Spy Runner

by Eugene Yelchin

  He left the attic, ran to the kitchen, and came back holding a butter knife. He tried to make a neat cut in the suitcase lining, just wide enough to squeeze his hand in, but the knife was dull, and when he pushed in the blade, the lining ripped along the bottom edge. He tried to lift the lining, but he pulled too hard and the whole thing came off. There was nothing in between the leather and the lining. He turned the suitcase round and slashed the lining on the inside of the lid. He was not careful anymore, hacking at the fabric roughly. When he ripped the rest of the lining away, there was nothing below it either.

  He rose and stood with the knife in his hand, gaping at the mutilated suitcase. Then he raised his head and looked around the room. Next, he surprised himself by snatching every stitch of Shubin’s belongings and shoving them back into the suitcase where they came from.

  12

  Jake burst into the kitchen with the bulging suitcase under his arm, tossed the butter knife into the sink, kicked the screen door open, leapt over the back porch railing, and, dropping to his knees, shoved the suitcase under the porch into the dark and weedy hollow.

  A loud crack and then another, closer, came from the street below the house. Someone needs to fix his muffler flashed through Jake’s head. He darted to where his roadster leaned against the wall, tossed one leg over the crossbar, stood on the pedals, and flew down the driveway, sloping toward the street. Pedaling hard to build up speed, he leaned way back and yanked on the bars. The front wheel left the ground. Shooting into the street in a perfect wheelie, he heard another loud muffler crack beside him and felt rather than saw a brown Ford pickup truck speeding at him from the left. The truck’s passenger-side mirror whacked at the spokes of his bike’s airborne wheel. The bike spun, flinging Jake to the ground, and crashed on top of him.

  The Ford screeched to a halt, shifted gears, and, spewing clouds of smoke, sped in reverse. Jake sat on the curb beside his bike, frowning at a dark spot blooming below his left knee’s denim. The truck came to a stop beside him, and a heavyset man scooted from the steering wheel toward the passenger-side window. His face, bloated and flushed, hung above the rim of the door. A pair of beady eyes, sunk behind the puffy folds, looked down at Jake with curious intensity.

  Jake could not be sure, but it seemed to him that behind the stench of gasoline and rubber smoke, he caught a whiff of that sick-sweet odor he had smelled last night on the breath of midnight air. He waited for the man to say something and when he did not, Jake said, to be polite, “It’s all right, sir. I’m okay.”

  The man nodded, curling his thick upper lip into a frightful grin. His teeth were capped in gold.

  Something happened in the pit of Jake’s stomach. An icy hand snatched at his insides, and while the man scooted back behind the steering wheel, and while the engine whined, and while the tires spun in place, the icy hand held tightly on to Jake’s insides. The truck fired a burst of sparks out of its muffler and squealed around the corner and out of sight.

  Jake sat quietly on the curb, longer maybe than he had ever sat before without moving. No, it was not the hackberry bush with the yellow bird feeder he saw outside of his window last night. He saw that man. That very man.

  Jake rose carefully, carefully lifted his bike, and carefully walked it up the street toward the Armbrusters’ house. He must tell Duane everything. About what Jake had done to the suitcase, and about the man with gold teeth, and about his mother telling him to keep Shubin a secret. Duane would know what to do. He was smart. It was because of Duane, of course, that Jake nose-dived into the pool, but Jake was not going to hold a grudge against him, the only person Jake could trust.

  He left his bike by the curb in front of the Armbrusters’ house, walked up the gravel path, climbed the front porch steps, and rang the doorbell. In the sudden gust of wind from the desert, the American flag to his left snapped against the post.

  “What do you want?” said Mrs. Armbruster, opening the door.

  Her voice sounded so harsh that at first, Jake did not recognize her. “Who? Me?” he said, surprised. “I want Duane.”

  “Go away.” She slammed the door.

  Astonished, Jake gaped at the door slammed inches from his nose. He rang the bell again and, just in case, stepped back a little.

  “What?” said Mrs. Armbruster, opening the door.

  “It’s me, ma’am, Jake McCauley. Don’t you recognize me?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Where’s Duane?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “What do I want, ma’am? We always ride to school together. You know that.”

