Nothing but a Smile (18 page)

Wink frowned. “That happens sometimes, a car stuck on the tracks. It
could
have been an accident.”

She explained that it was a slow-moving freight train—one that had barely picked up speed coming out of Breakey—and they sat quietly with that for a good long while, watching the land roll by.

She was gaunt and haggard, looking more like one of those FSA portraits of Okies by Dorthea Lange than the widow of a bank president. And she looked older than her years—at least as old as Chesty's aunt and uncle back in Chicago. But she also looked more like Chesty than they ever did. Sal had never met anyone who shared his narrow nose and distinctive brow. It made her wonder if her husband's mother was also artistic. She'd never thought to ask him.

The family plot Chesty's mother took them to wasn't actually in the Breakey cemetery but in a tiny rural cemetery twenty minutes down the road. Sal got the feeling there was a good reason they'd removed themselves to this exile. Back in town, there were no doubt many citizens of Breakey still smarting from the collapse of the savings and loan fifteen years before.

The grave had been dug in one of the few remaining spaces, near other Chesterton headstones, including that of Chesty's dad and another awaiting his weary-looking mother, the final date still unchiseled. “It's nothing much,” she said. “Hardly anything left to it, nowadays, the rate they seem to be dropping like flies, the Chestertons … But still, we managed to hang on to a little space yet. This, for William, and a spot for me, which'll be soon enough, I imagine. And of course I been saving a spot for you, too, child. I knew William would be coming back one day, and now he has and he brought me my never-before-seen daughter-in-law along in the bargain, and I couldn't be happier to finally lay eyes on you, I just couldn't, and the Lord did finally deliver my boy back to me.”

Sal wasn't sure what to say about the plot the nice lady had saved for her—if she should thank her, if she should say she wasn't sure yet what she'd be doing when the time came. She was only twenty-five. Her own folks were buried north of Chicago, and she had no idea if they had room for her. And did this mean she would never fall in love again, the next fifty or sixty years? Right now, the idea felt as improbable as her becoming a jungle explorer or learning to fly, but she wasn't unrealistic. The heart could mend. And even now, in her grief, the idea that it wouldn't, that she could actually face the remainder—heck, the majority—of her life alone,
decades
of solitude, made something catch in her lungs or her sternum. So she said nothing, pulling the slender woman toward her, hugging her. Chesty's mom had a hard boniness to her that made her almost painful to hug, and Sal thought,
I wouldn't have it any other way.

The honor guard was a pimply corporal with bottle-bottom glasses who'd come by bus from the nearest Army Reserve unit.

He didn't appear to have ever traveled beyond the borders of Nebraska, let alone seen action. As he folded the flag, his hands shook—a sign she interpreted as more likely meaning he was a novice than any indicator he was particularly moved. Once he'd performed this little bit of patriotic origami, he presented it to Sal, along with a rigid salute.

As much as she kind of wanted it, after considering a moment, stroking her gloved hand across the crisp fabric, she turned and placed it in her mother-in-law's lap. From the way Mrs. Chesterton's shoulders shuddered and her veil swayed with her sobs, Sal could tell she'd done the right thing. She'd cherish that flag. And while Sal had a hard time reconciling the notion that Chesty had never touched this particular American flag, had never had anything to do with this
specific
flag, had probably never even strode the same continent as this flag—unless this happened to be an old one they found in some warehouse where it had been collecting dust since before his induction and shipping out—his mom might have less of a sense of that mattering since she'd had no real connection with him anyway, his personal inventory, as it were, since he was ten. Sal could hand the poor lady a purple hand-painted necktie with a hula girl on it and say it was his all-time favorite, and she'd cherish it, certainly. What else did she have?

“Wink,” she said. “What did you think would happen to you?”

They were about an hour out of Breakey She'd invited him into her compartment, and they were standing by her window,
staring out at the flat scenery and the sunset just beginning to start its slow maneuver.

He started to tell her
Nothing,
he just thought she'd need an escort, that the train might be packed with rowdy soldiers.

