Mr. Vargas hung his hat back on the hook and set his briefcase on the floor beside his desk and sat down to write a note.
Suddenly, Jake did not want Mr. Vargas to write to his mother. Why did he talk that way about her? And why did he smile like that? He had seen Jake’s mom only once, when she and Jake ran into him at the grocer’s. Mr. Vargas talked to her for two minutes, if that. How did he know that she was an upstanding citizen and a role model? He did not know anything about her.
Mr. Vargas put his pen aside and folded the note. “I don’t need to remind you, McCauley, that your mother has made many sacrifices for you. Never remarried, for example.” He held the note out to Jake. “You better take good care of her, McCauley. After all, you are the only man in the family since your father was killed in the war.”
Jake felt his heart leap. “How do you know my dad was killed?”
“What?” Mr. Vargas said, startled. “I thought—”
“My dad is MIA,” Jake cut him off. “Missing in action.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. Missing in action. Of course. Please take this to your mother.”
Mr. Vargas began to rise, holding up the note, but Jake was already turning, already running to the door. “No, sir. My mom’s too busy to come.”
5
On the way home, Jake, sitting loosely on his bike, knees bopping up and down, hands deep in the back pockets of his jeans, rolled steadily along, looking neither left nor right but straight ahead. Beside him, Duane pedaled in sudden spurts, slowing at times, then catching up again.
The sky was specked with hazy daylight clouds, but to the west, the sun began its steady slide behind the mountains, pitching the boys’ shadows across a two-lane blacktop that stretched ahead of them in one straight and endless line.
“What did you talk to Vargas about?” Duane said, and when Jake did not answer, Duane caught up to him, weaving alongside Jake’s bike. “Shucks, Jake, what’s eating you, bud? It’s your roadster, right?”
He leaned over the gleaming bars of the latest make of Schwinn Phantom in two-tone finish with chrome-plated fenders, a recent present from his father, and studied Jake’s battered ancient roadster. “Hear that squeaking, bud? It’s your chain. The links must be rusted.”
Jake did not bother to look at the chain squeaking between his pumping feet. Of course the chain was rusted. He had inherited this prehistoric roadster from his father, who had put a million miles on it before Jake was even born.
“A rusted chain could lead to a serious problem, Jake,” Duane declared, as if reading from a bicycle manual. “You might injure yourself. If I were you—”
A crashing roar drowned his advice. The front wheel of Duane’s perfect Schwinn wobbled, and Jake swerved to avoid Duane ramming into him. A giant shadow spread over the boys, dousing the setting sun.
“Superfortress!” Duane hollered over the roar. “B-29!”
The enormous bomber was passing so low over them, it seemed to Jake that if he rose on the pedals and stretched up his arm, he could touch its darkened belly. Balancing his bike in place, he watched the B-29 fold its silvery flaps after takeoff.
“Did I ever tell you about the B-29s?” Duane hollered. “What the Russians did?”
He had, of course, a few times, but knowing that Duane would tell it again, Jake did not answer, watching the B-29 breach the mountain range and, sparkling in the sun, melt behind the shimmering haze of the waning day.
“My dad said the Russians got ahold of a couple of our B-29s during the war with the Nazis,” Duane went on when they were riding again, “and took them apart piece by piece and built their own bombers exactly the same! Exactly, bud! Called reverse engineering. But they gave theirs a different name, of course, TU-4 or something, so we wouldn’t know they had stolen from us. The Commies, right? Always cheating.”
Jake nodded, pedaled silently for a while, and then he said, “What about the fellows who flew those B-29s? What happened to them?”
“You mean the crews?” Duane shrugged. “My dad didn’t say. I bet the Commies shot them all.”
Without noticing it, Jake was pedaling harder, as if trying to outride the terrible fear that his dad might have been on one of those B-29s downed by the Russians. Strangely, he knew Duane’s father’s rank and his position in the air force but not his own dad’s. He had always imagined him to be a B-29 pilot. If not a pilot, then at least a gunner.
