by Sandra Kring
When I reach the store, I jam my brakes on so hard that the ass end of my bike kicks sideways, and the whole thing tips right over, dumping me and Lucky out onto the grass. Halfway up the store steps I run, Lucky crashing into the back of my legs when I stop, lickety-split. There that flag is, and the star is still blue. Whew! Jimmy ain’t dead.
I swear that when Lucky was a little pup, he musta got that same damn fever I had, ’cause this dog can’t learn nothing new, it seems. I’m in the yard with him, throwing a stick and telling him to fetch it, but he don’t do nothing but hop around my feet. I pat him on his head, where his hair stands straight up like mine, and tell him it’s okay if he’s dumb as a stump. He’s my dog, and even if he ain’t a smart dog like Scout or Spot, he’s still one good dog.
I don’t go inside ’til my hands get cold, ’cause Ma and Dad are in the living room, and if Ma and Lucky are in the same room together longer than two minutes, she starts fussing over what he’s licking or sniffing, and if he even starts to walk behind a chair or the sofa to take a nap, she starts bellering ’cause she thinks he’s going off to take a piss or a shit, and she makes me take him outside again.
Ma and Dad got the radio on and Dad holds up his hand for me to be quiet. I can tell the man who’s talking is a reporter giving the war news. The first thing I think is how I hope if it’s bad news he’s saying, it’s about that European Theater, not the Pacific Theater. That’s what words they use, depending on if they’re talking about the war in that Europe place or about the war in that Philippines place. I don’t know why they call them two wars theaters—unless maybe it’s ’cause if you go down to the theater to watch a picture show, they always show a little movie about one of them wars first. I remember then that John is in the European Theater, so I whack myself in the head for hoping the bad news is about that Europe place.
The reporter is talking. “Bataan has fallen. The Philippine–American troops on this war-ravaged and bloodstained peninsula have laid down their arms. With heads bloody but unbowed, they have yielded to the superior force and numbers of the enemy.”
Ma turns her head fast as a chickadee and says, “They surrendered?”
“Wait, Eileen,” Dad says. Dad finishes listening to the report, then he lets his back fall against his chair.
“They’ve all surrendered? What does this mean, Hank?” Ma’s picking at her skirt, just like I pick at my pants when I get scared. “What will happen to Jimmy now?”
“They are prisoners of war, Eileen.”
“Oh, my God! What will they do to him, Hank?”
“There’s international laws about how countries have to treat war prisoners, Eileen. Jimmy will be fine.” Dad don’t look at Ma when he says this. He gets up and stuffs his hands in his pockets. He walks in half a circle, stops, and walks back to where he was.
“Dad?” I ask. “What did that reporter guy mean when he said that Bataan falled?” I don’t want to, but in my head, I can see that little thumb of a place snapping off and falling right into the ocean, just like Louie’s ship did.
“It means, son, that our boys had to give up because the Japs were winning.”
That don’t sound right to me. Jimmy, he always says you never give up. Never. That no matter how many times you fall down when you’re learning something new, you gotta keep getting up and trying again, even if your goddamn knees and elbows are all scraped to shit. That’s what Jimmy telled me when he helped learn me to ride a bike.
Ma don’t even notice when Lucky starts chewing on the leg of the sofa. I notice, though, and I give him a scoot with my foot. I’m feeling skittery ’cause I got pictures of Jimmy and Floyd’s bloody heads sinking down into that ocean. It don’t seem right to me, our army losing that battle like that. Jimmy never gives up, and no team Jimmy’s ever played on loses.
Ma’s eyes go buggy, and her hands start to shaking. Those shakes creep right up her arms and then crawl right down the rest of her, not stopping ’til they reach her feet.
Dad looks scared when this happens. Lucky, he sees Ma’s shoes hopping and he thinks she’s play-teasing him, so he crouches and hops and barks at her feet. Dad picks him up and gives him to me. “Take Lucky and go upstairs, Earl.”
I run up them stairs, planning to take Lucky and head under the covers of my bed, but then I hear Ma crying hard, and I don’t go to my bed. I go to Jimmy’s room that is whistle-clean and quiet. I set Lucky down and I get on my hands and knees and look down the vent that shows into the living room.
