by Richard Peck
When we got tired of nothing happening, Scooter and I set off to collect enough of whatever it took to win the war.
“Let’s get this war over with,” Scooter said. “I’m sick of it.”
“GAS!” I said to liven things up, and we rummaged around for handkerchiefs we naturally didn’t have.
Then we went off collecting. We were tired of rubber, but we’d take anything that wasn’t nailed down. Especially scrap metal because if you turned in twenty-five pounds of it, the Varsity Theater would give you a free ticket for a Saturday matinee.
We started with our own street, skipping the Hisers, who always used everything up. They were laying out a victory garden that ran back to the alley. By the end of the summer, rows of sweet corn rustled like open country, and there were tomatoes enough for all. Mrs. Hiser put up fifty-two bottles of her own ketchup, one for every week, in recycled Royal Crown Cola bottles. The summer smelled like spiced tomatoes simmering.
We had our Number One ration books now, after the big sugar panic of the spring. Sugar was down to a trickle, so Kool-Aid was out. Everything on the table was going to be rationed sooner or later, canned goods because of the tin—everything. The Hisers were ready.
Mr. Hiser said he’d retired from retirement. He was in bib overalls again and his Purina Chows cap.
“You boys are welcome to do some digging and weeding,” he told us, so Scooter and I got busy collecting scrap farther down the street.
The oldest house dated from before bungalows, like a house in the country before the town crept up. An old man lived there alone. Mr. Stonecypher. And if any house in town was haunted, here it was. So Scooter and I dared each other to begin at Mr. Stonecypher’s. It sounded swell till we got there.
We pulled our Radio Flyer wagons around to the back. We’d tried hitching the wagons to our bikes, but that hadn’t worked. “You knock.”
“No. You.”
The back door flew open, and we fell off the step and grabbed each other.
Mr. Stonecypher glared out. He looked like Father Time. “Stick ’em up,” he said.
We stared.
“Whatcha want?” He had a voice like a gravel pit.
“WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?” Scooter yelled at him, really brave. “WE’RE COLLECTING STUFF FOR THE WAR EFFORT.”
Mr. Stonecypher jerked. He had eyebrows like nests. “Quit yelling,” he said. “I’m not deaf. That’s Hiser.”
“Tin cans?” Scooter said. Housewives were to soak off the labels, flatten the empty cans, and take them back to the store. So said the OPA. There was no housewife here, but Mr. Stonecypher looked like he ate straight from the can.
“Five thousand tin cans will make a shell casing,” Scooter said like he knew. I let him do the talking.
“That a fact,” Mr. Stonecypher said. “Don’t stand in the door. Come on in. You’re letting the flies out.”
He didn’t tell us to wipe our feet, and no wonder. We stuck fast to the kitchen floor. Everything was flaking or rusted out. It was fairly interesting, but only in daylight.
“Whatever you’ve got we’ll take,” Scooter said, all business. We were looking for metal because of the movie tickets, but whatever, even rubber. But not paper. Paper came later.
A brown picture of a young soldier in an old uniform hung in the living room. The place was so clearly haunted I couldn’t believe it. Scooter spotted a wind-up Victrola with a gigantic brass horn. A load of scrap metal right there.
“How about that?” he asked Mr. Stonecypher, who was on our heels.
“Nothin’ doin’,” he said. “Them things is coming back.”
“How about your basement?” Scooter said.
“Forget my basement. It’s off-limits,” Mr. Stonecypher said. “I keep my still down there. If you saw it, I’d have to rub you out.”
A still was for making corn liquor. People made their own at home back in Prohibition times. We looked at him. Did he know Prohibition was over? His teeth clicked at us. “You can scout around the attic. I got a job for you up there.”
A problem with old people, as we were to learn, was that they always had a job for you.
Down a dark hall, Mr. Stonecypher pulled a folding ladder out of the ceiling, and Scoot swarmed up. So I had to.
The eaves up there were clotted with dried wasps’ nests. An old lightbulb with a pointed tip hung down. Scooter pulled its chain so we could see because there was only one pokey window over the front porch roof.
