FDR came into the room. “She’s been like this since yesterday,” he said. “I gave her two Milltowns.”
“Are the Milltowns doing this to her?”
“I don’t think so, Gussie.”
“Maybe we should take her to the hospital.”
“I don’t think it’s very serious. Her bowels are regular and her heartbeat is strong. This will pass in time.”
Gus didn’t press the issue.
FDR cleared his throat. “We’ll go out for dinner tonight, Gussie,” he said. “Mommy isn’t up to cooking. Soon as she gets herself together, we’ll go. I’m thinking of the Townhouse. They have a decent menu there.”
Flora’s pasty white thighs were round as kegs. Her calves were webbed with blue veins. She struggled to a sitting position then leaned forward to pull up her stockings. She couldn’t reach them over her stomach.
She looked at Gus. “I hardly recognize you, Gussie,” she said. “You’ve changed somehow. You don’t seem happy. Are you unhappy Gussie? Are you going to have an unhappy life?”
There was something obscene in her appearance—her naked legs against the brown bedspread, her collapsing hair.
“I’m doing okay, Mommy,” he said.
“Are you? I don’t think so, Gussie. A mother knows these things. I doubt very much that you are doing okay.”
She reached down for her stockings again but her hands got no further than mid-thigh. “Come here, Gussie,” she said. She patted the bed. “I have something to tell you.”
Gus sat down next to her. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of rancid body oil and stale cologne. There was a half gallon of Rhine wine on the floor next to the night table. “They say a child remembers the womb,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I remember carrying you. You were tucked safely inside but moving restlessly as if you were afraid of confinement. You moved my water like a drowning swimmer who had lost his stroke. I don’t think you were meant for dentistry, Gussie.”
“That’s what you wanted to tell me?” Gus said.
“I’m sorry we pushed you so hard. But no, I do not think you would be a happy dentist. And I want you to be happy, Gussie. If you can’t be a happy dentist, then I just want you to be a happy something, not an unhappy nothing, not an aimless swimmer far from shore. Whatever you choose to do in life, I will support. Your happiness is all I’ve ever wanted.”
She reached up and touched his face. Her hand went to the back of his neck. Her pull was weak but Gus didn’t resist. He allowed her to bring his face down to her puckered lips which were dry as paper. “Are you still mama’s miracle baby?” she said. She gave Gus a sidelong look, her expression sly and coquettish.
FDR, standing in the doorway, cleared his throat. “You want to get dressed now, Mommy?” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m starved, and I’m sure Gussie is starved, too. Right, Gussie? The men of the house are ravenous!”
“Give me a few minutes,” Flora said. “Can you ravenous men wait a few minutes? Gussie? Can you wait for me? Or is your mother too much of a burden for you to bear?”
She still wasn’t dressed an hour later. FDR and Gus went out and ordered hamburgers at the Burger Shed Café in downtown Milk River.
“She’s losing it, FDR,” Gus said. “You’d better take her home.”
“She won’t go,” FDR said. “Not as long as you’re here.”
“So all this is my fault?” Gus said.
“No, son. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It’s the wide open spaces,” Gus said. “This flat cow country gets to you.”
FDR sighed. “Yes, I know. I’m feeling it, too.”
“She’s drinking a lot,” Gus said.
FDR sighed again. He drummed the table with his fingers. “It gets her through these long afternoons. Back in the frontier days, many women depended on the constipating opiate laudanum to help them endure monotony and hardship. Some died of impacted bowels because of it.”
Gus wanted to tell him that he’d also been drinking a lot. He wanted to tell him that he loved the big empty country, his special view of it atop his radio masts, and how, on certain days, he’d seen the horizon arc with the earth’s curvature. He wanted to tell him that this great endless ocean of silent flatland was beyond beautiful and at the same time too awful for a non-native to deal with. He wanted to tell him that he had momentary glimpses of something in the landscape he couldn’t define. Ray Springer’s “It” wasn’t an explanation Gus could offer since he himself didn’t understand what Springer meant. “It” was barely a word! More words didn’t help. Springer said there was an inverse relationship between “It” and words. Gus asked what he meant by inverse. “The more words you play out the less you get back,” Springer said. “You can talk yourself into a coma, Gate.”
