We're on the road again, AJ thought happily, as they left Roswell behind. Lucas whistled in harmony with the Glen Miller band on the radio, and Norma smiled at him as they headed west toward Arizona on Highway 380. Elvis hasn't hit the scene yet, and nobody has heard of rock and roll, AJ thought. Still, any music on a sunny morning, with a spring breeze blowing across the southern New Mexico mesas, was guaranteed to raise everyone's spirits.

AJ paid no attention to the music, for he was still obsessed with the bombshell that hit him the day before: She's been sending me coded messages all along! Who she was — now that he had a real name to add to the nickname he heard only once in Denver — was a mystery to him, as was her reason for following him from city to city around the country, and sending him hundreds of little cryptograms. When he realized that her necklace ornaments spelled "BJ" and began to press her for answers, she clammed up and simply shook her head. Moments later, Mr. Powell slammed open his door, threw out the wailing young boy like a dead fish, and called him in to get his papers signed. When he came out of the office, Joanna was gone.

The star drawings were packed in the bowels of a moving truck that had left the previous afternoon. He knew he wouldn't see them again until they arrived in California; there had been no reason to memorize any of the patterns all the years he collected the drawings, so he wouldn't be able to decipher them until they moved into their new home. Only the two-star patterns at the beginning and end of the message stuck in his mind: if BJ at the end of each drawing meant "BJ," he thought, then AJ at the beginning must mean "AJ." So I know three letters of her coded alphabet; hopefully, it won't be too hard to figure out the rest. He sighed, and then decided to stop obsessing, and focus instead on the drive across the southwestern deserts of America.

Their route followed the Rio Hondo river for the first fifty miles, past ticky-tacky shops at the edge of Roswell and then into arid land filled with mesquite and sagebrush. To their south stretched an enormous vista of rolling sagebrush plains, with no trees, no cattle or houses — just a sense that they were headed out into desert. On the north, El Capitan was visible, standing far above the other peaks in the Capitan range. Hawks were visible circling lazily in the sky, swooping down to inspect something near the ground, and then coasting back up into the wind currents again.

Past the town of Capitan, they navigated through hilly valleys, filled with scrub pine trees and fertile green sage grass. They wiggled through the Indian Divide, past Carrizozo Peak, and out of the mountains onto a huge plain known as the Chupadera Mesa, which extended to the northern and western horizon. An hour later, they stopped for a Mexican lunch of green chili and enchiladas at the crossroads of Route 380 and Route 54, and Lucas refilled the gas tank before they headed off again.

Thirty-six miles further into the desert, along a bumpy, two-lane road, they passed through the tiny village of Bingham. The wind, which had been blowing steadily since Carrizozo, was now whipping the sage brush back and forth. In BeforeTime, AJ knew only that this was an area where the government tested V-2 rockets captured from the Germans at the end of the war; now he knew much more. Twenty miles south, in the Stallion Range Center of the White Sands Missile Test Range, was the Trinity Site — where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945. The area around Trinity was utterly desolate, but was also very much alive: there were no people around, but desert life abounded. There must have been a lot of very surprised rabbits and rattlesnakes when the bomb went off, AJ thought. He remembered that the Spanish called this area Jornado del Muerto on their march toward the northern mountains of Santa Fe in the 1500s. Journey of Death, he thought. It fits.

They reached the Rio Grande River just before two o'clock and zoomed through San Antonio a few moments later, turning north toward Socorro. Past Socorro and Magdalena, they entered the Cibolla National Forest, a rich growth of piñon trees that reminded AJ of Colorado. Off to the south and the east were lush meadows — and then, coming out of the trees and over a ridge, they entered an enormous valley, the Plains of San Augustin, with vistas that stretched off for miles in every direction. The plains were the remains of vast inter-mountain lakes that existed thousands of years ago, according to the map Norma carried, and though a close-up view showed that they were covered with nothing but sage grass, the panorama from the top of the ridge was a thick carpet of pale green.

Norma and Lucas chattered happily as they passed through Datil, Pie Town, Omega, Quemado, and Red Hill; they were anticipating sunshine, orange trees, and a more hospitable climate in California. AJ had a sense that they might not have any of the Big Fights on this trip; perhaps they would even enjoy each other's company. Norma pointed out that Pie Town was located right on the Continental Divide; Quemado had a small cemetery and a quaint old Spanish church; but Datil, Omega, and Red Hill had nothing at all to remember them by. And between the towns, there was absolutely nothing: just 50 miles of open country, with tumbleweeds blowing across the road and vast empty areas like the North Plains between Pie Town and Quemado.

