Chapter 2

"Where's that Spitfire you were working on?" Charlie Michaels asked, wiping his face on his forearm. "That was a neat one. Testor's wasn't it?

"No, Guillow's. Ma put it away, up in the closet. I lost the prop and the stupid cat chewed up the rudder." Bud spat in disgust. "Damn cat."

"You ought to finish it. Last time I saw it you had the wings on and everything, but you hadn't doped it." Charlie put his foot on his shovel and dug deeply into the reddish loam, grunting with effort.

"Yeah, I know." Bud stuck his spade in the soft ground and tossed aside some more dirt, adding to the growing pile. "I've got a P-40 I never finished either, up in my closet somewhere."

"Then we could fly it and shoot it down with the b-b gun, like we did with my Stuka." Charlie produced his a gap-toothed smile and then hissed out a string of spit.

"Yeah, that was fun, and it sure did burn good."

"Nothing like that Ronson lighter fluid. Makes a great flamethrower, don't it? Remember those lead soldiers we fried down by the tracks, the ones you snitched from the ten-cent store? Think we're deep enough?"

Bud measured with his shovel. "Naw, we got to go down another foot at least."

"Damn," Charlie said. "Whose bright idea was this anyhow?"

"Yours, asshole," Bud said with a laugh. "Get digging."

Charlie Michaels' father worked at the Georgetown Prep and that was where the boys had met when Bud attended the Jesuit school for a year and a half. Mr. Michaels was the head groundskeeper, had been for twenty years. He mowed the fairways and the lawns with a big, old Fordson, tended the greens and sandtraps, kept the rough from getting out of hand, and he paid the boys one cent each for the golf balls they found and dredged out of the various streams and ponds. Like his son, he was a lean man with bony elbows and knees, and his scraggly mustache was getting white at the ends. He chewed tobacco steadily and was careful where and when he spat.

Both boys were thirteen the year the war began with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and both had paper routes and other things in common including an abiding curiosity about girls and airplanes. They were hard at work building themselves an underground hideout where they could safely smoke cigarettes, read forbidden magazines and get away from adult eyes.

The abandoned farm they were digging on lay well behind Bud's home and along a dirt road that seemed to wander off going nowhere. Neither boy knew who owned the property and that question had never risen. They simply found part of an old kitchen garden that was fairly easy to dig in and got to work, laying out an area six feet long and four feet wide for a start. They had found several sheets of corrugated and galvanized sheet metal that had been atop a shed at one time and were hoping to roof over their dugout with those.

They dug in silence for a while, working side-by-side, grunting with effort. The dirt pile slowly grew. They had decided to dig their own place after visiting one three guys from Prep had dug back in the woods. They had a Coleman lantern and a plywood door for their cozy hole.

"Your sister still going away to school?" Charlie asked, stopping to lean on his long-handled shovel and wipe his face.

"Yeah. She's in her second year up at some girls' school in Massachusetts. Mount Holyoke. Cost's a bundle, too."