Inside Out

24

Ward Field, Virginia

The afternoon sun lengthened the shadows of the two boys who were pedaling their bikes down an isolated asphalt road as fast as their young legs could pump. The road had been constructed before World War II by the Army Air Corps, cut through rolling wilderness of an inhospitable nature. In order to avoid any misunderstanding about who owned the road and access thereto, warning signs were posted for a mile before the riders reached the first barricade. That initial barricade was comprised of foot-tall concrete stumps that looked like worn-down teeth. The ground on either side of the road allowed vehicles with a reason to proceed, to skirt the structures. The boys quickly guided their BMX bicycles between the bumps.

Over the next hill, a large faded sign read:

U.S. Government

Restricted Area

No Trespassing

For all of the attention the two young bikers paid it, the warning might as well have been written on the surface of the moon.

George Williams and Matthew Barnwell were both twelve years old, although George was six days older. They were, by mutual pact, best friends forever. George was skinny and his hair spiked out from his head like porcupine quills. A cup of rust-colored freckles seemed to have been poured over his face, scattered ear to ear and from his chin to his forehead, with more spilling down his neck. His small canvas backpack had his initials hand-lettered on the flap.

Matthew was shorter than George by a head, thirty pounds heavier, and had skin the color of a buckeye.

George pumped along, but Matthew had to get off his bike and walk it to top the final rise in the road. He stared down at Ward Field. The main gate was located a hundred feet below them. Several miles of chain-link fence topped with barbed wire enclosed the entire air-training facility. The gate was closed, wrapped with heavy chains and padlocks. The signs on either side of the gate were ill-tempered: ARMED RESPONSE! The gatehouse door and window were nailed shut. The boys coasted down the hill outside the fence, their tires cutting narrow tracks in the tangled weeds.

George and Matthew didn't know anyone who had been inside the fence, but for years kids had passed down tales of people who had gone missing after last being seen heading toward the old base. The red and white water tower, an attractive object to young men with climbing ambitions, had been partially disassembled, and the door to the wire safety cage surrounding the first twenty feet of ladder was padlocked.

Plywood covered every window of the barracks, and the roof of one had collapsed. Quonset huts were scattered around the facility: all of the structures were joined by a system of footpaths and narrow paved roads. Weeds proliferated through the concrete runway and parallel taxiway. There were three hangars; the most recent, far larger than the other two, had been built in the Vietnam era so C-130 cargo planes with tall, wide wings and tails that rose up behind them like scorpion stings could taxi straight inside.

The first time the boys scouted the fence, at the beginning of the summer, they had discovered their entrance-a depression where runoff had carved a shallow channel under the fence. George slid under easily, but Matt needed him to pull the fence up while he squirmed under.

They started across the field of knee-high weeds toward the control tower, which was barely more than a square room built on wooden telephone poles marinated in creosote. Its narrow steps were mostly rotted away and the windows were coated black with grime. Inside, a plywood table was anchored to the wall facing the runway, and a thin mattress provided a place for the boys to sit. They had a supply of old nudie magazines, candles, matches, playing cards, and a few cigarettes. The two boys didn't visit more than every other week or so, because it was so far from home. In the weeks since they had first come out, they had never seen a living soul.

As they passed close to the large hangar, they suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of a power saw. Both dropped hastily to the ground and were hidden by the tall weeds. The racket was coming from inside the building. “Somebody's here,” George told Matthew. His heart felt hot in his chest, and his mouth had gone dry with excitement. The sounds of raised voices filtered out of the structure.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Matt said.

“Think they're going to fix this place up again?”

“Naw, it's way too fucked up. Maybe they got a UFO in there. Shit, what if those men are aliens and we're gonna be invaded unless we can stop them and be heroes and get millions of dollars and be on television?”

George said, “We better get out before they catch us.”

“Split?” Matt exclaimed. “You nuts? We can sneak into the little part of the big building and see what they're up to.”

“If they're in that part, too…”

“Don't be chicken. If they do have a UFO, they can move it later and we couldn't prove it was here,” Matt said. “I'm going to spy on them.”

George was terrified, but he wasn't about to back out.

They approached a familiar entry point and knelt beside the sheet of weathered plywood covering a window. George gripped the corner of the thin board and held it up while Matt propped a cinder block under the bottom so they could climb inside.

What had once been offices now served as crowded storage rooms for the equipment not worth taking when the base had closed. The boys moved as quietly as possible through narrow aisles formed by dozens of dust-covered desks, adding machines, light fixtures, typewriters, file cabinets, and boxes stacked to the ceiling.

