Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Billy hauled back on the stick and released the gun switch as he roared over the beach and the smashed gun and then he felt bullets hitting his plane. Small-arms fire. Something caught in the engine, a small shudder, and he felt the plane suddenly lose power. Goddamn. He looked over the nose of the plane, through the whining propeller, and saw the airstrip — neat, gray, hacked out of coral — and at the edge of it, the Japs. Two rows of them, a tiny formation. The front rank kneeling, the back standing, perfectly disciplined, blazing away at his plane. A bullet smashed through the plexiglass of the canopy near his head, ricocheted off something, and smacked into the instrument panel. Sparks flew. Billy screamed, felt his face. No blood. He was past the Japs now and he could hear and feel the bullets whanging into the fuselage and tail of the plane. They were riddling him. Then he saw, as he passed over the end of the runway, what they were protecting. There, under the trees, wrapped in camouflage netting, a lone Zero. A small ragged piece of the once-mighty Japanese air force, stranded here in the backwash of the war. Maybe not even operative, grounded because there were no parts, nobody to come fix the damn thing so it could kamikaze into an American ship. Or maybe that’s what the seaplane was doing here. Whatever, it was fiercely defended by a pitiful little garrison of small funny men. And maybe there was more gasoline.

  Billy turned far out over the water, cursing them. His engine sputtered and coughed. Either the bullets had crippled it, or he was running out of fuel. Then he saw the thin wisp of smoke trailing from the engine cowling. A bullet had severed the oil line and the oil, hitting the superheated engine, vaporized into evil black smoke that said the plane was mortally wounded. Without oil, the engine would soon freeze, fuel or no fuel.

  He swung the plane back around to the right, back toward the island. It was limping badly now, coughing black blood from the wounds deep in its gut. Billy was at five hundred feet. He could see the airstrip as he approached and the small knot of men — perhaps ten in all — massing their firepower. They started popping away at him when he was well out from the beach, heading straight in at them, losing altitude, the plane’s engine squalling now in protest. He presented a fat wounded target. As he came, he could hear the slugs beginning to hit the plane, ripping into the metal. Two bullets hit the windshield and shattered it and he felt a searing pain in his shoulder and the sharp pinpricks of plexiglass cutting his face. He couldn’t squeeze his hand, couldn’t pull the trigger, because the arm was frozen from the bullet in his shoulder.

  “No!” he sobbed. Through the fractured windshield he could see the formation of Japs getting bigger. They were winning. Finishing off his airplane. And he thought, This is how it’s supposed to be. An even fight. Then there was another eruption of oil from the engine — not smoke this time, but liquid oil, hot and black, spraying back over the engine cowling and splattering the blasted windshield. He bellowed with rage and somehow he forced his frozen hand to squeeze the gun switch and he heard the guns buck and roar in awesome noise, drowning out his own frenzied battle screams. Then the guns quit and the plane itself became a hurtling projectile. He pulled back on the stick at the last possible instant and the plane pancaked onto the runway and into what was left of the Jap formation, spraying bodies in all directions. The last thing Billy remembered was the P-51 screeching on its belly, headed straight for the Zero under the trees, in an incredible crescendo of noise that was bigger than creation itself.

  Billy came to with flames all around him, and he thought, This is it. But he reached up with his good hand and found the canopy latch and gave it a mighty shove and the canopy slid back and the fierce heat of the flames licked at him. He unbuckled his harness and scrambled up out of the cockpit, onto the stub of jagged metal that was all that was left of the wing, and sprawled onto the sand. He picked himself up and started to run, whimpering with fright, and then the two planes — his own and the Zero it had skidded into — blew with a mighty roar behind him, slamming him onto the runway.

  He lay there for a long time, semiconscious, and then realized that he was alive and that nobody had walked up and shot him. He had made it. He staggered, exhausted, to a shallow trench on the other side of the runway, collapsed into it, and passed out. When he awoke, it was late in the day. The wreckage of the two planes was still smoldering. On the runway, bodies and pieces of bodies. He had killed the entire Jap garrison. He inspected his own wounds. A slug had passed through the meaty flesh of his right shoulder and there was a small piece of shrapnel in his left foot. Other than that, and some singed hair from the fire, he was all right.

  He found two small huts on the end of the runway. One of them was the Japs’ living quarters, with bamboo and thatch pallets on the floor, each under a canopy of mosquito netting. The other was an operations building. In one corner was a stack of foodstuffs, a large bag of rice, canned fish, tins of hard crackers, some items he couldn’t identify. In another corner was a small table with what was left of the Japs’ radio. It was in a thousand pieces, obviously unusable. There were maps on the wall, a pile of yellowing newspapers and magazines on the floor, and in another corner, incongruously, an old windup Victrola and a stack of Nelson Eddy records. Outside, behind the building, were a rain barrel half-full of brackish water and a small lean-to where Billy found a shovel. Using it as a crutch, he hobbled back to the center of the runway and managed to drag the Japs’ bodies over to the shallow trench and cover them with sand. Utterly spent, he returned to the huts, ate some canned fish and drank some water from the rain barrel, threw up, and went to sleep for two days.

