1


THE NEW NEIGHBOR

Early Sunday morning, Alex headed up the hill. The weight she was carrying was heavy on her shoulder, but she was unaware of it. “Hi, Amelia,” she called to a blue dragonfly darting by. There were grass flowers in the warm breeze, a sweet scent that was almost dizzying. Then the sharp smell of fresh asphalt from the new road hit her with the thrill of a slap.

She stopped in front of one of the new houses. The ground around it was raw red clay. A large woman was on her knees, planting a bush. Her back was to the road.

“Hi!” the girl called as her dog’s tail began waving in expectation.

No response.

She cleared her throat to get the woman’s attention.

Nothing.

Finally Alex hollered, “Lady! Would you like to buy some plants?”

The dog barked, thinking it was some sort of game.

“Huh? What?” the woman called out, almost falling over as she jerked around, her trowel flying.

“Sorry,” Alex muttered, starting to turn away. “I’m selling plants.”

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed, her face clearing a little. “Well, hold on,” she called in a friendlier voice as she stood up slowly like you’d fold out a pocketknife.

The woman was tall and square-shouldered, in jeans and a dark red shirt. She had dark curly hair and strong-looking hands. Her face was long. She looked like she’d been out in the sun a lot.

Alex was an eleven-year-old in a not-too-clean T-shirt and dirt-stained jeans. She’d just cut her hair herself for summer. The plants she was selling were in two baskets hung on the notched broomstick she carried across a shoulder like a coolie. The large brown dog wagged happily beside her.

The woman’s face softened as she studied Alex. “Let’s see what you’ve got. I like plants, and I sure do need something around here.”

Alex figured the woman felt bad about getting angry. She pointed to her left basket. “These are azaleas, reds and whites,” she said in a professional voice. “They’re a dime each. In this other basket there’s hollyhocks and foxgloves. They’re two for a nickel. The foxgloves’ official name is digitalis. You get heart medicine from the leaves.”

The woman looked closely, then nodded. “Right! I’ll take ’em all if you’ll show me where they should go.”

“Sure,” said the girl as she lifted off her carrying pole and started emptying the baskets, delighted to have made such a big sale.

“First tell me your name,” the woman said, wiping her big hands on her jeans. “Tell me about yourself and how you got into the plants business. Tell me inside. I haven’t got my money on me. I’ve got milk, and I can give you a bomber bar I invented for the high-altitude pilots.”

“A bomber bar? What’s that?”

“Come on in; I’ll show you.”

Alex hesitated. She’d been warned about going alone into a stranger’s house, but there was something intriguing about this woman. Alex imagined herself a spy, read all the spy stories in the magazines, figured she was pretty good at telling who was dangerous. She decided to risk it.

“Can Jeep come in too?” she asked. “He won’t do anything.”

She didn’t say so, but Jeep was her protection. If she said “Sic!” he’d attack.

The woman understood. “OK.”

“Got something for him?” Alex asked.

“I reckon,” the woman said, smiling and sticking out her hand. “I’m Captain Ebbs. Call me Ebbs.” She had a nice smile.

Alex rubbed her hand clean and shook Ebbs’s. It was rough and twice as big as hers. Ebbs didn’t paint her nails like Alex’s mother did.

“I’m Alexis Hart,” she said. “I live down the hill, last house above the creek. You can call me Alex.”

Ebbs’s house was a small white clapboard box like the others in the development, but inside it looked strange. The floors were bare and it was almost empty, except tacked to the walls were photographs of fighter planes, bombers, different-sized rockets, and a big balloon with a gondola underneath. In one corner there was a dark painting.

Alex stared at the photographs, the rockets especially. They were bigger, much bigger, than the ones in her book. Ebbs was in one picture standing with some officers and a tall man in a suit. She wore a military uniform with a narrow slant hat.

Alex’s house was filled with rugs, stuffed chairs, and little tables with photographs of old people in polished silver frames.

“You waiting for the rest of your stuff?” she asked as Ebbs pointed her to one of the two kitchen chairs and plunked down a glass of milk and a plate with a grainy-looking brown bar on it. Ebbs shook her head. “Nope, this is it,” she said, motioning around. “I move a lot because of my work, so I can’t keep much, and anyway, things slow you down. Do you bicycle?”

“Sure,” said Alex, taking a tentative bite of the bar, then putting it down. It tasted bitter.

Ebbs noticed but kept talking. “I sail a small boat. You don’t want anything extra on a sailboat either. It took me a while, but now I live like I’m sailing, everything essential and shipshape. Do you like to sail?”

“Never done it.”

“If you want, I’ll teach you.”

“Thanks,” said Alex. Then she asked in a polite voice, “Is there a Mr. Ebbs?”

Ebbs’s eyebrows went up a little. “My older brothers,” she said. “But they don’t live here. It’s just me,” she added quietly. “No family.”

“Oh.”

The dog whined.

“Right, I forgot!” Ebbs said. “Does he like cheese? I’ve got some old cheddar I can give him, but it’s pretty hard.”

“He’ll eat anything!”

As Ebbs sat down with a yellow chunk in her hand, the dog waved his big forward-curling tail. He was shorthaired but his tail was bushy. He came up to Ebbs slowly, stiff-legged and formal, sniffed, then took the cheese delicately and settled down to gnaw.

“Very dignified,” Ebbs said. “What’s his name again?”

“Jeep. He’s my brother’s dog, but he sticks with me.” Alex paused, then added, “Folks usually want to know why he’s called that.”