The Arizona border was marked only by a small, weather-beaten sign between Red Hill and Springerville; someone had used the sign for target practice, and it had half a dozen bullet holes through it. At Springerville, they took Route 260 into the Apache National Forest, in a U-shaped path that would eventually take them to Carrizo. The forest was filled with white birch and pine trees, many with pebbly trunks ten feet in diameter and stretching two hundred feet into the air. A few miles further up into the mountains, they were surrounded by alpine meadows, with sheep grazing in lush grass beneath snow-covered peaks. It was the beginning of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and they drove along a gently curving road past a small mountain lake, through McNary and into a tiny town with the odd name of Hon Dah. Could that be where the Japanese got the name for their car? AJ wondered as they drove on toward Whiteriver.

The next morning, they were on the road at 8:30. Past Globe, the terrain was rugged once again, with winding roads and no passing lanes. They crossed Bloody Tanks Wash and Pinto Creek, and then found themselves in real desert, with the first saguaro cactus plants that AJ had seen; all of them were ten feet tall, with arms sticking up above the rocky terrain. They drove through Devil's Canyon in the Mescal Mountains, filled with grotesque rock formations and devilish statues, and then through the Queen's Creek Tunnel and over an enormous bridge across Queen's Creek before reaching the town of Superior.

Half an hour after leaving Globe, they passed through Gonzales Pass, and then down a steep grade and out onto a flat plain. This was classic desert, with huge cactus plants, sand, and very little vegetation. There was also very little traffic, and Lucas managed to get the Chevy-Jeep combo up to 70 mph while zooming through Apache Junction, Mesa, and Chandler as Route 60 bent northwest to bring them to the western edge of Phoenix.

The city was much smaller than AJ remembered from BeforeTime, but it was already approaching Denver in size — retirees were flocking to the dry sunshine, bringing their civilization with them. Thirty years from now, he thought, pollution will blow all the way from California, and moisture from the swimming pools will raise the humidity to a level approaching Florida's. For now, it was pristine; still, Lucas shook his head and scowled at the sprawl of the city. He insisted on driving straight through until they reached the small town of Buckeye before stopping for gas.

They were out in the open now, in typical Arizona desert, with sand and sagebrush all around them, and low mountains on the horizon. Unlike yesterday's mountains, these were completely barren: no trees, no grass, nothing to provide a green cover. And unlike the scenery the day before, there was very little saguaro cactus on this side of Phoenix; only one or two lonely sentinels out in the middle of the desert, standing tall above the sagebrush, as if guarding against attack from aliens in space.

Because of the dearth of towns, most of the highway signs announced the intersections with local roads and dry arroyos. They crossed the Hassayampa River, the Coyote Wash, and Sore Finger Road, which won the prize for most imaginative road-name on the trip. There were a few small one-store towns — Aguila, Wenden, and Quartzsite — but nothing noteworthy until their lunch stop of Blythe appeared at the Colorado River, which marked the boundary between Arizona and California. The river was broad and deep here, and it looked powerful and beautiful to AJ as it wound south for its final hundred miles into the Gulf of California.

In BeforeTime, AJ remembered, there had been an interstate highway that stretched from Phoenix, through Blythe, and all the way to Los Angeles. But this is the 50s, he thought, and the interstates don't exist yet. There was nothing west of Blythe except desert, though the old Highway 60 headed due west toward the Joshua Tree National Monument. Lucas explained at lunch that he had decided to turn south instead on a small two-lane highway, Route 78, for a long 75-mile detour around the Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range to Brawley, some 20 miles north of the Mexican border at Mexicali. From Brawley, they would head back north again, along the western edge of the Salton Sea, which he wanted to see. Why the detour? AJ wondered. Is he trying to keep those FBI guys from following us?

Leaving Blythe, the land was incredibly fertile, with green fields, and rows of palm trees; it seemed the residents were milking the nearby Colorado River for everything it was worth. They headed south on the Ben Hulse Highway, parallel to the river, past enormous long, 500-foot stacks of hay bales. They passed through Palo Verde, with a population of 300, and then all of a sudden — in a flash, it seemed — they were beyond the agricultural area and into real desert badlands, far more desolate than anything AJ had seen all day. They were on a narrow two-lane road, with no shoulders, and the road passed through incredibly steep up-and-down dips reminiscent of roller coaster rides. But then, ten minutes later, they were beyond the dips and passing around the south end of the Chocolate Mountains, with another vista of empty sage brush and badlands stretching to the horizon.

Much of the land they had driven through in New Mexico and Arizona had fences within a hundred feet of the road — presumably to keep cattle in and strangers out. A few fences had rather odd signs — like "Turtles Are Protected: Be Aware" — but this land had no fences. If you decided that you were bored with civilization, AJ thought, you could take a sharp turn off the road and drive through the desert for the rest of your life, without ever being seen again. Occasionally, there were tire tracks suggesting that someone had done just that; but Lucas explained patiently, when Norma asked, that it was more likely that the tracks were made by hunters, campers, or prospectors.

