Drink for the Thirst to Come (15 page)

Pearl Harbor was my sixteenth birthday and I wanted to go fight. Daddy said trenches is no place for kids. Said he ought to know, having been a kid in the trenches himself, the last war. But he kept thinking. That same Sunday evening we walked into the bottomland and watched night gather and scoot out from under the trees by the Red. Ground crackled underfoot and sucked my boots like it wanted to draw me down. Our place is rich loam and always keeps a little damp under an early freeze so nothing strange there. That night smelled so pretty, a little charred hickory in the air. But we’re talking about Daddy, who was still thinking. I held my breath.

“That Old World’s a strange place,” he said. “Europe’s got things in her soil, up her airs, probably under her waters, too. I won’t speak to that; I never been under them waters.”

I didn’t know what Daddy was talking about but seemed like he was changing his heart. He didn’t do that much, so I stood quiet.

“I learned things in the mud of France what I wouldn’t have got nowhere else.” He chewed on his cheek. “You can go,” he said. “But.” He looked at my eyes like he was sure it was me busted the kitchen window, which it was. “You watch now, y’hear?”

“I’ll be careful,” me being agreeable, figuring he’d already changed his mind once that night.

“I ain’t saying be careful. Cripes, careful ain’t for soldiers. I’m telling you, keep your eyes open and your ears clean.” He beaded down hard. “I’d tell you about the old ones as cares for earth and air, tell you about them things in the fire. Water too I guess, cripes. I’d tell you, but then you’d think your daddy’d gone crazy with fairy ways and Santy Claus.” He spat on the ground. “You’ll see. Maybe. Maybe only us folk sees them.” He looked at me. “Farmers—part spit, part dirt, and all hot air.” He kicked the place where his spit fell. “We got old ones, too. Old Folk here go back before the white man, so maybe they’re less partial to you and me…”

The dark had crawled up to his face. For maybe the ninth time in his life, Daddy smiled. He shoved my hair around, then, “Anyways,” he said, “old wars is mainly lies.”

Next day I ran across them fields to enlist. I lied about my age. Daddy confirmed the lie on a paper he wrote out, saying, “My boy is oldern he looks and smartern he seems.”

Being small, I had nothing much to work the lie upon, but what I lacked in height and muscle, I made up for in face hair and brass, so they took me.

Boot camp shaved my head and ran me ragged. We lifted, jumped, pushed-up, polished, threw, crawled, and fought. We got yelled at, told not to think Goddamnit and to jump when someone says to jump and quick too. When I got past thinking and got big where it mattered, the Army declared me a soldier then sent me to the Air Corps. Which would be all right, I figured, flying a plane of hurtling silver, shooting down my enemy man-to-man.

They shipped me to gunnery school where I sat in wheelbarrows and shot broom handles, which is how I learned the .30 caliber and the .50. Sergeant Bugg said in all his days he’d never seen one so deadly with a broom as was I.

My buddy was a guy from the east called Socrates. He was smart and told me Sarge was ironic—making fun. Soc and I took turns running the barrow while the other aimed the broom.

When they gave me shooting guns that was better. I could write my name with a caliber .30—if what I aimed at wasn’t dodging, diving, or shooting back. Shooting, diving, and ducking—that was war, seemed to me. Soc laughed, shook his head, and wrote down what I’d said in a book he was making.

They assigned us to the B-17, the Flying Fortress. Soc learned waist gunning. Being small, I became a tail gunner.

Let me tell you about the B-17: The 17’s a hair off 75 feet long. Tail gunner sits less than three feet from the dead end.

Let me tell you about the tail of a B-17: The plane skinnies from the waist on. Heading back, first you stoop, then you duck, then you waddle. You try not to bump your head but, naturally, you do. You watch grabbing anything along the sides because on the skin and between the ribs are breaker boxes, conduits, wire bundles, oxygen bottles, there are hydraulic lines everywhere, control cables that squeak through struts, roll over pulleys, and dip into secret places. All that keeps the plane flying or someone alive. Anyway, you never touch anything metal with your bare hands, not at Angels Sixteen and up, because the cold burns your skin right to it. That’s why you’ve got a flight suit and gloves.

Flying, the plane shifts, creaks, and chatters, she bends, twists, flaps, moans, and shivers. Can’t tell you all the sounds she makes.

