Saving Lucas Biggs (5 page)

“Really?” Mrs. Garrett teased, wrinkling her nose. “You like these?”

Charlie and Grandpa Joshua sat at the wooden picnic table, which was so old it was silver-gray and smooth as glass. The picnic table, in turn, sat under the oak tree, which was so old it had a personality—crotchety and protective at the same time, like a cranky grandma. It was one of the things I loved best about Charlie’s house: everything seemed to have been there forever, and nothing ever changed. When Charlie and Grandpa Joshua saw me, both of them stood up. They looked so much alike with their plaid shirts and old-fashioned politeness that I came as close to laughing as I had in days.

“Hey,” I said, and slid in next to Charlie on the picnic bench.

“Hey,” they both said back.

All unexpectedly, I felt shy. I’d met Grandpa Joshua lots of times before, of course, at holiday dinners and stuff, and after his wife, Grandma May, died a couple of years ago, he’d come for extended visits to Charlie’s house. But I realized right then, sitting across the table from him, that we’d always been together in the hustle and bustle, the laughing, goofing, and storytelling of Charlie’s family and mine. We’d talked but never
talk
-talked, and I was pretty sure we were about to have one very serious conversation.

Just when the awkwardness was getting unbearable, Charlie cleared his throat and said, “So. You’re probably wondering why I brought you all here today. . . .” His voice was fake-deep and fake-serious, and he made a triangular tent with his fingers like a CEO in a movie.

Grandpa Joshua and I looked at each other and shrugged.

“Not really,” I said, grabbing a cinnamon roll, opening my mouth hippo wide, and taking a bite.

“Nope,” said Grandpa Joshua, doing the same.

It was a good way to begin. I’ve found that almost everything is better when it starts with a joke and a mouthful of really great food.

But before long, Charlie and I were sitting, serious-faced and broomstick-straight, looking at Grandpa Joshua expectantly, with our hearts in our throats. At least, my heart was in my throat, stuck there and whirring like a cicada. And if I knew Charlie—and I did—his was, too. We were all set for Grandpa Joshua to unveil a grand plan to save my dad.

Instead, he told us a story, one that he introduced by saying, “Judge Biggs has it in for your dad, Margaret. Just as he’s always had it in for anyone who threatens the Victory Corporation’s interests. He’s bad, no doubt about it.”

“He’s evil,” I spat. “Heartless and evil through and through.”

“Maybe so. I’m not so sure about
through and through
, even now, but maybe. The thing is, he wasn’t always this way. As a matter of fact, he used to be one of my favorite people in the world.”

My heart stopped whirring. My heart just plain stopped.

“Wait!” Charlie squawked. “You
know
him?”

“When I was your age,” said Grandpa Joshua quietly, “Lucas Biggs was my best friend.”

Charlie and I just stared at him.

“Are you maybe confusing him with someone else?” I asked, finally, in a small voice. What if Grandpa Joshua’s memory was going? He was old, after all. If his mind was getting foggy with old age, how would he possibly help me?

But his answer was steady as a rock: “No.”

“But how could somebody like Judge Biggs be friends with somebody like you?” I asked.

“The history of our town,” said Grandpa Joshua, “is full of twists like that.”

Charlie, who was almost never rude, especially to adults, burst out with “Oh, come on! A history lesson? We don’t have time! And anyway, we all know the history of Victory. The Canvasburg Uprising, that miner—I forget his name—who sold everyone out and killed that guy, the—”

“Maybe you know
some
of the story,” interrupted Grandpa Joshua, as heated up as I’d ever seen him. “Maybe you learned a
version
of it in history class. But there’s more to it, so much more that you might want to reconsider everything you ever believed about Victory, Arizona.”

Fine. But how in the wide world did this have anything to do with my dad? I itched with impatience, but then I happened to get a look at Grandpa Joshua’s face. His usually kind brown eyes were fierce and sad and full of something I couldn’t name, maybe with
his
version of history, the one he’d carried around all this time, maybe with the truth that would set my dad free. I did my best to shove my impatience away.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell us. Please.”

