Rocket Science

Chapter Ten

Floyd came in from the kitchen with a tray of coffee in mismatched cups from two different sets of china, plus an odd one. He’d forgotten the cream and sugar. Mrs. Bellamy would be fluttering if she were here right now.

Ollie took a sip, then stared around the table. He showed a little more backbone than I would have expected from the kid I knew back in high school, locking eyes with Mr. Neville and Mr. Bellamy in turn before returning his gaze to me. He ignored Floyd.

“The Army’s got Military Police all over Augusta right now. They flew in about an hour ago on a C-47 from Fort Leavenworth. Landed behind the fence at the refinery and set up a perimeter. There’s a Colonel Pinkhoffer putting Chief Davis on the hot seat, asking questions about who would have been driving a blue Cadillac convertible out east of town this afternoon. Everybody’s either hopping mad or scared spitless, and Bertha’s making a huge nuisance of herself down at City Hall trying to break this open for the papers. Not just ours. Chicago, Kansas City. It’s big news. Word is the Army’s raising the same kind of Cain in El Dorado, too.”

Mr. Bellamy glared like a stone toad. “Yeah?”

I didn’t say anything, just stared down at the tablecloth to avoid Ollie’s hard look. I don’t lie well, even when I have nothing to say. And this was not the dumpy, goofy kid I’d known in high school. Nobody was who they used to be any more, except maybe Floyd. Was that the war, or just growing up? I couldn’t tell.

“Well,” said Ollie to fill the silence. He scratched his head and looked unhappy. “Here’s the thing. Just a few minutes before Colonel Pinkhoffer showed up with a couple of squads of M.P.s, one of Reverend Miller’s farmhands came by the station. The Reverend sent me a message asking if Vernon here was okay.”

“I guess I am,” I said. That was the biggest whopper I’d ever told. Adding up the last few days, with Pinkhoffer on top for garnish, I’d never been in this much trouble in my life. I’d never heard of this much trouble in my life. I felt a terrible sinking feeling, like going deep into quicksand with no rope.

“That’s not the way I heard it.” Ollie put his cup down, spread his hands on the tablecloth. Mrs. Bellamy’s second-best linen, I noticed, which already had gun oil and coffee stains on it. I wouldn’t want to be Floyd or Mr. Bellamy when she got home. “Reverend Miller didn’t say much in his note, but Junius, the farm hand, was happy to share a little bit of gossip. He says Reverend Miller found you out here near the Bellamy place sitting on the front of Doc Milliken’s blue Cadillac convertible. The Reverend was concerned that you looked really scared, and you’d maybe been roughed up some.”

He glanced at Mr. Bellamy and Mr. Neville for a moment before continuing. “The car looked worse, Junius said. That’s why Reverend Miller wondered what happened to you, and if there was anything he could do to help. His note said he left you with Alonzo and Floyd Bellamy, so I came out here.” Ollie drummed his fingers on the table, obviously considering if he wanted to tell me anything else. “I haven’t talked to Chief Davis about nothing yet, Vernon.”

“You might say I’ve had a bad time of it,” I said, smiling weakly.

Ollie looked even more unhappy. “That’s all you have to say to me? That ain’t good enough, Vernon.” He shook his head, ticking off on his fingers as he continued to talk. “A blue Cadillac convertible was used in an attack on an Army CID officer somewhere out this side of town. The officer’s orderly fired his weapon at the car. Reverend Miller says the windshield of Doc Milliken’s car looked shot out. And Doc Milliken says he doesn’t know where his car is — that you took it without permission.”

He picked up his coffee and slurped at it, collecting his thoughts. “That’s theft, Vernon. Felonious assault. Probably half a dozen other charges I can’t think of right now. But somebody will. Look, I’m not saying it was you and I’m not saying it wasn’t, but there’s only one blue Cadillac convertible in Augusta.”

The walls were closing in on me, but I had to try. That Ollie had come out here, on his own apparently, to speak to me unofficially, meant I had a chance of persuading him.

“Ollie…” How to make him believe me? The truth had become so complicated that I didn’t understand it myself any more. “Doc Milliken gave the car to me, told me to keep it for the weekend, right after you and Deputy Truefield left his house last night. I needed it because you had impounded my Hudson for evidence.”

Ollie shook his head. “Sheriff Hauptmann took your Hudson right before dark. He had me sign it over to him, said he was going to return it to you.”

