Jay Lake - Rocket Science

Augusta’s lone fire truck pumped valiantly as men rushed around the house with buckets, blankets and axes, but there looked to be no hope for the building. Mrs. Swenson stood in the front yard crying into Ruthie Milliken’s arms, her dressing gown dotted black with ember burns. I looked up toward the window of my room on the second floor. It was a roaring inferno.

There wasn’t much I had that I really cared about. My childhood things and most of my college books were still at Dad’s house. Mr. Bellamy’s pickup was far enough down the street to be out of danger. All I was really losing were my clothes and some notes and keepsakes. But the sheer effrontery of it really angered me.

I was sure the fire was deliberate, and that it was aimed at me. Small towns in Kansas were supposed to be safe, not crawling with Nazis and Army investigators, arsonists and father-beaters.

“Well, I guess there ain’t much call for these axes.” Mr. Bellamy leaned on the front fender of the Cadillac, watching the house burn and fighting his hacking cough.

“I’m going to check with the hose crew, see what help they need,” said Floyd. He ran off toward the fire truck.

I walked around the yard, looking for Ollie or another Augusta cop. Instead, almost immediately I found Sheriff Hauptmann, flipping through a notebook. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Sheriff, what are you doing in town this early?”

The Sheriff turned. His eyebrows rose as if he was surprised to see me, but then he smiled. “Vernon, how are you? I was afraid you might still be inside.”

He didn’t look very afraid. I glanced at his notebook. I recognized it as one of my engineering workbooks. “Where did you get that?”

He looked down at the book as if he had never seen it before. “This? It was on the lawn. I was trying to figure out whose it was.”

“My name is written on the cover,” I pointed out. “How did it get on the lawn?”

“You do remember our conversation of last night? I think the fire was deliberately set, by someone searching your room. They could have thrown this out the window.” Sheriff Hauptmann looked concerned, as if Nazis were going to leap from the lawn and drag me away.

I glanced back toward the burning house. There was certainly plenty of junk scattered around it, thrown out of windows or dropped as the residents fled. Now it was all getting soaked by hoses and trampled by eager firefighters. “Anybody hurt?”

“You were the only one unaccounted for. Where were you, by the way? I didn’t see how you got here.”

I looked at Sheriff Hauptmann holding my notebook, and I wondered what I could tell him. The same instinct that made me hold back the night before kept me quiet again. I just wasn’t ready to squeal on the Bellamys yet. I looked him straight in the eye and lied. “I was at my dad’s place, sir.”

If he caught me out by hearing from someone else that I had just driven up from east of town with Mr. Bellamy and Floyd in the car, so be it. With any luck, I’d be away from him before that happened.

Sheriff Hauptmann smacked his forehead. “Son, son, I completely forgot. It’s this house fire — it put me off. Your dad, we don’t know where he is.”

My sense of terrified dread from yesterday returned as if it had never left me. “What do you mean? Deputy Truefield took him to Wichita. How lost can he get?” It was all of a fifteen mile straight shot into the city from Augusta.

Hauptmann shook his head. “Truefield was tired, so he stopped for coffee just outside Wichita. When he got back to the cruiser, your dad was gone. He must have wandered off. We have the Wichita police and the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department out looking for him.”

I could barely contain my anger. “Coffee? I can’t believe Truefield stopped for coffee with an injured man in his car. What the heck is the matter with that idiot?”

Hauptmann frowned. “Vernon, I know you’re upset, but you’ll have to take it easy. I’ve already reprimanded Deputy Truefield for negligence, and we’ll find your dad. No one’s dropped him down a well.”

“You don’t know that. The fake Markowicz might have followed your precious Deputy and kidnapped Dad while Truefield was having his little cup of joe. Dad literally could be down a well right now. They already tried to kill him once. Abandoning a man whose life is clearly in danger isn’t negligence, it’s dereliction of duty.”

“Vern, son, you’d better go sit down. I know you’re under quite a strain what with your dad being attacked, then your house burning down, but you’re starting to say things you might come to regret. I’m doing the best I can, as are all my men, and I’ll thank you not to push me further on it. Now go get some rest. I will find you if I need you, or when we have news of your dad.”

Hauptmann shoved past me and walked toward the fire truck. As I watched him go I could see Floyd dragging a new hose across the street for the fire crew. Hauptmann stopped walking and stared at Floyd, then turned and looked back at me. I just stared the Sheriff down, keeping my face noncommittal.

There was something odd about the way he was handling all this. He wasn’t acting as I would have expected a cop to act — more defensive and secretive than anything else. The CID people must be making him keep a tight lid on things. I suddenly realized that Hauptmann had kept my notebook.

I walked back to the Cadillac, fishing in my pocket for the keys. I found the twisted silvery thing from the f-panzer instead. Even standing near the angry heat of the huge house fire, it still felt warm to my touch. I pulled it out as I sat down in the driver’s seat, and turned it over in my hands.

I pressed the buttons, one after another. The first two had no effect, but the third one made the thing tingle in my hands. It felt like a mild electric shock. I realized that I shouldn’t be fooling with the device out here in public, so I put the twisted thing back in my pocket, leaned on the steering wheel and watched the fire complete the destruction of my home.

The passenger door of the car opened, and the Cadillac shifted slightly on its springs. Without turning, I said “Hello, Mr. Bellamy.” I wondered what name he would call me now. Since he’d started getting sick, he had gone the past year without calling me “Vernon” once.

Then he kissed my ear.

“Yikes!” I jumped, then looked to my right. Lois smiled at me, pearly teeth like kernels of corn between her fresh, full lips.

I hadn’t seen her in weeks, not even to say “hi” to on the street.

“Hey, Vernon. How are you?” She glanced toward the fire then back at me, her eyes big and soft with determined compassion that melted my heart.

Lois wore one of her Sunday-go-to-church dresses, a green shirtwaist number with a pink sweater over it. She looked gorgeous. I’m a sucker for girls with dark hair in pink sweaters.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I wasn’t here when the fire started or anything, so I was never in any danger.”

“You look pretty upset,” she said. “You should be.”

I wondered what she wanted, but I wasn’t going to turn down the attention.

“It’s not good,” I sighed. I thought about telling her about Dad getting beaten half to death by the Nazis, while the CID chased them, and maybe me, around, but that didn’t seem to be a good idea. The less said about that stuff, the better. “Dad’s missing,” I finally said.

“Missing?” Her eyes were soft, drowning pools of memory. “Oh, Vernon, you know how he is. He’s just sleeping it off somewhere stupid, where nobody can find him.”

“No, I wish that was all there was to it. He was injured yesterday, took a bang on the head.” I edited down the real events — no need to tell Lois how angry I was at Sheriff Hauptmann and his Deputy, any more than talking about Nazis hiding in the Augusta library. “He wandered off when the person taking him to the hospital in Wichita stopped for an errand.”