by Laura Newman
Jerry and I didn’t have flat feet and most of the senior class was joining up. And the girls knew it. They knew this was the end of the plans they had so carefully laid under the tutelage of their mothers. Legs crossed beneath the vanity, applying eye shadow, perfume to the wrist, all a sort of primer for their daughters. The girls had planned to emulate their mothers, and now all the men were leaving town. It caused a kind of madness in them. By Christmas they had turned from flirty larks into women. Those who got pinned by New Year’s were lucky, and if they could get engaged by prom, the tiniest diamond would do, they would be saved. If not, they were destined to be typists, teachers, or nurses—just other words for Old Maid. They went on a kind of attack.
Jerry finally got up the nerve to ask out Julia Stein. The redhead in him loved the smoky darkness of her eyebrows against her alabaster skin and her absolute love of math. She did not giggle. Hers was a straight-on assault. He’d loved Julia since she was seven years old, never outwardly shaken by the racial taunts and slurs, never bending. She simply said she used the same Bible we did but only the first part. But I think “sticks and stones” was her litany. Her big-nosed brother Victor was an easy target. Bob worked him for years until eighth-grade gym, when he pulled the shower towel from around Victor’s waist, triumphant to reveal to us all the circumcised Jew. But the joke was on Bob because Victor had the biggest putz we had ever seen and that was the end of the joking, right then and there.
Never in our town had a child baptized in Good St. Wenceslaus’s church dated a Jew, but now, what did it matter? She’s an American, ain’t she? Well, Julia got the diamond in April and Jerry got laid in May and by June their baby Pearl was on her way. Julia was never the type to be a nurse anyway. That girl became a doctor. I stood best man and Maureen caught the bouquet.
On the best day of spring Maureen and I picnicked on the far side of Mr. Lesky’s hay fields where a few aspens shaded a spot of grass with their triangle leaves. When a breeze drifted through the limbs, the leaves applauded, it was a day as fine as that. I pushed the cold fried chicken away and lay Maureen back on the same threadbare cloth she used for our tea party the day my brains fell out. I buried my nose in her hair and slowly unbuttoned her sweater, the little silver buttons. Bless the girl, she wore an under-smock with a ribbon and I slid it open and cupped her breasts in my hands. I moved my mouth to her, she smelled like flour and earth and she had freckles, which immediately won my love. I licked the space beneath the small weight of her breasts, dipped down toward the dell of her belly, glazed by the beauty of the sound of her rising breath. But Maureen was having none of that. She stopped me there and there she would always stop me although I had a lot of fun trying to shift my hands, my face, lower. She swatted me away and I kissed her wrists. I gave her a silver ring and she did not begrudge me the lack of diamonds. When I left for boot camp she gave me a box of good parchment stationery and a silver-plated pen.
Boot camp was at the fairgrounds but that was fine, we were on our way. Jerry and I joined the Army Air Corps. I talked him into it. I didn’t want to sleep on the ground and I just didn’t think I could trust something as unruly as an ocean.
Rose surprised us all. She packed up the house and took Ma with her and moved to San Francisco. Our little house with the green door was empty quick as that. They took an apartment in the noisy city, but Rose said honking cars, honking geese, what’s the difference? She loved the hustle and buzz. She went to the Embarcadero and dated sailors because they sure looked fine in their whites. But she married Pete the Junk Man who could fix up anything. They moved to Hayward with Ma and had a little girl named Debbie. That crease in Rose’s forehead never did flatten out, but she gained a laugh that suited her. She kept a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter and Debbie never had to wait on an orange.
No one can tell the whole of this war, any war. How can you snare that crazy essence? Inconceivably, the Jews were becoming landfill and lampshades, Russians were planting cabbages in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, the Swiss were remaining neutral with extended banking hours, and Mussolini was changing his mind. Pieces of bone still wash up on on the shores of Normandy, smooth as sea glass. The ocean can’t swallow all the shipwrecks at Dunkirk, flecks of rust still copper the shore. I have a pile of pity for those boys, both sides. But that was not my war, I was having none of that.
