Under the Apple Tree Page 5

  “Artie, will you come down from there? It’s past your bedtime!”

  The spotter sighed, pulling the mittens his mother made him wear from the pocket of his mackinaw and putting them on before climbing back into the house through his bedroom window. The mittens hampered his ability to focus binoculars and so he never really wore them on duty but pretended to his mother he did. It wasn’t lying, it was part of being patriotic and protecting women—especially mothers—from all the things about War they didn’t understand.

  With Roy away at Marine Boot Camp in Quantico, Virginia, Artie was serving as an Assistant Junior Air Raid Spotter. Good Americans everywhere, from Brooklyn to Hollywood, were fighting on the Home Front in order to do their part, and Artie was proud to be one of them, helping protect his own hometown against attack from Japs or Germans.

  At first there was wise-guy, defeatist talk around Town that Birney, Illinois, was safe from the War, being almost in the middle of the heart of America. Sure, these shirkers had to admit there were German subs off the East Coast and everyone knew New York might be bombed; a Jap sub had actually tried to shell an oil plant in California, and enemy planes had been spotted over San Francisco, but the scoffers laughed and said there wasn’t any threat for a small farm town like Birney, in Illinois.

  Like fun!

  The wise guys were laughing out of the other side of their mouths when the Illinois Civil Defense put out a pamphlet that Mr. Goodleaf brought to school for everyone to study that showed how “Chicago can be bombed.” There were maps that showed how via the polar air route, Chicago was actually closer to Nazi-occupied Norway than New York City! And if the Nazis were going to bomb Chicago, they were sure as shooting likely to drop a few on All-American towns like Birney, only a couple of hundred miles away, just to try to demoralize the heart of America.

  After Artie climbed down from his spotter’s perch on the roof and into his upstairs bedroom window, he went to the kitchen and gulped a hot Ovaltine Mom had ready for him, and then went to bed but not to sleep. Under the covers, with his secret miniature flashlight the size of a fountain pen, he studied the article he’d clipped out of Life magazine with instructions for identifying enemy planes.

  Under the silhouette of the Jap Nakajima 96, the Life article said, “If you see the full front view (above, center) you should throw yourself flat on the ground, against possible machine gun fire.… If you will memorize these planes, you will doubtless save yourself a great many unnecessary alarms.”

  He wondered if he ought to practice throwing himself flat on the floor, but then he heard his mother’s footsteps and clicked off the flashlight, tucked the Life article under his pillow, and pulled the covers over his head. The black silhouetted shapes of enemy planes, Jap and Nazi, swooped and soared through his mind, vicious as vultures but doomed to defeat because of the vigilance of all Americans, including himself, Artie Garber, a soldier of the Home Front, and his brother Roy, in training to be a United States Marine.

  Safe and sound, he slept.

  When Artie went to Damon’s Drugs now he didn’t waste his time with the comic books. He flipped through the real magazines, looking for stuff about the War. The most exciting thing he came across since the article in Life about spotting enemy planes was an editorial in Collier’s about what to do if real-live Jap or German airmen bailed out in your own hometown. Artie took the Collier’s and sat down at a table to study it more carefully. He was going to order a cherry Coke to sip while he reread the crucial instructions, but he realized the price of one would pay for half of a dime War Stamp, so he asked for a glass of water instead, and bought a penny bubblegum ball to go with it. Goose bumps rose on his arms as he read again the advice to Home Front patriots: “It may come, to pass, as has been predicted, that enemy airmen will fly over here occasionally during the war, drop bombs on important industrial spots, then bail out, let their planes crash, and give themselves up. In case such things do happen, we’d like to put in an earnest plea now, to any civilians who may reach these airmen instead of police or soldiers, not to obey the human impulse to lynch them, shoot them, or kick them to death.”