Dad is bent over, his butt poked out. He’s got Ma’s shoulders in his hands. “Eileen, look at me. Jimmy’s going to be fine. You hear me? Jimmy’s going to be just fine.”
“I can’t do this, Hank,” Ma says. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can, Eileen. You have to. Earl needs you and so do I.”
Ma, she leaps out of her chair and she starts pacing. Her hands are rubbing the top part of her arms like they’s freezing and she’s trying to thaw ’em. “I don’t care who needs me. Right now, I need my son!”
“I know, Eileen. I know. But we have to be brave. For Earl, and for Jimmy when he comes home.”
Ma, she starts picking at her head then, like she’s got lice crawling around in them spit curls. “Comes home? We don’t even know if he’s coming home, Hank. He could be dead already. How would we even know? We haven’t heard from him in weeks. Neither has Molly. Oh, my God, he could be dead already!”
I ain’t suppose to bug Ma and Dad after Dad tells me to get lost, but seeing Ma with her worst case of the nerves ever, and Dad not knowing what in the hell to say or do to make her nerves stop, I run down them stairs and I take Ma’s hand. “Come on, Ma,” I say. “I gotta show you something that’ll help.”
“Earl, I don’t think your mother wants to look at anything right now,” Dad says, but Ma, she lets me take her hand and lead her out the back door and around the house.
The way the streetlight is hitting the store window, I can’t see nothing but shiny black glass. I drop Ma’s hand, and I hurry halfway up them stairs and lean over the bent pipe. I look real hard, and there that flag is. “Come on, Ma,” I say, reaching out my hand. “Come up here and have a look.”
Ma, she moves like she is sleepwalking. When she gets to me, I lean my head down to touch hers so I can see where she’s looking. I point at Jimmy’s blue star. “Ma, when you get them scared thoughts banging around in your head, you come out here and take a look, same as I do. Long as that star there is blue, Jimmy ain’t dead.” Ma, she looks at Jimmy’s star, then she buries her face against my chest, and she bawls hard.
Chapter 10
The Army lost Jimmy! That’s what the letter we got in the mail from them says. Mary, she got a letter saying they lost Floyd too, and Dad says every other family of them ninety-nine boys got the same letter, saying their soldier is lost too.
After Ma gets that letter and reads it out loud to me and Dad, she lets Dad put his arms around her, and she flops against him like a bug splattering on a windshield. “We always pay for our mistakes,” she cries. Her head is laying sideways on Dad’s shoulder. “We always pay.” Dad pulls her off him and gives her a little shake. “You aren’t paying for anything, Eileen. You hear me?”
I don’t know what the hell Ma and Dad are talking about, but I know I don’t like the way it makes my guts feel. I don’t stick around to hear what else Dad says to Ma. I call Lucky and we go upstairs. I help him get up on our bed and pull the quilt over us. I hold Lucky real tight, and he licks the tears offa my face. “Lucky,” I say, “I wish me and you were over in that place. We’d find Jimmy and Floyd and the rest of them guys, for sure.” Lucky barks a little, and that means, “You damn bet we would, Earwig.”
Pert’ near every day Ma writes a letter to Washington asking ’em if they found Jimmy yet, and I pedal it down to the post office. They don’t answer, but Ma, she keeps writing anyway.
Ma ain’t the same no more. She wears the same dresses, and she wears
the same pin-curled hair, but she don’t look the same. Her face looks all hard, like it’s made of Bakelite, and Dad says she’s getting too skinny. She don’t act the same no more either. She don’t fuss at me about washing behind my ears, or changing my socks, and she don’t tell me to finish my vegetables so I can stay healthy and not get the polio, which is all over Willowridge again, dropping kids like flies.
Dad says we gotta get up each morning and do the same things we always do. He says we have to do this so we don’t get all buggy and fall off our rockers. So that’s what we do. We get up every goddamn morning, even if we don’t want to, and I let Lucky out to take a piss and a crap while Ma makes breakfast and Dad shaves. After we eat, Dad goes off to the garage, I tie Lucky up by his doghouse, and then me and Ma get busy in the store.
We gotta keep busy, so it’s probably a good thing when we have to start messing with those ration books that the government comes up with so we don’t hog up all the food, leaving the soldiers shit out of luck. They call off school for a couple days so the teachers can start figuring out who-all needs sugar and how much each of us needs. That means Eddie don’t got to go to school.
