Underworld (82 page)

They were the two of them alone and he wanted to obey. He felt the solemn weight of the situation, the size of Nicky's going, but there were always kids playing cards on the stoops and corners and he wasn't sure, when they dealt him in, that he'd say no. And not because he could memorize the cards. It wasn't so sneaky as that. It was another kind of thing completely. He was a little bit of a hero with his brother upstate, doing what he'd done, and boys from blocks around wanted to know him.

This is why he thought it might be hard to obey her, with the lamb chops knobby in his arms.

You can't fight a war without acronyms. This is a fact of modern combat, according to Louis T. Bakey.

And where do these compressed words come from?

They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe—storky bespectacled men who deal with systems so layered and many-connected that the ensuing arrays of words must be atomized and redesigned, made spare and letter-sleek.

But acronyms also come from the ranks, don't they, at least occasionally? Look at old Louis strapped and cramped in his aft-facing ejection seat in the lower deck of the forward fuselage, going through the checklist. And the crews in alert barracks worldwide waiting for the klaxons to sound. And the guys on the line who load the ordnance and juice the engines. These are men who feel an armpit intimacy with the weapons systems they maintain and fly. This gives their acronyms a certain funky something.

And this is why the high-altitude bomber sitting on the ramp out there, crew of six including Louis, a great, massive, swept-winged and
soon-to-soar B-52—this aircraft is known as a BUFF to tens of thousands of men throughout the command, for Big Ugly Fat Fuck.

In the cockpit the pilot and copilot hacked their watches for the second time. The crewmen at their separate stations went through the standard hundred-headed procedure, the gunner floating alone in the tail turret at the end of a crawlway, the EW officer shoehorned into a cubicle at the rear of the upper deck, and down in the squat black hole Louis Bakey let a yawn come rolling out and looked at the panels, switches and monitors that encased him in a more or less total monopoly of avionic jargon and he half nudged the navigator pressed in next to him.

“Chuckman, I find myself in a very pussy-minded mood today.”

“Hell of a time to be thinking such thoughts.”

“I don't think no thoughts. They just come.”

“Being we're strapped in this tube for the next.”

“That's the fucked-up beauty of the thing. How thoughts just come. Of and by themselves.”

“Not counting debrief. Twelve hours, Louisman.”

“In other words you're saying.”

“Hold that thought.”

“Hold that thought,” Louis said. “Put it on the back burner.”

“Exactly.”

“First we bomb them.”

“Then we fuck them,” said the navigator.

Whatever the bluntness of the acronym, there was nothing ugly about the nose art that adorned the area of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows. A tall young leggy blond, a cheerleader type in a skimpy skirt and halter with hands on hips and feet apart and a dare-me look on her face, she wants to be sexy but isn't sure she knows how, very girl-next-doorish. And her name painted in script just above the line of mission symbols that numbered thirty-eight.

Long Tall Sally.

The pilot taxied to the runway and the tower cleared the plane for takeoff.

The copilot said, “Five, four, three.”

The pilot had the throttles gang-barred to full-on position.

The copilot said, “One, zero, rolling.”

When the plane rumbled past marker 7, for seven thousand feet of runway, the copilot said, speaking with a sense of enormous buffeted mass that caused his teeth to feel uprooted because this is nearly half a million pounds of Big Ugly Fat Fuckness laboring to lift itself over the marsh grass—the copilot said,
“Committed.”

And then the dark body began to loom like some apparition of the mists, long wings bending and flaps extended and wheels breaking contact and then the gear coming up and the smoky spews of trailing black alcohol and the storm-roar shaking the flats.

In the hole the navigator, Charles Wainwright Jr., called Chuckie, continued to scan the skaty-eight meters and switches and disconnects, a whole lifetime of indicators clustered in front of him and above him and to one side—the side not occupied by Louis Bakey, the radar-bombardier.

Chuckie scanned the switches and harassed his buddy, encouraging marriage to a decent woman with church affiliations.

