Under the Apple Tree

by Wakefield, Dan;

  Mom grabbed her coat from the hall closet and swung it on as she stopped briefly by the door to the living room.

  “Okay, kids, there’s enough in the kitchen to feed an army, so have a good time.”

  Roy and Shirley broke out of their clinch, but each kept an arm around the other.

  “Thanks,” Roy said.

  “We’ll be fine,” Shirley said.

  “And don’t worry if we’re late, these ‘Bingo for Bonds’ nights go on to all hours.”

  “Heck, yes,” Artie said.

  Mom grabbed his hand and pulled him along out of there, as the Andrews Sisters crooned, “you’ll never know just how much I miss you—”

  “Bingo for Bonds Night” was actually over a little after nine, but Mom suggested instead of going straight home that they have dessert at Verna’s, this great little truck stop joint on Route Nine. They had already had bread pudding and brownies at the Catfish Dinner, but nobody mentioned that. It was a night for not mentioning things, especially what was on anyone’s mind.

  They all had a piece of Verna’s hot apple pie, while the jukebox played the same song that Roy and Shirley had been dancing to in the living room that afternoon.

  “You’ll never know just how much I care …”

  Artie prayed that Roy and Shirley still cared for each other, still loved each other, and that love would make Roy be more like himself again, or the way he used to be, anyway. He hoped they had made out all the way while everyone was gone, but the one thing that scared him was if somehow while Roy was doing it with Shirley he could tell if she had done it with anyone else. You were supposed to be able to tell if a girl was a virgin or not, she bled all over the place if she was, but that would have happened way back before Roy went off to the War, when they first had done it. But what if there was some secret way a guy had of knowing whether a girl had done it with somebody else? If there was any kind of test like that, old Roy would know it, and if he found out Shirley’d done it with anyone else he’d probably go right off his rocker.

  “Maybe we ought to get going,” Artie said.

  He was picturing Roy going stark-raving in the living room, pitching Shirley right through the door with some sort of deadly jujitsu he had learned from the Japs.

  “Have some more pie,” Dad said.

  “I’m stuffed.”

  “What’s the big rush?” Mom asked.

  Artie squirmed in his seat.

  “It’s late is all.”

  “Tomorrow’s not even a school day,” Mom said.

  “Well, I want to get up early, so if Roy wants someone to talk; to. He gets up with the birds now.”

  “Best thing to do for Roy is not worry over him,” Dad said.

  Mom nodded.

  “He needs time.”

  “Shoot, he’s had most all afternoon and night,” Artie said.

  “I wasn’t talking about that, for Heaven’s sake.”

  “What your Mom means is, he needs time to get the War from his head, relax and recuperate. These things don’t happen overnight.”

  “He’s only got eleven nights left,” Artie said.

  “He’ll have his whole life,” Dad said.

  Mom sniffed, and blew her nose.

  “Even then, he’ll have scars,” she said.

  “The one on his leg’s not so bad,” Artie said. “I saw it.”

  “Your Mom doesn’t mean those kind,” Dad said quietly.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just pray those are the worst kind he has.”

  Artie was getting a headache. He figured there’d be plenty of time to pray that Roy didn’t get any worse scars than he had; right now he was worn out from praying that Roy hadn’t found out anything about Shirley that she didn’t want him to know.

  When Artie and his folks finally came home, stomping and talking real loud as they went inside, Roy and Shirley were sitting on the living room floor playing Chinese checkers.

  “Who’s winning?” Mom asked real brightly.

  “Oh, Roy is, he’s really good,” Shirley said.

  Roy took one of his marbles and hopped it right over a row of Shirley’s. Then he looked up and actually smiled, the way he used to.

  “Haven’t lost my touch,” he said.

  Shirley reached over and squeezed his hand.

  Artie figured everything was fine.

  The next morning, Roy wasn’t up with the birds. He didn’t even come down for breakfast, though the smell of waffles and syrup and sausage was as powerful as perfume all through the house.

