Boy No More

Chapter 1 I was walking down the middle of the road when I saw a couple of people pushing a car up a hill. There was never a lot of traffic, not with gas rationing. The man on the driver's side had one hand on the steering wheel."Help us out," the man said. He had on a greasy cap, and his front bottom teeth were missing.A girl was behind the car, her shoulder against the spare tire like she had the whole weight of the car on her. She made room for me, and we pushed together. I recognized her from the school bus stop. She was that tall older girl who always had her nose in a book."Hi," I said. "I know you. You take the bus to school."She looked at me through a tangle of hair and nodded."Push, Nance," the man said."I am pushing, Woody!""Good girl."She muttered something girls don't say. I'd never known a girl who said things like that."You two kids, push the heck out of it," Woody said. "We're almost to the junkyard.""Why don't we just push it in the ditch?" Nancy said."Oh, don't say that, Nance. I just paid twenty-five bucks for this baby. I love this car.""That's about all you love," she muttered.I was trying to figure out who he was. Not her father. You didn't talk to your father like that. Maybe an uncle or a cousin.We finally reached the top of the rise, and the weight of the car eased. It started rolling, and Woody jumped in behind the wheel. "In like Flynn!" he yelled. "Keep pushing, kids. Faster, faster!"The girl and I were running and pushing. "Start it," she cried. "Start it, Woody!"The car coughed, belched black smoke, coughed again, and off it went. "Bakersfield Express," Woody yelled, sticking his head out the window.We were left standing there in the exhaust. "Pushing this car to the junkyard -- it's a joke, right?" I said to her."No, he practically lives in that junkyard." She brushed the hair out of her face. "This isn't the first time I've pushed his stupid car."At the dairy on River Road I stopped. "I live over there," I said, pointing to the house across the road. "We live upstairs. Second floor.""Uh-huh," she said, turning down the path to the river.I watched her for a moment, then called after her, "I'm Adam!"She raised her arm, fingers sort of waving good-bye to me. Copyright copy; 2004 by Harry Mazer Chapter 2 My father was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, and World War II started for America. He was an officer on the USS Arizona, Lt. Emory J. Pelko, and he was onboard his ship that Sunday morning.I was there too. No, not on the ship, in the harbor. Davi Mori, Martin Kahahawai, and I had gone fishing early that morning. We had found a rowboat, and we were out on the water fooling around when we heard the drone of the planes coming over. We thought it was a practice, a navy exercise, a war game, till the bombs started falling and the boat we were in tipped and the air exploded, and we were thrown into the water.I saw my father's ship, that great battleship the USS Arizona, explode and sink. There were a thousand men onboard, and most of them went down with the ship. Their bodies are still down there in the wreckage. My father, too.I know he's gone, I know I'm never going to see him, but sometimes I can't help thinking he got free somehow and he's going to come home. Copyright copy; 2004 by Harry Mazer Chapter 3 Right after Pearl Harbor my mother, my sister, and I were evacuated from Hawaii and sent back to the States. For a while we lived in San Diego in navy housing near the base -- a couple of cheesy rooms, with a sink and a stove along one wall. I hated it there -- the sunny San Diego sky was too much like the sunny Hawaiian sky, too much like the Pearl Harbor sky. I wanted to move, and I didn't care where we went.When Mom got a lMazer, Harry is the author of 'Boy No More', published 2004 under ISBN 9780689855337 and ISBN 0689855338.