Saving Lucas Biggs (6 page)

In the meantime, Aristotle grabbed the piano and shoved it onto its face. Beneath the keyboard, he hid Luke and me from the flying bullets.

“Stay, boys,” ordered Aristotle. “Josh’s dad and me, we going around to hide people behind all the stoves and iceboxes.”

“No!” argued Luke. “Get Mr. Martinelli’s gun. We have to stop those guys!”

“Be still, Luke!” barked Aristotle. To my dad, he said, “Frederic. Let’s go.” I think he knew, after my dad had risked his life to save Mr. Alexandropoulos in the mine shaft, that he was brave enough to do what they were about to do.

As soon as their shadows disappeared, Luke bolted from under the piano. Outside, the gunfire had slowed to short, jumbled bursts. “Luke!” I hollered as he scuttled, head low, around the corner of the tent and headed for the Martinellis’. He didn’t listen, so I chased him. The gunshots seemed to have moved farther off.

I could hear a baby wailing and someone was shouting for her family members in panic. A thin tendril of smoke drifted up from our left, but above it all, the sunlight blazed and the air was crystal clear.

Inside her tent, Mrs. Martinelli lay on the floor, unhurt. Beneath her, protected by her bulk, lay her four kids. “Where’s Mr. Martinelli?” asked Luke. “Where’s his gun?”

“He took it,” panted Mrs. Martinelli. “He’s up in the mountains hunting for dinner!”

“For crying out loud!” shouted Luke. “What are we going to do?”

“Find something heavy,” I replied, scanning the tent, “to shelter the Martinellis.” Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to own a stove. But they had dug a fireplace right in the middle of their floor, under a hole in the canvas roof that let smoke out. It was at least two feet deep and three feet across.

Four rounds spattered across the floor, kicking up dust and bits of gravel, followed by four burps from the machine gun. Bullets, I was learning, travel faster than the sound of the gun that fires them.

“Get in!” I shouted, surprised at how steady I sounded as I picked myself up off the floor. It occurred to me that if I got killed, I’d never hear the shot that did me in.

But mostly I thought:
Is everybody safe?

Mrs. Martinelli tossed her kids into their cooking pit like sacks of salt and leaped in behind them. Luke was already out the door, but when I tried to crab-walk after him, I felt a tug. Mrs. Martinelli, reaching over the lip of her hiding place, had me by the ear. “Climb in here, you little fool!” she screeched.

“No,” I said. “I have to help.”

Her free hand happened to land on an iron frying pan lying nearby.

“Luke’s out there,” I protested, frantically trying to wriggle free of her grasp before she dragged me into the pit.

Mrs. Martinelli drew her skillet back. Just as she cocked her elbow to clock me, a slug zinged off it. She dropped the frying pan like it had just come off a red-hot stove, and I made my escape, leaving her to the safety of their accidental foxhole.

Outside, I found Luke dragging Ed Kowalski toward his tent. Ed had been shot in both feet. I took one arm and Luke took the other, and we managed to get Ed inside. They say reading is good for you. Turned out, it sure was good for Ed. He and his brothers had a tin steamer trunk full of old detective novels they’d read over the years. That thing was three feet high and four feet thick and jammed solid with cheap novels. It stopped slugs better than armor plate. By now, we knew exactly where the tank was firing from—on the side of a hill due east of Canvasburg—and Luke and I hid Ed behind his books and crouched there with him.

The sound of whimpering came from nearby. “The Tiklas kids,” moaned Ed. “Next door.” Luke and I looked at each other. Neither of us said a word. We slithered under the wall of Ed’s tent and then under the wall of the Tiklases’.

“An icebox!” shouted Luke. We pushed it over on its side and stuck the Tiklas kids behind it. A burst of fire riddled the radio by my elbow, and then the shots drifted up into the branches of a tree outside. “They’re not even aiming,” muttered Luke, watching the stream of gunfire wander off into the desert outside the door. “They’re shooting from the hill in front of camp, but they’re just taking potshots.”

“Hundreds of potshots,” I added.

Luke threw back his head and, at the top of his lungs, shouted to the whole camp: “They’re firing from the hill to the east! Get behind something heavy! You’ll be safe!”

“A stove. An icebox. A piano,” I hollered.