  “I think we should just let him sleep,” Mom said.

  Dad nodded as he dug into his waffle.

  After breakfast Artie went upstairs and stopped at the door of Roy’s room to listen. He didn’t hear a sound, not even snoring. He had hoped that Roy would be up-and-at-’em this morning, maybe even like his old self again, after the time alone with Shirley. Maybe it hadn’t been so great after all, maybe later on they’d had a fight when Roy took her home and now he was really down in the dumps, or maybe he’d had some terrible nightmares about the War and was trying to wake up from them and couldn’t. Artie lifted his hand, hesitant, then rapped very softly on the door. There was no answer. Artie put his hand on the knob, turned it gently, and peeked inside.

  The bed was all made and Roy was lying on top of it wearing just his skivvies and the dog tags that hung around his neck. You could see the red stitches on his stomach where they’d taken off skin to fix his leg, and the other stitches on the part of his thigh where he’d had the operation. He was smoking a cigarette, tapping it into an ashtray that lay in the hollow of his belly, and staring at the action photos of himself as a basketball and football star that hung on the opposite wall. Or maybe he was staring right through them; the way his eyes looked he might be staring through the wall itself, through the house, the Town, the whole country. The real smile of the night before was gone, the mouth a hard line again, so he looked like the older veteran who had stepped off the train, a stranger, and even more strange and out of place in this boyhood room with the pennants and sports pictures, the ribbons and trophies of high school games. The man on the bed didn’t match the rest of the room.

  “Roy?”

  The man’s body jerked up straight, the hand dropping the cigarette.

  “I’m sorry!” Artie said, and rushed to brush at the sparks and ashes that had fallen on the bedclothes.

  “Damn!” said Roy, whacking a spark out.

  “Dumbo Garber, that’s me,” Artie said.

  “Take it easy, kid. I’m the goof-up.”

  “I shouldn’t have bothered you, that’s all.”

  “Hey, I can’t just hang in the sack all day, can I?”

  Suddenly Roy smiled, and clapped a hand on Artie’s shoulder, the first time he’d done that since he’d been home.

  “Hell,” he said, “I haven’t even thrown you a pass yet. My leg may be gimpy, but there’s nothing wrong with my throwing arm.”

  “Let’s go!”

  Roy swung off the bed, holding his wounded leg, and Artie charged off to get the football. It was almost like old times.

  In the next couple of days Roy was mostly like he used to be, but there were moments when he seemed to slip out of it and into the silent, far-off stare, not seeming to notice or hear anything going on around him, and then he’d snap back again, like going in and out of a trance.

  Every day Roy would have a big breakfast with the whole family, and then he’d take the car and drop Artie at school and Dad at the station and go get Shirley for their all-day picnic at Skinner Creek. Evidently Shirley’s folks didn’t make any fuss about it. Artie guessed they must be impressed and maybe a little afraid of the grim new Roy who’d been seasoned and aged by the War, who was now in some ways older than anybody’s parents.

  One day when Artie came home from school Roy was asleep in a chair in the living room and Shirley whispered not to wake him; she was getting ready to walk on home by herself, but Artie i
nsisted he’d walk her. He hadn’t even had a chance to talk to her alone since Roy had been back, and he wanted to know if everything was going as good as it looked, and if there was anything he could do to make it even better.

  “I wish these days would never end,” she said dreamily, as Artie strode proudly beside her, protector of his brother’s beloved.

  “You’re real happy, huh?”

  “Deliriously. Except—”

  Shirley’s face clouded over, like she was in some dark trance of her own, seeing into depths of things.

  “What? Except what?”

  “Clarence.”

  “You’re not still in love with him, are you?”

  “Artie! I was never in love with him, I explained all that to you. I did love him, as a person, that I cared about deeply, that’s all.”

  “But you still care? Is that it?”

