Troublemakers (40 page)

   
The Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph I held in my hand, the one Jeffty said he had gotten in the mail for ten cents
(ten cents!!!)
and two Ovaltine labels, was brand new, shiny gold metal, not a dent or a spot of rust on it like the old ones you can find at exorbitant prices in collectible shoppes from time to time... it was a
new
Decoder. And the date on it was
this
year.

   
But
Captain Midnight
no longer existed. Nothing like it existed on the radio. I’d listened to the one or two weak imitations of old-time radio the networks were currently airing, and the stories were dull, the sound effects bland, the whole feel of it wrong, out of date, cornball. Yet I held a
new
Code-O-Graph.

   
“Jeffty, tell me about this,” I said.

   
“Tell you what, Donny? It’s my new Capt’n Midnight Secret Decoder Badge. I use it to figger out what’s gonna happen tomorrow.”

   
“Tomorrow how?”

   
“On the program.”

   
“
What
program?!”

   
He stared at me as if I was being purposely stupid. “On
Capt’n Midnight!
Boy!” I was being dumb.

   
I still couldn’t get it straight. It was right there, right out in the open, and I still didn’t know what was happening. “You mean one of those records they made of the old-time radio programs? Is that what you mean, Jeffty?”

   
“What records?” he asked. He didn’t know what
I
meant.

   
We stared at each other, there under the porch. And then I said, very slowly, almost afraid of the answer, “Jeffty, how do you hear
Captain Midnight?”

   
“Every day. On the radio. On my radio. Every day at 5:30.”

   
News. Music, dumb music, and news. That’s what was on the radio every day at 5:30. Not
Captain Midnight.
The Secret Squadron hadn’t been on the air in twenty years.

   
“Can we hear it tonight?” I asked.

   
“Boy!” he said. I was being dumb. I knew it from the way he said it; but I didn’t know why. Then it dawned on me: this was Saturday.
Captain Midnight
was on Monday through Friday. Not on Saturday or Sunday.

   
“We goin’ to the movies?”

   
He had to repeat himself twice. My mind was somewhere else. Nothing definite. No conclusions. No wild assumptions leapt to. Just off somewhere trying to figure it out, and concluding-as
you
would have concluded, as
anyone
would have concluded rather than accepting the truth, the impossible and wonderful truth-just finally concluding there was a simple explanation I didn’t yet perceive. Something mundane and dull, like the passage of time that steals all good, old things from us, packratting trinkets and plastic in exchange. And all in the name of Progress.

   
“We goin’ to the movies, Donny?”

   
“You bet your boots we are, kiddo,” I said. And I smiled. And I handed him the Code-O-Graph. And he put it in his side pants pocket. And we crawled out from under the porch. And we went to the movies. And neither of us said anything about
Captain Midnight
all the rest of that day. And there wasn’t a ten-minute stretch, all the rest of that day, that I didn’t think about it.

   
It was inventory all that next week. I didn’t see Jeffty till late Thursday. I confess I left the store in the hands of Ian and David, told them I had some errands to run, and left early. At 4:00. I got to the Kinzers’ right around 4:45. Leona answered the door, looking exhausted and distant. “Is Jeffty around?” She said he was upstairs in his room...

   
... listening to the radio.

   
I climbed the stairs two at a time.

   
All right, I had finally made that impossible, illogical leap. Had the stretch of belief involved anyone but Jeffty, adult or child, I would have reasoned out more explicable answers. But it
was
Jeffty, clearly another kind of vessel of life, and what he might experience should not be expected to fit into the ordered scheme.

   
I admit it: I
wanted
to hear what I heard.

   
Even with the door closed, I recognized the program:

   
“There he goes, Tennessee! Get him!”

   
There was the heavy report of a squirrel-rifle shot and the keening whine of the slug ricocheting, and then the same voice yelled triumphantly,
“Got him! D-e-a-a-a-a-d center!”

   
He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilohertz, and he was hearing
Tennessee led,
one of my most favorite programs from the forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.

   
I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program; I knew every one of them by heart, had never missed an episode. Further evidence that this was a new installment: there were occasional references during the integrated commercials to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the forties: aerosol spray cans, laserasing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”

   
I couldn’t ignore it: Jeffty was listening to a
new
segment of
Tennessee led.

   
I ran downstairs and out the front door to my car. Leona must have been in the kitchen. I turned the key and punched on the radio and spun the dial to 790 kilohertz. The ABC station. Rock music.