They passed through the Imperial Sand Dunes, a seven-mile stretch that looked like tan snow after a blizzard, with waves and ripples perfectly formed. Ten miles further along, they finally reached Brawley. After the absolute desolation of the land they had just driven through, the lush agriculture of the town was a stark contrast. The irrigation was provided by the Alamo River, which helped explain the palm trees that lined the highway. There were more cultivated fields and stacks of hay bales that looked like giant pieces of Nabisco Shredded Wheat. As they drove along one field of emerald green alfalfa, AJ noticed a tight formation of six dazzling white sea gulls flying at top speed at a height of only three feet above the field; the color contrast was amazing, and the presence of gulls was equally amazing after all their travels through the desert.

But the reason became obvious when Norma showed him the map: they were now only 140 miles from the California coastline. But the gulls didn't even have to fly that far: they were only a few miles south of the Salton Sea. Past Brawley, they crossed the New River, zoomed through Westmorland, and gaped at the highway sign that warned "65 Miles To The Next Town." Moments later, the southern end of the Salton Sea became visible a mile off on the eastern side of the highway. But then the road bent closer to the water, and AJ could see that it was a dark, cobalt-blue; it was picturesque and impressive, but still a let-down his from BeforeTime memories of a vast ocean, larger than the Great Salt Lake, stretching from Mexico to Reno.

Past Coachella, at the north end of the Salton Sea, a long range of hills became visible off to the west, which Norma identified as the Little San Bernardino Mountains; most were barren, but at least one had snow at the top. In the distance, they could see that clouds filled the entire open space of the San Gorgonio pass through which the highway led. AJ could still remember driving the interstate from Phoenix to Los Angeles in BeforeTime, when he came around a bend in the road to see not only the San Gorgonio Pass, but also thousands of windmill turbines, at the bottom of the pass and snaking up the hills and ridges, lined up to catch every breath of the wind that blew off the ocean, through the pass, and on into the desert. The generators were like a vast armada of seagulls all flapping their wings and taking flight simultaneously — not just ten or twenty, but rows upon rows, hundreds upon hundreds, of white three-bladed propellers spinning, whirling and twirling in the sunshine. It was absolutely the most breath-taking sight he had ever seen, and it typified the futuristic image of California. But that was then, he thought, and this is now.

They navigated up a small rise, between the rugged pine-covered hills that towered above them on both sides, and through the beginning of a rainstorm. Lucas joked that he didn't want any more lightning storms like the one that had hit them in Virginia three years earlier, or the one that chased them out of Denver the previous spring. They dropped down the other side of the foothills, where the clouds were banged up against the mountains, as if giants had thrown mounds of ice cream against the peak, and then raced through Beaumont and Moreno Valley, and into their new destination of Riverside. This is it, AJ whispered. California!

They had a chance to familiarize themselves with Riverside for a few weeks, as they settled into the Thunderbird Lodge, while Lucas started his new job and Norma looked at the real estate listings. It usually took them about two weeks to found a house to rent, during which time they camped out in the motel. Last time they did this, AJ remembered, I was able to stay out of school for the whole time. But this time his parents decided that he should enroll in a nearby public school right away in case the house search took longer than usual.

Three weeks later, to the day, the Halifaxes moved into a compact one-story ranch house, in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of town known as Belvedere Heights. It was up in the foot hills, at the very edge of the San Bernardino mountains. AJ was given a bedroom of his own, with an extra door that led directly out to the back yard. And the back yard had a lemon tree and two orange trees, something very exotic compared to the cactus and sage brush of Roswell.

Soon after they settled into their new house, a boy down the street, Tommy Ingraham, knocked on the door to announce that his dog had just delivered a litter of tiny black puppies. Tommy's parents decreed that all but one had to be given away, and he begged AJ to take one.

If this had happened in BeforeTime, AJ thought, it would have caused a minor crisis. What does one do with a dog in Manhattan? Is it house-broken? What does it eat? Who's responsible for taking it out on the street every morning with the super-duper-pooper-scooper? Where are its papers, and what is its lineage? Does it have fleas, ticks, rabies, tapeworms, or contagious fungi? Has it been spayed, de-clawed, and de-loused? How will we keep it out of the kitchen and away from Dad's computer? Is anyone in the family allergic to the beast's hairy fur? Who will take care of it when the family goes away for the weekend? Every time Zack had proposed the idea of a dog, AJ remembered, he was so overwhelmed by these life-and-death questions that he eventually gave up and stopped asking. By contrast, this dog simply arrived home with AJ one afternoon, and was accepted into the family with no fuss at all. When Norma asked its name, AJ shrugged; he had called the mutt "Blackie" in BeforeTime, and while it now seemed an idiotic name, he was unwilling to change it.

