Edenville Owls (7 page)

I
was alone, standing out of the light, near some bushes, in front of Miss Delaney’s house when the man came again. He parked his car and got out and walked up to the door and rang the bell. In a minute Miss Delaney let him in and the door closed behind them and everything was quiet.

I felt helpless, like a little kid.

Figure it out. You’re smart. Figure it out.

I walked slowly around the house. Maybe there was a way to get in. If I got in, I could hide and maybe listen to them next time the man came to talk with Miss Delaney. Miss Delaney lived upstairs. Old Lady Coughlin lived downstairs. She had some kind of little furry black and white dog with a sharp nose and thin legs. As I walked around the house, the dog started yapping and Old Lady Coughlin came to the back door and looked out. I stopped stock-still in the shadow of some bushes and she didn’t see me, and after a minute she went away. I kept moving around the house, staying in the shadows and behind bushes. In back of the house there were two porches, one above the other, one on the first floor and one on the second. Above the second-floor porch was a window. Probably to the attic.

Back out front, I looked at the man’s car and had a thought. No one was on the street. I walked toward the car and looked at the house. I didn’t see anyone in the windows. I tried the car door on the passenger side. It was open. Nobody locked up much in Edenville. I opened the door, opened the glove compartment, and took a peek. The car registration was in a small leather wallet in the glove compartment. I took it and closed the glove compartment, closed the door, and ran like hell.

Under a light on the wharf, I opened the registration. His name was Oswald Tupper, and his address was 132 County Road in Searsville, which was the next town north of Edenville. I always carried a pencil stub and a little notebook in case I saw something I needed to write down. I took them out, wrote down the name and address, put them back in my shirt pocket, and threw the wallet with the registration into the water. It floated for a while, bumping with the little waves against the foot of the wharf, and then, as the water soaked in, it sank.

I walked up to the bandstand and sat in the dark with my hands in my pockets and my collar up. Searsville was just up County Road a few miles. I could ride my bike there. Across the harbor I could see the lights from Edenville Neck. I was too far to see anything except the lights. But I liked them. I liked looking at the lights of ordinary people, while I was alone, mysterious, outside, in the night.

There was a big old empty house on Pearl Street, with the windows all boarded up. Last summer the Owls decided it would be a perfect spot for a clubhouse. So I climbed up a telephone pole and jumped to a small second-floor roof, and crawled in an open third-floor window. I had to hang from a rafter and drop into the darkness to get in. Afterward it scared me to think about it. What if they had ripped out all the floors? I would have fallen three stories. But they hadn’t, and I landed on a solid floor. The other Owls were impressed.

I went to the first floor and opened the back door from the inside and everyone came in and we hung around in there for a while. But pretty soon we decided it was kind of boring in there and we left and never went back. We really just liked breaking in, I guess.

What was I doing? I was fourteen years old, and I was sneaking around in the night spying on a couple of adults, even though Miss Delaney had made me promise not to. I must have been reading
Dime Detective
too much. I looked around the dark, empty bandstand. It was a school night. Joanie would be home. She wouldn’t be coming down here in the dark. What did I think I was going to do? I was going to save Miss Delaney. And how did I think I was going to do it? I didn’t know yet. But I knew I was going to do something.

I’d have to figure it out.

WE
were trailing against Pinefield by one point with seventeen seconds to go when I got fouled and went to the line for two free throws. I was a good ball-handler, but I was a terrible foul-shooter, and all of us knew it. If I hit them both, we would take the lead. I missed them both and felt like I wanted to crawl in a hole. The Pinefield center, a guy named Lou, got the rebound and fired a pass downcourt to one of his forwards for the insurance basket. Nick intercepted and passed to me, alone downcourt, still near the foul line, wanting to die. I took two dribbles and laid the ball in and we won. Nick had saved me. He and I ran to each other and hugged. The other Owls joined in and we did a kind of little dance in the middle of the court, while Pinefield walked sullenly off.

Afterward we hitchhiked back to Edenville.

Nick said to me, “You still friends with Joanie?”

“Sure,” I said. “You?”

“We’re still going out,” Nick said.

“Anything hot going on?” Russell said.

Nick smiled at him.

“You don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”

“Bobby don’t care,” Russell said. “He’s in love with Miss Delaney.”

“How’s that going?” Nick said to me. “You finding anything out?”

“I’m getting there,” I said.

“What’d you find out?” Russell asked.

“You don’t know, do you?” I said.

“Man!” Russell said. “Nobody tells me anything.”

Nick and I looked at each other for a minute. But neither of us said anything.

“You think he’s still bothering her?” Billy said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You been spying on them?” Russell said.

“I keep an eye out,” I said.

“You seen him?” Manny said.

I didn’t even know Manny was interested.

“Yes,” I said.

“He see you?” Billy said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Whaddya mean ‘not yet’?” Russell said.

“Nothing. I just mean he hasn’t seen me yet.”

“You think he will?” Nick said.

“Maybe,” I said. “I mean, you hang around long enough, you may get spotted.”

Nick looked at me.

“You got some kind of scheme,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You got a plan,” Nick said. “Don’t you?”

“I’m trying to figure it out,” I said.

“You could get into bad trouble,” Billy said.

“If I do, you guys can save me,” I said.

“Have to,” Nick said. “Joanie would kill me if I didn’t help you.”

“Hell,” Russell said. “She’d kill us all.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

Nick grinned.

“Owl patrol at the ready,” he said.

IT
was a mild winter. No snow. The temperatures were usually above freezing. The sun was usually out. It was out on Sunday morning when I got on my bike and road up County Road to Searsville.

