I told Julie later that I figured Belman had said something about Greg’s dad. It had happened before. Ever since I was first friends with Greg, people would see his dad somewhere after he’d been drinking, and then they’d make fun of him when they saw Greg. Greg couldn’t stand it when anybody did that.
It was one thing for him to complain about his dad to me or whatever, but it was another for somebody else to say something.
Twice I’d had to help Greg out when he went after a bigger guy, like Belman in the lunchroom. Both times I tackled the guy off Greg — even though I was so scared my teeth were actually chattering — and then Greg and I went running away before the guy could get up.
This time, though, it was something different. Greg clued us in when he came to band practice that afternoon.
“He said he heard we were starting a band,” Greg explained, “and he said we were the three loseriest kids in school. That’s actually how he said it: ‘loseriest.’ I don’t even think that’s a real word. What an idiot.”
“And you dumped your lunch on him for that?” Julie asked.
Greg looked away. “He might have said some other things,” he said. “But, hey, why don’t we get started on practice, anyway? I’ve been working on the vocals for that bullying song, and I’m ready to wail.”
I laughed when he said “ready to wail.” It sounded like an old eighties expression my dad might use to sound cool.
Greg plugged his guitar into his amplifier, and Julie and I did the same with my guitar and her keyboard.
I thought for a second I heard a trumpet playing off somewhere down the hall — just for a second — but then nothing.
Greg came home with me after practice, but he still wouldn’t tell me what Belman had said in the lunchroom. I finally gave up, and we decided to get on the Internet and look up the Battle of Midway. Even history research beat doing homework, as far as Greg was concerned.
What we found out was a lot.
There was a bunch of stuff online about how powerful the Imperial Japanese Navy was, and how pathetic the U.S. fleet was in comparison, especially after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Americans and the Australians might have stopped the Japanese at Coral Sea, where the Yorktown got bombed so badly, but the Imperial Navy, with their battleships and aircraft carriers and deadly submarines and superior airplanes and pilots, were definitely kicking butt everywhere else.
Especially because of their fighter planes — the famous Japanese Zeroes — that were so much faster than anything the U.S. had in the air. The way the Internet explained it, because they were so fast it was easy for the Zeroes to shoot down U.S. bomber planes whenever we tried to attack Japanese ships.
“Man,” Greg said at one point, letting out a long whistle. “I never realized how much better than us they were.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We were getting totally schooled.”
Greg and I wrestled for the mouse so we could keep on clicking and reading.
“So let me get this straight,” Greg said after we read some more. “It was basically two wars we were fighting at once: the one in Europe against the Nazis and the one in the Pacific against the Japanese. And early on we were losing both?
“And look at this,” Greg said before I could answer. He pointed to a page on one of the history websites we’d found. “We were afraid of the Japanese attacking Hawaii again and finishing off the job they started at Pearl Harbor.”
I pointed to the paragraph after the one he was exclaiming about. “And we were afraid that they would attack California, too.”
We both just sat there for a minute, letting this all sink in.
“So what about the Battle of Midway?” Greg asked.
“I think we’re getting to that,” I said. “But what I want to know first is where in the world Midway is even located.”
We pulled up some maps and pored over them until Greg shouted, “There it is!”
“Where?” I asked, squinting. The spot he was pointing at was barely a dot on the map. I leaned closer and squinted harder at the dot, and the writing next to it, and sure enough, there it was: Midway Islands. Right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Japan and California, more than a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands.
Somebody cleared his throat behind us, and Greg and I both jumped out of our chairs.
It was William Foxwell.
“It isn’t actually an island,” he said, as if he’d been in on the conversation all along. And who knows? Maybe he had been, just listening and not saying anything. He didn’t exactly make a lot of noise when he moved around. Definitely no clanking chains or spooky winds or creaking doors.
“What is it, then?” Greg asked.
“It’s what you call an atoll,” William Foxwell said. “I remember we heard about it. We had an airbase there. The Japanese wanted it to use for their next attack on Pearl Harbor. And they wanted our boys gone.”
“Right,” Greg said. “And an atoll is what exactly?”
“Kind of a coral reef ring with a big lagoon in the middle. The islands where the bases are, they’re part of the atoll.”
“What about the Battle of Midway?” I asked. “Do you remember that now, too, and what happened on your ship?”
William Foxwell nodded. “Kind of. Some of it. There’s a lot that’s still so fuzzy. But yeah. I remember now after the Coral Sea battle, after we made it back to Hawaii on the Yorktown, they brought a whole army of workers on board for emergency repairs. They had the entire crew working, too. And if we couldn’t repair something, they had us just nail up thick sheets of wood or steel and wall it off. Nobody even got any leave to go ashore. We were told it would take three months, that we’d be out of commission too long to help out at Midway. But the admiral said the Yorktown was getting fixed no matter what — and not in three months but in three days! He said she was going out to battle no matter what.”
“The admiral?” Greg asked.
“Admiral Chester Nimitz,” William Foxwell said, with an admiring tone in his voice. “The old man.”
