Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

He lowered his binoculars, wiped his eyes, blinked, and craned forward, certain he saw a darkened wing move swiftly over the moonlit landscape.

The sound of a motor groaned in the distance.

The wing and the motor might mean an enemy aircraft.

But now the wing was gone and the motor coughed and chugged, from over on Old Route One. The spotter had to admit, disappointed, that the motor was probably the truck of some farmer.

But what about the wing?

It might have been a Japanese Nakajima 96.

On the other hand, it might have been a crow.

The spotter reached into the pocket of his mackinaw and took out the pack of Enemy Aircraft Identification Cards that showed the silhouettes of Jap and German planes. His fingers, stiff with cold, let the pack slip, and half a dozen cards went floating off the roof, lazily drifting down like black and white leaves of winter. The spotter scrambled to grab the cards and almost toppled from his perch. It was a close call, like you had to expect at any minute during Wartime.

“Artie, will you come down from there? It’s past your bedtime!”

The spotter sighed, pulling the mittens his mother made him wear from the pocket of his mackinaw and putting them on before climbing back into the house through his bedroom window. The mittens hampered his ability to focus binoculars and so he never really wore them on duty but pretended to his mother he did. It wasn’t lying, it was part of being patriotic and protecting women—especially mothers—from all the things about War they didn’t understand.

With Roy away at Marine Boot Camp in Quantico, Virginia, Artie was serving as an Assistant Junior Air Raid Spotter. Good Americans everywhere, from Brooklyn to Hollywood, were fighting on the Home Front in order to do their part, and Artie was proud to be one of them, helping protect his own hometown against attack from Japs or Germans.

At first there was wise-guy, defeatist talk around Town that Birney, Illinois, was safe from the War, being almost in the middle of the heart of America. Sure, these shirkers had to admit there were German subs off the East Coast and everyone knew New York might be bombed; a Jap sub had actually tried to shell an oil plant in California, and enemy planes had been spotted over San Francisco, but the scoffers laughed and said there wasn’t any threat for a small farm town like Birney, in Illinois.

Like fun!

The wise guys were laughing out of the other side of their mouths when the Illinois Civil Defense put out a pamphlet that Mr. Goodleaf brought to school for everyone to study that showed how “Chicago can be bombed.” There were maps that showed how via the polar air route, Chicago was actually closer to Nazi-occupied Norway than New York City! And if the Nazis were going to bomb Chicago, they were sure as shooting likely to drop a few on All-American towns like Birney, only a couple of hundred miles away, just to try to demoralize the heart of America.

After Artie climbed down from his spotter’s perch on the roof and into his upstairs bedroom window, he went to the kitchen and gulped a hot Ovaltine Mom had ready for him, and then went to bed but not to sleep. Under the covers, with his secret miniature flashlight the size of a fountain pen, he studied the article he’d clipped out of Life magazine with instructions for identifying enemy planes.

Under the silhouette of the Jap Nakajima 96, the Life article said, “If you see the full front view (above, center) you should throw yourself flat on the ground, against possible machine gun fire.… If you will memorize these planes, you will doubtless save yourself a great many unnecessary alarms.”

He wondered if he ought to practice throwing himself flat on the floor, but then he heard his mother’s footsteps and clicked off the flashlight, tucked the Life article under his pillow, and pulled the covers over his head. The black silhouetted shapes of enemy planes, Jap and Nazi, swooped and soared through his mind, vicious as vultures but doomed to defeat because of the vigilance of all Americans, including himself, Artie Garber, a soldier of the Home Front, and his brother Roy, in training to be a United States Marine.

Safe and sound, he slept.

When Artie went to Damon’s Drugs now he didn’t waste his time with the comic books. He flipped through the real magazines, looking for stuff about the War. The most exciting thing he came across since the article in Life about spotting enemy planes was an editorial in Collier’s about what to do if real-live Jap or German airmen bailed out in your own hometown. Artie took the Collier’s and sat down at a table to study it more carefully. He was going to order a cherry Coke to sip while he reread the crucial instructions, but he realized the price of one would pay for half of a dime War Stamp, so he asked for a glass of water instead, and bought a penny bubblegum ball to go with it. Goose bumps rose on his arms as he read again the advice to Home Front patriots: “It may come, to pass, as has been predicted, that enemy airmen will fly over here occasionally during the war, drop bombs on important industrial spots, then bail out, let their planes crash, and give themselves up. In case such things do happen, we’d like to put in an earnest plea now, to any civilians who may reach these airmen instead of police or soldiers, not to obey the human impulse to lynch them, shoot them, or kick them to death.”

Artie could see it all happening in a flash:

Him and Fishy are out at Skinner Creek playing broom hockey with a radiator cap, when they notice a flash of white silk in the woods. An enemy parachute! Alertly, they hold up their brooms across their chests like rifles at the ready. Artie pockets the radiator cap for possible use as a lethal, grenadelike weapon, and he and Fishy stealthily slide across the ice toward the dangerous enemy. Moving within a few yards of the white silk mound, which is moving and shaking with something alive underneath it, Artie cries out, “Come out with your hands up, or prepare to meet your maker!” The white silk is suddenly thrown aside and up from the ground springs a short, stubby, Japanese Zero pilot, his face the color of, dark lemonade, his buck teeth protruding like fangs. He reaches for the revolver in his holster but before he can draw, Artie whips the radiator cap from his pocket and hurls it at the dirty, slant-eyed Son of Nippon. The Jap falls backward with a gurgling cry as the improvised missile strikes him on the brow and Fishy leaps upon him, pinning the little demon to the cold ground, shouting as only Fishy would at such a moment, “Gonna hang your yellow balls from a flagpole, fooger!” The Jap screams “Banzai!” and lunges upward, grabbing Fishy’s neck with clawlike little monkey hands. Artie springs to the rescue, beating the Jap to submission with his broomstick. The two young patriots tie the enemy’s hands behind him with cord from his own parachute, and Fishy starts kicking him to death, but Artie restrains him. “This is a democracy,” Artie explains. “Even this dirty yellow dog deserves his day in court!” Fishy, after planting one more kick in the Jap’s belly, agrees to abide by the principles of democracy, and the two brave citizen-soldiers march the prisoner into Town as people pour out of stores and houses to cheer as the captured airman is led to the altar of American Justice.

Artie took a big gulp of his water, folded the Collier’s to the page of editorials, and got up to show the vital defense information to Fishy, who was huddled in a corner by the magazine rack. Fishy had not yet shown a lot of interest in keeping up with the War, but was still poring over the pages of demoralizing sex publications like Peek and Titter , which showed pictures of half-dressed women whose mouths were always puckered in a way that looked to Artie as if they were just about to whistle or spit.