  “Of course I still care. I wish him well, wherever he is, but that isn’t it, what bothers me so.”

  “What is, then?”

  “That I was so weak, so carried away, that I—that we did it. While Roy was at War. It’s like a dark cloud, over all this happiness.”

  “But he’ll never know, will he? Roy?”

  “If he ever did, it would be the end.”

  “But he loves you.”

  “He’d never forgive me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. He’s a man.”

  “You mean men can’t forgive, ever?”

  “Not that.”

  “How come? How come you’re so sure?”

  Shirley stopped walking and put her mittened hand on Artie’s arm, as if to physically convey the truth of what she told him.

  “Artie. It’s the way men are.”

  He nodded, Shirley took her hand away, and they walked on to her house in silence, weighed down by the burden of nature’s stern law.

  When Artie got home a car he’d never seen before was parked outside, and he hoped it wasn’t some reporter come snooping around. This one old guy had come over from the paper in Moline the second day Roy was home and asked a lot of questions about “what it was like” on Guadalcanal and Roy’s answers got shorter and his face got tighter till. Artie was afraid he’d explode and finally he said he was sorry but he couldn’t really say any more and the guy got ticked off and asked how the people on the Home Front were supposed to know what was going on if their own boys returning home wouldn’t talk? Then Roy’s tan had turned the color of a bruise and he handed the reporter his hat and said, “Tell ’em to read Ernie Pyle.”

  If any reporter was snooping around, Artie would give him the bum’s rush and say, “Tell ’em to read Ernie Pyle.”

  It wasn’t a reporter, though; it was Bo Bannerman, Roy’s old teammate and pal who had gone with him and Wings Watson to see Bubbles LaMode the day of Pearl Harbor. Bo had been “rotated” back to the States after flying twenty-five missions over Germany as a ball-turret gunner on a B-17, and was stationed at Scott Field, right over in Rantoul, Illinois. When his folks wrote him Roy was coming home after being wounded, Bo had got a pass and come back to see his old pal. The two buddies were sprawled on the living room floor, drinking beer and whooping it up just like in the old days, while Shirley’s record of “Besame Mucho,” the Latin love song, was playing on the Victrola.

  Artie took off his coat and went back to the kitchen, not knowing if he ought to intrude on the talk of the two heroes, who probably had stuff to say to each other that regular people weren’t supposed to hear. Mom was whipping up a batch of Toll House cookies and she asked if Artie wanted to help, or would rather go listen to “the boys.”

  “They might not want me sticking my nose in,” Artie said.

  “I’m sure they won’t be shy about telling you to scram if that’s how they feel.”

  She reached up in one of the cabinets and pulled down a bag of potato chips.

  “Here. Feed these to the lions.”

  She smiled, and twitched Artie’s ear.’

  “Hey, thanks, Mom.”

  Artie ripped the bag open and went in to offer it to the guys.

  “Grab some grub!” Roy said, reaching in for a huge handful.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Bo said, rummaging in the sack.

  “Hey, Artie, you remember Bad Bo here,” Roy said.

  “Sure. How they hangin’, Bo?”

  “Loose as a goose, little buddy. Hey, the kid’s hep, huh, Roy?”

  “Whattya expect from my own brother?”

  Artie, full of pride, took that as kind of an invitation to join them, so he sat on the floor and tried to sprawl out the way Bo and Roy were, like he was one of them.

  Bo demolished the potato chips he had taken and reached for another fistful.

  “Hey, Bo,” Roy said, “don’t they got potato chips over in England?”

  “They got what they call ‘chips,’ but they’re really french fries, not actual potato chips.”

  “And warm beer, I heard tell.”

  “You ain’t heard nothin’ about what England’s got, Keemosabee.”

  “You tryin’ to tell me somethin’?”

  Bo tipped his beer can and guzzled down what was left.

  “Chug-a-lug,” he said. “You wanna hear some ‘war stories’?”

  “Hear some? I got some to tell.”

