The Green Glass Sea

THE END OF June was hot and dry, so dry the air seemed sharp. What little grass there was turned brown and withered, and pine needles stood out pale and dead on the trees. Late in the afternoons clouds gathered over the mountains, and some nights the sky was alive with lightning, crackling and booming, but no rain reached the Hill. Tensions and tempers ran high. Everyone seemed to be on hold, as if waiting for a phone that refused to ring.

On a Thursday noon, Suze sat at the kitchen table, the remains of a peanut butter sandwich at her elbow, fiddling with some bottle caps. She had a dozen or so, all different colors. They were going into her next picture, but she hadn’t figured out where yet. She spun a Lemon NEHI cap with her thumb and finger, and it skittered across the oilcloth and plinked into the side of her mother’s coffee cup.

“Oh, for crissakes. Will you stop? ” Mrs. Gordon snapped. She put down the pencil she’d been using to do the puzzle in last Sunday’s paper. “Can’t you think of anything else to do?”

“Sorry, ” Suze said, stung. Her mother had been in a bad mood all week. She scooped up the errant bottle cap and put it into the shoebox on the chair next to her. “I’ll leave. ”

“Because Norma took the night shift running the vacuum separation, and we got good precipitate. I have almost eighty curies to proc—” She stopped and shook her head. “Oops. Shop talk. Anyway, because there’s a lot to do today. ”

“But isn’t everything done?” Suze asked. “If Daddy’s down there testing to see if it works, it must be finished, right?”

Terry Gordon looked at her watch. “The siren’s going to blow any second. Why don’t you see what Dewey’s up to?”

“Dewey’s never up to anything anymore, ” Suze sighed. “All she ever does is sit on her bed and read comics. She talks to me if I go in there, but she doesn’t want to do anything, not even invent stuff. ”

“Suze, she lost her daddy. Can you imagine anything harder? She’ll come out from under eventually, but it’s going to take some time. ”

“Imagine that, ” her mother said, trying not to smile. “Look, sweetie. I’m sorry. I know it’s been kind of lonely for you too. ” She picked up her white T badge and pinned it to the pocket of her shirt. “How about some night this week we play some gin? You and me? We haven’t done that in ages. ”

“And in the meantime, you can work on your art project. I like what you’re doing with the colors. ” She ruffled Suze’s hair on her way out the door and was gone.

Suze was startled and pleased. She hadn’t thought her mother was paying much attention. Maybe she would work on it for a while.

She cut and glued and sorted for an hour. It was hot in the kitchen, even with the windows open. Her sweaty fingers left smudges on the shiny paper, and she was thirsty. Suze started to turn on the tap for a glass of water, then remembered that there was a shortage—too many people on the Hill, in too hot weather—and they weren’t supposed to use water except for emergencies. And she’d drunk the last Coke in the icebox the night before.

She found her shoes under the couch and two dimes in the desk drawer. If only there was a Woolworth’s on the Hill. It would be nice to just wander and browse. She missed going into a store where she didn’t already know exactly what she’d find.

An hour later Suze returned with a Clark bar, the newest Wonder Woman, and a bad mood. She slammed the screen door and went back to the bedroom.

Dewey was sitting on her bed, barefoot, wearing a sleeveless man’s undershirt and a pair of khaki shorts. A comic was propped up on her knees.

Suze flopped hard onto her own bed and opened the Clark bar. By the time she’d crunched her way through to the end, peeling the wrapper down around the softening chocolate as she ate, her lips were smeared with brown and she felt a little better. “What’re you reading?” she asked Dewey.

“Airboy. ” Dewey held up the comic. Airplanes zoomed in the background behind a Jap pilot with bug-eyes and lots of blood gushing out of his mouth.

“It’s one of Charlie’s. Or Jack’s. I’m not sure which is which. ” Dewey lifted up the edge of her bedspread and pointed. “There’s a ton of them under here. You can read some, if you want. ”

Suze whistled. There were three or four huge stacks of comics under Dewey’s bed. She leaned over and took one off the top. The Sub-Mariner, a pointy-faced man wearing nothing but swim trunks, was beating up Nazis on a busted-up U-boat. “Cool, ” she said. “How come the boys gave you all their comics?”

“They didn’t give ’em to me. I’m just keeping ’em ’cause they had to go to their gramma’s last week. ”

“Couldn’t they just leave them in their house?” Suze asked. The boys lived in another of the Sundts, two buildings away.

