"When the war's over, the first thing I'm getting is a new coat," Elizabeth said. "I saw just the one I want in the Sears catalog. It's blue, and it has a big fur collar. It's so pretty."
"I'm getting saddle oxfords," I said, "and roller skates. Maybe even a bike of my own."
"And all the candy we can eat," Elizabeth went on.
"And no more Spam," I added.
Elizabeth pulled a pack of gum out of her pocket and offered me a stick. Popping it into my mouth, I chewed silently. Big white clouds floated by over our heads. They looked like angels with spread wings, I thought, hovering above us, protecting us.
"Look," Elizabeth said.
Way down the train tracks, Gordy and Doug were crossing the rails. They each carried a bulging grocery bag. We watched them vanish into the woods.
"They must be going to their stupid old hut," Elizabeth said. "Have you ever wondered why they aren't scared of the so-called crazy man?"
I stared at Elizabeth uneasily. "He hates girls," I said, "and they're boys. They don't have anything to worry about."
Elizabeth chewed her gum quietly for a while. "Suppose he's a Nazi spy?" she asked me suddenly.
"Who?"
"The crazy man, dumbo." Elizabeth leaned toward me. "Maybe Gordy tells him things."
"Like what?"
"Government secrets."
"How would Gordy know any secrets?"
Instead of answering, Elizabeth grabbed a limb and swung down from the tree.
"Where are you going?" I called after her.
"Following them," she yelled.
Darting across the tracks, Elizabeth looked back and signaled me to hurry. On fear-trembly legs, I scrambled over the fence and sneaked through the woods after her. We ran from tree to tree, pausing frequently to look and listen. Over our heads, the wind sighed in the bare branches, and the leaves were ankle deep on the ground. Occasionally a crow or a blue jay cried. The boys were nowhere in sight.
When we neared the hut, we crouched behind a tree and stared at the smoke rising from the crooked chimney. The holes Elizabeth and I had smashed in the windows were covered with cardboard, and someone had scrubbed "Kilroy was here" off the walls.
"I bet a Nazi is in there with them right this minute," Elizabeth whispered.
Nazi or crazy man, I didn't want to meet him. Squatting beside Elizabeth, I looked over my shoulder. All I saw behind me were bare trees and tangles of leafless shrubbery and vines. Stripped of foliage, the woods were bleak and open. Anyone could see us from a long way off, and I wanted to sneak away.
Nervously, I nudged Elizabeth, but, before I could speak, the door of the hut suddenly opened, and the crazy man stepped outside. At the sight of him, my heart pounded so hard I was sure he'd hear it, but he walked off into the woods. He stopped near a tree, and, when I realized what he was doing, I shut my eyes.
After the noise of falling water stopped, I heard the man crunching back over the leaves toward the hut. I opened my eyes then and got my first good look at him. He had a bushy beard and shaggy dark hair, but he was young, maybe about Jimmy's age or even younger. He was wearing army clothes, the kind soldiers wear in battle, but they hung on his skinny body like they belonged to someone else, someone much bigger.
While I watched, Gordy and Doug joined the man. He lit a cigarette and handed Gordy the pack. For a few minutes, nobody said anything. They just sat on a log smoking.
"You're awful thin," Gordy said after a while. "Are you sure you're getting enough to eat?"
The man smiled. "It's probably more than I'd be getting over there."
While Elizabeth and I crouched motionless behind the tree, Gordy, Doug, and the man finished their cigarettes.
"When's it going to be over?" the man asked. His voice was soft and sad. He sounded tired.
"Beats me." Gordy shook his head. He had on a scuffed-up leather jacket and a matching helmet like bomber pilots wear. The chin strap was unbuckled, and the wind clinked the metal parts every now and then. "The news gets worse every day."
"Let's go inside," Doug said. "No sense freezing our tails out here."
The man nodded, and I watched them go into the hut and shut the door.
As soon as it was safe to move, Elizabeth whispered, "Let's go."
With the wind moaning over our heads, we crept away from the hut. When we were out of the boys' hearing, we ran through the woods, ducking branches and dodging the long arms of bramble bushes, not caring how much noise we made. All we wanted to do was get back to our side of the train tracks.