My war was taking place in Southern Italy, Cerignola, as part of the 756th Bombardment Squadron, 459th Bombardment Group of the 15th Air Corps. We piled into our B24 Liberators and nearly willed those beasts to flight. They had a habit of not actually taking off, and Omar, the only Muslim I ever met, told us if he died like that and not in honest battle he wouldn’t get his forty virgins. I just wanted one virgin. I focused on her freckles, on the one freckle shaped like a little star.
We lumbered up and took our position in the squadron, two hundred planes or more, and flew over the Mediterranean like shoals of silvery fish. We crossed into France with the objective of bombing a bridge in Avignon and it could have been a milk run, I was hoping for a milk run. But the German fighters showed up taking sniper shots and the flak guns spit up at us. Formation could not be broken. There were no evasive maneuvers.
The little star-shaped freckle. Bombs falling on fields of sunflowers, a million yellow petals flung into the air. Bombs falling on lavender, singeing the wind with sulfur and sachet. Bombs falling on the Palace of the Popes, ruining Roman ruins. My mind flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I couldn’t pay attention. I willed myself to pay attention. See that Luftwaffe going down? Who hit it, us or the flak? I started whistling Dixie.
Krauts jumped from the spiraling plane. Their parachutes clouded. I was the waist gunner so I shot one dead. I can’t say I shot him out of the sky because his parachute still held him up. But he was dead. Blood coursed from his chest. I wondered if his blood would reach the ground first. I wondered if his soul would slide out with the blood or if it would be stuck there for a while inside his muscles. Or had I shot a hole right through it? Or was his soul already rising, bobbing just within the parachute, passing through silk, no concern left at all? I had to pay attention. It was very hard for me. I had been in Italy for only two days.
We bombed the bridge and went back to base. Really I don’t know anything about bombing fields of flowers or architectural sites. My mind just made stuff up, which I kept to myself. When we landed we ran our fingers over the pocks of shrapnel in our plane and went to find out who had failed to make it back.
Jerry made it back. We weren’t assigned to the same plane and sometimes didn’t go on the same missions, but we had a place to meet for nights of cards and cigarettes. Jerry liked to talk about Julia—if they had a girl they would name her Pearl after the harbor. There was a night we went one-over-the-eights and he told me intimacies about her, how once she had taken him in her mouth, and he too had tasted the very inside of her. I didn’t want to hear it. She was his wife for Christ’s sake, but I wanted to hear it too. Half the nights I couldn’t sleep. I would think of Maureen and get heated up but I didn’t want to be rough on my memory of her. So, God forgive me, sometimes I would borrow Jerry’s wife and Julia would let me rise beyond her thigh.
I wrote letters to Maureen and told her not one true thing about the war.
The missions went by: Bucharest, Budapest, Brunswick, a synthetic oil factory at Odertal, Ploesti. Munich, where two B24s broke apart five hundred feet in front of me after accidentally brushing together when we were regrouping to head home.
I remember the night Jerry and I took a long walk around the field. We moved as far out as we could so the lights faded enough to see the Milky Way. The air was heavier in Cerignola than in Cedar Rapids. The stink of the planes, the gas and grease receded just a little. We could almost smell the wheat fields beyond. The clean smell. It was nearly unnatural, I had become so accustomed to the smell of war fought in planes. Jerry was excited. He had a new plan
. When he got home he was going to become an airline pilot. He figured there would be a surplus of planes left over from the war and a boom in commercial aviation. He and Julia could move to Chicago and take vacations in Hawaii. I said who’s going to want to fly to Hawaii in a B24 but Jerry said parts is parts—they’ll build new planes out of the leftovers. When we got back and I sat down to write to Maureen, Jerry asked me to let him use my stuff to write Julia. I told him buzz off but he was so excited he sat there and kept on talking right over me while I finished my letter. Damned if he didn’t keep it up until we went to bed. Those redheads are so excitable.