“See that winder?” Mr. Stonecypher’s voice echoed up. “It’s open a crack. Shut it for me. I don’t want to get bats in my belfry.”
Scooter stared at me with round eyes. Too late, he mouthed. But he banged the window down, which caused a lot of buzzing in the walls.
“How about these toys?” Scooter yelled down. An open box was heaped with really old cast-iron toys. A little touring car and a toy implement like a manure-spreader or something. Many things, small but heavy.
“Leave them.”
We jumped. Mr. Stonecypher had followed us partway up the ladder. Only his eerie old head showed, like a skull on the attic floor.
“And keep clear of that trunk.”
Over against the webbed eaves stood a hulking foot locker, stenciled with brown letters. “Don’t mess with it, or I’ll have to rub—”
“How about that?” Scooter pointed out the head of an old brass bed. A single bed, but tall. It was a couple of movie tickets right there.
“If you can get it down, you can have it,” Mr. Stonecypher said, “and tell ’em to drop it directly on old Hirohito’s head. And that’ll do you.” He vanished.
We worked for half an hour getting the brass bed loose and down the ladder in a shower of mouse droppings. It was about too much for us. We were at the back door now and heading for open country with it. Mr. Stonecypher was still on our heels, and his teeth were clicking like a Spanish dance. When we were outside, he said, “Here’s some more metal for you.”
He put out his old papery paw and dropped a dime into each of our hands. “And you ought to wear your Cub Scout uniforms, or something to make you look regulation. Ain’t everybody as friendly as I am.”
Then he banged the back door on us.
We’d sweated through our polo shirts, and the bed kept falling off the wagon.
“What do you think was in that trunk?” I asked Scooter.
“Mrs. Stonecypher,” he said.
Dad Could See in the Dark . . .
. . . as any Halloweener could tell you. The Civil Defense issued him a white tin helmet and an armband with the striped diamond in a circle, and he was the street’s air raid warden.
When the siren sounded, I supposed I’d be sitting home in the dark. But Mom handed me something, an armband with a striped diamond in a circle, homemade and the size to fit over my puny bicep. She was doing more sewing now. Clothes rationing was just around a couple of corners.
The armband wouldn’t have fooled anybody, but it felt right. Behind us, Mom threw a towel over the radio to hide the orange light in the dial. They said the Luftwaffe could see a struck match from a mile up. At the door, she pulled on me. “Don’t let your dad fall down. Watch out for him.”
“Because he’s the biggest kid on the block?” I said.
“No,” Mom said. “Because he isn’t.”
Outside you couldn’t see where the porch steps ended. The corner streetlight was off, and there wasn’t a star in the sky, like they’d blacked out heaven. The Packard out at the curb could have been anything—a pile of lumber.
The Hisers’ house next door was a black shape. Even the night birds seemed to be standing around on their branches, wondering what happened.
I kept next to Dad. We were to spot for any stray lights left on, and our beat was both sides of the street, from the park boundary at our end down to West Main.
The Hisers’ porch swing squawked in the night. There was nothing to see out here, but they wouldn’t have missed it. Dad flashed his red-bulbe
d light up at them.
“Earl?” Mr. Hiser spoke over the spirea. “Hitler was here, but he seen you coming.”
The Hisers cackled.
Box elder roots had heaved the sidewalk, but Dad’s foot knew that slab by heart, from hide-and-seek. A lot of people were on their porches. It was too hot inside, hotter than a Model T radiator, as Mrs. Hiser always said. Living room radios blared so that people could hear the WDZ rebroadcast of a Brooklyn Dodgers game. The Dodgers were enjoying a ten-and-a-half-game lead. You could follow the play from house to house. “There’s the pitch . . . and it’s low and outside . . .”
We were passing the Friedingers’ place when I got the idea we were being followed. It was probably just being out in the dark, but I could feel it down my back. A shoe scraped behind us, and I leaned into Dad. I wasn’t about to look around. A small rock got kicked.
