Читать книгу Heroes of Earth - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 12

CHAPTER 7

The first day Arnold spent at home was like a vacation. It was too cold to go to the beach, but he lay on the sofa reading Twain’s Letters to a Woman Sitting in Darkness and listening to the cries of seagulls in the midday quiet. You couldn’t hear the surf on the ocean beach at Assateague, not with the loblolly pine forest, the salt marsh, Assateague Channel, and half of Chincoteague between here and there, but Arnold felt the presence of the sea nonetheless. An island like Chincoteague was a boat afloat in vast waters that had covered the world for hundreds of millions of years, long before the dinosaurs had walked the earth, back before the continents had split apart and slowly assumed their current positions and shapes. You couldn’t sense it if you were stuck in a classroom, but you could now in the faint salt tang of the air and the faint ringing of bells on buoys strung along the narrow channels surrounding the island. It surrounded and comforted him as he read about how Private Shipman and his companions had caught a Filipino rebel named Felix and given him “the water cure.”

“He choked and sputtered and begged us by God and Mother Mary to stop. Deadeye Don snickered and flicked him with another wet towel, putting it over his face when he wouldn’t shut up so he gagged and wriggled like a beached fish. Then he stopped moving. Tom said, ‘I dunno, Don, I think you might have kilt him,’ and Don said, ‘Who cares? He ain’t told us nothin’ worth hearin’ nohow.’ And that, my darling Daisy, is how we civilized Felix.”

Arnold laid the book aside, put his hands behind his head, and stared at a painted-over crack in the ceiling for a while. What he’d told Gloria wasn’t 100% true; not every Twain book was banned by SCOD, and he’d actually read Tom Sawyer in fourth grade. But he knew The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn only from Dad’s library, and he’d never read anything like the Letters. It went even further than Dad did when he got together with his buddies back in Pikesville, or now with Mr. Nomura, and complained about the government and “our big blue friends running around telling us what to do.” What would Mark Twain have had to say about the High Ones? Would he have approved of the way they stopped people from fighting each other, or would he have scorned them like Huck Finn scorned the “do-gooders” who were always trying to “sivilize” him? Arnold longed to talk about it with Mom, but it sounded like she was having one of her “bad days,” tossing and turning and groaning loudly in bed, and he didn’t want to disturb her.

There was a knock at the door and Arnold sat up guiltily, until he realized it was hours too early for either Alison or Dad. Though he didn’t want to talk to anyone, curiosity won out, and he got off the couch and opened the door a crack, leaving the chain in place.

A green eye crinkled at him from about his own height. “Hi Arnold, can I come in for a second?”

“Sure, Gloria.” Arnold slid the chain back and opened the door for the librarian. Or is she a magician? What should I call her? Whatever she was, today she had on a black jacket with bulked-up shoulders that looked like it had come out of a Goodwill bin that specialized in Eighties castoffs, a shimmery purple skirt, and thigh-high black suede boots that had been ruined by salt-marsh mud with that giveaway rotten-egg smell.

As she shut the door behind her Arnold studied the cardboard box she was carrying under one arm. It was about thirty centimeters on a side and ten centimeters thick, and was labeled, THE REUNION, CENTRAL PARK, SEPTEMBER 6, 1983. “What’s in there? Records?”

“That’s right. I’m giving them to you for keeps. Do you have a turntable?”

“I think we might, in the closet somewhere. No one seems to listen to anything that isn’t on the n-network anymore.”

“I know, but I thought you might be different.”

“Because I’m a weirdo?”

“Because you’re out of step with the times.” Gloria smiled. Some of her teeth were crooked, but this didn’t make her ugly. To the contrary.

“That’s true enough,” Arnold said. “Matt and his buddies tell me so all the time—usually not so nicely, though. Let me see if I can find that record player.” He started to turn toward the coat closet, but paused halfway and said, “You’re shivering. Are you cold?”

“N-not at all, d-dear,” Gloria said, her teeth knocking together.

“Are you scared, then?”

“Only a little.”

What do you do when the grown-ups around you are scared? Arnold remembered the hushed late-night conversations Mom and Dad used to have behind their closed bedroom door back in Pikesville. Occasionally Mom would raise her voice to a near-shout, or Dad would snarl something too low to make out.

