Gripping a crowbar, Bum Bum ran his hand along the edge of the crumbling wooden window frame above our heads.
“Broke in here once when I was ten. Wasn’t too hard.”
“Where’s the window lead to?” Kendal asked.
“A shitter. And from there, Cressie’s storeroom.”
Bum Bum steadied himself on Rocco’s shoulder, who knitted his fingers into a step for Bum Bum’s foot. They counted together, one, two, three, and Rocco boosted Bum Bum high enough to lever the crowbar between the window frame and the ledge. One quick motion and the window groaned open, ancient paint chips flaying away like dead skin under a rasp. Bum Bum pumped the crowbar to widen the space, then slithered through headfirst. Next, Kendal jumped up, grabbed the sill with his good hand while Bum Bum caught the other, and scrambled in easily, his feet kicking the air behind him. My turn. One, two, three, and Rocco boosted me, but I didn’t have the strength to pull myself over the sill and ended up dangling by my fingertips. Kendal and Bum Bum grabbed my hands and hauled me through the window, my arms shrieking with pain.
“You hardly weigh nothing,” whispered Bum Bum, giving Rocco a thumbs-up. The deal was, Rocco would remain at his post in the alley and raise the alarm if Cressie — or anyone else — showed up at the back of the store.
“Ready?” asked Bum Bum. Kendal nodded yes for us both. I heard the squeak of hinges, and the space ahead of us yawned like a vast, windy black hole.
“I’m going to chance a light ’til we see where we’re going,” whispered Bum Bum. “Knowing Cressie, he could’ve set bear traps.”
A wild, staring eye sprang up out of the darkness, startling me; Kendal grabbed my arm to steady me.
“Just a horse’s head,” he whispered. “From that broken-down old carousel in the park.”
The flashlight raked the room, illuminating a stampede of horses, legs flexed, heads thrown back and nostrils flaring, some lying on the floor impaled on their poles, others slumped against the walls, flank to flank.
He angled the flashlight at the floor as we picked our way past upturned hooves and charging legs. Then he cut the light and gently pushed open the door leading into the store.
Streetlights illuminated Cresswell’s Collectibles just enough for us to make our way to the wall of cubbyholes behind the cash. Kendal pointed up at the Florsheim shoebox on the top shelf, stepping on a footstool to slide it out.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he whispered, the box under his arm.
As we turned to retrace our steps, a supernova exploded inside Cresswell’s, the light so intense that I was blinded for a few seconds. I spun in every direction until hands grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the floor, a body — Bum Bum’s — squashing mine. Grit on the floor ground into my face as voices shouted and glass shattered all around us. Someone or something was coming through the front window of Cressie’s store. Eyes squeezed shut, arms over my head in duck-and-cover position, I heard the sound of boots hitting the floor planks.
I opened my eyes to bloody rose petals floating in the air, bouncing in the light of cherry tops rotating on the roofs of squad cars parked outside the front window. White circles, like the end of a reel of a Super 8 home movie, exploded in my field of vision, but I could still make out Bum Bum scrabbling at the floorboards with his fingers, yanking one up. A trap door. He swung his legs into the hole and dropped over the side, disappearing from view. Kendal pushed me after him. I fell onto soft, stinking earth, Kendal landing on top of me. We were inside a pit, maybe four feet below floor level. The odours of oil and mould and something I couldn’t identify, and didn’t want to, hung heavily in the air. Bum Bum pulled a chain to close the trapdoor and all was dark.
“Where are we?” I whispered. The smell was gagging me.
“Shhh,” said Bum Bum.
Boot steps thundered over our heads. Fingers of light poked through gaps in the floorboards, feeling for us; Bum Bum’s face was suddenly visible, his eyes staring upwards, one hand holding the trapdoor chain taut. He looked weirdly calm. As if he did this every day.
