He shook his head, I guess picturing it again in his mind, and then he continued.
“All the antiaircraft guns started firing away,” he said. “I could feel it in the water. Shook up everything. Felt like it rattled my bones, and made that broken leg hurt something awful.” He reached down to rub his ankle, as if that old pain was somehow still there, even though he was a ghost now and I was pretty sure ghosts couldn’t feel pain. At least not the physical kind.
William Foxwell’s voice got softer, fainter again. “I guess every one of those Japanese planes must have refueled already because when the dive-bombers dropped their bombs, it seemed like every one I saw was a direct hit on the carriers, and every explosion let loose a firestorm from all those planes exploding with all that fuel.” He shook his head again, practically whispering now. “And one fire would start another, and then another, and then another until it spread to almost everywhere, even the water around the ships where the fuel spilled and spread. The dive-bombers kept coming and their bombs kept hitting the flight decks of those carriers. The whole ships seemed to be on fire. And then there were the secondary explosions as the fires spread to the engine rooms and the munitions.”
I was practically bouncing on my bed with excitement, hearing this part of the story. The good guys were finally winning!
He paused again. His face darkened. “It felt good at first. All that destruction thanks to the dive-bombers — it was revenge for all our boys who’d been shot down, and meant that the torpedo bomber crews hadn’t died in vain, you know? It was like the Devastators were the decoys, only nobody thought about it that way at the time. But that’s what they — I guess we — were. Once the Japanese shot all of us out of the sky, and none of our bombs hit, they let their guard down; that’s when the dive-bombers came in and surprised them. Caught them with their pants down, so to speak. I was happy, too, because it looked like us taking out all their carriers — it would turn the tide of the battle our way.
“But then I remembered our own boys on the Yorktown when that armor-piercing bomb hit us at Coral Sea, and I knew the same thing was happening to their boys — the Japanese sailors. All of them just doing their jobs, following their orders, hoping to survive the war and go back home to their families.
“Only that wouldn’t be happening for so many of them. Thousands, I bet.” He sighed. “And it wouldn’t be happening for me, either.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. His voice was trembling. I felt bad for him, and bad for all of them — all those brave Americans who were killed, and now the Japanese sailors, too.
He shrugged, and then faded quickly — faster than before. His voice came from so far away that I could barely hear him.
“William!” I said, panicked. Was this it? Was this the last time I’d see him? I’d never seen him like this before.
“Can’t remember exactly what happened next,” he said, just before vanishing altogether. “Only thing that I’m about half sure of is that I didn’t drown the way I was afraid would happen, and no shark got me, either. I have this picture of me, dripping wet, standing on my bum leg, and somebody talking to me — in Japanese.”
I stared at the empty space at the foot of my bed. Was it too late to save him?
I sat there for quite a while after he disappeared, not moving, not doing anything except think about everything William Foxwell had just told me. It was four in the morning and I knew I would never get back to sleep. So I finally roused myself and did the only logical thing at that time of the night that there was left to do after everything I’d just heard from William Foxwell. I picked up my Midway book, found the place I’d left off before, and started reading again. We had to keep trying.
The account in my book laid things out pretty much the way William Foxwell had described them: the dive-bombers raining bombs down on the Japanese carriers, destroying three of the four that day, and the fourth one in another attack later on.
Meanwhile, a Japanese scout plane had finally discovered the location of one of the American aircraft carriers. It was William Foxwell’s ship, the Yorktown. The Japanese still had that fourth carrier at the time, and so sent their remaining bombers out on the attack. The Yorktown took several direct hits and nearly sank. Hundreds of the men on board were killed. The rest had to abandon ship.
But doomed ship or not, the Yorktown still wouldn’t go down the way everybody expected, though it was a sitting duck, barely able to move, even with the help of other ships. The Yorktown was slowly crawling back toward the Hawaiian Islands the next day when the end finally came. A Japanese submarine found, and torpedoed, the Yorktown and an escort ship, blasting the escort ship literally in two, and sinking the Yorktown.
As I read the chapter, I realized that William Foxwell didn’t know anything about that, and I wondered if I should tell him — and if I’d even have the opportunity. How hard would that be, to find out that even more of his friends had been killed in the Battle of Midway, all those guys he and Dewey Tomzak had served with for months and months at sea? I wasn’t so sure he needed to know that. Maybe he hadn’t heard what Mr. Tomzak told us about the Yorktown being a doomed ship. He hadn’t brought it up, anyway, and so I decided the next time I saw William I wouldn’t bring it up, either. I just hoped that there would be a next time.
The battle still wasn’t over even then, with the sinking of the Yorktown. The U.S. retaliated by sending the last of their bombers from their other two carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise, to find and sink that last Japanese aircraft carrier, and with it any chance the Japanese had of taking Midway, and Hawaii, and attacking California.
I sped through the next chapter in the book to learn what happened and found the two words I was looking for — and that marked the end of the Battle of Midway:
“Mission accomplished.”
But what did that mean for William?
