On The Wings of Heroes

by Richard Peck

  THE STAR IN THE WINDOW

  Four Stars Hung on Our Street . . .

  . . . blue stars on little white flags in front windows. Ours for Bill and the Runions’ for Cleve, the Rogerses’ for Jinx, the Tomlinsons’ for Scooter’s dad. They were the landmarks now that nobody played much hide-and-seek around the Hisers’ box elder tree.

  We followed Bill as far as we could, in our minds and the mail. He met up with his ten-man crew in Oklahoma for eight weeks of training on the B-17 Flying Fortress, shortened to six.

  Scooter and I had plane-spotting books. We never spotted anything but a Piper Comanche, but we knew the particulars of a B-17: the 104-foot wingspan, the four motors, the tail gunner folded into the Plexiglas dome, covering them from behind with two .50-caliber guns.

  They named their plane the Baby Snooks after a little girl on the radio played by a grown-up lady. Heading east, they flew somewhere over us, getting the hang of it. Bill wrote from Gander, Newfoundland.

  In another night after that, they flew across the Atlantic. Their flight suits were wired for warmth.

  When Bill wrote from Somewhere in England, the letters were V-mail—flimsy blue sheets. His crew was flying missions over the enemy now. When the bomb bay doors opened, I wondered if you could see the bombs all the way down to the ground, like in the newsreels. The Americans flew the day raids. The British flew the night ones.

  In the evenings Dad lay on the living room floor in front of the Philco with his head propped in the crook of his good arm. We listened to Richard Hottelet broadcasting from London, telling about crews parachuting out of burning bombers, hanging in the air with the sky on fire.

  Dad listened, and Mom watched him listening. In October our B-17s were bombing Schweinfurt, trying to knock out the ball bearing factories. Now we were losing more planes than came back.

  When Dad realized they were sending out those big B-17s like Bill’s without any fighter planes to cover for them, something coiled tight inside him.

  There were long strings of empty days without letters. Then Bill wrote three pages about how they’d had to ditch in the English Channel. The German fighters had raked them with gunfire from nose to tail. One engine caught fire, and they had to dive for enough air speed to put out the flames. A 20-millimeter shell cut the fuel line. They were coming in on a wing and a prayer, and they didn’t make it back to home base.

  I pictured Bill running and jumping hedges, trying to tag out on the Hisers’ box elder, and never quite making it.

  They were in the water till morning in the one raft that inflated, praying to be picked up by our side. They wore their Mae Wests, their life jackets, and I wondered whose milkweed was stuffed inside. Not all of them got back, but Bill did. Then come to find out, that flight didn’t even count as one of Bill’s twenty-five missions because they didn’t complete it.

  There were things he couldn’t put in a letter. But we knew the Baby Snooks was at the bottom of the choppy English Channel. Bill said your first plane was like your first love. He never mentioned the name of any of the other planes he flew, not even the last one.

  What the Government Wanted Now . . .

  . . . was spider’s thread wound onto reels to make the cross-hairs for gunsights and bomb sights. Now they were drafting spiders. But these threads weren’t anything you could collect, for all the webby attics Scooter and I had pilfered through. It was a job for experts.

  Besides, what Scooter? He was gone, since the second week of school. When the navy decided his dad was too old to ship overseas, they gave Mr. Tomlinson a desk job on North Island in San Diego.

  The Tomlinsons rented out their house to war workers, four to a room. Scooter and his mom and the Schwinn took the Super Chief train to California. He sent one postcard from Coronado Island, and that was the last of Scooter for the duration. There I was, high and dry, with junior high still most of a year away.

  I was moping home from school one afternoon, from Mrs. Spicer’s class this year. It was early in November, because the leaves were coming down. There was the Cub Scout neckerchief Scooter had tied in the Friedingers’ Dutch elm. It was faded and wind-whipped, but you could still see the Cub yellow and blue. It took me back.

  A top-heavy old black car gunned past me up the empty street, a 1931 Buick, in fact. Luggage-rack back and tail-lights up on stalks. The license plate hanging by a screw. It was all over the street, weaving from curb to curb, scattering leaves. So I had to know, even before it took a wide swing up into our driveway.

