On The Wings of Heroes (3 page)

The Packard bulked at the curb, darker than night, empty as a looted tomb. But I knew better. I climbed up on the running board and peered into the open window. “Dad?”

He was in there behind the wheel, pulled back in the shadows, smaller than his regular size. The window on his side was down too.

A sacred Halloween ritual was pinning horns. If a Halloweener could get into a car, he'd jam one end of a stick into the horn on the steering wheel and the other end into the back of the seat. Then he'd run like the devil while the car owner had to come out and unstick the horn before the battery ran down. Car horns went off all over town. One went off right then, over on Summit. Dad was waiting for business, and the windows were down for bait.

He was also out there in the cold and the dark, watching for me, waiting for me to come home.

“Climb in, Davy,” he said. “Keep down.”

I leaned into the old hunting jacket he wore over his Phillips 66 uniform. The car smelled like a grease pit and dead pheasants.

“Get anything good?” he said, and I offered the sack. The diamond in his Masonic ring glinted when he rummaged for a taste.

“Fudge,” he said, and spat it out his side window. He wouldn't swallow chocolate. The army had issued the soldiers bars of bitter chocolate to keep them awake, in France, back in his war. He wouldn't eat anything they'd fed him in the army.

“Whose?” he asked.

“Old Lady Graves.” She was an old crab but baked especially for Halloween.

She also lived on the far side of West Main Street. Still, I wasn't afraid to mention that Scooter and I'd crossed it. The two of us crossing a thundering truck route after dark, not looking both ways, in masks, wasn't the kind of thing that troubled Dad. You didn't have to watch every word.

I slid one hand into the game pocket on his hunting coat and sat on the other. You could see your breath. The sky was powdered with stars, and again there was a ring around the moon. Dad had already told me that as a kid he'd lain on top of a haystack to watch Halley's comet.

I began to nod off. He didn't. All the porch lights were out now. Mom had gone to bed.

Sometimes I could hear Dad thinking, and it was pretty much always about my brother Bill. He was gone by then, down in St. Louis, taking the Civil Aviation Administration course at Lambert Field. War was raging out in the world, other places. Bill was nearly nineteen. That's what was on Dad's mind.

He nudged me. “Get way down.”

He could hear a Halloweener a mile off, behind a building. He was easing down till his back was flat on the car seat. The old cracked leather wheezed beneath us. His Phillips 66 cap edged forward over his face. I could get all the way under the glove box without knocking off my Pluto mask.

It felt like we were down there several days. Then came the fall of a foot in the leaves along the curb. A faceless figure was coming up behind us, past our back bumper. He'd have a stick in his hand, the right length. A chill rippled down my spine. But Dad was there, much of him arranged around the steering column.

The figure stepped up to the driver's side and found the window down. He couldn't believe his luck, and sighed. He leaned in with his stick.

Dad's hand shot up from nowhere and grabbed a wrist. The stick snapped, and a terrified voice yelled, “Mama!” before he thought.

Dad sat up, never letting go. “What can I do for you, son?” he asked, friendly enough.

The figure couldn't think. He was trying to twist out of Dad's grip, and failing. “Y-y-you can turn me loose.” But that wasn't going to happen.

I stayed where I was under the glove box. It was bound to be one of the Rogers boys, and I didn't want to be a witness. It wouldn't be Jinx, who kept his nose clean with his senior-year basketball season coming up. But there were several other Rogerses, all bad dreams.

“I wasn't gonna do nothin',” the twisting Rogers said, overlooking the stick in Dad's lap.

“Hop on the running board,” Dad said, still gripping him with a fist the size of a ham. The Packard's running board was a foot wide, plenty of room to ride. With his free hand, Dad turned the key, jerked the choke. The Packard roared alive. Lights in bedroom windows went on. People may have thought it was morning.

Dad switched on the headlights, and we drove off down the street. I was sitting up, tucked behind Dad's shoulder.

The Rogerses lived halfway down. Dad swung into their driveway and pulled up by the porch. We'd have sounded like a Sherman tank coming through their living room wall. The porch light went on, and Old Man Leland Rogers came out in his pajamas. He squinted through the screen wire.

“Earl?” he said. “Which one you got?”

“Which one you missing, Leland?” Dad said around the squirming boy.

“I wouldn't miss any of them if they was all in the reformatory,” Old Man Rogers said. “But I thought I had 'em counted.” He was chewing a cold cigar. “Don't let him go till I get there.”

Old Man Rogers unlatched the screen door and tramped down to the car in his bedroom shoes. Dad handed the boy over. I sneaked a peek, and it was their eighth grader, Homer. He was flapping his hand, trying to get the circulation back into it.

“You fool,” Old Man Rogers said to Homer, and pushed him up the porch steps.

So now that everybody was accounted for and home safe, we backed out of the Rogerses' drive and drove up the slumbering street, Dad and I, my hand in his pocket.

. . . slipped away from there. We raked one last time, got the storm windows up, and it was December.

After church, we always ate our Sunday dinners in the dining room: old hen and slick dumplings dinners.

