Under the Apple Tree

by Wakefield, Dan;

  “Stay away from it. Sure, there’s some of your sharpies there, but it’s all grab and gimme, hustle and bustle, wham-bam, thank-you-ma’am. That’s London. Gimme a hayloft out in one of them little ‘shires’ any day of the week.”

  “Like they say, you been making hay, huh, Bo?”

  “Making hay when the sun shines!”

  “Well, there’s no hay to speak of out on the islands,” Roy said, “but there’s plenty of grass. And I don’t mean just to roll around on. You ever seen a gal wearin’ a grass skirt? The way it parts and moves back and forth when those legs come swishing out? It’s one of the seven wonders of the world, ole buddy. And there’s no grass at all on top o’ course, just the beautifullest boobs God ever gave to woman.”

  “I guess, but hell, man, you’re talkin’ dark meat. If that’s what you favor, or is all to be had, I guess it’s okay, but—”

  “Not ‘dark’ like you’re thinkin’ of, buddy. More like cocoa. Hot chocolate with a lotta milk in it. Creamy tan. And luscious.”

  “No bull?”

  “Swear to God. But that’s just the islands. A year ago, I got me a week of R’n’R in Pearl, and that is Heaven. I mean, the most luscious women in the world. Chinese, Native Hawaiian, mixes and strains of the best stuff made even better.”

  “So whattya do, talk pidgin to ’em? ‘You gimme some nooky-nook,’ all that palaver?”

  “Hell, not on Pearl. On Pearl you got a very educated class of girl, the nicest kind of girl in the world, right in your convent schools—and when school’s out, lookout, buster! There was this one, Marie—”

  “Lemme tell you about this country gal called Nell—”

  “I’ll match you Nell with my Liana from Pearl any day.”

  “Liana? Thought you said Marie?”

  “Hell, I had me Liana after Marie. Now listen to this—”

  Artie lost track of the names and anatomies, the athletic exploits of wild hula girls of the islands and steamy English milkmaids. He kept forcing down the beer, not wanting to show how confused and surprised he was.

  He had thought he was going to hear about the secrets of battle, the way it really feels to have a sneaky Jap come at you with a knife, the terror of a Messerschmitt diving at the turret of your B-17 while you hung there thousands of feet above the evil terrain of Germany. But that wasn’t what “War stories” were at all.

  When Bo and Roy finished off their first beers from the pack and opened more, Artie glugged down the rest of his can and took a second one to keep right up with them.

  “Ice cubes!” Bo shouted. “You tryin’ to pull my chain, Garber? What the hell she do with any ice cubes at a time like that?”

  “Don’t knock it till you try it, ole buddy.”

  “Well, how? I mean, where?”

  The stories got so complicated that Artie didn’t really understand them, or even think he wanted to. He was glad when they finished off the six-pack and Bo had to go home for supper. Artie wanted a chance to talk to Roy alone. His head was buzzing, but he felt real good in a new kind of way, in spite of the pukey taste of the beer. He felt like he almost understood the answer to a puzzle, and if only he could fit a few jagged little pieces into place he would solve the whole thing.

  When Bo left, Roy flopped down on his bed and lit a cigarette. Artie stood up and went to the window. The sun was going down and everything seemed suspended, lifted out of time.

  “Say, Roy, I was just wondering,” Artie said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I guess if a guy is overseas, in Wartime, he gets to make out whenever he wants, even if he’s married, or got a girl back home?”

  “Well, sure, I mean, in Wartime, you never know which day is your last, so you just try to do whatever you want and that you’d like to do, see? It’s like ‘live for the moment,’ ’cause that may be all you got.”

  Artie nodded.

  Roy took a big drag on his cigarette and blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Then he waved the hand with the cigarette and spoke in a funny, fake-English accent.

  “Laugh, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die!”

  “Sure,” Artie said. “I get that part.”

  “What part don’t you ‘get’?”

  “Well, what about the girls?”

  “The girls back home, you mean?”

