The Green Glass Sea (20 page)

Suze stopped herself with a shudder. That wasn't funny. She didn't want to think about that. It was too close to what had happened to real people in Germany. Jews, like Gramma and Grandpa Weiss. There were stories in the newspaper that week, about GIs finding bodies stacked in piles, and big brick buildings that were really ovens. She'd had nightmares from just reading about it.

She crumpled the picture of the toaster into a tight ball and tossed it, hard, into the trash can by the back door. She picked up the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee box and busied herself reading the directions, so that her brain would fill up with something else, something easy.

The chugging opening bars of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” came out of the radio, and without thinking about it, Suze started shaking the box to the rhythm. Shooshpah, shoosh-pah, shoosh-pah. Spaghetti made a pretty good train sound. She stood up, keeping the box in motion, and began to march around the kitchen in time to the toe-tapping music. Shoosh-pah, shoosh-pah.

And then, in mid-song, the music stopped abruptly, replaced by the voice of Bob Parton, the disk jockey, sounding excited.

“The Germans have surrendered!” he said. “The war in Europe is over! President Truman announced this morning that General Eisenhower . . . ”

Suze stared at the radio in shock for a minute, then began shaking the box of spaghetti furiously, like a New Year's Eve noisemaker. She jumped up and down so hard that a paper Toto dog, only partially cut out, fluttered off the table and glided across the linoleum. Suze paid no attention.

“It's over! It's over!” Suze half sung, half shouted. “It's over, it's over,
it's o-ver
!” She jumped to Dewey's side of the table, and without thinking about it, grabbed her arm and pulled her into the celebration.

They danced around the tiny kitchen, arms linked together, both shouting, “It's over!” to the cacophony of the box of spaghetti, until the radio began to blare out “The Star-Spangled Banner. ”

Suze dropped Dewey's arm and put her hand over her heart, automatically, the way they always did in school, and closed her eyes. When the anthem was over, she was standing in the kitchen again, looking at Dewey.

Suddenly everything felt awkward.

“The war's over, ” Suze said in a normal tone of voice.

“Yeah, ” Dewey said. “I'm glad. ” She looked around for a second, then sat down.

Suze felt a little out of breath, but she didn't feel excited anymore. Not the same way. The radio droned on and on about generals and treaties and terms, and Suze turned the volume down, picked the Toto dog up off the floor, and sat back at the table. She fiddled with her scissors.

“I bet there will be a lot of parties tonight, ” she said after a minute. “Maybe my dad will even come home early. He can stop working for one night. It's the end of the war, after all. ”

“Maybe, ” Dewey said. “I guess they'll have to keep making the gadget, though, because of the Japs.
That
war isn't over. ”

“Oh. I forgot about them. ”

“Yeah, but I bet the army hasn't. On the other hand, ” Dewey said, smiling, “now maybe Papa can come home from Washington, and stop looking for a Nazi gadget. ”

Suze stared across the table. “The Nazis have a gadget? ”

“Probably not, or the war wouldn't be over, ” Dewey said, shaking her head. “But Papa said that before the war, scientists all over the world talked to each other, all the time, so the ones that turned into Nazis
could
have known the same stuff. ”

“How do
you
know about that?” Suze glared suspiciously at Dewey. “It would be top, top,
top
secret. ”

“I don't know much. Just what Papa said in his letter. ”

“Oh, right. Like the censors would let something like
that
get through, ” Suze said scornfully. Dewey was just trying to sound big.

“It was in code. ”

“Code? Like a spy?” Suze snorted. Now she was sure Dewey was full of baloney.

“It's not like he's passing on war secrets or anything, ” Dewey said quickly. “He just lets me know what he's doing.” Dewey got up and went back to the bedroom. She returned a minute later with a flimsy piece of paper and spread it out on the table. It had been folded and refolded so many times it was almost in pieces.

“See, Papa's letters have always been in code. Ever since I was little. He says it exercises my brain. When I was in first grade, it was mostly rebuses—you know, the puzzles where the pictures sound like words?”

Suze nodded impatiently.

