Chapter One


The wheels made a horrible sound; no wonder. The wagon belonged to Joey Kind down the block, who
hadn't used it in years; the whole thing was a rusted mess. And the nerve of Joey to say, "You be careful,
Meggie Dillon. Don't ruin it."

Too bad, I wanted to tell him, keep your old wagon. But I had to borrow it. It was all for the war effort.
And right now rattling along in the center of the wagon was Big Bertha, Mom's iron statue that had a clock
in her stomach. She'd been rusting away in the attic forever, just like Joey's wagon.

Big Bertha was going to war. Mr. North at the junkyard would pay me a quarter and Bertha would be
melted down into bullets. Poor Bertha.

It was almost dark so I began to hurry. I chugged past Grandpa's house but I knew he wasn't there. He
was at my house waiting for Dad to get home from work. Dad had news, that was all Mom would tell us,
and we'd hear it over a late supper of salad greens and flounder in tomato sauce: greens we'd grown in
Grandpa's garden, and flounder Grandpa and I had caught this morning. Poor flounder. Poor me for
having to eat it with every single one of its skinny bones getting caught in my teeth.

Someone was moving along the side of Grandpa's house. My mouth went dry. Here we were in the middle
of a war. Suppose it was a spy?

As quietly as I could considering the squeak of the wheels, I shoved the wagon into a pile of bushes and
tiptoed up the driveway. I went slowly, ready to tear back to the street and across the lawn to one of
Grandpa's neighbors before the spy shot me.

A pair of shadows. I clapped my hand to my mouth so I wouldn't make a sound. Then I realized I knew
them both. One was Joey Kind's older brother, Mikey, and the other was a kid I had seen down at the
beach flexing his muscles as if he were Charles Atlas, the weight lifter. His name was Tommy or Donny or .
. . I wasn't sure, but I remembered my friend Lily Mollahan nudging me, asking, "Did you ever see such an
idiot in your life?"

He was not only an idiot, he was big. They were both big, sixteen or seventeen, and tough, and I
shivered thinking what would happen if they caught me following them.

But what were they doing? They had an open can of red paint and a couple of brushes, and they began
to dab something on Grandpa's kitchen window.

"Hey!" I yelled, without stopping to think.

They spun around. Mikey looked embarrassed, but the muscle guy kept going with the brush. It looked as
if he were painting a spider . . . but then I saw. He was painting a swastika, the Nazi sign, on the glass
pane.

"That's what we do to Nazis around here," he said.

"He's not a Nazi!" I could feel the anger in my chest, a pain so sharp it was almost hard to breathe. "He's
American," I managed.

"Sounds German to me." The muscle guy was grinning. And then he was imitating Grandpa, mixing up his
fs and his vs, sounding the way the Nazis did in the movies . . .

. . . sounding like Grandpa.

I had a quick picture of Grandpa in my mind, Grandpa sitting on a bench down at the canal, his head back,
that awful red hat on his head, his face sunburned, singing "Mairzy Doats" with a German accent.

"Get out of here, both of you!" I yelled, almost forgetting it would be dark in about two minutes and I was
alone with them back there.

"You're lucky," Muscle Man said. "If this were anywhere else but Rockaway, they'd probably put him in jail.
He's got to be a spy."

I picked up a stone, ready to throw it, but Mikey took a step toward me. "You know what,...

 

"Tough and tender, this [book] is an excellent addition to World War II shelves."

 

Willow Run by Patricia Reilly Giff
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