23. B-Minus Time Traveler

December 7, 1940, a day that will live in infamy! December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy!

The problem was, they both sounded pretty legit. Or was it December 17th? It had a seven in it, he was pretty sure.

Mateo hung his head back to stare at the ceiling. It had a fancy pattern on it instead of a bunch of noise-reducing panels in a metal frame, but other than that it felt just like a pop quiz back in high school. If a pop quiz counted for maybe your life plus a bunch of other people’s, not ten points.

One thing he did know was that it would be a bad move to guess and get it wrong. He needed something he knew. Maybe radar was invented in 1940? But that could go really wrong, too. Either he had the year way off, or the idea was already out there and they just needed to nail down the engineering, or it was already built and top secret, and oh LOOK, the suspected spy knew about it!

What a mess. Why hadn’t he been one of those history freaks rather than spending his off-time with Avi and sometimes Colette, blowing up stumps for farmers with dry ice bombs?

Ok, ok. Don’t think about how you’re never going to see anyone you know ever again. Focus. Focus. Not on them. World War Two. 1940. England, if you can swing it. Planes. Bombs. Days that will live in infamy. Maybe you saw a movie about this sometime.

...no idea. If his movies had fights he liked the ones where the good guys could solve them with a throwdown and a oneliner.

Colette would have this in the bag. That’s who they needed. If they got her they’d be sitting around her on the floor like kids at storytime! This wasn’t even her area but she’d figure it out anyway. Wasn’t she looking up some story from back in the day in the archives she worked at?

Well yeah duh. That’s what an archive was. He let that thought go. Maybe he was focusing too hard on England, gee I wonder why. Maybe something from near home that he’d just heard of instead of getting in school. But that was the thing, nothing much happened in the Driftless. Not even the ice age happened in the Driftless!

He sang through all seven verses of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” just on the off chance it had a year as well as a month. Nope. Maybe there was some family story or something, or something that happened on a holiday. That’d make it easier to date. Uh, the... Valentine’s Day ... massacre. No good, that was way earlier. The Easter...rising? He was pretty sure it got a mention in some Irish punk song but it was back in the 20s, right? He wanted to be sure about whatever it was. He probably had one shot at convincing them — the Christmas truce! That was in — no wait, there was no way that happened in World War Two. It had to have been the first one, not the sequel. Sequels were always worse.

What other holidays were there that made sense for 1940 Minnesota? The 4th of July? Thanksgiving? New Years? What else was there they named stuff after? Wasn’t there some St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre? Two problems with that: he didn’t know when St. Bartholomew’s Day was and he didn’t know when the massacre happened. Probably a day that would live in infamy to somebody, though.

Memorial Day. The Superbowl. Labor Day, the May one from Guatemala or the September one from the States. National Baked Bean Week. Veteran’s Day. The Day I Give Up On this BS and Get Thrown Back in Regular Jail. Screw it.

He stared at the ceiling for a while like the answer would show up in the fancy patterns and the cracks, like a magic eye picture. It was getting colder. Good time to have wound up with more blankets. He wondered if it snowed in England. What a weird idea, a winter with no snow. Definitely not in Kansas anymore. They’d given him some regular clothes — well, regular to them. Weird to him. But way better than jail clothes, you felt a lot more like a person in regular stuff. They even let him have a belt. Right now he was wearing a Mr. Rodgers sweater over his jumpsuit and he was glad he had it. This place probably went up before insulation was invented.

He wondered what they’d think of Minnesota back then. Back now. The winter must have been rough in the 40s, no fleece or gore-tex. Did they have army surplus back then? Nah, that wasn’t until after World War Two, right?

He sat up. Hadn’t Colette said something about that? She’d been pulling up something about weather back in the day, and she’d told him a crazy story about a blizzard nobody expected blowing up during a really mild November and killing a bunch of duck hunters and cargo ship crews on the Great Lakes. When was it — some weird old army holiday —

It was like trying to pick up soap in a bathtub, but he wasn’t about to give up. What were some old holidays? Maybe Lincoln’s Birthday? Was that — no. Armistice Day. The Armistice Day Blizzard. He couldn’t remember when Armistice Day was, but it didn’t matter. They could look it up. It was in November and it was October 29th today. They’d told him the date the day after Perv Vulcan’s test and he’d kept careful track since then, easier since they gave him a couple sheets of paper and a cell with a window. Now he just had to wait for the sneaker guys to show up with dinner. He couldn’t sit still so he took off the sweater and started doing pushups like he’d been doing lines.

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