The Secret of Midway

by Steve Watkins

  I looked back to see what was happening with William Foxwell, to try one last time to pull him into my boat so we could try to escape — but he wasn’t there.

  For the next three days in real life, I waited for him to come see me. At school I was so distracted that I messed up on a couple of tests and forgot to turn in three assignments, and so got hammered with a ton of extra homework. Not to mention how mad at me Mom and Dad were because I was doing so poorly in school.

  “You’re a smart kid!” Mom kept saying. “So do the work already!”

  Dad threatened to break up the band and not let us practice anymore after school — or participate in the All-Ages Open Mic Night, which was in just two more weeks.

  Our band practices were pretty flat. Julie used the word “desultory,” which Greg and I had to look up. It means “disconnected” and “lacking in consistency,” which totally fit. Nobody said it, but I was sure we were all afraid of the same thing: that we had taken too long finding the answers we needed for William Foxwell, and now it was too late.

  Greg actually seemed to be taking it the hardest of everybody. It was like he was genuinely depressed, like William Foxwell had been his own dad or brother or uncle or something. I thought he was even going to start crying one day at practice when Julie asked me if there was anything new — any middle-of-the-night visits, any information — and I said no. That was on the third day of no William Foxwell.

  And then, out of desperation, I guess, Julie came up with a crazy idea that seemed like about the longest of long shots that I could imagine.

  “I told my dad about our problem,” Julie said to Greg and me at lunch. “Not everything, of course. I explained that this was Anderson’s relative, and we were searching for the answer to his disappearance in the war. I told my dad that it was important to Anderson and to his family, and I asked if he had any suggestions for us in our quest to solve the mystery.”

  “And did he?” Greg asked.

  Julie nodded emphatically. “Yes. After I explained about our theory — that perhaps there was a fourth pilot or someone from one of the U.S. torpedo bomber flight crews who was captured by the Japanese — my dad said that my great-great-uncle had served in the Imperial Navy during the war.”

  “Is he still alive?” I asked.

  “He is,” Julie said.

  “Wait, was your great-great-uncle on one of the Japanese ships at Midway?” Greg asked eagerly.

  Suddenly, we were both excited.

  But Julie shook her head. “Great-Great Uncle was still only in training at that time, so early in the war.”

  Greg tapped his spoon in a pile of instant mashed potatoes on his lunch tray, leaving little craters. “Well, so much for that,” he said.

  I wasn’t so ready to give up. “Maybe you could call him?” I suggested. “See if he knows anything, or knows somebody who might know. I mean, it’s not as if we have a whole lot of other options — or ideas.”

  “Yeah,” Greg chimed in. “Good point. I guess.” He didn’t sound at all enthusiastic.

  Julie was, though.

  “I already called him,” she announced.

  “Your great-great-uncle?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Last night. Which was his morning, of course, in Japan.”

  “Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Greg said. “What did he say?”

  Julie smiled one of those actual smiles of hers. “He said that he did have a friend, who was a very young officer at the time, who served on a destroyer for the Imperial Navy, and it was one of the escort ships for the Japanese carrier fleet that attacked the island of Midway. Great-Great-Uncle said that he would call his friend and talk to him, to see if he had ever heard anything about a mysterious fourth American captured after all the planes were shot out of the sky.”

  Greg shoveled in a mouthful of potatoes. I took a bite of my soggy sandwich.

  After he swallowed, Greg asked when Julie thought we’d hear back from Great-Great-Uncle’s friend. Julie shrugged. She was eating shiny peas from green pods out of a plastic container that she’d brought from home. She said it was called edamame, and it was Japanese.

  “Hopefully, we hear something soon, but these men — Great-Great-Uncle and his friend — are very old and do not move quickly. I only hope Great-Great-Uncle remembers his promise to call. Until then, we wait,” Julie said.

  “I hope it’s soon enough,” Greg said. “And I hope he knows something that can help. I don’t think we have much time.”

  We had another good band practice that afternoon — even when Uncle Dex came down with his electric ukulele to sit in on “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” — which I was having my doubts about us performing. I still wasn’t sold on Julie’s “Hamster Talks,” either, but she seemed to have established herself as the band leader, and it was obvious that Greg was fine with it, no matter what I might think.

  It was pretty ironic, too, us singing “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” when I was sitting there missing William Foxwell, and hoping he hadn’t gone away, or at least not totally away. Not yet. Not until we had the answers he needed.

  My mind must have wandered, thinking about all that stuff, because Julie stopped playing and got on me about messing up the chords.

  “Pay attention, Anderson,” she said. “We’ll never win if we don’t get this right.”

  “Wait,” I said, caught off guard. “Win what? I thought we were just playing the open mic night. Us and everybody else who has a middle school band. Including Belman.”

  “Yeah,” Greg said. “That’s right. But it’s also a competition. Didn’t you see the flyers they posted around school? Like, the fine print? Whoever they vote the winner gets to do a whole concert at Halloween.”