“Their mom hates comics. Especially the war ones. They’ve been stashing ’em in their tree house, but they were afraid someone might swipe ’em, or they’d blow away if it got real windy. ” She dropped the bedspread. “Besides, I’ve read all of yours. ”

“Mostly. There’s some Flash and Blue Beetle and Batman, and lots and lots of war. Boy comics. ” She looked down at the comic in her hand. “This one’s got a girl in it. The Black Angel. But she doesn’t really get to do much. ”

“Yeah. All of them. ” Suze thought about what had happened on the way back from the PX. Dewey would understand. “I had just finished my Coke, maybe twenty feet from Barbara’s house on Bathtub Row, when her and Betty and a couple others came out wearing their Girl Scout hats and those yellow neck things. I guess it’s too hot for a whole uniform. ”

“Yeah, they saw me all right. Betty said, ‘Look out, here comes a truck, ’ and they all crossed over to the other side of the road, laughing. Like it was funny. ” Suze said the F so hard she almost spit.

“Yeah, like I was a skunk or something. ” Suze leaned on one elbow and looked at Dewey. “How did you know?”

“Of course not—oh, you haven’t been around. She’s in Michigan for the summer. Visiting an aunt or someone. ” Suze sighed again. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when school starts. What if none of them will sit near me?”

“Yeah. Shazam. ” Suze thought about that for a minute, then smiled. “I’ve got an idea, ” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while. ” She jumped off the bed and went into the kitchen to get her shoebox.

Ever since she discovered the dump, Suze had been collecting little scraps of her own. Not metal parts, like Dewey’s Mason jar full of screws and springs, but random objects whose colors and details caught her eye: a lead soldier with a broken hand, some acorns, a doll’s shoe, some stamps with intricately patterned borders, green wooden houses from a Monopoly game, a March of Dimes pinback button, bottle caps, some small smooth stones she’d found in the creek at the bottom of the nearest canyon.

She sifted through these treasures until she found a pale caramel river rock, a little smaller than an Oreo, but thicker. It fit snugly in the curves of her cupped hand, a good shape, a nice weight. A second stone was dark gray, a little bigger and flatter.

Suze reached for her box of colored pencils. She selected a red one and rasped the sharpener around its blunted tip, letting the curls of wood drift into the wastebasket by the side of the table. The scarlet edges stood out sharply against the dark pile of coffee grounds.

The caramel stone wobbled on the hard tabletop, so she put a woven potholder underneath it to steady it, and carefully printed SHAZAM on it. Not quite right. She used her art gum to erase the letters, brushing the rubber crumbs off the table with the edge of her hand.

Solomon for wisdom, Hercules for strength, Atlas for Courage . . . Suze grinned and printed ΣΗΑΖΑΜ, then erased that too, because in capitals it just looked like it was spelled wrong. Lowercase was better. She sharpened the pencil again and printed σηαζαμ.

That was it. That looked magic. But she erased it a third time and printed the last version again, as neatly and carefully as she could, because now it was a sorcerer’s stone, and you can’t be too careful. The second stone was easier. She blew on both of them to get rid of any art gum crumbs or dust, and went into the living room, returning with two bottles of ink and her tiniest paintbrush. Black India ink for the caramel stone. Silver ink, a Passover present from Grandpa Weiss, for the dark one. It took her ten painstaking minutes to letter each stone:

σηαζαμ

Suze picked up one corner of the potholder and slid it to the other side of the table, where the stones could lie flat and undisturbed until the ink was completely dry and wouldn’t smear.

She read her new Wonder Woman for twenty minutes, just to be sure, then checked. The stones looked dry. She tilted her head at different angles, to see if there was any wet-ink reflection. Nope. She wiped her hand on the leg of her shorts and gingerly touched one with the tip of a finger. No smear. Suze carried the stones back to the bedroom on the potholder as if they were crown jewels on a velvet pillow.

“Nice rocks, ” said Dewey. She tented the comic upside down, using her knee as a bookmark, and leaned forward. “What kind of writing is that?”

“They were almost all Greeks, so I figured this is probably how the wizard spelled his secret name, ” Suze explained.

“You know what I was wondering?” Dewey asked. “How come Mercury? That’s the Roman name for the guy on the dime. The fast guy. The Greeks called him Hermes. ”

Dewey examined them closely. “I’ll take the silver one, ” she said finally. She picked it up and cradled it in her hand. “What are they for?”

“They’re the magic stones of the Shazam Club, ” Suze said. She picked up the other stone. “We carry them in our pockets, and no one else knows we’ve got secret powers. Wisdom and strength and—I forget the rest. ”

“Yeah, ” said Suze. She looked down at the stone in her hand, then reached over and chinked it against Dewey’s. “Shazam, ” she said.

“Shazam. ” Dewey tucked the stone into the left-hand pocket of her shorts and picked up Thrilling Comics by the spine, pinching it shut. She tossed it onto her pillow. “Wanna see if there’s anything good at the dump?” she asked.