Sarah sat back on her heels, eyes watering and a bit wild. Her mouth opened and then closed, empty. She seemed, at that moment, undone, and as surprised as Avery was by her rudeness. As a rule, Sarah was never consciously rude to anyone.
After a long, painful pause, she pulled herself slowly to her feet with an over-bright smile all around. “Okay, everyone,” she said, slipping into a deliberately honeyed purr. “We’re almost done here. Wouldn’t want to get red pizza sauce all over your pretty dresses,” she said, oozing patience. “Please change and then we’ll eat.” She added with a courteous nod to him, “If you’re hungry, Wes, please help yourself.”
He wasn’t, and didn’t.
Instead, he retreated to the master bath to shower and scrub any residue of the day’s dirt and oil off his body. It was a farmer’s ritual, established early by his mother, who claimed the mark of a considerate man was scrupulously clean hands, nails, ears, and hair. He’d hoped to wash away the darkness of his mood as well.
But there it was, staring back at him in the mirror, with a constriction in his chest muscles like curved staves around an empty barrel. Inside, he felt hollow, helpless against the slow, steady drip of rising dread.
—
AFTER THE HUBBUB OF the pizza party, the kitchen seemed over-quiet. Sarah needed a Nembutal and a bit of sherry badly, but more than that she needed to speak with Charlotte.
“Charlotte?”
Sarah saw her halt mid-step, in the exact same way she’d done as a child playing freeze-tag with the neighbor kids in their old backyard. Only her eyes moved, wary as a chained dog.
“Please. Just hear me out.”
Charlotte’s eyes stopped just short of rolling; her look turned instantly sullen. She was tired and wanted to go to bed. One hand sought the doorjamb, the other slid to her hip.
Sarah draped the dish towel over the lip of the sink and turned to face her. “Growing up, I had a sister,” she said quietly.
“Kitty, right?” Charlotte saw her mother’s face blank with surprise.
“How in the world would you know that?”
“Grandma Do told me.”
“Mama?” The very same woman who’d warned her and Wes never to mention Kitty to Charlotte? “Don’t go soiling that child’s mind with your sister’s dirty laundry,” she’d scolded.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Years ago. Grandma Do took me to downtown Tuscaloosa to pick up a hat she’d ordered. The lady at the shop said something about Kitty, about me being the spittin’ image of her. So I asked Grandma who she was. She said Kitty was the pretty one, but you got all the talent. She also said not to mention that…to you.”
Sarah compressed peeved lips—the old family judgment still rankled. She’d have to stew on that, and on her mother’s deception, later. “When Kitty was your age,” she continued, “she was up for Homecoming Queen, too.”
“Really? Did she win?”
“Yes. But that’s not the point.” Sarah sighed, willing herself on. “Kitty had her pick of dates. But she chose a boy she hardly knew, a college guy she’d met at a hamburger joint near U of A. He was handsome. She liked his car, she said, and his New York accent.”
Sarah looked down vacantly at her hands. When had they turned into her mother’s—same elegant length, same narrow, ridged nails, same web of wrinkles and emerging liver spots? She squeezed them into fists to make the wrinkles go away, then opened them flat again to see Mama’s hands return.
“Homecoming night,” Sarah said, old, still-painful images flashing through her mind, “he showed up with a bottle and, like most boys, only one thing on his mind. He got her drunk at the dance and, on the way home, took advantage. It was a major catastrophe, Charlotte, and a huge scandal. It changed everything for all of us.”
“Is…is that when she died?”
“No,” Sarah said truthfully. “But it was the beginning of her downhill slide.”
Charlotte glanced toward the door, then returned her mother’s pained look.
“Couple of things, Mom,” she said. “First, do you really think it’s possible for me to walk around high school with these”—she spread her open palms beneath her ample breasts—“and not be aware what ‘most boys’ have on their mind? Second, two of the girls here tonight—don’t ask me who—are saying that if we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, they’re not leaving without losing their virginity.” Shock flattened her mother’s face. “I’m not one of them, Mom. And Emilio’s not like that. Besides…he’d never do anything that might disappoint Dad or Steve.” She turned on her heel and left.
