The Art of Keeping Cool

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Elliot’s eyes blinked fast in the lamplight. “You want him to leave like everybody else.”

  I shook my head. I did want him to leave, but not like everyone else. I’d changed my mind that afternoon.

  “Abel doesn’t fit in here. People are afraid of him,” I told Elliot.

  “They’ll get used to him. His English is getting better. Anyway, they hardly see him anymore.”

  “They see him even when they don’t see him. They’re waiting, that’s all. One little slip and they know they’ll have him. He doesn’t have a chance.”

  “You’re on Grandpa’s side, aren’t you?” Elliot said in a hard, dry voice.

  “No, I’m not. Not anymore. I’m on Abel’s. You said it yourself, you have to know when to leave.”

  “Well, it’s not time yet.”

  “Elliot, anyone can see it’s time. Past time. If you really cared about Abel, you’d be telling him that instead of helping him stay around.”

  This made Elliot furious. He drew himself up as if he might hit me. To him, Abel’s leaving was impossible. He couldn’t stand even the thought of it.

  “You keep away from him,” he said, shakily. “And keep away from me, too. I’m not speaking to you anymore.”

  “Elliot, don’t.” I stepped toward him.

  “Stay away!” Elliot shrieked. He shoved me back and ran out the barn door. I heard his feet pounding toward the house, and the outraged slam of a door.

  I reached over and turned off the kerosene lamp. The dim outline of the barn door appeared and through it, the glimmer of a few stars. I walked out and just then, a great roar of planes came up on the house. A formation of five aircraft passed low overhead with a rush of dark metal.

  They were headed to sea on a reconnaissance mission, an ordinary event. Maybe Elliot’s anger had sharpened my senses because as their wing lights passed over, a cold fear went through me. I began to run home through the dark, remembering how my mother had called me, not once, but many times in the yard that night. Remembering a tremble in her voice, and how Carolyn had called out for me, too. I raced down the road, into the cottage driveway, across the front lawn. My mother heard my hand on the latch.

  “Robert?”

  She was getting up as I rushed in. The look on my face must have asked the question.

  “It’s your father,” she said. “We’ve had a telegram. His plane’s lost, shot down over the channel. They’re out searching for him this very minute.”

  12

  OVERNIGHT, IT SEEMED, I became an expert on battle news: Allied skirmishes against the Germans in North Africa, the German army’s drive into Russia, the marines landing at Guadalcanal. I read the newspapers Grandpa left lying around and listened to the radio. The geography of Europe obsessed me. On a map I’d cut out of a magazine, I followed the action. I knew the locations of battles, the towns occupied, the likely position of airfields in England (no one knew where they were, exactly) and the flight routes of bombing raids. That was how I answered when people asked about my dad.

  He was downed, not lost, we said. His whereabouts were “as yet unreported.” The strain showed on my mother’s face, which looked puffy and beat-up, as if she’d been in a fight. She stayed home from work, scared that news would come while she was away. Carolyn could make her cry by asking too many questions.

  “Don’t ask Mom anymore if they found him,” I told her. “She can’t stand being asked that.”

  “But I want to know!”

  “She’ll tell you when she finds out anything. Do you think she wouldn’t tell you first thing?”

  “But where is he?” Carolyn said. “Why can’t they find him? They could go out in the ocean and find where the plane is and get him into a boat. Then he could come home.”

  “Maybe they will,” I told her. “I hope they will. But don’t tell Mom that stuff. She’s too tired.”

  Grandpa said nothing about Dad, as usual, but Grandma opened up and talked about him. She came to visit us now, bringing casseroles and cookies. She ate lunches with my mother, helped splice together a clothes line that had snapped, made paper dolls with Carolyn. While she worked, she talked. She was the one who told us that Dad used to draw when he was a kid. She told us about a portrait he’d made of his dog, Baron, using colored pencils. The next time she came, she brought it over and it was pretty good. Not anything like Elliot could do, but okay. My mother said she had no idea my dad had a knack like that.

