On The Wings of Heroes

by Richard Peck

  By the end of winter, a poster hung over Miss Mossman’s desk, showing an aircraft carrier sinking, under the words

  LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS

  If we knew any military secrets, we weren’t to tell anybody who could be a fifth-columnist, which was the wartime word for spy. I took this personally since I couldn’t keep a secret.

  Every Thursday we brought as many dimes as we had for pink War Savings Stamps to stick in a booklet. When you had eighteen dollars and seventy cents, you traded the booklet for a War Bond. It would mature in ten years and be worth twenty-five dollars.

  “I hope you children mature in ten years,” Miss Mossman said.

  Toward the end of the winter when they started rationing rubber, she saw her chance to get us into the war. Rubber was the first thing to go because the place it came from was behind enemy lines now. Scooter put a pin in the Malay Peninsula.

  Guidelines from the Office of Price Administration, the OPA, told kids to bring in all old rubber items to a point of central collection. We’d be competing with other schools. Miss Mossman said anything could help the war effort, even rubber doormats.

  “Not ours,” Mom said.

  LaVerne Bixby brought her mother’s dishwashing gloves. Duane Hemple brought in all seven of his Seven Dwarf rubber statuettes, which he was a little old for. Somebody threw in a pair of handlebar grips, which reminded me to keep mine with me when I wasn’t on my bike. People brought in a mess of rubber.

  One morning just before the Pledge of Allegiance, Walter Meece, who was slow, shook out a sack of something into our collection corner.

  On the stroke of eleven, a big woman loomed up at the window of our door. She rapped once and stalked in. Miss Mossman was in the middle of telling us something and stopped. It was Mrs. Meece, Walter’s mother, clutching her big pocketbook.

  “Where’s the stuff?” she said over us to Miss Mossman. But she could see our rubber pile from there. She started up an aisle, brushing desks on both sides. Walter got down in his seat, thinking she was coming after him. But she turned at the front of the room, sharply past Miss Mossman.

  When she bent over our collection, a silence strangled us. She grunted and sorted through—galoshes, hot water bottles, bathing caps, a played-out garden hose. She had on a big hat. When she found what she was after, she held it up.

  One of the girls screamed.

  Mrs. Meece was holding a rubber girdle, huge. Hers.

  She shook it at Miss Mossman, who’d turned to stone. “I’ve got an Eastern Star luncheon today,” Mrs. Meece said, “and I have to fight my way into this thing first.”

  Out she stalked with the loose ends of her girdle flapping outside her pocketbook.

  Later that day somebody heard Miss Mossman out in the hall talking to the principal, Miss Enid Howe. “We’re collecting nothing else in my classroom,” Miss Mossman said. “Nothing. I don’t care. Fire me.”

  But Miss Howe didn’t.

  The Phillips 66 Station . . .

  . . . that Dad ran across town in the North End was on a different planet from our leafy street. Now that his helper Charlie had been drafted, he was down to part-timers. Dad was back and forth from the pumps to the lift, running himself ragged.

  I told him I’d be glad to drop out of school and help, at least for the duration. I could pump gas and read the tire gauge. If I could get the hood up, I could check the oil. But Dad said we’d talk about it when I was bigger than the dipstick. I’d be out there on Saturdays sometimes, getting underfoot, pretending to work.

  Dad ran the station like a club where old codgers hung out on the pump island, complaining and remembering. And on cold days he let paperboys roll their newspapers in the station, out of the weather. You had to be twelve for a paper route, and they were a tough twelve. They wore no socks with their knickers, and they wrote things in ink on their arms. I overheard vocabulary from them I didn’t know what to do with.

  I was there the Saturday after the OPA issued a new order. A car owner with more than five tires was to turn in any extras to his local gas station. They’d clamped a freeze on tire sales. Now you needed a certificate from the Ration Board, and it wasn’t easy. The government made it hard to get a new tire, but they wanted your old one.

  Mr. Smiley Hiser drove across town to turn in an extra spare to Dad personally. His old Essex sedan with pull-down window shades stood square out by the pumps. I shook out the squeegee to wash down his windshield. We gave full service.

