The Art of Keeping Cool

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Getting ready for the big bam?” he called out. She nodded and he waved and rode on past.

  We turned into the thickets again and, after a long thrash, came out on the bay. We slid down the bank to the beach the way Elliot and I had before, and walked fast to the military fence. The hidden slit was still there. We crawled through. I was sure Carolyn would start complaining about something, but she didn’t. She followed behind me the whole way, quiet and serious.

  I wanted to get to the stone wall in the field where Elliot and I had spied on the fort before, but far down the beach I saw a soldier patrolling with a rifle on his shoulder. Then I saw another soldier, much nearer, come out from the shadow of the embankment and stand still, looking away to sea.

  Quick as I could, I pulled Carolyn in close to the embankment.

  “They’ve put guards out. We’ll have to climb up here.”

  “Where? There’s no place.”

  It was so steep I had to half-haul and half-push her up. I was sure the soldier would hear us. Rocks and sand sputtered down onto the beach behind us. He never looked around, though. When we got up, we lay flat for a while just in case. Then I rose up slowly on my knees and took a peek into the field we’d climbed up to.

  It was lucky I’d been careful. About a hundred yards away, somebody was standing with his back to us. His arms were folded across his chest and he was looking toward the fort, to where the cement bunkers for the big guns opened out of the artificial hill not more than a quarter mile off. In three seconds I knew who it was. Abel Hoffman.

  I dropped back down beside Carolyn and kind of caught my breath.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “A man. Stay down.”

  After a while, I stuck my head up again. Abel hadn’t moved. He was still staring the same way at the guns. Elliot wasn’t going to find him at home if he went visiting this morning, that was for sure. I told Carolyn we could try sneaking forward a little into the long grass. We crawled on our bellies until we found a place where the view of the guns was better. We could see their gray barrels now, extended from the bunkers, aiming out to sea. I was so excited I got a chill up my spine.

  I kept checking on Abel. He was looking at the guns through binoculars, now, arms held taut. His plaster cast was gone. He shifted his weight, made a quarter turn to the right, and stared through the binoculars out to sea. I pulled Carolyn down. She’d been standing up, trying to see better.

  “Keep your head below the grass. Where’s your cotton?”

  “Right here. I couldn’t hear anything so I took it out.”

  “Well put it in again.”

  “Are the guns going to shoot soon?”

  I showed her my watch, then remembered she couldn’t tell time. “It’s two minutes of ten. Get ready.”

  From across the field we’d been hearing a low grinding or cranking noise. I began to realize it was coming from the guns. When I looked more closely, I saw that their barrels were being slowly raised. The cranking stopped, started again, stopped. Started. Finally, when the guns were pointed steeply up toward the sky, the grinding stopped for good, and all around, the land seemed to go quiet.

  Far off, the bell in the church steeple at the town common begin to chime. It sounded peaceful and ordinary. I thought of Grandma attending her meeting there, and of Grandpa back at the house, escorting patients into his office.

  “You again? We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he’d tell the old ladies. It always got a laugh.

  For some reason, my father came into my mind, and I almost got a clear sight of him in the cockpit of his plane, flying over France. But I was too excited about the guns to concentrate and he got away again.

  I began counting with the chimes in a whisper. Carolyn raised up for a view and joined in. We whispered together, all eyes on the guns.

  “Four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . .”

  On the eighth chime, a huge tongue of fire erupted out the end of the first gun. Then came a roar so loud that I felt as if my brain had exploded in my head. I saw a bird dropping straight down out of the sky, from shock it must have been. A moment later, the first echo of the concussion returned from across the water. It was so loud itself I thought for a minute that someone had fired back.

  The second gun followed a few seconds later, and this time I saw how the flaming tongue reached almost to the beach embankment in front of it. The field blazed up and began to burn in places.

  The sock of this explosion felt like a real body blow. Up and down the coast, great masses of birds flushed into the sky. I stood up and saw gulls, crows, ducks, terns and, from the inland ponds, Canada geese and even pure white swans flapping wildly upwind. The echoes from both blasts began to come back, again and again. They got mixed up with the ringing in my own ears until I couldn’t tell which was which, and wondered if I was going deaf.

  Somehow, underneath all this, I heard a whimper. I looked down and saw Carolyn curled into ball in the long grass. Her hands were gripping the sides of her head.

  I dropped beside her and spoke to her, but she couldn’t answer. She was trembling all over, her little body clenched up like a fist. There was nothing I could do to help her.

  After a minute, she sat up, though, and took some deep gulps of air. Finally, she gave me a weak smile.

  “I wasn’t afraid!” she announced.

  “You are very brave,” I said. I really did think so, too.

  “I didn’t think it would be so loud.”

  “You aren’t the only one.” I held out my hand and showed her. I couldn’t hold it still for anything.

  Behind us, a commotion suddenly broke out.

  “Carolyn, get down!” I said in her ear.

  We ducked. Across the field, heading directly for us, came Abel Hoffman. He ran past about two yards away and I thought he hadn’t seen us until he stopped at the edge of embankment just beyond our hiding place, turned back and glanced straight into our faces.

