Sweet Talk (17 page)

In January, therefore, I was elected homeroom vice president by people I still didn’t know (nobody in 7-B rode our bus—that gave us an edge), and in March my family moved to Fort Sill, in Oklahoma. I surrendered my vice presidency to a civilian girl, and that was the end for all time of my career in public office.

Two days before we left Fort Niagara, we took the dog, Duke, to Charlie Battery, fourteen miles from the post, and left him with the mess sergeant. We were leaving him for only six weeks, until we could settle in Oklahoma and send for him. He had stayed at Charlie Battery before, when we visited our relatives in Ohio at Christmastime. He knew there were big meaty bones at Charlie Battery, and scraps of chicken, steak, turkey, slices of cheese, special big-dog bowls of ice cream. The
mess at Charlie Battery was Dog Heaven, so he gave us a soft, forgiving look as we walked with him from the car to the back of the mess hall.

My mother said, as she always did at times like that, “I wish he knew more English.” My father gave him a fierce manly scratch behind the ear. My brother and I scraped along behind with our pinched faces.

“Don’t you worry,” the sergeant said. “He’ll be fine here. We like this dog, and he likes us. He’ll run that fence perimeter all day long. He’ll be his own early-warning defense system. Then we’ll give this dog everything he ever dreamed of eating.” The sergeant looked quickly at my father to see if the lighthearted reference to the defense system had been all right. My father was in command of the missile batteries. In my father’s presence, no one spoke lightly of the defense of the United States of America—of the missiles that would rise from the earth like a wind and knock out (knock out!) the Soviet planes flying over the North Pole with their nuclear bombs. But Duke was my father’s dog, too, and I think that my father had the same wish we all had—to tell him that we were going to send for him, this was just going to be a wonderful dog vacation.

“Sergeant Mozley has the best mess within five hundred miles,” my father said to me and MacArthur.

We looked around. We had been there for Thanksgiving dinner when the grass was still green. Now, in
late winter, it was a dreary place, a collection of rain-streaked metal buildings standing near huge dark mounds of earth. In summer, the mounds looked something like the large grassy mounds in southern Ohio, the famous Indian mounds, softly rounded and benignly mysterious. In March, they were black with old snow. Inside the mounds were the Nike missiles, I supposed, although I didn’t know for sure where the missiles were. Perhaps they were hidden in the depressions behind the mounds.

Once during “Fact Monday” in Homeroom 7-B, our teacher, Miss Bintz, had given a lecture on nuclear weapons. First she put a slide on the wall depicting an atom and its spinning electrons.

“Do you know what this is?” she said, and everyone in the room said, “An atom,” in one voice, as if we were reciting a poem. We liked “Fact Monday” sessions because we didn’t have to do any work for them. We sat happily in the dim light of her slides through lectures called “Nine Chapters in the Life of a Cheese” (“First the milk is warmed, then it is soured with rennet”), “The Morning Star of English Poetry” (“As springtime suggests the beginning of new life, so Chaucer stands at the beginning of English poetry”), and “Who’s Who Among the Butterflies” (“The monarch—
Danaus plexippus
—is king”). Sparky liked to say that Miss Bintz was trying to make us into
third-graders again, but I liked Miss Bintz. She had high cheekbones and a passionate voice. She believed, like the adults in my family, that a fact was something solid and useful, like a penknife you could put in your pocket in case of emergency.

That day’s lecture was “What Happens to the Atom When It Is Smashed.” Miss Bintz put on the wall a black-and-white slide of four women who had been horribly disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima. The room was half darkened for the slide show. When she surprised us with the four faces of the women, you could feel the darkness grow, the silence in the bellies of the students.

“And do you know what this is?” Miss Bintz said. No one spoke. What answer could she have wanted from us, anyway? She clicked the slide machine through ten more pictures—close-ups of blistered hands, scarred heads, flattened buildings, burned trees, maimed and naked children staggering toward the camera as if the camera were food, a house, a mother, a father, a friendly dog.

“Do you know what this is?” Miss Bintz said again. Our desks were arranged around the edge of the room, creating an arena in the center. Miss Bintz entered that space and began to move along the front of our desks, looking to see who would answer her incomprehensible question.