Arnold was already much too old to think that Tiger was anything more than a stuffed animal so old he had lost his eyes and smelled like dust and ancient drool. But he used to hug him tighter whenever he heard his parents arguing and worrying. He’d try to imagine he was holding a real tiger with real sharp teeth who could tear to bloody shreds Dad’s mean boss Mr. Armstrong and the mysterious “them” even he was scared of. Remembering, Arnold suddenly wondered whether Dad’s “them” overlapped with Mr. Freed’s, if that was why Mom and Dad and Alison always tried to be nice to the old hippie, and if Gloria was scared of the same shadowy conspiracy.

He wasn’t really Sir Arnold the Brave, but he could give Gloria a quick, shy hug, with his head turned to the side and his eyes squeezed shut, and so he did before darting over to the closet, tossing old galoshes and scarves into a heap on the floor in search of Dad’s record player. He missed seeing the single crystalline tear Gloria shed, a perfect diamond-bright globe that fell to the polished wooden floor and rolled like a miniature marble, coming to rest in a dim corner.

“Here it is!” he said triumphantly, pulling out the heavy, blocky black base of the turntable, knocking its dusty brown plastic cover loose in the process. When he turned he saw that Gloria had gone, leaving a chilly, wet November breeze blowing through the open door. Walking over to shut it, he saw she had left behind the record album she had brought him.

“No way,” he said softly, studying the head shots of four middle-aged, long-haired men against the background of an enormous crowd. There were no names under the pictures, because no one could possibly mistake John Lennon in those round spectacles, black-haired Paul McCartney, mustachioed George Harrison, and bearded Ringo Starr—the Beatles together again, in the reunion concert that could never have been, not after John disappeared back in 1971, the only, mysterious clue ever found being the words “Imagine THIS!” spray-painted on the wall of his recording studio and a plumber’s helper driven into the sheetrock wall handle first.

An artifact from a parallel world. How cool is that? He put the record player on the dining room table, plugged it in, and carefully took the first of the three shiny black disks in the impossible reunion album out of its paper sleeve. There was no dust on it, no hint of scratches.

How much would this be worth, if you could sell it? If the League didn’t stop you. Arnold pushed the thought aside, switched on the turntable, and lowered the needle arm onto the outer rim of the first of the three LPs in the boxed set.

Most of the songs were familiar—Grandma was a self-described “Beatlemaniac,” and a solid, throaty alto—although some were played in a minor key, lending a touch of sadness to tunes that had once been all bouncy youth.

Arnold was so mesmerized he didn’t hear Mom creeping up on him.

“What’s that you’re listening to?” she said suddenly.

Started, Arnold banged his right knee hard on the underside of the table, flipping the needle arm violently up. When it came down it made the record skip.

Nowhere man—nowhere man—nowhere man…

Arnold wanted to cry. I’ve ruined something that can never be replaced.

But Mom didn’t seem upset at all. She stepped softly toward the table on her bare, wrinkled feet, her pale blue eyes wide. “Impossible,” she whispered, picking up the box with a shaking hand. “I must be dreaming.”

Arnold found his voice. “It isn’t a dream, Mom. Gloria brought the album over. But I’m afraid I scratched it…”

“Hmm? Don’t worry about that, we’ve got some fix-it spray somewhere…” Still staring at the box, she reached out with her other hand and took the needle arm gently off the record. “So it’s true, what Dad told me about the tunnel between the worlds,” she said. “I thought I must have dreamed that, too.” Her pale, skinny knees were knocking together under her nightgown.

Arnold stood up, got a chair for her, and went into the kitchen to pour her a glass of milk. She smiled and thanked him absently when he handed it to her, but her eyes never left the picture of the concert that had never been.

“I should call your grandmother,” she said. “She has to hear these songs. And what are these new ones?”

“New ones?” Arnold looked where Mom was pointing on the box. There were two unknown tracks on the B side of the third LP, both credited as “Lennon/McCartney.”

Arnold found the right platter in its yellowed paper sleeve, put it on the turntable, and carefully lowered the needle arm into the right place in the shiny black circle before the first song. It was about courage, and John Lennon’s voice was saying he had composed it “for my little daughter, Rosie.”

Mom shook her head. “He never had a daughter. Only one son, I think,” she said, but Arnold barely heard her; he was too busy listening to the music.

