Authors: Richard Peck

On The Wings of Heroes (7 page)

BOOK: On The Wings of Heroes

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“I'll skin up there and turn it off,” I said, helpful.

Scrambling up the ladder, I grabbed for the light chain. The box of ancient toys was still there. And the old trunk over in the eaves with the stenciled lettering. Then I was feeling my way back to the ladder past the trunk.

Mr. Stonecypher wasn't in a big hurry to see us leave. Now he hung in his front door.

“Earl, you tell me what this war's for when you find out,” he said to Dad. “You tell me what the last one was for.” The fire in his old eyes flared, but his head drooped. I could see in the dark now.

Dad put his hand out on Mr. Stonecypher's sloping shoulder. He kept it there, and Mr. Stonecypher put his face in his old hands. There was a bad, shaky sound like a sob.

“I wish I could tell you,” Dad said in a voice half his size.

Mr. Stonecypher swallowed hard. “You got through it, Earl.” He looked up, and his old face glistened. “You may have been roughed up, but you come through and come back and had your life and your boys.”

“I did,” Dad said, “but a lot of the best ones didn't make it.”

Mr. Stonecypher turned in the door, and Dad's hand slipped away. Then the old, old man closed himself into his house, and you could feel him in there, in the dark.

We made the rest of our rounds, down to West Main, which was the truck route. The Civil Defense Auxiliary Police were directing the traffic that crawled along with just running lights. We headed back on Scooter's side of the street, Dad between us, bear-big in a night too dark for shadows.

“Dad, what did it mean? With Mr. Stonecypher?”

“He lost his son in the First World War,” Dad said. “His only boy. He'd have been my age. Maybe younger.”

We were by the Tomlinsons' front walk. “There's a trunk in his attic with letters on it,” Scooter said.

“That'd be the foot locker they sent his boy's gear back home in,” Dad said. “That's what he's got left.”

We watched Scooter up to his porch. The all-clear sounded, and the world came back. The streetlamp on our corner showed us the way home. Lights in porch ceilings came on, buzzing fishbowls in yellow halos, all the way to ours.

“We're going to have to look out for Scooter,” Dad said.

“How come?”

“His dad's taking up a commission in the navy.”

“Scooter never said.”

“Maybe he's not ready to,” Dad said. And I remembered the snazzy Schwinn that Scooter got last Christmas. It could have been his dad already saying good-bye.

I leaned into my dad the rest of the way.

“When you're taller than I am,” he said, “are you still going to stick this close to me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” So he threw an arm around my spindly shoulder, and we went on home. Mom was pulling a towel off the Philco, and a song welled out: “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World.”

Now the Government Wanted Milkweed . . .

. . . to replace something called “kapok” from the Malay Peninsula. Milkweed was for stuffing in life jackets, to keep shipwrecked sailors afloat, or pilots who'd ditched at sea.

At the tag end of summer the stuff was bursting out of its pods along every country road, and Scooter and I wanted to be outdoors till the last second before school. We'd already scooped up enough scrap metal to get us into the Varsity Theater through all next year and into 1944.

Last summer the park was the size of our universe. But the bikes pushed out our boundaries. We fell off them and got crossways in traffic. I'd crashed down a culvert and sprung the frame on mine. But we'd been almost to Maroa and Mt. Zion on secondary roads. Sacks for the milkweed hung off our handlebars and caught the breeze.

We were out past Wyckles Corner one blazing morning so close to September you could smell school. There was milkweed, tangled with ragweed and goldenrod. We'd just bumped our bikes over a blue racer snake, dead in the road with a red smear where a car had run over its head.

Before Scooter got any ideas about tying the snake to his back fender, I wanted to put some distance between it and us. The road was ankle-deep in dust, so it was uphill pedaling the whole time.

Back in the fields stood a ruined old barn with a Red Pouch Tobacco sign flaking off its side. A falling-down barn and then an old sloping house. You could see daylight through both of them. Deep in weeds up by the house was a beat-up 1933 Chevy sedan with suicide doors. It had a license plate, but it looked pretty weary.

There was a mess of milkweed, but we liked the look of the spooky old barn. The doors were off it, and I thought we could see enough from out here in the lot. Snakes could be in there out of the sun, snakes with swaying heads. Copper-heads. We looked inside, then looked again.

In the middle of the dirt floor were the remains of an ancient automobile, striped with sunlight, furred with dust. An old jalopy like the mummified corpse of a car in this rickety tomb of a barn.

“Neat,” Scooter breathed, and walked his Schwinn inside. He parked it against a support beam, so I had to. A row of rusty rattraps hung webbed together down the post.

The car had been old when Packard built Dad's. Even the chicken droppings on it were older than we were. Wooden-spoke wheels. The tires were long gone, and everything had lived in it at one time or other: chickens, hogsâsnakes, no doubt. The crank was still in the slot under the radiator.

Anything this historic had to be a treasure. Scooter smeared spit on the radiator cap, and the nickel winkedânickel, not chrome. He rubbed an emblem, and the faded letters read: PAN AMERICAN.

The hood was missing, and generations of animals had been nesting in there, living in messes of theirâ

“Something ate the roof,” Scooter said, but the skeleton of it was there, like a ribby old umbrella. Scooter turned the latch, and the front door jumped off the car and smacked the dust of the floor. Then we were sitting on the front seats, leather oozing stuffing.

Scooter was behind the big wood steering wheel. The metal pedals stood high enough for his feet. Mine dangled because there wasn't much floor on my side. We sat there, pretending the missing motor was turning over, firing back through the tailpipe. Scooter geared down with the missing shift. We were two sports from another time, barreling down country roads, free as air, old enough to drive.