“I hope you’re right,” Sarah said to Charlotte’s retreating back. “I really do,” she said, now addressing the empty kitchen. She poured herself a large glass of sherry, tossed down a couple of pills, and went out onto the back porch to nurse the insult and irony that, of all people, Steve’s opinion mattered more than hers.
Par for the course, she thought desolately.
Outside, the lake was dark under a barely there, final-quarter moon. Down to its last dime, her daddy would have said. Small, pale wisps of mist rose off the water like smoke from a circle of country cabins. Or a gathering of old ghosts, Sarah thought, sipping sherry. She paused briefly to cover the birdcages for the night, then fighting off exhaustion—Stay busy or go crazy, right? Mama’s motto ran through her head—she trudged back to the dining room to hand-stitch the pinned hem of Charlotte’s homecoming dress.
The kitchen was oddly hushed. Overnight, a thick fleece of fog had formed on the lake, crept up the dock, captured the back lawn, and laid siege to the house. Beads of moisture striped by watery rivulets cloaked the rear windows. Beyond them, there was nothing but diffuse gray silence.
Avery hated fog like this: too thick, too quiet, too close for comfort. Fog like this took him to a place he never wanted to go again: the living hell of January 27 and 28, 1945, the worst thirty-seven hours of his life, when after flying eight hours from Tinian to Tokyo, dropping their load on the Mitsubishi aircraft plant, and circling back, Cap’n Ritter announced, eight hours in, that they were still two hours from base. The race between strong headwinds and dwindling fuel would be “close.” Ninety-two nerve-racking minutes later, Ritter announced, “Close but no cigar, boys,” and rang the bail-out bell. Isolated in the tail turret, Avery opened his escape window and, seeing other crew members already in the air, stood, snapped on his chest parachute, lifted the life raft pack that served as his seat cushion, attached it to his chute harness, and dove out into…nothing but clouds rushing and roaring in his ears and, after the pop of his chute, a sea fog so inpenetrable he never saw the water surface coming. Stunned by the impact, he had no memory of inflating his Mae West, ditching his chute harness, or pulling the inflation straps on his raft. Alone, unable to see his feet, he was certain he’d landed in hell—not the fire-and-brimstone kind favored by preachers in his youth, but a cold, wet wasteland inhabited by unseen monster waves that came at him, one after another, in a nauseating, unending roller coaster, while every bump beneath the thin rubber membrane of his raft was, in his increasingly addled state, the nose of a shark, the fin of a killer whale, or the lines of a surfacing Japanese sub. More likely, he decided as the hours rocked by, he’d suffer death by vomiting and its attendant dehydration surrounded by an undrinkable sea. It was, in the end, thirty-seven hours of shivering hell before he heard the muffled chug-chug-chug of an engine and saw the megaphone-shaped sweep of a searchlight atop a ship he could only hope was American. It was, in fact, a Merchant Marine cargo ship (a final parting gift from his grandfather, who had passed on six weeks before?), its crewmen angels with grizzled faces whose strong tattooed arms, not unlike Old Pa’s, lifted him up and out of hell and set him down in the heaven of a steaming shower. (It was later, when he was reunited with his surviving crewmen—they’d lost four out of eleven that night—for one week’s R&R at a camp on Waikiki Beach, that he hit upon the idea of sending a thank-you to Inspector 833 for the
rubber raft that saved his life. Eight-three-three was a number he’d easily recalled and taken as an omen, he explained in his note, since it was also his mother’s birthday: August 3, 1903.)
Weather like this, palpable as cotton, set Avery’s nerves on edge. Earlier, he’d paced around the kitchen, an uneasy captive, while Charlotte downed her cereal and milk. He’d followed her out the door, calling to her friends in the car, “Take it slow!” He’d returned to the kitchen to refill his mug, then moved, antsy, into the dining room.
Sarah, up late sewing, was apparently sleeping in. Her handiwork—Charlotte’s multilayered red dress, each layer neatly hemmed—hung off the top ledge of the china cabinet. A second dress, the sparkly white one for the parade, hung beside it, bristling with silver pins.
Ground clouds had flanked both sides of the house and were reassembling near the sidewalk and in the street. Avery checked his watch and stepped out on the front stoop to wait.