“Are you coming to the parade on Friday?” Duane called after him, trying to keep up. “The American Legion, remember? I’ll be riding a float with my dad. You know what kind of float? B-29! Yes, sir! Like the one we just saw. Superfortress! Dad took me to the AFB—the air force base? To see them building the float in the special hangar. Because it’s humongous, bud! Humongous!”
Jake stepped on the pedals, but Duane managed to keep up, talking excitedly. “But listen, bud, that’s just a parade float, right? Not a big deal. My dad is going to start teaching me to fly real aircrafts at the base. Don’t tell anyone, but my dad said we’d be testing a top secret bomber. He wants me to know how to drive it in case of an emergency.”
Jake stole a glance at Duane. My dad this. My dad that. Why did he not brag about him in class? Swallowed his tongue in front of everybody. Could not even look his father in the eye. Was Duane afraid of him? Afraid? Could you be afraid of your own father? Jake did not know.
The boys lived in a suburb that sliced the desert into a grid of recently paved streets. The homes sprawled to the southwest, but at its eastern border, a chain-link fence with no beginning and no end kept the suburb from spreading. Beyond the fence lay an enormous empty lot of dry caked mud and cactus huddles. Beyond the lot began the air force base where every male grown-up in the boys’ neighborhood served.
“Later, bud,” Duane called out, swinging into the clean-swept driveway of the three-story house, the largest home on their street. “See ya in the morning.”
On the front lawn, Major Armbruster, in his full air force dress, stood watering the grass. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake watched Duane duck under the spray from the water hose, disappear behind the blue Cadillac parked in the driveway, and reappear again beside the porch. The American flag, billowing from one of the posts, obscured Duane for a moment, and when the flag cleared the view, it was just the Schwinn Phantom leaning on its kickstand. Duane must have entered the house. Jake glanced back at Major Armbruster, saw him looking in his direction, and quickly turned away, ashamed to be caught spying.
It pained Jake to feel envious of Duane. Not of Duane’s stuff, but of his having an American hero for a dad. But Jake knew even this was not the truth. The truth was, of course, that being an American hero had nothing to do with his envy. Jake was envious of Duane for simply having a dad.
Jake turned into the next driveway. Passing a mesquite tree, he caught hold of a rusted chain drooping from the tree branch and pulled himself atop a tire swing. The roadster bounced over the buckled concrete, collided with the house wall, and fell on its side. Spinning on the tire swing, Jake frowned at his mother’s bruised prewar Chevy. The way her motorcar was parked looked as if she had been in an awful hurry to get into the house. The garage door was lifted, but the Chevy had not made it inside, angled halfway in, halfway out, the driver’s door flung open. Her shoe lay on its side below the clutch. Five feet away, the heel of her other shoe pointed up from the brown grass. The front door of the house was not fully shut, and on the threshold, his mother’s purse lay slumped on its side. Spilled keys, coins, and a compact mirror shone brightly against the doorstep.
6
Pressing his mother’s purse to his chest, Jake stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. The window shades, drawn to keep the house cool, kept away the fading daylight, and the murky hallway suddenly felt ominous to him.
“Mom?” Jake called uneasily. “Where are you?”
His mother did not answer, but the sound of water running in the kitchen reassured him. Jake bounded up the hallway
. The water was gushing into the sink from the open faucet, but his mother was not in the kitchen. Jake peered in suspicion at two glasses gleaming on the Formica counter. One had its rim stamped brightly by his mother’s lipstick, but who was drinking from the second glass? Few visitors came to their home, and besides, his mother was not the kind to leave the faucet open, park her Chevy on the lawn, or run around without shoes.
The wall phone hanging by the kitchen doorway shrilled over his ear. Startled, Jake spun around and stood staring at it. The telephone continued ringing. Jake lifted the handset and pressed it to his ear.
“Hello?”
Behind the faint crackling in the wires, someone was wheezing on the other end of the line.
“Who is this?”
“Give me Shubin.”
“Who?”
“Shubin.”
