Underworld (83 page)

Louis droned on.

“Six, five, four.”

And Chuckie thought of the Ballad of Louis Bakey, a tale the bombardier never tired of telling and the navigator never wanted to come to an end because it was like a great Negro spiritual that makes your whole face tingle with reverence and awe.

How Louis comes strutting out of bombardier school and finds himself crewing on a B-52 at twenty-six thousand feet over the Nevada Test Site, simulating the release of a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb.

Simulating, mind you, while an actual device of this exact magnitude is meanwhile being detonated from the shot tower directly beneath the aircraft.

The idea being, Let's see how the aircraft and crew react, metalwise and bodywise, to the flash, the blast, the shock, the spectacle and so on.

And if they come through it more or less intact, maybe we'll let them drop their own bomb someday.

Whole plane's blacked out. Windows shielded by curtain pads covered with Reynolds Wrap. Crew holding pillows over eyes. Little nylon pillows that smell to Louis intriguingly like a woman's underthings.

A volunteer medic sits in a spare seat with five inches of string hanging out of his mouth and a tea-bag tag at the end of it. He has swallowed the rest of the string, which holds an x-ray plate coated with aluminum jelly, dangling somewhere below the esophagus, to measure the radiation passing through his body.

Louis does his phony countdown and waits for the flash. A strong and immortal young man on a noble mission.

“Three, two, one.”

Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that's like the touch of God. And Louis can see the bones in his hands through his closed eyes, through the thick pillow he's got jammed in his face.

I move my head, there's whole skeletons dancing in the flash. The navigator, the instructor-navigator, the sad-ass gunner. We are dead men flying.

I thought Lord God Jesus. I swear to Jesus I thought this was heaven. Sweat is rolling down my face and there's smoke coming off the circuit breakers and the detonation's blowing us thousands of feet up, against our best intentions.

I thought I was flying right through Judgment Day with some woman's nylon breasts plumped up in my face.

And when the shock wave hit, we got pummeled up another two thousand feet, this big tonnage aircraft acting like a leaf on a blowy night.

And I kept seeing the flying dead through closed eyes, skeleton men
with knee bone connected to the thigh bone, I hear the word of the Lord.

And I thought, because, being a black man, I would be harder to see through. But I saw right through my skin to my bones. This flash too bright to make racial niceties.

All the same in God's eyes, so let that be a lesson.

And the medic with the string hanging out of his mouth and his hand on the tea-bag tag so he won't swallow it, and I can see the x-ray plate through skin, bones, ribs and whatnot, and it's glowing like a sunrise on the desert.

When it is safe to withdraw the pillow and open his eyes, Louis opens his eyes and puts down the pillow and makes his way to the cockpit and helps the copilot remove the thermal curtains and there it is, alive and white above them, the mushroom cloud, and it is boiling and talking and crackling like some almighty piss-all vision.

My eyes went big and stayed that way and ain't ever really closed. Because I seen what I seen. That thing so big and wide and high above us. And it was popping and heaving like nothing on this earth. And we flew right past the stem and it's rushing and whooshing and talking, it's pushing the cloud right up into the stratosphere.

Thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

In a few years I lost my handwriting skills. Can't write my name without wobbles and skips. I pee in slow motion now. And my left eye sees things that belong to my right.

And that was the Ballad of Louis Bakey told to a thousand airmen on wind-howling bases through the short days and long years of constant alert in the dark and stoic heart of cold war winters.

“Bombs away,” said Louis blandly.

But the mean and cutting fun had gone out of it for Chuckie. He didn't want to kill any more VC. And he was developing a curious concern for the local landscape. Tired of killing the forest, the trees of the forest, the birds that inhabit the trees, the insects that live their whole karmic lives nestled in the wing feathers of the birds.

The aircraft racked into a tight turn.

“Louisman, don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night?”

“Don't start in with me.”

“Thinking there's got to be a more productive way to spend your time.”

“That's what they're thinking down there.”

