The Boys Start the War the Boys Start the War

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” said Eddie. “We’ll wait until we see them up there spying again. Then Beth and I will go down to the river carrying Caroline.”

  “In a sheet,” said Beth. She went to her room for a notebook and pencil and returned, scribbling as she came. “We’ll be carrying Caroline in a sheet and walking real slow, crying.”

  “Like one of those old silent movies! Oh, Beth, that’s wonderful!” Caroline said.

  “When we get to the river, we’ll lay her down and cry some more,” Eddie continued.

  “And I’ll have my arms folded over my chest. I’ll look like this,” Caroline closed her eyes and let her lips fall open just a fraction.

  “We’ll have to pray over her,” Beth said. “We’ve got to take our time.”

  “Okay, but when it’s over, we’ll tip the sheet and slide you off into the river, Caroline. You’re the best one to do it because you swim like a fish,” Eddie told her.

  “You’ll have to hold your breath and sink deep down, then swim underwater for a ways,” Beth cautioned. “Make sure you climb out far up-river where there are bushes to hide you.”

  “And the boys will think I’m dead!” Caroline said. “Eddie, this is the most wonderful idea you’ve ever had. But shouldn’t I have flowers?”

  Flowers, Beth wrote in her notebook.

  “What If Mom sees us?” Caroline wondered.

  “She won’t,” Eddie said. “She’ll be so busy moving in, she won’t know where we are half the time.”

  Caroline, Eddie, and Beth exchanged smiles and went downstairs to help. A wonderful script and an audience, ready and waiting, Caroline thought. What more could she possibly want?

  It was four days later that Beth rushed in with news. She had been reading a book back in the trees near the river when she saw the boys come over the swinging bridge and sneak along the bank on the Malloys’ side.

  “They were dragging a large plastic bag behind them, and dumped it on our bank, right at the edge of the water.” Beth panted. “And do you know what was in it? Dead fish! Dead birds! Run-over squirrels and possums! The boys want us to think the river’s polluted. I heard them talking!”

  “Those creepy jerks!” cried Caroline.

  “Those jerky creeps!” said Eddie. “This isn’t a joke anymore. This is war!”

  For two more days the girls spied on the boys. Whenever they passed a window, they looked. When they went to the old garage and climbed up in the loft, they kept one eye on the house across the river. And finally, on the third morning, when Mr. and Mrs. Malloy were debating whether Mother’s plants or Father’s trophies should go in the sunny room on the left side of the house, Caroline looked out and saw the four boys spying on them again from the widow’s walk.

  She rushed into the next room and told Eddie and Beth.

  “Now!” whispered Eddie.

  They got a bedsheet and took it to the kitchen. Taking off her shoes, Caroline lay down on it with her arms folded across her chest. Then Beth picked up the sheet at one end, Eddie picked up the other, and they moved slowly out the back door. Step by step, with heads bent, they walked somberly down the sloping hill toward the river.

  They found a spot on the bank where they were sure the boys could still see them, and then struggling hard to keep from laughing—gently laid the bedsheet down, Caroline hoped there were no dead fish or squirrels beneath her.

  “Cry,” whispered Beth.

  “What?” murmured Caroline, barely moving her lips.

  “Not you,” said Beth. “Cry, Eddie.”

  Eddie wasn’t so good at acting, but through half-closed eyes, Caroline saw her older sister put her hands to her face, her shoulders shaking. Wonderful.

  Beth did it much better, of course. Beth even crawled over and kissed Caroline tenderly on the forehead. It was rather nice having her sisters weep over her. Even nicer when Beth picked a few wildflowers and put them between her folded fingers. Both Beth and Eddie bowed their heads.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep …” Eddie recited, and Beth joined in.

  But then came the hard part. Caroline swallowed as she felt the sheet being lifted again. Her bottom bumped against the ground once or twice as she was carried down the bank.

