"When do we shoot everyone on the school board? For gosh sakes, they started school a week early this year! They deserve to be shot. My gosh, how"d you do it, Doug?"
"I said, "Bang! You"re dead!""
"And Quartermain?!"
"Quartermain?"
"You broke his leg! Sure was your busy day, Doug!"
"I didn"t break no leg. My bike . . ."
"No, a machine ! I heard old Cal screaming when they lugged him home. "Infernal machine!" What kind of infernal machine, Doug?"
Somewhere in a corner of his mind, Doug saw the bike fling Quartermain high, wheels spinning, while Douglas fled, the cry of Quartermain following close.
"Doug, why didn"t you crack both his legs with your infernal machine?"
"What?"
"When do we see your device, Doug? Can you set it for the Death of a Thousand Slices?"
Doug examined Charlie"s face, to see if he was joking, but Charlie"s face was a pure church altar alive with holy light.
"Doug," he murmured. "Doug, boy, oh boy."
"Sure," said Douglas, warming to the altar glow. "Him against me, me against Quartermain and the whole darn school board, the town council-Mr. Bleak, Mr. Gray, all those dumb old men that live at the edge of the ravine."
"Can I watch you pick "em off , Doug?"
"What? Sure. But we got to plan, got to have an army."
"Tonight, Doug?"
"Tomorrow . . ."
"No, tonight ! Do or die. You be captain."
"General!"
"Sure, sure. I"ll get the others. So they can hear it from the horse"s mouth! Meet at the ravine bridge, eight o"clock! Boy!"
"Don"t yell in the windows at those guys," said Doug. "Leave secret notes on their porches. That"s an order!"
"Yeah!"
Charlie sped off, yelling. Douglas felt his heart drown in a fresh new summer. He felt the power growing in his head and arms and fi sts. All this in a day! From plain old C-minus student to full general!
Now, whose legs should be cracked next? Whose metronome stopped? He sucked in a trembling breath.
All the fiery-pink windows of the dying day shone upon this arch-criminal who walked in their brilliant gaze, half smile-scowling toward destiny, toward eight o"clock, toward the camptown gathering of the great Green Town Confederacy and everyone sitting by firelight singing, "Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp grounds . . . "
We"ll sing that one, he thought, three times.
CHAPTER NINE.
Up in the attic, Doug and Tom set up head quarters. A turned-over box became the general"s desk; his aide-de-camp stood by, awaiting orders.
"Get out your pad, Tom."
"It"s out."
"Ticonderoga pencil?"
"Ready."
"I got a list, Tom, for the Great Army of the Republic. Write this down. There"s Will and Sam and Charlie and Bo and Pete and Henry and Ralph. Oh, and you, Tom."
"How do we use the list, Doug?"
"We gotta find things for them to do. Time"s running out. Right now we"ve gotta figure how many captains, how many lieutenants. One general. That"s me."
"Make it good, Doug. Keep "em busy."
"First three names, captains. The next three, lieutenants. Everybody else, spies."
"Spies, Doug?"
"I think that"s the greatest thing. Guys like to creep around, watch things, and then come back and tell."
"Heck, I want to be one of those."
"Hold on. We"ll make them all captains and lieutenants, make everyone happy, or we"ll lose the war before it gets started. Some will do double-duty as spies."
"Okay, Doug, here"s the list."
Doug scanned it. "Now we gotta fi gure the fi rst sockdolager thing to do."
"Get the spies to tell you."
"Okay, Tom. But you"re the most important spy. After the ravine meeting tonight . . ." Tom frowned, shook his head. "What?"
"Heck, Doug, the ravine"s nice but I know a bette r place. The graveyard. The sun"ll be gone. It"ll remind "em if they"re not careful, that"s where we"ll all wind up."
"Good thinking, Tom."
"Well, I"m gonna go spy and round up the guys. First the bridge, then the graveyard, yup?"
"Tom, you"re really somethin"."
"Always was," said Tom. "Always was."
He jammed his pencil in his shirt pocket, stashed his nickel tablet in the waistband of his dungarees, and saluted his commander.
"Dismissed!"
And Tom ran.
CHAPTER TEN.
The green acreage of the old cemetery was filled with stones and names on stones. Not only the names of the people earthed over with sod and fl owers, but the names of seasons. Spring rain had written soft, unseen messages here. Summer sun had bleached granite. Autumn wind had softened the lettering. And snow had laid its cold hand on winter marble. But now what the seasons had to say was only a cool whisper in the trembling shade, the message of names: "TYSON! BOWMAN! STEVENS!"
Douglas leap-frogged TYSON, danced on BOWMAN, and circled STEVENS.
The graveyard was cool with old deaths, old stones grown in far Italian mountains to be shipped here to this green tunnel, under skies too bright in summer, too sad in winter.
