On The Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck

same. But we were different.

By That Summer of 1943 . . .
    . . . the town was pretty well picked clean. Now even copper pennies had rolled off to war. The 1943 pennies were steel and zinc. A lot of them passed for dimes before people got wise to them.
    Scooter and I had done our share for the effort. Even the idea of Old Lady Graves’s sewing machine gnawed at us, though we never got it. But we didn’t go near paper again, never mentioned it.
    Now the Chamber of Commerce announced a Jalopy Parade as the main event of the summer, to shake loose still more scrap metal. There were old hulks of cars around that needed to go to war because they weren’t going anywhere else.
    The plan snowballed. Now they were talking about crowning a Jalopy Queen for a procession of decorated clunkers and high school bands. It was going to wind through downtown and end at Sol Tick’s scrap yard.
    In the middle of parade mania, Bill came home. He didn’t call from the Wabash depot, and we didn’t hear the taxicab. We were just sitting down to supper at the kitchen table. I can still see the light of that summer evening slanting in the window. Bill walked in, wearing his second lieutenant’s uniform and his bars. And his wings. Silver wings. It was Bill, leaner, with Dad’s grin. He whipped off his cap, and it rolled on the linoleum.
    I remember Mom’s hands flying to her face and the kitchen swimming. I remember Dad coming out of his chair that fell over behind him.
    In a crate out by the garage Dad had been feeding up two chickens for this moment. I was out there when he wrung the neck off first one, then the other. His good hand was a windmill, and the birds pinwheeled in the air, feathers white on the grass like summer snow. In the long evening shadows Dad did kind of a dance between the flopping fowls.
    The Hisers were out, working their victory garden. When they saw Dad dancing in that fall of floating feathers, they knew Bill was home. They capered down their runner-bean row, cackling.
    Dad and I plucked the chickens over buckets of boiling water down in the basement, letting Mom have Bill to herself. We cleaned and dressed the birds and soaked them in cold pink salt water.
    Upstairs they popped in the pan, and the potatoes were on the boil. Then Dad was laying into them with the masher and all our butter, and Mom was going for the company dishes.
    The Hisers brought over the last of their strawberries and shortcake to go with them. But they wouldn’t stay. They were in and out because every minute mattered, with Bill here.
    He’d brought presents. Beaded moccasins for Mom, a hunting knife in a tooled Mexican leather sheath for Dad. My present was upstairs.
    It wasn’t quite dark. This was the longest day of the year. I watched Bill pull his kit out of his musette bag and lay it out on the bed like an inspection. The dress shoes like patent leather, those Brassoed buttons, the wings. There was a pair of fleece-lined boots and a cap and big, fleecy gloves. The bed was woolly as a sheep. But there by the pillow was the pen wiper I’d made in Miss Mossman’s class.
    â€œYou know what these mean?” Bill held up the thick gloves. He looked down at me, but not as far down as before.
    â€œIt’s cold up there?” I said. “That high up?”
    â€œAnd down below too.”
    So I almost knew he wasn’t heading anywhere hot, like the South Pacific or Africa. It was almost a secret, and I thought I could keep it.
    I was following Bill’s every move when he pulled the red and white letter sweater out of the closet. “You’re ready for this, aren’t you?”
    I was starting to shoot up, so yes. He gave me the sweater on the first night, not his last. He didn’t make me wait.
    I told him about the Jalopy Parade. The sponsored jalopies, the decorations, the floats, the marching bands, the Parade Queen. Flags waved all over our particular world, but it must