Woodford Brave Read online

  The thought of Sawyer and Aidan sitting in the tree house, going fishing, and working together to make their own slingshots really rankled. As soon as Dad got home, I’d make a slingshot that would send Sawyer all the way to the Torch of Evil’s planet. I tried to ignore how swollen the inside of my cheek was from where Sawyer had socked me a good one. At least Sawyer’s elbow was scraped raw and he had lost that wad of gum he’d been working over for the last two weeks.

  Thunk.

  A spider web stretched across one corner of the garage. “I ought to be figuring out how to capture Ziegler instead of fighting spider webs,” I mumbled to Echo, who didn’t even twitch a whisker to help.

  I imagined being the Kid, accompanied by a trusted feline sidekick. Armed with my broom of annihilation, I batted down webs formed by giant acid-injected zombie spiders planning to suck my super-warrior blood dry and use it for nefarious purposes. I was attacking a web that had attached itself to my leg when Aidan interrupted my daydream.

  “Nice d-d-dance.”

  The clatter my broom made when I dropped it sent the cat flying out the door. So much for being my fearless sidekick.

  Sawyer and Aidan stood side by side. It hadn’t taken Sawyer long to replace the wad of gum that had almost killed him. A bruise the size of a chicken egg jumped when Sawyer switched the wad from his left cheek to his right. His bat rested on his shoulder, his mitt dangling from the tip, and he carried his new slingshot in his hip pocket the way I carried my comic books.

  I picked up the broom and tried sweeping the spider web off my leg, making sure nothing with eight legs was crawling for higher ground.

  “Mom said to tell you I’m sorry,” Sawyer mumbled around the gum, but I could tell he didn’t mean it by the way he kept his eyes narrowed. “She said I shouldn’t have said all those things. I guess I did sort of throw you a curveball. You still sore at me?”

  I reached up to adjust my cap, forgetting yet again that it was gone. As long as I’d been wearing it, I’d felt like Dad and I were a team. But now that link was gone. It made me want to sweep Sawyer’s head right off his neck. But Jackson was shuffling across the alley and I was pretty sure Aidan’s brother would tell on me if I tried to behead another kid.

  “Naw. I guess not,” I lied.

  Jackson stepped into the shade of Mrs. Springgate’s garage and leaned against the wall.

  “Then let’s p-p-play ball,” Aidan shouted, loud enough to send Ziegler’s dogs into a barking frenzy.

  “I have to finish this first. Mom’s making me.”

  “What’re you doing?” Sawyer asked.

  I looked at the broom. The garage floor. The pile of dirt by my feet. Back at Sawyer. I knew he wasn’t the smartest kid in Harmony, but that had to be the stupidest question to ever make it past his wad of gum. “Um . . . sweeping.”

  Sawyer rolled his eyes. “I know that. But sweeping’s a girl’s job. Why are you doing it?”

  The thunking stopped and Anne leaned over her fence, trying to hear every word.

  “I’ll do it,” Jackson said. Obviously, Jackson was not embarrassed to do what Sawyer called girls’ work. I glared at Sawyer, waiting for him to razz Jackson like he had me, but all he did was shift his gum to the other cheek.

  “Thanks, J-J-Jackson,” Aidan said. Then he gave me a shove. “Cory owes you one. He’ll have to hurry to repay you before you l-l-leave for the Marines.”

  Great. Jackson would probably think of something worse than sweeping out a dusty garage. It didn’t make me feel any better when Echo wrapped his body between Jackson’s ankles.

  “I’ll remember that,” Jackson said, then reached down and scratched my cat’s ears. “Now get lost.”

  “I’ll get my mitt,” Anne hollered from across the alley.

  “Forget it,” Sawyer said before she got two steps from her gate. “Baseball isn’t for girls, right, Aidan?”

  “R-R-Right,” Aidan said. “The M-M-Majors don’t allow girls, so neither do we.”

  “Tell that to the Peaches,” Jackson said. “They’re part of League play now.”

  That sure took me by surprise since I figured Jackson would follow only the men’s league.

  Sawyer didn’t bat an eyelash. “Well, there are no Peaches in Harmony,” he said. “Are you on our team, Cory? Or are you going to stay here and play house with your girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I muttered.

  “Then you’re w-w-with us,” Aidan said.

