Chapter Two
Cal had signed up for the Citizens Defense Corps back when he and Becky were dating, but he’d had to wait three months for a position to open up.
When it did, a volunteer had driven him and two old-timers—in a blatting Ford Rheinland—to Lima for training.
At the end of it, they’d been asked to swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S.
government and been handed certificates of membership signed by Governor Bricker.
Cal, who’d hoped to become an air raid warden, was assigned the rank of messenger.
His duties would consist of patrolling, observing, and delivering messages to the air raid wardens, if there were any to deliver.
Just as the enlistment doctor had predicted, they gave him an armband, one that bore a lightning bolt similar to The Flash’s.
Five nights a week, he walked his rounds with a whistle in his pocket, peering up into the night sky, ready to send word if things got dicey.
But nothing got dicey. The war was far away.
—
A honeymoon would have to wait—they couldn’t afford one—but that was okay.
He moved with Becky into a furnished one-bedroom apartment above the Winniker Barbershop on Main Street.
The communal stairway smelled like Pinaud powder and aftershave, but the rooms were theirs to do in as they wished, and they wished to have sex.
Often. Given that they were married now and had waited, they had a lot of catching up to do.
She hadn’t really known what to expect but was glad his demeanor in bed mirrored his demeanor upright, was thankful for his patience, his restraint; she found it sexy.
He didn’t last long but tried to, and she found that sexy too.
They got to know each other from all sides.
He found a tiny birthmark she wasn’t even aware of behind one of her knees.
She noticed that his pinkies bent backward at the top knuckle.
Marriage, at first, felt like a really long, sex-filled date.
Of course, it was much more than that. They had to learn how to cohabitate.
They had to learn how to make space for each other in ways that had nothing to do with their bodies.
They both worked, so it made sense to Becky—and, almost as quickly, to Cal—that they share the upkeep of the home they were making together.
She didn’t always want him to come along when she dropped by her parents’ house in the evenings, which was fine with him because her father made him nervous.
He didn’t want her going with him out to Everett’s because he didn’t want to subject her to the old man and didn’t want her to see the place any closer than from the road.
“It was bad when I was growing up, but nothing like it is now,” he said.
Becky told him she didn’t scare easily, but she understood.
Her friend Janice came over to their apartment once a week for “girl night,” wherein she and Becky did pretty much the same things they’d done when they were in middle and high school: ate Twinkies, drank Coca-Colas, painted each other’s toenails, and held séances.
The crystal ball came out—the one Becky had ordered from the back of Haunted Tales when she was twelve—and while Cal sat in the living room listening to the radio (if he wasn’t out on one of his Citizens Defense patrols), they turned off the kitchen lights, lit candles, and tried to summon Catherine the Great, or Paul Revere, or Rudolph Valentino.
Janice had a startling laugh, and a lot struck her as funny during the séances, which made Becky laugh, too, though not as often.
Cal was glad they could enjoy themselves with him there but thought it all a little silly as he leaned sideways to better hear Chip Davis, Commando.
Husband and wife, they were the same people as before, but when they had spats now, it felt so grown-up.
They were proud of themselves for rising above their hiccups of irritation, especially when they each knew they were in the right.
Gestures of kindness felt different too.
They went further, meant more, because, technically, they were no longer required; the wooing part was over.
She admired a little blue ceramic owl in a gift shop downtown; he bought it for her the next day on his lunch hour and slipped it into the pocket of her robe that evening.
On a daytrip into Findlay, she bought him a copy of Daredevil #13, a double issue he’d missed because it had come out the month they got married.
She also took him to the library, got him a library card, and showed him a whole section of adventure and crime novels that were geared toward adults but seemed to have been written for someone weaned on comic books.
They weren’t sure if they were doing marriage right, but they were happy to figure it out as they went. All but the sex. That, they had down to a science.
Before long, the science worked.
