To taunt his friend with this, his lack of a father—he was appalled at himself. Shame bubbled up like mucky black water when his foot went through thin ice in the swamp beyond the high-school grounds. Though he tried to apologize the next day, he was not sure the easy trust between him and Buddy was ever quite restored. Besides wiring things and gluing airplane models together, they used to spend hours making childish artifacts of no clear utility—plywood cutouts of Disney characters, for example. Owen would hold his breath as he delicately steered the thin blade of his coping saw around some fragile protuberance like Goofy’s muzzle or Mickey’s ears. Creatures from all the animated Disney cartoons, plus green-skinned gremlins invented to illustrate wartime slang, populated hundreds of armed-forces insignia; it almost seemed that Disney and Hollywood were running the war, with its cast of millions. Buddy wanted to be in the Corps of Engineers, making bridges for armies to cross on; Owen wanted to be a test pilot, pulling out of dives at the last second. He had met Buddy, in fact, while playing with a rubber-tracked toy M-4 tank in the playground sandbox, and this taller boy had come over and offered to show him his collection of model airplanes—P-51s and Zeros and Spitfires and Messerschmitts, some lead models and some he had carved himself out of balsa wood—in his basement, which was just up beyond the cornfield, a mere six odd house numbers from Owen’s house, and three beyond the ill-fated Hoffmans’. The Rourkes—Buddy and his mild-mannered mother and twerpy younger sister—lived not exactly in a house but in the first floor and basement of a double house, of yellow brick, fairly new. It held four families all told, people who couldn’t afford a house of their own, and this was a little like living on Second Street, or having a father who was not nice to your mother.

Owen was grateful he did not live in an apartment, just as he was glad not to be a girl or left-handed. Imagine having to write in that contorted position to avoid rubbing your hand in wet ink! He was a lucky person, he decided early. He was certainly lucky compared with the children of London or Leningrad or, later on, Berlin and Tokyo. When his family turned out all the lights and crouched on the stair landing to be away from flying glass, it was a mock air raid, a pretense, and when a plane droned overhead, and he waited with his heart pounding for the bomb to fall, it was of course one of our planes, and no bomb fell. But, then, why would Tojo and Hitler want to bomb Willow? Because of one little parachute factory?