  Artie could see it all happening in a flash:

  Him and Fishy are out at Skinner Creek playing broom hockey with a radiator cap, when they notice a flash of white silk in the woods. An enemy parachute! Alertly, they hold up their brooms across their chests like rifles at the ready. Artie pockets the radiator cap for possible use as a lethal, grenadelike weapon, and he and Fishy stealthily slide across the ice toward the dangerous enemy. Moving within a few yards of the white silk mound, which is moving and shaking with something alive underneath it, Artie cries out, “Come out with your hands up, or prepare to meet your maker!” The white silk is suddenly thrown aside and up from the ground springs a short, stubby, Japanese Zero pilot, his face the color of, dark lemonade, his buck teeth protruding like fangs. He reaches for the revolver in his holster but before he can draw, Artie whips the radiator cap from his pocket and hurls it at the dirty, slant-eyed Son of Nippon. The Jap falls backward with a gurgling cry as the improvised missile strikes him on the brow and Fishy leaps upon him, pinning the little demon to the cold ground, shouting as only Fishy would at such a moment, “Gonna hang your yellow balls from a flagpole, fooger!” The Jap screams “Banzai!” and lunges upward, grabbing Fishy’s neck with clawlike little monkey hands. Artie springs to the rescue, beating the Jap to submission with his broomstick. The two young patriots tie the enemy’s hands behind him with cord from his own parachute, and Fishy starts kicking him to death, but Artie restrains him. “This is a democracy,” Artie explains. “Even this dirty yellow dog deserves his day in court!” Fishy, after planting one more kick in the Jap’s belly, agrees to abide by the principles of democracy, and the two brave citizen-soldiers march the prisoner into Town as people pour out of stores and houses to cheer as the captured airman is led to the altar of American Justice.

  Artie took a big gulp of his water, folded the Collier’s to the page of editorials, and got up to show the vital defense information to Fishy, who was huddled in a corner by the magazine rack. Fishy had not yet shown a lot of interest in keeping up with the War, but was still poring over the pages of demoralizing sex publications like Peek and Titter, which showed pictures of half-dressed women whose mouths were always puckered in a way that looked to Artie as if they were just about to whistle or spit.

  When Artie went up and tapped him on the shoulder, Fishy was engrossed in the pages of Wink. His eyes were focused like ray guns on a picture of a woman wearing a frilly black bra with matching panties, a garter belt as complicated as the straps of a parachute, and black shoes with heels like daggers. Artie just stole a quick glance at the picture, which made him feel queasy.

  “Hey, Fish,” he said, “I got something real important to show you.”

  Fishy only made a kind of grunting sound, and his eyes remained fixed on the picture like it was a map of hidden treasure he was trying to memorize.

  “I said I got something to show you!”

  “Better’n this?” Fishy asked, his gaze still burning on the page of the magazine.

  “I mean something real,” Artie said. “Important.”

  Fishy sighed, stuck the Wink back in the rack, and said, “Foog.”

  Artie started reading from the Collier’s editorial in an urgent, Wartime whisper. Fishy squinted as he listened, like he was trying to get it, but it really was too complicated, like one of those math problems about how many acres of crops Farmer Brown would have if he planted a third with potatoes and the rest with wheat and it rained seven months of the year except on Thursdays. When Artie finished he looked eagerly at Fishy, hoping at last his pal’s patriotism would be aroused.

  “Well?” Artie asked.

  “What?” Fishy looked blank.

  “Well, what would you do if you caught one?”

  “Bluegill, croppy, or bass?” Fishy asked.

  “Not fish, you dope, enemy airmen! Japs par
achuting down in the woods to spy and sabotage us! Would you lynch him, shoot him, or kick him to death? Or would you just tie him up and take him to jail so he could have a fair trial?”

  “Kick him in the old crotcherooney,” Fishy said.

  “Collier’s says you shouldn’t, even though it’s a human impulse. You got to restrain yourself.”

  “Foog.”

  Fishy plucked the Wink from the rack again and flipped back to the picture he’d been memorizing.

  “Don’t you even give a darn about the War?” Artie asked. “I mean, if everyone stood around looking at stuff like that, the Japs’d beat us easy. Germans, too.”

  “Show ’em this, they’d be too busy beating their meat,” Fishy said, shoving his right hand in his pocket.

  “You boob!”

