On The Wings of Heroes (13 page)

. . . that didn't come till D-day in the next year. But we got
our
invasion early. Grandma and Grandpa Riddle settled into the spare room downstairs, and we were a full house. They brought their ration books, so there were more red points for meat and cheese, and sugar for baking.

But five of us were using the bathroom now. And Grandma Riddle was everywhere you turned and bigger than some of our rooms.

Mom had always been in charge of the house and Dad and me, and she did a really good job. She was the top mom of the world, it seemed to me. But overnight she turned into a daughter, and Grandma ruled.

As she often said, “Idle hands are the devil's workshop,” so when she wasn't showing Mom how to clean house or cook, she was crocheting terrible doilies for the davenport and antimacassars for the chairs.

Mom drew the line at going to the grocery store with Grandma. I had to walk her there, and it wasn't a good experience. She wanted to go every day, and the grocer didn't like her. She squeezed the fruit. And she'd say things like, “Give me a ten-pound sack of weevils and throw in some flour.” Which he also didn't like.

Mom fell back on every front, but hung on, living for the mail delivery. When a long time went by without word from Bill, Grandma would say, “No news is good news.” Which also grated on Mom.

Dad and Grandpa Riddle did a lot better. Most mornings Grandpa climbed into his bib overalls and went off to work with Dad in the Packard. He was pretty good help at the station. The pumps were electric now, so he never quite got the hang of pumping gas. But being a farmer, he could repair anything. Mostly he hung out on the pump island with the other codgers, and they showed him respect because he was Earl Bowman's father-in-law.

We made it to Thanksgiving, and an eighteen-pound turkey appeared from somewhere. All the fixings were like before the war, and the Hisers came. Mrs. Hiser said Grandma Riddle's cornbread stuffing was the best thing she ever put in her mouth. Grandma said she'd show Mom how to make it.

So it was a long day, and at the end Mom took Dad down to the basement and told him she couldn't take another minute of it. She was going to have to go out and get a job. She was either going to have to get out of the house or go out of her mind.

On Monday she was working in the office at the blood bank. By Christmastime she was running it. That suited Grandma fine. She said she could finally give our house the cleaning it needed. “The dust around here is thicker than the fur on a squirrel.” She promised that when a letter came from Bill, she'd call Mom at the blood bank as quick as she'd read it.

. . . and fleets of big black Lincolns fanned out from Chicago. Lincoln Continentals mostly, and some of them headed down our way. The Chicago mob was selling counterfeit gas coupons to filling station operators.

Gas rationing worked like this. If you had a ration book of “A” coupons, you got three gallons of gas a week. Period. If you had a “B” coupon book, you were a war worker or a traveling salesman and got a little more. But a “C” coupon was the Big Time. That meant you were a doctor or a cop, and you got a lot more. When Dad learned that Congress in Washington voted themselves “X” coupon books, meaning all the gas they wanted, something coiled in him again.

Now the Chicago mobs were working our territory, big black beetles swarming over our world. They were selling counterfeit “C” coupons to gas stations. The stations could sell gas twenty cents a gallon over the ceiling, then cover up the illegal sales by turning in the counterfeit coupons to the OPA.

They said that thirty-five percent of all the gas sold up in Chicago was with bogus coupons. Fifty percent in New York. It was a sweet deal. But when the big bozos in snap-brim hats came to Dad with a deal he couldn't refuse, he threw them out. They said they'd be back, with a fifty-dollar starter set of “C” coupons, and they'd expect it in cash.

They came back in a Lincoln one December day, waiting until Dad and Grandpa were between customers. All of a sudden they were swarming around the place, big guys in pinky rings. They told Dad to dip fifty dollars out of the safe. He said he'd call the cops, and the mobsters laughed. They showed him the coupon book he was supposed to buy from them, and he told them where to put it.

So one of them came up behind Dad and swung a monkey wrench against the side of his head. His cap flew off, and his glasses. He fell sideways on the pavement on his bad arm, and didn't move. They did this to my dad.

Then they stuck the bloody wrench under Grandpa's chin and said they'd make an example out of him too. He was eighty-three years old, and he just looked at them. They piled into the Lincoln and left.

It was a school day, so I didn't know till I got home. Grandma was holding the fort. Mom had gone straight to the hospital. Grandpa Riddle was running the station, but Grandma wanted him home.

We went in shifts to the hospital, and the Hisers were there every day. On the second night I was there with Grandpa. Dad looked smaller in the bed, smaller than he could make himself on Halloween night. In the hospital nightshirt, he wasn't himself. There were stitches in the side of his head, and the concussion made him see two of everything. He looked wrung out—like a gully beginning to wash. And the hospital food was like the army's.

