Saving Lucas Biggs (10 page)

“This house,” Aunt Bridey continued. “I was raised in it, back when my little vegetable patch was a whole farm. Before the Victory Corporation forced my father’s spread out from under him because there was coal buried in it. I grew up during the quiet years, which I felt were far too quiet.”

She glanced at the photo of herself and the soldier. No slamming it on its face today.

“So you went looking for an interesting friend,” I supplied. “You went to a Halloween party with that guy who wore a Confederate costume?”

“I went looking for an interesting
time
,” she corrected, “inhabited by Lieutenant Walker, of the Confederate States Army, whose uniform was anything
but
a costume.”

I took a long look at Lieutenant Walker. He had that look in his eyes, the stare, the expression only real soldiers in real pictures from the Civil War ever had, because they had to stand in rows and shoot their own neighbors and sometimes their own brothers.

“Deserter, visionary, hero. A young man with a dream,” continued Aunt Bridey, “that I thought I was going to help bring to life.”

“Wait—” I stammered, doing the math. By my calculations, Aunt Bridey couldn’t have been more than forty years old. “How were you going to help him, if he was in the Civil War? I mean, you weren’t born yet.”

Bridey just stared at me with her fizzing eyes like she was deciding something about me. Then she gazed back at the picture. “I left myself this daguerreotype as a souvenir,” she said. “I couldn’t bring it through time with me, because that’s not allowed, so I hid it in a corner of that cave out back, and it waited for me through the years.”

“Where’d you stash it—next to the time machine?” I joked. Aunt Bridey was making me nervous. “Does H. G. Wells live across the creek?”

“Time machine,” she scoffed. “H. G. Wells was an idiot. He didn’t know the first thing about time travel.”

“Hold on.” I realized I halfway believed her. The photo was so strange—and of course, so was Aunt Bridey. “What are you telling me?”

“I traveled through time,” she said evenly. “And made a friend who was as brave as anyone in history. But after what you and Luke did in the face of that gunfire, you might be his equal.”

“Aunt Bridey?” I pleaded, confused and a little scared. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want you to realize,” she replied, “that I understand time backward, forward, and inside out. And I understand friendship, too.”

“So—” I began.

“So I know beyond the shadow of a doubt,” she said, fixing my eyes with hers, “that friendship will stand the test of time.”

“I see,” I said slowly.

“I doubt it,” she said. “Not now. But you will.”

“Thank you, Aunt Bridey,” I gulped. “I think.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, “I think. Now: Never tell a soul about this. If you do, I’ll just say you’re crazy.”

“You would know.” I grinned. But I stopped grinning as my mind took off going ninety to nothing, considering all the angles, because if she could really time travel, then maybe she could slip back to the night before the gun opened up on my friends, and maybe she could pilfer the ammunition, or maybe she could sabotage the gun, or maybe, or maybe . . .

“Now don’t go getting any ideas,” Aunt Bridey warned, “because I can’t travel anymore. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s something my relatives have to say about that—since the ability runs in our blood, we made a family rule:

“There is one Now: the spot where I stand,

And one way the road goes: onward, onward . . .

“. . . you get the idea . . .” She trailed off.

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” I said.

“Possibly,” she said. She poured out her nectar in a nearby flowerpot. “But I’m not crazy. Now take your potatoes and go. At least”—she added as I turned to leave— “you’re in no danger from that awful Tin Lizzie anymore.”

“That what?” I asked.

“That tank Biggs’s thugs shot at you with. One of my goats got out yesterday. Had to track him to Humboldt Draw to catch him. Those idiots stashed their Model T behind a boulder there. It won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Oscar ate all four tires.”

“Oscar?” I asked.

“My goat,” replied Aunt Bridey.

“Which way is Humboldt Draw?” I asked as I headed out the door.

She told me.

“I’ll be back later for the potatoes!” I hollered over my shoulder.

When I got back to Canvasburg, I realized where Luke had been that morning—jail. As soon as he’d heard the doc say we needed to keep Preston warm, he’d run off to steal more coal, but by then, we’d picked up everything in sight. So by the light of dawn, Luke fired up the elevator all by himself and went clattering down to the mine to do his collecting. Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight because he was flustered about Preston. Maybe he wanted to provoke the company. Whatever he hoped to accomplish, when he came back up, the sheriff and Elijah Biggs were waiting for him.

