The Boys Start the War

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  Yearling has been the leading name

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  OTHER YEARLING BOOKS

  BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR

  YOU WILL ENJOY

  THE GIRLS GET EVEN

  BOYS AGAINST GIRLS

  THE GIRLS’ REVENGE

  A TRAITOR AMONG THE BOYS

  A SPY AMONG THE GIRLS

  THE BOYS RETURN

  THE GIRLS TAKE OVER

  BOYS IN CONTROL

  To the young readers of Buchhannon, West Virginia,

  which is almost, but not quite,

  the location of this story.

  Contents

  One: The Aliens

  Two: Burial at Sea

  Three: Ghost

  Four: Conversation

  Five: Peace Offering

  Six: The River on Caroline

  Seven: Free-for-all

  Eight: Floating Heads

  Nine: Ransom

  Ten: Siren Song

  Eleven: Trapped

  Twelve: Letters

  Thirteen: Kidnapped

  Fourteen: Hornswoggled

  Fifteen: Bamboozled

  “The island’s sinking!”

  Wally studied the rivers of yellow that began streaming out from the middle.

  “Sandbags! Sandbags!” he cried, lifting his waffle up at the edges with his fork, first one side, then the other.

  If he made a little cut in each corner, the hot syrup traveled from one square to the next, but if he poured the syrup directly over the pat of butter, sitting like an island in the middle of his breakfast, the island grew smaller and smaller as the butter melted, until finally …

  “They’re coming!”

  The back door banged and Wally jumped. Jake and Josh came tumbling into the kitchen, followed by seven-year-old Peter.

  “Who?” asked Wally.

  “The new guys over in Bensons’ house!” Jake grabbed the field glasses from the shelf where Mother kept them after she finished her bird-watching. “C’ mon!”

  Feet pounded on the stairs, and Wally knew that his brothers were headed for the trapdoor in the attic ceiling and the small balcony on top of the house—the widow’s walk, it was called—where they could see out over the whole town, practically.

  He sighed, picked up his plate and fork, and went up the first flight of stairs to the bedrooms, then the second set of stairs to the attic.

  He could never understand why his two older brothers were always in such a rush. Sooner or later they would find out whether the three new boys in that family were their own ages or not, so why the hurry? Wally felt that you should spend the last week of summer vacation as lazily as possible, and now he couldn’t even enjoy his waffle in peace.

  Yesterday Josh had been sitting under a tree sketching Martians, or what he thought Martians would look like. Jake had been figuring out what they would all do on Halloween, and Wally and Peter had been lying in the grass, watching ants crawling in and out of a rotten apple—exactly the kinds of ways you expected to spend a summer day. Peter was the only one in the family who liked to study things the way Wally did. They both had brown hair, blue eyes, and thick, sturdy hands like their father’s, Jake and Josh, however, were string-bean skinny, with skin that tanned by the first week of June.

  Jake already had the stepladder in place, and Josh climbed to the top and pushed up on the trapdoor. Blue sky shone through the square opening as a shower of pigeon droppings rained down on them. One piece landed on Wally’s waffle. One gray-white blob of digested worms and bugs. Wally stared helplessly at his plate, then set it on the floor and followed his brothers to the balcony above.

  He sat down in one corner and watched as Jake inched forward on his stomach, field glasses in hand, until he was close to the railing. The wind whipped at Wally’s shirt, but it was a warm, dry wind that spelled September.

  “Why are they just sitting there?” Jake wondered aloud; holding the glasses steady as he stared across the river.

  Wally squinted, studying the car in the driveway of the house at the end of Island Avenue. The large piece of land in the middle of Buckman was not really an island, because water surrounded only three asides of it, but people called it “The Island” anyway. If you were coming in from the east; you entered Buckman on Island Avenue and kept going until you were out on the very tip, and then you crossed the bridge over into the business district. You might not even have noticed that the river on your right was the same as that on your left; it simply looped about at the end of the island.

  “Okay, a door’s openings here they come!” said Jake.

  “How old are they?” Josh asked.

  Wally hoped there would be friends for each of them—an eleven-year-old for the twins, a nine-year-old for him, and a seven-year-old friend for Peter. The family that had moved out of the house on the other side of the river—who had left West Virginia to go to Georgia—had five boys of all ages, and they had been the best friends the Hatfords ever had.

  “Well, say something!” demanded Peter when Jake didn’t answer. “Are they aliens or what?”

  “There’s the father,” said Jake. “Now someone’s getting out one of the back doors.… A guy about twelve, I’d guess…”

  “Yea!” cheered Josh.

  “No, wait a minute … it’s a girl … no, a boy.…” Jake’s voice began to fade. “A girl. She just took off her cap.”

  A girl! Wally and Josh stared at each other. Who said anything about girls?

  Josh took the field glasses next. He sat with his elbows propped on his knees, staring across the river. “No one else is getting out…. Now the other door’s opening. It’s the mother…. Here come the rest.” He gasped. “Another girl …!”

  “Two girls?” wailed Jake.

