The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun (19 page)

C H A P T E R
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T
he shaft of the Washington Monument in the distance poked its pencil point into the low heat haze of the hot, sticky morning air heavily freighted with the fumes of vehicular traffic. Marshall and Julian stood transfixed by a feeling of sudden strangeness and mutual embarrassment which had descended like a curtain to separate the boy and the man, cut them off from the camaraderie that had characterized their relationship during the trip, and they remained there on the sidewalk almost as strangers once again. A line of cabs was drawn up at the curb.

It had been close to ten o’clock in the morning when they had emerged from the bus, each with his one piece of hand luggage, and marched unhindered through the humming Washington, DC, bus station.

By bringing attention to themselves with their bizarre costumes they, by some reverse principle, attracted no attention beyond the momentary glance of one policeman on duty in the terminal as well as one or two passers-by.

Marshall next had changed into his old, stripped-down battle jacket again, carried his western hat instead of wearing it, and the fact that he had a small boy in a Buffalo Bill outfit in tow attracted no more notice than did the frantic mother of a recalcitrant six-year-old clad in a space suit, whose face from time to time she attempted to slap through his helmet. Thus Marshall and Julian passed unchallenged into the city of their destination. The large clock outside the terminal showed the time as 10.13 and even as they watched it clicked over to 10.14.

The solidness of their being there, the feeling of the hot cement pavement beneath their feet, the overwhelming presence of the Capitol City testifying to their end of the journey, had thrown Marshall into a state bordering on confusion, the confusion mixed with guilt and worry, plus the sense of the passage of time as the horrid clock now showed 10.15 and he realized he had no fixed plan.

With Julian it was more a matter of the innate tact which some children possess or perhaps more the fear of offending a grown-up. He had set out for Washington and now in Washington he was. But he was very well aware that without Marshall things might have been very different. He had been helped over dangers, some half realized or only guessed at, and there was no doubt but that for Marshall and the truck ride to Albuquerque he would probably at that moment be back home in San Diego. And then there had been the matter of the little affair of the hand grenade which none of the Press had got straight as to exactly what had happened. But Julian knew. Dead is a difficult thing for man wholly to imagine, even when in battle he is threatened with immediate extinction, for a child almost impossible. Yet Julian remembered the roar and the volcano of dirt, smoke, metal, stones and cabbage leaves that had erupted in the neighbouring field.

Well, but now here was private business with no more than a taxi ride separating him from the Patent Office and the final realization of his dream. He did not know how either to say goodbye or to show his gratitude, nor at that moment as again the clock fired another minute backwards into eternity, did Marshall.

It was Julian who gave Marshall the opening he needed in some way to prepare Julian, even slightly, for what might be going to happen and what he was about to do to him.

The boy had set his suitcase down and was still clutching the toy rifle. He now fingered his flowing moustache and goatee and asked, “Should I still keep these on?”

The question yanked Marshall’s scattered thoughts back on to the more orderly track of question and answer and he replied, “What? Oh, yeah, sure, kid, you better. It got us past those cops, didn’t it?”

Marshall had been certain that all terminals would be watched but the scrutiny upon their arrival had been purely perfunctory since once again official obtuseness, of not looking for a runaway boy from San Diego to arrive on a bus from L.A., could be counted upon. Besides which there was Buffalo Bill, and Marshall felt the longer Julian was able to keep to this disguise, the better. What Marshall didn’t want for at least twenty-four hours, or at the very least twelve, was a hullabaloo over Julian West, his discovery and his invention and so he repeated, “Yeah, yeah, kid, sure. You look okay. Nobody will recognize you.”

Julian now essayed a tentative trial at parting. He said, “Well . . . gee . . . thanks for everything . . . you were great.”

Marshall said, “That’s all right. You’re not so bad yourself.”

Julian said, “You know, I mean, you were really great . . . If you hadn’t thrown away the bomb . . . I mean the grenade, we . . .”