“In life,” she said. “Is all this pretty much how you thought, or … ?”

He
had
been thinking about that a little since the late-breaking news of Chesty's childhood. The whole business had made him wonder why the two of them had hit it off so easily, back in the PTO. Though neither one had been aware of it, they had something big in common: they had both been shipped off to an uncle. True, Winks dad hadn't parked his car in front of the Southern Pacific, and his uncle only owned a small bean, beet, and wheat farm, not a bank. His surroundings had been nothing like Chicago's Gold Coast. In fact, the school district he'd been moved into at Uncle Len's was the same one where, back in ‘27, some madman dynamited the new school building—a very different background, Wink figured.

But before that, before they shipped him to the country where, according to his dad, even the dirt was healthy, Wink had spent most of the previous year sick in bed with scarlet fever.

It hadn't gone over so well with his mother. Two years before he was born, there was another boy, Carl, who would have been his older brother. Carl was four when he caught the Spanish flu.

Wink remembered a gaggle of aunts and near aunts attending when Wink was ill—cute fun ones who played checkers and
I spy with my little eye …
Also old bluehairs from the church who tried to catch him up on his schoolwork.

That year in bed, he read a lot and drew a lot and followed the funnies like a religious zealot, especially Rube Goldberg. The man's hilarious, overengineered machines, designed to complete
the most mundane tasks, captivated him, and soon he was drawing his own third-grade versions. He loved the idea of being able to do all kinds of things, all on his own, with no help from anyone else. All he would need would be one of those wonderful machines. Then he'd get by just fine and never feel lonesome.

As near as he could puzzle it out in hindsight, his mother just couldn't stomach seeing another kid so sick, so hit the sauce and eventually ran off while he was still bedridden. “Which was why all the ladies coming by,” he explained now to Sal, “bringing covered dishes. I didn't know it till I recovered—just thought she didn't want to catch it. Figured she was just keeping out of my bedroom, that she was still right down the hall.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Sal said, and he felt her hand lightly on the small of his back before she withdrew it.

Meaning to rope it back to the subject at hand, he told her he remembered wanting to be Rube Goldberg for a while, or at least a syndicated cartoonist or illustrator of some sort, and then after being shipped up to the farm in St. Johns, he thought he wanted to be his uncle Len, or at least live there for a time, two un-bathed bachelors without a care in the world.

He wasn't sure any of this was really addressing her question, but beyond the career dreams, maybe it
was
all sort of the way he'd pictured. For one thing, he never thought he'd settle down and marry. Even as a boy, it had seemed as much a long shot as it seemed now. One thing he'd always noticed was babies and kids gave him the most difficulty drawing. Early on, he got quite good at women's faces and even the female form, maybe because of the many doting women who visited him and took care of him that year in bed, and the close proximity of their faces and breasts as they loomed over him. But his children, even after years of art instruction, looked more like fairies or leprechauns and his babies looked corrupt, like fat captains of industry or surly beat cops.

“Oh, brother,” Sal said, when he laid it all out for her. “And what did Reenie say when you told her this story—you not wanting to settle down?”

“Or bathe.”

“Or bathe.”

“Actually, I never thought to tell her any of this.”

She turned to face him. “Never
thought
to, or … ?”

“I didn't see how it was relevant to her.”

She gave him an arched look that was an awful lot like something Reenie would work up, the eyebrow taking wing like that.
Winkin' Sally …
It was the closest Sal had come to
amused
since they'd started out from Chicago. She turned back to face the window.

“Still not sure,” he said.

About any of it,
he thought.

She gave him the Argus. It was the C-3, for 35mm—the popular model folks called the Brick, on account of it was no bigger than one, really. “And Chesty's favorite, too,” she said. “Fits in your hand pretty nicely, huh?”

“Wonderful,” he said, hefting it.

