A Master Plan for Rescue Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a tone of finality, as if we’d both completed some strenuous task, and his weight lifted off me. Cold, snow-smelling air rushed into my lungs.
    I pushed myself to sitting. Moon Shapiro was already a blue-jacketed blur halfway up Academy Street. The people who’d stopped to watch began to drift away, the backs of their coats moving into and out of focus, as if I were discovering something about them, and then forgetting it.
    I sat on the cold sidewalk brushing gravel off my cheek, thinking about the afternoons I’d come out of P.S. 52 and seen Declan Moriarity on the ground, the leg with the polio brace bent at an odd angle, or Francis D’Amato, his flesh-colored eye patch going grimy in the dirt. When you sat in the front row, a beating by Moon Shapiro was an inevitability. Fighting it would be like fighting fate.
    I got to my feet, feeling the world tilt, then right itself. Yanking on the side of my jacket, trying to flatten the spot where it had bunched up from Moon sitting on me, I walked home, my sides aching with every inhale.
    •   •   •
    By the time I got there, it had started to snow. Aunt May was in our kitchen, still wearing her coat.
    “Glenn went up to the roof an hour ago with a bottle of rye and my best bedspread,” she was telling my mother. “Now he’s just sitting there with it over his head and snow blowing in his face. Says he’s not coming down.”
    My mother lit a cigarette and handed it to her sister. Aunt May was short where my mother was tall, curved where my mother was angular.
    “Any idea why?” my mother said.
    “Well, he finally got inside Whitehall Street.”
    Uncle Glenn had been going down to the induction center at Whitehall Street every day for a week. But the line of men trying to enlist had been so long—around the block most days—the office had closed before he’d managed to put one foot inside the door. That day, though, he’d gotten inside. Made it to the physical. Stood shirtless as an army doctor put a stethoscope to his chest and listened to his lungs, all the while Uncle Glenn talking about how eager he was to go overseas and kill Nazis.
    “How long have you had asthma?” the army doctor had asked him.
    “Pretty much all my life,” Uncle Glenn told him.
    My uncle’s asthma would come on him like an ambush. More than once, I’d found him slumped on the stairs of our building, sucking on his inhaler, Aunt May’s groceries spilled on the floor at his feet, a burst bag of flour drifting up around his ankles like snowfall.
    “And what happened?” my mother said.
    “They declared him 4-F,” Aunt May told her. “Unfit for service.”
    I pressed my hands to my sides, pushing them against all the sore places.
Uncle Glenn must have been standing in front of that army doctor at the same time Moon Shapiro was sitting on my back, at exactly the same time.
    My mother noticed me in the doorway and asked me why I was touching my side like that, asked me if I needed anything. I told her no, nothing.
    Then I went into the living room, turned on the radio and concentrated on
Superman
, pretended I lived in Metropolis, pretended I had nothing to do with anything that was going on here.
    When my father got home and my mother told him about Uncle Glenn on the roof, he rummaged around the coat closet for an old horse blanket, got his own bottle of rye, and went up there himself. He didn’t come down until after I’d gone to bed, bringing into my room the mingled scent of developing chemicals and whiskey.
    “This 4-F business,” he said. “That’s only between Uncle Glenn and the U.S. Army.”
    His white shirt glowed in the darkness of my room.
    “Nothing about it is the same as you.”
    I nodded in the dark.
    “And about the other thing,” he said, “I could take you down to Murray’s gym tomorrow. Show you some moves.”
    “That’s okay.”
    The white shirt stopped at the door. “You heard what I said? About it not being the same?”
    This time I