Saving Lucas Biggs (2 page)

“Be there,” he said.

I didn’t answer, just flicked my eyes away again, staring straight ahead and not looking back, even when I heard Charlie shouting my name, over and over, fainter and fainter. Pretty soon, his voice was as gone as everything else, and I was back on that ocean of silence, as alone as I had ever been in my life.

Josh

1938

“NEXT STOP, VICTORY, ARIZONA!” hollered the conductor of the streamlined, high-speed, silver-sided, all-steel, superdeluxe, ultramodern Desert Zephyr. I craned my neck to see over my little brother Preston’s bobbing head, but all I glimpsed was an endless range of sawtooth mountains reclining beneath a towering sky.

Two days before, a doctor in Memphis, Tennessee, had looked at an X-ray of Preston’s lungs and told my mom and dad, “Take him someplace dry and sunny.”

“When?” asked my father.

“Now,” said the doctor.

“For how long?” asked my mother.

“Until he’s well,” said the doctor.

“Or . . . ?” began my dad.

The doctor just shook his head. He wasn’t big on small talk, but he had Preston’s best interests at heart.

Numb, we had trudged out the door and caught a ride to our hometown, Low Ridge, Mississippi, on the back of the mail truck. With us rode a bale of Memphis newspapers. I was the one who spotted the
V
in the bottom corner of the classifieds on the back page. “Live in Victory! Work for Victory! Enjoy the good life!” read the ad. Turned out there was a coal mine in a town called “Victory, Arizona,” in need of miners.

“Arizona is dry and sunny. And with a name like ‘Victory,’” declared my dad, “it’s the
only
place for us. Hannah! Preston! What do you—”

But my mother, reading over my shoulder, just said, “The sooner the better.”

Dad telegraphed the Victory Fuels Corporation, landed one of those great jobs, raided what was left of his bankroll after the doctor visit, and bought four tickets for the Zephyr. Before I had a chance to tell the mayor of Low Ridge I wouldn’t be mowing his lawn anymore, I found myself watching the sun set on a strange serrated countryside outside the window of the train while Preston’s head nodded sleepily against my shoulder.

“I know,” said my dad from across the aisle, studying the bemused expression on my face through narrowed eyes. “This all happened in a hurry, didn’t it?”

“It’s just that—I don’t know anything about the desert, Dad,” I replied. “Except—in Bible stories, God is always banishing people to it when he gets mad. For up to forty years. And sometimes he afflicts them with boils. And I read that sidewinders and Gila monsters live in the prickly pear, and scorpions nest in your shoes while you sleep.”

“Nobody told me about the scorpions,” said my dad, shuddering.

“But ‘Victory’
is
a heck of a lot better name for a town than ‘Low Ridge.’”

“Much better,” agreed my dad.

“And if it’s good for Preston,” I added, “I’m all for it.”

The rhythm of the train wheels on the track began to slow, and before I knew it, we were gliding into the station. Preston woke up. “Are we there?” he asked. He reached for my hand, because he was still halfway asleep, and in his sleep, he liked me.

“We’re here, Presto,” I replied.

Three minutes later, the train was gone and all four of us stood rooted to our spots, staring up at a fifty-foot-high, fire-engine-red
V
looming against a sky so blue, I wanted to pour it into glasses for my family to drink.

V
for Victory, the town, and
V
for the Victory Fuels Corporation.

“It’s beautiful,” murmured my mother. She wasn’t talking about the sign, though, or even the town; she gazed at the green-shouldered mountain towering behind it all: Mount Hosta.

My dad set our bag on the platform and gawked at Victory as its lights flickered on in the dusk, absentmindedly patting his pockets for cigarettes.

“You gave up smokes two years ago, Dad,” Preston reminded him.

It was true. He couldn’t afford them.

My mother wobbled on the heels of her Sunday shoes and sat down suddenly on the disintegrating cardboard box held together with twine that passed for our luggage. Her hands began busily smoothing invisible wrinkles out of her best dress.

“It looks like—boats!” Preston exclaimed. “It smells like—perfume! It feels like—Thanksgiving!”

