“Oh,” was all I could say. I think I was beginning to understand, but all I could think to ask was, “Do your men know they’re shooting blanks?”
“Of course,” he said. “Do you want to know another secret in return for your promise never to tell your parents about us?”
“I have no parents,” I said.
“Oh? You live with—?”
“My aunt.”
“Okay. She’ll want to know where you’ve been all afternoon and you can tell her—”
“She never asks me anything.”
“Okay. I see. You probably spend all your time with Latha Bourne.”
I was stunned. “How do you know about her?”
“You yourself told me that she and her husband are our closest neighbors down the mountain. Willard told me her name. Joe Don told me how nice she is. Sammy described her store and post office. Ella Jean told me how beautiful she is. Gypsy told me her store is where you have the office of The Stay Morning Star.”
“Why do you need to know all those things?”
“It’s called intelligence. Not this kind of intelligence,” he reached out and touched my cranium, “but the accumulation of information one needs to know, including but not limited to secrets.” He smiled. “Later you can tell me all the secrets about Latha Bourne. Right now I need your promise never to tell her about us. Not a word.”
That was a tough request. If I couldn’t tell Latha, who could I tell? But as long as I was making promises to this very sharp and kind army officer, I might as well keep on making them. “Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell her anything. So what’s your next secret?”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s shake on that promise too.” When we had shaken hands for the third time, he patted the pistol strapped to his belt. “This Nambu automatic, jido kenju” he said, “is not loaded with blanks. It has real .7 mm cartridges in its clip. But don’t you dare tell a soul.” I shook my head solemnly, a bit honored that he was sharing with me intelligence known only to himself. He laughed. “Maybe,” he said, “if we run completely out of K rations and have to shoot a cow for food, I’ll have to use my pistol!” I laughed with him. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to shoot any cows. But the time might come when I’ll have to ask you to buy some grub for us at Latha’s store.”
“Sure,” I said. “Any time.”
“Well, I guess that’s about it, for now.” He stood up, and I stood also. He put his hand on my shoulder. He was a tall man, and I really had to bend my neck to look up at him. “One more little himitsu to himitsu” he said. “And perhaps this one will hold us, for the nonce. Do you know the word nonce? English, not Japanese. No? It means the present, for the time being. Okay? Well, I need you to promise, for the nonce, that you will not discuss any of this even with your friends, your fellow Axis, let alone your enemies, the Allies. I know you will be curious to learn from each of your friends what I talked about with them, but each of them has already promised me not to discuss our presence here with each other, and therefore none of them will be willing—or should not be willing—to discuss it with you.”
“Did you have to bribe them with himitsu to himitsu?” I asked.
He laughed. “No, actually, it was threats more than bribes. But don’t even ask them about that.”
“Okay. So all of us Axis will just have to pretend that this whole day never happened.”
“Excellent! Can you do that? And give me your word?”
We shook hands for a fourth time. Shaking hands standing up was somewhat different from shaking hands sitting down. Our hands weren’t on the same level. I had to reach up. “So what’s the last secret?” I asked.
“You and your friends have been required to think of yourselves as Japanese, right? Even those of your Axis who have been Nazis, such as Joe Don, will now have to change into Japs as Germany surrenders.” He began walking me toward the door. “You know, your General Willard Dinsmore managed the tactical coup of guessing where we’d land, even though, I can tell you, our pilot, Second Lieutenant Bosco, who broke his arm in the process, was trying his best to land on a remote mountaintop where we wouldn’t be found.” We were at the open door, and I could see my fellow Axis waiting for me, sitting in the late afternoon sunlight as it filtered through the second-growth timber that grew up like dank weeds around the old farmstead. I doubt if we were close enough for them to hear these concluding words of Lieutenant Mc-Pherson: “What a coincidence, or accident of destiny, that we should land in the midst of a fine group of boys and girls who, like ourselves, have been given the role of pretending that they are Japanese!”