He heard the distinctive squeal of the Divco brakes first. Then he saw the twin lights, the white snub-nose, and the square top of Jimmy Simms’s milk truck roll into view. He moved quickly onto the walk, intent on asking the big man for an update on activity out at the air base. But something in Simms’s manner stopped him.
Normally a smiler, a greeter, a glad-handed gossip, Simms lumbered up the drive in silence, solemn as a pallbearer. He held out the crate of glass bottles like a condolence offering. Once the transfer was made, his eyes made a darting circuit of the door, the drive, the fog-filled street, then returned to Avery, narrowed with warning.
“DefCon Two,” he confided in a low voice, all but whispering. Then he shook his head—a man struggling to reconcile the truth with his own disbelief—and turned away. Avery watched him climb heavily back into the truck, shift and lurch into reverse, and nod his sober good-bye. Avery stood there, holding the crate of sweating bottles, staring at the space where the fog had swallowed the white truck.
DefCon Two.
To anyone living near an SAC base, the Strategic Air Command’s system of monitoring the nation’s Defense Condition was common knowledge. It was a five-point sliding scale, shorthand for the degree of readiness required of all military personnel. Normally, the base wavered between a peaceable DefCon Five and a moderately alert DefCon Four. But DefCon Two—DefCon Two—was maximum alert, full readiness for all-out war! As far as Avery knew, the nation had never reached DefCon Two before. And if we hit DefCon One?
Avery felt the shudder from the back of his neck to the base of his spine. The milk bottles rattled their response. Blindly he turned toward the house.
His brain was numbed by the news. DefCon Two. Three small syllables that loomed so large he was very nearly knocked to his knees with dread. He closed the refrigerator door, leaned an elbow atop its cool surface, and pressed a thumb to his temple, fingers flat across his forehead, to think.
DefCon Two. A decision like that came down from the top. The Joint Chiefs alone? Or was the President involved?
The face of the man at the top of air force command reared in Avery’s mind: steely eyes beneath dark glowering brows, heavy jowls, belligerent lips wrapped around a thick cigar. He was only a two-star general when he arrived on Tinian Island to assume command of the air war against Japan, but he’d already earned the nicknames of Iron Ass and Bombs Away LeMay.
Before his arrival in early ’45, the B-29 crews flew high-altitude, daytime sorties against strategic military targets. But Curtis LeMay changed everything.
Memories of those first frantic weeks in late February ’45 rose painfully like welts after a whipping. Rumors flew after late-night calls from crew chiefs rousted every mechanic on the island out of bed to work round-the-clock modifying the B-29s to LeMay’s specifications. Unbelievably, the general’s orders were to remove all defensive weapons and munitions except those of the tail-gunners and replace them with additional bombs. When reconfigured, LeMay’s B-29s were an aerial apocalypse straining their engines under the jam-packed combination of highly explosive white phosphorus bombs (to crack open roofs), plus napalm and incendiary clusters (to set off the firestorm).
Flight crews dropping by the hangars were aghast, outraged, and near mutiny. But old Iron Ass ordered them up, not only defenseless and at low altitudes, but with the express command that “not being able to make it back is no reason to abort.”
The night of March 9, Avery was aboard one of LeMay’s 334 bombers that branded Tokyo with a fiery X, then dumped everything they had—seventeen hundred incendiary tons—from seven thousand feet. Block by block, Tokyo blew up in flames. In less than three hours, sixteen square miles of the city and one hundred thousand residents were incinerated.
The air reeked of burning wood, debris, and flesh. From the tail, Avery viewed the inferno through dark glasses against the glare of Tokyo’s searchlights. After leaving Tokyo, for more than 150 miles out, he could still see the leap of flames and debris several thousand feet high and dark clouds of smoke hurled upward to more than fifteen thousand feet. Even now, in the safety of his own home, he swallowed hard against that singular black taste—ashes in our mouth—and the hollow horror on the faces of his fellow crewmen.
When questioned about the switch from military targets to civic centers, old Iron Ass made no bones about it: “There are no civilians in Japan,” he answered curtly. After Tokyo, sixty-six other Japanese cities (and towns when they ran out of cities) felt the wrath of LeMay’s nighttime “fire jobs.”
Now that crazy bastard was a Joint Chief? With a nuclear arsenal capable of incinerating the planet three times over. Did President Kennedy, a mere PT-boat commander, have what it would take to stand down LeMay’s five-star bloodlust? He’d certainly shown no balls at the Bay of Pigs.
