Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

They pulled onto their street and Roy took a long glance at Artie, like he was sizing him up. He didn’t say anything till he pulled the car up in their driveway and yanked the gearshift to neutral.

“Artie, when you’re old enough to see Bubbles LaMode, you’ll be old enough to drive. Right?”

“In about a million years.”

“Well, when you’re old enough to drive, and you got a real hot date, what you do is, you drive up to Devil’s Foothills, and say you want to see if there’s any sign of the Phantom Caveman being back in these parts. Then you park.”

“Then what?”

“Then you ‘do what comes naturally.’”

“What about the Phantom Caveman?”

“He’ll never bother you. Okay? Now I got to get going or we’ll never make it to Moline in time for the show.”

Roy stamped on the gas pedal a couple of times, racing the motor in urgent bursts, but Artie didn’t get out of the car.

“What if the girl doesn’t want to ‘do what comes naturally’?” he asked.

“Don’t worry. She will. She’s just got to pretend she doesn’t.”

“I bet Shirley Colby wouldn’t.”

Roy slammed his fist on the dashboard.

“Dammit! How come you always got to bring her up?”

“How come you always hit something when I do?”

“You’re crazy!”

“Am not! Last time I said ‘Shirley Colby’ you kicked a tree. Remember? We were walking along Main, you were carrying your team bag—”

“I remember I told you then and there she’s an Iceberg. You get it? Now ‘that’s all she wrote.’”

Roy mashed the gas pedal down to the floor and the car rocked and shivered with the roar.

“Hey, Roy! I won’t ever mention Shirley Colby again if you play some pass with me now!”

“I’m gonna be late!”

“You wouldn’t have got the car if I didn’t tell the fib about the Phantom Caveman!”

Roy took his foot off the gas and pressed his head against the steering wheel, closing his eyes.

“Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,” he said.

“Does that mean yes?”

Roy took a deep breath, raised his head, and switched off the ignition.

“One long one,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Wahoo!”

Artie ran in and got the football in less than a shake, tossing it to Roy and then getting into scrimmage position with one knee and one fist on the ground, ready to spring.

“Okay,” Roy sighed.

“No! You gotta say it!”

It wasn’t any good without the ritual, the barked command of the quarterback.

“ Go out for one! ”

The simple, traditional signal of passer to receiver, like familiar magic, sent a tingling thrill through Artie, as always, and he leaped ahead, legs and arms pumping, running now not across his own snow-covered front yard but an autumn green gridiron, lined with straight white chalk stripes that marked the way to the goal, the field surrounded by cheering throngs whose roar was the very sound of glory. Artie jerked his head back over his left shoulder, saw the quarterback set, feeling the laces of the ball like braille, cocking his throwing arm and sending the spiral like a spun bullet through the clean air to strike the receiver in the pit of the stomach. Artie grunted at the impact but held, clutched, the ball, the victory, as he slumped breathless to the ground with the crowd’s acclaim sweetly stinging his ears. He lay there, panting, as the fans’ roar faded in the blast of the starting car and the quarterback, behind the wheel, fled.

Artie sat alone in the center of the universe.

Without anyone telling him so, Artie felt in his bones that his own hometown of Birney, Illinois (Pop. 4,742—Moose and Odd Fellows—Welcome!) was the focal point that the rest of the world spread out from in all directions, and the circular, white wooden gingerbread Bandstand in the middle of the Town Square was the center of Birney, and therefore of everything. He had learned in school that “the population center” of the U.S.A. was over in Elvira, a hundred miles or so to the southwest, but he figured that was just the “geographic” center, the way the North Pole on the map was only the “geographic” North Pole, but not really “true north,” which was where the magnetic pole was located. He reasoned that if Elvira was the “population center” of the United States (and therefore, by definition, of the world and the universe), Birney must be the “magnetic” or “true” center. He never asked anyone about it; it was something he just knew.

When he squeezed his eyes shut he could picture the Town, fanning out from the Square, and beyond it fields and farms and woods, and beyond that cities, oceans, and foreign lands. If you went to the east you would hit New York and then the Atlantic Ocean, and across that, Europe, where everyone spoke different languages, except the English, who had kind of funny, high-falutin accents, but were brave and clean, like us, and were fighting the dirty Germans who didn’t play by the rules but bombed whole cities of men, women, and children by the dark of the night. If you went to the west you hit California, and down at the bottom of it, Hollywood, where poor Shirley Temple had to live and grow up without ever seeing real snow, but on Christmas her parents put cotton all over the yard to make it look like a White Christmas. If you kept walking west from Shirley Temple’s cotton-covered lawn you would fall into the Pacific Ocean, or, if you had a boat, and kept sailing west, you would come, inscrutably, to the lands of “the East,” where the tall, trustworthy, yellow Chinese people, who were our friends, were fighting the short, bloodthirsty yellow Japanese people, who were our enemies. When Artie got his mind as far as the coasts of China and Japan, to the west, or England and Germany, to the east, he saw flames, as he had seen them in the newspapers, magazines, and newsreels about the War, the burning and bombing of cities and villages; the dead and bleeding bodies of soldiers in uniform and refugees in rags. He was glad to be able to blink himself back and be in Birney, “Home of the Bearcats,” where life went on like it was supposed to, with people mostly behaving themselves, working and playing ball and listening to the radio after supper and going to church on Sundays, like God intended.

Artie felt God was usually watching over him, and glad of it, but today he hoped the Almighty was busy looking after the refugees in the flaming cities at the far edges of the earth, so He wouldn’t notice or mind about anyone who happened to skip Sunday School in Birney, Illinois. If God’s attention were elsewhere, it would also mean Ben Vickman wouldn’t get any points on his scorecard in Heaven for being in Sunday School today, as he surely was. Vickman had won the Good Attendance medal, and was out to add new bars on it that hung from a little chain and made him look like some kind of old-fashioned French General. Vickman was mainly a good guy, but Artie was tired of him lording it over everyone because his Dad was a Doctor, and anyway, he didn’t want to wait till Ben got out of Sunday School and went home to change to his messing-around-in clothes before thinking up something neat to do for the rest of the day.

Artie was in the mood for something more adventurous, anyway. He stood up from the floor of the Bandstand, feeling he had somehow “centered” himself in the scheme of the universe, and trotted off toward the little clump of shanties across the railroad track where Fishy Mitchelman lived. Fishy could do about anything he wanted, since his Dad flew the coop to join the Merchant Marine. His Mom, who liked everyone to call her Trixie, painted ladies’ fingernails at the Birney Beauty Shop, and didn’t much care what her son did as long as he didn’t call her “Mom.” Lots of mothers didn’t like their kids to even associate with Fishy, but Artie’s Mom actually liked the guy and was always feeding him cake and cookies, trying to fatten him up. He was a year older than the kids in his class, and a lot wiser in the ways of the world, which he learned about from spying on Trixie and her boyfriends, and hanging around with guys on his side of the tracks who did wild stuff like hopping freights to Chicago and getting tattooed. In return for Fishy’s wisdom of the world, Artie helped him do his homework sometimes, writing up whole essays for him, but spelling some words wrong on purpose so it wouldn’t look suspicious.