Gemini Summer (16 page)

fifty

The first reporters arrived before the sun was up. They kept coming through the morning, from north and south and east and west, in cars and dust-covered trucks, with notebooks and microphones and cameras. There were people from television, people from radio, people from newspapers as far away as Boston. There was even a fellow from
Life
magazine.

The sheriff was happy at first. He polished his star and posed with one foot on the front steps, his snakeskin boot all bright and shiny. But no one took his picture. They shouted, “Where’s the boy? Where’s the dog?”

Danny was in the jail cell, hearing all the clamor and commotion. He had Rocket at his side, the dog panting nervously. Danny heard the sheriff shouting back, “Just wait, okay? Just settle down, you hear?”

Every now and then the front door opened, and the sounds from the street came in a louder burst and roar. In one of those bursts arrived the nice lady who’d brought him chicken the night before. Now she came with a breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs. She said hello to Rocket, then pushed the plate through the gap below the door.

“You’re creating quite a ruckus, young man,” she said. “There’s someone out there from the
National Enquirer
? He’s asking to see you. They’re all asking to see you. They want to take your picture.”

Rocket whined. Danny said, “They can’t do that. They can’t take our picture.”

“Now, don’t I just know that?” she said. “You sleeping here in the same clothes you’ve been wearing for days? You look a fright, but don’t you worry, now. That’s why the sheriff’s waiting. Till I get you all cleaned up for your pictures.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Danny. If they took his picture, his parents might see it. But the lady was already gone. There was another burst of shouting as she went out to the street.

Then Alice came to see him. She came skipping down the stairs with her canvas bag swinging from her shoulder, her hair flying back. “Hi,” she said. “You know you’re famous now?” From her bag she took a newspaper from New York City and held it up for Danny to see the headline: “Mystery Boy Says Dog’s His Brother.”

“Your story got sent out on the wire,” she said. “They’re reading about you all over the place. From Kalamazoo to Timbuktu.”

From the bed, through the bars, he glared at her. “You lied to me,” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” said Alice.

“You promised not to tell anybody.”

“I promised not to tell the
sheriff,
” she said. “That’s all. I was very careful about that.”

She didn’t look so pretty anymore, not to Danny River. She was like a fairy-tale witch who had come to him in the guise of a beautiful lady, and now he was seeing what she was really like. “You’re mean,” he said.

“Don’t say that. I was just trying to help,” said Alice. “What’s wrong with your dog?”

Rocket’s teeth were showing. He was half talking and half growling at Alice.

“He doesn’t like you. He knows you tricked me,” said Danny.

“Oh!” she said through the bars. “I was trying to save him, Danny. People won’t let him be taken away from you now.”

“You didn’t even think about that, ’cause they can’t stop it,” said Danny. “It’s only Creepy Colvig who matters, and now he’s going to know where I am, and he’s going to get Rocket. The police can’t stop him; nobody can, except for Gus Grissom, but I won’t ever get to the Cape thanks to you.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t
look
sorry, or
sound
sorry, with her words coming out like a snake’s. “If they take him, I’ll get you another dog, okay?”

Danny couldn’t believe she would say such a thing, not after hearing his whole story. She hadn’t believed a word of it; he could see that now. She had listened and nodded and pretended to believe him. He didn’t know what “the wire” was, but he imagined his story riding the telephone wires, racing from pole to pole, from city to city.

“Did you get paid for the story?” he asked.

She was getting less pretty every minute. “Don’t think I did it for money,” she said. “I thought you’d be happy. I did it for you.”

“Well,
thanks,
” said Danny River. “Thanks a lot,” he said, and turned away, his face toward the wall.

He didn’t answer when she said goodbye. She said goodbye to Rocket, too, but the dog didn’t move.

“So long, Rocket,” she said again.

“Forget it,” said Danny. “Dogs never say goodbye. They love to say hello, but they never say goodbye.”

He heard her go up the stairs. A bell rang three times, and the teletype machine began to clatter and bang. It typed away, shaking the table, rattling like a machine gun. The bell rang again, and the machine whirred to a stop.

As though the teletype was a sort of mechanical rooster, it seemed to wake the office and the whole town with its bell. Telephones started ringing. Cars blew their horns. The reporters shouted more loudly, “Where’s the boy? We want to see the dog.”