“Don't start in with me,” Louis said. “I don't need a wife. I don't need a church. You're the one who needs these things.”

“I already, Louis, have had a wife.”

“Who you didn't appreciate mentally.”

“I had to go through my awkward phase. I was finishing out some things,” Chuckie said.

The two men had been crewmates since Greenland, flying through arctic mirages and fifty-knot gales. Their current bombing runs were strangely uneventful by comparison, or a different level of reality at any rate, easier to project as a movie.

“I know what you need,” Louis said. “A woman who'll be willing to accept your history of screwups. You need to unload this stuff on someone who's innocent. You want a sweet young female who was born to understand you. Like the sweet thing on the nose of this aircraft.”

Louis said sweet thing in a scornful black voice. Since Louis was a scornful black, this was not surprising. Swee' thang. Not that he didn't have a spiritual side that Chuckie responded to. You only had to listen to his stories of the early A-tests over Nevada—stories he'd told
dozens of times through the years in lonely barracks in Greenland, Goose Bay and a number of remote SAC bases in the continental U.S.

“I don't think you ought to deride.”

“Deride. That's nice,” Louis said. “I rather deride her than ride her, tell you the truth. I believe she's too skinny for my taste. Plus she's been misnamed.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I get so tired. Educating these boys.”

“What's it mean, Louis? Misnamed.”

“Long Tall Sally.”

“From the song of the same title.”

“At least he knows that much. Heavens above.”

“You think I don't know Little Richard and his Ow-ow-ow-ow?”

“This boy worth saving,” Louis said. “But the point being.”

“Used to hide his records from my parents. Oh baby woo baby. I was thirteen years old.”

“This old Negro is touched, Chuckman. But the point I'm making is that the Long Tall Sally in the song and the Long Tall Sally they painted on our nose are not one and the same female of the species.”

“Why not? Check her out. She's long, she's tall, she's got great legs and she looks to me like her name could be Sally. Woo. We're gonna have some fun tonight.”

“Gonna have some fun tonight. That's exactly right,” Louis said. “Only the Sally in Little Richard's number ain't gonna be seen in no car in no drive-in movie doing a little necking with a youth like yourself.”

“Why not?” Chuckie said.

“Because she black and she bad.”

Chuckie studied his radar scope and recomputed the aircraft's path over a couple of thousand miles of sea curve and mango atoll.

“What do you mean she black?”

“Because the song has a plot that somehow got lost in the wooing and wheeing.”

“This song's been around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years maybe?”

“More or less,” Louis said.

“And in all these years I'm not aware of anybody coming forth with a correction to the skin color of the title character, okay?”

On the intercom the pilot said conversationally, “I wonder if that's Manila down there. Sure looks pretty, Nav.”

This was an unfunny dig at the windowless pair in the lower deck, who not only lacked a skyscape but sat facing backwards and not only sat facing backwards but would be forced to eject downwards if nicked by an enemy SAM.

Another sinister acronym designed to kill.

“Pilot, this is Nav,” Chuckie said.

And he fine-tuned his scope and requested a minimal turn, aligning the plane's actual path with the track he'd plotted earlier.

Then he said, “Louis, this girl out there is good luck for us. Nearly forty missions without a major incident. Don't abuse her goodwill. She's Long Tall Sally. The one and only.”

When Louis became agitated he used a staccato patter, a kind of hyperdrawl with elements of falsetto pique that he strung throughout at a master pitch.

“Song say. You have any idea what the song say? This woman in an alley. Old uncle John in the alley with her. She built for speed. She got everything he need. Yes baby woo baby. Gonna have some fun tonight.”

They were fifty thousand feet above the South China Sea, flying in a three-bomber formation called a cell, and there were fifteen cells in the air today, and each cell carried over three hundred bombs, and the resulting zone of destruction was known as a sandbox, and Chuckie was bizarro'd in one part of his brain by the crazy conversation he was having with old Louis even as he felt sad and hurt, in another and nearer part, by his buddy's attitude toward the girl on the nose of their aircraft.