“Then later, it was mostly numbers. Like . . . ” Dewey wrinkled up her forehead. “Like 4-5-23-5-25 would be D-E-W-E-Y. Alphabet code. That's an easy one. Most of them were trickier. ”

Suze looked down at the letter. “This is just words. ”

“Well, yeah. Like Papa's going to send a number code by the censors? That would just make them pay attention.”

“I guess so. ” Suze read the letter and smirked. Code? What a bunch of bushwa. This was just a boring old letter. “There's nothing secret in here. ”

“Sure there is. Look. ” Dewey pointed to a line. “He says he saw
Casablanca
with Uncle T. But Papa doesn't go to movies, and I don't have any uncles. So it must be a clue. ”

“About what?”

“Well, that one's not really code. It's just Spanish. ”

Suze muttered under her breath. Casablanca.
Casa blanca
. House. White. House—“White House? You think your dad went to the White House?”

Dewey nodded. “With Uncle T. , who has to be Truman.”

Hmm. That was pretty good, even for baloney. “But what about the Nazis? There's nothing at all about Nazis, in any language, ” Suze said. Let her try to explain
that
.

“Yeah there is. See here, where he calls me a little Munchkin? Papa never calls me cute names, so that's gotta be code too. ”

Suze thought for a minute. What would Munchkins have to do with Nazis? Well,
Oz. Nazi
. They both had Zs. Was that it? “Because Oz sounds kind of like Nazi?” she said. “The Zs?”

Dewey raised her eyebrows in surprise, so high that Suze could see them above her glasses. “Wow. That's good. I hadn't thought of that at all. ” She looked down at the paper. “Wow, ” she said again.

Suze felt oddly pleased. “So what did you think it meant?”

“Munich, ” Dewey replied. “Munchkin, Munich. ”

That made sense too. Suze wished
her
father would write secret notes. This was kind of fun. “What about the rest?”

Dewey shrugged. “I figure a pocketknife with that many blades is a useful gadget, right? But since Papa doesn't have a knife like that—”

“—and no one can find another, it means—”

“—Nazi scientists aren't building a gadget, ” Dewey finished. “I told you. ”

Suze whistled through her teeth. “That's really clever. ”

“Papa's good at puzzles, ” Dewey nodded. She looked down at the letter, then up at Suze. “You won't tell anyone, will you? I don't want Papa to get into trouble, ” she said seriously.

“Nope. My lips are sealed, ” Suze said.

“Thanks. ” Dewey gave the butter knife a hard twist and the two halves of the duck split open with a pop and rattled onto the tablecloth. She pulled the spring out and looked at it in triumph. “Finally. ”

Suze stared at the letter and the demolished duck. “It's a good thing you Kerrigans are on
our
side, ” she said after a minute, and went over to light the stove and boil water for spaghetti.

THE AFTERNOON EVERYTHING
changed started out pretty ordinary. Suze sat on the couch in the living room, a stack of comic books on one side of her, and the big yellow bowl full of buttered popcorn on the other. A green bottle of Coke balanced on the wooden arm of the couch.

“What are those about, anyway?” Dewey asked from the chair across the room. She'd been reading a book about geometry—Suze wasn't sure why, since school was almost over for the summer—but she'd come to the end of it. A cereal bowl of popcorn was wedged between her leg and the side of the chair.

“What are what about?”

“Your comic books. What kind of stories do they have?”

“Just the usual, ” Suze said, without taking her eyes off Wonder Woman, who was about to lasso a very evil-looking Jap.

“I don't know what that means. ”

“You've never read a comic book?”

Dewey shook her head.

“C'mon. You've
never
read a comic book?” Suze asked again. That was unbelievable. How could anybody, even Dewey, grow up in America and never read a comic book? It was just the sort of thing that spies got trapped by.
Who is Clark Kent?
And a Nazi wouldn't know, would he?

“Classics Illustrated.
Treasure Island
. Once, ” Dewey said sadly. “Then my Nana took it away. She said they'd rot my brain and give me nightmares. ” She looked wistfully at the pile at Suze's side.