  Finally she felt her head begin to rise as the top of the sheet was lifted, her feet begin to fall as the bottom of the sheet was lowered, and in what was the greatest performance of her life so far, Caroline Malloy, her body stiff as a board, eyes closed, arms still folded across her chest, slid all the way off the end of the sheet and into the chilly water.

  “Did you see that?”

  Wally crouched on the balcony beside his brothers and stared.

  At first it seemed as though the two older girls were dragging a sack of garbage, and then he saw that it was the girls’ youngest sister. Dead! Obviously dead.

  Wally looked wordlessly at Jake, his mouth hanging open. They had only thrown a few dead fish and squirrels and possums. The new folks were throwing people!

  The boys couldn’t hear across the river, of course, but they had studied the small girl lying there on the sheet and she hadn’t moved a finger. Not a toe. The sisters were crying like crazy, and then, like a burial at sea, they’d dumped her in the river.

  “I don’t believe it!” said Jake hoarsely.

  “In the river!” said Josh.

  They sat with their eyes glued to the spot in the water where the body had disappeared. The body sank way down and did not come up again, and the two sisters were walking slowly back up the hill toward the house, arms around each other, heads down.

  “They must have weighted her down with stones,” breathed Jake.

  Wally’s throat was so dry, he could hardly get the words out. “What—what do you suppose she died of?” The answer, at the back of his mind, was too awful to say aloud.

  “The—the water wasn’t that polluted,” murmured Josh.

  “We only took over one bag of dead stuff,” said Jake.

  “Anyone with a grain of sense wouldn’t drink that water or swim in a river with dead animals along the bank,” Josh added.

  But what if she didn’t know? Wally wondered. What if she hadn’t seen? What if she’d gone swimming one day farther down and the germs had been carried along in the current?

  “M-maybe one of those dead squirrels had a disease,” he suggested finally.

  “Oh, man!” Josh rested his head in his hands. “Mom’s going to have a fit.”

  “Well, we don’t know that the dead fish and stuff killed her, so we aren’t going to tell,” Jake declared hoarsely, and looked around at the others. “Okay? You got it? Not a word to anybody!”

  “We can’t even tell Mom the girl died?” asked Peter.

  “No! Nothing! We’ll wait to hear it from someone else.”

  Wally glanced over at Josh. He’d brought along his sketchbook because he liked to draw what houses and trees looked like from above, Josh drew things in his sketchbook that most guys never thought of drawing, but the page in front of him now was blank, and Wally was glad. He didn’t want any evidence of what they had seen from the roof. If the girl had died because of what the boys had tossed on their bank, then Wally himself was a murderer because it had been his idea in the first place. He took a deep breath as he and his brothers climbed back inside.

  The boys were sitting soberly around the kitchen table, wondering who would find the body first, when their mother came in the back door.

  “Good grief, is this how you’re giving to spend your last few days of vacation—just moping about?” She laid her car keys on the counter and opened the refrigerator. She had just thirty minutes to eat lunch and get back to her job at the hardware store.

  “We’ve been busy—just taking a break,” Josh told her.

  “Busy doing what?” Mother asked.

  Wally saw Jake give Peter a warning look. “Just messing around,” Jake said.

  As she passed out the sandwiches, Mother added, “I would ha
ve thought you’d be across the river by now, getting to know that new family.”

  “Fat chance,” said Josh. “They’re all girls.”

  “Really?” Mother looked around the table. “Somehow I had the idea there were boys.”

  “So did we,” Jake told her.

  “How many girls?” Mother asked.

  “Two, now,” Peter answered. “I mean three. Three girls!” He looked quickly at Jake. “Three girls, all right. I counted.”

  Mother studied him curiously.

  “Well, at least they have children,” she said, chewing thoughtfully. “It could have been worse. It could have been a family without any kids at all. I’d go over and make friends with them, if I were you.”

  “We will,” said Jake, “when the Mississippi wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.”

  Josh laughed a little, and so did Mother, but Wally found it hard to smile at anything. Could you go to jail for planning a murder even if you didn’t know anyone was going to die?