Most of AJ's afternoons were spent outdoors, with only a modest effort on homework. But there was another project that occupied a great deal of time during the first weeks after they arrived: decoding the star drawings that had finally been unpacked. The messages were all short, which made the decrypting job more difficult; but AJ had several hundred messages in his collection, which provided a sufficiently large sample of words and letters to work on. From a dimly-remembered computer project, he remembered that the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet were E, T, A, O, N, he, R, S, and H — but he knew that using this information was dangerous: based on the character frequencies, he would have concluded that the star-code J was the letter "N" if he hadn't already discovered that it was a "J". But he also remembered that two-letter diphthongs could be useful: the sequence "TH" was the most common in the English language, while combinations like "QZ" and "VW" were extremely uncommon. And Joanna had shown him the spacing between words, so he could make an educated guess that a one-star character, standing alone, was either the letter "A" (which he already decoded as A from the greeting at the beginning of each message) or the letter "I".

Still, it was slow going. Joanna is a clever girl, he grumbled after decoding half the letters and then discovering that three of them were wrong, but she can't always spell correctly, and she made a few coding mistakes when she encrypted her messages. But the alphabet finally fell into place:

 

 

With this in hand, it was a relatively simple process to translate Joanna's messages. Most were simple and playful — COME PLAY WITH ME — but some were as ominous as the black pencil with which they were drawn, and some were utterly inexplicable.

The inexplicable messages were especially frustrating because Joanna had not appeared in school since his arrival in Riverside — or if she was here, she had managed to remain in hiding. There had been no star drawings on his desk, and thus no way to communicate with her. However, AJ remembered that in Denver and also in Roswell, there had been no messages in the first school he attended upon arrival in the city; the stars always began with the following school year, in what turned out to be his "permanent" school. In any case, there was nothing more he could do at this point — she'll either reappear, he thought after carefully hiding all of her messages away in his bookshelf, or she won't.

But to ensure that he would remember the stars and their meaning, he spent several afternoons after school translating his own diary into Joanna's code. It was slow and laborious, and it took much more space than his original writing; the diary filled three hard-covered school composition books, and he began a fourth one to record his experiences in California. It's a pain in the ass, he thought, but this way, Mom and Dad won't be able to figure out what I'm writing if they ever find this stuff.

School finally came to an end, and he had another summer free to enjoy himself. Much of the summer was spent entirely alone, exploring the mountains that he reached by riding his bike up Two Trees Road and into a grove of cottonwood trees that led into Box Tree Canyon, where a tiny creek disappeared into the side of the hill. The mountains were dry and dusty, without trees or grass, for there was no relief from the dry heat during the summer, not a single day of rain.

 

 

The tallest peak was only 3,000 feet high; the 10,000-foot serious mountains were some ten miles behind them, further east towards Barstow and Redlands. But the "little mountains," as he called them, were his own private playground, and to him they were a lush paradise. The mountains seemed to go on forever, with more and more rows of peaks behind the ones he could see — mountains that extended all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, or at least to the deserts in Nevada.

His favorite pastime was hiking into the mountains, hunting for lizards with his slingshot; Blackie stayed home, for AJ worried that he would not be able to climb up the rocks. Occasionally Tommy or one of the other neighborhood kids came along, but mostly he went alone, up through the scrub brush and sandy rocks. Sometimes he spent just the afternoon, but often he brought along a sandwich and a canteen so he could spend the entire day. Norma didn't care, as long as he was home for dinner; and because of the late summer sunsets, she even allowed him to wander back into the hills after dinner.

Five minutes away from Two Trees Road, he was in a grassy, shallow mini-valley within a larger canyon, completely away from civilization: no other houses were visible. Some of these canyons within a canyon were like small baseball fields; he tried once to convince Tommy that they should bring their bats and balls up here, but Tommy thought he was nuts. But to have a canyon to himself — whether for baseball or just wandering through — was an awesome luxury. In BeforeTime, he remembered, his kids had the top of a school building for their playground, while he had the whole world — it stretched on forever, as far as the eye could see. None of those New York kids have anything like this, he muttered cheerfully, as he moved over the ridge of one canyon, into the next.

The sage brush was up to his chest, sometimes as tall as he was. Though it was thick, he found that he could move through it easily; small white butterflies fluttered up into the sky as he pushed back the branches. What slowed him down was the soft, spongy, loamy soil and the layers of loose grit on top of the sandstone rocks. Occasionally, a rabbit would pop up, scamper down a ravine, up the other side, and then disappear into a rock. And there were millions of prairie dog holes, though he never saw one of the little fellows. The birds, rabbits, and prairie dogs were not even worth hunting; they were too fast, too shy.