  It could only be Grandma and Grandpa Riddle, with Grandpa fighting the wheel. I lit out, and the Buick was by our back porch door.

  Grandma Riddle began to spill out of the car. I hadn’t seen her since before the war, and she was even bigger. The doorpost knocked her hat sideways, and her furpiece had a face with ears and eyes.

  “Say listen, young man,” she hollered at me, “go in that house and find my grandson Davy. He’s a weedy little twerp. In fact, he’s small potatoes and few in the hill. About knee-high to a grasshopper.”

  “I’m Davy, Grandma.”

  She fell back across the front seat and swatted Grandpa with her pocketbook. “Elmore! Fire this thing up and take me back home. This overgrown galoot is trying to pass hisself off as my grandson.”

  “I am your grandson, Grandma.”

  Her gaze glittered through trifocals. She’d known all along. She planted a huge lace-up shoe on the driveway. “Elmore,” she said over her shoulder. “Give me a shove. We’re staying.”

  Then Mom was there at the back porch door. Very pale. Pale as Patty MacIntosh.

  “Mama,” she murmured. “. . . For one thing, where did you get the gas to come all the way here?”

  “Drained it out of the tractor,” Grandma said. She was fighting her way out of the Buick. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what to reach for. Her furpiece was strangling her. The little fox face was snapping at her ear. Grandpa Riddle was climbing out on his side, slow, unlocking his knees.

  “Papa,” Mom said, softer.

  “We’d have written ahead, honey,” he said over the car, “but we thought you’d turn us back.”

  He came around the car. Talk about weedy. When he took my hand, his was like cornshucks. He was too wrinkled to shave.

  He didn’t kiss Mom, but he put an old stained finger under her chin and looked at her over his specs.

  “Davy,” Grandma said, “gather up all my reticules and valises off the backseat.” Grandma had brought everything she owned. The floor was crammed with Ball jars of home canning. Pickled peaches and watermelon pickle and pig’s feet and rhubarb.

  Grandma was on her feet now, weaving, looking for her land legs. They’d been all over both lanes of the hard road for hours, from below DuQuoin. She looked Mom up and down.

  “Joyce, you look like a gully beginning to wash. What you could use is a dose of salts and a square meal.”

  We were all four by the back door. Grandma jerked her big coat around her. “My stars and garters, it’s cold up here. I don’t know how you’ens live in it.”

  Mom bit her lip. Her lips were thin today, though usually she was pretty. She and Grandma never had hit it off. The war had been a good excuse for not visiting, till now.

  “We had to come,” Grandma thundered. “It was a matter of life and death. Two poor old parties like us can’t get by on that sugar ration. I don’t mind honey in my coffee, when we can get coffee. But Elmore won’t have it.”

  She pointed down at Grandpa. He was half the size of Mr. Hiser, and she was three Mrs. Hisers.

  “And what about gasoline for country people?” Grandma wanted to know. “I can’t get in to the store, and we’ve been riding on fumes since Blue Mound. And the back tires are from off the tractor.”

  Grandpa looked down the Buick at a back tire. It was caked with mud from the field. Using tractor tires on a public road was against the law.

  “We’re going to have to gang in here with you’ens in your fron
t bedroom for the time being,” Grandma said. “That’s all there is to it. There’s a war on, you know. And where’s Earl Bowman? Working, I hope to heaven. Joyce, you remember what I said before you married him.” She waved Mom aside. “And get out of the door. I’m coming in.”

  Mom’s hands worked in her apron. Her knuckles were whiter than her face.

  All Europe Waited for the Invasion . . .

  . . . that didn’t come till D-day in the next year. But we got our invasion early. Grandma and Grandpa Riddle settled into the spare room downstairs, and we were a full house. They brought their ration books, so there were more red points for meat and cheese, and sugar for baking.

  But five of us were using the bathroom now. And Grandma Riddle was everywhere you turned and bigger than some of our rooms.

