Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  You have no idea, Harry thought.

  “I got a bunk at a BOQ at the airfield. I’m heading there now. Why don’t you think it over, maybe give me a call sometime tomorrow.” Kneece took a last slurp and nodded. “Ah, I let it get cold. Shame. I thank you for your time, Major. Sorry to have bothered you at home.”

  Glass shattered inside Harry’s flat. Then the voices of the boys:

  “Oh-oh! Dad’s gonna kill you!”

  “Nunh-unh! He’s gonna kill you!”

  Kneece smiled. “I think you better get on in there, sir.” Then the captain’s arm rose and fell in something between a salute and a wave good-bye before he disappeared into the hallway.

  As Harry reentered his flat to break up his squabbling sons, he noticed that the identification photo of Armando Grassi still lay on the kitchen table. He picked up the small, cracked photo, regarded the halo of wild curls, the mischievous eyes.

  Days later he shared his chagrin with me. “Dead a week and half a world away,’ Harry told me, shaking his head in amazement, “and the son of a bitch was still a pain in my arse.”

  *

  Late that night, Harry quietly slipped out from under the bedclothes, careful not to disturb Cynthia, pulled on his robe and slippers, and tiptoed through the chilly rooms into a kitchen still shrouded with drying linens. He dropped a few coals on the lowering fire, poured himself a glass of milk from the icebox, and sat at the table in the darkened room.

  Then, Cynthia was there, sitting across from him. He only then realized that she, too, had been lying awake. Earlier that day, he had told her of Kneece’s visit, but not his request. Still, they’d had too many years together for her not to feel this something hanging over him all that day, and for the same reason, he knew she knew. But, as was her way, she didn’t press him.

  They exchanged a smile, his apologetic, hers understanding. She said nothing, simply held out her hand for his glass of milk and took a sip before handing it back.

  He reached into his robe for his cigarettes, lit one. He watched the smoke curl upward into the shadows.

  “Well.” He sighed.

  “Well,” she said.

  He reached into his bathrobe pocket for the photograph of Armando Grassi and set it on the table.

  “That’s him?”

  He nodded. She took his matches from the table, struck one, and held the photo near the flame for study.

  And then he told her.

  He was about to explain those reasons Kneece had given him to justify the madness of leaving his safe home, and all those perfectly sane reasons for staying, when she leaned over, silenced him with a kiss, then led him by the hand back to bed.

  PART TWO

  COLCHIS

  Chapter Four: The Golden Boat

  “Major, you really have got to look at this!”

  “I don’t think I do, really.” Harry kept his eyes glued to the arched roof of the C-47 Dakota.

  “You’re missing something,” Woody Kneece warned.

  “I don’t think so.” The squares of sunlight coming through the aeroplane’s windows wavered on the roof, then Harry felt one of the wings dip and the squares danced their way along the curve of the fuselage as his back pressed against the side of the ship. “Oooohhhh…”

  “You OK, Major?” It was the flight mechanic, a sergeant less than half Harry’s age.

  Harry forced a smile and a nod, afraid that if he opened his mouth to respond he might vomit.

  “Wow…” an awed Woody Kneece said, his voice hushed. Harry could feel the captain nearby on the bench that ran the length of the Dakota’s cargo compartment, hunched round to press his face near one of the small fuselage windows. The pilot, once clear of the cinder runway, had steered the ship in a lazy, rising turn, taking it out over Port Newark, then back round the southern edge of Manhattan. The harbor waters had fallen away beneath them, becoming a distant rippled sheet flecked with whitecaps, marked by the curlicues of wakes from dozens of ships maneuvering in and out of their harbor slips, and the broad-shouldered tugs assisting them. Within the frame of gray water and porcupine frill of piers was the finger of southern Manhattan, its towers wreathed in tendrils of vapor from countless steam vents, chimneys, and smokestacks.

  “From up here kinda reminds me of the Emerald City,” Kneece said. “He going to fly us over? That’d be something, flying over the Empire State.”

  “Too much cargo,” the flight mechanic said. “We can’t get that high.”

