On The Wings of Heroes (11 page)

They were already heaving our bundles up into the truck. They'd been heavy to us, but nothing to the Scouts. And what could we do? It was Troop 15 too, Carlisle Snyder's troop.

If he was here, he wouldn't let them pull this on us, I thought.

I looked up, and he was right there, in uniform, our paper in his arms. One of the gang.

Scooter saw. Who could miss our so-called Cubmaster? We stared, which is all we could do. But he never looked us in the eye. After they'd gunned off, we still watched all the way to the corner, but he wouldn't look back.

We were both about to cry, but not over the paper. Scooter unknotted his Cub neckerchief. He went up to a Dutch elm growing next to the Friedingers' curb and tied the neckerchief to the highest limb he could reach. It had something to do with not being a Cub if it led to being a Scout. Anyway, we didn't mess much with Cubs after that, but I know for a fact that Carlisle Snyder never came to another den meeting.

We got our General Eisenhower medals. The paper wasn't the problem. When they weighed ours, we were way over, but I never wore the medal. I figured Carlisle Snyder was wearing his.

Scooter and I went on home that afternoon. Our empty wagons rattled, and we were back in time for
The Lone Ranger
on the radio. So that part was the same. But
we
were different.

. . . the town was pretty well picked clean. Now even copper pennies had rolled off to war. The 1943 pennies were steel and zinc. A lot of them passed for dimes before people got wise to them.

Scooter and I had done our share for the effort. Even the idea of Old Lady Graves's sewing machine gnawed at us, though we never got it. But we didn't go near paper again, never mentioned it.

Now the Chamber of Commerce announced a Jalopy Parade as the main event of the summer, to shake loose still more scrap metal. There were old hulks of cars around that needed to go to war because they weren't going anywhere else.

The plan snowballed. Now they were talking about crowning a Jalopy Queen for a procession of decorated clunkers and high school bands. It was going to wind through downtown and end at Sol Tick's scrap yard.

In the middle of parade mania, Bill came home. He didn't call from the Wabash depot, and we didn't hear the taxicab. We were just sitting down to supper at the kitchen table. I can still see the light of that summer evening slanting in the window. Bill walked in, wearing his second lieutenant's uniform and his bars. And his wings. Silver wings. It was Bill, leaner, with Dad's grin. He whipped off his cap, and it rolled on the linoleum.

I remember Mom's hands flying to her face and the kitchen swimming. I remember Dad coming out of his chair that fell over behind him.

In a crate out by the garage Dad had been feeding up two chickens for this moment. I was out there when he wrung the neck off first one, then the other. His good hand was a windmill, and the birds pinwheeled in the air, feathers white on the grass like summer snow. In the long evening shadows Dad did kind of a dance between the flopping fowls.

The Hisers were out, working their victory garden. When they saw Dad dancing in that fall of floating feathers, they knew Bill was home. They capered down their runner-bean row, cackling.

Dad and I plucked the chickens over buckets of boiling water down in the basement, letting Mom have Bill to herself. We cleaned and dressed the birds and soaked them in cold pink salt water.

Upstairs they popped in the pan, and the potatoes were on the boil. Then Dad was laying into them with the masher and all our butter, and Mom was going for the company dishes.

The Hisers brought over the last of their strawberries and shortcake to go with them. But they wouldn't stay. They were in and out because every minute mattered, with Bill here.

He'd brought presents. Beaded moccasins for Mom, a hunting knife in a tooled Mexican leather sheath for Dad. My present was upstairs.

It wasn't quite dark. This was the longest day of the year. I watched Bill pull his kit out of his musette bag and lay it out on the bed like an inspection. The dress shoes like patent leather, those Brassoed buttons, the wings. There was a pair of fleece-lined boots and a cap and big, fleecy gloves. The bed was woolly as a sheep. But there by the pillow was the pen wiper I'd made in Miss Mossman's class.

“You know what these mean?” Bill held up the thick gloves. He looked down at me, but not as far down as before.

“It's cold up there?” I said. “That high up?”

“And down below too.”

So I almost knew he wasn't heading anywhere hot, like the South Pacific or Africa. It was almost a secret, and I thought I could keep it.

I was following Bill's every move when he pulled the red and white letter sweater out of the closet. “You're ready for this, aren't you?”

I was starting to shoot up, so yes. He gave me the sweater on the first night, not his last. He didn't make me wait.

