Out of the Blue: Spy Boy
by Lisa Brunette
Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Brunette
Cover art: Anne Harrington
Cover concept: Lisa Brunette
Author's image photography by Allyson Photography
Author's image illustration by Lindsey Look
Published in the United States of America
by Sky Harbor LLC
PO Box 642
Chehalis, WA 98532
[email protected] Direct inquiries to the above address
All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for the use or misuse of any information contained in this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Out of the Blue: Spy Boy
Story One in the Series
by Lisa Brunette
Sky Harbor LLC
A version of this story first appeared in the journal Accent Miami.
…military brats, my lost tribe, spent their youth in service to this country, and no one even knew we were there.
— Pat Conroy
Mather Air Force Base, California
1980
A woman in fatigues clutches a bouquet of roses under her arm while eating blueberry frozen yogurt from a Styrofoam cup. Meredith watches her, riveted, admiring the clean look of her boots—even the stress-wrinkles in the leather are shiny. The green canvas tops of her boots seem starched, and her pants are tucked neatly inside them. She has rarely seen women dressed this way although her father dresses in fatigues all the time. The woman’s hair is secured so tight at the back of her head it would take a helicopter’s rotor wash to pull it free.
An air-raid siren cuts the air. The woman doesn’t pause, doesn’t think about the things she holds. She drops them: the roses, the cup of yogurt, and she runs. A full run, her arms pumping, her boots clipping the pavement. Meredith loses sight of her in the parking lot and turns back to the flowers. She wants to rescue them, pick them up in her arms and take them home.
“Meredith Lynn,” her mother says, pulling her elbow. “Come on. It’s just a drill.”
Meredith asks her why the woman ran, and her mother tells her that this place they moved to last month is a SAC base, spelled S-A-C but pronounced ’sack,’ like sack lunch. SAC stands for Strategic Air Command. “She’s trained to do that,” her mother says. “To run when the sirens call—in case there’s a nuclear war.”
Meredith nods. She knows all about nuclear war, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what her parents say the U.S. had to do to end World War II. At school, she draws mushroom clouds on the brown paper covers of her schoolbooks. When the air-raid siren goes off, she and the other kids crouch beneath their desks with their hands over the backs of their heads, something called “duck ’n cover.” The drill always goes on too long, the kids relaxing their hands, fiddling with broken paperclips and scraps of paper on the floor. Pushing dust around with their fingers, they joke about dying with their butts up in the air. Everyone knows that a desk isn’t going to save their lives. They have seen the films on TV about Hiroshima. They know what happens at ground zero, the white heat, the instant vaporization, not a trace of their bodies left, only their shadows burnt into cement.
Meredith leaves the roses on the pavement. Following her mother into the BX, she imagines the yogurt melting and dripping into a milky pool.
There’s a dead cat nailed to the gate behind her school, a cigarette poked into its mouth. Rumors of satanic rituals ripple throughout the sixth grade class because next to the cat someone scribbled a goat with horns and the numbers 666. The teachers glance nervously at each other at lunchtime, scan the tables for odd behavior. Mrs. Loesch keeps shuffling through her purse, searching for something but never finding it. During long division, Meredith watches her worn, navy-blue orthopedic shoes pace in front of her. She thinks about the woman with the spit-shined boots.
Meredith walks home by herself. A path from school follows a creek, probably the same creek that runs behind her house, so she takes it. But first she has to climb down a steep hill from the street to the creek that runs beneath it. In her slip-on flats, her feet are unsteady on the incline; she loses her balance and rolls to the bottom of the hill. A scrape the size of a quarter on the top of her hand bleeds. She will have a scar there for the rest of her life. Some younger kids yell down to ask if she’s okay, and she jumps up, takes a bow, and they all laugh.
Pine trees filter the sunlight onto the creek that gurgles around rocks and fallen trunks. The air smells clean here, pure. She follows the path, imagining herself as Sacajewea leading Lewis and Clark through dangerous land. She steps lightly over long auburn pine needles strewn like pick-up-sticks. In a clearing near the back of houses is a park with a jungle gym, swings, and a slide. She sits in one of the swings and pumps her legs furiously till she’s swinging as high up as she can. Right at the point where it’s as high up as she can stand it, she launches herself out of the swing, landing neatly in the wood chips. She walks back over to the swing seat, which has flipped upside-down from her launch. Someone’s drawn a pentagram there in red marker and the word “Satan.” She backs away from it.
Then she notices a little boy, hair so blonde it hurts her eyes when the sun hits it, taking pictures, from the top of the highest point on the slide, which is shaped like a rocket ship and higher than the pines. He wears a button-down shirt with suspenders and jumps around with quick, surreptitious movements. It seems he’s looking out at the B-52s behind their barbed wire fences, or toward the SAC office buildings. His camera doesn’t look like any camera she’s seen before. It’s a shiny metal, aluminum or titanium like the fancy bikes the officers’ kids have. He stops to buckle his sandals, never letting go of the camera. None of the other children play with him, but he doesn’t seem to care. Meredith pushes off the bar, executes a perfect pike-out, and lands in the wood chips as clean as Nadia Comaneci.
“What is that thing?” she asks the boy.
He slips away, running up the steps of the rocket ship to take more pictures.
She follows, thinking that if he is a spy, she should do something to stop him. He’s fast going up the steps, and Meredith feels her chest tighten. It’s not bad enough to warrant pulling out her inhaler, which is always embarrassing, so she keeps going. Cornering him at the top of the slide, she asks again, gasping a bit, “What are you doing?”
He replies in what sounds like gibberish. Some other language, German or Russian: Enemy languages. Not Spanish, Meredith knows what that sounds like, and not Japanese. Her friend Suzy speaks Japanese, and it doesn’t sound the way he speaks. Before she can reply, he careens down the slide and runs out of the park, between the houses and away.
At dinner Meredith announces: “I think I saw a spy today.”
Her father passes a plate of bread over her head to her mother, who doesn’t take any. She eats very little these days because her stomach always bothers her. They ignore Meredith.
She clears her throat. “I said, I saw a spy today. He was taking pictures of the base.”
“What are you talking about?” her mother asks.
“No spy’s setting foot on this base,” her father counters.
“He’s a little boy.”
Her parents smile at each other as if she is trying to be cute.
“I’m serious.”
“Kids can’t be spies,” her father explains. She watches him layer margarine onto his bread.
“They used kids in Viet Nam,” she says, knowing they know she’s right.
“Well, what did this little spy do?” her father asks.
“He wouldn’t talk to or play with anyone else and—”
“What a crime!” her father shouts, making her mother laugh.
“You didn’t let me finish! He climbed around taking pictures with some fancy little camera. And when I asked him about it, he said something in Russian.”
Her parents swap knowing looks. They are trying to think of what to say next, how to interpret Meredith’s prepubescent angst, working in their heads to calculate how difficult this last move was for her since it was so hard for them. The movers had been three days late, so the whole family slept in sleeping bags on the floor. When they finally arrived, two lamps were broken as well as the leg off one end of the dining room table. It’s possible that their daughter’s still in shock, still adapting to life on base, they think. They try to shut out images of potential problems at school, counselors and meetings with Meredith’s teachers and how that would get back to the commanding officer. Finally, her father straightens up in his chair and says: “Meredith, don’t be silly. There are no spies on this base. The boy you saw was probably German. Have you ever heard German before? We have a base in Germany; some of the Air Force kids are half-German. He had a camera and was