Dodging and Burning

by John Copenhaver

  15

  CEOLA

  There she was. Alive. And I was babbling like a fool, and she was smiling, or trying to smile, distracted by the train behind me and her need to get on it. And then she was shaking my hand … So glad to meet me, any friend of Jay’s, but she had to go … I quickly asked her about Jay’s photo of her, but she looked at me like she didn’t understand a thing I was saying. Then I went on about your story, and how maybe photos do tell the future, and she should be careful, but she wasn’t listening … and like that, she was on the train, gone in a cloud of steam.

  By the time I made it to the station wagon, questions were bouncing between my ears, questions I should’ve asked Lily if I’d had my wits about me. Was that her in the photo? If it wasn’t, who in God’s name was it? If it was her, then what happened? How did she go from being a bloody mess to that nice lady on the train platform? Was the photo staged? Was she trying to fake her own death? Why? And what did she mean she’d heard so much about me?

  I opened the door and gave Jay a look.

  “You saw her?” he said. I nodded, but before I could say a word, he held up his hand and said, “Not now. We’ve got to go.”

  He started the car, and we were on our way. I almost asked where we were headed, but I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer. Instead, I filled the quiet space between us with daydreams. Seeing Lily alive confirmed for me that life was much more like fiction than adults would admit. Jay had always understood that. Robbie, you’d understood it too.

  I began to fantasize that Jay and I were driving out of town, and we would keep driving until we were far, far away, leaving Royal Oak and its petty characters behind. We were going to settle in a city and open a detective agency and solve crime; we were going to be partners. We’d call ourselves the Blue Hearts Detective Agency, and we’d interview clients in a dark, musty room, smoke cheap cigarettes, drink booze, and wisecrack—and we’d always get our man.

  Then, like that, Jay’s kiss at the top of the Ferris wheel came to me, and it didn’t fit. I could still feel the pressure of his hand over my heart and his lips against mine. I saw the photos he’d shown me of him, his naked body stretched out like a cat in the sun. And the picture of you in the boat, your hands behind your head and your swimming trunks undone. I saw Jay’s countless photos of corpses that had spilled from his album—soldiers, women, children, all bent and broken like rag dolls. They seemed to spread forever across the floor, to fill up the entire room. I tried to shake them from my mind, but they had hitched in their claws and wouldn’t let go.

  When we turned onto Route 4, I knew where we were headed. Soon we were driving up the Greenwoods’ tree-covered road, the dew bending the branches low overhead, and I was afraid. But of what, I couldn’t say. Jay? The truth? My own foolishness? Mama and Papa? Definitely Mama and Papa, in that moment. It was very late—so late, in fact, that I knew no excuse, no matter how creative, would satisfy Mama’s questions or temper Papa’s anger. But it was well beyond the point of no return, and I was hungry to know how this story was going to end.

  We parked and found our way across the weedy yard to Jay’s makeshift room. Inside, he raised the wick on his oil lamp. Where he hadn’t covered the glass walls with sheets or quilts, the surfaces worked like mirrors, reflecting, twisting, and intensifying the light like the inside of a camera. Jay pointed to the cot, and I sat, my arms at my sides, my back straight, aware of all the objects in the room—the picnic table, the piles of dusty books, the photos of soldiers pinned to the quilt above the cot, the Purple Heart, the trunk, the liquor bottles, Jay’s body moving around, stirring the thick air.

  He dropped down on the far side of the cot from me and poured himself a half-glass of whiskey. “Do you want something to drink,” he said, “like water?”

  I shook my head no.

  He tossed back his drink, leaned against the wall behind the cot, casual-like, and stared at a dark corner of the room. He was thinking. Ruminating is the fifty-cent word for it. I could almost see the shadows stirring, pulsating, taking the form of his memories. But what sort of memories were they? Good? Bad? Tragic? Memories of the battlefield? Memories of you?

  After a long while, he began to speak.

