“I’ll tell,” Joanie said from off the bandstand. “I’ll tell the police and everybody else.”
“You come up here now, young lady, or I’ll cut your boyfriend’s head off.”
Russell came out suddenly from behind the corner of the Village Shop.
“I know too,” he said.
Tupper seemed shocked. He looked kind of wildly at Russell. I bit his hand where he was holding the knife and stomped as hard as I could on his toes. He dropped the knife and kind of gasped and I pulled loose and jumped off the bandstand.
Tupper picked up the knife.
“I’ll kill all of you if I have to,” Tupper said.
His hand was bleeding a little where I bit it. His voice sounded funny. Higher than it had been.
“Me too?” Nick said.
He had been behind the wharf office shed, and now he was in full view in the moonlight walking up toward the bandstand. Tupper was holding his big knife low in front of him, moving it back and forth toward us. When he heard Nick, he pivoted in that direction and waved the knife at him.
“How about me?” Billy said.
He came out from behind the other side of the wharf office.
“Or me?” Manny said in his soft voice.
He had been behind some low evergreen shrubs.
“You can’t kill us all,” I said.
“I can,” Tupper said.
He lunged off the bandstand toward me. I ran. He couldn’t catch me, so he whirled and dashed toward Joanie. She ran, faster than I had. He couldn’t catch her. He stopped and looked around.
“Nigger,” he said to Manny and lunged at him.
Manny was the fastest runner of any of the Owls. He got away from Tupper easily. I thought about a story I had read in Argosy where they were hunting a bear with dogs. The dogs were all around the bear and every time the bear charged, the dogs in front of him would run off and the dogs behind him would nip at him.
“You can’t catch us,” I said. “So you gotta do what we say or we tell everyone.”
I wasn’t as scared anymore. My heart was still beating very hard. But I didn’t feel so sick to my stomach now. In the moonlight everything looked pale. But I thought that Tupper looked paler than the rest of us. And even though it was kind of chilly, there was sweat on his face. He backed up onto the bandstand again.
“If any of you tell anyone,” he said, “I will find you alone, and kill you.”
“No,” I said. “You won’t.”
He stood still on the bandstand, as if he didn’t know where else to go. Even though he wasn’t moving, he seemed somehow in a frenzy.
“Because all the rest of us will tell on you,” I said. “I looked in the encyclopedia in the library. The punishment for people who desert in wartime is death.”
“There’s been a mistake,” he said. “I tried to explain that to you.”
“And then you threatened to kill us,” I said.
“I was frantic,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“We’ll make a deal with you,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“You leave Miss Delaney alone,” I said. “And her kid.”
“It’s my child too,” he said.
“You leave both of them alone,” I said. “And you move away from here. We don’t care where, but it has to be a long way from here, and you never come back and you never bother Miss Delaney again.”
It was quiet. I could hear my own breathing. And my heartbeat. He stood alone on the bandstand. The six of us stood around the bandstand. Nobody moved.
“And if I don’t?” he said.
“We start talking, including how you threatened to kill us.”
“And if I talk about Miss Delaney and the marriage and divorce she didn’t mention and the child she lied about…?”
“Maybe she gets fired,” Joanie said from behind him. “But you get taken away by the army and executed.”
“Are you willing to make that swap?” I said.
He looked around at us. He looked at the big knife he was holding. Then he pushed the button and closed the knife and put it in his pocket.
“I accept your offer,” he said.
CHAPTER 43
NONE of us knew what to do next. Including Tupper…or Krauss. I couldn’t figure out what to call him in my head. Tupper, I decided, that’s what his name was to me. We stood still where we were, like sometime had stopped the movie projector and a single frame stood motionless on the screen.
“Does Claudia know?” he asked all of a sudden.
“She doesn’t know about this meeting,” I said.
“Does she know I deserted?” he said.
“Yes.”
He put his hands behind his back and began to walk slowly around the bandstand.
“You’re children,” he said. “You can’t know.”
He kept walking. It was more like he was talking to himself than to us.
“Every day wondering if you’ll die. Every night afraid to go to sleep because you might not wake up. Every day people dying near you.”
He stopped and looked toward the harbor, and stood there.
“I had to go,” he said to himself, or us, or the harbor, or something.
All of us stood there watching him, none of us saying anything.
“You gotta be gone from here by Wednesday,” I said. “Or we tell everybody.”
