I walked toward a raised clump of weed and metal, where the base of the silo had been, stepping carefully over metal junk hidden in the tall grass. At the center of this clump was the wreck of the plane, or rather, enough pieces to reconstruct the idea of a plane: one wing, a black chunk of engine, a tangle of metal and bubbled glass that had been the cockpit. It had all burned to near shapelessness. I circled around the remains of the craft. It looked like it had been the size of a Piper Cub, or a World War II fighter. At any moment I expected to see a skull, leather cap and goggles miraculously intact. But surely the pilot would have been buried when the crash happened. How long ago?
I heard the distant growl of the Toyota’s muffler and started stepping toward the house. O’Connell parked the truck, and got out with two big plastic grocery bags in her arms.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Camping supplies. There’s more in the back. What were you doing out there?”
“The call of nature.” There was no sense telling her about the plane. She’d only try harder to make me leave. I went around to the back of the truck and got three other bags from the bed. One held bottled water, rolls of toilet paper, a carton of cigarettes. The other bags were stuffed with what looked like big beach towels, purple and trimmed in silver.
“Is this all for me?” I asked. “Or are you staying?”
“You’re lucky Olympia has no hotel.”
I set down the grocery bags inside the door, then went back to the truck to get my duffel and O’Connell’s bag. O’Connell followed me out and retrieved a pizza box from the seat of the car. She said, “We’d better get set up before it gets dark.”
We ferried everything upstairs and split up the supplies. I didn’t have to ask if she wanted to sleep separately. O’Connell took the back bedroom with the double bed; I, of course, took the room with the comics.
The things that looked like towels were exactly that: Kansas State University beach towels. I guessed she couldn’t afford sleeping bags.
“Can I show you something?” I called. O’Connell came to my door. “Please,” I said.
She sat on the purple towel I’d spread out on the bed. I sat next to her, and handed her the book I’d found, opened to the inside cover. In a wobbly hand someone had written, “Property of Bobby Noon.”
“His name was Bobby,” I said.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“And that’s not all.” I began to show her the magazines and comics I’d set aside. I pointed out the heroes and villains on the covers: the Shadow, Captain America, the crazed Japanese soldiers.
“They’re blueprints for the cohort,” I said. “The Truth, the Captain, the Kamikaze—they’re all here.”
“What about the Little Angel?” O’Connell’s demon, the little girl in the white gown. “What comic book character is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of Shirley Temple–Little Lulu amalgam. Like what’s-her-face in The Little Rascals—the token girl.”
“Who kills old people and terminal patients.”
“Hey, I’m not saying this explains everything. But think about it—
so many of the cohort are like characters straight out of the pulps.” I looked around for the Katzenjammer Kids book, spotted it by the bookcase, and brought it back to her, stepping around the many small piles of pages. I carefully opened the book to the page I’d seen. “Look at this—it predates anything in Dennis the Menace.”
One of the panels showed the blond-haired Katzenjammer boy firing a slingshot at his drunken uncle, knocking his glasses into the air. “O’Connell, I’m in here.”
She stared at the page for a long moment, then stood quickly and walked to the window—I winced as her foot came down on a Hit Comics with Kid Eternity on the cover. She leaned close to the cracked glass, gazing across the fields. “This doesn’t tell us anything new, Del. We already know the archetypes take whatever forms exist in the culture—”
“No! No. Look at all this. I was drawn here for a reason. This is ground zero. This is where it started. With Bobby Noon, the boy on the rock.”
“What are you saying?” She didn’t look at me. “He dreamed you into being?”
“Or summoned me.”
The dying glow made a moon of her face. In a few minutes the room would be dark. I looked around for the flashlight, and O’Connell suddenly jerked back from the window.
“What is it? O’Connell?”
She took another step back. “I just realized . . . I can see the lights on the top floors of the hospital from here.”
“Yeah?” Then, “Oh, right, we should cover the windows, they’ll see the flashlight bouncing around in here.”
I helped her take the dusty covers from the beds. We carried them downstairs, shook them out in the front yard, then went back in and covered the window in my room. We did the same in O’Connell’s room, even though we could see nothing out the window but darkness.
“Del,” she said softly.
I couldn’t see her face. She held the flashlight pointing at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, then: “I’m sorry if you felt like I doubted you.”
That wasn’t what she was going to say.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have believed me. Tomorrow we’ll go into town, find out about the Noon family.” I almost said, Find out about the plane crash.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” I said.
I crossed the hall to my room, using the edge of the door frame to guide me. I moved gingerly through the dark, trying to remember where I’d left comics on the floor, and found the bed with my shins. The sheet glowed faintly against the window. I stepped forward, pulled it down. A three-quarter moon was rising over the hospital. Several of the top windows of the building flickered a faint blue: television light.
The air coming through the hole in the window was frosty. I felt my way into the duffel, pulled out a cotton sweater, and something clattered onto the floor. I reached down, and my fingers found the wooden handle of the slingshot. I held on to it, moving it from hand to hand as I pulled on the sweater.
I lay down and the bed frame popped alarmingly, but didn’t collapse. I used the duffel for a pillow, my feet framing the moonlit window. Not enough light to read by, though. I should have taken the flashlight.
I’d found the farm and the House that Time Forgot. I’d found the boy on the rock. Tomorrow I’d pull answers from this town like teeth. And somehow, eventually, I’d figure out what to do with the body I’d stolen. The kid rested inside my head like a spent bullet. I stretched the slingshot, aiming the empty pouch between my feet, through the hole, straight at the moon’s villainous chin. Draw, O Coward!
I fired. The moon refused to go out.
BOBBY NOON , BOY MARVEL
OLYMPIA, KANSAS, 1944
“Prepare to be annihilated, imperialist dogs!”