There were millions of birds in the mountains — everywhere: chirping, singing, flying, making their nests in the bushes. Huge splotches of bird shit adorned the tops of the larger rocks, with white stains dripping down the sides. But aside from the birds, it was absolutely silent up in the hills except for the sound of his own footsteps; the silence was the antithesis of the Manhattan noise that had surrounded him in BeforeTime. Sometimes, the sound of dogs barking floated up into the hills from the homes below, and he could sometimes hear the moaning whistle of a train, as it moved south from San Bernardino on the Southern Pacific Railroad track, cutting along the edge of the southern-most mountain.

The after-dinner hikes were the best, for they provided an opportunity to watch the sun set from a wide rocky ledge he had discovered, high up on one of the craggy hills that looked out over the neighborhood and the entire valley. Huge boulders at the top of the ridges looked, from below, like pebbles that could be tipped over easily; but up close, he could see they were the size of a garage and weighed 20 tons or more. The wind changed as the heat of the day faded away, and the birds took advantage of the drafts; he watched hawks and crows and an occasional seagull coasting on the updraft, circling high overhead and then swooping down to pounce on victims near the ground.

In BeforeTime, he remembered, I came to this same ledge. It was ten feet long, shaped like a teardrop, with a scooped-out depression in the center. He discovered it when he spotted a lizard sleeping in the sun, and he found that he, too, liked to sun himself on this wide, quiet, hidden place. The wind and rain had gouged out all kinds of strange holes, crevices, nooks, and crannies in the sandstone rocks around the ledge; it was a tiny replica of the fantastic rock sculptures in Arizona and Utah.

As he sat on the ledge, feet dangling over the edge, the sun descended slowly toward the edge of the world. He watched it settle, inch by inch, down into the abyss beyond the horizon. It was calm and peaceful, and except for the distant cry of a bird circling above, perfectly silent. He drifted off for a moment, and when he focused again on the sun, a startling thought occurred to him: I can't tell whether I'm in NowTime or BeforeTime. And it didn't matter: he had become a child again, the child that played happily in the hills once before, and now once again.

Maybe this is what reincarnation is all about, he thought. If I go back, I'll be going back to mortgage payments, tax notices from the IRS, and a million other hassles. All of that seemed much farther away, now that he had been here in NowTime for a little over three years. It can wait for now, he thought.

His reverie lasted long enough for the sun to drop entirely below the horizon. It was still light, but the shadows were lengthening. He would have another hour before the dusk became deep enough to made the path hard to find. It's time for a little end-of-the-day lizard hunting, he thought. Some of the lizards were scouts: they could sit motionless on a rock for long periods, watching him with their head cocked. Then, with no warning, they would twitch and scoot off to safety. He was convinced they could watch him from the back of their heads. Sometimes he tried to outwait them, to see if he could creep closer; sometimes he just shot his slingshot at them as soon as he saw them.

Lucas had no concern about his hiking in the mountains, and didn't even insist that he have a companion with him. By contrast, AJ realized, I would never have allowed Zack or Danny to wander up here alone in BeforeTime, not when they were only ten like me; I would have worried too much about the danger of their falling. But in the NowTime 50s, it was acceptable — he was miles away from anyone, and could lie undiscovered for days at the bottom of a ravine if he fell; but nobody worried.

Lucas's only rule was that he have a pocket-knife with him at all times. The knife had been a birthday two years earlier in Denver, and it made a noticeable bulge in AJ's pocket — no Swiss Army knife, just a simple one-bladed knife that folded into a compact hunk of metal about three inches long. Lucas had one reason for insisting on the knife; and his insistence carried the stern warning, accompanied by threats of broken arms and legs, that he had used only once before, when AJ received his rifle. The pocket-knife might be used for carving wood, or gouging holes in leather, or any other damn-fool thing he wanted to do, Lucas said, but it must be with him at all times in case of a rattlesnake bite. AJ had no idea if there were any rattlesnakes in southern California, but Lucas was convinced they inhabited every square inch of territory west of the Mississippi.

Fortunately, AJ was not required to practice the required response to a snake bite: twisting a tourniquet tightly above the wound, slashing an "X" deep into the flesh at the point of the bite, and sucking the venom out and spitting it on the ground. But Lucas repeated it over and over, and gestured so convincingly with his own knife, that AJ was convinced he would carry out the steps by instinct. "Five minutes!" Lucas roared, with an intense glare. "That's all you have. Five minutes! After that, the poison will make you begin stiffening up, and you'll never walk down out of those mountains alive."

So AJ carried the knife in his front pocket, and the slingshot in his left rear pocket; after years in BeforeTime of periodically patting the left cheek of his rear end to make sure he had lost neither his wallet nor his comb, it was a relief not to have to worry about either. At the age of ten, he thought, who worries about combing his hair? And who has enough money to worry about a wallet?