I hadn’t really thought about when he would leave. In my head it was like, we face him down, and he disappears. But I didn’t know what else to say, and the Wednesday deadline just sort of came out.
“Two days,” he said sadly. “Two days for a man who was nearly killed defending a country that has long since gone to hell. Two days.”
He shook his head, still looking toward the harbor.
“Risk your life defending the Jews and the coons,” he said.
I didn’t like him saying the coon stuff in front of Manny.
Tupper turned from the harbor and looked at us; it was a funny look. He looked right at us, but I don’t know if he actually saw us.
“You know,” he said, “all the movies you see are made by the Jews. You know that they have signed a nigger to play baseball with white men.”
We were all starting to shift around a little. We were getting sick of him.
“You gotta be gone by Wednesday,” I said to him. “And never come back.”
“It wasn’t cowardice,” Tupper said.
With his hands behind his back, he started walking around the bandstand again.
“It was a revelation. Suddenly, in the midst of the carnage, I realized I could no longer fight this evil war. I was willing to pay any price, take any risk, but not for the niggers and the Jews and the Communists. I would walk away. I would risk the wrath of the army and the disdain of my countrymen, if I had to…”
“Probably why he grabbed some other guy’s name,” Russell said.
“And his medal,” Nick said.
Tupper appeared not to hear them.
“But I would not continue in this monstrous betrayal.”
Russell walked over to Manny.
“Guy’s a lunatic,” he said to Manny. “Let’s get out of here.”
Manny nodded and the two of them walked away.
“We should have been fighting the Communists,” Tupper said.
Billy saw Russell and Manny leaving and looked at me. I shrugged. He went after them.
“I don’t want to listen to this anymore either,” Nick said.
“Me either,” I said.
We both looked at Joanie
“Or me,” Joanie said.
“The Nazi’s understood the threat,” Tupper said.
He was looking down at the floor as he walked, hands clasped behind his back, like he was musing out loud.
“Wednesday,” I said.
And Nick and I walked away with Joanie between us.
“Don’t you see?” Tupper said. “Don’t you sense it, the poison, the corrupt
ion seeping into every small crevice? I did the only thing I could do…”
We walked Joanie home, then Nick and I walked partway home together, and separated when Nick went up toward his house and I kept on toward mine. As soon as Nick was out of sight, I started running toward home.
He never said, and neither did I. But I’ll bet Nick did the same thing.
CHAPTER 44
ALL day Monday and Tuesday I walked around with a sinking feeling in the middle of my stomach, like you get sometimes going down in an elevator. In class, I thought Miss Delaney seemed a little tired, but maybe it was just me. Nobody else seemed to notice.
On Wednesday after school, all of us, Joanie too, rode our bicycles up to Searsville. We stopped and huddled up just before we got there, at a bend in the road, out of sight, about a hundred yards from the church and meetinghouse.
“What if he’s got a gun or something?” Russell said.
“He can’t shoot us all,” I said.
“He can if we all go in,” Russell said.
“I’ll go in,” I said.
“And me,” Joanie said.
Everyone looked at her. And at me. You couldn’t expect a girl to go in. But she wanted to. She’d snuck in upstairs at Miss Delaney’s house with me. The truth was, I felt safer with her along. I didn’t know why. She couldn’t do anything if Tupper did have a gun.
“Okay,” I said. “Me and Joanie will go in. The rest of you will string out along the road. Russell will be right at the turn where he can see and hear what’s going on. Then down the road farther, but where he can still see Russell, will be Nick, and farther down will be Manny and farther will be Billy. Anything happens, you can signal each other and take off for the cops…. You all know where the police station is in Searsville?”
They all did.
“Anything happens…any gunshots…or you get a signal from me or Joanie or Russell, you know. All of you ride like hell for the station. Don’t wait for me, or Joanie, or each other. All of you ride for the cops, whoever gets there first…”
They took their positions.
Joanie and I went on around the bend and into the gravel yard. There were no cars there. The door to the meetinghouse was half-open. We stood for a minute and listened. We didn’t hear anything. We walked to the meetinghouse door.
“Stay outside,” I said to Joanie, “so Russell can see you.”
She nodded. Her face was pale and tight. Her eyes seemed even bigger than usual.
With a big clenched lump in the middle of my stomach, I pushed open the door and peeked in. Nothing. I went in. Nothing. No movement. No sound. I walked around the room. The folding chairs were stacked where we had stacked them before we had left on Sunday. The big flag with the cross on it was gone. I went back out.
“Nobody there,” I said to Joanie.