Ma is busy pricing Karo syrup (that she says she knows is gonna sell like hotcakes when people can’t buy as much sugar) when Eddie comes in. Eddie is eight years old now, and in the third grade.
Eddie don’t talk to me first. He goes right up to Ma, and says, “Good morning, Mrs. Gunderman. Would you like to buy some Victory Seeds?” Eddie says it just like he’s one of them salesmen that come around now and then, selling Bibles or them encyclopedia books.
Mrs. Lark is in the store, and so is Mrs. Flannery, and they both go over to Eddie so they can get a good look at them green packages with a big red V on ’em. “Our school’s selling them,” Eddie says. “The seeds are to plant in Victory Gardens. Whatever room sells the most gets to carry the flag on Fridays when we march around the school.”
Mrs. Lark, she don’t know nothing about Victory Gardens ’cause she don’t keep a radio. Like she says, she can’t sit around listening to a radio all day when she’s got cows to milk and fields to plant. So Eddie tells her about the Victory Gardens Roosevelt is asking everybody to plant. Eddie talks real good. He don’t get all balled up with his words like I know I would if I had to sell them seeds.
“Well, I’ll be,” Mrs. Lark says. She rubs her hand on the leg of her trousers, and she takes a package of string-bean seeds. “Where are people planting these gardens? Most people in town don’t have yards big enough for much of a garden.”
“Well, Mrs. Lark,” Eddie says, “in some towns, folks with more land than they are using are divvying it up, borrowing a little plot to families so they can grow some food for themselves. They have to plant and weed their plot themselves and pick the stuff when it’s ripe. Lots of times, they have to give the landowner some of the stuff too, just as a way of saying thank you, I guess.”
“I’ll be,” Mrs. Lark says. Then she says that she has a lot of land, and that people can use her land for a big-ass Victory Garden. Mrs. Lark don’t say big-ass, but that’s what she means, ’cause she’s talking about donating a lot of acres.
Ma and Mrs. Flannery say that’s right nice of her for offering her land, and Mrs. Flannery says she’ll place an announcment in the paper so people know about the Victory Garden, since she’s going to the paper anyway to place an ad to sell their old Ford.
After Eddie sells them ladies some seeds, he asks Ma if I can go along with him while he sells more ’cause he wants his room to carry the flag. Ma says she guesses I can, since it’s for a good cause.
We go door to door, selling them seeds, and we put the dimes and nickels in our pockets. We sell so many packages that by the time Eddie’s legs are tired, our pockets are lumpy as an old man’s knuckles.
“Hey, Earlwig,” Eddie says as we walk back toward home. “Know what?”
“What?”
“At school now, sometimes a teacher goes into the hall and blows a horn, real loud. Then we gotta hurry up and crawl under our desks.”
“How come?”
“’Cause. Teacher says it’s an air-raid drill. I guess we got to do it so we’re practiced up in case them Jap or German planes get over here and start bombing us. If we get under our desks, then we ain’t going to get killed, I guess.”
This makes me all skittery inside. “Well, what if you ain’t got no desk? I ain’t got no goddamn desk.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s gotta be a desk, because if we’re in the lunchroom, then we gotta dive under the lunchroom tables.”
“That’s good,” I say, “’cause I ain’t got no desk.”
I walk Eddie home, even if his ma don’t say I gotta anymore. I walk him home ’cause Eddie wants to show me something in his new Captain Midnight Flight Control Newspaper. Eddie’s real lucky to get Cap’s newspaper in the mail. I want to get it too, but Ma says it don’t pay ’cause it’s mostly words, and I can’t read worth a damn. She don’t say damn, though.
“Wait until you see what we can get, Earlwig,” Eddie says, as he’s looking for the right page.
“Hey, Eddie,” I say. “You think now that you ain’t such a little kid no more, you could call me by my real name, instead of ‘Earlwig’?”
“Sure, Earl,” Eddie says.
“Not ‘Earl.’ ‘Earwig.’ It don’t seem right, no one calling me Earwig no more.”
“Sure, Earlwig,” Eddie says, then he whacks himself between the eyes. “I forgot already. But I’ll start remembering.”
