Willow Run (5 page)

I felt a lump in my throat thinking of Grandpa turning over a shell with his wide fingers.
“Do you know how old this must be, Margaret? Hundreds of years, sliding back and forth in the surf?”

And now I had ruined them.

I stood up. From the bedroom I could see into the kitchen, and beyond that, the window. The tough kid had recovered from his fall. He marched up the street singing at the top of his lungs:
“Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk. …”

I reached for the other stuff in the box: old contest entries, a postcard collection I had started with only two postcards, and a few pennies in the bottom. And something else. Grandpa's envelope of salad seeds. I ran my fingers over the words:
lettuce, cukes, tomatoes
.

I could see Grandpa's face as he handed me the envelope. And then I realized it had come unglued and the seeds were scattered over the bottom of the box. All useless now.

I was glad Grandpa was so far away. He'd never know what had happened to them.

Dear Lily,

There is no ocean here at Willow Run, no paint on the houses. They go together in a row and you can hear people talking and fighting and even going to the bathroom. The houses were just slapped up because thousands of people have come here to make the bombers. My father took me in to see. The factory is a mile long. Everyone just makes one little piece that they fit
together until the B-24 is finished. My father says they build a bomber every 103 minutes. I hate the whole thing. How is the attic? Did you find the red candy?

Margaret

I had forgotten to tell Lily: the bedroom was so dark at night I might have been locked in a trunk. Not even a window!

In that skinny bed I kept thinking of my yellow room in Rockaway. The window there was always propped open, and I could smell the sea, could tell the difference between high tide and low: that clean-washed smell as the water rose, the smell of grit and sand when it ebbed. And always the sound of seagulls screeching.

I remembered listening to the boom of the surf and figuring out what I'd do the next day. Sometimes it was swimming with Lily, or going out in the boat. Maybe it was even
the movies with Grandpa. I hated to go to the movies with Grandpa.

He'd whisper through the whole thing, grabbing my arm.
Vatch out, mister. He's coming up the stairs and he's got a gun. More popcorn, Margaret?

I turned over now, looking for the thin line of light that came in under my door from the kitchen.

Dad was getting ready to go to work on the night shift— the graveyard shift, he called it—and outside, a door slammed: Ronnelle on her way out, too.

I stretched my arms and spread my fingers like the starfish that drifted near the jetties in Rockaway, their spiny arms floating just under the surface of the green water. I could touch one wall the same way, and drift a couple of inches to touch the other.

Somewhere there was a sound. A cough?

I took a quick breath. Was someone hiding under the bed? The newscaster had been talking about spies, but they were in California, I thought, or was it Florida?

I tried to see in that dark room, holding my eyes open, trying not to blink. We were on top of the largest plane factory in the world. Wouldn't there be spies? Wouldn't there be people who wanted to know how the planes were made?

Or worse yet, to blow them up?

I remembered a movie Grandpa and I had seen. In the end the movie spy had dropped all the way from the top of
the Statue of Liberty into the water below. But that was after he had ruined half the country.

I swung my head and shoulders over the edge of the bed even though it was too dark to see, and there it was again, a cough. But then I realized. It wasn't from this apartment, it was from the other side of the wall, in the apartment next to us, but not on Ronnelle's side.

I shimmied back up, leaning close to the bars of the bed, and heard a man's voice, and then the woman's. She was still coughing. A boy was there, too, his voice loud and high. No, I heard the difference. Two boys.

Those tough kids?

Just a family, then, not spies at all. I could feel the relief in my chest; it was almost as if I were beginning to breathe. They began talking all at once, and before I could stop myself I rapped on the wall with my knuckles.

“What was that?” one of the boys asked. He sounded nervous.

Then the father's voice: “It was nothing. Nothing at all. We're safe.”

And the mother in her soft throat-clearing voice: “We're here together. Don't worry.”

A cottage in the Catskill Mountains one weekend. Was I five, six? We had shared one room, Mom and Dad in the big bed against the window, Eddie and I in cots. All together. Safe.

“I want to go home,” the same boy said. “Right now. Home to my apartment in Detroit.”

“Baby Kennis,” said the other one.