She nodded. We walked to the church. She stayed out. I went in. Silence. Emptiness. Nothing. I went back out and shook my head. Both of us looked at the space where the shiny new trailer had been. It was gone. Joanie looked at me and smiled. I nodded.
“Gone,” I said.
My knees felt a little shaky. So did my stomach.
“Gone with the wind,” Joanie said.
She patted my shoulder.
“You did it, Bobby,” she said. “You won.”
I nodded. Then we got on our bikes and collected the rest of the Owls. Russell fell in with us as we passed him.
“Gone,” I said.
Russell grinned and nodded.
Then Nick, then Manny, then Billy.
“Gone,” I said each time. “Gone. Gone.”
Together we formed a small close column, three rows of two. And rode to Edenville. In front of Miss Delaney’s house we parked our bikes in a semicircle. I got off and walked to her door and rang the bell. In a moment I could hear her walking down the stairs.
She opened the door. Her face tightened up when she saw me, and past me to the other five on their bikes. “He’s gone,” I said.
She stepped out onto the little porch.
“Excuse me, Bobby?”
“Mr. Tupper is gone. We had a…a kind of meeting with him and told him if he didn’t leave here and leave you alone, we’d tell the army where he was.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Miss Delaney said.
“He seemed kind of crazy about it,” I said. “But there was six of us and he couldn’t catch any of us, and…he’s gone.”
“You’re sure?”
“Meeting hall’s empty, church is empty, house trailer’s gone, car is gone,” I said. “He’s gone.”
She sat down all of a sudden on the front step, with her skirt tucked under her, and hugged her knees and began to rock a little.
“My God,” she said. “Oh my God.”
I didn’t know what to do. I patted her shoulder and she put her hand up and placed it on mine and kept rocking and saying, “Oh my God.”
Behind me, Joanie said, “Come on, Bobby.”
I looked back. Joanie jerked her head at me. I nodded and slipped my hand out from under Miss Delaney’s.
“We’ll talk later, Miss Delaney, just remember everything’s all right now.”
She nodded and began to cry. I went back to my bike and all of us rode away.
Nobody said anything for a time until Russell broke the silence.
“Think we’ll all get A’s in English?” Russell said.
“Except you,” I said.
“I’d get one anyway,” Russell said.
“Now all we got to do is win the state tourney,” Nick said.
“Piece of cake,” I said.
JOANIE and I sat alone on the bandstand on the last day of August. It was Saturday, Labor Day weekend. School was to start next week. Ninth grade. Edenville had no high school. This would be our last year. Next year we’d go to Eastfield High School or away to prep school. It would be different again.
“The town is really proud of you, Bobby,” Joanie said, “all the Owls.”
“The state tournament,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Been better,” I said, “if we won it all.”
“You got to the final game,” she said. “Five kids without even a coach.”
“I know,” I said. “We did pretty good.”
“And they don’t even know what you did for Miss Delaney,” Joanie said.
“We all did that,” I said.
“But you figured it out,” she said. “And, just like the basketball, you were the leader.”
“I don’t know if I could have done it without you,” I said.
We were quiet for a bit. The harbor was full of sails. There were several younger kids down on the wharf, fishing for scup and catching blowfish. Some of the older guys were parked on the edge of the wharf, sitting on the hoods of their cars, talking.
“It was great,” I said, “wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Even if nobody but us knows it,” I said.
“Yes.”
The weather was warm, but the breeze off the harbor made it nice where we were. A brown and white spaniel was searching the lawn in front of the bandstand. Tracking some popcorn, maybe, that people had spilled last night.
There was something about the view: the green lawn sloping down to the water, the sun shining, the nice breeze, the happy dog cruising around on the grass, it made me feel good. I guess I thought my life might be like that: sea breeze and sunshine and green grass…and Joanie.
“You think we might start dating when we get a little older?” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
My throat tightened up a little, but I said it.
“You think we might get married someday?”
“Maybe,” Joanie said.
“But?”
“But I think sometimes, what if we get to be boyfriend and girlfriend,” she said, “and husband and wife…will I lose my best friend?”
“No,” I said. “You won’t.”
An
d she never did.
Robert B. Parker, recipient of the Grand Master Edgar Award, has long been considered the master of American detective fiction. He is the author of more than fifty novels for adults, including the New York Times best-selling Spenser novels. Edenville Owls is his first book for younger readers.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, he and his wife, Joan, currently live in Cambridge.
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