Before dark? That was before he showed up at Doc Milliken’s house. How could Hauptmann have even known about the Hudson being impounded unless he was involved in the attack on Dad? Ollie might have called him before coming after me, but I doubted it.

Not if he thought Dad’s life was in danger. Which it had been.

The evidence was hardly airtight, but I was beginning to have a pretty good idea why Dad disappeared on the way to Wichita. I’d bet good money that Truefield never even left town with Dad. Either Dad was dead, or they’d hidden him somewhere in Butler County under Hauptmann’s jurisdiction. Butler County was the biggest county in Kansas, so that covered a lot of ground.

“Vernon,” Ollie said. “Are you going to say anything in your defense? Please give me something I can use. Something I can check out on my own and show to Chief Davis.”

Mr. Bellamy shook his head at me, but I thought I could trust Ollie. He seemed so square, so willing to help. And I’d known him for years — not as long as the Bellamys, but Ollie was a lot more on the level than they were right now. Mr. Neville’s angry glare told me all I needed to know about how level the Bellamys were. Or maybe had ever been.

“I ran over Captain Markowicz in Doc Milliken’s Cadillac. I thought he was—” I stopped as Mr. Neville coughed, while Mr. Bellamy tried to glare me into silence. What did Ollie know about the Nazis?

“Thought he was what?” asked Ollie gently.

It was hard to figure out what I could say, especially in front of Mr. Bellamy and Mr. Neville. I’d already admitted to assaulting a military officer. “I thought he was trying to kill me,” I said.

It sounded weak, even to my ears. Ollie obviously didn’t buy it. “Vernon, there’s something strange going on.”

That was a masterful understatement.

Ollie went on. “Running over a crippled guy with a car — that just doesn’t sound like you.”

“Crippled? There was nothing wrong with him until I hit him with the Cadillac.”

“Vernon, Captain Markowicz has a broken arm. I mean, he had it before he met you.”

That broken arm again. “I think there might be two Captain Markowiczes around. The one I ran over didn’t have a broken arm — no sling, no cast, and he was waving his hands like crazy when he bounced off the hood.” Good Lord, I sounded like a thug. “Sheriff Hauptmann said the guy with the broken arm isn’t the real Captain Markowicz.”

Of course, Hauptmann also said the real Captain Markowicz was dead in Kansas City. Either Hauptmann was lying, which I was perfectly willing to believe at this point, or the red-haired man I mowed down with the Cadillac had experienced a miraculous recovery from his broken arm. A third alternative was that he was a second impostor.

But he had been worried about a search warrant. That sounded like a real cop to me.

Ollie frowned. “The Markowicz I talked to was wearing a sling… and I thought he had a cast. What did the fellow you ran over look like?”

“That’s enough boys,” interrupted Mr. Bellamy. “I think its time for Ollie to be leaving. Vernon’s tired, and there’s a lot to think about. Floyd, please show Ollie to the door.”

Ollie stood up without saying anything more. He stared at me for a moment. I felt ashamed, never realizing how much I’d valued Ollie’s good opinion of me. And I didn’t know why Mr. Bellamy had cut us off, beyond an obvious distrust of cops on the part of an old moonshiner. He’d brought the gang in, so there was more than met the eye here, too. As I mused, Floyd took Ollie’s arm and walked him out through the living room.

“What was that all about?” I asked, turning to Mr. Bellamy.

“Don’t you worry,” he said. “This’ll all get squared away. You need some rest.” He was still holding his shotgun. I took his point.

It was obvious I wasn’t going to get any answers out of Mr. Bellamy. Whoever he’d become, or more to the point, gone back to being, was someone I didn’t like. That made me sad. At the same time, I wondered how he had kept this side of himself hidden from me all these years.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll get cleaned up and go back to sleep.” It was time for another trip to the outhouse, before full dark. Armed men on the roof or not, I figured I could lay in bed and try to figure a way to find Dad and get us both out of this whole mess.

I went into the kitchen and grabbed a candle, because I don’t like to do my business in the dark. I lit it off a safety match and headed for the back door. That was when it struck me that the pig’s blood had been cleaned this morning without any help from me. That was one chore Floyd hadn’t managed to pawn off. I smiled at the thought of Floyd actually doing work. It was so unlike him.

