Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

“I’d feel pretty punk.”

“Oh, Artie,” she said. “So do I. So do I.”

The tears were coming down her cheeks, and Artie got it now, what she was telling him.

“I heard we got guys working on secret weapons,” Artie said, “that’ll end the War in no time and bring Our Boys back home. Maybe that’s what’ll happen, real soon.”

“If it doesn’t, I think I’ll explode. Or just burn up inside. Maybe that’s what I deserve. The fires of hell.”

“Don’t say that stuff.”

“I’m sorry. I’m talking baloney. Forgive me? After all, think of all the other girls. Sweethearts. Even wives. They have to wait, too. If they can do it, I can do it.”

“Sure you can. You just have to be real brave and tighten your belt.”

“My belt?”

Shirley suddenly laughed, and then blew her nose, real hard. Artie stood up and tossed a rock into Skinner Creek, making a splash in the sunny green water. Then, without saying anything, he and Shirley turned and walked back through the woods toward Town.

Artie’s eleventh birthday was April 18, and he got everything he wanted—and more. His parents gave him the official pair of Boy Scout semaphore flags, each one divided into a red and white triangle and sewn onto a stick, just like regulation Army or Navy or Marine Semaphore flags, and Warren Tutlow came over and looked through Artie’s binoculars at Artie up on the roof making some of the new signals he had already learned by positioning the flags: he could do “V” which was for Victory, and also “SOS,” and “Hi.” When he learned the whole semaphore alphabet he’d be able to send entire messages clear across town to Warren Tutlow by signaling from his roof.

Shirley Colby came by to give Artie her present, which was a purple label “Okeh” record of “We’ll Heil, Heil, Right in Der Führer’s Face,” and Shirley went downstairs to the basement with him while he cranked up the old Victrola and marched around the room making the Bronx cheer “Heils” along with Spike Jones and the City Slickers on the record. Shirley smiled a little, but she looked real pale and even thinner than usual. Artie hoped she wasn’t going to waste away to nothing before Roy came marching home.

Fishy Mitchelman dropped over and gave Artie a pinup picture of Betty Grable that he had torn off a calendar at Bob’s Eats on Main Street.

Most exciting of all, after supper and the birthday cake with eleven candles that Artie blew out with only one little extra huff that his folks said counted as one huff so he got his wish (which he wouldn’t have told them on pain of death), Artie went to the movies with Caroline Spingarn. It wasn’t actually a real “date”; kids in sixth grade weren’t allowed to have dates yet, but they could “meet” each other at the movies, and that’s what Artie and Caroline did. They met each other at seven o’clock sharp in front of the Strand and Artie bought tickets for both of them and they went inside and sat together to watch Errol Flynn in Desperate Journey . Artie thought about holding Caroline’s hand, but he kept feeling this presence behind him and Caroline, like a lookout scout, and sure enough it turned out to be Mae Ellen Spingarn, Caroline’s older sister who was a Junior in high school, who came to sort of keep an eye on Caroline since it was her first time to meet a guy for a movie. Artie was glad he hadn’t tried to sneak his hand onto Caroline’s (Mae Ellen would have seen for sure), but anyway Caroline herself leaned close to him a couple of times, pretending to giggle at something but the real reason was to give him a whiff of her Camay Beauty Soap smell, which really knocked him out.

That night he studied his aircraft spotter cards with his penlight beneath the blankets, and then, after resisting for a long time and trying to think of serious stuff like the War, he took the Betty Grable pinup from the envelope Fishy had handed it to him in and he studied that with greater concentration than he’d ever been able to apply to the Messerschmitt or Stuka, memorizing every line and curve of the perfect body, imagining the wet red slurp of those fabulous lips on his mouth, sucked in the sight of the blond hair and the bare limbs stretching from the tight-fitting bathing suit, and found when he switched off his penlight that he had so well imprinted the picture on his mind that he could see it in every detail with his eyes closed and that vision made his cheeks grow hot and even more magically made his thing get big and hard till he touched it to see what was happening and touching it felt good so he did it more although he knew it was wrong and a dangerous thing to do, and for a while he tried to push the pinup picture from his mind and see the sweet face of Caroline Spingarn or the lovely, haunted eyes of Shirley Colby, but old Betty Grable kept popping back into his mind, looking over her shoulder at him with that come-hither smile, and his mind’s eye traced down the perfect swell of her thighs and along down the calves and up again to the full, smooth, protruding behind, and the bare back and then the blond-capped goddess face and as Artie pressed himself to the thrill of it he throbbed in a way he had never done before, wiping out his mind for a moment in a terrifying mixture of pleasure and pain that left him limp and gasping. He was still dry but he knew something had exploded in him and that he would not be the same again. His thing had shrunk back to normal and he only hoped he hadn’t done it any permanent damage.

The next morning Artie found out he had gotten his wish when he blew out his birthday candles. The radio said that Colonel Jimmy Doolittle had led a bunch of B-25s on a bombing raid on Tokyo, revenging Pearl Harbor and scaring the devil out of the Japs by attacking their own hometown. This was the first sign the tide could be turning for America in the War. But everyone knew now it wouldn’t be over easily or soon. The Japs, even though they were laughably short, were mean and tricky fighters, and they’d been preparing for War for years and years, while America was just beginning to roll its tanks and ships off the assembly lines. On the other side of the world, the Nazis were still goose-stepping all over Europe, and America was going to the rescue of the brave, clean English, who were led by old Winston Churchill and the valiant pilots of the RAF. Like the popular song said about beating the Germans, “We did it before, and we can do it again,” but it was going to be a long, bloody battle.

People were beginning to settle in for the trials and deprivations of Wartime. In May, you had to line up to get Food Stamps for the rationing of most of the stuff that was good, like meat, butter, sugar, and eggs. Artie knew that Wartime sacrifice had really come home when Mom served up the first supper of liver, which wasn’t rationed at all, and no wonder, the way the stuff tasted. When Artie complained, Dad just told him to put more catsup on it, and that way at least you could get it down.

All the guys in Roy’s class joined up right after graduation. Bo Bannerman got in the Air Corps, and Wings Watson joined the Army. There was a big parade down Main Street for the boys who were leaving to defend America and save the world for democracy, and as the drums rolled and the bugles blared, Artie wished he were old enough to go himself.

Since that wasn’t possible he did the next best thing and planted a victory garden in the backyard. He dug the rows himself and spent his own money to buy the packages of Burpee’s seeds for radishes, carrots, and his favorite vegetable, lima beans. There were never enough limas to make more than a couple of helpings for supper, and the carrots were kind of short and stubby, but the radishes came out great. Artie pulled them up proudly, washed the dirt off them, and put them on a plate at the supper table. Mom and Dad said they were the best radishes they’d ever had. Eating them made Artie feel good even though they didn’t have much of a taste when you got right down to it; the thing was, radishes tasted so blah that it made you realize you were living in Wartime, and if worse came to worst and America’s farms were destroyed by German incendiary bombs you could always survive on radishes from your own backyard till Victory came.