White Sands, Red Menace

Each day the next week, Mrs. McDonald, the Social Science teacher, wrote one of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms on the board. One freedom a day. Dewey figured there’d be a quiz on Friday. But since she’d memorized all that in third grade, she only pretended to listen, doing other homework and making notes for new parts of the Wall.

On Thursday, Mrs. McDonald wrote FREEDOM OF SPEECH and turned to the class. “We are very lucky to be living in America,” she said. “If we lived in a country with a dictator, our newspapers could only publish what the government wanted us to know. We couldn’t—Yes, Susan? What is it this time?”

Dewey winced. Suze and Mrs. McDonald had been at it since the first week of class, but Suze just couldn’t keep quiet.

“What about the radiation sickness that’s killing people in Japan?” Suze asked. “My mom says our government won’t let the papers print anything because it might scare people and turn them against ‘our new friend, the atom.’”

“People throw up and burn from the inside out. Their skin comes off like—”

“That is disgusting!” Mrs. McDonald slammed her hand down on her desk so hard a pile of papers spilled onto the floor. “Mr. Wolfe’s office. Now!”

Mrs. McDonald glared at her. “You want to keep your friend company?”

After a few seconds, Dewey shook her head. It was true. There’d been a whole issue of The New Yorker about Hiroshima, and how awful radiation sickness was. But would it help anything if she got in trouble, too? She looked at her lap as Suze left.

Suze wasn’t in Home Ec, and on her way out the front door after the bell rang, Dewey saw Mrs. Gordon walk into the principal’s office, wearing a dress and a hat, not the shirt and jeans she’d had on when they’d gone home for lunch. Uh-oh.

At home, Dewey paced around the attic, waiting for Suze to come home, so she could apologize. She should have stood up, too. Forty-five minutes later, she couldn’t stand it. She had to do something. She put the intercom boxes into a grocery bag and left a note on the kitchen table. Out. Back around 5:30—D.

She turned right down the alley, away from downtown. It felt better to be outside. The cottonwoods arched overhead, beginning to turn yellow. The crunch of gravel under her shoes changed when she stepped over the culverts at each cross street, her footsteps hollow over the metal pipes.

Parker’s Fix-It Shop was a one-story, tin-roofed concrete building behind a house at the corner of Fifteenth and Indiana, the edge of town. Only the blind school and the golf course lay beyond Sixteenth. A painted red sign ran across the top of the whitewashed wall, and the wide wooden door stood open.

She stopped just beyond the corner of the building, feeling awkward, as if she were walking, uninvited, into someone’s house. It wasn’t like the Hill. There, she’d asked anyone for help, army or civilian. They were all in it together, to win the war. But now . . . ?

Dewey hoped the tall boy—Owen, his name was Owen—would remember that he’d said she could come by. A long metal sign hung above the door, like an old friend, familiar yellow script on a black background: MOTOROLA RADIOS. She took a deep breath and walked into the shop.

A wooden counter with a cash register and a display of vacuum tubes divided customer from repairman. Half the counter came up to Dewey’s shoulders, and half was only waist high. Probably so people with really heavy things—cabinet radios and record players—wouldn’t have to lift them up.

Behind the counter was a shelf of household machines— fans, radios, kitchen clocks, an electric mixer—each with a stiff paper tag, customers’ names in bold black ink. Beyond that, workbenches and tables held parts and repairs in progress. Hundreds of drawers, some a few inches square, others as big as a breadbox, covered one wall.

Owen sat in front of a high workbench, hunched over a complicated array of tubes and wires, a printed diagram propped in front of him. She saw his lips move, as if he were reading not quite out loud. Dewey smiled, because she did that too, when she was trying to match a picture in a book with an object in real life, walking herself through, step-by-step.

He jerked his head up, his finger still in place on the diagram. He looked confused, then nodded. “Amazing Sprocket Girl,” he said, then closed his eyes, tight, as if that had been such a wrong thing to say.

“See.” He marked a tiny, precise X on the diagram and stood up. Unfolded, it seemed to Dewey. “What’cha got?”

“Samson Pair Phones,” he said. “They’re old, but they oughta work.” He turned one so the open back faced him, tubes and wires exposed. “Speaker wire’s not connected, that’s all.”