The sheer ordinariness of it all made me feel a little better about the Bellamys, even in the face of all of today’s weirdness.

Outside it was twilight. The crickets stirred in the fields, and one of the heifers was lowing. Before I went into the outhouse, I turned to look at the farmhouse again. The man on the roof was in silhouette. It looked like he was watching me, but in the near-darkness I wasn’t sure which way he was pointing. I didn’t wave. Neither did he.

Inside the outhouse, my candle guttered in the draft from the cracks in the door and the walls. This place was hellish in the winter, I knew from bitter experience. I’d actually chapped my butt cheeks staying out here one weekend back in primary school.

In the flickering candlelight, the seat looked dirty. I didn’t want to think about which old man had come down here with his colitis or whatever it was. “The Bellamy Gang strikes again,” I muttered as I tore off another page of Sears and wiped down the edge of the board. As I dropped the page through the hole, I noticed something big and pale in the pool beneath.

Pork fat, I told myself, strips taken from the hog. But who threw pork fat in the cesspool? You could make cracklings, feed it to the chickens or the pigs, render it down for soap. I was jumpy every way there was from Sunday, nothing going the way it should. I wasn’t about to hang my bottom over a hole with something mysterious in it.

Breathing through my wide-open mouth, I got down on my knees and stuck the candle through the wooden seat, pressing my face up the rim. My forearms crushed my ear, and the stench of cesspool literally made me flinch. The smell was everything I had come to know and love about a Kansas outhouse, and worse.

I peered down at the pool. The candle wavered as I tried not to let the flame get too close to my face, casting wide shadows on the clay walls of the pit and across the turgid dampness below. It was hard to see, but there was definitely something tall and pale rising out of the brown liquid. Whatever it was, it was big. The entire hog?

One arm on the seat, I leaned a lot further in and extended the candle down to the liquid surface. They needed a new pit soon, especially if the whole gang was going to be around for a while. I really didn’t want to do this, but I had to know what was down there in the Bellamys’ cesspool. Candle between my thumb and forefinger, I leaned close.

It was Mrs. Bellamy, her arms tied to the board above her, her mouth gagged with a length of muslin, her eyes bright with fear.

My stomach heaved, the wrenching almost pulling me in with her. Coffee and bile sprayed on my candle, while my nose filled with the stuff as I was puking upside down. I dropped the candle as I writhed around, then pulled myself up.

I had to get her out of there. Was this why Floyd had been bluff and nervous? His own mother? Or had that gang of crazy old men done this?

Why?

I leaned back in. “I’m going to help you, Mrs. Bellamy,” I whispered.

Mrs. Bellamy. My eyes flooded as I thought about her rolling out biscuits, chasing me with a willow broom when I’d stolen a tart. We weren’t all that close — my friendship had always been with Floyd — but she took care of me, especially after Mom had died the fall I turned fifteen.

I tied the bathrobe around my face, for a mask, and went to work pulling the seat bench up. It was nailed down, but not very well. Of course, someone had lifted it recently to stick her inside. When I pulled the board up, it stuck, not wanting to come all the way free.

She was tied to it.

I worked the board over, looking down at the top of her poor head, and the hank of rope that kept her hands pulled upward, tied off to a fresh nail in the bottom of the seat board.

It only took a moment to work that free, then I leaned down, gagging, to untie her hands. The reek drew tears to my eyes, and I kept trying to sneeze and choke at same time, without managing either one.

When I worked her gag free, Mrs. Bellamy drew a huge breath, like she was going to scream.

“Quiet!” I hissed. “They’re on the roof, watching. Listening.”

“I am going to cut them boys apart like last year’s venison,” she said, her voice hard and bitter.

“Uh… ma’am…”

“Get me out of here.”

“I’m trying.”

It was an outhouse, it wasn’t supposed to be big. I braced myself as best I could, leaned down, and tried to pull her free. She had nothing to grip on but the edge of the seat bench, and my hands. Mrs. Bellamy was a woman of generous proportions, and I wasn’t strong enough to haul her up.

“I got to think,” I said. “Can you stand it down there a little longer?”

“I’m not getting any dirtier, Vernon Dunham,” she said tartly. Her voice softened. “But think fast. Please.”

Not only did I have to get her out of the pit, I had to get the two of us off the Bellamys’ farm. I’d already been in the outhouse too long. One of those old men in Mr. Bellamy’s gang was bound to notice. I imagined the sniper on the roof with his rifle pointed at the outhouse door. What the heck could I do to keep us alive?

