Under the Apple Tree

by Wakefield, Dan;

  Artie put off his duty for more than a week, thinking maybe if he waited a little while he’d come up with some better psychological strategy to use on Foltz, or, better still, that the impostor would just leave town on his own.

  No such luck. When Artie went to the Strand one night to slip Shirley a piece of Mom’s angel food cake through the ticket window, he poked his head in the door of the lobby and there was Foltz in his spic and span uniform, standing at rigid Attention by the ticket box like he was some kind of Russian General in his Red Army outfit.

  The next afternoon Artie got up his gumption, put on his Boy Scout uniform to make his visit more official, and marched right over to Miss Winger’s Boardinghouse.

  Miss Winger wasn’t home, so he went right on up to the room he knew Foltz was living in, and rapped sharply on the door.

  Foltz was wearing wrinkled pajamas and a moldy old bathrobe, even though it was late in the afternoon. Artie wondered if he’d been jacking off while he thought about doing pre-verted stuff to Shirley Colby.

  “Oh,” said Foltz. “It’s you.”

  He didn’t ask Artie to come in but he held the door open so he could.

  Artie just nodded and went inside. Foltz started plucking books off the unmade bed so there’d be some place to sit down, but Artie just lowered himself to the floor and folded his legs into Indian pow-wow position.

  Foltz shrugged and went over to a hotplate where something was cooking in a pot.

  “Want some beans?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  Foltz picked up the pot, got a fork, and started eating the beans right out of the pot.

  “Supper,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, the best thing you could do, really, would be go somewhere else.”

  “You mean leave Town?”

  “You hit the nail on the head.”

  Foltz ate some beans and then waved the fork toward Artie, like he was leading a band.

  “And what will you do if I don’t, officer?”

  If Foltz was going to get smart, Artie was going to lay his cards right on the table with no ifs and buts.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to expose you.”

  Foltz made his croaking little laugh.

  “To who?”

  “The United States Marines.”

  “For what?”

  “Impersonating a veteran of Guadalcanal, and messing around with the girl friend of a Marine who really was there, and who is still out fighting for his country in the South Pacific.”

  “That’s your privilege,” Foltz said. “But it you ask me, the Marines have bigger fish to fry these days.”

  Foltz sounded as jaunty about it as Jimmy Cagney, and Artie decided to get him where it hurt.

  “Too bad you’re not man enough to be out there helping them,” he said.

  Then he was sorry.

  Foltz started quivering, like he was going to go to pieces right then and there. He put the pot back down on the hotplate, turned, and went to the window. He just stood there, staring out, his back toward Artie.

  “I should have known,” he said. “Kids are the worst.”

  “Well, you asked for it,” Artie said kind of feebly.

  Foltz turned around suddenly and stared at him, the blotches on his face getting redder.

  “I didn’t ask for a punctured eardrum I never even knew I had till I went for my goddamn physical,” he said.

  “I guess not,” Artie said.

  “You think I wouldn’t give my ass to be out there right now with your brother, doing my part? I tried to join the damn Marines. They turned me down. Semper Fidelis! Ha.”

  Before Artie could think what to say, Foltz started crying.

  Artie didn’t know what to do.

  He just sat there, feeling crummy.

  The crying started all at once and then, after Foltz had angrily clawed his hands at his face, the crying stopped. He brushed the moldy sleeve of the bathrobe over his eyes and then went back and picked up the pot of beans and started pacing the room and eating as he talked.

  “You know what they did at the Draft Board when I asked if there was anything I could do, any kind of operation I could have to fix the damn thing? They laughed. I should get a medal, kid. I have given more laughs to more people in Wartime than Bob Hope with all his jokes. Me, I don’t have to tell jokes. I am a joke.”