  Mom had always been in charge of the house and Dad and me, and she did a really good job. She was the top mom of the world, it seemed to me. But overnight she turned into a daughter, and Grandma ruled.

  As she often said, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” so when she wasn’t showing Mom how to clean house or cook, she was crocheting terrible doilies for the davenport and antimacassars for the chairs.

  Mom drew the line at going to the grocery store with Grandma. I had to walk her there, and it wasn’t a good experience. She wanted to go every day, and the grocer didn’t like her. She squeezed the fruit. And she’d say things like, “Give me a ten-pound sack of weevils and throw in some flour.” Which he also didn’t like.

  Mom fell back on every front, but hung on, living for the mail delivery. When a long time went by without word from Bill, Grandma would say, “No news is good news.” Which also grated on Mom.

  Dad and Grandpa Riddle did a lot better. Most mornings Grandpa climbed into his bib overalls and went off to work with Dad in the Packard. He was pretty good help at the station. The pumps were electric now, so he never quite got the hang of pumping gas. But being a farmer, he could repair anything. Mostly he hung out on the pump island with the other codgers, and they showed him respect because he was Earl Bowman’s father-in-law.

  We made it to Thanksgiving, and an eighteen-pound turkey appeared from somewhere. All the fixings were like before the war, and the Hisers came. Mrs. Hiser said Grandma Riddle’s cornbread stuffing was the best thing she ever put in her mouth. Grandma said she’d show Mom how to make it.

  So it was a long day, and at the end Mom took Dad down to the basement and told him she couldn’t take another minute of it. She was going to have to go out and get a job. She was either going to have to get out of the house or go out of her mind.

  On Monday she was working in the office at the blood bank. By Christmastime she was running it. That suited Grandma fine. She said she could finally give our house the cleaning it needed. “The dust around here is thicker than the fur on a squirrel.” She promised that when a letter came from Bill, she’d call Mom at the blood bank as quick as she’d read it.

  Droning Bombers Fanned Out Over Europe . . .

  . . . and fleets of big black Lincolns fanned out from Chicago. Lincoln Continentals mostly, and some of them headed down our way. The Chicago mob was selling counterfeit gas coupons to filling station operators.

  Gas rationing worked like this. If you had a ration book of “A” coupons, you got three gallons of gas a week. Period. If you had a “B” coupon book, you were a war worker or a traveling salesman and got a little more. But a “C” coupon was the Big Time. That meant you were a doctor or a cop, and you got a lot more. When Dad learned that Congress in Washington voted themselves “X” coupon books, meaning all the gas they wanted, something coiled in him again.

  Now the Chicago mobs were working our territory, big black beetles swarming over our world. They were selling counterfeit “C” coupons to gas stations. The stations could sell gas twenty cents a gallon over the ceiling, then cover up the illegal sales by turning in the counterfeit coupons to the OPA.

  They said that thirty-five percent of all the gas sold up in Chicago was with bogus coupons. Fifty percent in New York. It was a sweet deal. But when the big bozos in snap-brim hats came to Dad with a deal he couldn’t refuse, he threw them out. They said they’d be back, with a fifty-dollar starter set of “C” coupons, and they’d expect it in cash.

  They came back in a Lincoln one December day, waiting until Dad and Grandpa were between customers. All of a sudden they were swarming around the place, big guys in pinky rings. They told Dad to dip fifty dollars out of the safe. He said he’d call the cops, and the mobsters laughed. They showed him the coupon book he was supposed to buy from them, and he told them where to put it.

  So one of them came up behind Dad and swung a monkey wrench against the side of his head. His cap flew off, and his glasses. He fell sideways on the pavement on his bad arm, and didn’t move. They did this to my dad.

  Then they stuck the bloody wrench under Grandpa’s chin and said they’d make an example out of him too. He was eighty-three years old, and he just looked at them. They piled into the Lincoln and left.

  It was a school day, so I didn’t know till I got home. Grandma was holding the fort. Mom had gone straight to the hospital. Grandpa Riddle was running the station, but Grandma wanted him home.