Once again I didn’t have a chance to fill Greg and Julie in on any of this until lunchtime. That didn’t work out too well, either. I had just started telling them about William Foxwell and the rear cockpit gunner and the accident belowdecks outside the head when a shadow darkened our table.
We all looked up, surprised. Of course, it was Belman.
“Hello, dorks,” he said.
Julie stiffened. Greg grabbed the edges of his tray — as if he was going to actually hit the guy with it this time. I scooted my chair back as far as it would go, which unfortunately wasn’t very far because of the wall.
“What do you want?” Julie demanded.
“Oh, nothing,” he said in this phony sweet voice. “Just came by to say hi. Oh yeah, and to tell you I’m looking forward to seeing you three at the All-Ages Open Mic Night. My band’s playing. Yeah, that’s right. I have a band, too, only it’s a real band and not a wizard dork band.”
“We’re not a wizard band,” Greg said indignantly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that if we were.”
“Hey,” Belman said, “Wrock and Rowling! Isn’t that what you dorks like to say?” He pointed at me and said, “Harry.” Then he pointed at Greg and said, “Ron.”
He pointed at Julie next, but she beat him to it.
“Hermione,” she said. “And ‘loseriest’ isn’t even a word, by the way. And those wizard bands play some great music. You should check them out on YouTube some time.” Then she stomped on his foot.
We got out of there fast.
“Do you think he’s going to do something to us?” I asked, once we were safe out of the cafeteria and hiding in a narrow, unused hallway in the math wing. “I mean, he said he has a band.”
“I hope he does,” Greg said, brandishing an empty lunch tray, which he’d carried with him for some reason. “I’ve got this tray, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
Julie let go of one of her rare smiles. “He was probably in too much pain. But never mind him. We’ll deal with him later. Anderson, you have to tell us what the ghost said last night. Quickly.”
“The ghost has a na
me, remember?” I said. “It’s William — William Foxwell.”
“Yes, of course,” Julie said, rolling her eyes. “So tell us.”
I gave as quick a summary as I could — about William Foxwell helping the rear cockpit gunner after he hit his head, about William putting on the flight suit and climbing on the Devastator, about the takeoff and locating the Japanese fleet, about the Zeroes and the plane crash into the ocean. I told them all the rest of it, too — everything else I had read about the Battle of Midway, including what happened to the Yorktown later on.
Greg jumped in when I finished. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but I stayed up really late last night, too, and I was exploring on the Internet.”
“Why wouldn’t we believe that?” I asked, annoyed that he was changing the subject. “Were you watching your favorite funny animal videos on YouTube?”
Greg scowled at me. “No,” he said. “I found these discussion groups for guys that had fought in the war, and for their family members who had questions about what happened to their grandfathers or whatever. I spent a lot of time just scrolling through the ones from World War II. You could look up what they had to say about different battles, so I went to the Battle of Midway.”
“Good work, Greg,” I said, feeling kind of bad and trying to make up for what I’d said.
“Thanks,” he said. “Anyway, I came across this one post; it was from a guy who said his grandfather had told him the strangest story years ago, about how the grandfather was supposed to be on one of the torpedo bombers at Midway only he had an accident and hit his head and never made it to his plane.”
“That must have been the guy!” I shouted. “The rear cockpit gunner whose place William Foxwell took!”
“Yeah,” Greg continued, grinning. “The grandfather had told his grandson that when he regained consciousness his flight suit was gone, and all the planes had already taken off. But the guys he talked to on the flight deck all insisted that there were pilots and rear cockpit gunners and bombardiers on all of them, so he didn’t know what to think. He decided that either everybody was confused, or else there was a rear cockpit gunner ghost that took his place. They weren’t ever able to solve the mystery — everybody on board was too busy sending out the dive-bombers after the torpedo bombers were all gone, and then they got attacked later on by the Japanese, and then I guess they got sunk and a lot of the sailors lost their lives and the rest had to abandon ship.”
Julie had already pulled out a notebook and pencil. “What’s the name of the site?” she said. “I’ll look it up, and we’ll find the grandfather and ask him more about what happened.”
“Can’t,” Greg said. “The guy who posted the story said his grandfather died ten years ago.”
“Did anybody else comment on the post?” Julie asked.
Greg shook his head. “I guess so many of the guys who were in the service back then, they’re really old now — in their nineties. Not too many of them are left.”
I couldn’t help thinking about my great-grandpa just then. He was Pop Pop’s dad and he died before I was born. He’d been in the war, too, in a way — working in a factory that made tanks and armored cars and army trucks and stuff. Pop Pop told me about him. I guess it was a time when everybody pitched in together in whatever way they could. It was sad to think of them all being so old now, and passing away. It made me kind of proud, too, though — that they had done all that for us.
The bell rang and Julie put away her notebook.
“At least what Greg found out confirms William Foxwell’s story,” I said. “That what he said happened must have really happened.”
“But what about the last thing he told you?” Greg asked as we pushed ourselves out into the stream of kids pouring down the hall. “About somebody speaking to him in Japanese?”