  Artie flung down the Collier’s in disgust and stomped out of the drugstore, knowing it was no use counting on Fishy to help in the War Effort. He was through with that jerk for the Duration.

  Walking home briskly in the bracing cold, Artie felt suddenly surprised and proud that he had used that word in his mind—Duration. It was a new term, one of the many new things brought on by the War, from songs and slogans and uniforms even to new meanings of words. “The Duration” meant for however long it took to win the War, like when you said you shouldn’t use a lot of sugar or gas for “the Duration.” Artie vowed he’d find a new friend for the Duration, a real red-blooded patriotic kid who would help him carry on the work of the Home Front, and maybe even join the Marines with him if the Duration was still going on when they got to be eighteen. Fishy Mitchelman would never get in the Marines; even the Army might turn him down. They probably had tests that would show he thought too much about sex to be able to fight good.

  Priority.

  That was another important new word Artie learned from the War. With so much going on and everyone having whatever they did for the War Effort added on to their regular life, like work and school, people had to figure out what things were most essential and give them “priority,” which meant top billing, or 1-A classification.

  Artie’s own priorities included schoolwork (you had to be smart to fight the enemy), his paper route (the more money he earned, the more War Stamps he could buy), writing letters to Roy with clippings from the sports page to keep up his morale, keeping watch from his rooftop position as an Assistant Junior Air Raid Spotter, cheering up his folks so they wouldn’t be blue all the time with Roy off at Boot Camp, and last but not least, maybe in fact most important of all, “taking care” of Shirley Colby like he promised his brother he would.

  2

  On the days Shirley had cheerleader practice after school, Artie sped right to the gym when he finished his paper route and walked her home, carrying her books. In the late blue afternoon light, with lamps coming on in the windows of houses, they strolled down the quiet sidewalks, talking about the War, and Roy.

  “What’s his favorite breakfast?” Shirley asked.

  Artie’s mind raced to come up with the best answer. He would never in a million years have revealed that Roy glommed huge blotches of peanut butter on Wonder bread and gurgled milk straight from the bottle without even sitting down at the breakfast table, since it might make him seem like a screwball. Bacon and eggs was the normal thing to have, but it almost sounded too normal, like Roy was no different than any other Tom, Dick, and Harry. Artie tried to think of what people in movies had for breakfast, lovey-dovey husbands and wives in vine-covered cottages with sun streaming in through the gingham curtains, but the only thing that popped into his mind was Jimmy Cagney squishing the grapefruit into the face of that pretty blonde he was mad at, and he realized grapefruit was a lousy answer since it might make Shirley think of the same thing. Artie himself had switched his breakfast loyalties from Tom Mix’s Hot Ralston to Quaker Puffed Wheat because it was “the cereal shot from guns” and that seemed better than “cowboy en-er-gee” in time of War, but it didn’t sound like the sort of thing a girl would understand. Then all of the sudden the right thing for Roy to like for breakfast came to Artie in a flash.

  “Wheaties,” he said.

  “Wheaties?” Shirley asked, like she was checking to make sure.

  “‘Breakfast of Champions,’” Artie said proudly.

  Shirley smiled, hugging her arms close to herself, like she was holding this new information with tender protection.

  “Wheaties,” she said dreamily.

  She began to hum.

  Artie figured she was in the mood to sing now. On their walks, they usually ended up singing a song together, but Shirley didn’t like the fighting tunes that were Artie’s favorites, like “Good-bye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama,” so he learned all the words to the sad-sweet kind she liked the best. He started crooning her favorite, even though his voice always croaked on the high notes, and Shirley joined in singing “The White Cliffs of Dover.”

  When they finished, Shirley always had tears in her eyes, and Artie never said anything. It was like keeping quiet after a prayer. The walks with Shirley made Artie feel special, almost like he was in a movie about the Home Front of America, him being Mickey Rooney the kid brother, and Shirley being Claudette Colbert only younger, the beautiful girl who was keeping the home fires burning for her guy.