We were even with the Bixbys’ overgrown lilac bush. Dad edged me off the sidewalk. One sidestep, and we’d vanished into bush branches. My hand hooked Dad’s belt. Twigs fingered my face. Somebody was coming along the sidewalk. A step, then a stumble. Somebody wondered where we’d gone. The night stood still.
A shape, small and gnomish, passed us, a reach away. We stepped out, Dad with me stuck to him. He flashed his red bulb on the follower.
Face glaring red in the dark, bug-eyed, Scooter shrieked.
He was scared out of his wits, but what did he expect? We were out here on official business, which he wasn’t. Dad reached into his pants pocket. Was he going to cuff Scooter and run him in? Seemed fair.
Dad pulled something out and handed it over. “Here, Scoot,” he said. “Try this for size.” I saw in the red light it was a homemade armband like mine. Mom had sewn two of them. And it was okay. It was fine. Dad had another side, and Scooter took it.
We went on past the Rogerses’ house, but we were safe enough with Dad here. That’s when we saw our first light, beaming like a beacon down through tree limbs from an attic window. It was Mr. Stonecypher’s. Scooter looked around Dad at me.
“Well, he’s an old duffer,” Dad said. “Who knows how long he’s left that light burning.”
Scooter and I happened to know. He looked around at me again. We’d forgotten to turn out the light when we’d brought the brass bed down, days and days ago. Weeks? Anyway, it had slipped our minds. We’d been busy.
“We’ll wait,” we said when Dad turned up the front walk, but he told us we were on duty. The Stonecypher porch crinkled with last year’s leaves. Dad knocked, then pounded. The house was dark as pitch, except for the attic.
The door sprang open, and there etched against blackness was the ghostly Stonecypher shape.
“Keep them hands where I can see ’em,” he greeted. Scooter and I shrank.
“Mr. Stonecypher,” Dad said, pointing to the attic, “whose side are you on?”
“Who wants to know?” he rasped. “That you, Earl? Why you wearing a wash pan on your head? Better come on in before you get lost. They’re havin’ a blackout. And don’t stand in the door. You’ll let the flies out.”
Scooter groaned. But we had to go in, and it was that same smell of old medicine inside. Dad said he was showing a light upstairs, though Mr. Stonecypher didn’t think so. But when he pulled the ladder out of the hallway ceiling, light flooded down. He spotted Scooter and me, blinking. His old eyes narrowed, but his jaw clamped shut.
“I’ll skin up there and turn it off,” I said, helpful.
Scrambling up the ladder, I grabbed for the light chain. The box of ancient toys was still there. And the old trunk over in the eaves with the stenciled lettering. Then I was feeling my way back to the ladder past the trunk.
Mr. Stonecypher wasn’t in a big hurry to see us leave. Now he hung in his front door.
“Earl, you tell me what this war’s for when you find out,” he said to Dad. “You tell me what the last one was for.” The fire in his old eyes flared, but his head drooped. I could see in the dark now.
Dad put his hand out on Mr. Stonecypher’s sloping shoulder. He kept it there, and Mr. Stonecypher put his face in his old hands. There was a bad, shaky sound like a sob.
“I wish I could tell you,” Dad said in a voice half his size.
Mr. Stonecypher swallowed hard. “You got through it, Earl.” He looked up, and his old face glistened. “You may have been roughed up, but you come through and come back and had your life and your boys.”
“I did,” Dad said, “but a lot of the best ones didn’t make it.”
Mr. Stonecypher turned in the door, and Dad’s hand slipped away. Then the old, old man closed himself into his house, and you could feel him in there, in the dark.
We made the rest of our rounds, down to West Main, which was the truck route. The Civil Defense Auxiliary Police were directing the traffic that crawled along with just running lights. We headed back on Scooter’s side of the street, Dad between us, bear-big in a night too dark for shadows.
“Dad, what did it mean? With Mr. Stonecypher?”
“He lost his son in the First World War,” Dad said. “His only boy. He’d have been my age. Maybe younger.”
