Read Online Sons by Evan Hunter - Free Book Online

definitely coming as soon as North Africa fell. Michael had thought of enlisting in the cavalry, having always been fond of horses, but then he’d learned that cavalry meant
mechanized
cavalry, which meant tanks, and we both knew a kid named Sal Brufani who had been burned to a crisp in a tank outside Bizerte, just before Christmas. Michael furthermore got sick even riding a boat on Lake Michigan, which eliminated the Navy as a possibility. So, unless he wanted to have his ass shipped to Italy or, worse yet, to the Aleutians or the Solomons, the only logical open choice (I convinced him) was the Air Force.
    In any case, our language on the way home from school each day was inclined to get a bit salty, and I didn’t like Linda hearing such stuff. For example, just last week, Michael had come up with a new Confucius Say joke, which broke everybody up, but which made Linda
— and
me — very uncomfortable. He’d told it without any warning, just popping it out of the blue, “Confucius say, ‘Girl who marry basketball player get gypped; he always dribble before he shoot.’” Charlotte Wagner had thrown back her head and opened her mouth wide to let out one of her horse bellows, delicately feminine and designed to knock over the Wrigley Building. The other girls all followed suit, of course, except Linda. She started to laugh, and then quickly glanced at me, and blushed, and smiled only tentatively and in a frightened way, and then put on a very grave and serious look when she saw I wasn’t laughing at all. Sarah Cody had meanwhile knocked Michael’s books into the gutter and called him a dirty slob. He laughed wildly and said, “Who? Me? What’d I say?” and began wrestling first with her and then Charlotte, with a lot of indiscreet cheap feeling going on, and with Linda walking very silently beside me, her eyes lowered. I later warned Michael to be a little more careful with his language when my sister was around, and he promised he would.
    I was surprised by what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, not because it was really so dirty, but only because she’d told me at
all,
though with a blush. As I crouched under my desk now and listened for our punctual eighth-period Japanese raiders, I thought of how much pleasure it would give me to break the news to Charlotte as soon as this drill was over. The whole thing had started about two weeks ago when Charlotte, climbing the steps of her house on Banks, had waved to the other girls and said, “Well, girls, keep ’em flying,” causing all the girls to burst into hysterical laughter which none of the boys understood.
    “What’s so funny?” Michael asked.
    “Oh, nothing,” Charlotte said breezily, and then turned to the girls again, and again said, “Keep ’em flying, girls,” and went up the steps and into her house. Nor had that been the end of it. Every day since, the girls had given each other the same mysterious farewell, “Keep ’em flying!” They were obviously delighted by our puzzlement, and the harder we pressed them for an explanation, the sillier they became, giggling and exchanging sly glances, and shoving at each other, and generally behaving as though they were carrying around the ultimate secret of the female universe. Up to now, or more accurately up to the minute Linda had let me in on the secret outside the bio lab, I had always thought the slogan was a patriotic reminder to the folks at home, urging them to do their share in the war effort by respecting rationing and the like, and buying war bonds, and keeping silent about troop shipments. But now I knew. And whereas the slogan had a great deal to do with the war effort, it had nothing to do with pilots (although the silk was probably needed for parachutes — that
was,
in fact, the point) but only to do with the selfless contribution busty Charlotte and her girlfriends were being asked to make in these trying times.
    I could hardly wait to let her know I knew.
    A single gong