“Wrong number, sir. There’s no one here by—”
Click. The line went dead. Jake shrugged and set the handset down. The phone shrilled again at once. Jake swiped the handset and pressed it to his ear.
“Yeah?”
Wheezing on the other end.
“Listen, sir,” Jake said, “I told you—”
Click. The wheezing fellow hung up. Jake looked at the handset and carefully set it back into the cradle, expecting the phone to ring again. It did not.
With a gunshot pop, a floorboard cracked in the attic. Jake’s heart leapt in fright, and he let his mother’s purse fall to the floor. Lifting his face to the ceiling, he listened to the muffled voices upstairs. What was she doing up there? Who was she with?
* * *
Before Jake was born, his father had built himself a study in the attic, a small, cozy room with a square window cut through the pitched shingled roof. His mother stayed away from there and never mentioned it, as if the study were a secret. When Jake was little, he had not known it existed, but now, when his mother was not home, he would often climb the creaky stairs to be with things his father left behind—his air force jacket and his books, his navigation maps and his brass desk calendar swiveled to the day he went to war. One day before Jake’s first birthday.
He heard something heavy dragged across the floor in the attic, bolted out of the kitchen and through the hallway toward the staircase, but halfway up the steps, he saw the attic door fly open and halted at the sound of his mother’s voice: “Easy does it, mister. I don’t want you hurt.”
“I don’t get hurt, angel,” a raspy voice replied.
She was up there with a man!
Jake stood, afraid to move, and when he heard his mother laugh, a queasy feeling made his belly tighten.
“Is that a fact?” said her voice. “Let’s keep it that way.”
Jake’s mother, Mrs. McCauley, barefoot, laughing, her hair a mess, backed out of his father’s study, hauling a large trunk. Facing the doorway, she stretched her left foot behind her, searching with her toes for the first step below the cramped landing. When her foot found the step, she began turning. The trunk pivoted, and a man Jake had never seen before appeared holding the other end.
“What did you keep all this junk for?” the man rasped, chuckling.
Mrs. McCauley glanced over her shoulder down the staircase and, seeing Jake standing there, dropped her end of the trunk. It surprised the man. The trunk slipped out of his hands and crashed onto the landing. “What the hell?”
“Hello, honey,” said Jake’s mother.
The man looked past her in Jake’s direction. The only thing Jake could tell for certain about the stranger standing in the dim light of the landing was that he wore spectacles. Two radiant crescents gleamed on either side of his nose.
“Is that Jake?” the man said hoarsely.
Mrs. McCauley looked up at the man as if she was expecting him to continue, but he did not say anything more.
“What’s in the trunk?” Jake said.
“Your father’s things, Jake. I will explain.”
“He’s tall,” the man said, and looked at Mrs. McCauley.
“He’s twelve. Why don’t you two shake hands?”
The man hesitated for a moment, moved around the trunk, and stepped down into the slanted light filtering through the slats of the shuttered window. Mrs. McCauley pressed her hips against the banister to let him pass and briefly smiled at Jake. The man squeezed between Mrs. McCauley and the wall, careful not to brush against her, halted one step above Jake, and held out his hand.
Jake looked at the narrow, ropy hand, long tobacco-stained fingers, broken nails, and then beyond it, at the face behind a pair of crummy spectacles with a wad of dirty tape around the bridge of its frame and one split lens. He could not see the eyes sunk deep in the shadows behind the glinting lenses. The man’s nose was bent a little to one side, probably broken, and the ashy gray skin of his face was so deeply lined, it made Jake think of scars. The face was thin, too thin, and his colorless hair was thin, too, with an ashy gray scalp visible through it.
“Shake hands, honey,” Mrs. McCauley said. “What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid.”
This thin man seemed so insubstantial in the faint light of the staircase that Jake would not have been surprised if he had suddenly vanished, leaving behind the smell of stale tobacco and unwashed clothes. Jake would not have minded if he had vanished, but the stranger stood there, holding out his hand, and when Jake took it, the man’s powerful grip came as a shock.
