On The Wings of Heroes (12 page)

The entry fee was a fifty-dollar war bond. Somehow, Dad pulled the money out of thin air. Working into the nights, he and Bill had unfrozen the axles on the Pan American and found four tired tires, bald as Miss Titus's mama and of various sizes.

Once we got the auto hosed down, it had a real good coat of deep red lacquer paint on it, which we buffed. Scooter and I went to work with a can of Brasso on the brightwork. We painted whitewalls on the tires. Mom resewed the upholstery, and we laid plywood where the floors were missing.

A lot of jalopies were painted all over: song titles and sayings like “Don't Make a Yankee Cranky.” Some of them were too rusted out to say anything. But our polished jalopy was going to go out in style with everything but a hood and a horn.

We thought we'd tow it, but Dad said they might want the Packard too. He didn't see why we couldn't rig up some kind of engine to get us as far as the scrap yard. He had a little Willys-Knight motor he tinkered with. Its transmission was near death, and it had no reverse gear. But he and Bill got it slung in the car and introduced it to the driveshaft. A lot of baling wire was involved.

And now we were in the staging area, behind the high school Model A's, waiting our turn in the parade. Dad was behind the wheel, wearing his Shriner's fez. Scooter and I were up there with him. Mom sat on the backseat with Bill in his uniform.

Behind us, a team of plumed white dairy horses pawed the pavement, ready to go. They were hitched up to a float, which was the centerpiece of the parade. It was a Wizard of Oz castle with tin can towers, blinding in the sun. On top was the Jalopy Queen and her court. She sat in a throne made out of chrome car bumpers with her court arranged around her in their prom dresses, carrying tinfoil bouquets.

Bill looked back. “That's not—”

“Diana Powers,” Mom said.

She'd have been a few years behind Bill in school. And of course he'd never seen her wearing a crown of gilded sink-stoppers on top of a parade float. And a real low-cut prom dress. She was the best-looking girl in the county, by far. Even I noticed, and I was just beginning to notice these things. Her family lived on top of Moreland Heights and owned all the grain elevators between here and Pana. Diana Powers looked down from on high.

“Bill?” she called out. “Bill Bowman?”

He stood. The Pan American swayed. His wings winked as he turned.

“Bill Bowman,” she called down. “I've always had such a crush on you. Get up here.”

Our turn came. The Willys-Knight motor labored, and we made the corner into Water Street past the Hotel Orlando, the Busy Bee Shoeshine Parlor. The Model A ragtops were getting a roar from the crowd. But ours was the best jalopy, and the sign on the re-hung door read:

Scooter wrote it.

Behind us came the Jalopy Queen's float. High in the air like the figures on a wedding cake were Diana Powers, nodding to the crowd, and standing above her my brother Bill, and both of them golden in the rust, white, and blue day.

THE STAR IN THE WINDOW

. . . blue stars on little white flags in front windows. Ours for Bill and the Runions' for Cleve, the Rogerses' for Jinx, the Tomlinsons' for Scooter's dad. They were the landmarks now that nobody played much hide-and-seek around the Hisers' box elder tree.

We followed Bill as far as we could, in our minds and the mail. He met up with his ten-man crew in Oklahoma for eight weeks of training on the B-17 Flying Fortress, shortened to six.

Scooter and I had plane-spotting books. We never spotted anything but a Piper Comanche, but we knew the particulars of a B-17: the 104-foot wingspan, the four motors, the tail gunner folded into the Plexiglas dome, covering them from behind with two .50-caliber guns.

They named their plane the
Baby Snooks
after a little girl on the radio played by a grown-up lady. Heading east, they flew somewhere over us, getting the hang of it. Bill wrote from Gander, Newfoundland.

In another night after that, they flew across the Atlantic. Their flight suits were wired for warmth.

When Bill wrote from Somewhere in England, the letters were V-mail—flimsy blue sheets. His crew was flying missions over the enemy now. When the bomb bay doors opened, I wondered if you could see the bombs all the way down to the ground, like in the newsreels. The Americans flew the day raids. The British flew the night ones.

In the evenings Dad lay on the living room floor in front of the Philco with his head propped in the crook of his good arm. We listened to Richard Hottelet broadcasting from London, telling about crews parachuting out of burning bombers, hanging in the air with the sky on fire.

Dad listened, and Mom watched him listening. In October our B-17s were bombing Schweinfurt, trying to knock out the ball bearing factories. Now we were losing more planes than came back.

When Dad realized they were sending out those big B-17s like Bill's without any fighter planes to cover for them, something coiled tight inside him.

There were long strings of empty days without letters. Then Bill wrote three pages about how they'd had to ditch in the English Channel. The German fighters had raked them with gunfire from nose to tail. One engine caught fire, and they had to dive for enough air speed to put out the flames. A 20-millimeter shell cut the fuel line. They were coming in on a wing and a prayer, and they didn't make it back to home base.

I pictured Bill running and jumping hedges, trying to tag out on the Hisers' box elder, and never quite making it.

