The Green Glass Sea (21 page)

When she came back, Dewey was standing next to the sink, a juice glass of water in her hand. “Are Billy Batson and Captain Marvel the same person?” she asked.

“Yeah. Billy Batson's just his secret identity. ”

“But . . . ” Dewey frowned. “But Billy's just a kid. And Captain Marvel's a grown man. How can—?”

“Shazam, ” Suze said confidently. “Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury. The ancient wizard gives him all those guys' powers when he says the word. ” She smiled. She didn't get to explain much to Dewey, and it felt kind of good. When it came to comic books, Suze knew her onions.

“Oh, ” Dewey said. “Well, I guess it works. ” She turned to go back into the living room, but stopped as she passed the table and looked at the teetering soldier.

“Why did you do that?”

Suze followed her gaze. “The marble?”

“Yeah. ”

“I want that guy to stick out, but it didn't really work. ”

“Stick out how?”

“Like this. ” Suze picked up the soldier and held it about an inch away from one of the buildings. “I want it to look like he's standing in front of the PX, not just pasted to it. Like in the shoebox dioramas we made for school, except these people are too big for a shoebox. ”

Dewey nodded, then scrunched up her face, thinking. “What about a bigger box? From a department store?”

“Hmm. ” Suze looked at the tabletop. “That would work. Except, ” she said, sighing, “there isn't a department store for like two hundred miles. ”

Dewey nodded and looked around the kitchen. “A drawer, then, ” she said.

“What?”

“A drawer. ” Dewey put
Captain Marvel
down and pulled out the shallow silverware drawer to the left of the sink. “See. It's about two inches deep, so you could paste some stuff to the bottom, and some on the sides. When you were done, you could probably even hang it on the wall, like a frame. ”

“Yeah, ” Suze said slowly. “Yeah. That might work. ” She stepped over to the counter and looked into the drawer for a long minute before she sighed again and pushed it back in with a thunk.

“What?”

“Even
my
mom would probably notice that the silverware drawer was missing, ” Suze said. “Or the desk drawer. Or any other drawer. ” She slumped against the counter. “It was a good idea, though. ”

“You just need one that nobody's using. ”

Suze looked around the small, cluttered apartment. “Around here? Fat chance. ”

“Not
here
, ” Dewey said, sounding like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “The dump. ”

“There are drawers at the dump?”

“There's just about everything at the dump. ”

“Drawers?”

“Probably. There's usually a busted-up desk or two. You should check it out. ” Dewey picked up
Captain Marvel
and turned to go.

Suze bit her lip. She knew there was a dump, of course. But she didn't know exactly where it was, or how it worked, and she didn't want to admit that. Maybe if she went for a walk, she could find it? Not likely, since she hadn't stumbled across it in two years of wandering.

“Uh, where exactly is the dump?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“You've never been to the
dump
? ” Dewey made it sound as if she'd never eaten cheese.

“
You'd
never read comics, ” Suze countered.

Dewey shrugged. “True. ” She held up
Captain Marvel
. “So we'll trade. Let me finish this one, then I'll take you, if you want. I'm always up for a trip to the dump. It's about my favorite place on the Hill, and I haven't been this week. ”

“Sure, I guess so. ” Suze's voice came out sounding as if she was doing Dewey a big favor by going, which wasn't what she'd meant, exactly. But Dewey didn't seem to notice.

By the time Suze had found her shoes—one under her bed and one under the dresser—Dewey had replaced
Captain Marvel
on the top of the stack and was waiting by the back door.

They walked to the bottom of the stairs. Suze turned right and was five feet down the dirt road when Dewey said, “Hold up a sec. ” She ducked under the angle of the stairs and came out a few seconds later pulling the handle of her red wagon.

Suze looked at it and frowned. Walking with Dewey was one thing. Everyone knew she was staying with the Gordons and nobody had made too big a deal. It was kind of old news. But a little red wagon? Suze was almost twelve. “Do we have to take that?”

