Rocket Science

Chapter Six

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?”

“The only thing I can figure is someone saw us using his truck when we hauled everything home from the railroad depot the other day. I didn’t mention that to the Sheriff. But it gets worse anyway.”

“For your Dad?” Floyd seemed genuinely concerned, and I silently blessed him for the question. Some days it was easy to remember why we had been such great friends all these years.

“No, Doc Milliken says Dad’s going to be okay. He didn’t come to, so Hauptmann and the doc sent him on to Wichita for X-rays in case he has a concussion. The it-gets-worse part is that the paperwork from the f-panzer was stolen while I was at the library. The fake CID man pulled a con on me, got me away from my desk at the library with a telephone call. When I went back, the papers were gone.”

“Crud,” Floyd said. His brow furrowed for a moment, then he grinned. “We don’t need any paperwork, Vern. That’s why we’ve got you.”

“There was a lot of critical information in those papers, Floyd. For one thing, now I know where the airplane came from.”

Floyd gave me a strange look. “Belgium.”

I remembered the men down in the hole in the ice, the airplane with the dark stain beneath it. “A lot further than that,” I said. “Above the Arctic circle, deep in the ice.”

“Huh.” Floyd didn’t seem impressed. “So after you found out about your dad and these roving killer Nazis, you borrowed Doc Milliken’s car and came all the way out here late at night to check up on us. Wow, chum, that’s some dedication.”

“I didn’t know if those lunatics who tried to kill my Dad would have come here looking for you. Lots of people saw us at the train depot. It won’t be hard for them to put it together.”

Floyd sucked his lower lip under his teeth and shook his head. “Vernon, there’s nothing you could have done if there were Nazis here at the farm. Hit them over the head with your flashlight, maybe.”

I realized what Floyd was politely telling me. “I guess that was pretty stupid of me.”

“They tried to kill your dad, who is, pardon me, a lot tougher than you.” God bless him, he didn’t even look at my legs when he said that. “They capped off this CID guy, and he was a trained soldier. What do you think they would have done to you?”

Floyd’s concern was touching, but a bit misplaced. “What about you and your parents?” I asked. “I almost spilled the whole story last night, but I wanted to catch up on my sleep, talk it over with you at length, and have one last look at the aircraft before we turned ourselves in.”

“Turn ourselves in? For what?” Floyd seemed genuinely shocked. “You’re crazy.”

“Floyd, there are Nazi killers right here in Butler County, looking for something. There is a Nazi secret weapon in your barn. Put two and two together. What else could they possibly want in Kansas? It ain’t wheat or pork bellies, I promise you that. As for me, I would much rather be answering uncomfortable questions from Sheriff Hauptmann and the U.S. Army CID than wondering where the next bullet was going to come from. They almost killed my dad. I don’t need any more warnings.” Even as I spoke, in my heart the airplane soared, giving the lie to my noble sense of self-preservation.

“Bullets aren’t that bad,” muttered Floyd. “A lucky man can dodge them. But I guess you have a point.” His face brightened as he snapped his fingers. “What if we just get that thing out of here? It’s still on your dad’s truck. We could drive it away. Mary Ann has cousins in Ponca City. We could take it down there, get it right out of Kansas altogether.”

“Floyd, the Nazis are looking for a truck from Dunham’s Cartage. They’ll be swarming all over the county soon enough. Besides, I’m not taking that thing to Ponca City. That’s across the state line in Oklahoma, and that makes whatever trouble we’re already in a problem for the FBI.” Which might be on the case already, for all I knew. A dead CID captain was bound to attract a lot of attention in Washington, and the trail lead from Missouri right here to Augusta. “Finally, if we move the aircraft and the f-panzer, we’re just moving the problem. These maniacs will tear up Butler County until they find it, and if they don’t, they’ll tear up the rest of Kansas. We’re safest with our own authorities.”

“No, no, that’s not how it works,” said Floyd. “I seen it plenty of times in Europe. A guy stumbles across something big, a busted bank vault or the treasury under some old chateau. He turns it over to the MPs or the Judge Advocate General, next thing he knows, he’s peeling potatoes on bivouac in Libya while some officers cut themselves in for a percentage and maybe take a few extra medals for the poor guy’s trouble. We need to keep this between us two. See, the way out is, we catch the Nazis and turn ’em over to the authorities ourselves. The war is over, how many of them can there be around here?”

I thought about the inimical Mrs. Sigurdsen from the library. Maybe we could work an angle with her, rat her right into Leavenworth. It was a pleasant if passing fantasy.

I shook my head violently. “Floyd, now you have me thinking like an idiot. We are not going Nazi hunting. The farther away we stay from these people, the safer we will all be. You, me, your parents, my dad. Everybody.”