“Than dropping bombs on people who never said a cross word to you.”

“Living in tunnels. I'll tell you what they're thinking. They're living in tunnels they dig in the ground and we're in a Big Ugly Fat Fuck pounding the shit out of them. And they're thinking there's got to be a more productive way.”

A number of times lately on these routine missions Chuckie has had ejection fantasies. Check the leg guards and ankle restraints and then pull the trigger ring and
boom.
He'd be fired down and out and into the smoky sky. To come floating over Golden Gate Park, in the playful movie version, where a miniskirted blond named Sally raises her head from a copy of Frantz Fanon maybe or Herbert Marcuse, two authors Chuckie has had a tough time finding in the PX at the base, to see a polka-dot parachute dropping toward the treetops.

No, he'd never been a fan but the baseball had been sweet to have around—yes, sweet, beaten, seamed, virile and old, a piece of personal history that meant far more to him than the mobbed chronicles of the game itself.

The aircraft headed back to Guam, which rhymes with bomb, but he was thinking of Greenland now, the shadowless white maw, the tricks of light, vistas without horizons at the end of them. A place that never became more than a rumor, even to those who were based there, most of all to those—the kind of unverified information that resembled his life.

Down out of the sky finally. When they landed he heard the hot screech of the wheels and felt the drag chute pop and hold. He knew the Follow Me truck was out there on the taxiway but he couldn't see it of course, still stuck, for a few minutes longer, in the dimlit hole, surrounded by his acronyms.

Louis said, “I want pussy, Chuckman, and I want it now. But she's got to respect me and what I do.”

“And what you stand for.”

“What I stand for. Very good, son. I see I'm getting through to you.”

The truck said Follow Me and the ground crew was already moving toward the aircraft, dragging hoses, pipes, lines of test gear, the men prepared to go through a checklist the size of eleven lengthy novels on the subject of war and peace.

“Because if she don't respect me,” Louis said, “I feel empty when it s over.

“I know the feeling.”

“The feeling never changes.”

“First we fuck them.”

“Then we bomb them,” Louis said.

And it wouldn't be long at all before the massive aircraft lumbered down the runway again, fatted with ordnance, every rivet straining at the takeoff, up, out, over—a mortal power in the sky.

It was a place you might wander into if you didn't know the neighborhood, a graveyard bar under a bridge approach, and you might mistake the place at a glance for one of those Eighth Avenue bars that never seem to close, the Red Rose or the White Rose or the Blarney Stone, where the pipe fitters and garment workers go, or the railbirds back from the track, or the insomniacs back from nowhere, a sandwich and a beer, or a shot and a beer, but this was another category altogether, a place practically outside time, called Frankie's Tropical Bar, on the Lower East Side, and who do I see when I walk in the door but Jeremiah Sullivan, speaking of graveyards, because he didn't look too good.

“Am I seeing right?”

I said, “Hello, Jerry.”

“Nick Shay? Where the hell did you come from?”

I said, “Hello, Jerry. Where are we?”

“I know where I am. Where the hell are you? I hear things every so
often. California, Arizona. I saw your mother three, four years ago. It's been what? Fifteen years?”

I said, “I'm in town for a week. Doing a research project for some outfit in the Midwest. What about you?”

“Don't be so calm. Fifteen, almost, fucking years. What are you drinking?”

“What are you drinking?”

“Don't ask,” he said.

“That's what I'll have.”

He looked around for the bartender but the guy was gone. A man with a bandaged head sat at the far end of the bar trying to bounce a coin into a shot glass. And there were two women on stools not far from where Jerry was standing, a couple of local biddies you might assume, only they weren't cozy or talky or interested in other people's talk—just ancient and wasted regulars of the art.

We traded the pure facts of whereabouts and job and then Jerry supplied elaborate reports on people we'd grown up with, news he'd probably been storing for an occasion such as this, his suit pants sagging under his paunch and his tie knotted halfway down his shirt-front.

“You married, Nick?”

“No.”

