The Boys Start the War Read online

  Jake and Wally and Peter all laughed.

  “You get caught?” asked Wally.

  “No, but boy, was she mad! She said this was exactly the kind of thing that gives her nightmares, and I said, well, why did she read books like that if they gave her nightmares? Stupid thing!”

  “Ha!” said Jake.

  Home again, Wally had just poured himself a glass of Hi-C, and the boys were making peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, when the phone rang. Wally answered.

  “Listen,” came his mother’s voice, and she was beginning to sound like Miss Applebaum. “Your father was talking with Mrs. Malloy this morning on his route, and she wondered who she could hire to wash their windows. Dad told her you boys have more time on your hands than is good for you, and that you’d come over after school and help. Now, I don’t want you to expect payment.”

  Wally yelped.

  “Wally?” said his mother.

  “It’s not fair!” he shouted. “They’ve got three girls who could wash windows. Eddie can climb up a ladder as well as any of us, and she’s even taller than Josh. Besides, I’ve got plenty of things to do!”

  “Name one.” said his mother.

  Wally stood speechless. He didn’t have any homework to do; he didn’t play on any team. He didn’t even need a haircut. He did, of course, still want to see how long it took a waffle box to go around the river, but …

  “Wallace Hatford, you and your brothers have yourselves a snack and get on over to the Malloys’. With the four of you working, you could have their windows done in no time, and it’s the least we can do for new neighbors. Why, when we moved in, the Bensons came over and helped us wallpaper the dining room. I’ll never forget it. And I don’t want to hear any arguments.”

  The receiver clicked, and Wally stood staring at the phone in his hand. He didn’t have to tell the others; they’d already heard.

  “We’ve got to wash their windows, right?” said Josh.

  “Right,” said Wally. “I’ll bet Caroline put her mother up to this! Went right home and told her how much we wanted to help! And Dad probably said we’d do it for nothing.”

  “I’ll wash their windows, all right,” muttered Jake. “I’ll put out their lights, curl their hair, and knock them into the middle of next week.”

  “Gosh!” said Peter.

  “They’re getting too cocky!” Jake went on.

  “Those girls think they can get away with anything. They need a good scare, that’s what. Then maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

  “But how?” asked Peter.

  Everyone turned to Wally.

  “I’ll think of something,” Wally told them.

  By the time they finished their snack and headed off toward the Malloys’, the boys had given up any idea of trying to scare the entire family. But they were convinced that they could scare Beth half put out of her mind, and the thought of it, the vision of it, the sweet taste of victory in their mouths, made the idea of washing all the Malloys’ windows worth it, every window.

  It would have been better, of course, if Caroline, Beth, and Eddie were not smirking at them as they came across the lawn. Were not, in fact, sitting on a blanket out on the grass, sunning themselves, with cookies and soft drinks beside them, ready to enjoy the show.

  “I’m so glad to meet you.” said Mrs. Malloy, coming down the stepp. “Your dad said you were the best window washers around, and I think it’s wonderful the way you offered to help.”

  Wally didn’t know whether he imagined it or whether he really did hear a snicker from Caroline.

  “You do know each other, don’t you?” Mrs. Malloy went on, motioning to the girls on the lawn.

  “Eddie, Beth, and Caroline, this is.…” She paused, waiting for the boys to say their own names.

  “Josh,” said Jake.

  “Jake,” said Josh.

  “Peter,” said Wally.

  “Wally,” said Peter.

  Wally could hardly keep from grinning. Caroline looked at him and then at her mother, but she didn’t say anything and Wally knew why. If the girls squealed, the boys would tell about the cake. Even-Steven.

  Mrs. Malloy turned toward the house. “We have these to do,” she said, “as well as the storm windows there in the garage. We might as well do them all.”

  Wally stared in dismay. There were twenty windows at least on the house, which meant twenty storm windows more stored in the garage. This time he heard a definite snicker from the girls on the grass.

  “The girls will help, of course,” said their mother, and Caroline’s smile disappeared in an instant. So did Beth’s and Eddie’s. “What you boys can do is get the ladder from the garage and soap each window. Eddie can turn the hose on them from below to rinse them, and you can dry them after that. Beth and Caroline will change the water whenever you need it, and get clean rags. With all seven of you working together, I doubt it should take more than a couple of hours. I’ll have doughnuts and cider for you when you’re done.”

  When Mrs. Malloy went inside for the bucket and rags, Jake looked over at Eddie: “Nice going.” He smirked.

  Eddie tossed her head and looked away.

  The old garage leaned a little to one side, but Wally didn’t mind. It was his favorite place on the Bensons’ property, and he and his brothers and the Benson boys used to play in there for hours. For a time they’d turned it into a club house, and other times it had become a hideout. It was dark and musty, with loose boards that creaked in the wind.

  He and Jake carried the ladder from the garage and put it up to the first window of the house where Mrs. Malloy was pointing. Eddie glumly got out the hose, and after Mrs. Malloy supervised the cleaning of the first window, she went back inside.

  “Which window is yours, Eddie?” Josh called down. “I’ll be sure to leave lots of smudges on it.”

  “Har, har,” said Eddie.

  The reason the work went so quickly was because no one spoke much after that. Wally had read once about an order of monks who went about their work in silence and never spoke except for one hour on Friday evenings. This must be what it was like to be a monk, he decided as he carried the last of the storm windows out of the garage, except that there wouldn’t be any girl monks around.

  Josh did the climbing of the ladder, Beth kept him supplied with clean water and rags, Jake and Wally carried storm windows in and out of the garage, Eddie hosed them off, and Caroline and Peter wiped the storm windows clean. In and out, up and down, back and forth.…

  Mrs. Malloy had been right about one thing—the work did go faster with so many of them helping. Once, as he passed Caroline, she looked so cheerful, he was about to tell her about the monks who never talked except for an hour on Friday evenings, but then he remembered she was the enemy, so he told Jake instead.

  “If there were girl monks, you know what they’d be called?” he asked, grinning. “Monk-ees.”

  Jake laughed out loud.

  It was then that it happened, but no one knew quite how. It might have been Jake’s laugh that made Eddie turn, hose in hand, but as she did, the water made a loop in the air and caught Josh, up on the ladder. His bucket came crashing to the ground with a splash, two inches away from Beth, soaking her to the skin with brown, dirty water.

  While Wally stared, Beth pushed a sponge in Jake’s face, Peter rushed to help his brother, Caroline went to help her sisters, and Wally simply tried to get the hose out of Eddie’s hand. It was spewing water in every direction. The next great battle of the war had begun.

  “Hey, what’s this?” cried Mrs. Malloy, coming out of the house. “Girls! Stop it!”

  Wally, who had the hose now, was holding it upright like a pitchfork, and realized that water was cascading down onto Mrs. Malloy’s flower bed. As he jerked it away, he sent a stream of water across the porch, catching the girls’ mother right in the face.

  Wally gasped.

  Spluttering, Mrs. Malloy rushed down the steps and turned off the faucet, then stood
there shaking water from her clothes.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” she demanded.

  “They started it, Mom,” said Caroline, wringing out the tail of her shirt.

  “We did not!” said Jake hotly. “Eddie turned the hose on Josh.”

  “He dropped his bucket on purpose!” cried Beth.

  “I did not!” said Josh.

  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.

  It 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.�
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  “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.