The Boys Start the War (8 page)

Mrs. Malldy looked around curiously, “You kids hardly know each other! How did you get to be enemies so soon?”

Wally looked at Caroline.
I dare you,
his eyes told her. No one spoke for a moment.

“Just fooling around, Mom,” said Caroline.

“Yeah, just goofing off,” Eddie murmured.

“Nobody’s hurt,” added Beth.

“Well, let’s finish up that last window, then, and have some refreshment,” Mrs. Malloy said.

For a moment they all looked as though they were going to laugh, Wally thought. They
did
look funny, with their heads dripping water, their clothes soaking wet. And when Mrs. Malloy brought out the doughnuts and cider, and they sat on the steps to eat, he thought, for maybe one fifth of a second, that the war might be over.

That was before Mrs. Malloy went back inside, however. That was before the boys started home. Because they had not gone ten feet from the house when suddenly,
Bam! Pow! Biff! Splatt!

Two wet rags and two soggy sponges hit the boys on the backs of their necks, and when Wally and his brothers wheeled around, the Malloy girls were disappearing inside the house and the door slammed shut.

“That does it,” said Jake. “We’ve got to do something. What’s the scariest thing you can think of, Wally? We’ll start with Beth. Have you thought of anything yet?”

And, as always, Wally said the first thing that came to mind: “Floating heads.”

“Like we used to do with the Bensons on Halloween?” said Jake, his eyes lighting up. “Wally, it’s wonderful! It’s perfect!”

“Floating heads!” said Josh.

“Wow!” breathed Peter.

I
t was almost too delicious to think about. All through dinner that evening Wally tried not to smile, but whenever he caught Josh’s or Jake’s eye, he felt the corners of his mouth turning up just a bit at the edges.

“Well, how did the window cleaning go?” Mr. Hatford asked as he passed the peas.

“Did you get better acquainted with the Malloy girls?” asked their mother. “What are they like?”

“A Whomper, a Weirdo, and a Crazie,” replied Peter.

“Just girls, Mom, that’s all,” Wally said quickly.

Mrs. Hatford helped herself to the ravioli in the center clothe table. “Did Mrs. Malloy say anything more about my cake?”

“No.…”

Mom looked disappointed, Wally thought.

There was a little framed motto on the wall of the dining room:
If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,
it said. Maybe that was true of the Malloys as well. If the Malloy girls were unhappy here in Buckman, their mother wouldn’t be happy either. And if Mrs. Malloy wasn’t happy, she’d probably talk her husband into taking them back to Ohio. Wally hoped so, anyway.

But right now it was Mrs. Hatford who was unhappy.

“I had rather hoped—well, a cake like that wins ribbons in some places!” she said.

“First time you see her, she’ll probably ask for the recipe,” said Father. “
Nobody
makes chocolate chiffon cake the way you do, Ellen.”

Wally went back to studying the ravioli on his plate. It was only recently Mother had tried anything fancy like ravioli. Usually, the people of Buckman stuck to fried chicken, beef pot-roasts, and pork chops with gravy. But someone had told Mrs. Hatford about the frozen ravioli you could buy at the grocery, and Wally was trying to figure out how they got the meat inside the little squares of dough. Did they make a pocket of dough first and then cut a little hole in the top and pour in the filling? Or did they put the meat between two pieces of dough, like a sandwich, and seal the edges together, or—

“Eat, Wally,” said his father.

Wally quit studying the ravioli and thought about floating heads again. Last year at Halloween,
when the Bensons were still here, the boys had frightened the residents of Buckman half to death with their floating heads.

It was the Bensons’ idea, actually. Each boy bought a rubber mask, the scariest he conld find, and each set out with a flashlight long after tricks-or-treats were over for the evening, when children were settling down to count the pieces of candy they had collected and adults were turning off porch lights, glad that another Halloween was over. What each Benson and Hatford boy had done was sneak up to a lighted window, rap on the pane, then hold a flashlight beneath his chin so that the light illuminated the rubber mask and no more.

To a child looking up, or an adult turning around in his or her chair, all that could be seen in the dark outside was a grotesque head, made worse by the fact that the boy did not just stand there, but bobbed up and down, this way and that, so that it seemed for all the world as if a bodiless head were floating around outside the window. Children screeched, women screamed, and by the time anyone got to the door, the boys were halfway down the street, laughing to beat the band.

Jake had planned the details. They would wait until later, when Mother was working on her quilt and Dad was watching TV. Then they would creep outside with the zombie mask from last year, the worst of the lot, quietly place the ladder against the Malloys’ house, just beneath Beth’s window, and
Josh would climb up with the mask and flashlight, and rap.

“I know which window it is too,” Josh had said. “When I was washing the windows, I found out where each girl sleeps. Eddie’s got baseball stuff all over her walls, Caroline’s got pictures of movie stars, and Beth’s got books.”