Ebbs waited for her to say, but she didn’t. Alex remembered her mother warning her about “going on,” talking too much.

“So tell me,” Ebbs demanded.

Alex relaxed. She liked to talk, and since Ebbs had bought her out, she didn’t have to hurry on.

“Chuck named him that because he’s the same color as his war surplus jeep,” she began. “The garbageman found him hurt by the road and left him with us. He said he was a Chesapeake Bay retriever, but he hates water and he doesn’t look like the ones in the book, so Mother says he’s a mutt. He sleeps on my bed even though he’s not supposed to. Mother says he makes my room smell like a caveman’s cave because of what he rolls in. He rolls in everything!” She didn’t tell how she pulled him close at night and buried her head in his chest, breathing in his damp warm dog scent.

Ebbs reached out and stroked the dog’s head as he swished his tail slowly like a Chinese fan. “OK, Jeep,” she said. “I’ve spent a lot of time in jeeps, so I won’t forget your name.”

As Jeep stretched out at her feet, Ebbs straightened up and turned to Alex. “So how did you get into the plants business?”

“It’s my dad. We do it together. Most mornings he gets up at five, so I do too. I’m the only one because it’s so early. He says dawn’s the best part of the day.”

“Right!” said Ebbs as she heaved up to get her purse out of the bread drawer. “What are you going to do with the money?” she asked as she counted out some coins.

“Buy stuff for Moon Girl. That’s our rocket. We named it after this German rocket movie.”

“No kidding!” Ebbs exclaimed. “What sort of rocket?”

“Like the ones in your pictures only a lot smaller,” Alex said, getting up to study the picture of Ebbs standing beside the big rocket. “What do you do?”

“I work with our space scientists,” Ebbs replied. “It’s classified, so I can’t say much, but in that one I’m with our top rocket engineer, Doctor Wernher von Braun. He’s the one in the suit. I helped get him for us. His rockets like the V-2 we’re standing beside are going to send us to the Moon.”

“Doctor Von?” Alex asked, her eyes open wide. “The V-2 to the Moon? What do you mean, you got him?”

“Helped,” Ebbs corrected. “He designed rockets the German Army used in the war. As it was ending, the Russians went after him for their program. We wanted him for ours. We got to him first.”

“He worked for the German Army?” Alex asked, remembering newsreels of marching troops Sieg Heiling Hitler and the swastika. “He was the enemy?”

Ebbs nodded. “Yes, but all he’s ever really cared about is building rockets for space travel.

“Tell me about the rocket you’re building.”

“We made it to shoot up on steam,” Alex said, “but when we got it going it fell over and chased us around. Then Chuck went away to school, but now he’s back so we’re going to fix it up to run on gunpowder.”

“Gunpowder? You’ve got gunpowder?”

“No, but we’re gonna make some. Our book’s got the Chinese formula for it. Dad’s got the sulfur we need—he uses it for killing bugs. The rest we’ll buy at the hardware store.”

Ebbs scowled. “A lot of people have got burned, lost hands and eyes trying to make gunpowder. Is your dad in on this?”

“No.”

“I see,” Ebbs said slowly. “How old is your brother?”

“Chuck’s seventeen. He can make anything,” Alex said proudly. “Mother says he’s got genius, but Dad says he’s wasting it ’cause he can’t buckle down and learn math. He was going to Tech, but he got kicked out.”

“Uh-oh. Why?”

“ ’Cause he mixes things up when he reads, and nobody can read anything he writes. My other brother, John, says his writing looks like what ancient people did sticking sticks into mud pads, but I can read it and so can Rosy, the guy who’s teaching us radio.”

Alex went to another photograph, this one of a white and black balloon hung with ropes and sandbags. There were men in diving suits waving from the small gondola hanging below.

She pointed. “Is that like the balloons they send up to check the weather?”

“Yeah,” said Ebbs, surprised, “only it’s a lot bigger. It’s called Skyhook. I work with it—send it way up with fruit flies and seeds to see how life does exposed to solar rays.”

“Why?” Alex asked.

“Because I work on food for space pilots—stuff like that bomber bar you didn’t like,” Ebbs explained. “I made ’em for the crews of the bombers in the pictures over there—guys who’d be in the air six or seven hours on a run and needed something to keep their energy up so they’d be alert for the hardest part of the flight, the landing. I’ve invented other space food too.”

Alex listened, rapt, for the next half hour as Ebbs described her concoctions and told Alex about the experiments they were doing to figure out how to keep the pilots from throwing up on liftoff and feeling nauseous in flight.

“Chuck and I read about space in the magazines,” Alex said. “Are we going up soon?”

“Maybe,” Ebbs replied, “but I can’t talk about it. Tell me, though—you mentioned weather balloons. What do you know about ’em?”

“Nothing yet,” Alex replied, “but Chuck and I are going to track one, find it coming down, and get its transmitter for our rocket.”

“Right,” Ebbs said, drawing out the word. “The same brother who makes the gunpowder—he’s into radio too?”

“Oh yeah!” Alex exclaimed. “Saturday mornings we go down to the Radio Institute where Dad works. Rosy’s teaching us. Chuck says we’re going to build a radar dish to track Moon Girl.”

Jeep started rattling his tags.

“We gotta go—Sunday dinner’s at noon,” Alex said, heading to the door.

“Come back later. Bring more plants,” Ebbs called as Alex followed Jeep out.

“OK!”