  I hadn’t read the fine print, of course. I’d been distracted worrying about William Foxwell. But now that they said it, I was suddenly nervous, and when we went through it again I messed up even more. And this time I was paying attention.

  It was hard waiting to hear back from Great-Great-Uncle. The longer it took, the more discouraged I felt. Mom noticed that I was dragging around at the end of the second day of waiting and asked me what was going on. I couldn’t exactly tell her, of course, and that was hard, too. I always used to tell Mom everything, but even before William Foxwell came into my life, I had stopped. After her diagnosis, and when she started having such a hard time with the MS, I didn’t want to add anything else to all that she had to worry about. So if it was anything bad or sad, I either told Dad or kept it to myself.

  “I’ve just been trying to help this guy, sort of this friend of mine,” I said. “But sometimes I guess you can’t just fix things for somebody no matter how much you want to.”

  I figured being vague like that would be okay, and it was. Mom pulled me down on the couch next to her and gave me a hug. “Well, I’m sure it means a lot to your friend that you’re trying to help,” she said. “And just that you care, and your friend knows you care — I’m betting that can lift his spirits, too.”

  Mom seemed happy to be giving me advice and all, and that made me happy, too. I hoped she was right, that it did help William Foxwell to somehow know how hard we were working to get the answers he needed and everything — and that we did care so much. Even if we hadn’t seen him in nearly a week.

  I thanked Mom and went to my bedroom. Just before I went to sleep I whispered aloud everything that had been going on, on the chance that William Foxwell was nearby and able to hear me, even if he was stuck on the other side of some sort of invisible curtain in a place where I couldn’t hear him back.

  That night I had yet another dream about William. Everything was fuzzy at first, but then as it slowly came into focus, I realized we were both on a Japanese ship — which from what I could tell, after looking at so many pictures of ships while reading about the Battle of Midway — was one of the escort boats, a destroyer.

  William Foxwell was kneeling on the deck, surrounded by Imp
erial Navy officers. They were shouting at him. I could see it all but couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything. It was as if I was the ghost and he was real, and alive.

  He lifted his head in the dream and looked past the officers at me, and he said just one word: “This.”

  “This what?” I tried to say back, only my voice still didn’t work. “Are you trying to tell me this is what happened to you?”

  He couldn’t answer, and everything went out of focus again. But somehow I knew that he was reaching out to me in the dream, and that, as he continued to fade away from me and from Julie and Greg and everything, this was as close as he could get.

  We were at band practice the next day when Julie got the call. Greg and I pressed in as close as we could to hear the conversation, even though it was all in Japanese, and even though Julie had to apologize and tell Great-Great-Uncle the reception was bad and she had to go upstairs. We followed her out of the dank basement and up past Uncle Dex and out onto the sidewalk, practically shaking with excitement.

  But then, as they talked, Julie’s face fell and I knew it was bad news. Greg saw it, too. He punched the Kitchen Sink door and scraped up his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said when she got off the phone. “Great-Great-Uncle says his friend, Mr. Yamaguchi, remembers nothing. No American prisoner of war was picked up in the Pacific Ocean by the destroyer; there’s nothing to tell. Mr. Yamaguchi asked Great-Great-Uncle to not contact him again. He was angry that Great-Great-Uncle invaded his privacy, and adamant that we are to leave him alone.”

  Julie and Greg both teared up. I might have, too. “Great-Great-Uncle says he’s sorry for disappointing us,” Julie said. “He says it is so difficult for those who served, even so many years later, to talk about the war.”

  We stood there for a while, not talking, nobody moving, until finally we filed silently back inside.

  “Why the long faces?” Uncle Dex asked. “Something the matter?”

  Greg and Julie didn’t say anything, so it fell on me to answer. “It’s just this friend of ours who we were trying to help,” I said, which was pretty much the same thing I had said to Mom the night before.

  Thankfully, Uncle Dex didn’t ask anything else.

  Nobody was in the mood for rehearsing, but nobody was in the mood for going home, either, I guess. I know I wasn’t. It was hard enough knowing we’d let down William Foxwell without being all alone, too.

  We were all just sitting there, messing around with our instruments because we didn’t know what else to do, but not really playing or anything. And that’s when he came back, the very faint outline of him, anyway.

  When he spoke, his voice sounded so far away that it was practically like he was trying to talk to us from seventy years ago.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” we heard him say. “For all you’ve done. It was so great of you and I know you did your best. And, hey, I even got to play the trumpet again, so that was something good that came out of it all, too, even if I was a little, uh, rusty.”

  I couldn’t believe it. William Foxwell was actually trying to be cheerful, or at least not distraught, which was how we were all feeling, all the way down to our bones. I couldn’t believe it was going to end this way, after we had come so close. And now he was doomed to that limbo or wherever it was he’d been wandering and lost all these years.

  “It was an honor knowing the three of you,” he said, his voice even fainter than before. And then the outline, the faraway voice, everything about William Foxwell blinked out like the last ember of a fire. It was almost as if he’d never been here at all.

