“He wasn’t lying,” I said.
“Kasparian?” She tapped a cigarette from the pack.
“Dr. Ram. He was on to something. The cure. He could have helped me.”
“Somebody else, maybe,” she said. “Not you.” She lit the cigarette, exhaled in the direction of the half-open window, but the smoke seemed to eddy in the cab. I think I was up to a pack a day in secondhand smoke. “It’s been twenty-five minutes,” she said.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Go by the house again, and I’ll scrunch down.”
“Fine.” She put the truck in reverse, turned to look over her shoulder as she started to roll, and hit the brakes. I looked up in time to see a maroon Corsica cruise by, the driver oblivious to the near crash.
“Was that . . . ?” O’Connell said.
“Yep.”
“Oh my.”
“Her peripheral vision’s not so good on that side.”
“Then I suppose we should go.”
O’Connell pulled into the driveway and I hopped out. It was Thursday, and I didn’t know anymore when Mom did her big shopping. She could have just been running to the store for milk. She could be back any minute.
“Keep it running,” I said. I’d always wanted to say that. I walked briskly around to the back of the house, pushed through the chain link gate that never stayed shut, and stepped up to the back door, ready at any moment for SWAT teams to burst from the bushes. How in the world did people work up the nerve to break into strangers’ houses?
The key was under the windowsill to the right of the door, in the notch my dad had cut out for that purpose. I dropped the key, finally got it into the lock, and quietly pushed open the door. The kitchen smelled like chocolate chip cookies. Warm cookies. On the counter was a cookie rack loaded with six rows of happy, chunky mounds. Mom never made them just for herself—they were always for company, or for some special occasion. I couldn’t count the number of times she’d slapped our hands away from the plate. If we begged, she’d give us one apiece—one—and then banish us from the kitchen.
I reached out, stopped, my hand hovering over the rack. Heat rose off them. She must have pulled them out of the oven right before leaving for the grocery store. She wouldn’t have counted them, would she?
I pulled back my hand. Not yet. Take one on the way out. And one for O’Connell. That would be our reward. Surely Mom wouldn’t miss two.
I went down the basement steps, my hand automatically finding the lightbulb chain.
The brown box marked “DeLew Comics” was right where I remembered seeing it with Amra. The box was suspiciously light. I set it on the ground and pulled off the lid.
Inside, a thin stack of comics, maybe twenty issues, fewer than a dozen pages each of faded, 81?2-by-11 sheets. I picked up the top issue. A muscular man in red-and-yellow striped spandex floated above a city street, surrounded below the waist by a massively overinked tornado. Shakily drawn cars flew through the air; bystanders cowered. Mister Twister #2. There’d never been a #3.
I exhaled, laughed to myself. I’d been afraid the comics would be gone, evaporated like an imaginary friend. There were fewer copies than I remembered—weren’t there like a hundred left over?—but at least they existed. I wanted to sit down and read them right there, but there was no time. I fit the lid back onto the box and tucked it under my arm.
I glanced around to see if there was anything else I needed, and
“You secretly ate two—no, four cookies.”
I scooped my loot from the cookie rack and made my escape. I inhaled the first cookie before we left the driveway, and I had the comic books out of the box before we got out of the neighborhood. I absentmindedly waved O’Connell through a few rights and lefts, sending her down Euclid.
“Damn, these are good cookies,” O’Connell said. I wiped my fingers on my shirt and turned pages. I didn’t find what I was looking for in the first comic, set it aside, and opened the next one.
O’Connell shook her head. “You’d better be right about this, Mr. Pierce.” All this way for a comic book. For a page in a comic book. I found it in the third issue. Olympia! “Pull over, now,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” O’Connell said. She parked in back of the Steak n Shake. I handed her the comic, open to the page I’d found. “Look at that,” I said.
I hopped out of the truck, went around to the bed. My duffel was under the tarp, snug under the cab window. I unzipped it, took out the topmost binder, and carried it back inside.
O’Connell was looking at the full spread across the top of page four. The comic was done in only one color, blue mimeograph lines on white paper, but the picture was clear enough, to my eyes at least. The house was there, the barn, the big silo, the line of trees—and the faint smudge over the house. Then I handed her the binder, where the same farmhouse had been drawn by the Painter.
“See?” I said. “They’re the same.”
“I admit they’re similar,” she said. “But I don’t see what it tells us.”
“The smudge.” I pointed to the comic. The pages had been badly duplicated, but if you looked closely enough you could see lines that looked like outstretched hands, legs, the suggestion of a cape. Once you saw those features in the comic, they became more obvious in the Painter’s rendition.
“See?” I said. “It’s RADAR Man.”
She looked back and forth between the comic book page and the plastic sheeted page from the binder. “Okay,” she said. “If you say so. But once again, so what? You’d already seen that the Painter drew some of your memories. This time he remembered your comic book.”
“No! Some of those pictures were drawn before I was born. He’s not drawing my comic book—we’re drawing the same place.”
“That could be any farm anywhere.”
“No. Not anywhere.” I pointed to the little text box above the drawing in the comic book: Meanwhile, over Olympia Kansas . . .
“RADAR Man’s hometown,” I said.
O’Connell looked at me, eyes narrowed. “Is that a real town?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”
She sighed. “I suppose we have to buy a map.”
By eight that night we’d reached the Missouri side of Kansas City. O’Connell swung into the parking lot of a Motel 6, hit the brakes, and triggered a landslide of paper and plastic from the bench seat onto the floorboards: my comics, the binders I’d taken from the Waldheims, newspapers, two maps of the Midwest. The pickup looked like someone had emptied a file cabinet through the passenger window. O’Connell turned off the cassette—the pickup didn’t have a CD, and we’d been listening to her homemade mix-tapes since leaving Chicago—and said, “Do you have any cash?”
I opened my wallet. Inside were my last two twenties, a couple of ones, and the water-damaged Hyatt card where I’d written Tom and Selena’s phone number. She took the twenties.
“Hey!”
“I’ll see if this will pay for a room,” she said. I thought: A room?
I put my comics back in the box, inserted pages back in their binders. I folded the Missouri-Kansas map so that it was open to show a circled and recircled dot of a town. I still hadn’t gotten over the thrill: Olympia, Kansas, was real. All we had to do was follow the yellow brick road.
O’Connell came back with a key, drove us around the side of the
