City of God (29 page)

Out back, a walled half-acre was given over to a Victory garden,

And beyond this was a long slow-rising upland to which Miss Manderleigh pointed as she brought out a picnic basket, and a heavy portable radio

Like a hostess determined to see to the fun of her guest.

He still had no idea, he hadn't even thought of it,

except perhaps as his own fantasy, though

it was just the two of them, my brother told me

Trudging up the long hill road that was like a church aisle

between the hedgerows bowing like deferential courtiers
in the sharply rising wind.

Oh dear, Miss Manderleigh said

The sky a weird green vault, the first drops falling,

And then this rainy blow was upon them,

a very un-English rainstorm

And by the time they reached the shelter of a barn

they were soaked to the skin.

Birds had been barnthwacked by the wind.

Two or three of them in the tall whipped grass flapped in circles around their broken wings.

Inside, in the darkness, the portable radio my brother held like luggage

had somehow switched itself on and suddenly

They were listening to a shortwave speech of Hitler's

Sounding like the spillage from an upended toolbox of nails and nuts and bolts,

The crisis of the world war rudely denying any pastoral exception

and probably accelerating the two young people's

instinct to make love while it still was makeable.

She turned the radio off, he lit a lantern

and warmed himself in the sight of Miss Manderleigh

her wetted pastel picnic outfit, all the over- and undergarments pressed like a single sheer wrap against her newly apparent person.

Amused to be so flummoxed, Look at this, she seemed to say

With her lips pressed together dimpling her cheeks in comic self-denigration, her eyebrows raised, the lantern light shining from her eyes

This surprising strapping girl with fleshy pink shoulders

the upper back rounding as she crossed her arms

over her breasts, a curious glance at her raised foot in his hand

As if the undressing were being performed on someone else.

Not that my brother reported the details

—he is given to reticence in all matters sexual—

But I embellish his account

with horse blankets to burrow under

a bottle of wine from the basket,

the cork popping, the wine in two glasses

the cucumber sandwiches and deviled eggs neglected

the wind whistling through the siding

a couple of farm horses in their stalls seemingly glad for the company

their shudders and snorts modified in his mind to a kind of animal approval.

That evening at dinner the general in dress uniform presided from the end of the table,

Miss Manderleigh and my brother on either side.

They dined on the garden's produce and game birds from the fields.

You knew in this country at war where everything came from.

When the general was ready to call it a night

he muttered his hopes for my brother's well-being and shook his hand.

His man helped him up the winding stairs.

Ronald and Miss Manderleigh drank brandy and soda, and played cribbage by the fire

And when she was satisfied the house was quiet she led him to her room.

He told me he'd become quite drunk but did remember her bed, the four posts carved like chess bishops.

I like to think how they must have swayed in parallel, rhomboiding east, rhomboiding west,

until the pale dawn crept under the hems of the wartime window drapes.

I like to think how this weekend of pragmatic English sport

was by this time an achieved hallucination in his mind.

How he'd imagine them shuttling to the matins bells of the cathedral a Cotswold away,

with monks in their cells yawning as they scourged themselves,

and the latinate syllables rising like unnerved barnswallows into the dark European morning.

And not much later it was Good-bye First Sergeant

First Sergeant it was in that way of patriotic flings with doomed Allied airmen,

And everything wet in the gray light, the stained quarry stone of the castellated manor.
The old bedewed high-polished black Bentley the browned gravel under his feet.

He looked off to the barn a rolling hill away so oddly placed to kill the wind-blown birds.

The chastened hedgerows still now, the morning cold and calm.

He stood there not knowing what to say, they had not exchanged addresses.

He felt from her no lingering intimacy.

She was one of that English race that did what had to be done.

They were threadbare now, on their uppers, but they still did what needed to be done.

As an American soldier he was new to that,

There was so much they would not speak of

Anything they did was a form of mourning.

Miss Manderleigh exhausted, and badly in need of sleep,

Her smile was a terrible struggle on her swollen lips

and her hair too hastily combed this morning

for the illusory farewell of a sweet and lasting friendship.

And he would never forget the genderless sad soul that stared from her eyes,

erasing from his memory their color, as he said good-bye.
Good-bye Miss Manderleigh, good-bye.

Twenty-four hours later all the crews of my brother's wing

were put on alert, and at dawn the next morning

the Flying Fortresses, each carrying five thousand pounds of bombs

lumbered down the runway into the mists over Suffolk.

Group joined group circling in the sky over East Anglia

until the rendezvous of all 140 B-17s and their P-47 fighter escort was made.

The bombs of this particular mission were intended for the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, deep inside Germany

Or perhaps Regensburg where the Germans made their fighter planes

Or was it Regensfurt or maybe Schweinburg

I'll have to remember to check that with my brother

He is as reticent about his war experiences as about his romances as a young man

A modest family hero, now in his seventies playing tennis every day

And proud of his three grown sons with whom he likes to fish,

And devoted to his first wife of forty-odd years and to a martini before dinner

And to the rituals of the High Holy Days.

In any event the mission would prove a disaster

Although the Fortresses were fitted out with long-range fuel tanks,

the P-47s had only fuel to fly them

over Holland as far as the German border and back

But it was over Germany that the Huns appeared,

their squadrons of yellow-nosed Messerschmitt 109s

diving from the rear upon the stolid straight-flying bombers
maintaining their formations

as they were raked by the fighters' wing cannon Punctured, stippled, set on fire

their own .50-caliber twin-muzzle turret guns kerchunking away at the infuriating stings

of the curling diving here-and-gone 109s.

