A Master Plan for Rescue Read Online Free PDF

didn’t bother to nod.
    When I think of it now, I have to look for the logic. But then I was a boy, the son of a mother who had faith in signs. And in my mind, Moon Shapiro waiting until the second day I’d been moved to the front row to knock me to the dirt beneath that sad, little tree was a sign as clear as my grandfather’s shootings. Moon’s hard-knuckled fists had stamped 4-F into my flesh as assuredly as the army doctor had stamped it onto Uncle Glenn’s paperwork. We were unfit for service. Whatever that service might turn out to be.
    •   •   •
    Over the next weeks, Moon Shapiro beat me up on a schedule only he could predict. Sometimes I’d come through the chain-link fence and find Declan’s face in the dirt, or Francis flat on the sidewalk. Other days it would be only Moon, leaning against that tree, making it bend like he was a gale force wind. Then it would be my cheek pressed into the gravel, my colorful organs his fists would seek. And each time they landed, I’d think
4-F, 4-F, 4-F
.
    Nearly every day, walking home, I’d see another blue star appear in another window of an apartment building. A Son in Service star, hung whenever someone in the family had enlisted, joined up to fight in Europe or the Pacific. Each time I spotted one of these stars, I felt more useless, more 4-F. Because they only reminded me that everybody—except me—was doing something for the war effort.
    My father had taken a second job, working a graveyard shift at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—although he claimed he possessed no discernible mechanical skills. My mother was now doing the bookkeeping for the businesses of men who had gone to war. Aunt May got a job stitching together uniforms in a converted dress factory on 34th Street. And during the National Boy Scout Scrap Metal Drive, I’d had to walk around the block to avoid Bobby Devine—dressed in his uniform—who was on Dyckman Street collecting old signs and car bumpers.
    Uncle Glenn had joined Civil Defense. After that night on the roof, he’d spent a couple of weekends training on Staten Island, and now he had a certificate signed by Fiorello La Guardia, a white Civil Defense helmet and armband, and a piercing silver Civil Defense whistle.
    Every night, Uncle Glenn put on his white helmet and armband, and patrolled the neighborhood, blowing his whistle up at the window of anybody who hadn’t pulled his blackout shades all the way down. One night, when we were on our way to see a Roy Rogers movie at the Alpine theater, Uncle Glenn made us miss the newsreel because he’d stopped to blow his whistle at somebody’s window for five minutes.
    “Can’t you maybe take one night off from Civil Defense?” Aunt May had asked him.
    “You don’t see Hitler taking the night off,” he told her.
    I asked Uncle Glenn how old someone needed to be to join Civil Defense, and he said definitely older than twelve. But the next day, he brought me a pack of enemy aircraft spotter cards.
    These were regular playing cards printed with the silhouettes of enemy planes—German and Japanese—and they were a coveted item at P.S. 52. Standing on the playground with your face turned to the sky, praying for the sight of a Focke-Wulf Kurier or a Mitsubishi Reconnaissance to come rumbling over the roof of the school so you could identify it, had replaced skully as the favored recess pastime.
    That night, I sat on my bed and memorized the shape of all the German aircraft—the ones I thought most likely to find their way over New York City. I didn’t worry too much about my eyes, how they had not been corrected as well for distance. The planes were big, and I only needed to recognize their forms.
    The following afternoon, I took my place beside the other boys gazing into the sky.
    It was one of those clear, blue-sky days New York sometimes gets in the wintertime. So clear, I couldn’t tell how far up I was seeing, because it’s difficult to gauge depth when everything is the same