Josh

1938

THE PRESIDENT, OWNER, AND chief executive officer of Victory Fuels, the great Theodore K. Ratliff, saw that picture of Preston in the Times. And I’ve always believed Preston’s picture is what turned the tide in our favor. Aristotle had already gotten old Mr. Ratliff to take note of our plight, to answer a few of our letters, to start asking questions about how Biggs treated us, and to think about us as people, not just mine machinery. As soon as Ratliff came across my little brother playing taps in the paper, he ordered his personal railroad car attached to the Desert Zephyr, and he sent a telegram to Aristotle saying he was headed for Victory with a contract in his briefcase, an agreement guaranteeing fair wages and safe working conditions. The citizens of Canvasburg unanimously elected Aristotle to sign it for us all when Mr. Ratliff arrived.

We’d won.

The morning of the day Mr. Ratliff’s train was scheduled to arrive, I made breakfast as usual. I wasn’t too good at it, but I was the only one in the family whose body parts all worked. I was excited because I had a half dozen oranges for Preston. I’d earned them by hiking three miles south to an orange grove and working half a day digging irrigation ditches. People were starting to claim oranges had a magic ingredient called vitamin C. Made you healthy. I figured even though Doc O’Malley had sprung Preston from the infirmary and he was on the mend again, he still needed all the vitamin C he could get.

And I baked biscuits with flour mailed from Salt Lake City. Baked them for, I don’t know, a good half hour at least.

Not much later, as I sat in the doorway of our tent scraping the ashes off the biscuits—or, as Preston liked to call them, meteorites—I watched the first sunlight of the day boiling over the desert like a tide of red rolling up to drown me. I held my breath, as if that would save me, but I couldn’t go without air forever, and as I breathed again, a ruby crescent peeked over the rim of the world. In seconds, it had grown into a scarlet crown; then it was half an orange globe, and then a yellow ball, huge, glued to the horizon, and thwock, the ball pulled itself loose and floated up into the blue sky, burning whiter as it rose.

Suddenly, I spied a girl. I’d never seen this girl before. I’d never seen a girl like this girl before, flitting from tent shadow to tent shadow. She had hair as red as the sunlight that’d just singed my retinas. She had eyes so green, I could see them fifty yards away, and her feet were really large.

“You gonna bring those meteorites in or write a poem about ’em?” demanded Preston, sticking his head out of the tent.

I jumped a foot. And just like that, the girl was gone.

As I set the biscuits on the kitchen table, I heard Aristotle sing out “Ta-daaa!” like a Ringling Brothers ringmaster. Luke followed him into our tent. Some kind of optical illusion made it appear that their hair was short, neat, and slicked down on top of their skulls. Aristotle wore a jacket he must’ve managed to borrow from another miner—the sleeves were only a few inches too short. In his pocket was a neatly folded black-and-red handkerchief.

“Sharp—right down to the pocket square!” commented Mom.

Aristotle adjusted it slightly. “My talisman,” he said proudly.

“What happened to your heads?” asked Preston.

“Wait—” gasped my dad. “You got haircuts?”

“I thought I heard a chainsaw,” threw in Preston.

“For the big day,” said Aristotle, patting him on the shoulder. “For the big meeting with Mr. Ratliff! We gonna get a safety inspector and a new elevator and time off when we hurt and a nine-hour workday and only five hours on Saturday and—”

Luke interrupted, caught up in the excitement. “And they say Biggs is gonna get it when Mr. Ratliff gets here! And US marshals are gonna track down those guys from the tank! And oh, brother, when they do!” Luke smacked his fist into his palm enthusiastically. And then he seemed to realize how worked up he’d let himself get and narrowed his eyes doubtfully. “Unless this is all one big joke and Mr. Ratliff and Biggs are just pulling our legs for a gas.” He shot a level stare at Aristotle as if they’d discussed this angle already, but his father didn’t seem to notice.

It wasn’t easy being Luke. Proud of his dad and angry at him all at the same time.

“Hey—you guys—come look! The detectives are gone!” shouted Preston from the door of the tent.

“Great day in the morning!” said my dad, rolling my mom outside. “Let’s have a look.” Before I could follow, Aristotle grabbed my shoulder.

“Josh,” he said quietly, “I think this is gonna go good. But”—and for a second, his optimism, his hope, his confidence, the things he wore like armor every day of his life, dropped away—“you never know.”

“Aristotle—” I said.

“However it happens—you’re Luke’s friend. And that boy, he love two things. He love what is right. And he love to win. And I don’t know which he love more. If I’m not around, you help him choose, Josh.”

“If you’re not around? Are you planning a trip? Are you headed for Hawaii?” I asked, taking a wild stab at a joke because Aristotle sounded so serious, it scared me.

But Aristotle had already stepped into the sunshine. I followed.

Down by Honey Brook, there was the girl again.

“Who is that?” I muttered.

“Who is what?” asked Aristotle.

“That girl,” I said, pointing.

“What girl?” asked Aristotle.

She was gone.

“You getting too worked up, Josh,” said Aristotle. “You seeing things.”

The crowd began gathering three hours before Mr. Ratliff arrived. Preston had put together a combo with a few kids from school, and they kicked off on the platform of the railroad station sometime around two. My parents sat in the front row to listen, and Luke was already there with his dad. I’d told them all to go on without me—I’d lost something and needed to find it. I didn’t tell them I was searching for a girl, possibly imaginary, who disappeared whenever anybody besides me looked at her.

I thought maybe I was bats. It was like I’d spotted one of those ghosts that disintegrate when the sun rises. I glanced around camp, but no dice; just the Spanakopolouses rinsing out their socks for the big event. Mr. Ratliff’s train whistle wailed out there on the desert, so I had to give up.

