On The Wings of Heroes Read online

  The porch floor rattled like hailstones under their feet. The leader’s boots went out from under him. His bat took a wild swing at nothing. He fell flat on his back, measuring his length on a floor thick with ball bearings.

  It was a hard fall, and the wind shrieked out of him too late to save the others. They dropped in every direction as the ball bearings spun like steel marbles under them and cascaded down the steps. The boys behind took the full weight of the ones ahead. They grabbed and grappled and fell in a gaggle down the noisy Niagara of the steps.

  When they were in a heap at the bottom, Dad rose out of the dark and the spirea to let fly with the first bucket of water. Still, they couldn’t find their feet, or words, and they were drenched. It was a cold night with a ring around the moon.

  Their leader was still on the porch. He rolled off his back and whimpered as the ball bearings bore into his hands and knees. His arms skidded, his elbows bounced. Dad had another bucket just for him.

  At last they grunted off across the yard, gathering speed. Their knicker legs were slick and clinging, and they were still running into each other, all their mischief forgotten. They didn’t look back to see Dad there, sprouting out of the spirea, grinning like the pumpkin.

  I got a bat out of it, not quite a Louisville Slugger, taller than I was. Years after, you could still find ball bearings, like rabbit droppings, down among the spirea roots.

  The Last Halloween . . .

  . . . before the war, Scooter Tomlinson and I went out trick-or-treating in masks one final time. Now that we were in Cub Scouts, we figured we were getting too old for this type of thing. We’d been at it for years, ringing doorbells in the dark, demanding our treats. Tootsie Rolls, Cracker Jack, home baking, all that booty before the war took the candy away, the sweetness.

  I came home in the night, dodging shadows, whistling in the dark. The Pluto mask was parked on top of my head. I was swinging a sack of treats.

  The Hisers’ box elder tree was the center of our universe. The other landmark was the 1928 Packard coupe parked out in front of our house. It was Dad’s fishing car. He drove it to work, one of the biggest, heaviest cars ever built. It was thirteen years old and looked older, and no particular color now. The front bumper was a two-by-six plank. When Dad fired it up every morning, people awoke four blocks away.

  The Packard bulked at the curb, darker than night, empty as a looted tomb. But I knew better. I climbed up on the running board and peered into the open window. “Dad?”

  He was in there behind the wheel, pulled back in the shadows, smaller than his regular size. The window on his side was down too.

  A sacred Halloween ritual was pinning horns. If a Halloweener could get into a car, he’d jam one end of a stick into the horn on the steering wheel and the other end into the back of the seat. Then he’d run like the devil while the car owner had to come out and unstick the horn before the battery ran down. Car horns went off all over town. One went off right then, over on Summit. Dad was waiting for business, and the windows were down for bait.

  He was also out there in the cold and the dark, watching for me, waiting for me to come home.

  “Climb in, Davy,” he said. “Keep down.”

  I leaned into the old hunting jacket he wore over his Phillips 66 uniform. The car smelled like a grease pit and dead pheasants.

  “Get anything good?” he said, and I offered the sack. The diamond in his Masonic ring glinted when he rummaged for a taste.

  “Fudge,” he said, and spat it out his side window. He wouldn’t swallow chocolate. The army had issued the soldiers bars of bitter chocolate to keep them awake, in France, back in his war. He wouldn’t eat anything they’d fed him in the army.

  “Whose?” he asked.

  “Old Lady Graves.” She was an old crab but baked especially for Halloween.

  She also lived on the far side of West Main Street. Still, I wasn’t afraid to mention that Scooter and I’d crossed it. The two of us crossing a thundering truck route after dark, not looking both ways, in masks, wasn’t the kind of thing that troubled Dad. You didn’t have to watch every word.

  I slid one hand into the game pocket on his hunting coat and sat on the other. You could see your breath. The sky was powdered with stars, and again there was a ring around the moon. Dad had already told me that as a kid he’d lain on top of a haystack to watch Halley’s comet.

  I began to nod off. He didn’t. All the porch lights were out now. Mom had gone to bed.