He also had no watch on these trips into the mountain; at his age, it had not yet occurred to anyone that he should own one. AJ judged the time by the approximate position of the sun in the sky, but Norma never seemed to care whether he was half an hour early or half an hour late. Up in the mountains, there was no sense of time, no sense of urgency. It was an enormous relief after years of living in BeforeTime New York, where minutes and seconds were something that even youngsters had to keep track of, and after working in the computer profession, where time was measured in units of microseconds, nanoseconds, and even picoseconds.

With the warm weather and lazy schedule of summer, he often slept out in the back yard in a sleeping bag; he stayed awake late into the night, watching the sky and looking for shooting stars. When he first climbed into the sleeping bag, he could often hear squeals and giggles from the Ingraham house down the street, where Tommy's sisters skinny-dipped in their pool at night; but by midnight, all the lights in the neighborhood were out and the area was pitch black. The stars spread out in a canopy that stretched from the western horizon to the skyline of the mountains behind them in the east. The stars were visible in all of the western cities they had lived in, of course, but they were even more spectacular here; having spent his adult BeforeTime life in New York where the stars were never visible, it was mind-boggling.

These hours, when he was alone and it was quiet, when he was peacefully fading into sleep, were among the best in California — and quite possibly the best in his childhood life. And yet if you had asked me about it in BeforeTime, I wouldn't even have remembered the experience, he mused dreamily one evening. It's interesting that the things most worth doing over are the small, quiet moments that you don't even remember later on.

During the daytime, AJ found that Lucas was less interested in the local scenery than the ongoing events of the Cold War. On August 24th, Lucas announced at breakfast that Congress had stripped the Communist Party of its rights and had deprived Communist unions of their protection under the National Labor Relations Board; only two of the 346 Congressmen voted against the legislation. This didn't seem like such a big deal to AJ, but he reminded himself that labor unions were much more powerful, much more popular, and much more relevant in NowTime society than they would be thirty years hence. What really outraged Lucas was a detail that even AJ found surprising: the initial legislation was proposed by that paragon of liberalism, Senator Hubert Humphrey. His proposal would have made party membership punishable by a $10,000 fine and ten years in jail.

"Do you realize," Lucas asked Norma, "that the Senate passed Humphrey's bill unanimously, and it failed to become law only because it died in conference when the House voted on it?" Norma opened her mouth to say something, then paused and shook her head.

Just after Labor Day, school started again. AJ was now in 6th grade, in a new school — the Longfellow school on Sixth Street and Eucalyptus. The school was surrounded by row houses and apartment buildings on the adjacent streets, and the playground was on the other side of Seventh Street; it was almost entirely packed dirt instead of the grassy fields of the first Riverside school. Still, the school yard was the place all the children spent their social time, during lunch breaks and recesses.

For sixth grade boys, this meant less running, shouting, and games of tag; everyone was now much more serious about baseball. For the first time, AJ's left-handed status became an advantage: nobody wanted to borrow his baseball glove. Many of the ball games erupted into shouting matches over disputed calls of "Out!" and the shouting matches further degenerated when one of the kids threw his glove and hit an opponent in the face; in a flash, all of the baseball gloves were hurled as projectiles. Smack! Whump! the gloves thudded against bodies, fell into the dust, and became indistinguishable from a dozen others covered with grime. AJ's was the only one that did not fly through the air; it was still new, and he wanted to keep it well-oiled and supple.

On the third day of school, he noticed a familiar face in the school yard, standing at the edge of a pack of girls who observed the glove fights with a collective air of disdain. It took him a moment to remember her name: Joanna. He was momentarily puzzled, and a little surprised; but it was almost beginning to feel normal that she eventually appeared wherever they moved. Maybe, he thought as he ducked from a dusty brown glove hurtling toward his face, her father works at the same defense job as Dad. Maybe they get transferred every year, too.

But there was no chance to ask her: the school bell rang, and the children scattered. He made an attempt to catch up with Joanna, but she had taken off like a shot and disappeared into the school building. There were only three sixth grade classes, and within a couple of days, he had determined that she was not in any of them; since sixth grade was the highest grade in the school, before they moved on to junior high, AJ could only guess that she was a year or two behind him. However, it was hard to tell by looking at her size: at this age, there was a full 18 inches of size difference between the tallest and shortest even in the sixth grade, and as much as two feet when you put the shortest fourth grader next to the tallest sixth grader. The girls were growing faster at this age, and a few of the sixth graders were developing breasts, which embarrassed them and amazed the boys. Joanna was roughly his height, and had not begun developing; AJ concluded that she must have been in fifth grade.

