Drink for the Thirst to Come (17 page)

We made the run, dropped our load, and then were on our own. I hoped there were ball bearings all over Schweinfurt.

Gremlin
was light and bouncy without bombs and a good part of its fuel. Her tail was frisky. We dropped into the coffin corner, the number five slot in formation, and were the first hit from the rear by fighters. Sitting in my nest, chute stuffed in the tunnel behind, I had time to think as I popped tracers at the 109s that swept up and past. I was thinking about the novel Soc wouldn’t finish, about numbers and how I didn’t believe this thing, this B-17, could fly, not for real, so how could we be here?

When the little hairy guy behind me started singing, I barely had time to yell what the hell’s a civilian doing on a combat mission? He laughed and the tracers laughed with him, said I was right, the damned thing couldn’t fly, not if I didn’t believe it. He didn’t speak American but I knew what he was saying. He told me to get on with it; he was none of my worry. I was there to give them their Festival, the fireworks.

Those are my words. His were something older. Finer. He laughed and laughed. I didn’t believe in him any more than I did in the ability of a B-17 to climb to Angels Twenty-five, then soft as a bird, come back to earth.

The headset was jammed, everyone shouting at once. The bombardier and navigator were on nose guns, yelling. Jens, the radio guy, was on dorsal. The waist gunners were doing the port and starboard dance as the F-Ws and MEs swooped over, under and past us. The two between my legs were working and I was doing my share of yelling. Our thirteen guns poured streams of half-inch steel-jackets in divergent cones of fire. We surrounded
Gremlin
with a shell of shielding metal.

Except from what slipped through.

The Messerschmitt dropped into our slipstream. My tracers reached for him, but he was below my cone of fire. Then a funny thing: A haze of—I can only call it “female” light—flew down, flew up, flew in, surrounded him, danced him up, up so softly, to be pecked by my bullets. They swam him back and forth; my 50s tapped along his engine cowling. Smoke streamed. When the bullets reached the canopy, it vanished in a spray of blood and fragments.

My kill.

The plane didn’t realize its pilot was dead, though, and kept to the mission. Slid itself under us, then, in revenge or maybe for fun, peeled up and into our starboard wing. We lost the last ten feet of wing and the 109 spun flaming away and down.

Gremlin
waggled but flew. When we lost the outboard engine, we banked into the stream of fuel pouring from the broken wing. I was believing less and less in this 17’s ability to fly.

There was music behind me. The space aft of bulkhead seven was filled with, well, “people,” I guess you’d call them. Some had stuck their heads through
Gremlin
’s skin. Watching the show, I guessed. A few slipped outside for a better look at the broken wingtip. They dissolved their way along the vapors that vented from us.

We plunged into a cloud mass and sky raced past my windows. The intercom was solid sound.

Our war was over. We might could limp a bit, but
Gremlin
was not going back to Cornhole. The old guy behind me was having just the best time about that.

We popped out of the thunderhead into clear sky. Ahead, the sun would be going to ground. My view was behind. Way back, Schweinfurt was a pillar of smoke rising to catch the failing light. Below was night where thunder licked the clouds. Smoke and fuel poured from the inboard engine, gas vapors filled the air in our spiraling wake.

Doas ignored the headset screams and feathered the inboard portside engine and pulled the bottle. The extinguisher did its job. We drove along struggling to stay airborne. After the bomb run, our altitude had been close to our operational ceiling, near Angels Thirty. In the last—Christ, it had only been about ten minutes—I reckon we had dropped to eighteen, twenty.

Not that I wasn’t already scared, but when the old guy leaned over my shoulder and shoved, well, through me—the only way I can describe it—and pushed his face out the bulletproof glass in front of my nose, it upset me. He pulled the rest of the way through me and out of the plane and stood on my twin barrels. I knew he didn’t really need them guns to stand in the air.

He called. A wave of others like him, and some a lot prettier and others, different, flowed up from below. They came so easy, no effort…

…leading a flock of ME 109s. The Messerschmitts peeled off to bypass my tracers. I yelled to Doas that we had company but a stream of tracers buzzed through the ship forward my position, and that was it for the rest of the world.