“It,” Ray said, had nothing to do with yesterday or tomorrow. “It” was off the clock. “It” was not related to success or failure. Success and failure were the Siamese twins of life. There was failure in success and success in failure. Same coin, two sides. Ray Springer called this the shithouse rule. “Say you take a healthy dump,” Springer said, “but if there’s no toilet paper in the shithouse you leave feeling cheated. Your work didn’t get rewarded with a nice roll of wipe. On the other hand, if you’re bound up tight as an overwound clock a fat roll of quality toilet paper won’t be any use to you at all. It just sits there fat and happy while you grunt and groan.”
Springer formulated the shithouse rule twenty thousand feet over Dresden with the help of the piece of flat shrapnel that spun through his guts like helicopter blade. He showed Gus the grooves and craters in his belly where the piece of steel had tumbled in and tumbled out before settling in his sheepskin flight jacket.
“I’m sitting in a pool of my own blood and shit, looking down on a burning city,” Springer said. “We’re shot up pretty bad but it looks like we’ll be able to get home. Then the radio op finds this station in Zurich playing American music and he pipes it into the intercom and it’s Frank fucking Sinatra singing “All or Nothing at All,” the song that gets the bobby-sox girls gooey. You get the picture, Gate? Forty thousand German civilians burning in white phosphorous hell, and me? I’m praying to some god I don’t even believe in—Don’t let me fucking die goddamnit! Don’t let my dick go floppy!—while Frankie croons his Hit Parade fuck-song in my ear. On one side of the coin a city full of cremated Germans; on the other side, my roscoe’s future. All to the tune of Frankie’s number one fuck-song. You believe some god has a say in it, then you got to believe he’s a badass jokester with one bodacious mean streak. I could almost hear his horse laugh shaking the ribs of our shot-up plane while the side-gunner above me starts chuckling, like he gets it. He was just crying himself to death, but it sounded like chuckling. Silly-ass situation, Gate, don’t you think? Does it get more silly-ass than that? But silly-ass is what you need to get used to if you want to see things straight. You need to look at yourself in the funhouse mirror every morning and say, I am one silly-ass son of a bitch going out to do some silly-ass son of a bitch thing with a bunch of other silly-ass sons of bitches. You see what I’m saying?”
“Yes. No. Not really,” Gus had said.
“Give it a few more years, Gate. Get married, get a job, have some babies—in short do the All American three-step boogie. You’ll eventually figure it out if you don’t get brain-lock first.”
Gus poured ketchup on his burger. “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose,” he said, recalling a short poem about a ballturret gunner Ray had once recited.
FDR looked at him. “A riddle? I don’t care for riddles, Gussie,” he said.
“Maybe your life is a riddle, FDR,” Gus said.
Gus had meant to provoke FDR and was immediately sorry but FDR only nodded in tacit agreement which made Gus feel worse.
FDR leaned back in his chair. The waitress came by and refilled his coffee. He thanked her and stirred some sugar into his cup.
“For what?” FDR said. “For telling the truth?”
PART TWO
10
Winter arrived early and all at once. It knifed south from the arctic and through the Canadian plains killing any vegetation that had survived previous frosts. Ice crystals like tiny acetylene torches were suspended in the stark afternoon sky. The sun, dull as a nickel, perched on the rim of the frozen earth. It was forty-seven below and ordinary jackets were useless against the killing wind. Gus wore his hooded sheepskin parka over his civvies and insulated “bunny boots” on his feet. He wore thermal long johns, a cable-knit sweater, and heavy wool pants. Windchill dropped the virtual temperature to minus seventy-seven.