  After Mother went back to work, the boys walked down to the river and followed it as far as the bridge. But they couldn’t see a trace of a body—not bobbing about on the surface, not floating just beneath it, not caught in the roots of a tree or snagged on the branches that sometimes clogged the channel. The muddy water of the Buckman River moved lazily on, gracefully parting to make way for a rock here and there, then coming together again in its slow meander around the bend under the bridge.

  When Father came home from work, Wally and his brothers were waiting for him on the steps. Mr. Hatford was a mailman in Buckman, and the boys knew that if anybody died anywhere at air in town, their father was one of the first to know.

  “Hi, Dad,” said Josh as Father came up the walk.

  Mr. Hatford’s shirt was damp, and he mopped his face with the small towel he carried over one shoulder in hot weather. The first thing he usually did when he got home was shower, but today he could scarcely make it into the house because the boys were blocking the steps.

  “How y’doin’?” he said, maneuvering around them and going inside. The boys got up and followed him.

  “Anything exciting happen today?” Jake inquired.

  “I told Mrs. Blake I wouldn’t deliver her mail unless she kept her dog in the house,” Father said. “Almost got my pants torn off by that beast of hers. Other than that, no.”

  “Anybody die?” asked Peter. Wally reached over and pinched his arm, but it was too late.

  “Not that I know of. Why? Did I miss something?”

  “I guess we’re getting bored,” Jake said quickly. “Nothing exciting ever happens around here.”

  “Well, you could always go check out that new family,” Father suggested. “Mr. Malloy is the new football coach at the college, I hear, and they’ve got three daughters about your ages.”

  “Did you meet them?” asked Josh.

  “No, but I will before too long. Want me to say something for you?”

  “No!” cried the four boys together.

  Father smiled a little as he took off his shirt. “Okay, then. We’ll just let things develop and see what happens.”

  What happens, Wally thought, is that someone’s going to find the body, and someone is going to ask questions, and someone—namely Wally himself—was going to jail. All because of two words. Two words! Dead fish. He swallowed, but it didn’t get rid of the rock in the pit of his stomach.

  On the last two days before school started, it seemed to Wally that he and his brothers were up on the widow’s walk every waking moment, watching the new family through Mother’s field glasses. He knew their name now: Malloy. Sometimes Mrs. Malloy came out to empty the trash. Sometimes Mr. Malloy drove off in his car. Once in a while Jake or Josh would catch a glimpse of the two older sisters, but the younger one was nowhere in sight.

  “Do you suppose she’s not dead?” Wally asked hopefully. “Maybe they only thought she was dead, but the water revived her and she swam back to the bank.”

  “So why haven’t we seen her around?” asked Jake. “Why do we see the two older sisters but we never see her?”

  “She’s sick, maybe?” suggested Peter.

  “No, she’s dead, all right,” said Josh. He had drawn a picture of what the youngest Malloy girl would look like after being dead in the river for several days. Wally wished he hadn’t drawn it, but Peter studied the picture with wide eyes.

  If the Bensons were still here, Wally thought, they would have helped look for the body. They would have had some good ideas about where it could be. Then he remembered that if the Bensons were here, the Malloys would not be. What would he be doing if the Bensons were back?

  Well, he decided, he and Bill Benson would probably have figured out by now what made the rows of little holes in the trunk of the pear tree. Sapsuckers, he had thought, but his friend had said bees. They had even been going to camp out all night and take turns watching, just to find out. Now they never would. Now there were girls to watch instead.

  Wally spent most of his time lying in the grass behind the house, staring up at the sky. Peter lay down beside him.

  “Do you see that spiderweb, Wally?” Peter asked, pointing to the thin strands of silver spun between a forsythia bush and a lilac. “Do you suppose the spider spins the cross ones first or the down ones?”

  Wally often wondered that himself. “I think,” he said, looking hard at the web, “that the spider sort of goes across and down at the same time—just drifts down hanging by a thread. Pretty clever, when you—”

  “And if the thread breaks, splat!” said Peter delightedly, whapping one hand on the ground.