Neither of us said a word until we were in our alley. Then Elizabeth turned to me, her cheeks and nose red from the wind. "Oh, my lord," she whispered, "I know who he is."
I stared at her, but she teased me with her secret for a few seconds.
"He's not crazy and he's not an old bum and he's not a Nazi," she said finally. "He's a dirty, rotten, low-down coward."
"What do you mean?" I stared at her.
"Didn't you recognize him?"
I bit my lip and thought hard. There had been something familiar about the man, but I couldn't think who he reminded me of.
"It was Gordy's brother Stuart," Elizabeth said. "Gordy must be helping him hide from the army."
"Golly, you're right," I whispered. "It was Stuart. He's so skinny I didn't even recognize him!"
Elizabeth whistled. "That's why Gordy never brags about Stuart. He's a deserter, Margaret!"
"I'm going to tell Daddy," I said, breaking into a run. "That's against the law!"
"No, wait!" Elizabeth grabbed my arm and yanked me back. "Don't you see? We've got something on Gordy now. He'll do anything to keep us from blabbing about Stuart."
"But it's not fair, Elizabeth. If our brothers went to war, Stuart has to go, too."
With the toe of my sneaker, I scuffed at the cinders packed into the alley's ruts. The wind tweaked at my neck and nipped my nose. At my back were the train tracks and the woods and the deserter. Not a crazy man to keep me awake all night, not a Nazi spy to help Germany defeat us, but Gordy's brother Stuart. A yellow-livered skunk, a man too low to fight for his country.
"We can tell later," Elizabeth said. "But not yet. First let's make Gordy pay for all he's done to us."
I bit my lip and tried to back away, but she had me by the shoulders, forcing me to stay close.
"Come on, Margaret," Elizabeth said, "don't ruin our only chance to get even."
"Okay, okay," I muttered.
Elizabeth hooked her little finger with mine to make my promise official and then ran home.
Ducking under the half-frozen sheets and towels hanging on the clothesline, I crossed the lawn and trudged up my back steps. Alone in my room, I sat down at my desk and spread out my homework. Social studies, long division, spelling words—how did Mrs. Wagner expect us to do all this in just one weekend? I felt tired just looking at it.
Instead of getting to work, I doodled on a piece of notebook paper and tried to remember all I knew about Stuart.
He'd been our paperboy for a while, probably just before he graduated from high school. I had a memory of my parents sitting on the porch one afternoon. Daddy was holding the Evening Star Stuart had just delivered and watching him go on down the street, lugging his sack of newspapers. "That's the only Smith who'll ever amount to anything," Daddy had said.
It must have been just after Donald Smith blew up the toilet at the Esso station with a firecracker. Or maybe Daddy was thinking of the night Donald wrecked a trolley car by putting a garbage can on the tracks. Donald did so many awful things it was hard to say. But now he was a gunner, shooting down Nazi planes, doing his part for America. And what was Stuart doing?
Thinking harder, I dragged up a recollection of Stuart watching Jimmy, Joe Crawford, Butch Thompson, and Harold Bedford play basketball behind our garage. He didn't play himself, probably because he was younger than the others, but he seemed to enjoy being there. He was skinny even then, and his clothes never fit him rig
ht. His pants were always either too long or too short, his shirts didn't stay tucked in, and he never had a warm coat. On the coldest days, he wore a thin sweater.
I guess in some ways Stuart was kind of pitiful, and some of the boys teased him. For instance, Joe Crawford thought Stuart was a sissy because Donald always made him cry when they were little. Even in high school Joe remembered that and wouldn't let Stuart forget it.
But Jimmy always took up for Stuart. He called him the little poet because he always had his nose in a book. Now that I thought about it, I realized Jimmy liked Stuart.
What would he think if he knew what I knew? Surely Jimmy would agree it was wrong for Stuart to hide in the woods. It was bad to be a deserter, everyone knew that, but I had a feeling Jimmy wouldn't hate him for it. He wouldn't want me to blab either. "Not the little poet, Maggie May," Jimmy would say. "You can't tell on the little poet."
I stared out the window at the bare branches of the maple tree, so black against the red sunset. On my notebook paper I'd doodled a picture of a princess, like the ones Jimmy used to draw for me.