Eddie finds the right page and jabs his fat finger down on a picture. “See this thing that looks like a spyglass? It’s a MJC-ten plane spotter. You look in this end, and you can see planes in it.”
“Now, that’d be good to have,” I say to Eddie. “Then if the Jap or the German planes come to bomb us, we’d see ’em and know when to dive under a table or a desk even if there weren’t no teacher around to blow a horn.”
Me and Eddie like Captain Midnight best of all the heroes ’cause he flies a plane, just like Charles A. Lindbergh. Captain Midnight don’t just fly to get across the ocean, though. He flies places to fight evil. He even fights dirty Nazis and Japs. Me and Eddie are lucky ’cause we are members of the Secret Squadron. We even got certificates to prove it.
“Know how we are saving up for decoder rings?” Eddie says. “Well, I was thinking maybe we shouldn’t send our premiums in for those decoder rings after all. Maybe we should save them to get ourselves two swell plane spotters instead.”
“Yeah, Eddie, let’s do that.”
“If we get enough premiums, we could each get a plane spotter and a code-o-graph. How swell would that be, Earwig?”
I grin ’cause Eddie remembered to call me by my real name. “That would be real swell, Eddie. You think we could get enough premiums for both?”
“If we drink up enough Ovaltine, we could. Too bad you still can’t get premium points at Skelly gas stations like in the old days. Then your dad could have given us a whole mess of them and we wouldn’t have to drink so much, huh, Earwig?”
“Yep,” I say. “Man, Eddie, if we get code-o-graphs, then we can call up Washington if them bombers come, just like Chuck does when him and the Cap is in trouble. Washington’ll send help then, sure as shit.”
Eddie’s ma calls up the stairs, “Eddie, your soup is getting cold. Earl, you want to stay for lunch?”
“No thank you, ma’am,” I shout, real polite-like. “I gotta go bring Dad his lunch.” When I’m going out the door, I hear Eddie tell his ma he don’t want no plain old milk for lunch. He wants Ovaltine.
A couple days later, Ma tells me I gotta watch the store for a little bit ’cause she’s got to get down to the high school and sign up for the sugar ration. She scoops up the papers she’s got on the counter that she says are forms so the government knows how many people we got in our house, and how big and old we are, so they know how much sugar we gotta have.
“Ma, what if
I gotta make change?”
Ma is busy tying her scarf under her chin. She rolls her eyes. “Earl, I’ve showed you a thousand times. Just do your best, and ask the customer to help double-check your figures if you aren’t sure.”
No one comes into the store while Ma’s gone, except for Eva Leigh. Little LJ’s got a big head now, with hair that only grows on the top. If you run your hand over that hair, it stands straight up and follows your hand around like a puppy. LJ walks now too, but if Eva Leigh lets him loose, he rips crap off the shelves, so even though he’s a walking baby, Eva Leigh still pokes out her hip and props him on it, ’cept now he’s heavy enough that she’s gotta lean herself way over in the other direction so he don’t tip her over. LJ kicks his legs and screams to get down unless she gives him a cracker or something from her purse to shut him up. Once I even see’d him bite her shoulder when he wanted down, and it made me hope that he ain’t getting the orneries like his dad.
Even with LJ fussing at her hip, Eva Leigh don’t look so skittery no more. Not since that nasty Luke got drafted and sent off to Germany. She don’t droop so much when she walks either. I heared her tell Ma after Luke left that, awful as it is, and as much as she misses him, it sure is nice not being scared that she’s gonna do something wrong and get hit.
“Morning, Mrs. Leigh. You look real pretty today, with your hair all curled up like that.”
“Thank you, Earl.” Eva Leigh smiles, with her new lips that are painted the color of a rose. “Where’s your mother?” Eva Leigh is roaming around the store. She puts a couple cans of evaporated milk and a box of Tide on the counter. I know I’m gonna have to make change if Ma don’t get back before she’s done shopping, but I know too that if I have trouble, Eva Leigh will help me and be nice about it.
“She went to the school to sign up for them sugar books.”
“Oh,” she says. “I did that this morning.”
“I can check you out, though, Mrs. Leigh. If you help me make the change, I can do that.”