Five Minutes in Heaven Read Free

Commie Killers were forced to accept her as a member, even though she was a girl and the youngest kid in the neighborhood. But fair was fair, and the Commie Killers’ mission was to spread justice throughout the land. They consoled themselves with her promise to hide them one at a time in her father’s office at her house as he examined patients. You had to lurk outside the door until he went into the bathroom between appointments. Then you slithered across the floor on your belly and slid beneath the huge maroon leather sofa. You could hear him discussing all kinds of interesting things with naked people you later saw walking around town fully clothed. From a certain angle, you could even catch a glimpse of the examining table.
    On the day of her initiation, Jude concealed her tricycle in the pine grove by the path to Ace Kilgore’s headquarters. Someone dug a cellar hole in the field across the street from Sandy Andrews’s house before going bankrupt. Ace and his gang had constructed a network of trenches, bunkers, and tunnels in the abandoned hills of red clay, like an ant colony. Parents tried to prevent their sons from playing with Ace. He threw snowballs with rocks in them at little children. And he tied twine with tin cans on one end to dogs’ tails. Once, he and his platoon pushed a junked refrigerator onto the train tracks in the valley, causing the engine to derail. Jude’s father said he might get sent to reform school. Every kid in the neighborhood tried to avoid meeting his eyes, which were a dull shoe polish black. If he caught you looking at him, you became the target of an interrogation regarding your secret espionage activities for the Russians.
    Nevertheless, every boy in Tidewater Estates sneaked away to Commie Killer meetings except Sandy Andrews, who was a sissy. They made their mothers rip the patches off their fathers’ old army uniforms and sew them on their jacket sleeves, and they pinned their fathers’ multicolored bars on their chest pockets. Ace had the most because his father had been a hero in the war. Jude made Clementine retrieve her father’s olive uniform jacket from the attic. It stank of mothballs, but it sported the requisite bars and patches, which Clementine agreed to stitch onto her jacket if her father gave his permission. Instead, he forbade her to have anything to do with Ace Kilgore.
    Jude used to play with the neighborhood girls at Noreen Worth’s, but she was tired of diapering dolls with handkerchiefs and rolling around the playhouse floor speaking in tongues. Besides, Noreen, whose father was a Holiness preacher, claimed Jude was a bad
    Baptist because at Jude’s church people just sat in their pews and kept quiet. She had also played a few times with Clementine’s daughters in Riverbend. But all they ever did was jump rope, turning two ropes really fast and chanting things Jude couldn’t understand. Whenever Jude tried to jump in, she ended up on the ground, trussed like a calf for branding. She found it hard to believe that these were the children Clementine loved more than herself. So, despite her father’s stern injunction, Jude found herself irresistibly drawn to the Commie Killers.
    The hideout was dark inside, apart from the light from a white candle stuck in the clay floor. The boys were wearing only Jockey briefs, so Jude hurriedly stripped down to her white cotton panties. Ace passed out several round Quaker Oats boxes and wooden spoons. As some drummed, others danced. Watching from the corner of her eye, Jude copied their writhing, hopping movements, like an Indian war dance. Ace’s father’s colonel hat with the golden eagle above the brim kept slipping down over his eyes. So excited was Jude finally to be a full-fledged defender of the American Way that she had goose bumps all over her flesh. She thought she could hear a cat yowling from the corner of the cave.
    The boys were kneeling in the dirt as Ace