‘Doug, why didn’t you crack both his legs with your infernal machine?’
‘What?’
‘When do we see your device, Doug? Can you set it for the Death of a Thousand Slices?’
Doug examined Charlie’s face, to see if he was joking, but Charlie’s face was a pure church altar alive with holy light.
‘Doug,’ he murmured. ‘Doug, boy, oh boy.’
‘Sure,’ said Douglas, warming to the altar glow. ‘Him against me, me against Quartermain and the whole darn school board, the town council – Mr Bleak, Mr Gray, all those dumb old men that live at the edge of the ravine.’
‘Can I watch you pick ’em off, Doug?’
‘What? Sure. But we got to plan, got to have an army.’
‘Tonight, Doug?’
‘Tomorrow …’
‘No, tonight! Do or die. You be captain.’
‘General!’
‘Sure, sure. I’ll get the others. So they can hear it from the horse’s mouth! Meet at the ravine bridge, eight o’clock! Boy!’
‘Don’t yell in the windows at those guys,’ said Doug. ‘Leave secret notes on their porches. That’s an order!’
‘Yeah!’
Charlie sped off, yelling. Douglas felt his heart drown in a fresh new summer. He felt the power growing in his head and arms and fists. All this in a day! From plain old C–minus student to full general!
Now, whose legs should be cracked next? Whose metronome stopped? He sucked in a trembling breath.
All the fiery–pink windows of the dying day shone upon this arch–criminal who walked in their brilliant gaze, half smile–scowling toward destiny, toward eight o’clock, toward the camptown gathering of the great Green Town Confederacy and everyone sitting by firelight singing, ‘Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp grounds …‘
We’ll sing that one, he thought, three times.
CHAPTER NINE
Up in the attic, Doug and Tom set up headquarters. A turned–over box became the general’s desk; his aide–de–camp stood by, awaiting orders.
‘Get out your pad, Tom.’
‘It’s out.’
‘Ticonderoga pencil?’
‘Ready.’
‘I got a list, Tom, for the Great Army of the Republic. Write this down. There’s Will and Sam and Charlie and Bo and Pete and Henry and Ralph. Oh, and you, Tom.’
‘How do we use the list, Doug?’
‘We gotta find things for them to do. Time’s running out. Right now we’ve gotta figure how many captains, how many lieutenants. One general. That’s me.’
‘Make it good, Doug. Keep ’em busy.’
‘First three names, captains. The next three, lieutenants. Everybody else, spies.’
‘Spies, Doug?’
‘I think that’s the greatest thing. Guys like to creep around, watch things, and then come back and tell.’
‘Heck, I want to be one of those.’
‘Hold on. We’ll make them all captains and lieutenants, make everyone happy, or we’ll lose the war before it gets started. Some will do double-duty as spies.’
‘Okay, Doug, here’s the list.’
Doug scanned it. ‘Now we gotta figure the first sock-dolager thing to do.’
‘Get the spies to tell you.’
‘Okay, Tom. But you’re the most important spy. After the ravine meeting tonight …’ Tom frowned, shook his head. ‘What?’
‘Heck, Doug, the ravine’s nice but I know a better place. The graveyard. The sun’ll be gone. It’ll remind ’em if they’re not careful, that’s where we’ll all wind up.’
‘Good thinking, Tom.’
‘Well, I’m gonna go spy and round up the guys. First the bridge, then the graveyard, yup?’
‘Tom, you’re really somethin’.’
‘Always was,’ said Tom. ‘Always was.’
He jammed his pencil in his shirt pocket, stashed his nickel tablet in the waistband of his dungarees, and saluted his commander.
‘Dismissed!’
And Tom ran.
CHAPTER TEN
The green acreage of the old cemetery was filled with stones and names on stones. Not only the names of the people earthed over with sod and flowers, but the names of seasons. Spring rain had written soft, unseen messages here. Summer sun had bleached granite. Autumn wind had softened the lettering. And snow had laid its cold hand on winter marble. But now what the seasons had to say was only a cool whisper in the trembling shade, the message of names: ‘TYSON! BOWMAN! STEVENS!’