Chapter fifteen
When the six of us were safely out of sight of the bivouac, marching down the mountain trail back toward the village, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Wow!” I said to them. “How about that guy?”
“What guy?” said Willard.
“Lieutenant McPherson,” I said. “Aint he something else again?”
“McPherson?” Willard said. “That don’t strike a bell with me.
You, Joe Don?”
“Never heared tell of nobody of that name,” Joe Don said.
“Hey! Come on, you-all!” I complained. “Caint we even say what we thought of him?”
“Him who?” Sammy said.
“The lieutenant!” I turned to Gypsy and appealed to her. “Didn’t you think he was the best-looking man you ever saw?”
Did I detect a faint spark of agreement in Gypsy’s eyes? But she just said, “Dawny, you’re the only good-lookin feller I’ve seen lately.”
I would have blushed if I hadn’t known she was just teasing me.
It took courage, but I spoke to my secret sweetheart, Ella Jean, “Didn’t you like him?”
“Hush, Dawny!” said my sweetheart.
So I hushed. I was dying to learn what prices he had paid to buy each of their silences, but it was obvious they weren’t going to talk, and I even grew abashed at myself, as if my attempt to make them talk was a violation of my promise to the lieutenant.
Walking past Dill’s Gas and Service, which of course wasn’t a conventional service station but just a shack with a gas pump out front and a yard in which the owner tinkered with cars, we casually waved at Every Dill, who was working on Doc Swain’s car under the big maple tree. “Howdy,” Every called to us. “Any of you’uns find where that gliding machine come down?”
Willard spoke on our behalf. “Howdy, Ev. Nope. Reckon it must’ve been over towards up yonder back around in there somewheres.”
We came to my house, or rather Aunt Murrison’s, but I didn’t see her, and I didn’t stop there. I might or might not show up for supper. We went on into the village. There we encountered a group of what was left of the former Allies, sitting on the porch of Latha’s store. We couldn’t just pass them by, and that store was my destination anyhow, regardless of whether I could say anything to Latha about our adventure.
“Any luck?” asked Jim John Whitter, who couldn’t hide his disappointment that the glider hadn’t come down in the Whitter meadow, the Field of Clover. All the Allies looked like they hadn’t been invited to somebody’s big birthday party.
“Nope,” said Willard, our spokesman as well as our general. “Didn’t it land down here in the bottoms?”
“Nope,” said Larry. “Looked like it landed somewhere back up that-away where you’uns was.”
“Saw it drift over a few times,” Joe Don said, “but couldn’t make out rightly just where it took a notion to light down.”
We sat in silence on the store porch for a while, as the afternoon waned. It was a situation for getting out our pocketknives and doing a little whittling of useless sticks, just to pass the time, but we didn’t have any pocketknives anymore. Gypsy and Ella Jean said they had to go help start supper, and they left together, their arms around each other. I was jealous, not of their arms, but of the almost sure chance that they would compare notes on their experience. After a time, Jim John said, offhand, “Do
n’t look to me like we’ll be able to put a ball game together this Saturday, since you Axis has got us so bad outnumbered now.”
“We aint Axis no more,” Willard said. “But we’ll make ye the loan of a few players, enough to help ye play us.” Sog, the former warlord, said glumly, “Aw, shee-ut, us Allies might just as well show the white flag, lay down our arms, and call it quits.”
“Yeah,” Larry agreed, “we might as well pull in our horns. But then it sure is going to get real dull and slow around this old town.”
The former Axis, the four of us, couldn’t help exchanging looks, and in their looks I caught enough to convince me that I hadn’t just been dreaming what had happened during this long day.
“Too bad,” Willard said sorrowfully. “It’ll sure enough just get real dull and slow hereabouts.” Even he, with his great strength, had to bear down and concentrate to avoid cracking a grin.