I told him about the Jalopy Parade. The sponsored jalopies, the decorations, the floats, the marching bands, the Parade Queen. Flags waved all over our particular world, but it must be small-time stuff, piddly, if you wore wings and could strip a bomb sight in the dark.

“Where's ours?” Bill asked.

“Our what?”

“Our jalopy. Representing the Earl Bowman and Sons Phillips 66 Gas and Oil Station?”

But it didn't work that way. Sponsors were bigger outfits, lots bigger: Block & Kuhl's department store and the American Legion and the starch works and the League of Women Voters.

The attic was all shadow now. Bill switched on a light. Another one went on in my head.

“There's one in Miss Titus's barn,” I said, “if she'd let us have it, which she wouldn't in one million years.”

. . . Miss Titus would let us have her ancient auto, let us parade it with the jalopies, send it off for scrap. When we went out to see her, Bill wore his uniform, and maybe that clenched the deal.

We drove out after Dad closed up the station, out Wyckles Corner way in the growling Packard, three across. The family car was a '36 Pontiac sedan that Mom drove. But you'd need the Packard to get up Miss Titus's lane. It was one rock after another.

Though it was evening, she was on her porch, and it was like the first time, but without the shotgun. She leaned on a hoe for the snakes.

Summer had come, and she wasn't my teacher anymore, and I never learned as much from another one. When we were in the weeds of her yard, her voice rang out, “Earl Bowman? Talk about a bad penny.”

But even then Bill in his uniform filled her specs. She lit a lantern and led us down to the webby barn. Over her feed-sack dress she wore a carpenter's apron. Its pockets brimmed with stuff: a ball-peen hammer, a paperback Webster's dictionary, a box of kitchen matches. She held the lantern up to the auto.

“By golly, it's a Pan American,” Dad said. “The only automobile ever built in this town.”

“My father bought this one at the factory door,” she said. “One of the first. He gave six hundred and fifty dollars for it. Cash, naturally.”

“They weren't in business long. This is just about one-of-a-kind.” Dad had to get closer, under the missing hood.

“Miss Titus, maybe it ought to be restored,” Bill said, “in a museum.”

She turned on him, though the lantern never bobbled. “Where are you going next in that uniform, young man?”

“I'm not supposed to say, ma'am.”

She saw the Eighth Air Force insignia.

“England,” she said, “for raids over Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, the Ruhr valley. The submarine pens off the coast of France?”

“If you say so, ma'am.”

“B-17s?” she said. “Flying Fortresses?”

Now Dad was listening, from the auto.

“How many missions will you fly?” Miss Titus asked.

“Twenty-five, ma'am.”

A moment in the dark barn lingered. You could hear a rumble in the evening sky. Then Miss Titus said, “When you've flown your last mission and are back home with us, then it'll be time to talk about restoring things and putting them in museums.”

. . . our own Rose Bowl of Wrecks, was the biggest blowout in the summer of '43. That was the middle summer of the war, though we didn't know it. We only knew it was time to cut loose.

On the hottest day, here came G. K. Ingersoll in a Plymouth police car, not scrap, blaring his sirens to clear the parade route. The high school band stepped out behind him with “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,” in march time. The majorettes of the Red Pepper pep squad flung their glitter batons as high as five-story buildings.

The mayor rode in an open Pierce-Arrow four-door, missing three doors and the radiator. It was towed by a team from the Meadow Gold Dairy. Milk was delivered by horse-drawn wagons, and every dairy horse in town was pulling a jalopy.

Two big Percherons from the brewery pulled the Emerson Piano House's 1937 woody Ford station wagon that had suffered a bad fire. The Daughters of the American Revolution rode on rims in a peeled-roof Studebaker Dictator that had flipped several times. They were pulled by a road grader decked with Revolutionary War flags, proclaiming:

 

Then here came the Taylorville High School band belting out “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again.”

Van Natta's Funeral Home was donating an old Chrysler hearse of theirs that still ran, barely. The windows were out, and against a wreath of weeds on the coffin was a sign reading:
—meaning Hitler and Hirohito.

And for as far as you could see, flags and more flags, and some jitterbugging in the streets between bands.

Three high school senior guys, graduated now, were donating their Model A ragtops, though they still ran. If you were a high school hotshot, you drove an old Ford Model A to school and cruised around and around the building at lunchtime.

Now they were turning in their Fords before reporting to basic training. The rumbleseats were full of girls, and the latest song titles were scrawled all over the hoods and doors:

 

There were thirty-eight jalopies in all, which Scooter calculated would add up to a landing craft.