“No, ” Dewey said. “But it takes about twenty minutes to walk to the dump, and it's kind of hot today. I wouldn't want to carry a wooden drawer all the way back. ” She looked at Suze, looked back at the wagon, and waited.

Suze was pretty strong, but she was already starting to sweat a little, just standing there in the sun. Maybe Dewey had a point. “Okay. Let's take it, ” she said after a minute. “Do you want me to pull?”

“You can have the way back, when it's full, ” Dewey said.

“Deal. As long as you don't want to bring back an anvil or something. ”

“Promise, ” said Dewey.

SUMMER HAD FINALLY
come to the Hill. The trees had thick green leaves, although there wasn't much shade anywhere near the road. At least there was a little bit of a breeze coming through the pines and scrub oaks to the west. The sky was a bright, storybook blue, with high, puffy white clouds. They could hear a baseball game in progress near the school—the crack of a bat and cheers—the sounds only slightly muffled by distance in the clear mountain air. It was the kind of summer day Suze loved, the kind that just might turn into an adventure.

The wagon bumped and squeaked on the dirt road, rattling over ruts left from last week's rains. Most of them were as dry and brown as crusts of old bread now, but a few muddy puddles remained where the potholes were deeper.

It was quiet. A lot of the men were gone, off to someplace in the southern desert called Base Camp. Suze didn't know where, or why. It was even more secret than the usual secret stuff. Her father had gone down the day before and was going to be away for the next week.

“Wait up, ” Dewey said. She dropped the wagon's handle and bent down to tie her shoe. Her left shoe, not the odd brown one that laced up the sides. Suze had almost forgotten about Dewey's shoes. Maybe she'd just gotten used to them while they'd been sharing a room.

“Will you have to wear one of those shoes forever?” she asked after they'd started up again. “I was just wondering.”

“I hope not, ” Dewey said. “The doctor in St. Louis said there's an operation I can have that'll make my legs the same size again, but they can't do it until I'm eighteen, until I stop growing for sure. Then I can wear normal old shoes, like everybody else. ”

“That'll be good. ”

“Yeah, real good. ” Dewey looked down at her feet. “I mean, I'm kind of used to it, but no one else ever is. I get tired of having to explain all the time, or pretending that I don't notice when people are staring. ”

Suze felt her cheeks redden, and was suddenly glad that no one paid much attention to
her
feet. “Yeah, ” she said after a minute, which seemed lame, but she couldn't think of anything else to say. They walked along past the post office, the PX, the Pond.

“After this picture's done, do you know what you're going to do next?” Dewey asked as they turned onto the main road and headed east.

“I'm not sure. ” Suze had a whole pile of loose pages to cut out, and some ideas had been floating around her head as she lay in bed at night, falling asleep, but nothing had quite jelled. Maybe a grocery store—there were more food ads than anything else—or a circus. Not with the same pictures, but those were the two ideas that kept coming back. “Maybe something with a circus, ” she said finally. “How 'bout you? Are you gonna make another gadget thingy?”

It was Dewey's turn to think. “I don't know. I just finished a wind-up guy that rolls around, sort of in a circle. I might make a better one of those, now that I've figured out most of the hard parts, but I'm not sure either. ” She smiled. “Maybe I'll get a good idea at the dump. It depends on what I find. ”

“Are there magazines there?” Suze asked.

“Not usually. Mostly army and science and building stuff. But you never know. It's kind of like treasure hunting, except somebody thought it was just junk. ”

Suze nodded. “Like drawers, ” she said. “Not quite pirate treasure, but I hope I find one. A wooden drawer, about two feet wide. Oak would be nice. ” Suze could almost see it, a polished square full of bright colors and shapes, hanging on the bedroom wall, the wood glowing in a beam of sunlight. “What about you?”

Dewey bit her lip and Suze saw her fingers drum for a moment on the handle of the wagon as she thought. “What I really want to find is a record player. Not the needle part, that could be busted. Just the turntable, the go-round. ”

“How come?”