Suppose my brother was down there in that hut? How would I feel if someone turned him in? I sighed and put my head on my desk. If I hadn't followed Elizabeth across the train tracks, if I hadn't spied on Gordy, I wouldn't know about Stuart, and I wouldn't have to ask myself questions I couldn't answer.
11
The next week, Mrs. Wagner kept us busy, but the following Saturday Elizabeth burst into my room and thrust a sheet of paper at me. "Read this and tell me what you think," she said.
In scrawling penmanship, Elizabeth had written:
Dear Gordy,
We know you are hiding a dirty coward deserter in your hut. We also know who he is—your yellow brother Stuart. Maybe we will tell, maybe we won't. That's for us to know and you to find out!
Suspensefully yours,
Two Anonamus Enemies
P.S. You stink.
"Well, what do you think?" Elizabeth perched on the foot of the bed, grinning. "Didn't I do a good job of disguising my handwriting? I bet even Mrs. Wagner wouldn't recognize it."
It did indeed look amazingly sloppy, large and loopy and slanting backward instead of forward.
"I wrote with my left hand," Elizabeth confessed. "I was going to write more, but it took so long, I got tired of it."
"You spelled 'anonymous' wrong," I told her.
Elizabeth shrugged. "Who cares? I'm not getting a grade on it."
"If we don't sign our names, how can we blackmail Gordy into being nice?" I asked.
"Oh, this is just the first letter," Elizabeth said. "We'll let him worry for a week, then we'll reveal our true identities."
Though I didn't dare say it, I thought Elizabeth had been listening to too many radio shows. She sounded like one of the Shadow's enemies. Looking at her sprawled on my bed, rereading her letter, it occurred to me she was the first girl I'd ever known who might grow up to be a criminal.
***
After lunch, Elizabeth and I set out to deliver Gordy's letter. I wanted to send it through the regular mail. I even offered to pay for the stamp, but Elizabeth insisted on hand carrying it to his house.
"What if he sees us?" I asked her as we crept along behind the sagging fence bordering Gordy's yard.
"He won't," she said with a lot more confidence than I felt.
"How about his father?" I asked. In some ways, I was more scared of Mr. Smith than I was of Gordy.
"Quit worrying, Margaret," Elizabeth said. "I know what I'm doing."
Crouching even lower, she peered through the fence at Gordy's house. At first glance, it seemed almost identical to the shingled bungalows on Garfield Road, but, unlike them, its paint was worn to a dingy gray. The front door was scuffed and scarred. An old refrigerator stood on the porch, and one of the windows was covered with cardboard.
In the yard, a broken swing dangled from a tree, and a couple of tricycles and a scooter lay on their sides in the dirt. I saw Gordy's wagon, but I didn't see his bicycle.
"Do you think he's home?" I whispered.
Elizabeth shook her head. "Let's watch the house for a while to make sure."
We squatted for so long my knees ached, but nothing happened. No one came, no one left. A thin stream of smoke rose from the chimney and drifted away on the wind. The swing's rope twisted and untwisted, and its broken seat clacked against the tree trunk. The longer I stared at the dark windows, at the paint peeling away from the sills, at the naked baby doll lying on its back on the porch, the sadder the house looked.
After a while, a thin gray cat crept up the steps and sat down by the door, its ears perked hopefully. When the door stayed shut, the cat hunkered down and tucked its paws under its chest. Closing its eyes, it dozed at its post.
Elizabeth smoothed Gordy's envelope. "Do you dare me to put this in the mail slot?"
I nodded, knowing she wanted me to encourage her.
Elizabeth looked up the street and down. No one was in sight. She leapt to her feet and ran up the sidewalk. Thrusting the letter through the mail slot, she thumped on the door and dashed back again. "Come on!"
I was already running as fast as I could. Heart thumping, feet pounding, gasping for breath, we raced around the corner and headed for home.
"Did anyone see us?" Elizabeth asked me after we'd gone into my room and slammed the door.
"Just the cat," I said. "You sure scared him. I never saw a cat disappear so fast."
We laughed then, just thinking about Gordy's cat, but later, after Elizabeth's mother called her home for dinner, it didn't seem so funny. Not just the cat, but the whole thing. Monday we would have to go to school and see Gordy. Even though we had the goods on him, as Elizabeth said, I was scared of what he might do.