We were by the Tomlinsons’ front walk. “There’s a trunk in his attic with letters on it,” Scooter said.
“That’d be the foot locker they sent his boy’s gear back home in,” Dad said. “That’s what he’s got left.”
We watched Scooter up to his porch. The all-clear sounded, and the world came back. The streetlamp on our corner showed us the way home. Lights in porch ceilings came on, buzzing fishbowls in yellow halos, all the way to ours.
“We’re going to have to look out for Scooter,” Dad said.
“How come?”
“His dad’s taking up a commission in the navy.”
“Scooter never said.”
“Maybe he’s not ready to,” Dad said. And I remembered the snazzy Schwinn that Scooter got last Christmas. It could have been his dad already saying good-bye.
I leaned into my dad the rest of the way.
“When you’re taller than I am,” he said, “are you still going to stick this close to me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” So he threw an arm around my spindly shoulder, and we went on home. Mom was pulling a towel off the Philco, and a song welled out: “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World.”
Now the Government Wanted Milkweed . . .
. . . to replace something called “kapok” from the Malay Peninsula. Milkweed was for stuffing in life jackets, to keep shipwrecked sailors afloat, or pilots who’d ditched at sea.
At the tag end of summer the stuff was bursting out of its pods along every country road, and Scooter and I wanted to be outdoors till the last second before school. We’d already scooped up enough scrap metal to get us into the Varsity Theater through all next year and into 1944.
Last summer the park was the size of our universe. But the bikes pushed out our boundaries. We fell off them and got crossways in traffic. I’d crashed down a culvert and sprung the frame on mine. But we’d been almost to Maroa and Mt. Zion on secondary roads. Sacks for the milkweed hung off our handlebars and caught the breeze.
We were out past Wyckles Corner one blazing morning so close to September you could smell school. There was milkweed, tangled with ragweed and goldenrod. We’d just bumped our bikes over a blue racer snake, dead in the road with a red smear where a car had run over its head.
Before Scooter got any ideas about tying the snake to his back fender, I wanted to put some distance between it and us. The road was ankle-deep in dust, so it was uphill pedaling the whole time.
Back in the fields stood a ruined old barn with a Red Pouch Tobacco sign flaking off its side. A falling-down barn and then an old sloping house. You could see daylight through both of them. Deep in weeds up by the house was a beat-up 1933 Chevy sedan with suicide doors. It had a license plate, but it looked pretty weary.
There was a mess of milkweed, but we liked the look of the spooky old b
arn. The doors were off it, and I thought we could see enough from out here in the lot. Snakes could be in there out of the sun, snakes with swaying heads. Copper-heads. We looked inside, then looked again.
In the middle of the dirt floor were the remains of an ancient automobile, striped with sunlight, furred with dust. An old jalopy like the mummified corpse of a car in this rickety tomb of a barn.
“Neat,” Scooter breathed, and walked his Schwinn inside. He parked it against a support beam, so I had to. A row of rusty rattraps hung webbed together down the post.
The car had been old when Packard built Dad’s. Even the chicken droppings on it were older than we were. Wooden-spoke wheels. The tires were long gone, and everything had lived in it at one time or other: chickens, hogs—snakes, no doubt. The crank was still in the slot under the radiator.
Anything this historic had to be a treasure. Scooter smeared spit on the radiator cap, and the nickel winked—nickel, not chrome. He rubbed an emblem, and the faded letters read: PAN AMERICAN.
The hood was missing, and generations of animals had been nesting in there, living in messes of their—
“Something ate the roof,” Scooter said, but the skeleton of it was there, like a ribby old umbrella. Scooter turned the latch, and the front door jumped off the car and smacked the dust of the floor. Then we were sitting on the front seats, leather oozing stuffing.
Scooter was behind the big wood steering wheel. The metal pedals stood high enough for his feet. Mine dangled because there wasn’t much floor on my side. We sat there, pretending the missing motor was turning over, firing back through the tailpipe. Scooter geared down with the missing shift. We were two sports from another time, barreling down country roads, free as air, old enough to drive.