“It would be fun to mess with. Like if I put magnets on it, so they went around, and then put a piece of glass over it, or thin enough wood, and put some BBs or ball bearings on the glass, I could see how they'd move. ”

“Would it do anything?”

“Maybe, ” Dewey said. “But I'd have to play with it for a while and see what happened before I decided. ”

“Yeah. I know what you mean. ” Suze hadn't put it into words, but that felt like what she'd been doing for the last couple of days. Playing with the images until they almost seemed to go where they belonged, fitting together into a puzzle she hadn't ever seen before.

She looked at Dewey out of the corner of her eye. She'd never had a conversation like this with another kid. She didn't feel like she had to be funny, or try to show Dewey how smart she was. She could just—

“This is it, ” Dewey said.

The dump looked like a vacant lot, fenced on three sides. On the right were organized bins of different kinds of lumber, but the rest was seemingly random piles of recognizable objects in unfamiliar configurations—a stack of wall-less windows, pieces of motors and other machines, shovels with splintered handles, a steering wheel, a stack of stenciled ammo crates, the front grill to a Buick.

“The furniture stuff—if there is any—is usually in the back corner, ” Dewey said. “I'm going to check out the little junk boxes over here. ” She pointed to her right. “You can take the wagon. Yell if you need help yanking something out. ”

Suze nodded and picked up the handle of the red wagon. She'd had one like it when she was in kindergarten. But she was much taller now, more than five feet, and had to bend her knees a little as she pulled it around the corner of a wall of construction metal, some rusty, some shiny in the afternoon sun.

Her eyes widened and her heart raced, just a little, when she saw four desks lined up against the chain-link fence. Three of them were metal, army green and battleship gray, but one was wood, like the teachers' desks in her old school in Berkeley, except painted a pale institutional green.

To get to the desk, Suze had to abandon the wagon and climb over a stack of fluorescent light fixtures and around a varnished wooden door propped up against them. She barked her shin on the edge of the door, but it just scraped off a little skin and didn't bleed. She tried to remember if she'd had a tetanus shot. But that was for rusty nails, and the door was only wood. It wouldn't matter, she hoped.

The desk had a huge piece missing from the back corner—which was probably why it was at the dump—and seven drawers. Three deep ones were stacked along each side, and a wide, shallow one ran across the middle, above where her knees would go. That one was perfect, not quite two feet across and two inches deep. She tugged at it, but there was some sort of catch at the back, to stop a person from accidentally pulling it all the way out, spilling paper clips and rubber bands all over the floor. By the time she'd crawled underneath and released the catch, her hands and knees were covered with dirt.

Suze pulled the drawer out, admired it for a minute—it might be oak, under the paint—then lifted it over the stack of fixtures, propping it carefully on the other side so it wouldn't get scratched up. She looked at the other desks, and decided, after some deliberation, that they were too metal and ugly, and there wasn't anything to do about that. She clambered back over the fixtures and put the good drawer into the wagon.

Dewey knelt in front of a line of gray metal boxes with lots of dials. She was using a screwdriver to pry off a black Bakelite knob. The stubs of metal on the fronts of the boxes were all that was left of their other knobs, which lay in a small pile next to her knees. The wagon's wheels crunched in the dirt, and Dewey looked over her shoulder.

“Find one?” she asked.

Suze grinned and pushed a strand of hair off her sweaty, dusty face. “Yeah. The rest were metal, or way too deep. ”

The knob came off in Dewey's hand with a small popping sound. She dropped it onto the pile with the others, and stood up. “That's a good one, ” she said, wiping her hands on a bandana from her pocket.

“It's great, ” Suze said. She ran a finger lightly over the smooth painted front of the drawer. “I can't wait to get home and see how everything fits. Are you gonna look for any more jun—?” She'd been about to say “junk, ” but that sounded like an insult she didn't mean. She groped for a word. “Any more, uh, paraphernalia?” She grinned. It was one of her favorite big words.