I could see now that we were in a crawlspace at the mouth of a larger tunnel. Light continued to stab at us but we were too deep to be seen. Still, I cowered into Bum Bum; he pulled me into his arms and whispered close to my ear, “Calm, now.”
“Where the hell did he go?” a dead-sounding male voice demanded. I knew this voice: the policeman from the Pat Boone lie detector test.
“There was more’n one. They just disappeared,” said another voice. “Try out back, they must have made a run for it.”
“The Mounties should catch their own man,” a third voice griped.
Then, the policeman’s voice again. “No dicking around. Treat with extreme prejudice. Girls, boys, I don’t give a shit. We’ll pump them all until someone tells us where that Yammer went.”
Bum Bum, Kendal and I could see each other’s faces clearly now as the rosy pink lights of the cherry tops rippled through the crawlspace like a river of blood.
“Rocco,” I whispered.
Bum Bum shook his head as if to say, don’t worry. He began to move forward into the darkness, and Kendal and I followed. We wriggled on our bellies like three blind slugs. Pebbles ground into my hands and knees. Occasionally, I slid through something disgustingly wet and mushy, trying not to imagine what it might be.
Bum Bum whispered, “Stop.” His flashlight clicked on, revealing a solid wall of greasy bricks. When bits of dry earth crumbled over us, I felt a rush of claustrophobic panic: What if the tunnel collapsed and we were buried alive? What if no one ever found us? Would it be a slow death, suffocating in the ground under Cressie’s? Bum Bum’s face loomed out of the darkness.
“You got the box?”
Kendal coughed. “Sure.”
He pulled off the lid. Bum Bum’s flashlight illuminated the contents: no solenoid. Instead, the box held a postcard of a bombed-out building, a shuffling ragged mass of humanity staring vacantly at the camera. On the back, in script lettering, were the words: “I love New York.” But over the word love was a drawing of a heart with a slash through it.
“Duff left us a message,” said Kendal.
We sat crushed together, until the last shout and boot step vanished. And then, we waited a little longer.
“Okay,” said Bum Bum at last.
He pushed himself into a half-crouch and duck-walked into an alcove I hadn’t realized was there. We were facing a wooden door sunken into the brick wall. Bum Bum knocked hard three times, paused, then twice again. The door shivered and reluctantly opened, letting in a blast of fresh air, and Rocco’s head.
“What the fuck?” queried Rocco.
The three of us yanked at the door from our side and it gave way enough for us to squeeze through. Bum Bum turned to smile at me, his face covered in dirt.
“After you.”
Legs trembling, I crawled through the opening into a deep window-well made of brick. I looked up. Rusty grillwork divided the night sky into a grid of stars.
“What was that place we crawled through?” I asked, after we’d each got out.
“One of Harriet Tubman’s old tunnels for hiding escaped slaves. Shipman’s Corners is honeycombed with them,” said Kendal. “How did you know it was there, BB?”
“There isn’t a hiding place in this town I don’t know,” said Bum Bum.
“Who were those guys?” I asked.
“Cops,” said Bum Bum. “Canusa Mounties, most likely. Maybe some ShipCo MPs. They must have loved taking the boots to Cressie’s window.”
* * *
Bum Bum boosted Rocco, who pushed the grillwork aside, and lifted each of us single-handedly to the top of a brick wall that had once been part of a long-abandoned canal. One lonely ship’s bollard, the concrete cap cracked in half, squatted in a patch of weeds like an iron toadstool.
None of us was old enough to remember the days when ships unloaded at the docks of stores in downtown Shipman’s Corners, but we had all played beside the abandoned canal, with its rainbow of scum and dirty white foam. On warm days, the rotten egg smell drifted all over town. After a kid fell in and drowned under the thick froth, the town agreed to pump out the water and fill in the trench, but Cressie’s back alley still had the look of a place where sailors had once swung barrels and crates off ships.