  Wally thoughtfully bit his lip. This was serious! He grabbed the field glasses himself, “My turn,” he said.

  At the tip of the island a man and woman stood looking up at a large old house. Wally could see a tall girl behind them, leaning against a tree and holding a baseball cap in one hand. A smaller girl was running down to the river.

  Another leg emerged from the backseat of the car. A sneakered foot, faded jeans, a knee, a thigh, and then the last member of the new family got out and stretched.

  “A girl,” said Wally, disbelieving, and handed the field glasses back to Josh.

  Nobody spoke for almost a minute.

  “They’re aliens, all right,” said Josh.

  “Three kids in one family and they’re all girls?” Jake cried incredulously. “I thought Mrs. Benson told Mom they had rented their house to a family with three boys!”

  Wally tried to remember exactly. “She said she thought there were three kids—”

  “And that maybe we would still have enough to play baseball….” added Josh. “I thought she meant boys!”

  Wally’s shoulders slumped. For years, ever since he could remember, the Hatford and Benson boys had got together every afternoon, rain or shine, to shoot BBs, fish, swim, play kick-the-can, camp out near Smuggler’s Cove, climb Knob Hill, explore the old coal mine, or just lie on their backs in the grass and talk.

  More than that, with the five Benson boys, the Hatford brothers regularly won first place in the costume contest at Halloween. One year they had each dressed up like some of
the teachers at school; another year they had been dominoes; and a third year they chained themselves together like a prison gang. With the nine of them they had their own baseball team, and every May played a team from Grafton. They had even started their own band. Nothing would be the same again.

  Wally stared out over the hills that dipped and rose like a roller coaster all around Buckman. The steeples of the United Methodist Church and the college chapel peeped up over the tops of the trees surrounding the courthouse, and the shiny horseshoe of a river curved around the island. It was a wonderful old town, but anytime he and his brothers walked over the swinging footbridge now, they would find three girls in the last house on Island Avenue, not the friends they had known all their lives.

  “We just figured it would be a family of boys, that’s all,” he said at last.

  “Well, we figured wrong,” said Josh.

  For a long while there was not another sound from the widow’s walk. Finally Jake broke the silence:

  “Let’s burn the bridge.”

  Wally turned and stared. “What?”

  “Just go down there some night and burn the footbridge,” Jake said. “Then the girls couldn’t get over to our side of the river. Not here, anyway. They’d have to cross the road bridge and get to school the long way around.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” said Josh. “Dad would kill us.”

  “We don’t have to burn the bridge. We’ll just never invite them over here,” said Wally.

  “That’s not enough.” said Jake.

  “We won’t have anything to do with them,” offered his twin, whose arms and legs were as long and spidery as Jake’s.

  “Not enough,” said Jake.

  “Well, what do you want to do, then? Vaporize them?” asked Peter, getting right to the point.

  Jake sat with his lips pressed hard together and Wally could almost see currents connecting ip his brain. Jake was the ringleader, the planner, and he usually got his way; “Do you remember the movie we saw once, The Gang from Reno!”

  “Yeah,” said Josh and Wally.

  “No,” said Peter.

  “It was about this village up in the mountains,” Jake told him. “A motorcycle gang from Reno comes and takes over. But the villagers finally drive them out just by making them miserable. We’ve got to make the new people miserable.”

  Wally leaned against the railing and studied Jake. It sounded pretty awful, even talking about it. “How do you know that the Bensons will move back if we do?”

  “Because they weren’t sure they’d like Georgia, so they’re only renting out their house here instead of selling. If they have trouble keeping renters, they just might give up and move back. You know they’d really rather live here. Anybody would rather live here. We’re just helping them make up their minds, that’s all.”

  “But how are we going to make the new family miserable?” asked Josh, and they all turned to Wally. This always happened. Wally got involved whether he wanted to or not. He always said the first thing that came to his head, and that’s why his brothers asked him.

  “Think, Wally!” said Jake. “Think of the most terrible, awful, disgusting, horrible thing in the world.”

  Wally tried. He wondered if there was anything more awful or disgusting than pigeon poop on a waffle.

  “Dead fish,” he said finally.

  Jake and Josh looked at each other.

  “That’s it!” yelped Josh. “We could dump them on the bank over on the other side, and the family will think the river’s polluted.”

  “We’ll dump everything dead we can find, and they’ll be afraid to swim or fish or anything,” said Jake. “Start collecting all the dead stuff you can, and put it in a bag in the garage. Great idea, Wally!”

  “Hoo boy!” cried Josh. “The war is on!”

  “Wow!” said Peter.

  Wally blinked. How had this happened? What had become of his wonderful day? Only a few minutes ago he’d been peacefully planning to float a waffle box down the river—see if it would make the curve at the end of Island Avenue and come back up the other side. Then he was going to climb to the top of the courthouse to see if there really were bats up there, the way Josh said, and after that he was going to jump from the largest branch of the sycamore into the river, and maybe he would even have gone out to the cemetery after dark, just to say he’d been.

