Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Page B

worse?"
    Lillian lifted her shoulders slightly. "I don't know. The Japs chop heads off. But the Germans put people in ovens."
    Her words came out into the still evening and the fireflies continued to blink; but my own eyes were wide open and my stomach was seized with cramps.
    "Is that really true, Lillian?"
    "Yeah. You can see it in the newsreels. Oh, I forgot. You're not allowed to go to movies, are you?"
    "No." No wonder. I had been taken to
Snow White.
I had thought all movies were like
Snow White.
    "Charles, did you know that, about the ovens and the chopping heads off?" I asked.
    "Yeah," Charles lied. His eyes were as wide in the early darkness as mine.
    "Lillian, Hugo Hoffman was a German," I told her, making my voice as meaningful as Grandmother's.
    "Who's Hugo Hoffman?" She lit another cigarette, putting the stub of the first into her purse so that Grandmother wouldn't find it in the yard.
    "Next door. Remember when the little boy next door died? His father was German."
    "Yeah?"
    "At the beginning of the war he disappeared."
    "No kidding. Where'd he disappear to?"
    "Nobody knows. When the war started he just went off in the night and nobody ever saw him again."
    Lillian was interested. "And then the kid died. What'd he die of?"
    My stomach cramped again. "Pneumonia, the doctor said."
    "The doctor
said.
I wonder about
that,
let me tell you. There's all sorts of strange stuff goes on. I bet anything that guy is a spy for the Germans."
    Suddenly we were talking in whispers, in secret voices. Even Charles.
    "Spies is over there, where the war is. They ain't in a little ole town like
this,
" he whispered.
    Lillian blew smoke out again and looked impatiently down the street for her ride. Then she said in a hushed, ominous voice, "Don't you kid yourself. Spies are all over, and the walls have ears. There are
German radio operators right in this town, let me tell you. Out in California there are thousands of Japs with radios, signaling subs. There isn't a safe place left. And the only thing you can do about it"—she rose, as the sound of the noisy car came—"is go out and have fun. Right?"
    "Right," said Charles.
    "Right," I echoed. We both waved toward the car as she left, but it was dark now; the only things we could see were the small glowing circles of cigarettes, redder than fireflies. From the kitchen Tatie called to us to come in.
    ***
    "Charles," I whispered to him in the morning, as we stood in the backyard, "do you believe what Lillian said about spies?"
    "Yeah."
    "What're spies?"
    He hesitated. "People who fight for the other side."
    "How can they fight for the Germans, here in this town? What did she mean about radios?
Everybody
has radios.
We
have a radio."
    "It's a special kind of spy radio they have. They talk to Hitler."
    I knew about Hitler, vaguely. Hitler was an enemy.
    "Do you think Hugo Hoffman talks to Hitler?"
    Charles sat on the grass and thought. "You know
what, Elizabeth? That Hoffman house, she's got a big attic. Look at all them windows."
    I looked up. All of the houses on Autumn Street were very large. They all had attics.
    "So what?"
    "I bet that Hugo Hoffman, he been up in that attic all the time, talking to Hitler."
    I knew that it couldn't be true. If Hugo Hoffman had been in the attic the day that Noah cried and called out, the day that Nathaniel and I had held the duck race, Hugo Hoffman would have come down, spy or no spy. But I didn't want to tell Charles about that.
    "He couldn't be. He'd starve."
    "Elizabeth Jane, you so..."
    "I am
not
stupid, Charles. Nobody can live in an attic and not eat. And how would he go to the bathroom? There aren't any bathrooms in attics."
    Charles explained it to me patiently, the way my Sunday School teacher went through things again and again, making me feel unbearably ignorant.
    "He creeps down at night, after everybody asleep, and eats and pees. His wife, she probably knows he's there. Spies, they can tell their wife, but nobody else."
    I looked