  It was as obvious as the shadow stretching from my grandfather’s statue that Sawyer had drawn a battle line smack dab down the middle of Satan’s Sidewalk, with Anne on one side and us on the other. Just like the Americans against the Nazis or the Space Warrior versus the Torch of Evil. Being on any side with Sawyer made me feel like I had bitten into a rotten apple, but what choice did I have? Aidan was my best friend. Of course I had to side with him.

  Once the three of us got to the square, Sawyer made every pitch and every swing of his bat look effortless. When I was up to bat I felt like my muscles and joints were made of broken rubber bands. It didn’t help that every time I reached up to adjust my cap, my hand grabbed nothing but hair. It was Sawyer’s fault that cap was gone, which made me want to hit a ball straight at Sawyer’s grinning face. But of course, all I ended up hitting was air.

  I had to admit that Sawyer was acting extra nice by yelling out pointers and not throwing a beanball even once. Still, I was glad when Mr. Franklin stepped outside the Drug Emporium and shouted to me.

  “The new books are in, Cory. I saved a Space Warrior for you!”

  It used to be that Aidan would race me to buy the latest edition first, but now I wasn’t sure he’d want to come. “I’m going to go check it out. How about you?”

  “Sure, Cory,” Aidan said, making me feel a little better. Then he ruined it. “Won’t we, Sawyer?”

  “Pretty soon you’re going to need Sawyer’s permission to pee,” I muttered, turning to push open the door to Franklin’s. The drugstore felt like a cave after being out in the sun, mostly because Mr. Franklin had plastered the windows with posters advertising defense saving stamps, war bonds, and the government’s price control order. I slowed, letting my eyes adjust.

  Mr. Franklin looked over the drug counter at us. Ever since Aidan and I knocked down an entire display of citrate of magnesia, he always watched to make sure we weren’t goofing off when we came into his store. I was extra-careful to walk around the pyramid of Gold Medal Flour and Quaker Oats that he’d built by the front door.

  The store’s wood floors were scratched and warped, and the windows were grimy with dust. The front of the store was filled with shelves of girly things like face powder and lipstick. We headed to the back, where Mr. Franklin kept the comic books. With paper getting scarce because of the war effort, he only ordered the most popular ones. Most of them showed superheroes like Captain America, the Boy Commandos, and Superman battling Hitler and his evil axis of power. But Mr. Franklin always stocked the Mighty Space Warrior for me.

  Sawyer picked up the latest issue of the Young Allies. “There ought to be a comic book about baseball players. I can’t believe you still read this junk, Cory.”

  He’d never liked comic books, so I was used to him making fun of the Space Warrior, but I never expected Aidan to say what he said next. “Cory does more than read about the Space Warrior. He p-p-pretends to be him.”

  Sawyer hooted at that. “What do you do? Tie your mom’s bathrobe around your neck and try to fly? Or do you wear your underwear over your trousers and leap off Mrs. Springgate’s garage?”

  “Gee, Aidan. With friends like you, who needs enemies?” I asked.

  “I d-d-didn’t mean anything by it,” Aidan said.

  “We’re just pulling your leg,” Sawyer said, play-punching my arm and obviously trying to make nice. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a penny. “Here, I found this. You can put it toward your comic book.”

  “Your
copy’s on the shelf,” Mr. Franklin hollered from where he was stacking soap powder. “Right next to the laxatives.”

  “That man gives me the creeps,” Sawyer said.

  “Why?” Aidan asked.

  “That, for one thing,” he said, pointing to the fetal pig floating in a jar of formaldehyde on a shelf next to a collection of amber-colored apothecary bottles, a broken brass scale, and a marble pestle and mortar. The jar had been there so long the glass was grimy and dust coated the lid. The pig was curled up, its hind legs tucked under its snout so you couldn’t see the umbilical cord. Its eyes were shut, but not squeezed tight, and it wore a faint smile as though a funny thought had flitted through its tiny brain. I wondered if the pig had been dreaming at the moment it died and if the dream was imprinted on its brain, stuck there for all eternity. It was sort of sad to think it would never get the chance to do all the piggy things that pigs usually do.

  Sawyer jabbed me in the side. “Better watch out so that Franklin doesn’t stuff you in a jar and pickle you forever.”