  He told how his whole hometown had laughed at him. The awful thing was they had laughed at him even before because he wasn’t any good at sports and never went out for the teams and spent his time reading poems and painting pictures of trees and flowers and he wanted more than anything to join the Army and prove to the world once and for all he was a man and instead it was proved that in fact there was something really wrong with him all along; he must have been born being chicken.

  “Chickie,” they started calling him.

  “Chickie Foltz.”

  Girls made fun of him. When he came along, they sang the popular song “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” But Foltz wasn’t to young or too old, he was just too damaged to be of any use. That’s what he felt like anyway, and he felt it even more when the girls sang the part real loud about how the best guys had gone to the army, and the poor guys who were left at home were too feeble to get girls to be hot for them. Think what it must feel like! It meant you couldn’t make a girl fall in love with you, much less make out with her. You were nothing, you were lower than a worm.

  Foltz ran.

  He dumped his books and paints in one suitcase and threw some clothes in another one and hitched out of town, carrying with him not only his damn damaged eardrum but the telltale Selective Service Card that every male (man or not) had to have on him at all times, the Card that bore the stamp of his official stigma: 4-F.

  He hitched to Chicago, thinking he could be anonymous and left alone in a big city, that maybe he could even find a girl there who’d believe he’d been wounded on Guadalcanal when he told her the real-life stories he’d learned from reading Guadalcanal Diary, but the hitch was, he didn’t have a uniform, and a twenty-year-old guy in Chicago without a uniform in 1943 might as well have been a leper fresh out of a leper colony. There were guys in uniform everywhere, pairs and bunches and gangs of them, sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, soldiers and Air Corps guys from camps and bases in Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan, Marines back home on leave from the East and West coasts to see their folks and girl friends, all of them wearing some uniform, seal of approval, safe and confident, clothed in the colors of war and service, surrounded wherever they went by the “V-girls” and “cuddle bunnies” who were ga-ga over any man in military dress, hot lips puckering and parting to please, please take me, I’m yours, for the night, the weekend, the forty-eight-hour pass, please! Even short guys were loved if they had on a uniform; they were thought to be cute and cuddly and extra brave for putting their little bodies on the line, going into battle along with everyone else, regular fellows who cocked their caps at a jaunty angle and walked with a strut and made everyone laugh and cheer when they got a real big luscious blonde on their lap, kicking her legs in hot delight and circling her long thin arms around the game little trooper.

  Foltz got a job as a waiter in a fancy restaurant where the dinner was actually stuck on a sort of sword and soaked in oil and you had to set the food on fire before you served it to the customers. He had to wear a costume with silk knickers and knee socks, and he knew people stared at him not because of the outfit but because he was the only young guy wearing one. Poor excuse for a uniform. When he wasn’t at work he stayed in his room reading poems, or went to movies where he sat in the safety of darkness watching the stories of other people’s lives on the screen, but in Chicago there were always lots of servicemen at the movies, soldiers and sailors with their buddies having a good old time, or worse, with girls, holding hands and legs and boobs, necking and breathing in hard, heavy gasps, making it hard to concentrate on the cowboys ch
asing the Indians or the gangsters blasting the coppers up on the screen. Once at the fancy restaurant a drunken Air Corps Colonel with a girl who looked just like Lana Turner told Foltz he would make a good mascot for the French Foreign Legion in a getup like that and the girl laughed, her wet red lips spreading wide over gleaming white teeth, and after Foltz set their dinner on fire for them he turned around and went to the kitchen and shucked off his clothes and quit, knowing he had to run again.

  This time he went to small towns where there weren’t gangs of servicemen coming on passes and leaves to have a great time, towns with no attractions, off the beaten path, towns that rolled up the sidewalks at ten o’clock when the movie was over, towns where nobody knew Clarence Foltz and would believe, for a while, that he really was a wounded veteran of Guadalcanal. When they started to quiz him too closely about the actual nature of the wound, or what it was really like on Guadalcanal, he’d leave in the night and move on.

