The Methuselah Project (4 page)

“That’s where my plane smacked. See where the prop gouged up some of your stinking Reich? After that, it was a high-speed slide to the tree line. Then,
wham!
” He slammed a fist into the palm of his opposite hand.

The Germans exchanged remarks. One of them spat into the snow.
“Kaputt.”

“Yeah, you can say that again. She’s one totally kaputt airplane.”

Exerting his authority, the leader of the squad repeated his rifle jabs toward the road. Roger marched. For their part, the soldiers never slapped or struck him as Roger had anticipated. As long as he obeyed instructions, they didn’t even force him to raise his hands. This was working better than he’d hoped.

At the road, a military truck with a canvas-covered bed waited by the roadside. Behind the truck idled a dark green automobile. Shadows moved inside it. The sun glared on the windshield and Roger couldn’t see the car’s occupants.

He glanced inside the rear of the truck. Empty. Looks like he was this group’s only trophy for the day.

The doors on both sides of the automobile swung open, and out stepped two soldiers. A third figure followed from the car’s back seat: an aging gentleman wearing a dark-brown herringbone overcoat and matching fedora.

A civilian?
Beneath the fedora were gray hair, bushy gray eyebrows, and round, wire-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes. The civilian’s gaze intersected Roger’s. In some way Roger couldn’t fathom, the older man’s stare seemed to bore right into him, reading his very thoughts. Roger surprised himself by being first to look away.

The ensuing discussion between the Germans included few words Roger could figure out. But he gleaned from facial expressions and tones that the Wehrmacht troops who had captured him hadn’t been expecting these others. Irritated voices competed back and forth until the civilian in spectacles produced an envelope, which he handed to “Fritz.”

With an air of disdain, the sergeant extracted a single sheet of paper. He began reading aloud but then continued silently. Whatever he found written there wiped all resistance from his face and voice. Almost reverently the sergeant refolded the document, inserted it back into its envelope, and returned it to the civilian. He then stepped backward and shot off a respectful salute accompanied by, “
Heil
Hitler!”

The man in the fedora turned his attention back to Roger. He paced a circle around the pilot while scrutinizing him from head to toe. In British-accented English he finally said, “You seem to be an acceptable specimen. Well-proportioned build. Relatively light-colored skin. Brown hair. Blue eyes that reflect intelligence, despite temporary confusion. Well-defined nose bridge. Tasteful, geometric, Aryan-like attractiveness … I imagine you are the type that could make women swoon in your own country?”

“What is this? You’re sizing me up like I’m a head of beef at market or something.”

“I take it you were born in the United States, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“Huh?”

“Do you have Jewish blood in you, or don’t you? Answer quickly.”

“No, I don’t. Go ahead and check my dog tags if you want.”

The man ignored the offer. “What is your basic ethnic background, both mother’s and father’s lineage?”

Roger clamped his mouth shut.

“Do not worry. The information is strictly for me personally. It will not affect the war effort, nor will it betray any vital military secrets.”

Roger considered. The War Department didn’t require him to state more than his name, rank, and serial number, but curiosity nibbled at him. What was the old codger up to? Was there a way to find out? Roger thought fast. He’d been reared in an orphanage and couldn’t make even the vaguest guess of his family ancestry. Just to see what would happen, he concocted an answer on the spot.

“Okay. I guess it won’t do any harm. My mother’s maiden name was O’Leary. Her clan immigrated to Chicago from Ireland a few generations back. My father’s side of the family came from England in the 1800s, during the California gold rush. Why do you need to know?”

The civilian in the spectacles ignored Roger’s question and instead posed more of his own: “You are in good health, I hope? No cold, no flu? And how about allergies? Do you have any?”

Since when did Nazis fret about the health of their prisoners?

“No. If you really want to know, my health is fantastic. I got banged around a little when my plane cracked up, but nothing serious.”

“Excellent. You will do nicely.”

The gent nodded and uttered something to Sergeant Fritz in German. The soldiers, in turn, dropped the tailgate of their truck and motioned for Roger to climb aboard.

“Schnell!”
the sergeant barked, possibly to regain a modicum of authority in the eyes of his men. An imperious wave of his rifle needed no translation.

“Okay, I’m
schnelling
already.” Roger climbed aboard and took a seat on one of the two wooden benches that lined the truck bed.

The enemy soldiers joined him, their weapons still held at the ready.

“Hey, guys, you won’t need those things. People have accused me of having a hole in my head, but I won’t try anything that’ll tempt you to add a new one.”

The grim-faced men regarded him in silence.

“Sheesh. Am I the only person here with a sense of humor?”

Through the open rear, Roger watched the civilian’s dark green sedan back up, then drive around the truck. Roger’s vehicle shifted into gear and jolted forward.

So, now we’re following the civilian guy?
Roger leaned back and shut his eyes.

What difference could his ancestry possibly make? And allergies?

I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

A thought sprang into Roger’s mind: this is the kind of jam that makes men pray. The notion startled his eyelids open, which caught the attention of his guards. He shut them again. Ridiculous or not, Roger’s mind spanned westward across the Atlantic and touched down in the place of his earliest childhood memories, the spot he always associated with prayer: Sunshine Children’s Home in Indianapolis.

He punctuated the absurd memory with a chuckle partly intended to mystify his captors. Of all the kooky things to think about at a time like this …

For the first time in ages he pictured those Sunday afternoons, when elderly Miss Hawkins came to visit, still wearing the prudish black or navy dress she’d worn to some church service that morning. This thin-faced matron would summon all the orphans into the activity room, where they dragged three-legged stools with chipped green paint into semicircles radiating out from her.