***
A week passed without anything happening. Sometimes I thought Gordy was watching Elizabeth and me, but he didn't say a word to either of us. Or anybody else, for that matter. In fact, he spent most of the day with his head on his desk. He didn't cut up in class or cause trouble on the playground. Mrs. Wagner didn't keep him after school. Once she asked him if he was sick, but he just shook his head and stared at the floor. If I'd liked him, I would've been worried about him.
The next Saturday, Elizabeth and I were sitting in our tree, talking.
"I think our note scared Gordy pretty bad," Elizabeth said. "He hasn't said boo to anybody all week."
For a few minutes, she sat quietly, swinging one foot and frowning. The sun shone through her hair, changing it into a cloud of silver. I watched her warily, wondering what she was thinking about.
"Let's go down to the hut again and see what's going on," she said.
"Do we have to?" I asked, but she was already on the ground, running toward the train tracks. Reluctantly, I swung down from the safety of our tree and ran after her.
Following our usual procedure, we crept close enough to see the hut. Except for a tiny trace of smoke from the chimney, the place looked deserted. No voices, no movement, no sound came from behind the closed door.
"I'll sneak up and look in the window," Elizabeth whispered. "You stay here and watch for Gordy."
"Be careful," I told Elizabeth, but she was already crawling toward the hut.
Nervously, I watched her cross the clearing on her hands and knees. When she was below the window, she rose slowly to her feet, and, while I held my breath, she peered inside. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Elizabeth didn't move, I didn't move, the squirrel who had hopped into the clearing behind Elizabeth didn't move. We were all as motionless as statues.
Then the woods behind me exploded with noise. Before I could shout a warning, Doug grabbed me, and Gordy was going after Elizabeth. She fought like a cat, furious, all fingernails and teeth, but she couldn't get away from him.
As we struggled, the hut's door opened, and Stuart ran outside. "Hey," he shouted. "What's going on? Let those girls go before you hurt them."
But Gordy and Doug ignore
d him. Shoving past Stuart, they dragged Elizabeth and me into the hut. Stuart followed us, and Gordy kicked the door shut. Blocking it with his body, he let go of Elizabeth.
"You sent that letter, didn't you?" Gordy yelled. His face was white, and the scar over his eyebrow was purple.
Quicker to recover than I was, Elizabeth glared at him. "So what if I did?" she panted, still breathing hard.
"Who else have you told?"
"That's for me to know and you to find out." She folded her arms across her chest and tipped her chin up.
"Didn't I tell you not to come down here?" Gordy yelled. "Didn't I warn you to stay out of the woods?"
"You aren't the boss of me," Elizabeth said, "and you don't own these woods."
"Hold on, Gordy." Stuart pulled his brother away from Elizabeth. "Leave her be. She's only a girl."
Nothing made Elizabeth madder than being called a girl. She clenched her fists and glared at Stuart, but he just laughed at her. "Aren't you Joe Crawford's little sister?" he asked.
"Don't you dare even speak my brother's name, you dirty deserter," Elizabeth said. "Joe's fighting the Japs right now. He's not hiding out in the woods, letting other people die for our country!"
Stuart stopped smiling then, and Elizabeth pointed at me. "Margaret's brother is in the war, too."
"I know," Stuart said. "So's my brother Donald."
"So how come you're not?" Elizabeth yelled.
Gordy grabbed Elizabeth and whirled her around so she was facing him. "You better not tell anybody about Stuart," he said.
"Why shouldn't I?" Elizabeth asked. "It's against the law to hide a deserter."
Gordy ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead so it stood up like grass for a minute. Darting a look at Doug, he shoved his hands in his pockets and scowled at Elizabeth.
"Do you know what happens to deserters?" Gordy asked her. For once he didn't yell. Instead he leaned toward Elizabeth, almost like he was begging. "Stuart could be shot or put in jail or sent straight to the front. Some Nazi would kill him the first day. Do you want that to happen to him?"
"Huh," Elizabeth said. "It would serve him right." She flicked her eyes at Stuart. "I don't feel sorry for him, not one bit. I'd rather see him die than Joe."
Stepping on the Cracks Page 6