  “Do you have anything else he did?” I asked.

  “No, I wish I’d kept a few more. There was a year when he worked pretty hard at it. Then he gave up, I guess. Your Grandpa had him out hunting, fishing, building the hen houses out back. And there was his schoolwork to attend to. Your dad used to get behind. He didn’t like studying, but the way our house worked, he’d have to get it done or he wasn’t allowed to do anything else.”

  “Did you know that Elliot can draw?” I asked Grandma. “He’s good, too. He just doesn’t like to show people.”

  She nodded her head kind of sadly. “Elliot’s another one who gets behind on his schoolwork,” she said.

  My father was still missing when, toward the middle of August, another convoy ship was torpedoed off Cape Cod. A day later, we heard that Abel Hoffman had been arrested again. The rumor went around that he’d been sneaking into houses near him and stealing food—an apple pie, a leg of lamb. It didn’t sound much like Abel to me but, whatever was true, the charges were quickly upgraded when another search of his place in the woods uncovered a pile of drawings overlooked before.

  They were detailed studies of the fort showing buildings, weapons sites, fortifications. People were shocked but not really surprised. The idea was about that Abel had played a part in the latest submarine attack.

  He’d been in jail two days when Elliot showed up at our cottage one morning. I was in the backyard watering a few tomato plants I’d planted for my mother. I saw him coming, but didn’t look up. Two weeks had passed since Elliot had pushed me in the barn and told me to stay away from him. In all that time, he’d never spoken to me, not even about my father being shot down. I was pretty burned up about it.

  “They arrested Abel again, did you know?” he asked as he came up.

  “I heard,” I snapped out.

  “Listen, I need you to help me. You know those drawings Abel supposedly did of the fort? They aren’t his. They’re the ones I drew. Remember? After we went through the fence that first time? I brought them over to show Abel and forgot to take them home.”

  I shrugged. “So go and tell somebody.”

  “I did tell them. They don’t believe me.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “The FBI. They’ve sent three agents this time because they think Abel’s case is so bad. They’re interrogating him all the time, in shifts to try to break him down. Abel told them the drawings are works of art, by another artist. When they asked who, he wouldn’t tell.”

  “So how did you find out?”

  “Tony Wagner told me.” His dad was a town policeman. “I went to the police station yesterday and said I was the one who drew the fort drawings. No one believed me. They basically said to shut up or I’d get in trouble.”

  “Sounds like good advice to me.”

  Elliot gave me a hard look.

  “The FBI has been spying on Abel. All summer, probably. They knew I’d been there a lot.”

  “They didn’t need a spy to figure that out. Everybody in town knew.”

  Elliot looked down at the tomato plants. “I don’t care what people know.”

  “Well, I do. I’m not getting stuck in the middle of this. Abel should have left when he could. You should have made him go.”

  Elliot stood beside me, watching me water. After a minute, he said:

  “Robert, it’s awful what’s happening. When the police brought Abel in, a big crowd of people stood outside the station and yelled at him, terrible things. They threw rocks and garbage at the door he went in. Yester
day, they were there doing it again. One man brought a live chicken and said its name was Nazi Hoffman. He threw it on the ground and let people kick it around for a while, then he grabbed it and wrung its neck. Everyone laughed. The police didn’t do anything. They all want to kill him.”

  I looked up at last.

  “Well, what should I do?”

  “Come with me and back me up about the fort drawings. Please? You’re the only one who knows I did them.”

  I walked over to the outside faucet and turned off the water. I coiled up the hose. Elliot watched. I wondered if he even knew what he was asking me to do.

  “Robert, please.”

  “What makes you think the Feds are going to believe me any more than you? We’re in the same family, you know.”

  “You weren’t his friend.”

  “No, I’m your friend,” I said angrily.

  “Well, that doesn’t matter so much,” Elliot said.