The intercom was filled with shouts, commands, and someone moaning.

The cabinetry of gauges and lights and glowing tubes at Ronald's station

Seemed all at once to fall in upon itself like a sandcastle

The lights went out, the intercom went dead

He found a glowing piece of shrapnel burning through his glove

The fuselage wall in front of him was like an eye of blue, the color of his mother's eyes

Smoke suddenly filled the shuddering Fortress and almost as suddenly dissipated.

He disentangled himself and ran forward

for the reason that the craft was tilted in that direction.

He found the co-pilot slumped on his stick, the pilot gesturing.

Ronald pulled the dead boy back from his chair —his head was almost severed from his body—

gently cradled him to the floor of the cabin and took his place.

He removed his own flight jacket using the fleece lining

to wipe the blood out of the co-pilot's oxygen mask,

and put the mask on.

He wiped the blood spatter from the windows.

A calibrated row of lights marked the path of German rounds through the fuselage.

The 17's nose having been brought up level,

he was ordered to hold the controls while the pilot, whose face was smeared with blood attempted to clear it from his eyes.

So there was Ronald maintaining his new station,

Ahead the sky was filled with broken formations of Fortresses

Pairs of Focke-Wulfs now taking over from the 109s curling out of the sun
diving upon the 17s,

Flying right through their groups, machine guns spitting

and soaring off insolently for another run.

It didn't seem to matter that one or another Hun would explode or tail off in a plume of smoke,

They were suicidally joyous.

The bombers burst into flame,
or spun like falling leaves
or wheeled over themselves on their wing-tips or dove straight-arrowed into the ground.

Contrails and tracers crisscrossed the sky indecipherable messages
punctuated with bursts of black flak

Bodies flew past, parachutists caught in the slipstream
pieces of wing, engine cowlings, hatches a bare foot, a head in its leather helmet, instrument panels, a propeller idly turning

All the debris of machines and men Sky crap now to be flown through.

How long it lasted he couldn't tell there seemed to be no other possible life until finally the Focke-Wulfs were outdistanced

and what remained of the squadrons perhaps sixty planes,
came within sight of their target.

With only a vicious covering flak to fly through the crews were ready to go to work.

Bomb bays were opened, the Fortresses turned made their approach
and went in for their runs.

The city below seemed to puff out all at once

There was a new sound under the engine drone,

the wumphing of delayed explosions of the ground, accompanied by cradle sways of the aircraft

His plane suddenly rising, Ronald heard the bombardier shout, Bombs away

He imputed an anthropomorphic sense of triumph to his plane

that had delivered its stern message to the Germans.

Now let's get the fuck out of here, the pilot said.

Only then realizing no response from the stick. Whatever he did, nothing happened.

The flight plan called for avoiding the Luftwaffe that had tormented them on the way in

by continuing on, heading south over the Italian Alps to airfields in North Africa.

But the run had pointed them westward over Germany.

He could not coax the plane to turn or bank, or climb or do anything except go forward.

It felt to him as they droned onward that the cables were stripped, hanging by a thread

And that any minute everything might come off in his hands.

Oh shit don't do this to me, Ronald heard him say.

Gradually they decreased altitude by temporarily slowing the ground speed and feathering two of the engines

Until they were flying soundly enough in order to avoid detection
just five hundred feet

above perversely neat fields lined with hedgerows.

Small herds of cows moved to a sluggish gallop as they passed

An old man pointing, a woman was at her clothesline a railroad station porter shaking his fist

A long freight train on a siding, guards raising their rifles,

Ronald felt all of Germany was now alerted to this wounded American beast lumbering over the countryside.

Yet on they went, just three or four crewmen left alive in their freezing pungently burnt-out plane alone, without radio contact,

And the wind whistling through a thousand tears in the fuselage

and dead comrades slumped in their shattered gun turrets. . .

Friends, brothers and sisters

How can we see to it that our stories don't falter like old veterans parading?

The experience of experience is untransmittable,

The children shrug what's done is done, and history instructs them finally

not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,

As some thirty million were in World War Two, each a packet of terminal agony for at least one unendurable moment

and all the loving structures of consciousness satanically compressed as the world came to an end.

I ask how many times the world may come to an end before the world comes to an end?

Sitting in the rubble of the pilot's cabin the green fields below grayed in the dried blood on the window screen,

Perhaps my brother Ronald had intimation beyond the circumstance in which he found himself

Of a Europe so historically steeped in fantasy, fantasy of king, fantasy of priest,

as to be instantly enlistable to the causes of murderous storytelling

From the mouths of its most monstrous twentieth-century impresarios,

the loudspeaking sociopaths who always knew whom to blame.

Or perhaps he ruminated on the difference between war and peace

as a matter of organization, the deaths of peace

being comparatively haphazard, slapdash, local or attenuated by such means as poverty

compared to the surefire concerted mass mobilization of war death.

More likely, as he sat freezing in his shirt and then, no more comfortably, in his flight jacket whose fleece lining was hung with small stalactites of the dead airman's blood,

he thought of his mother and father, Ruth and Ben, while not quite able to visualize them

but feeling them as prevailing moral presences conferring strength merely from their existence as his mother and father.

And he thought of his kid brother, Everett, who so seriously took instruction
in the throwing and catching of a baseball, and he felt that Everett's protected innocence was strength-conferring.

He checked his watch: in the States their day was in full swing.

He swore he would someday rejoin their modest life of work and school and home