Under the Apple Tree Read online

Now it was different.

  Now it was Wings Watson.

  Artie could picture him, flying down the basketball court, leaping for a rebound; horsing around with Roy and Bo at the filling station, grinning and playing the peanut machine, giving Artie a friendly poke in the ribs, spitting through the little gap between his front teeth.

  Dead now.

  Gone.

  Where?

  They didn’t even have his body, or what was left of it, at the funeral.

  The service was held in the living room of the Watsons’ rickety old gray farmhouse a few miles from town. Sam Watson mostly raised chickens and his wife Eldora was known as “the Egg Lady” because she delivered fresh eggs to people in town. She and her husband stood gripping each other’s hands by the table where they’d put the silver-framed picture of Wings in his uniform along with a vase of flowers. That was all there was of Wings at the funeral. The picture of him. He was smiling.

  Later, his “remains” would come home in a box that no one was allowed to open. Some people wondered if the rule was really for “health reasons” like the government said or whether what was left was too awful to look at or whether it was only rocks and sand in the plain pine box, at least his family would have something to bury while all the time whatever was left of the real flesh and bones was somewhere in the bloody foreign ground of a country shaped like a boot.

  How come he had to go clear over there from Illinois?

  That was just one of the questions that nagged at Artie’s mind, even though he knew all the right answers about us having to save the world for democracy.

  Even worse than those kind of questions were the ones about what really happened to a young guy who died. Somehow it seemed fairly natural for an old person to die; they were tired out from living a long time and even though it was sad, everyone had to go sometime. Lots of young guys were dying every day in the War of course, but Artie hadn’t known any of them personally, so he hadn’t really thought a lot about it till Wings Watson was killed.

  The scariest part was that now Artie understood that Roy could really get killed. He knew it in his mind all the time, of course; thousands of American guys had been killed on Guadalcanal when Roy was there with them fighting the Japs, and more were getting killed right now in the Solomons where Roy was right this very minute. But he had always before just thought of those guys as “casualties,” part of the score against us, and he didn’t believe in his guts that Roy would really die way out in those weird little islands with palm trees and coconuts. But if his own buddy and teammate was killed in Italy, it suddenly seemed possible that Roy could really get killed in some crazy place like Vella Lavella.

  On a clear afternoon at the end of September when Mom was hanging the wash on the backyard clothesline, Artie went out and offered her some of the Coke from a bottle he’d opened when he came home from school.

  She took two clothespins out of her mouth and had a swallow of the Coke.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a pal.”

  “Mom? I was just wondering.”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe in Heaven? I mean, like it’s really a place people go when they die, unless they’re so terrible they have to go the other way?”

  “A place? You mean like Birney is a place?”

  “Aw, c’mon. Birney’s just a town.”

  “Oh—you mean a bigger place? Like Chicago?”

  “Stop pulling my leg, Mom.”

  “Well, lots of people seem to think Heaven is a ‘place.’ Clouds instead of houses, and angels playing harps.”

  “But you don’t think that way.”

  “Not really, no.”

  “So what do you think it is? If it is?”

  “Oh, I think it’s there, all right.”

  “Where? Out in the universe, you mean?”

  “No. I think it’s all around us. In the grass, trees, sky. Even clean laundry.”

  “So you think if a person dies they come back as a tree—or a sheet?”

  “Not exactly. I think they become a higher part of things. In a way we can’t see or understand.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “I don’t ‘know’ like in a book. I have Faith.”

  She unfurled a sheet and it billowed out in the wind.

  “Just like I have Faith that Roy will come home from the War,” she said.

  “But what about Wings Watson?”

  “Is that what you’ve been brooding about?”

  “I’ve just been thinking is all.”

  “Thinking is fine. Sometimes praying is better.”

  “I do that too.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She pinned up one end of the sheet, standing on the toes of her old blue Keds. Artie grabbed the other end, and took a clothespin out of the basket to hitch it in place.