  I’m going to do my best to relate what he told me. Not because I have to be accurate for you—hell, you know more of the truth in Heaven than I do here on earth! No, I have to do this, because I’ve lived too long with his story on the inside of my head. I’ve replayed it so many times, I no longer understand it. It’s all garbled, like the way an echo becomes nothing but noise after traveling a far distance. Maybe if I put it down here—really get it out of me—I can see it for what it is. I know it won’t be Truth with a capital T, but it’s what I’ve lived with, so it means something.

  His voice came out clear and low, but I could hear a tremble of pain underneath, a rumble like a train still a distance down the track: “Not long after your brother received his orders, I went to the recruiting station on Main Street and signed up for the Navy. Grandma threw a fit, begging and pleading, screaming and cursing to high heaven. She cooked up some crazy plan for me to hide out in the mountains. She was scared to death of losing someone else, you see. It took me several weeks to persuade her to let me go. But fate was already gunning for me, so to speak.”

  He explained how, only days after he signed up, he’d received a letter. It was from a local draft board, ordering him to report to the recruiting station. It was unusual to receive orders so fast. He went downtown, stripped, and went through all the tests and questionnaires. When the ordeal was over, he was told to go to the Army desk, where a gruff sergeant said, “Here, sign these.”

  “I was here last month,” he said, “and I joined the Navy.”

  “No, you didn’t, kid. You were drafted today, and our quota says everybody goes into the Army.”

  He was beside himself. He hadn’t enlisted just to be drafted! He had words with the sergeant, but the jowly, red-faced old fool told him to shut up and sign the papers, or he’d arrest him for being a goddamned draft dodger. Jay pushed back, not intimidated by the threats, and wrote a series of letters, but before long, he was in the Army and on a train to Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

  “Basic training was difficult,” he said. “The heat was unbearable at Croft, already in the nineties by the morning run and over one hundred degrees for calisthenics. But all the physical activity distracted me and kept me from missing Robbie too much. During my downtime, to keep the blues at bay, I volunteered to take photos for the camp rag called The 40th Column.”

  His photos made an impression. The Column’s advisor, a Lieutenant Jessup, liked them, especially a shot of a bunch of trainees dragging a large truck out of a gully with ropes, and another of grunts crawling through the mud of the barbed-wire infiltration course. The lieutenant said they looked like stills from combat films, like authentic newsreel propaganda from the front. He showed them to members of the Signal Corps, who were designing a public relations brochure about life at Camp Croft. They included his photos in the project; that was Jay’s start as a photographer.

  One day, Sergeant Davis, who was a commanding officer, approached him. “You have a good eye, Private,” he said. “Combat photographers are in serious need of replacements. Son, they’re going to send you in shooting film, not bullets.” He slapped Jay on the back and gave him the sort of cockeyed smile you give the damned.

  After Thanksgiving, Jay was transferred to Camp Crowder, Missouri, where he joined the 166th Signal Photographic Company. Eastman Kodak sent technicians to train the men, since most of them had next to no experience with photography. They learned the basics about different types of cameras, lenses, papers, speeds of film, what have you. Jay knew his way around a Speed Graphic, which was the Army’s camera of choice, but he had a lot to learn about setting up a shot and about how to maneuver on the battlefield. They ran drills with infantry and tanks, and in every sort of weather—rain, sleet, snow, you name it
. They learned how to move with squads and platoons while juggling their heavy backpacks and bulky equipment. They had to reload film as quick as rabbits and often blindfolded. They had to learn to change it under a coat or a blanket and feel their way through it. They also had to practice changing lenses while dodging artillery fire.

  “And all the time,” he said, “we had to keep in mind the photos we took had to tell a story, and if we didn’t tell the story right, we weren’t doing our job. It was more exhausting and more frustrating than basic, but I began to understand my purpose in the war.”

  He poured a little more whiskey and said, “It was during this time I met this fellow from New York City named Darren West. We were having our prints critiqued, when he leaned over and said, ‘Rudy Unger is a Neanderthal.’ I was holding a picture of Rudy flexing his big biceps for the camera just before lights-out. Rudy was a handsome guy with a cruel disposition. I worked hard to stay on his good side. I gave Darren a sideways glance and said, ‘He’s swell to look at, though.’ It just slipped out. I was about to backpedal when he whispered, ‘You’ve made him look better than he is. Not my type.’ It was good to know I wasn’t alone, really good, but I was rattled I’d taken such a risk. It was dangerous.”