  “Man, that poor King Kong had a looong way to fall, didn’t he?”

  The aeroplane dipped its wing again; at the lurch, Harry squeezed his eyes shut and grabbed the bench, holding it so hard his fingertips hurt.

  “Major?”

  Harry felt a diplomatically light touch on his arm. He forced his eyes open: the flight mechanic stood over him. The sergeant’s cherubic young face had a preternaturally sage air to it, as if he’d been through this many times, both Kneece’s exuberance and Harry’s rigid fear.

  “You need a bucket or somethin’, Major?”

  “No, thanks, Sergeant, I’m fine.”

  “You let me know”

  The craft leveled off, and the engines settled from the strain of the climb into a steady hum.

  “Damn, I shoulda brought a camera!” Kneece moaned, almost in pain. He stumbled across Harry — “Excuse that, Major, sorry” — as he headed for the rear of the cargo compartment, threading his way among the packing crates to get a last glimpse of Manhattan falling behind.

  “If man were meant to fly, huh, Major?” The sergeant said it without sarcasm or malice. “Tell you the truth, I’m not that crazy ’bout flyin’ myself.” The flight mechanic saw the doubt on Harry’s face and nodded. “No, really. I was just a gas jockey back home — that’s Minnesota — and liked to mess with engines. How I got from messin’ with Mr. Dobie’s Model T to this, I’m not quite sure. I still like messin’ with ‘em, ’n’ if it makes you feel better some, those Pratt and Whitneys are the best. But I’d just as soon mess with ’em on the ground.”

  “Where are we?” Kneece called from his vantage in the rear of the ship.

  “That should be Connecticut down there.”

  “Man, it doesn’t take long, does it? New York, then Connecticut, really covering some miles!”

  The flight mechanic smiled his sage smile. “Well, Cap’n, we got a long ways to go yet.”

  Below were bands of barren trees, glades of faded grass, rivulets and streams sparkling with the early sun. There were patchwork squares of farms with their clapboard houses, weathered barns and fallow acres set off by low walls of piled fieldstone. The pastoral scenery gliding by a few thousand feet below reminded Harry of the miniature scenery he set along the rails of his sons’ electric trains.

  “How you feelin’ now, sir?”

  Harry smiled at the flight mechanic to let him know he was doing better.

  “Bucket’s always there if you need it, sir. Don’t be afraid to call for it.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  “If you or the captain feel like it, there’s a thermos of coffee up forward and some sandwiches. Now, if you don’t mind, sir, I’m gonna catch some sack time. We haven’t had a day on the ground since last week. Just yesterday we made the round trip to Presque Isle, and the day ’fore that we were hustling up and down Labrador way.”

  Harry nodded at Kneece, who was now bouncing from one side of the cargo compartment to the other, trying to see all there was to see. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t disturb you.”

  The Dakota carried auxiliary long-range rubber fuel tanks within the body of the aeroplane. A plywood table sat over the tanks, and from the charts splayed thereon Harry guessed it was used for navigational purposes. The sergeant cleared away the charts and clambered aboard, using a parachute pack for his pillow and his flight jacket as a blanket. Within seconds, the flight mechanic was — enviably, in Harry’s view — asleep.

  As the aeroplane continued north
ward without incident, and the Pratt & Whitney engines the flight mechanic took such pride in thrummed with a comforting steadiness, Harry’s mood began to ease.

  The ship’s wireless operator, sitting before his set in his nest behind the pilot, brought out a guitar. The Air Transportation Command was a hybrid entity; military personnel wrapped round a core of civilian volunteers from the commercial airlines, which explained why the flight mechanic wore olive drab coveralls and sergeant stripes while the guitar-picking Sparks was attempting to stay warm inside a bulky Northwestern University pullover.

  “You mind?” Woody Kneece asked, and Sparks handed the instrument over. “Let me show you.” Kneece began running his fingers smoothly through the same chord progressions Sparks had been fumbling with.

  Sparks shook his head, marveling at the captain’s fluid movements. “My hand just won’t go that way.”

