Ep 3 - The 'Not So' Diplomatic Couriers! - SERIES: Adventures of A&J

It was 1952. I’d say I was a typical teen boy.

My overconfident, crazy cousin, Jeremy — not so much. Only one week into summer vacation, and he was coming up with yet another harebrained scheme.

“It’s the perfect solution to our summer blues, Arnie,” Jeremy said.

“I’m not blue!” I protested.

“Okay, boredom then.”

“I’m not bored either, Jer. It’s only been a week, but tell me about your plan because whether I want to hear it or not, you’re gonna tell me anyway.” I sighed.

“Look, every year we gotta sweat and slave in the hot sun mowing lawns just to earn a little cash so we can have a little fun. I’m tired of that. We’re thirteen now! We can be paperboys!”

“Yeah, but what about delivery baskets? We don’t have any for our bikes, and we don’t have the money to buy them.”

“Got it covered! Dad’s all for me getting a paper route. Says having a real job at my age will build character. He’ll buy us the big baskets that go on the front handlebars, so we’ll be set. I worked it all out. It’s going to be great!”

“And what time do we have to get up by? Don’t the papers get delivered before the sun comes up?” I asked.

“We have to be down at The Herald by 5 am sharp to pick up our bundles.”

“That’s earlier than we get up for school! It’s before sunrise! Ugh,” I groaned.

“It’s not that bad. The sunrise is beautiful, and how many times do we get to see that? It’s only an hour earlier.” Jeremy said.

“That’s my point exactly. I don’t wanna get up that early in the morning! Not during summer vacation!” I whined.

“My dear Arnie...” He took me by the shoulders and sat me down on the dining room chair. I’d been pacing, trying to figure out how to get out of this. “...Look, we get 2 cents a paper delivered, and they start us with twenty-five papers each. If we do a good job and get done within an hour, they’ll bump us up to forty! Forty papers, Arnie. Do the math!”

I was making the mental calculations, but Jeremy didn’t wait for me. He blurted out, “That’s half a dollar each, daily to start, and then we can get a raise to almost a full dollar a day! Once we get that raise, we’ll be making an entire $10 between the both of us, Arnold! Ten whole dollars a week! Can you just imagine being that rich!”

“That is a lot of money. We could go to the malt shop and the sweet shop like every day and hit up the picture show every week this summer!”

“Exactly! Now, you’re seeing my vision.”

I was getting a little caught up in the magic of the dollar signs in Jeremy’s eyes.

Jeremy could tell he was winning me over, and he plowed onward with his pitch. “See, here’s where we’ll work smart, not hard. If you help me, we double our efforts. You go down one side of the street while I cover the other. I help you with my route, and you help me with yours. We’re guaranteed to get done faster, working together!”

“Don’t you mean I help you with your route, and you help me with mine?”

“Potato, Po’tatto. Same difference.”

I huffed out a huge breath. “But, we gotta do it every day?”

“Yeah, so what? It’s just one summer, and it’ll be easy work. We’ll make twice as much doing half the amount of work mowin’ lawns. And we’ll have the whole day after 7 am to do whatever we want! The town will be our clam shell! Just ridin’ our bikes and throwin’ papers. What could go wrong?”

“I think you mean oyster. The world is our oyster.”

“Nah, clams taste way better. S'pecially, when they’re fried, and you eat them with that special sauce down at Harvey’s Diner, and—”

“Jer!”

“What?”

“Okay, I’ll give it a try just this one summer.”

What could possibly go wrong? It was just a simple paper route, right?

It did seem easy enough, but there was this nagging feeling in my gut. Whenever I got caught up in Jeremy’s schemes and plans, it almost never went as smoothly as it should have.

***

Uncle Barry was true to his word, but that was the O’Leary family for ya. If you said you were doing something, your word was as good as a US Treasury Bond. He took us down to the office of the town Herald and introduced us to Mr. Jones, who would be our supervisor.

We were to report to the back door of the Main Street Herald at 5:15 sharp. We’d be given our stack of 25 papers each, and we’d have to roll them, bind them with rubber bands, and load them up in our large baskets on the front of our bikes. That should only take about 15 minutes, ensuring we were on our bikes and headed to the assigned neighborhoods just before 6 am.

The day went off without a hitch. In fact, the first week was fantastic! We got paid our first week’s salary, and I couldn’t have felt better if I’d been a magician who learned how to turn pennies into ten-dollar bills.

Of course, the first thing we did with our funds was run to the malt shop and order the biggest chocolate malt on the menu. Then we went to the picture show.

They’d just changed the show out for a new one; “Diplomatic Courier.” It was a spy film and seeing as our aspiring occupation for that week was to be spies when we grew up, this film was perfect!

I think it was the first film we ever watched without our parents there. We loved it! We couldn’t wait for Saturday to roll around so we could see it again. It’s all we could talk about that third week into our route.

