Willow during the war, as Owen went from eight to twelve, was like a prairie village brushed by black clouds that sweep low overhead but do not discharge their tornado, though at the Scheherazade there were newsreels of airplanes turning cities into fields of fire and of GIs storming sandy island beaches strafed by fanatical Japanese who had to be burned out of their caves with flamethrowers like nests of insects. While the great Eurasian continent from end to end seethed with moving masses and vast death and the oceans drank torpedoed ships, North America held its breath, a land of women and children and old men and price controls and rationing tokens and war stamps and Hollywood comedians on the radio. Yet the tingle of global gambles filled the air and enthralled their island of peace: there was a speeding-up, a sense of stakes higher than the old proprieties. Carol Wisniewski let herself be fucked by Marty Naftzinger standing up, and Momma took a job at the parachute factory and did plane-spotting on the roof of the fire station, playing solitaire with a special deck of cards, and Grampy came out of his retirement to work on the borough highway crew, and Daddy put on a warden’s helmet in air-raid drills looking for light leaks from the windows along Mifflin Avenue. Owen took the paper off of tin cans and jumped on them, flattening them on the cement floor of the chicken house for the war effort, while the chickens rustled and cackled on their crusty rungs, or in the cubbyholes where glass eggs lured them into laying more. The eggs—brown, speckled, dabbled with dung—Grammy sold in reused paper egg cartons to her many relatives, and the flattened tin cans piled up on the school grounds, making a shining mountain which only Chub Kroninger, the three-star general of fifth-grade scrap collection, was allowed to climb. Promotion was achieved by weighing the metal turned in, and Owen’s family was too small and poor to furnish enough scrap metal to raise him in the ranks. Daddy had taken to rolling his own cigarettes on a clever little machine; the store-bought packs had been a main source of tinfoil, along with sticks of chewing gum.