The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun (25 page)

If only the boy would do or say something or burst into tears or poke a grimy fist into his eye, lash out at him, instead of this dead, cold and still uncomprehending stare.

Yet it was not entirely uncomprehending for Marshall was too uncomfortable and guilt-ridden to see that something was awakening behind the lenses of the spectacles.

He pleaded, “Look, kid, we had a great time together, didn’t we? And I kept the cops off your back, didn’t I? You got your picture in the papers, you’re a hero and when you get back to school all the kids will be envious of you.”

For the first time then Marshall became aware that something had been stirring in Julian and that he was being studied by him. The boy’s face was no longer dead but only perplexed and questioning. For a moment Marshall didn’t know which was worse, the dead boy or the one come to life, and what would that one say.

He got in quickly with, “You know you had plenty of guts going off like you did not knowing anything about, well, you know—and you weren’t scared like me of that hijacker, were you?” And this last brought up the scene again and something that had been missing and so after a moment’s hesitation he said, “Do you want to let me have the gun? See, you wouldn’t be needing it now and they asked me about it upstairs.”

Automatically, Julian’s hand went to the pocket where the Bubble Gun used to live. Marshall’s eyes followed the gesture. Julian was shaking his head slowly in negation as his hand came out of his pocket empty, pulling a part of the lining with it. Then Marshall knew that for whatever reason he no longer had the Bubble Gun, but that if he had he would have given it to him. And it was Marshall and not Julian at that moment who fought back tears.

He said, “What else can I say, kid? Maybe in a way it’s a good lesson for afterwards. Never trust anybody, especially a guy like me.”

He rose to his feet, but remained gazing down saying, “I’ll let you know how things come out,” and then after another moment’s hesitation, “No hard feelings, eh, Julian?”

Julian looked dumbly and miserably into Marshall’s eyes and slowly shook his head. This was the most painful and astonishing thing of all he had to endure, to show that he understood and that there were no hard feelings. He felt nothing but a deep and unappeasable sorrow as only the young can experience, the grief of disillusionment and the shattering of trust.

Marshall held out his hand and asked, “Will you shake?”

Slowly Julian put a limp hand into Marshall’s and they shook. Marshall found he could bear it no longer. He had wanted to finish with something like “Good luck, kid,” but was unable to bring it out. Instead, he gave the cold hand one more squeeze, turned quickly away, strode across the lobby and plunged through the revolving door, thus affording that Fate, which looks after matters of absurd timing, her daily giggle. For as Marshall went out through one side of the door, Aldrin West came in the other.

For a moment West paused inside, confused by the traffic shuffling through the lobby and then almost immediately spied his son and hurried over to him.

“Julian, my God, I’m glad I’ve found you.”

The meeting, of course, was like nothing he had expected or imagined. He had seen himself throwing his arms about the boy and hugging him hard and Julian perhaps glad to see him and returning the embrace. He was not prepared for the rather diffident and quiet person who looked up at him from the bench, his face almost expressionless and his voice oddly muted as he greeted him with “Hello, Dad.”

His father sat down beside him. He said, “Julian, I’ve seen the colonel. I’ve just come from there. He told me all about you. I’m proud of you. And everything that was in the newspapers about what you did. You’re the greatest son a man ever had and I’ve been a rotten father to you.”

Julian looked surprised at this and even shook his head slightly in negation for he had never really thought so. It had never dawned upon him to evaluate his father, or even his mother, as good, bad or indifferent. Parents were as they were and that was that.

Julian said, “No, you aren’t . . .” But then suddenly his voice trailed off. He stopped and the strange far-away look with which West was to become familiar passed into his eyes again.

West said, “Your idea is great, you know. It’ll work. The colonel said so.”

But the look upon Julian’s face had become so remote and bleak that West became alarmed. He said, “Has something gone wrong? What happened? Have you filed the papers? Look, now that I’m here I can help you. The colonel explained about getting an attorney . . .”