I didn’t always understand what Preston was talking about. Neither did Preston. He was only nine, and his thoughts followed their own rules. Still, I got what he meant about Thanksgiving. Even though it was barely September, the breeze flowing off the high slopes behind Victory felt as crisp as November in Mississippi. I saw what he meant about boats, too. The houses of Victory reminded me of a nautical painting that used to hang in our elementary school: they glistened in rows like the fleet of ships, only the ships rode a dark wave and the houses rode a mountain.

“One of those houses is ours!” declared my father. He reached down to help Mom up, and then he hefted our alleged suitcase. Mom drew a deep breath and smiled, and when she took his trembling hand in hers, I realized they were both as nervous as I was.

As we walked down Main Street, we saw a redbrick building three stories tall. “Look at that!” exclaimed Dad. “A clock, right in the tower of the Victory courthouse.” He sounded so proud, you’d have thought he put it there himself.

“There’s a bank,” hollered Preston. “To put all our money in!”

“And here,” said my mom, “is a doctor’s office: Peter O’Malley. I bet he’s good. He sounds good. Doesn’t he sound like a good doctor?”

“Indeed he does,” replied my dad.

“A restaurant,” I sang out. It was called the Globe, according to the gold letters on the plate-glass window facing the street; it featured white tablecloths and a waiter in a tuxedo. “Like in New York. Or Paris.”

Inside the Globe, a family sat at a table in a pool of yellow light that flowed across the carpet and poured onto the sidewalk. The father hoisted a glass of butter-colored wine as if toasting their good fortune. The mother dangled her fork above a glistening plate of lettuce. And the two kids laughed at something she’d said. Each one had a hamburger as big as a catcher’s mitt on his plate.

“Hey!” observed Preston indignantly. “They haven’t taken a single bite, and the waiter is already bringing pie.”

“Let’s eat here, Dad,” I said. When I saw his eyes widen, I quickly added, “I mean—another time—after we save up enough money. Our whole family. We’ll sit at that table while the sun sets and it’ll get dark outside, but we’ll be together, inside, in the light.”

“That,” said my dad, smiling at the thought, “is
exactly
what we’ll do.” Then he stopped at a side street that veered straight up the foot of the mountain. “‘C Street,’” he said, reading the sign.

Preston took off like an antelope. “Yahoo!” he caterwauled, flashing his sharp white teeth in the dark ahead of us.

“Preston hasn’t coughed since we got here, Frederic,” said my mother as we began climbing.

We passed a house with a sign in front that said
SYLVIA TASSO, PIANO INSTRUCTION
, which Preston eyed with distrust, because while he was big on the piano, he wasn’t much for piano teachers. Dad announced, “Here it is!” stopping in front of a little bungalow perched on a level spot on the apron of the mountain. “Our new home!”

It was a real ripsnorter. Better than anything we’d ever had back in Mississippi, because there we’d lived in a lean-to made of rusty tin. The house at 403 C Street had a wooden floor, a stove, running water, a sink for washing dishes, and electric lights. It had a bedroom for my parents and one for Preston and me. It had a bathtub.
Inside
the house! The icebox was already filled with ice. My dad said somebody from the Victory company must have gathered it earlier that day in the peaks of the mountains above us and brought it down. There were fresh eggs in the icebox, too, which was good, since we were starving and all we had were the ragged socks in our lopsided box and the clothes on our backs. There was even a pine table with four chairs around it waiting for us in the kitchen.

“The company is giving all this—to us?” marveled my mother.

“They take care of their own! Three cheers for Victory Fuels!” exclaimed my dad, seating himself proudly at the head of the table like the newly crowned king of a small but significant nation.

“Look at this!” cried my mom, opening a glittering chrome bread box on the counter by the sink. “Store-bought bread!”

I cringed as Preston tore open the bag, snatched the heel, and stuffed it into his mouth, which he could stretch so wide it still gave me a start, even though I’d known him nine solid years.

We heard our new neighbor begin the Minuet in G Major by J. S. Bach on her piano.

“Tomorrow, I start work in the coal mine,” declared my dad, rising from the table and taking my mother’s hand. “But tonight, I hope you’ll dance with me.”

