by Ron Carlson
“He didn’t save him.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Tom.” Julie stood back, tugging sharply at the thread in Burns’s forehead, and she looked at him frankly. “None of us did.”
Burns was walking in the snow. So this is where it was, he thought. He tried to see the valley as Alec might have, and began picking his way across the meadow. The surface of the snow was crusted and his snowshoes only cut a few inches with each step. He worked into a warm rhythm of small steps up the incline, breathing into the gray afternoon. It was wonderful to move this way after being on the snow machine all day. The clouds had come down and Burns felt the air change as he marched. It lifted at him somehow, not a wind but some quickness that was sharper in his nose, and it grew darker suddenly and he saw the first petals of snow easing down around him.
At the top he turned, breathing hard, and put his hands on his hips to rest. He felt the old high thrill in his chest just like the winter days at Yale, the flasks in the stands at the rink, and crossing campus at midnight wired tight with alcohol, his coat open to the sharp tonic of the air. Now his head was almost against the somber tent of clouds and below him the snow fell as it does at sea, ponderous and invisible at once, disappearing except where it fell on his sleeves, his eyebrows. The snow was falling everywhere.
His knees burned faintly as he stepped along the crest of the hill and descended into the draw where Alec had trapped. Here the small pines were thicker and there were game trails in the snow between the clumps of trees.
The year he quit drinking, that June, he and Alec had sailed from Martha’s Vineyard to the Elizabeth Islands and an exhilaration had set in that Burns remembered keenly. Alec had been on loan from Helen. They had anchored off the islands and swum the hundred yards to shore and then lain on the deserted sand, laughing and panting, and the boy had said to him, “This is it, Dad. This is the best day of my life.” Burns thought at that time: I am as close to being happy as I will ever be. And he did feel happy, proud to be a good sailing coach and pleased to have captured the Elizabeth Islands on the most beautiful day in the year, but the other thing was always with him. He didn’t say it before they stood and began to swim back, but Burns had decided that day to live. He would live.
Halfway up the draw, Burns stopped. This was it. He fell back in the snow, flinging out his arms. He lay there and let his heart pound him deeper. He could hear it crashing in his ears. The pin-dots of snow burned across his forehead, and his arms and legs glowed. Julie was right about Alaska: it was too warm. Burns closed his eyes. This was where Alec died. When he opened them, he stared up into the falling snow until he felt the lift of vertigo. The roaring silence was nicked by a new sound now, the snow machine buzzing closer and then—as he felt the snow fix and himself rise into the sky, weightless—a face appeared above his head.
“Right,” he said to Blazo. “I’m coming. One more minute.” He caught Blazo’s look and added, “Don’t worry. I’ll get up.”
“You and me,” Blazo said. “We’ve been gone a long time already.” Blazo’s face disappeared, and Burns felt himself again sink into the snow. It was pleasant here, lonely and floating, and Burns stopped trying to sort his thoughts. He was hungry, and pleased to be hungry again. He could feel his feet. His blood seemed very busy. Something had a grip on him. He thought, the world has got ahold of me again. He drew a breath, the air aching in his chest, and he said, “Alec.” His voice sounded sure of something. “I’ve been in the snow here, Alec,” he said into the sky. “I’ve lain on my back in the snow.”
II
ON THE U. S. S. FORTITUDE
Some nights it gets lonely here on the U.S.S. Fortitude. I wipe everything down and sweep the passageways, I polish all the brass and check the turbines, and I stand up here on the bridge charting the course and watching the stars appear. This is a big ship for a single-parent family, and it’s certainly better than our one small room in the Hotel Atlantis, on West Twenty-second Street. There the door wouldn’t close and the window wouldn’t open. Here the kids have room to move around, fresh sea air, and their own F/A-18 Hornets.
I can see Dennis now on the radar screen. He’s out two hundred miles and closing, and it looks like he’s with a couple of friends. I’ll be able to identify them in a moment. I worry when Cherry doesn’t come right home when it starts to get dark. She’s only twelve. She’s still out tonight, and here it is almost twenty-one hundred hours. If she’s gotten vertigo or had to eject into the South China Sea, I’ll just be sick. Even though it’s summer, that water is cold.