By this time, Jeremy and I formed a routine. We had it down to an art and science getting done in record time. Our boss had nothing but praise, seeing as no complaints were coming in from the neighbors, and we were always done early.

The shenanigans started that Monday. We were coming up on Mr. Miller’s house. Jeremy put on the brakes. I wasn’t paying attention and kept going, delivering papers down my side of the block. It wasn’t until I reached the end that I noticed Jeremy was not at the corner directly parallel to me on the other side of the street.

I craned my neck around looking for him, and spotted him. He was intensely watchful of something or someone. I pedaled across the street and back to him.

“Hey, what’s up? You okay?” I asked.

“You ever notice that for the past three weeks, Mr. Miller leaves his driveway at exactly 6:10 am every single Monday, but not on any other day. Isn’t that strange?”

I scrunched my nose. “Yeah, so what? Loads of people leave early for work.”

“He’s a teacher at the college, though. Isn’t he on summer vacation like us?”

“Um, well, maybe he’s doing a summer school course? I dunno how college works.” I shrugged.

“I got a feeling about him, Arnie. We should keep an eye on him. Just like Mike Kelly in ‘Diplomatic Courier.’ He had a feeling about Jenine.”

“No! He wasn’t suspicious of her the whole time. Besides, that was just a film. Not real.”

“I know that. It’s just Mr. Miller’s different, and I been watchin’ him.”

I could feel that knot growing in my gut. Jeremy was off on one of his crazy ideas. If I didn't wrangle him in, it would get out of control like a bull in a china shop with a vendetta. He could get fixated, and the consequences would be catastrophic.

“No, no, no! Jeremy, he’s just another adult, who lives a boring life, going to his boring job and coming home, and watching the same boring news every day. Your head’s just full of ideas from that film, and now you wanna stir the pot! We got a good thing going here with this paper route. Let’s just finish our work, and we can get candy from the sweet shop. We still got money left over from last week.”

Jeremy nodded, and we finished the route. After we were done and we’d filled our brown paper sacks with taffy, licorice, lemon drops, and other sweets, the two of us sat in our old wooden shack of a clubhouse out in my backyard.

It was going to be a hot day, and we were hiding from the heat and my mother. She would have flipped her lid if she saw how much candy we’d bought. She said too many sweets were not suitable for growing boys. I didn’t see the problem. Moms could be so overreactive.

“Hey, Jer, let’s go to the pool today. It’s gonna be a scorcher.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You’re awfully quiet. Penny for your thoughts?”

“I’m okay.”

I suspected he was still thinking about Mr. Miller. Turns out, I wasn’t wrong. As we got on our bikes with our towels stuffed into our delivery baskets, we had to pass through Mr. Miller’s neighborhood.

Jeremy came to a screeching halt. He dropped his bike on the sidewalk and crept along the fence line of Mr. Miller’s lawn.

“Jer! What the hell are you doin’?”

“I just wanna take a peek. Like I said, I got a gut feeling about this guy. I think he’s a Soviet.”

“That’s the most knuckle-headed, crazy talk I ever heard! C’mon, let’s scram.”

Jeremy stopped and looked at me, serious as a heart attack. “Arnold, look here. We can’t be spies when we grow up unless we practice our intuitive skills. C’mon, it’ll be just like Diplomatic Courier. We’re both couriers anyway. I’ll be Mike Kells, and you can be my sidekick like Sergeant Ernie.”

“Jer, you’re gonna get us in trouble!” I pleaded with my cousin. I just wanted to get to the pool and get to the front of the line before the rest of the kids.

“This will only take a few minutes, Arnie. Let’s just have a quick peek around.”

I had no choice. If Jeremy was right, and sometimes his crazy ideas actually panned out, this could be dangerous. I sighed and followed closely behind him.

We crept along the side of Mr. Miller’s fence and crouched near the small shoe-box-sized basement window that was opened just a crack. Jeremy laid down on his stomach, and I followed his lead.

We saw Mr. Miller sitting at a huge metal desk with transistor equipment. He was holding a microphone or something with his left hand and making notes on a pad of paper with his right. He was speaking a foreign language that I didn’t recognize.

Jeremy clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle a gasp. His eyes were wide as saucers, and he whispered, “That sounds like Russian! See, I told you! A Soviet!”

“How would you know what Russian sounds like?”

“They were speakin’ it in Diplomatic Courier. Don’t you remember?”

“Jeremy, you’re so full of shit. I don’t remember any part of the film where they were talking in Russian. This is all conjecture. You just wanna believe—”

Just then, an angry door slammed, and we saw the red, glowering face of Mr. Miller charging straight towards us from his back door.

Jeremy shot up faster than a rocket on a sugar rush. I, on the other hand, pushed myself up, and my glasses slid off my nose into the grass. Just as I was fumbling to get them back on, I felt the hot, searing pain of my left ear being jerked upward in Mr. Miller’s vice-like grip on it. Mr. Miller was going to rip my ear clean off!