  “I get scared too,” Mom said. “So does Dad. So does everyone. There’s lots to be scared about.”

  “So what do you do? Besides pray?”

  “Think about what’s next.”

  “You mean, like when the War’s over?”

  “No. That’s too far away.”

  “Like what, then?”

  “Supper,” she said. “I think about what we’re going to have for supper.”

  “What are we?”

  “Tuna fish with noodles.”

  “Dessert?”

  “Tapioca.”

  “That’s neat.”

  “See? It’s even nice to think about.”

  “I get it.”

  Artie tried to concentrate on saying his prayers for Roy and America, and thinking about good stuff, like tuna fish with noodles and tapioca for dessert, and keeping his mind off sex.

  Since his pow-wow on the subject last summer with Chief “Pops” Hagedorn, Artie had kept his hands off his thing at night except to just check and make sure it was still there. As Pops had predicted, the Lord in his wisdom had provided “release of excess” around every week or so in a wet dream. The trouble was, the Lord didn’t make up the dreams the way Artie would have most enjoyed them. They were all tangled up and crazy, like the one where Artie was an escaped prisoner from a Florida chain gang, hiding out in the swamps, when he came upon this woman who had the body of Dorothy Lamour, sarong and all, and the head of Shirley Colby. She licked her lips playfully and started taking off her sarong just as a giant alligator came into the picture and started chasing Artie up a tree, and then everyone including the alligator and the Lamour-Shirley woman turned into monkeys. Artie would have imagined the whole thing differently and left out the part where they all turned into monkeys, but at least he woke up wet and “relieved of excess” so he figured he just had to relax and accept the fact that the Lord worked in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

  For a week or so after Wings Watson got killed, Artie turned kind of sour on the War. He took thirty-five cents that he could have used to buy a quarter and a dime War Stamp and spent it all on a cherry Coke and banana split at Damon’s Drugs, and afterward read through the College Football issue of Sport magazine instead of trying to find out the latest stuff about the invasion of Italy. He went out to Roy’s rock at Skinner Creek by himself and prayed to God to keep Roy safe, and after praying he tried to concentrate his mind on sending messages to Roy by mental telepathy. Last winter he had read this article about how Beatrice Houdini, the wife of the great escape-artist magician, had given up trying to contact her husband from the dead. Mrs. Houdini explained to the press that “Harry could escape from anything on earth. If he can’t slip through a message for me from Heaven then the deal is off.”

  What stuck in Artie’s mind was that Mrs. Houdini evidently believed in Heaven, and he figured he had a better chance of contacting Roy if he ever died since Houdini and his wife were only related by marriage but Roy was Artie’s own brother. As everybody knew and said all the time, “Blood is thicker than water.” Artie thought if he could contact Roy by mental telepathy while he was sti
ll alive, then maybe he’d have an easier time of doing it if Roy got killed and his spirit merged into the trees and clean laundry of the earth that made up the mystical realm of Heaven. Artie just tried to concentrate on sending Roy simple messages like “Hello, it’s me, Artie—come in if you hear me.” Sometimes the wind would stir in the trees and Artie thought maybe that was Roy signaling back, but there wasn’t any real proof and he concentrated so hard on sending and trying to receive the messages that he got these fierce headaches, so after a while he gave up and wrote Roy a long V-mail letter.

  When he told about Wings Watson getting killed he got real mad at the evil, power-mad Nazis, and suddenly his old patriotism revived again. He realized that Wings Watson’s death had demoralized him, making him wonder about the sense of the War, questioning the weird events of the world that made a guy from Illinois have to go and get killed by a bunch of Germans way over in Italy, but now he saw that such brooding and questioning of the rightness of things was just the effect that the Nazis wanted to have on you when they murdered one of your own neighbors in cold blood. Artie vowed that he’d never be demoralized like that again, falling into the trap of doubt and despair. He pledged to himself as the brother of a fighting Marine that he’d renew his Home Front efforts with even greater zeal.

