In the flickering candlelight, the seat looked dirty. I didn’t want to think about which old man had come down here with his colitis or whatever it was. “The Bellamy Gang strikes again,” I muttered as I tore off another page of Sears and wiped down the edge of the board. As I dropped the page through the hole, I noticed something big and pale in the pool beneath.
Pork fat, I told myself, strips taken from the hog. But who threw pork fat in the cesspool? You could make cracklings, feed it to the chickens or the pigs, render it down for soap. I was jumpy every way there was from Sunday, nothing going the way it should. I wasn’t about to hang my bottom over a hole with something mysterious in it.
Breathing through my wide-open mouth, I got down on my knees and stuck the candle through the wooden seat, pressing my face up the rim. My forearms crushed my ear, and the stench of cesspool literally made me flinch. The smell was everything I had come to know and love about a Kansas outhouse, and worse.
I peered down at the pool. The candle wavered as I tried not to let the flame get too close to my face, casting wide shadows on the clay walls of the pit and across the turgid dampness below. It was hard to see, but there was definitely something tall and pale rising out of the brown liquid. Whatever it was, it was big. The entire hog?
One arm on the seat, I leaned a lot further in and extended the candle down to the liquid surface. They needed a new pit soon, especially if the whole gang was going to be around for a while. I really didn’t want to do this, but I had to know what was down there in the Bellamys’ cesspool. Candle between my thumb and forefinger, I leaned close.
It was Mrs. Bellamy, her arms tied to the board above her, her mouth gagged with a length of muslin, her eyes bright with fear.
My stomach heaved, the wrenching almost pulling me in with her. Coffee and bile sprayed on my candle, while my nose filled with the stuff as I was puking upside down. I dropped the candle as I writhed around, then pulled myself up.
I had to get her out of there. Was this why Floyd had been bluff and nervous? His own mother? Or had that gang of crazy old men done this?
Why?
I leaned back in. “I’m going to help you, Mrs. Bellamy,” I whispered.
Mrs. Bellamy. My eyes flooded as I thought about her rolling out biscuits, chasing me with a willow broom when I’d stolen a tart. We weren’t all that close — my friendship had always been with Floyd — but she took care of me, especially after Mom had died the fall I turned fifteen.
I tied the bathrobe around my face, for a mask, and went to work pulling the seat bench up. It was nailed down, but not very well. Of course, someone had lifted it recently to stick her inside. When I pulled the board up, it stuck, not wanting to come all the way free.
She was tied to it.
I worked the board over, looking down at the top of her poor head, and the hank of rope that kept her hands pulled upward, tied off to a fresh nail in the bottom of the seat board.
It only took a moment to work that free, then I leaned down, gagging, to untie her hands. The reek drew tears to my eyes, and I kept trying to sneeze and choke at same time, without managing either one.
When I worked her gag free, Mrs. Bellamy drew a huge breath, like she was going to scream.
“Quiet!” I hissed. “They’re on the roof, watching. Listening.”
“I am going to cut them boys apart like last year’s venison,” she said, her voice hard and bitter.
“Uh… ma’am…”
“Get me out of here.”
“I’m trying.”
It was an outhouse, it wasn’t supposed to be big. I braced myself as best I could, leaned down, and tried to pull her free. She had nothing to grip on but the edge of the seat bench, and my hands. Mrs. Bellamy was a woman of generous proportions, and I wasn’t strong enough to haul her up.
“I got to think,” I said. “Can you stand it down there a little longer?”
“I’m not getting any dirtier, Vernon Dunham,” she said tartly. Her voice softened. “But think fast. Please.”
Not only did I have to get her out of the pit, I had to get the two of us off the Bellamys’ farm. I’d already been in the outhouse too long. One of those old men in Mr. Bellamy’s gang was bound to notice. I imagined the sniper on the roof with his rifle pointed at the outhouse door. What the heck could I do to keep us alive?
For one thing, I couldn’t do the obvious and just walk around front and borrow the Willys pickup. A rope on the bumper would help me get Mrs. Bellamy out of the pit. But Mr. Garrett and the man on the roof doubtless had orders to stop me from leaving, orders that almost certainly included using their guns. The Cadillac was hidden up in the peach orchard, but I had already made a terrible mess of that car. Floyd had said that he needed the tractor to get it there. I didn’t think I could manage to drive it out, even if I somehow got to the car unobserved.
There was always the barn. Dad’s truck would run — it hadn’t rained much in the last day or two, plus the old Mack had been indoors. There was even the f-panzer, which had the advantage of being armored. If I could get it started, and if there was no special trick to driving it — Floyd had driven the f-panzer back from the railroad depot, while I had never even climbed inside the cab — it would be a perfect getaway car.
Plenty of rope and chains there, too. If I could get up there, I could drive back down in the armored vehicle, park it between the outhouse and the snipers, and get her out. Though Lord only knew how lame me and old Mrs. Bellamy could move fast enough for it to matter.
Would I have to go for help, bring the police or the Army back to rescue her?
I had trouble imagining leaving someone standing waist-deep in cess, but I was having more trouble imagining how to safely get her out of there.
If going for help was my plan, there was always the computational rocket. It was still on top of the Mack, and there was no way to taxi it out for a takeoff roll. Of course, it wasn’t a normal airplane. Maybe it didn’t need a takeoff roll. While that was probably wishful thinking, I knew that the Army was working on a machine, back East somewhere — Connecticut? — that flew vertically. Sort of a fully-powered autogyro. Maybe my aircraft could do the same thing.
“Hang on,” I told her. “I have an idea.”
“Soon, Vernon.” Her voice was heavy, sad. “Please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The handset hung heavy in the pocket of my bathrobe. “Hey,” I whispered, touching it for luck. “Computational rocket. Can you hear me?”
“What?” asked Mrs. Bellamy.
“Yes,” said the voice in my ear.
Not again. “Mrs. B, I’m using a radio,” I said. “I need to talk.” I paused, took a deep breath, which turned out to be a mistake with the bench off the cesspit. “Okay,” I told the empty air. “I’m in big trouble here.”
“I warned you,” said the voice.
“Forget the editorial. Can you fly? Without the hundred of liters of oil?”
“I can. In technical terms, I am currently capable of limited subsonic atmospheric operations.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Correct,” said the machine.
And for a moment, I was silent, marveling at the thought that I was talking to a giant calculator, the ultimate Babbage engine.
Maybe it was me that had gone over the edge. I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. That line of reasoning was pointless. Even if it was true, I had to do the best I could. I certainly hadn’t imagined all the gunplay, the house fire, the attack on my dad. Mrs. Bellamy standing below, breathing like a cow in winter. “How will you take off? You’re parked on top of a truck.” Here was the critical question. “Can you get airborne without a rollout?”