  That made me furious. I thought for a minute that I would tell him to get lost. “Sorry, Elliot, I don’t have time,” I’d say. “My father’s been shot down, in case you forgot. Why would I stick out my neck for some dumb Kraut?”

  Then I looked up again and knew I couldn’t say that. The reason was, it was unfair what was happening to the man. However stupid he was to be living in our woods, however German he was, he was no spy. He didn’t deserve to be arrested. Somebody had to stand up for him. Somebody had to take the heat or we might just as well have been living in Nazi Germany.

  “Okay,” I said to Elliot. “Let’s go.”

  “Robert, thank you! You’re a real, true friend.”

  I was still angry at him and didn’t want to be thanked. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not doing it for that.”

  We ran, and got to the town hall about 10 A.M. But the FBI agents had gone up to Providence the night before and weren’t due back until noon.

  “Stick around. I know they want to see you again,” the police clerk said to Elliot when we went inside to ask. “You and your parents.”

  “My parents! Why?”

  “You’re all in big trouble, that’s why. People who keep company with German spies can expect to have problems when they’re found out.”

  “Who said anything about my parents?”

  The clerk glanced away smugly. I could see from Elliot’s face that his nerves were getting ready to act up so I dragged him outside.

  “Why was she talking about my parents?” he whispered.

  “She doesn’t know anything. Don’t get worked up about it.”

  “But, are people talking about my parents?”

  “Probably. That’s what people do.”

  Right then, for the first time I think, Elliot began to realize how actions he’d taken could spill over onto others, coloring how people felt about them. Up to then, he’d kept so apart from his family that he’d never thought of how he might be affecting them, only of how they affected him. I could see he was turning it over in his mind.

  We stayed nearby waiting for noon, sitting on stone walls around the town common, walking through the old graveyard a couple of times. Some gravestones dated back to the early 1700s when the Indians were still in Sachem’s Head, living down in the same woods where Abel’s place was.

  We bought a soda at the grocery store and took turns swigging it in front of the magazine rack. There were some good comic books for sale there.

  “You should draw comics,” I told Elliot. “You’re as good as any of these guys.”

  “I used to try sometimes,” Elliot answered. “The thing was, I could never think of anything funny.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “Your funny unfunniness.”

  “My unfunny funnilessness, you mean?”

  “See? You’re getting funnier.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Elliot said, with a gallows grin that made me smile just seeing it. The trouble with Elliot was, you couldn’t stay mad at him very long, especially if he didn’t want you to.

  Ten minutes later, when we came out of the store, people were beginning to gather in front of the police station. We could see that something had happened. We went over and someone said the agents were back and they were going to take Abel up to the state prison outside of Providence.

  “Right now?” Elliot asked.

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  “Why can’t he stay here?”

  “His own safety, probably. There’s a lot of feeling against him in this town.”

  We stood off to one side and soon the station door swung open. Abel Hoffman stepped out between two police officers. He looked awful. His hair was matted and his clothes were rumpled. His face didn’t have much expression on it. He stopped and blinked in the sunlight, then turned his head aside as if the brightness hurt his eyes. They’d cuffed his hands in front of him. When Elliot saw him like that, he made a strange noise, a kind of gurgle, and went into one of his freezes. Some loudmouths in the crowd began to yell.

  “Hey Kraut, we got you this time.”

  “You’ve sunk your last ship, Nazi.”

  “You’re dead meat now.”

  Nasty stuff, but Abel didn’t look up. He shuffled forward, doing what he was told. There didn’t seem to be any spirit left in him. The officers cleared a path through the crowd and led him out to the street where a black sedan waited. They were getting ready to put him in the backseat when an argument started up about his handcuffs. The Sachem’s Head police didn’t want Abel going off in the ones they’d put on him. With the wartime metal shortage, handcuffs were hard to come by. They wanted theirs back.