From nearby, I heard somebody take up the call and pass it down the rows of tents. The message made its way around camp. Then silence fell.

“Luke? Everybody’s safe?” I whispered.

“Maybe,” said Luke cautiously.

“Help,” came a voice. “Help me.”

“Mrs. Tasso?” I called.

“I can’t move!” she wailed. Mrs. Tasso was eighty-nine years old and frail as a sparrow.

“Her tent is three rows away,” I said. As I thought about running through the open to get there, all the fear I hadn’t had a chance to pay attention to before suddenly rose inside me like a black tide.

“We better go now, before they start shooting again,” said Luke.

In the clear sunlight of the morning, it was plain what Luke and I had to do—and that we’d do it together.

We bolted for Mrs. Tasso’s tent.

We found her crouched in the middle of her floor. “Where’s Mr. Tasso?” I asked.

“He’s up in the hills fishing in Honey Brook,” she said.

Instead of knocking over her old piano for shelter, Luke laid hold of a giant oak cupboard and yanked it onto its face. A cascade of crockery poured out, along with a pistol. We got Mrs. Tasso hunkered down in the remains of her dinner dishes, and Luke snatched the gun and bolted.

I followed through thickening smoke and found him struggling with his father behind an old coal hopper at the edge of Canvasburg, fifty yards from where the tank sat parked and silent. Just as I got there, Aristotle took the gun.

“. . . they can’t do that!” Luke cried as I crab-walked up. “It’s not right! We have to show them!”

“You get yourself shot, my brave Luke, and that don’t help nobody!” Aristotle rejoined, restraining him.

“Come on, Luke,” I chimed in. “Those aren’t playground bullies! They’re crazy! And they have a machine gun!”

“What should we do then?” retorted Luke. “Just hide here and take it?”

Aristotle looked at the gun in his hand with resignation in his eyes. My dad, at that moment, came scrambling up. “I think everybody’s covered,” he said. “I don’t think they can hit anybody unless they move the tank.”

Aristotle opened the chamber of the pistol. I could tell it was something he’d done before. “Empty,” he said, dropping it on the ground like he was relieved to be rid of it. “Okay.”

And with that, he took off running in a giant sweep toward the tank. Nobody inside seemed to notice. “They don’t see him,” observed my dad. “They’ve been firing blind this whole time. They didn’t leave any way to aim when they built that ridiculous thing.”

“Did Aristotle know that before he ran off?” I asked. My dad shrugged.

Luke watched, his fists clenched, shaking. I saw him wipe away a tear. “Be careful, Daddy,” he whispered. “And get ’em!”

Aristotle had circled all the way around behind the tank and scaled the back. Frantically, we watched the nose of the machine gun swivel in his direction, but it couldn’t turn far enough. “They can’t point their gun backward,” muttered my dad.

As we watched, Aristotle appeared on top. He unscrewed the hatch, reached in, and yanked out a man. The man was surprisingly scrawny, and dirty, and sheepish. “You shot first!” we heard him whine.

“With what?” demanded Aristotle. “We don’t got guns.” He tossed the man to the ground, and the man scuttled away.

He reached in and fished out another. “Somebody threw a rock!” this one complained.

“Hogwash!” bellowed Aristotle, and threw him off the tank to skitter after the first, smacking the dust off his hands as the guy disappeared into the brush.

“That was the bravest thing I ever saw in my life,” I breathed.

“I never even saw anything close,” said my dad.

“He let ’em go!” replied Luke in astonishment. “What’s wrong with him? He should’ve pounded ’em! He should’ve wrung their necks! They shot at us, for Pete’s sake! Is he yellow? Is he—”

“Luke,” said my dad gently as Aristotle jumped down from the tank and made his way toward us. Luke stared at Dad wildly, and my father put a hand on his shoulder, holding him until he calmed down. “You and Joshua find water. Bring it to the hurt people, because they’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Come on, Luke. Come on,” I said. Slowly, Luke followed me back to camp, where we found a tin cup and a bucket, which we took to Honey Brook.

We heard the sound of sobbing and spotted the three Rodi kids behind one of the flowerpots Mrs. Tasso had planted in the middle of camp to pretty things up. “Everything’s going to be okay,” said Luke quietly, even though he said it through clenched teeth, and he was shaking with rage.