Douglas leap–frogged TYSON, danced on BOWMAN, and circled STEVENS.
The graveyard was cool with old deaths, old stones grown in far Italian mountains to be shipped here to this green tunnel, under skies too bright in summer, too sad in winter.
Douglas stared. The entire territory swarmed with ancient terrors and dooms. The Great Army stood around him and he looked to see if the invisible webbed wings in the rushing air ran lost in the high elms and maples. And did they feel all that? Did they hear the autumn chestnuts raining in cat–soft thumpings on the mellow earth? But now all was the fixed blue lost twilight which sparked each stone with light specules where fresh yellow butterflies had once rested to dry their wings and now were gone.
Douglas led his suddenly disquieted mob into a further land of stillness and made them tie a bandanna over his eyes; his mouth, isolated, smiled all to itself.
Groping, he laid hands on a tombstone and played it like a harp, whispering.
‘Jonathan Silks. 1920. Gunshot.’ Another: ‘Will Colby. 1921. Flu.’
He turned blindly to touch deep–cut green moss names and rainy years, and old games played on lost Memorial Days while his aunts watered the grass with tears, their voices like windswept trees.
He named a thousand names, fixed ten thousand flowers, flashed ten million spades. ‘Pneumonia, gout, dyspepsia, TB. All of ’em taught,’ said Doug. ‘Taught to learn how to die. Pretty dumb lying here, doing nothing, yup?’
‘Hey Doug,’ Charlie said, uneasily. ‘We met here to plan our army, not talk about dying. There’s a billion years between now and Christmas. With all that time to fill, I got no time to die. I woke this morning and said to myself, “Charlie, this is swell, living. Keep doing it!”’
‘Charlie, that’s how they want you to talk!’
‘Am I wrinkly, Doug, and dog–pee yellow? Am I fourteen, Doug, or fifteen or twenty? Am I?’
‘Charlie, you’ll spoil everything!’
‘I’m just not worried.’ Charlie beamed. ‘I figure everyone dies, but when it’s my turn, I’ll just say no thanks. Bo, you goin’ to die someday? Pete?’
‘Not me!’
‘Me either!’
‘See?’ Charlie turned to Doug. ‘Nobody’s dyin’ like flies. Right now we’ll just lie like hound–dogs in the shade. Cool off, Doug.’
Douglas’s hands fisted in his pockets, clutching dust, marbles, and a piece of white chalk. At any moment Charlie would run, the gang with him, yapping like dogs, to flop in deep grape–arbor twilight, not even swatting flies, eyes shut.
Douglas swiftly chalked their names, CHARLIE, TOM, PETE, BO, WILL, SAM, HENRY, AND RALPH, on the gravestones, then jumped back to let them spy themselves, so much chalk–dust on marble, flaking, as time blew by in the trees.
The boys stared for a long, long time, silent, their eyes moving over the strange shapes of chalk on the cold stone. Then, at last, there was the faintest exhalation of a whisper.
‘Ain’t going to die!’ cried Will. ‘I’ll fight!’
‘Skeletons don’t fight,’ said Douglas.
‘No, sir!’ Will lunged at the stone, erasing the chalk, tears springing to his eyes.
The other boys stood, frozen.
‘Sure,’ Douglas said. ‘They’ll teach us at school, say, here’s your heart, the thing you get attacks with! Show you bugs you can’t see! Teach you to jump off b
uildings, stab people, fall and not move.’
‘No, sir,’ Sam gasped.
The great meadow of graveyard rippled under the last fingers of fading sunlight. Moths fluttered around them, and the sound of a graveyard creek ran over all their cold moonlit thoughts and gaspings as Douglas quietly finished:’ Sure, none of us wants to just lie here and never play kick–the–can again. You want all that?’
‘Heck no, Doug…’
‘Then we stop it! We find out how our folks make us grow, teach us to lie, cheat, steal. War? Great! Murder? Swell! We’ll never be so well off as we are right now! Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you! Well, do we fight back? Will you let me tell you how to run?’
‘Gosh,’ said Charlie. ‘Yeah!’
