Willow Run

The wheels made a horrible sound; no wonder. The wagon belonged to Joey Kind down the block, who hadn't used it in years; the whole thing was a rusted mess. And the nerve of Joey to say, “You be careful, Meggie Dillon. Don't ruin it.”

Too bad,
I wanted to tell him,
keep your old wagon
. But I had to borrow it. It was all for the war effort. And right now rattling along in the center of the wagon was Big Bertha, Mom's iron statue that had a clock in her stomach. She'd been rusting away in the attic forever, just like Joey's wagon.

Big Bertha was going to war. Mr. North at the junkyard would pay me a quarter and Bertha would be melted down into bullets. Poor Bertha.

It was almost dark so I began to hurry. I chugged past Grandpa's house but I knew he wasn't there. He was at my house waiting for Dad to get home from work. Dad had news, that was all Mom would tell us, and we'd hear it over a late supper of salad greens and flounder in tomato sauce: greens we'd grown in Grandpa's garden, and flounder Grandpa and I had caught this morning. Poor flounder. Poor me for having to eat it with every single one of its skinny bones getting caught in my teeth.

Someone was moving along the side of Grandpa's house. My mouth went dry. Here we were in the middle of a war. Suppose it was a spy?

As quietly as I could considering the squeak of the wheels, I shoved the wagon into a pile of bushes and tiptoed up the driveway. I went slowly, ready to tear back to the street and across the lawn to one of Grandpa's neighbors before the spy shot me.

A pair of shadows. I clapped my hand to my mouth so I wouldn't make a sound. Then I realized I knew them both. One was Joey Kind's older brother, Mikey, and the other was a kid I had seen down at the beach flexing his muscles as if he were Charles Atlas, the weight lifter. His name was Tommy or Donny or…I wasn't sure, but I remembered my friend Lily Mollahan nudging me, asking, “Did you ever see such an idiot in your life?”

He was not only an idiot, he was big. They were
both big, sixteen or seventeen, and tough, and I shivered thinking what would happen if they caught me following them.

But what were they doing? They had an open can of red paint and a couple of brushes, and they began to dab something on Grandpa's kitchen window.

“Hey!” I yelled, without stopping to think.

They spun around. Mikey looked embarrassed, but the muscle guy kept going with the brush. It looked as if he were painting a spider… but then I saw. He was painting a swastika, the Nazi sign, on the glass pane.

“That's what we do to Nazis around here,” he said.

“He's not a Nazi!” I could feel the anger in my chest, a pain so sharp it was almost hard to breathe. “He's American,” I managed.

“Sounds German to me.” The muscle guy was grinning. And then he was imitating Grandpa, mixing up his
f
s and his
v
s, sounding the way the Nazis did in the movies…

… sounding like Grandpa.

I had a quick picture of Grandpa in my mind, Grandpa sitting on a bench down at the canal, his head back, that awful red hat on his head, his face sunburned, singing “Mairzy Doats” with a German accent.

“Get out of here, both of you!” I yelled, almost forgetting it would be dark in about two minutes and I was alone with them back there.

“You're lucky,” Muscle Man said. “If this were anywhere else but Rockaway, they'd probably put him in jail. He's got to be a spy.”

I picked up a stone, ready to throw it, but Mikey took a step toward me. “You know what, Meggie? I think you want the Nazis to win the war. You and your Nazi grandfather.”

My arm went down to my side. “That's not true. You know that's—”

“Anywhere else, something would happen to him. Worse than jail,” Mikey said. “Worse than anything. And to you, too.”

Why was he saying this? Maybe because I'd told the lifeguard at the beach that he was out too far.

But maybe not. He'd always been mean.

Or maybe that was what people really thought, that Grandpa was a spy, that I…

Somewhere down the block I heard a door slam. The two of them slipped past me along the side of the house. When they were halfway down the driveway I plunked the stone after them, hitting the pail of paint.

“Crummy aim,” Muscle Man said, and Mikey called, “
Heil
Hitler.”

“Watch out, next time—” and then I broke off because it looked as if they were going to come back after me.

I darted around back, but now I heard them marching up the street yelling,
“Heil, heil,”
with that same accent.

I went up to Grandpa's window and put my finger on the painted swastika. It was thick and still shiny wet, and I could feel that my cheeks were wet, too.

Grandpa was the biggest pest in the whole world, calling me Margaret every two minutes instead of Meggie, whispering during movies so I couldn't even hear what was going on, saying
bah
whenever he didn't agree with me.

So why was I crying?