  Artie wanted to find a more serious, grown-up way of helping the War Effort now. Buying War Stamps was still okay, and he certainly wasn’t going to waste his money anymore on binges of banana splits, but filling up the Stamp book was really just a duty that didn’t give him much of a charge anymore. Collecting scrap paper seemed like kid stuff now, and in fact it was the younger boys who had taken up that campaign, little kids in the fifth and sixth grades who were rolling their own red wagons down the street and knocking on doors for papers and magazines the way Artie and Tutlow had done the year before.

  Collecting scrap metal seemed more serious because it was harder, heavier work and what you collected went directly into making armaments, but the trouble was most of the good stuff had already been rounded up in the big drive of the Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko Scouts last summer. Artie knew darn well that every farmer in fifty miles had been cleaned out of his last rusty shovel and broken tractor chain. When he tried to take two beat-up old pots from his own kitchen to start a new drive, Mom caught him and told him in no uncertain terms she needed those pots more than the Armed Forces did.

  “But the thing is,” Artie said, still holding on to the pots, “only 7,698 more of these will make a whole pursuit plane.”

  “The Air Corps can make its own planes,” she said, “but I’ve got to make our suppers.”

  Artie surrendered the pots.

  He went down to his Dad’s filling station and rummaged around in the garage till he found an old tire iron he figured could be made into a machine gun barrel, but Dad said it was essential to his own effort and he couldn’t give it up to the War Effort.

  “Cripes,” Artie said, “there’s nothing any good a guy can do anymore on the Home Front.”

  Dad took one of the rags from his pocket and swiped it across his big forehead.

  “There’s plenty,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “A guy can brush his teeth after meals, he can clean his plate even if it’s Spam or liver, pick up his clothes, and study his lessons.”

  “Heck, that’s just regular stuff.”

  Dad put an arm on Artie’s shoulder and spoke some philosophy.

  “Keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole,” he said.

  Artie sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. He figured that meant you should take care of the little things and the big things would work out for the best. That’s the way adults always talked, telling you the best way a kid could help win the War was to obey his parents and teachers, which was okay for keeping the nation’s mighty War Machine running smoothly, but it wasn’t very inspirational.

  Artie realized he’d better talk things over with another patriotic kid.

  3

  “We got to figure out something real to do,” Artie said.

  Warren Tutlow nodded, knowing exactly what his buddy meant.

  They were chowing down on nickel hamburgers and bottle Cokes at Bob’s Eats on Main Street, trying to figure out a new, glorious, and (hopefully) dangerous way to serve the Home Front.

  “You listen to ‘Captain Midnight’ last night?” Tutlow asked.

  “Sure,” said Artie. “They had the ‘Secret Squadron Signal Session’ on the air. Couldn’t you get the message?”

  “Heck, yes,” Tutlow said. “I know how to use my Decodograph. All I meant was, Captain Midnight and his guys get to go to the South Pacific and outwit the Japs, and we’re still stuck right here in Birney.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to be on the Home Front, I guess.”

  “We’re veterans of the Home Front,” Tutlow said. “The little kids could do that stuff now.”

  “That’s the whole thing. We got to think up something the little kids would be too little to do, something really big.”

  Tutlow pushed his glasses back hard against his nose, which probably created pressure on his brain and made him think better.

  “How about inventing a secret weapon?” he asked.

  “That’s not as easy as rolling off a log,” Artie said.

  “You got that from ‘Red Ryder,’” said Tutlow.

  “Got what?”

  “‘As easy as rolling off a log.’ That’s what they say when they tell you to send in your coupons for a Red Ryder BB gun. ‘It’s as easy as rolling off a log.’”

  “Well, anyway,” Artie said, “you can’t just go around inventing secret weapons. You got to have factories and stuff.”

  “I got a chemistry set.”

  “I’m no good at chemistry.”

