“I don’t know how to unload it.”
“It’s simple, you just—”
“I don’t give a shit. Listen, Sheldon. You take a gun—this one if you want—and you walk right into Old Bruno’s house and you ask him who killed your father. You’re twelve. You’re not scary, I get that. Your balls haven’t even dropped yet. But Mr. Colt made this gun scary enough to even things out for you. If Old Bruno knew your dad, then he knows about you and he won’t have any doubt that you know how this thing works. You’ve killed a hundred animals, Sheldon. He’s just one more monkey. So, you point it at him and say, ‘Tell me who killed my dad and I won’t shoot you.’ Now, he probably won’t believe you, and even dashing off a round might not scare him. So, you need a bigger plan and here’s what I think.” Abe tapped his temple with the barrel of the gun. “You say you’re going to shoot him in the head and then make it look like suicide. To make that believable, you hold up a piece of paper and say it’s his suicide note. You already wrote it. So, he has to make a choice.”
Abe looked over at his Underwood typewriter, still cooling from Sheldon’s marathon letter-writing session to Lenny. “No need to bluff either. You could type up a nice suicide note for him right there. Read it to him. Something like ‘Without my precious sons in my meaningless life, I’ve got nothing. I’m alone and only getting more alone. I have nothing to live for. So long, cruel world.’ ”
“That’s terrible,” Sheldon said.
“There’s time to work on it. The point is, you show up and demand answers. I can come with you if you want. I got nothing to lose.”
“Would you really? You’d come with me?”
“I’ve always wanted to see where you grew up. My dad’s from there and we never go. I’d like to see it.”
“Yeah, but I burned the house down. There’s nothing to see anymore.”
“Dad said the crazy brothers did it.”
“No, I did it. I lied to get them locked up.”
Sheldon told him the story. Abe listened, expressionless. When Sheldon was finished, Abe said, “They said that? About the fucking Jews and coming back for the piles of gold?”
“I didn’t say gold.”
“It’s what they meant. They think Jews sit on piles of gold like that dragon in The Hobbit.”
“What’s a hobbit?”
“It’s like a dwarf but less hairy and with better manners. It’s from a new book that just came out. You might like it. Anyway, they said that?”
“Yeah, they said it.”
“So, you did what you had to do.”
“Maybe I didn’t have to.”
“Oh, please,” said Abe, his admiration turning into total disgust. “Jews wait too long to throw a punch, and we’re always second-guessing ourselves. You think the fuckin’ Italians are out there second-guessing themselves? You think the Irish are? The Greeks? The Russians? You think people in the Mob are thinking, ‘Oh no, should we really have slit this guy’s throat from ear to ear? Maybe he wasn’t going to say nothing. Maybe we were hasty.’ ”
Abe chuckled at his own joke. He tossed the revolver back into his underwear drawer and pushed it closed. He picked up the watch again. He turned the crown backward. Slowly. Clicking and clicking again.
Sheldon didn’t understand any of this. He didn’t know anything about people from those countries. In Whately, the world was made of only Christians and two Jewish families. All the Christians were Protestant and interchangeable; if they had heritage from Europe, it never came up in conversation. Here, according to Abe, the Christians were broken up into groups, and they all had qualities that Abe thought were self-evident.
“You know why, don’t you?” Abe said.
“Why what?”
“Why we keep second-guessing ourselves. It’s because we’re trapped. Don’t you see? Henry Ford is blaming us for the Depression. The Nazis are saying we’re all communists and degenerates. You know this guy Julius Streicher? After the Berlin Olympics two years ago, he says they’re going to need to exterminate all the Jews. That means murder, Sheldon. Fuckin’ Roosevelt won’t let in the refugees because he says they’re a threat to national security. Says that if America lets in the refugees—Jews like us—some are going to be commies and others—well, they won’t be fascists, but they’ll report back to the Germans because if they don’t, the Germans will kill their relatives. It’s in all the papers! Mr. Olson waves them around every Thursday.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Olson. My social studies teacher. He hates the Nazis something fierce and he shows us this stuff. It’s right in the papers! It’s not like it’s a secret or anything. It’s everywhere. I collect them.” Abe nodded toward the dresser, but Sheldon already knew this.