Munich. I am the turret gunner on this mission so I have an elevated view. It’s horrifying and I keep humming the Viennese waltz and swirling my gun like a dance partner. The sounds of the plane, the bombs, form the bass. The air whistling through my oxygen mask is a silver tinkling bell. The flak, I see it leave the ground soundlessly, and then it explodes into the crescendo. I whirl my gun around like Elmer Fudd at the opera. I am a ridiculous soldier. We can’t break formation; we never can break formation. I am the turret gunner so I see the flak forming and I feel it hit the plane, I see it break through my turret and little pieces of silver glance by my chin, no, they hit my chin, and dislodge my oxygen mask from my face. I look down in my lap and pick up small chunks of metal, fallen stars, drop them in my pocket, and the waltz plays on. I adjust my mask and keep on shooting. Our plane is not compromised. The mission is accomplished, or not accomplished, but we are heading back to base.
We regroup like a flock of iron seagulls and maybe my shoulders relax. But then I see two Libs five hundred feet in front of me heading for the same space. I see them both shake, trying to shift but the wings collide and crumple like tinfoil, easy as tinfoil. I see the name of one of the planes, Betty Boop. I close my eyes, count to ten, feel each number like a boxer staving off the knockout count because I don’t want to see these planes fall. I count slow as that knocked-down boxer rising back up, leaning on the ropes. But it doesn’t work because when I open my eyes it’s as if no time has passed at all. I watch fury, smoke and flame.
Jerry wants to be a commercial pilot and he wants to tell Julia his plans. He wants to use my silver-plated pen and the watermarked paper that Maureen gave me. I am selfish with it. Ink is hard to come by. Last night he paced around me wound up with words, hands flying, ablaze with visions of the future. I pretty much ignored him.
I watch this junked-up piece of metal and I think of my friend, my whirlwind of a friend, my incinerated friend falling from the sky in his Betty Boop plane. I think of my stupid silver pen and the letter I didn’t let him write. I see him at my window on a summer evening, trailing fireflies like sparks from the fire of his hair. Skinny. I see him running down the street on the first day of winter. I see his mother losing all her faith. Julia with her growing belly wondering just what’s she going to do now. I imagine the letter I didn’t let him write, and I hate myself forever. The silver fox ran over the hill and just like that my friend was gone.
I could never bring myself to write Maureen again, which was just another unkindness. Later I heard from Agnes that at first Maureen thought I was dead, then she thought I fell in love with an Italian girl, then she got mad and quit the counter at The Good Morning Café, moved to Wisconsin to marry a goat farmer. Agnes told me she loved the little goats. She put bows around their necks because she never could have children, but her goat cheese was spectacular. She sent a round to Agnes each Christmas for some years, then that fell off too.
I developed a twitch in my trigger finger after Munich which actually improved my shooting and there was a part of my chin that never needed shaving again.
Down in Africa, Intelligence built miniature replicas of the Ploesti oil fields and the surrounding Romanian villages for our lead pilots to study so that when we made the strike on Hitler’s biggest octane supply it would be just as familiar as looking down on our own hometowns. Except Intelligence wasn’t intelligent enough to consider that oil burns like a son of gun. As soon as we started the bombing, black smoke concealed every possible landmark. And the Krauts might not have known when we were coming, but they sure knew we would come, and they were having none of that. We threw it down, they threw it up.
I think I was in the seventh ring of hell. The day turned to a cyclone of smoke and soot, cordite, yellow tracers from the flak guns, metal falling all around like meteorites. I saw Jesus in the silver clouds picking up little lost soldier souls, gathering them in. My fractured mind sang along to Beethoven’s Fifth, all symbols and percussion, my gun the conductor’s baton. I was shooting pretty well, though. Then we were hit. The plane made a sound like a harpooned whale, so plaintive, as if that crate was sad to let us down. I tried to think of Maureen and her fine freckles, but she was lost to me.
Yet we did not go down. I don’t know how it is that we limped our way out of battle. Maybe no one bothered to take another shot at us as it was clear we were already earthbound. But when the smoke cleared we saw farm fields below us. To no avail we dumped our guns and everything we could toss except our parachutes to try and lighten our load. We made it a good distance before we bailed, one at a time and miles apart, and I had my first visit to Yugoslavia.