  “No, I meant the girls overseas, that you guys do it with.”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, they’re not all whores or anything, I guess.”

  “Hey, there are whores in every country of the world, always will be, peacetime and War. But one thing your old brother can say, with his head held up to any man: ‘I never paid for it.’”

  “So the girls you did it with over there, they were really ‘nice girls’?”

  “Damn right they were. Some of those native girls, they don’t really know too much, and o’ course if they are nice you want to give them a chocolate bar or something. Even the Christian girls, those educated ones like Marie from the convent school in Pearl? Well, they appreciate a gift if you got PX privileges, a nice pair of nylons, something a lady anywhere in the world would like, but it sure is nothing to do with whoring.”

  “I don’t mean whoring. What I don’t get is, how can they be nice girls, if they do it with soldiers and all?”

  “Hell, Artie, it’s Wartime for them, too. Their countries are being bombed and invaded, their own men are off fighting and dying in the war. There’s no tomorrow for them, either.”

  “So it’s like in Wartime, people don’t have to obey the sex laws and stuff and everyone agrees it’s okay.”

  “Pretty much, I guess, yeah.”

  “And a nice girl whose guy has gone off to War and her country is at War and she does it with some other guy, she still is a nice girl?”

  “Damn right! Now you take that Marie, in Pearl, the one from the convent school? Hell, I’d be proud to bring her right home here for supper. You sure are thinking this matter out, buddy.”

  “I just want to make sure I get how it is,” Artie said.

  Roy got up from the bed and took his shirt off. He went to his dresser and pulled out a can of talcum, shook some onto his hand and then slapped it under his armpits. He was getting ready to get dressed for supper, and Artie wanted to solve the puzzle before they went downstairs or he knew he’d lose the whole sense of it.

  “Don’t break your brain, ole buddy,” Roy said. “Just ask the old Corporal here.”

  Roy mashed the cigarette out in an ashtray on top of the dresser, then pulled a fresh shirt from the top drawer and started putting it on.

  Artie walked across the room and back, wobbling a little bit, but feeling like he was almost floating. He felt he was right on the edge of some beautiful solution, if only he could gather in his mind the exact right words.

  “Okay,” Artie said, straining his whole mind into one single focus of super concentration. “What if there’s this girl whose country is at war, and the guy she loves has to go off and fight far away, and while he’s gone, the girl makes out with another guy? If she still loves the soldier and wants to marry him when he comes back, is she a nice girl even though she made out with some other guy in Wartime?”

  “Hell, yes. If her country’s at war, and her guy is off fighting the enemy, there’s no tomorrow the night she makes but with another guy. Nice girls all over the world are doing it right now, be they French, English, Hawaiian, whatever.”

  “And no one could blame them?”

  “No one who’d been around the block and knew which end was up.”

  “Especially a guy who’d been making out with lots of different girls of all different creeds and colors while he was off to war. Right?”

  Roy was about to light a new cigarette, but he left it dangling in his mouth and squinted real hard at Artie.

  “Are you asking about a particular guy?”

  Artie’s head began to throb, and he rubbed it real hard, trying to keep things in f
ocus that seemed to be slipping away and spilling.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I mean, if it’s true what you say then it doesn’t matter who the guy would be, does it? Or the girl?”

  Roy lit the match he’d been holding, but he had trouble getting the flame to hold still at the tip of the cigarette. Finally he made the connection, and waved out the match.

  “What girl?” he asked.

  “The one who’s the girl friend of the guy who goes off to War and makes out with lots of other girls.”

  “Is this the girl who makes out herself while the guy she loves has gone off to War?”

  Artie felt like his brain was going to burst.

  “Well, I guess it could be, yeah.”

  Roy took the cigarette he had only started to smoke and jabbed it into the ashtray on the dresser so it broke, and some sparks flew up.

  “Let me get this straight now,” he said. His voice got higher and faster as he spoke. “A guy goes off to fight in the War and risks his life and limb to keep his country safe, and the so-called ‘nice girl’ he leaves behind is fucking her ears off with every stud who comes down the pike.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “You just said she made out while her boyfriend was gone off to War.”

