Under the Apple Tree Read online

  You could have heard a pin drop as Caroline stood up and walked to the center of the circle, very calm and composed, like it didn’t mean a thing for a nice girl like her to be kissed by a sex maniac wearing a zoot suit.

  Fishy got up and stood in front of her, looking slightly down at her eyes, she looking back up at him. Artie figured maybe she just liked the idea of Fishy being the only guy taller than her, and that’s why she asked him to get in the game. So she wouldn’t be embarrassed by having to bend down to kiss a guy.

  Suddenly Fishy wrapped his arms around Caroline, mashing his mouth against hers at the same time, and instead of jumping away or screaming, Caroline mashed back, wrapping her arms around the padded shoulders, pressing herself against the zoot-clad body, as Fishy bent her back at the waist like he was doing a dip at a dance, but he didn’t bob back, he just kept dipping and holding the kiss, like he thought he was Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind or something, and the other kids were gasping and whistling through their teeth and Artie felt his stomach moving wildly and was scared he was going to heave his pretzels. He suddenly yelled out “Puget Sound!” and Tutlow called out the basketball hex words “Oogum Sloogum!” but Fishy and Caroline kept on kissing, till finally, out of breath and red in the face, Fishy pulled away, stood straight up again, blinking and swaying like he might fall over, and then he said “Fo-dee-do” in a hoarse whisper, and turned and walked wobbling up the basement stairs and out.

  Everyone was talking all at once and Caroline went to the bathroom to fix her lipstick and Ben Vickman put “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” on the record player. Artie couldn’t tell if the game was over now, after the bombshell kiss of Fishy and Caroline, and he wasn’t even sure if he wanted it to start again. He didn’t like the idea of kissing Caroline right after Fishy had had his mouth all over hers and maybe had passed on some awful communicable sex disease he had picked up in the hotel bathrooms of Chicago; on the other hand, he wanted to kiss Caroline to show he could do it even better than Fishy, wanted to kiss her so great and so long and hard that even the memory of Fishy’s kiss Would be wiped out of her mind for the rest of Eternity.

  Before he could even figure out how he had felt about it all, Caroline had ambled back from the bathroom, looking as cool and collected as if nothing at all had happened and the girls were back in the circle on the floor and it was Artie’s turn to spin. He clutched the middle of the bottle and aimed the mouth toward Caroline, thinking maybe if he pointed it there first it would know it was supposed to end up there, and then he gave it all he had with his wrist. The bottle spun sluggishly, making only a couple of circles before it stopped dead in a perfect point toward Marilyn Pettigrew.

  “Crum!” called Ben Vickman, who creamed for Marilyn Pettigrew, and must have thought Artie had spun for her on purpose. Fat chance. Marilyn was stuck on herself because she was a Science whiz and her Dad had a “C” card for gas rationing on account of being a Veterinarian and supposedly having to do “essential” driving to deliver calves and rescue stray pigs and stuff. Marilyn had a little pug nose and everything about her was pert and prissy, like the outfit she had on tonight, a plaid skirt and a white blouse with a matching plaid sash draped over the shoulder like she was ready to blow on a bagpipe.

  Marilyn stood up with a coy smile, twined her fingers behind her back, and minced to the center of the circle. Artie stepped out in front of her, feeling as much like stomping on her patent leather foot as kissing her, but he tried to pretend she was really Maria Montez, a beautiful princess disguised as a bagpipe player.

  Artie took a deep breath, grabbed her, and pressed his mouth on her prissy thin lips before she could even scream. Her arms flew out from behind her back and waved at her sides, like she was trying to fly, and Artie dipped her backward, just like Fishy had done with Caroline, but he went so far they both toppled over and fell to the floor and Artie was shook loose from her mouth and she yelled “Heeeelp!” and Ben Vickman rushed over and yanked Artie up by the arm, saying at the same time “You win the Purple Heart, Garber!” and squeezing his hand on Artie’s left tit in a terrible, painful hickey that would quickly turn black and blue. Artie yelled.