“There wasn't even a war then,” Scooter said.

From the regulation canteens on our web belts we drank the last of our water. A breeze drifted through. It was breezier than a cane-bottom chair, as Mrs. Hiser would say. I dozed.

The barn turned into a covered bridge, also rickety, and we were thundering through it in our brand-new Pan American straight from the dealership. It was the days of yore, and the President of the United States was . . .

“Warren G. Harding,” Scooter mumbled out of his own daydream. He reached to squeeze the invisible bulb on the missing horn. “Beep, beep,” he sang out.

Soon after that, an explosion about busted my eardrums. Hail rattled the roof from a clear blue sky. Scooter peeled out of his side. I slid off my seat. We thought about rolling under the car, like school air raids. This could be the real thing.

“Scram!” Scooter yelled. “The barn could be coming down.” And true, it was raining roofing.

We cut out, then pulled up short. A black shape stood in the barn door against the sunlight. The figure held a shotgun.

I may have screamed. Scooter did.

The hail on the roof had been buckshot out of the gun. I'd never been so scared, and dying this far behind the lines didn't seem fair.

“Well anyway you're not tramps,” the figure said.

Our eyes adjusted. It was a dried-up woman with a face like a walnut. She'd lowered her blunderbuss. Had that just been a warning shot? The gun hung broken open in the crook of her wrinkled arm, like she'd been out hunting. Her skirt tails were in her boots. What century were we in?

“But boys in a barn are trouble enough,” she said. “Start toward me.”

My heart lurched, and I had to follow, keeping even with Scooter. “It was that Beep Beep of yours that gave us away,” I muttered to him. His web belt was way bigger than Scooter's waist. It worked down over his knees as we walked, closer and closer to this old woman and the barrels on that shotgun, still smoking.

“Smoking?” she said. “Cornsilk in a dry barn?”

“N-n-no,” we said.

“What's in those canteens?” she inquired. “Home brew? Rot gut? Corn liquor?”

“N-n-no,” we said.

Scooter's belt wound down to his ankles, and his canteen settled in the dust.

“Town boys,” she noticed. “What's your business in my barn?”

Scooter found his tongue. I'd left mine somewhere. “We're collecting milkweed for the war effort,” he piped.

“Did you find much milkweed growing inside my barn?” She wore tortoiseshell spectacles, old as the car. Her magnified gaze crackled through them.

“We like your old automobile,” Scooter said in a small voice.

“And you just make yourselves at home on other people's property?”

We pretty much did. We'd been in and out of other people's attics and basements all summer long, scouting for scrap. We didn't mention it.

“Up to the house.” She nodded toward it. Scooter stepped out of his belt, and then we were on the porch, out of the sunâand options. A slop jar, covered, stood on the floor. The screen wire on the door billowed out.

“Inside,” she said, parking her shotgun against the house, which was some relief.

Inside, hogs wouldn't have come as a surprise. But it was mostly stacks of books. Shelves with more books ran across the top of a closed door to another room. A kerosene lamp stood on a big table with a stack of newspapers and
Time
magazines. She'd been eating her lunch at one end, on oilcloth, when she heard intruders in her barn.

“You. The talker,” she said to Scooter. “What's your name?”

If she got our names, our gooses were cooked. “Scott W. Tomlinson,” Scooter said. “Ma'am.”

“And what do they call
you
?” She swiveled on a bony hip. Her dress was a feed sack.

“. . . Davy.”

“Bowman?” she said, but how did she know? Was she a witch? She looked it. Who was she?

“I am Eulalia Titus. Miss.”

“Pleased to meet you,” we lied softly.

She sent Scooter around the back of her house. She had a jar of something cooling down her well and told him to bring it. “And watch where you step. Snakes.”

Scooter scooted. I could feel myself turning pale because of snakes in the vicinity.

“You better sit down,” Miss Eulalia Titus said. “You may have had a touch of the sun.”

She'd been reading a new book by Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent. “You thought I was too far back in the sticks to know there's a war on,” she said. So she read minds.

Scooter came back with a jar of buttermilk. Miss Titus poured out three cheese glasses. It was barely cool, and I hated buttermilk.

“I suppose you two are used to iceboxes,” she remarked.

Actually, we were used to refrigerators.

The three of us fit around the end of the table. Miss Titus was small and stringy, though of course she could blow you away. Scooter's elbows were nowhere near the oilcloth, so he was minding his manners. A screen-wire dome among the books covered a tall cake with butter icing.

We three were knee to knee. Miss Titus had a little mustache. “Just so you know,” she said, “that cake took two weeks' sugar ration.”

“Sixteen ounces,” Scooter said.

She gave him a look. “You're the sharpest tool in the shed, aren't you?”

He looked modest. Also, he had a buttermilk mustache. Miss Titus's was real.

“He's the smartest kid in our grade,” I said, which was true.

Miss Titus stood up to cut three slices out of the cake. It was layer.

“Where's mine?”

A terrible voice came out of nowhere, or the grave.

“I said where's mine?”

Scooter froze. Every hair on my head stood up. If I'd had hair anywhere else, it would have stood up too. That voice was scarier than the gunfire, and where had it come from?

“All right, Mama!” Miss Titus pushed back from the table.

Mama?
Miss Titus was the oldest woman in the United States. And she had a mama? Scooter smacked his forehead.

Miss Titus pushed a door open. Looking back at us, she said, “You think
I'm
mean.”

We fidgeted. From the other room a voice like a crow cawing said, “Is it store-bought cake or homemade? Because I like store-bought.”

BOOK: On The Wings of Heroes

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