For one thing, I couldn’t do the obvious and just walk around front and borrow the Willys pickup. A rope on the bumper would help me get Mrs. Bellamy out of the pit. But Mr. Garrett and the man on the roof doubtless had orders to stop me from leaving, orders that almost certainly included using their guns. The Cadillac was hidden up in the peach orchard, but I had already made a terrible mess of that car. Floyd had said that he needed the tractor to get it there. I didn’t think I could manage to drive it out, even if I somehow got to the car unobserved.

There was always the barn. Dad’s truck would run — it hadn’t rained much in the last day or two, plus the old Mack had been indoors. There was even the f-panzer, which had the advantage of being armored. If I could get it started, and if there was no special trick to driving it — Floyd had driven the f-panzer back from the railroad depot, while I had never even climbed inside the cab — it would be a perfect getaway car.

Plenty of rope and chains there, too. If I could get up there, I could drive back down in the armored vehicle, park it between the outhouse and the snipers, and get her out. Though Lord only knew how lame me and old Mrs. Bellamy could move fast enough for it to matter.

Would I have to go for help, bring the police or the Army back to rescue her?

I had trouble imagining leaving someone standing waist-deep in cess, but I was having more trouble imagining how to safely get her out of there.

If going for help was my plan, there was always the computational rocket. It was still on top of the Mack, and there was no way to taxi it out for a takeoff roll. Of course, it wasn’t a normal airplane. Maybe it didn’t need a takeoff roll. While that was probably wishful thinking, I knew that the Army was working on a machine, back East somewhere — Connecticut? — that flew vertically. Sort of a fully-powered autogyro. Maybe my aircraft could do the same thing.

“Hang on,” I told her. “I have an idea.”

“Soon, Vernon.” Her voice was heavy, sad. “Please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The handset hung heavy in the pocket of my bathrobe. “Hey,” I whispered, touching it for luck. “Computational rocket. Can you hear me?”

“What?” asked Mrs. Bellamy.

“Yes,” said the voice in my ear.

Not again. “Mrs. B, I’m using a radio,” I said. “I need to talk.” I paused, took a deep breath, which turned out to be a mistake with the bench off the cesspit. “Okay,” I told the empty air. “I’m in big trouble here.”

“I warned you,” said the voice.

“Forget the editorial. Can you fly? Without the hundred of liters of oil?”

“I can. In technical terms, I am currently capable of limited subsonic atmospheric operations.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Correct,” said the machine.

And for a moment, I was silent, marveling at the thought that I was talking to a giant calculator, the ultimate Babbage engine.

Maybe it was me that had gone over the edge. I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. That line of reasoning was pointless. Even if it was true, I had to do the best I could. I certainly hadn’t imagined all the gunplay, the house fire, the attack on my dad. Mrs. Bellamy standing below, breathing like a cow in winter. “How will you take off? You’re parked on top of a truck.” Here was the critical question. “Can you get airborne without a rollout?”

“I will be forced to destroy this enclosure, after which I can take off vertically.”

“You’re going to blow up Mr. Bellamy’s barn?” I hadn’t realized the aircraft was that powerful.

“I do not wish to commit such vandalism, but that is what I shall be forced to do to fly from here.”

“Vernon…” said Mrs. Bellamy, in a voice which made it clear she was more worried about me than about herself.

“Wait,” I told her. “Please.” I reached in and squeezed her hand, then turned my face away from the stench. “Look, um…” I realized I had no name for the thing. “What can I call you? I feel pretty silly saying ‘computational rocket.’”

“I have recently been referred to as ‘Otto.’”

“I am not calling you Otto,” I hissed. It flew, it talked, it knew more than I did, and it came from some ancient, unimaginable place and time. Atlantis? Mars? Lord only knew, and He wasn’t telling me. A name popped into my head. “How about Pegasus?”

It was the best I could do. I was thinking of the sign at the gate of the Mobil refinery west of downtown Augusta.

“Pegasus? What does that mean?”

Dim memories of college classics courses bobbed to the surface. “Pegasus was a flying horse in Greek myth, borne of sea foam and blood.” I was amazed I could remember that. That the blood should be Dad’s was something I would regret for the rest of my life, but the name fit. Another bit of myth popped into my head. “Bellerophon rode her to places he could not have gone by any other means.”

