Red Menace Read online

  Advance praise for

  “Red Menace is a compelling and engaging story of a tumultuous and painful time in our history. Through a young boy’s eyes, we are drawn into the experience of a particular family, in that time and place. Marty Rafner is a character with great heart and depth. Lois Ruby accomplishes that rare feat of sparking an interest and enticing the reader on to ask questions, dig deeper, and learn more.”

  —Clare Vanderpool, author of Navigating Early and Newbery winner Moon over Manifest

  “Lois Ruby brings the divisiveness of the Cold War era to life through the experiences of a thirteen-year-old Kansas boy. Like many boys, Marty Rafner cares only about baseball and its heroes, but he’s forced to contend with the realities of McCarthyism and its effects on the nation and his own small town. We watch Marty discover new heroes and perhaps become one himself. This is a powerful work that will touch the hearts of young people and alert them to a troubling time in our nation’s history.”

  —Rabbi Michael Davis, whose grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Cronbach, delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  Text copyright © 2020 by Lois Ruby

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Carolrhoda Books®

  An imprint of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

  Jacket illustration by Alexandra Bye.

  Paper background: Stephen Rees/Shutterstock.com.

  Main body text set in Bembo Std.

  Typeface provided by Monotype Typography.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ruby, Lois, author.

  Title: The Red Menace / Lois Ruby.

  Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Books, Lerner Publishing Group, [2020] | Summary: “During the summer of 1953, thirteen-year-old Marty’s parents are suspected of communist sympathies, upending his life and causing him to question what it really means to be a patriotic American” —Provided by publisher. Includes historical notes.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019000738 | ISBN 9781541557499 (lb : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Communism—Fiction. | Cold War—Fiction. | Surveillance—Fiction. | United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—Fiction. | Jews—United States—Fiction. | Family life—Kansas—Fiction. | Kansas—History—20th century—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.R8314 Red 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000738

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1-46157-45954-9/11/2019

  For my two 2020 bar mitzvah boys, Jacob and Max

  “I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning. I think about it all day and dream about it at night. The only time I don’t think about it is when I’m playing it.”

  —Red Sox centerfielder Carl Yastrezemski

  “The Rosenbergs were familiar. To a child the connection was unavoidable: if they could be executed, what was to prevent the execution of one’s own parents, particularly one’s own mother? . . . [I] can still summon the terror—and the fury at my mother for risking her life, the utter despair . . . She must have sensed then that what she and my father were committed to—that progressive political dream they’d lived together—had become a nightmare.”

  —author Carl Bernstein

  Chapter 1

  Thursday, April 16, 1953

  Last week the FBI pulled up across the street and aimed binoculars at my house. At Amy Lynn’s next door, too. They’re staking us out round the clock, like we’re Mafia bootleggers.

  Hey, G-men, I’ve got news for you. Al Capone doesn’t live in the neighborhood. This is Palmetto, Kansas, not Chicago, Illinois. No dead stiffs lying around on Oxbow Road.

  They won’t notice anything suspicious about me, Marty Rafner, the world’s most loyal Yankees fan. Right now I’m innocently shooting hoops with my best friend Connor Dugan, who lives down the block, though the FBI’s not checking out his family.

  Connor has his big butt in the air as he dives into the sage hedge to get the ball. Jabs his finger on one of those thorny things, so he pops the finger into his mouth, sucking blood.

  “Shoot!” I holler. Connor flubs a one-hander wide of the basket. “Jeez, you never even came near the pole.”

  “Basketball’s not my game. I’m a baseball man.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t forget, Mickey Mantle played football and basketball in high school, not just baseball.”

  Connor puffs up. “But I pour all my talent into one game. First string, shortstop. Let’s see, where are you? Oh, yeah, way out in center field. You need a telescope to spot the ball.” He shoots.

  “Whoa. That one hit the rim. You’re missing closer.”

  “Hey, Marty, how bad you think it hurts when they shoot that electricity through you?”

  The Rosenbergs. They’re always lurking in the back of our minds. Even if my parents didn’t know them personally and didn’t make them the hot topic at our dinner table, the daily radio bulletins would keep reminding us about their upcoming execution.

  I don’t respond, but Connor just won’t ice it. “Think it feels like your insides are fried? Two eggs, sunny side up?”

  It’s like a jolt of current is racing through my own gut. I shoot and miss. “Nah, I think it’s more like you’re zapped with a stun gun.” Dribble, dribble, lay-up, my signature shot, like I practiced a million times. A million times, and I still overshoot the rim.

  “You kidding? They’ll be flopping around for about six minutes.”

  My shot bounces off the board and streaks past us into the street. Under the G-men’s car. “Go for it, Con.”

  “I’m not messing with the FBI!”

  Am I gonna sacrifice a decent basketball, or wait a month or a year until they give up and go home?

  They make it easy for me by starting up their Studebaker and crawling a few feet up the block, freeing the ball so I don’t have to belly my way under their car. But as soon as I’ve got my prize, the car backs up into its same old rut.

  I swear, Connor’s got a one-track mind. “Wonder if they’ll sit next to each other, like a two-seater electric chair. Picture it, sparks flying back and forth, zowie.”

