The Art of Keeping Cool Read online

  I examined the book’s back cover and thumbed through the pages hoping for more evidence. There was none, so I laid it on the floor by my bed. I turned out the light, but I couldn’t sleep. I began to think about the farm. My old homesick ache came back and I wished I was there again.

  I imagined tall green walls of corn growing up in front of me, the Ohio sky sweeping over my head. I saw the hogs come leaping like clowns out of the barn (our hogs always had a great sense of humor) toward the outdoor pen where they lived in warm weather.

  I saw my mother hanging up fresh wash and my sister throwing handfuls of straw at the barnyard rooster, who hated to be teased and flew at her with angry squawks that made her scream and laugh.

  I looked for my father and at first he wasn’t there. But then, high up in the sky of my mind, I found a small, silver airplane and watched as it flew toward me. Closer it came, closer and closer, until the drumming of the engine rose in my ear and I could almost see the pilot at the controls.

  Almost but not quite. The shape was there but I couldn’t make out the face. Would I recognize my own father in his flying gear? That was a question I’d been asking myself. I’d seen magazine photos of British RAF pilots in leather helmets and padded flight suits. It was cold up there in the air, my father had written this in one of his letters. “Colder than a freezer box. Even my eyelashes froze,” he wrote.

  I wanted this pilot to turn around so I could see his face. I waited and waited, staring at the shadowy head. I willed it to turn, sent my thought waves out there to tell it to turn, but it didn’t, or wouldn’t, and at last I gave up and drifted away into a sad kind of sleep.

  • • •

  The next morning there was bad news. Elliot and I heard it first thing at school from Grace Cody, whose family rented rooms to an officer from the fort.

  “A ship got torpedoed by the Germans yesterday and sunk right off here,” she was telling everyone.

  “Off where?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but close. The fort’s been put in a state of readiness. The principal’s going to make an announcement.”

  “What happens when you’re in a state of readiness?” Elliot asked in a nervous voice.

  “You’re ready to shoot, of course,” I told him. “If anything else happens, that’s it, we shoot.”

  That made him look even jumpier and I was sorry I’d said it. Elliot didn’t like guns. I used to wonder if he’d had a run-in with one when he was younger.

  A student assembly was called in the lunchroom after lunch. The principal told us what had happened.

  A six-thousand-ton British freighter carrying supplies to England had been sunk, torpedoed by a German submarine just south of Cape Cod. Eighteen crewmen were lost. Fifty-two survivors were rescued at sea, many taken to a town not far up the coast from Sachem’s Head. Shocking as all this was, there was no immediate threat. Nothing to worry about, the principal said. The fort was monitoring the situation, reconnaissance planes were out patrolling the area.

  “The most patriotic thing we can do is return to our classes and concentrate on our studies,” he informed us. Everyone in the lunchroom groaned out loud.

  “The trouble with patriotism is it gets used as an excuse for everything,” Elliot complained to me that afternoon when we walked home. “Suddenly it’s my patriotic duty to take out the trash and my patriotic duty to hang up the laundry.”

  “Well, otherwise you don’t do anything,” I pointed out. “I’m the one who has to help Grandma all the time, while you’re lying around your room.”

  “I’m not lying around, I’m working,” Elliot said.

  “While I’m peeling potatoes.”

  “Tell Grandma you resign from duty. Say you’ve got homework. She always lets me off for that.”

  “She’s afraid you’re flunking out, that’s why.”

  “I am flunking out,” Elliot said with a shrug. He was hopeless about school. He didn’t even pretend to care.

  “Let’s walk down to the fort,” I said. “Then no one will have to be patriotic and maybe we can see what’s going on.”

  “We know what’s going on. They’re in readiness,” Elliot said.

  “I know that! The point is, what kind of readiness. Come on, El, you’ll see some great stuff for drawings.”

  “The fort is not my idea of good material.”

  It took a little more badgering, but finally he agreed to go.