Down the way, I saw my dad give me a thumbs-up from our tent. Preston and my mom were alive.

“We should check on Mrs. Tasso again,” I said. We ran to her tent. In front lay Mr. Tasso. Two trout had fallen out of his creel, and they twitched in the dust as their gills worked uselessly. Over him knelt Mrs. Tasso.

“He’s dead,” she gasped, looking into my eyes. “Joshua! My Theophilus is dead!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, or to do. I saw that she was wounded, too, her dress sopping with blood, and I remembered what my dad had said. “You should take a drink,” I told her. But I’d spilled all our water. “Wait, Mrs. Tasso,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

Luke sat beside her while I ran. I filled my bucket, but I didn’t go back right away. I was too sad, I was too afraid, I was too confused. When I came back, Mrs. Tasso had died. Luke still held her hand.

“Mrs. Martinelli!” I cried, spotting the smoldering ashes where her tent used to be.

They were all dead. Mrs. Martinelli and her children. The gunfire hadn’t so much as grazed them. They’d stayed safe in the pit in the middle of their tent. But one of the last bullets to fly had shattered her kerosene lamp, and it had set their tent aflame, and the fire had left nothing for them to breathe in their hideout. The whole thing had happened in seconds. Mr. Martinelli ran down the mountain when he heard the gunfire, but he was too late.

Doc O’Malley came. He was from town, but it turned out he wasn’t one of
them
. Everybody who wasn’t dead, he saved. He didn’t say a whole lot. He didn’t have a nurse, a partner, or an assistant. He just worked and worked, stitched and palpated, examined and scrutinized with his blazing green eyes, set bones and observed and listened and kept Luke and me running back and forth to the pharmacy for hours straight, scribbling down orders on a prescription pad, handing them over without looking up from Sally Tiklas or my mother or my little brother. And Joe Donahue, the pharmacist, stayed up all night and filled every one, handing each bottle back to Luke or me without saying a word about money. Mr. Donahue was a terrible businessman but a great human being.

Later, in the dark, on the edge of Canvasburg farthest from the mountain, hidden from the lights of Victory, Aristotle and my dad and Luke and I dug graves. Four small ones. Plus three the size of grown-ups. Others from Canvasburg pitched in to help: Mr. Darley, the Rubino sisters, and all three patched-up Kowalski boys. When the sun rose on the far side of the plain, the graves were done. At sunset that day, we held the funerals.

There wasn’t a preacher, so Aristotle stood under a cottonwood tree by Honey Brook and said as much as he could say. And what he said was: we were going to stay. All of us. We would never leave those children where they lay, or their mother, or Mr. or Mrs. Tasso, because we loved them. We would keep living our lives right here.

Mr. Martinelli, who’d been staring into the sky like he was hypnotized, shouted, “I’m going to kill them! Every one of them! I’m going to take my gun and find them and kill them, starting with Biggs! I’m declaring war on the Victory Corporation!”

We all looked at Aristotle. Especially Luke.

And Aristotle said it again. “We gonna do better than that for these souls, our friends. We gonna take away the occasion of all wars.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Mr. Martinelli. “Nobody out there even knows what’s happening to us. We’re on our own. We need guns. We need to fight.”

“Look,” Aristotle said, unfurling a sheaf of paper he’d stowed in his jacket. “I been writing letters. To people I know. Good people. This guy, Walter Mendenhall, he’s a reporter, he writes for the
Weekly World Worker
, in Denver, Colorado, he gonna tell people. They gonna be out
raged
!” And for a second, I could see it. Deep in Aristotle, under his bravery and his calm, he was as angry as any of us. But he held it tight and kept it buried deep.

“
If
he agrees to write about our story,” my mother added, leaning forward in the kitchen chair we’d set out on the grass for her. “And
if
anybody bothers to read the
Weekly World Worker.
That’s a radical paper, Aristotle. It’s not exactly the
New York Times
.”

“We gonna get him to write about us,” said Aristotle. “And people gonna read about us.” And really, the way he said it, I had to believe him, and I guess everybody else did, too, even Mr. Martinelli, who dropped his eyes to the ground and fell silent.

Everybody except Luke. “We need to
fight
, Dad!” he protested. “For
ourselves
!”

“That’s what we’re doing, my Luke,” said Aristotle.

But Luke just turned away in disgust.