“He’s twelve.”
“Right. He’s twelve. Boys are like that.”
“Maybe in Russia they are, but not here. I’ve tried everything. I put clocks in every room, made a chart for him when he needs to get up, go to school, eat, do his chores, every little thing, and still he forgets everything. He’s always in a hurry, and he’s always late. He’s not quite…”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. McCauley. “He’s different.”
His mother and Shubin looked up when Jake swung the screen door open. They were seated at the table, dinner was served, and they were eating it, at least Shubin was, but when he saw Jake, his loaded fork halted halfway to his mouth.
“What happened, honey?” said Mrs. McCauley. “You’re all wet.”
Before he could answer, the screen door bounced back and whacked Jake from behind. He was not looking directly at Shubin, but he spied the Russian’s left hand flying up to cover his mouth. Was he laughing at him?
“You must have been playing with Duane,” said Mrs. McCauley, smiling. “Well, it’s all right. Why don’t you go and change into dry clothes, honey, and come back while the meatloaf is still warm?”
His mother’s meatloaf was nowhere near Mrs. Armbruster’s cooking, but it was the best thing she knew how to make, and now she was giving it to the Russian. Jake stood speechless, shocked by her betrayal.
“I should have told you this before, honey,” said Mrs. McCauley. “From now on, Mr. Shubin will share all our meals.” She exchanged glances with Shubin, then looked at Jake again. “Please don’t just stand there, Jake. Go into your room and change your clothes as I said.”
Jake did not move. The sound of his mother’s cold and measured voice, the voice she used when she was annoyed with him, had always made Jake uneasy, but her speaking to him in that voice in front of the Russian felt even more like a betrayal than feeding him Jake’s favorite meal.
“What is the matter, Jake?” Mrs. McCauley said. “Did you not hear me?”
Deliberately, Jake was only looking at his mother and not at the Russian, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught Shubin making a quick and urgent gesture, moving his left hand side to side as if erasing something off the blackboard, or maybe trying to erase Mrs. McCauley’s growing anger.
Jake’s sodden shirt and jeans stuck to his skin, his high-tops felt slushy inside, he was cold, and all he really wanted was to change into dry clothes and have a bite of his mom’s meatloaf, but having that man watching him made it impossible. Jake had to say something to him first, something clever, and something insulting, but absolutely nothing came to his mind, and he remained in place without speaking.
“You stop this silly behavior at once, Jacob McCauley!” his mother said. “Go into your room and change your clothes.”
“I don’t want to get in the way, ma’am.” Shubin laid his fork over his plate and began to rise. “I think I better—”
“Sit down!” Mrs. McCauley shouted, and slapped the table so hard the plates leapt up.
Shubin dropped into his seat and snatched his fork again.
“I would like you to be present for this, Mr. Shubin,” said Mrs. McCauley.
The way she said it was confusing. Jake knew that his mother was angry with him, yet there was something in her voice that told him that she was also angry with Shubin.
In the gaping silence that followed, the dishes in the cupboard began to rattle, tinkling softly at first, then violently knocking one against the other. A butter knife slid off the edge of the counter and clanked to the floor. A ceiling fixture blinked on and off and on and off again. A rolling thunder rumbled through the kitchen walls as some enormous thing roared over the roof of their house.
“What was that?” said Shubin.
“Don’t answer him, Mom!” Jake dashed across the kitchen toward the hallway door. “He’s trying to fool us!”
“What are you talking about?” said Mrs. McCauley, glancing at Shubin.
“He knows what I am talking about!” Jake stormed out and slammed the door behind him, but opened it at once and stuck his head back in. “And guess what, Mom? I’m not different. I’m an American! He’s the one who’s different, okay? He’s a foreigner! So stop telling him stuff!” And then he slammed the door for good.
10
According to his mother’s chart, a list of rules to which Jake had agreed, scrawling his signature in the bottom right corner, he was supposed to be asleep, but it was past midnight and he was nowhere near sleeping. He lay in the dark, aiming his Eveready flashlight at the model of the B-29 Superfortress suspended from the ceiling on a fishing line. Slowly spinning in the light beam, the plane looked real.