“Do you know?” She stopped in front of my desk.

“No,” I said.

“Do you know?” She stopped next at Sparky’s desk.

Sparky looked down and finally said, “It’s something horrible.”

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s something very horrible. This is the effect of an atom smashing. This is the effect of nuclear power.” She turned to gesture at the slide, but she had stepped in front of the projector, and the smear of children’s faces fell across her back. “Now let’s think about how nuclear power got from the laboratory to the scientists to the people of Japan.” She had begun to pace again. “Let’s think about where all this devastation and wreckage actually comes from. You tell me,” she said to a large crouching boy named Donald Anderson. He was hunched over his desk, and his arms lay before him like tree limbs.

“I don’t know,” Donald Anderson said.

“Of course you do,” Miss Bintz said. “Where did all of this come from?”

None of us had realized yet that Miss Bintz’s message was political. I looked beyond Donald Anderson at the drawn window shades. Behind them were plate-glass windows, a view of stiff red-oak leaves, the smell of wood smoke in the air. Across the road from the school was an orchard, beyond that a pasture, another orchard, and then the town of Lewiston, standing on the Niagara River seven miles upstream from the long row of red-brick Colonial houses that were the officers’
quarters at Fort Niagara. Duke was down the river, probably sniffing at the reedy edge, his head lifting when ducks flew low over the water. Once the dog had come back to our house with a live fish in his mouth, a carp. Nobody ever believed that story except those of us who saw it: me, my mother and father and brother, my grandmother.

Miss Bintz had clicked to a picture of a mushroom cloud and was now saying, “And where did the bomb come from?” We were all tired of “Fact Monday” by then. Miss Bintz walked back to where Sparky and I were sitting. “You military children,” she said. “You know where the bomb comes from. Why don’t you tell us?” she said to me.

Maybe because I was tired, or bored, or frightened—I don’t know—I said to Miss Bintz, looking her in the eye, “The bomb comes from the mother bomb.”

Everyone laughed. We laughed because we needed to laugh, and because Miss Bintz had all the answers and all the questions and she was pointing them at us like guns.

“Stand up,” she said. She made me enter the arena in front of the desks, and then she clicked the machine back to the picture of the Japanese women. “Look at this picture and make a joke,” she said. What came next was the lecture she had been aiming for all along. The bomb came from the United States of America. We in the United States were worried about whether
another country might use the bomb, but in the whole history of the human species only one country had ever used the worst weapon ever invented. On she went, bombs and airplanes and bomb tests, and then she got to the missiles. They were right here, she said, not more than ten miles away. Didn’t we all know that? “You know that, don’t you?” she said to me. If the missiles weren’t hidden among our orchards, the planes from the Soviet Union would not have any reason to drop bombs on top of Lewiston-Porter Central School.

I had stopped listening by then and realized that the pencil I still held in my hand was drumming a song against my thigh. Over hill, over dale. I looked back at the wall again, where the mushroom cloud had reappeared, and my own silhouette stood wildly in the middle of it. I looked at Sparky and dropped the pencil on the floor, stooped down to get it, looked at Sparky once more, stood up, and knocked out.

Later, people told me that I didn’t fall like lumber, I fell like something soft collapsing, a fan folding in on itself, a balloon rumpling to the floor. Sparky saw what I was up to and tried to get out from behind his desk to catch me, but it was Miss Bintz I fell against, and she went down, too. When I woke up, the lights were on, the mushroom cloud was a pale ghost against the wall, voices in the room sounded like insect wings, and I was back in my life again.

“I’m so sorry,” Miss Bintz said. “I didn’t know you were an epileptic.”

At Charlie Battery, it was drizzling as my parents stood and talked with the sergeant, rain running in dark tiny ravines along the slopes of the mounds.

MacArthur and I had M&M’s in our pockets, which we were allowed to give to the dog for his farewell. When we extended our hands, though, the dog lowered himself to the gravel and looked up at us from under his tender red eyebrows. He seemed to say that if he took the candy he knew we would go, but if he didn’t perhaps we would stay here at the missile battery and eat scraps with him.