Number 132 was a small white one-story building near the road with a few cars parked on the gravel parking lot in front. It looked like some kind of meeting hall. In back there was a house trailer parked next to the hall. The trailer was one of those smooth rounded silver ones, and it looked new. There was a wooden sign by the road that said “Church of America” across the top, and underneath that, “The Rev. Oswald Tupper. Service at 11, Youth Group at 1.” It was ten past eleven. I leaned my bike on the sign. My stomach was tight, and I felt like I was out of breath.

I looked at everything for a minute. Then I took in as much air as I could and went into the hall. It was small, with folding chairs to sit on. There were maybe fifteen or twenty people sitting down, and up front, there he was. He had on a dark double-breasted suit and a red tie. He was standing at some kind of lecture stand and behind him on the wall was a large American flag with a big crucifix on it.

I realized I was still holding in the breath I had taken. I let it out as quietly as I could and went and sat on an empty chair in the back. I knew he saw me come in. He had looked right at me. But he didn’t seem to recognize me. I was, after all, just some kid he’d chased away from his car once. He smiled when I sat down.

“Latecomers are welcome too,” he said.

His voice was very round and official-sounding in the church. It didn’t have that scary sound it had had when he told me to get away from his car. I looked down at my knees as if I were praying.

“As I was telling the others,” Tupper said with a smile, “‘we are face-to-face with both disaster and possibility. The disaster is that the war is over, and the white race lost. Franklin Delano Jewsavelt and the kike conspiracy managed to defeat that struggle for racial purity. But therein lies the possibility. The war is over, all is in flux, and the energies of white America can be focused on the preservation, at least here, in this free country, of the purity of the white race.”

Jewsavelt? Kike? What in God’s name was he talking about?

“The Communists and the Jews,” Tupper went on, “would have us coupling with niggers, and raising a generation of baboons who will do what the Jew commissars tell them.”

Niggers? Baboons? What in hell was a Jew commissar?

“That is why,” Tupper said, “it’s so heartening to see young men here. Young men who have not yet been corrupted, young men who are proud to be American and proud to be white. Young men in whom our future rests, if they will take the opportunity that lies before us. If they will stay true to what they are and what they came from.”

I looked around the room. The men were nodding agreement with everything Tupper said. As he continued, I nodded when the men did. There were three or four other kids in the room, sitting beside their fathers. They nodded too, when the adults did.

Tupper went on about this stuff for a long time. It wasn’t like he used words I never heard. Lots of people said
nigger
and
kike
in Edenville. I was used to it, although it always made me feel uncomfortable. But you never heard a minister say it in a church, like it was religious.

After the sermon we waited while Tupper went to the front of the church to greet everybody on the way out.

“This your first time here, son?” he said to me as I came out.

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name son?”

“Murphy, sir, Robert Murphy.”

“A fine old Irish name,” he said with a fake Irish accent. “Would you be Catholic?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “No matter. I hope you’ll be joining us in youth group this afternoon.”

“I have to go home, sir,” I said. “But I hope I can come next week.”

“I hope so, Robert,” Tupper said. “You’re just the kind of lad I’m looking for.”

I said, “Yes, sir,” and moved on.

As I pedaled home along County Road, I kept glancing back to make sure no one was following me.

“MY
uncle John was in the war,” Joanie said. “My mother’s brother. He saw one of those Jewish prison camps.”

We were on the bandstand. It was sunny, and pleasant for winter. Joanie was sitting in the sun on one of the bandstand railings. I was walking around the perimeter of the bandstand as we talked.

“Concentration camps,” I said. “What did he say about them?”

“He wouldn’t talk about them,” Joanie said. “Just that they were awful.”

“I think they killed Jews there,” I said.

“That’s what Uncle John says.”

There were a lot of veterans around Edenville. Guys who’d been on ships. Guys who’d been waist gunners in B-17s. Guys who’d been in North Africa. Guys who’d been in Italy and Europe and the Pacific. Some of the guys had been wounded. Some of the guys who’d been in the Pacific were still kind of yellowish from some jungle disease they’d got. Philly DeCosta was deaf in one ear from being an artillery gunner. Most of them wore some part of their old uniforms around. Leather flight jackets, pea coats, and a lot of old field jackets with the insignia still on them. I still knew most of the patches the way I knew all of the airplanes. Screaming Eagle for the 101st Airborne; blue and white stripes for the 3rd Division. Corporal’s stripes. Captain’s bars. I always wanted a field jacket, a real one, worn by a real soldier. But the war was over, and I had missed my chance. Unless there was another one. I felt sort of guilty, and I never said it, but I hoped there’d be another one.

“Do you suppose this man is a Nazi?” Joanie said.

“Hard to figure a Nazi preacher,” I said.

“Maybe he isn’t really a preacher,” Joanie said.

“He says he is. He gave a sermon. People come to listen.”

“Still doesn’t make him a real minister,” she said.

“No.”

“Are you going to go back for the youth meeting?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“I would be,” Joanie said. “He sounds awful.”

I shrugged.

“Remember we promised never to lie to each other,” Joanie said.

“Maybe I’m a little scared,” I admitted.

She smiled.

“Maybe,” she said.

“But I don’t know what good it would do me to go,” I said.

“Because you know all you need to know about him?”

“I guess.”

“I agree,” Joanie said. “What we need is to know what’s going on with Miss Delaney.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“I’m figuring,” I said.

“If you go to that man’s youth meeting ever,” Joanie said, “I could go with you.”

Wow!

“I think it’s only for boys,” I said.

“Isn’t it always,” Joanie said.