  Jay leveled his eyes at me, scrunching his eyebrows together. He nodded his head like he was asking, Is it all right I’m talking about myself in this way? I didn’t know how to respond.

  He went on.

  Darren and Jay began confiding in each other. Darren came from a well-to-do family in New York City. His father had disowned him, and his mother had left his father because of it. “Mother is a lovely, passionate person,” he told Jay. “You would really like her. She wants me to be who I am and do what I like.” Jay thought Darren’s mother must be like Carla Prescott, bighearted in that way.

  Later on, Darren confessed that his mother had been clinging to him too much. He had joined the Army to escape her as much as his father. He ended up at Crowder because he’d made spending money by developing photos for a portrait agency while he was studying painting at NYU.

  One evening near the end of their time at Crowder, Jay and Darren got drunk. They were at the back of a local dive, three sheets to the wind, when Darren reached across the table, put his hand on Jay’s, and said, “I want one night before we get shipped to England. Just one night. Then I’ll vanish. I don’t want to get in the way of your feelings for Robbie.”

  Jay had told him about you!

  “Robbie never left my mind, Cee,” he said, his voice cracking, “not for a minute. Please believe me. I loved him and wished a thousand times for the day when the war would be over, and we could be together again.”

  I didn’t like where the story was going, the way his eyes were shifting, the way he was talking about you. I wondered if I trusted him at all.

  “When I was a little younger than you,” he said, “Grandma took me on vacation to Miami. The ocean was different there, like a pane of bottle-blue glass spreading to the horizon, and the sun seemed more beautiful reflecting in it than it did in the sky. I often thought about that blue water and dreamed about Robbie and me escaping to a tropical island somewhere in the Caribbean, living out our lives with the ocean at our front door and the sand beneath our feet. We would stand side by side and look out and see nothing but waves sparkling in the sun. There we would be, the two of us together.”

  “Could I have come too?” I said.

  He smiled, just a flicker. “Your brother wanted that life. He wanted to get away—away from everything he was here, in this goddamned place. But he would’ve wanted you along, I’m sure. You would’ve lived with us. You would’ve been tan every day of the year and gone to school in a hut and drank water from coconuts and built sandcastles on the beach.”

  “That sounds swell,” I said. “Really swell.”

  The warm glow faded in his eyes, leaving his face dull and empty. The shadows in the room around him seemed to swirl and darken like ink spreading in water. I was frightened again.

  “Do you want to hear the rest of my story?” he said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Cee?”

  “Yes. I guess.”

  “Okay”—he cleared his throat—“on with it.”

  In early 1944, Darren and Jay boarded the USS Susan B. Anthony and crossed the Atlantic, landing in Belfast. Shortly after that, the 166th was assigned to General Patton’s Third Army, and they were relocated to just outside Manchester, England. They settled into flimsy, tarpapered barracks, much shabbier than their barracks at Fort Crowder, and ate stale bread, powdered eggs, and weak chicory coffee. On clear nights, they watched Nazi bombers fly over on their way to bomb Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, and Coventry. Preparations for D-Day were under way, and everybody knew it, but nobody knew when it was going to happen.

  Several detachments of the 166th would take part in the invasion, but the cold, rainy spring weather wore on Jay, and in late April, he came down with pneumonia. He was sick as a dog. He watched the majority of the 166th leave for Portsmouth to be deployed with Patton’s army to France. Before Darren left, he gave Jay a letter to mail to his mother. On the envelope, he had sketched a shadowy valley in the Lake District, which he had visited while on R&R one weekend, and painted them green with splotches of watercolor. He shook Jay’s hand and wished him the best.

  “It was frustrating to see him go,” Jay said. “I wanted to be a part of the action. I had come too far to be stuck in a damned hospital. I thought a lot about your brother during those days. I tried to imagine what he might be seeing and doing in the Pacific.”

  “Didn’t he write you?”

