Edenville Owls

Chapter 43

None of us knew what to do next. Including Tupper... or Krauss. I couldn’t figure out what to call him in my head. Tupper, I decided, that’s what his name was to me. We stood still where we were, like sometime had stopped the movie projector and a single frame stood motionless on the screen.

“Does Claudia know?” he asked all of a sudden.

“She doesn’t know about this meeting,” I said.

“Does she know I deserted?” he said.

“Yes.”

He put his hands behind his back and began to walk slowly around the bandstand.

“You’re children,” he said. “You can’t know.”

He kept walking. It was more like he was talking to himself than to us.

“Every day wondering if you’ll die. Every night afraid to go to sleep because you might not wake up. Every day people dying near you.”

He stopped and looked toward the harbor, and stood there.

“I had to go,” he said to himself, or us, or the harbor, or something.

All of us stood there watching him, none of us saying anything.

“You gotta be gone from here by Wednesday,” I said. “Or we tell everybody.”

I hadn’t really thought about when he would leave. In my head it was like, we face him down, and he disappears. But I didn’t know what else to say, and the Wednesday deadline just sort of came out.

“Two days,” he said sadly. “Two days for a man who was nearly killed defending a country that has long since gone to hell. Two days.”

He shook his head, still looking toward the harbor.

“Risk your life defending the Jews and the coons,” he said.

I didn’t like him saying the coon stuff in front of Manny.

Tupper turned from the harbor and looked at us; it was a funny look. He looked right at us, but I don’t know if he actually saw us.

“You know,” he said, “all the movies you see are made by the Jews. You know that they have signed a nigger to play baseball with white men.”

We were all starting to shift around a little. We were getting sick of him.

“You gotta be gone by Wednesday,” I said to him. “And never come back.”

“It wasn’t cowardice,” Tupper said.

With his hands behind his back, he started walking around the bandstand again.

“It was a revelation. Suddenly, in the midst of the carnage, I realized I could no longer fight this evil war. I was willing to pay any price, take any risk, but not for the niggers and the Jews and the Communists. I would walk away. I would risk the wrath of the army and the disdain of my countrymen, if I had to...”

“Probably why he grabbed some other guy’s name,” Russell said.

“And his medal,” Nick said.

Tupper appeared not to hear them.

“But I would not continue in this monstrous betrayal.”

Russell walked over to Manny.

“Guy’s a lunatic,” he said to Manny. “Let’s get out of here.”

Manny nodded and the two of them walked away.

“We should have been fighting the Communists,” Tupper said.

Billy saw Russell and Manny leaving and looked at me. I shrugged. He went after them.

“I don’t want to listen to this anymore either,” Nick said.

“Me either,” I said.

We both looked at Joanie

“Or me,” Joanie said.

“The Nazi’s understood the threat,” Tupper said.

He was looking down at the floor as he walked, hands clasped behind his back, like he was musing out loud.

“Wednesday,” I said.

And Nick and I walked away with Joanie between us.

“Don’t you see?” Tupper said. “Don’t you sense it, the poison, the corruption seeping into every small crevice? I did the only thing I could do...”

We walked Joanie home, then Nick and I walked partway home together, and separated when Nick went up toward his house and I kept on toward mine. As soon as Nick was out of sight, I started running toward home.

He never said, and neither did I. But I’ll bet Nick did the same thing.