“So he was, like, in charge, or whatever?” Greg asked.
“Oh yeah,” William Foxwell said, nodding emphatically. “Definitely the one in charge.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
William Foxwell smiled. “What do you think happened? The old man said to get the Yorktown repaired and join up with the rest of the fleet at Midway, so that’s what happened. Of course, nobody was supposed to know anything about where we were going and what was up. It was all top secret. But we knew all the same. My buddy Dewey Tomzak told me about it. He heard it from a guy down in the engine room. Don’t know where the engine-room guy heard it, but once somebody did, everybody did.
“Dewey said there was a rumor that we had a bunch of genius math guys in a secret bunker monitoring all the Japanese radio communications,” he continued, “and those boys managed to crack the Japanese radio code and that’s how we knew they were going after Midway. And that’s how the old man knew where to set his trap. Except we had only two other Yorktown-class carrier ships, ones that could hold a whole lot of planes — just two in the whole entire fleet, I’m pretty sure — so it was why they needed the Yorktown so bad.”
I’d been scanning the history website while he talked, and so far everything he said matched up: What William Foxwell hadn’t said — and maybe didn’t know, and maybe never knew — was that the Imperial Japanese Navy armada steaming across the Pacific was the most powerful naval force in history!
Greg was peppering William Foxwell with a bunch of other questions about Midway, but I could tell William’s gas gauge was close to empty, or his battery was running down, or whatever it was that happened to him when he began fading out, and his memory stopped working.
And then there was a quick knock on my bedroom door, the door swinging open before I could answer. It was Dad, who seemed to have a habit of interrupting just when things were getting the m
ost interesting.
“Hey, boys. Time for dinner.”
William Foxwell had already disappeared.
My head was spinning with all we’d just learned. It was hard being with William Foxwell one minute, and finding all this stuff out about what happened to him, and in the war, seventy years ago, and then suddenly being back in the real world.
Dad asked Greg if he’d like to come with us. We were going out for cheeseburgers because Mom was asleep on the couch in the living room and Dad didn’t want us to disturb her.
“Yes, sir,” Greg said quickly. “I’d like to.”
“And spending the night again?” Dad asked, as if that was a normal thing, which I suppose it kind of was.
“If that’s okay,” Greg said.
Dad looked at his watch. “Sure it is,” he said. “Let’s just call your dad so he’ll know where you are.”
Greg said he would, though he went outside to do it on his cell phone.
Julie went one step further than Greg and me and actually checked out some books on the Battle of Midway from the library. Greg and I both felt that if you couldn’t find it on the Internet, why bother? But when we said that to Julie, she just rolled her eyes and said, “Information is only as good as its source.”
“But the Internet is so easy!” Greg told her, and I had to agree. Plus, it had gotten us all the way to sixth grade and hadn’t let us down yet. So far, so good.
Julie rolled her eyes again, and handed each of us a book. “Morons,” she said. “Read these, and report back tomorrow. If you can find the entire book online, you can read it there. We need to know everything.”
Greg couldn’t believe it. “A whole book in one night?” he wailed. “Not possible!”
I said pretty much the same thing, but I knew there was no use arguing with Julie.
“Look,” she said, “you might have both seen him last night, but I just have a feeling that we don’t have all the time in the world to find out what happened to him. We have to get serious about this, or else I’m afraid William Foxwell will be stuck like he was for all those years since the war.”
“You mean, like, forever?” Greg asked.
“Maybe,” Julie said. “It could be. I mean, what are the rules here? It’s like there are Newton’s laws, physical laws, all of which we can verify and understand.”
“Sort of,” Greg said.
“Not sort of,” Julie said. “Definitely. So how does it work with ghosts? Anderson can see him and talk to him when he’s by himself. Anderson was the first one that the ghost revealed himself to. I only saw him, or the idea of him, or whatever that was, when he visited Anderson at the cafeteria that day. But to the rest of the kids in the lunchroom it just probably looked like Anderson was talking to himself.”
“Not probably,” Greg said. “That jerk kid Belman said something about it. He asked me if Anderson was mentally challenged or mentally ill or something.”
“What?” I said. “You didn’t tell me that before.”
Greg looked down. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” he said.
“Too late for that now,” Julie said.
She waited for about a second, then changed the subject back to ghosts in general, and William Foxwell in particular.
“It is only a theory,” she said, picking up where she’d left off, “but what I think is that there is an energy. That energy was awakened when Anderson found the coat and the letter, and at first, once it was awakened, that energy was very strong. So strong that Anderson could hear William Foxwell and see him. So strong that he could follow Anderson, and even show himself to us, to Anderson’s friends.”
I was getting the picture. “So strong that he could lift some things and hold them — the letter and the coat?” I asked.
“Right,” Julie said. “And the trumpet. The letter and the coat, these had great meaning for him. So the energy was strong. I’m not so sure about the trumpet.”
“Maybe that had great meaning for him, too,” I said. “Not that particular trumpet, but playing the trumpet. Maybe he played in the high school band?”