  “It’s fighting you because it doesn’t know it can do this. You keep practicing and it’ll learn the moves. After a while, you won’t even have to think about it.”

  The Dakota’s captain was a bear of a man named Doheeny, about Harry’s age, and so big Harry couldn’t see how he fit his broad-shouldered bulk into the cramped confines of the cockpit. Now Doheeny squeezed between the cockpit seats into the cargo compartment. “I thought I detected a musical improvement.” In his plaid flannel shirt and twill work trousers, the captain seemed more roughneck lumberjack than aviator, the only symbol of his station being the crushed cap from his airline days. But his deep voice had an unexpected softness. Doheeny set one of his massive paws on Sparks’s shoulder. “See what happens when you practice?”

  “Well, I gotta be truthful,” Kneece said. “Any good Southern family of means wants their kids to look cultured. Doesn’t matter if they’re dumb as cotton bales, as long as they look cultured. This way, when ladies and gents from Charleston society come to call, you can truck out the little fella and show ’im off.”

  “What’s that?” Sparks asked as Kneece’s random strumming turned into a melodic plucking.

  “Some kinda Mozart, I think. Now me and my family had different ideas of culture. I’d get tired setting in that parlor playing for Miz Francie and Mr. Seville and whomsoever. So, late at night” — a dramatic strike of the strings — “when all are snuggled tight in their big ol’ brass beds” — another strike — “Lil Woody’d sneak out over to Buck Town, go down to them nasty ol’ juke joints where the colored boys’ll let you sit in if you can syncopate a little” — another strike, his voice lowering into something playfully lewd — “a little boogie-woogie!” Kneece’s fingers began to jump about the guitar’s strings, tickling up a boogie beat. Kneece was on his feet now, though he had to stoop his tall frame to accommodate the curved roof of the aeroplane. “If you can truck a little at the same time” — Kneece’s feet began to move in jitterbug steps — “show ’em a little jigwalk, some short George, you got ’em clappin’ with you now, they’re sayin’, ‘Hey, that white boy ain’t too bad, pour him a little hooch, why dontcha!’” Climaxing with a few hard strums, Kneece stood frozen with an absurd leer on his face. “And I’m thinkin’ if Mama and Daddy could see me now, givin’ some colored patootie the round-your-back…” A hand clutched at his chest as he fell to the deck of the cargo compartment making choking sounds, then kicking his feet in cartoon fashion before falling into an exaggerated rigor. After a dramatic beat, he sat up with a grin. “Then Lil Woody gets his inheritance early.”

  Doheeny applauded — “Bravo!” — Sparks laughed, and even Harry forgot they were thousands of feet in the air long enough to smile. Kneece went back to helping Sparks work his way through his chord practice, and Doheeny made his way back toward Harry, stopping for a moment by the sleeping flight mechanic. There was something in the way Doheeny stood over the young sergeant that made Harry think he was going to caress the boy’s head, much as Harry had often tousled the hair of his own sleeping sons.

  “Shame he missed the show,” Harry said.

  “Stripes here taking good care of you?” Doheeny asked. Harry noticed that the Dakota captain rarely — if at all — called any of his crewmen by name.

  “Fine. He’s a good kid.”

  “It’s a good crew.” Doheeny lowered himself on the bench beside Harry “How’re you doing, Major? I couldn’t help but notice when you climbed aboard you looked like somebody climbing the gallows.”

  Harry shrugged. “OK.”

  “We’re about halfway to Presque Isle. When we touch down, I’d appreciate it if you fellas stay on the ship. I just want to check in at Ops, top off on fuel, and be off. I want to make White Pigeon — that’s the call sign for the field at Goose Bay — I want to be there before dark.”

  “Is it that far?”

  “This time of year it gets dark early up there. I’d like to avoid a night landing if I could.”

  “Difficult?”

  “Let’s just say at this stage of the game, me and my wife’d rather I keep my challenges to a minimum.”

  “Hey, is that snow? Look at it all!” Kneece was again glued to a window.

  Harry turned. Below, bare, dark trees stood out like charcoal strokes against an undulating white blanket. Between pillowy drifts, creeks and streams and ponds shone like polished glass as their iced surfaces caught the midmorning sun.