Jake raised the flashlight until the bomber’s shadow slanted onto the large map tacked to the facing wall. Once folded into his father’s Great World Atlas, the faded map was coming apart at the creases. A dotted line that Jake had drawn on the map ran west to east, from North America to Europe. Tossing the blanket aside, Jake stood up on his bed and, balancing upon the mattress springs, moved the light beam past the model bomber so that its shadow tracked the dotted line.
“Come in, Delta Alpha Delta One,” he whispered. “Off the ground at twenty-four hundred hours. Roger that. Over and out.”
He flew the bomber east from Arizona toward West Virginia, then left the coast north of Delaware Bay. To stretch fuel, he slowed down over the ocean, but ninety miles off the Irish coast, his wing tanks were running dry. He lost visibility and began drifting sideways, but broke through the heavy fog over London into the crisp and clear skies. Crossing the English Channel, he had engine trouble. Outside of Berlin he smashed into a cold front. The weather behind the Iron Curtain was always awful. Entering the Russian airspace, he picked up a load of ice on both wings and plunged into darkness.
“Calling Delta Alpha Delta One,” he whispered, blinking at the shadow of his model bomber against the red-colored portion of the map. “Come in. Come in. Delta Alpha Delta One? Where are you?”
Every time Jake entered the Russian airspace, a faint sickness came over him. He knew that every morning at school during the Pledge of Allegiance while whispering his secret pledge to save his dad he was lying to himself. He could not save him. He was only a boy playing a game with a shadow of a toy over an old faded map. To save his dad, he would have to fly a real B-29 all the way to the Arctic Circle, where the top secret uranium mines were surrounded by guard towers and barbwire with electric current coursing through it. How could he possibly do it, if he had never even been inside the Superfortress’s cockpit, let alone learned how to fly the real thing?
He heard footsteps in the hallway, then up the stairs to the attic.
The Russian!
He clicked the flashlight off and dropped onto his scrambled sheets. The door creaked open overhead, creaked closed. Shubin walked into his father’s study. His footsteps were so loud, it seemed that he was in the room with Jake. With every step he took, the whole house shuddered, causing the model bomber to give little shivers on its fishing line. Jake shivered, too. On a breath of chilled air, a sick-sweet scent wafted into the room through the open window. Jake slapped the sheets beside him, looking for his blanket. It must have fallen off the bed. He rolled onto his side, snatched the blanket off the floor, and rolling back, glimpsed a dark shape behind the open window.
A man stood in the driveway.
Jake froze, hanging off the bed and clutching at the blanket. The moon was not out yet, and the man’s large head and sloping shoulders, all that Jake could see of him above the windowsill, were black against the blackness of the night. The air hummed with the crickets’ choir. Jake’s heart pounded against his chest. The man’s head moved slightly as if to look at Jake, and something flashed in its lower portion, gleaming a burnished yellow, as if the man smiled at Jake with teeth of pure gold.
Next, the doorknob squeaked, slowly turning. The door creaked open. Jake flung the blanket over himself, hidin
g. He screamed when someone touched him.
“Honey! What’s the matter?” His mother pulled the blanket off his head and cradled him into her arms. “You’re shivering.” He felt her dry cool hand on his moist forehead. “I knew it, you’re warm.”
All at once, as if the moon were waiting for his mother to save him, the room grew lighter. A shaft of moonlight fell through the open window, shaping itself beside her feet into a slanted square. Above the crook of his mother’s elbow, Jake could see the open window. Where the man with gold teeth stood a moment ago, a thick clump of hackberry swayed gently over the moonlit driveway.
“Oh, honey. Why don’t you ever listen to me? I told you to change out of your wet clothes. You could catch pneumonia.” Holding Jake close, his mother glanced about the room. “Better keep the window shut.”
