Taking Aim

by Michael Cart

  At the end of class, she handed out six paintings, one for each of us. Self-portraits, she told us. Each picture had a cloud in the sky with our name inside of it and, below it, a smiling girl with orange hair. Daisy had given us all her hair, which was curly and red. My self-portrait showed a girl holding hands with a tree.

  Daisy looked like a child straight out of a storybook. Caroline, whose self-portrait was of a girl lying in a field of blue and purple flowers, raised her hand and said she was free to babysit on the weekends. The rest of us chimed in—we were all babysitters—and Daisy begged you to take your wife to a party so that we could come over and babysit.

  “Daddy never takes Mommy on dates,” Daisy told us. “It makes Mommy mad because she has a lot of cool turquoise jewelry that she never gets to wear.”

  This was on a Friday, and on Monday, you asked Caroline if she was free to babysit on Saturday night. She wasn’t; she’d been invited to a dance by a boy she knew who went to the boarding school not far from here. You asked me next. I wasn’t doing anything, so I said yes.

  I imagined Daisy scooting down the stairs in footie pajamas, Mary Poppins on her heels, and on the last step. I imagined being led into the kitchen to meet your wife, a half-empty glass of wine on the granite countertop by her fingertips. I imagined that she had Daisy’s hair, although your wife’s was long and flowing, and that she was wearing a chunky necklace of turquoise.

  I never got to babysit for Daisy, of course. None of us did, which is why we embraced Mary Poppins so obsessively, why we loved her even as she slobbered on our ballet flats, why we stole our own dogs’ favorite toys and lavished them on her. We understood that it was Mary Poppins and not your wife who was keeping you tethered to your life.

  There was so much we understood and yet didn’t understand. When you assigned us our big project—to choose one of the famous portraits you showed us and study it and research the artist and context and place the painting on the continuum of art history—we thought at first that you were doing it for us.

  I chose Helga, by Andrew Wyeth. Spenser chose the da Vinci; Marlie, the Vermeer; Arielle, the Fragonard; Cackie, the Renoir; and Caroline, the Balthus. The paintings spanned the centuries and featured (arguably) the greatest portrait artists of the Western Hemisphere. At the time, that’s all the connection we could see. We were juniors in high school. There were boys to love, colleges to visit, SATs to take over and over until the scores were high enough, field hockey practices to run us ragged.

  To see the real connection took years of perspective.

  Every time I visit one of these paintings in a museum, my fingers tremble, and I have to hold hands with myself. When you assigned us the project, you’d been searching for Daisy, not the child Daisy you knew, but the woman she would never become. By the end of the school year, you had six different Daisies, six lives she might have lived. Each portrait features a woman with red hair.

  We, your girls of art history, have remained close. At our tenth high school reunion, we learned that you’d gotten divorced and moved away. We wanted to believe you were happy, that you’d found a good woman and a way to simplify your life. We wanted to believe you’d gone to Tahiti like Gauguin. We wanted to believe that Mary Poppins was still alive, still with you.

  We tried to track you down on the internet but gave up as the years passed. By our twentieth reunion, we had all become mothers except for me. I’d married, but the children I have are imaginary. They are inside of the books I write and illustrate. My publisher insists that the little girls in my stories have politically correct, nondescript brown hair. But she doesn’t care about the dogs. I wish I could find you, Mr. Howe. I wish I could tell you that all the dogs look like Mary Poppins, every single one of them.

  THE BATTLE OF ELPHINLOAN

  Elizabeth Wein

  “You working, Dad?” Janet asked softly, sticking her head out the open cottage window, which was easier than opening the heavy oak-and-iron door. The smell of pipe smoke and low tide hit her in the face in a gust of wet wind off the Firth. It was a late summer morning so bright and clear that the light on the water hurt her eyes.

  Struan Lennox was sitting on the narrow stone bench that was jammed up against the front wall, the lanky Scottish deerhound, Flora, sunning herself at his feet. He gave Janet a grunt that was no answer. His hands were busy holding up a heavy set of field glasses through which he was staring intently eastward toward the North Sea, and because his hands were otherwise occupied, he was using his teeth to hold his pipe. That meant his mouth was also otherwise occupied and he couldn’t actually talk to his daughter.