  Dad ducked out from under a car on the lift when Mr. Hiser rolled his extra spare across the pavement.

  “Smiley,” Dad said, “where are you going to find another tire for an Essex when you need your next one?”

  “Say what?” Mr. Hiser said, cupping an ear.

  “Take your tire home, man,” Dad boomed. “We’ll all be riding on rims before this war’s over.”

  “They say it’ll be over by Christmas,” Mr. Hiser said.

  “They said that last time,” Dad remarked.

  A long car pulled up at the pumps. A bulky guy in a belted coat got out and swaggered over. He had Big Shot written all over him. “Say, listen, buddy,” he said to Dad, “give me a Firestone for a Cadillac.”

  Dad looked him over. Eight or so tires still hung on the lubritorium wall.

  “I’ve got a certificate from the Ration Board,” the big shot said, “if that’s what’s worrying you.” He flipped a wallet out of his overcoat. A whole page of precious tire certificates unfolded like a road map.

  “I can’t help you,” Dad said.

  The big shot sighed and put his certificates away. He reached out with something wrinkled sticking out of his fat fist. A twenty-dollar bill. I’d never seen one.

  Dad didn’t seem to see it now. “You heard me say I can’t help you.”

  I dropped back over by the pumps.

  “Don’t waste my time.” The big shot jerked a thumb at the tire wall. “You’ve got one left.”

  “It’s earmarked for a regular customer,” Dad said, which couldn’t be exactly right because he didn’t have a regular Cadillac customer.

  I dipped the squeegee into soapy water. To reach the Cadillac’s windshield, I’d have to walk up the front fender, which the big shot wouldn’t like. But he was busy. I could barely reach across the window on the driver’s side.

  “This war’s a real opportunity for you little guys to throw your weight around, isn’t it? For the first time in your life.”

  Nobody talked to Dad like that.

  “Maybe you don’t know who I am,” the big shot said. He was standing too close, in Dad’s face.

  “Maybe I better not find out.” Dad’s right hand clenched. It wasn’t his good hand, but this guy wouldn’t know that. I almost fell off the fender from looking back. The big shot’s ears had gone an ugly color. When he turned around, I jumped down off the fender. Dad’s work shoe rang on the pavement behind him, and the big shot made a kind of skip. He piled in the Cadillac and thundered out onto Division Street.

  Mr. Hiser blinked from Cadillac exhaust. “What did he say he wanted?”

  “More than his share,” Dad said.

  “Wonder who he was.”

  “The Water Commissioner,” Dad said.

  I was beside them now, and Dad wasn’t grinning, so you wouldn’t even recognize him. I held up something to show them, and now they both blinked. It was the Cadillac’s wiper blade, off the driver’s side, because nobody ought to talk to my dad like that.

  “It could have worked loose anyway,” I said, “sooner or later.”

  “Son,” Dad said, “that’s not what we mean by full service.” But his hand was working over his mouth, and he was grinning behind it. That’s all I wanted.

  “Say what?” Mr. Hiser said, cupping an ear.

  Eight-to-Five Orphans . . .

  . . . was our name for all the new kids flocking into school now from all over. They brought their lunch in buckets because their mothers were working in the new war p
lants, so they couldn’t go home for noon. Behind Miss Mossman’s desk, posters showed women with big arms working on the assembly line with planes streaking overhead:

  KEEP ’EM FLYING

  the posters said, and

  RELEASE A MAN TO FIGHT

  Before the war, nobody’d been a stranger. Now everybody was, practically. We were jammed in all the way over to the radiators. The new kids dressed funny and talked funny. Some of them were rough customers for this end of town. Three of the girls were.

  Now a bucket of sand and a shovel stood next to Miss Mossman’s wastebasket to put out incendiary bombs. She said they could burn you to a crisp. According to her, the Enemy was waiting for the war plants to get into full production. Then the sky above us would be black with bombers releasing their payloads on us.

  A wall chart from the Office of Civilian Defense, the OCD, showed how to duck and cover, grab your knees, tuck your head. Miss Mossman said to expect drills regularly. But we only had one, as it turned out.

  “When I blow this whistle three times, it could be a practice. It could be the real thing. Don’t tarry to find out,” she said. “Get under your desks.”

