2

That September Artie started the seventh grade and the Allies invaded Italy. American and British troops had finally hit the mainland of Nazi-held “Fortress Europe.” Our team was really on the offensive now!

Artie came home one day from delivering his paper route to find Mom and Dad in the living room, dressed up like it was Sunday. Their faces were so darn white it looked like they might have just given blood to the Red Cross.

“Whatsamatter?”

Mom’s mouth opened but no sound came out, and she shook her head and looked down at the floor.

“Roy,” Artie said. “He’s okay, isn’t he?”

“God willing,” Dad said.

He went and put a hand on Artie’s shoulder.

“Billy Watson was killed.”

“Wings? You mean Wings Watson?”

Dad nodded.

“At Salerno. Over in Italy.”

“I know. In ‘the ankle.’”

“Son, he was hit by a shell. It wasn’t just in the ankle.”

“No, I meant—”

Artie felt like someone had punched him in the gut, and it was hard to talk, the words coming out between gasps of breath.

“I meant ‘the ankle’ on—on ‘the Italian Boot,’ where we landed. Is where—Salerno—is.”

He leaned against Dad and put an arm around him, holding on.

“Thousands of miles from home,” Mom whispered. “Our Boys, dying.”

Artie felt sick and scared at the same time.

He had known that lots of Our Boys would get killed invading Italy, but that was the Price of Victory, so even though it made him feel sad there was no use getting down in the dumps about it. He had thought of the casualty figures in the War sort of like the opponents’ score in a ball game. It was bad if their score was high, but you didn’t think of each number of the total as a real American guy who was all the sudden dead. It was too hard to picture when you didn’t even know the guys who had changed into nothing but numbers.

Now it was different.

Now it was Wings Watson.

Artie could picture him, flying down the basketball court, leaping for a rebound; horsing around with Roy and Bo at the filling station, grinning and playing the peanut machine, giving Artie a friendly poke in the ribs, spitting through the little gap between his front teeth.

Dead now.

Gone.

Where?

They didn’t even have his body, or what was left of it, at the funeral.

The service was held in the living room of the Watsons’ rickety old gray farmhouse a few miles from town. Sam Watson mostly raised chickens and his wife Eldora was known as “the Egg Lady” because she delivered fresh eggs to people in town. She and her husband stood gripping each other’s hands by the table where they’d put the silver-framed picture of Wings in his uniform along with a vase of flowers. That was all there was of Wings at the funeral. The picture of him. He was smiling.

Later, his “remains” would come home in a box that no one was allowed to open. Some people wondered if the rule was really for “health reasons” like the government said or whether what was left was too awful to look at or whether it was only rocks and sand in the plain pine box, at least his family would have something to bury while all the time whatever was left of the real flesh and bones was somewhere in the bloody foreign ground of a country shaped like a boot.

How come he had to go clear over there from Illinois?

That was just one of the questions that nagged at Artie’s mind, even though he knew all the right answers about us having to save the world for democracy.

Even worse than those kind of questions were the ones about what really happened to a young guy who died. Somehow it seemed fairly natural for an old person to die; they were tired out from living a long time and even though it was sad, everyone had to go sometime. Lots of young guys were dying every day in the War of course, but Artie hadn’t known any of them personally, so he hadn’t really thought a lot about it till Wings Watson was killed.

The scariest part was that now Artie understood that Roy could really get killed. He knew it in his mind all the time, of course; thousands of American guys had been killed on Guadalcanal when Roy was there with them fighting the Japs, and more were getting killed right now in the Solomons where Roy was right this very minute. But he had always before just thought of those guys as “casualties,” part of the score against us, and he didn’t believe in his guts that Roy would really die way out in those weird little islands with palm trees and coconuts. But if his own buddy and teammate was killed in Italy, it suddenly seemed possible that Roy could really get killed in some crazy place like Vella Lavella.