“Maybe he got captured by the Japanese,” I said. “Maybe they rescued him. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“There were some men of the flight crews who survived their crash landing and who were captured,” Julie said, though she wasn’t smiling.
“That must have been it, then,” I said. “He was captured.”
Greg chimed in after me. “So maybe he lived a lot longer than the war,” he said hopefully. “Like, they just kept him prisoner while the war was going on. Maybe he tried to escape.”
Julie shook her head. “No,” she said. “I read about this in the book I assigned to myself. They brought the prisoners on board Japanese ships and interrogated them. In one of the accounts I read, they threatened the American pilot with a sword. The Japanese demanded the men tell them the position of the American ships. Especially the aircraft carriers.”
“And then what?” I asked, though I had that sinking feeling again about what she was going to say next.
“They were executed,” she said. “Their bodies were returned to the ocean.”
“Oh no,” I said.
Greg was outraged. “Wasn’t that against the law? Weren’t they supposed to just keep them in a prison camp or something?”
“You’re thinking about the Geneva Conventions,” I said. Pop Pop had told me all about them. “Those are the international laws about the treatment of prisoners — that you aren’t supposed to execute a prisoner unless he is a spy. You’re supposed to treat prisoners humanely.”
“Then it was against the law,” Greg said.
“Yes, I would suppose so,” Julie said. “But in war, apparently, everyone doesn’t follow the law. But in any case there is another problem.”
“Which is what?” I asked. We were standing in the middle of the hall, so caught up in the conversation that we hadn’t split up to go to our separate classes. But I didn’t say anything. I had to know the rest — about this other problem.
“It’s about the names I found in my book,” she said. “The names of the prisoners.”
She looked up at the ceiling for a minute, then continued.
“None of them was William Foxwell.”
Band practice went surprisingly well that afternoon. We figured we needed three songs for the All-Ages Open Mic Night, so Julie led us through another one she had written. It was called “Hamster Talks,” and it was a hamster talking about how much it sucked to be in a cage all day, but also how great it was when little kids took you out and played with you, and how cool it was that you could go to the bathroom anywhere and your humans had to clean it up, and then still had to feed you every day whether they wanted to or not, and give you plenty of water. It was kind of hilarious.
“So you have a hamster?” Greg asked her, obviously expecting her to say yes.
“No,” Julie said. “They’re disgusting.”
Greg and I were both confused. “Then why did you write the song,” I asked, “if you hate hamsters?”
Julie insisted that she didn’t hate hamsters, she just found them disgusting, like she’d said, and anyway, what was wrong with writing a song about a hamster?
It was actually a pretty catchy tune, and helped us take our minds off what might have happened to William Foxwell, and how he could have heard a Japanese voice after he crash-landed in the Pacific during the Battle of Midway.
Julie called me that night just as I was crawling into bed. I was running on fumes, as Dad likes to say when he’s super tired and hasn’t had enough sleep in a while. I’d been up practically the whole night before, so I was feeling about half dead myself.
“I’m worried about William Foxwell,” Julie said, doing her usual thing of skipping over the hello part of the phone call. “And I’m sorry that I called him ‘the ghost’ this afternoon.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I guess it’s easy to forget sometimes that he’s human. Or that he used to be.”
“We need him to come back again soon,” Julie said. “So we can ask him for more that he can remember about the Japanese voice. He has to help us help him. You have to summon him, or whatever it is you do.”
“But that’s just
the problem, Julie,” I said, feeling helpless. “I can’t summon him. He just shows up whenever he wants to. Or whenever he can. And he told me that it seems to be getting harder sometimes.”
“He didn’t come tonight?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Not so far. Sometimes when I give up wondering if he will, like if I just fall asleep, or get busy doing homework or whatever, then he might show up.”
“Then fall asleep right now,” Julie ordered. “I’ll hang up and perhaps he’ll come when you are sleeping and you can ask him.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “Ask him what exactly?” I asked.
“If there was a prisoner that no one knew about, that wasn’t in any of the records of the Japanese or the Americans or anyone. And if he was that secret prisoner of the Battle of Midway.”
It’s hard to fall asleep when you’re trying to, especially if you’re trying as hard as I was that night, and if you’re as worried as I was that we might not be able to solve the mystery of William Foxwell in time, but somehow I managed.
As soon as I fell asleep I had another dream about him. Once again, like in the last dream I had about William Foxwell, I was on a boat in the ocean, only this time I found him. He was treading water, exhausted, struggling to keep his head up. I extended my arm as far out of the boat as I could, but every time he reached up to grab my hand, he slipped under the waves and had to use both hands to pull himself back up and keep from drowning. I didn’t see a life vest, or half a life vest, or anything that might keep him from drowning. It was just me and him. Greg wasn’t even there this time. This went on for a long time, me reaching and never quite getting to him, and William slipping under. And then there was a shadow over both of us. I heard shouting — in Japanese. I looked up and it was some kind of Japanese ship. All the Japanese sailors and officers were angry, and yelling at us, barking orders that we couldn’t understand.
The Secret of Midway Page 10