We slid down the embankment below the wall and picked our way through what would have been the bottom of the canal but was now a scrubland of weedy trees, junked stoves and wrecked cars. Rocco led us to where he and Kendal had hidden the Swinger and the Cutlass, in a thick patch of wild raspberry bushes.
The boys and I agreed that Duff’s Cutlass had to go. Given what we’d just seen, there was probably an APB for it across Shipman’s Corners and the Greater Canusa Region. I was pretty sure the evil Mustang-driving nurse would be part of the force. Headlights off, we took a fast, short drive to an abandoned canal hidden on a slice of scrubland between a private golf course and an engine train factory. The relentless shrieking of the siren continued as we drove the back roads and veered onto a rocky path.
We all put our shoulders to the back fender of Duff’s car. It teetered on the broken concrete along the edge and finally tipped over the side into the frothy water below. Nose down, trunk in the air, the way you’d imagine the Titanic sinking, the Cutlass paused for a moment as it filled with water, then sank in a fizzy rush of tainted foam, like a giant Alka-Seltzer after a particularly nasty party.
Afterwards, as we walked toward Rocco’s Swinger, a flash of light illuminated the horizon. In the distance glowed what looked like a raging fire.
“What the fuck,” said Rocco. “Maybe it really is a nuclear war.”
“No, the fields must be burning out in the township,” said Kendal.
“It’s all vineyards out there,” said Bum Bum. “Those wood posts would burn like stink.”
“Sparkling Sparrow,” I whispered.
As we would later discover, someone had set all two hundred acres of grapevines alight.
* * *
Rocco pulled into the driveway at Nonna’s house just as the siren stopped. We heard later that the school caretaker had finally figured out a way to disable Duff’s solenoid: he took a blowtorch to it. It had been sounding for three continuous hours. Complaints of hearing loss and tinnitus would keep the Shipman’s Corners audiologists busy for years to come.
When we wearily staggered into the house, Nonna Peppy was holding the phone, her face white. She held it out to me without a word.
“Hello?” I said.
“Debbie, it’s Linda.”
“Where are you?”
“On our way west. Hitchhiking. We’re going to join those people going out in the boats to stop the Amchitka tests. Debbie, Duff says there’s a chance, an actual chance, that we could prevent World War Three. We could change the future and save all the people in those cities. Maybe even ourselves.”
“Linda, Duff’s crazy,” I said. “The cops are after him.”
The line crackled; I could hear the sound of truck horns and Duff’s muffled voice urging Linda to hurry up, hurry up, their ride was leaving.
“Listen, sweetie, I have to go. Tell Dad we left the station wagon at the Husky truck stop outside Sudbury. Tell him I’m sorry about the vineyards, but Duff said it had to be done or no one will sober up and see what’s going on. I love you all. I’ll come back, I promise, soon as we get this done. Tell me you believe me.”
“I believe you,” I echoed.
“Tell Mom and Dad that I’ll be fine.”
The boys stood watching me. Pepé the Seventh was there, too, pressed against Nonna Peppy. Even though the siren had stopped, a residue of sound remained, a lingering noiseless echo of disturbed air, like thunder building up before a storm.
“I’ll be back, I promise,” Linda said again, and hung up.
* * *
Six days later, just before the real Cannikin thermonuclear underground detonation, we saw Linda and Duff on the news, part of a seafaring group going out into the Bering Sea to get close enough to Amchitka Island to stop the test. They said they were demanding a “green peace.”
On camera, Duff pumped his fist in the air. Linda mouthed a chant along with the others. Hell, no, we won’t go.
Mom, Dad and Nonna Peppy sat with their hands in their faces. Mom weeping, Nonna Peppy praying.
“Linda said they’re coming back,” I tried to reassure them. “She promised me twice.”
I never saw Linda or the Trespasser in Shipman’s Corners again.
I came to believe that all of it — the time hop, the lost eighteen months — had been part of my imaginary life. It was time to breathe the clean, fresh air of reality.