‘Then,’ said Doug, ‘talk to your body: Bones, not one more inch! Statues! Don’t forget, Quartermain owns this graveyard. He makes money if we lie here, you and you and you! But we’ll show him. And all those old men who own the town! Halloween’s almost here and before then we got to sour their grapes! You wanna look like them? You know how they got that way? Well, they were all young once, but somewhere along the way, oh gosh, when they were thirty or forty or fifty, they chewed tobacco and phlegm–hocked up on themselves and that phlegm–hock turned all gummy and sticky and then the next thing you know there was spittle all over them and they began to look like, you know, you’ve seen, caterpillars turned into chrysalis, their darned skin hardened, and the young guys turned old, got trapped inside their shells, by God. Then they began to look like all those old guys. So, what you have is old men with young guys trapped inside them. Some year soon, maybe, their skin will crack and the old men will let the old young men out. But they won’t be young anymore, they’ll be a bunch of death’s–head moths or, come to think of it, I think the old men are going to keep the young men inside them forever, so they’re trapped in all that glue, always hoping to get free. It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? Pretty bad.’
‘Is that it, Doug?’ said Tom.
‘Yeah,’ said Pete. ‘You sure you know what you’re talking about?’
‘What Pete is trying to say is that we gotta know with precision, we gotta know what’s accurate,’ said Bo.
‘I’ll say it again,’ said Doug. ‘You listen close. Tom, you taking this down?’
‘Yup,’ said Tom, his pencil poised over his notepad. ‘Shoot.’
They stood in the darkening shadows, in the smell of grass and leaves and old roses and cold stone and raised their heads, sniffling, and wiped their cheeks on their shirtsleeves.
‘Okay, then,’ said Doug. ‘Let’s go over it again. It’s not enough just seeing these graves. We’ve got to sneak under open windows, listen, discover what those old geezers are sick with. Tom, go get the pumpkins out of Grandma’s pantry. We’re gonna have a contest, see which of us can carve the scariest pumpkin. One to look like old man Quartermain, one like Bleak, one like Gray. Light them up and put them out. Later tonight we start our first attack with the carved pumpkins. Okay?’
‘Okay!’ everyone shouted.
They leapt over WHYTE, WILLIAMS, and NEBB, jumped and vaulted SAMUELS and KELLER, screamed the iron gate wide, leaving the cold land behind them, lost sunlight, and the creek running forever below the hill. A host of gray moths followed them as far as the gate where Tom braked and stared at his brother accusingly.
‘Doug, about those pumpkins. Gosh almighty, you’re nuts!’
‘What?’ Doug stopped and turned back as the other boys ran on.
‘It ain’t enough. I mean, look what you’ve done. You’ve pushed the fellas too far, got ’em scared. Keep on with this sort of talk you’re going to lose your army. You’ve got to do something that will put everything back together again. Find something for us to do or else everyone will go home and stay there, or go lie down with the dogs and sleep it off. Think of something, Doug. It’s important.’
Doug put his hands on his hips and stared at Tom. ‘Why do I got this feeling you’re the general and I’m just a buck private?’
‘What do you mean, Doug?’
‘I mean here I am, almost fourteen, and you’re twelve going on a hundred and ordering me around and telling me what to do. Are things so bad?’
‘Bad, Doug? They’re terrible. Look at all those guys running away. You better catch up and think of something between here and the middle of town. Reorganize the army. Give us something to do besides carving jack–o’–lanterns. Think, Doug, think.’
‘I’m thinking,’ said Doug, eyes shut.
‘Well then, get going! Run, Doug, I’ll catch up.’
And Doug ran on.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On the way into town, on a street near the school stood the nickel emporium where all the sweet poisons hid in luscious traps.
Doug stopped, stared, and waited for Tom to catch up and then yelled, ‘Okay, gang, this way. In!’
Around him all the boys came to a halt because he said the name of the shop, which was pure magic.
Doug beckoned and they all gathered and followed, orderly, like a good army, into the shop.
Tom came last, smiling at Doug as if he knew something that nobody else knew.