  When he fled like that from a little town called Loogootee, in Indiana, a John Deere salesman gave him a ride to Birney, Illinois. He went straight to the only movie house, the Strand, where he saw Five Graves to Cairo and asked for a job. The regular Usher was leaving the next week for the Army and Foltz took his place.

  Then he met the beautiful, lonely girl who worked in the ticket booth, the only girl who didn’t make fun of him, who listened to him, who took long walks in the woods with him.

  So here he was, and here he would stay.

  Foltz had finished his pitiful supper, and he put the empty pot back on the hotplate.

  “So go ahead and expose me,” he said. “I’m tired of running.”

  Artie stood up from his pow-wow position, remembering the old Oriental saying, “He who laughs last, laughs best.”

  “There’s one thing you’re forgetting, Foltz,” he said. “My brother.”

  “Don’t worry, I know she loves him. I know she’ll marry him when he comes home. I don’t mind playing second fiddle.”

  “But Roy would mind. He’d kill you.”

  Foltz jerked the closet open and grabbed his Usher outfit off a hanger.

  “If you’ll excuse me now, I have to ‘get into uniform.’”

  He croaked his harsh laugh.

  “Shirley just feels sorry for you,” Artie said.

  The blotches on Foltz’s red face got brighter, but he didn’t say anything. He just yanked his moldy bathrobe off and started unbuttoning the grubby pajamas.

  Artie got the hell out of there, not wanting to see the nude body of the pre-vert.

  The only thing left to do was call the guy’s bluff. Expose him for what he was to the whole town, starting with Mr. Risley, the owner of the Strand.

  First, though, it was only fair to warn Shirley.

  Artie was determined that he wouldn’t let her talk him out of it. As much as he liked her, he knew that right now she was under the influence of being a girl and couldn’t help herself. Even though what he was going to do might make Shirley both sad and mad, he knew he was doing the best thing for her, as well as for Roy and America. He had thought the whole thing over for three days and nights, during which he tossed and turned and slept only fitfully, wakened by dreams of bombing raids and refugees. He was so tired in school he had to pinch himself to keep his eyes open. Before he went to Shirley’s he took a cold shower and made himself a hot cup of Ovaltine for strength.

  Shirley came to the door herself, looking all keyed up.

  “Just the person I wanted to see!” she said, and grabbed his arm, leading him right to the living room where Mrs. Colby sat with her fingers pressed to her temples like she was trying to think of the answer to the $64 Question on “Dr. I.Q.”

  “You remember Donna Modjeski, don’t you, Artie? Tell Mother about her.”

  “Donna Modjeski’s real neat,” Artie said. “She was a cheerleader.”

  Mrs. Colby glared at Shirley.

  “You are not ‘a Modjeski,’” she said. “You are ‘a Colby.’”

  It sounded like she was talking about breeds of cows, like telling someone, “You are ‘a Holstein.’”

  Shirley went on like she didn’t even hear it.

  “Well, Artie, Donna Modjeski is working in a defense plant in Indianapolis. Building airplanes. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Sure! That’s really neat!”

  Mrs. Colby kept concentrating.

  “No daughter of mine,” she said, “is going to be a ‘Rosie the Riveter.’”

  “No one mentioned riveting,” Shirley said. “I’m talking about wiring.”

  Mrs. Colby squinted.

  “Factory work is factory work,” she said.

  “Listen to this!” Shirley said.

  She grabbed a magazine off the couch that was folded to a certain page, and began to read.

  “‘… the work is exacting and tedious, but women’s nimble fingers are adept at such jobs.’”

  She held up the page of the magazine like it was evidence.

  “That’s wiring they’re talking about!” she said.

  Mrs. Colby sighed.

  “Propaganda in Wartime is not only used by the enemy,” she said.

  Shirley flung the magazine onto the couch.

  “It’s not propaganda—it’s the truth! It’s also the truth that out of six hundred and thirty-two occupations essential to War Production; there are only fifty-seven of them that can’t be done by women.”