Sheldon looked outside at the storm. His father had once told him that glass is actually a liquid. When Joseph was in France, he saw stained-glass windows at a cathedral and the priest showed him how the bottom of each windowpane was thicker than the top. “They’re melting,” the priest had said. Joseph said it was an amazing thing to consider. Not only the fact of the windows, but to have been discussing something so small in the midst of something so big.
Sheldon thought that Abe was waving around pieces of paper in a world that looked solid but was actually melting. The difference here was that no one was bothering to talk about it.
“Here’s why Jews are silent about it all. Two Jews are accused of killing a Christian,” Abe said, setting up a joke. “They’re facing the firing squad. One of them puffs out his chest and yells, ‘What would you do? Would you stand there like cowards and murder two innocent men?’ and his friend, tied to the other pole, whispers, ‘Don’t make trouble.’ ”
Abe didn’t laugh. Neither did Sheldon.
“We’re quiet, they come for us. We speak up, they come faster. I’m telling you, Sheldon. We’re getting squeezed. And I’m not going to stand around like that guy tied to the pole. Neither one of them. I’m not letting it get that far.”
* * *
Sheldon woke to Mirabelle’s face. She was kneeling over him, and the longest strands of her hair were tickling his nose and cheeks. She was smiling weakly at him. Her eyes, he noticed, were more hazel than brown. There was an explosion of green around the pupil. He didn’t want to speak because he didn’t want anything to change.
For some reason, his pillow was wet.
“Morning, sleepyhead. There’s work to do.”
Work?
“I thought school was canceled,” Sheldon said, rubbing his left eye.
“It is. Which is why you and Abe are going to help Dad sandbag the Connecticut River with about a thousand men from the WPA.”
Sheldon turned his head toward the window. The wind had let up, but the gutter had broken, and now the rainwater was pouring onto the glass and obstructing everything outside.
“It’s raining,” said Sheldon. “A lot.”
“The river is rising six inches an hour. It’s going to overflow the dikes. Dad wants you and Abe to help make it stop.”
Sheldon had looked at Mirabelle many times, most often when she wasn’t looking back. He had never stared so directly into her eyes at such close range.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sheldon said.
“You stack sandbags and they keep the water back.”
“No, I mean . . . if they have a thousand people stacking up bags, they don’t need me.”
“They don’t.”
“So . . . ?”
“Dad needs you. He wants Mr. Henkler and Mr. Stone to know that the Corbin men were there with their sleeves rolled up helping save the company.”
“I’m a Horowitz man.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“That’s nuts,” said Sheldon.
“It is. It’s also true. Most things are nuts and true.”
“If that was true,” said Sheldon, framed by her hair that smelled like almonds and chamomile, “that would be nuts.”
“Now you’re getting
it.”
Mirabelle stood and Sheldon sat up. He had put himself to sleep thinking about the mystery of who was stealing the guns from the armory. It didn’t affect him much, but he liked the puzzle. If guns were being smuggled out, but all the doors had guards who were checking the workers’ bags and pockets, how were they getting out?
Nero Wolfe would have made a giant map of the armory and used a red wax pencil to mark all the entrances and exits. Uncle Nate said that most of the windows don’t open, but the buildings are enormous so obviously some of them do. If there was a dumpster outside, one of the men could be tossing the guns out and collecting them later. Or some men below the window could stretch out a blanket and a worker inside could throw the weapons out and have them land in the blankets like the people who jump from windows and are caught by firemen in the Buster Keaton movie he once saw before he stopped going to the theater.
The chances of getting caught, though, seemed rather high. Until recently, Sheldon had never tried to get away with much. Maybe it was easier to get away with things if you’re of a mind for it. Abe certainly seemed to be. He wanted to get in as much trouble as he could, as though he could bust out of the problems of the world single-handedly like the Phantom or the new Superman guy.
None of this explained why his pillow was wet, though.