The next day in school, Miss Jerram declared that since we were no longer divided into Axis and Allies, she might as well reassign all of our seats, so that the aisle would no longer be the division between opposing factions. “But we don’t have only a short time left before school lets out for the summer,” she observed, “so we might as well just stay put where we are until next fall.” Then she conducted a postmortem on the hunt for the glider. Representatives of each of the parties who had scattered all over creation as the glider was landing were invited to report on their success, or rather their lack of success, and various speculations were made about just where the glider might have landed. Several students—not us—had seen the smoke billowing up from the mountain ridge where they assumed the glider may have crashed in flames. “Joseph Donald,” she said, “didn’t your group go up in that direction?” Yes’m, Joe Don reported, and they tromped all over the mountain a-lookin for that durn thing, but all they found was a pile of ashes. “Then whoever was flying it must’ve burnt to a crisp!” Miss Jerram said. “That’s just awful. Maybe we ought to notify the sheriff or somebody.” Willard suggested that if the Army Air Force or whoever had sent the glider was missing one of their men they’d probably be sending somebody out to look for it. Miss Jerram used up a good chunk of our “time o’ books” for the discussion of the glider, which was just as well with me, because I had no enthusiasm or patience for the day’s lessons in geography, history, mathematics, or even English. Then Miss Jerram said, “I hate to say it, but all of us got so wrapped up with that glider yesterday that we forgot all about the poor mule’s funeral, and we didn’t finish filling in the grave.”
Gypsy said, “That’s okay, Teacher. I went up there last night and saw to it.”
“Saw to it?”
“I filled in the grave,” Gypsy declared. Was she wearing a touch of rouge? Had she painted her mouth too?
“By yourself?”
“No’m,” said Gypsy. “Ella Jean went with me.”
“What did you use for a shovel?”
“Well, uh—” Gypsy struggled, and for a moment there I thought she might say, “A folding U.S. Army shovel made from the War Effort Scrap Drive,” but she said in fact, “We just sort of kicked a lot of that pile of dirt back into the hole, ye know, and then we just sort of drug the rest of it in with sticks and rocks, ye know.”
I couldn’t wait for recess. At recess, the divisions had never been Allies on one side of the schoolhouse yard, Axis on the other, but rather boys on one side, girls on the other. I crossed over, and grabbed Gypsy by the arm, and asked, “Did you run into that detail that McPherson was sending to finish the burial?”
“What’s a ‘detail’?” Gypsy wanted to know.
“One or more troops of soldiers sent out for a particular duty,” I defined it for her.
“Soldiers?” Gypsy said, and I thought she was doing a splendid job of pretending she’d never heard that word either.
“Didn’t some men help you and Ella Jean fill in the grave?” I insisted. “Or didn’t you help some men do it? Or watch ’em do it? Or anyhow take ’em to show ’em where the grave was, which they wouldn’t’ve known to begin with?”
“Dawny, have you been readin them comic books again?”
I was exasperated. It was true that I sometimes read comic books, when I could get them, and I was partial to the military activities of the various captains: Captain America, Captain Marvel, Captain Wings, Captain Midnight, and The Captain and the Kids, but even my thorough familiarity with those comics would not have goaded my hyperactive imagination into fabricating the adventures I—and Gypsy—had just had. Or would it have? Needless to say, the rest of the school day was agony for me. Whatever fondness I had discovered I had for Miss Jerram was reversed when she sent me to the blackboard to do some arithmetic problems and then jumped on me. “Dawny, you’re not marking up sums. You’re drawing pitchers of airplanes!”
The minute school was out, without so much as a word attempting to coordinate the agenda with the other former Axis, I took off lickety-split for the bivouac, not stopping at Latha’s store, not stopping at my house, not stopping period. My bare feet were red and sore and my lungs were trying to leave my chest when I arrived panting at the old farmstead in the dark holler up above the Dill place.