Down to the cells came the nice lady and the sheriff together. The sheriff opened the bars and they came in. The lady gave Danny clean clothes—pants and socks, and a shirt in a cellophane packet. The sheriff was holding a torn piece of paper.

“Here’s something interesting,” he said. “A runaway from up north. Name of Danny River. Boy of nine years old, blond hair, in the company of a black-and-white dog. That sound familiar to you,
Beau
?”

“I never told you my name was Beau,” said Danny River.

“Get dressed. You’re going home,” said the sheriff.

fifty-one

The phones were still ringing when Danny went up in his clean new clothes. The lady was talking on one, and the sheriff was on his radio, and the reporters were staring through the windows. A lady shouted, “There he is!” and cameras flashed, and lights brighter than headlamps glared in through the glass. Rocket stayed right at Danny’s side.

The sheriff turned off his radio. He put a hand on Danny’s shoulder and led him from the office as though they were father and son. On the little porch outside the door they stood above the crowd of reporters, and Danny saw that the street was choked with cars and trucks.

The reporters all yelled at once, all different things. Some of them cried, “Here! Look over here!” and others whistled so that Rocket would lift his head for a picture.

“Settle down!” shouted the sheriff. He held up both his hands in a V above his head and turned slowly across the crowd.

There were stone lions crouching on platforms beside him. He lifted Danny and seated him on one of the lions’ backs. The flashbulbs popped all over.

“This here’s Danny River,” he said. “And this here’s his dog. And I’m Sheriff Eugene Brown.”

“Are you going home, Danny?” shouted a reporter.

“Did you talk to Gus Grissom?” said another. “Did he call you?”

“Did your parents call?” said a lady.

“Now, we’ve had calls from all over,” said the sheriff, his white eyebrows moving. “We’ve had calls from as far as California. From Canada. But the boy’s tired, and he just wants to go home. You can say this in your newspapers and on your televisions: you can say the boy was put up for the night by Sheriff Eugene Brown, and now we’re going to get him on his way.”

They shouted back with more questions: Was he going to Cape Canaveral? What about Gus Grissom? Danny tried to answer, but the sheriff kept yelling, “No comment. No comment.” One hand on Danny’s shoulder, the other parting the crowd, Sheriff Eugene Brown took Danny to the police car. He put the boy and the dog into the backseat, then waved once more and drove away.

He started the siren. It whooped and whined as they passed through the town, toward the morning sun.

It was a very small town; in minutes they were out in the country, zooming down a gravel road in a cloud of gray. The sheriff kept the siren wailing, though the only thing they passed was a tractor. Danny saw the driver look down, startled, as the car went screaming past him.

Danny tapped the sheriff’s shoulder. “Where are we going?” he asked. He saw the sheriff’s lips moving but couldn’t hear most of the words.
The city; your daddy; the Greyhound;
that was all he understood.

Rocket lay with his paws covering his ears. Danny put his hand on the dog’s chest and felt him trembling. He imagined he was whining, but couldn’t hear
that,
either. There was only the siren piercing through the car.

It seemed the sheriff was used to the sound. He still spoke on the radio, and must have heard when the radio spoke to him. Miles and miles from the town, he suddenly picked up the microphone, and his lips moved for a while. Then he looked back at Danny and spoke again.

“Pardon?” said Danny.

The sheriff flipped a switch that stopped the siren. “Change of plans!” he shouted, as though the thing was still blaring. “Brace yourself, boy.”

There were no handles on his door. Danny barely had time to put a hand on the seat before the sheriff slammed the brakes and spun the wheel, sending the car skidding sideways down the road. In a crunch of gravel, it slid through half a circle. Then it straightened out, and the sheriff drove back through his cloud of dust. He turned on the siren again.

They swung left at a crossroads and went tearing north, enveloped by the dust. The car slid round the bends, and stones popped and crackled against the chassis. Danny had no idea now where he was going. For all he knew, the sheriff was taking him all the way home in that horrible howl of the siren.

Rocket’s ears started twitching as they passed a herd of grazing cows. He jumped up to Danny’s window, and a moment later, right beside them, appeared a yellow airplane, like a crop duster. It made Danny think of Steve Britain’s little Skyraider going round and round Camp Wigwam. For an instant they seemed to be flying together, the car and the airplane, until the crop duster passed them. The sunlight flashed on its wings as it banked in a turn and settled to the ground.