But it was no longer a surprise when the star drawings began to appear on his desk in the morning. The first one was brief, but gaily colored — as if she had inaugurated a new box of crayons to compose a message welcoming him to the Longfellow school. But this time, he was ready: he still hadn't figured out how she managed to leave the messages on his desk without ever being caught, but he had decided that he could leave messages for her, too. At the end of the next school day, he placed an envelope on the book rack beneath the seat of his school-desk; the envelope was taped shut, and it had the characters BJ to attract her attention. Inside was his first message to her:

 

 

But she did not answer; a week later, there was only the plaintive message:

 

 

He tried again, with a longer, and more aggressive question:

 

 

But again there was no answer; indeed, there were no messages of any kind in the weeks that followed. I've spooked her, he decided glumly. He wandered the hallways and playground during the lunch break and recess periods, but she was nowhere to be found in the school. Like a turtle, she had pulled into her shell; but like a chameleon, she had blended into the scenery and effectively disappeared. He could only hope that she would re-surface again when she was ready — and in the meantime, he returned his attention to school life.

With school starting up again, his morning routine had changed: instead of riding his bike, he now took a bus. He didn't miss the long uphill ride home in the afternoon, and there was an added benefit of the new routine: if he arrived at the bus stop early enough, there was time for fifteen minutes of the glorious California alternative to snowball fights: rotten orange fights. The bus stop was on Canyon Crest, a two-lane road that stretched as far as the eye could see, lined along one side with healthy, thriving orange trees, and along the other side with the railroad tracks. AJ knew now, as he did not know in BeforeTime, that these trees would sicken and die from smog within a decade; but for now, they were filled with plump, juicy oranges.

Not all of the oranges stayed in the trees, though; a modest number had fallen on the ground and were slowly decaying. They were the size of a baseball, and so soft that they squished when held tightly. With a few minutes of scavenging under the trees, each of the half-dozen boys waiting for the bus had gathered an armful, and they proceeded to pelt anyone within range. The girls declared themselves off-limits, with shrill threats to tell their mother, the police, and maybe even Eisenhower.

Naturally, very few of the oranges found their mark: most of the boys had poor aim and limited strength, and all of them were adept at skipping away from the juicy blobs of fruit. But every once in a while, one of the projectiles hit home with a resounding thud and a wet, glutinous splat! Never mind that the victim looked like a pitcher of orange juice had been poured down the front of his shirt, and that it would be nearly lunch time before it dried. Both victim and aggressor recognized it as a moment of exquisite joy: a whoop and squeal of "gotcha!" arose from a dozen throats simultaneously.

At home, Norma and Lucas showed little interest in AJ's school activities; occasionally Lucas asked a question when Norma inquired about his activities in the classroom, but mostly he left AJ alone. Norma's questions were generally rote, too; it was obvious that she and Lucas were much more interested in discussing office politics at his company. So they settled into a patter that usually lasted for only a few minutes at the beginning of the meal:

"How was school today, dear?"

"Fine." Translation: same old shit.

"What did you learn in math?"

"Nuthin'." We're still doing fractions.

"Well, how was social studies?"

"Okay." Boring, actually, but what do you care?

"What did you have for lunch?"

"Food." You watched me make it this morning, dammit. Same as yesterday: cheese sandwich, apple, cookies, and milk.

But tonight, this last answer evoked a sharp reaction from Lucas: "Don't be a smartass, kiddo. Your Mom asked you a reasonable question."

Jesus! AJ thought. This was exactly what my kids used to do to me, and this is exactly how I reacted to them as a parent. So he tried to make amends.

"Well, we did learn one interesting thing in history today," he observed brightly.

"What's that?" asked Lucas.

"Well, we were studying the history of Israel and Egypt."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, and I learned some stuff about King Solomon that I didn't know before."

He heard a sharp intake of breath from Norma's side of the table, but when he looked up, she was focusing her attention on some errant peas on her dinner plate.

"Aha," said Lucas noncommittally. He was staring at Norma, but then turned and shrugged at AJ. "That's really great."

"Well, did you know he had 700 wives and 300 concubines?" AJ asked. "One of the brides was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh, who captured the Canaanite city of Gezer and gave it to his son-in-law as a gift."

"Really?" said Lucas, with a mild look of amazement.

"Yeah, and he's the guy responsible for the saying 'nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore' that gets quoted from the Bible."

"That's a nice saying," Norma said quietly. She had a faraway look on her face.

"But what I didn't realize was that I had learned the story about Solomon and the baby all wrong."

A stricken look came over Norma's face. She must be embarrassed at how ignorant I am of the Bible, AJ thought.

Lucas interrupted with a question about his math class. He didn't seem to care about Israelite history, but AJ wanted to finish the episode.