  Sometimes I could hear Dad thinking, and it was pretty much always about my brother Bill. He was gone by then, down in St. Louis, taking the Civil Aviation Administration course at Lambert Field. War was raging out in the world, other places. Bill was nearly nineteen. That’s what was on Dad’s mind.

  He nudged me. “Get way down.”

  He could hear a Halloweener a mile off, behind a building. He was easing down till his back was flat on the car seat. The old cracked leather wheezed beneath us. His Phillips 66 cap edged forward over his face. I could get all the way under the glove box without knocking off my Pluto mask.

  It felt like we were down there several days. Then came the fall of a foot in the leaves along the curb. A faceless figure was coming up behind us, past our back bumper. He’d have a stick in his hand, the right length. A chill rippled down my spine. But Dad was there, much of him arranged around the steering column.

  The figure stepped up to the driver’s side and found the window down. He couldn’t believe his luck, and sighed. He leaned in with his stick.

  Dad’s hand shot up from nowhere and grabbed a wrist. The stick snapped, and a terrified voice yelled, “Mama!” before he thought.

  Dad sat up, never letting go. “What can I do for you, son?” he asked, friendly enough.

  The figure couldn’t think. He was trying to twist out of Dad’s grip, and failing. “Y-y-you can turn me loose.” But that wasn’t going to happen.

  I stayed where I was under the glove box. It was bound to be one of the Rogers boys, and I didn’t want to be a witness. It wouldn’t be Jinx, who kept his nose clean with his senior-year basketball season coming up. But there were several other Rogerses, all bad dreams.

  “I wasn’t gonna do nothin’,” the twisting Rogers said, overlooking the stick in Dad’s lap.

  “Hop on the running board,” Dad said, still gripping him with a fist the size of a ham. The Packard’s running board was a foot wide, plenty of room to ride. With his free hand, Dad turned the key, jerked the choke. The Packard roared alive. Lights in bedroom windows went on. People may have thought it was morning.

  Dad switched on the headlights, and we drove off down the street. I was sitting up, tucked behind Dad’s shoulder.

  The Rogerses lived halfway down. Dad swung into their driveway and pulled up by the porch. We’d have sounded like a Sherman tank coming through their living room wall. The porch light went on, and Old Man Leland Rogers came out in his pajamas. He squinted through the screen wire.

  “Earl?” he said. “Which one you got?”

  “Which one you missing, Leland?” Dad said around the squirming boy.

  “I wouldn’t miss any of them if they was all in the reformatory,” Old Man Rogers said. “But I thought I had ’em counted.” He was chewing a cold cigar. “Don’t let him go till I get there.”

  Old Man Rogers unlatched the screen door and tramped down to the car in his bedroom shoes. Dad handed the boy over. I sneaked a peek, and it was their eighth grader, Homer. He was flapping his hand, trying to get the circulation back into it.

  “You fool,” Old Man Rogers said to Homer, and pushed him up the porch steps.

  So now that everybody was accounted for and home safe, we backed out of the Rogerses’ drive and drove up the slumbering street, Dad and I, my hand in his pocket.

  The Dwindling Year . . .

  . . . slipped away from there. We raked one last time, got the storm windows up, and it was December.

  After church, we always ate o
ur Sunday dinners in the dining room: old hen and slick dumplings dinners.

  One Sunday we were tucking in when we heard an awful racket outside and a hammering on our back door. Mrs. Hiser was yelling through the glass for us to turn on the radio and take cover. They’d bombed Pearl Harbor and could be heading here.

  Something hit Dad hard. He pushed his plate away like it was army food. Mom reached out for Bill’s empty chair. And all the world before the war went up in far-off smoke and oil burning on water.

  REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR

  Only Fifteen Shopping Days . . .

  . . . were left till that Christmas of 1941. Crowds bustled. Shelves cleared. The window of the Curio Shop on East Prairie Avenue was heaped high with broken dishes, torn fans, ripped-up paper lanterns. They’d wrecked all their Made-in-Japan merchandise and made a display of it that drew a crowd.

  Scooter and I looked, but it was something in the window of Black’s Hardware that pulled us back every Saturday, to see if it was still there.

