Louis got up and went to the front windows of the bar. He pulled down the shades. He then turned off the overhead lights. That made it pretty dark inside. At first you couldn’t see anything except the blue glow of the TV set, where the bullneck preacher was now crying like a child, his thick, ham-pink face straining under a perfectly timed emotion, since the service was about over. He bit his lip and blinked back tears.
“I’m crouched down behind the bar, I think,” Louis said. “Or maybe I’m behind the jukebox. I’ll give your eyes another minute to get used to the dark, then I’ll come out. Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
It was a long minute. The preacher had finished weeping and was now smiling up at the sky, where heavenly approval fell on him in the form of swiftly moving spotlights. Then someone slammed a glass down. I guess I was looking in the wrong place. I turned to the left and then to the right. Nan caught my face in her long hand and aimed it straight ahead.
The white moths I had seen swarming out of his ear had now formed themselves into the shape of a skeleton. The jaws of the skull opened. “Pitchblende,” it said.
“Turn on the lights!” someone begged. A chair was knocked over. Someone bumped into someone else and cursed. Nan stood up, dragging me out of my chair. The glowing bones drifted toward us. But now their shape changed. They weren’t bones piled on bones anymore. It was a circle of moths.
“I’m dreaming on my feet,” Louis said, but his voice wasn’t coming from anywhere near the moths.
Nan jerked me to one side as the moths came closer, but it was too late to avoid them. We were in them, passing through them. It was like passing through an electrical portal of some kind that took you from one place to another. I felt the hair on my head move.
Nan and I were running, hand in hand, over chairs and tables, over the bar, over brick walls and alleys and parked cars until we were nowhere near Lucky’s or town but in a big, grassy, sunblown field, not scared but eager, not escaping but finding.
We were young. I saw how beautiful she had been, and I felt my own young strength as we loped across that meadow, kicking the heads off dandelions, the bees thick and busy, the cottonwoods at the meadow’s end leaning pleasureful-ly against the perfumed breeze. “Keep going!” I yelled. “Don’t stop!”
Leonard raised the shades and switched on the lights. I sipped my muscatel, Nan sipped hers. Louis raised his glass of whiskey and squinted at it. “Whew,” he said softly.
“Louis,” said some old man with rheumy eyes. “I got this numbness in my foot...”
“No more cures,” Louis said. “The world has gone stale. Not the world of trees and rocks and animals, but the world that men have made. We hate it so bad we are itching to blow it up. I didn’t go up on that mountain to figure out some new cures. It’s useless to get rid of cancer in a man who can’t tell the difference between the urge to grin and the urge to spit.”
The baseball game came on and Leonard turned up the sound. Attention drifted gradually from Louis to the television set.
“Let’s take a walk,” Louis said to Nan and me. “There’s more to tell.”
Outside, Louis said in a dreamy way, “I was bom with a caul, you know. My mother wouldn’t have anything to do with me for a month. She figured it meant I could see and converse with ghosts. She was superstitious.” He laughed. We laughed too, but we weren’t too sure of what it was we found funny.
We walked up Main Street. The air was thin and cool for midsummer. Out of the comer of my eye I saw Nan shiver. I wondered if she had dreamed of a perfect meadow, felt her strong young legs pounding the grass as the pollen-heavy bees bounced off our bare arms.
“I’m not here,” Louis said.
Nan grunted, as if her suspicions had been borne out.
“I’m in that shaft,” Louis said. “I’m in that tarp. I could already be dead. Maybe dead for weeks.”
Nan let some air hiss out between her teeth.
I felt light as a moonwalker. It seemed that I might float off if a good breeze came up. Some Sunday strollers were out. Louis nodded to them and they nodded back. Louis’s nod seemed to say, Let’s let bygones be bygones.
I was tingling all over. The atoms of my skin and the atoms of the air were mingling. The sidewalk felt like it was paved with marshmallow. Nan squeezed my arm until it hurt. She nodded at Louis, meaning for me to take a good look.
Although his edges were blurrier than ever, he looked good. I was proud, as I always had been, to be his friend. I was thinking, Isn’t it nice that things never really end and what appears to be finished often fools you and more often than not comes back to start all over again with only minor changes for the sake of variety. Louis turned and smiled at me. It was a smile that could make you feel that you’d finally gotten the point after years and years of pretending there wasn’t one.