I’d jumped out of a plane before, at boot camp, so I was ready for the stomach-wrenching free fall and the sweet, heavy tug of the parachute’s release. The silk slowed me and delivered me down just like the baby and the stork. I bailed over farmland, rutabaga and beets—I know my crops. Instead of fences, low rock walls around neatly squared off fields, stone farmhouses, and groves of old trees. Plenty of open space for a safe landing. But a rogue wind was having none of that. Just before landing I was pushed hard to the side and down. I smacked straight into a stone wall and broke my ankle so severely it twisted out into a dancer’s first position.
The parachute collapsed right over me, shrouded me in white, and for a moment I thought Jesus was an angel come to gather me too, but no such luck. I fought my way out of the chute and before the pain overcame the gauze of my shock I grabbed my foot and wrenched it forward. There, that looks better. Then I passed out. But the pain was a dominatrix, whipping me back to consciousness. Through watery eyes I watched as a farmer and his wife came toward me across the fields. I was in enemy territory, unarmed, and I couldn’t even run. I started to giggle. Well, why not? I was going to be killed by Ma and Pa Kettle. What a fine kettle of fish. I hummed Hi-ho the derry-O, the farmer in the dell, crazy to the end. But they just picked me up and carried me into their home and waves of pain made me shiver.
When I awoke I was in the softest bed. I could smell wood smoke and ash. Smoke without the stench of gasoline or metal. Out the window I saw the wife feeding my parachute into an open fire. I imagined it hurt her to burn all that silk, enough to make her daughter a tiered wedding gown and a fine bassinet for the firstborn to boot. But it was death for them if the Germans found me on their farm, so they burned everything but my boots. And the wife, bless her, she kept my chunks of flak and put them beside the bed like touchstones. I don’t know how long I was there. I have images of wavy pain and borscht, rough sheets but clean, and the meditative sound of a rocking chair. Eventually they packed me into a hay wagon and moved me west to new people, and this happened again and again, sometimes a short distance, sometimes far, like a slave on the Underground Railroad.
Who were these people who didn’t even know my name, didn’t speak my language, risking their lives for a nineteen-year-old boy, this string of hearts who willed me to live? Uncle Sam gave me a medal for breaking my ankle on a stone wall, but my injury seemed easy compared to the act of spiriting a single soldier all the way to an English base on the Adriatic. I looked out at that argent sea and knew my war was over. The Limeys delivered me to Naples, back into the arms of Uncle Sam, who put a silver plate with seven screws into my ankle.
On the last day of summer I went into town. It was a starry, star
ry night and I found a tavern with accordion music spilling out in the street, candles on the tables. The town was full of soldiers and the noise of life, a bony dog barking on the step. I drank my beer and the barkeep filled me up again. She was as beautiful as hope, dark hair, smoke eyes. It was a busy night and she wiped her hands on the apron tied around the waist of her black dress. Soldiers were dancing with girls, inside, outside. I wanted to dance with the beautiful barkeep, smell her, feel her against my chest, rest my hand in the small of her back. I would have married her this very night, cathedral bells ringing down the alleyways. Intuitive girl, she saw my melancholy but mistook it for lust, slapped my arm with a smile, and splashed another drink my way. I tipped my pewter mug to the beautiful girl, to Jerry, to all that was lost, drank it down. I survived the war and that was that.
The Color of Fisticuffs and Bloodlines
Never ask a mother if she would exchange
her life for the life of her child. The
answer may not always be yes.
Japan, Winter 2010—Kimiko
Kimiko was born during an earthquake in Matsumoto, Japan, still elbows deep in her mother when the 7.4 struck. The doctor held on to Kimi, but the infant was slippery and, of course, still connected to her mother’s body. The earthquake was a jumpy tumbler. There was an avalanche of white ceiling tiles, scalpels on the loose. The doctor struggled against the earthquake to bring Kimi into this world, a fight of samurai against Godzilla. Everybody was screaming. The doctor fell to the floor and Kimi went with him, placenta ripped from her mother’s body. Kimi landed on the doctor, her tiny head protected by the doctor’s chest. For an instant, his wild heartbeat pounded in her ear, the sound of a rolling ocean in a seashell. Then Kimi was slapped in the face with the placenta. The earth settled down with a final shogun-shrug, and suddenly everything was silent. That was Kimi’s cue to cry.