Grandpa who loved Rockaway, who told me that Hitler was a maniac. Grandpa who had cried when he told me about hiking in the Hartz Mountains when he was a boy, who cried, too, when he talked about the terrible things that were happening in Germany. What would he say if he saw that swastika?

I went around back to his garage. I was glad I knew where every single thing was. Right away I put my hand on the can of turpentine, found an old rag, and stood there crying as I wiped the paint off the window.

It took a long time, but that was all right. I couldn't go home and let everyone see that my eyes were red. If Mom thought something was wrong she'd start to question me… and wouldn't let go until I was cornered.

After I finished, I put the turpentine can back in the garage. I wiped my hands with the rag, then stuck it down deep in Grandpa's garbage can.

Big Bertha and the wagon could stay in the bushes
tonight. She'd have to go to war tomorrow, and Joey Kind's wagon could park there forever without getting any worse than it was now.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Then I started home to hear Dad's news.

Mom was at the door. “The fish is like a piece of cardboard, the salad wilted, everyone wondering where you were.”

“Sorry.” I reached up to give her a quick kiss.

She kissed back, then wrinkled her nose. “What's that smell?”

Grandpa came out of the dining room. “Margaret and I never catch cardboard fish.”

I wanted to tell him for about the hundredth time not to call me Margaret, but at least he had distracted Mom.

“Let's eat,” she said. “Dad has been waiting to tell us…”

And there was Dad at the table, grinning, his eyes big behind his glasses. It made me think of the bird game my brother, Eddie, and I always played. Dad was an owl in those
glasses with the heavy frames, and Mom a plump pigeon like the ones who flew around Sonny Breitenback's coop, always busy fixing up their nests with bits of straw and pieces of ribbon.

Eddie and I could never figure out what Grandpa was. “Something big, wings flapping all over the place,” I always said. Eddie agreed; then he said I was a Canadian goose, always stretching my neck into everyone's business.

Eddie was definitely one of those red-winged blackbirds who appeared every March, looking plain until they fluttered their wings;
Talk to me, talk to me,
they always said. The redwings were my favorites, hands down, and so was Eddie, with his round face and the gap between his square front teeth.

Grandpa gave me a nudge. “So where are you, Margaret?”
Vhere
.

“Right here.”

“Well?”
Vell
.

They were staring at my sleeve. I took a look; it was a smear of red paint I hadn't noticed in the dark. Suppose I hadn't gotten all the paint off the window?

Grandpa would never say anything, but I knew he would wonder about it. He might mutter
bah
to himself, but how would he feel?

“Where did you get that lipstick?” Mom ran a spatula under the fish, which was curling up around the edges.

“Looks like Victory Red.” I pulled out my sleeve to see it
better: it was just like the lipstick Lily Mollahan smeared on her mouth as soon as her grandmother was out of sight.

“Listen.” Dad pushed at his glasses. We stopped talking as he held out his hands. “My news.” He took a breath. “There's a top-security factory that makes bombers, B-24s. Great planes that are going to win the war for us.”

Dad loved planes. Before he found out he had trouble seeing and needed those Coke-bottle glasses, he'd been a barnstormer, flying planes all over the country, going to every air show he could find.

I took a bite of the fish; it was the worst thing I had ever tasted.

“So what's the news?” Grandpa said, chewing, picking bones out of his mouth at the same time.

“I have a chance to be a foreman at the factory,” Dad said, beaming at us. “Can you imagine doing something so important for the war effort!”

I could feel my mouth opening.

“It takes four days to get there,” Dad said, “a place called Willow Run, Michigan.”

We put down our forks. Who could eat that poor dried-up fish, anyway? I swallowed and Muscle Man was back in my head, that mean look on his face. What had he said? Something like
“Your grandfather would be arrested anywhere else.”

And what had Dad said?
“Top-security”? “Important for the war effort”?
In my mind was a picture of a movie
Grandpa and I had seen. It was about G-men and the OSS and German spies all over the place. Wouldn't they be at the factory looking for spies, too?

Oh, Grandpa.

“Will we all go?” I said in a small voice.

Dad sighed. “The only thing is,” he said, “I heard the apartment isn't great. Two postage-stamp bedrooms, a pull-out couch in the living room.”

A way out. “So not Grandpa,” I said quickly, my throat burning. “Too small.”

Grandpa turned to look at me.

I could see tears in Mom's eyes. She put her hand on Grandpa's arm. “How could we ask you to take such a trip? To give up your house and your garden?”

One thing I knew—Grandpa couldn't come with us. Before Grandpa could answer, I cut in. “Suppose Eddie comes home on leave? Suppose he just comes home and none of us are here?”