Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

The worst part was that after all the fighting and dying there still wasn’t any end in sight. The new issue of Life predicted for the New Year, “The Most Sobering Fact About It Will Be Death,” and went on to say that even though lots of people had thought Hitler would collapse in ’43 and the War would be over that Christmas, the truth was, “We are still far from Victory.” After the great invasion of Italy, where Wings Watson got killed, the valiant American and British armies were all bogged down. The depressing story about it in the magazine said, “In the Mud and Mountains the Allied Advance Has Been Virtually Stopped.” Over in the South Pacific where poor old Roy was still fighting his heart out, it seemed like there wasn’t any end to the number of rinky-dink little islands the Marines had to capture just to inch a little bit closer to the Japanese homeland. Last year it was Guadalcanal and Midway, now it was Tarawa and Kwajalein, and the same old stuff all over again.

Artie flipped through the Life in Damon’s Drugs, it seemed like he’d seen the same pictures a zillion times: muddy soldiers crawling out of foxholes, or bloody soldiers lying on beaches; ships and planes being blown up; bodies of dead Japs rotting in caves; all the same old stuff. Artie felt guilty that the War really bored him now, but at least he wasn’t the only one. In fact, he was part of a whole new problem that was sweeping the nation.

He was “slacking off.”

That was the newest Wartime term, and it didn’t have anything to do with sex, even though it sounded a lot like “whacking off,” and was almost as bad. It meant you had got lazy and bored with helping out on the Home Front, and weren’t doing your part in the War Effort anymore.

After looking at the new Life with all the depressing War news, instead of getting inspired to go out and start a new scrap drive or something, Artie just wanted to put off his homework and squander what money he had on him for a dime giant hamburger and a chocolate malt, at Bob’s Eats.

He was “slacking off.”

As he moseyed down Main Street from Damon’s to Bob’s, Artie started singing the new hit song to himself. It wasn’t one of those rousing ballads about our Brave Boys and the evil enemy; it wasn’t about the War at all. In fact, it wasn’t about anything; it was only these rhyming words that went:

Mairzy doats and doazy doats

And little lamsy divey …

It was just a fast way of saying “mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” which didn’t mean anything at all. Maybe that’s why people liked it so much. Since it didn’t mean anything, you didn’t have to think about anything when you sang it or listened to it.

Artie was about to bite into his dime giant hamburger when a bony hand clamped him on the back of the neck, and a deep, grainy voice began to sing in an imitation colored-person’s accent:

“Is you is, or is you ain’t my ba-by?”

Artie swung around and saw Fishy Mitchelman, all duded up in an outfit that surely was the first of its kind ever worn in Birney, Illinois. Fishy had on a bright yellow sport coat with padded lumps at the shoulders, a black shirt with a thin green tie, and brown peg pants that were clinched in high above his waist and hung down to a gathering drape around the ankles, where the material billowed down and over a pair of pointy shoes. If not the real thing, it was sure a good imitation of the weird type of getup that Artie had seen the hoods in big cities wearing in magazine pictures since just after the War had started.

“You got a zoot suit? ” Artie asked incredulously.

Fishy held up his right hand and snapped his long, thin fingers.

“What’s buzzin’, cousin?” he said in a kind of chant.

Artie put down his hamburger in wonderment as Fishy took off his flat-brimmed porkpie hat, lofted it in a high, graceful toss that landed it right on one of the coat hooks on the wall, vibrating for a moment like a horseshoe settling around the stake, and then hanging secure. Fishy pulled out a chair from Artie’s table, turned it backward, and sat down straddling it.

“Where’d you ever get that stuff?” Artie asked, staring transfixed at the exotic outfit.

“Me and Trixie rolled up to Chi for Kringle Time,” Fishy said, pronouncing the nickname of Chicago as “Shy,” the way the hepcats said it. Fishy acted real casual, like it was a normal, American thing for a mother to take her son to a big city for Christmas, instead of staying home and having turkey with all the trimmin’s and opening presents under the tree.

“Well, what did you and your Mom find to do up there at Christmas, anyway?” Artie asked.

Fishy stuck both his hands in the air and snapped the fingers on each one, making a little bob with his head at the same time.

“We swang,” he said.

Artie just nodded, like that was normal, too, whatever weird stuff it actually meant. He turned back to his hamburger, but before he could pick it up again, Fishy had suddenly rubbed his hands in his sticky, slicked-down, Brylcreemed hair and then grabbed the burger, taking a monstrous bite.

“Hey!” Artie protested.

Fishy flopped the burger back on the plate and stood up, chewing.

“Thanks,” he said. “It was reet.”

That was hepcat language for “neat.”

“Where you goin’?” Artie asked.

Fishy hiked his pants up higher on his chest, and lifted the long, gold, looping key chain out of his pocket and twirled it around and around his finger.

“Goin’ to Spingarn’s party tonight.”

“Caroline? She’s having a party?”

“Didn’t she give you the nod?”

“Huh? Well, I haven’t talked to her lately. I guess she forgot.”

Fishy twirled the gold key chain off his finger now, and stuck the end back in his pocket.

“Gotta fade,” he said.

And he did.

Artie looked down at his hamburger. There were fingerprints of grease on the bun. He picked it up gingerly, turning it around to the opposite side from where Fishy had taken his enormous bite. Artie took a small nibble in a place that was free of fingerprints. It was okay, but he didn’t feel hungry anymore.

He felt rotten that Caroline hadn’t invited him to her party, and he couldn’t help wondering if maybe besides her getting back at him for calling her a pest last fall he was just being punished in general for slacking off so much. Here he had just wasted most of a dime hamburger when people all over the world were starving, not to speak of wasting good money that could have bought a whole dime War Stamp.

Artie realized shamefully it was this kind of selfish, wasteful attitude that had made the last big bond drive such a fizzle all over the country. The only thing that saved the drive from being a complete bust was when the government released some secret documents about the horrible atrocities the Japs had done to Our Boys back a couple of years ago when they captured all those soldiers on the Philippines and put them in prisons to torture them. Some of the secret documents even revealed that the Japs had done atrocities on Red Cross nurses, and people really got stirred up about it. Tutlow had cut out a neat story for his War Scrapbook about how outraged people were over the atrocity reports, and Artie’s favorite part in the article was: “A blond stenographer in Seattle said: ‘I’ll tell you what the girls in Business say. They say kill the little yellow bastards, each and every one. Kill the big ones, kill the little ones, kill the medium-sized ones.’”

That was the good old patriotic spirit, and a lot of people caught it along with the blond Seattle stenographer. Bond sales really picked up for a while, but then even anger over the atrocities fizzled away and most people went back to slacking off again.