  A Schwinn bicycle stood in the window. A solitary Schwinn, casual on its kickstand, sharp as a knife. Two-toned cream and crimson with a headlight like a tiny torpedo. An artificial squirrel tail dyed red, white, and blue hung off the back fender under the reflector. I couldn’t look at the thing without tearing up. You could have played those chrome spokes like a harp. And look at the tread on those tires.

  It was the last Schwinn in town, and maybe the whole country, for the duration. The duration was the new wartime word, and you heard it all day long, like the song “Remember Pearl Harbor,” on the radio, over and over. The duration meant for however long the war would last.

  I’d been wanting a two-wheeler for a year and thought I could handle that Schwinn, though it was full-sized and weighed thirty pounds. I thought I was long enough in the leg and had the arms for it, almost. Never mind that I didn’t know how to ride a bike.

  I didn’t expect to get it for Christmas, and didn’t. It was twice what bikes cost, and the last one on earth. Scooter and I checked on that Schwinn faithfully, knowing that one Saturday it wouldn’t be there.

  I pictured the kid who’d get it, some rich kid from up on Moreland Heights. I saw him in new Boy Scout shoes and salt-and-pepper knickers and a chin-strap helmet with goggles, swooping down a curving road with that patriotic squirrel tail standing out behind. I saw the easy arcs he made from ditch to ditch. He’d be a little older than we were, a year or two older.

  We didn’t know what to expect out of Christmas this year. Scooter usually did pretty well for presents. He already had his Chem-Craft chemistry set. We’d had our first fire with it, burning a circle out of the insulation on the Tomlinsons’ basement ceiling.

  The stink bomb we’d built to go under Old Lady Graves’s back step had gone off too soon, in Scooter’s arms. I threw up the minute I smelled him, and his mom made him strip naked in their yard. She hosed him down and burned his shirt in a leaf drum. But that was last summer after his birthday.

  One December Saturday when we checked, Black’s window was empty, and the Schwinn was gone.

  Dad brought home a tree standing up out of the Packard’s rumble seat. People said there’d be no trees next Christmas and no string of lights when these burned out. Mom baked all Bill’s favorites. Dad rolled out peanut brittle on a marble dresser top. People said that next year there wouldn’t be enough sugar for Christmas baking.

  But this one still smelled like the real thing: pine needles and nutmeg, Vicks and something just coming out of the oven in a long pan. And Bill was home. “That’s Christmas enough for me,” Mom murmured.

  We untangled the strings of tree lights, Bill and I, stretching them through the house. He could stick the star on top without stretching. But then he and Dad had hung the moon.

  Bill was home from St. Louis with a full-length topcoat and his aeronautics textbooks. Bill wanted to fly, and he was taxiing for takeoff already.

  He and Dad were down in the basement on Christmas Eve, puttering on mysterious business while Mom kept me busy. When Bill came upstairs, wiping grease off his hands, the kitchen radio was playing “Stardust.” Bill swept Mom away from the sink, and they danced, turning around the kitchen like it was the Alhambra Ballroom and Mom was his date. Her forehead was shiny, and her eyes were shining. She still held a dish towel that hung down from his shoulder. They danced until the radio began to play “Remember Pearl Harbor,” and Mom switched it off.

  Bill slept in the big front room upstairs. Dad had divided the attic in two and boxed in the rooms under the eaves. I had the little one at the back. We didn’t get a lot of heat up here. On nights this cold I wore mittens and a cap to bed.

  You could talk between the rooms. The wall was beaver-board, and we left the door open. From his bed, Bill said, “Davy? You remember to hang up your stocking?”

  No answer from me. I was too old to hang up a stocking, as we both knew.

  “What did you get me?” Bill inquired because it was a known fact that I couldn’t keep a secret.

  “A pen wiper,” I said. “Pen wipers for everybody. We made them in school.”

  “Miss Mossman?” Bill said, naming my teacher. He’d had her. “A pen wiper’s good,” he said. “I’ll keep it on my desk and take it with me. Wherever.”

  Silence then. Silent night.

