Rocket Science (18 page)

“Vernon Dunham, I
know
that. They had me locked up since yesterday in the root cellar, moved me out here when that policeman came.”

“Why?”

Her face set, impassive. “There’s some things you might be better not knowing, boy. I’m sorry. Just...get me help. Please?”

Squeezing her hand again, I turned to press my face against the outhouse door, down around knee-height, hopefully below where that old man on the roof would be likely to try shooting through the wood, and peeked out through the cracks. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. I would just have to brave it out. I figured I’d have to do it the ordinary way — open the door, walk out into the yard, and head for the barn. If Floyd or any of Mr. Bellamy’s gang stopped me, I would say that I was checking up on Floyd’s secret project.

The door creaked like an old leaf spring when I pushed it open. I stepped out into the dark yard, where there was just enough starlight to the bulk of the house, a few windows glowing from lanterns inside. I could see Floyd, too, standing right in front of me with one hand behind his back. He had a tense grin.

“Hey, Vernon.”

Had it been him that tied her up? Or one of those crazy old men with guns? “Uh, hello, Floyd.” I wished I were a better liar. Then maybe my voice wouldn’t have quavered so much.

“Spent a lot of time in the outhouse, I see. Thought I told you to use the chamber pot next time.”

I noticed the man on the roof had his rifle pointed at us.

“Not feeling too good,” I said, patting my stomach through the flannel bathrobe.

Floyd studied me, looking up and down, his eyes resting on my stained sleeve. “I see you’ve lost your candle. That’s a shame. Daddy told me to come apologize. We meant to dig a new trench and move the outhouse this morning, but what with the fire in town and your getting shot up, it just got away from us.”

“I didn’t notice anything unusual in there,” I said. Stupid, I told myself. I realized my breathing was faster, ragged, echoing like a drum between me and Floyd.

Floyd shook his head, sorrow and denial and indifference all together on his face as his smile quirked down to a little set of the lips. An expression I’d seen on Mr. Bellamy’s face. “Vern,” he said, “you never could lie worth a damn.” His eyes shone in the starlit darkness, tears or fear I couldn’t tell. He pulled his hand out from his back to show me a butcher knife, ten inches of sharp steel.

So he was in on it. Whatever ‘it’ was. He might as well have shoved his mother down that cesspit. For a moment, my eyes focused on the little hole at the upper corner of the blade. I shook my ahead, trying to clear the spell of the knife, and glanced up at the roof of the farmhouse. What would happen if I attacked Floyd and ran for the barn? The man on the roof was still watching us.

I looked back at Floyd, then glanced down at the ground. I didn’t want to meet my best friend’s eyes. Not now, not ever again. He laughed, a nervous chuckle that sounded forced. I felt a dim glimmer of hope at the fact that he felt the need to force it. Who was listening? Was Floyd laughing for his father? For Mr. Neville?

He whispered, “She was going to the Sheriff, Daddy said we had to stop her. We tied her up in the root cellar, but when Ollie come out here, we had to hide her better. Mr. Neville wanted to shoot her right then, but I couldn’t let him do that. Not my
Mama
!” Floyd was almost crying. “It was the best I could do, to save her. I had to leave her out there, to keep her away from Mr. Neville. What am I gonna do, Vern?” Then, more loudly, as he caught his breath. “I think you’d better come inside and have a little talk with Daddy.” Floyd waved me toward the kitchen door with the butcher knife.

Chapter Eleven

W
ell, Vernon,” said Mr. Bellamy
, slapping one hand against the pump of his shotgun. Mr. Neville sat next to him, in the same chair he’d had all evening, polishing the barrel of his pistol with one Mrs. Bellamy’s good napkins. Not that she had anything to say about it at this point.

I was flat terrified. Floyd was caught under their guns, just like me and Mrs. Bellamy, but he was trying to stay on their good side. Would he push me in the cess pit, too, to save me? Or worse? And the fact that Mr. Bellamy had finally gotten my name right after all this time was somehow all the more terrifying.

Mr. Bellamy leaned forward across the dining table. “What are we going to do with you?”

I could hear Floyd pace behind me. He still had that butcher knife. I just looked at Mr. Bellamy and shook my head.