Courage, girl

You’ll need courage for the road ahead

For the road full of dread

I’d give you more, girl

For this cold old world,

But all I can give you, girl,

Is your heart that’s oaken

Even when it’s broken

You’ll have your courage

The words made Arnold’s heart swell until he almost believed he could be brave. The other new song had a strong beat that gave it an almost martial air:

Fight for what is right

Struggle on, through the night

Follow your own light

Whatever others might—

“I’m home!” Alison called, slamming the door, making the needle jump out of its groove. “Hey, you have the record player out? What’s that you’re—oh, wow!” she said, picking up the boxed set and examining it. “This must be from one of Gloria’s parallel worlds!”

Arnold punched her on her left arm, the one that wasn’t holding the box. “She gave it to me, not for you! You’re always messing up my stuff!”

Mom rolled her eyes. “Come on, you two, you’re too old to fight like that. I’m sure Gloria meant you to share. Can’t you take the message of all those songs about peace and love to heart, just a little?”

She looked so frail, of course she got what she wanted, which was for everybody to sit around the table spellbound, listening to the greatest rock-and-roll concert that never was. Dad got home just when they had started again from the beginning, the part with the great old songs and the scratch Arnold had made by mistake. He just laughed when Mom mentioned the accident and asked him where the tube of spray stuff was. Instead he showed off a trick where you turned the turntable backwards by hand while bearing down gently on the needle arm to “erase” the skip.

Nowhere man, the world is at your command!

Was that the message Gloria had been trying to send him by giving him the album? That he might think he was a nowhere man, but actually great things were on the way for him? Parents and teachers, the nice ones anyway, were always trying to sell you that message, but Arnold wasn’t feeling very inspired by it right now. Hell, he couldn’t even keep for himself the one gift he’d gotten to make his suspension from school a little easier. Plus, nobody was even thinking about dinner, and Arnold was hungry.

He slouched off to the kitchen and began fixing himself a sloppy peanut butter and banana sandwich, but the gears of his mind were still turning. Gloria was certainly more than just an offbeat school librarian, so she had to be trying to tell him more than just “be the best you can be.” She’d also given him the Twain book, after all. What had that been about? The book was about how cruel and hypocritical empires were. Like the Cosmic Harmony? Put that together with the Beatles’ courage song, and the fight-for-what’s-right song, and what did you have?

Gloria’s an alien, no question about it, but obviously from a different planet from the High Ones. She must hate them as much as the Patriotic Front and the Human Defense League do. Maybe more!

The peanut-buttery knife in Arnold’s hand clattered to the kitchen floor unnoticed. “That’s why she’s here,” he whispered aloud. “She wants volunteers to help fight the High Ones. But everyone else is too scared to help her.”

For the thousandth time since he’d been suspended he thought about his humiliating encounter with Bubba and Mr. Wright. What if I’ve been looking at this all wrong? I’m the only one who has the guts to stand up to the way things are. Everyone at school complains about the strip searches, but they all meekly take their clothes off every morning. Dad’s not much better. He may talk a good game about how the old constitution didn’t allow unreasonable searches and seizures, but I don’t remember him ever going to the school to complain, not back home in Pikesville and not here, either. And Mom… Mom’s too sick to do anything, you can’t blame her.

Who was behind all the trouble? The High Ones! There hadn’t even been such a thing as terrorism before they came, or anyway not much of it.

SCOD was their fault, too. It had been founded on the symbolic date of July 4, 1976, the same day the new constitution and the new name for the country went into effect, and seven years almost to the day after the Arrival. SCOD’s goal, stated on a large wooden plaque mounted on the wall next to the athletic trophy case when you walked out of the strip-search changing rooms into the school, was to “return God’s grace to America by stamping out the immorality that has brought down divine wrath.”

“They claim to be godly patriots, but really they are an instrument of social control,” was how Dad put it once, in a beer-soaked late-night conversation with Mr. Nomura. He had slurred the words “social control,” and Mr. Nomura had hiccuped his agreement.

Does Dad really think I can sleep through all their loud talk, or does he just not care? Back in the Sixties, Dad liked to say, you could write or say just about anything you wanted, though Mom liked to ask how would he know, when he wasn’t even born till 1970?

Suddenly Arnold was desperate to get back to school so he could ask Gloria directly what she wanted him to do. She had to be in danger every day she was here! What if she just up and disappeared, like she did earlier today after leaving the Beatles album for him—only what if this time she went away for good, or SCOD disappeared her? Then I’ll never learn how to join the Resistance. And I’ll never see Assateague Ashley and Jo again!