"It's okay." Justin put a hand on her shoulder. "I mean, it's not okay, but I was glad to do it. I mean—you know."
"I think so." Beckie laughed—shakily this time, not the wild laughter that had kept them both from screaming. "You're all right, Justin. Better than all right."
"Am I?" He was stuck in Elizabeth. He was stuck in this whole alternate. He was liable to get blasted to hamburger or murdered by a plague. All things considered ... He patted Beckie. "Could be worse, I guess."
Nine
Mr. Snodgrass stared at the hole in the wall. He'd been at the grocery when the Ohioans shelled Elizabeth. The store didn't get a scratch. "You were in the kitchen, you say?" he asked Beckie.
"That's right," she said. "Justin was over. We were getting fizzes, and . . ." Once terror was past, it didn't seem real. She'd been in a car crash once, when a drunk rearended her mother. This was like that, only more so.
He looked at the hole again. "You were lucky," he said.
"Tell me about it!" she exclaimed. That startled a smile out of him. But fair was fair. She had to give Justin his due: "It wasn't just luck. Justin kind of, uh, tackled me and got us both under the table."
"That was smart of him," Mr. Snodgrass said. Had he served in the army? Had he fought in one of Virginia's little wars? Beckie realized she didn't know. He nodded to himself. "That was right smart, matter of fact. Best he could've done with the two of you where you were, I reckon."
"It scared me when he did it," Beckie said. "Then things started blowing up, and I got scared worse."
"Yeah." Mr. Snodgrass' voice was dry. "Almost needed a new diaper myself." Beckie started to laugh, then cut it off when she realized he wasn't kidding. And she'd been about that scared, too, when shells crashed down all around. For a little while, she'd had nothing to do with whether she lived or died. If that wasn't enough to scare somebody, she couldn't think what would be.
"What are we going to do?" she said, not so much because she thought Mr. Snodgrass had the answer as because she had to let it out or burst.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing I aim to do pretty darn quick," he said. Beckie made a questioning noise. He went on, "I'm going to get the spade out of the garage and dig me a good trench in the back yard. Maybe another one in the front yard. Cover over part of it with some corrugated sheet iron I've got and it'll make a tolerable shelter. Better'n ducking under the kitchen table, that's for sure."
"Sounds like a good idea," Beckie said, and then, "Can I help?"
He started to say no. She could tell. But she also watched him change his mind. "Well, maybe you can," he said. "I'm not as spry as I used to be. You don't mind getting dirty and sweaty, you don't mind blisters on your hands, I expect you'll do all right."
Beckie looked down at her palms. They were soft and smooth. Why not? What had she ever done that would toughen them up? She hadn't thought she would get stuck in the middle of—or even on the edges of—a war, though. "I don't care," she said firmly. "Better my hands than my neck."
"Now that's a sensible thing to say." Mr. Snodgrass looked around to make sure Gran was out of earshot. He didn't see her, but lowered his voice anyway: "You've come out with a good many sensible things lately, you have. Makes it hard for me to believe you're really Myrtle's granddaughter, no offense."
"I'm not mad—I know what you mean," Beckie said. They traded conspirator's grins. She went on, "Maybe I got it from my dad's side of the family—I don't know. But I'll tell you something: my mom doesn't get along with Gran, either."
"Can't say I'm surprised." Mr. Snodgrass looked around again. "Back when Myrtle lived here, nobody got along with her."
"Some things don't change, do they?" Beckie said.
"I reckon not," he answered. "Come on, then. Let's get to work."
It was just as hard as he said it would be. Digging a long, deep slit in the ground was no fun at all, not when the temperature and the humidity were both in the nineties. That was how Mr. Snodgrass put it, anyway. To Beckie, who was used to Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, it seemed about thirty-five. It was hot and sticky either way. One of them would dig for a while, then stop and pass the shovel to the other. Beckie didn't let Mr. Snodgrass be a hero—she didn't want him keeling over.
And she didn't feel much like a hero, either. Sweat made her clothes stick to her like glue. She figured she would have to wring out her blouse after she finally took it off. Antiperspirant or no antiperspirant, before long she could smell herself. She did get blisters. They stung. She could go on working in spite of them. She could, and she did.
Mr. Snodgrass got blisters, too. "Haven't tried anything like this in a while," he said while Beckie took a turn with the spade.
"It's tearing your lawn to pieces," she said.
"Well, I can set it to rights one of these days," he answered. "That'll give me something to do. And you notice we aren't the only folks digging in."
Beckie let fly with another shovelful of dirt. She had noticed. Several other people up and down Prunty Street were making shelters. One house had taken a direct hit. That made as good an argument for digging in as any she could think of.
Then Mr. Snodgrass said, "Don't know what we'll do if they start throwing poison gas at us. I couldn't begin to tell you where the gas masks're at. Have to dig 'em out, wherever they are."
"Why do you have gas masks?" Beckie asked.
He paused to wipe sweat off his forehead before answering, "Well, you never can tell." He seemed to think that was reason enough. In a place like this, not far from the border between two states that didn't like each other, maybe it was.
Travel was supposed to broaden you. It sure was teaching Beckie things she'd never known before. The main thing it was teaching her was how lucky she was to live in Los Angeles, a city far from any border, and in California, a state too strong for any of its neighbors to bother much. Before she left for this trip with Gran, she took all that for granted. As she started to dig again, she knew she never would again.
Most of the time, Justin and Mr. Brooks had been the only guests in Elizabeth's only motel. They weren't any more. Virginian soldiers filled the other rooms. They played the TVs in the rooms loud. They played what sounded to Justin like bluegrass music even louder. Being soldiers, they got up too early in the morning and made all kinds of ungodly noise right outside the window.
When Justin grumbled, Mr. Brooks gave him a crooked smile. "Go ahead," he said. "Bang on the walls. Go to their captain and complain."
Justin thought about that for a good microsecond, maybe even a microsecond and a half. "Yeah, right," he said sweetly.
Mr. Brooks laughed. "When I was your age, we said, 'And then you wake up.' Same thing either way."
"We say that, too, but it's not quite the same," Justin answered. The coin and stamp dealer raised an eyebrow. "We are waking up—that's the problem," Justin explained.
"Oh. Well, you're not wrong. But I don't know what we can do about it," Mr. Brooks said. "Besides complain, I mean."
The last four words took away what Justin was about to say. Instead of giving the automatic answer, he had to think about what came out next. "The real problem isn't the soldiers," he said after a few seconds. "The real problem is that we're stuck in this miserable little place when we really need to be down in Charleston."
"That's a problem, all right," Mr. Brooks agreed. "I don't know what we can do about it right this minute, though. Sometimes you've got to sit tight and wait."
"I'm sick of doing that!" Justin said. "It's driving me up the wall."
"Have you got any better ideas?" the older man asked pointedly.
"If I did, I'd be using them, believe me," Justin said.