"Mine didn't," Walter said. "I never won once; I entered around fifteen times."
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "Mr. Gumm, before you go I have something I want to give you. You wait here." She hurried off into a side room. "For helping."
He thought, Probably a cookie or two.
But when she returned she had a brightly-colored decal. "For your car," she said, holding it out to him. "It goes on the back window. A CD sticker; you dip it in warm water, and then the paper slides off and you slide the emblem on the car window." She beamed at him.
"I don't currently have a car," he said.
Her face showed dismay. "Oh," she said.
With a braying, but good-natured, laugh, Walter said, "Hey, maybe he could paste it onto the back of his coat."
"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Keitelbein said, in confusion. "Well, thank you anyhow; I wish I could reward you, but I can't think how. I'll try to make the classes as interesting as I can; how's that?"
"Swell," he said. Picking up his coat he moved toward the hall. "I have to be going," he said. "I'll see you Tuesday, then. At two."
In a corner of the room, on a window seat, somebody had built a model of some sort. Ragle stopped to inspect it.
"We'll be using that," Mrs. Keitelbein said.
"What is it?" he said. It appeared to be a representation of a military fort: a hollow square in which tiny soldiers could be viewed at their duties. The colors were greenish brown and gray. Touching the miniature gun-barrel that stuck up from the top of it, he discovered that it was carved wood. "Quite real," he said.
Walter said, "We built a bunch of those. The earlier classes, I mean. CD classes last year, when we lived in Cleveland. Mom brought them along; I guess nobody else wanted them." He laughed his braying laugh again. It was more nervous than unkind.
"That's a replica of a Mormon fort," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "I'll be darned," Ragle said. "I'm interested in this. You know, I was in World War Two; I was over in the Pacific."
"I dimly remember reading that about you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "You being such a celebrity... every once in a while I come across a little article about you in one of the magazines. Don't you hold some sort of record as the longest contest winner of any of the newspaper or TV contests?"
"I suppose so," he said.
Walter said, "Did you see heavy fighting in the Pacific?"
"No," he said candidly. "Another fellow and I were stuck on a hunk of dirt with a few palm trees and a corrugated-iron shack and a radio transmitter and weather-measuring instruments. He measured the weather and I transmitted the information to a Navy installation a couple hundred miles to the south of us. That took about an hour a day. The rest of the day I lay around trying to figure out the weather. I used to try to predict what it would be like. That wasn't our job; all we did was send them the readings and they did the predicting. But I got pretty good. I could look up at the sky and that plus the readings gave me enough to go on, so my guesses worked out more times than not."
"I imagine weather conditions were of prime importance to the Navy and Army," Mrs. Keitelbein said.
He answered, "A storm could wreck a landing operation, scatter a convoy of supply carriers. Change the course of the war."
"Maybe that's where you got your practice," Walter said. "For the contest. Making book on the weather."
At that, Ragle laughed. "Yes," he said. "That's what he and I did; we made book on it. I'd say it was going to rain at ten o'clock and he'd bet me it wouldn't. We managed to fritter away a couple of years doing that. That, and drinking beer. When they brought in our supplies once a month they left off a standard ration of beer -- standard, we figured, for a platoon. Only trouble was, we had no way to cool it. Warm beer, day after day." How it took him back to remember all that. Twelve, thirteen years ago... He had been thirty-three years old. An employee in a steam laundry when the draft-notice showed up in the mailbox.
"Hey, Mom," Walter said excitedly. "I got a real good idea; what about Mr. Gumm talking to the class about his military experiences? He could give them a sense of participation; you know, the immediacy of the danger and all that. He probably remembers a whole bunch of training they gave the GIs about safety and what to do under fire and emergency situations."
Ragle said, "That's about all there is; what I told you."
"But you remember stories the other guys swapped, about air-raids and bombings," Walter persisted. "They don't have to actually have happened to you."
Kids are all about the same, Ragle thought. This boy talked along the lines Sammy talked. Sammy was ten; this boy was, say, sixteen. But he liked both of them. And he took it as a compliment.
Fame, he thought. This is my reward for being the greatest -- or longest -- winner in the history of puzzle contests. Boys between the ages of ten and sixteen think I'm somebody.
It amused him. And he said, "I'll wear my full general's uniform when I show up Tuesday."
The boy's eyes widened; then he tried to stiffen and appear blasé. "No kidding?" he said. "A full general? Four star?"
"Absolutely," he said, as solemnly as possible. Mrs. Keitelbein smiled, and he smiled across at her.
At five-thirty, when the store had been closed and locked up, Vic Nielson called the three or four checkers over together.
"Listen," he said. All day he had been planning this out. The window shades were down; the customers had left. At the registers one of the store's assistant managers had started counting the money and setting the tapes for tomorrow. "I want you people to do me a favor. It's a psychological experiment. It'll only take thirty seconds. Okay?" Especially he appealed to Liz; she was the power among the checkers, and if she said okay the others probably would.
"Can't it be done tomorrow?" Liz said. She already had her coat on, and she had changed from low heels to high heels. In them she seemed like some majestic three-dimensional pineapple juice display poster.
Vic said, "My wife's parked out in the lot waiting. If I don't get out there in a minute or so, she'll start honking. So you know this won't take long."
The other checkers, male, small, watched Liz for her reaction. They still had on their white aprons, and their pencils behind their ears.
"All right," she said. Waggling her finger at him she said, "But you better be telling the truth; we better be right out of here."
He walked over to the produce department, shook a paper bag loose from one of the bins, and began blowing it up. Liz and the other checkers gazed at him dully.
"What I want you to do is this," he said, throttling the full bag of air. "I'm going to pop this bag and then I'm going to yell a command at you. I want you to do exactly what I say; don't think about it -- just do it when you hear me yell it. I want you to react without giving it any time. You understand what I mean?"
Chewing on a piece of gum that she had pilfered from the candy and gum rack, Liz said, "Yeah, we understand. Go on, pop and yell."
"Face me," he said. The four of them stood with their backs to the wide glass exit door. It was the only door through which any of them passed to get into and out of the store. "Okay," he said, and, lifting up the bag, yelled, "Run!" And then he popped it. As he yelled, the four of them jumped slightly, startled. When the bag popped -- its noise in the empty store was terrific -- the four of them bolted like hares.
None of them ran toward the door. As a group they ran directly left, toward an upright support pillar. Six, seven, eight steps at it... and then they halted, wheezing and disconcerted.
"Now what's this?" Liz demanded. "What's this about? You said you were going to pop the bag first, and then you went ahead and you yelled first."
"Thanks, Liz," he said. "That's fine. You can go meet your boy friend."