  “I never said with every guy who came down the pike!”

  “Oh, there was just a handful, a lucky two or three who hit the jackpot?”

  “One! There was only one guy!”

  Roy grabbed the front of Artie’s shirt, twisting it.

  “Who?”

  Artie jerked away. Everything was spinning now, out of control.

  “Hey, come on, you’re getting me all mixed up,” he said.

  Roy grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward him again. His hot, beery breath was in Artie’s face, making him dizzier.

  “Who was the sonofabitch who got in her pants?”

  Artie pushed his hand against Roy’s chest. “I was only talking about ‘some girl,’ that it might have happened to.”

  “I know who the hell you’re talking about!”

  “I never said Shirley!”

  Roy let go of Artie and slammed his fist on the dresser so hard the ashtray jumped off and fell to the floor.

  “That bitch! That dirty little two-timing bitch!”

  “You liar!”

  “Me? What the hell did I ever lie about?”

  “You said it was all right for a nice girl to do it if her country was at war!”

  “I didn’t say America, for chrissake!”

  “But America’s at war—we’re fighting the Japs and the Germans, you are yourself!”

  “America is not getting bombed and invaded, it isn’t at war like England and France and Hawaii, and you know why not? I’ll tell you why not—’cause guys like me are over there getting blown to shit to protect our loved ones, while all the time they’re home humping away like rabbits!”

  “You mean if the Nazis had actually bombed Chicago, or the Japs had invaded California, then it would have been okay for Shirley to make out with a guy?”

  “You got everything all screwed up, kid. I was talking about foreign girls, not American girls.”

  “American girls are different?”

  “They’re damn well supposed to be! What the hell you think we’re fighting for, anyway? Haven’t you ever heard of ‘the American Way of Life’?”

  “It’s not fair!”

  “Great. I come home and find out my girl friend is cheating on me and my own little brother is knocking the American Way of Life. Jesus. What am I fighting for, anyway?”

  Roy went to the closet and grabbed his Windbreaker.

  “All I meant was, it doesn’t seem fair that you get to make out in Wartime all you want, and Shirley’s not allowed. That’s the part I don’t get.”

  Roy rammed his arms in the jacket and yanked the zipper up. “Well, ole buddy, I’ll make it real simple for ya. The fact is, I am a guy and Shirley is a girl. You got the picture now?”

  Roy grabbed his cane and pounded out of the room.

  “Hey, wait!”

  Artie ran after him, scrambling down the stairs two at a time.

  “Hey, Roy, please don’t!”

  Roy was already charging out of the door, hobbling forward with huge, lopsided strides.

  “Stop!”

  Artie hurled himself outside, careening across the front yard in a dizzy panic, throwing his whole body into tackling his brother around the waist, but Roy didn’t even fall, he just kept on moving, pushing Artie away as he went. Artie held on for dear life, sliding down and grabbing hold of Roy’s good leg.

  “Please!” he yelled.

  “Get away, go home.”

  “She wasn’t in love with the other guy, she just felt sorry for him!”

  “I can’t wait to hear all about it, straight from the bitch’s mouth.”

  “No!”

  Artie still clung to Roy’s leg but then Roy broke into a limping gallop and his heel came back and struck Artie in the chest. He let go of the leg and sprawled on the sidewalk as Roy hobbled off like fury down the middle of the street. The pain shot through Artie’s body like sudden poison but was not as bad as the awful knowledge that he’d gone and ruined the lives of his two favorite people in the world.

  Roy was drunk for three days and Mom and Dad couldn’t do anything with him; he was like a wild man. He still wasn’t all the way sober when he packed up and left for Parris Island before his leave was even up.

  Everyone in Town knew the story.

  Artie went to the Strand to find Shirley, but Patsy Ann Paddington, the new Junior Prom Queen, was sitting in the ticket booth just like she’d always been there and always would be.

