“See!”
“Call. How about pretending? Just for fun, pretend the guy is a spy, and we’ve got to get the proof.”
He looked uncertain. “Like one of your jokes?”
“Yes. No.” Sometimes Call could be perfectly sensible and at other times you could have gotten more sense out of a six-year-old. “It’s like a game, Call.” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Come on.” I started running for the path through the salt meadow marsh with Call puffing behind me.
If Call’s family was as poor as my grandmother said they were, I could never figure out how Call got so fat. As a matter of fact, both his mother and grandmother were fat. I thought that if you were poor you were skinny. But the evidence seemed to contradict this. And Call had other problems with running besides his weight. Like all of us, his shoes came from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. To order shoes from a catalog, you stood on a piece of brown wrapping paper, and your mother drew a pencil line around both your feet. These outlines were sent to the mail-order house, and they sent you shoes to fit the brown wrapping-paper feet. But the brown paper outlines didn’t tell the mail-order house how fat your feet were on the top. For that reason, poor Call never had a pair of shoes that would lace properly. The tops of his feet were so fat that once he got his shoes laced up, there was nothing left to make a proper bow. So when he ran, his shoes often came unlaced and flapped up and down on his heels.
It was low tide, so I left the path and began making my way through the marsh. My plan was to give the old Wallace house a wide berth and come up on it from the south side. The old man would never expect people from that direction.
“Wait!” Call cried out. “I lost my shoe.”
I went back to where Call was standing on one leg like an overweight egret. “My shoe got stuck,” he said.
I pulled his shoe out of the mud for him and tried to clean it off on the cordgrass.
“My grandma will beat me,” he said. It was hard for me to imagine Call’s tubby little grandmother taking a switch to a large fifteen-year-old boy, but I held my peace. I had a greater problem than that. What would Franklin D. Roosevelt say about a spy who lost his shoe in the salt marsh and worried aloud that his grandma would beat him? I sighed and handed Call the shoe. He put it on and limped back to the path.
“Sit down,” I commanded.
“On the ground?”
“Yes, on the ground.” What did he expect, an easy chair? Then I cleaned his shoes and mine as best I could with my handkerchief. My mother had trouble persuading me to carry one because I was a lady, but I now realized that a handkerchief was an invaluable tool for a counterspy—to erase fingerprints, and so forth. “Now,” I said, “I’m going to fix your shoestrings.” I unlaced his strings and started again, skipping the second and fourth holes. This way I could make the lace long enough to provide a decent bow.
“There,” I said, tying them for him as though he were a little child.
“You left out four holes.”
“Call. I did it on purpose. So they wouldn’t come loose all the time.”
“They look dumb.”
“Not as dumb as you’d look in your sockfeet.”
He pretended to ignore this and stared at his shoelaces, as though trying to decide whether to retie them or to leave them be.
“Why don’t you think of it as a secret signal?”
“A what?”
“Counterspies have to have ways of identifying themselves to other counterspies. Like secret code words. Or wearing a special kind of flower. Or—tying their shoes a certain way.”
“You can’t make me believe that spies tie their shoestrings funny.”
“Just ask Franklin D. Roosevelt when we meet him.”
“That’s one of your jokes.”
“Oh, come on. You can tie them again later, after the mission.”
He had his mouth set to argue, but I didn’t wait for a retort. Good heavens. The war would be over and he’d still be sitting there fussing about his shoestrings. “Follow me and keep low.”
The cordgrass was about two feet high. There was no way, short of crawling through the mud on our bellies, that we could approach the Wallace house unseen. But there is a way of feeling invisible that makes one almost believe it’s true. At any rate, I felt invisible, creeping bent over toward that great gray clapboard house. My heart was beating as fast and noisily as the motor of the Portia Sue.
There was no sound of life from the house. Earlier I had heard sawing and pounding. Now everything was quiet except the gentle lapping of the water on the nearby shore and the occasional cry of a water bird.
I signaled for Call to follow me to the southwest corner of the house, and then, keeping close to the side, we slipped silently to the first window facing south. Carefully, I raised my head until my eyes could peer over the sill into the room. It was evidently the room that the old man had chosen for his workshop. Weather-beaten chairs, their cane bottoms sagging and broken, were arranged to serve as sawhorses. The floor was covered with wood curls and sawdust. The sounds I had heard from across the marsh came from here, but the old man was no longer in the room. I gestured Call to stay down, that there was nothing to see, but of course he stuck his head up and peered in, just as I had done.