* * *
Lenny had said he’d seen one of those comic books, but Sheldon was pretty sure he hadn’t. The newsstand in Whately didn’t have any copies of anything back in June, or July, or August, and where had Lenny been other than Whately since then? Nowhere, that’s where. How he got hold of his one-and-only copy of The Escapist from Empire Comics, Sheldon still didn’t know, but beyond that, Lenny’s cache was limited. He must have heard about it in the newspaper or on the radio and tried to embellish. Lenny did that sort of thing. He wasn’t a liar; he would never lie to Sheldon. But he liked to add to stories to make them more interesting to people.
Like that time he found some pictures of naked girls and said they were French.
“How the hell do you know they’re French?” Sheldon had wanted to know.
Lenny—unlike Sheldon—had finished his bar mitzvah over the summer and was therefore a man according to Jewish law and tradition, which meant little in their rural New England village, but at that point in their conversation, it had meant everything to Lenny.
“Ah, you’re still a kid,” he said. “What do you know?”
One black-and-white photograph showed a naked woman on her knees facing the camera with a smile. She was in a field with a wooden barn in the distance. Her arms were locked behind her head, and her sloping breasts pointed menacingly at the boys.
“She’s not speaking French,” said Sheldon. “She’s not wrapped in the French flag. I don’t see a bicycle with a basket holding any of those French breads. I think you got suckered.”
“What difference does it make, Sheldon? It’s a real girl, all naked and smiling. When have you seen one of those? Don’t touch it, for God’s sake,” Lenny said, smacking Sheldon’s hand away from the photo.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be thinking that you’ve touched it.”
“Is that the only one or have you got more?”
Lenny had one more he’d been protecting in a newspaper. In this one, a topless woman posed with a lyre. She was sitting without a smile and a sheer skirt was draped around her thighs. Her hair was short, dark, and perfect, as if she were in a silent film. Her eyes were enormous and her look coquettish.
“This one’s classy,” said Sheldon, taking it out of Lenny’s hands and slapping away his attempt to retrieve it. “The first one looks like she’s laying an egg. But this one. I’d like to meet her.”
“Yeah. You’d know what to do,” Lenny had said.
Lenny’s discarded newspaper was the Fitchburg Sentinel from July 11, 1938. Splashed across the top was the banner headline, HUGHES SPANS ATLANTIC IN 16 1/2 HOURS , with a side column titled, TEN KILLED IN PALESTINE AMBUSCADE—BOMBINGS, SLAYINGS TERRORIZE DISTRICTS AS ARABS WAGE UNRELENTING WAR ON JEWS .
Lenny folded the front page into a boat.
Sheldon pawed the card with the musical nymph, ignoring Lenny’s handiwork.
“I’d know,” said Sheldon, after deep consideration. “I already know what goes where, and after that . . . I wouldn’t be afraid to ask questions.”
* * *
Sheldon wished that Lenny had seen that Superman comic and could tell him more about it. It seemed to Sheldon that Abe wanted to be someone like that; someone to correct the wrongs of the world all by himself.
Sheldon still wasn’t sure whether Abe’s claims about anti-Semitism were real. He couldn’t see it, or touch it, or taste it. It wasn’t in the laws like it was in Germany, or the way that the Negroes had separate schools. That was all written down. It was law. It was policy. Abe kept saying it was there, but Uncle Nate said it wasn’t. Either way, Sheldon was off to sandbag the river and keep it from overpowering the dike that protected Colt.
Mirabelle was still standing over him smelling like she did.
“I don’t want to get wet,” Sheldon said. “I hate getting wet in the rain. I have my reasons. Also, I can’t swim. Not so good, anyway.”
“You just need to look busy,” Mirabelle said. “No one’s expecting you to be very helpful. You’re twelve.”
“Noah’s storm wasn’t this bad. It was only longer,” said Sheldon, in a last-ditch effort to go absolutely nowhere.