  The fort was at least two miles down the road. At that time, though Elliot had a bicycle, I didn’t, so we walked everywhere. It took longer, but we could cut across fields or through shrub forests off the paved road. Elliot liked this because he could look for more wild birds’ eggs. I never knew what it was about birds’ eggs that got him so excited. He used to spend hours hunting for them. Woodcock eggs, plover eggs, sanderling eggs, seagull eggs, on and on. I began to look for them, too, just from being with him all the time. Once you start looking for almost invisible things like wild eggs, it’s hard to stop.

  Bushwhacking and egg-hunting this way, we got to the fort’s front gates at about four o’clock. They were closed. A private was on duty, tipped back in a chair against the cement guard house, reading a magazine. All we could see beyond him was some movement far off that might have been trucks unloading something.

  “Nothing looks any readier than usual,” Elliot sniffed.

  “Lets wait,” I said. We sat down across the road.

  A quarter of an hour went by, then an officer came out on foot, walking toward the guard, who jumped up and saluted. They had a short talk, more salutes, and the officer turned and walked back inside.

  “That was a lieutenant colonel!” I whispered.

  “How could you tell?”

  “He had silver oak leaves on his shoulder.”

  Elliot was impressed. It was the first lieutenant colonel we’d ever seen.

  “We’ve got to get in,” I said. “How about if we circle around? Is there a way we could cut in off the road and get closer?”

  “We could come up from the bay beach side,” Elliot said, “but they probably have guards there, too.”

  “Let’s try,” I whispered. “Maybe we could see what they’re doing with the big guns.”

  Elliot was not particularly in favor of this, but he followed me down the road. Around the bend, out of sight of the guard, we cut inland through dense thickets of brush and swamp maple. The ground was soft from recent rain and thaw, and our shoes got heavy with muck. After about twenty minutes, we still hadn’t come out on the beach. Elliot began to make noises about going back.

  “Not yet,” I begged him. “I know were coming up on something. Listen, the ocean isn’t far away.”

  We stopped to listen. There was the sound of surf on rocks and the high, bleating shrieks of seagulls going after bait.

  “This way,” I said, and set out more to the left than we’d been going. Five minutes later we came out on the rocky shore of the big gray-blue bay, really the mouth of the Sachem River, that scooped away down the coast toward Newport. The view was so tremendous that I stopped in awe.

  Maybe the ocean is something you never get really used to. With a cornfield, you watch it grow and know pretty well everything there is to it. But an ocean hides whole worlds underneath, millions of things that live and swim and die and are born, unseen by human eyes. It can also hide danger.

  “Look, some fishing boats,” Elliot said. “I’m glad I’m not out there. I’d feel like a sitting duck.”

  “The Nazis would never waste one of their precious torpedoes on a fishing boat.”

  “Yes, they would. In Maine, fishing boats have been getting picked off. I heard about this one case where a German sub came up out of the water right in front of a trawler, and the Germans started firing machine guns at the crew. Everybody got shot dead except one guy who jumped overboard and hid underwater. He was rescued later and told what happened.”

  We gazed across the water, silent for a moment.

>   “Mike Parini says he saw German commandos come ashore on Briggs Beach a couple of nights ago,” I said. “He reported it to the Coast Guard.”

  “How could he tell they were commandos?”

  “He said they were wearing German military uniforms.”

  “German commandos would be stupid enough to wear their uniforms to invade America?” Elliot asked.

  “No, Mike Parini is stupid enough to believe they would,” I said.

  We had a good laugh over this, then climbed down the embankment to the beach and set off along it. A stiff southwest wind had sprung up. It made the waves sit up and break into little white caps across the bay. Half a mile down, a high, wire mesh fence rose in our path. A sign posted on it read: “Entry Strictly Forbidden, U. S. Military Zone, Keep Out.”