“That would be you, Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus.

“Right, me. I’ll soar to heaven and take my place among the stars with you. Unfortunately, at the moment I’m in this outhouse with Mrs. Bellamy, who is well and truly stuck. I need to get away from here, and bring her help. If I manage to sneak down to the barn, how long will it take you to prep for takeoff?”

“Vernon!” she said.

“I can accomplish my atmospheric preflight sequencing in approximately two minutes.”

For someone who got their English from the gospel radio, Pegasus sure could talk like an operations manual. That made it easier for me to accept it as a machine.

“All right, Pegasus. I’ll get over there as fast as I can. You seem to know where I am all the time. As soon as you sense me coming, start your preflight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pegasus?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t call me sir.”

“Yes.”

I bent down over the pool again. “I’m going for help,” I told Mrs. Bellamy. “We can’t get you out, just the two of us, and your… husband’s… friends are out there. With guns.”

“Vernon Dunham, I know that. They had me locked up since yesterday in the root cellar, moved me out here when that policeman came.”

“Why?”

Her face set, impassive. “There’s some things you might be better not knowing, boy. I’m sorry. Just… get me help. Please?”

Squeezing her hand again, I turned to press my face against the outhouse door, down around knee-height, hopefully below where that old man on the roof would be likely to try shooting through the wood, and peeked out through the cracks. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. I would just have to brave it out. I figured I’d have to do it the ordinary way — open the door, walk out into the yard, and head for the barn. If Floyd or any of Mr. Bellamy’s gang stopped me, I would say that I was checking up on Floyd’s secret project.

The door creaked like an old leaf spring when I pushed it open. I stepped out into the dark yard, where there was just enough starlight to the bulk of the house, a few windows glowing from lanterns inside. I could see Floyd, too, standing right in front of me with one hand behind his back. He had a tense grin.

“Hey, Vernon.”

Had it been him that tied her up? Or one of those crazy old men with guns? “Uh, hello, Floyd.” I wished I were a better liar. Then maybe my voice wouldn’t have quavered so much.

“Spent a lot of time in the outhouse, I see. Thought I told you to use the chamber pot next time.”

I noticed the man on the roof had his rifle pointed at us.

“Not feeling too good,” I said, patting my stomach through the flannel bathrobe.

Floyd studied me, looking up and down, his eyes resting on my stained sleeve. “I see you’ve lost your candle. That’s a shame. Daddy told me to come apologize. We meant to dig a new trench and move the outhouse this morning, but what with the fire in town and your getting shot up, it just got away from us.”

“I didn’t notice anything unusual in there,” I said. Stupid, I told myself. I realized my breathing was faster, ragged, echoing like a drum between me and Floyd.

Floyd shook his head, sorrow and denial and indifference all together on his face as his smile quirked down to a little set of the lips. An expression I’d seen on Mr. Bellamy’s face. “Vern,” he said, “you never could lie worth a damn.” His eyes shone in the starlit darkness, tears or fear I couldn’t tell. He pulled his hand out from his back to show me a butcher knife, ten inches of sharp steel.

So he was in on it. Whatever ‘it’ was. He might as well have shoved his mother down that cesspit. For a moment, my eyes focused on the little hole at the upper corner of the blade. I shook my ahead, trying to clear the spell of the knife, and glanced up at the roof of the farmhouse. What would happen if I attacked Floyd and ran for the barn? The man on the roof was still watching us.

I looked back at Floyd, then glanced down at the ground. I didn’t want to meet my best friend’s eyes. Not now, not ever again. He laughed, a nervous chuckle that sounded forced. I felt a dim glimmer of hope at the fact that he felt the need to force it. Who was listening? Was Floyd laughing for his father? For Mr. Neville?

He whispered, “She was going to the Sheriff, Daddy said we had to stop her. We tied her up in the root cellar, but when Ollie come out here, we had to hide her better. Mr. Neville wanted to shoot her right then, but I couldn’t let him do that. Not my Mama!” Floyd was almost crying. “It was the best I could do, to save her. I had to leave her out there, to keep her away from Mr. Neville. What am I gonna do, Vern?” Then, more loudly, as he caught his breath. “I think you’d better come inside and have a little talk with Daddy.” Floyd waved me toward the kitchen door with the butcher knife.