  “Maybe he’s like Dr. F-F-Frankenstein,” Aidan whispered. “Their names even sound alike, and the p-p-pig could be one of his experiments!”

  “Isn’t Frankenstein a German name?” Sawyer asked. “Maybe he changed it to Franklin.”

  “J-J-Jackson said lots of Germans changed their names to sound more American. It’s been on the radio and in all the newspapers.”

  That was true. Mom said people did it during the Great War, too. I looked at Mr. Franklin. He did look sort of shifty, the way his eyes roved around the store and his hands kept touching things. First a bottle of alcohol. Then a box of bandages. Darting here and there.

  “He can’t be a spy,” Sawyer said. “He’s lived in Harmony forever.”

  “Heinck worked in America for thirteen years as a toolmaker,” I reminded him. “Before he was caught and tried as a Nazi spy.”

  We’d all heard the story of the eight Nazi spies who landed submarines on American soil. Most, including Heinck, had spent time in the United States before coming back to blow up places that made materials for the war against Germany. They were caught before they got a chance, but it didn’t mean there weren’t more spies just like them hiding in plain sight.

  Sawyer sucker-punched me in the gut. It was a light punch, but it was still enough to make me gulp air. “Hey, Cory,” he said, his voice full of sarcasm. “If you’re so brave, why don’t you go ask him if he’s part of the same ring as Ziegler?”

  “I already proved how brave I am,” I reminded him, hearing my own voice getting snappy.

  “Nuh-uh,” Sawyer said. Then he started counting things up on his fingers. “You didn’t prove Ziegler was a spy, you didn’t knock on the Demons’ Door, and you dropped that cat so fast I’m surprised sparks didn’t fly off your fingertips.”

  “He’s r-r-right,” Aidan said. “You didn’t prove anything.”

  I had a twitchy urge to push both of them right into the display of Morton’s Salt. But the bells over the door jingled and Sawyer stood on tiptoes to try to see over the shelf of shampoo.

  “This could be a rendezvous with another spy happening right under our noses,” Sawyer said, dropping his words to a whisper. “What are you going to do about it, Cory? Hide behind the salt or go get ’em?”

  Woodfords never hid and they never ran. I stepped around the tower of salt, half-expecting a Nazi to be aiming a gun at my heart. But it was only Anne. Mr. Franklin smiled when he saw her. “There you are,” he said, not sounding a bit like a spy. “I found something in my cellar you can have for your project. It’s in the alley for you.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Franklin,” Anne said. She glanced back at the three of us peeking around the shelf. She eyeballed the jar of formaldehyde before looking straight at me.

  “Nice pig,” she said. Then she turned and walked out the front door.

  “Wh-Wh-What’s she up to?” Aidan asked.

  “I’ll find out,” I said, knowing full well Aidan would leave Sawyer behind to follow me.

  Aidan gave me a grin. A real one. “Now you’re t-t-talking.”

  I shoved in front of Sawyer and went out the door in super-stealth mode. Hugging the side of the store, I kept my back flat to the rough bricks and led the way around the building. Slowly. Quietly. I peeked around the corner to the alley. Anne was tugging on a plank of plywood almost as big as she was.

  “What are you doing?” Sawyer blurted. The Space Warrior would’ve cringed at the way he blew our cover.

  Anne turned, hands on her hips, and glared at us. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “We’ll help you lug it home if you tell us,” Sawyer bartered.

  “I don’t need your help or anyone else’s.”

  “Yes, you do,” Sawyer said. “Girls are weaklings. They can’t carry heavy stuff like lumber.”

  “Just watch.”

  It took a few tries, but Anne hoisted the plywood up on her head, and after a few wobbly steps she was able to carry that piece of wood the entire three blocks back to Satan’s Sidewalk. Of course we followed. Aidan carried the bat and mitts so Sawyer could fire rocks at the board with his slingshot. I was glad that every one of his rocks missed. We all took turns throwing guesses about what she was planning.

  “Is it a bookshelf?”

  “A t-t-toy box?”

  “A dollhouse?”

  Anne acted as though our words were nothing more than wind whispering through leaves. Once she stepped foot onto Satan’s Sidewalk, I automatically became the Kid, checking tree branches for signs of the Mallory ghosts. I was ready to protect a damsel in distress even though Anne really didn’t fit the description of any damsels in stories I had read. Ziegler’s dogs started barking as soon as our feet hit the alley, but that didn’t slow down Anne.