“Harlan,” said the mother, warning him.

Harlan and Kennis.

It was too late to take back the rap on the wall. I lay there, turning the pillow over to make it cooler, and thought of Grandpa again.

I wondered what he was doing. He used to come to our house every morning, a mess of greens for Mom under one arm, his tackle box and a greasy-looking bag of lunch in the other.
“I suppose you want to go fishing, Margaret. I'll take you if you can manage to keep from talking all the time.”

“No, thanks. There's something else I have to do. Lily and I have plans.”

I had said that at least once a week.

Maybe I should have gone with him all the time. Never mind. Eddie was his favorite. He didn't need me there every two minutes.

I closed my eyes. Was I going to cry over Grandpa? Grandpa, who smelled of pickle vinegar and mixed up his
v
s and
w
s?

Certainly not.

On the other side of the wall the boys were making a lot of noise, fighting with each other, knocking into things. One of them must have turned over a chair. I could feel the vibration on the iron bed bars against my head.

“That's enough,” the mother said.

I'd never get to sleep.

Another chair went over.

Without thinking, I reached up and rapped against the wall again.

For a moment, there was silence; then someone banged back with a fist. A hard bang. Not a kid's bang. It must have been the father. He kept banging.

I slid my face under my doll Rosemary's fat cloth body, where I couldn't see anything, not even that skinny light under the door. And then the two cats jumped up on the bed with me and Mom stood at the door. “Who's doing that?”

I came out from under Rosemary as Mom turned on the overhead light. The string with its knob on the end swayed back and forth, making line shadows on the wall.

One of the boys was banging, too, now, his fist lighter than the father's.

Mom sat on the edge of the bed next to me. “What nerve.” She put her head close to the wall. “That's enough in there.”

Something was growing inside my chest again, something so big it felt as if I couldn't get my breath, as if I were going to explode. I sat up in bed and then my breath did come, and I was crying, crying loud enough for them to hear me on the other side of the wall.

I kept telling myself to stop as Mom put her arms around me and began to rock back and forth, as the mother on the other side of the wall said, “Ah, ah.”

“What is it?” Mom kept asking.

“I don't know.” I was barely able to get the words out.

How could I tell her it was Grandpa's pickle jars broken on the kitchen floor when I had watched him seal the tops, his head bent over, humming under his breath?

How could I say it was Eddie, who had sung “Marching Along Together” with me in the Catskill Mountains when I was five? Or that I was glad when Eddie left because I thought it would be fun to be the only one home?

How could I say that I had thought this was going to be the best adventure anyone could have?

“We'll go home when the war is over,” Mom said.

“Amen,” the father said on the other side of the wall.

“We'll have a wonderful party, and Eddie will be home, and we'll row out in the bay on a sunny day,” Mom said, smoothing back my hair.

“There's not even a tree here.” My voice was thick. “No cucumbers. Nothing.”

Dad stood in the doorway, shaking his head.

I gulped and stopped crying. I knew he had to go to work. After a while they went back into the kitchen. I whispered to the wall. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.” But I didn't say it loud enough for anyone to hear.

I gave Jiggs and Judy a pat and closed my eyes.
Go to sleep,
I told myself, and then right next to me, I heard a knocking: three quick bings and a bong.

My eyes flew open. This wasn't from the tough boys’ wall
at the head of the bed. These bings came from my right side—or was it my left? I could never tell the difference between left and right.

It wasn't from Ronnelle's apartment. That wall was next to the kitchen and Mom and Dad's bedroom.

“Hey,” I said aloud. Suddenly I knew exactly what it meant. I'd heard it on the radio a million times, the army's code: V for Victory.

I scrunched over to the wall: bing bing bing bong, I went with my knuckles.

After a moment, the code came again.

I couldn't wait until morning when I'd find out who was in that apartment in back of us.

I threw on my clothes and ate cornflakes leaning over the sink, half the milk dripping onto my blouse. I wiped myself off and tiptoed outside to investigate.

I had to count: our apartment was the fourth from the corner, so what I had to do was go around the block, count down four apartments, and… pretty good figuring. If the war lasted another seven years or so, I could sign up as a secret agent.