There’s Dennis. I can see his wing lights blinking in the distance. There are two planes with him, and I’ll wait for his flyby. No sign of Cherry. I check the radar: nothing. Dennis’s two friends are modified MIGs, ugly little planes that roar by like the A train, but the boys in them smile and I wave thumbs up.
These kids, they don’t have any respect for the equipment. They land so hard and in such a hurry—one, two, three. Before I can get below, they’ve climbed out of their jets, throwing their helmets on the deck, and are going down to Dennis’s quarters. “Hold it right there!” I call. It’s the same old story. “Pick up your gear, boys.” Dennis brings his friends over—two nice Chinese boys, who smile and bow. “Now, I’m glad you’re here,” I tell them. “But we do things a certain way on the U.S.S. Fortitude. I don’t know what they do where you come from, but we pick up our helmets and we don’t leave our aircraft scattered like that on the end of the flight deck.”
“Oh, Mom,” Dennis groans.
“Don’t ‘Oh, Mom’ me,” I tell him. “Cherry isn’t home yet, and she needs plenty of room to land. Before you go to your quarters, park these jets below. When Cherry gets here, we’ll have some chow. I’ve got a roast on.”
I watch them drag their feet over to their planes, hop in, and begin to move them over to the elevator. It’s not as if I asked him to clean the engine room. He can take care of his own aircraft. As a mother, I’ve learned that doing the right thing sometimes means getting cursed by your kids. It’s okay by me. They can love me later. Dennis is not a bad kid; he’d just rather fly than clean up.
Cherry still isn’t on the screen. I’ll give her fifteen minutes and then get on the horn. I can’t remember who else is out here. Two weeks ago, there was a family from Newark on the U.S.S. Tenth Amendment, but they were headed for Perth. We talked for hours on the radio, and the skipper, a nice woman, told me how to get stubborn skid marks off the flight deck. If you’re not watching, they can build up in a hurry and make a tarry mess.
I still hope to run across Beth, my neighbor from the Hotel Atlantis. She was one of the first to get a carrier, the U.S.S. Domestic Tranquillity, and she’s somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Her four girls would just be learning to fly now. That’s such a special time. We’d have so much to talk about. I could tell her to make sure the girls always aim for the third arresting wire, so they won’t hit low or overshoot into the drink. I’d tell her about how mad Dennis was the first time I hoisted him back up, dripping like a puppy, after he’d come in high and skidded off the bow. Beth and I could laugh about that—about Dennis scowling at his dear mother as I picked him up. He was wet and humiliated, but he knew I’d be there. A mother’s job is to be in the rescue chopper and still get the frown.
I frowned at my mother plenty. There wasn’t much time for anything else. She and Dad had a little store and I ran orders and errands, and I mean ran—time was important. I remember cutting through the Park, some little bag of medicine in my hand, and watching people at play. What a thing. I’d be taking two bottles of Pepto-Bismol up to Ninety-first Street, cutting through the Park, and there would be people playing tennis. I didn’t have time to stop and figure it out. My mother would be waiting back at the store with a bag of crackers and cough medicine for me to run over to Murray Hill. But I looked. Tennis. Four people in short pants standing inside that fence, playing a game. Later, I read about tennis in the paper. But tennis is a hard game
to read about at first, and it seemed a code, like so many things in my life back then, and what did it matter, anyway? I was dreaming, as my mother was happy to let me know.
But I made myself a little promise then, and I thought about it as the years passed. There was something about tennis—playing inside that fence, between those lines. I think at first I liked the idea of limits. Later, when Dennis was six or so and he started going down the block by himself, I’d watch from in front of the Atlantis, a hotel without a stoop—without an entryway or a lobby, really—and I could see him weave in and out of the sidewalk traffic for a while, and then he’d be out of sight amid the parked cars and the shopping carts and the cardboard tables of jewelry for sale. Cherry would be pulling at my hand. I had to let him go, explore on his own. But the tension in my neck wouldn’t release until I’d see his red suspenders coming back. His expression then would be that of a pro, a tour guide—someone who had been around this block before.