We were down to the end of the visiting hours. The nurses' aids were piling the bedpans. Standing up, Grandpa wasn't a lot taller than Dad's bed. He had worked a full day, keeping the station going.

“I don't know what I'd do without you, Mr. Riddle,” Dad said. He always called Grandpa Mr. Riddle.

“Pshaw,” Grandpa said. “We pitch in. It's how we do it down home in the southern part of the state, Earl.”

I watched them in the shadowy room. My dad. My grandpa.

“Of course, running your place of business wasn't what we come up here for,” Grandpa remarked. “Nor takin' on all them Chicago Al Capones.”

“I wondered.” Dad spoke from deep in the pillow. “It would take something to get you two off the farm and out of Williamson County. It wasn't the sugar, was it? Or the gas.”

Grandpa shook his old smooth head. “No. We were gettin' along. If there's anything we know, it's how to do without.”

A little quiet fell. Then Grandpa said, “It was the radio. We tune in a good deal. We heard about the raids the boys are flying over Germany and them places. We heard about the toll the Nazi fighters and the flak was taking on boys like Bill. Finally, the wife said she had to be up here with her daughter. She needed to be here for Joyce.”

“Ah,” Dad said.

“So up we come,” Grandpa said, “to get Joyce out of the house and into a job somewheres. The wife says that waitin' on the mail is an old woman's job.”

My head swam. Grandma
planned
to run Mom out of the house? For her own good? She wanted Mom to get a job so she wouldn't just be home, waiting? My head throbbed.

“She means well, you know,” Grandpa said. “The wife.”

“I know now,” Dad said.

Grandpa and I drove home in the Buick. He was a scarier driver after dark. Things kept looming up, and he held the steering wheel like reins.

“Grandpa,” I said, “do you have a license?”

“Of course I've got a license.” He ground a gear. “How else could I hunt?”

“I mean a driver's license, Grandpa.”

“A what?” he said, jumping the curb as he turned into our street too soon.

. . . Grandma was there to sign for it. She called Dad from the station and Mom from the blood bank, and she didn't open it. I came in from school, and there they were, the three of them with the yellow envelope in Dad's hand. Grandma Riddle hovered behind Mom.

We'd made it through Christmas, and a letter from Bill came like a present. It was January now, of 1944, and Bill was missing in action.

It was on that giant raid over Stuttgart—three hundred and thirty aircraft. But everything went wrong. Cloud cover scattered the bomber force, and half of them had to look for other targets. The Luftwaffe fighters were all over them with head-on attacks. Forty-five bombers were lost. Bill's plane was.

The telegram didn't tell us that much. It only said he was missing. But we were wise to the war now, from Bill's letters and the radio. We knew all the things that
missing
could mean. If they parachuted out of the plane over Germany and nobody shot them coming down or killed them when they landed—if they were prisoners of war, we'd get a postcard about that. From the Red Cross in Switzerland, sooner or later.

And if he came down alive in France, it depended on who found him.

And if they crash-landed the plane in the English Channel, that too depended on who found them. But it was a January heaving with ice, so they wouldn't last long in the water. The wires in their flight suits wouldn't be working. The milkweed wouldn't matter.

. . . that winter when we walked through the days.

Just because Mom never missed work at the blood bank didn't meant I was an eight-to-five orphan. I came home every noon, my feet crowding my shoes because the rations book said I wasn't due a new pair till March.

Now in frozen January, Grandma Riddle fixed me my lunch, hot biscuits and gravy, a caldron of simmering soup, thick enough for a mouse to walk across. She had less to say than before. We listened to her soap opera on the kitchen radio,
Lorenzo Jones and His Wife, Belle
.

Dad was working the pumps in his fleece jacket with Grandpa helping, business as usual. Dad's stitches were out, and his vision was back. The cops hadn't been as interested in the attack on him as you'd think. It was in the paper, though:

 

Mrs. Hiser pasted the clipping into her scrapbook of car wrecks and house fires.

It was almost real life we were living, but not really. It was just waiting, and I didn't know if I was a brother or not.

I got up in the middle of the night one time. I don't know why. I didn't have to go that bad. The floor numbed my feet as I padded down to the bathroom. The whole world seemed asleep, so I jumped back when the bathroom light hit me.

What if it's Grandma in there?
I backpedaled in panic. But it was Dad sitting on the rim of the bathtub, holding a hot towel to his bad arm and his aching shoulder. It was like my first memories of him. He'd always been up a lot at night with his arm.

He was only wearing pajama pants, and his feet were white on the white tile. He didn't hear me coming, or something. He jumped, and the hot towel came away from his shoulder. His eyes widened behind the glasses.