  Mrs. Spingarn came’ storming down from the kitchen, turning on the ceiling light that flooded the basement with a harsh glare, and shouting, “I am very disappointed in all of you!”

  Artie grabbed his coat and quickly went up to Caroline to apologize.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I got carried away.”

  Caroline shrugged, like he didn’t even count.

  “You’ll learn,” she said.

  Then she made the little brush of her hair back with her hand, and turned away. Now she reminded Artie of Lauren Bacall.

  He bent forward, crouching, as he passed Mrs. Spingarn, hoping she didn’t notice his hard-on.

  At home in bed after Caroline’s party, Artie did something he had never done before, something which probably ranked as a new kind of sin, no doubt a worse one, than those he had committed in the past.

  He beat off thinking about a girl his own age, in his own class at school: the sleek new ambling Caroline Spingarn.

  The sin itself was bad enough, but even worse was the realization that from now on he couldn’t guard against lustful thoughts and deeds by avoiding sexy movies and magazines. Now that looking at Caroline Spingarn could get him just as hot as watching Princess Tahia or a Lana Turner pinup picture, it meant that if Artie was to keep himself pure in body and mind, he would not even be able to go to school! He would just have to sit around the house all day taking hip baths, and reading the Scout Manual and the Bible.

  That was impossible, and Artie resigned himself to waging a lifelong battle with sin, which he was no doubt doomed to lose, along with his mind, his hair, and his child-bearing seed, while acquiring in the process pimples, bad breath, and assorted forms of ravaging disease.

  2

  Artie really got down in the dumps. He caught two bad colds in a row, and had to stay home from school. It seemed like winter would never end. Like the War, it just kept dragging on. There weren’t even any good snows to get your spirits up, just a few little flurries that quickly turned to slush, and then there was sleet, and long, cold rains that chilled you to the bone. For supper, they started having Spam a lot, which was some kind of Wartime imitation of meat that came in a can, and something called “Spanish rice,” which Artie figured was invented to feed the growing numbers of refugees in the world. When he moaned about it, Dad got real hot under the collar and said how Roy was probably having nothing but C rations, and then Mom got sad about Roy still being halfway around the world and in danger every minute of the day. Artie felt awful, knowing he’d turned into a full-time slacker. He even let his homework slide, and started getting complaints from customers on his paper route, saying he’d missed the porch altogether and the paper had got all soggy from the rain.

  He started staying home from school when he wasn’t even sick. One morning he woke up full of remorse after jacking off the night before imagining him and Caroline Spingarn being trapped alone on a desert island.

  He told Mom he had a terrible earache. At least that was something original.

  As usual, he turned on the radio and listened to soap operas to keep his mind off sex. He listened to “Our Gal Sunday,” “Young Widder Brown,” “Ma Perkins,” “The Romance of Helen Trent,” “Stella Dallas,” “Vic and Sade,” “Lorenzo Jones,” and “Just Plain Bill, Barber of Hartville.” That got him safely through the day, but the sadness of the stories and the organ music that went along with them left him feeling even groggier than when he woke up in the morning. In the afternoon the sun had come out, and that made him feel even worse, being inside under the covers. He wondered if he’d ever feel like getting up and facing the world again, or whether he might spend the rest of his life in bed, becoming like one of those old cranks who sit in their house for years letting old newspapers pile up until they can’t even get out the door and just die.
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  It was listening to “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy” that finally snapped him out of it. First it just made him feel worse, listening to Jack and his pals risking their lives just like Roy out in the South Pacific outwitting the Japs while he just lay in his bed like a wet noodle. Then it got him mad at himself, realizing he was wasting his own red-blooded All-American boyhood hiding under the covers and slacking off all day after jacking off the night before, and he decided right then and there that he was going to get himself fired up again and rejoin the fight for freedom.

  Artie got dressed and went downstairs to get something to eat. Dad was still at work of course, and Mom hadn’t come home yet from her day of wrapping bandages for the Red Cross with the Moose Ladies Auxiliary, but she’d left him a note saying there was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for him in the icebox to have for lunch. It was way too late for lunch now, and anyway peanut butter and jelly struck him as too kidlike for his manly new mood of dedication. Instead, he made a big bowl of Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions, and ate it while he read the paper.