On a clear afternoon at the end of September when Mom was hanging the wash on the backyard clothesline, Artie went out and offered her some of the Coke from a bottle he’d opened when he came home from school.

She took two clothespins out of her mouth and had a swallow of the Coke.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re a pal.”

“Mom? I was just wondering.”

“What?”

“Do you believe in Heaven? I mean, like it’s really a place people go when they die, unless they’re so terrible they have to go the other way?”

“A place? You mean like Birney is a place?”

“Aw, c’mon. Birney’s just a town.”

“Oh—you mean a bigger place? Like Chicago?”

“Stop pulling my leg, Mom.”

“Well, lots of people seem to think Heaven is a ‘place.’ Clouds instead of houses, and angels playing harps.”

“But you don’t think that way.”

“Not really, no.”

“So what do you think it is? If it is?”

“Oh, I think it’s there, all right.”

“Where? Out in the universe, you mean?”

“No. I think it’s all around us. In the grass, trees, sky. Even clean laundry.”

“So you think if a person dies they come back as a tree—or a sheet?”

“Not exactly. I think they become a higher part of things. In a way we can’t see or understand.”

“But how do you know?”

“I don’t ‘know’ like in a book. I have Faith.”

She unfurled a sheet and it billowed out in the wind.

“Just like I have Faith that Roy will come home from the War,” she said.

“But what about Wings Watson?”

“Is that what you’ve been brooding about?”

“I’ve just been thinking is all.”

“Thinking is fine. Sometimes praying is better.”

“I do that too.”

“I know,” she said.

She pinned up one end of the sheet, standing on the toes of her old blue Keds. Artie grabbed the other end, and took a clothespin out of the basket to hitch it in place.

“I get scared too,” Mom said. “So does Dad. So does everyone. There’s lots to be scared about.”

“So what do you do? Besides pray?”

“Think about what’s next.”

“You mean, like when the War’s over?”

“No. That’s too far away.”

“Like what, then?”

“Supper,” she said. “I think about what we’re going to have for supper.”

“What are we?”

“Tuna fish with noodles.”

“Dessert?”

“Tapioca.”

“That’s neat.”

“See? It’s even nice to think about.”

“I get it.”

Artie tried to concentrate on saying his prayers for Roy and America, and thinking about good stuff, like tuna fish with noodles and tapioca for dessert, and keeping his mind off sex.

Since his pow-wow on the subject last summer with Chief “Pops” Hagedorn, Artie had kept his hands off his thing at night except to just check and make sure it was still there. As Pops had predicted, the Lord in his wisdom had provided “release of excess” around every week or so in a wet dream. The trouble was, the Lord didn’t make up the dreams the way Artie would have most enjoyed them. They were all tangled up and crazy, like the one where Artie was an escaped prisoner from a Florida chain gang, hiding out in the swamps, when he came upon this woman who had the body of Dorothy Lamour, sarong and all, and the head of Shirley Colby. She licked her lips playfully and started taking off her sarong just as a giant alligator came into the picture and started chasing Artie up a tree, and then everyone including the alligator and the Lamour-Shirley woman turned into monkeys. Artie would have imagined the whole thing differently and left out the part where they all turned into monkeys, but at least he woke up wet and “relieved of excess” so he figured he just had to relax and accept the fact that the Lord worked in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

For a week or so after Wings Watson got killed, Artie turned kind of sour on the War. He took thirty-five cents that he could have used to buy a quarter and a dime War Stamp and spent it all on a cherry Coke and banana split at Damon’s Drugs, and afterward read through the College Football issue of Sport magazine instead of trying to find out the latest stuff about the invasion of Italy. He went out to Roy’s rock at Skinner Creek by himself and prayed to God to keep Roy safe, and after praying he tried to concentrate his mind on sending messages to Roy by mental telepathy. Last winter he had read this article about how Beatrice Houdini, the wife of the great escape-artist magician, had given up trying to contact her husband from the dead. Mrs. Houdini explained to the press that “Harry could escape from anything on earth. If he can’t slip through a message for me from Heaven then the deal is off.”