“Don’t go there, Mom!” he cried, and tried to catch her by the arm, but she was at the window already. The windowpane swiveled and the reflection of the empty driveway streaked across the glass. The man was gone.
“There,” said Mrs. McCauley, and then she latched the window.
Shubin’s shoes banged across the room upstairs.
“Why is he stomping like an elephant?” she said. “He’ll keep you up all night.”
She hesitated for a moment, staring at the ceiling, then came back, sat down on the bed beside him, and lifted something off the floor. “I warmed up some meatloaf. You must be starving.” The edge of the dinner plate glinted in her lap. “Let me feed you,” she said. “Tell me if it’s hard to swallow.”
Jake leaned away from the coming fork. “I’m not sick, Mom. And I’m not hungry. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
He nodded toward the window. “Someone was standing out there just now.”
Mrs. McCauley looked over her shoulder at the window, then turned back and studied him. “Someone was standing in our driveway?”
Jake nodded.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Some guy with gold teeth.”
“Gold teeth?”
She set the plate down on the floor, went back to the window, unlatched it, and looked out, turning her head in all directions. Then she looked at him over her shoulder. “Do you want me to tell Mr. Shubin?”
“No!”
She returned, forgetting to shut the window again, and sat at the edge of the bed. “You sure you saw someone there?”
Jake looked past her at the moonlit hackberry framed by the window. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
His mother smiled, or he thought she smiled; she was just a shape against the moonlight. She took his hands in hers and held them pressed together between her palms, which were cool and soft and pleasant.
“You came to my room once in the middle of the night,” she said, “just standing there, breathing, staring at me in the dark. I nearly had heart failure.”
“Oh yeah? How old was I?”
“Four, I think. Four and a half.”
“What did I say?”
“You said that there was an airplane waiting outside of your window. You were going to fly to Russia to look for your dad, and you wanted me to come along.”
He tried but could not remember watching her sleep and felt a pang of regret but it passed quickly. It did not matter what it was like then because she was beside him now, making him feel safe. He wanted to tell her about his toy airplane, and his wall map, and his plan to save his dad, but suddenly she let go of his hands and shifted away from him. He watched her profile etched against the moonlight, still close to him and yet somehow far away. Her thin, nervous fingers were doing something in the dark, and although all Jake could see was a faint glint of her wedding ring, he knew what she was doing. She always twisted her wedding ring when she was upset about something.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Nothing, baby.”
“It’s not nothing, Mom. It’s something. Tell me.”
She was silent.
“It’s that Russian, right?” And speaking hurriedly before she could interrupt him, he went on, “I saw a movie at Duane’s house? About this Russian spy. He lied to everyone and he spied on everyone and, you know what else he did, Mom? He broke into someone’s office and took pictures with his spy camera of some top secret stuff. And guess what, Mom? He looked just like that Russian upstairs, I swear, whatever his name is, Shubin or something.”
His mother turned to him abruptly. Her eyes glistened so intensely in the dark that Jake didn’t feel safe anymore. He felt frightened.
“Let’s go to the police tomorrow, Mom! Let’s go to the FBI! Let’s turn him in, Mom! You think that when we were in the kitchen he didn’t know it was a B-29 flying over our house? He did, Mom, he did! He knows we live next to the air force base. That’s why he wants to live with us. We must get rid of him.”
“No, Jake!” she cried. “Listen to me—”
Suddenly, the floorboards in the attic ceased creaking, as if their Russian tenant had stopped to hear what Mrs. McCauley was about to say to her son.
She peered at the ceiling for a moment, then leaned close to him. “Shubin is not a Communist spy, Jake,” she whispered, “but it would be safer for us if you don’t—”
“If I don’t what?”
“If you don’t talk about him to anyone. Not to Duane, not to anyone at school.”
“Why?” he said, puzzled. “Why would that be safer for us?”
She leaned even closer, and he felt her lips brush his ear. “You know how people are about the Russians these days. Nobody likes them.”