It took the sheriff twenty minutes to reach the same place, an airport that seemed to sit in the middle of nowhere. He drove right onto the runway, then along its painted yellow lines, toward a block of buildings and a control tower that looked like a toy or a model. Along the sides of the runway, parked on the grass, were half a dozen private planes. Danny could see that one was a jet, with the name of an oil company painted on its tail, and he wished that Beau was there to see it. Then he laughed at himself, because Rocket was gazing at the airplanes, and in the black pools of his eyes Danny could see Beau staring out.

At last the sheriff turned off the siren. He parked the car and turned around in his seat. “I have to ask you something,” he said. “This story you’re telling, do you believe it?”

“Yes,” said Danny.

“It’s not just a tale to make yourself look important?”

Danny shook his head.

“Then why doesn’t the dog do something?” The sheriff was looking at Rocket. “If he’s what you say he is, and he’s so darned smart, why doesn’t he do something to save himself?”

Danny hadn’t thought of that. He told the sheriff, “If you say his real name, he barks.” But that didn’t sound impressive even to Danny, and he blushed when the sheriff laughed.

“I’d think about that if I was you,” said Sheriff Eugene Brown. He got out of the car and opened the door for Danny, and they all stood on the sun-heated runway. The yellow crop duster was being refueled in a halo of gas fumes.

“Why did you bring me here?” asked Danny.

“There’s someone flying in to meet you, boy.”

“In that?” asked Danny, looking at the yellow plane.

“No. In that.” The sheriff pointed at the sky.

Danny looked up. There was a pinpoint of light moving above the fields, like a shooting star crossing the whole, huge sky. Rocket went crazy, spinning around in tight circles, barking and talking.

The light seemed to stop as it turned toward them. Suddenly it was hurtling right above them in a tremendous flash, in the wonderful roar of a jet engine. It changed in an instant from a speck of light to a white-painted fighter, then in an instant back again. It climbed straight up through the sky, winking like silver and diamonds, then fell and hurtled back. Again it passed above them, and on across the fields. It traveled in a moment as far as Danny could see, and the air was full of its fabulous, powerful sound.

People came out from the tower, out from the planes, out from nowhere, it seemed. They stood in a group, all staring at the sky with their hands at their foreheads.

The fighter appeared in the distance, its three wheels hanging down, and it seemed to float above the field like a bird or a kite. It touched the runway and rumbled toward them, shimmering with the heat and the whirls of thin smoke from the jet. It stopped not a hundred feet away. The engine slowed to a whine, and then to a stop.

Rocket barked. He dashed toward it.

The plane was long and narrow, with a pointed nose and a tail like the fin of a shark. The wings were short, as narrow as knife blades, and half the plane stuck out in front of them. It looked to Danny like a big dart, and he knew right away—from Beau’s models—that it was a T-38. Not entirely white after all, it had a blue stripe down its length, and a symbol like an atom painted on its tail. A long canopy bulged at the top, while the engines were nestled very close to the body.

Danny had never really marveled at airplanes, but this one looked beautiful even to him. It was like a strange bird that stood on three spindly legs, and it seemed as though it could hardly wait to lift those little legs and take to the sky again.

There were two cockpits, but only one flier. Danny could see him in the front seat, a man in a red helmet, his face covered with a mask. Rocket was right under the plane now, not tall enough to touch it even standing on his hind legs.

The canopy hinged open in two sections, each lifting up and backward like the hood on Mrs. River’s Pontiac. Seeing the glass and metal moving like that made Danny think of the plane as less like a bird and more like an incredible machine that must have come down through space from the distant stars.

The pilot lifted himself in his seat. He unfastened his mask and it swung free from one side, showing a face that was round and happy. He hoisted himself over the side of the cockpit and slid to the ground.

He was wearing a blue flight suit and a black parachute harness that jangled with its buckles. As Rocket leapt around him, he bent down to pat the dog’s head. Then he walked toward Danny and the sheriff. Though he wasn’t a big man, he looked enormously heroic to Danny.

He took off the red helmet, and his hair was black and short. He took off one of his thick gloves and held out his hand, grinning all the time with the friendliest smile that Danny could imagine. “I’m Virgil Grissom,” he said. “They call me Gus.”