“Shubin,” the man said in his raspy voice.
Shubin? Where had Jake heard that name?
“But you can call me Victor if you want.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Victor Shubin? Why, it’s a Russian name.”
“You’re a Russian?”
“My mom and dad were. Guess it makes me one.”
Jake remembered the wheezing voice on the phone. Shubin? The phone call was for him!
“Mom? Can I talk to you in private?”
Jake wrenched his hand out of the man’s grip and fled downstairs. When Mrs. McCauley came into the kitchen after Jake, he shut the door and whispered, “Who’s that guy, Mom?”
Mrs. McCauley walked past him toward the sink and turned off the running water. “He told you, Jake,” she said. “You can address him as Mr. Shubin for now.”
“What do you mean for now?”
“While he’s staying with us.”
“Staying with us?”
Mrs. McCauley collected the water glasses off the counter and put them into the sink. “I’m renting out your father’s study in the attic, Jake,” she said in a casual tone, as if it were barely worth mentioning. “It will be Mr. Shubin’s room.”
“What?” Jake stared at her in astonishment. “How could you do this, Mom? He said that Dad’s things were junk!”
“You know we need money, Jake. Your father’s air force pension and my salary are not enough to cover our expenses. We have to rent the room.”
“Yeah, but why to him?”
“My boss, Mr. Hoover, has highly recommended him.”
“Your boss, Mr. Hoover? The guy who makes window blinds? How does he even know him?”
“He’s been helping Russian refugees ever since the end of the war, Jake. You know how terrible that war was on the Russians. Those who chose freedom need another chance.”
“But, Mom, if he’s Russian, why does he speak American so good?”
“English, Jake, not American. And it’s so well, not so good. I guess he studied it a little harder than you do at school.”
“We can’t have a Russian in here, Mom! Duane’s dad said today that if the Russians come, there’ll be such spying and snooping and wiretapping going on that if you dare to whisper even one word against the Communists, you’ll be arrested, imprisoned, and killed!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jake. Mr. Shubin is not a Communist.”
The hallway floorboards creaked, and Jake’s head swung in the direction of the door. “Who is it?”
The
door cracked open, and the Russian poked his head in. “Oops. Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Jake swiftly turned his back to him and whispered to his mother, “Not a Communist, Mom? Why is he snooping around, then?”
Mrs. McCauley spread her arms to stop Jake from running out, but he was too fast for her. By the time the screen door slammed behind him, Jake was already leaping over the hedge, crossing the property line into the Armbrusters’ backyard.
7
The handful of gravel sprayed against Duane’s second-story window, and when the window remained closed, Jake scooped another handful and pitched that, too. This time, the pebbles knocked against the window frame and bounced back. Jake ducked, bracing himself against the wall. He sidled stealthily toward the rear of the house, hoping to slip in through the kitchen door without Duane’s folks spotting him. He had done it before.
Mrs. Armbruster was in the kitchen.
“What are you standing there for, lamb?” she said, smiling at Jake through the screen door. “Come in, lamb, come in.”
Jake stepped into the blinding lights of Mrs. Armbruster’s gleaming kitchen, instantly drowsy from the sweet smell of her cooking and the hum of her convenient appliances.
“The boys are in the TV room,” said Mrs. Armbruster, and stirred something bubbling in a chrome-plated saucepan. A cloud of steam rose, obscuring her hefty shape. She sailed out of the cloud toward the Frigidaire, opened it, and took out a casserole. “You go right in, lamb. They’re watching a movie.” Her ample hip bumped the Frigidaire’s door, and it closed with a soft and pleasant thump.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Jake mumbled, and, conscious that she was watching him, slowly stepped out of the kitchen. The moment he was out of her sight, he took off running. He sped over the perfectly polished floors of the perfectly furnished rooms, passed through the rainbow-colored light bouncing off the cut-glass chandelier, and slid to a stop in front of the door behind which music was playing, the kind they used in the movies when something bad was about to happen.
Spy Runner Page 2