  “He’s left already.”

  Jake stood, speechless, gaping at Mrs. Armbruster. She began closing the door, but halted, frowning at something on the ground. He followed her gaze. From under the rolled-up leg of his jeans, a red streak was making its way onto the rubber mat below his feet. His knee was bleeding.

  “Sorry, ma’am.” Jake smeared the pooled blood across the word WELCOME with the sole of his sneaker. When he glanced back up at Mrs. Armbruster, the expression on her face was different.

  “Wait here, lamb,” she said in her regular voice. “I’ll get a Band-Aid.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Jake said. “But I’m late already. I better go.”

  He turned away and walked to the curb where his bike stood leaning on the kickstand.

  “Jacob?” called out Mrs. Armbruster.

  He turned around.

  “Is it true that your mother let a Communist into your house?”

  Jake thought about it. He did not really know. He got on his bike and swung into the street and pedaled away, feeling the whole time that Mrs. Armbruster was watching him until he turned the corner.

  13

  It was late in the morning and there should have been motorcars and trucks on the blacktop shimmering across the desert floor, but the road was empty. Jake had never ridden to school without Duane before. The spooky emptiness surrounding him brought forth the nagging feeling that the bad things that had begun to happen since Shubin’s arrival were only the beginnings of worse things yet to come.

  At last a city bus passed him, working hard to climb uphill. The driver leaned out of the window and looked at Jake without expression. A row of empty windows rattled by. In a low growl of gears, the bus mounted the slope, then dipped out of sight. Jake was squinting into the distance, waiting for the bus to show up ahead, when the sound of another vehicle gaining on him from behind caught his ear. He did not turn around, expecting the motorcar to pass him. It did not. Jake listened to the engine’s steady hum behind his back. Soon he was convinced that the gold-toothed fellow who nearly drove him over in front of Jake’s house was now following him in his truck. Jake could never outride the truck on his roadster, but he panicked and dashed forward. Strangely, the truck neither tried to catch up with him nor cut him off. It took Jake a while to gather courage to glance over his shoulder. When he did, he saw not the gold-toothed fellow’s truck behind him but a two-door Buick, black, not one of the latest models.

  Jake exhaled in relief, slowed down, and looked over his shoulder again. He could not make out the driver behind the sunlit windshield, but the way the Buick dawdled at about a hundred yards behind him made Jake instantly suspicious. The nagging feeling that worse things were yet to come returned to him at once. The Buick was tailing him on purpose. To test it, Jake slowed down, rolled for a while in lazy half circles, then quickly glanced over his shoulder. The gap between his bike and the Buick remained the same, about a hundred yards. Jake stood on the pedals, leaned forward over the bars, and hauled fast, but the same hundred yards remained between them.

  Certain now that he was under surveillance, he tried to show to whoever was driving the Buick that he was not afraid to be followed. He switched to one steady speed, fast but not too fast, hoping that if he could only stop looking over his shoulder, the Buick might somehow disappear, but he kept looking, and the Buick kept following him at a hundred
yards behind.

  14

  Then up ahead, Jake saw the same city bus warped in the haze of the shimmering heat. It rose over the sloping blacktop and dipped out of sight. It rose again, closer. The bus had made it by then to the end of the line and was doubling back downtown. The driver was in no hurry, and it took the bus a long time to pass Jake in the opposite direction. By the time they were side by side, Jake had a plan.

  The bus driver looked at him, bored, and looked away. As the bus rumbled past, Jake made a sharp U-turn into the cloud of exhaust uncoiling behind it. His rear tire slid on the turn; the bike fishtailed and leaned close to the ground. Jake swung his bars to the right, kicked at the blacktop with his left foot, and came up level. He did not wait to see if the Buick would also make a U-turn, but sped around to the right side of the bus to shield himself from view. If he could stay covered until the bus stopped downtown, he would have no trouble losing the Buick there.

  Jake could ride fast—that part was easy—but he had no room to ride in. The bus was crowding him toward the ditch to his right. Besides, the motor smoke was so noxious that everything before Jake’s eyes became awash in tears: the bus, the blacktop, and the ditch all blurred together. Bouncing over the blacktop’s crumbling edge, the bike was bucking like a bronco, and Jake rode standing to avoid the jabbing seat.