  Janet sighed. Her dad might be looking for enemy aircraft or he might be looking for a good stretch of coastline for his next painting or he might be watching birds. Any of these things could count as work if it sparked inspiration. He had a series of propaganda posters he was supposed to be designing for the Ministry of Information and he was already three submissions overdue.

  The bench was the only thing that separated the cobbled Fore Street from the cottage, like every other fisherman’s cottage on the harbor front. But only Janet’s cottage had someone sitting in front of it in the morning. Every woman’s man was away fishing, and every mother’s son was off to war, barricading the island against the seemingly inevitable invasion by the German army—just as soon as they could get a toehold on some British beach, enemy troops were bound to come roaring over the water and pouring into the mainland. Big blocks of concrete had been dragged into place along the sandy spits where the Firth emptied into the North Sea to stop German tanks from unloading there.

  “Dad? You got a moment? Can I take the shotgun up the cliff path? I want to get a pigeon or two.”

  Since the first food rationing had started early in the year, her dad had decided they’d begin as they were likely to go on, and they’d stopped buying meat. Working in propaganda had its effect on him. We live in a fishing village, it’ll mean more for everyone else, you won’t miss it when it’s gone, he argued. But he didn’t usually object when Janet went shooting.

  Now her father grunted a question mark at her.

  “They’re still roosting in the old dovecote up by Elphinloan Castle. They don’t belong to anybody. Lots of people get pigeons there.”

  Her father lowered his binoculars and turned his head to get a look at her. For a moment his set, distant expression washed fond and warm as he gave her a nod of approval; he harrumphed, and then he turned back to the potentially hostile horizon as seen through the field glasses.

  “I know not to waste a shot,” Janet assured him, just to make it feel like they were having a conversation. “Come on, Flora!”

  She felt a bit mean inviting Flora without asking her dad if he minded. But Janet needed the company more than he did. Sometimes Janet was pretty sure the only company Struan Lennox needed was her mother’s ghost.

  The cobbled lane that ran in front of the fishermen’s cottages turned abruptly into a narrow path through the heather at the foot of the eroded sandstone sea cliff. The path climbed halfway up the cliff, then wound its way to the shelter of Elphinloan Point, where there was a large concrete swimming pool that filled up when the tide came in. The Home Guard had dumped bales of barbed wire all around the edge of the pool when the war started, and the concrete sunbathing terrace in front of the changing rooms now had a great big antiaircraft cannon mounted on it. Janet skirted this gun emplacement cautiously. If the soldier boys saw you, they wouldn’t let you up the cliffs. Or worse, they’d only let you pass if you gave them a kiss, especially if you were up there bare-legged in last summer’s too-short skirt on a sunny day. They knew Janet and liked her, but they teased her mercilessly.

  There were half a dozen of them on guard today, and like Janet’s dad, they were all glued to the horizon with field glasses clamped to their faces.

  Something must be up, Janet thought. Maybe there’s an air raid on. She crept through the heather like a cattle rustler with tall, shaggy, unsubtl
e Flora trying to keep low at Janet’s heels. Janet and the deerhound emerged triumphant on the open moorland at the top of the cliff path on Elphinloan Point without anyone having noticed them. It was a glorious day to be up there in the heather overlooking the glittering Firth, even without the excuse of shooting dinner.

  Janet had nearly reached the wreck of Elphinloan Castle, with the black lump of the old dovecote squatting in its shadow like the castle’s own strange offspring, when the attempted invasion came.