  I froze. Beside me Carolyn went stiff. He stared at us with his mouth hung open, gasping for air, then he spun around and took a tremendous leap off the embankment. We heard his heavy grunt when he landed, knapsack and all, on the sand at the bottom. We stood up and crept closer to the edge where we could watch him. He was running like a madman up the beach. When he came to the wire fence, he slid through the slit and never stopped to put the dead brush back where it should go. He just ran on and on, and he was still running when he went around a curve in the shore and disappeared.

  But that wasn’t all Carolyn and I saw that day. Soon after, four soldiers with guns entered our field and began walking around the place where Abel had been standing. We got down fast. In a minute, someone gave a shout and I looked and saw a soldier holding up a blue cap.

  “Spread out and search the field,” another soldier yelled.

  After this, my heart began to thud in my ears and I didn’t look over the grass anymore, but lay flat and still and told Carolyn to lie still, too. We lay for what felt like hours, barely breathing, while boots tramped by on all sides. Every minute it seemed like the next minute we’d be caught.

  10

  THE TRAMPING DIED away. The field turned quiet. I thought it might be a trap and we lay still a while longer, straining our ears. The waves were rattling stones back and forth on the beach, making it hard to hear. Finally I peered above the grass. The soldiers were gone.

  “Run,” I told Carolyn. We slid down the embankment and took off along the beach. Not until we came out on the road did we slow down and have enough breath to talk.

  “What if they’d found us?” Carolyn panted. “Would they put us in jail?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Who was that man?”

  “The German who lives in the woods. He shouldn’t have been there. He knew it, too.”

  “Was he spying?”

  I told her I didn’t know for sure, that he might have been, but not to say anything to anyone yet.
r />   “Well, he saw us,” Carolyn said.

  “I know he did.”

  “Will he do anything?”

  “Probably not. He’ll be too scared.”

  “I was scared,” Carolyn said with a shudder. “I was scareder than I ever was.”

  “Well, keep quiet about it until I figure things out. And don’t tell Mom no matter what. Well get skinned.”

  After we got home, I tried to think of what to do. Abel Hoffman was looking worse and worse. You could tell by the way he was standing in the field that he wasn’t there for fun. He was watching things too closely, first the guns, then the bay. Also he kept bending over to write in something— his notebook probably, the one he’d had on the day the guns came down the road.

  I was ready to swear he was up to something, but I didn’t want to raise a flap without being sure. I decided to tell Elliot first, and see what he thought. Maybe he’d noticed Abel doing something fishy at his boat-studio lately. After that, we might want to tell Uncle Jake, who could get word to someone at the fort quietly, without my mother finding out.

  But when I took Carolyn back up to Grandma after lunch, Elliot was nowhere around.

  “He hasn’t come back yet. He’s off looking for eggs,” Grandma said.

  I knew what that meant and headed home before she could think of some job I had to do. When I went up there for supper, he was back, but he was in one of his moods, and wouldn’t even look at me. I knew I’d see him the next morning working on the hen houses, and thought I’d talk to him then. But that night at our cottage an officer from the fort knocked on the door. In his hand he held two small clumps of ear cotton.

  Carolyn took one look and burst into tears. She ran for cover behind my mother.

  “What is this? What is this?” my mother asked her in amazement. Carolyn would never cry just for a stranger at the door.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask your boy some questions,” the officer said. “We understand he was down near the guns with his sister this morning, watching the practice firing. There was someone else in that field. I’d like to ask him about it, if you don’t mind.”

  And so we were caught after all. Carolyn’s cotton wads had been found in the field during a second search. The soldier who’d passed us on his bicycle remembered her with the stuff sticking out of her ears. A few questions to neighbors and we’d been tracked down.

  In a very short time, the officer, a lieutenant in charge of fort security, pried out of me everything I knew about our morning in the field, and also some things I hadn’t known I’d known.

  “This man, this supposed painter, had binoculars, you say? Big ones, small ones?”

  “Big ones. He always has them, wherever he goes.”

  “So, high-powered binoculars.” He wrote it down in a small book. “And a camera? Did he have a camera?”

  “No.”

  “But he was observing the guns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He’d look out to sea sometimes.”

  “With the binoculars? Did you think that was strange?” “Yes.”

  “Was anything out there, in the bay, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Could he have been noting a direction, for instance the possible trajectory of shells?”

  “I guess sex.”

  “So, he was observing technical matters,” the officer said, writing in his book.

  “Maybe.”

  “Interesting.”

  My mother sat appalled and silent, holding Carolyn on her lap as if she were a little child again. The lieutenant smiled at her.

  “Mrs. Saunders, you musn’t think your children were in any danger. We had patrols monitoring the dangerous sections of beach. We anticipated trespassers. These two weren’t the only ones out there, by any means. A good number of townsfolk slipped in to catch a glimpse, quite understandable under the circumstances. Its not every day a gun like that gets fired. Don’t be too hard on your youngsters.”

  He gave me a wink and grinned at Carolyn, as if he would have done the same thing in our shoes. “We believe, however, that there may be those among us who have other motives than innocent spectating.”