They made their way cautiously through the maze created by the stored equipment, using the weak light that entered the room through a grime-encrusted transom window.

Because he was the heavier of the pair, Matt boosted George up onto a file cabinet. George then planted one foot on the cabinet and the other on Matt's shoulder. From this position, he could peer through the narrow wedge at the side of the transom window.

“See any aliens?” Matt asked hopefully.

“Shhhhh. Just a bunch of guys working on airplanes and stuff.” George opened his backpack and removed the binoculars they had found in the tower. The lens on the left side was shattered, but the other side made a perfectly good telescope.

Even without uniforms, the men inside the hangar looked like soldiers to George. He knew that adults usually joked around when they worked, smiled some. But it was almost like these men had never learned how to smile, each concentrating hard on what he was doing.

“There's two airplanes and an army helicopter,” he reported. “There's a guy up on a ladder painting numbers on the big plane.”

“What else?”

“Aw, man, there's some tables full of really, really neat stuff.”

“Like what?” Matt demanded.

“Some machine guns. Bombs… or diver's tanks.”

“You're lying. I wanna see.”

“And all kinds of boxes. There's this real old man that must be the boss, because he's just looking at a computer and writing stuff down. These guys are so cool.”

“I want to see!” Matt whispered.

The old man closed the laptop and called out, “All over here!” The seven men in the hangar walked over and sat like students in chairs that had been set up.

“There's seven Army men plus the wrinkly guy,” George reported.

“Hurry up, my shoulder's gonna fall off.”

“Just a minute, he's going to talk. Be real still, and quiet.” George was so excited he almost spoke above a whisper. This was way better than a new video game. He strained to hear, hoping the discussion would be about UFOs or something just as exciting.

The old man spoke loudly and then more softly. It was hard for George to get most of it.

“What's he saying?” Matt asked, impatiently.

“Talking about… the teams and… two possible points of insertings. He doesn't know yet which one they will do. Marshals and devils. Whipstick has never been… breached.” The old man went on talking, but the words became harder to decipher.

Matt sneezed and George almost fell, but he grabbed the edge of the transom just in time, and regained his balance by shifting his weight onto the file cabinet.

“Damn it! I almost fell.”

“Sue me, I sneezed from the dirt mite poop in here.”

When George raised the binoculars back to his eye, he was struck dumb by what he saw, or didn't see. The eight men were gone-vanished. George scanned the space frantically, but to his horror, he saw nothing.

“I heard something,” Matt insisted.

“Shut up!” George hissed. “They're not…” His binocular lens went dark. He opened his left eye, which he had clenched shut while peering through the single lens, and found himself staring straight into incredibly deep-blue eyes, inches from his own. Before George could scream, Matt suddenly twisted under him and George fell to the floor, landing hard on his side. When George opened his eyes again and looked up, a large man with a crew cut was looming over him, holding Matt by the arm. The man was also holding the scariest knife George had ever seen.

“What's clickin', chickens?” the knife man asked. Matt started blubbering, a high-pitched squeal that quickly became a cry. His whole plump body was trembling.

Like ghosts materializing from shadows, men suddenly filled the room. The sight of them, the knife, the sour smell of their sweat, made George feel very weak. As one of the men bent down toward him, the boy was aware of a warm wet spreading underneath him.

Five minutes later, now seated in one of the metal folding chairs in the hangar, George Williams was embarrassed, frightened, and physically uncomfortable. His clammy jeans clung wetly to his legs and bottom, and the stench of his urine was embarrassingly obvious to all. The old man and the seven others standing behind him looked fierce and evil. Matt sat on a similar folding chair inches from his.

The old man was really angry. “You boys are trespassing on a restricted military complex. That's a federal crime. Prison. Government can take away your parents' houses, cars, anything of value. You two hooligans will be in a youth facility with hard-core, butt-boogering, rap-talking, gold-toothed niggers who'd as soon cut your throat as look at you.”

George was certain this was the worst moment of his life. Why did I come through the fence? Why did I peek into the hangar? Why, why, why?

Matt snickered. “What's a hoolican?”

The old man's face abruptly reddened and became so contorted with rage that George was sure he would simply explode. “You little twit! Do you think this is a fucking joke? Do these men look like comedians?”