At bulkhead seven, there’s a caibo can to the side. It stinks but so much of the plane does in so many interesting ways, I didn’t mind. Past the can, you crawl; you crawl around the hump where the tailwheel snugs into the fuselage. You crawl and eventually there’s an armored seat. Above it is a glass box big enough for your head. After that is the air. Twin .50s poke between your legs in case you want to kill something means you harm. In woolens, flight suit, helmet, gloves, boots, and parachute, you barely squeeze into that iron-bottom seat. Even I had trouble. After a bit I started leaving my chute back by the tail wheel. An easier crawl that way. SOPs said not to, everyone said not, the gunnery sergeant, pilot, everyone, so I figured everyone must do it so I did it too. That wasn’t exactly thinking—which I knew not to do—but without the chute, I could at least move a little, look around, get some idea where the targets were coming from, the notion being you kill the target before the target kills everybody.

That’s the tail of the B-17.

When the Army graduated us to the war, Soc and I shipped as cargo on a flight of 17s being ferried to 8th Air Force, England. Replacements—ships and us. No one had to tell us what we were replacing or why we were required.

At Angels Twenty-five—that’s Air Corps talk for twenty-five thousand feet—it’s three hundred miles an hour and forty below zero outside the plane. It’s not much warmer in.

Soc and I hunkered down forward of the waist guns and talked. Keeping warm, you know? Soc talked, anyway. He talked about the war, the world after the war—”geopolitics” he called it—he talked about the next war, about the big sciences of life and death and, well, he talked about Socrates things. For warmth, you know.

“Next time,” he said, “it’s going to be science. New wars will be numbers and engineering.”

Couldn’t help laughing. I remembered what Daddy said about old wars.

Soc didn’t notice. “Look here,” he said. His voice was rubbery through his O-mask. “Soon it’ll be just our machines fighting theirs. Our brains versus theirs. Men won’t even see the battles they’re in.” He pulled his mask deeper into the fur hole around his hood. “Science won’t make war obsolete—just the warrior.” The voice came out his O-tube.

“Might have a point,” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

I pointed my face at the plane around us. There we were, I told him, sailing the mighty ocean in a single night, freezing our soft asses behind thin metal at Angels Twenty-five. I was trying not to think, see? At least I wasn’t thinking science, but you look at a B-17 on the ground. There is no way it flies. A 17 is sixty-five thousand pounds of Mother Earth, mined, smelted, poured, shaped, fitted and tuned. It could not, no shade of doubt about it, fly. It could not but that everyone agreed it could—pilot, crew, folks at home, the enemy in Berlin, everyone knew a B-17 flew—so fly it just naturally does. Science? I didn’t know; Soc would have called that superstition.

“Yeah,” I said, “the plane’s the warrior, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said and went on thinking aloud. “We’ll pave the world, dwell in buildings of the mind, all be part of a vast electric…” His eye poked from his parka. “You know what?” his rubber-voice asked, “we are priests.” Oxygen hissed around his words. “Yeah, you and me, acolytes of the new rites of combat. Yeah, that’s going to be my book,
Priesthood of Mars
it’s called.” He squinted. “Or
In Holy Orders
… Well, something like.” He pulled his head back under the fur and said something I don’t doubt was important, but which I couldn’t hear.

On the ground in England another bunch of pilots—they seemed like pretty happy guys, mostly drunk I think—took the planes and flew them off to bases all over what they called Anglia. That was still England.

Soc and me shipped in a beat-up bus to our assignment base, Cranwell Hall, Suffolk, the Air Corps having more important things to fly than us, for Christ sake. I was used to least tit by now.

England’s air breathed different. It tasted. Smelled like Granma’s place, old and smoky. The air and that cold night flight might have put me to sleep because on the way to Cranwell I dreamed. It was full night when Soc nudged me awake. Our headlamps were blacked down to little slits and the bus crawled behind a little squeak of light on the road ahead.

“German night raiders!” Soc whispered and pointed overhead. Gave me a chilly thrill. Here I was in the war, history all around. I got used to it in a few minutes.

Fields rose on steep hills, both sides of the road. All along those up-and-down meadows the harvest ground-stubble was afire. Low flames tumbled in long weaving lines. They rolled uphill, wriggling and whipping like deep blue worms in red and yellow rut. Between the fires and our creeping bus, dark shadows danced; people and animals, I guessed. The shadows herded the flames across the leas and over the crests!

“Farmers?” I asked Soc.

“Don’t know,” he whispered, and kept writing his book.