People were advised to carry food, blankets, kindling, and matches if they were driving any distance. Water pipes in the outer walls of unprepared houses froze then burst, flooding basements, bathrooms, and kitchens. The engines of ungaraged cars would not turn over unless warmed overnight by electric head-bolt heaters. Batteries froze, crankcase oil thickened to the consistency of tar, windshields iced over, rubber lost flexibility. Some lit dangerous fires under their engine blocks in desperation.
Cottonwood trees, greedy siphons of ground water that grew along the riverbanks, cracked open. The woody explosions were loud as rifle shots as water froze and expanded within their trunks. Cattle that could not be rounded up in time and moved to shelter froze where they stood in the drift lines along fences. Despondent ranchers, facing another year of financial loss, dreamed of tropical escapes.
Spit froze in midair and skipped on the sidewalk like a flat white stone. Miniature icicles formed in noses on the inhale, thawed on the exhale, then froze again with the next breath taken. Eyes filled with protective tears, unsalved lips cracked and bled, and ears, uncovered too long, darkened with frostbite.
Gus found refuge in the Athenian ice cream parlor, where he met Tracy Winshaw. She was sitting in a booth by herself, drinking coffee and reading a hardback book. Next to her coffee cup a lipstick-stained cigarette sent a thread of smoke straight up from a tin ashtray. She was thin as a twig but her face, Gus thought, could have been on the covers of glamour magazines. She wore her black hair long and tied in a loose ponytail. When she turned her head quickly—and she did this often to see who came into the Athenian and who left—the ponytail would toss prettily. Gus was taken by the way her ponytail flounced to her quick movements. Her pale unblemished skin was drawn tight over her cheekbones and her dark eyes behind the lenses of her cat-eye glasses had the deep visionary luster you see in photos of starving refugee children. Her full lips, though, saved her from looking completely ethereal. She was beautiful in the soulful way of Audrey Hepburn or Gene Tierney. A song, “Angel Eyes,” by Nat King Cole played in Gus’s mind as he watched her from his stool at the soda fountain.
He slid off the stool and went to her booth. “Well, now there, then,” he said, using the phrase James Dean made famous in Rebel Without a Cause. The hip California style of casual speech made these small town girls giggle. She didn’t. He sat down opposite her; she kept reading.
“You look kind of down, sitting here by yourself,” Gus said. “I thought I’d come over and cheer you up.”
She regarded him with severe indifference. “How thrilling,” she said, “but I don’t need cheering up.”
The book she was reading was titled Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare.
“Pardon me for breathing,” Gus said.
“Everyone has a right to breathe. Just don’t do it in my booth. Distribute your cheerful germs somewhere else.”
Gus managed a twisted hayseed grin. “Hey, how about this here gol-dang cold front?” he said. “By golly, she was forty above just yesterday. Looks like I’ll have to chip my cows out of the ice. And my tractor? Couldn’t get Old Fireball out of the barn unless I primed her carb with nitroglycerin.”
She picked up her cigarette and blew a stream of smoke across the booth. “You’re very funny,” she said. “Do you invent your own material or do you get it out of that How To Be The Life Of The Party book?”
Someone came into the Athenian and Tracy turned quickly to see who it was. Gus watched her ponytail lash left then right.
Gus tried another approach. “I see you dig Bertrand Russell,” he said. Russell’s picture was on the back cover of her book. Gus had seen his picture in the newspapers. Russell had been leading a protest against the atomic bomb at some American military base in England. He even remembered the caption under the photo: Better Red Than Dead. What crap, Gus thought at the time, but now had enough sense to keep his opinion to himself. The Chinese Reds were shelling poor little Quemoy again, but Gus didn’t want to bring this up and maybe spoil whatever chances he might have with her.
“You’ve read Bertrand Russell?” she said.
Gus hadn’t, but said, “He’s one of the great thinkers of our time.”
“I’m trying to read The Principia,” she said. “It’s pretty heavy going, though. I’ll try it again after I’ve taken more science and math at the college.”
“College?” Gus said.
“I’m a sophomore at Northern Plains State.”
“There’s a college in Milk River?”
“We even have electricity and indoor plumbing.”
She studied Gus, his olive drab parka with squadron markings on it. She said, “You’ve never read a word of Bertrand Russell, have you?”