  Roy slugged down some more beer, and Bo took his empty can and bent it double with his bare hand.

  “There more where this come from?” he asked.”

  Roy crushed his own empty can and winked.

  “You better believe it, pardner. This is the Home Front.”

  “I’ll get ’em!” Artie volunteered eagerly, and scrambled up from his sprawl. He started to run to the kitchen but Bo waved him back.

  “Uh, Roy,” Bo said in a low, secret voice. “Before we crack any more, is there someplace we can swap war stories without burning the ears off your Mom out there in the kitchen?”

  “We’ll beat a hasty retreat to my old room. Artie, how ’bout bringing us up that whole six-pack from the icebox?”

  Artie snapped a salute and said, “Roger!”

  “And Artie,” Roy said, “bring up a church key with it, okay?”

  “Church key?”

  “You know—the opener. So we don’t have to chew the lids off the cans.”

  So that was what you called the little metal gizmo that cut the neat little triangles in the top of the beer can. It wasn’t an ordinary “can opener”—it was a church key! Elated at feeling even more a part of the manly world of the servicemen, Artie bounded off to the kitchen while Roy and Bo went upstairs singing raucously: “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder—”

  When Artie brought up the beers he hesitated, then asked, “Is it okay if I stay?”

  Roy took a can of beer and knotted his brows as he looked at Bo.

  “Whattya think, Sarge? Is the kid ready?”

  “If he’s old enough to button his fly, and button his lip.”

  “I’ll never tell, Scout’s Honor!” Artie said.

  “Okay, close the door,” Roy said.

  A thrilling tingle went through Artie’s whole being. He felt he had been allowed entry into an inner sanctum of manhood such as he had never dreamed of knowing as a mere almost-thirteen-year-old kid. He was with a couple of veterans of the War, one from the European Front, one from the Pacific, about to exchange war stories! These were things that the brave fighting men didn’t deign to disclose to inquiring reporters, the real stuff of battle too personal to spill to civilians, too gory and terrifying to reveal to girl friends and wives, parents and loved ones. He squatted on the floor, Indian fashion, concentrating totally, wanting to remember for the rest of his life the wrenching details of what it meant to face death and deal death to others.

  As if all this weren’t enough, Roy opened not two but three cans of beer, and handed one to Artie.

  “You going to hear war stories, you might as well have a little foam.”
r />   “Hey, thanks!”

  “Just button your lip about that, too,” Roy said.

  “Damn right!” Artie said, feeling grown-up enough to cuss out loud.

  He took a swallow of the beer, and almost choked.

  It tasted like soapsuds.

  Artie smacked his lips, like he really loved it. He’d have gladly drunk horse pee if that’s what the guys were having.

  “Whoo-ee!” Bo exclaimed. “Let’s tell a few tales.”

  Roy waved his beer can and stamped his feet.

  “Roll me o-ver, in the clo-ver!” he sang out, croaking.

  Artie was a little surprised, since he thought the sacred nature of the subject would make the guys somber, sad in a courageous kind of way, and something like reverent. But he realized that was dumb. Roy and Bo were carrying on just like a couple of death-defying RAF officers in those movies where they banged on the piano and got pie-eyed before going up on a mission to shoot down whole squadrons of Messerschmitts. You treated war and death lightheartedly, that was the style!

  Artie squeezed his eyes shut and forced down another slug of beer.

  “Let me tell you ’bout England,” Bo said. “What they got over there, see, they got these country girls. Blond, rosy cheeks, bazooms on ’em like Howitzers, big, long legs, and ass—you never saw a beautiful sight till you saw one of those milky-white, firm big bottoms of an English country gal. And legs! A good English country gal makes Grable and them look like they’re standin’ on hatpins. I mean, these sweet English lassies are built for a man, and they appreciate a man. Roy, they got ways of showin’ their appreciation that you never heard tell of.”

  “Country gals? I thought London was supposed to be the hot old town.”