  My stomach roller-coasts.

  “Bet you two bits Julius and Ethel will holler like banshees when that shock whizzes through them. Pshoooo.” Revved up by this picture, Connor sinks one and sends the rim vibrating.

  I snag the ball smack out of the net and glance across the street at the Everlys’, where Luke’s not. Luke used to dribble about fifty times before shooting. Where’s he now? On a transport, heading home from Korea with a Purple Heart. Might not be able to stand up, let alone shoot baskets.

  Man, don’t I know anybody whose life is toodling along happily? Amy Lynn’s family is getting the same attention from the G-men that mine is. That’s about everybody on our block—the Sonfelters, the Dugans, the Everlys, and us, the Rafners. Oh, and a few other neighbors I only see when I take the trash cans out to the street. Mom calls them the Garbage People.

  I pull the ball to my achy chest, hugging it like the earless stuffed chimp I used to stash under my pillow. “Those two boys, both their parents will be dead on the same day. Think about it, Con. How would you feel?”

  “Parents like that? They sold us out to the Ruskie
s. We’re talking A-bomb secrets.”

  “Aw, come off it. They never gave the Russians any secrets, on account of they didn’t have any to give.” My parents and all their Hawthorne professor buddies swear that the Rosenbergs are not spying traitors. A lot of people think they are, though. Doesn’t matter one way or the other anymore, does it? Appeals denied, date set, boom. Zap.

  The U.S. Supreme Court’s refused to hear the Rosenberg case twice already, and the execution date is circled on Mom’s kitchen calendar. Doomsday, June 18. Only two months away.

  Connor lives for that day. “My father says their kind, Julius and Ethel and Amy Lynn’s father, they’ll turn us all into a whole country of pinkos.”

  My lip curls up to the left, like Mom’s when she hears things that tick her off, and a lot of things do. Around our house, pinko is a lip-curling cuss word. So my lip’s practically wagging like a tail, and I can barely get the words out. “The Rosenbergs were framed, Con, and you know it. The trial was a circus, the judge was crooked, the star witness—Mrs. Rosenberg’s own brother—man, he lied on the stand to get his wife out of hot water.”

  “Well, my father says if they’re commies, that’s good enough for him. The only good red’s a dead red.” Like his father’s such an expert. Mr. Dugan’s the head of buildings and grounds at the College, but he’s got louder opinions than half the faculty.

  Connor shoots again. The rim rattles and the ball bounces off.

  I snag it. “You’re all heart, Con. Get this: the Rosenbergs are not guilty!” I pound my gavel-fist full force on the basketball. Needs air. So do I, trying not to picture Michael and Robby shooting baskets in some other driveway, knowing their parents will both be dead before their next birthdays.

  Connor snorts. “Not guilty, huh? That’s what they all say on Death Row.” He does a staggering number, gasping with his last breath, “I’d rather . . . be dead . . . than red. Aaarggghh.” Keels over in the grass, belly up. Great for bouncing the basketball off his flabby gut.

  I don’t want to talk about the Rosenbergs anymore. It’ll be a relief when June 18 finally rolls around and the whole thing’s over, and the Yankees are hotter than lava, and the Mick is batting .330, and life is ordinary, white-bread, Kansas normal again.

  “Shoot!” I yell again, knocking the wind out of Connor with a basketball bomb to the solar plexus.

  “Hey, you trying to kill me?”

  “It’s tempting.”

  Connor laughs, but I’m semi-not kidding. I guess my anger inspires him, because he jumps up and sinks two in a row.

  Chapter 2

  Friday, April 17

  It used to be so easy with Connor and me. We didn’t even have to talk; just knew what was up. But everything’s different now, since the FBI poked their noses into our lives. Who’s left I can count on? Old faithful, Mickey Mantle. No doubt about it, the Mick’s still my man. I don’t write him memos anymore, though. Not since a couple years ago, when I decided it was dumb for a guy hitting fifth grade to scratch notes to some other guy who wouldn’t read them anyway, even if I’d had the guts to drop them in the mail. Which I didn’t.

  But here I am dragging the shoebox full of memos from the top shelf of my closet. Why now? What’s the FBI got to do with the Mick? Nothing, although I’m starting to think nobody’s safe from their clutches, and man, the feds sure went after Jackie Robinson a few years back.

  The house is quiet this afternoon. It used to be swarming with students from everywhere from Athabasca to Zurich—which, if you asked me to find them on the map, forget it. Some nights I’d wake up to their shouting. I’d trundle out to the hall. Cigarette smoke would be coiling up the stairs, and I’d hear them rant about some guy named McCarthy. Not Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist, and not Joe McCarthy, the manager who’d taken the Yankees to four consecutive World Series in the ’30s. That would be worth getting fired up about. No, they were ranting about Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator, the one known around our house as the Lie-Mongering, Red-Baiting Carnivore, since he eats up peoples’ lives. Turn over every rock, the Carnivore says, and you’ll uncover a cowering communist red menace.

  It’s tough being the son of two college profs, especially the doctors Rosalie and Irwin Rafner. Other families sit around the dinner table talking about I Love Lucy, or about whether you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the top or the bottom, or whether there was an air raid drill at school. Not my mom and dad, the super-brains who turn a warm meal into a hot debate.