“This song written by a black woman from Apaloosa, Mississippi. Richard add the little touches. I guarantee, brother, this Sally we're talking about ain't no skinny blond playing kissy-face in no backseat. She's an advance class of entertainment.”

Sad and hurt. Chuckie's mind began to wander to Greenland, his previous posting, not a bad place to survive the breakup of a marriage. His human discontents were muted in the icy mists and the whole blowing otherworld of whiteouts and radio disruptions and unrelenting winds and total cold and objects that did not cast shadows and numerous freak readings on compasses and radar scopes and the BUFF that crashed on
an ice sheet with live nukes aboard, anomalies of the eye, the mind, the systems themselves, and the experience made him sense the ghost-spume of some higher hippie consciousness. Or maybe Greenland was just a delicate piece of war-gaming played in a well-heated room in some defense institute, with hazelnut coffee and croissants.

Louis was conversing with the pilot in bombspeak, which must mean it was time for Chuckie to pay attention.

Once divorced, twice expelled from school, once fled from same, many times estranged from parents, thrice charged with petty larceny, once emergency-roomed for barbiturate overdose, once experimentally wrist-slashed, many times avomit on the pavement outside a bar—the shoplifting charges expunged from the record thanks to influential friends of dad.

“Little Richard's mostly for white people anyway,” he muttered to Louis.

“But Long Tall Sally's black. Just so you don't forget it.”

His late great dad. Not really such a bad guy in death. But so tensely parental in life, all empty command and false authority, that Chuckie suspected the man's heart just wasn't in it. No, he didn't blame his parents for everything that had gone wrong. Chuckie was misery enough on his own recognizance. But he couldn't think of his father without regretting the loss of the one thing he'd wanted to maintain between them. That was the baseball his dad had given him as a trust, a gift, a peace offering, a form of desperate love and a spiritual hand-me-down.

The ball he'd more or less lost. Or his wife had snatched when they split. Or he'd accidentally dumped with the household trash.

One of those distracted events that seemed to mark the inner nature of the age.

Next to him Louis sat in his station with his bomb release mode and his master bomb-control panel and his bombing data indicator and his urinal and his hot cup. Everything you'd want for a fulfilling life in the sky.

Louis said, “Pilot, this is Mad Bomber. Will release in rapid sequence. One hundred twenty seconds to drop.”

Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca meant nothing to Chuckie.
Vague names from his unstable childhood. The memory of the baseball itself, the night of the baseball—vague and unstable and dim.

Louis spoke through a teary-eyed yawn.

“Pilot, come right three degrees. Hold. Bomb doors open. Check. Sixty seconds to drop.”

So many missions, all those indistinguishable bombs. Chuckie used to love these bomb runs but not anymore. He used to feel a bitter and sado-sort of grudge pleasure, getting even for his life, taking it out on the landscape and the indigenous population. He'd been a proud part of a bomb wing that was dropping millions of tons of ordnance off the racks and out of the bays. The bombs fluttered down on the NVA and the ARVN alike, because if the troops on both sides pretty much resemble each other and if their acronyms contain pretty much the same letters, you have to bomb both sides to get satisfactory results. The bombs also fell on the Vietcong, the Viet Minh, the French, the Laotians, the Cambodians, the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge, the Montagnards, the Hmong, the Maoists, the Taoists, the Buddhists, the monks, the nuns, the rice farmers, the pig farmers, the student protesters and war resisters and flower people, the Chicago 7, the Chicago 8, the Catonsville 9—they were all, pretty much, the enemy.

Louis droned on.

“Steady, steady, steady. On auto now. Tone audible. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven.”

Five hundred pounders on this run, sleek and effete, one hundred and eight of them at Louis' drowsy touch, aimed at the Ho Chi Minh trail, a mission based on the bullshit readings of image interpreters who spend their days and nights scrutinizing the itty-bitty blurs on nearly identical frames of recon film that unfurl endlessly across their eyeballs more or less, Chuckie thought, the way the bombs drop endlessly from the B-52s.