A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked my mom at the viewing the day before the funeral, but she looked offended.

  “Nothing,” she said. “That’s just how they do it.” She clearly did not want to think about his thumb. Other than his thumb, his body looked healthier than it had in life. The color of his face had been artificially restored, and his hand, which was once cramped into a permanent tortured fist from arthritis and lack of movement, had been surreally straightened out. I wondered if they’d had to break his bones with a hammer to make it look like that. We could never get him to open that hand, as hard as we tried, so maybe his thumb always looked like that inside, like the way my club thumbs once looked inside my fists. Maybe he was embarrassed it looked like that.

  To me, this was the thumb that had carefully run over the missile rollerons, spinning them gently. It was the thumb that used to grasp me around the waist and swing me over his shoulders. It was the thumb that used to hold sextants to shoot the stars. I did not want to see it gone. His thumb became a vortex that I tripped and fell into, a thumb surrounded by a body—my father—now a body, not a father. Yet the vortex I was sucked into, that space of death without senses, still seemed more sensible, more real, than the cardboard characters sitting in the pews. My mother, sister, and I were all arrested by that same vortex of death. Who had propped everyone else up in here?

  In my dad’s last months and years, his body began disappearing and shrinking all over. At first, he stopped eating but would still drink Boost. Later, he would not even do that. The only thing he would eat, in the end, was ice cream. My mother tried to keep him full of ice cream to keep him alive, but he often insisted on drinking his ice cream through a straw, perhaps thinking it was Boost, even though nothing went up the straw. When my mom took the straw away and gave him a spoon, he would shout like a child, “No! Give me the spoon!” and then take the straw back. All the while his body was shrinking and shriveling in the hospital bed at home. It got smaller and smaller even as his mind refused to die. At least the metal bars on his bed kept his body from falling on the floor, turning slowly into dust down there. Before we had those installed, the firemen would have to come and pull his cobweb-ridden body up and back into the bed. My mother could not lift him, and it seemed all he wanted to do was slump to the ground, as if getting ready to go under it, to dig a tunnel down.

  In the last stage of Alzheimer’s, the body forgets how to work. The stomach forgets it is hungry, the mouth forgets to swallow, the heart forgets to beat. In the end, my mom would not forgive herself for not being his all-night vigil, not being able to stay awake to keep him alive when his body forgot how to live. She had slept through his death, through the sound of his rasping breath, and now could not stop the nightmares about how it may have happened. Even though his death certificate said he’d had a “heart attack,” she thought it was her fault, as she once had felt by her mother’s side.

  My mom said that even near the end, when my dad mostly slept, he might suddenly open his eyes and say, “You look pretty today.” Because of moments like these, she had agreed to a feeding tube to keep him alive a little bit longer. In the end, that tube hung out of his belly, attached to what looked like a Slurpee machine. But we knew that it was plumping up his body again, a body that had wanted to shrink into nothingness.

  Now my dad’s body was artificially plumped up by embalming fluid. The death artists had even managed to close his mouth, shaping it into a peaceful smile: not too happy, just enough to signify rest. At the viewing, my mom had leaned over and whispered to me, “It’s nice to see him looking healthy again.” I imagined my mom wanted him to wake up to forgive her then, and I knew he would if he could. He would hug her and tell her that she had done a great job, that dying was its own fault. He would have said he was sorry because, even though he had made it to twenty years at work, he could not make it to fifty years with her, holding out those last few months until they got to Gold. He would smile at the sight of her in her best funeral dress and say, You look pretty today. But because he could not say those things, my mom compulsively pictured his death for a year, even in her dreams.

  The pastor was talking as though he wanted to save someone, not realizing there was no way to save my dad now. I wanted my dad to dance on top of his coffin, to come back to life as his great-uncle had. The pastor said, “And his wife, Mary, is a true saint for taking care of Earl until the end.” My mom smiled and looked down modestly. Behind her, in the stillness of that moment, someone chuckled. Her smiled vanished.

  “Of course, someone had to chuckle,” she said later. “I could not possibly be a saint.” But she was. For years, I had watched her mind adapt to his needs and way of thinking as she soothed him back to life even as he was dying. She would always correct me when I said he was “crazy.” She would say, “It’s an illness, a disease, not a psychological problem.” She dove into his disease with him. When he flirted with me, unaware that I was his daughter, she said nothing. “Oh, I didn’t know you liked me that way,” he said as I helped him put on his seat belt. She told me about the time he panicked when he could not recognize her. When he insisted that he had to find her, that she might be hurt, she had driven him around town for hours, looking for herself. Periodically, she would stop and show him her driver’s license, trying to convince him of who she was. “No, not that Mary,” he would say. “The other one.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” she would say, driving and crying quietly.

  Even as my mom slowly moved into my dad’s mind, she would try to translate his world to the world outside. She always believed what was in his mind was just as valid as the world outside—because it was him—and seemed slightly offended when others did not. If she had woken up in time to see my father dying, I knew his eyes would have simply lit up one last time, not caring about the dying anymore. Just happy to see her pretty face.

