The Boys Start the War (10 page)

There was a short pause at the other end. And then a man’s voice said, “Caroline, this is Mr. Hatford, across the river. I wonder if you would mind returning my briefs.”

W
ally, Josh, Jake, and Peter stood still as cement as their father made the phone call.

Mr. Hatford turned around, phone in hand.

“She says she’ll return my briefs if you return her paper, Wally. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

Wally nodded and swallowed. “Tell her I’ll return the paper if she returns the flashlight.”

Mr. Hatford spoke into the phone again. “He says he’ll return the paper if you return the flashlight. Don’t ask me what’s going on around here. I’m only their father.… Okay, five minutes from how on the bridge.… He’ll be there.”

Wally’s father put down the telephone and looked at the boys. “That wouldn’t be
my
flashlight she’s talking about, would it?”

Wally nodded still again.

“Is this what goes on in the afternoons when
I’m not here? People run off with my flashlight and shorts? I get home early for the first time in a couple of months, and what do I see? Some girl leaving our yard at sixty miles an hour waving my underwear in the wind!”

“She’s the Crazie,” Peter explained soberly.

“Well, if you’ve got something of hers, Wally, you get on out to the bridge and give it back. I want my briefs and my flashlight back, and anything else that’s missing. What do they want next? Socks? Toothbrush? Keys? They holding a garage sale or something?”

Wally went to his room for Caroline’s drawing of Miss Applebaum.

“You guys have to come too,” he murmured to the others, and they all followed him out the door.

For a minute or so they trudged silently across the yard and over to the other side of the road.

“Once we get Dad’s stuff back, we’ll be even,” Wally said, thinking that this would be a good time to forget about the Malloys once and for all.

“But we can’t stop now!” said Jake. “If we’re not bugging the girls, what
will
we do?”

That was something Wally hadn’t thought about. “Mom will enroll us in violin lessons,” he said worriedly.

“She’ll make us get a paper route,” said Josh.

“She’ll send us to camp next summer,” said Peter.

Jake grinned, “So we’ve got to stay busy, right?”

“Right,” said Wally.

The boys looked at each other and smiled.

“Tell you what,” said Josh. “We won’t start anything if
they
don’t.”

“Yeah,” said Jake. “But they will.”

Caroline and her sisters were coming across the bridge. Wally knew that his dad was back on the porch watching, and he wasn’t about to do anything dumb like float Caroline’s paper over the edge of the cable railing.

Caroline’s face was red. He had never seen her embarrassed before, but he was looking at it now.

“Here’s your paper.” he muttered.

“Here’s your stuff,” said Caroline, and handed him a sack.

Eddie and Beth looked daggers at all four boys together.

“You better check that sack,” whispered Josh as the boys turned and started back again. “They probably took the batteries out of the flashlight.”

Wally looked in the sack. Everything was there. He checked the flashlight. Two batteries, one bulb. He took out the briefs and turned them over. No writing on the seat of the pants.

“Thank you,” said their father when they reached the porch. “Now, do you think it’s possible that you boys can stay out of trouble for a couple of days? If you want something to do, you could wash
our
windows, not to mention my car or the dishes or the kitchen floor.”

“I’ve got homework.” said Jake.

“Me too,” said Wally, and all four boys went upstairs.

There was always a “Back-to-School” night in Buckman the second week of September. No matter what, every parent who had a child in school was supposed to go to his or her classroom that night, meet the teacher, sit in the kid’s seat, and listen to a talk about what the students would be learning that year. Afterward there were cookies and coffee in the gym, and the principal went around shaking hands. You no more missed Back-to-School night in Buckman than you missed your grandmother’s funeral.

Mr. Hatford was going to spend the evening in Josh and Jake’s classroom, while Mrs. Hatford would divide the evening between Miss Applebaum and Peter’s teacher. The boys, of course, would stay at home.

Always before, on Back-to-School night, the Hatfords went to the Bensons’, or the Bensons came to the Hatfords’, and the boys wrestled on the rug, made popcorn, ate candy, enjoying the fact that for once they were free and their folks were in school.

But this time there were no Bensons to come over, and to make matters worse, it rained.

“We could go through the kitchen and eat all the chocolate chips,” said Wally.

“There aren’t any, I already looked,” Jake told him.

“We could call up some of the guys at school to come over,” said Josh.

“Who do we like at school?” Jake asked. There were friends, of course, but none they liked as well as the Bensons.

“We could wrap up in blankets and roll down the stairs,” said Peter.

“Negative,” said Josh.

They decided at last to turn out all the lights and play hide and seek. Wally was it.

He sat down on the couch in the living room and counted to fifty.

“Here I come, ready or not.” he yelled, and groped his way to the hall.

It was one of the most exciting games the boys played, and they reserved it for moments of incredible boredom. When you were “it” in the dark you never knew when a hand was going to reach out and grab you, whether you would crawl under the bed and find a body, whether you would collide with someone on the stairs.

He heard a soft thud from somewhere, but wasn’t quite sure if it was up or down, in or out. It had to be in, though, because outside was off-limits. There were three live bodies waiting to be found, and in the dark, they could change hiding places as much as they liked. Even if you touched something, you had to make sure it was a person.

