A Master Plan for Rescue Read Online Free PDF Page B

featureless blue.
    Still, after ten minutes or so, I was certain I had seen the glint of something silver—possibly the wing of a plane—high in the sky.
    “There,” I called out.
    “Where?” said Bobby Devine.
    “Above the Chesterfield sign.”
    “That?” Bobby Devine breathed his Juicy Fruit breath onto my face. “Jesus, Quinlan, that’s a pigeon.” He shook his head. “Honestly, an entire battalion of Messerschmitts could come flying over Queens and you’d miss it completely.”
    That day, walking home, it seemed there were dozens of new Son in Service stars in the windows of the apartments on Academy Street and Nagle Avenue, dozens more on Dyckman Street. No matter where I looked, I was surrounded by them, entire constellations of blue stars.
    •   •   •
    As winter—and the war —wore on, sugar, meat, and rubber were rationed. One afternoon, Miss Steinhardt passed out colored ribbons for us to wear around our necks. Blue meant you lived near enough to P.S. 52 to risk running home during an enemy air strike. Red meant you had to take your chances of dying under a desk with Miss Steinhardt.
    Those of us with blue ribbons spent most of the day praying for the shrill sound of the air raid siren—anything to break up the stuffy monotony of Miss Steinhardt’s classroom. I prayed doubly hard, gazing at the twin bands of blue ribbon on either side of the microphone box pinned at Rose’s throat, imagining myself leading her to safety as we ran down Academy Street, away from the strafing of a Heinkel 115. Away from the round face of Moon Shapiro, peering out of a P.S. 52 window, his red ribbon a noose around his neck.
    Rose and the radio were my only consolations that winter.
    Every afternoon, I went straight for it, draping my body over the top of its cherrywood console, as if that might cause the tubes inside to warm up faster. Then I stretched out on the floor in front of it, pressing my back against the green and brown checkerboard linoleum, pushing my glasses onto the top of my head, so that nothing in my real world would be in focus.
    One of those afternoons, I was listening to
The Lone Ranger
in the dark. That was something I did. Pulling down the blackout shades and leaving off the lamps, so the only illumination would be the amber light shining from behind the small glass plate at the front of the Silvertone. It was late March, a sleeting day more like winter than spring. Moon had kept me pressed against the sidewalk a long time, and the front of my jacket was so soaked, I’d thrown it over the radiator to dry.
    The Lone Ranger and Tonto were riding across the Texas plains, chasing after the Butch Cavendish gang, and suddenly I smelled those plains, a dry and dusty smell—though that might have been my jacket on the radiator. Still, a second later, I
saw
those plains, saw the flat, parched expanse of them, the long line where they met the horizon, and then the pale brown dust kicked up by the churning legs of Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse, moving in time with the hoofbeats coming out of the Silvertone’s speakers.
    I saw it all—in every distance, and more clearly than I could have in real life. The pearl handle of the Lone Ranger’s gun, each strand of Silver’s pure white mane, every feathery tip of Tonto’s headdress fluttering in the wind.
    I sat up, my head too full of these pictures to remain on my back, and stared into the amber light behind the glass plate. The light I’d always imagined was shining directly from whatever station the radio was tuned to, directly from the broadcasting studio into my living room.
    Pictures kept tumbling from the speakers into my head, clearer than I’d seen anything in a while. The vast darkness of the western sky at night. The Lone Ranger’s campfire, flaming up orange. I got to my knees, crawled to the radio, and pressed myself against the Silvertone’s cherrywood bulk. Then I shut my eyes and let the amber light from the broadcasting