If a person could see and understand the way one thing leads to another in this life, a person could make some plans. As it was, I’d hardly even seen the stars before, and now here, in the ocean, they lie above us in sheets. I know the names of thirty constellations, and so do my children. Sometimes I think of my life in the city, and it seems like someone else’s history, someone I kind of knew but didn’t understand. But these are the days: a woman gets a carrier and two kids in their Hornets and the ocean night and day, and she’s got her hands full. It’s a life.
And now, since we’ve been out here, I’ve been playing a little tennis with the kids. Why not? We striped a beautiful court onto the deck, and we’ve set up stanchions and a net. I picked up some rackets three months ago in Madagascar, vintage T-2000S, which is what Jimmy Connors used. When the wind is calm we go out there and practice, and Cherry is getting quite good. I’ve developed a fair backhand, and I can keep the ball in play. Dennis hits it too hard, but what can you do—he’s a growing boy. At some point, we’ll come across Beth, on the Tranquillity, and maybe all of us will play tennis. With her four girls, we could have a tournament. Or maybe we’ll hop over to her carrier and just visit. The kids don’t know it yet, but I’m learning to fly high-performance aircraft. Sometimes when they’re gone in the afternoons, I set the Fortitude into the wind at thirty knots and practice touch and go’s. There is going to be something on Dennis’s face when he sees his mother take off in a Hornet.
Cherry suddenly appears at the edge of the radar screen. A mother always wants her children somewhere on that screen. The radio crackles. “Mom. Mom. Come in, Mom.” Your daughter’s voice, always a sweet thing to hear. But I’m not going to pick up right away. She can’t fly around all night and get her old mom just like that.
“Mom, on the Fortitude. Come in, Mom. This is Cherry. Over.”
“Cherry, this is your mother. Over.”
“Ah, don’t be mad.” She’s out there seventy-five, a hundred miles, and she can tell I’m mad.
“Cherry, this is your mother on the Fortitude. You’re grounded. Over.”
“Ah, Mom! Come on. I can explain.”
“Cherry, I know you couldn’t see it getting dark from ten thousand feet, but I also know you’re wearing your Swatch. You just get your tail over here right now. Don’t bother flying by. Just come on in and stow your plane. The roast has been done an hour. I’m going below now to steam the broccoli.”
Tomorrow, I’ll have her start painting the superstructure. There’s a lot of painting on a ship this size. That’ll teach her to watch what time it is.
As I climb below, I catch a glimpse of her lights and stop to watch her land. It’s typical Cherry. She makes a short, shallow turn, rather than circling and doing it right, and she comes in fast, slapping hard and screeching in the cable, leaving two yards of rubber on the deck. Kids.
I take a deep breath. It’s dark now here on the U.S.S. Fortitude. The running lights glow in the sea air. The wake brims behind us. As Cherry turns to park on the elevator, I see that her starboard Sidewinder is missing. Sometimes you feel that you’re wasting your breath. How many times have we gone over this? If she’s old enough to fly, she’s old enough to keep track of her missiles. But she’s been warned, so it’s okay by me. We’ve got plenty of paint. And, as I said, this is a big ship.
FORT BRAGG
(HOW SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING CHANGED MY LIFE)
It all started in my dentist’s office on a day in June so beautiful that I had let my guard down, so to speak. The sun was shining in the blue sky. Birds were chirping in the trees. My L-9 molar was pounding out a pretty heavy drum solo in my skull, and so I was not my usual vigilant self. It was then I picked up a copy of Women’s Minute Magazine, the monthly oversize glossy (which is almost all ads), and turned—by absolute accident—to page ninety-three.
I’ll never forget it: the sound of the dentist’s drill coming from the other room, the small acrid smell of dental smoke in the air, and my face throbbing to my splitting molar, and there on page ninety-three, a full-page photograph of the Taj Mahal at sunset. It was beautiful.
But BANG! Before I could even read the bold lettering at the bottom of the ad (I think it concerned a floor wax or a deodorant), the SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE grabbed me in a way that would change my life forever!
