White Sands, Red Menace

“Hey,where’veyou been?” Dewey asked when Suze came into the attic. “Your mom’s been bugging me for an hour. I had to climb down from the Wall three times to answer the intercom. Did you have detention again?”

“Nope. I’ve been a saint. But I caught holy hell in the kitchen anyway.” Suze dropped a brown paper grocery bag down on her table. “Ynez had band practice, and her grandmother wanted to play cards with some other old ladies, so I said I’d babysit Tony and Ray. I made them Halloween costumes.”

“Better than that,” Suze said. “Look!” She upended the bag, and hundreds of cork-lined bottle caps poured out onto the table and clattered to the floor.

“Yeah. At the Crystal plant, all the messed-up ones get tossed into a big bin. They can’t go on bottles if they’re printed crooked, or the wrong color. Ynez’s mom brought a bunch home.”

“Neat.” Dewey kneeled down and picked up a handful—green, orange, purple, red, brown. “What’re you going to use ’em for?”

“‘My Alamogordo’?” Dewey said in a pretty good Mrs. McDonald voice. Dewey was working on a display about the hardware store. Mr. Stevenson’s family had been around almost as long as the town, and he’d said she could borrow some old jars and pioneer stuff from the basement. “You’re making a little bottling plant?”

“I haven’t figured it all out yet. But Doña Luisa showed me how to make hinges when she came back from playing cards. That’s why I was so late.”

“Out of leather. These are just decoration, like buttons. Sometimes she paints them and puts little pictures on the inside, so the cap’s like a frame. I want to try that.”

After dinner, Dewey did the dishes and finished her homework—writing all forty-eight state capitals on a blank map. It was easy, except for North and South Dakota. She always got them confused. She put the papers in her satchel and went upstairs to get Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine Owen had loaned her. It had rockets and people with special powers, and was even better than a comic book because she could read for hours.

She opened the door to the attic and heard pounding, then Suze swearing. A second later, a small projectile bounced into the stairwell and landed at her feet, spinning. A green Lemon-Lime bottle cap, all smashed up, a jagged hole punched through its center. Dewey pocketed it and climbed the stairs.

Suze stood next to her table, scowling and holding Dewey’s hammer in one hand. Dewey stopped a safe distance away. “What’s up, doc?” she said.

“It’s all stupid.” Suze put the hammer down with a slam that made Dewey wince. Her hammer.

Suze blew a raspberry in the direction of the pile of bottle caps. “I can’t figure out how to stick them onto the box. Glue doesn’t work, ’cause the inside isn’t flat. I tried filling the whole cap, but it just runs out everywhere.” She pointed to a congealing beige pool on a piece of newspaper.

“The drill slips off and scratches the paint. I hammered a nail through, but it just made a big dent in the cap.” Suze took a deep breath. “Then I laid one facedown on one of those boring horse books, and nailed it from the back side.”

“I’m fubaring them all up. I guess I’ll have to wait and ask Doña Luisa next time I’m over.”

“Want me to take a look?” Dewey asked. Sometimes Suze didn’t. When she was really cranky, she just snapped.

“Lemme see a good one.” The bottle cap’s edges were flared and fluted, the back side about an eighth of an inch deep and lined with cork. Dewey turned it over, turned it back again. “Okay, now a snafu’d one.”

“Oh. I’ve got that one.” Dewey took it out of her pocket and examined it. She ran a finger—gingerly—across the face, and could feel the sharp points pull at her skin. “Ugly,” she agreed. “And dangerous.”

“Ouch.” Dewey went to her shelves and came back with a wooden dowel three inches long and as big around as a quarter. “This might work.”

Dewey surveyed Suze’s worktable, a chaotic sea of unsorted, unorganized junk. She wasn’t sure how Suze ever found anything. “You got any scraps of wood? Like a cigar box lid?”

“I think so.” Suze pawed through an even more jumbled crate on the floor and came up with a thin piece of wood the size of a postcard. “How ’bout this?”

Suze handed her the brown jar, and Dewey glued the dowel to the center of the wood. It stood up like a tiny ring-toss game.

“Okay.” Suze began sorting the good bottle caps into piles by color. Dewey picked up a LIFE magazine and leafed through its pages. This month’s, so Suze hadn’t cut it up yet. She stopped at a full-page drawing of a man on a gallows.

“Yeah. Their rockets—bombs—killed thousands of people. Why isn’t that a war crime?”

“My dad says it doesn’t matter, ’cause we need ’em to teach our army how to work the controls and stuff.” Suze touched the dowel. “It’s stuck tight.”

“Okay. Hand me the hammer and a little nail.” Dewey turned the platform over so the dowel end rested on the table. “Pencil?”

Suze handed her the fat black marking pencil. Dewey squinted and made an X on the wood, over the center of the dowel, and hammered the nail through it.

“There,” she said. “That should work.” She turned it over so that the base lay flat on the table again.

“Watch.” Dewey fit the bottle cap, cork side down, onto the top of the dowel, like a little hat. She set the tip of a nail in the center of the metal cap, then struck a single, sharp blow with the hammer. She wiggled the nail free of the wood and pulled it out. “Is that what you wanted?”

Suze picked it up. A neat round hole, its edges smooth and folded inward, pierced the center. She smiled, for the first time since Dewey had come upstairs. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted.” She admired the cap for a moment.

“You’re good.” Suze stared at the Wall for a few seconds. “Um, by the way, I keep forgetting to tell you. Those are really swell glasses you’ve got now.”

Dewey smiled. She’d had them for three days, and she knew Suze had noticed—new glasses were pretty obvious, lots more than a built-up saddle shoe. Maybe Suze had thought it would be rude to mention them? She sometimes got weird talking about personal stuff—underwear and the box of Kotex they shared in the bathroom.

“Thanks,” she said, “they’re—” But Suze was already fitting a new bottle cap onto the dowel. Dewey tucked Amazing Stories under her arm and headed downstairs to read in peace and quiet, away from Suze’s now-happy pounding.