I swung my arms and practiced whistling, which was still at a kindergarten baby level, marching off and on the curb to let the grown-ups pass on their way to work at the factory.

And there on the corner was the ice cream man and his
truck. He looked as grumpy as he had the first time I'd seen him, so I narrowed my eyes into tiny slits at him.

He narrowed his eyes right back and took himself to the other side of the truck, where I couldn't see him. But he wanted to laugh, I could see that. It was just the way it was in school. Something funny would happen and Sister Martha's eyes would shoot lightning like Flash Gordon. “Stop acting like hyenas,” she'd say.

That always made me laugh harder.
Hyenas
. And sometimes I thought Sister Martha's lips were twitching, too.

I looked back over my shoulder now, but the ice cream man had forgotten me already. He locked the door of the
SUNDAE, MONDAY, AND ALWAYS
truck, bent down, and put the key under the fender.

And then I was around the corner, counting apartments, and there was a freckle-faced girl with messy hair in front of the fourth one, the jump-roper I had seen the other day. She was slapping a washline up and down and jumping faster than I'd ever seen anyone do it in Rockaway… and with bare feet.

She was so tough!

Without thinking I took a few running steps toward her, rocked back and forth, and then I was in with her, jumping a thousand times a minute, both of us shouting as the rope whistled around us.

I knew I was going to miss; my heart was pounding:
“… thirty, forty …”

We collapsed on the curb, hardly able to talk. “Bing bing bing bong,” I managed.

She grinned at me. “V for Victory. I think you scared Harlan and Kennis. Good for them.”

“Hyenas,” I said, thinking they had scared me a lot more than I had scared them.

She rolled up her pants legs to her knees. “See these scars?” she asked between breaths. “Fell off a seesaw. Ten stitches. Didn't even cry. My real name is Janie. Everyone calls me Patches now.”

Ten stitches. “Brave.” I'd have been howling if the doctor had come near me with a needle and thread. “I know you're tough, not even bothering to wear shoes.” I tried to think of something interesting to tell her. “I'm Meggie. I just made a horrible face at that ice cream man.”

“People say he's a spy,” Patches said.

“He is so mean.” “He certainly is. He keeps his key under the truck. Kids could come along and have a zillion ice cream cups if they wanted to.”

She stared at me, her forehead dotted with perspiration, and began to grin. “Let's just take a look.…”

“Let's.”

She looped the rope over her arm and threw it on the bare patch of dirt in front of her apartment; then we dashed down the block, turned the corner, and almost ran into the boy with the World's Fair pickle. Harlan or Kennis.

“Have to take up the whole sidewalk, Harlan?” Patches asked.

Harlan.

“It's a free country,” he said. “I was just going to buy myself some ice cream from Arnold the Spy.” He swiped at his face, leaving a trail of dirt on his cheek. “He should be in the army.”

“My brother's in the army,” I said.

“Eddie. He's a hero.” “That's nothing,” Harlan said. “My uncle Leo was, too. He's dead. Shot at Palermo.”

I looked at him, horrified, telling myself that would never happen to Eddie. Eddie was probably home on leave with Grandpa anyway.

We walked back toward the ice cream truck. A lot more happened here in Willow Run than at home, I thought. Ten stitches, dead uncles… and so I reached under the ice cream truck, groping along the sandy tire until I found the key and held it up over my head like a trophy.

Harlan stared at me. “Wow.”

And Patches: “Meggie's not afraid of anything.”

Before I knew it I had put the key into the lock. I opened the little square door in the truck and put my face into the misty air as it swirled out. Inside, ice cream bars and Dixie cups were stacked on top of each other, and rows of wooden spoons were lined up like slats on a wood fence.

“I have orange ice pops on special today,” I said.

“I'll take one,” said Harlan, but Patches shook her head. “Too cold for me.”

I reached inside and pulled out two pops, seeing Eddie's face, and Grandpa's, and even Lily Mollahan's. I didn't have to wonder what they'd think. I
knew
what they'd say. I picked up a stone, my heart fluttering. Why was I doing this? “We'll put two scratches in the running board,” I said, “and pay him back.”