Chapter 43

"Now listen class," said Bud's homeroom teacher after they had stood and saluted the flag and then listened to the Bible reading and the morning announcements, "now listen, I said, this is important. The scrap drive ends this Friday, and we are in second place only a few hundred pounds behind 11-C. Now Mr. Henderson and I have a little bet, and I hope you are not going it let me down. I'd hate to have to wash his car. Get out there in your neighborhood and scavenge, every one of you. Newspaper committee I know you can do better. Let's get that bonus for a thousand pounds."

Everybody nodded and Gina Miller, chairman of the metal group of which Bud was a part stood and said, "Half a ton will do it, gang. Find some cast iron, old radiators are great. Do your best." Bud smiled at her, but she did not seem to notice. Gina was not only the prettiest girl in the 10th grade, Bud thought, but just about the smartest one too. Unfortunately she had a boy friend on the JV basketball team so all Bud could do was admire her as she jiggled through the halls, her books clasped to her wonderful chest.

Bud had already contributed an old pump head to the scrap drive, plus the horseshoe that had been over the store's front door since his grandfather's time, and he had emptied every tin can he could find from walking the sides of the highway in both directions from his home, taken off the lids, put those inside and them stomped the cans flat. He had cleaned out dusty things hidden away in the store's rafters, including a small anvil that brought him cheers and a broken harness the scrap drive turned down, and if one of the seniors had not hauled in what was left of a Model -T Ford, engine block and all, Bud might had been the top metal-getter in the whole school.

Neither his mother nor his father had any suggestions, but the fellow who raised chickens at what had once been a Williams farmhouse, said he thought he recalled a rusted car chassis out in the woods. Bud went exploring while in the back of his mind he could see the corrugated metal that roofed the dugout he and Charlie Michaels had built two or three years before.

On the far side of the old streetcar right-of-way, where he found and pocketed a railway spike, he struck gold. There was a soot crusted oil drum that had been cut open to use as a stove and sitting crookedly beside it was a huge copper kettle or cooking pot of some kind, so big Bud couldn't get his arms around it. It was fire scorched on its rounded bottom and weighed, Bud estimated, at least a hundred pounds. Copper was number one along with aluminum on the list of metals wanted for the scrap drive. The government was already talking about making pennies out of steel or zinc.

Bud found an old garden hose in the weeds, rigged a harness around the big copper thing and dragged it out of the woods, down the weedy trolley embankment and right up to the outhouse behind father's store. Proud of himself, he went in the back door, took a bottle of orange soda from the big refrigerator and approached his father, who was working on his charge accounts.