  “There are some women who will do anything,” her mother said. “There always were and there always will be.”

  “Some women! Mother, there are half a million women working in War Jobs.”

  “Heck, yes!” Artie said. “Miss Winger has this niece who works in a Navy Shipyard in Boston.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Mrs. Colby said.

  “Mother, you can’t just stick your head in the sand. Things are changing.”

  “I bet Miss Winger’s niece is as nice as Miss Winger,” Artie said, “and that’s about as nice as you can get.”

  “Times may change, but values remain the same,” Mrs. Colby said, ignoring Artie’s comeback. “Of course in Wartime, standards are lowered, and indeed there are women who are only too glad for an excuse to go around with dirty fingernails and no makeup.”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Mother, don’t you even read the ads?”

  “I am not in the habit of perusing the Employment Section.”

  “I don’t mean those kind of ads. I mean the ones for soap and hand lotion, where the women in War Plants tell how they use Pond’s or Hind’s or something and stay looking nice to keep up their morale.”

  Mrs. Colby stood up.

  “I won’t hear any more of this nonsense. I’m going upstairs and lie down. And I don’t want you hiking off “somewhere with your little friend. I want you here when your father comes home.”

  “We’ll just be in the kitchen,” Shirley said. “I want to make Artie some lemonade.”

  Mrs. Colby walked out of the room like nobody else was even there.

  Shirley led Artie to the kitchen and he leaned against the stove while she started slicing up lemons with brisk efficiency.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said in a low voice just above a whisper. “Out of Birney.”

  “Because of Foltz, you mean?”

  Shirley nodded.

  “It’s going too far. I care for him. Love him, I guess. I can’t help it.”

  “You mean you don’t love Roy anymore?”

  “Of course I do! That’s why I want to get away from Clarence.”

  “You mean you’re in love with two guys at the same time?”

  “Of course not. I can’t help loving Clarence, but I’m not in love with him. “I’m in love with Roy. It’s not the same thing.”

  “I can make Foltz leave town. I’m going to tell on him.”

  “No! It’ll just make a terrible mess. Besides, I want to go to Indianapolis. I can live with Donna Modjeski and work in the War Plant. I�
�ve got to do something real or I’ll lose my mind, I know I will.”

  “But your folks won’t let you.”

  “If they won’t give me their permission, I’m going anyway. I’m free, white, and eighteen. I’ve made up my mind.”

  “So what if he follows you? Foltz.”

  “I won’t tell him where I’m going. I’ve made up my mind about that, too.”

  “When are you going to go?”

  “Soon as I can. Next week, maybe. On the Greyhound.”

  She started squeezing the lemons with grim determination.

  “Wow,” Artie said in the low, conspiratorial tone that Shirley was using. “This is really something!”

  “Yes,” she said. “Finally.”

  5

  Artie stayed home on Saturday night instead of going to Ben Vickman’s party. He knew darn well the whole “party,” the records and dancing and Cokes and potato chips were just an excuse for playing spin-the-milk-bottle, and he sure didn’t want to spend the evening watching Fishy Mitchelman smooch it up with Caroline Spingarn. Besides that, the kids were still kidding him about what happened at Caroline’s party. When bigmouth Vickman invited Artie he said, “You can come if you don’t tip anyone over—including yourself!” Everyone got a big yuk out of it, and at recess the guys grabbed each other when they saw Artie coming and pretended to “dip,” making high-pitched screams that were supposed to be an imitation of Marilyn Pettigrew when she was felled by Artie’s over-zealous embrace.

  Artie told Vickman he was busy studying for a merit badge in Botany.

  He told himself he had too many serious things on his mind, what with worrying about what was going to happen with Shirley, Foltz, Roy, and the War, to mess around with seventh grade social life.

  He told his folks he had a crick in his back and just wanted to lie on the davenport and read through Mom’s new magazines.