I just —”
“This was in 2001, don’t forget. I came back the same time I left.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither.” Kosh closed his eyes, then opened them. “But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I mean, if it was real — and I’m not so sure it was — I might have had time to save some of those people. I might have used the ladder to break through the doors and get some of them out. But all I could think of was getting off that roof.”
“Anybody would be scared.”
“Didn’t say I was scared.”
“Well, I was. Anyway, you didn’t have time to save anybody.”
“Maybe not.”
“I’m just glad we got off.”
Kosh put his hands on Tucker’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Look, I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you. I owe you one. I got a bad feeling about that . . . whatever it is.”
“Maybe it’s a time portal. Or a wormhole,” Tucker said, lifting the terms from a movie he had seen.
“Call it what you want. I want nothing to do with it.”
“I mean, we both went through, and the ladder went through, and we both ended up at the same time and place. But when we went through it backward, it took us to where we each started from.” Tucker took a breath. A thought had been slowly solidifying in his brain. Maybe the thing he’d seen on the roof back in Hopewell was another time portal. Maybe that was what happened to his dad the day he had disappeared. . . .
“HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET UP THERE IF YOU HAVE TO fix the roof or something?” Tucker asked.
“Let it leak,” Kosh said.
Tucker backed away from the barn to where he could see the peak. The satellite dish was there, but the disk, wormhole — whatever — was not visible.
“It’s not there,” he said.
“It’s been gone before. I’m taking no chances,” Kosh said. He looked up at his handiwork. The bottom fifteen rungs were gone. “Guess I don’t have to take them all off.” He climbed down and collected the rungs, hanging them over his forearm as he picked them up.
Tucker said, “Shouldn’t we tell somebody about it?”
“Tell who?”
“NASA? The FBI? The Highway Department?”
“The Highway Department?”
“Well . . . it’s transportation, right?”
Kosh shook his head. “Believe me, we do not want to get the government involved in this.”
“But maybe they could figure out a way to save the towers. Go back in ti
me with an antiaircraft gun and shoot the planes down.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Why not?”
Kosh ticked off points on his thick fingers: “First, it’s a done deal. The towers collapsed, and that’s that. You go back and change that — even if you could change it, which I don’t think you can — then everything from then on would be different. You’d be a completely different person. And second, if you were a different person, then none of this would’ve happened in the first place.” He raised his nonexistent eyebrows, daring Tucker to prove him wrong.
“So we just do nothing?”
“What we do is, we stay off that roof.” Kosh looked at the rungs hanging on his arm. He walked over to the rusting pile of scrap metal by the corner of the barn and dumped them on top of a bunch of empty beer cans. “As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.”
“What never happened?”
Kosh jerked his thumb toward the roof.
Tucker was confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we forget about it. Get on with our lives.”
“But —”
“No buts. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a mental institution or chained to a wall in a CIA dungeon, and I especially do not want to spend the rest of my life dead.”
“But —”
“But nothing. I been in a straitjacket once, and that’s one time too many. Case closed.” He crossed his arms and regarded Tucker. “How are your hands?”
“They’re okay.”
“Good. Anybody asks you what happened, say you fell off your bike.”
The next day, over a breakfast of pancakes and bacon, Tucker tried again to talk to Kosh about the tower, but Kosh said, “That’s ancient history, kid.”
“Ancient history? It was yesterday!”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kosh said.
“You’re worse than my dad,” Tucker said. “He used to say that all the time.”
“Maybe he had his reasons.”
Frustrated, Tucker finished his breakfast and went outside. He looked up at the roof. No disk. Maybe it was gone for good. And maybe Kosh could pretend it had never happened, but Tucker knew better — the disk had been real. Furthermore, he was sure there had been another one in Hopewell, on the roof of his house. The one that had caused his father to disappear. But disappear to where? Not the World Trade Center. And he had not returned through the disk but had come walking up the road with Lahlia. That might mean there was yet another disk — and that Lahlia had come from some place that was certainly not Bulgaria. Some place with pyramids and priests and a “blood moon,” she had said that day at the swing.
He thought about the misty people he had seen floating above the barn, and in Hopewell. Ghosts? Angels? They had not looked very angelic. No wings, or halos, or radiating goodness. His mom believed in angels, but she said she had been seeing “ghosts.”
He didn’t know what they were. Lahlia had called them Klaatu. Tucker was becoming convinced that the disks, Lahlia, and the ghosts were all connected. And maybe his parents’ disappearance, too.
He had to return to Hopewell.
Back inside, Tucker followed sounds of hammering to the third floor, where he found Kosh balanced precariously on a sawhorse, installing a strip of bead board in the ceiling.
“How’s it going?” Tucker asked.
Kosh turned his head to look at Tucker, lost his balance, and slipped. His hammer fell to the floor, and he landed with one foot on either side of the sawhorse and let out a string of curses.
“Good thing that sawhorse isn’t six inches taller,” said Tucker.
Kosh looked down at the two inches of space between his crotch and the bar of the sawhorse and cursed some more.
“And I can’t find my damn stepladder,” he said. Tucker opened his mouth to explain, thinking that the missing ladder would surely prove to Kosh that they had really been to the World Trade Center, but what he saw in his uncle’s face stopped him cold.
Tucker’s big, fearsome, seemingly invulnerable uncle was afraid.
“I guess I got to drive into town and buy a new one,” Kosh said.
“There’s a ladder in the garage at home,” Tucker said. “Why don’t we go get it?”