“Yeah. I know that.” Dewey tapped the speaker cone in the second box. “I need to solder the contact, and you said you had an iron I could use?”

“Right. Right.” He tapped his head with his knuckles. “Get a brain, Parker,” he muttered, and lifted the hinged edge of the low counter. “C’mon back.” He opened a flat drawer and held up an iron with a dangling cord. “Done this before?”

Dewey shook her head. “I’ve read about it, but never had a chance to try.”

“Today’s the day.” He plugged the cord into a wall outlet above the table. “Couple minutes to heat up.”

“Nice setup,” Dewey said as she climbed onto a metal stool. Her feet dangled an inch or two above the crossbar. Owen pulled another over; the tip of his sneaker grazed the floor when he sat down.

“It’s coming along. We’ll have to add a bench when we start servicing televisions. New components.”

“Yeah. Broadcasting in Los Angeles, too. El Paso can’t be far behind. Parkers’ll be the fix-it shop soon.”

“Not yet. But there’s this course—hold on.” He jumped off the stool and sprinted to a pile of repair manuals and magazines, opening one to a dog-eared page. “See.” He held out an issue of Popular Mechanics.

Dewey read the headline: BUILD A TELEVISION SET IN YOUR OWN HOME. “I’ve seen that,” she said.

“Well, Pop lets me keep the receipts for anything I fix myself, minus parts. I’ll have enough saved by summer.” He touched a finger to the tip of the soldering iron. “Just about ready. I’ll grab something you can practice on.”

Dewey looked around. Half the workbenches and tables were low, but the rest were chest high, like the lab tables at school. She could see pale rectangles farther up on two walls, as if everything had been moved down a few feet. Even she could reach most of the shelves without standing on a step stool. She liked that idea.

At the back of the room, she recognized a lathe and a drill press from her visits to the Hill’s machine shop. “Do you make your own parts?”

“Not yet. That’s Pop’s department. Custom jobs, and things that still aren’t back in production.” He laid a postcard-sized sheet of copper and a dozen snippets of wire on the table. “I’ll do one, talk you through it, then you try a few.” He patted the intercom box. “Don’t want to wreck this baby.”

Owen’s movements were skilled and precise. He showed her how to wipe the tip of the iron on a damp sponge for a clean contact, how to heat the wires first, then gently touch the solder to them. He told her what to watch for—the silver gleam as the lead-and-tin mix melted, the wisp of smoke when the contact was made—then handed her the iron.

On her first try, the wire didn’t get hot enough and pulled away. He gave her more advice and the second held—with a huge blob of solder.

“You got it!” he said after her third attempt. “One more like that and you can do the real McCoy. Wow. Took me half a spool of wire to get one that nice.”

“Thanks.” Dewey felt good. She was finally getting to solder, and she was pleased by the compliment. She attached one more wire to the copper plate, the electric iron starting to feel familiar in her hand. “Okay,” she said, turning the first oak box over. “Let’s do this.”

The second speaker connection was cooling when a man’s voice called through a door at the back of the shop. “Owen? Time to start supper.”

“Be right in,” Owen shouted back. He turned to Dewey. “I gotta go.”

“Yep. Learned during the war. Pop was gone and Mom worked all day. Now I just do Thursdays. It’s her late night. She’s Mr. Mobley’s secretary. The lawyer?” Owen unplugged the soldering iron and put it into a wire stand.

“Mac and cheese with wieners. It’s easy, and Betsy’ll eat it. My little sister,” he explained. “She’s five, and kinda picky.” He pointed to the two intercoms, long wires trailing from their backs. “You want a carton?”

“The sack’s easier for me to carry,” Dewey said. “Got a rubber band? I’ll coil the wire and tuck it inside the chassis.”

Dewey packed up the oak boxes while Owen turned off the shop lights. He flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and shut the door behind them.

The sun was setting on the other side of the desert, an orange sliver barely visible between the trees and houses. The whitewashed walls of the shop glowed a warm, pale gold.

“Owen!” The man’s voice came from the house, sharper and more insistent than the first time.

“Gotta go,” Owen said. “Pop only fires one warning shot.” He turned toward the house, stopped, looked back.