  Wally sighed.

  Usually there was at least some excitement connected with going back to school in the fall. This year Mother had bought them all new T-shirts and jeans, and Wally and Peter had picked out new sneakers as well. But the boys hadn’t put paper in their notebooks yet. They hadn’t even sharpened their pencils. The big question among the boys was what they would say to the girls when the two remaining Malloy sisters walked across the bridge the next day on their way to school.

  Mother didn’t come home for lunch, so Jake made beans and franks. “Why don’t we watch from an upstairs window tomorrow, and when we see them start across the bridge, we’ll time it so we get out to the road when they do. I just want to hear what they have to say about their sister,” he said.

  “What if they don’t say anything?” Wally asked. “We don’t even know their names. We can’t just say, ‘Hey, so-and-so, how’s what’s-her-name?’”

  “We could say, ‘How is the sister we saw rolled up in a bedsheet?’” Peter suggested. Josh shot him a disgusted glance, and Peter went back to lining the beans up in rows on his plate, then stabbing them three at a time with his fork.

  The following morning Jake and Josh crouched at an upstairs window, watching the bridge. Peter, with his new lunch box, waited below.

  Wally, however, was still dressing. As he put on his new sneakers, he realized that the treads were so deep, he couid probably roll up a tiny piece of paper and stick it in a groove without it falling out. If he ever had to carry a secret somewhere, and there was any danger of being searched, he could always wear a new pair of sneakers and—

  “They’re coming!” Josh yelled.

  Like a whirlwind the twins rushed downstairs; where Peter was waiting. With Wally bringing up the rear they all went outside.

  The two older Malloy sisters, wearing jeans and long shirts down to their knees, were walking arm in arm across the swinging bridge, leaning on each other, heads together, like two girls who had more sadness than they could possibly bear, Wally thought.

  As they came closer, the Hatford brothers pretended to be looking down the road, at the sky, anywhere, in fact, except at the Malloys.

  “Ask!” Jake whispered to Josh.

  “You ask!” said Josh. “You always try to make me do it.”

  “Wally, you do it,” said Jake.

  “Why
me? What the heck am I supposed to say?”

  The girls had reached the middle of the narrow bridge now and, still walking side by side, held on to the cable handrails as the bridge bounced slightly beneath their weight.

  “If one of us doesn’t ask, Peter will,” Josh warned. “He’ll say something dumb, like ‘Have you buried anyone lately?’”

  “I will not!” snapped Peter.

  Wally didn’t know what he’d say, but he knew that someone had to say something, so he stepped out in front of his brothers and started toward the bridge.

  But suddenly there was nothing at all to say, because, as he stared, the two older Malloy girls stepped off the end of the bridge and the third Malloy sister popped out from behind them. She came right down the path to the very spot where Wally was standing. She had either never been dead at all or she was the first ghost in the history of Buckman, and here she was now, in front of his very eyes.

  “This,” said Caroline to her sisters as the Hatford boys headed up the sidewalk, “was our greatest performance yet.”

  “What do you mean yet?” asked Beth, pulling a paperback from her bookbag to finish before school. The Fog People, it said on the cover. “I’m not going to spend all my time dropping you in the river and hiding you on the bridge.”

  “But they believed! They really, truly believed that I was dead and buried at sea! The look on their faces when I came out from behind you. If we could carry that off, we could do anything. We’d make a wonderful team!”

  The four Hatford brothers were growing smaller and smaller in the distance. They hadn’t said hello or ‘Welcome to Buckman’ or anything at all. They’d just gaped, their mouths wide open.

  Eddie whirled her baseball cap around on one finger. “You know they’ll try to get even.”

  “We are even! They dumped dead fish and squirrels on our side of the river. And we spooked them into thinking I was dead,” said Caroline. She almost wished they weren’t even, because she had so many wonderful scenes yet to play. There must be a hundred and fifty ways she and Beth and Eddie could fool the boys. Boys made such a wonderful audience. They’d believe anything.