  “Where are we, Cap’n?” Kneece asked giddily

  “New Hampshire. We should be over Maine in a few minutes.” Doheeny turned to Harry. “Excitable young fella, isn’t he?”

  Harry smiled. “First time seeing snow.”

  “What’s going on down there?”

  Far off, Harry saw the glittering circle of a frozen lake set snugly between soft banks of snow covered with firs. Small human figures, dark against the glowing ice, scrambled about, sometimes forming a heaving knot that would abruptly break apart, then the figures would dart to another spot on the ice, where they would repeat the process.

  “Hockey,” Doheeny said.

  Kneece laughed. “Ice skaters? I feel like I’m flying into Currier and Ives!”

  Doheeny straightened and set his hand on Kneece’s shoulder with a smile. “Enjoy it, son, because I guarantee you the novelty of this moment will not last.”

  *

  “I’ve got Presque Isle’s beacon,” Sparks announced, pressing his kapok-cushioned earphones close. “We’re maybe a half hour out.”

  The terrain below had grown rougher: sharp hills forming a maze of twisted ravines, their flanks covered with scrub and hunched firs whose boughs sagged under snow. Icicled outcroppings of granite poked through the thick, white coating. And nowhere a sign of man: no stonewalled farms, no spire of a church poking above the tree line, not even the track of a rural lane through the forest.

  It was an inhospitable place, whipped by gusts of wind Harry could feel rocking the C-47.

  “Next stop, Presque Isle!” The copilot was a sleepy-eyed sort, almost dwarfish in stature. Harry thought he’d been paired with Doheeny because only such a small person could fit in the cockpit space alongside the captain. “Show your ticket stubs for all meals and beverages!”

  A band of ice, blazing like frozen fire under the winter sun, wandered down from the hills, guiding Harry’s eyes to what he at first thought was nothing but a collection of snowdrifts along the riverbank. But curls of smoke from stubby little chimneys told him the drifts were the snow-covered roofs of a riverside hamlet.

  “They cut down everything for firewood?” Kneece asked, noting the treeless hills.

  “Potatoes,” the flight mechanic answered. “They clear the ground for potato farms. All this part of the state, that’s all it is is potatoes. Miles and miles of’em.”

  Kneece chuckled. “Purple mountain majesties, amber waves of grain… and spuds.”

  The aerodrome stood near rail tracks just outside the collection of roofs. As the Dakota turned onto its landing path, Harry could see a rail engine, puffing black smoke, while a relay chain of small human
figures off-loaded one of the attached freight cars straight into the cargo cabin of another Dakota.

  There was a rumble and the Dakota shuddered — “Just the wheels comin’ down, sir,” the flight mechanic soothed — and then Doheeny set the ship down as tenderly as anyone can set down twenty tons of heavily laden metal on a narrow snow-cleared strip of tarmac. As the plane slowed, a jeep sped out from a cluster of clapboard buildings and Quonset huts nearby and took a position in front of the Dakota, leading it off to a parking area.

  The plane halted, the crew pulled on parkas, and the flight mechanic was off to supervise refueling. Sparks went to check with the field’s Communications shack, Doheeny and his copilot to the Operations shack for information on weather ahead. The interior of the Dakota chilled rapidly in a wind that pushed the frigid temperature below zero, and twenty minutes later, once airborne, the flight mechanic offered them something wonderfully warming and aromatic from a thermos.

  “From the mess hall,” he said. “Lobster bisque. Up here they know a dozen ways to make lobster, and a thousand things to do with potatoes.”

  As they sipped at their thermos cups of soup, the copilot turned round to call back: “As of now, you two guys are international travelers.”

  “We’re in Canada?” Kneece twisted for another look out the windows.

  “It’s not gonna be much different, Cap’n,” the flight mechanic told him. “Just colder.”

  *

  The copilot was taking his turn on the cot-cum-navigation table, leaving Doheeny alone in the cockpit. The flight mechanic sat with Sparks, whiling away the flying time with hands of gin rummy.