"Well, now I know why we wear seat belts," Beckie said. Gran hadn't wanted to put hers on. Mr. Brooks had been polite then, too: he'd politely told her she could walk in that case. He wasn't kidding. Even Gran, who was stubborner than most cats, could figure that out for herself. She had the belt on. So did Beckie, without argument.
As they sped east, away from Elizabeth, Mr. Brooks said, "I hope the Virginians didn't mine this stretch of road after they went down it."
Gran found another smart question to ask: "What happens if they did?"
"We blow up." Mr. Brooks sounded remarkably lighthearted about it. Would that make Gran stop asking questions? Beckie would have quit a lot sooner herself, but her grandmother never had known how to take a hint.
"Do you think we can get there without blowing up?" No, Gran had no clue that she might be irritating.
"Not a chance. I came this way on purpose, just so I could go sky-high," Mr. Brooks answered, deadpan. "And when you and Beckie wanted to come along, I really looked forward to blasting a couple of innocent bystanders, too."
Beckie giggled. She couldn't help herself. Gran was not amused. "Young man, are you playing games with me?" she demanded. Her tones suggested she would take Mr. Brooks to the woodshed if he dared do such a thing.
He stopped wasting time being polite: "Mrs. Bentley, get out of my hair and let me drive. I didn't want to bring you. You wanted to come. Now pipe down."
Gran opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Chances were nobody'd talked to her like that since Beckie's grandfather was alive. It didn't do him much good, not from what Beckie'd heard, but Mr. Brooks took Gran by surprise. The silence was chilly, but he didn't seem to care.
Then they came to a checkpoint. A soldier strode out from a sandbagged machine-gun nest and held up his right hand. "Where y'all think you're going?" he demanded. "There's not supposed to be any civilian traffic on the road."
"I know that, but we've got a medical emergency." Mr. Brooks pointed to Gran.
The soldier took a step back. He brought up his assault rifle. "If she's got the plague, you really can't take her anywhere."
"No, nothing to do with that. You can see for yourself— she'd look sicker if she did," Mr. Brooks said. He was right about that. Gran, as usual, looked healthy as an ox. She also looked surprised to hear she was sick. Usually, she complained about her health. It would be just like her to say she was fine now. To Beckie's relief, she didn't. Mr. Brooks went on, "She's been getting her therapy in Parkersburg. We can't go there now, so I have to take her down to Charleston for treatment. You don't want her to die, do you?"
By the look on the soldier's face, he couldn't have cared less. "Let me talk to my sergeant," he said at last. "You stay right there till I get back if you know what's good for you."
He walked back to the revetment. When he returned, he had an older man with him. "What the devil's going on here?" the noncom said.
Mr. Brooks went through his song and dance again. "She's a sweet old lady," he said—with a straight face, too, which proved he was a good actor. "I wouldn't do this if I didn't have to, believe me."
"Well. . ." The sergeant rubbed his chin. "All right. Go on. I hope your mother gets better."
"Uh, thanks." Mr. Brooks hadn't said anything about that. In his shoes, Beckie wouldn't have, either. But he rallied fast— maybe he could have been an actor. "Yeah, thanks. Twonk's Disease is treatable if you catch it in time." He drove away before the sergeant could change his mind.
"Twonk's Disease?" Beckie said.
He cast off his usual air of gloom to grin at her. "First name that popped into my mind."
"Is there such a thing as Twonk's Disease?"
"There is now. If you don't think so, ask that soldier."
Beckie thought it over. Mr. Brooks had something, no doubt about it. What people believed to be true often ended up as important as what really was true. "What would you have done if he told you to turn around?" she asked.
"I don't know. Maybe I could have taken out the whole checkpoint." He didn't sound as if he was kidding. He sounded more like someone weighing the odds. Beckie didn't know what kind of weapons he had. She hadn't known he had any, though she would have guessed he did.
"More to you than meets the eye, isn't there?" she said.
"Me?" He shook his head. "Nah. I'm about as ordinary as—"
"Somebody who talks about taking out a checkpoint full of soldiers," Beckie finished for him. Had he tried, she suspected he could have done it. He might look ordinary, but he wasn't. Come to think of it, neither was Justin. An interesting family. An unusual family, Beckie thought. She wondered what Justin's mother was like.
Mr. Brooks looked faintly embarrassed. Embarrassed at talking that way, or embarrassed at showing too much of himself? Beckie wasn't sure. "Talk is cheap," he said. "I got mad at that guy, and so . . ."
"Sure," Beckie said. Yeah, sure, she thought.
"You know," Gran said, "I saw a TV show about Twonk's Disease once. I think I should go to the doctor and get looked at, because I may have it."
Beckie didn't say anything. There didn't seem to be anything to say. Mr. Brooks just kept driving. If his eyes twinkled a little, if his cheeks and even his ears turned pink, then they did, that was all. If he was laughing inside, nobody could prove it. And that was bound to be just as well.
Things weren't as simple as Justin wished they were. They weren't as simple as he'd expected them to be. That seemed to be how growing up worked. Once you got into the middle of something, it usually turned out to be more complicated than you figured it would when you started.
With most things, that was annoying, but you dealt with it and went on. When you were pretending to be a soldier, complications were liable to get you killed.
Justin hadn't thought he would have to go on pretending very long. He hadn't thought he would have to go into combat, either. He had thought he would be able to slip away from the real soldiers as soon as he got into Charleston. He turned out to be wrong, wrong, and wrong, respectively.
Gunfire started up again well before sunup. He didn't hear it, not at first. Even if he was sleeping on the ground, he was sleeping hard. He didn't want to wake up even when Smitty shook him. "Come on, man—move," Smitty said. "You want to get shot?"
"Huh?" All Justin wanted to do was close his eyes again.
"Come on." Smitty shook him some more. Then a bullet cracked by overhead. That got Justin moving. It got him moving faster than Smitty was, in fact. His lifelong buddy of not quite twenty-four hours laughed at him. "There you go," Smitty said. "See? I knew you could do it."
"Thanks a lot," Justin said as he dove into a hole a shell had torn in the ground.
Smitty went on laughing, but not for long. "Hey, man," he said, "you better pile some of that dirt in front of you. You'd rather have a bullet or a fragment get stopped there. That way, it won't tear you up."
"Uh, yeah." Justin pulled an entrenching tool—halfway between a big trowel and a small shovel—off his belt and started work. He dug some more dirt out of the hole and piled that in front of him, too. The deeper he dug, the thicker the rampart got, the safer he felt. Maybe some of that safety lay only in his mind, but he'd take it any which way.
Would he have thought to dig in if Smitty didn't suggest it? He hoped so, but he wasn't sure. Soldiering seemed like any other job—it came with tricks of the trade. Smitty knew them.
He'd probably learned them in basic training, or whatever they called it here. Justin . . . didn't.
In an ordinary job, knowing the tricks let you work better, work faster. Maybe it kept you from getting hurt if you worked with machinery. Here, knowing what was what helped keep you alive. Justin had seen a lot of dead bodies since he got to Charleston. He could smell more that he couldn't see. It was another hot, sticky day, and corpses went bad in a hurry. The sickly-sweet stink made him want to puke.