“There are a lot of ways to break a person,” began Grandpa Joshua. “And Victory Fuels had a pretty good handle on all of them. People’s spirits they broke in the cruelest way: by first lifting them up, by making their workers, folks who’d traveled hundreds of miles for a new life, at first believe that they’d found one. But at some point, usually pretty early on, those families, mine included, would wake up and realize that while they’d been enjoying their decent house and their three meals a day, a trap had fallen smack down around them.

“The Victory Mine broke bodies, too,” he continued.

There was a tiny, sorrowful catch in his voice, and that’s when Grandpa Joshua’s story stopped being a history lesson and started being a story about real people, and even though I was dying for him to get to the part in it where my dad gets saved, I knew I had to listen to every word of what came next.

Josh

1938

EIGHT HOURS AFTER THE MINE collapsed, when Aristotle Agrippa and his rescue party finally carried my dad out, two of his ribs were broken and he had a fear of the dark that haunted him the rest of his life, but he was alive, and the very next day he went back to work. Mr. Alexandropoulos, whose life Dad had saved by running deeper into the shaft when he should’ve run the other way, was not so lucky. His backbone had cracked and he would never walk again.

So Elijah Biggs, the boss of the mine, fired him as he lay in his infirmary bed, then marched over to his house dressed in an expensive suit the color of sherbet and threw his family into the street. He even helped carry out a lamp and a few dishes.

“The Victory Corporation isn’t a charity!” Biggs informed the angry mob of miners that gathered in the yard to protest. It had already footed the bill for his infirmary stay and would probably never see that money again. And now, how could Mr. Alexandropoulos work in the mine if he was in a wheelchair? And how could he live in a Victory house if he didn’t work in the mine?

The crowd rippled, eddied, and murmured in anger. The two hulking “associates” in cheap suits who accompanied Biggs everywhere stood on his right and his left glowering, daring anybody to complain. Folks turned around to slink home. Biggs smirked in triumph. But Aristotle Agrippa, strong and straight, made his way through the crowd, and as we closed ranks behind him, we stood taller, and nobody felt like retreating anymore.

When Aristotle got to the Alexandropouloses’ front porch, face-to-face with Biggs, he said, “You got to stop this.” Everything and everybody fell silent. Even the thugs who passed for Biggs’s bodyguards put civil expressions on their flat faces to listen.

“You,”
spluttered Biggs, “can’t tell
me
to stop!”

“We can tell you what’s right,” replied Aristotle simply. “And what’s right is, you got to stop.”

Biggs turned to his stooges and muttered, “Fix this.” They shuffled their feet and glanced at each other and didn’t do it right away, because Aristotle stood there looking like something his forefathers in Athens might’ve carved from marble and set up in the town square, something you didn’t necessarily want to ball up your fist and punch.

“No,” said Aristotle, never taking his clear gray eyes off Biggs. “
You
take care of this.”

“I just did,” taunted Biggs, pointing at the Alexandropouloses’ possessions in the street.

“If you gonna do this to Mrs. Alexandropoulos,” Aristotle informed Biggs, “better do it to me, too.”

“What?” snapped Biggs.

“I ain’t gonna work for you,” declared Aristotle.

“Then you just lost your house,” barked Biggs.

“I know,” said Aristotle.

My dad limped forward right away and said, “I quit, too.”

And then and there, the whole crowd quit in protest, right down to the guy who oiled the elevator cable.

“Who—who’s going to work the mine?” stammered Biggs.

“We will,” answered Aristotle, “after you do what’s right.”