—
Dear President Roosevelt, Everett typed at home, with two fingers, on the Olivetti he’d found in the Recycle for Victory bin,
As it is now August of 1943 and we are more than a year and a half into our involvement in the carnage of young men dying on land and at sea, I think it is high time to ask if you have noticed that the ones who do the talking in war are never the ones who do the dying?
Woodrow Wilson was a talker and also a shitbird.
You, sir, can certainly talk a blue streak from your chair.
No offense intended regarding the specifics of your health.
If I had neighbors which thankfully I do not and saw them engaged in bloody carnage with people down the road, would I not be a fool to rush out of my house and throw myself into the middle of it without knowing if I could afford to do so?
Would I not be both a fool and a coward to send my children in my place?
When your son was on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, your wife went on the radio and told us she understands the sacrifice that war demands. Respectfully, I believe she was thinking wishfully. Like any good mother she just wants her son back.
I accuse you and the organization you currently run of purposefully selling U.S. steel to Japan for years. I accuse you of capitalistic greed and murder. You do not have my vote for a fourth term.
Most sincerely.
Lance Corporal Everett B. Jenkins.
US Army Retired.
The letter—folded into an envelope addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
—was tucked into one of the leg pockets of Everett’s dungarees as he pedaled his tricycle and cart into town.
He tipped his straw fedora and waved it in the general direction of Dora and Grace and Robert as he passed the cemetery, then rounded the statue of St. Christopher and turned onto Carson Street, the cart clattering behind him all the while, loudly announcing its condition: empty.
Downtown was, to him, turbulent, almost feverish.
He remembered Main Street with wooden sidewalks, gas streetlamps, dirt that was always somehow both dry and muddy.
(Pavement didn’t reach Bonhomie until just before the turn of the century.) Now the street was twice as wide as it used to be, and seemed wider still.
They’d taken out the median to make room for more cars, and they’d parked cars diagonally all up and down either side of the street, like tugboats trying to nudge the businesses back—to make room for more cars.
Even with all that space to move around in, someone honked at him.
It was another reason he never wanted to leave the house.
People honked and hollered because he was in their way, or because he was digging through the Salvation Army donation box or a garbage can, or just because he was a grown man on a homemade man-size tricycle.
He did his best to ignore them all—though sometimes people waved and called out because they had something to give him, and those people he couldn’t ignore.
Here was Mrs. Crenshaw, clutching the throat of her pink housecoat, waving to him from her front porch as he turned off Main and onto First Street.
She was a little younger than him, around sixty, and a decade ago, out of the blue, she’d asked if he wanted to have sexual relations with her.
Her phrasing. Certainly not, he’d said. But he thanked her and then avoided First Street for a year.
Come, her wave said now.
Fair maiden, Everett thought, I have turned the handle of my nickelodeon for the last time.
Not that, the wave said. I have something for your cart.
He stopped.
—
Cal’s Nash was parked in front of the house when Everett got home, the driver’s door standing open. Cal was on the porch, peering into one of the windows.
“Trespassers get shot,” Everett said as he turned the tricycle onto the gravel drive.
“Nice to see you too.” Cal came down the porch steps.
Something was missing from his son, Everett thought. The only thing that brought him around anymore. “Where are the groceries?”
“I don’t have any, I’ve got something to tell you. What’s in the wagon?”
Everett got down and showed him. A pair of snowshoes in need of mending.
A box of Zane Grey books with frayed brown covers.
A twist of metal flashing and, beside that, a dirty towel.
Everett pulled the towel back to reveal a puppy.
Light-brown coat speckled white around the legs and muzzle. Bone-thin.
“Somebody threw out their dog?”
“He belonged to Mrs. Crenshaw,” Everett said. “Her bitch had four pups, she found homes for three of them, but this one was the runt nobody wanted. I think he stopped eating.”
“Because he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead.” Everett kicked one of the cart wheels, and the puppy’s eyes opened. Its chest swelled and shrank. “Mrs. Crenshaw couldn’t bring herself to drown him.”
“So you’re going to do it?”