  When he saw the ad for the new movie playing at the Strand he felt the thrill of knowing he was back on the right track, that God was looking down to help him regain his patriotism. The movie starting that very night was Destination Tokyo, a terrific War story about these guys on an American submarine who slip right through the entire Japanese Navy to strike at the Imperial stronghold. It came to Artie in a flash that he’d kill two birds with one stone in his exciting new effort to get back into action by going to watch the inspiring movie and then walking Shirley Colby home. He’d been neglecting her lately, but he’d make up for it by buying her a rainbow Coke at Damon’s Drugs.

  Artie crept up to the Strand ticket booth with his head bent low, and then popped up so he was staring right into Shirley’s face. He raised his upper lip and stuck his teeth out so he looked like a Jap.

  “Destination Tokyo, prease,” he said in his best Oriental slur.

  “Oh! Artie. You scared me.”

  “So solly, prease.”

  He slid his quarter under the little arc of an opening in the glass, and Shirley slipped his ticket through.

  “How you doing?” she asked.

  “Well, I been kind of under the weather, which is why I haven’t been around for a while, but now I’m I-A. In fact, how about I buy you a Coke when the show’s over?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t,” she said quickly.

  “How come?”

  Shirley’s eyes flicked away, and her cheeks got brighter.

  “I have to go right home.”

  “Well, I can walk with you.”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

  She looked past him, over his shoulder, and Artie realized there were other people standing in line behind him.

  “I can walk you real fast,” he said.

  “Please, Artie. Not now.”

  A guy behind him started whistling real loud.

  “Okay,” Artie said.

  He took his ticket and headed for the door, feeling like he’d just got the brush-off. In the lobby, he looked around for Burt Spink, the fat, jolly Usher, who always had some kind of joke about the weather, like “Colder than a brass monkey’s balls in December,” or “Hotter than a witch’s tit in Brazil.” He figured old Burt would get his mood up again.

  Burt wasn’t there, though. Instead, there was some guy he’d never seen before standing at Attention by the ticket box, all decked out in a red jacket with gleaming gold buttons, a white shirt and little black leather bow tie and black pants with a red stripe down the side. All he needed was a little round black cap with a strap underneath the chin and he’d have looked like “Johnny,” the midget mascot for Philip Morris cigarettes. Except this guy was tall and skinny, and he had a blond, flattop haircut and blotchy skin. Still, the outfit looked so much like the Philip Morris trademark Artie wouldn’t have been surprised if the guy made the high-pitched “Johnny” yell: “Come in and call for Phil-ip Morr-ees!” Burt Spink always wore an old green soda jerk jacket and a wrinkled striped shirt.

  The new Usher jerked his head toward Artie with military precision, like he was executing an “eyes left.”

  “Ticket, please,” he snapped.

  “Where’s Burt Spink?” Artie asked as he handed over his ticket.

  “If you mean my predecessor, I understand he has enlisted in the Armed Forces,” the new guy said, tearing Artie’s ticket exactly in half with a single rip, and handing him the stub.

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot he was joining up when he turned eighteen.”

  “Follow me, please,” the new Usher said sharply, and turned with a click of his heels to the door of the theater. The Movietone News was on, showing some Flying Fortress coming in on a wing and a prayer from a mission over Germany and Artie stopped a moment, staring at the screen, then heard a click and a solid beam of light shot forth from the heavy black flashlight the Usher carried and struck the tops of Artie’s shoes.

  “This way, please,” the Usher instructed and Artie obeyed, even though the new guy was taking him farther down than he liked to go, right to the second row before the screen, where you had to crane your neck up to see the picture and the actors loomed over you like giants. The beam of the Usher’s flash seemed to be pulling Artie forward like a magnet, and when it swung sharply to the left he sidled past a couple on the aisle and sat down in the empty third seat, even though he usually made a point of being on the right side of the theater. He was going to complain to the Usher that he had put him in the wrong place, but the beam snapped off and the Usher had turned and melted into the dark. Artie could excuse himself and go look for a place he liked better, but he felt stuck, like the darned Usher had nailed him into that seat and there was no use trying to shift.