They were in the water till morning in the one raft that inflated, praying to be picked up by our side. They wore their Mae Wests, their life jackets, and I wondered whose milkweed was stuffed inside. Not all of them got back, but Bill did. Then come to find out, that flight didn't even count as one of Bill's twenty-five missions because they didn't complete it.

There were things he couldn't put in a letter. But we knew the
Baby Snooks
was at the bottom of the choppy English Channel. Bill said your first plane was like your first love. He never mentioned the name of any of the other planes he flew, not even the last one.

. . . was spider's thread wound onto reels to make the cross-hairs for gunsights and bomb sights. Now they were drafting spiders. But these threads weren't anything you could collect, for all the webby attics Scooter and I had pilfered through. It was a job for experts.

Besides, what Scooter? He was gone, since the second week of school. When the navy decided his dad was too old to ship overseas, they gave Mr. Tomlinson a desk job on North Island in San Diego.

The Tomlinsons rented out their house to war workers, four to a room. Scooter and his mom and the Schwinn took the Super Chief train to California. He sent one postcard from Coronado Island, and that was the last of Scooter for the duration. There I was, high and dry, with junior high still most of a year away.

I was moping home from school one afternoon, from Mrs. Spicer's class this year. It was early in November, because the leaves were coming down. There was the Cub Scout neckerchief Scooter had tied in the Friedingers' Dutch elm. It was faded and wind-whipped, but you could still see the Cub yellow and blue. It took me back.

A top-heavy old black car gunned past me up the empty street, a 1931 Buick, in fact. Luggage-rack back and tail-lights up on stalks. The license plate hanging by a screw. It was all over the street, weaving from curb to curb, scattering leaves. So I had to know, even before it took a wide swing up into our driveway.

It could only be Grandma and Grandpa Riddle, with Grandpa fighting the wheel. I lit out, and the Buick was by our back porch door.

Grandma Riddle began to spill out of the car. I hadn't seen her since before the war, and she was even bigger. The doorpost knocked her hat sideways, and her furpiece had a face with ears and eyes.

“Say listen, young man,” she hollered at me, “go in that house and find my grandson Davy. He's a weedy little twerp. In fact, he's small potatoes and few in the hill. About knee-high to a grasshopper.”

“I'm Davy, Grandma.”

She fell back across the front seat and swatted Grandpa with her pocketbook. “Elmore! Fire this thing up and take me back home. This overgrown galoot is trying to pass hisself off as my grandson.”

“I am your grandson, Grandma.”

Her gaze glittered through trifocals. She'd known all along. She planted a huge lace-up shoe on the driveway. “Elmore,” she said over her shoulder. “Give me a shove. We're staying.”

Then Mom was there at the back porch door. Very pale. Pale as Patty MacIntosh.

“Mama,” she murmured. “. . . For one thing, where did you get the gas to come all the way here?”

“Drained it out of the tractor,” Grandma said. She was fighting her way out of the Buick. I wanted to help, but I didn't know what to reach for. Her furpiece was strangling her. The little fox face was snapping at her ear. Grandpa Riddle was climbing out on his side, slow, unlocking his knees.

“Papa,” Mom said, softer.

“We'd have written ahead, honey,” he said over the car, “but we thought you'd turn us back.”

He came around the car. Talk about weedy. When he took my hand, his was like cornshucks. He was too wrinkled to shave.

He didn't kiss Mom, but he put an old stained finger under her chin and looked at her over his specs.

“Davy,” Grandma said, “gather up all my reticules and valises off the backseat.” Grandma had brought everything she owned. The floor was crammed with Ball jars of home canning. Pickled peaches and watermelon pickle and pig's feet and rhubarb.

Grandma was on her feet now, weaving, looking for her land legs. They'd been all over both lanes of the hard road for hours, from below DuQuoin. She looked Mom up and down.

“Joyce, you look like a gully beginning to wash. What you could use is a dose of salts and a square meal.”

We were all four by the back door. Grandma jerked her big coat around her. “My stars and garters, it's cold up here. I don't know how you'ens live in it.”

Mom bit her lip. Her lips were thin today, though usually she was pretty. She and Grandma never had hit it off. The war had been a good excuse for not visiting, till now.

“We had to come,” Grandma thundered. “It was a matter of life and death. Two poor old parties like us can't get by on that sugar ration. I don't mind honey in my coffee, when we can get coffee. But Elmore won't have it.”

She pointed down at Grandpa. He was half the size of Mr. Hiser, and she was three Mrs. Hisers.

“And what about gasoline for country people?” Grandma wanted to know. “I can't get in to the store, and we've been riding on fumes since Blue Mound. And the back tires are from off the tractor.”

Grandpa looked down the Buick at a back tire. It was caked with mud from the field. Using tractor tires on a public road was against the law.

“We're going to have to gang in here with you'ens in your front bedroom for the time being,” Grandma said. “That's all there is to it. There's a war on, you know. And where's Earl Bowman? Working, I hope to heaven. Joyce, you remember what I said before you married him.” She waved Mom aside. “And get out of the door. I'm coming in.”

Mom's hands worked in her apron. Her knuckles were whiter than her face.