  The FBI agents nodded. One agent went across the road to his car to get a pair he had in the trunk. The police officer on Abel’s left side went with him to clear a path through the crowd while the second officer got out his keys. He unlocked Abel’s handcuffs and was just turning to take the FBI cuffs when a man came running up the street.

  “We got the Nazi’s camp!” he yelled. “The whole place is on fire! Look there. It’s going up!”

  We whirled around and saw, low over the woods, a cloud of smoke funneling up into the sky. While everyone stared, a scuffle broke out near the police car and suddenly Abel was running away down the street. The officer who had unlocked his handcuffs lay sprawled on the ground. For a second, no one moved. Then somebody cried, “Get him!” and the whole crowd took off after him. The FBI agents ran across the road to their car and tried to jump in, but the people racing past blocked their way and they had to wait to get the doors open.

  I was just going to take off, too, when a hand grabbed my shirt and yanked me back. It was Elliot. His eyes were wild.

  “Don’t,” he whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Wait till they’ve gone.”

  “I want to go.”

  “He’s taking them by the road. He’ll cut into the woods and try to lose them. I know a short way.”

  “Where?”

  “Come on.” He led me behind the school into a dense tangle of brush and, soon, to a brook which I saw right away was the same one that went down the side of Abel’s meadow. By this time of the summer, it was shallow and sluggish, and opened in front of us like a pathway through the bushes and trees. We hopped and splashed along it, climbing the bank to go around the deep places. After a while we began to smell smoke. The air got thicker and thicker until at last, through the trees, we saw flames leaping up.

  Elliot stopped in his tracks. “No! Don’t do that!” he yelled, and grabbed my arm. “They’re burning his paintings.”

  “Well, let’s get them out.”

  “They’re on fire,” Elliot cried. “Look, they’re all on fire.”

  “Come on!” I said, and tried to drag him along. But his boots wouldn’t move. They stayed stuck in the stream bed.

  “Elliot, come!”

  He wouldn’t budge.

  “Elliot!”

  Maybe he didn’t
hear me. His eyes were on the flames and he was stiff all over.

  “Well, stay then!” I shouted. I pried his hand off me and ran on alone.

  No one was in Abel’s meadow when I came into it, but back in the woods, beyond the blaze, dark shapes were moving. Both sheds were on fire. Thick orange flames were shooting high into the air. Inside the walls, the outlines of Abel’s big canvases were still visible, racked side by side down the length like trusting animals in a barn waiting for rescue. But as I watched, the end of one shed collapsed and the paintings there crumbled into fiery pieces. The flames surged higher into the air.

  Maybe I went into shock myself. Back in the woods, I saw the mass of shadowy shapes move toward Abel’s boat-studio, not yet touched by fire. With a shout I ran forward, madly waving my arms.

  “Get away!” I shrieked. “Go back! Keep away!” They stopped, surprised, and watched me come. We faced each other over the bow of Abel’s boat, and I recognized a few people, including Larry Bean from the filling station in town. They knew me, too, and in another minute would have pushed me aside and set Abel’s boat on fire. But just then a loud cry rang out and Abel himself burst out of the woods.

  He raced forward across the meadow, roaring with fury. He ran for one burning shed, swerved toward the other, then stopped between the two, raised his big hands to his head and began to shake it violently back and forth. A long wail rose out of his throat and trailed off below the sharp crackle of the fire. Not far from me, the men who had been stalking the boat-studio stepped back and melted away into forest shadow.

  With no warning, Abel Hoffman’s legs collapsed and he dropped to the ground, still holding his head. A breeze blew in off the bay. Flames leaped again in the air. A shower of sparks flew into some trees nearby and I saw how dry they were. In an instant, a small blaze flared up and glowed through the leaves.

  Abel was on his feet again. He was looking over his shoulder. The crowd from the police station had begun to straggle in. Abel had led them on a roundabout route through the back woods as Elliot had said. Now they came out panting, one by one, to stare wide-eyed at the sheds. Others came up behind until a good-size throng was lined up along the far edge of the field.