Marshall said, “That’s okay. If you hadn’t distracted that loony son of a bitch when you did I could be lying up in a mortuary parlour in El Paso with a bullet through my skull waiting for someone to come and collect me.”

Julian’s mind did an instant replay of the scene and he asked, “Would he really have shot you?”

Marshall replied, “Yes, he would.”

Julian had a new thought. He said, “Then you were just pretending to be scared so that maybe . . .”

Marshall said, “No, I wasn’t. I was scared for real. Good and.”

Julian looked up at him and pulled at his lower lip.

Marshall said, “Look, kid, there isn’t time to go into this now but after you’ve been around a while you learn that there are times to be scared and others not to be. But you can’t always pick ’em. See?”

Julian was gravely and curiously satisfied. Since he had left home there seemed to be a number of things now that he could see or somewhat understand that he never could before.

People by ones, twos or threes got into the cabs waiting end to end, slammed the door shut with a violent thunk and gave instructions to the driver. The front cabs drove away, the next cabs moved up.

Marshall had one more try. He said, “Look here, Julian, do you know anything at all about how the Patent Office operates?”

The question and the expression on Marshall’s face was concomitant with Julian’s own nervousness and he reached for the diagram. “Well, I go and show them this and the . . .” and here he patted the Bubble Gun in its absurd western holster.

Marshall said, “Listen, maybe you ought to know. It isn’t all that simple. See, they’ve got to make a search and maybe somebody else thought of it first.”

Julian refused even to consider this and said, “Aw, I’ll bet nobody ever thought of this before.”

But Marshall was insistent on somehow trying to condition the boy for the catastrophe he was preparing for him.

He said, “Well, maybe even something like it, you know. See, a lot of people get ideas which are almost the same.”

Julian said, “That’s why I better hurry. I gotta get mine in first, don’t I?” And his gaze into Marshall’s face was so straightforwardly innocent that the deviousness of Marshall’s own mind at that moment forced him to wonder whether Julian was masking and actually suspected him of what he was up to and about to do, but the moment passed and he realized there was no guile in the purely practical statement.

He said, “Look, Julian, you do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

Julian nodded and said, “Uh huh,” and wondered why Marshall was going on like this.

“You haven’t got a grandmother here, have you?”

Julian shook his head and said, “No. She lives in Olympia, but that’s Washington too, isn’t it? So it wasn’t really a lie.”

“Where are you gonna stay tonight?”

Julian shrugged and replied, “Somewhere. I’ve got some money left.”

Marshall had one more try. “Oughtn’t we maybe to phone your old man?”

Julian shook his head emphatically. “He wouldn’t care. He’s too busy. Mom would start screaming.” Then he added, “I’ve got to go to the Patent Office.”

Marshall’s good impulses faded. He, too, had to get to the Patent Office and what was more, with a head start. And he’d got to stop worrying about Julian. If anything was a sure thing it was that sooner or later the cops would pick him up and send him home. He would come to no harm.

Marshall said, “Okay, we’ll get a cab and I’ll drop you off there.” Then, without further ado, he began the perpetration of his black deed. “Hey, wait a minute, I forgot. I gotta make a phone call. I’ll be back in a sec.”

He turned and was off, leaving Julian standing on the sidewalk, uncertain as to whether he was further upset by the delay or pleased that the total separation from Marshall was not yet to be.

Marshall wasted no further time. He re-entered the bus station, hurried through the waiting-room and exited the other side, where an arriving cab discharged a fare. He held the door open while a man and woman got out and paid.

Marshall then asked, “Okay?”

“Uh huh. Where to?”

Marshall said, “The Patent Office,” got in, shut the door and was driven off.

It took some twenty minutes of standing, a solitary and slightly absurd figure, outside the bus station, before Julian realized that something had perhaps gone amiss, though adults often did chatter for ages on the telephone. Maybe Marshall was talking to his girl. The suspicion that he had been ditched never at any time entered his mind. He decided to wait another five minutes and then go and look. Now, further uncertain, he gave it ten and then went back into the bus station where he found the banks of public telephone booths, but none of them contained anyone even resembling Marshall and he then fell prey to the sudden panic that he might have missed him in the crowd or that Marshall had now returned to their rendezvous, so he ran to the door and looked out at where he had been standing, but there was no sign of his friend. He wandered back into the terminal hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Marshall had said he would be right back and in so doing had put a requirement upon Julian to wait for him.