There in the reflection pond of the Taj Mahal, in points of light flashing off the dark water, were the words:
LET YOURSELF GO. LIVE IT UP! LEARN TO DANCE!
And right beneath them (and this was cleverly, slyly done in the shadow of the Taj Mahal), the unmistakable silhouette of Fred Astaire.
The next thing I knew, I was walking across the parking lot of the Floyd DeMooch Dance Studio with a big grin on my face, despite a tooth that was trying to kill me.
Inside an hour later, I had mastered the Waltz, the German Polka, the Lindy, the Stroll, the Pony, and the Southern Austrian version of the Minuet. I had really let myself go. My teacher was a lovely fragrant woman with a faint mustache. Her name was Hanna, and for a heavy woman, she was light on her feet.
I was living it up! She taught me the Tango (the dance of the year, she said) in fifteen minutes. It was during that lesson that I realized that I liked the heat of her damp face against mine and the feel of the little loaf of flesh around her waist (though I only felt it from time to time after she corrected my right-hand position on her back: thumb straight up along the spine).
Now I’m going to tell you something. During my lessons, the ad with the Taj Mahal in it et cetera softly flashed in my mind with every beat of my tooth and finally I LET MYSELF GO, as it had instructed me (see what I mean!), and I asked Hanna to marry me.
Her face beamed red under the little sheen of sweat and her mustache rose in a sweet smile that I took as the very definition of happiness!
Was I wrong!
So, we got married and it wasn’t until I drove Hanna home that I had one of those realizations that men have once or twice in a lifetime: I was already married! What would I tell Doreen?
I was smart enough to sneak Hanna into the basement, an apartment she loved, and I left her there unpacking her suitcase and record player. Upstairs Doreen was on her hands and knees waxing the floor! Oh, I felt like a cad! But I decided the best thing would be to tell the truth, come clean, honesty is—after all—the best policy.
I would simply tell Doreen about the ad and how it had led me to marry someone else. Doreen was sure to understand.
I started at the beginning. A mistake. I took the ad out of my jacket pocket, where I had folded it after quietly ripping it out of the magazine in the dentist’s office, and showed it to Doreen. Before I could go on about the Waltz and how the Sherbet Shuffle is just a variation on the Stroll and, incidentally, how I had married a large dance instructor who was right now humming happily in the basement, before I could explain any of it, I saw Doreen go into a kind of trance there on her hands and knees.
And then—wait until you get this!—she got up, dropped the sponge, smiled a spacey
smile at me, and left the house. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought perhaps she had seen me sneaking Hanna into the basement. But, no. Then I saw the answer. I stood there in the new wax which was barely dry, doing an abbreviated cha-cha-cha (it never hurts to practice), and I saw that I had inadvertently laid the ad sideways for Doreen and—examining it closer (cha-cha-cha)—I could see a whole other message in the reflection pond of the Taj Mahal. The ad was like one of those records you play backward to hear messages from the devil. Sideways in the reflection pond of the Taj Mahal, it said:
LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG, AND LEAVE A BEAUTIFUL MEMORY!
Luckily I was already on my subliminal message (cha-cha-cha) or this one would have given me a bad ride too. I ran to the window, but our old Datsun was halfway down Butternut. As the first strains of the Bossa Nova beamed up through the newly waxed floor from Hanna’s record player, I thought, “There goes Doreen. I’ve lost my wife!”
But, as you already know, I had another.
As it turned out, I saw Doreen one more time. It was about a week later and I was awakened from an afternoon nap by what I first thought was an electrical shock, but what turned out to be my L-9 molar, which left untreated was pretty hot by now. Anyway, the television was on a weekend sports program, and I saw our Datsun zip through the screen. Well, that sat me up. It was the “Tour de l’Univers” from Budapest to Sacramento, and the cars were galloping right along. I saw the Datsun several times, and noted with rue the car’s name painted across both doors: BEAUTIFUL MEMORY. In one close-up I recognized Doreen at the wheel. She had a helmet on, but I could see her smiling.