  On a large screen behind the altar, Mitch projected a video he’d made with photographs of my father set to classical music. There were very few of his childhood, giving one the illusion that his life had started in World War II. This seemed fitting, since as my father’s mind had gone backward in time, slowly erasing its recent history, it had finally decided to stop at the war and stay.

  My dad stood in a field in Cornwall in his dress U.S. Army Air Corps uniform, with a silver sword by his side. He looked like a kid playing dress-up, pretending to go to war. But his thumb held that sword tightly in place, just as a living thumb would do. He was receiving the Air Medal for a heroic act he never told us about. Maybe it was for the woman who chased him with a gun in Stockholm. My sister and I never got whole stories. We could see one alleyway but not the city, one doorway ducked into but not the war.

  After the funeral, we headed to the cemetery, past the wild horse and burro facility and dog pound, close to the Russians, on the outskirts of town. There, you could look out over the valley, with delicate yellow daisies punctuating the view like exclamation points.

  As “Taps” was played and the American flag finally folded up and handed to my mother, I felt that my father belonged there, in the place where words were written on petals, where dogs and burros were your guardians. He deserved to leave his sanity, finally, here.

  “Beyond the sanity of fools is a burning desert,” the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, “Where Your sun is whirling in every atom: / Beloved, drag me there, let me roast in Perfection!” I wanted to be thrown out on the desert floor after I died, which would keep my body warm, not into a cold, dark hole. I wanted to let flowers grow all around me and coyotes lick at my flesh. I cried for my father but also for the veterans that surrounded him—and for the next war and the next, and all the wars that I knew would never end at China Lake. I cried for all the bodies.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Rubble of a Life

  After the funeral, I found my dad’s secrets buried in his box, a greenish-gray cardboard carton held together
with a shoelace-like ribbon from World War II. It was the box that no one ever opened, meant to remain forever in that secret space between his bed and our beige carpet. So when, only a week after his death, I found it sitting on top of the bed, I felt as if I had stumbled upon a crime scene. My mom must have pulled it out. It looked so exposed, waiting for anyone to look inside. What was I supposed to do?

  I pulled off the top.

  Inside, I rummaged through stacks of letters until I came across a photograph I recognized, the one he kept in his top dresser drawer, next to his Tums and spare car keys. Only now I noticed something different about the black-haired woman in the photograph on the cliffs of Cornwall. I never knew who she was. I had asked my father once, and he’d replied, “She was my best friend’s girl. He asked me to look after her when he went to the front.” Maybe he was still looking after her, in his drawer. Only now did I notice that she was posed so beautifully and seductively that it was clear she loved the photographer. Was he my father or his best friend? I could see only her eyes, not his.

  Thrusting my hand back in the box, I felt around as in a grab bag until my fingers met the hard edges of a U.S. Army Air Corps dog tag. It was stamped “Earl Marwin Piper.” There was a story about this too. My dad told us he always thought his middle name was Marvin, and no one was really around to correct him. His parents, of course, must have told him his middle name, but then they were gone and there were no other Marwins around. So he started writing “Marvin” on his official forms until the air corps caught his mistake. Then in Newquay, a stranger noticed the name on his tag and said, “Ah, Marwin, ‘Friend of the Sea.’ You’re Cornish?” That was how my dad found out his name was Celtic. Cornwall had given my dad back his name, a name perhaps ironic for a man who could not swim, yet appropriate for someone who flew over oceans. “Welcome home,” the Cornish man had said.

  From his great-grandfather, who had been a tin miner in Cornwall, to his grandfather, who had blown off his arm at fourteen in a mine, my dad must have known his family’s story was buried deep in that Cornish soil. He must have learned that his sister’s pasties, which my mother could never replicate, were designed to be easily carried in your pocket down into the mines. He must have realized that his small, dark stature came from Cornwall, where the door frames were rarely more than five feet tall. He must have felt he finally “fit.” The mines took and took from the Pipers, but serendipity and graves and the stormy ocean had finally washed a tiny bit back up on shore for my dad. A name. A door frame. A great-grandfather buried nearby.

  As my father’s past must have materialized before his eyes in Cornwall, so my father’s box made my memories take on a physical, tangible dimension. Then I pulled out something unfamiliar, a passport with stamps and dates inside and a photograph of my dad in a white aviator’s cap with gold braid on the edge. It read “American Air Transport Service.” My dad had never been a commercial pilot or navigator, so the picture looked all wrong. I ran into the living room, passport in hand, to ask my sister what it meant. Time was our paramount concern since we could not predict when our mom might return from the store.

  “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

  “His box was on Mom’s bed, so I opened it,” I confessed, hoping she would not rat me out. “Did he ever work for a commercial airline?”

  “Wow, that’s a spy passport,” my sister said, looking it over closely. We examined each stamp to see where he had been: Leuchars, Metfield, Bromma. She had told me earlier that she thought he was part of Operation Sonnie in Sweden, which she had pieced together from his flight routes. “I knew it!” she said.

  “Is this what you thought he was in?” I leaned over her beanbag chair to look more closely.

