least a conventional one. But after Dr. Ram, after the Shug, after all the varieties of shit that had gone down in the past ten days, I didn’t give a damn anymore. I could raise a little hell.
I smashed in the window, then ran the jack back and forth along
the edges of the window until the shards were cleared. I leaned in. The sunlight showed a dim room populated by hulking furniture. I put a leg through the window and levered myself inside.
“Coming?” I said.
“Why not.”
We were in a front room, surrounded by couches and chairs. It looked like the occupants had walked out of the house one day and never looked back. A cup sat on the end table. The lamp was still plugged in by its huge black plug. Everything lay under a thick coating of dust, and a faint animal funk hung in the air. I moved toward a bookcase crowded with knickknacks and squinted at a framed photograph that held pride of place. A man in a navy uniform, my age or maybe younger, stared humorlessly at the camera. He held the hand of a boy who could have been ten or eleven, head tilted as if he doubted the picture would come out. The soldier and the boy shared narrow eyes and a thin nose.
“Jesus,” O’Connell said. She stood just behind me. “That boy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The boy on the rock.” We’d been looking at pictures of him for days. We moved from room to room, through shafts of dusty light. The small dining room held a table and six chairs. In the middle of the table was a vase sporting a dozen dead twigs, the leaves long turned to dust and blown away.
In the kitchen was a low iron stove and a small round-shouldered refrigerator. The floor was decorated with mouse turds, and the counters were coated with dirt, accumulating topsoil. Dishes sat in the black, mold-covered sink. A nearly intact snakeskin curled against a baseboard.
I didn’t want to open the refrigerator, but I pulled open the cabinets. The shelves were full of white dishes and orange-tinted glass bowls and tall drinking glasses.
O’Connell nodded toward the calendar hanging near the back door: May, 1947.
“Shit,” I said.
I’d expected an empty house, or a trashed hangout for teenagers, but not this museum. It looked like no one had entered the place in fifty years.
“Is any of this familiar?” O’Connell said.
“Not exactly,” I said. But it didn’t feel unfamiliar. It felt like a copy of a copy of someplace I’d visited, or maybe a place I’d read about in a book. “Let’s try upstairs.”
The stairs groaned and creaked under my weight, and I walked up gripping the gritty banister. At the top was a short hallway with four doors, two in each direction. The peaked ceiling was close, designed for smaller people.
I went right, pushed open a door that faced the rear of the house. The small room contained a double bed with a knitted blue bedcover, and a chest of drawers topped by a framed mirror. Dust coated every surface, but not as thickly as downstairs.
I opened the door on the other side of the hallway. Only one window here, overlooking the front yard. It was the cracked window I’d seen from outside: The hole was the bull’s-eye. It was a little boy’s room. A narrow bed occupied one corner, under a St. Louis Cardinals pennant. The closet was open, empty metal hangers glinting like teeth, and clothes had slipped from the hangers into a pile. Two tall bookshelves, half the shelves full of hardcover books leaning against each other, the other half filled with stacks of magazines, some of them spilling across the floor.
“You’ve got that look on your face again,” O’Connell said. I walked into the room and stooped to pick up the nearest magazine, already knowing what it was. The page was torn down the right side, and grime had faded the colors and muddied the lines, but I still could make out the pictures. In the first panel, a golden-age Captain America, skinny and goofy looking in his half mask, punched a buck-toothed Japanese soldier across the room. It had to be from the early days of Captain America Comics, 1941 or 1942.
O’Connell stepped into the room and I held out a hand. “Just don’t step on anything.”
She looked around at the room. “Why?”
I started picking up the comic books and stray pages: a black-andwhite “paste-book” of Katzenjammer Kids newspaper strips; some Timely comic book I didn’t recognize featuring the original Vision; an issue of Boy Commandos complete except for the missing cover and back page.
O’Connell made a huffing noise, then disappeared. The floor was thick with treasures. A dozen pages of black text on gray paper from an issue of Black Mask. A copy of Weird Tales with a beautifully lurid cover. A ten-issue run of Blackhawk, the Polish air ace.
Soon I’d found scores of complete comics and pulps—Thrilling Western, High-Seas Adventures, Detective Comics, Dick Dare—and I hadn’t even started on the books on the bookshelves. Who knows what the rest of the house was hiding.
“Del.” O’Connell had returned.
“Uh-huh.” I delicately turned the page of a Captain Marvel. He was fighting Nippo, a Japanese spy armed with magical black pearls. I pitied any Japanese kid trying to grow up in America in those days.
“You’ve been at this for an hour,” O’Connell said. “I’m starving.”
“This is a classic Captain Marvel. You know, Shazam?” O’Connell leaned in the doorway, holding a cop-sized flashlight that I’d seen in the truck’s glove compartment. “Never mind,” I said. “I forget you grew up a girl. See, Billy Batson’s this little kid, an orphan newspaper boy, but when he says this magic word he turns into this big guy with a cape and gets the powers of the gods—the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the, uh, something of Atlas, then Zeus, Achilles, and the speed of Mercury.”
“Some of those aren’t gods.”
“You know what I mean. Look, I found a Detective Comics with the Joker in it—the Joker!” I looked up at her. “We have to stay here.”
She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know, what time does it get dark? I don’t want to be—”
“I mean for the night.”
“Not a chance,” she said.
“All right then, I’ll stay. You find a hotel, then pick me up in the morning.”
“What? No. I’m not going to leave you here alone. Why in God’s name would you want to stay here?”
I looked around at the comics, the bed, the Cardinals pennant. The afternoon light gave everything in the room a shimmering quality, the bed and bookcases and yellowing pages of the comic books trembling from some inner energy, on the edge of snapping into place.
“I don’t know. I just . . . Listen, why don’t you get something to eat. Bring me back something if you want. I just need some more time here.”
“We’re not staying the night,” she said.
After a while she left me sitting in a patch of light on the floor, a comic book spread across my knees.
When I walked outside to pee, the sun was dropping. The nearest thing to a bathroom inside the house was a cinderblock room that looked like a late addition to the property; inside was a footed tub, a dry toilet, and a foul- smelling drain set into a cement floor slicked with mold. I decided that outdoors was more sanitary, and headed for the high grass near the barn.
Something glittered in the grass. I zipped up, walked a few feet. Half buried in the ground was a rusted length of metal shaped like a wide sword. Another blade was nearby, still connected to the central cone.
A propeller.