  “You could be the guy who tests the weapons to see if they work.”

  “Like fun,” Artie said. “I’m not gonna get blown to kingdom come.”

  “You got a yellow stripe down your back or something?”

  “Boy, are you in a crummy mood today.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess my morale is low.”

  “Well, that’s why we got to think of something.”

  Artie took the top bun off the rest of his burger and splashed some more catsup on it.

  Tutlow started to take a bite of his own burger when he stopped with his mouth open, looking like he’d been conked on the bean. He was staring at something on the wall.

  “That’s it,” he said, putting his hamburger down without even taking the bite.

  “What is?” Artie asked.

  “Lookit, on the wall, the new poster,” Tutlow said.

  Artie turned and looked at the new patriotic poster Bob had put up. It was a picture of Uncle Sam with a finger to his lips, and it said: Even In This Friendly Diner There May Be Enemy Ears—Stop Loose Talk and Rumors.

  Artie read the poster and then glanced quickly around Bob’s Eats, seeing only a couple of kids from the School Traffic Squad, and an old guy who looked like a truck driver.

  Artie leaned across the table and whispered.

  “Where’s the ‘Enemy Ears’?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But they might be anywhere. Right here in Town.”

  “You saying there’s enemy agents in Birney?”

  “They caught a German spy in Chicago, didn’t they?”

  “The FBI did, yeah.”

  “Well, the FBI needs help. They haven’t got enough guys to go to every town in America.”

  “You think we should call them and ask? The FBI?”

  “Not till we got evidence,” Tutlow said.

  “Of spies?”

  Tutlow nodded slowly.

  “Wow,” said Artie. “That makes us counterspies.”

  Tutlow put a finger to his lips, and spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Quiet,” he said. “There may be ‘enemy ears.’”

  Artie clammed up, making his face look exp
ressionless, so no one could read it. He was almost too excited to finish his hamburger. They had finally found something real to do.

  Just then Fishy Mitchelman burst in the door, his long arms flapping.

  “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” he sang in his cracked, off-key voice as he pulled out a chair from the table where Artie and Warren were sitting, plunked himself down in it, leaned over Artie and pressed his mouth onto the straw sticking out of Artie’s Coke bottle, and took a big slurp.

  “You dooh-dahs getting much?” Fishy asked.

  “Is that all you still can think about?” Artie said disgustedly, using his thumb and forefinger like tweezers to pluck the straw Fishy had slurped on out of the Coke bottle and drop it on the table. By now, Fishy might have some sex disease he was conveying around.

  “There’s a War on, you know,” Tutlow said.

  “Gotta have music,” Fishy said. “Listen to this, and guess me.”

  Fishy put his big hands on the table and started beating out a staccato rhythm, closing his eyes and bobbing his head back and forth, then he suddenly stopped and looked at Artie and Warren with hopeful eagerness.

  “Who am I?” he asked.

  “Samuel F. B. Morse?” asked Tutlow.

  “Foog,” said Fishy, squinching his face like he smelled something bad.

  “I give up,” said Artie.

  “Gene Krupa!” Fishy exclaimed.

  “Well, that’s good,” Artie said. Actually, he was glad to see Fishy get interested in something besides sex; he figured maybe there was hope for the guy after all, and imagined what a swell counterspy he would make, if he just got serious.

  “Would you like to put your talent to work for the War Effort?” Artie asked, wanting to give Fishy the benefit of the doubt.

  “Banzai!” Fishy shouted, and Warren Tutlow, shaking his head, gave Artie a kick in the shins under the table.

  “Never mind, we got to be going now, Fish,” Artie said and stood up.

  Warren stood up too, and they went to pay Bob for their Cokes and burgers.

  “Where you guys goin’?” Fishy asked.

  “Secret,” Warren Tutlow said.

  “Fish-ee!” said Mitchelman, googling his eyes around and flapping his arms. He was one guy the War hadn’t changed at all.