  “He did. I wrote him too. But we had to be careful. The military scrutinizes the mail for leaks in classified information. If they caught wind of our true feelings for each other, we could be handed our blue papers—that’s a dishonorable discharge. It’s happened to other soldiers and ruined their lives. So we wrote letters with messages concealed in them—cryptographic messages—but in this case, even the cryptograms had to be disguised. We didn’t want the officers who were sorting our mail to think we were spies. I would send him crossword puzzles or word games or photos of camp or of me, and he would write stories for me. I received Robbie’s last letter only days before I was given the doctor’s clean bill of health.”

  By mid-December, Jay was off to Paris. While there, he met up with a few soldiers in the 166th who had taken a pass for Christmas. Before they knew it, they were summoned back to the front. The Germans had started a major offensive in the Ardennes forest and were forcing the Allied lines back.

  After many miles in a jeep, navigating through barren, ice-crusted countryside and forests that seemed as empty and cold as outer space, they arrived at the Belgian town of Saint-Hubert, where they joined up with an infantry company. The weariness and frustration behind the infantrymen’s eyes was plain as day. It spooked Jay but gave him purpose. He could read a silent wish on their faces—they needed him to record what they were going through.

  So after a day or two, he found his bearings, joined up with a Cavalry group made up of only GIs and jeeps—no tanks—and headed into the snowy woods to do his job. They drove through forests with the trees as black and thin as bars. They came across bombed-out villages, still burning like visions of the apocalypse, and blasted tanks and jeeps, no more than shells of squashed beetles. When they found the other men, they were frostbitten and starving, some with blistered feet, others with infected wounds, all of them wanting to go home. Jay’s own feet were beginning to hurt him, the cold was so intense. But all the same, he was set on recording it, making sure other people saw what he saw.

  “That Christmas, a small group of us gathered around an army chaplain for a service in the snow,” he said, his milky-blue eyes widening a bit. “Although I’m not religious, I wanted to be there, with those men. I looked around at them, their heads tied up with dirty scarves and their feet wrapped with rags. Many had to live in those same clothes
day after day, night after night, the fabric sticking to their skin, becoming part of them. As the chaplain went on about the meaning of Christmas, about love and hope, the men stood still, some with stony faces, others crying quietly. I looked away and tried to pretend the snow was sand and over the next hill was an ocean with Robbie standing in the warm surf—”

  He flinched, a memory passing over him like a swooping bird. I sensed he was about to tell me something important, something hard to tell. You see, I didn’t really understand war. I’d lost you, and I knew how that felt, but to me, war was just a mixture of photos from Life and shots from Hollywood propaganda. It was soldiers hoisting American flags into the sky or sailors standing at attention on the bow of a ship. It was fighter planes zipping across the sky. It was Bob Hope cracking jokes on The Pepsodent Show. It was Uncle Sam clad head-to-toe in red, white, and blue. But it wasn’t something I could reach out and touch. For Jay, it was right there, growing out of the corners of the room, a smoky reflection in its mirrored walls that swelled to three dimensions, more real than the cot under him, or the roof over him, or me beside him.

  He stopped talking, reached under the cot, and pulled out a manila folder. He wiped a thin layer of dust off it and opened it away from me so I couldn’t see what was inside. He flipped through its contents and said, “You’re going to see my tour of duty, but through my eyes.”

  The first photo he showed me was of a group of fifteen or so soldiers during downtime. Most of them were sitting close together on the side of a truck, legs dangling like boys. Some of the GIs were puffing on cigarettes, others were chatting. Several were standing, absentmindedly holding their rifles, helmets tipped back, seeming not to notice they were ankle-deep in black mud and cold slush. One soldier grinned as wide as the Cheshire Cat, looking like he had just heard a dirty joke. Another waved at someone beyond the edge of the picture. One boy was studying the sky, questioning the weather with an open face, wondering what tomorrow would bring. A little left of center, a young man was staring at the camera. He was good-looking with dark features, thick eyebrows, and a wide, blank forehead. A Montgomery Clift look-alike. He smiled with his big eyes—a warm, knowing expression, as if the joke was that no one but Jay and this boy knew they were all having their picture taken.