“You seeing someone special?”

“No. I met a woman recently in Chicago. But no's the answer. I'm not the marrying type. I don't see myself married. I don't feel marriage bound. I don't even think about it.”

“In your wildest dreams. Me, I'm married. Two kids. I'd show you pictures but you don't want to see pictures.”

The bartender showed up and I got a stinger that overflowed the glass. It was late afternoon, in fading light, and there was a palm tree mural, unfinished, behind the bar, and a live sombrero dangling from a beam. Jerry said this used to be a jazz club that failed almost immediately and after they dropped the music and after the clientele changed he found he kept coming back. He needed an hour between the office and the family to be alone, he said, and think.

He was right. I didn't want to see pictures.

“I'm thirty,” he said. “When my father was thirty-five he looked like an old man.”

“Only to you. You were in first grade. They all looked like old men.”

“No, he was old. He was worn down. It's good to see you, Nick. I think about you. I go back there. The place was so crowded once. Now it's empty.”

We'd gone to grammar school together, with the nuns, and then Jerry had gone to a Catholic high school and I switched to public and we saw each other only rarely, in a movie lobby maybe buying a Coke, he's with his friends, I'm with mine, and there was a curious sense of separation, not unfriendly but deep, and it was the school difference partly, the veering of habits and practices, but also something irreconcilable, the style, the friends, the future.

“You've been away a hell of a long time. A hell of a long time. Maybe you want to think about coming back,” he said.

“Live here? Forget it. No. I like it out there.”

“Out there. What's out there?”

“Everything you've never heard of.”

“If I never heard of it, how terrific can it be?” he said.

We used to call him Jumpy Jerry because he twitched and squinted and still did, I noticed, wearing glasses now and a school ring.

I didn't tell him about the Jesuits. Too interesting. He'd keep me here for hours. I told him about the project I was working on, to alter traditional methods of school instruction, and how I'd been visiting schools in ghettos and marginal parts of town, here and in Philadelphia, as a freelance associate in a behavorial research firm in Evanston, Illinois.

“And you teach.”

“I've taught, I've taught. And I'll go back to it probably,” I said, “sooner or later. Secondary schools. Civics and English. But I want to teach Latin.”

This was also too interesting. He should have been royally amused but it was too interesting for that. Jerry had seemed for a time to be priestward bound, that was the word on him, or the Irish Christian Brothers maybe, and it put a look of total dislocation on his face, thinking of the Nicky he used to know and the one he'd hear about later, doing Latin in a classroom.

“You go see your mother?”

“Went up there yesterday,” I said.

“She still in 611?”

“Still there.”

“I like to go back,” he said. “I go eat on Arthur Avenue. I walk all over. I take my kids to the zoo.”

“See it now. It's disappearing.”

“It used to be so crowded. Or is that just in my mind? The summer nights. Fantastic. It's great to see you, Nick. I'm having one more. Have one more.”

I wanted to finish the first one and leave, or not finish it and leave. A chance meeting like this, if you run it five minutes longer than it's worth, you ruin the night and the following day.

He kept adjusting his glasses.

A man alone at a table was moaning a bummed-out monologue that involved being followed wherever he went, and they were recording his private thoughts, and they were sending the seeing-eye blind to spy on him with their dogs and their pencils and their cups, and they were doing this on buses and subways both.

“Jerry, you ought to go home and play with your kids. When you're fifty or sixty, you can come here and think about the past.”

But he didn't want to go home. He wanted to recite the destinies of a hundred linked souls, the street swarm that roared in his head. The dead, the married, the moved-to-Jersey, the kid with five sisters who became a safecracker, the handball ace who's a chiropractor, the stuck-up blond in the fifth grade who married a Puerto Rican prizefighter.

“We ought to go up there, Nick. Serious. Take the subway, we'll be there in forty-five minutes. We can get dinner at Mario's. I'll make some calls. Get some of the guys. They'll love it. They'll meet us. Serious, man. Come on, drink, we'll go.”