“Do either one of you practice?” she finally snapped. We’d been working on a song of hers, a message song about bullying. The message was supposed to be that bullying is bad, which, of course, everybody already knows, though that doesn’t seem to stop it from happening.
Greg admitted that he didn’t exactly like to practice on his own. “But isn’t that why we’re here?” he asked. “To practice?”
I nodded in agreement.
Julie got annoyed. “This is supposed to be band practice,” she said. “It’s not the same thing as instrument practice, where you actually try to learn how to play your guitar. It’s not just going to happen because you want it to happen. You have to learn.”
Greg and I looked at each other, clearly both thinking the same thing: How could somebody our same age sound so much like a grown-up?
“Let’s just try it again,” I suggested. “We’ll do better, I promise.”
“Fine,” Julie said. “But promise me you’ll practice your instruments when you go home tonight, too. And every night. And every morning. All the time!”
Greg said he was going to start sleeping with his guitar. “I’ll probably unplug it from the amp, though,” he added. “I don’t want to get electrocuted or anything.”
“Same here,” I said.
Julie threw both hands down on her keyboard. The sound shook the room. “Idiots,” she said.
Greg and I just grinned at her.
We launched into the antibullying song again, which seemed appropriate after the incident with Belman and his gang in the lunchroom, and this time almost, sort of, approximately, kind of got it right.
Mom was mad at me when I got home late from practice. She even yelled at me, which she just about never did.
“Anderson Carter, do you know what time it is?”
She was clearly upset with me, but I could also tell that she was in a lot of pain from her MS, and it had probably been a terrible day for her all around. I felt bad, though, that I hadn’t checked in with her to see if she needed me to do anything to help.
“Sorry, Mom,” I said. “Practice ran late. Do you want me to fix you some dinner or something? Or get you the ice pack?”
Mom sank back into the recliner in the living room, still tense and angry. A vein stood out on her forehead, but I didn’t know if that was because of her being mad, or because of how bad she hurt.
“Make yourself something,” she said. “Your father’s stuck in traffic and won’t be home for another hour or so. He just called.”
I got Mom some iced tea and cut up an apple and put some cheese and grapes and stuff on a plate, just in case she changed her mind. I hung out with her in the living room, telling her about school and stuff. She felt better after she ate and after she held the cold glass of tea between her hands for a while, sipping occasionally. I told her about band practice and about that song that Julie wrote for us.
“I smell a hit,” she said with a small smile.
I hated it when Mom wasn’t feeling well, which was a lot of the time. And nothing made me happier than when she started to feel better.
She dismissed me to go do my homework, and so I finally went to my bedroom, dragging my guitar, amp, and book bag with me — and fully expecting William Foxwell to be there. Well, actually I was hoping he would be so I’d have an excuse not to do my math homework. But he didn’t show up that night until I finished my last assignment. It was almost as if he’d planned it that way.
“Hey,” I said. “Where have you been? Are you okay?” It was funny how quickly I’d gone from being scared out of my mind to being worried about him, the same way I always worried about Mom.
He sat on my bed in his usual place down near the end. The mattress still didn’t sag or anything. It was like he was there but he was also not there, as weird as that sounds.
“It took me a while,” he said.
“What did?” I asked.
He looked around my room, taking in the posters and stuff, as if it was the first time he’d ever been there.
“Putting it all together,” he answered. “The story. My story. It’s like puzzle pieces. There’s Betty and Glenn and my old hometown. There’s my mom and dad. Enlisting. The war.”
“I was going to ask you about that,” I said. “You know we won, right? The war, I mean.”
He brightened considerably. “Oh yeah?” he said. “I sort of figured we did, from the way you boys were talking. And your friend Julie, well, I can see she’s got some Japanese in her, but she was pretty sure about being an American, too.”
William Foxwell scratched his chin, and then asked, “How long did it take?”
“The war?” I asked. “World War II?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That one.”
“About six years,” I said. “But the U.S. was just in it for the last four.”
William Foxwell shook his head. “That’s an awful lot of war.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Too much war.”
“I guess any war is too much,” he said. “But sometimes you just have to do it. I mean, Hitler and the Nazis. I remember them. And Pearl Harbor and what the Japanese did there.”
“You know we’re kind of on the same side now,” I said. “Us and Japan. We drive a lot of their cars.”
William Foxwell’s face tightened. “The same side you say? Wow. I’d have never thought that would happen. Who are we up against now? Is it the Germans again? The Soviets?”
I shook my head. “No. Neither one. We’re on the same side as the Germans now, too. I mean, we’re friends with Japan and Germany. And the Soviet Union is called Russia now. Although I’m not too sure about them. We’re not exactly enemies with the Russians. But I don’t think we’re what you’d call friends, either.”
“Interesting,” William Foxwell said. “So I guess it was all worth it in the end. The war, I mean. The one I was in. World War II. There haven’t been any others since then, have there?”
“No,” I said. “Well, yes. But no world wars.”
