Under the Apple Tree Read online

  Shirley threw her arms around him and they clinched, and then the train was coming and everyone crying and hugging and waving and Artie got off the last line, shaking his fist for Roy and shouting, “Give ’em gung ho!”

  7

  Artie felt a little weird pulling the little red wagon he used to play with as a kid right down Elm, but he figured anyone who wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t a toy any longer but part of the War Effort was a real dumbo. All the good guys in the class had got their old wagons out of their basements to use for collecting paper in the big scrap drive the school was having. With Roy gone off to War now, Artie felt he had to do everything possible to help on the Home Front, and he and Warren Tutlow had pledged to collect a thousand pounds of scrap paper for the drive. Artie was on his way to meet up with Tutlow and load a whole bunch of papers and magazines out of old Miss Morse’s basement when who should pop out from some bushes at him but Fishy Mitchelman.

  “Gonna give Caroline Spingarn a ride in your little red wagon?” Fishy asked with a leer.

  “Not that it’s any of your beeswax,” Artie said, “but me and Warren Tutlow are collecting for the scrap paper drive and we signed up to get a thousand pounds.”

  “Won’t get any thousand pounds on that little dinkydoo,” said Fishy.

  Artie gave him a real disgusted look and started pulling the wagon along up Elm, walking real fast.

  Fishy fell in beside him, squinting his eyes.

  “Old four-eyes Tutlow able to see good enough to collect?” Fishy taunted.

  “Warren Tutlow’s got more brains than you eat applesauce,” Artie shot back.

  “Foog,” was all Fishy could reply. “Anyhow, any jerk at all can load paper around.”

  “So how come you don’t?” Artie asked.

  “I am. I’m comin’ along right now and help.”

  “Well, it’s about time you started doing something for the War,” Artie said.

  He didn’t know if Warren would want Fishy coming along, but he hated to discourage the first sign of patriotism from the guy.

  Fishy started marching, and singing at the top of his lungs, “Good-bye Mama, I’m off to Yokohama—”

  Artie joined in, “For the red white and blue, my country and you …”

  When they finished the song, Artie glanced at Fishy from the corner of his eye and said, “How come you said that about Caroline Spingarn?”

  “’Cause she creams for you,” Fishy said.

  “Foog,” was all Artie could think to say.

  Warren Tutlow didn’t seem to mind Fishy coming along, but when they got to old Miss Morse’s basement and started stacking up the magazines and tying them in bundles so they wouldn’t fall off the wagon and fly all over Town, Fishy stopped helping after a couple of minutes and went into a corner to look at the pictures of women in some old fashion magazine.

  “Hey, Fishy,” Artie said, “you going to help, or just stand around being a slacker?”

  Fishy had already fixed his attention on one particular picture and was eyeballing it like he did the dirty magazine in Damon’s Drugs.

  “Hubba-hubba-hubba,” he said in an unhealthy whispery sound.

  Artie went over to see what he was looking at. It was an ad for some kind of cold cream, and it showed this sexy woman sitting on a beach wearing a real skimpy bathing suit.

  “Is that all you can think about?” Artie asked.

  Without even answering, Fishy ripped the page from the magazine, folded it neatly, tucked it in his pocket, and started up the stairs out of the basement.

  “Hey, where you goin’?” Artie asked.

  “Gotta go home and take a nap,” Fishy said.

  “You’ll ruin your brains!” Artie shouted in warning.

  Warren Tutlow finished tying a bundle of magazines and said, “Your buddy seems kind of fickle about doing stuff.”

  “He’s not fickle, he’s a sex maniac. Not my buddy anymore, either.”

  “Well, I guess you always find out who your real friends are in Wartime,” Warren said.

  “Bet your bottom buck,” said Artie, and feeling a bond of battlefront comradeship, they hefted the stacks of magazines up the stairs.

  Artie told Warren Tutlow he had to take an afternoon off from the scrap paper drive to attend to one of his other important Home Front duties, which was keeping up the morale of Shirley Colby, so she in turn could keep up Roy’s morale out on the battlefront with her loving, true-blue, inspirational letters from home. Also, Artie wanted to be able to write Roy himself and give him a firsthand account of how he was keeping an eye on Shirley, and how she was keeping a stiff upper lip and her home fires burning for him.

