Papa November

by Rudi Dornemann

The shortwave radio still sat on the desk at the back of the cabin and it felt like more than luck when Shelly found a numbers station on her first run down the dial. A woman’s voice read the numbers, calm, never pausing for breath, reciting five-digit combinations.

When she was young, Shelly’s grandfather only gave those stations a few seconds if they found one during the day. They’d move on to more interesting transmissions, accented voices from places she’d find in the old atlas with musty-sweet pages. At night, he’d let the numbers ramble.

“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.” He’d open another beer, grandma would read fat historical paperbacks, and Shelly would doze off.

The monotone numbers soothed her now, while her mind spun questions for morning. Take or avoid the interstate? Go north to the city?  How near was a town where she could top off the tank? The further she got tomorrow, the better.

“I know how you think,” Glen always said. “You’ll never leave me ’cause I’ll guess where you’re going before you even get there.”

But he hadn’t known she would leave. She hadn’t known until she drove past work and onto the onramp. Then she couldn’t go back — even if she got home by five like everything was normal, he would know.

The radio voice repeated the call sign “Papa November Pa-pa Nov-em-ber,” and maybe Shelly did doze, because a man unfolded himself from the air up near the ceiling, his gray skin nearly silver in the light of the bare bulb. He climbed down the dresser and looked at her.

She tried to speak, but all the muscles in her throat and neck froze rigid. The man’s shoulders were twisted, one leg was too short, one foot too big. He stared as if seeing into her, and evened out. He had Glen’s eyes and forehead, then he didn’t; there was a hint of grandpa’s many-times broken nose, then his face went mannequin blank.

Shelly felt her lips moving with the numbers, as if she knew them.

The gray man replied with codes of his own: “35-A14, 24-C9, 63-J2…”

She woke just before dawn with a hunch. In the atlas, she saw she was right: those were pages and map-grid coordinates. Places she could go.

Glen might know her, but he didn’t know Papa November.