  You’d think at least one good thing would have happened after that — like us winning the All-Ages Open Mic Night Competition and getting a standing ovation, and everybody in school knowing our names and deciding we were these three quirky but also very cool kids.

  But it didn’t happen quite that way.

  First, Greg’s dad hit another rough patch and got mad at him for not cleaning up his room and grounded him. That didn’t stop Greg from sneaking out, of course, but it did make him really late for the concert. He called to tell us what happened and that he was on his way.

  Julie and I were nervously waiting for him, standing right next to the stage with our instruments, when Belman and his band got up to perform. They were playing right before us. Belman’s band was called the Bass Rats, which I had to admit was a pretty good name.

  First, he introduced himself and his bandmates, and then he thanked everybody for coming out to hear them and said he looked forward to winning the competition. Everybody except Julie and me laughed.

  “He’s so conceited,” Julie said.

  Unfortunately, he was also really good and everybody rocked out to all of the Bass Rats’ songs.

  There were about fifty kids in the audience, mostly middle school and high school kids, though a few looked as if they might still be in elementary school. All the parents, my dad included, were sitting in a sort of parents’ waiting room out in the front of this long warehouse that was a drum studio/alternative music concert venue called Eyeclops. Their logo was a giant eye in the middle of a pyramid. I wasn’t sure what that had to do with drums. It looked more like what you see on a dollar bill.

  “Thank you, everybody,” Belman yelled into the mic after their last song. “It’s great to be here in Fredericksburg!”

  Julie sniffed. “He says that as if his band has ever played anywhere else,” she said.

  Belman wasn’t finished. “I want you guys to be really nice to the next band up.” He gestured toward us, where we were waiting in the wings. “They’re all in third grade, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first time they’ve been away from their mommies. This might also be a good time to take a break if you want. Maybe go outside and get some fresh air because, I mean, they’re just learning how to play, so it could get really ugly in here.”

  Every one of those fifty kids — including the real elementaries — looked at me and Julie and laughed when Belman said that. And dumb me, I couldn’t help myself. I yelled out, “We’re not in third grade!” But that just made people laugh more.

  “Of course you’re not,” Belman said, with that big, weird grin of his.

  Julie and I just stood there and fumed. What else could we do?

  At that moment Greg finally showed up, but everything went even more downhill after that. We went onstage after the Bass Rats left, but we couldn’t get our instruments tuned right. Julie got frustrated and snapped at us, which only made people laugh some more. Once we started, Greg tried singing louder to make up for it, but he was off-key or something and his voice kept breaking in the middle of certain notes. A lot of certain notes.

  It was a disaster, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. We only did two of our three songs because I wasn’t about to let Greg and his cracking voice start singing about hamsters, no matter who wrote the lyrics. Nobody called for an encore, which was fine with me. I practically ran offstage when we finished, and wished I could keep running — out the door, out of the building, all the way home to try to convince Mom and Dad that we should move to a different town where nobody had ever heard of me before.

  Afterward, Greg tried to convince us, and himself, that it wasn’t that bad. “Really, once I got warmed up, I thought it sounded fine. And I bet nobody even noticed we weren’t in tune.”

  “It was my fault,” I said to try and make him feel better. “I kept forgetting the chords.”

  “Oh, stop it, you two,” Julie finally said. “We just need more practice. We were distracted. We have to rededicate ourselves to our mission.”

  I rolled my eyes. “We have to rededicate ourselves to being invisible at school,” I said. “People are going to be making fun of us from now until we graduate. From high school! I mean, what were we thinking? And I’m pretty sure Belman and his band will win.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” Greg said. “He’s such a jerk and all.”

  “Yes,” Jul
ie said. “Where’s the poetic justice?”

  “What’s that?” Greg asked.

  I answered. “It’s when the good guys win and the bad guys get what’s coming to them — their just deserts.”

  “Just deserts?” Greg repeated.

  Julie sighed. “They get punished,” she said.

  “Oh,” Greg said. “Well, that sure didn’t happen tonight. Or with anything, lately.”

  “You mean with William Foxwell?” I asked.

  He didn’t have to answer. We all knew what he was talking about.

  We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Eyeclops studio having our conversation, and after a while, Dad came out to find us. “You guys ready to go?” he asked.

  “Just in a minute, Dad,” I said. “We have to go back inside and get our instruments.”

  Dad said he would wait in the parents’ room, and for us to come get him when we were ready.

  None of us was in a hurry to get laughed at some more, so we just stood there, listening to the strains of what sounded like dying cats back inside Eyeclops. I figured it must be that band with the actual elementary kids. At least there was somebody worse than us. Not that that made me feel any better.

  And then Julie’s phone rang.

  She fished it out of the pocket in her cargo pants, and said, “Huh.”

  “Huh, what?” Greg asked.

  “Huh, it’s from Japan.”

  “Well, answer it already,” I said, and so she did.

  Her jaw dropped almost immediately after she said hello. She covered the speaker, looked at us, blinked three times, and said, “It’s Mr. Yamaguchi!”