  There was an article in Life magazine Artie tore out to give to Shirley to help her in her own War Efforts, and he took it to her after cheerleading practice. Shirley sat down on the bottom row of the gym bleachers with Artie and read the part of the article Artie had underlined for her, which said: “Since kiss imprints are liable to smudge en route through the mail, best to let the lipstick dry as thoroughly as possible. Sometimes in order to get a better impression of their lips, girls apply a little cold cream on top and blend it carefully.”

  When Shirley finished reading it, she burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” Artie asked, afraid he had done something awful.

  “I’m sorry,” Shirley said, sniffing, then dabbed at her eyes with a dainty white handkerchief.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Artie said. “But why?”

  “I’m terrible,” Shirley said.

  “Why?” was all Artie could say again.

  “Because,” said Shirley, biting her lip, “I don’t want to kiss a piece of paper. I want to kiss him!”

  Then she broke down sobbing again, and Artie felt like a heel, though he hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. He wanted to make her feel better, but he couldn’t put his arm around her or take hold of her hand or any stuff like that right in public and him just a kid, so he asked if she’d like to go to Damon’s Drugs for a small lemon Coke. A small Coke was only a nickel, which was half of a dime War Stamp, but Artie felt it would be well spent for the War if it would make Shirley feel better again.

  Shirley blew her nose and then smiled and said that sounded just fine.

  Shirley insisted on buying Cokes for them both, and Artie gave in, figuring it was all right because even though she was a girl she was older than he was, so it was kind of like having a big sister buy you something instead of a girl friend. Afterward Shirley wanted to take a walk, and Artie was glad; it was something he could do to help, walking with her out to Skinner Creek and talking so she wouldn’t be sad and alone.

  The sun was warm and reflected in the puddles from the rain the night before and everything smelled earthy and pungent, like it got just before things started to grow and get green again. It was a heady smell, like some kind of perfume except it was made by Nature instead of in factories.

  They went right to the rock where Roy always used to go to think things out, which also was right by the place where he and Shirley had done it under the blankets that time and Artie was only a stone’s throw away but they never knew it. Artie got a little nervous, worrying he might give away what he knew, like saying out of a clear blue sky, “I was here the time you and Roy did it under the blankets but I didn’t look and I couldn’t help listening but when you both started making all the noise I took off.” It was scary just having that go through his mind in Shirley’s presence, knowing he might get his wires crossed and blurt it out, and he had to concentrate hard on being sure he didn’t give it away.

  “Me and Warren Tutlow have collected seven hundred and forty-two and a half pounds of scrap paper for the War Drive,” Artie said, trying to change the subject in his mind.

  “Amazing,” said Shirley.

  “Not really, it’s not really much of anything till we get a thousand pounds.”

  “A thousand pounds,” she said.

  Artie could tell she was a
thousand miles away, or however far it was to one of those little dots of an island where Roy might be hurling a Jap over his head at this very minute.

  “You really shouldn’t worry about Roy,” Artie told her. “If a guy comes at him with a knife, he knows how to throw him right over his shoulder. I know. He did it to me.”

  “I’m terrible,” Shirley said.

  “What?”

  Shirley stood up, and folded her arms real tight across her stomach.

  “I am,” she said. “A terrible person.”

  “No, you’re a wonderful person,” Artie said. “If anyone said you were terrible, I’d gouge out their eyes with my thumbs. No one did, did they?”

  “No.”

  “So how come you think so?”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t get it,” Artie said.

  Shirley bit at her lip.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you like this,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I like you to talk to me.”

  “I don’t have anyone else to talk to about it. They’d think I was crazy.”

  “How come?”

  Shirley sat back down on the rock, drawing her knees up to her chin and smoothing the skirt down over her legs. She was wearing stockings with her ballet slippers and the sun made glinting lights on the smooth silk of her legs.

  “There are certain things a girl can do in Wartime that it wouldn’t be right to do otherwise,” she said.