  Artie got up the nerve to call the Colby house by putting a handkerchief over the phone to disguise his voice in case Shirley’s mother answered.

  Shirley’s voice sounded like she was speaking from the bottom of a well about a thousand miles away. Artie begged her to meet him at Skinner Creek and he thought she said yes.

  Shirley wore no makeup. Her face looked pale and startled.

  “It’s all my fault,” Artie said.

  He blew his nose to keep from crying.

  “Don’t blame yourself for my mistake,” Shirley said.

  She took his hand and they walked along the creek.

  She told him she was going to Indianapolis to live with Donna Modjeski and work at the Curtiss Wright airplane factory.

  “Can I see you off at the Greyhound?” Artie asked.

  “My parents are going to drive me.”

  “Oh.”

  He was glad she had a ride, but sad because it seemed like her mother had proved it was right that in the end she could only depend on her own family.

  “Will you come back home when the War is over?”

  “We’ll see,” was all she would say.

  It seemed like she was one of the casualties—a person who was wounded in the War, and might or might not get well again.

  They sat on the bank of the creek and Shirley smoked a cigarette. It didn’t seem right to talk. Artie thought of how long ago it was that they used to walk home after cheerleader practice singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and he had to blow his nose again.

  He walked her back to the corner of her block and then turned and ran home and shut himself in his room.

  The day after school was out the Allies invaded the beaches of Normandy, France, and Tutlow came over with some homemade explosives to celebrate D-Day. The aspiring little scientist was blinking eagerly behind his thick glasses, anxious to blast off his improvised arsenal, but Artie just shook his head.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “What’s wrong? You still in a funk ’cause your big hero brother got two-timed?”

  “Oh, go blow it out your ear,” Artie said, and walked in the house.

  He snitched a Pabst Blue Ribbon from the icebox and drank it alone in his room, listening to the senseless clangor
of church bells and firecrackers. The beer still tasted awful to him, like soapsuds, but he liked that it made him belch. Belching seemed lowdown and grown-up, which was how he felt instead of like a kid who got a kick out of setting off homemade explosives. He even liked knowing the beer was bad for him.

  Even though Roy was back in the States, it seemed he was actually farther away now than when he was halfway around the world. He wrote back a postcard after he got to Parris Island, saying he was settled there and everything was fine. Now that he didn’t have a girl to write home to, the family knew they wouldn’t be hearing much from him, but Mom tried to look on the bright side. She said they’d be seeing more of him now; he’d probably get to come home for Christmas, and maybe even Thanksgiving. After all, he was only in South Carolina, not the South Pacific. Artie didn’t say anything, but he knew in his gut that Roy wouldn’t come back home till the War was over.

  Artie got a postcard from Shirley, too. It showed a picture of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the center of Indianapolis. She said she was working hard and loved it. The card was signed “Rosie the Riveter,” and didn’t have any return address.

  Artie felt like that was all he had left of his two favorite people.

  Postcards.

  V

  1

  Artie sure was relieved when America dropped the Atom Bomb on Japan.

  The most important thing it meant was that Our Boys wouldn’t have to die invading the stronghold of the evil yellow Empire. Before the Bomb was dropped, the papers were saying it would cost about 175,000 American lives to capture the “Home Islands” of the Japs, where every last fanatical man, woman, and child would fight to the death and fall on their swords. But even the crazed Warlords knew there was no use battling the A-Bomb, so it saved the lives of those hundreds of thousands of American boys who’d have been killed in the invasion.

  It also meant Roy would finally come home. Like Artie suspected, he hadn’t come back to Birney for the holidays, even though he could have taken a train from South Carolina. Instead he sent presents to the family, U.S.M.C. souvenirs of Parris Island, and a card that said he was going to spend Christmas with a real Southern Belle on her family’s gigantic plantation. But now that the War would be over he wouldn’t have any more excuses to stay away. He’d have to come home, and Artie and the folks could help him adjust and begin his new life in the Post-War world.