  He waited his turn at the trapdoor and slowly climbed down the ladder to the attic below. He picked up his plate, went down to the kitchen, scrunched up the empty waffle box and his waffle along with it, and then, with a sigh, threw them both in the trash.

  Caroline Malloy leapt out of the car and rushed across the lawn, her ponytail flying out behind her like a flag.

  “The river!” she screeched. “Beth! Eddie! Look!”

  Edith Ann, the oldest, who hated her name and made everyone call her Eddie, stuck her baseball cap back on her head and wandered over. Beth, who had had her nose in a book, The Living Tentacles of Planet Z, ever since the family left Ohio that morning, came slowly across the yard, turning a page as she walked, and probably would have stepped right off the edge of the bank if Caroline hadn’t caught her.

  “Look!” Caroline said again, and the three sisters stared out over the Buckman River.

  They were lined up like steps. Eddie, eleven, was tallest by far, and always wore her cap, even to the dinner table, Beth, ten, was fair-haired and pale-skinned, and tended to list to one side in a strong wind. It was eight-year-old Caroline, with dark hair and eyes like her father’s, who had big plans for that river. Caroline, her mother always said, was precocious.

  “I hope there are rapids!” she cried. “I hope there’s a dam and a waterfall and quicksand and snakes …”

  She couldn’t go on. It was just too exciting. If they were only going to be here a year, she wanted to make the most of it. Caroline wanted to be an actress, and she imagined a scene in which she was floating unconscious in the water, heading for the falls, and someone had to rescue her. Or she might be sinking in quicksand, and would cleverly grab a vine at the last minute to pull herself out.

  If it was a really dangerous scene where she had to paddle through rapids or something, she could always count on Eddie to be her stuntwoman. In fact, if Eddie did the hard parts and Beth wrote the script, the three of them could play almost any scene they liked.

  They’d call their company Malloy Studios, her dream went on, and it would take its place beside Universal and Paramount in Hollywood. Actress, scriptwriter, and stuntwoman, all related. Not that Beth and Eddie knew anything about this, of course.

  “Caroline on the River,” she said to the others. “Would that make a good movie title, Beth?”

  “The River on Caroline, maybe,” Eddie told her.

  Beth made a face. “Movie titles have to be mysterious, like Faces in the Water or Curses in the Current or something.”

  “How about The Nymph from Nowhere?” Caroline suggested. “How does that sound?”

  “Girls!” yelled their father. “We need your help unloading before the van gets here. I’ve got to move the car.”

  Caroline took one last look over her shoulder as she followed her sisters back to the house. Picking up her own suitcase, she went upstairs, where Eddie and Beth were choosing bedrooms. She didn’t much care what room she had, because as far as she was concerned, there was only one place she really belonged, and that was onstage. Somewhere in her life there was a stage, a camera, lights, and a script just for her.

  “You can have this room, Caroline,” Eddie said, showing her the one next to the bath.

  Caroline dropped her things on the floor and went right to the window to study the river once again, Eddie leaning over her shoulder.

  “Hey!” Eddie said after a moment. “Look over there!”

  “Where?”

  “On top of that house across the river. Do you see something moving?”

  Caroline rested her chin on her hands and squinted. She did see somethin
g, but she wasn’t sure what.

  “I’ll get Dad’s binoculars,” she said, running downstairs and out to the car.

  “Take something with you as you go,” her father insisted as she started toward the house again, and Caroline picked up at bag filled with shoes.

  When she returned, Beth was in her room also.

  “What are you looking at?” Beth asked.

  “We’re not sure,” said Caroline. She crouched by the window, holding the binoculars up to her eyes. Then she giggled, “Look at them over there! They even have field glasses!”

  Beth squeezed between Caroline and Eddie and looked where her sister was pointing. “They look like leprechauns,” she said.

  “They’re boys,” Eddie told her.

  “How can you tell? They could be leprechauns, chimpanzees, creatures from the black lagoon …”

  “But what are they most likely to be, Beth?” Eddie insisted. “Hand her the binoculars, Caroline.”

  Beth took the binoculars. “Boys,” she answered.

  “Right.”

  “Spying on us!” Beth said, starting to smile.

  “Right again.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Eddie laughed. “Give them something to look at.”

  “But what?”

  “We’ll see,” said Eddie.

  Caroline smiled to herself. Whatever did girls do without sisters? She took the binoculars again and watched as the four boys across the river slowly made their way back down the trapdoor in the roof.

  “Whatever we do, it’s got to be good,” said Eddie. “If they want a show, we’ll give them something to talk about.”

  “Like what?” Beth insisted. “Dance naked around the yard?”

  Eddie gave her a pained look and was quiet a moment, thinking. At last she said, “Somebody has to die, and Caroline’s it.”

  “Eddie!”

  “Oh, just pretend,” Eddie told her.

  Delicious goose bumps rose up on Caroline’s arms. “I hope we don’t go back to Ohio,” she said aloud. “I hope we never go back. This is so much more exciting.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” said Eddie. “We’ll wait until we see them up there spying again. Then Beth and I will go down to the river carrying Caroline.”