11
The model B-29 was the first thing Jake saw when he opened his eyes in the morning, and while he watched it slowly spin, twisting and untwisting the fishing line that fixed it to the ceiling, he wondered why he felt so miserable, but when the shadow of the bomber slanted across the map hanging on the wall, he remembered: a Russian by the name of Shubin had moved into his father’s attic.
Imagining Shubin sleeping in his dad’s neat old army cot made Jake sick to his stomach. He listened intently for any sounds from the attic, but the racket of the morning birds outside was too loud. Jake climbed out of bed and, tugging on his still-damp jeans, glimpsed the reflection of the driveway in the open windowpane. Last night in that driveway he saw a man standing under the hackberry tree. A man with gold teeth.
Jake hesitated, then cautiously approached the window. When he looked out, a small pearly dove flitting from a bird feeder startled him, and he quickly stepped back into the room. From there, Jake watched the feeder, a shiny yellow box shaped like a miniature house swaying from the hackberry branch, exactly where he had imagined the man’s gold teeth flashing at him in the dark.
Jake began breathing again. How could he have mistaken the hackberry tree for a man and the bird feeder for his mouth full of gold teeth? It was Shubin’s fault, of course. Having him up in the attic made Jake terribly suspicious.
He closed the window, latched it securely, and looked at the clock on the dresser. He was late. His mother had gone to work before it was his time to get up, and he had either forgotten to set the alarm clock last night or had managed to sleep through its ringing this morning. He finished dressing in a hurry and was halfway out of the front door when a startling thought stopped him cold. His mother said that it would be safer for them if he did not tell anyone about Shubin. What did she mean by safer? What kind of danger were they in?
He left the front door open and went back into the house. Quietly, he crossed the hallway toward the staircase and stood, looking up at the door to his father’s attic. The door was closed. He waited, not knowing what he was waiting for, and after a while, he crept up the staircase and pressed his ear to the door. He expected to hear Shubin snoring, but what he heard was silence. He listened for a minute, then drew away from the door. Trying to be as quiet as he could, he took a step down. As his foot landed on the stair, the door behind him slowly creaked open.
Jake froze with his han
d on the banister, then cautiously looked over his shoulder into the open doorway. The morning light came into the room from a square window above his father’s cot. The cot stood neatly made, as if Shubin did not sleep in it last night. Jake stepped back up on the landing, moved to the doorway, and peered into the empty room.
All of his father’s wonderful things were replaced by the Russian’s dreary belongings. A stack of sickly gray socks and a stack of sickly gray boxers were folded on the shelf where his dad’s history books used to stand, and in place of his air force jacket, an ugly woolen coat with greasy elbows slung off the wall. His dad’s beautiful glass globe with the light inside was gone, and the brass calendar was gone also. Instead, the Russian’s personals—a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a comb, a safety razor—lay side by side on a towel spread at the foot of the cot.
Jake stepped in closer, gaping in disgust at the safety razor. Tiny black hairs stuck to its rusted edge reminded him of the Russian spy’s bristly chin in the movie he saw at Duane’s house. Instantly nauseous, he looked away and saw a suitcase slumped behind the door. Duane’s voice, breathless and excited, rang through his head: First thing you do is look inside the lining. It probably has a false bottom.
No, Jake was not going to snoop. Leave the snooping to the Commies. He stepped back toward the door, but before he knew what he was doing, he was kneeling over the suitcase and unfastening the lock. His hands trembled with excitement. Would it not be amazing if he could expose Shubin as a Russian spy? Jake saw his name in the newspapers, front page, sensational news, and he thought of Duane dying from envy, and he thought of Major Armbruster shaking his hand, and he thought of his mom begging his forgiveness for taking in spies, and for some reason he even thought about Trudy Lamarre, the redhead from his class.
He threw the lid open. The suitcase was empty. He felt through the lining and knocked on the top and the bottom and knocked on the sides. Just in case, he yanked at the handle. Nothing.
Spy Runner Page 4