We walked to the far end of Main Street, where the town ends. Then Nan and I, on our own now, turned and drifted slowly back.
Safe Forever
More people had been blown up or burned to death in 1945 than ever before in history thanks to aerial bombardment. I was eleven years old and in love with aerial bombardment. What could be more elegant than a squadron of B-29s unloading five-hundred-pound bombs or clusters of incendiaries on Tokyo, Nagoya, or Yokohama? My nightly prayer to Jesus included a plea that the war last at least until 1952 so that I could join it. I wanted to be a pilot or bombardier aboard a stratosphere-skimming Superfortress, our first true strategic bomber. So, when VJ Day came on August 14, all my dreams were vaporized in mushroom clouds of despair.
I was out on my ice-cream route in the Oakland suburb of Sobrante Park when victory was declared. My pushcart was full of 7-Eleven ice-milk bars, Fudgesicles, and orange sherbet push-ups but sales were slow. I rang the bells that were wired to the handle of the pushcart hard and loud, but the streets remained empty. Then, as if they had been given a signal, people rushed out of their houses. I gave credit to my energetic bell-ringing. I felt the power of my bells. But they didn’t approach me. They gathered on their lawns and in their driveways, drinking liquor directly out of bottles. Some were singing and cheering. Men and women kissed each other wildly, and children, infected by the frenzy of the adults, ran in circles, screaming. It was a warm afternoon and there was no reason these people shouldn’t have wanted ice cream. I rang my bells at them. I yelled, “Seven-eleven bars! Fudgesicles! Push-ups!” My ears rang from my own clamor.
Two men approached my cart and yanked open the heavy, insulated lid. They reached into the smoking-cold box and helped themselves to boxes of my stock. They started passing out handfuls of Fudgesicles, 7-Eleven bars, and push-ups to the cluster of children that had followed them. I held out my hand for payment, but they ignored me. They reached past my outstretched arm and helped themselves to more of my stock. “Wait!” I said. “You have to pay me!”
“The war’s over, buster,” one of them said. “The Japs said ‘uncle.’”
I tried to grab back a carton of Fudgesicles, but he held it over his head. Women and children began to reach into my cart as if it were their right. “Don’t!” I said. “You can’t do that!”
“What are you, some kind of war profiteer?” one of the men said. “I got news for you, the war’s over.” He was about twenty-five years old and healthy-looking. Though I was panicky now, wondering how I was going to explain the loss of my stock to my boss and stepfather, Dan Sneed, a calmer part of my mind wondered why this man wasn’t in uniform. Why weren’t all these men in uniform? Dan Sneed was 4-F. What excused them?
I guess the question was visible in my eyes. It made him nasty. “Put a smile on your kisser,” he said. “This is the happiest day of your life. Or maybe you’re a Jap-lover.”
He took my pushcart and wheeled it away from me at a fast trot. When he made a severe turn, he dumped it. The rest of my stock, along with several steaming blocks of dry ice, shot into the street. The children swarmed on it, screaming happily. Then someone came
up behind me and untied the strings of my change apron. All my quarters, dimes, and nickels fell around my feet. I dropped to my hands and knees to retrieve them, but I had to compete with other children and a few adults.
I was paralyzed by defeat. I sat on the curb. After the money and ice cream were gone, the crowd moved away from me. I righted my cart and wheeled it back the way I came, my bells hanging silent.
An elderly woman who lived a few houses from ours tried to buy a 7-Eleven from me. I told her I was sold out. She put her dime back into her change purse. “You be sure to pray thanks for our atom bombers,” she said as if scolding me for taking victory over Japan for granted.
“I will, ma’am,” I lied. I felt no gratitude. God had not granted my prayer that the war go on for another seven years. Why should I be thankful for early victory?
“Many won’t have to go now,” the woman said. “Many will be safe forever.”
She looked at the closed lid of my pushcart and sniffed. “Sold out already?” she said. “That seems unlikely.”
I pushed my cart away from her.
“You remember to pray thanks,” she said. “Your mother might have lost you to the war, save for our bomb.”
“I know,” I said gloomily.
