Jennings shifted his gaze to me. “Is that so, Henry?”
“Sure is, Mr. Jennings.” I went right along with it. “We could guide you up there and no one would be the wiser.”
“Maybe,” Jennings said. “Maybe.” He glanced back at his men, then stared at me. “Do you know right now when a landing party is coming in?”
“Soon,” Steve said. “We know one is coming in soon. We already know where, and we’ll find out exactly when in the next few days, I’d guess.”
“All right. Tell you what. If you hear of a landing, you come tell us at the weigh station where we stopped working the tracks. We’ll have men there. I’ll go back south and talk to the Mayor, and if he agrees to the idea, which maybe he will, then we’ll bring men up and be ready to move. We got the tracks working again, did I tell you that, Henry? It was tough, but we did it. Anyway, you know where those buildings are, the weigh station.”
“We all know that,” Nicolin said.
“Fine, fine. Now listen: when you get word of a Jap landing, hustle to the station and tell us, and we’ll see what we can do about it. We’ll leave it at that for now.”
“We have to go along on the raid,” Steve insisted.
“Sure, didn’t I say that? You’ll be our guides. All this depends on the Mayor, you understand, but as I said, I think he’ll want to do it. He wants to hit those Japs any way he can.”
“So do we,” Steve said, “I swear it.”
“Oh, I believe you. Now, we’d better be off.”
“When can we check with you and see what the Mayor said?”
“Oh—a week, say. But get down there sooner if you hear word.”
Nicolin nodded, and Jennings pointed his men south.
“Good talking with you, friends. Good to know that someone in this valley is an American.”
“That we are. We’ll see you soon.”
“Goodbye,” I added.
We watched them slip through the trees in the forest. Then Steve struck me on the arm.
“We did it! They’re going for it, Henry, they’re going to do it.”
“Looks like it,” I said. “But what was that you said about how we’ll know when the landing will come in a few days? You lied to them! There’s no way we can be sure when we’ll find that out, if we ever do at all!”
“Ah come on, Henry. You could see I had to tell them something. You pretend to object to all this, but you like it as much as I do. You’re good at it! You’re the fastest thinking, fastest running resistance man around, and the cleverest in figuring these kinds of things out. You’ll be able to find out that landing date if you want to.”
“I suppose I can,” I said, pleased despite myself.
“Sure you can.”
“Well… let’s get back before anyone notices we’re missing.”
He laughed. “See? You are good at this, Henry, I swear you are.”
“Uh huh.”
And the thing is, I thought he was right. I was the one who had kept Jennings and his men from shooting us by mistake, back there. And every time I was in a spot, the right things seemed to happen to get me out of it. I began to feel that these things didn’t just happen to me, but that I was doing them. I made them turn out right. I could make sure that we joined the resistance, and fought the Japanese, without breaking the vote or getting the rest of the valley angry at us. I really thought I could do it.
Then I remembered the old man, and all my feeling of power vanished. We were still in the forest between the Nicolins’ and Concrete Bay; if I headed inland I would soon run onto Tom’s ridge.
“I’m going up to see how the old man is doing,” I said.
“I’ve got to get back to the pit,” Steve said. “But I’ll—wait a minute!”
But I was already off, making my way through the trees inland.
16
The old man’s yard always looked untended, with weeds growing over the collapsing fence and junk scattered everywhere. But now as I climbed the ridge path apprehension made me see it all again: the small weatherbeaten house with its big front window reflecting the sky; the yard drowning in weeds; the gnarled trees on the ridge tossing in the wind, and snatching at the clouds that were growing with every minute. It all looked abandoned. If the house’s owner had been dead and buried ten years, it would all look as it did now.
Kathryn appeared in the window, and I tried to change my thoughts. Wind pushed the weeds up and down. Kathryn saw me and waved, and I lifted my head in hello. She opened the door as I walked into the yard, and met me in the doorway.
Casually I said, “So how’s he doing? What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s asleep now. I don’t think he slept much last night, he was coughing so bad.”
“I remember he coughed some when he told us that story.”
“It’s worse now. He’s all congested.”
I studied Kathryn’s face, saw the well-known pattern of freckles shifted by lines of concern. She reached out to hold my arm. I hugged her and she put her head to my shoulder. It scared me. If Kathryn was scared, I was terrified. I tried to reassure her with my hug, but I was trembling.
“Who’s that out there?” Tom called from the bedroom. “I’m not sleeping, who’s there?”
Then he coughed. It was a deep, wet, hacking sound, like he was choosing voluntarily to put a lot of force behind it.
“It’s me, Tom,” I said when he was done. I went to the door of his room. None of us had ever been welcome in there; it was his private place. I looked in. “I heard you were sick.”
“I am.” He was sitting up in bed, leaning against the wall behind it. He looked sick, there was no doubt about it. Hair and beard were tangled and damp, face sweaty and pale. He eyed me without moving his head. “Come on in.”
I walked into the room for the first time. It was filled with books, like the storeroom down the hall. There was a table and chair, several books on each; a stack or two of records; and tacked to the wall under the one small window, a collection of curled photographs.
I said, “I guess you must have caught a cold on our trip back.”
“Seems to me it should’ve been you who got it. You got the coldest.”
“We all got cold.” I remembered how he had walked on the seaward side of me to break the wind. The times he had held me up as we walked. I looked at the photographs, heard Kathryn move things around in the big room.
“What’s she doing out there?” Tom asked. “Hey, girl! Quit that in there!” He stared to cough again.
When he was done my heart was pounding. “Maybe you shouldn’t shout,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Lamely I added, “It’s rotten to have a cold in the summer.”
“Yeah. Sure is.”
Kathryn stood in the doorway.
“Where’s your sister?” Tom said. “She was just here.”
“She had to go do some things,” said Kathryn.
“Anybody home?” came a voice from the door.
“That must be her now,” Kathryn said. But it had been Doc’s voice.
“Uh oh,” said Tom. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” Kathryn said apologetically.
Doc barged into the room, black bag in hand, Kristen on his heels.
“What are you doing here?” Tom said. “I don’t want you fussing with me, Ernest. You hear?” He shifted in his bed until he was against the side wall.
Doc approached him with a fierce grin.
“Leave me alone, I’m telling you—”
“Shut up and lie flat,” Doc said. He put his bag on the bed, and pulled his stethoscope from it.
“Ernest, you don’t need to do this. I’ve just got a cold.”