Mando was wild about An American Around the World, even worse than Steve, and now he clamored for it. Steve sat on the bed at Tom’s feet, and Kathryn sat on the floor beside his legs. Gabby and Doc and I sat on chairs brought in from the kitchen, and Mando and Kristen took the empty bed, holding hands again.
The first chapter Steve read was Chapter Sixteen, “A Vengeance Symbolic Is Better Than None.” By this time Baum was in Moscow, and on the day of the big May parade, when all the tyrants of the Kremlin came out to review Russia’s military might, Baum smuggled a packet of fireworks—the strongest explosives he could get his hands on—into a trash can in Red Square. At the best part of the parade the fireworks went off, spewing red, white and blue sparks, and sending the entire government under their chairs. This prank, a tiny echo of what Russia had done to America, gave Baum as much pleasure as the tornado had. But he also had to hightail it out of the capital, as the search for the culprit was intense. The things he had to do in the next chapter to make it to Istanbul would have tired a horse. It was one adventure after another. Doc rolled his eyes and actually began to chuckle in some places, like when Baum stole a hydrofoil boat in the Crimea, and piloted it over the Black Sea pursued by gunboats. Baum was in mortal danger, but Doc kept on giggling.
“Now why are you laughing?” Steve stopped to demand of Doc, annoyed that his reading of Baum’s desperate last-chance flight into the Bosporus had been marred.
“Oh no reason, no reason,” Doc was quick to say. “It’s just his style. He’s so cool when he tells about it all, you know.”
But in the next chapter, “Sunken Venice,” Doc laughed again. Steve scowled and stopped reading.
“Now wait a minute,” Doc said, anticipating Steve’s censure. “He’s saying the water level is thirty feet higher there than it used to be. But anyone can see right out here that the water level is the same as ever. In fact it may be lower.”
“It’s the same,” Tom said, smiling at the exchange.
“Okay, but if so, it should be the same in Venice.”
“Maybe things are different there,” Mando said indignantly.
Doc cracked up again. “All the oceans are connected,” he told Mando. “It’s all one ocean, with one sea level.”
“You’re saying this Glen Baum is a liar,” Kathryn said with interest. She didn’t look at all displeased by the idea, and I knew why. “The whole book is made up!”
“It is not!” Steve cried angrily, and Mando echoed him.
Doc waved a hand. “I’m not saying that. I don’t know what all is true in there. Maybe a few stretchers, to liven things up, though.”
“He says Venice sank,” Steve said coldly, and read the passage again. “The islands sank, and they had to build shacks on the roofs to stay above the water. So the sea level didn’t have to rise.” He looked peevishly at Doc. “It sounds likely to me.”
“Could be, could be,” Doc said with a straight face. Steve’s jaw was tight, his face flushed.
“Let’s go on reading,” I said. “I want to know what happens.”
Steve read again, his voice harsh and rapid. Baum’s adventures picked up their pace. He was in as much danger as ever, but somehow it wasn’t the same. In the chapter called “Far Tortuga,” when he parachuted from a falling plane into the Caribbean, with several others who then inflated a raft, Doc left the hospital and went into the kitchen, his face averted to conceal a wide grin from Steve and Mando. The men on the inflatable raft, by the way, perished one by one, victims of thirst and giant turtle attacks, until only Baum was left to land on the jungle beach in Central America. It should have been pretty dramatic, and sad, but when Baum met up with a jungle headhunter Tom went “heee, heee, heee, heee,” from his bed, and we could hear Doc busting up in the kitchen, and Kathryn started laughing too, and Steve slammed the book shut and nearly stomped on Kathryn as he stood up.
“I ain’t reading for you folks any more,” he cried. “You’ve got no respect for literature!”
Which made Tom laugh so hard he started to cough again. So Doc came in and kicked us all out, and the reading session was done.
But we came back the next night, and Steve agreed sullenly to read again. Soon enough An American Around the World was done, which was probably just as well, and we went on to Great Expectations, and took the parts to read in Much Ado About Nothing, and tried some other books as well. It was all good fun. But Tom kept coughing, and he got quieter, and thinner, and paler. The days passed in a slow sameness, and I didn’t feel like joining in the joking on the boats, or memorizing my readings, or even reading them. Nothing seemed interesting or good to me, and Tom got sicker as day followed day, until on some evenings I couldn’t bear to look at him, lying on his back hardly aware of us, and each day I woke up with that knot over my stomach, afraid that it might be the last day he could hold on to this life.
17
Mornings I got up at dawn before the boats went out, and went up to check on him. Most mornings he was asleep. The nights were hard, Doc said. He got sicker and sicker, right up to the edge of death—I had to admit it—and there he hovered, refusing to pass on. One morning he was half awake and his bloodshot eyes stared at me defiantly. Don’t write me off yet, they said. He hadn’t slept that night, Mando told me. Now he didn’t feel up to talking. He just stared. I pressed his hand—his skin was damp, his hand limp and fleshless—and left, shaking my head at his tenacity. Living a hundred years wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to live forever. That look in his eyes told me, and I smiled a little, hoping he could do it. But the visit scared me. I hustled down the hill to the boats as if I was running from the Reaper himself.
Another morning I noticed it was aging Doc to care for him. Doc was over seventy himself; in most towns he would have been the oldest one. Pretty soon he might be ours. One morning after a hard night I sat with Mando and Doc at the kitchen table. They’d been up through the small hours trying to ease Tom’s coughing, which had lost power but was more constant. All Doc’s wrinkles were red and deep, and there were rings under his eyes. Mando let his head rest on the table, mouth open like a fish’s. I got up and stoked their fire, got some water on, made them some tea and hot cereal. “You’re going to miss the boat,” Doc said, but smiled his thanks with one corner of his mouth. His hand trembled his tea mug. Mando roused at the smell of corn and scraped his face off the table. We laughed at him and ate. I trudged down the hill with the knot over my stomach.
That was Saturday. Sunday I went to church. There were people there who (like me) hardly ever went to church: Rafael, Gabby, Kathryn, and hiding at the back, Steve. Carmen knew why we were there, and at the end of her final prayer she said, “And Lord, please return our Tom to health.” Her voice had such power and calmness, to hear it was like being touched, being held. Her voice knew everything would be right. The amens were loud, and we walked out of the church like one big family.
That was Sunday morning, though. The rest of the week the tension made folks irritable. Mando lost sleep, and took the short end of Doc’s temper; he didn’t much care what books I read from, or even whether we read at all. “Armando!” I said. “You of all people have got to want to read.” “Just leave me be,” he said blearily. Around the ovens the women talked in quiet voices. No boisterous tattling, no shrieks of laughter tearing the air. No old man jokes on the boats. I went out to help the Mendezes gather wood, and Gabby and I nearly got in a fight trying to decide how to carry a fallen eucalyptus tree to the two-man saw. Later that day I passed Mrs. Mariani and Mrs. Nicolin, arguing heatedly at the latrine door. No one would have believed me if I had told them about that. I hurried down the path unhappily.