“Yes. That’s right. That could be it,” Julie said, pausing and nodding.
Then she continued, “So, anyway, the energy was so strong at first, but my theory is that there is a limited amount of this energy, and once it is awakened, it can only exist for a certain time, and then no more.”
It was my turn to start nodding in agreement. This made a lot of sense. “And that’s why William Foxwell is only coming to see me every so often now,” I interjected. “And why he fades in and out sometimes, and his voice gets hard to hear, and he can sometimes listen in on what we’re saying, but not be a part of the conversation or show himself to us. Stuff like that.”
“Yes,” Julie said. “At least, that is my theory. And I think that maybe the energy that is William Foxwell — his ability to talk to us — might be running out. And if we don’t have the answer for him soon, we may never be able to solve his mystery for him so that he can find his peace.”
Greg grabbed one of the books Julie had checked out of the library. “Well then, what are we waiting for?” he asked. “Let’s start reading already.”
I nearly burst out laughing. Those were definitely not words I thought I’d ever hear coming from Greg.
At the same time I felt a kind of panic or nausea or something in the pit of my stomach. What if Julie was right? What if we were running out of time to help William Foxwell right when we just seemed to be getting started? Everything that Julie said made sense, scary as it was, and as much as I didn’t want to believe it.
And then another thing struck me. Listening to Julie talk, and seeing how much thought she’d put into figuring all this out, and also seeing how much Greg cared about what happened to William Foxwell — it all made me realize something. I had been thinking that William Foxwell was sort of, well, my friend, but I could see now that Greg and Julie must be feeling the same way about him.
After that, we got back down to the business of dividing up the books.
Julie’s was about what the Japanese were up to in their plans to attack Midway. Mine told the American side of the story. And lucky Greg, he had a short autobiography of a navy pilot who was the only man in his torpedo bomber squad who survived the U.S. attacks on the Japanese aircraft carriers. It was called Sole Survivor.
I felt my stomach sink.
William Foxwell didn’t show up that night, which made me worry even more about what Julie had said. I finished my homework and practiced my guitar for a while, then dove into my assigned reading, which I didn’t mind at all because I knew it might help us help William Foxwell, and, of course, just because it was history.
The story began with the now familiar account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and their plans to control the Pacific Rim. And they were well on their way to doing it after Pearl Harbor, too.
I shuddered when I read about the Battle of the Coral Sea and the armor-piercing bomb that one of the Japanese planes dropped on the Yorktown’s deck — just the way William Foxwell described it. The book talked about all the men who were killed and wounded and horribly burned, and I wondered how many of them had been his friends, and how awful that must have been for him and for those guys’ families.
But at least their families knew what happened to them — that they had fought bravely and been heroes. And I guessed that meant they could rest easy in heaven or whatever, after they died. Not like William Foxwell, who still felt so guilty because he froze and hid during the battle, and then went missing somehow in the Battle of Midway. He was still missing in action, in a way.
I continued reading deep into the night. Another whole chapter on the guys who broke the Japanese code, and how, even though they were able to decipher a lot of the Japanese radio communications and stuff, they weren’t able to figure out everything. It was like only hearing every third or fourth word of a conversation, or worse — encrypted, in Japanese. So there was still some gue
ssing involved when they told Admiral Nimitz about the Japanese plans to attack Midway.
And there was another complication. Admiral Nimitz knew that everything the code-breakers had deciphered might have been a total Japanese ruse — fake information planted to trick the U.S. into thinking the attack was on Midway, when really they were planning to attack somewhere else altogether.
But Admiral Nimitz listened to the code-breakers and decided that the best bet was to be lying in wait somewhere out of sight near Midway when the Imperial Navy showed up, and then hit them in a giant sneak attack using all the American torpedo bombers and dive-bombers and anything else they could fit onto our aircraft carriers.
That was going to be a lot easier said than done, of course, and Admiral Nimitz knew it. The Japanese had so many more ships and planes than the U.S. that the whole plan struck a lot of Admiral Nimitz’s advisers as practically suicidal. Especially because the U.S. didn’t even have any battleships anymore, with all their big guns and cannons and stuff to fight a big naval battle. They had all been destroyed or damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor six months before.
Meanwhile, the gargantuan Japanese force steaming toward Midway was the same force — most of the same ships, most of the same officers, most of the same bomber and fighter pilots, most of the same everything — responsible for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Admiral Nimitz knew the U.S. had only one chance, and that was to first let the Japanese attack the island of Midway — the atoll of Midway! — and let them think the American fleet was nowhere around. Knowing the enemy was coming, the navy and the marines set up all the defenses they could on Midway in preparation for the attack, which they knew would come in waves. The first wave would be the Japanese fighters and bombers from their aircraft carriers, bombing the military area to keep the U.S. distracted and out of the sky. The second wave, if the battle got that far, would be the Japanese bombarding Midway from their battleships in preparation for a huge land invasion.
The Secret of Midway Page 7