He nodded. “Good,” he kept saying. “That’s good.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So, anyway, we did find out some things. Like the name of your ship. And the place where you went missing in action. Were you around when we were talking about it — but just not where we could see you? Usually I feel this weird sort of breeze when I can’t see you, but I’m pretty sure you’re there.”
He sat up straighter on the bed. “No, not this time,” he said. “I kind of got hung up.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Well, anyway, you were on an aircraft carrier ship called the USS Yorktown,” I said. “First in the Battle of the Coral Sea, which was where your ship got bombed. That’s the bombing you told me about the other day. But then a few weeks later you were in an even bigger naval battle called the Battle of Midway. I haven’t had time to find out much about that yet, but Julie said she found a record, that that was where you went MIA. She said you were eighteen at that time, and you were a seaman second-class, and you were still serving on the Yorktown.”
William Foxwell’s expression went from quizzical to dead serious. “Eighteen,” he said. “Wow. I mean, I knew I was young and all. But eighteen …”
“Do you remember anything about the Battle of Midway?” I asked.
He frowned, wrinkled his brow, obviously thinking hard, trying to remember. “Midway. Midway.” He repeated it a few more times, but then seemed to sort of give up. “I’m going to have to think about that one.”
Then he brightened. “But I do remember something else about my ship. The Yorktown. That sounds right, now that you mention it. Big carrier. Couple thousand of us sailors crammed on board. Months and months at sea. And I remember something else about that Coral Sea battle, too. The Japanese did manage to sink a bunch of our ships. Couple of destroyers, maybe a cruiser, and they nailed us good on the Yorktown. But they couldn’t sink the Yorktown no matter what.
“And I remember us sailing back to Hawaii afterward, with that gi
ant bomb crater gaping open right down the middle of the ship. I couldn’t believe we made it. The ocean never looked so big as when we did that. We couldn’t repair anything out to sea, so there were the reminders of what happened — right there, everywhere you looked.”
“Is there anything else you remember?” I asked, still hoping.
“Now that we’re talking about it, yeah, I do,” he said. “A few things, anyway. I remember my job was to hose down and clear the flight deck. There were a couple of teams of us. That’s what we did morning to night. That and clean and shine anything there was on deck that could be cleaned and shined. There were always oil spills after takeoffs and landings. Those leaky old planes. Or if one of them pancaked a landing, we had to clean that up, too.”
“Pancaked a landing?” I said, not sure I heard him right.
“Yeah. An emergency landing,” he said. “I sure did wish I could be up in one of those planes instead of scrubbing that darn flight deck. Torpedo plane, dive-bomber, fighter — I didn’t care what. I just wished I could somehow get to fly. Pilot or navigator, machine gunner, I didn’t care what.
“But that wasn’t my job, even though I studied those planes every chance I got, down in the hangar belowdecks. I remember working out in the blazing sun until we were bone tired. Then it was back down below to our bunks, four deep. No, wait. Not bunks. It was hammocks. Wasn’t any such thing as privacy. You had your one little shelf and your footlocker stowed down below. And lying there, trying to sleep, there was always so much snoring. Plus, somebody’s rear end was always hanging down just above you, practically in your face.”
He laughed. “You sure didn’t want them serving beans in the mess hall, let me tell you,” he said. “Guys in their hammocks, packed in like sardines. Nowhere to get away from a gas attack. And you just know once one fellow started, everybody else was going to answer.”
I laughed, too, and that got William Foxwell laughing some more, and once we both got started it was hard to stop. It was good to know some things hadn’t changed, and some things never stopped being funny, whether you were in the middle of a world war or not.
William Foxwell faded away not too long after that. Maybe all that talking and then laughing wore him out. My eyelids kept drooping shut, so I couldn’t say for sure, just that one minute he was there and the next minute he was gone.
The night wasn’t over yet, though. I was just about asleep when somebody knocked on my window — three times fast, three times slow, three times fast again, which everybody knows is Morse code for the old distress signal SOS.
I knew right away it was Greg, but it still surprised me. He hadn’t done this in a while.
I opened the window and helped Greg climb in.
“Need a place to sleep?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked.
He shook his head and I said okay. My sleeping bag was tucked under the bed, and I dragged it out and handed it to him, plus one of my pillows. He threw it on the floor, unzipped the bag, crawled in without bothering to change for bed, and turned his face to the wall.
I heard his muffled voice: “Thanks, Anderson.”
“No problem,” I said. I knew what it was, of course — his dad had been drinking. Mostly he didn’t drink, according to Greg. But sometimes his dad went into what Greg called his “dark patches” and he drank a lot, usually just for a couple of days. And when that happened, he started yelling at Greg for all kinds of stuff, or for nothing at all. It was never anything more, just the yelling, but that was bad enough for anyone. Greg found it easier if he just stayed out of his dad’s way when he was in a dark patch.
Mr. Troutman was pretty quiet most of the time besides that. I could never tell if he liked me or not, but I guess he thought I was okay. Greg and I hung out at my house most of the time, so it wasn’t much of an issue. Mr. Troutman had a construction company and hired a lot of war veterans to work for him. He was a war vet, too. Greg said his dad had served in Vietnam. Mom once told me she thought that might have something to do with Mr. Troutman’s drinking.