I couldn’t work my way through the crowd to Luke. The mob surged and I got close to the front, but then it flowed backward and pulled me away. About all I could make out was the sight of Dad studying Mom’s tires nervously.

A little girl standing near me, a little blond town girl in a dress that cost more than any dress my mom had ever owned, kept eyeing me. Finally, she yanked loose from her mother, marched up to me, planted both feet on the dusty ground, and declared: “My mother says you should be thanking us. Instead of bothering poor Mr. Ratliff. My mom says we gave you jobs, and all you could do was complain, when you should say thank you. And now nobody’s making any money! My mom says people like you, what are you good for! My mom says she hopes you’re happy, you upset that nice old man in his house and he had to come from New York!”

Before I could give the little angel my opinion of all this, I saw the red-haired girl again, from the corner of my eye, shimmering like a mirage on the far edge of the crowd, shamrock-green eyes on me for a second and then flashing somewhere else. Those eyes were like being zapped by the tail of a South American eel.

“Nice talking to you,” I said to the sweetie pie, “but I gotta scamper.”

I thought about fighting my way to the front to tell Luke about the red-haired girl haunting our town, but what was I going to say? “There’s a girl here! And she’s got red hair! And green eyes! And nobody seems to notice her but me!” Instead, I decided it would be better to catch her first and then tell people about her, so I scuttled around the crowd and began searching again.

Mr. Ratliff’s train was still a good ten minutes away. Victory was only three blocks long and four blocks wide, so I had time. I gazed up A Street and B Street, and when there was only C Street left, I glanced down an alleyway and spied her slipping up the back stairs of the Victory Fuels Corporation headquarters. Since I only saw her climb as high as the second floor, I figured she’d either managed to slip inside or she was hunkered down on the landing, hoping I hadn’t spotted her. Up the steps I clambered.

I found her crouched on the corrugated iron, calmly staring at me over the top step. When I skidded to a stop to keep from tripping over her, she gave a smile as if, somehow, she already knew me.

“Caught you!” was all I could come up with.

“Because I let you,” she returned.

“What?” I asked.

“I had to talk to you. But only you. I had to let you catch me, and nobody else,” she said.

“That’s what the disappearing act was all about?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Hold on. Are you,” I began, finally putting two and two together about the green eyes, “Doc O’Malley’s—niece?” I asked.

“That’s a long story,” she sighed. She stood and glanced up and down the alley.

“What story is a long story?” I asked. “Who are you?”

“Margaret O’Malley,” she said.

“I knew it,” I said, offering my hand. “An O’Malley. I’m Josh. Josh Garrett.”

“Of course you are,” she replied, shaking my hand firmly. “And—and—I’m sorry. But there’s something I have to tell you.”

Margaret was the first O’Malley I’d ever met who didn’t have glasses as thick as the window of a submarine in a novel by Jules Verne. I was afraid her eyes might fry me to a crisp.

At that moment, a cheer went up from across town, which meant Mr. Ratliff’s arrival had happened, and I’d missed it, but I didn’t mind too much because his big meeting with Aristotle was the next day, and our moment in the sun was still coming, and in the meantime, this Margaret O’Malley was turning out to be very interesting.

Without wasting energy on further introductions, she launched into a story about traveling through time that was so strange, improbable, eerie, sad, infuriating, and confusing, and at the same time so incredibly similar to Aunt Bridey’s, that I had no choice but to believe every word. She left the details hazy enough so that when the future arrived, I wouldn’t be able to get myself into too much trouble, but the upshot was, history as she understood it showed that Elijah Biggs was destined to murder Theodore Ratliff the next day and frame Aristotle Agrippa for the crime.

“But there’s no way Elijah Biggs would do something like that,” I objected when she was done. “Sure. He’s awful. And he has it in for Aristotle Agrippa. But he wouldn’t kill his boss. I mean, if Mr. Ratliff were dead, who would be president of Victory Fuels International?”

Margaret stared patiently at me.

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Elijah Biggs would.”

“It’s absolutely true. Mr. Ratliff will die tomorrow unless I do something,” she said.

“Unless we do something,” I corrected. “Come on. We have to find Luke.”

“No,” said Margaret, stopping dead. “He can’t know I’m here. Nobody can know I’m here. No police, no bodyguards, no friends or brothers or dads or moms, and especially no Luke Agrippa. I can’t let anybody know what I’m up to. I have to keep my effect on history as tiny as possible.”

“Then why’d you tell me?” I asked.

“Because I know you,” replied Margaret, “even if you don’t know me. And because I can’t do this alone.”

“Well, we have to tell Luke,” I insisted. “He’s smarter than I am. And taller. And can throw things farther.”

“What kind of things?” asked Margaret.

“For instance a football,” I said.

“How far?” she asked.

“At least forty-five yards,” I said. “Some people say fifty.”

“Well, that’s impressive,” said Margaret, “but we’re still leaving him out of it.”

“Then I’m taking you to see Aunt Bridey,” I finally said, ducking behind the fence along C Street, which was the only way to get to the foot of Mount Hosta without being seen. “I don’t care if you want to or not.”

“Aunt Bridey?” asked Margaret uncertainly, as if she recognized the name.

“If Elijah Biggs really has it in for Mr. Ratliff, and we’re going to have a snowball’s chance in July of stopping him, then we have to ask Aunt Bridey for help,” I told Margaret, turning toward the mountain, “because I don’t have a clue about what to do next, and if anybody does, she does, and that’s just how it is.”

“My dad used to tell stories about his aunt Bridey,” mused Margaret.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“She was a moonshiner.”

“Then his stories were true,” I replied.