  We came to a halt. The fence went out into the water too far to get around without swimming. The other end ran up the embankment and across an open field. We couldn’t go that way without being seen. We were about to turn around when Elliot saw a strange pile of dead brush halfway up the embankment. I never would have noticed it but he’d see things like that. Whatever was different or out of place, Elliot’s eye would catch it.

  He was right about this brush. Underneath, we found a long slit that had been cut in the fence. Someone had been going in and out. We checked around to see if anyone was watching, then went through ourselves, pulling the brush over it again. We kept walking, staying close to the embankment so we couldn’t be seen from above. After a while I told Elliot to wait a minute. I wanted to check where we were.

  I climbed up the sandy bank. It was about twice the size of the one we’d come down and not easy to get toeholds in. When I got to the top, I raised up slowly on my knees, looked around, then dropped on my stomach and waved for Elliot to come. Fast.

  “What is it?” he asked, when he came up, panting.

  “You won’t believe it.”

  We raised our heads together.

  Across a short field, so close you could see the spring yellows and reds of the wild flowers growing in front, the gray barrel of one of the big guns stuck out from a huge concrete bunker. It was pointed straight over us. Elliot dropped his head fast.

  “Bull’s-eye!” I whispered.

  “What if it fires?” Elliot asked, face down.

  “The shell would go out to sea. It couldn’t hit us. In fact, we’re even too close to see anything. Let’s go farther down the beach. We’ll get a better angle.”

  Elliot thought this was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. We slid back down the embankment and, keeping under its shadow, crept a few hundred yards farther along. Then I crawled up again and looked over.

  “Perfect!” I mouthed back to Elliot.

  When Elliot’s head came up over the embankment this time, he saw we were a good distance beyond the big gun, and relaxed. We were now in a position to see all around the bunker and beyond to the fort, which wasn’t just made of concrete like you’d think. There were regular wood houses, sheds and outbuildings, even some army tents pitched together on one side. They spread like a small village around the foot of a grassy hill that bulged up suddenly out of the land.

  Everyone in town knew about this hill. You could see it from the road. It was the fort’s battery, an operations center for the big guns and their one-ton shells. Underneath was a vast network of concrete rooms and storage chambers connected by wide underground corridors. The rooms housed the electrical generators, the communication systems, air conditioning and plumbing pipes, ammunition magazines, everything the fort needed to keep in a state of readiness.

  There were two other camouflage hills in Sachem’s Head, where smaller guns watched over the sea in other directions. In fact, the whole place was loaded with artillery, but secretly, so the Germans would never find it. A spy plane wouldn’t have a clue what was here, even if it flew right over.

  “See that house?” Elliot pointed to an ordinary-looking farmhouse on a bluff not far away. “Its really a lookout. There’s a hidden ladder that goes up the inside of the chimney. The windows are painted to look like they have curtains, but there are gun mounts in them. The whole house is made of cement. My father told me. I wonder if he’s here?”

  “Let’s get closer. Maybe we’ll see him.”

  We began to crawl on our stomachs across the field. Fifty yards in, we came to a stone wall where we could sit and spy out without being seen. A lot of soldiers were running around. It looked like something was getting ready to happen. We were too far away to see what.

  “If the lookout spots something, how will the guns know where to aim?” I asked. They were too big to be moved by hand, anyone could see that.

  “Everything gets reported to the plotting room,” Elliot said. “You can’t see it because it’s hidden underground. That’s where they do the calculations to work out the range and direction for the guns, so they can target enemy subs and ships exactly. All the charts are there, and they have radio contact with lookout stations up and down the coast and—”

  A deafening roar drowned him out. The meadow rattled around us like a box of marbles. We fell on the ground and buried our heads under our arms. I thought Elliot would be a basket case for sure, and wondered if I’d have to carry him home. But after a few seconds he got his voice working and asked, “Was that the big gun?”

  I was kind of shaken up myself. I knew it wasn’t the big gun, though, because no smoke was coming out of the barrel. The firing had come from somewhere else.

  “I think it was one of the eight inchers.”

  “What were they shooting at?”