  They might not be incendiary bombs. The Germans had used poison gas before and might again. If anybody smelled it, he was supposed to yell “GAS!” We were to have handkerchiefs to stuff in our mouths so a bomb blast wouldn’t knock our teeth out. For the poison gas, we’d need them to cover our noses.

  Late one morning, Miss Mossman let fly with three blasts on her whistle. We peeled out of our seats and hunkered under our desks. Heads tucked, mouths full of handkerchief. Happy to. Anything for a change. They were the old-time desks with inkwells and scrolly iron sides, bolted to the floor.

  We all seemed to fit under there, even Hoyt Albers, who was the biggest boy. Even Beverly C., an eight-to-five orphan who sat across from me. I wondered if she would.

  Beverly C. was junior-high big and then some. Big and shapeless, like a boulder with hair. We wondered if she was even our age, and I still won’t give her full name for fear she’ll find me.

  Under our desks we were all quiet for once. But then Mervyn Krebs hollered out, “GAS!”

  He must have spat out his handkerchief. We all did, and heads banged the undersides of desks all over the room. This was our first real scare, and I got a whiff of something pretty bad myself.

  Then we got busy working our handkerchiefs over our noses in those close quarters. Above us, Miss Mossman sighed.

  “Walter Meece,” she said, “come up.”

  Walter said it wasn’t him, but he got up out of the desk in front of Mervyn’s and wandered up to the front of the room. Miss Mossman wrote him a restroom pass, and then we listened to Walter tripping over the bucket and shovel on his way out.

  When we scrambled up after the all-clear, Beverly didn’t. She was wedged in there tight as a tick, with parts of her bulging through the scrollwork sides. There wasn’t a cubic inch under her desk that wasn’t Beverly. She tried to move, but she was down there for the duration.

  When she saw, Miss Mossman moaned. “Oh, sweet heaven help me.” She too was afraid of Beverly.

  The room went dead. People got to work folding up their handkerchiefs. You didn’t laugh at Beverly, and people were scared they would. Or even smile. She had two sidekicks, a pair of eight-to-five stooges, Doreen R. and Janis W. They didn’t fight at Beverly’s weight, but they packed a wallop. Everybody owed them a dime apiece on War Stamp Thursday. They were on their feet, monitoring, checking to see if anybody laughed. They could spot a smirk rows away.

  I grinned. Before I could help it. The sight of big Beverly, almost a solid block in the shape of her space, made me grin before I thought.

  Doreen saw and pointed at me across the room, which was doom enough. But Beverly herself saw. Over her hunched shoulder one of her squinty eyes saw me through the iron curlicues. Her incendiary stare burned me to a crisp.

  “You, Davy Bowman,” Beverly said, unblinking. She never called you by name. “At noon you’ll be picking up your teeth all over the school yard. You won’t have nothing left to grin with. And you’ll wonder where your nose went.”

  I heard her every word. She was only muffled by her shoulder. She didn’t own a handkerchief, as you could see by her sleeve.

  I fried through eternity while Miss Mossman and four boys tried to pry Beverly out of her desk. Why should I help? When she was free, she was going to kill me. And nobody to stop her. None of the boys would come up against her and Doreen and Janis. Scooter himself sat quietly at his desk, gazing out at a robin on the windowsill.

  Somebody had to go for the janitor. If I’d been sent, I wouldn’t come back. When he turned up with a wrench, he found Beverly crated for shipping. I barely noticed when he unbolted her desk and the ink from her well went everywhere. We dipped pens then. Ballpoints didn’t come in till after the war. I wondered if I could outrun Beverly, and how that would look. I thought about the fire escape.

  Now she was out, expanding in the aisle on legs like kegs. She was big enough to pick up a mule. While the janitor bolted her desk back to the floor, she looked down at me under a single heavy brow. And she made a fist the size of Dad’s.

  I just sat there.

  Then sweet heaven helped me.

  It was nearly noon when somebody knocked on the classroom door. We all looked—anything to take our minds off Beverly. Miss Mossman blocked our view when she opened the door. Then her arms went out.

  “Is that Billy Bowman,” she cried, “all grown up?”