Gremlin
seemed to stop dead for a second, then she eased side-wise, wobbled, and went right again. The sky was beautiful, blue, gold, and red against the towering column of Schweinfurt. Hundreds of little guys and their thousand friends sat in the air outside; they watched like we were a movie.

Black smoke streamed past my face. Thin at first, it grew thick in a second or two. I felt heat behind me. I turned…

Saw…

Red flame and pretty young people. Fire wrapped them like love and they sang it. They had my parachute. It blossomed and the shrouds were ribbons of white and dancing heat snakes, the silk bubbled red and gold. The pretty people poured the light of my chute from hand to hand. My eyeballs sucked dry with the heat.

I guess it was another piece of the starboard wing. Something rammed back along the fuselage and spun by like an echo. Soon the fire would be at the fuel and we’d go up like a bomb.

I thought I’d jump, take any way to go but fire death. Another part of me said do nothing. A moral conflict, Soc might have called it.

The Old Guy stuck his face back through the glass and into mine. In pure joy he sang. In his words was the stench of war. He sang in ways I didn’t know. He sang, “Why are you waiting? Walk with me.” Maybe it was, “Be with me.” He wanted me to be with the air, with him. That was my place. The plane was of earth. Dirt made metal. Metal made to fly. No sense, but there she was.

Then he was Miss Duchenne, my teacher whom I’ve dearly loved these years and have mentioned before. I considered. She gave her arm, an offer to dance, and said she’d tell me, there, of metal ores and plastics made of oil from the deep, and rubber from jungle trees a world away. We’d dance and learn together.

I reached behind, released the emergency hatch. My hands blistered, but I didn’t care. Doas, the others, were gone or going. Way I saw it, my post was deserting me. I said goodbye to the war, the world, let go my belief that steel could fly and rolled out slick, Miss Duchenne on my arm.

The air was liquid ice and washed me away from
Gremlin
and its smells. I danced a cool bee-bop turn with warm Micheline Duchenne. On my back,
Gremlin
dropped away above, then dissolved in flame and parts. The air wrinkled and pieces scattered, grinding finer and finer, ripping past us, then falling smaller, smaller than dust.

Miss Duchenne laughed at my concern. She said, “They don’t like left-behinds.” The air, the water, the fire would cleanse it all, she said. When she said it, the sky above us went clear with night and stars. I fell, believing in the people of the flames, in the cleansing air, and probably the waters too, I didn’t know about that. Micheline thanked me, bid
adieu
, and slipped into the night. I spread my arms and leaned into the thunder below. Earth opened up to take me, laughing with me, at my fall to home.

I remember nothing, after, but singing voices and an orchestra of machinery that ground down, forever. And when I woke, everyone was talking German. I knew they did not speak German in heaven so figured I was elsewhere.

I was: Berlin. After six hospitals, I’d ended in Berlin. To count it: I had two broken legs, a shattered arm and collarbone. Other things internal. Spleens and such. They thought I’d lose an eye, but I kept it. I had burns where my flight suit had flamed as I fell. According to one Kraut, a doctor, S.S. officer, whatever he was, the fall should have extinguished me. And where was my parachute, he wanted to know?

“The old folk took it. I left it in the plane,” I said.

He nodded. I could not survive a fall from three miles without a parachute. Could I? Would I care to try it again? 16,000 feet? Show them how I did it, would I, would I?

I said no. I said I didn’t know. That maybe I was borne aloft, that flights of angels had sung me to my rest. Miss Duchenne taught me those words, oh, years ago. Even I laughed at it with him. I never told that I had danced to earth.

The final report was a beaut. In scientific German, complete with numbers, it said falling I’d blacked out from lack of oxygen, from cold, from pain. That, unconscious, my arms and legs had spread. That I’d pancaked down, buoyed by an updraft from the storm. That, while the terminal velocity for my aerodynamic configuration would have killed me on impact, I had fallen among evergreen trees; my fall was broken by branches, and, farther down, by underbrush, that when I landed, I fell into deep snow and loamy soil. Like on Daddy’s farm.

Finally, the Germans said I was brave, a soldier who did not accept death as given, but trusted to the elements of air, earth, fire, and water. I think that smiling Kraut doctor put in that last part. Maybe he was right.