Floyd opened his mouth to say something else when the fire siren went off in Augusta. We were more than ten miles away from town, but when the wind was out of the west, you could hear it. That siren was loud.

“Oh, crud,” said Floyd, turning to run back into the house. “I hope that’s not a refinery fire.”

The Mobil refinery was Augusta’s biggest employer. If anything bad happened there, the town was in deep trouble.

I dropped the molding I had been cutting and trotted after him. As an afterthought, I stopped, turned to grab the silvery thing, and jammed it into my pocket. It didn’t seem like something to leave lying around outside, not even in the Bellamys’ yard. Especially not there, perhaps.

I can’t run like Floyd, because of my bad leg, but I can walk pretty fast when the need arises. I made it through the kitchen just as Floyd clattered up the stairs. I followed him up to find him standing outside his bedroom window out on the porch roof. From down the hall, Mr. Bellamy was yelling something about fire axes.

“What is it?” I asked. I knew Floyd could see part of Augusta from the porch roof if he stood on his toes and strained. The Bellamys’ farm was pretty high up on a ridge east of town, off Haverhill Road.

“Smoke,” said Floyd.

“Is it the refinery?”

“No, looks like a building fire. Let’s get into town.”

“I’ll drive,” I said. I wasn’t letting him touch the wheel of Doc Milliken’s Cadillac, and his truck was at my boarding house.

I limped downstairs and started the convertible. Floyd came running out of the house, carrying an axe and a shovel, followed by Mr. Bellamy moving more slowly, carrying another axe. They threw the tools in the back seat. Floyd jumped in after the tools, while Mr. Bellamy opened the passenger door and got in the front.

“Let’s go, Varian,” rasped Mr. Bellamy over the rumble of the Cadillac’s V-8 engine. As we pulled away, he began to cough.

We roared into town in the middle of an impromptu caravan of volunteer firefighters — everything from rattletrap hay wagons to a cut-down bus. As we drove up Highway 54 towards State Street, I had a sinking feeling about where the smoke was coming from. Reverend Little was at the head of our little caravan in his flatbed Chevy, and as he turned north onto State Street, I was sure the fire would be on Broadway.

It was. Mrs. Swenson’s boarding house was in flames. My heart seized with that moment of cold terror you experience when you fly over the neck of a horse, or try to land an airplane solo for the first time. The thick, tarry smell of a burning house filled my nose. It was hot to be near it, hotter than a summer’s day in the hay fields. Even the willow tree in the yard was burning, which in some illogical fashion struck me as a greater tragedy. The house was dying a terrible death. I prayed no one was dying with it.

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.”

“A head injury,” she said. “That’s the last thing he needed.”

“I know that, too.” I suddenly wished I had been a lot nicer to him all along. He needed me at least as much as I needed him. His leaving me for a bottle was no excuse for me to run away in turn. The smoke from the fire stung my eyes as I thought about him.

Lois touched my shoulder. “Does it have anything to do with that plate in his head?”

“He got hit right on the plate, actually. Doc Milliken sent him on to Wichita for X-rays. That’s when he disappeared, on that trip.”

“Oh, Vernon, this is so terrible.” Lois hugged me, tight. I could feel her bosoms pressing into my side. She wasn’t a very demonstrative girl, and we’d never been that close, so I must have been very obvious about needing a hug.

Heck, I hadn’t even told her about Doc Milliken’s hitching post and Mrs. Bellamy’s kitchen door.

After a minute Lois leaned over to whisper in my ear. That about made me jump out of the car, startled with a ticklish pleasure. “What are you doing in Doc Milliken’s car?”

“He loaned it to me,” I said. “I had a problem with the Hudson yesterday.”

“Think we could go for a ride?” She ran her hand across my shoulder. “I want to let you know in person how I glad I am that you’re safe and sound. And you had such a rough day yesterday.”

It was just liked I’d imagined. The convertible had an effect on Lois that my ratty, faded-black Hudson sedan had never managed. I looked at the fire. Sheriff Hauptmann was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Bellamy was chopping down a tree near the flames, looking quite spry for a man with a near-fatal chest condition. Amazing what stress could do. Floyd pulled yet another hose from somewhere down the street.

There was nothing for me except to be miserable and worry about Dad. Except go for a ride with Lois.

“Sure thing,” I said, starting the Cadillac. It was early enough in the day that I even if we did a little mugging I might get her back in time for church. Though probably not Sunday School. I drove down Broadway, away from the fire, a smile stealing across my face despite my woes.

A voice spoke in my ear. “Wer ist dort?”

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Lois, stroking my arm.

The voice spoke again. It was definitely masculine. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”