  “The German painter in the woods?” my mother asked.

  “I’m not the one to say about that. There’s an agency man, FBI, who’ll be coming down from Providence tonight.”

  “FBI!” I cried.

  “Espionage is a federal offense,” the lieutenant said. He glanced at my mother. “This is only a preliminary investigation, but it must remain confidential for the time being. Please, we ask that you not speak to anyone about what your son saw, or my visit this evening. This is very important.”

  “Of course.”

  “And Robert.” He gazed at me. “We appreciate your honesty. We’d more or less guessed it was Hoffman from the blue cap we found out there. He’s been under surveillance. We just needed confirmation.”

  “Has he done something else?”

  “That’s what we’re checking into.”

  When the lieutenant stood up to go, I remembered the other thing I’d seen Abel Hoffman do in the field.

  “I forgot to say, he had a notebook.”

  “A notebook?” The lieutenant swung around.

  “He was writing in it. Or drawing, I couldn’t really see. He could have been sketching the layout of the fort.”

  “Interesting. But he had no camera. You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The lieutenant made a last note of this, thanked us again and left. He’d hardly closed the door behind him when my mother let go of Carolyn and turned furious eyes on me.

  • • •

  The lieutenant had said the investigation would be confidential but somehow, in the next twenty-four hours, almost everyone in town heard about it.

  They heard Abel Hoffman had been in the field with binoculars and that he’d run off when an army patrol caught sight of him. They knew about his cap being found, about the slit in the fence, about his habit of going to the beach to paint.

  The only thing they didn’t know was that I was the one who’d talked. The fort took credit for uncovering everything and I was glad. I knew Abel had seen me and it made me nervous. But more than that, I was glad I hadn’t told Elliot what I’d seen in the field. I’d never tell him now. If Elliot ever found out, he’d guess in a minute that I was the one who’d turned Abel in. For that, he’d never forgive me.

  Sometime during the night, Abel was picked up at his boat-studio and brought down to the town hall for questioning. I heard about it when I went up to Grandma’s the next morning. The news was all over town. The only thing I wanted to do was get into town myself to see what was happening. I worked on the hen houses, chopped some wood and set off as soon as I could. Elliot wasn’t around. He was sick, Grandma said. I guessed that meant he’d heard the news, too.

  People were crowding the commons, talking about Abel’s arrest when I got there. The word had gone out that federal agents were in on the case and everyone had a theory of what that meant. Little groups were standing around in different places, then folks would go off to do a job or have a sandwich, and come back and join a new group. There was a feeling in the air of something big about to blow wide open. I saw some kids from my class at school and we horsed around together. I wondered what they would have thought if they knew I was the one who’d turned Abel in. I wanted to tell them but I kept quiet. The funny thing was, I wasn’t sure myself what I’d seen Abel doing in that field. That’s why I was there in town, milling around with everybody else. I was waiting to get told.

  The police brought Abel out of the town hall about mid-afternoon. He looked jumpy and hollow-eyed. I was standing pretty far back in the crowd where it wasn’t likely he’d see me. Just in case, though, I turned my face away and kind of watched slant-wise. Something was different about him. After a few seconds, I realized that he didn’t have his boots on. The FBI agents hadn’t let him put them on
when they arrested him, or they’d grabbed him so fast that no one thought of it. He was walking around like a kid in his bare feet, hobbling over the gravel to get to the police car. It kind of took away the foreign look he’d always had for me before, made him look more ordinary.

  When they got him in the car, he was driven away, not up to Providence as everyone thought, but to a place down the road where he was turned free and allowed to go back to the woods. Later, we found out he’d been released for lack of evidence, fined twenty-five dollars for trespassing on military property and warned against doing it again.

  The FBI hadn’t wanted to rile up the crowd around town hall by letting him loose on the spot. They were worried about Abel getting home in one piece. And they were right. A lot of people were mad when they found out. A rumor went around that the reason he got off so easy was a big-name friend of his in the art world in New York City had covered for him. Everybody thought the federal agents had fallen down on the job.

  At supper that night, Grandpa said, “The man’s hiding something, I can smell it. When somebody has to secret himself away in the woods like that, whether they’re German or Pekingese, you know they’re up to something.” Though he’d taken in and treated Abel, he wasn’t any more in favor of him than the rest of the town.

  “I heard the police searched all over his place and couldn’t find anything,” Aunt Nan said. “They were looking for a camera. That would have given them grounds to remove him. They want him to get out but they can’t make him go without evidence. He has identification papers, all proper and legal. Also he’s on somebody’s private land who said he could be there.”

  “On whose?” Grandpa said. “That’s who they should arrest.

  “Agnes Gunderson,” said Aunt Nan, looking over at Grandma. Grandpa looked over, too, because Agnes was one of Grandma’s dear friends. They did the flowers together at the church.

  “Well, can’t you talk some sense into the woman?” Grandpa said to Grandma. “Does she even know he’s there?”

  “She knows and she’s in favor of it,” Grandma said. “Agnes isn’t one to put a poor struggling artist out.”