Free Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea by Jonathan David Kranz Page B

interrogation meant to remain secret. It was like the set to a scene that looped through his head (“You’ll never make me talk.” “Oh, we’ll make you talk, all right!”), but it was real and just feet in front of him. Although he knew there was no one nearby, Ethan turned around, listening for footsteps, movement, the hard breathing of someone watching intently. The kitchen refrigerator hummed overhead. An acoustic guitar whispered from a neighbor’s radio. Again, the last-man feeling came over him — everyone above had been sucked into the sky by aliens or angels. Or they might as well have been.
    Ethan reached for the clamp light, feeling for the switch. He turned it on, then blinked in the sudden brightness. The light revealed a cord that ran through the floor joists toward an outlet elsewhere in the basement. Why go to the trouble? Ethan wondered. He kneeled on the chair and looked behind it. On the floor was a low, black trunk bandaged with peeling bumper stickers. Scarred metal knuckles reinforced the corners; on one broad side of the trunk, a leather strap hung loosely, like a large dog’s panting tongue.
    Ethan gripped the chair back, bracing himself against a weightless feeling threatening to push him over. The trunk had to be Jason’s. The idea was less a thought than a sudden gut conviction. Reason followed the feeling in a progress as calm and measured as a principal’s footsteps. His mother hated the basement — she said it gave her “the willies” and refused to enter it. If she needed something from downstairs, she always sent Jason to get it. For his father, the oil tank space would’ve been both cramped and unnecessary — the basement was already his; he wouldn’t need a private fortress within it.
    No, this was the kind of place a boy might retreat to. And in the trunk? Whatever Jason wanted to keep to himself. Like what? Dope? Love poems? Dirty magazines? Plans for world conquest? Ethan folded the chair, which screeched as it collapsed on itself, and leaned it against the wall.
    There was just enough room to swing the trunk lid open. On top, he found a box of Cheez-It crackers (against his better judgment he nibbled one and spat it out: stale) and an opaque plastic pouch that looked promising — rare coins, knives, pills? — but only held pens, pencils, a draftsman’s compass, and a thick pink eraser. Beneath these were stacks of comic books and a few magazines: sequences of Green Lantern and Spider-Man, a two-year-old Scientific American and a couple of Popular Mechanics . Farther down, Ethan found some papers, school papers, exams crawling with elaborate equations and figures. Teacher praise, of the kind Ethan rarely saw himself, shouted in red pencil. “You show much promise,” said one note, canted diagonally on the margins of the page. This, Ethan marveled, Jason found not just worthy of keeping, but of hiding. Isn’t that what makes treasure treasure? Burying it?
    More school papers. More magazines. Nothing interesting. But from within the snug space between the trunk’s side and the magazine stack, Ethan withdrew a marbled notebook, one of the cheap kind, piled high at the five-and-ten at the end of every summer, which no one ever brought to school anymore. Ethan slipped it out of the trunk. The corners were scuffed down to the cardboard; the spine had been reinforced with strips of silver duct tape. He opened it carefully, as if the pages would turn to dust and dissolve between his fingers. Inside, he saw page after page of precise handwriting that was exceptionally easy to read, unlike his own. Here, behind an oil tank under the incriminating glare of a clamp light, he scanned pages with dates, pages with places he recognized, pages with people he remembered. Then, when Ethan found it the first time, he knew what he had been looking for all along, bobbing within the waves of words: his name.
    Before