  “What did you get me?” I asked, and my breath puffed a cloud. I hoped for his high school letter sweater, Cardinal Red. He’d lettered in track. I’d go in his closet and try it on a lot. It hit me just above the ankle.

  “You get anything for me?” I asked in the dark because he was drifting off.

  “Socks,” he mumbled, “underwear.”

  “Oh,” I said. I turned over once, and it was morning.

  A Stack-of-Pancakes Morning . . .

  . . . with Staley’s syrup and bacon popping in the pan. I woke up to the jangle of the sleigh bells on the old leather harness Dad had always rung to make me think Santa was just leaving.

  Dad wouldn’t give up on the bells.

  Downstairs, the tree lights were on, though daylight poured in. All the Made-in-Japan glass balls on the tree glittered in their prewar way. We were all there in our bathrobes.

  But right in front of the tree was a bicycle. The kickstand dug into the living room rug.

  It took me a second because the room went blurry. But it was a bike, painted a gloss black with a thin silver stripe. Not quite a Schwinn, but not that heavy—leaner, faster-looking. I didn’t want to move or say anything. I might wake up.

  Then I saw it was Bill’s old bike. The tires were a little smooth. But the paint job was showroom fresh, hardly dry. And where did those chrome fenders, front and back, come from? They were new, or off some other bike. Dad must have looked around for them. And that stitched-leather seat? The handlebars had seized up with rust long ago, but now they were sanded down, and the bell was new, and the grips. Hanging down below the rear reflector was a squirrel tail. A real one, off a squirrel.

  “Is it mine?” I said.

  And they said yes.

  We got through the morning and the other presents. I handed out the pen wipers. Finally the four of us were outside on the driveway with the bike. It was cold, but there was no ice underfoot.

  If this had been a real dream, I’d have climbed on and ridden away down the drive, down the street, into the world without a wobble. I’d been on bikes before, other people’s and junior-size. But I’d fallen right off and crusted both knees.

  This bike of mine was full-size. Somebody had built up the pedals with wood chunks.

  Dad held the handlebars while I climbed on. The seat fit that part of me like a glove. The balls of my feet grazed the built-up pedals. But it felt like I was up a tree, and the concrete on the drive looked far away and hard. Bill stood a bike’s-length away, but not near enough. Dad gave a push, the front wheel went sideways, and over I went.

  Over and over. But we kept at it. I was wringing wet under my layers, and they we
re working overtime not to laugh. But we stuck to it. I was going to find the balance, learn to ride. It was part of my present, and the day. Back and forth I wobbled, from one pair of big hands to another. Mom watched, dancing out of danger in that graceful way she had, because I went in every direction.

  Just for a flash I found it. The wheels and I aligned. I zipped past Bill and rode the length of the house before I sprawled off and the bike fell on me. And that hurt, but I didn’t let on. By the time they got to me, I was up and climbing, stumbling over the chain guard.

  Then it worked for sure. I’d started back by the garage, and I was still on and steering when I came down the slope of the drive to the street. There were no hand brakes then. You back-pedaled to stop. I forgot and barreled across the street into the Blanchards’ driveway before I fell off.

  But I was like the Wright Brothers, both of them, at Kittyhawk. I’d flown this far.

  I turned the bike, alone here on this side of the street. I was sucking wind, blowing steam. And there coming up the street was Scooter, red-faced in a stocking cap.

  He was on the Schwinn from Black’s window.

  On and off it. And his dad was running along behind, picking him up, putting him on again. But Scooter was biking too, almost, and on that brand-new Schwinn with the two-tone paint job and the headlight like a tiny torpedo. He usually did pretty well for presents.

  And it was all right. It was swell. We both had bikes, and mine was Bill’s.

  Miss Mossman . . .

  . . . did her best to bring World War Two into our classroom. At first it was uphill work this far behind the lines. Still, several of us hoped they’d bomb the school before we got to decimals. Also, Miss Mossman wasn’t any good at geography. Scooter was and took over the classroom map and the box of pins. On the Monday after Pearl Harbor, he’d put in a pin to show Hawaii. Before Christmas, he’d put a pin in Germany.