Jay Lake - Rocket Science

“It would have served you right, you idiot delinquent.” Behind him, Floyd ran into the dining room brandishing a baseball bat.

“What’s going on down here? Daddy, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” grumbled Mr. Bellamy in a more normal tone of voice, rubbing his hand. “Just tried to top off young Victor here, that’s all.” He glared at me, demonic in the light of my dropped flashlight. “Should have finished the job when I got the chance.”

Floyd peered at me. “What’s the matter with you, Vernon? Sneaking into people’s houses like a crook. Daddy could have killed you.”

I remembered the blood on the floor. It didn’t make sense — Nazis hadn’t slaughtered Floyd’s family in their beds like I had feared. What was it doing there? “Where’s Mrs. Bellamy?”

Floyd coughed, looked nervous. “Mama’s at her sister’s tonight. My Aunt Perneta over in Leon.”

“Then whose blood is that?” I asked, pointing at the floor.

Floyd bent down and looked at it, while Mr. Bellamy picked up his shotgun to inspect it for damage. Floyd laughed, his voice thin. “We slaughtered one of the hogs this evening. Cats must have knocked over the drip pan.”

“You slaughter pigs in your kitchen?”

“No, we slaughter ‘em in the yard,” said Mr. Bellamy. He tested the action on his shotgun. “We slaughter burglars in the kitchen.”

“We cut down the joints in there,” Floyd said. He looked at the shattered woodwork of the door and its frame. “And Mama’s gonna slaughter you, Vern, when she finds out about her kitchen door. You’d better fix this in the morning.”

Great , I thought. What a day. Dad’s in the hospital in Wichita and I’m down one Hudson, one historic hitching post and a kitchen door. Not a Nazi in sight here at the Bellamys .

“Virgil,” said Mr. Bellamy, “why don’t you just stay here tonight? It’s late, and you and Floyd will need an early start to fix that door before Mrs. Bellamy gets back from her sister’s.”

“Thanks, sir. I think I will.” I picked up Doc Milliken’s flashlight and shut it off. Mr. Bellamy was already going back upstairs with the shotgun under his arm.

“He knew it was you all along,” said Floyd quietly.

“What do you mean? We surprised each other.”

Floyd laughed. “Daddy can shoot a tomato off the vine from fifty feet and not touch a leaf. There’s no way he missed you unless it was on purpose.”

I realized that I had knocked the shotgun out of Mr. Bellamy’s hands after he fired. “Why would he do such a thing?” I asked, incredulous, as I wiped blood from my collar. I was accumulating far too many bloody shirts.

“He just wanted to scare you,” said Floyd, shaking his head. “Let’s go to bed.”

“What about the pig’s blood?”

“Oh, you can clean that up in the morning when you fix the door. If you’re lucky, I’ll even help you.” Floyd flashed me his million-dollar grin. He had his nerve back, now that the gunfire was over. War will do funny things to a guy.

We trudged up the stairs. Floyd called out, “Good night, Daddy!”

“Good night boys,” wheezed Mr. Bellamy from down the hall. A cackling laugh followed, disintegrating slowly into a cough.

It was a darn good thing I liked Mr. Bellamy, I thought, as I wiped more blood off my collar. “Floyd,” I said, “I need a bandage, please.”

The land rose behind the Bellamys’ house, making a long back yard with a little stand of peach trees where wrens flitted back and forth. The bright morning sun glinted on the dew-soaked grass as I went to the tool shed that sat at the edge of the small orchard. There was a small stock of trim and molding in there, according to Floyd.

It was still early in the day when I started cutting pieces to patch the frame of Mrs. Bellamy’s kitchen door. I hauled out a pair of old sawhorses, their two-by-fours weathered to the sandy gray of granite. I set my vises and measured, then began cutting with the hacksaw, all the while thinking about Nazis and their airplanes, buried in the Arctic ice for far too many years. I felt like Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, trying to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

After getting my longest piece of molding sawn down, with the mortis cut at the top, I took a break. I went over to the barn to fetch the twisted silvery thing I had found in the f-panzer. Inside, with the bantams clucking and the straw-smell so overwhelming, the airplane loomed over me like the sculpture that it was. I stood and stared up at the mysterious lines, somehow crumpled and folded, yet obviously a deliberate design of intelligence and skill. The same intelligence and skill that had allowed it to lie buried in the ice above Norway.

Somehow the truth was too strange. Had I really meant to come and burn this thing out? It was too powerful, to great a machine, to succumb to such a simple exorcism.

I shook off the spell and stepped into the f-panzer to find the little device. I left the barn without looking back at the airplane, and headed back for the tool shed. I drove a couple of nails into the tool shed wall to prop the thing on so I could keep looking at it as I worked, trying to puzzle out the shape, the materials, the metallurgy. It was a tiny reflection of the miracle that was Floyd’s airplane.

My airplane.

“Hey, Vernon!” Floyd called, coming out from the house with a cup of coffee in his hand. It looked like his mom’s good china.

“I hope that’s for me,” I said hopefully.

Floyd looked genuinely puzzled. “No. Should it be?”

Typical . I had to laugh. “Never mind. What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me that you’re gonna fly that plane today.”

“No. Not anywhere near ready to do that.” I realized that last night I had been too tired to explain anything to Floyd. I took a deep breath. “Besides, I don’t think I’m going to fly it at all.”

“You can’t be serious.” Floyd looked puzzled and sly at the same time, as if he thought I was pulling his leg and he was pretty sure he was in on the joke.

“Maybe you noticed the blue Cadillac parked in front of the house this morning?”

“Oh yeah.” Floyd slurped his coffee with a satisfied smile. “I just figured you were moving up in the world.”

“Sadly, no. I had car problems. Nearly fatal, in fact. A funny thing happened on the way to the library yesterday.”

“No kidding?”

I sighed. Where to begin? “My Dad was almost beaten to death. Whoever did it stuffed his body in the trunk of my car, then called in a tip on me to the Sheriff’s Department. A frame job. Thank goodness it was badly done.”

Floyd slammed his coffee cup down on one of my sawhorses, nearly cracking Mrs. Bellamy’s china. “Jesus Christ, Vern, I am so sorry. Who did it? We’ll get the sons of bitches, you and me. I got friends, you know.”

“This is crazy stuff, Floyd. Nazi agents, apparently, right here in good old Kansas. They’ve already killed an Army CID officer who was on to them. One of them pretended to be him on the telephone with me. At any rate, that’s what I was told, after Sheriff Hauptmann decided not to arrest me for the crime.” I jerked my head toward the barn. “They’re hunting our airplane, Floyd.”

I was mildly surprised to hear myself use the word “our airplane.” I’d almost said “my airplane.” Last night I had been full of resolve to burn the thing to ash, today I was ready to defend it to the death.

Floyd didn’t even blink at the mention of Nazis. I guess a few years in Europe could do that to a guy, too — gun shy at night, brave as a rock in daylight. “Why your Dad?”