“Every day. On the radio. On my radio. Every day at 5:30.”

News. Music, dumb music, and news. That’s what was on the radio every day at 5:30. Not Captain Midnight. The Secret Squadron hadn’t been on the air in twenty years.

“Can we hear it tonight?” I asked.

“Boy!” he said. I was being dumb. I knew it from the way he said it; but I didn’t know why. Then it dawned on me: this was Saturday. Captain Midnight was on Monday through Friday. Not on Saturday or Sunday.

“We goin’ to the movies?”

He had to repeat himself twice. My mind was somewhere else. Nothing definite. No conclusions. No wild assumptions leapt to. Just off somewhere trying to figure it out, and concluding—as you would have concluded, as anyone would have concluded rather than accepting the truth, the impossible and wonderful truth—just finally concluding there was a simple explanation I didn’t yet perceive. Something mundane and dull, like the passage of time that steals all good, old things from us, packratting trinkets and plastic in exchange. And all in the name of Progress.

“We goin’ to the movies, Donny?”

“You bet your boots we are, kiddo,” I said. And I smiled. And I handed him the Code-O-Graph. And he put it in his side pants pocket. And we crawled out from under the porch. And we went to the movies. And neither of us said anything about Captain Midnight all the rest of that day. And there wasn’t a ten-minute stretch, all the rest of that day, that I didn’t think about it.

It was inventory all that next week. I didn’t see Jeffty till late Thursday. I confess I left the store in the hands of Ian and David, told them I had some errands to run, and left early. At 4:00. I got to the Kinzers’ right around 4:45. Leona answered the door, looking exhausted and distant. “Is Jeffty around?” She said he was upstairs in his room…