  Speed had never failed to cheer him up, and this ride was so crazy and so fast that soon Jake’s heart was pounding not with fear but with joy. He made his roadster leap over a wide crack in the concrete and, for one thrilling and breathtaking moment, he floated suspended in midair. Jake’s face lit up with a smile.

  On landing, his bike’s rusted chain snapped in two, and while Jake’s feet cycled loose and useless pedals, he lost control of the bike and fell sideways into the moving bus. His shoulder slammed into the greasy rivets, and he began sliding down. Powerless, he saw the rear tire of the bus: black, enormous, spinning, smoking, flinging pebbles, growing larger and larger, rapidly closing in. If he hit the blacktop now, that monstrous tire would make a pancake out of him. He dropped the bars, twisted toward the bus, and shoved with both hands off its blackened sidewall. In a dizzying flash, he saw his roadster bouncing into the gaping ditch, he saw the bus slanting away, he saw the crumbling blacktop rising, and then the sun hit his eyes, blinding him.

  Next thing he knew, he was sitting in the ditch, coughing up dust. A dozen feet away, his bike lay on its side, wheels spinning. Jake rubbed dirt out of his eyes, climbed up to the edge of the ditch, and cautiously peeked out. The bus was rumbling away in the distance. The Buick was nowhere in sight.

  “Come in, Delta Alpha Delta One,” Jake said. “Mission accomplished. Over and out.”

  He wished that Delta Alpha Delta One—which stood for his dad, of course—could see him at that moment. How smartly he outran that Buick, how fast he was, how brave. When Jake was proud of something he had done, he had often seen himself as if from some distance, as if he were watching himself through his father’s eyes.

  “Delta Alpha Delta One,” he repeated, and felt something lodged behind his cheek. His tongue moved the object to the front of his mouth, and he spat it out. A tooth lay in the palm of his hand. He stuck his finger in his mouth and found the hole and gently poked at it. The edges of the hole were sharp and hurt a little, and when he took the finger out, it was bloody. He spat the blood and wiped his lips and stuck the tooth into the pocket of his jeans.

  By the time Jake found a spare pin in his messy saddlebag, fixed the chain, straightened the wheels, and hauled the roadster out of the ditch, the black two-door Buick with its motor running was waiting for him a hundred yards down the road.

  15

  The first thing Jake saw when he swung into the school’s parking lot was Duane’s Schwinn Phantom neatly stowed inside the bike rack. Behind Jake, the Buick that had followed him as he rode away from the ditch until he arrived at the school slowed to a stop and stood idling across the street. Forcing himself not to be in a rush, he set his bike into the rack alongside Duane’s Phantom, strolled leisurely up the pathway toward the school’s front door, skipped up a few concrete steps, drew the door open, and only as he slipped into the hallway did he let himself peek over his shoulder.

  The Buick was gone.

  Jake bolted up the hallway, cool and dark after the blazing sun outside. The hallway was lined with bruised metal lockers. Most of the lockers were closed, but some doors swung open, and Jake slammed the doors shut with his fist as he ran. Each time he hit one, a hollow thud rolled through the hallway. The linoleum was freshly waxed, and Jake took corners sliding on one foot, then ran again, leaping over a water pail left behind by the janitor.

  He halted beside the door to Mr. Vargas’s classroom to catch his breath and stuck his finger into the hole left by the tooth that was now in his pocket. The hole still hurt a little, but not too bad, and there was no more blood. He beat the dust off the front of his shirt and the knees of his jeans, took a deep breath, and as quietly as he could, slipped into the classroom.

  The window blinds were tightly shut, and the ceiling lights were off. The classroom was dark. He could not see his classmates, but in the stifling air of the room, he felt the heat of their bodies and of their common breath. While he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, something began rattling in the back of the center aisle, and a flickering ray, beaming thinly out of the movie projector, cleaved the darkness and lit up a bright white square to his right.

  “How kind of you to show up at last, McCauley,” Mr. Vargas’s voice rose from the dark. “Go sit down.”