There was nobody there. There was no trace of anybody having been there. I mean, there were no footprints in the dirt nor prints of a mule’s horseshoes. Nothing. I went inside the old house, walking carefully on the rotting floorboards, to the place where Lieutenant McPherson had set up the two director’s chairs for my interview or interrogation or whatever it had been. I found the place where the chairs would have been and where our feet would have touched the floor, but the dust and debris were thick and untouched. Nobody had sat there. Or not for a dozen years. I stepped my foot into that dust, and it left a clear print, which seemed to mock me, as if to say, “I’m the only footprint in all this dust.” It occurred to me: why would anybody have bothered to bring director’s chairs into this place?
I was reeling. I went back outside the house and yelled, “HELLO?” My voice, higher and less manly than I’d thought, traveled way up into the dark holler and faintly echoed back to me. Pleading, I yelled, “WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” Some birds flew up from a distant tree, and that was all.
I sat down on the edge of the porch, alone except for you. I needed you to tell me that I had not lost my mind. I needed you to forgive me for not paying much attention to you except in times of need. More than anything, I wanted you to help me sort through my head about the day before in an effort to discover where I had gone off the track. Even if you could not explain to me why there was no trace whatsoever of anybody having been at that house for twelve years, perhaps you could explain what actually had happened yesterday.
I was certain that I had gone up into the mountain forest with my friends Willard, his sister Ella Jean, Joe Don, his sister Gypsy, and Sammy, kid brother of my only local hero, the late Mare Coe. I had thought that we were hunting for the place where a glider would come down out of the sky. I had thought that we had actually seen the glider come in for a crash landing, and that everything as I have written it for the past many pages actually happened. But—and this was my first new thought—was it possible that I, having lost all of a heap my local hero Mare, my national hero President Roosevelt, and then my all-time hero Ernie Pyle, was driven to create a wonderful new hero, Lieutenant McPherson? Okay, granted that I did that. So why couldn’t I keep him? For pity sakes, if McPherson was only the product of my pubertal fancy, like a mental image of a voluptuous but impossibly tantalizing woman summoned up to promote the most extravagant erotic thoughts, why couldn’t I make him come back again? When I dreamed of Ella Jean, either at night or whenever my conscious reveries needed her, the loss of her at the end of the episode was always softened by the thought that she’d return whenever I wanted.
Could you let him come back again? Gentle Reader, one thing I know about you, if nothing else, is that you possess certain powers, even a kind of magic: you could snap shut this
book right now and obliterate me, just as you opened it in the first place to create me. Could you kindly let the soldiers come back again? Or, if they had to leave and go into hiding somewhere else, could you help me find them? If you will, I promise you the most exciting story you’ve ever read.
I stood up. I remembered one little thing that had happened here yesterday: the business of the well water. A soldier had been required to step off the distance from the outhouse to the well, to make sure that the former could not have contaminated the latter. I went to the well, where the old fragment of rope still hung from the rusted iron pulley, untouched. The soldiers had produced their own rope and bucket and pulled up several bucketsful of good clean pure well water, and refilled their canteens with it, and everybody had had a good drink, but there was no trace of this activity around the well. I looked up at the outhouse, and walked slowly toward it, bent over, studying the ground closely, until, finally, halfway to the outhouse, I spotted in the dirt the unmistakable imprint of the heel of a soldier’s boot. There was just that one, but it was clear, and it was enough. “Ha!” I exclaimed, with exultation.
“Very good, Donny,” you said.
“Thank you,” I said to you. Thank you for restoring my faith and convincing me I wasn’t crazy. I even looked around for you, but you weren’t there. In your place was simply a bush, speaking, not unlike that burning bush that spoke to Moses. The bush spoke again, repeating the same words, “Very good, Donny.” And then the bush raised one of its limbs and brushed some leaves away from its head, and I could see the face. The bush was my new hero. The bush turned its head and spoke louder, “Rucker!” Another bush appeared before my bush and its limb snapped up in a salute. “Goddamn it, Rucker! You missed a spot! Look! Is that a heelprint or isn’t it?”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 91
