Pandemonium

. . .

They fool around in the water for a couple more hours, but no else tries the jump. Not Bobby—he’s proven his point—and not even the older Johnson boy. Maybe he’s too scared by Bobby’s close call. They reread Bobby’s funny books, and Bobby even reads one aloud to the little Johnson girl. The brothers think she has a crush on Bobby.

When the brothers get bored with reading they make Bobby come up with another game—Bobby’s the one with all the ideas. The other kids think he reads too much, and think he’s being a show-off when he uses words like annihilated and electrodynamics. But he’s real good at made-up games.

Billy instructs them on how to set up a barricade by the end of the bridge and arms them with Tommy-gun sticks, on alert for strange cars driven by foreign agents. The Johnson girl, being a girl, is supposed to hide. But only two cars and one tractor go by, and they’re all people they’ve seen a thousand times before, so Bobby tells them that the agents are disguised as their friends and neighbors. So informed, they shoot out the tires of the next car that comes by.

At suppertime the Johnson boys walk home, their kid sister trailing after them. Bobby stays on the bridge with his copies of Captain Marvel and The Shield and Action Comics. From his perch on the wall he can look south toward the roofs of town, or north to the hospital on the hill, or across the fields to where the red silo pokes up like a rocket. His grandmother’s voice is too weak to call him from this far. He’s twelve, and he’s the man of the house now. He can go home when he damn well wants to. He bunches the damp cape into a pillow, lies down on his back upon the wall, and holds the Captain Marvel over his head to block the sun. He doesn’t have to read the words anymore; he’s got them all memorized. Gram hates that he spends his money on the books, even buying the used ones from the other boys, but she doesn’t try to stop him. His dad liked comics. In one of his letters he said they passed them around the ship until they were all taped up like wounded soldiers. Nobody’s told Bobby what happened to his father, but he knows. For the millionth time, he pictures his dad on the deck of the destroyer, blue sleeves pushed up his forearms, a copy of Captain America rolled into his back pocket. He’s hammering away with his antiaircraft gun at the Japanese Zero diving straight for him out of a cloudless blue sky. The airplane grows huge, a thousand pounds of metal already breaking up under the hail of bullets, trailing oily black smoke and fire. And now his father can see the face of the pilot, a madly grinning man with a white bandanna wrapped around his head, the red circle in the middle of his forehead like a third eye. For the millionth time Bobby pushes the picture out of his head, stares hard at the pictures in his book. He makes himself consider again who’d win in a fight, Captain Marvel or Superman.

“Hey,” a voice says.

Bobby looks over, and it’s the little Johnson girl walking on the road, barefoot and in her white nightgown. “Did you sneak out?” he says.

“Read me another,” she says.

A wind ruffles the comics lying on the wall behind his head. He reaches up to hold them down, but one of them takes off, fluttering in the air over the water. He twists and grabs it, crumpling it in his fingers—it’s Action Comics #32—and then he’s slipping off the wall. His left hand scrabbles for the edge, but his fingernails scrape uselessly off the cement surface, and he drops.

He’s rolling as he falls, and strikes the water on his back. The creek is shallower here, only three feet deep, and choked with rocks. He doesn’t feel anything when he strikes bottom and the stones jam against his spine. He lies there for a moment, stunned. He’s almost reclining on the rocks, his face only six inches from the surface. His vision is blurred, but he can see the wavering gray rectangle of the bridge, the bright sky, and between bridge and sky a dark blot. It’s the silhouette of the girl’s head. She’s staring down at him. His breath’s been knocked out of him. He should sit up now. He tries to lift his head, but nothing happens. He can’t move his legs or his arms either—it’s as if he’s become buried up to his ears in quicksand. The one thing he can feel is a burning at the top of his lungs. He tries to open his mouth, but not even that’s working.

He stares up at the bridge, and the girl is still looking down at him. Stupid girl. She was too small to help him anyway. He thinks, if only one of the