But even as he threaded through the passing throng, continuing his search, Julian suddenly became aware that he was attracting attention and was being noticed by people turning to look at him. Intuition, plus some of the hard practical wisdom of Marshall that had rubbed off on him during the voyage, caught him up. As long as he had been in the company of his “big brother”, Marshall, no one had paid any attention, but now by himself, unaccompanied, in this outfit he was highly conspicuous.

Julian drifted out of the maelstrom of passenger traffic to the shops and rest-rooms at the side, and in one section, half concealed, he came upon a corner where the cleaners kept their gear. There was no one there and Julian quickly stripped off his moustache and goatee and then divested himself of the Buffalo Bill outfit which he stuffed into his suitcase, resuming his leather jacket and putting on his glasses again. The toy rifle was too long to fit into his bag, which had managed to take the cartridge belt and holster. The Bubble Gun he restored once more to his right-hand jacket pocket. Then, closing the suitcase, he stood the rifle up in a corner with the mops and brooms, gave it a last regretful look, turned away and emerged from the cleaners’ nook exactly the same small boy who boarded Bus 396 in San Diego, California, so many ages ago.

Well, not exactly the same boy. He found himself missing Marshall. He missed him dreadfully to the point when he was close to being frightened.

If there had never been a Marshall it would have been different. He would have wandered through his dream world untouched, unimpinged upon, following along the line of least resistance but always moving towards his objective guided by the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But there had been Marshall, tall, handsome, laughing with those funny eyes that could light up almost as though there was a battery behind them. There had been the Marshall, the touch of whose firm hand had been more of a comfort than the man had realized, the Marshall who had fed him, looked after him, talked to him, treated him like a man and seemed to take him seriously. Now he was gone, vanished into the crowd or from the face of the earth as though he had never existed. He had left no address, nothing but a memory and Julian sensed a void such as he had never felt before. He wished now that he had not changed from Buffalo Bill, almost as though in divesting himself of those marvellous garments which had played such a part in their adventurous escape, he had also somehow divested himself of Marshall. He was no nearer the answer to his friend’s disappearance. It had to be accepted as one of those things that happened. Kids got lost and yelled for their mothers. Why shouldn’t grown-ups, too, get lost? He thought for a moment of going to the information desk and asking to have Marshall called for over the loudspeakers and then said to himself, “Boy, would that be a great idea! Tell everybody where we are.”

He picked up his case. It wouldn’t do to linger in that terminal with the police on the lookout. When he had left home filled with his determination to patent his invention and show his father, there had been no Marshall. So there was no Marshall now and he was just one cab ride away from the end of the line. He pulled himself together, picked up his little case and strode purposefully through the waiting-room to the exit.

Julian went to the head of the cab rank where the driver, a black, was lounging reading the morning paper, and asked, “Are you free?”

The driver, who was youngish, pleasant looking and with a quirk to his lips as though most things that he encountered amused him, looked up from his newspaper and into the face of the small boy which appeared at his window level and gave him a kind of shock, as though he had seen him somewhere before and ought to be saying, “Why, hello there,” instead of, as he did, “Uh? Yes, sure. Where do you want to go, sonny?”

Julian replied, “The Patent Office, please. The place where they patent inventions.”

The driver put aside his reading and shifted his body to a more alert position. “The Patent Office?” he repeated. “Now, what do you think you’re going to do there?” You could never tell with kids. Sometimes they just string you along for the hell of it.

Julian replied, “Patent my invention.”

Now slightly startled, the man repeated, “Patent your invention? Well, what do you know! Starting early, aren’t you? That’s about a three dollar trip across the river. Don’t get me wrong, kid, but I’m running a business. Have you got any money?”