Terrified, the boys fell silent, stunned and trembling. George wasn't thinking about the men or their weapons. He was thinking about two years earlier, when he had been caught shoplifting and the store's manager called the cops, who called his father, who took him home and thrashed him with a belt.

The old man pulled a chair in front of the boys, then took a folding knife from one pocket and an apple from another. He sliced the apple down the center and handed each of them half. They stared down at the fruit in their hands, confused. George's father often went from ranting to silence in the blink of an eye. Maybe the old man was tired of yelling.

“What are your names? Please don't lie to me or you will be very, very sorry.”

“George Williams.”

“Matthew Barnwell.”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve,” George said.

Matt nodded. “Me… too.”

“Did anyone come here with you?”

Both shook their heads.

“No one at all?”

“Nope,” Matt said.

“Does anyone know you're here?”

“No, sir,” George said.

“Where do you boys live? How far from here?”

George said, “Three miles. Green Meadows subdivision.”

“How did you get here?”

“On our bikes.”

“You've been in here before?”

“No,” Matt said.

“Don't lie to me,” he snarled.

“Lots of times,” George said quickly, not wanting to piss him off again.

“Alone? Just the two of you?”

“Yeah. The tower out there… it's our secret clubhouse. Was before, I mean. We never bothered nothing.”

“We don't ever hurt anything,” Matt added soulfully.

George thought Matt sounded pathetic.

“Where did you get these?” The old man picked up the binoculars.

“They were in the tower. They were already broken.”

“Theft of government property,” the old man said with a sigh. He looked as fragile as ash.

He stood behind them and placed one wrinkled fist on each boy's shoulder. George eyed the pocketknife in the old man's right hand, the blade inches from his cheek. “Aren't you scared to come here alone to this dangerous place?” the old man asked softly.

“It's not dangerous,” George said, grasping for straws. “If you're careful on the broken stairs, it isn't.”

“Signs say ‘armed response.' Did you know you could be shot for sneaking in here?”

“We thought it was a bluff,” Matt protested, eyeing the solemn-faced men watching them. “Nobody ever came before.”

George looked at the guns on the table. The stacks of loaded magazines. The large pistols. The table was filled with fascinating equipment.

“Nobody till you,” Matt added. “Are you Army men?”

“We're Special Forces,” the old man answered. His eyes flickered to take in his men, standing nearby, watching silently. “I am a general. My men and I are not going to be here long. But it's vital that nobody bothers us while we're working. This is a top-secret mission. I'm not entirely sure I should let you go. You might tell people, and then it could get back to the other side and we could lose a very important and extremely expensive war game.”

“We wouldn't ever tell, no matter what,” Matt vowed. “We're real good at secrets. We never, ever told anybody about this place. It's our secret and if we told, other kids would take it away.”

“If you don't tell my dad, I won't tell anybody about you guys fixing up your stuff here. He'll kill me, honest,” George heard himself say.

The old man was silent for a long time. Then he said tenderly, “Eat your apple. I'm not going to put you in jail this time… or even call your parents. But, George and Matthew-if you ever mention our presence, you and your parents will be in serious trouble. Just so you understand this is not a joke. Do I have your word of honor you will never speak of this? Both of you?”

Both boys nodded enthusiastically. “Well,” Matt said, “we thought it was a UFO you had in here.”

“Wouldn't that be something,” the old man murmured. “If you two can keep the secret and not tell anybody, you can come here anytime you like after we're gone and play all you want.”

“I bet riding in a helicopter is real fun,” Matt said. “When I grow up I'm going to be a helicopter pilot in the Army and fight with missiles and machine guns like yours.”

“I'm sure you will. You keep my secret and I'll make certain you get in the Army.”

“You sure got a lot of guns and stuff,” George said, relaxing, his excitement growing. “Are they real?”

“When you were spying on us, did you learn anything?” the general suddenly asked George.

“I heard you talking about devils and marshals. And how you are going to do something nobody's ever done before.”

“What did you hear?”

“Break into whipsticks.”

The general's face froze; his smile became a grimace.

“I have an idea,” the general said. “Boys, this is Ralph. He's a helicopter pilot. He will take you both for a nice helicopter ride.”

“Yes!” Matt exclaimed, not believing their good fortune.

“I have to be home by five-thirty,” George told him, hoping that wouldn't make the general cancel their ride.

“Oh, you'll be down well before five,” the old man assured him. “Don't want you two out after dark. Nobody knows better than I do how dangerous a place the world is.” The old man looked at Ralph. “Take special care of these boys.”