The house was empty. Mother and Dan Sneed were still at work. I fixed myself a bacon and American cheese sandwich and listened to my radio programs. Terry and the Pirates were still fighting Japs somewhere in Burma. Jungle Jim was still tracking Nazi agents in a South American rain forest. Superman had located Hitler’s secret weapon that would have guaranteed a German victory and was carrying it into outer space where it could be disarmed safely. It was all anticlimactic. The war was a dead issue.
I switched off the radio and carried my plate back into the kitchen. That’s when I saw Mother’s note, taped to the icebox. “Charlie, put the roast in the oven at 3:30. 300°. Boil ten spuds. Wash some lettuce. Shell peas. Set up the bar. Company tonight.” It was almost 4:00. I’d been doing all the cooking since Mother had been hired as a welder at the Kaiser shipyards up in Richmond. Dan Sneed worked until dark, managing twelve pushcart boys as well as operating his own ice-cream truck in the Piedmont and Emeryville areas. He wore an all-white uniform. The jacket had a “Mr. 7-Eleven!” patch stitched over the left breast pocket. I put the bloody rolled rib roast into the oven and turned on the gas. After I rinsed the lettuce and shelled the peas, I carried the card table out into the living room and covered it with a white tablecloth. I took Dan Sneed’s stock of liquor out of a kitchen cabinet and set the bottles in a neat row on the card table. I set a row of drink glasses in front of the bottles. Later, I would chip enough ice from the twenty-five-pound block in the icebox to fill the pewter bucket. I rechecked Mother’s instructions to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, then went back to the bar and poured myself enough sloe gin to darken my tongue. A thread of fire tickled my throat. “Banzai!” I yelled, holding my glass high. “Take that, Jap!” I yelled, making ack-ack sounds between my teeth.
I went out to the garage, light-headed, to visit my B-25. It was spread out on the workbench, half finished. It had been the hardest model I’d ever attempted to build. I knew I would not finish it now. A freewheeling sense of despair overcame me. The B-25 Mitchell was the first bomber to strike at the heart of Japan, back in 1942. But now it was ancient history, just as the war itself would soon be. Next to the B-29 and its atomic bomb, the Mitchell was as dated as the Wright brothers’ “flyer.”
The two Olson gasoline engines that would have powered my B-25 sat in their mounts, bolted to the workbench. I primed one of them with a little gas, connected the spark-plug wire to the big Eveready dry-cell battery, and spun the prop. The little engine sputtered, then caught, instantly filling the garage and neighborhood with a high-pitched roar. I opened the needle-valve throttle all the way, my mind happily saturated with noise. A haze of pale smoke hung in the garage in layers. I filled my lungs with it. Burning gasoline was one of my favorite aromas. I bent down to the exhaust port, mindful of the invisible propeller, and sucked fumes up my nose. A climbing tide of vertigo rocked me back.
The concrete floor of the garage felt like rubber. So did the driveway and sidewalk. I knelt down and ran my hands through the dry August lawn to see if the grass felt rubbery too, but it felt like the weak legs of docile insects. I pulled a gray tuft out of the dry ground and tossed it across the street. Then I went next door to see Darwin Duncan, not my best friend, but convenient.
“You want to go to Hayward?” I asked him.
Darwin was a small boy with an unhealthy yellow glow. His mother was a registered nurse. She kept a bookcase full of medical texts. Darwin and I would often study the Human Anatomy for Nurses text when no one was home.
“What for?” Darwin asked suspiciously. He was wearing heavily padded ear-phones. There was a soldering iron in his hand.
“What do you mean, what for? To go swimming, why else go to Hayward?”
Darwin and I went to the Hayward Plunge at least once a week during the summer. It was a big indoor pool. I’d learned how to swim there, and how to dive. My favorite dive was illegal, but the lifeguard didn’t stop you unless you were bothering people with it. You’d spring along the edge of the pool, then dive with a kind of spinning, corkscrew twist. The motion caused your body to auger its way to the bottom. It was frightening because you didn’t have control. Hydraulic pressure seized you, applying an uncancelable torque that you had to ride out. You had to see the corkscrew dive to its end. Then, when you hit bottom, you had to figure out which way was up, even though it was obvious. You were disoriented.