Avery shook his head in disbelief. The fate of the world rested on a bunch of old warlords and America’s youngest-ever President. Not to mention that wacko Khrushchev.
He rubbed his temple. The pulse just beneath the skin had begun to race. He needed to move. He pushed himself straight, crossed the kitchen, and picked up the phone. The action caused Sarah’s note (TUES: Langford, 11:00 & 1st Baptist, 1:00, WED: Cherry Plaza, 1:00) to flutter to the floor. He bent to pick it up and tucked it back behind the phone jack. Pointedly ignoring the fog-filled window, he dialed the station.
“Orange Town Texaco. Steve speakin’.”
“Everything okay over there?”
“Nothin’ I can’t handle. But…”
“What?”
“Bad news from the depot. Couple of convoys stopped by, requisitioned all their mid-grade. Cleaned ’em out. We got only a thousand gallons of regular. Seven-fifty premium. Best they could do.”
Avery blew out frustration in a half breath, half whistle.
“Been tellin’ customers we’re down to five gallons a car. Till things loosen up.”
“All right,” Avery said, remembering why he called. “Listen, I have to stop by the cottage on Princeton, post a FOR RENT sign. Might be a few minutes late.”
“Gonna miss McNamara on TV? He’s ’bout to update the press.”
Avery’s eyes shot to the kitchen clock. Nine twenty-nine. The navy’s blockade of Cuba was set to start at ten.
“Oh, and Cap?”
“Yeah.”
“There was a lady here—va–va–voom!—looking for you. Told her you’d be in at ten. She’s havin’ breakfast at the Rexall ’cross the street. Comin’ back to see you then.”
“Anybody I know?”
Steve paused. “Hard to say, Cap. But definitely worth the drive over.”
—
AVERY DECIDED THE COTTAGE could wait and switched on the TV.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stood checking his notes behind a DOD podium. The former president of Ford Motor Company, he had a reliable look—solid frame, square face, round glasses, hair combed straight back. But during the war, Avery knew, McNamara had served as Curtis LeMay’s statistical analyst. How much sway, Avery worried, did old
Iron Ass still have over his former lieutenant colonel?
McNamara’s statement was painfully brief:
Overnight the US Navy had tightened its line of interdiction from eight hundred to five hundred miles off Cuba’s coast. Despite the increased leeway, approximately twenty-five Soviet ships remained on course for Cuban ports. The first test of the quarantine, a possible clash between American and Soviet ships, could come within twenty-four hours.
Avery was struck by McNamara’s gaze into the camera, the sly, calculating gleam as he told reporters it was a “fair assumption” that some of the Soviet ships were carrying offensive nuclear weapons. The man’s smugness, his failure to mention that the nation’s military had moved to DefCon Two, tightened the constriction in Avery’s chest and the creeping numbness inside his head.
A sudden need to get out propelled him off the couch, through the door, and into his truck.
—
FOUR BLOCKS FROM HOME, away from the socked-in haze of his neighborhood, the sky was a steel-gray lid set atop the town.
At the stop sign on Smith, Avery stuck his head out the window and gulped fresh air, but the tightness in his throat and chest remained. From somewhere above the cloud cover, he heard the sound of thunder, rolling southwest. Another fighter squadron bound for McCoy. Where the heck are they putting them all?
Pulling into the station, he saw his usual parking spot was occupied by a sleek white Chrysler Imperial with a No. 3 Hillsborough County plate. He swerved into the open spot between Steve’s Admiral and the street.
Out at the pumps, Steve caught his glance and gave a quick head jerk toward the office, followed by an appreciative eye roll. Clearly the lady, “va-va-voom,” whoever she was, was waiting inside.
He saw her legs first. One long, silk-stockinged shin crossed over the other, nice calves, stylish black heels, and the discreet silver wink of a barely there ankle bracelet. The hem of a slim black skirt. But everything else, except for both sets of slender fingertips, nails painted dark red, was hidden from view by the held-high spread of an out-of-town newspaper—the Styles section of the The New York Times, probably purchased across the street at Hammond’s Drugs.
A Place We Knew Well Page 11