  We sat up and looked out to sea. The fishing boats we’d seen before had gone home for the day. Farther out, the ocean was empty.

  “I bet it was just practice,” I said. “I heard they shoot the eights off every once in a while to be sure they’re working right. If the big guns ever shoot, you’ll know it, don’t worry.”

  “How will I know it?”

  “At this range? Your eyeballs crack.”

  Elliot looked at me. For about three seconds, I think he believed it, then he figured things out.

  “That’s not true, is it?” he said. “It’s not true at all.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. Anyway, your eyeballs don’t crack. Grandpa told me. What happens with a loud noise is your eardrums get sucked out.”

  I stopped smiling. “They do?”

  “Yes. They get sucked out and explode. Then they snap back in like old stretched-out rubber bands. It’s very painful.”

  “It is?”

  Too late, I saw that I’d fallen for the same sucker trick. Elliot was watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “I guess it would be painful if it really happened. But it wont because what really happens is your veins erupt and blood spurts out your nose and ears. Then your lungs collapse and your kidneys turn hard as rocks.”

  “Is that so?” Elliot inquired coolly. “I guess that’s why your skin begins to peel off and you turn purple all over?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And then your whole body explodes.”

  “It’s bad, bad. Luckily it’s over so fast you never know what hit you.”

  “Or what didn’t hit you,” Elliot pointed out.

  There was something warm and satisfying about this conversation that pleased us both. We looked out to sea some more in case anything interesting had come up, such as a shot-up German sub. Nothing had, so we crawled back through the field to the beach and started for home.

  Far off, the church bell was ringing from the town commons. Six chimes. Six o’clock! We began to run to be in time for supper. The sun was in our eyes. I would never have seen the far-off figure coming toward us, but Elliot caught a flash of blue against the sand.

  “Look!”

  I shaded my face and saw him, too. Abel Hoffman. He was walking slowly up the beach, his stick keeping time as usual. His big canvas knapsack was on his back with t
he stool sticking out behind.

  “He’s been painting somewhere,” Elliot said.

  We waited for a minute, expecting him to turn off toward the road the way we had come, but Abel didn’t turn. When he got to the wire fence with the army’s sign to keep out, he climbed up the embankment, moved the dead brush aside, slipped through the slit in the wire and kept coming.

  “Holy smoke, he knew it was there!” Elliot said. “He must have been here before.”

  “Maybe he made it,” I said.

  He was heading straight for us, now. Elliot looked around.

  “Come on. I don’t want to meet him.”

  We climbed up the sand bank again and lay flat behind some thorny beach plum.

  Abel came heavily along, unaware that he was being watched. He passed below our hiding place and went on down the beach.

  “Where’s he going?” I whispered.

  “To paint, of course,” Elliot whispered back. “He must have a place he likes along this beach. I hope he doesn’t get caught.”

  “A strange place to want to paint with a bunch of guns at your back.”

  “No, it’s nice here. There’s a beautiful view of the ocean and the coast up to Newport. I’d want to come here, too, if I were him.”

  “Well, he’d probably invite you if you’d just go see him.”

  Elliot turned his back and gazed across the bay. I knew he was mad I’d said that.

  When Abel went out of sight, we slid back down to the beach and set off again. For a long while, we didn’t talk. Elliot was mulling over something in his mind. I knew it was useless to ask him what. Anyway, I was doing some thinking of my own.

  When we came out on the West Main Road, I said: “You know, it really is strange that Abel Hoffman should want to sneak in and paint on the bay beach. There are so many other beaches around. The view down the coast is even better on the other side of the harbor.”

  Elliot said nothing. I wasn’t even sure he’d heard me. We walked home silently, side by side.

  5

  THE GERMANS STRUCK again at the end of the week.

  Uncle Jake told us when he came in the kitchen for lunch. It was Saturday. He’d been over at the fort all morning working on a problem in the underground air-conditioning system and was there when the terrible reports began to come in.