  Dipping in and out of the light beam, Jake went down the aisle, glancing left and right at his classmates. To his surprise, no one looked at him, and no one greeted him as he passed. Everyone’s eyes were fixed upon the screen. He glanced over his shoulder, worried that he was missing something important, but the movie had not begun yet. White scratches and numbers were flashing inside the flickering square.

  He dropped into his seat and nudged Duane’s elbow. “A car just followed me,” he whispered. “No kidding. A black Buick.” He pulled his tooth out of the pocket of his jeans and pushed it across the desk toward Duane. “Tried to make a run for it, but busted a chain just like you said. Couldn’t lose them, but look—cracked a tooth.”

  Duane moved his elbow away and, paying Jake’s tooth zero attention, kept his eyes on the screen. Jake studied his profile for a moment, confused.

  “Listen, bud,” he whispered, “I nose-dived into the pool, okay? You didn’t. So it’s not you who ought to be unfriendly.”

  “Settle down, McCauley,” said Mr. Vargas from the dark.

  “Yes, sir.” Jake nodded in the direction of Vargas’s voice and leaned into Duane again. “No false bottom in his suitcase.”

  “McCauley!” said Mr. Vargas.

  Jake shoved the tooth back into his pocket, peered at Duane for a moment, then turned to the screen when someone’s voice crackled in the movie, “How prepared are we if Russia should attack?”

  A gray bomber was flying low over the frozen sea. The bomber looked exactly like the B-29 Superfortress, but it carried a star on its fin. TU-4 flashed through Jake’s mind.What did Duane call it? Oh, yes, reverse engineering. He leaned into Duane to tell him that the bomber on the screen was one of those knockoffs the Russians had made, but instead he heard himself whisper, “What’s the idea leaving for school without me? Your mom—”

  “McCauley!” cried Mr. Vargas. “I’m giving you one last chance.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Jake narrowed his eyes at Duane, who still refused to look at him. Well, fine. Jake could play this game, too. He scraped his chair far away from Duane’s, leaned back, and, folding his arms against his chest, peered at the screen. Who did Duane think he was anyhow? He would have to beg Jake to tell him about the crazy chase he had with the Buick. Could Duane do it on his perfect Schwinn? Not on his life. Thinking about the Buick made Jake uneasy, and once again t
he feeling that worse things were yet to come began to nag at him. To distract himself, he tried to focus on the screen, where, inside the cockpit of the Russian bomber, the goggled and leather-helmeted crew was leaning over their instruments. “Target in sight, Comrade Commander,” one of them crackled. “Set detonator,” another fellow crackled back. “Detonator set,” the first fellow answered. “Release safety.” “Safety off.”

  The movie began showing New York City—the skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty, people crossing the street in a hurry, women in the park rolling babies in strollers, stuff they always showed when they showed New York. Then up in the gray, grainy sky above the skyscrapers, the Russian bomber came into sight.

  “Nuclear device fused for ground burst, Comrade Commander,” the first voice crackled again.

  “Stand by for the bomb release,” the second voice responded.

  At that moment, something stung Jake on the cheek. His hand darted to his face, and he turned around, startled. No one was looking at him, but on the desk beside his elbow, he saw a wadded paper ball. Jake looked in the direction from where it might have been fired. Eddie Cortes. Or Tony Gonzales. Both sat still, watching the movie. He unrolled the ball, smoothed the rumpled paper, and stared at the words scrawled in red pencil.

  Jake McCauley is a Communist!

  A second paper ball thumped against his neck. He swung around and glared at Vernon and Dean. They were watching the movie. Crumpling the note in his fist, Jake glared at Duane’s profile. Even in the dark, he could see Duane’s cheeks flare up.

  “You dirty traitor,” Jake whispered. “You told them about the Russian in my house.”

  Something flashed from the direction of the screen. The light bounced off the ceiling, and the darkened room throbbed with blinding brightness. At the sound of the blast, a dull thud went through Jake’s chest as if someone had punched him in the solar plexus. On the screen, above a boiling stem of flame and smoke, a huge white ball was swelling to a giant mushroom. With astonishing timing, the school siren went off in the hallway.