  He hated the Usher’s guts.

  Who did he think he was, anyway?

  In fact—who was he?

  Artie was sure he’d never seen the guy before, which meant he wasn’t from Birney or Oakley Central or anywhere around there.

  It was strange. Artie had a hard time concentrating on Cary Grant steering his submarine through the Japanese Imperial Navy, wondering who in the world the new Usher was and what he was doing there.

  “Who is he, anyway?” Artie asked Shirley.

  He had waited for her at the far corner of her block the next night after supper, not wanting to have to face Mrs. Colby but determined to have a word with Shirley on her way to work.

  She was walking real fast, but as they rounded the corner away from her house she stopped and fished a pack of Luckies from her purse.

  “Clarence Foltz?” she asked, as she pulled out a cigarette and looked up and down the block. It was bad enough for a girl to smoke, but a girl smoking “in the street” was even worse. It looked like the coast was clear, though.

  “That’s his name?” Artie asked.

  “Why? What’s funny about it?”

  Shirley got the cigarette lit and took a big drag, blowing the smoke out of her nose.

  “How do you spell it?”

  “F-o-l-t-z, I guess,” she said, and started walking again.

  “Never heard of it. Who is he?”

  “The new Usher, for Heaven’s sake.”

  “I know that. I mean, where does he live?”

  “Miss Winger’s Boardinghouse, I think.”

  “I mean where’s he from? Like where do his folks live?”

  “Michigan. Some little town.”

  “So what’s he doing here in Birney?”

  “Working. At the Strand.”

  “I know. But how come?”

  “Men have to work. He’s a man.”

  “Then how come he’s not in the Army?”

  “Artie, I swear. Are you practicing up for the FBI?”

  “All I asked was a simple question, like any good citizen would.”

  They turned onto Main and Shirley stopped, threw down her cigarette on the sidewalk, and mashed it
out with the toe of her loafer.

  “For your information,” she said, “it just so happens that Clarence Foltz was wounded in Guadalcanal.”

  Shirley started walking on, faster than ever now.

  Artie had to take longer strides to even keep up with her.

  “How come you didn’t say so? Did he know Roy?”

  “There were thousands of boys on Guadalcanal. They didn’t all know each other.”

  “Well, where was he wounded?”

  “Aren’t you even listening? I told you, Guadalcanal.”

  “I mean where in the body? Did he get it in the leg? The stomach?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Sounds like you know just about everything else about him. You sure must have talked to the guy a lot.”

  “Of course I talk to him. We work together.”

  Shirley started going even faster, so she was almost running now.

  “Hey!” Artie said. “Where’s the fire?”

  “I’m late!” Shirley said, and suddenly cut across the street.

  Artie knew when he wasn’t wanted. He stopped, took off his cap, and scratched his head, watching Shirley make tracks for the Strand.

  “Fish-ee,” he said to himself.

  “Highly suspicious,” said Warren Tutlow.

  He was crawling out on the lower limb of the maple tree next to the Garbers’ garage, holding the basketball cradled in his right arm.

  “That’s exactly what I thought myself,” Artie said, figuring “highly suspicious” was really the same thing as “fish-ee.”

  Squinting through his glasses at the basketball hoop on the regulation white-painted wooden backboard nailed above the door of the Garbers’ garage, Tutlow gently lowered his right arm with the ball balanced in his hand. He was going to try a one-handed underhand shot from the limb of the maple tree, just like the hot-shot show-off he was sometimes. They were playing HORSE, so if Tutlow made the crazy shot, Artie would have to climb out on the limb of the maple tree and try and duplicate it, or get another letter against him. He was already behind, HOR to H, as Tutlow had made one ordinary free throw that Artie had missed, as well as one of his, stunt shots, an impossible two-handed backward fling while rolling down the driveway in Artie’s old wagon. Just as Tutlow was about to shoot, Artie screamed “Puget Sound!”