  It began as a low hum, the drone of summer bumblebees. It rose and became like the relentless wing beat murmur of starlings swarming. Then the noise droned loud and mechanical, the background whine of a sawmill at work—more motor than midges, and Janet realized it was aeroplanes she could hear. She turned toward the line of high, bright cirrus in the northeast and saw the German air force, the Luftwaffe, roaring in: a swarm of Heinkel bombers and their attendant Messerschmitt fighter planes to protect them. They were only a cloud of menacing black spots high in the air above the Firth, but there were more of them than Janet could count. The whine of their approaching engines was the only sound she could hear anymore, filling the sky. She imagined the young antiaircraft gunmen on the cliff below her, hunkered in their patch of barbed wire on the sun terrace of the abandoned swimming pool, holding their breath and waiting for a good shot.

  Janet wished she had her dad’s field glasses.

  Flora caught her excitement and danced with graceless eagerness around Janet’s legs. Janet laughed.

  “They’re not birds, you great daftie! They’re aeroplanes!” She stood straight and expectant, watching the sky, hoping to see a few of them fall. It didn’t occur to her to be afraid.

  The raiders roared past her, coming in lower as they lined up the railroad bridge and shipyards of Edinburgh that were their target twenty-five miles up the Firth. The dovecote and Elphinloan Castle suddenly erupted, too, in a cloud of clapping and clattering wings, as all the startled pigeons roosting in the ruined towers scattered to the skies away over the sunny moor like a flight squadron scrambling to action. Janet hurried to raise the slim Dickson shotgun to her shoulder but didn’t dare fire at them—she hadn’t been anticipating the shot and knew she’d miss by a mile. Flora suddenly lost her head and lolloped madly at high speed through the heather after a startled rabbit. She missed, too.

  Across the Firth, another whining cloud appeared as the Royal Air Force launched its counterattack, and suddenly the cannon below the cliff exploded into havoc.

  The air battle lasted ten minutes. Janet watched the silhouettes of planes reeling in the sky, the vapor trails unfurling, and the black smoke trailing behind one Messerschmitt fighter that had been hit. And then suddenly there was nothing left but the vapor trails. It was unbelievable how fast they all came and went. One minute nothing but wind and birdsong, the next all engines and gunfire, then birdsong again. It left Janet breathless.

  At last she stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled to Flora.

  “Well, that was better than the circus!” she greeted the deerhound happily. “Come on—let’s get those enemy pigeons.”

  She set off toward the dovecote. She might be able to nab some birds as they came back in, if they stayed together and she was patient enough to wait for them.

  Janet hadn’t even reached the dovecote when the wounded Messerschmitt came back.

  It was flying low and now trailing smoke in three different columns of color, black and white and blue, like a stunt plane in an air show. Janet nearly wrenched her head off her shoulders as she whipped her neck backward to watch the plane scream over her head. It missed the black ruined keep of Elphinloan Castle by what looked like inches and buried itself in the heather a few hundred yards farther on across the moor.

  “Wow,” Janet breathed.

  She started to pick her way toward the downed plane. It was hard work scrambling over the tufted heather and she’d only got halfway there when the whole wreck went up in a blaze of daylight fireworks.

  Janet wasn’t quite close enough to feel the blast. But she was close enough to drop to her knees and clap her hands over her ears and cower on the open moor, her head buried in her arms, for longer than she could count.

  The world put itself back together, as suddenly as the battle had been over. The roaring stopped. Out of the smoke on the horizon Janet saw, staggering toward her like a cadaver rising from its grave in a horror film, the looming figure of a once-human man.

  He was a black silhouette in the smoke at first, but then he grew details. Not a cadaver after all, though white as a ghost beneath a trickle of gleaming liquid ruby streaming from his nose. His eyes and skull were encased in leather and isinglass. As he staggered toward Janet, he raised the back of one hand to wipe his nose and she saw the slim steely pistol clenched in his gloved fingers. His index finger was hooked against the trigger.

  Flora hurtled forward in eager greeting, ridiculously anxious, as always, to welcome everybody Janet met.

  On her hind legs Flora was taller than Janet. Her coat was wild and shaggy and her long snout was full of long teeth. The airman staggered back a step as the deerhound leaped at him, and in a moment of sure, defensive ruthlessness, pointed his pistol at Flora’s head and fired. The crack of one clear gunshot ripped the air and Flora fell instantly.