We rode back to the post in silence, through gray apple orchards, through small upstate towns, the fog rising out of the rain like a wish. MacArthur and I sat against opposite doors in the back seat, thinking of the loneliness of the dog.

We entered the kitchen, where my grandmother had already begun to clean the refrigerator. She looked at us, at our grim children’s faces—the dog had been sent away a day earlier than was really necessary—and she said, “Well, God knows you can’t clean the dog hair out of the house with the dog still in it.”

Whenever I think of an Army post, I think of a place the weather cannot touch for long. The precise rectangles
of the parade grounds, the precisely pruned trees and shrubs, the living quarters, the administration buildings, the PX and commissary, the nondenominational church, the teen club, snack bar, the movie house, the skeet-and-trap field, the swimming pools, the runway, warehouses, the officers’ club, the NCO club. Men marching, women marching, saluting, standing at attention, at ease. The bugle will trumpet reveille, mess call, assembly, retreat, taps through a hurricane, a tornado, flood, blizzard. Whenever I think of the clean squared look of a military post, I think that if one were blown down today in a fierce wind, it would be standing again tomorrow in time for reveille.

The night before our last full day at Fort Niagara, an arctic wind slipped across the lake and froze the rain where it fell, on streets, trees, power lines, rooftops. We awoke to a fabulation of ice, the sun shining like a weapon, light rocketing off every surface except the surfaces of the Army’s clean streets and walks.

MacArthur and I stood on the dry, scraped walk in front of our house and watched a jeep pass by on the way to the gate. On the post, everything was operational, but in the civilian world beyond the gate power lines were down, hanging like daggers in the sun, roads were glazed with ice, cars were in ditches, highways were impassible. No yellow school buses were going to be on the roads that morning.

“This means we miss our very last day in school,” MacArthur said. “No good-byes for us.”

We looked up at the high, bare branches of the hard maples, where drops of ice glimmered.

“I just want to shake your hand and say so long,” Sparky said. He had come out of his house to stand with us. “I guess you know this means you’ll miss the surprise party;”

“There was going to be a party?” I said.

“Just cupcakes,” Sparky said. “I sure wish you could stay the school year and keep your office.”

“Oh, who cares!” I said, suddenly irritated with Sparky, although he was my best friend. “Jesus,” I said, sounding to myself like an adult—like Miss Bintz maybe, when she was off duty. “Jesus,” I said again. “What kind of office is home-goddamn-room vice president in a crummy country school?”

MacArthur said to Sparky, “What kind of cupcakes were they having?”

I looked down at MacArthur and said, “Do you know how totally ridiculous you look in that knit cap? I can’t wait until we get out of this place.”

“Excuse me,” MacArthur said. “Excuse me for wearing the hat you gave me for my birthday.”

It was then that the dog came back. We heard him calling out before we saw him, his huge woof-woof. “My name is Duke! My name is Duke! I’m your dog!
I’m your dog!” Then we saw him streaking through the trees, through the park space of oaks and maples between our house and the post gate. Later the MPs would say that he stopped and wagged his tail at them before he passed through the gate, as if he understood that he should be stopping to show his I.D. card. He ran to us, bounding across the crusted, glass-slick snow—ran into the history of our family, all the stories we would tell about him after he was dead. Years and years later, whenever we came back together at the family dinner table, we would start the dog stories. He was the dog who caught the live fish with his mouth, the one who stole a pound of butter off the commissary loading dock and brought it to us in his soft bird dog’s mouth without a tooth mark on the package. He was the dog who broke out of Charlie Battery the morning of an ice storm, traveled fourteen miles across the needled grasses and frozen pastures, through the prickly frozen mud of orchards, across backyard fences in small towns, and found the lost family.

The day was good again. When we looked back at the ice we saw a fairyland. The red-brick houses looked like ice castles. The ice-coated trees, with their million dreams of light, seemed to cast a spell over us.

“This is for you,” Sparky said, and handed me a gold-foiled box. Inside were chocolate candies and a note that said, “I have enjoyed knowing you this year.
I hope you have a good life.” Then it said, “P.S. Remember this name. Someday I’m probably going to be famous.”

“Famous as what?” MacArthur said.