  “I’m heading home,” Sawyer said. “I’ve had enough of this.”

  Anne had obviously gotten under his skin by proving he was wrong about the way girls should act. I figured he didn’t want to walk past Ziegler’s dogs, either. I wasn’t sorry to see him go.

  Aidan and I kept after Anne. “Come on, you can tell us,” I said, but my words only bounced off her back as if she were surrounded by a shield of invincibility. Without saying good-bye, Anne turned into the Burkes’ garage and dumped the plank on the floor with a big smack.

  Most kids would’ve hurled a few insults our way, or at least thumbed their noses. Not Anne. She acted like we didn’t even exist. For some reason, that made it even worse when she grabbed the cord and pulled the garage door shut.

  11

  SUCKER PUNCH

  Anne worked in her garage for the next three days. The only time she left was to take her dad a sack lunch down at the hardware store. “We’ll spy on her from our tree house,” I decided.

  It rankled me right down to my toenails when Aidan and Sawyer grabbed the platform and left me to perch in the branches. They sat there side by side, aiming their slingshots at any bird or squirrel stupid enough to wander by. At least they missed every single time, or else I would’ve felt bad.

  There was no way I could see inside Anne’s garage from my vantage point. Not even with Grandpa’s old binoculars. I checked out Satan’s Sidewalk while Aidan and Sawyer went on and on about the Yankees’s batting averages as if they were secret codes.

  Doris Day singing to Les Brown’s Orchestra floated across Satan’s Sidewalk from Mom’s radio, colliding with Jackson’s station playing Sinatra. Mrs. Springgate sat on her back stoop, sipping beer from a mason jar. My cat hung out at the base of the tree for a while. He’d been sneaking into my room every night and this morning I’d woken with him sprawled across my belly. I was getting used to having him around. He rubbed his head on the tree bark right below where I swung my feet until he got bored and went wandering. I knew when he reached the end of the alley because Ziegler’s dogs let loose with a volley of barks.

  “They smell that cat’s fear,” Sawyer said.

&nb
sp; “Who says Echo’s scared?” I asked.

  “It’s a cat. Everyone knows how jumpy they are. That cat’s even the color of fear. Yellow.”

  “He ought to be scared. Those dogs c-c-could tear him apart in ten seconds flat,” Aidan said.

  “Ziegler’s dogs could tear anyone apart,” I pointed out. “He probably plans to use them to help the Nazis take over Harmony.”

  “The Nazis can have this sorry excuse for a town as far as I’m concerned,” Sawyer said. “Just as soon as I join a Major League team.”

  I was ready to remind him that fighting Nazi aggression was more important than baseball, but Anne’s grandmother pushed open the back door. The screen door bumped against her hip and she held a crumpled sack in her hand. We knew what was in the sack. Her father’s lunch.

  “Anya?” she yelled toward the garage.

  “Anya?” Sawyer repeated in a whisper.

  Anne skipped out of the garage, clapping her hands free of dust. She snatched the lunch from her grandmother and headed around her house and down the street toward the hardware store. She did everything just as she had the last two days, except for one thing. She left the garage door open.

  I jumped from that tree faster than my cat could pounce on a rat. Sawyer and Aidan almost fell out of the tree when they realized what my mission was. They acted like it was a race to the death, but there was no way they could catch up. Echo appeared from a clump of bushes and frisked at my heels, stopping when I reached the shadows of Anne’s garage.

  I paused, letting my eyes adjust to what light struggled through the single grimy window over a workbench. When I figured out what Anne was building in the middle of the floor, I laughed loud enough to make the cat meow.

  Sawyer shoved me aside so he and Aidan could see.

  Aidan let out a whistle. “Would you l-l-look at that?”

  “I never would’ve guessed it,” Sawyer said, snorting as if dust had flown up his nose. “Not from a girl.”

  A space in the middle of the garage was swept clean. The plywood was sanded and painted the same color as the shutters of her house. One two-by-four was secured to the plywood at the back with several eyebolts. Another two-by-four was connected to the front of the wooden plank with a single eyebolt in the center, allowing it to pivot for steering. At the ends of the two-by-fours were wheels from an old baby carriage.