  The walks were wonderful, but Artie thought they weren’t enough. He thought Shirley ought to be more in his own family, and finally he got up the nerve to ask his folks how come they never had her over for supper.

  It was the night Mom made her special hot chili that you put on top of spaghetti and ate with cornbread and cold milk and custard pie for dessert. Maybe because it was Roy’s favorite meal that Mom forgot and set four places at the table and then when she saw what she’d done she sat down and cried. Dad rubbed the back of her neck and jollied her up, and after everyone got to stuffing themselves with chili and feeling good again, Artie came out with his question.

  “How come we don’t have Shirley over for supper sometime?”

  Mom and Dad gave each other a look.

  “We hardly even know the girl,” Mom said, which wasn’t like her at all.

  “But you should! She’s Roy’s girl now!”

  “If we’d had all of Roy’s girls here for supper,” Dad said, “we’d have fed half the state of Illinois.”

  “But this is different!”

  “Wartime doesn’t make everything different,” Mom said. “That’s the same custard pie, and you’ve hardly touched yours.”

  “Roy never gave a girl his ID bracelet before.”

  “Artie,” Dad said, “an ID bracelet is not a five-carat engagement ring.”

  “But that’ll be next. You do this first.”

  “Time will tell,” Mom said.

  Artie pushed his pie away.

  “Fish-ee, if you ask me,” he said.

  Mom looked at Dad and said, “Joe?”

  Dad sighed and put down his fork.

  “All right, son. The fact is, we don’t want to be out of line.”

  “That’s right,” Mom said. “The Colbys are—funny.”

  “You mean snooty?”

  “Don’t go putting words in our mouths,” Dad said.

  “But Shirley isn’t that way at all,” Artie said. “She’s just real quiet, and serious.”

  “I’m sure she’s a very fine girl,” Mom said.

  Dad nodded.

  “And we’ll probably get to know her better when Roy comes back from Boot Camp.”

  Artie shrugged, then played his ace, acting as nonchalant as possible.

  “Too bad we can’t have her before then so she could read us the long, terrific letters Roy wrote to her, telling how he’s doing at Boot Camp and all.”

  Mom’s mouth fell open.

  “Letters?” she asked.

  Dad grunted.

  “Roy writing a postcard would be like me writing Gone With the Wind.”

  “Well, I guess Shirley inspires him. Like in the Coty ads?”


  “What’s perfume got to do with it?” Dad asked.

  “The Coty ads in the magazines now, where they show the guy in the Army, and the girl waiting for him, and it says ‘His duty to serve—hers to inspire.’”

  Dad rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes.

  “Oh, carry me home to die.”

  “Please, Joe! I don’t want to hear that when boys are dying.”

  “Sorry, Dot. Artie’s got me coming and going.”

  “All I said was Shirley must be inspiring Roy, since he wrote her this long letter about how he is and what he’s doing and everything.”

  “You win, Captain Midnight,” Mom said. “Does Shirley like chicken and dumplings?”

  “I think it’s her favorite,” Artie said.

  “For supper, Thursday night,”. Mom said.

  “Oh, carry me—”

  Dad stopped, and cleared his throat.

  “Carry me back to ole Virginny,” he said instead of the other one.

  It was what he would say now when things seemed crazy to him for the rest of the Duration.

  Artie was pretty nervous walking Shirley home from cheerleader practice. He knew darn well she’d like to come to supper at Roy’s house, but he didn’t know for sure how she’d like bringing his letter along to read to the folks.

  “You get any more letters from Roy?”

  “Oh, no, I’m sure he doesn’t have any time. He must have stayed up all night to write the one he did. I read it over and over before I go to bed.”

  “I guess it’s a real good one.”

  Shirley got the kind of look on her face like she did that night after the movies when she and Roy seemed to be hypnotized.

  “I never knew what was inside him before. Because of—well, the things he did, I thought he was shallow.”

  “Oh, no, he’s real deep,” Artie said loyally.

  Shirley looked at him with her hypnotized expression.

  “Just think. You’re his brother.”

  “Heck,” Artie said, like it was nothing, and grabbed hold of a tree branch and snapped it back.