Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy Page A

the warning honks in the harbor where there floated in close to our Brooklyn docks great floors of ice which we said we’d use as rafts or aim like icebergs at the Queen Mary or the Normandy when one of those famous lengths appeared between the Statue of Liberty and the tip of Manhattan and as if by scale more than size cut off the gray waterfront of Jersey City. I haven’t stopped talking, I’m telling about Boyd coming up to us wiping his nose on his mitten and sleeve and saying, Hey are you guys my friends?
    We looked at him over our sandwiches and looked at each other and at our sandwiches, and I said, Gee I don’t know, Boyd, and Sub shrugged and said, Let’s have our lunch in the tunnel, and when Boyd asked if he could come—which was just as foolish to ask as about being friends, because we were sort of friends and Boyd had helped dig the tunnel—we said Sorry, Boyd, we got to discuss a plan, we’ll see you later.
    We climbed over the drift to get to the entrance which was on the street side so we could be private from people walking by on the sidewalk. We crawled in on two knees and one hand, holding our sandwiches and finished them in no time with Boyd squatting at the tunnel mouth watching. Then we decided to close the entrance and we dug into a mound we’d left inside the entrance when we were lengthening the tunnel.
    Tris and Ruby don’t want to hear how stony-hard the crust of that pile was so that at first we couldn’t get hold of enough snow to block the entrance but then, with both pulling, the whole piece came away like a boulder and we jammed it perfectly into the hole and our den was a bluish dark yet shadowy white too, shutting out Boyd’s dripping red nose and damp yellow mittens.
    I wish I had a snowhouse.
    It was cold in there. Boyd kept saying, Hey come on, you guys, you discussed your plan, lemme come in there now, can I? And we said Not yet, Boyd, and tried not to giggle because if he’d heard that, he’d have tried to bash his way in, and he was bigger.
    How old were you? said Tris.
    Eight. Just a year older than you, Ruby. I guess the drift was small inside but it seemed big. Well, Boyd wasn’t there after a while, and I was cold and thinking my mother could make us some of her special hot chocolate with marshmallow, but we were discussing whether we’d join the Boy Scouts when we were eleven going on twelve.
    A truck rolled down the block, it seemed slow but then it was on top of us, the motor still running though the truck had stopped. Then it seemed to move and stop again and move and stop. Then some man was yelling, Come on back you got plenty room, come right in here, and before we knew it a great behind crunch shook us where we sat, and then some yelling and talking I couldn’t understand, and another crunch and this time the street-side wall moved right in on us and Sub said, Get the roof, and rammed his hands up but didn’t have enough room and the snow was hard and the wall on the sidewalk side was too hard and thick and we got scared because we couldn’t see what was happening to us.
    The motor idled down and a man yelled, Come out of there, and we hauled on our boulder, got it away from the entrance, and crawled out into bright daylight right face to face with the tail-lights of a green delivery truck. Well, big Boyd was on the sidewalk crying. The man said, Lucky your friend told us you were in there.
    Boyd was really crying, you know.
    That’s a crazy story, says Tris, who turns the page to a new set of bomb diagrams. He turns to me sharply—I bet there would have been a lot of blood in the snow.
    Is it over? asks Ruby.
    No. The funny part is that Boyd got up on our snowdrift and cursed the truckdriver and the man in the cab with him saying they had no right to drive like that, and you wrecked our tunnel, what’d you have to go bust up all our work—and Boyd called them names, then the helper got out of the truck and came over and reached for Boyd to grab him and