  “Sure,” Artie said, figuring she meant the stuff she did with Roy underneath the blanket but naturally didn’t want to come right out and say so. Knowing he sort of knew what she meant without her having to spell it out made Artie feel proud and wise.

  “In Wartime, a girl should do her duty, if she loves a man, but she’s not supposed to really be crazy about it.”

  “She’s not?”

  “Not any more than a man who does his duty by killing the enemy should actually enjoy doing it. Then he’d just be a killer, nothing more than an animal.”

  “I guess so,” Artie said. “But I don’t think you have to worry about that happening to Roy. I mean, I think he’ll just kill off the Japs he has to, to get the job done, but he won’t want to keep on killing people after we win the War.”

  “Of course not. By the same token, a girl should do her duty, and do it well, and be glad she had the right and privilege of doing it, but she shouldn’t really love doing it, or she’d just be an animal herself, like the man who enjoys killing the enemy so much he becomes a killer.”

  “But you don’t have to kill anyone. You just have to keep the home fires burning.”

  “They’re burning all right.”

  “So everything’s fine. You’re doing your duty.”

  “I did,” she said. “The trouble is, I want to keep doing it.”

  “Your duty?”

  “I’m being a phony to call it that. Don’t you see? ‘Duty’ is something you have to do even though you may not want to, and if you really love doing it, it can’t be ‘duty.’”

  “What is it, then?”

  Shirley squeezed her eyes shut, and hugged her knees to her chin.

  “Sin, I suppose.”

  “But things that are a sin in peacetime, aren’t a sin in war,” Artie said. “Like killing is a sin if there isn’t a war on, but killing a Nazi or Jap is something you have to do and it’s good if you do. That’s why they give guys medals who kill a lot of enemies. That’s a guy’s duty. But they don’t give girls medals for doing their duty.”

  “If they did, I’d get the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “Well, I bet Roy’ll give you all the medals he wins when he gets back home.”

  “I don’t want his medals!” Shirley cried. “I want him!”

  “You will,” Artie said. “He loves you. As soon as he comes back; you’ll have him.”

  “If he comes back.”

  “I swear he will.”

  “And when he comes back. Months? Years?”

  “However long it takes to get the job done.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Heck no, it’s not. He’s my brother.”

  Shirley jumped up and started walking around the rock, shaking her head.

  “Listen to me. I’m sorry. See how selfish I am? I really am terrible.”

  “You’re not either,” Artie said.

  Shirley stopped, and stared off into the woods.

  “What if something wonderful happened to you,” she said, “something you thought would be nice, but turned out to be the most exciting and fabulous thing that ever happened to you, and you got to have it happen for a little more than a whole week, and then you knew you couldn’t have it happen anymore for months or maybe years or maybe never?”

  “I’d feel pretty punk.”

  “Oh, Artie,” she said. “So do I. So do I.”

  The tears were coming down her cheeks, and Artie got it now, what she was telling him.

  “I heard we got guys working on secret weapons,” Artie said, “that’ll end the War in no time and bring Our Boys back home. Maybe that’s what’ll happen, real soon.”

  “If it doesn’t, I think I’ll explode. Or just burn up inside. Maybe that’s what I deserve. The fires of hell.”

  “Don’t say that stuff.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m talking baloney. Forgive me? After all, think of all the other girls. Sweethearts. Even wives. They have to wait, too. If they can do it, I can do it.”

  “Sure you can. You just have to be real brave and tighten your belt.”

  “My belt?”

  Shirley suddenly laughed, and then blew her nose, real hard. Artie stood up and tossed a rock into Skinner Creek, making a splash in the sunny green water. Then, without saying anything, he and Shirley turned and walked back through the woods toward Town.

  Artie’s eleventh birthday was April 18, and he got everything he wanted—and more. His parents gave him the official pair of Boy Scout semaphore flags, each one divided into a red and white triangle and sewn onto a stick, just like regulation Army or Navy or Marine Semaphore flags, and Warren Tutlow came over and looked through Artie’s binoculars at Artie up on the roof making some of the new signals he had already learned by positioning the flags: he could do “V” which was for Victory, and also “SOS,” and “Hi.” When he learned the whole semaphore alphabet he’d be able to send entire messages clear across town to Warren Tutlow by signaling from his roof.