  Janet, still crouched low and having pulled her scattered wits back together after the shock of the explosion, for a moment couldn’t comprehend what she’d just seen and heard.

  Then her world exploded again in a storm of grief and anger. Janet stood up, pulled her dad’s shotgun from her back, and pressed it to her shoulder with her wrist braced in the sling, all in one swift, thoughtless movement. But she knew, even in the maelstrom of emotion that enveloped her, that if she fired at such a large target so far away she’d never kill him. She’d no intention of wasting bird shot on him to hurt him—she wanted to kill him. So she waited for him to come closer.

  But the Luftwaffe pilot didn’t come straight for her. He stared down at Flora’s still, lanky body for a long moment before he looked up at Janet. Then he staggered forward determinedly, holding the pistol out ahead of him in his right hand. He held his left hand open in supplication, as if he couldn’t get the opposite sides of his body to agree with each other.

  A split second later she realized she’d just made herself vulnerable. She’d waited too long to fire at him.

  She took three deliberate steps forward, leveling the shotgun at him. She was close enough to do him a deal of damage now, but she didn’t have any idea if it would be fatal damage. She didn’t know if she could be sure of killing him, even up close. She had two cartridges in the shotgun and they were both full of bird shot. It was an idiotic way to try to kill anything bigger than a rabbit. But maybe he didn’t know that. Her gun was about five times the size of his.

  He came forward, too, still holding his pistol forward and aimed at her, still threatening.

  He stopped about a yard away from her. They stood facing each other for a long moment, eyeing each other with fear and hatred.

  Still training his pistol on Janet, the airman peeled off his gloves one at a time, then reached up with one hand to unbuckle the straps of his helmet and pull it off. He was younger than she’d thought. He had a round, boy’s face on a hulking man’s body. Not a friendly boy, though. A grim, desolate, hard-eyed stranger with a boy’s round face and a bloody nose. A bullying killer who’d been knocked down and was back on his feet now.

  Shoot him! Janet urged herself. Who cares if you kill him or not? Don’t shoot at his head or heart. Fill his hands or his eyes with lead shot—disable him, make him scream! Who’d blame you? He’s an enemy soldier and he’s just murdered the most gentle and loyal dog in the world—

  He gestured at Janet with his pistol and said something she couldn’t understand. He pointed back toward the silhouette of Elphinloan Castle and the cliffs at the edge of the Firth.

  Janet thought he was telling her t
o go.

  She took a step backward. She didn’t want to turn her back on him. She didn’t think he’d shoot her in the back like a coward, not when he could have shot her in the face a moment ago. But she didn’t want to turn and run like a coward herself, either.

  Janet backed away slowly, never lowering her shotgun.

  The airman followed her.

  He swept his arm toward Elphinloan encouragingly, as if he wanted to urge her, Go on! Go on!

  That’s when Janet realized why he hadn’t already killed her. He wanted her alive.

  If she didn’t shoot him now, she was going to end up as his hostage, or—

  But even in her blind grief over Flora’s pointless, mistaken death—adoring Flora would have never hurt anyone, even an invading German pilot—Janet suddenly realized that she couldn’t bring herself to maim a man in cold blood because he’d killed a dog. Even Flora.

  “All right, you Jerry bastard,” Janet snarled aloud. “You show me what you’re after. And then we’ll see what we see.”

  She, too, gestured with one hand—an invitation.

  “You can jolly well get in front of me,” she told him.

  He wouldn’t, though. He wanted to keep an eye on her and her shotgun. He stayed at a respectful distance from her, not wanting to get in deadly range of whatever she might fire at him, but keeping her within his own sights. They walked side by side but a little apart back to the cliff path, Janet and the shot-down Luftwaffe fighter pilot, like beaters driving grouse toward a shooting party.

  He made her cross the path and walk with him up past the castle to the edge of Elphinloan Point where the cliff stuck out into the Firth. Of course, he knew where to look; of course, he knew where the antiaircraft station was. He’d seen it all from the air.