  He awoke feverish and light-headed, and wandered about the island, half-delirious, for several days. Then he stumbled onto a bunker dug into the sand back under the trees, covered with sturdy palm logs except for a small padlocked door. He busted off the lock, opened the door, and found the Japs’ booze cache — several cases of a powerful rice wine in brown corked bottles. He lifted out one bottle, uncorked it, sniffed the strong tart odor of the wine, poured part of it on the festering wound in his shoulder and drank the rest. Within days, the wound had begun to heal. He took stock of his provisions, figured that he had enough food to last a year and ample fresh water from the frequent rainstorms. He hauled rocks and logs to the beach, constructed a sign large enough to be seen from several thousand feet up. He supplemented the Japs’ food with fresh fish and coconuts, swam in the small lagoon, listened to Nelson Eddy, drank rice wine, and waited.

  He had been there for two months, completely out of touch with the world, when a Navy PBY circled over the island one afternoon and its crew noticed the big block letters in the sand on the beach that read FUCK TOJO.

  “There’s got to be an American down there,” said the pilot to the copilot, so they circled the island and landed the PBY in the bright green water of the small lagoon on the island’s east side. They rowed ashore in a rubber dinghy and found Billy Benefield, dressed in a Japanese loincloth, quite drunk, lying in a makeshift hammock stretched between two palm trees at the edge of the island’s small runway. Billy watched them cross the runway toward him, and when they reached the hammock, he swung his legs over the side and gave a lurching salute.

  “Glad to see you sonsabitches,” he said, “I was about to run out of wine and I’m bored with whacking off.” Then he passed out.

  So Billy Benefield came home the hero he no longer wanted to be.

  The war was well over. Hitler and Roosevelt were dead, Churchill was deposed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been reduced to ashes and MacArthur had become de facto emperor of Japan, and American soldiers were rioting in Manila and Paris, demanding to be sent home. Several million had already gone, streaming back into civilian life in a country that wanted to forget places like Tunis and Tarawa.

  But Billy Benefield was too good to pass up. The Army Air Corps brass figured the country could handle one last hero. So they dried Billy out in a hospital in Hawaii and sent him home with decorations — the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Silver Star, an
d the Purple Heart — and two escort officers, one of them a former Hollywood press agent.

  Billy stepped off the C-47 at Presidio and told a waiting crowd of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen how he had single-handedly captured an entire Japanese island and held it until Uncle Sam came to find him. On instructions from the Air Corps brass, he left out the role of the Navy and the Japanese rice wine.

  That done, the Air Corps unleashed Alsatia and she dashed wailing across the tarmac, holding her hat on her head with one hand, and threw herself into Billy’s waiting arms while the bulbs popped and the cameras whirred. Then the Air Corps handed Billy his mustering-out papers, and after a wild night in a San Francisco hotel, Billy and Alsatia boarded a TWA flight for Chicago.

  Tunstall Renfroe, like the Army Air Corps, also knew a good thing when he saw it. Once news of Billy’s rescue hit the papers, Tunstall wired Alsatia, forgiving all. Then Tunstall took it upon himself, as the town’s wartime air raid warden, to organize a welcome-home celebration for the hero and his bride.

  There was another press contingent waiting at Midway Airport in Chicago, along with Tunstall and Marvel Renfroe and Rosh and Ideal Benefield. The Benefields and Renfroes carried bundles of newspapers that featured front-page pictures of Billy and Alsatia’s passionate kiss on the tarmac at Presidio and accounts of Billy’s heroics. There was a tearful and somewhat awkward reunion and Billy recounted his exploits to the Chicago press; then they all took a taxi across town where they caught the train. They changed trains in Cincinnati and headed south toward home, into a land ablaze with autumn.

  They wired ahead to let the town know of their arrival time, and when the train pulled into the station just after noon, there was a crowd at the platform including the high school band, members of the Town Council, a colonel from the upstate air base where Billy had done his flight training, and an honor guard from the American Legion post, whose ranks had been swelled by returning veterans.

  Inside, as the train slowed, they all stood and began gathering up their parcels and coats (it had been cold in Chicago, but not so much that it prevented Marvel and Ideal from doing some shopping while they waited for Billy and Alsatia to arrive from the coast). They all stood, all, that is, except Billy. Rosh Benefield looked back and saw him sitting there in his seat on the opposite side of the car from the platform, looking glumly out the window toward the middle of town where the courthouse clock tower rose above the brown-leaved trees.

  Rosh pulled on his heavy gray overcoat and eased his big bulk past the others back to Billy’s seat, where Alsatia stood, bent over Billy, talking softly to him.

  She turned to Rosh and shrugged. “He says he doesn’t want to get off.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Rosh said. “Let us be alone for a minute.”

  She gathered her things and moved past him, stopped to whisper to Tunstall and Marvel and Ideal. Then the four of them went to the front of the car, leaving Rosh and Billy alone. Rosh lowered himself heavily into the seat next to Billy and looked for a long moment at the back of his son’s head.