Douglas stared. The entire territory swarmed with ancient terrors and dooms. The Great Army stood around him and he looked to see if the invisible webbed wings in the rushing air ran lost in the high elms and maples. And did they feel all that? Did they hear the autumn chestnuts raining in cat-soft thumpings on the mellow earth? But now all was the fi xed blue lost twilight which sparked each stone with light specules where fresh yellow b.u.t.terflies had once rested to dry their wings and now were gone.
Douglas led his suddenly disquieted mob into a further land of stillness and made them tie a bandanna over his eyes; his mouth, isolated, smiled all to itself.
Groping, he laid hands on a tombstone and played it like a harp, whispering.
"Jonathan Silks. 1920. Gunshot." Another: "Will Colby. 1921. Flu."
He turned blindly to touch deep-cut green moss names and rainy years, and old games played on lost Memorial Days while his aunts watered the gra.s.s with tears, their voices like windswept trees.
He named a thousand names, fixed ten thousand fl owers, flashed ten million spades. "Pneumonia, gout, dyspepsia, TB. All of "em taught," said Doug. "Taught to learn how to die. Pretty dumb lying here, doing nothing, yup?"
"Hey Doug," Charlie said, uneasily. "We met here to plan our army, not talk about dying. There"s a billion years between now and Christmas. With all that time to fill, I got no time to die. I woke this morning and said to myself, "Charlie, this is swell, living. Keep doing it!""
"Charlie, that"s how they want you to talk!"
"Am I wrinkly, Doug, and dog-pee yellow? Am I fourteen, Doug, or fifteen or twenty? Am I?"
"Charlie, you"ll spoil everything!"
"I"m just not worried." Charlie beamed. "I fi gure everyone dies, but when it"s my turn, I"ll just say no thanks. Bo, you goin" to die someday? Pete?"
"Not me!"
"Me either!"
"See?" Charlie turned to Doug. "n.o.body"s dyin" like flies. Right now we"ll just lie like hound-dogs in the shade. Cool off , Doug."
Douglas"s hands fisted in his pockets, clutching dust, marbles, and a piece of white chalk. At any moment Charlie would run, the gang with him, yapping like dogs, to flop in deep grape-arbor twilight, not even swatting flies, eyes shut.
Douglas swiftly chalked their names, CHARLIE, TOM, PETE, BO, WILL, SAM, HENRY, AND RALPH, on the gravestones, then jumped back to let them spy themselves, so much chalk-dust on marble, fl aking, as time blew by in the trees.
The boys stared for a long, long time, silent, their eyes moving over the strange shapes of chalk on the cold stone. Then, at last, there was the faintest exhalation of a whisper.
"Ain"t going to die!" cried Will. "I"ll fi ght!"
"Skeletons don"t fight," said Douglas.
"No, sir!" Will lunged at the stone, erasing the chalk, tears springing to his eyes.
The other boys stood, frozen.
"Sure," Douglas said. "They"ll teach us at school, say, here"s your heart, the thing you get attacks with!
Show you bugs you can"t see ! Teach you to jump off buildings, stab people, fall and not move."
"No, sir," Sam gasped.
The great meadow of graveyard rippled under the last fingers of fading sunlight. Moths fl uttered around them, and the sound of a graveyard creek ran over all their cold moonlit thoughts and gaspings as Douglas quietly finished:"Sure, none of us wants to just lie here and never play kick-the-can again. You want all that?"
"Heck no, Doug . . ."
"Then we stop it! We find out how our folks make us grow, teach us to lie, cheat, steal. War? Great! Murder? Swell! We"ll never be so well off as we are right now ! Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind bra.s.s bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you! Well, do we fight back? Will you let me tell you how to run?"
"Gosh," said Charlie. "Yeah!"
"Then," said Doug, "talk to your body: Bones, not one more inch! Statues! Don"t forget, Quartermain owns this graveyard. He makes money if we lie here, you and you and you ! But we"ll show him. And all those old men who own the town! Halloween"s almost here and before then we got to sour their grapes! You wanna look like them? You know how they got that way? Well, they were all young once, but somewhere along the way, oh gosh, when they were thirty or forty or fifty, they chewed tobacco and phlegm-hocked up on themselves and that phlegm-hock turned all gummy and sticky and then the next thing you know there was spittle all over them and they began to look like, you know, you"ve seen, caterpillars turned into chrysalis, their darned skin hardened, and the young guys turned old, got trapped inside their sh.e.l.ls, by G.o.d. Then they began to look like all those old guys. So, what you have is old men with young guys trapped inside them. Some year soon, maybe, their skin will crack and the old men will let the old young men out. But they won"t be young anymore, they"ll be a bunch of death"s-head moths or, come to think of it, I think the old men are going to keep the young men inside them forever, so they"re trapped in all that glue, always hoping to get free. It"s pretty bad, isn"t it? Pretty bad."
"Is that it, Doug?" said Tom.
"Yeah," said Pete. "You sure you know what you"re talking about?"