"I always thought that when the two women — harlots, Mr. Hernandez called them — were fighting over the baby and went to Solomon for a decision, and that he really did cut the baby in half. But we found out in class that he was just faking it, testing each woman's reaction to the possibility of dividing the baby into halves, to find out who the real mother was."

Norma dropped her fork on the plate with a clatter, and bolted from the table. Pretty squeamish, AJ thought. I said the baby wasn't really chopped in half.

"Enough of this history bullshit," said Lucas firmly. He seemed suddenly tense and edgy. "Why don't you get the hell out of here and go do your homework?"

As he lay in bed late that night, AJ found himself wondering once again about the odd behavior of both adults. His efforts to search for his identity had faded during the summer, but the dinnertime incident reminded there was more going on in the household than met the eye.

Maybe they've gotten sloppy, he thought. Maybe those FBI guys are still tracking them in their green De Soto. Maybe that's why they were so tense tonight. And if they were sloppy, it occurred to him, maybe they had left some of their papers where they could be found. Maybe they left the file drawers in their desk unlocked, he thought. He had checked numerous times over the years, but it had always been in the daytime; the idea of some nocturnal prowling had never occurred to him.

He slipped quietly out of bed and peeked out of the doorway of the room. Everything was dark; the house was silent. He had no idea what time it was, but he assumed that both parents were asleep. He retreated to back into his room, tip-toed to the closet, and carefully felt in the darkness for the cardboard box that held his comic books, star drawings, and coded diary notebooks. If they do have any juicy stuff for me to find, he thought, I want to be sure to write it down.

With notebook and pencil in one hand, he used the other hand to guide himself along the walls of the bedroom, out the door, down the hallway, and into the living room. Halfway across the room, he stubbed his toe on the coffee table, and he had to stop for several minutes while he took some deep breaths to cope with the pain. But eventually he found the desk, squat and heavyset, pushed against the wall at the far side of the living room.

He ran his fingers carefully down the front of the desk, on the both the left side and the right side. To his surprise and delight, he found that the drawers were all unlocked. Sloppy indeed, he thought. Now what?

There was a small lamp on the desk. He held his breath and listened for sounds throughout the house until he could hold it no longer; he let his breath out with a whoosh! and turned the lamp on. The only sound he had heard was his own heartbeat, which was racing with tension. I sure as hell hope they are asleep, he thought, or I'm a dead duck. He put his notebook and pencil on the desk, sat down in a grownup's desk chair that was still too big for him, leaned over, and opened the first file drawer. Let's hope it was worth all this fuss.

The file drawer on the right side was filled with Norma's files; the first folder that AJ pulled out was filled with recipes, and the second had sewing patterns from a Montgomery Ward catalog. Argh! he thought, replacing the folders and switching to the file drawer on the left side of the desk. This one, he assumed, would have Lucas's files, where there might be something more interesting than the ingredients for venison stew.

But at first, it looked no more interesting than Norma's. One folder held ads for fishing lures that Lucas had torn from a magazine; another contained carbon copies of correspondence had with a tenant who was renting the house they had left so quickly in Denver two years earlier. Thumbing through the rest of the folders, AJ snorted in disgust, and was about to abandon the search when he found one near the very end, labeled "COMPUTER."

Aha! he thought. Maybe this is what the FBI guys are looking for! He pulled it out, laid it on the desk, and was just beginning to open the folder when he heard a thump from the dark recesses beyond the living room. He quickly snapped off the lamp, held his breath, and waited. Maybe it's Blackie, he thought. Goddamned dog!

But it was not Blackie. There was another thump, and AJ heard the sound of footsteps emerging from his parents' bedroom. He was terrified, and he thought desperately, If I hide behind the sofa, he won't be able to see me in the dark. Groping down below the surface of the desk, he opened the file drawer and blindly stuck the computer file back inside. Does it go in the front or the back? he wondered, but there was no time; Lucas's footsteps were coming down the hallway, toward the living room.

AJ slid the file drawer closed, dropped off the chair, and crawled crab-like across the rug and behind the sofa. He waited, breathing in short, shallow gasps, while he heard Lucas walk across the living room from the other direction, approach the desk and turn the light on. He heard the sound of the file drawer being pulled to its stops, followed by the sound of fingers riffling through folders. There was a loud grunt, more paper-riffling sounds, and then the drawer was closed. The light was turned off, and AJ heard him walking toward the door. Lucas closed the door behind him, and the house was silent again.

AJ waited for what seemed like an hour before he dared budge from his hiding spot. Remembering his experience in Denver, he dared not look out the window to see where Lucas was going. And for a long time, he was not willing to risk creeping back to his bed. For all he knew, Norma might be prowling around, too; but there was no other sound from the house. If they were having another Big Fight, he thought,