  We went in shifts to the hospital, and the Hisers were there every day. On the second night I was there with Grandpa. Dad looked smaller in the bed, smaller than he could make himself on Halloween night. In the hospital nightshirt, he wasn’t himself. There were stitches in the side of his head, and the concussion made him see two of everything. He looked wrung out—like a gully beginning to wash. And the hospital food was like the army’s.

  We were down to the end of the visiting hours. The nurses’ aids were piling the bedpans. Standing up, Grandpa wasn’t a lot taller than Dad’s bed. He had worked a full day, keeping the station going.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mr. Riddle,” Dad said. He always called Grandpa Mr. Riddle.

  “Pshaw,” Grandpa said. “We pitch in. It’s how we do it down home in the southern part of the state, Earl.”

  I watched them in the shadowy room. My dad. My grandpa.

  “Of course, running your place of business wasn’t what we come up here for,” Grandpa remarked. “Nor takin’ on all them Chicago Al Capones.”

  “I wondered.” Dad spoke from deep in the pillow. “It would take something to get you two off the farm and out of Williamson County. It wasn’t the sugar, was it? Or the gas.”

  Grandpa shook his old smooth head. “No. We were gettin’ along. If there’s anything we know, it’s how to do without.”

  A little quiet fell. Then Grandpa said, “It was the radio. We tune in a good deal. We heard about the raids the boys are flying over Germany and them places. We heard about the toll the Nazi fighters and the flak was taking on boys like Bill. Finally, the wife said she had to be up here with her daughter. She needed to be here for Joyce.”

  “Ah,” Dad said.

  “So up we come,” Grandpa said, “to get Joyce out of the house and into a job somewheres. The wife says that waitin’ on the mail is an old woman’s job.”

  My head swam. Grandma planned to run Mom out of the house? For her own good? She wanted Mom to get a job so she wouldn’t just be home, waiting? My head throbbed.

  “She means well, you know,” Grandpa said. “The wife.”

  “I know now,” Dad said.

  Grandpa and I drove home in the Buick. He was a scarier driver after dark. Things kept looming up, and he held the steering wheel like reins.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “do you have a license?”

  “Of course I’ve got a license.” He ground a gear. “How else could I hunt?”

  “I mean a driver’s license, Grandpa.”

  “A what?” he said, jumping the curb as he turned into our street too soon.

  When the Telegram Came . . .

  . . . Grandma was there to sign for it. She called Dad from the station and Mom from the bl
ood bank, and she didn’t open it. I came in from school, and there they were, the three of them with the yellow envelope in Dad’s hand. Grandma Riddle hovered behind Mom.

  We’d made it through Christmas, and a letter from Bill came like a present. It was January now, of 1944, and Bill was missing in action.

  It was on that giant raid over Stuttgart—three hundred and thirty aircraft. But everything went wrong. Cloud cover scattered the bomber force, and half of them had to look for other targets. The Luftwaffe fighters were all over them with head-on attacks. Forty-five bombers were lost. Bill’s plane was.

  The telegram didn’t tell us that much. It only said he was missing. But we were wise to the war now, from Bill’s letters and the radio. We knew all the things that missing could mean. If they parachuted out of the plane over Germany and nobody shot them coming down or killed them when they landed—if they were prisoners of war, we’d get a postcard about that. From the Red Cross in Switzerland, sooner or later.

  And if he came down alive in France, it depended on who found him.

  And if they crash-landed the plane in the English Channel, that too depended on who found them. But it was a January heaving with ice, so they wouldn’t last long in the water. The wires in their flight suits wouldn’t be working. The milkweed wouldn’t matter.

  It Was the Worst Time . . .

  . . . that winter when we walked through the days.

  Just because Mom never missed work at the blood bank didn’t meant I was an eight-to-five orphan. I came home every noon, my feet crowding my shoes because the rations book said I wasn’t due a new pair till March.

  Now in frozen January, Grandma Riddle fixed me my lunch, hot biscuits and gravy, a caldron of simmering soup, thick enough for a mouse to walk across. She had less to say than before. We listened to her soap opera on the kitchen radio, Lorenzo Jones and His Wife, Belle.