  “Billy,” he said. Billy turned to look at him and he saw again how much Billy had changed. His face was deeply browned from the Pacific sun, the skin taut over the bones like a drumhead, small crow’s-feet under his eyes from squinting. That would change. The tan would fade, the flesh would fill out, most of the wrinkles would go away for a while because Billy was still young. What would not change was the look in his eyes. The boy was gone, and with him the last flicker of Rosh Benefield’s own youth. Rosh understood it as the look of a man who had been places and seen things he could never express to you because you were incapable of understanding, things that became part of his own fabric as surely as those you had drilled into him as a boy. Rosh had seen the look in the eyes of the others who came back from war. There was something of horror in some of them, the ones who had seen the worst of it. But beyond that was the common experience of having been away, having been scared and homesick and sometimes near death, and then having come to grips with it. A whole generation of young men, Rosh thought, would carry the same secrets in their hearts for a lifetime and be irreversibly altered by them. Even in the quiet and private hours of midnight in their own bedrooms, even in the most intimate moments of sharing, they could not share this. It was beyond comprehending. He wondered for a moment how it would change them and how it would change the country.

  “I want to just keep going,” Billy said to him. There was still a strange, hesitant quality in Billy’s voice, that of a man who had been alone for a long time with no one to share his thoughts.

  Ideal called to them from the front of the car. “Rosh, Billy, they’re waiting for us.”

  Rosh gave her a hard stare and turned back to Billy. “So you want to keep going.”

  “I just don’t want to talk to them. Can you understand that?”

  Rosh could hear the off-key blatting of the high school band out on the platform, playing “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along.” He looked out the opposite window at them for a moment. Twenty or so kids, mostly boys, in white shirts, dark pants, and white buck shoes. They looked unmercifully young and pimpled, but he thought that if the war had lasted another year, half of them would have gone.

  He turned back to Billy. “I understand, son.” He paused for a moment and looked down at his big hands, folded in his lap over the broad gray expanse of his overcoat. “What will you do if you stay on the train?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy said quietly. “I just want to sit here until it gets to the end of the line, wherever that is, and then get off where nobody knows me and nobody expects anything.”

  “And what do you think they expect here?” Rosh asked.

  “I guess it’s you I’m talking about,” he said.

  Rosh grunted. “Okay. What do you think I expect of you, Billy?”

  “You want me to go to college and then to law school and then come back here and settle down and become mayor. It’s all you’ve ever talked about. And now, with my war record and my ribbons and all this hoopla, I guess I can see it happening, just like you want.”

  “Rosh!” Ideal called back again, “everybody’s waiting. The conductor says they have to get the train moving, and all those people are standing out there …”

  “Dammit, Ideal, will you shut up a minute!” Rosh snapped, and she stood there stunned, as if he had hit her with a wet dishrag. Tunstall Renfroe cleared his throat and said, “Well, we’ll be waiting outside, Ideal,” and he took Marvel by the arm and left. Rosh could see him through the window, waving and smiling outside where the crowd was thick on the platform around the band. Ideal stood her ground inside the railroad car, arms full of packages, glaring at them, Alsatia beside her with a bemused look on her face.

  Rosh turned to Billy again. “Son, you don’t have to decide right this minute what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. Look, you’ve been away and become your own man. You can do anything you damned well please. Yes, if you want to go to law school and become mayor, it’s there for the taking. Maybe even more than that. Congress, if you wanted it. But if you want to get off the train here and say hello to all the folks and then go home and prop your feet up and wait for some sort of inspiration to hit you, that’s all right, too. You have to be your own man now. You can’t do what I want, or what you think people expect, unless it’s what you want.”

  Billy studied him for a moment. “You mean that, don’t you.”

  Rosh nodded. “Of course. That’s all a man should ever want from a son. As Jake Tibbetts likes to say, a fellow has to take his life in his own hands and shake it for all it’s worth. Do that, and I’ll be satisfied.”

  “But if I get off,” Billy said stubbornly, “that’s taking the first step.”

  “Have you talked with Alsatia about this?”

  “No. All we ever do is”— he stopped and blushed.

  Rosh smiled. “Well, don’t you think she’s got some say in the
matter?”

  Billy shrugged. “I guess.”

  “That’s one thing about having a wife. You can’t do anything without her putting her two cents’ worth in.”

  They sat there for a moment, Rosh looking at Billy, Billy staring at the back of the seat in front of him. The conductor swung inside the car and called out, “ ‘Board! Got to get moving, folks. We’re behind schedule!”

  Rosh got heavily to his feet. “Billy, I don’t think the Army Air Corps has taught you a damned thing about judgment. But you’re not going to learn any by sitting here on this train until it runs out of track. Now if you don’t want to get off, fine. I’ll step out there and give your regards to the folks and tell them you’ve got business elsewhere.”

  Billy waited awhile, deep in thought, and then looked up at him. “Aw, what the hell,” he said.