Mirabelle had said the river was rising six inches an hour. Maybe that meant the rain was falling six inches an hour—or close enough—which was the same as . . . one hundred and forty-four inches a day. Divided by twelve, that was twelve feet a day. Twelve feet a day times forty days was . . . almost five hundred feet of water! That would have covered everything. Sheldon didn’t know how tall Mount Ararat was but . . . close, right?
“You’re exaggerating,” Mirabelle said.
“No. I’m really not!”
* * *
Sheldon wasn’t simply “wet” as he tried to lift the fifty-pound sandbag onto his shoulder like the other men who were building the dike.
Ducks get wet.
Penguins get wet.
Otters get wet.
Those things get wet and then they get dry again. Those things only get wet on the outside. Sheldon was wet on the inside. This was a never-going-to-be-dry-again kind of wet.
Every step he took was like lifting a tree trunk rather than a leg. Every move of his arm was like wading through the rapids of a river. Every moment that passed was one step closer to being filled up like a water balloon and then chucked off a high bridge into a wide barge where he’d explode and there’d be nothing left but little scraps of clothing and eyebrows.
Abe was beside him in the storm with a bag on his shoulder the size of a giant dead dog. The river was filling up in front of him. The armory was a hundred yards behind them, where teams of men working like a chain gang were carrying boxes of materials out the front door and—assisted by staff—carting them off to higher ground.
Abe whacked his sandbag into place and turned for another.
“How long have we been here?” Sheldon yelled through the rain and the sounds of the men working and the trucks that were running.
“Nine minutes,” Abe shouted.
“It really feels longer.”
“Think of how it is for the men who are actually carrying things,” Abe shouted.
Everyone around Sheldon was carrying things.
“I weigh a hundred pounds,” yelled Sheldon. “The bags weigh fifty.”
“So?”
“Fifty when they’re dry. They aren’t dry anymore. Now they weigh more than I do. I can’t lift more than me.”
“Stop whining, Sheldon!”
“Where’s Mr. Henkler?”
Sheldon didn’t like talking because it helped the rain get into his mouth and make him even wetter, if that was possible. Also, everything was
loud. The rain made a constant noise so every man on the line yelled to be heard. The river below him was pressing itself into knots as white rapids formed on the surface. Sheldon shaded his eyes with a hand on his forehead because it helped him hear Abe’s answer somehow.
“He’s inside.”
“Inside?”
“Yes!” said Abe, as his sack thunked down on the others. Sheldon followed him to the truck where the others were stacked.
“Where’s Uncle Nate?”
“I don’t know.”
“So why are we doing this if no one’s around to care?”
“For God’s sake, Sheldon. You do it because it needs to be done!”
That wasn’t good enough for Sheldon. He couldn’t lift a bag from the truck, let alone carry it twenty feet and slam it down on a pile that was now up to his waist.
“I need to pee,” he yelled.
Two men nearby smiled and shook their heads. Sheldon didn’t care and neither did his bladder. If all went well, he could probably unscrew his leg and empty that out too.
When Sheldon turned toward the armory, it looked foreboding and alien in the gray and the wet, but he didn’t care. The giant Aladdin dome with the stars was sopping wet, which you wouldn’t expect of an Arabian artifact but there it was. Beneath the blue dome was a door and inside the door was a flight of stairs leading up to the landing with Mr. Henkler’s office where—very nearby—was a toilet.
Inside the antechamber of an enormous hall, the worker bees were collecting crates and carrying them out. Crates of equipment, of machined parts, of complete weapons—a depot of armaments that could have supplied the Union against the Confederates. The floor was an inch deep in water, and a large man with strong arms tried to hand Sheldon a box half his size, but Sheldon put up his hand to signal he wasn’t interested. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he announced, and he walked on with an air of propriety that quelled any questions.
The stairs were also wet. He couldn’t imagine why one of the worker bees downstairs from the WPA or Colt would have come up to the executive offices, but he followed the footprints until they ended at Mr. Henkler’s door. Sheldon, on an impulse to satisfy his curiosity and solve this minor mystery, peeked through the office windows, and standing right across from Mr. Henkler were two men dressed exactly like the man with the mustache.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 10