One Sunday we were tucking in when we heard an awful racket outside and a hammering on our back door. Mrs. Hiser was yelling through the glass for us to turn on the radio and take cover. They'd bombed Pearl Harbor and could be heading here.

Something hit Dad hard. He pushed his plate away like it was army food. Mom reached out for Bill's empty chair. And all the world before the war went up in far-off smoke and oil burning on water.

REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR

. . . were left till that Christmas of 1941. Crowds bustled. Shelves cleared. The window of the Curio Shop on East Prairie Avenue was heaped high with broken dishes, torn fans, ripped-up paper lanterns. They'd wrecked all their Made-in-Japan merchandise and made a display of it that drew a crowd.

Scooter and I looked, but it was something in the window of Black's Hardware that pulled us back every Saturday, to see if it was still there.

A Schwinn bicycle stood in the window. A solitary Schwinn, casual on its kickstand, sharp as a knife. Two-toned cream and crimson with a headlight like a tiny torpedo. An artificial squirrel tail dyed red, white, and blue hung off the back fender under the reflector. I couldn't look at the thing without tearing up. You could have played those chrome spokes like a harp. And look at the tread on those tires.

It was the last Schwinn in town, and maybe the whole country, for the duration. The duration was the new wartime word, and you heard it all day long, like the song “Remember Pearl Harbor,” on the radio, over and over. The duration meant for however long the war would last.

I'd been wanting a two-wheeler for a year and thought I could handle that Schwinn, though it was full-sized and weighed thirty pounds. I thought I was long enough in the leg and had the arms for it, almost. Never mind that I didn't know how to ride a bike.

I didn't expect to get it for Christmas, and didn't. It was twice what bikes cost, and the last one on earth. Scooter and I checked on that Schwinn faithfully, knowing that one Saturday it wouldn't be there.

I pictured the kid who'd get it, some rich kid from up on Moreland Heights. I saw him in new Boy Scout shoes and salt-and-pepper knickers and a chin-strap helmet with goggles, swooping down a curving road with that patriotic squirrel tail standing out behind. I saw the easy arcs he made from ditch to ditch. He'd be a little older than we were, a year or two older.

 

We didn't know what to expect out of Christmas this year. Scooter usually did pretty well for presents. He already had his Chem-Craft chemistry set. We'd had our first fire with it, burning a circle out of the insulation on the Tomlinsons' basement ceiling.

The stink bomb we'd built to go under Old Lady Graves's back step had gone off too soon, in Scooter's arms. I threw up the minute I smelled him, and his mom made him strip naked in their yard. She hosed him down and burned his shirt in a leaf drum. But that was last summer after his birthday.

One December Saturday when we checked, Black's window was empty, and the Schwinn was gone.

 

Dad brought home a tree standing up out of the Packard's rumble seat. People said there'd be no trees next Christmas and no string of lights when these burned out. Mom baked all Bill's favorites. Dad rolled out peanut brittle on a marble dresser top. People said that next year there wouldn't be enough sugar for Christmas baking.

But this one still smelled like the real thing: pine needles and nutmeg, Vicks and something just coming out of the oven in a long pan. And Bill was home. “That's Christmas enough for me,” Mom murmured.

We untangled the strings of tree lights, Bill and I, stretching them through the house. He could stick the star on top without stretching. But then he and Dad had hung the moon.

Bill was home from St. Louis with a full-length topcoat and his aeronautics textbooks. Bill wanted to fly, and he was taxiing for takeoff already.

He and Dad were down in the basement on Christmas Eve, puttering on mysterious business while Mom kept me busy. When Bill came upstairs, wiping grease off his hands, the kitchen radio was playing “Stardust.” Bill swept Mom away from the sink, and they danced, turning around the kitchen like it was the Alhambra Ballroom and Mom was his date. Her forehead was shiny, and her eyes were shining. She still held a dish towel that hung down from his shoulder. They danced until the radio began to play “Remember Pearl Harbor,” and Mom switched it off.

 

Bill slept in the big front room upstairs. Dad had divided the attic in two and boxed in the rooms under the eaves. I had the little one at the back. We didn't get a lot of heat up here. On nights this cold I wore mittens and a cap to bed.

You could talk between the rooms. The wall was beaver-board, and we left the door open. From his bed, Bill said, “Davy? You remember to hang up your stocking?”

No answer from me. I was too old to hang up a stocking, as we both knew.

“What did you get me?” Bill inquired because it was a known fact that I couldn't keep a secret.

“A pen wiper,” I said. “Pen wipers for everybody. We made them in school.”

“Miss Mossman?” Bill said, naming my teacher. He'd had her. “A pen wiper's good,” he said. “I'll keep it on my desk and take it with me. Wherever.”

Silence then. Silent night.

“What did you get me?” I asked, and my breath puffed a cloud. I hoped for his high school letter sweater, Cardinal Red. He'd lettered in track. I'd go in his closet and try it on a lot. It hit me just above the ankle.

“You get anything for me?” I asked in the dark because he was drifting off.

“Socks,” he mumbled, “underwear.”

“Oh,” I said. I turned over once, and it was morning.