  “Yes, it’s Sonnie,” she said. We had proof, even though we had to quickly store it back in its hiding place in case our mom walked in.

  And so the spy ID was stuffed back into a box that we both knew was vulnerable to shredding, since my mom could not seem to kick the habit of shredding secret documents for the DoD. The shredder was her way of downsizing, packing up, and moving on, leaving me wondering what was real from my memories. It was destroying evidence by the day.

  Yet thanks to his fictional passport, I could now follow my father into his past, piecing together a life after mine that had been torn down by his death. Each piece, I would later realize, was a brick in my own identity. Now I could pin down his movements in 1944–1945, Leuchars, Stockholm, and “American Air Transport Service.” I could go there with him. The passport triggered memories of stories he’d once told, such as being chased by a woman with a gun in Stockholm. He said she chased him because he had forgotten to take the price tag off his suit, his “disguise” as a civilian. That price tag gave away that he had bought it just for this occasion, that it was not really his. He also said the B-24s he flew in had to be painted black or green and that their bomb bays were converted to carry passengers and cargo. To me, these tales had merely been bedtime stories about enchanting faraway places, but now the facts had washed up on the shore for me.

  As I researched Operation Sonnie, I discovered its purpose was to bring American airmen who had crashed in Sweden, which stayed neutral during the war, back to England, as well as Norwegian resistance fighters who had to flee German-occupied Norway. It was run by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA. The operation also carried load after load of ball bearings to England. Near the end of the war in Europe, they carried a German V-2 test missile—launched from Peenemünde by Wernher von Braun—that had inadvertently landed in Sweden. It was a dud, but it was enough to start the missile race in the United States. No one had seen anything like it before. With a successful launch, it was feared, Hitler would win the war. He was that close to getting it right.

  It seemed my father had followed the missiles from the start.

  To understand my father’s job, I decided to follow the cargo, which in this case was ball bearings. Such a small thing, but so necessary for winning a war, for keeping all the cogs and gears of the mechanical world running. In 1943, the U.S. Army Air Corps bombed the center for ball-bearing production in Germany, Schweinfurt, realizing that Germany could not win a war without ball bearings. The problem was that Swedish ball-bearing manufacturers quickly filled the void, delighted to find a market desperate for their goods. These round little gems became a gold mine. To get these companies to stop supplying Germany, the United States had to offer more money than the Germans did. They had to buy the ball bearings.

  Being “neutral” was more like being a money launderer than a pacifist, it seemed. Sweden tried to get the best deals from both sides. They wanted to trade things. Internees for ball bearings. And so my dad came to carry loads and loads of ball bearings from Sweden to England—discreetly, of course.

  As for that other little thing, the price tag on my father’s suit, we were always told that my father ducked into a bar after seeing the woman with a gun. There, the guy next to him saw the price tag and quickly tore it off. Was he a spy too? I discovered that Stockholm was a hotbed of spies at the time, both German and American, and that the guy next to my dad at the bar must have known that that price tag meant my dad had just pulled the suit out of his duffel bag and had forgotten to remove it. Did anyone else forget to remove the tag? Did anyone die because of a price tag?

  As in Casablanca, where my father also flew, nothing was as it seemed in Stockholm. In bars across the city, there were copies of Handel und Wandel, a German newspaper with the byline “Businessmen within the Reich.” In reality, it was written and published by the OSS in Washington, DC. My dad probably carried that too. In it were tales of investment opportunities in the United States and Europe, as it explained “the willingness of Allied businessmen to work with German businessmen once the Nazis were out of the way.” It was trying to turn Nazis, to flip them.

  Was it in my dad’s bar that night?

  In S
tockholm, people were changing sides every day, as people tend to do when the winning side starts to lose. My dad was there in that confusion of not knowing who was whom. After being shot at, American airplanes were crash-landing in Sweden if they could, a better place to be interned than in Germany. They crashed there by the dozens.

  Nazis were also fleeing to Sweden, where they complained of not being treated as well as the American internees. They were kept on school grounds with the Norwegians while the Americans got to stay in nice hotels. Perhaps the Swedes were amazed by how quickly a Nazi could become not-a-Nazi. Perhaps not. Of course, if the war had gone differently, the Germans would have gotten the hotels and the Americans the internment camps. These were the small creepings up and down in the ladder of power. There was a price tag, or a ball bearing, that decided everything.

  Then there were the people my father carried. The Norwegians who escaped Nazi-held Norway crossed the mountains in snowshoes or skis, seeking that rare German-free route into Sweden. Then there were the Jewish refugees. One particularly persistent Swede, a spy also affiliated with the OSS, Raoul Wallenberg, was recruited to hand out fake Swedish “protective” passports to every Jewish person he could in Budapest. When the Nazis caught on to this ruse, Wallenberg rented thirty-two buildings downtown and declared them Swedish territory. He put up signs that read “The Swedish Research Institute” and “Swedish Library.” There, he housed almost ten thousand people at a time as arrangements were made to get them out of the country. Though he survived the war, he was arrested by the Russians as a spy afterward, sent to Moscow, and never heard from again. He was officially declared dead in October 2016.