“Maybe I could take some classes at Northern Plains State.”
“Before you go any further with this, I have to tell you something. I do not date flyboys.”
“On principle?”
“Principles are all we have, don’t you think?”
Gus saw her again a few weeks later. Both Flora and FDR were down with the flu and FDR asked Gus to do the grocery shopping. He gave Gus twenty dollars and the keys to the Buick.
It was still cold out, fifteen above, but the wind was blowing hard enough to make it feel like fifteen below. Gus saw Tracy walking down Main Street wearing a jacket that was far too light. He pulled up ahead of her and got out. “It’s way too cold to walk,” he said. “Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.”
She recognized him after a few seconds. She was wearing a gray wool skirt and long black stockings and carrying a book. She was cold, but hesitated anyway.
Gus said, “I’m just offering you a ride. I’m not asking you to go dancing.”
Her smile triggered glandular reactions in Gus.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m on my way to school. But I need to drop by Daddy’s office first.”
Her daddy’s office was in a two-story frame house on the south side of town. “This is a dentist’s office,” Gus said, reading the sign out front.
“Daddy’s a dentist,” she said. She seemed suddenly shy and apologetic.
Gus laughed, then groaned.
“What’s that about?” she said, annoyed.
“My daddy’s a dentist, too,” Gus said.
It was her turn to laugh. “If this is karma,” she said, “then I’m going to stick with materialistic atheism.”
She went into her father’s office and came out a few minutes later. She’d gone in laughing, but now she was frowning. Gus started the car.
“Your old man give you a hard time?” he said.
“Always, on allowance day,” she said. She pulled out a wad of paper money from her clutch purse, riffled through the bills. “He’s a fascist and a bigot. Or is that redundant?”
Gus nodded, but kept silent. Family warfare wasn’t an ideal topic of conversation to begin a relationship.
“I’m a hypocrite, I guess,” she said. “I take his money but reject his so-called ethics, or lack thereof.”
“I know what you mean,” Gus said.
“You do? No, I don’t think you do. My daddy’s a super extreme case. For instance, he won’t do dental work on Indians, Negroes, or Jews—though there aren’t many Negroes or Jews in Milk River,
except for the radar base. Even Eisenhower is too liberal for him. He thinks Ike is a tool of the Communists!”
“And you’d rather be Red than dead,” Gus said.
“Of course I would! Wouldn’t you? Do you even have to think about it? Dead is dead. It’s final. Political regimes are never final. And besides, what’s so wonderful about the capitalist system? We’d still be in the depression if it weren’t for the war. The capitalist system depends on war. The cold war is a capitalist invention. When it ends, and if we’re not all dead by then, they’ll think of some other way to keep the war factories going.”
“Wait a minute,” Gus said. “I forgot my notebook.”
“You think it’s a joke? Capitalism and war are symbiotic with one another. If one vanishes, so does the other.”
“I can’t believe that never occurred to me,” Gus said.
“You don’t know what symbiosis is, do you?”
“I’ve heard the word, I think. In high school biology.”
“It’s simple: War makes money so money makes war.”
Gus didn’t remind her of the wad of war-making money in her purse. He’d never been interested in politics and didn’t intend to become interested now. If he echoed her opinions he might have a chance with her, but she’d see through his false endorsements.
“You’re military,” she said. “You think what you do is a justified moral crusade, correct? You’ve been thoroughly brainwashed. If they told you to go into a nursery and shoot all the babies you’d do it because they’ve taken over your moral character and reshaped it. You belong to them. You—whoever you are—have ceased to exist as an independent entity. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I’m Gus Reppo, former independent entity,” he said. He offered her his hand.
She accepted it, smiling. “Tracy Winshaw,” she said.
Gus pulled the Buick into the college parking lot. Tracy looked at her watch.
“In ten minutes,” she said, “Professor Gordon will be lecturing on the worker’s movement since 1880. Doctor Gordon is a visiting speaker from Minnesota. He’s written books on the subject.”
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