Julian, deep down, had been glad and comforted by seeing his father and having him there, but now all the sadness arising from what had happened to him heaved like a tide within Julian and forced him to shake his head. He began, “They were stol—somebody got there ahead of me. I was too late.”

C H A P T E R
1 7

T
hey were on the jet plane side by side, Julian in the window seat, homeward bound. He had told his father the story piecemeal, except for the Top Secret part, interrupted by long silences which were puzzling to Aldrin West but which because of his new-found respect for his son he did not attempt to penetrate. West felt that there was more than the talked-about generation gap between himself and his son. There was a mystery connected with Julian of which the father was strongly aware. Perhaps it had always been present in some degree or other, lying behind the puzzle that Julian had refused to be an image of himself, to his annoyance. But now the father was sensitive to the fact that there was something deeper and that although his son had appeared glad to see him and was content to return home West felt himself cut off, closed out and unable to penetrate into what had really happened. There had been the newspaper account, there had been Julian’s story and there was still the enigma—Julian.

The pain within Julian was always there. A deep and unhealing wound and it seemed that every part of the story that he had told to his father or the questions he answered were in some way attached to his wound and kept tugging at it and hurting him. Marshall, Marshall, Marshall!

Childhood was over. Julian stood on the threshold of young manhood, with all the pangs of adolescence still to be suffered. He was, therefore, totally unable to talk about such things as love and pain even if he could have put his emotions into words. Most difficult of all, in fact almost impossible, was for Julian to synthesize, understand and separate the dual nature of his hurt, stemming not only from what had been done to him, but from that last meeting where his friend had laid himself so horribly bare, the glimpse Julian had had as well of what it was that Marshall had done to himself. And it was this deep-seated grief that had ushered Julian across his dividing line. But speak of these things to his father? Impossible.

The view from the window of the aircraft showed the green striations of the Appalachian Range beneath diem, the long streamers of mountains and valleys, as Julian concluded the most difficult part of his narration, “. . . I guess he took it sometime while I was asleep maybe and copied it.” And then almost immediately he felt the need to defend, and he said, “It didn’t get into the paper, but he was the one who threw the grenade out the window.”

The trailing edge of the wing moving forward revealed a small factory town by a river beneath them with black smoke belching up from chimneys and Julian thought again of that moment. He said, “It blew up in a field with a big bang.” But then as his thoughts turned back to the more recent events, he murmured half to himself, “He said he needed it more than I did.” And here Julian turned and looked at his father and again Aldrin West was aware of change and that it was no longer a child speaking to him when Julian said briefly and quietly, “I guess maybe he did.”

West, however, momentarily mistook it for the helplessness of the young and therefore supplied some adult belligerence. He said, “Look here, Julian, we can fight it. He could never win in court. I’m a witness as to when you made it. He wouldn’t dare stand up to it. We can beat him.”

Julian, once more lost in thought, was looking out of the window again at country that had flattened out into broken hills and the beginning of mid-western farmlands.

But then Julian became aware that his father had spoken to him and what he had said, and he replied simply, “I don’t want to.”

Aldrin West became confused for here again was that dark gap within his son that he did not understand, the shell he was unable to penetrate. What shadows had fallen upon this boy? Had something too terrible to relate happened to him? He felt his own guilt come choking up into his throat and he was miserably frightened until common sense once more reasserted itself. Julian’s story had been straightforward enough. He had encountered a rascal and had been taken by him. He tried another tack.

“Well, then, see, it doesn’t really matter that much then, does it, Julian? What’s important really is that you set out to do something and you got there and what’s more you made it all by yourself. You’ve shown that you’re a man . . .” West had wanted to go on with this speech into even more fulsome praise such as, “By God, you’ve proved to me that I have a son. I’ll never forget it again. I’m proud of you,” but it all dried up against the barrier of Julian’s absence once more.