Preston looked at me and I looked at Preston as our parents whirled around the floor. “They’re good,” he admitted in surprise. “Even Dad.”

“The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of Arizona,” I declared. We’d never known our parents had it in them.

Later, I woke up in the dark beside Preston in our new bed. He breathed as serenely as a puppy. I lay in our room, which smelled of green wood and fresh paint, watching the window curtains billow around me as if I were suspended in a cloud. The face of the old windup alarm clock I’d brought from Mississippi glowed twenty to five. A coyote sang outside. His pals joined him. Chilly desert air rolled down the mountain and poured into my room. I’d never heard a coyote in my life, and now a whole choir of them howled at the moon thirty feet from my head.

I’d never seen a mountain, and now I lived at the foot of one.

I’d never smelled the desert—and Preston was right. It did smell like perfume. Very interesting perfume. Kind of a cross between a bed of roses and an asphalt parking lot.

And Preston could breathe! I felt the dark spirit that had been hovering over our family ever since we’d walked out of Governor’s Hospital rise on the wind, turn west, and fly away.

A light appeared in the kitchen. Past my half-opened door, down the hall, I saw Dad take a seat at the table, alone in a bright yellow pool. Mom bustled up and set down an empty plate in front of him, which he stared at as if he’d never seen a plate before. Mom disappeared, but, a few seconds later, she reappeared with scrambled eggs. Before long, she was back with sausage, then coffee. Dad hardly moved. While Mom stood beside him admiring the breakfast she’d prepared, he finally picked up his fork as if to dig in, but as soon as she turned her back, he put it down and sat very still.

At five a.m., he’d start in the Victory Mine. He wouldn’t come up until five p.m. For most people, that might seem like a long time, but he used to work twenty-four hours straight sometimes in Low Ridge, farming land that belonged to somebody else to raise cotton that he had to trade away for less than what it cost to feed us. Sharecropping. Sometimes the temperature hit 107 degrees. Sometimes swarms of snakes invaded the fields. But he never complained, or missed a day, and he sure as heck never got the look in his eye that he had now.

But of course he had never ridden an elevator down a hole in the ground for half a mile to spend twelve hours without seeing the sky.

“Preston still hasn’t coughed,” I heard my mother say. “Not once. We did the right thing, Frederic.”

I reached out and found Preston’s hand as he slept, and my father, because he had to, stood up straight, took a breath, squared his shoulders, kissed my mom, and clomped out into the darkness wearing new leather boots—the company had given him those, too, along with the pick and shovel leaning against our mailbox and the lamp screwed to the front of his helmet.

Peering under the edge of my bedroom curtain, I watched him trudge toward the Victory sign at the mouth of the pit.

Out of the dimness, a tall man appeared. His shoulders were approximately as wide as a pool table; he had long legs, a little bowed, turned-in toes, and enough curly black hair for a flock of sparrows to nest in. In the glow of the Victory sign I saw him laugh, snatch the helmet off Dad’s head, and drop-kick it into the crowd of miners who’d materialized from the streets all around him. After the miners had played a quick soccer game with it, its shiny yellow paint looked five years old.

“Now you look like a real min-a,” shouted the black-haired man gleefully, placing the helmet back on Dad’s head like a bishop crowning a prince. Dad laughed. Draping his arm around my father, the man said, “Don’ worry. We gonna take fine care a you!” And with that, they all stepped into the elevator and disappeared into the earth, leaving the rest of us behind in the glow of dawn.

Before Preston and I left for school, I looked up from the breakfast table to see a man standing in our kitchen. He wore expensive clothes and a smile that fooled nobody.

“How’d you get in here?” Preston asked him.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” purred the well-dressed intruder. “Elijah Biggs. Manager of Victory Mine. I used to live in this very house. But I improved myself. Quite a lot. In fact, just last month, Mr. Theodore Ratliff came all the way from New York and promoted me to chief of mining operations.” With that, Elijah Biggs adjusted his yellow straw boating hat, shot the cuffs of his snow-white suit, and made sure his powder-blue bow tie was riding straight.