This wasn’t the first time Greg had come over to sleep at my house. I’d talked about it before with Mom, and she said it was okay, but not if it became a regular thing. Once, last year, Mr. Troutman came over and talked to Mom after Greg spent the night. He stood on the front porch and wouldn’t come in, even though Mom invited him. Mr. Troutman thanked her for being so nice to Greg and apologized. Mom said she hoped he was getting some help and he said he was.
Mom was sitting at the table when we came in for breakfast. Dad, who I had never even heard come in last night, had already left again for work.
“Morning, boys,” she said.
“Good morning, Mrs. Carter,” Greg said. He was always super polite to my parents. He told me one time that he wished they were his. I didn’t quite know what to say back.
We wolfed down some cereal and orange juice and rode our bikes to his house to get his books and stuff for school. He had biked over last night without bringing anything, not even a change of clothes. I guess when his dad got going after he’d been drinking, Greg just wanted to get as far away as fast as he could. It helped that I lived only a few blocks away, so it was safe enough for him to ride over.
He was happy to talk about anything else — especially the latest on William Foxwell. I even decided to fill Greg in on how guilty William Foxwell said he still felt — seventy years later — because he did what probably just about anybody would do during a bomb attack on your ship, which was to hide.
“Maybe he, like, redeemed himself later on,” Greg said.
“You know, did something heroic, saved somebody’s life, something like that.”
We were a couple of blocks away from school, still on our bikes, but it looked like we would make it in time for the homeroom bell.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It would be great if something like that happened. But he told me his job was basically just being a janitor on the ship, cleaning and stuff.”
“Well, we have to find out,” Greg said. “Or help him find out, or remember. Julie said we need to find out everything we can about this Battle of Midway.”
“Oh yeah!” I said, also remembering what Julie had said, and how she had said it: “The Battle of Midway was only the most important sea battle in the whole of World War II!”
I didn’t get a chance to talk to Julie that morning — we had a test, so we weren’t allowed to talk for the whole period in the class we had together. I’d studied a little, but not enough. It took me the whole period just to get through by mostly guessing at the answers.
We didn’t get a chance to talk during lunch, either, because there was an incident with Greg. Belman showed up in the lunch line and must have said something to him because one minute Greg was just standing there, holding his tray loaded with what looked like mashed potatoes and gravy and more green blobs of quivering Jell-O, and the next minute he was dumping it all onto Belman’s shirt. Belman was a lot bigger than Greg. He staggered back with this horrified look on his face, stared at the food smeared all over him and dripping onto the floor, then he grabbed Greg by the front of his shirt and started shaking him like a rag doll, yelling his head off the whole time. “I’ll kill you, you little twerp!”
The whole thing lasted only about a minute before one of the vice principals stepped in and broke it up. It was Mr. Crowley, who was also a PE teacher. He wasn’t very tall but made up for it by being about twice as wide as any other adult I’d ever seen. He ordered them out of the lunchroom.
Julie had just walked up to my table. “Come on,” she said, heading for the door behind them.
“Where?” I asked, reluctant to follow, even though it was Greg.
“To help him, of course,” she said, not even bothering to look back at me.
We stood outside the principal’s office and tried to eavesdrop on the conversation — or, rather, the lecture. Principal Lewis was really letting both Greg
and Belman have it. I must have heard him say, or shout, “This behavior will not be tolerated at this school!” half a dozen times. Through the door’s window I could see Greg just sitting there, fuming, but Belman was slumped down so low that he practically disappeared into his chair.
Julie swallowed hard, and then simultaneously knocked and pushed the door open. Principal Lewis stopped in mid-sentence: “This behavior will not be tol —”
“Sorry, sir,” Julie said in her most formal voice. “But we’re here as character witnesses.”
The principal just stared at her. Nobody ever just walked into Principal Lewis’s office like that.
“I’m sure you’ll want to hear what we have to say,” Julie continued, while the principal remained speechless, though his face had gotten so red — either from yelling at Greg and Belman or because of the interruption — that it seemed not impossible that he might just burst into flames.
Belman sat up straight and glared at Julie.
“We saw the whole thing,” Julie added. “Greg was just defending himself. I’m sure he feels terrible for letting his emotions get the better of him, but some things you shouldn’t be allowed to say at school, and I don’t think they should even be repeated here in your office.” Then, she cut her eyes at Belman.
I was certain that there was no way for Julie to know what Belman had actually said to Greg, but it didn’t matter in the end. Principal Lewis sputtered for a moment but didn’t ask for specifics.
“Back to your classes!” he barked at all of us. “And don’t let me hear about any more disturbances. This behavior will not be tolerated in this school. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir,” said Julie. She yanked Greg up, and we took off before Principal Lewis could change his mind. Belman wasn’t so lucky.
“Not so fast, young man,” the principal snapped when he tried to follow us. “You’d been warned already not to show your face back in my office.”
The door closed behind us, and we practically raced down the hall to grab books from our lockers and make it to the next class.
The Secret of Midway Page 6