Even now Roger could imagine Miss Hawkins addressing the pint-sized assembly, where she would conduct her own version of a children’s worship service. In her high-pitched voice, she would narrate Bible stories about Noah building the ark; about Joseph being stripped of his colorful coat and being sold into slavery; about Jesus feeding the crowds; or about the apostle Paul and his life-threatening missionary journeys throughout the Roman Empire.

As the Wehrmacht truck bounced and swayed across Hitler’s backyard, Roger continued down memory lane. Out of all the stories old Miss Hawkins had ever taught, the one that had always captivated him most was the account of how Jesus, promising to return to earth someday, ascended from the Mount of Olives and rose up to heaven.

In his mind’s eye, Roger pictured himself as a child listening to that story and then craning his neck to stare skyward through the tall, streaked windows of Sunshine’s activity room. The untouchable heavens. He dreamed of soaring through the air, especially on days when the clouds had resembled gigantic bunches of cauliflower solid enough for a boy to clamber up and explore.

“Children, always remember to pray,” Miss Hawkins had admonished them weekly.

Roger grunted again. He hadn’t thought about that wrinkled little lady for years. Surely she was long since dead. But if she were alive and could see her former pupil right now, she would no doubt waggle a bony figure and chide, “Remember to pray, Roger. Remember to pray!”

His mood turned sullen. Yeah, he’d prayed at Sunshine Children’s Home. For a while. Mostly he’d prayed that his mommy and daddy—whoever they might be—would remember to come back and fetch him out of there. They never had, and his young self had lost trust in the power of prayer. Little Roger Greene had remained a ward of the state of Indiana until the age of twelve.

The unintended train of thought, spurred by the civilian’s probing, reawakened the questions of his origins. Who exactly was he? He supposed that he was the result of a teenage girl’s secret tryst. Or maybe the poverty of the Depression years had played a role in his abandonment. As a child, he’d wondered whether one or two women on the staff at Sunshine knew more than just his name and birthday, but the workers had remained tight-lipped. Whenever he’d asked about his family or how he’d ended up in the home, they would sigh or shrug or reply, “Hard to say, Roger,” before changing the subject.

No matter how many times Roger had tried to ignore his curiosity, it eventually crept back to haunt him. Even though he’d tried to squelch it with school and sports and flying, he’d never succeeded in totally blocking the questions from his mind.

His thoughts glided forward to the Tucker years. When old man Tucker and his wife had agreed to take him home to their farm, he’d been excited that someone wanted a boy to love and appreciate. Wrong. The Tuckers already had two sons who had grown up and marched off to the Great War, never to return. Roger was just an extra pair of hands, milking the cows and bringing in the hay. That was no family.
Just a place to live and earn my keep until I was old enough to hit the road.

Roger shook his head to throw off the gloomy memories. When he opened his eyes, his German captors were regarding him as the truck jolted and bumped along the road.

He let his eyelids drop again. Unbidden, the cracking female voice echoed down the corridor of time: “Always remember to pray.”

Maybe that worked for some people, but not for him. Or did it? He recalled shouting a distress call for divine help just before his Thunderbolt had burrowed into that stand of trees. He’d been surprised to find himself alive, his cockpit relatively undamaged. Had that been an answer from the Almighty or just dumb luck? Hard to prove either way. Still, to appease the specter of wispy-haired Miss Hawkins, Roger collected his thoughts. When he’d gathered enough to string into sentences, he began.

God, I don’t know if You’re up there or not. Some people say You are; some say You aren’t. Even if You are, I don’t know if You have time to listen to an average Joe like me. I don’t know if You even care. But, God, You know all I’ve ever really wanted to do was to fly airplanes, to serve my country, and someday to find a girl good enough to marry. Old Miss Hawkins sure believed in You, so I’m trying what she told us—I’m praying. Only I don’t know exactly what to pray for in a jam like this. So if You want to help me somehow, I’d sure appreciate it.

Roger needed no theologian to tell him his unorthodox petition never would have won praise for eloquence. That task accomplished, he dismissed it from his mind. He leaned his head back and waited to see where these soldiers—and the gray-haired character with the spectacles—were taking him.

T
HURSDAY
, A
UGUST
7, 2014

FSC C
OMPUTER
R
EPAIRS
, P
EACHTREE
S
TREET
NE, A
TLANTA
, G
EORGIA

T
he dark-haired technician emerged from the back room of FSC Computer Repairs bearing Katherine’s laptop. “Here you go, miss,” he said with some sort of Middle Eastern accent. He placed it on the counter, then sat to write up an invoice. “These older models are solid computers. You’re lucky not to have one with cheap, imported parts.”

“I know it’s not the latest and the greatest, but it kept working, so I kept using it. What went wrong?” Katherine unsnapped her purse and extracted a credit card. She hated to add another charge to her bill, but she refused to borrow from Uncle Kurt, especially since he’d warned her against becoming a freelance editor in the first place. She could hear his voice, “There is no security, no future there. You will always be dependent on others for employment.” Well, at least she could prove she wasn’t dependent on her uncle.

“You had a very bad virus. Your notebook really crashed. When you tried to fix it by restoring to an earlier date and it suddenly went black … Well, it made my job that much harder. I had to wipe it clean and restore to factory condition.”

Katherine’s heart plummeted. The thought of reediting every page of Dr. Goodell’s essay on robot-assisted post-stroke therapy prodded her to the brink of tears. “Back to factory settings? So you couldn’t save that special document I told you about?”

“Oh yes, I managed to retrieve it,” he assured. “Don’t worry about that. I salvaged a number of other documents too. Not all of them, I’m afraid, but at least fifteen or twenty. I copied them back into your Documents folder after it was done restoring.”