Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

“I can’t think of any. Who?”

Tutlow put his fingers at the outer corners of his eyes and pulled them upward, slanting.

“So solly you forgot about Wu Sing Lee,” he said.

“The Chinese Laundryman?”

“Ah so.”

“But the Chinese are on our side. They’re fighting the Japs!”

Tutlow, still stretching his eyes into slants, leaned forward and raised his upper lip over his teeth, looking sort of like a gopher, but speaking in a sinister, Oriental accent.

“How you know for sure Wu Sing Lee not actu-ry Japanese? ”

“’Cause they don’t have laundries. Chinese have laundries.”

“How you know Wu Sing Lee not Japanese spy posing as Chinaman, using laundry to throw Amelicans off scent?”

“What makes you think he is? ”

Tutlow took his hands from his eyes and let his upper lip down to normal, getting real serious now.

“I don’t know for sure, but I know how we can find out. Lookit here.”

Tutlow reached under his bed and pulled out his terrific War Scrapbook. Artie scooted over next to him, and tried to see the article he turned to by the secret light of the flickering candle. It was a clipping from Time magazine that was underlined in parts with a yellow crayon. The headline said, “How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs.”

Tutlow pulled the scrapbook away from Artie and cleared his throat so he could read the important parts out loud. He made his voice real deep and serious, so it almost sounded something like H. V. Kaltenborn.

“‘Those who know them best often rely on their facial characteristics to tell them apart: the Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese are nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time.… Most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed spectacles.… Japs are likely to be stockier and broader-hipped.”

Tutlow slammed the scrapbook decisively and looked up at Artie.

“Well?” he asked, like he’d made his case.

“I dunno,” Artie said. “I never paid much attention to Wu Sing Lee.”

“In that case,” said Tutlow, “I guess we got our work cut out for us.”

He blew out the candle and Artie felt a shiver go through him as he sat there in the darkened room, about to take on the mission of a Home Front counterspy.

A high-pitched, tinkly bell sounded (like the kind that might be in a Japanese shrine!) as the two boys walked in the door of Wu Sing Lee’s Hand Laundry in a little alley off Main Street. Foreign odors, like tea and old seaweed, wafted in from the long, plain curtains that separated the back of the shop from the little counter and the shelves behind it with packages of laundry in the front, the only part of the place that customers could actually see . God only knew what mysterious rites were performed behind the curtains, where it was rumored that the lone Chinaman (if that was in fact his true nationality) not only washed and ironed the clothes but also slept, ate, and cooked his inscrutable Oriental meals.

Wu Sing Lee came out from the back of the shop with such a swift, delicate movement that the curtains barely seemed to part, and it was impossible to even catch a glimpse of what lay behind them.

“Help you please?” asked Wu Sing Lee with a kindly, open smile that was deceptively Chinese in nature.

“Uh, yeah, I got this laundry here to be washed,” said Artie, placing a pillowcase full of dirty socks and underwear on the counter. His mother always did all their laundry, but Artie had scrounged around in the closet and found some old stuff left over from Camp Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko that she hadn’t discovered yet. While Wu Sing Lee took the bundle and handed a ticket to Artie, the crafty Tutlow, whistling “I’d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China,” slithered clear over the counter so his head and shoulders were hanging down on the other side of it, so he kind of reminded Artie of a horse caught on a fence. Actually, what he was doing was checking out the laundryman’s size to see if he was “stockier and broader-hipped” than Chinese people are supposed to be.

“So when exactly will these be all done?” Artie said in a voice louder than normal, intended to keep Wu Sing’s attention away from Tutlow’s spying.

“Today Monday, be wash Friday.”

“Well, are you really positive about that?” Artie asked, testing him for one of the Japanese qualities.

“Oh, sure, sure,” the man said.

“Well, I have to be really positive, ’cause I’m going on this camping trip, with Boy Scout Troop Seventy-three, and we’re going up to Devil’s Toothpick, so I got to have all my socks and stuff.”

“You have Friday,” Wu Sing said, still smiling.

Tutlow crawled back from over the counter, and, pushing back his glasses that were falling from his nose, said suddenly to the laundryman: “You hear the one about why the chicken crossed the road?”

“One about chicken?” Wu Sing asked.

“To get to the other side!” Artie piped up, and he and Tutlow whooped and laughed, slapping their legs.

Wu Sing stared at them, still smiling but looking definitely nervous .

“Well, I’ll be back for the laundry Friday if you’re absolutely positive it’ll be done.”

“Be wash, be wash,” Wu Sing said, sounding nervous, positive , and even dogmatic all at the same time.

Artie was anxious to get out of there, but Warren stopped him at the door, to ask one final key question.

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” he said to Wu Sing, “which do Chinese people really like better—chow mein or chop suey?”

Wu Sing suddenly began to laugh. He was laughing so hard his eyes were squinting.

“What’s so funny?” Tutlow asked.

Wu Sing continued to laugh, like this serious question was some kind of great joke. Tutlow shot a glance at Artie, who nodded, realizing Wu Sing Lee was laughing loudly at the wrong time .

The boys hurried out of the little shop, breaking into a run as they got to the sidewalk, knowing now the awful truth:

Wu Sing Lee was a Jap .

Artie was standing on top of the Odd Fellows Building, whose three stories made it the tallest structure on Main Street. He was wildly waving his semaphore flags above his head. The reason he was only flapping them back and forth instead of actually forming letters of the alphabet in semaphore code was that Warren Tutlow didn’t know semaphore, and he said they would lose precious spying time if he had to go to the trouble of learning, so when Artie spotted Wu Sing Lee coming out of his laundry he should just wave the flags back and forth above his head. Tutlow was up in a maple tree back of Main Street, watching Artie through a pair of Boy Scout binoculars.

“Artie, what are you doing up there?”

Darn it all, Caroline Spingarn’s telescopic eyes had picked out Artie from clear across Main Street where she was coming out of Damon’s Drugs.

He shook his head back and forth as hard as he could, trying to signal her to keep her trap shut, but it didn’t work.

Caroline cupped her hands to her mouth and called out louder.

“Is there going be an Air Raid?” she shouted.

Now several other people stopped on the street and looked up at Artie. Luckily, Wu Sing Lee had already walked into the bank, so he didn’t see Artie himself, though that was just luck after Caroline had drawn the whole world’s attention to him.

“I’m just practicing!” Artie shouted back.

“Just for Boy Scouts, or a real Air Raid?” Caroline called up at him.

Artie could have croaked her. In the first place, everyone in Birney had pretty much forgot about Air Raids anymore. In the first summer of the War their whole part of the state had a blackout once to practice up in case of Air Raids, but it was called for 10:30 at night when all the farmers and most everyone else in towns like Birney had already turned off their lights and gone to sleep, so you really couldn’t tell if the blackout had even worked, except in bigger places like Moline. In the meantime, the Nazis had never tried to fly on the polar route from Norway to bomb Chicago and now the whole Luftwaffe was busy defending its own cities against the American Air Corps and the British who were striking back at them from bases in England.