But before Luke spent too long in the clink, Aristotle got the sheriff to release him, since he was just a kid. I met them coming back from the sheriff’s office. Luke was shouting, “But Preston was gonna die! Doc O’Malley said!”

“Preston’s in the infirmary,” Aristotle said.

“He’s safe,” I threw in. Startled, they noticed me for the first time. “He can have food and medicine. Doc O’Malley made them admit him.”

“Son, you act too hasty,” Aristotle admonished Luke.

“I just wanted to keep him warm,” protested Luke.

“I know. It was a brave thing. You try. But why you start that elevator, where everybody can hear? Why you go looking for a fight?” asked Aristotle.

Luke stiffened. “The fight came looking for
me
,” he retorted. “It came looking for all of us. You just won’t let us fight it!”

We walked past the company store. A couple of customers strolled out. People from Victory. Lawyers, accountants, folks like that. Folks who still had money for food. The baker must’ve just pulled his bread out of the oven. The aroma was enough to drive a starving kid nuts.

“You know what this is, Dad?” Luke demanded, digging a brass key out of his pocket.

“I don’t wanna know,” said Aristotle.

“It’s the key to the sheriff’s gun cabinet. He just leaves it in his top drawer, and while you were promising him you’d keep me out of trouble, I stole it. And guess what?”

“I can’t,” said Aristotle tiredly as we neared Canvasburg.

“I’m gonna go into camp, and tell Mr. Martinelli and everybody else, and we’re gonna steal those guns, and rob the company store tonight, and we’re gonna eat, and after that, we’re gonna—”

Aristotle snatched the key from Luke and threw it what looked like half a mile, over the tents, out into the desert. Which was as close as I’d ever seen him to losing his temper.

“You never listen to me!” exploded Luke. “You never pay attention to me! You never take me when you go do things at night, and you never let me help!”

“You brave!” cried Aristotle. “You good! I love you! And I’m doing this for you, my Luke!”

“I found the tank!” I shouted. I wanted to put a stop to this argument. I wanted to help Aristotle. I wanted to help Luke. So I said, “It’ll get reporters here, won’t it? It’s what we need to show the world what happened? It’s evidence of what happened, right? A goat ate the tires, but the rest is still there.”

“Josh!” said Aristotle. “My boy! Where is it?”

We were almost back to Canvasburg. But I glanced around, just in case a stray detective happened to be nearby detecting. The coast was clear. I told Aristotle: Humboldt Draw.

“I’m going over the mountains tonight to send a telegram,” declared Aristotle. “To tell Walter Mendenhall. He’ll ride the train from Denver. He’ll bring Milton Katz, the great photographer. It’s gonna happen.”

“Aw, that’s just peachy!” burst out Luke in disgust. “I get thrown in jail, and swipe the key to all the guns, and Josh comes up with some story about a goat, and he’s the one you listen to?”

“I told you: no guns!” admonished Aristotle. “Now good-bye, son. I gotta go.”

“Let me come with you, Dad!” Luke begged. “This time, just once, let me?”

“You better not, Luke,” said Aristotle. “You stay here. They catch me doing this, they don’t put me in the jail, they put me
under
the jail.”

“Dad,” pleaded Luke. “I want to help.”

“Then you do what I tell you,” replied Aristotle, like dads say to their kids every day all over the world.

Aristotle sneaked away from camp as soon as the sun set. We heard gunshots on the mountain, but all we could do was hope it was Mr. Martinelli hunting or the detectives plugging tin cans with their pistols by moonlight.

Luke sat alone in his tent.

Since Aristotle was on his mission to telegraph the reporters, my dad went to mail the day’s letters and to bring back whatever replies had come to the Mercury post office. He came home with a crumpled box addressed to Preston. It appeared to be from Germantown, Pennsylvania.

“Who could’ve sent it?” speculated my mom. “I wonder if it’s dangerous.”

“Let’s see,” said Preston, chipper again after a warm night of infirmary blankets and a hot breakfast, ripping it open to find a dented old trumpet wrapped in a sweater.