“Is that ‘no?’” Mr. Bellamy looked at me like a roach he’d found in the flour tin. “Would that be, ‘I don’t know?’ Or maybe you’re saying ‘please don’t do anything at all to me,
sir
?’”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. My throat was closing up, and it was hard to talk. The headache I’d woken up with earlier was back with a vengeance. I wondered how much it would hurt when they killed me. I prayed it would be a bullet in the head, while I wasn’t looking. I didn’t want to know.

“I see,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Well, Vernon, I got some bad news and some good news for you.”

My voice had gone to empty air. I had nothing to say anyway, so I just nodded. It felt as if I was on a string.

“The bad news is, we’re gonna have to kill you.” He smiled at me, a narrow-lipped ancestral echo of Floyd’s million-dollar grin. Mr. Bellamy must have been handsome once, back before the Spanish-American War. “The good news is, we can’t kill you quite yet. You still have to figure out how to fly our airplane.”

Pegasus. Mr. Bellamy had always known about Pegasus and Floyd’s little adventures in Belgium. It made me wonder how deep their planning had gone.

“It’s too bad you didn’t serve, Vern,” said Floyd from behind me. He sounded tense. Mr. Neville glanced up at him, glaring over my head. “A quick-witted fellow can get in on all kinds of money-making deals in Europe right now. There’s desperate people over there, angry, desperate people with a lot of cash money to throw around.”

It was too bad that Floyd didn’t get himself killed in the Battle of the Bulge
, I thought. My decent, hard-working brother Ricky had to go die on some jungle trail in the Pacific while a cockroach like Floyd came back in one piece, loaded with cash. I couldn’t believe I’d ever cared for the little weasel, let alone spent most of my childhood with him.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Think of it as a motivational opportunity. You do your part fast, see, figure out how to fly that airplane. Then teach Floyd what he needs to know, we’ll kill you quick. Heck,” he said expansively, “I’ll let you pick how. Shotgun to the head, whatever. We’ve even got some rat poison.”

Mr. Bellamy smiled at me, little yellowed teeth peeking out from behind pale lips like fat caterpillars crawling across his face.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “you do your part slow, stall for time, guess what happens? We kill you slow and bad, then go find ourselves another aeronautical engineer. What do you think, Floyd? How could we do it? Give young Vernon here some ideas to think about.”

He was so close behind me I could feel his breath on top of my head. I imagined that butcher knife in his hand, twitching toward the back of my neck, aching to cut into my spine, slicing my throat the hard way — back-to-front.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” Floyd said. His voice was strong again, back under control in the presence of his father and Mr. Neville. But what he’d said in the outhouse...he didn’t believe in this...craziness. Floyd, who’d carried me when I couldn’t walk as a kid. “I don’t reckon Vern will be any kind of problem.” His fingers settled firm upon my shoulder. Was this my oldest friend talking? Or the surprising lunatic who’d come back from Europe? “He knows what’s good for him.”

Mr. Neville set down the napkin. “Kneecaps are good. While’s he’s sitting down, a bullet right from above. Blows the calf away. Cuff his hands, dump him in the slit trench before you fill it in, let him decide whether to drown in shit, suffocate under the dirt or just bleed out.”

“Uh,” gasped Floyd behind me, like he’d been sucker punched. His mother was out in that trench. But he was behind me, with a knife, instead of helping somehow.

I couldn’t do much about Mr. Bellamy or Mr. Neville — justice for them would come from somewhere else. But right then I decided I would kill Floyd if I had to tear his liver out with my bare hands. If Floyd lived out a long life in Kansas while me and Dad and my brother Ricky and who knows how many others rotted in the fertile ground, then there was no goodness in the world at all.

My hate must have showed in my eyes like a harvest burn-off because Mr. Bellamy stirred in his chair, his hand stroking the pump of the shotgun. “Floyd, I do believe Vernon’s showing some signs of commitment here.”

That irritated me. I hawked and spat on the table, then bit my lip. I might as well try to understand it all, if I was going to die for it. Start at the top, with what was most important. “What did you do to my dad? Why?”

Mr. Bellamy looked surprised. “Nothing. I know there was trouble, but that wasn’t our doing.”

“Aren’t you Nazis?”

Mr. Bellamy laughed, exchanging grins with Mr. Neville. “Us? Nazis? Boy, you’re crazy. I’ve been a Republican for sixty-eight years. Why in blazing hell would I want to be a Nazi?”