And so we found ourselves in a camp on the edge of town that became known affectionately as “Canvasburg” because of the huge old army tents from the Great War Mr. Darley’s veteran friends had donated for us to live in. Across town, the Victory Mine sat empty, earning not a penny. Biggs tried hiring replacements, a bunch of unemployed farmhands from Colorado, but they had no idea what they were doing and only managed to derail the mine train, start a fire in the elevator, and flood a quarter mile of tunnel, all without bringing out a single lump of coal. Soon, word went around that Biggs was up to his eyeballs in hot water with
his
boss in New York because he was losing money so fast.

The homemade tank showed up right after this rumor started.

It wasn’t much to look at. Just an old Model T with leaky tires, manhole covers welded all over like armor, and a machine gun bolted to the floor where the backseat used to be. It lumbered stupidly around the edges of our camp like an eyeless crab searching for prey at the bottom of the ocean. Biggs claimed it was manned by “detectives” protecting the upstanding people in the brick homes of Victory from us hooligans down in Canvasburg.

All the mining families met in an open spot amid the tents to decide what to do about it.

Mr. Martinelli stood up and said, “I got a hunting rifle!”

A murmur went through the crowd at the mention of a gun.

Aristotle rose slowly in the firelight, and from where I sat, he loomed even larger against the sky than the Victory
V
. Quietly, as the Model T motor coughed in the darkness and the creepy machine nosed around our camp, he said, “No guns. I seen what guns do. In the Great War.”

“But
they
started it,” challenged a voice from the crowd. “
They
brought the tank.
They
want to fight. It’s only fair if we—”

“We gonna fight,” Aristotle replied, as the whole crowd strained to catch every word. “But not like that.”

“Then how?” demanded the voice. A voice I recognized. Luke’s.

“There’s good people out there,” said Aristotle, staring across the dark desert as if he could actually see them. “I know them. We gonna tell them what’s happening. They help us.”

“We should give Victory a taste of their own medicine!” persisted Luke.

“Maybe, son,” replied Mr. Martinelli, nodding thoughtfully at Aristotle as he sat down again, “but maybe not yet.”

The next morning I heard a “pock” on the side of my family’s tent. I thought Luke was out front tossing acorns for a joke. Then I noticed a brand-new hole letting in sunlight, a hole the size of a bumblebee. I saw another one just like it in the far wall. For a few seconds, Mom and Dad and I stared at the dust motes swirling through the pencil-thin sunbeam. Preston sat frozen on his piano stool. Aristotle and Luke, who had come over like they did just about every morning to give my mother wildflowers they’d found by Honey Brook, froze in their tracks. The report of a gun echoed into silence among the hills.

And for a moment, even though it had two bullet holes in it, our tent still did its best to be our home.

There was the iron stove my mother cooked on, in the corner, cooling after breakfast. There were the pictures of our grandparents on the upright piano my dad had salvaged from a boarded-up church on the far side of the mountains in Mercury, New Mexico, so Preston could practice for his teacher, Mrs. Tasso. It still rang from the last note of the last scale Preston had played.

There was the bookshelf with the collected works of Charles Dickens on it we’d scavenged from beside the curb on trash day in the brick part of town.

There was my bed. Came from the same place. And in a corner, a bicycle we’d dug out of the dump. At least it was my bicycle that day. Luke and I shared it—we each kept it twenty-four hours and then it went next door.

For a few moments, it seemed like the stove and the bicycle and the piano and the other things we’d collected to fill up our cloth home would win. It seemed like that hole had never appeared, like the gunshot had never sounded.

“What . . .” Preston held up his right hand in wonder. His eyes were wide and his mouth made a perfect O of surprise. Three of his fingers were gone.

Then the machine gunner pulled hard on his trigger and we heard the yammer of his weapon as it cut our tents to confetti.

A bullet caught my mother in the leg and toppled her.

“Down! Down! Everybody down!” shouted Aristotle, pressing Luke and me flat on the floor of our tent. “The stove!” he said to my dad, who dragged Preston to it and shoved him under and turned around and did the same with Mom. They fit, but barely.