By afternoon, Aristotle was still not back. To boost Luke’s spirits, Preston had learned to play “When the Saints Go Marching In,” clutching the trumpet in the ruins of his right hand, his left fingers smacking the valves open and shut faster than the human eye could follow. A message stuck to the horn had read, “For Aristotle’s young friend.” I guess Aristotle must’ve written somebody in Germantown to ask if they could spare an instrument playable by a kid with only seven fingers, and they’d sent this old trumpet.

Elijah Biggs materialized at the door of the tent. This was a first; he’d never been seen in Canvasburg before. Most of the time, he did his best to pretend it didn’t exist. “A trumpet,” he observed. “Now where, I wonder, did a trumpet come from?”

“Germantown, Pennsylvania,” shot back Luke.

“Really,” sniffed Biggs, glancing around as if he smelled something foul. “Somehow, you’ve persuaded the fine people of Germantown, Pennsylvania, to feel sorry for you. I wonder how?”

Preston stopped playing.

“I notice your father is nowhere to be found,” observed Biggs.

“That’s because right now he’s—”

And I’m pretty sure that Luke was within half a second of telling Biggs exactly where his father was and what he was up to—

So I said, “Fishing! Aristotle went fishing!”

A look of chagrin crossed Luke’s face as he realized he’d been about to reveal our plans to Biggs. Biggs looked amused.

“Well, then,” said Biggs smoothly to me, “I’ll just have to admire his catch when he gets back. Although what kind of a yellowbelly goes off fishing while his friends are in such trouble—”

Luke moved so fast, I never saw how his hands got around Biggs’s throat. It wasn’t easy to pry him loose, since he weighed about twice as much as I did and was as strong as most coal miners. Luckily, the sheriff and Biggs’s two flunkys were there to restrain him.

“I’m not going to press charges.” Biggs chuckled, straightening his pastel tie. “If you ask me, the boy’s got the right idea, fighting his own fights, even if he’s on the wrong side.”

Preston launched into “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which was a joke aimed at Elijah Biggs, since if you asked Preston, he was
always
misbehaving. Biggs must’ve gotten the joke, because he turned around and stalked back to his brick office in disgust.

When he was safely gone, Biggs’s men let Luke go.

To take Luke’s mind off his dad, and Biggs, and everything else, I said, “Let’s go to Bridey’s. She’s got a bushel of potatoes we need to bring down.”

But instead of lugging the bushel basket back home right away, Luke and I gazed down the mountain, at Canvasburg, where all our friends and family were sad, and hungry, and shot, and in wheelchairs, and sick, and angry.

And I looked the other way, and said, “What do you think is up there?”

“Don’t know,” replied Luke. “Never been.”

“We’ll get back quick,” I said, and with that, Luke and I scampered up the slope.

There was a trail between the desert rocks, left by deer or antelope, or maybe the forefathers of the Navajo who lived around there, and sometimes it got so steep we had to crawl. Things began to change as we got higher—the air thinned out and freshened on our faces and billowed in our shirts, and the heat from all the climbing evaporated right out of us and wafted up to the clouds.

Up. Up is great. Nobody had ever told me about Up. Once you start Up, there’s just no stopping. Sure, my lungs seemed to be turning to sawdust. Sure, it felt like somebody had strung barbed wire through my hamstrings and started tightening it with a crowbar. But—

“Feel okay?” shouted Luke over his shoulder, bounding up the incline like a mountain goat.

“Oh yeah,” I wheezed.

“Need to stop?” asked Luke.

“Oh no,” I gasped.

“’Cause my legs are kind of tired,” Luke allowed.

Mine weren’t just tired. They felt like they might have to be amputated. Luckily, the waves of dizziness washing over me took my mind off the pain. “Come on,” I shouted, sprinting past him toward the base of a granite cliff. “Look! The top is right here!”

Of course the top wasn’t right there. When we got over the lip of the cliff, the mountain just kept right on stretching away from us, onward and upward.

“What do you know about that?” mused Luke.

“What do you know is right,” I agreed, and kept on hiking. I was sure we’d get to the summit soon, because I’d never before seen anything I couldn’t walk across in ten minutes. They didn’t call Low Ridge, Mississippi, “Low Ridge” for nothing. It was three feet high. You could basically step right over it. This mountain went on for miles.

The desert stones became a meadow. The meadow changed to brush. The brush gave way to trees. The trees grew thicker. Streams began to flow all around us. Pine needles carpeted the ground.