The Green Glass Sea (19 page)

Dewey's face was all screwed up and wrinkly, the way it was in school sometimes when she was thinking of the answer to a hard question. Her tongue was sticking out of the corner of her mouth, and she looked even weirder than usual. Suze thought about saying something, but she wasn't really in the mood.

But Dewey never seemed bored, Suze thought, even when all she was doing was staring at rusty junk. “What are you hunting for?” she asked.

Dewey glanced up, surprised.

“I need six of these little bolts, ” she said after a minute. “And the nuts to go with them. I'm pretty sure I've got more in here somewhere. ” She looked down at her fingers, which had continued moving pieces aside.

“Oh. ” Suze looked at the pile of junk on the bedspread. It was kind of interesting junk. “Can I see?” she asked, without really thinking about it.

Dewey shrugged. “I guess so. ”

Suze hesitated for a second, then sat down on the end of Dewey's bed, carefully, so that none of the little piles would spill onto the floor. Even so, the bed sagged where she sat, and a few tiny round balls, BBs or something, slid down the chenille, making tiny rattling noises and stopping at a fold in the fabric.

“Show me the thing you want, ” Suze said.

Dewey handed her one of the pieces she had been holding in her fist. The metal felt warm against Suze's skin. The bolt had a flat head smaller than a pea and was about half an inch long.

Suze leaned over the pile in the middle of the bed. After a few seconds, she reached in and pulled out a bolt. “Is this one?”

Dewey held out her hand, curved, palm up. Suze dropped the bolt into it.

“Yep, that's it. ” Dewey peered at Suze. “How'd you find it so quick?”

It was Suze's turn to shrug. “I just looked at it and tried to find another. It's easy. Like those puzzles where only one of the shapes matches exactly, but in real life. ” She looked at the pile, then pulled out another bolt from a haystack of intercrossed nails. “Here's another one. ”

“You're
good
at this, ” Dewey said.

Suze felt an odd sense of pride at the compliment, even if it was coming from Dewey. “I'm good at puzzles, ” she said. “Especially the kind where you have to find something. Jigsaw puzzles. I'm good at finding pieces for those too. ” She pulled two more bolts out from the pile. “See. What else do you need?”

Dewey handed her a nut, and within a few minutes, Suze had found five more of them and poured them into Dewey's hand as if she had uncovered uncut diamonds.

“Is that all you need?” Suze asked.

“For now, anyway. Now I can put all the pieces together and see if the wind-up part will work the way I want it to. ” Dewey swept her empty hand across the pile and scooped up a handful of metal bits, dumping them with a clatter into the Mason jar.

“Wait, ” Suze said. She bit her lip. “Uh, before you put them all away, can I look through them? Some of them are kind of interesting. ”

“Okay. I'm not going to need them right away. ” Dewey dumped the contents of the jar back onto the bedspread.

For a long time the bedroom was quiet except for the sounds of small metal parts clinking and tunking together. Dewey sat on the floor near the door, the parts of her gadget arranged around her in a semicircle. She had a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, and would pick one tool up, fiddle with a metal piece, then put it down again and pick up the other tool, making minute adjustments to something Suze couldn't see.

Suze sat on the bed, Indian-style, and sifted through the assortment of tiny metal objects, making piles of her own. She liked the shapes. She separated out the straight and pointy pieces, like nails and tacks, and put them on her left. Next to them she made a line of straight, blunt things. Bolts and small metal rods. On her right she put the round things, divided into silver washers, bronze gears, and tiny bearings and marbles of graduating size. In front of her she made a much smaller array of odd bits that didn't fit with anything—a gob of molten lead that reminded her of the lumps Daddy used to bring home, a small black knob, an electric plug with no cord.

When she had sorted the contents of the jar into families of shapes, she looked at them for a while, moving some from one pile to another, selecting others that she especially liked, displaying those up on the platform of Dewey's pillow.

She began to fit pieces together, nesting one against another in a way she found very satisfying. It wouldn't
do
anything, not like Dewey's gadgets, some of which actually wound up with a key and moved. But she liked when her eye found an angle or a particular curved edge and she pulled that piece out of the pile, fitting it into the metallic composition that was forming.

She heard Dewey stand up and come over to the side of the bed, but didn't pay much attention.

“That's kind of pretty, what you made, ” Dewey said. “You're good in art. Mrs. Nereson almost always puts your pictures up on the corkboard. ”

It was true, but Suze didn't know how to reply. Finally she just nodded her head.

“I'll be back in a sec, ” Dewey said.

Suze nodded again, and looked back down at the pile of nails she'd been assessing. The composition needed more pointy things. A few minutes later, when she heard footsteps coming back, she was absorbed in making a stylized cactus out of a J-hook and some carpet tacks.

Dewey came over and stood next to the bed again, this time with the lid of a shoebox proffered in both hands.

“What's that for?” asked Suze.

“So that when I go to bed tonight you have someplace to put your picture. That way you can keep making it better tomorrow. If you want. ”

Suze hadn't thought about it as a picture. She hadn't planned any of this. But when she looked at the arrangement forming on the pillow, she realized how much she didn't want to break it up into pieces of metal junk again and scoop them back into the jar.

“You mean I can
keep
these?” she asked.

“Sure. They don't really do anything. At least not anything I'm working on now. And there's always more around, if you know where to look. This place is lousy with perfectly good stuff people just throw away. ” Dewey shook her head. “This way you don't have to wreck it unless you want to. You don't, do you?”