Julian should have been glowing at this praise, filled with delight and experiencing that wonderful tickling feeling beneath the breastbone that comes when one is complimented, but he didn’t. He had hardly heard the speech. His mind had been turning back to the trip and all the times that Marshall had been there when he needed him, and at times when he hadn’t even known what it was all about, and he saw once more the gay, half-amused, half-mocking expression on Marshall’s face.

West was saying, “That colonel what’s-his-name—Sisson. It isn’t often that a boy of your age can earn the respect of a man like that. He thought you were pretty marvellous. He told me how you just walked in right through the Pentagon Building.”

The name of Sisson had Julian’s attention for a moment. He thought gratefully of the colonel’s help and kindness but once more there was a mystery there and it traced back, as did almost everything, to Marshall. Always Marshall. Marshall running down the aisle of the bus to the colonel after which they had both got off in pursuit of that other little man. And Marshall had come back alone and hinted something about secret stuff and spies.

Julian’s memory pictures were still unreeling scenes through his head and he suddenly laughed aloud and when his father looked at him said, “He got the truck driver to take us and then he changed me into Buffalo Bill and made me pretend to shoot an Indian.”

West said, “Eh?” He had not heard that bit before. He said, “Truck driver? Indian? What was that all about?”

But Julian was away again. He said, “Oh, nothing.”

West felt himself seized by the most dreadful pang of jealousy. He was Julian’s natural father. He ought to come first with him. And yet someone else had managed to take his place. But this was ridiculous too. The boy had had an exciting adventure, a momentary relationship with an apparently attractive ex-soldier type who would be a hero to any child, and then had been brutally pushed up against his first encounter with the feet of clay. Goddammit, he loved his son. He wanted to throw his arms about the thin shoulders of this boy and hold him hard to himself and shelter him. Instead he felt himself pushed into flat meaningless sentences such as “There’s the Mississippi down there. Old Man River.”

The broad winding yellow snake crawling across the face of the map was below them. Julian said, “I know. We came over it on a bridge. Marshall said he went down it on a riverboat once . . .”

A little later something which had been at the back of Aldrin’s head ever since he had become reunited with his son, surfaced into an exclamation of surprise: “Hey, what happened to your stammer, Julian?”

Julian, without even looking up at him replied, “Aw, who needs it? Marshall said to cut it out.”

The plane was over the Rockies and West observed, “The Great Divide.”

Julian said, “Uh huh. Marshall said if you poured a glass of water over it half would go into the Pacific and the other half into the Atlantic. We went through the pass and there was a man who played a funny instrument. I wonder what happened to him?”

West regarded his son with a sense of total helplessness. He knew he hadn’t been getting through to him at all. But he had yet one more card to play. They would be arriving home soon. Would they then fall back into their old ways and would he and his son be separate and unhappy? He played his card.

“I’ll tell you what we could do. You know down below next to the trunk-room which is sort of half storage and we don’t use? We could make it a kind of lab there. I mean, not a lab, but a place where, you know, you can work out any ideas you have. We could fix up a lathe or anything you need. A drawing-board and things like that.”

At this Julian looked at his father. He nodded a slow and reflective assent but said nothing and returned with his attention riveted to the window and the world below which had now become the wild moonscape of the badlands of the west, the bluffs, canyons and escarpments, the tumbled country akin to that which carried the deeepest memories for Julian.

And looking down from thirty thousand feet Julian actually espied, reduced to an almost microscopic insect, a bus crawling along on a lonely stretch of road and in a moment it seemed that he was transported there again on to old 396 sitting next to Marshall and munching on a hamburger, moistening it with Coke. The whine of the tires was in his ears mingled with the music of the hurdy-gurdy. He saw the faces of the chess players again and Marge and Bill leaning towards one another always as though magnetized, their fingers intertwined. And then there had been that trip from Albuquerque and those two funny sisters and all the different friendly people and he was both amongst them below and up in the airplane as well watching the bus crawl around a curve.

“. . . and we could work it out together.”