“What your English comrades call ‘Gremlins’ perhaps?” he said with a final smirk.

Or maybe it was Miss Duchenne.

The Germans traded me, with honors. The Air Corps was suspicious. Finally someone figured it would be better to celebrate than punish me. They sent me home a hero, an American miracle.

I walked again, learned to use my arm. I can almost see from the eye the Germans thought I’d lose.

One night after the war, walking our land looking at the night, the mud got to sucking at my boots. Daddy was next to me, also looking at the dark. He talked about weather, about crops. Then he was quiet. There was more he wanted to say and he said it. “This is the one time I’ll ask what happened,” he said. “If you’re ready, you can tell me.”

I did, told him more or less the truth. When I finished, he smiled for maybe the tenth time in his life.

“Tonight I was thinking about Socrates,” I said. “Them books he’ll never write. I was wondering why I lived and he didn’t.”

Daddy nodded. “Every man comes back from war is that question: ‘Why me, not them; why them, not me?’ You got an answer?” He looked at me and waited. I believe that was the first time Daddy ever asked something he didn’t already have an answer for.

“Maybe because I’m part dirt and spit and all hot air. Maybe because this is magic every season, every year.” Mud sucked at my boots. Fireflies winked as far as I saw. Rain cut the distance, and lightning. For a moment, I thought I heard the voices that were not speech or noise, but more and older, music without sound.

“Good reason as any,” Daddy said. He looked at me then watched the fireflies too. “Like I said, old wars is mainly lies.”

The thunder thanked me. I turned up my collar. Big rains and more were coming.

SOME STAGES ON THE ROAD TOWARD OUR FAILURE TO REACH THE MOON

The trip to the moon did not happen. It failed because of a hat. As with most things the failure arrived in stages, the end-point of many details. Of course it was not the fault of the hat.

Stage One: DeAngelo was born.

Stage Two: DeAngelo’s dad died. Korea.

Stage Three: DeAngelo found the dead cat three weeks after school started. Fifth grade. Luck was all. As usual he was dodging Keegan and Niewig after Release Time at Saint Sophie’s. As usual they got him. This time he came to earth by the peony bushes along the rectory wall, his face in the dirt, arm wrung behind. Niewig twisted, Keegan giggled.

Two feet from DeAngelo’s nose, lying in the tangle of stems and peony petals, recently dead—within a day, DeAngelo figured—was Father O’Doule’s cat. Its grinning head was angled stiffly; it screamed a silent yowl inches from DeAngelo’s face. Its paws stiff, tail going bare, muddy skin showed beneath the fur.

Pain from his twisted arm shot from his shoulder to the back of his head. He shoved pain and Keegan’s giggles to the background. When he did, what had happened to the cat became apparent: the thing expired, probably snoozing on O’Doule’s windowsill, directly above. Struck by sickness, nastiness, age, or poison, God had come to it and it had fallen three stone stories into the peonies that ringed the building. The cat was dead on landing, DeAngelo was sure, but getting it from alive on the sill to dead in the bush, that was the thing. He ran the stages in his head: the jerk of croaking death, that first. Then, propelled from the sill, already stiffening (bouncing off an imagined parapet which DeAngelo knew that falling bodies always struck in slow-motion), the cat body tumbled slowly, fell between stems, hit the ground, adjusted to place. The peonies rebounded, swayed, then were still with all evidence of death, fall and cat, gone. Then, forever begins.

Meanwhile, Niewig and Keegan knelt on DeAngelo’s back. They twisted and giggled until he grunted into the dirt, yes, yes he was queer, one big queer! He said it, said it again, whatever.

Whatever DeAngelo was at that moment though, Father O’Doule’s cat lay there, rotting. It would continue in that course. In
Encyclopedia Britannica
time-lapse he imagined: cat shriveling, collapsing, white grubs blooming, wriggling in quick time, devouring until.

And DeAngelo knew where it was happening. Better: no one else did, certainly not Reinhart.

Stage Four: DeAngelo showed Reinhart the drawings he’d made over a week of watching the animal disintegrate. Reinhart shrugged.

“Wait’ll you see,” DeAngelo told him.

The day he took him there, two things happened: the cat disappeared and Sputnik went up.