“No, ” Suze said slowly. “I guess I don't. ” She looked at Dewey, who didn't seem quite as weird, right then. “Thanks, ” she said.

Dewey smiled, just a small grin, and went back to work on her gadget while Susan Gordon carefully moved her first collage, piece by piece, onto the cardboard frame of the shoebox lid.

DEWEY CLIMBED THE
stairs to the apartment automatically, not even looking where she was walking. She'd had an idea for a new project while she was eating lunch in the woods, and the pieces hadn't quite come together in her mind. It would need a mainspring, and a worm gear, and she thought there was one in the cigar box, but it might not be the right size, unless—

She stopped in the kitchen doorway. Propped up against the napkin holder was a note that said DEWEY in capital letters. Below it, lying flat, was a large brown envelope. Army, very official, with lots of rubber stamps and dates and signatures.

A typed paper label said: “Miss D. Kerrigan, c/o Marjorie Gordon, P. O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico.” The note, scribbled on the back of a PX receipt, said:

Mrs. Gordon must have left it at lunchtime. Dewey sat down and carefully unwound the figure-eight of red string and paper circles that held the envelope closed, then smiled in delight. Inside was a flimsy V-mail envelope, unsealed, with no postmark. But Dewey recognized the angular handwriting instantly.

Papa.

It wasn't a long letter, not even a whole page. Dewey read it through twice quickly, and then a third time, taking in every word, every comma.

Dewey ran a finger gently over the blue ink signature from Papa's fountain pen. She sighed and carefully refolded the letter, sliding it back into its envelope. He wouldn't be back this week. But at least he'd written.

Humming under her breath, Dewey took the letter back to the bedroom. She hid it under the paper lining of her dresser drawer, with her Hill pass—her important papers—then opened her cigar box to look for a good, strong spring.

IT WAS FINALLY
spring, and Hitler was dead. Suze felt like the world was a giant jigsaw puzzle, and in the last month all the important pieces had been removed, one after another, leaving blanks and unfamiliar names. Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler. All dead. It just didn't seem real.

Because nothing in her life had changed much at all. She went to school, she came home. Daddy hardly ever left his lab until the middle of the night—if then—and Mom skipped supper more often than not. She missed having Mom cook. Sometimes there were leftovers in the icebox, but lately Suze had been stopping by the PX for a hamburger on the way home from school. It was either that or cold cheese sandwiches for supper.

Well,
that
had changed, a little. Last week, Dewey had made them macaroni and cheese, on the stove and everything, and it was pretty good. Better than cold sandwiches, for sure. Then Mom came home later and made a big fuss over Dewey, and how great it was that she was grown-up enough to make supper. Big deal. The directions were right on the box.

So on Tuesday, after school, instead of going home, Suze went to the Commissary to get something
she
could make for supper. The store was a lot smaller and dingier than the Piggly-Wiggly back home, and there wasn't a lot of choice. But she found Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti. The sauce and everything was in the box, so how hard could it be? On the way home, she thought about how surprised her mom would be, what she'd say. Suze smiled and juggled the box up in the air, catching it and throwing it up again. It made an interesting shooshing noise, with the long dry noodles inside.

Dewey was sitting at the kitchen table, taking something apart, as usual. Some kind of wind-up toy, a chicken or a duck, that she was prying apart with a butter knife.

“Hey, ” Suze said.

“Hey. ”

Suze put the box of spaghetti down on the table and watched Dewey for a minute. She was making that weird face she did when she was thinking really hard. “What're you doing?”

“Trying to get the spring out. I wound my other one too tight, and it got sprung. ”

“Oh. Do you have to bust the toy up to do that?”

“Yeah, ” said Dewey. “But it's pretty snafued anyway. ” She held it up, and Suze could see that its bill was almost rusted off, and it only had one foot.

“It doesn't waddle anymore, it just falls over, ” Dewey explained.

“Junk, ” agreed Suze. “I'm going to make spaghetti tonight. You can have some too. ”

“Okay. ” Dewey resumed her prying.

Suze waited for more of a reaction—gratitude, excitement, something—but Dewey didn't say anything else. Suze turned on the radio. It was almost 5:00, and she'd overheard Barbara tell Joyce that KRS—the only station on the Hill—was going to play some Top 40 music this afternoon, instead of the classical stuff they usually played. Suze didn't really mind classical, but it was hard to sing along to.

“. . . gonna take, a sentimental journey—” crooned Doris Day. Suze made a face. She didn't like that song much. Too slow and sappy. She went into the living room to get the collage she was working on.

She was trying to make a picture of her old life in Berkeley. Not like a drawing of her house or anything. That was kind of baby. Besides, she couldn't draw that well. The people one Sundt over had thrown out some old magazines—
Saturday Evening Posts
and
Ladies' Home
Journals
. They had big colorful ads, and she was cutting some of them out, like paper dolls from real life. Men in hats and women with baby carriages and the sign from a Texaco station. A Buick and a Plymouth. Sort of a street scene, but some parts were bigger than they ought to be. Her favorite so far was a tiny woman with a shopping basket filled with a giant bottle of Dr. Pepper. Suze hadn't glued anything down yet, just stuck the cutouts onto a big piece of cardboard with thumbtacks to see how they fit together.

She plopped the stack of magazines onto the seat of the empty chair and propped some of the finished figures up against the napkin holder. She leafed through the pages of a
Ladies' Home Journal
. It was really boring to read, but it had good pictures. She cut out a full-page shiny chrome Sunbeam toaster and held it up next to her people. It was the size of a building. That made her laugh, and she started to make up a comic book story to explain it while she leafed.