But Darwin didn’t want to go swimming. He was working on his radios. He was a radio nut. His room looked like a repair shop. Every flat surface, even his bed, was littered with the scavenged parts of old radios. His current project was a nine-tube, four-band superheterodyne. He was a genius, but his parents worried about him. They wanted him to be normal, like me. “Why don’t you play baseball, like CharUe?” they’d ask him in my presence. “Charlie, why don’t you teach Darwin how to throw a football?” But they were wrong about Darwin. He was probably a better athlete than me. I knew he could beat me in a footrace, at least. He just preferred to work out technical problems in the privacy of his cluttered bedroom.
His room was hazy with solder smoke. I liked the smell of solder smoke, too. Not as much as the smell of exhaust fumes, but the nose-pinching, acrid taste of hot solder had its appeal. It was like sour incense. I cleared a spot on Darwin’s bed and sat down to watch him work. He slid a thin screwdriver into a tangle of multicolored wires to make an adjustment of some kind. “I’m aligning the intermediate frequency amplifiers,” he said. Darwin was a year older than me and had skipped the fifth grade.
Human Anatomy for Nurses was shoved under his night table. I picked it up and thumbed it open to the section on Human Reproduction. The illustration of a woman lying on her back with her legs up and thighs held wide always made my heart lurch. This reaction was instantaneous and reliable. Then my mouth would go dry, and if I swallowed, my throat would click. All her parts, interior and exterior, were flagged with Latin labels. In my bed at night, after my routine prayers, I would whisper the forbidden Latin names as if I were preparing myself for some dark, subterranean priesthood. The pages of this section of the book were greasy with use. I thumbed ahead to the cutaway view of a tumescent penis fully encased by a vagina. My throat clicked loud enough to be heard, but Darwin didn’t look up from his delicate adjustments. I’d seen this drawing a thousand times, but the red machinery that allowed human beings to repeat themselves endlessly down the centuries made my palms sweat.
Darwin handed me the earphones. “This is London, England,” he said casually. “Loud and clear, with some selective fading.”
I put the earphones on. Behind a roar that sounded like a waterfall, I heard two comedians exchange quips about Adolf Hitler as if he were still alive and subject to the sting of ridicule. They were h
anging on to the war, too.
When I went home, Mother had dinner on the table. “Where have you been, Charlie?” she asked.
“Darwin’s,” I said.
“Dan’s not too thrilled with you.”
I went into the front room. Dan Sneed and a lanky WAVE were drinking highballs. I started to tell him that the loss of my stock wasn’t my fault, but he spoke first. “You didn’t chip any ice, Charlie. How am I supposed to make drinks for our guest if there isn’t any ice?”
“I’m sorry, Dan,” I said. “I forgot.”
“You forgot,” he said. He leaned down to get a good look at me. “Your blackheads are coming back again,” he said. He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with thin brown hair combed straight back. “Use the washcloth on your face, Charlie.”
“Don’t be too hard on him, Dan,” said the WAVE. “He’s got beautiful manners. He’s got the manners of an officer and gentleman.” She touched my cheek with her open hand. Her hand was damp and chilly. She had a long, melancholy face, but her eyes were bright and fun-loving. I decided to tell Dan later about what had happened on my route. Nothing could be done about it now anyway.
I went to sleep that night trying to picture the secret Latin parts of the WAVE, but I had trouble getting past her crisp blue uniform, which I admired extravagantly. The next morning, I found that uniform strewn down the length of the hallway, as if she had undressed on the run. Mother and Dan’s bedroom door was not completely shut. I pushed it open an inch. The lanky WAVE was in bed with them. She saw me. She sat up and stretched, the sheet falling away from her breasts. I ducked, as if from a wild pitch. “Wait up, Charlie,” she said. She made a halfhearted effort to pull the sheet up. Ampulla, areola, adipose tissue, epithelium, I thought. “How about starting the coffee, kiddo?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I whispered. Mother and Dan Sneed were still asleep on either side of the tall WAVE.
I made the coffee, then started some bacon frying. I broke six eggs into a bowl and whipped them until they were foamy. Then I collected the full ashtrays and drink glasses from the living room and brought them into the kitchen. I dumped the ashtrays into the garbage, then put the glasses in soapy water to soak. I laid six slices of bread on a cookie sheet and put them under the broiler. When she came out, all made up and in her uniform, breakfast was ready.
Borrowed Hearts Page 20
