Pandemonium

She looked around at the room. “Why?”

I started picking up the comic books and stray pages: a black-andwhite “paste-book” of Katzenjammer Kids newspaper strips; some Timely comic book I didn’t recognize featuring the original Vision; an issue of Boy Commandos complete except for the missing cover and back page.

O’Connell made a huffing noise, then disappeared. The floor was thick with treasures. A dozen pages of black text on gray paper from an issue of Black Mask. A copy of Weird Tales with a beautifully lurid cover. A ten-issue run of Blackhawk, the Polish air ace.

Soon I’d found scores of complete comics and pulps—Thrilling Western, High-Seas Adventures, Detective Comics, Dick Dare—and I hadn’t even started on the books on the bookshelves. Who knows what the rest of the house was hiding.

“Del.” O’Connell had returned.

“Uh-huh.” I delicately turned the page of a Captain Marvel. He was fighting Nippo, a Japanese spy armed with magical black pearls. I pitied any Japanese kid trying to grow up in America in those days.

“You’ve been at this for an hour,” O’Connell said. “I’m starving.”

“This is a classic Captain Marvel. You know, Shazam?” O’Connell leaned in the doorway, holding a cop-sized flashlight that I’d seen in the truck’s glove compartment. “Never mind,” I said. “I forget you grew up a girl. See, Billy Batson’s this little kid, an orphan newspaper boy, but when he says this magic word he turns into this big guy with a cape and gets the powers of the gods—the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the, uh, something of Atlas, then Zeus, Achilles, and the speed of Mercury.”

“Some of those aren’t gods.”

“You know what I mean. Look, I found a Detective Comics with the Joker in it—the Joker!” I looked up at her. “We have to stay here.”

She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know, what time does it get dark? I don’t want to be—”

“I mean for the night.”

“Not a chance,” she said.

“All right then, I’ll stay. You find a hotel, then pick me up in the morning.”

“What? No. I’m not going to leave you here alone. Why in God’s name would you want to stay here?”

I looked around at the comics, the bed, the Cardinals pennant. The afternoon light gave everything in the room a shimmering quality, the bed and bookcases and yellowing pages of the comic books trembling from some inner energy, on the edge of snapping into place.

“I don’t know. I just . . . Listen, why don’t you get something to eat. Bring me back something if you want. I just need some more time here.”

“We’re not staying the night,” she said.

After a while she left me sitting in a patch of light on the floor, a comic book spread across my knees.

When I walked outside to pee, the sun was dropping. The nearest thing to a bathroom inside the house was a cinderblock room that looked like a late addition to the property; inside was a footed tub, a dry toilet, and a foul-smelling drain set into a cement floor slicked with mold. I decided that outdoors was more sanitary, and headed for the high grass near the barn.

Something glittered in the grass. I zipped up, walked a few feet. Half buried in the ground was a rusted length of metal shaped like a wide sword. Another blade was nearby, still connected to the central cone.

A propeller.

I walked toward a raised clump of weed and metal, where the base of the silo had been, stepping carefully over metal junk hidden in the tall grass. At the center of this clump was the wreck of the plane, or rather, enough pieces to reconstruct the idea of a plane: one wing, a black chunk of engine, a tangle of metal and bubbled glass that had been the cockpit. It had all burned to near shapelessness. I circled around the remains of the craft. It looked like it had been the size of a Piper Cub, or a World War II fighter. At any moment I expected to see a skull, leather cap and goggles miraculously intact. But surely the pilot would have been buried when the crash happened. How long ago?