Danny, of course, knew who he was. Who else could have come flying in to see him in this sparkling white machine? But he couldn’t answer; he couldn’t speak. Danny put his own hand into the hand of the astronaut, and he touched this man who had gone flying around the whole Earth in little more than an hour, again and again, who had seen the sun come up and the sun go down three times in a day, the only man in all the world who had been twice into space.

“You must be Danny River,” this man said now, squeezing Danny’s hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Danny. You’re famous, you know.”

Danny blushed. He giggled. Gus Grissom was among what Beau had called “the seven great men,” and here he was telling Danny that
he
was famous?

“Holy man,” said Danny. “Holy man, this is great, Mr. Grissom.”

The astronaut laughed. “Gus,” he said. “Okay?”

Then Danny remembered himself why he was there and what was important. He said, “This is Rocket.”

“I figured it was,” said Gus. “I read about him in the paper this morning. I’ve been hearing about him nonstop on the radio. But nobody said he’s such a friendly little pooch.”

“He isn’t so friendly to everyone,” said Danny. “It’s just he knows who you are.”

The grin never left Gus Grissom’s face. It only grew wider. “He looks like my old Blackie.”

Gus shook hands with the sheriff, then took Danny aside, to sit with Rocket in the shade of the airplane’s wing. Rocket stayed right beside Gus, and Danny didn’t mind at all.

“Soon as I saw the paper this morning, and your story right there on the front page, I said I had to meet that boy,” said Gus. “I jumped straight into the T-38.”

“Thank you for coming,” said Danny. “Do you think you can save Rocket?”

That great, happy grin at last changed to something else. Gus looked at Danny and slowly shook his head.

“But you believe me, don’t you?” said Danny. “That’s why you came, isn’t it, Mr. Grissom?” He couldn’t bring himself to say Gus.

Gus Grissom looked out at the runway and the fields. He squinted, as though the sun was shining straight in his eyes. “I won’t lie to you, son,” he said. “It was you I came to see, not the dog. I don’t see there’s much I can do there.”

“You promised Beau you’d help,” said Danny.

“That’s your brother?”

“Yes. He wrote to you and you wrote back and said you’d help him if ever you could. You said if he came to the Cape you’d help him.”

Gus was still squinting. He looked worried now, even ashamed.

“You remember that, don’t you?” said Danny.

“No.” Gus shook his head. He was holding his red helmet, turning it in his hands. “I don’t live at the Cape, Danny. My home’s in Houston.”

“But the letter…”

“I never see those letters,” said Gus. “There’s some gals in an office take care of that. They send the same answer to everyone, son.”

“You signed it.”

“They have rubber stamps.”

Danny blinked. He felt that hole in his stomach, and it was bigger and deeper than ever. It seemed almost funny that he’d gone so far and tried so hard just because a lady in an office had put a rubber stamp on a piece of paper. But it really wasn’t funny at all.

Gus told him the same thing that Alice had said. He told him that no one would take the dog away now. But he didn’t know Creepy Colvig any more than Alice did. Poor Rocket understood it all; Danny could see that. Why, the dog was nearly crying, its eyes as wet as Danny’s.

“What was it you hoped I would do?” said Gus.

“I don’t even know,” said Danny.

As they sat quietly below the wing, the sheriff came up to the plane. All the people who’d come from the tower were starting to gather round it, and he couldn’t keep them back anymore. He walked right up to the T-38 with his snakeskin boots tapping on the runway. Then he bent down and looked underneath, and said, “I have to get going pretty soon.”

“Can’t I wait a little bit more?” said Danny.

“Got nothing to do with me,” said the sheriff.

“But—”

“It’s okay, Danny,” said Gus Grissom. “I’m going to fly you home. You and your dog.”

“Wow!” shouted Danny. “No kidding.”

“Honest Injun.”

“Holy smoke! Holy crow!” cried Danny. “You hear that, Rocket?”

The dog was leaping about, doing those quick twirls that nearly bent him double, talking a mile a minute. Gus Grissom watched him, and laughed. “Well, that’s the darnedest thing,” he said.

“Beau was always crazy about flying,” said Danny. “He said there were only two things he wanted to do, and one was to fly in a jet.”

“What was the other?” asked Gus.

“To float through space,” said Danny.

“Well, we can’t go quite that high,” said Gus, with a chuckle. “But we’ll go just as high as we can.”

“Thanks,” said Danny. “Thanks a million. I know you don’t believe me, but—”