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Chapter One (cont.)
Children had delighted in the abandoned excavations of unsold lots and had roofed over the
trench footings and half-basements with cast-off pieces of building materials, scrap
lumber and tarpaper. They made ideal "bunkers." The kids were crazy about
"bunkers," childish imitations of trench warfare, or bomb shelters -- the
influence of the previous war's stories and the present war's movies. They invented games
to employ these bowel-like structures, crawling into them fearfully, stocking them with
salvaged and stolen plunder -- lanterns, bits of candles, boards hammered into secret
altars, stashes for forbidden comic books, condoms from their lately drafted older
brothers' dressers, items of daringly pilfered lingerie -- including this one, an enormous
brassiere and an accordion-like corset that could wrap two or three boys.
The bunkers
were not for girls. Undoubtedly a few were invited, but they knew better than to crawl
into these dens. Goldilocks was a cautionary tale, after all. Still, a few bold lassies
must have penetrated these caverns, rarely.
Some bunkers
were larger, more labyrinthine, but this one was fairly simple, a rectangle twenty-four
feet by twenty. The trenches were deep enough that two eight-year old boys, Carmey and
Bertie, could actually walk upright in most places although they tended to hunch over to
avoid striking their heads -- there were sometimes nasty nails poking through the rough
boards that roofed the trenches.
The bunker
was well isolated from the others, almost in the center of the uncleared woods. Carmey and
Bertie had known about this bunker for some time but they had never dared approach it
until today. They knew it belonged to an older boy named Porky White, who led a gang of
teenaged boys who stole canteloupes from suburban gardens, beer from their parents'
refrigerators, candy from stores. All of this exciting loot was stashed in the bunker. The
gang, known as the Clawson Commandoes -- there was an inescapable air of militarism these
days -- naturally despised little kids like Carmey and Bertie. And they, in turn,
naturally writhed in envy of the Commandoes, from the helmet-liners on their heads to the
combat boots on their feet, and wanted to be just like them.
Porky White
was known to them to be a particularly nasty, cruel bully. He ruled this bunker like a
Chinese bandit, about which they had learned in movies and magazines. But he lacked the
charismatic attraction of their true idol, a Sicilian outlaw recently glamorized in the
pages of Life magazine, the bold and daring Giuliano. Perhaps the fact that they
were themselves of Italian heritage (fairly recent, their parents emigrants) enhanced
their idolization of Giuliano. They truly feared, respected and envied Porky White, but
did not idolize him.
They attended
a Catholic school. Porky went to public school. On this day, due to the funeral of a
priest, the St. Anthony school was out and public school was not. So they had a perfect
opportunity to creep into the citadel of Porky White and see what all was there.
It was a
bleak, cool day at the end of winter but before the beginning of spring. The sky was a
familiar gray, a featureless overcast, with a feeling that it could rain but probably
wouldn't. In this half-begun suburb, if one could climb the water tower and look down, one
would see a mildly rolling terrain with woods to the north and east and a city to the
south and sprawling to the west. But at one's feet were laid out streets with only
scattered houses on each block. Off to the east were farms and the shrunken remnants of
farms. There was almost no automobile traffic, because of gas rationing, but there was an
inter-urban trolley zipping along on a distant arterial rail line. |