Inside, honey lay sheathed in warm African chocolate. Plunged and captured in the amber treasure lay fresh Brazil nuts, almonds, and glazed clusters of snowy coconut. June butter and August wheat were clothed in dark sugars. All were crinkled in folded tin foil, then wrapped in red and blue papers that told the weight, ingredients, and manufacturer. In bright bouquets the candies lay, caramels to glue the teeth, licorice to blacken the heart, chewy wax bottles filled with sickening mint and strawberry sap, Tootsie Rolls to hold like cigars, red–tipped chalk–mint cigarettes for chill mornings when your breath smoked on the air.
The boys, in the middle of the shop, saw diamonds to crunch, fabulous liquors to swig. Persimmon–colored pop bottles swam, clinking softly, in the Nile waters of the refrigerated box, its water cold enough to cut your skin. Above, on glass shelves, lay cordwood piles of gingersnaps, macaroons, chocolate bits, vanilla wafers shaped like moons, and marshmallow dips, white surprises under black masquerades. All of this to coat the tongue, plaster the palate.
Doug pulled some nickels from his pocket and nodded at the boys.
One by one they chose from the sweet treasure, noses pressed against glass, breath misting the crystal vault.
Moments later, down the middle of the street they ran and soon stood on the edge of the ravine with the pop and candy.
Once they were all assembled, Doug nodded again and they started the trek down into the ravine. Above them, on the other side, stood the looming homes of the old men, casting dark shadows into the bright day. And above those, Doug saw, as he shielded his eyes, was the hulking carapace of the haunted house.
‘I brought you here on purpose,’ said Doug.
Tom winked at him as he flipped the lid off his pop.
‘You must learn to resist, so you can fight the good fight. Now,’ he cried, holding his bottle out. ‘Don’t look so surprised. Pour!’
‘My gosh!’ Charlie Woodman slapped his brow. ‘That’s good root beer, Doug. Mine’s good Orange Crush!’
Doug turned his bottle upside down. The root beer froth hissed out to join the clear stream rushing away to the lake. The others stared, the spectacle mirrored in each pair of eyes.
‘You want to sweat Orange Crush?’ Douglas grabbed Charlie’s drink. ‘You want root beer spit, to be poisoned forever, to never get well? Once you’re tall, you can’t ungrow back, can’t stab yourself with a pin and let the air out.’
Solemnly, the martyrs tilted their bottles.
‘Lucky crawfish.’ Charlie Woodman slung his bottle at a rock. They all threw their bott
les, like Germans after a toast, the glass crashing in bright splinters.
They unwrapped the melting chocolate and butter chip and almond frivolities. Their teeth parted, their mouths watered. But their eyes looked to their general.
‘I solemnly pledge from now on: no candy, no pop, no poison.’
Douglas let his chocolate chunk drop like a corpse into the water, like a burial at sea.
Douglas wouldn’t even let them lick their fingers.
Walking out of the ravine, they met a girl eating a vanilla ice cream cone. The boys stared, their tongues lolling. She took a cold dollop with her tongue. The boys blinked. She licked the cone and smiled. Perspiration broke out on a half dozen faces. One more lick, one more jut of that rare pink tongue, one more hint of cool vanilla ice cream and his army would revolt. Sucking in a deep breath, Douglas cried: ‘Git!’
The girl spun around and ran.
Douglas waited for the memory of the ice cream to fade, then said, quietly, ‘There’s ice water at Grandma’s. March!’
II.
Shiloh and Beyond
CHAPTER TWELVE
Calvin C. Quartermain was an edifice as tall, long, and as arrogant as his name.
He did not move, he stalked.
He did not see, he glared.
He spoke not, but fired his tongue, point–blank, at any target come to hand.
He orated, he pronounced, he praised not, but heaped scorn.
Right now he was busy shoving bacteria under the microscope of his gold–rimmed spectacles. The bacteria were the boys, who deserved destruction. One boy, especially.
‘A bike, sweet Christ, a damn blue bike! That’s all it was!’
Quartermain bellowed, kicking his good leg.
‘Bastards! Killed Braling! Now they’re after me!’
A stout nurse trussed him like a cigar store Indian while Dr. Lieber set the leg.
‘Christ! Damned fool. What was it Braling said about a metronome? Jesus!’
‘Leg’s broke, easy!’