What stuck in Artie’s mind was that Mrs. Houdini evidently believed in Heaven, and he figured he had a better chance of contacting Roy if he ever died since Houdini and his wife were only related by marriage but Roy was Artie’s own brother. As everybody knew and said all the time, “Blood is thicker than water.” Artie thought if he could contact Roy by mental telepathy while he was still alive, then maybe he’d have an easier time of doing it if Roy got killed and his spirit merged into the trees and clean laundry of the earth that made up the mystical realm of Heaven. Artie just tried to concentrate on sending Roy simple messages like “Hello, it’s me, Artie—come in if you hear me.” Sometimes the wind would stir in the trees and Artie thought maybe that was Roy signaling back, but there wasn’t any real proof and he concentrated so hard on sending and trying to receive the messages that he got these fierce headaches, so after a while he gave up and wrote Roy a long V-mail letter.

When he told about Wings Watson getting killed he got real mad at the evil, power-mad Nazis, and suddenly his old patriotism revived again. He realized that Wings Watson’s death had demoralized him, making him wonder about the sense of the War, questioning the weird events of the world that made a guy from Illinois have to go and get killed by a bunch of Germans way over in Italy, but now he saw that such brooding and questioning of the rightness of things was just the effect that the Nazis wanted to have on you when they murdered one of your own neighbors in cold blood. Artie vowed that he’d never be demoralized like that again, falling into the trap of doubt and despair. He pledged to himself as the brother of a fighting Marine that he’d renew his Home Front efforts with even greater zeal.

Artie wanted to find a more serious, grown-up way of helping the War Effort now. Buying War Stamps was still okay, and he certainly wasn’t going to waste his money anymore on binges of banana splits, but filling up the Stamp book was really just a duty that didn’t give him much of a charge anymore. Collecting scrap paper seemed like kid stuff now, and in fact it was the younger boys who had taken up that campaign, little kids in the fifth and sixth grades who were rolling their own red wagons down the street and knocking on doors for papers and magazines the way Artie and Tutlow had done the year before.

Collecting scrap metal seemed more serious because it was harder, heavier work and what you collected went directly into making armaments, but the trouble was most of the good stuff had already been rounded up in the big drive of the Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko Scouts last summer. Artie knew darn well that every farmer in fifty miles had been cleaned out of his last rusty shovel and broken tractor chain. When he tried to take two beat-up old pots from his own kitchen to start a new drive, Mom caught him and told him in no uncertain terms she needed those pots more than the Armed Forces did.

“But the thing is,” Artie said, still holding on to the pots, “only 7,698 more of these will make a whole pursuit plane.”

“The Air Corps can make its own planes,” she said, “but I’ve got to make our suppers.”

Artie surrendered the pots.

He went down to his Dad’s filling station and rummaged around in the garage till he found an old tire iron he figured could be made into a machine gun barrel, but Dad said it was essential to his own effort and he couldn’t give it up to the War Effort.

“Cripes,” Artie said, “there’s nothing any good a guy can do anymore on the Home Front.”

Dad took one of the rags from his pocket and swiped it across his big forehead.

“There’s plenty,” he said.

“Like what?”

“A guy can brush his teeth after meals, he can clean his plate even if it’s Spam or liver, pick up his clothes, and study his lessons.”

“Heck, that’s just regular stuff.”

Dad put an arm on Artie’s shoulder and spoke some philosophy.

“Keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole,” he said.

Artie sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. He figured that meant you should take care of the little things and the big things would work out for the best. That’s the way adults always talked, telling you the best way a kid could help win the War was to obey his parents and teachers, which was okay for keeping the nation’s mighty War Machine running smoothly, but it wasn’t very inspirational.

Artie realized he’d better talk things over with another patriotic kid.