I could see Jeremy making a getaway on his bike.

“Mr. O’Leary, have your parents not taught you that it’s improper to spy on your neighbors! To be sure, we are marching inside and calling your parents. And don’t think your cousin is off the hook. I saw him skittering away.”

I didn’t say anything. The pain in my ear was unbearable.

He finally released me and made me sit on his sofa while he called our mothers. Mr. Miller just glowered at me as I waited for the longest ten minutes of my life.

Finally, my mother arrived. She was shooting daggers at me intermittently between apologizing profusely to our neighbor.

We left his house together. I collected my bike from the curb and got the tongue-lashing of my life the entire walk home.

That evening Aunt Rose and Uncle Barry came over and sat us boys down on the sofa. My mother’s shrill voice started the interrogation.

“Wha’ on God’s green earth were ya spying on Mr. Miller fer? Her Irish accent became more pronounced when she was angry.

“Now, Eileen, I know you’re upset, but we should hear the boys out. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation. Probably just a harmless game gone south.” Barry glared at us. He wanted to give us the benefit of the doubt, but even he had his limits. He turned to us. “You boys better have a good explanation.”

“Dad, Mr. Miller was speaking Russian! I think he’s a Soviet spy!” Jeremey blurted out.

The parents looked at each other in turn. Then, Aunt Rose looked down at the floor, shaking her head. My mother’s eyes flashed with even more anger if that was possible. My father shook his head and rolled his eyes. Uncle Barry looked us in the eyes. There was a gleam in his.

“Boys, don’t you know Mr. Miller is a linguist? He teaches quite a few languages at the college.” Uncle Barry suppressed a grin.

Aunt Rose smacked her husband on the arm. “Barry, this is serious. They were invading his privacy. That’s a grave offense. And now all the neighbors will think we’re raising Peepin’ Toms!”

“Boys, she’s right. You can’t be prowling around an upstanding citizen’s house and calling them a Commie. That’s a serious accusation.”

He stared down at us, and I felt like I wanted to cry. I held in my tears, though. Boys didn’t cry, especially at thirteen.

Maybe Uncle Barry could see how upset and penitent we were.

“On the other hand, boys have wild imaginations, and they’re just trying to keep our country safe," he said to Aunt Rose. He then turned to us. “Of course, spying on your neighbor is not the way to go about it. There have to be consequences to your actions.” He looked at my father, to take over.

“Boys, I’ve spoken to Mr. Miller and Mr. Jones. As punishment for your actions, you’ll be docked two week’s pay, but you’ll still be expected to do your routes. You’ll also be marching down to Mr. Miller’s house first thing in the morning with your mothers and giving Mr. Miller an apology and a promise you shall do no such thing ever again.” My father’s normally quiet voice was terrifying when he was upset. I couldn’t even look at him.

“Yes, sir!” We both said in unison.

Honestly, Uncle Barry got us off easy. We’d later learned that Mr. Jones wanted to fire us. He didn’t want Peepin’ Toms working at The Herald. It would soil the good reputation of the town paper.

The worst part was facing Mr. Miller’s gargoyle face as he merely grunted over our ingratiating and groveling apologies.

After the hellish two weeks of enduring stink eye from every other mother in town when we rode our bikes down Main Street, things were back to normal. Well, as normal as your childhood could be when your cousin and best friend was Jeremy O’Leary.

***

“That was a great story, Poppa!” My little grandson Chase beamed up at me.

I ruffled his soft head of red hair and grinned. “Oh, you haven’t even heard the best part yet.”

His eyebrows rose, and he waited for me to finish.

“You see, about six months after our little stunt, there was an incident that the whole town would be talking about for years. A bunch of men in black suits stormed Mr. Miller’s house, took him away, and confiscated half his belongings down in that basement.”

“He was a spy?” Chase asked.

I nodded.

“Sleeper Agent, they called them, and Uncle Barry made sure everyone hailed his son as a town hero. If it hadn’t been for Jeremy’s intuition, the officials would have never looked into Mr. Miller.”

“Is that true?” Chase asked.

I laughed heartily. “Honestly, I’m not sure, but if you haven’t guessed by now, that side of the O’Leary family has a flair for the dramatic.”

“Wow, that’s crazy,” little 8-year-old Chase marveled.

“You see, Chase, back then, we were in the Cold War. There was this thing called The Illegals Program. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service planted spies living in plain sight. They assumed American identities and did things like enrolling in colleges, getting jobs, and such, with the goal of infiltrating policy-making circles. I later learned from Uncle Barry that he was likely working his way up the college circuit to be esteemed as a respected academic. Then he could influence small levels of government.”

“Wow! I can’t believe you met a real-life spy, Poppa!”

“That’s right, Chase. And just remember this. If it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, you might very well be dealing with a goose in a duck suit!”