   
I sat there for a few moments, then ran the dial slowly from one end to the other. Music, news, talk shows. No
Tennessee led.
And it was a Blaupunkt, the best radio I could get. I wasn’t missing some perimeter station. It simply was not there!

   
After a few moments I turned off the radio and the ignition and went back upstairs quietly. I sat down on the top step and listened to the entire program. It was
wonderful.

   
Exciting, imaginative, filled with everything I remembered as being most innovative about radio drama. But it was modern. It wasn’t an antique, rebroadcast to assuage the need of that dwindling listenership who longed for the old days. It was a new show, with all the old voices, but still young and bright. Even the commercials were for currently available products, but they weren’t as loud or as. insulting as the screamer ads one heard on radio these days.

   
And when
Tennessee led
went off at 5:00, I heard Jeffty spin the dial on his radio till I heard the familiar voice of the announcer Glenn Riggs proclaim,
“Presenting Hop Harrigan! America’s ace of the airwaves!”
There was the sound of an airplane in flight. It was a prop plane, not a jet! Not the sound kids today have grown up with, but the sound
I
grew up with, the
real
sound of an airplane, the growling, revving, throaty sound of the kind of airplanes G-8 and His Battle Aces flew, the kind Captain Midnight flew, the kind Hop Harrigan flew. And then I heard Hop say,
“CX-4 calling control tower. CX-4
calling control tower. Standing by!”
A pause, then,
“Okay, this is Hop Harrigan... coming in!”

   
And Jeffty, who had the same problem all of us kids had had in the forties with programming that pitted equal favorites against one another on different stations, having paid his respects to Hop Harrigan and Tank Tinker, spun the dial and went back to ABC where I heard the stroke of a gong, the wild cacophony of nonsense Chinese chatter, and the announcer yelled, “
T-e-e-e-rry and the Pirates!”

   
I sat there on the top step and listened to Terry and Connie and Flip Corkin and, so help me God, Agnes Moorehead as the Dragon Lady, all of them in a new adventure that took place in a Red China that had not existed in the days of Milton Caniff’s 1937 version of the Orient, with river pirates and Chiang Kai-shek and warlords and the naive Imperialism of American gunboat diplomacy.

   
Sat, and listened to the whole show, and sat even longer to hear
Superman
and part of
Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy
and part of
Captain Midnight,
and John Kinzer came home and neither he nor Leona came upstairs to find out what had happened to me, or where Jeffty was, and sat longer, and found I had started crying, and could not stop, just sat there with tears running down my face, into the comers of my mouth, sitting and crying until Jeffty heard me and opened his door and saw me and came out and looked at me in childish confusion as I heard the station break for the Mutual Network and they began the theme music of
Tom Mix,
“When It’s Round-up Time in Texas and the Bloom Is on the Sage,” and Jeffty touched my shoulder and smiled at me, with his mouth and his big brown eyes, and said, “Hi, Donny. Wanna come in an’ listen to the radio with me?”

   
Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; Borges denies the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.

   
Jeffty received radio programs from a place that could not, in logic, in the natural scheme of the space-time universe as conceived by Einstein, exist. But that wasn’t all he received. He got mail-order premiums that no one was manufacturing. He read comic books that had been defunct for three decades. He saw movies with actors who had been dead for twenty years. He was the receiving terminal for endless joys and pleasures of the past that the world had dropped along the way. On its headlong suicidal flight toward New Tomorrows, the world had razed its treasurehouse of simple happinesses, had poured concrete over its playgrounds, had abandoned its elfin stragglers, and all of it was being impossibly, miraculously shunted back into the present through Jeffty. Revivified, updated, the traditions maintained but contemporaneous. Jeffty was the unbidding Aladdin whose very nature formed the magic lampness of his reality.

   
And he took me into his world with him.

 
  
Because he trusted me.

   
We had breakfast of Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies and warm Ovaltine we drank out of
this
year’s Little Orphan Annie Shake-Up Mugs. We went to the movies and while everyone else was seeing a comedy starring Goldie Hawn and Ryan O’Neal, Jeffty and I were enjoying Humphrey Bogart as the professional thief Parker in John Huston’s brilliant adaptation of the Donald Westlake novel
Slay-ground.
The second feature was Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard and Laird Cregar in the Val Lewton-produced film of
Leinengen Versus the Ants.

   
Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of
The Shadow, Doc Savage
and
Startling Stories.
Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley a. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel,
Isle of the Black Ones,
in
Weird Tales;
and in August we were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom-”Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of
Argosy All-Story Weekly
promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.