by Richard Peck
Now Hoyt Albers’s mom took us on. We did regulation army calisthenics in her front yard while she watched from the porch. Scooter and I thought we were getting a little old for this. Knowing the secret Cub handshake and what WEBELOS meant wasn’t the big deal it used to be. But we thought we had a great Cubmaster. This was a Boy Scout who came to our meetings and took charge of our pack.
Ours was Carlisle Snyder, who wore his Scout uniform plastered with badges and medals to our den meetings. We tied a lot of knots under his direction, and he was pretty good with Walter Meece, who needed extra time for everything. Carlisle was in ninth grade, taller than Mrs. Albers, and shaved. He was pretty much who all us Cubs wanted to be.
Besides, the Community Paper Drive was starting up, the biggest collecting campaign of the war so far, and we were competing citywide as Cub dens and Scout troops.
Scooter wasn’t crazy about wearing his Cub blue and yellow, even the neckerchief. “There’s more to war than wearing a uniform,” he said. But we wore ours when we paired up for the paper drive.
Off we went again, pulling our wagons over the old scrap metal route. More people worked now and weren’t home during the day. We were back in the Country of the Old. Not Mr. Stonecypher. There wasn’t any paper in his attic, and his basement was off-limits because of the still.
“Old Lady Graves?” Scooter said.
“You knock,” I said.
“What this time?” she said when she flung open her back door. She was about Miss Titus’s age, but not as good-looking. Her scalp bristled with curlers. She had enough metal on her head to build a Jeep.
“Paper,” Scooter said. “When we turn in a thousand pounds apiece, we get General Eisenhower’s medal.”
“Do tell,” she said. “Start with the basement.”
It was real dank, though she’d kept every paper ever delivered to her. But water stood in her basement, and the newspapers had mostly turned into towers of foul mush. We took from the top and were up and down her back stairs with yellow piles.
Then she sent us up to her attic. “While you’re up there, bring down my dress dummy.”
We moaned.
“And my sewing machine. I’ve got to start making my own clothes again,” Old Lady Graves hollered. “There’s a war on, you know.”
Her dress dummy looked like her, but better. It had no head. Her sewing machine was a foot-pedal Singer with a rubber drive belt. It would be swell scrap, and it outweighed us. It barely budged, but we got it down, a stair step at a time. Only then could we go back for her collection of Saturday Evening Posts and Ladies’ Home Journals.
Hefting a stack higher than his head, Scooter tripped over something and fell flat. Magazines flew. I didn’t laugh, but it was funny, and he’d skinned his knee. He’d tripped over a bag of something. “What is it anyway?” he said.
It was a hundred pounds of sugar.
“Old Lady Graves is a hoarder,” Scooter whispered, which was no big surprise. We looked closer at the dusty bag. It was hard as a rock, and moth- and mouse-eaten. The lettering on it was faded. Scooter smacked his forehead. It was from World War I.
We sat on it, wringing wet from all our work. Scooter still thought we were giving too much to the war effort. But we wanted those medals of General Eisenhower’s.
We were even-steven about it, piling half our paper on Scooter’s back porch, half on mine. We’d finally figured out we had to take twine and tie our scrap paper into bundles. We were dragging full loads home one afternoon when a big stake-bed REO truck pulled up beside us. Three Boy Scouts from Troop 15 were up in the cab. The one at the wheel was an Eagle Scout, old enough to drive. He had badges all over him.
We were pulling these puny Radio Flyer wagons that kept tipping over, and now we looked up. It was a marvel how much paper you could get with a truck and a whole troop collecting together. Six or eight Scouts stood up there in the truck bed in the paper piles. The Eagle Scout leaned out from the driver’s seat.
“You two. We’ll take your paper.”
We tried not to get any smaller when the Scouts jumped down off the truck.
“It’s ours,” Scooter said. “We collected it.” But his voice hadn’t changed yet.
“You want to fight eleven of us for it, squirt?” the Eagle Scout said. “Put up your dukes.” And they all snorted. Scout snorts.
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.
By That Summer of 1943 . . .
. . . 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 an
d 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.”
But She Would . . .
. . . 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.”
The Jalopy Parade . . .
. . . 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:
DON’T TREAD ON ME
and
LIVE FREE OR DIE
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:
HERE LIES MUSSOLINI PLENTY OF ROOM INSIDE FOR TWO MORE
—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:
PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION
and
THE BOOGIE-WOOGIE BUGLE BOY OF COMPANY B
and
SO LONG, MAMA, I’M OFF TO YOKOHAMA
There were thirty-eight jalopies in all, which Scooter calculated would add up to a landing craft.
The entry fee was a fifty-dollar war bond. Somehow, Dad pulled the money out of thin air. Working into the nights, he and Bill had unfrozen the axles on the Pan American and found four tired tires, bald as Miss Titus’s mama and of various sizes.
Once we got the auto hosed down, it had a real good coat of deep red lacquer paint on it, which we buffed. Scooter and I went to work with a can of Brasso on the brightwork. We painted whitewalls on the tires. Mom resewed the upholstery, and we laid plywood where the floors were missing.
A lot of jalopies were painted all over: song titles and sayings like “Don’t Make a Yankee Cranky.” Some of them were too rusted out to say anything. But our polished jalopy was going to go out in style with everything but a hood and a horn.
We thought we’d tow it, but Dad said they might want the Packard too. He didn’t see why we couldn’t rig up some kind of engine to get us as far as the scrap yard. He had a little Willys-Knight motor he tinkered with. Its transmission was near death, and it had no reverse gear. But he and Bill got it slung in the car and introduced i
t to the driveshaft. A lot of baling wire was involved.
And now we were in the staging area, behind the high school Model A’s, waiting our turn in the parade. Dad was behind the wheel, wearing his Shriner’s fez. Scooter and I were up there with him. Mom sat on the backseat with Bill in his uniform.
Behind us, a team of plumed white dairy horses pawed the pavement, ready to go. They were hitched up to a float, which was the centerpiece of the parade. It was a Wizard of Oz castle with tin can towers, blinding in the sun. On top was the Jalopy Queen and her court. She sat in a throne made out of chrome car bumpers with her court arranged around her in their prom dresses, carrying tinfoil bouquets.
Bill looked back. “That’s not—”
“Diana Powers,” Mom said.
She’d have been a few years behind Bill in school. And of course he’d never seen her wearing a crown of gilded sink-stoppers on top of a parade float. And a real low-cut prom dress. She was the best-looking girl in the county, by far. Even I noticed, and I was just beginning to notice these things. Her family lived on top of Moreland Heights and owned all the grain elevators between here and Pana. Diana Powers looked down from on high.
“Bill?” she called out. “Bill Bowman?”
He stood. The Pan American swayed. His wings winked as he turned.
“Bill Bowman,” she called down. “I’ve always had such a crush on you. Get up here.”
Our turn came. The Willys-Knight motor labored, and we made the corner into Water Street past the Hotel Orlando, the Busy Bee Shoeshine Parlor. The Model A ragtops were getting a roar from the crowd. But ours was the best jalopy, and the sign on the re-hung door read:
THE PAN AMERICAN hometown made and ready to rain on Hitler’s parade
Scooter wrote it.
Behind us came the Jalopy Queen’s float. High in the air like the figures on a wedding cake were Diana Powers, nodding to the crowd, and standing above her my brother Bill, and both of them golden in the rust, white, and blue day.