  It was. My brother Bill was there. It was the cavalry sent to save me in the nick of time. I heard galloping hooves, flags flapping, a bugle.

  Bill was there to take me home for lunch, a miracle almost too big to believe. I chanced a glance back at Beverly.

  You wouldn’t know her. She was some other girl. She gazed up at my brother. Her squinty eyes were round, bat-ting. Her mouth was open. Her grubby hand stole up to touch her awful hair. And I saw my troubles were over, at least for now.

  “Who zat?” she whispered like a prayer.

  “My brother,” I said.

  And looking good. Taller and handsomer than ever. It must be the uniform. He was an Army Air Force Cadet.

  The Whole World Was Golden . . .

  . . . with forsythia in bloom that noontime when Bill walked me home for lunch. He’d come off the morning train with just time to see Mom first. His uniform buttons sparked sunlight, and there was a little strut in his step. I rode all the way home on the wings of my hero. So did Scooter, as far as his house.

  When Bill and I got home, Mom had all our favorites. Toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. A pie was in the oven.

  Bill was only home for a few days before he had to report for training. On Saturday he went out to Dad’s station, and I tagged along. I shadowed him the whole time, trying to match his stride and memorize him for later.

  In weather this good all the oldsters in the North End hung out at the station. Every old retired railroader and trucker sat out on the pump island, swapping lies, spouting chaw. When they saw Bill in his uniform, it put them in mind of San Juan Hill and Teddy Roosevelt.

  “After they get to that age,” Dad said, “they were all Rough Riders.” They looked up at Bill between them and the sun, and their old eyes watered. One glimpse at Dad’s eyes, and I saw he was memorizing Bill too.

  We went out to dinner, the four of us, on Bill’s last night. The band at the Blue Mill played “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific.” When they saw Bill, they struck up “Nothing Can Stop the Army Air Corps.”

  After we were in bed, I said to him through the wall, “How long till you’ll be shooting down planes and releasing payloads, that type of thing?”

  “The training takes most of a year,” Bill said, “though they’re speeding things up.”

  “So you’ll be home again, before . . .”

  “One more time,” Bill said.

  He went the next
morning when I was at school. I knew the time the train left and watched it on the clock. When I got home, all the gear was gone from his room, and his bed was made with military corners.

  That was the first night I went upstairs without being told. Then I thrashed in the sheets, sat on the windowsill, thrashed in the sheets some more. Bill was sitting up that night on the train, and tomorrow night and the night after that. I counted miles instead of sheep.

  When I was just drifting off, some sound from his room stirred me, some small sound. At first I thought Bill was back, home from a date or a night game—something. Now I was wide awake, eyes peeled in the dark.

  There was nothing to hear now. Still, somebody was in Bill’s room. Why didn’t it scare me under my bed?

  I eased the sheet back and slid out. Stepping over the squeaky floorboard, I waited and watched in the doorway between my room and his.

  The streetlamp from out on the corner threw a shape of light across the angled wall. There was the dark triangle of a Fighting Illini pennant, and the shape of somebody sitting on Bill’s bed. Slumped there.

  A hand rested on the pillow, and the streetlamp caught the diamond glint in the Masonic ring. Dad was sitting on Bill’s bed. There was enough light to see he had Bill’s letter sweater pulled over his shoulders. Dad, sitting there in the dark, where Bill had been.

  Scooter Put a Pin in Midway Island . . .

  . . . and school was out. The radio said the tide in the Pacific was beginning to turn.

  Two days into summer, and we forgot where school was. But it was too quiet, this summer, though we’d waited and waited. The world emptied out. Jinx Rogers had gone from commencement to basic training at Camp Leonard Wood, Missouri. Big Cleve Runion was up at Great Lakes.

  Bill was out in Santa Ana, California, writing back:

  Dad worked a longer day. Everybody was waiting for gas to be rationed, but he said it wouldn’t be till after the election. Only kids played hide-and-seek now, so Scooter and I didn’t. We played some catch in the street, fed each other some fast-balls. But I was used to three-corner with Dad and Bill, and the Packard for a backstop. August was on the way already, and there wasn’t even a state fair, not for the duration.