  Shirley Colby came by to give Artie her present, which was a purple label “Okeh” record of “We’ll Heil, Heil, Right in Der Führer’s Face,” and Shirley went downstairs to the basement with him while he cranked up the old Victrola and marched around the room making the Bronx cheer “Heils” along with Spike Jones and the City Slickers on the record. Shirley smiled a little, but she looked real pale and even thinner than usual. Artie hoped she wasn’t going to waste away to nothing before Roy came marching home.

  Fishy Mitchelman dropped over and gave Artie a pinup picture of Betty Grable that he had torn off a calendar at Bob’s Eats on Main Street.

  Most exciting of all, after supper and the birthday cake with eleven candles that Artie blew out with only one little extra huff that his folks said counted as one huff so he got his wish (which he wouldn’t have told them on pain of death), Artie went to the movies with Caroline Spingarn. It wasn’t actually a real “date”; kids in sixth grade weren’t allowed to have dates yet, but they could “meet” each other at the movies, and that’s what Artie and Caroline did. They met each other at seven o’clock sharp in front of the Strand and Artie bought tickets for both of them and they went inside and sat together to watch Errol Flynn in Desperate Journey. Artie thought about holding Caroline’s hand, but he kept feeling this presence behind him and Caroline, like a lookout scout, and sure enough it turned out to be Mae Ellen Spingarn, Caroline’s older sister who was a Junior in high school, who came to sort of keep an eye on Caroline since it was her first time to me
et a guy for a movie. Artie was glad he hadn’t tried to sneak his hand onto Caroline’s (Mae Ellen would have seen for sure), but anyway Caroline herself leaned close to him a couple of times, pretending to giggle at something but the real reason was to give him a whiff of her Camay Beauty Soap smell, which really knocked him out.

  That night he studied his aircraft spotter cards with his penlight beneath the blankets, and then, after resisting for a long time and trying to think of serious stuff like the War, he took the Betty Grable pinup from the envelope Fishy had handed it to him in and he studied that with greater concentration than he’d ever been able to apply to the Messerschmitt or Stuka, memorizing every line and curve of the perfect body, imagining the wet red slurp of those fabulous lips on his mouth, sucked in the sight of the blond hair and the bare limbs stretching from the tight-fitting bathing suit, and found when he switched off his penlight that he had so well imprinted the picture on his mind that he could see it in every detail with his eyes closed and that vision made his cheeks grow hot and even more magically made his thing get big and hard till he touched it to see what was happening and touching it felt good so he did it more although he knew it was wrong and a dangerous thing to do, and for a while he tried to push the pinup picture from his mind and see the sweet face of Caroline Spingarn or the lovely, haunted eyes of Shirley Colby, but old Betty Grable kept popping back into his mind, looking over her shoulder at him with that come-hither smile, and his mind’s eye traced down the perfect swell of her thighs and along down the calves and up again to the full, smooth, protruding behind, and the bare back and then the blond-capped goddess face and as Artie pressed himself to the thrill of it he throbbed in a way he had never done before, wiping out his mind for a moment in a terrifying mixture of pleasure and pain that left him limp and gasping. He was still dry but he knew something had exploded in him and that he would not be the same again. His thing had shrunk back to normal and he only hoped he hadn’t done it any permanent damage.

  The next morning Artie found out he had gotten his wish when he blew out his birthday candles. The radio said that Colonel Jimmy Doolittle had led a bunch of B-25s on a bombing raid on Tokyo, revenging Pearl Harbor and scaring the devil out of the Japs by attacking their own hometown. This was the first sign the tide could be turning for America in the War. But everyone knew now it wouldn’t be over easily or soon. The Japs, even though they were laughably short, were mean and tricky fighters, and they’d been preparing for War for years and years, while America was just beginning to roll its tanks and ships off the assembly lines. On the other side of the world, the Nazis were still goose-stepping all over Europe, and America was going to the rescue of the brave, clean English, who were led by old Winston Churchill and the valiant pilots of the RAF. Like the popular song said about beating the Germans, “We did it before, and we can do it again,” but it was going to be a long, bloody battle.