“Incendiaries?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said slow and plain. “Ask the driver.”

“Bombs?” I asked the old bloke driving. He said nothing. “Sir!” I yelled above the engine. “Was it bombs made them fires?” I guessed he was deaf.

When we cleared the burning hills and rolled into flat land and darker night the driver piped up. “Not bombs, Yank,” he said. “You be in Anglia, now. This be sea-born land ’n’ all here’bouts.” He hunched the wheel, his chin pointed ahead. “All the land here be claimed from the sea in King Charlie’s time.” He gave me a wink. “Them folk,” he cocked his head at the glowing hills behind us, “crazy with country ways, they are. After harvest, they dance wi’ th’ eelymen’als, give ’em their way about, you see? It were their old farthers as stole the warter’s land, they reckon, so pleasing them Undeens makes fer good crops—good wars, too, I reckon.” He coughed a saw-grass laugh my direction. “Eelymen’als like a good to-do!”

“Eely whats?” I shouted to him.

“Eel-e-mentals!” he hollered back, straining on the word. “Old folk! Them of earth and air, the fires and the warters. Them farm folk there be lettin’ the Sallymander play, I reckon. But what’s the point, I arsks? They’ll be fire enough anon, little Yank.” He laughed, then laughed again.

I listened like Daddy told me, but had no idea what the old bloke was saying. When I came back to the seat Soc was asleep. Soon I was too.

Let me tell you about Cranwell Hall and Lakenheath. At this time, all England was under arms. Cranwell Hall was one of hundreds of bases along the North Sea all aimed at the Continent. Every day, our planes from Cranwell and the others rose, rendezvoused over the Channel, and headed for Hanover, Bremen, Frankfurt, Brest, and a thousand places. We were taking war to the enemy.

Three miles from Cranwell was another farm town, Lakenheath: a street of houses, a monument to Daddy’s War, two pubs, a church—all flint and balance—and a chips shop.

Between Lakenheath and Cranwell Hall was a common meadow. On Lakenheath Lea, what the blokes called it, the Air Corps had built a dummy base. The figuring was that from three miles up and lit by marker flares, wood and canvas, painted lines and staked-out squares would look enough like planes, flight lines, and barracks to convince German night raiders to target the Lea and not Cranwell.

That was the idea. It frequently worked.

The Germans showed up at Cranwell about the same time Soc and I did so we spent our first night of war in the brig, a solid place and mostly empty.

Soc was shivering. “Ironic,” he said between waves, “our lives, plans, my future depends on the Germans being perfect. Planes, pilots, bombardiers, bombs all have to be on the money. We expect they’ll miss us because they’ll be on target for the decoy.” His eyes flickered in the winking dark. “What about Kraut fuckups? Our ruse is perfect but some Heinie sad sack misses by a mile and kills the real thing. Us! Ironic. So damn ironic.”

The night went flash and boom distantly and Soc said “ironic” again. I figured war had lots of irony.

That night the ruse and the Nazis worked swell. I slept. Sleeping, I dreamed fireworms crawling the fields. I heard musical voices in the flame. Maybe this was what Daddy’d said to listen for. But this was England. He’d been in France.

Next day, we met the First Sergeant. He said we were mostly useless and sent us to get assigned. We got driven to the crew area in a jeep, which was as much help as we got. Nobody liked us. Like the first shirt said, we were useless and probably already dead, so there wasn’t much point in fussing.

Eventually we got assigned. Soc got sent to one plane. I went to another.

My pilot was Shorty Doas—Captain Doas—from Kentucky and taller than me by just that-much. He looked hardly any older but must have been. I walked in, he took one look and grinned like I was a long-missed baby brother. He wrapped his arm on me and said none of the guys could now rightly call him Shorty. He said it again, louder, ran his hand from the top of my head to the middle of his so everybody got he was an inch taller. They all laughed. Then I was one of them.

Our plane was the
Gallopin’ Gremlin
. The other crews hated the name. Called us bad luck. Doas loved that. That was him, twist the devil’s tail.

The
Gremlin
’s crew had just formed up. None of us—the plane either, for that matter—had seen combat. The guy I was replacing was dead before anybody met him. Nobody knew him, not even his name. His gear was still in the first shirt’s office and Sarge was waiting for the guy’s orders to catch up so he could find where to ship it all back stateside. The pain-in-the-ass hadn’t been killed by action. Drunk when he arrived, he walked into a spinning prop on the flightline.