The noise came again. Upstairs. Wally was sure of that now. He ran his hand along the wall and started up, his other hand sweeping the air in front of him.

Halfway up the stairs, however, he heard another sound, and this time goose bumps rose on his arms. It was a sound like nothing he had ever heard before.

It seemed to be half human, half animal, yet more like a fire siren, only very, very soft. It rose and fell like the wind. Maybe it
was
the wind.

Then it stopped, and all Wally heard was the rain beating down on the roof. He went on, running his hand along the wall, poking each step with his foot to make sure there wasn’t a hand ready to grab his ankle. Just as he got to the top, however, the strange siren song came again.

He heard somebody running along the hallway, and then Peter’s voice, calling shakily, “Wally?”

“What’s the matter?” Wally said, putting out his other hand so Peter wouldn’t run into him. Peter ran into him anyway, and grabbed his arm.

“What’s that noise?” Peter said.

“I don’t know. Probably Jake or Josh.”

“I don’t wanna play this game anymore,” Peter told him.

“Well, go down and sit on the couch, then, until I find the other guys.”

“No, I wanna stay by you.”

Whoooeeeooo. Whoooeeeooo.

It was not a siren. It was not anything Wally could figure out.

“Josh, cut it out.” he yelled.

“It’s not me,” came a voice from one of the bedrooms. “What the heck is it?”

“Jake, I’ll bet.”

“Turn on the lights,” Peter begged.

“No, we can’t until we find Jake. That’s the rule.”

Whoooeee, whoooeee, whoooeeeoooo
….

Footsteps downstairs.

“Hey, what are you guys doing?” came Jake’s voice. “Who’s singing that song?”

It was
not
Jake. Three sets of feet went flying down the stairs, the boys tumbling and rolling, until Wally and his brothers lay in a heap at the bottom.

T
hree figures huddled on the widow’s walk on top of the Hatfords’ house. Rain beat steadily down on their yellow slickers and the air was cold.

“Even if we catch pneumonia and die, it’s worth it.” said Caroline, her teeth chattering.

“Even if we fall off the roof and break both legs,” Eddie agreed.

“One more time?” Beth asked.

“No. Didn’t you hear them running? Let’s wait until we think they’ve forgotten about it, then sock it to them again,” said Eddie. They giggled.

It had all started when Beth heard a group of women called Sweet Honey in the Rock on the radio, singing a song they had written called “Emergency.” She had called the others to listen. Caroline wasn’t sure how they did it, but, using only their voices, the singers had managed to make themselves sound just like a fire siren, each singing a
differerit pitch, but rising and falling together at exactly the same time.

So Caroline; Beth, and Eddie had gone out in the garage and lain in the loft, practicing quietly, and they did it—not as well as Sweet Honey in the Rock, but well enough. What’s more, they discovered that if they kept their voices soft, and wavered them just a little, they sounded like something none of them had ever heard before—not a siren, exactly—not quite human, not quite animal…. And as soon as they discovered that, they knew what they were going to do. Never had they felt such power.

“How long should we wait? I’m so soggy, I’m going to grow mushrooms,” Beth said.

“We have to lull them into thinking they were imagining things,” Eddie told her.

Caroline smiled to herself in the dark as she huddled in her corner of the widows walk. She had been so embarrassed when Mr. Hatford called and asked for his briefs back! And then, to have to walk down to the bridge with Mr. Hatford watching, and exchange things with Wally—it was too much; a humiliation that dreadful needed revenge.

She almost wished it were daylight and clear so that she could see out over Buckman. It felt strange being up here on the Hatfords’ roof at night, and she imagined how much fun the boys must have had spying on her and her sisters when her family first moved in. If she and Eddie and Beth had lived over here, and it were the
Hatfords
moving in, she had no
doubt they would have been spying on
them.
But that was beside the point. She wasn’t even sure
what
the point was anymore, except that she and Beth and Eddie had never had so much excitement back in Ohio, and she hoped they would not go back when a year was over.

“Okay, let’s do it again.” Eddie whispered.

All three girls leaned down over the trapdoor in the roof, mouths close against the crack.

“One, two, three … go,” said Beth.

And then they sang the song—the terrible, electrifying siren song that started low and soft, then rose higher and higher, louder and louder, tapering off into nothing, like the wind.

There was the thud of running feet once more from inside. Closet doors opening and closing. Yells. Squares of yellow light appeared on the lawn as lights went on all over the house.

“We’re driving them absolutely nuts.” Eddie grinned.

“Positively bonkers,” said Caroline. “How long are we going to keep doing this? Till they come running and screaming out of the house with their hands up?”

It was a question they hadn’t discussed.

“Why don’t we keep it up till their parents get home?” said Beth.

“Because then
our
parents will be home, and we’ll have a lot of explaining to do,” said Eddie.

“What time is it?”

Eddie tried to see her watch in the darkness. “Eight-thirty, I think.”

“Fifteen more minutes, then,” Caroline said. “Mom said not to expect them back before nine. That will give us time to get home and put the ladder away.”

The footsteps and door banging went on for some time before the house grew quiet again. Once more Beth gave the signal, and once more the three girls leaned over, noses almost touching the roof, and made the sound that rose and fell like the wind. This time they wavered their voices so that the song was even more eerie—ghostlike.