“Says her.
Treasure Island?
” Suze shook her head. “That's pretty tame. Even these, ” she patted the top of the stack, “even these won't keep you up nights. They're just adventures. Superheroes with special powers. ”

“Like what?” Dewey moved the bowl of popcorn to her lap and slid forward to the edge of the chair.

“Well, like when Captain Marvel says ‘Shazam' he turns from an ordinary guy into”—she looked at the comic on the top of the stack—“the World's Mightiest Mortal. Captain America got shot up with some sort of secret army serum, and Superman's super because he came from another planet. I'm not sure about Captain Midnight. But he can do nifty stuff too. ”

“There are a lot of captains, ” Dewey said. “Are all the heroes men?”

Suze nodded. “All the captains, yeah. Most of the others too. But there's Wonder Woman. And Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And Brenda Starr, but she's boring because she's just a reporter. Mostly she just gets rescued. Or kissed. ” Suze made a face. “I like Captain Marvel and Superman best. Superman can melt steel just by staring at it the right way. ”

“That would be kind of useful, ” Dewey said.

“Yeah. ” Suze crammed a handful of popcorn into her mouth and wiped her hand on her pants leg. “You want to read a couple?” she said as she chewed.

“Really?”

“Sure. ” Suze swallowed and took a drink of Coke. “I've read all these a bunch already. Just don't wreck 'em, okay?” Dewey gave her a funny look, and Suze realized that had been silly. Dewey was about the neatest person she'd ever met. She even used a bookmark when she was done reading, instead of turning down the corner of the page, like everyone in
her
family.

She thumbed through the top of the stack, and pulled out the third one down, which had a man in red tights standing with his foot on a Nazi's head. “Here. Start with Captain Marvel. This one's pretty good. ” She tossed the comic across the coffee table, spine first, so that it sailed into Dewey's lap.

“It looks swell, ” said Dewey. She ate a single piece of popcorn and settled back into the armchair with a contented smile.

Suze put the stack of comics on the coffee table, and went into the kitchen, where she'd been working before she decided to take a break and read. The table was covered with cutout pieces from shiny magazines—people mostly, and some cars and a tank. A Pyrex baking pan corralled an array of seemingly random objects: five bottle caps, a chip of green-painted wood, a marble, the cardboard top off a milk bottle, a red rubber ball, and a wax-paper square with a small mound of reddish dirt.

Her first collage, life in Berkeley, had turned out pretty okay. She'd glued everything to a big piece of cardboard, the side of a carton of cereal from the PX. This one was going to be the Hill, so she had cut out a lot of soldiers. Magazines were good for soldiers, and army-green trucks and buildings, because just about every ad was about being patriotic and the war. So that was useful. It was harder to find pictures dressed like people on the Hill—almost everyone in magazines looked like they were on their way to a party. Most of the women had dresses and lots of makeup, and didn't look like anybody she knew in real life.

She had spent a week walking around the Hill trying to figure out what she'd want to show, and another couple of weeks begging old magazines from people and cutting out enough pictures. She'd gotten pretty excited the night she found a water tower in an ad, and had spent most of another morning cutting carefully around the strands of a black-and-white barbed-wire fence.

Suze started laying out pictures on the kitchen table, layering them so it looked like trees behind buildings behind people. On the very top, she put some of the objects from the Pyrex pan—a Coke bottle cap near the building that looked like the PX, the red rubber ball on top of some playground swings.

She moved the pictures and the objects around for almost an hour, but no matter where she put them, they didn't quite make what she could see in her head. Everything was too flat. She wanted the people to be at the front—not just a paper's thickness away from the background, but sticking out from it. She tried taping a marble to the back of a soldier, but it only made his middle bulge. His head and feet drooped down, as if he'd been draped across a tiny, invisible barrel. She cut a strip from a piece of shirt cardboard, taped it down the soldier's back, then taped the marble to that. He was stiffer, but teetered head-foot-head-foot like an army seesaw. Suze sighed, put the soldier down onto the oilcloth, and went to the bathroom.