  Everyone in my family has strong opinions, except me—unless it’s about baseball.

  Far as I can see, the only great part about being a professor is these neat memo pads with my dad’s name printed in green ink. Just the size I needed to keep the Mick up to date on my baseball team, right? Har-de-har, like he was dying to know.

  The memo pad didn’t take much doctoring to make it mine, like this first one:

  From the desk of

  IRWIN RAFNER, Ph.D.’s son Marty

  DATE: August 29, 1951

  TO: Mickey Mantle

  Man, what a rookie season you’re having, a bat outta H-E-Double Toothpicks. So just when everybody (mostly me) was figuring you for Rookie of the Year, you go and hit a slump and get yourself booted down to the Triple A farm club. Hey, I know about slumps. Look the word up in Webster’s, and it’s got a snapshot of me: Martin Weitz Rafner, known on the field as Marty el Magnifico. You haven’t heard of me? Gimme time, and you will, because by seventh grade I’ll be the lead-off batter for the Palmetto Pirates JV’s. Won’t take long until the scouts discover me, like they did you down in Oklahoma. And if you believe that, you’d believe chickens had eyelashes. Hey, wait, this just came over the radio. They’re bumping you back up to New York, and you’ll be wearing Number 7. Great news for all the sevens in the world.

  Your friend,

  MARTY

  See what I mean? What a birdbrain. So, I’m thinking of making confetti out of the whole shoebox full of memos. Then I’ll soak the pieces in Clorox and toss the pulpy mess at the Palmetto dump before the G-men grab all my family’s personal stuff, like they did to Amy Lynn’s family. It’s happened to other people we know, too. Some of them are locked up. Look at Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg, cooling their heels in Sing Sing. On Death Row.

  A couple of months before they went to jail, their family came to our house for dinner when they were in town for some sort of meeting over in Wichita. It was before my tenth birthday. Michael and Robby were younger than me. If I’d known they were about to be accused of espionage, I might’ve expected people like movie stars, all fancy-dressed and snooty and full of snappy stories.

  Later, I racked my brain trying to remember how they’d acted at the dinner table—if they’d said or done something courageous or at least interesting, but they were just a regular Jewish family like us.

  I remember Mr. Rosenberg gazing out of those little round glasses that made his eyes look as big as ping-pong balls. “Splendid pot roast, Rosalie,” which it wasn’t, because my mother is a poet, not a cook. She could win the Nobel Prize for Shoe Leather.

  Michael, the bigger kid, was chawing on a slab of pot roast speared on his fork when Mrs. Rosenberg hollered, “Put that meat down, Michael!” Next thing, his little brother Robby, who was so small that he had to sit on two phone books, accidentally knocked a glass of apple juice across the table, which sent us all laughing like hyenas, and that was my first clue that everybody was super nervous, and that this wasn’t normal company in our home.

  I never saw them again, but they sure get a lot of air time at our house.

  Yeah, so what about Michael and Robby, who’ll be losing both their parents when the guy with the black hood throws the switch? One switch for two?

  Man, it’s just not healthy for a guy my age to personally know people who are gonna fry in the electric chair on June 18. That’s—wait, let me count—sixty-two days from today. Yikes.

  Chapter 3

  Friday, April 17


  I’m sitting with Amy Lynn on my front steps after school, shifting around for a shady spot. I don’t have much experience talking to girls, my mom being the only other one I know pretty well, and Amy Lynn Sonfelter’s not at all like Mom. Mom’s all sharp cheddar, but Amy Lynn’s as smooth as Velveeta. See where this is going? Nowheresville, because she’s already fourteen, and my thirteenth isn’t for a few days. She’s always saying, “Marty, you’re the little brother I never had.” Man, I should have been born two years old.

  Like Luke Everly used to say before Korea, back when he was teaching Connor and me how to do layups, “Love is cruel, but it beats hate by a long shot, kiddos.”

  In a minute Amy Lynn’s gonna have to cross the street to babysit Carrie when Luke’s wife, Wendy, goes to work at the college library. To get up the courage to pass the FBI car, Amy Lynn focuses a pair of binoculars at the G-men. It’s Spy vs Spy, right out of Mad Magazine. “I’m watching them watch us, and they don’t even know it. The short one with the dimpled chin is snoozing. Look at his blubbery lips. See?”

  She swings the binocs over. I catch a whiff of her shampoo, which smells like strawberries. Do girls wash their hair in Tutti Frutti gum?

  Must stink in that Studebaker across the street, though, both of them sweating all day and takeout leftovers rotting on the floor. About every three hours they drive over to the Shell station, so at least there aren’t buckets of pee fermenting in the back seat.

  Amy Lynn says, “At breakfast this morning, my father slapped the picture of Senator McCarthy in the Sentinel and hollered, ‘This is the scoundrel responsible for framing the Rosenbergs and for all our woes, he and his wretched posse of hate committees.’ ”

  “Hear that a lot at my house, too, only we don’t mention his name. We just call him the Lie-Mongering, Red-Baiting Carnivore.”