He sat down to draw a picture of Beth throwing up her hands in fright as she stared at a face outside her window. Josh had four sketchbooks full of drawings of all that the Hatfords had done with the Bensons when they lived in Buckman, and one of the favorite ways to spend a rainy day was to get out the sketches and remember how and where they had done each thing. Already, the boys discovered, Jake had a sketch of what Caroline might have looked like had she been eaten by fish, a picture of Eddie dumping her tray over Jake’s head in the cafeteria, a sketch of the girls in the river trying to retrieve the plate, and a drawing of the girls and their mother right after the water fight.

Peter grinned as he studied the picture of Beth and the floating head. “Make her mouth open and her eyes look like
this
!” he said, demonstrating.

After dinner the boys were strangely quiet, sitting around the living room pretending to watch TV with their father, their eyes on the clock. Sometimes Mr. Hatford fell asleep on the couch and slept right up until bedtime. Then he wouldn’t know whether
the boys were home or not. They could leave the TV on, and Mother, stitching her quilt upstairs, would think they were all in the living room.

To Wally’s horror, however, Father suddenly reached over, turned off the TV, and stretched.

“Same old stuff, night after night,” he said. “One of these evenings I think I’d like to walk over to the college and watch football practice—see what kind of a team we’ve got shaping up this year.”

Jake and Josh exchanged glances.

“You’d have to go early, Dad, because I think they only practice until six-thirty,” Wally said.

“I know. Maybe tomorrow. Think I’ll go outside awhile, stretch my legs.” He got up, put on a jacket, and went out on the porch.

“Hoo boy,” said Josh. The boys followed him out, and walked beside him as he sauntered along the riven.

“My favorite season,” he said. “Used to walk along this very same path when I was just a little kid. Spent my whole life in this town, you know that?”

“Did you ever want to live anywhere else?” asked Wally.

“No place I could think of.”

“So why did the Bensons leave?” asked Jake, “We thought
they
liked it here too.”

“Hal Benson just wanted to try out another college—see if he liked teaching down in Georgia as much as he liked the school up here. Guess you have
to try something to be sure.” Father looked down at Wally, who was on his left side. “You miss those boys, don’t you?”

“What do you think?” said Wally.

“Don’t you figure it might be kinda fun to have a mess of girls ground for a while?”

“You’re joking,” said Josh.

Even in the darkness Wally could tell that his dad was grinning a little. “I don’t know, that young one’s kind of cute. Something’s a little wrong with her nose, though. Don’t quite know what it is.”

About nine o’clock, Father was in the cellar, using the electric sander on an old dresser Mother wanted refinished, and she was upstairs working on her quilt, the radio going beside her.

Peter was supposed to have had his bath and be in bed, but because the boys had promised, they agreed to take him with them if they could get him out of the house unseen.

“We’re going down to the bridge, Mom,” Wally called to his mother. “Be back in a little while.”

“Don’t you go picking up poison ivy, now,” Mrs. Hatford called, trying to hold a needle between her lips as she spoke, then running it through the quilt again.

“We won’t. We’ll stay out the path,” Wally said.

There was no answer. Mother was humming along with the radio.

“C’mon,” Wally whispered into Peter’s room,
and the small boy tiptoed after them, his untied sneakers sticking out below his pajama bottoms.

They whispered all the way across the bridge, even though they didn’t have to be quiet there. By the time they got to Island Avenue on the other side, they weren’t saying anything at all. Josh had the green zombie mask with the gray eyes; Jake had the flashlight, and Wally and Peter were going along as lookouts.

It was a good thing the Malloys didn’t have any dogs, Wally thought, because a dog would have heard them coming as soon as they crossed the bridge. As it was the boys kept to the shadows, and all strained to see if there was a light on in righthand bedroom above the front porch—Beth’s room. There was. Wally and Jake poked each other and grinned. They crept up the side of the Malloys’ driveway and opened the door of the garage.

Squeeeak!
They froze in their tracks. All faces turned toward the house. But no one appeared at the windows, no one came to the door, and at last, convinced they were undetected, they picked up the long ladder, Wally at one end, Jake at the other, and carried it silently over to the bedroom in the corner.

Again they watched. Again they waited. Still no one came.

“Ready?” Jake whispered.

Josh nodded and slipped on the zombie mask. Wally sucked in his breath.

Flashlight in hand, Josh started up the rungs.

He was going as quietly as he could, Wally could tell, but even then the ladder seemed to make a kind of
pung, pung
sound with each step.

“Shhhh,” warned Jake below. Josh stopped and waited. Nobody came. He went on.

Wally and his brothers watched. Josh stopped and adjusted the mask. He went up two more rungs until he was right outside Beth’s window. At that very minute the light inside went out. And a second later, Josh’s flashlight came on. He tapped, then bobbed up and down, this way and that.

There was a scream from inside—a cross between a train whistle and a fire alarm.

Whipping off his mask, Josh came down the ladder two rungs at a time.

They could hear Mr. Malloy yelling, “Beth? What’s wrong?” Footsteps. More yelling. Voices.