She pointed out, in case he didn't know, that it was made in Michigan, and he gave her a grin, saying, “As if I needed anything more to recommend it, it being Chesty's personal favorite and all …”

She reminded him they wouldn't know if it was damaged until they got home and developed the film. “But either way,” she said, “even if it's a paperweight, I want you to have it. He'd be so glad you're doing what you're doing now—moving forward, I mean, trying new things …” She seemed to choke a little, saying it. “I'm feeling like some hokey sob sister here, Wink, like
I'm going to burst out with the waterworks again, but at any rate, he would be proud.”

He fiddled with the Brick a little, hoping she might pull it together.

“When we get home,” she said, “I'd
like
you to stick around. I suspect you've been planning to jump ship on me now. And maybe it seems like even less fun than it did before, babysitting a married lady, now that you'd be babysitting a boring old widow lady. You know I'm only teasing about jumping ship'—I'd understand perfectly if you decide to move on. You've done more than enough, coming out here. So if you'd rather go, that's fine, but—”

He told her he hadn't entertained any such thoughts, though of course he had. He wasn't sure why, but in his mind, he'd pictured getting home, gathering his satchel together, and cleaning out his room above the shop. Somehow, his friend never coming back seemed to change things in terms of Wink's living arrangement. Maybe, before, it had seemed temporary in a way it couldn't now, as if he might just be living down the little hall from her until the day he died.

The first thing she did when they got back to Chicago was develop Chesty's last roll of film.

The good news was, the Argus seemed to in fact be undamaged. The shots at the end of the roll, taken on the train by her and a few by Wink, were just as crisp and unblemished by light leaks as the shots at the front of the roll, taken on a stopover in Hawaii, was Wink's guess—of beach and jeeps and a couple pretty Wacs pretending to hold up a leaning palm tree.

The bad news was, the ones in the middle, taken in the hold of the cargo ship, were mostly underexposed. Two were beautiful, though confusing—abstract mounds of white cut by shafts of light ranged toward the rear of the hold, and the last of these, the one that had probably caused the explosion, showed the powder, misty, airborne; the drifts beyond; the about-to-be-injured ensign grinning back at the camera. The problem was, it wasn't damning evidence of anything one way or the other. But it was, she felt, worth taking up to the Tower to show Bob, her editor friend on the
Trib.

Reenie and Wink both told her she needed to give herself time before going out, that her job right now was to just let herself grieve.

“I'll do that as soon as I do this,” she said, and set up an appointment to show Bob the shots the next day.

Bob looked pained. “So they were sending cake flour to Nagasaki—not sure where the scandal is in that … Incompetence? Misuse of government funds? Maybe … And the photos don't show all that much the reader can even recognize.”

She tried to explain that it wasn't so much what Chesty was able to capture on film in those last seconds, but the way the military showed no interest in really investigating, even failing to bother examining his film. “It was as if they already had their own story, and anything else only stood to complicate things for them.”

Bob shrugged, sighing. “Unfortunately, hon, that's usually how it works.”

She could see him almost physically trying to control his glance shifting to the clock on the wall. Compared with his normal gruff demeanor, this seemed an almost heartbreakingly tender attitude.

When she began to gather up the shots, slipping them back in their envelope to go, he heaved up out of his leather chair and sort of lurched at her, draping one arm across her shoulders in a half hug. It was like being embraced by a halfhearted, geriatric bear.

“You're young, kid. You really are.” He said it so quietly, she had to think about it to understand what he was saying, and then he pulled away and turned his back to her, looking down at Lake Michigan, an act she wasn't so offended by because she thought she'd caught the slightest little hitch in his voice, and besides, this kind of a scene wasn't his usual area of expertise.

That evening, the three of them sat at her kitchen table, Chesty's photos splayed out before them.

Reenie sounded ready for a fight. “Maybe we could take it to the Swans Down people, see what they have to say for themselves. Or try to start some sort of boycott, get folks to stop using the stuff till someone—”

“Forget it,” Sal said. “I just wanted to see if anyone needed to see this.”

They sat there for at least another minute, staring at the blurry blizzard in the pictures—the last image Chesty had ever seen.

She wasn't looking for a fight herself, just an explanation. Or an apology or … something.