“Drive two hours for a ladder? No way.”
“We could check on the house, make sure everything’s okay.”
Kosh was not convinced.
Tucker said, “Tell you what: I’ll drive.”
“You? You won’t be street legal for another two years. If we go — and I’m not saying we’re going, because we aren’t — I’m driving. You clear?”
“Okay,” Tucker said.
Kosh picked up his hammer and climbed back onto the sawhorse.
“My dad has an electric nail gun,” Tucker said. “I bet it would make that job go a lot faster.”
“I don’t need a nail gun,” said Kosh, and promptly smashed his thumb with the hammer.
EXCEPT FOR THE TALL GRASS AND HALF A DOZEN SOGGY copies of the Hopewell Shopper on the front steps, the house was much as they had left it. Kosh immediately raided the garage for tools. Tucker examined the roof. He walked around the house to view it from different angles. He saw no sign of the disk. After a few minutes, he went through the house to search for any signs that his parents had been there. He found a dead mouse in the toilet, spiderwebs in every corner, and thousands of box-elder bugs. Other than that, everything was as he had left it.
He gathered some odds and ends — books, a handheld video game that needed a battery, a few articles of clothing — loaded them into a cardboard box, and carried them outside.
Kosh was standing beside the car, talking to a girl with blond hair. The girl turned toward Tucker.
“Hello, Tucker Feye,” said Lahlia.
Her hair was longer and was coming in darker yellow, more the color of corn than of corn silk. The summer sun had tinted her face a pale bronze, making her eyelashes look almost white. She was dressed in loose jeans and a black T-shirt with a pink skull and crossbones printed on the front. Above the skull were the words Eat Vegan or Die. He noticed that she filled out her T-shirt more than he remembered, and she seemed taller.
“Nice shirt,” he said, staring at her chest.
“Arnold and Maria find it disturbing.”
“I guess that makes sense, them being dairy farmers and all.”
“They are ignorant, but not unkind. Primitive people believe that by eating animal flesh they can take on the qualities of the creature they are consuming. Fortunately, Maria no longer tries to put dead animal parts into my food.”
“Animal parts?” That sounded disgusting. He imagined Maria Becker hiding a chicken gizzard inside a brownie. “Like what?”
“She would add broth made from dead roosters to my soup, and fried chips of smoked hog flesh to my salad.”
Kosh, who had been listening with an amused smile, laughed. “Chicken stock and bacon never sounded so bad,” he said. He headed back to the garage for more tools. A small gray cat appeared from beneath the lilac bushes, trotted over to Lahlia, and rubbed its cheek on her ankle. She bent over and picked it up.
“That isn’t the same cat you had before, is it?” Tucker said.
“Yes. This is Bounce.”
“Shouldn’t he be bigger? He still looks like a kitten.”
Lahlia stroked Bounce’s fine gray fur. “Maria says he’s a runt. Arnold and Maria have larger cats. Bounce doesn’t like them. He follows me everywhere.”
“Where did he come from, anyways?”
“He came with you.”
“What? I think I’d know if we’d had a cat in the car.”
“I don’t mean today. Later, he will come with you.”
Tucker shook his head, confused. Kosh returned from the garage, carrying another armload of tools.
“You’ll see,” Lahlia said. She turned to Kosh. “Have you returned to Hopewell to stay?”
“Just a visit,” said K
osh. He held up Adrian Feye’s nail gun. “We’re picking up a few things.” He looked at Tucker. “Lahlia tells me the new preacher is even crazier than Adrian,” he said to Tucker.
“My dad’s not crazy,” he said.
Kosh shrugged. “Maybe so, but this new guy . . . Tell him, Lahlia.”
“Father September preaches that computers are the source of all evil. He performs miracles. He made Mrs. Friedman walk again.”
“See what I mean?” said Kosh with a smirk.
“Arnold doesn’t like him. Arnold says if God puts you in a wheelchair, you should darn well stay there.”
“That’s crazy,” Tucker said.
“Arnold eats many chickens,” Lahlia replied. “I once drank mammal milk. Maria insisted. It was quite odd.”
“You should try it with chocolate in it,” Tucker said.
Lahlia smiled. “I like chocolate.”
Kosh, fitting the tools into the trunk of the car, said, “Everybody likes chocolate.” Head still in the trunk, he said, “You got everything you need, Tucker?”
“I guess so.” Tucker looked again at the roof, wondering how he could convince Kosh to hang around for a while longer.
As they were fitting the last few items into the car, a beat-up Toyota pickup truck drove by, skidded to a halt, backed up, and turned into the driveway. The pickup pulled up behind the Chevy, and Ronnie Becker got out. He looked the same as he had the day Tucker had seen him at Hardy Lake: long black hair, black jeans, and a studded leather vest. He walked up to Kosh, grinning.
“Kosh Feye. Long time, bro.” He held up his fist. Kosh gave him a halfhearted fist bump. “Haven’t seen you since you left me in — where was it? Flagstaff? How you been?”
“I’m good,” said Kosh.
They stood a few feet apart, looking at each other.
Ronnie said, “What happened to your eyebrows?”
“Lost ’em,” Kosh said.
“Looks like you busted your nose, too.”
Kosh shrugged. “What are you doing back in town, Ronnie?”
Tucker got the impression that Kosh and Ronnie had not parted on the best of terms.
“Helping the old folks out,” Ronnie said. “Arnold’s just as cranky as ever. You?”