“Nah,” said Floyd behind me, his voice solid again, “there’s Nazis out there, all right. That’s why Mr. Neville is here, and the boys on the roof. But we ain’t the Nazis.”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Oh, take your pick. I don’t rightly know for certain,” said Mr. Bellamy conversationally. He shouldered his shotgun, sighting along the barrel toward my face. “Probably Sheriff Hauptmann. He always was a fascist sympathizer, ever since he came home from Russia. Definitely one of those Captain Markowicz fellows is a Nazi. Heck, maybe both of them are. Doesn’t matter much. Their day is done, but the corpse ain’t quit kicking yet.”

“And I’ll bet there’s one in the public library,” I said bitterly, thinking of Mrs. Sigurdsen.

“I expect you’d be surprised,” said Floyd behind me. “About who’s who in Butler County, I mean.”

“Yep,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Know what your dad did in the Great War?”

“Yes.” I’d heard the stories, in and out of drink. They changed from time to time, but the substance was always the same. “He fought in the trenches with Pershing in France.”

“Nope.” Mr. Bellamy broke open the shotgun and checked the shells. “He killed Germans and Hungarians on the Eastern Front. With me and Doc Milliken. Only, Milliken wasn’t a doctor back then. Just a guy who was real good with a knife.” He paused reflectively. “Of course, that kind of follows on I guess. Me, I broke necks. Sometimes kneecaps and elbows.”

“Dad,” I whispered.

What else hadn’t my father told me? Everybody had his secrets, that was a fact of life. Today, at the age of twenty-three, probably breathing my last, I realized that I had never known anything about the sad old drunk who was my father.

“Grady was a good man,” said Mr. Bellamy. “I’m right sorry he got mixed up in this. I reckon they was trying to frame you up.”

Was
, he’d said. Thinking about Dad brought me close to tears. My old man had to be dead as a doornail by now, and I was going to die soon myself, one way or the other. But if I kept Mr. Bellamy talking I might learn something I could use. Maybe Pegasus could find a way to get a message out, if I got enough information to feed it to the computational rocket before these madmen killed me.

It was time to change the subject. I had always thought Mr. Bellamy was an ineffectual old man living on his memories. Now he was behaving more like Al Capone. If nothing else, he was a heck of an actor. “How did you get involved in all this?” I asked.

“The Eastern Front collapsed in 1917,” said Mr. Bellamy. “We Kansas boys was working for the British Army, on a special little project that our own country wouldn’t have a part of.”

“Kind of like Roger’s Rangers,” said Floyd, still behind me.

I was beginning to understand how he might have been drawn in — hero stuff was always interesting to Floyd, like real life comic books, even if he didn’t want to do the hard, dirty work that went along with it. At least not til the war had pulled him in.

“Shut up, boy,” said Mr. Bellamy. “This is my story, and I’ll tell it.”

He looked me over carefully, the same weighing up Mr. Neville had given me earlier. That seemed strange, given that Mr. Bellamy had known me almost all my life. I was an open book. What was left for him to judge?

“Your Daddy and me and Doc Milliken were in the Kansas Militia, back before the Great War, playing hard boys to make ourselves feel good. Then that fight started up in Europe and President Wilson tried to keep this country out of it. But there were lads like us that wanted in on the action. We’d grown up on stories of the Mexican War and Civil War, watched the Spanish War go by without us. We were already hitting thirty, and feared we wouldn’t make it in. This was our turn.

“Anyway, there were American pilots flying for the French, and American boys fighting for the English. The British Army came out this way, looking for strong, able men for a special project. They signed us up, taught us stuff they learned in the Boer War, stuff they couldn’t teach their own boys for fear of the newspaper publicity.”

“I’ve heard of the Boer War.”

“We were eager to go,” Mr. Bellamy continued, as if I hadn’t said a word. He seemed to be slipping back in his own mind. “Doc Grainger was still alive then, and Milliken hadn’t finished school yet. We wound up killing Germans for the Russians on the Eastern Front. We did a good job, until the Russians sold out to the Germans in ’17. We got interned, in a camp at the mouth of the Pechora River, where it flows into the Barents Sea. It was cold as hell, nothing to eat but ice, snow and rifle butts.”

Somehow, this story was coming full circle to Pegasus and its tomb in the Arctic ice.

“One thing lead to another, and eventually we was let go. We just stood there on that frozen beach in front of the gates of our camp, not knowing where to turn. We all made it home by different routes. Doc Milliken got rescued by a British unit fighting for the Whites outside of St. Petersburg. Your dad stowed away on a freighter from Arkhangelsk to Iceland.”