Prudence

by David Treuer

  The phrase “ask Felix” had become a bit of a joke between them. At first it had annoyed him how she would go on and on about what Felix had done and what he had fixed and how fast. Every story or bit of news about the Pines involved what Felix had done. They weren’t even safe in the winter. Felix lived in the boathouse throughout the winter doing God knows what—drinking, no doubt—and he sent regular letters, then telegrams, through Harris at the Wigwam. Harris probably composed them anyway, hewn from the raw materials of Felix’s few words—The Pines in good shape or Storm came through a few trees down structures fine. Harris was a finder of things (he’d found Jonathan his scotch and gin, even during the dry years when Jonathan couldn’t get what he wanted in Chicago).

  Jonathan turned his head to one side and then the other and moved his left hand up to the base of his shaft to keep the blood from escaping, trickling back down into the lake of his usual calm. He tried to think of the kitchen girls again, but he had already left that station. He cast his mind back to Chicago, to his consulting room and the nurse he met there these days (except not of course these days, the days he wasted at the Pines).

  Please, oh, please, please.

  There were many new nurses now. Of course some were attached to the armed forces and would be sent overseas. But there was a need for nurses on the home front, too. He had many applicants and hired more than he really needed, or could afford. They weren’t rich, after all. But he hadn’t had much during the Crash and so hadn’t lost much, and with a lot of hard work they were comfortable. The last nurse he had hired was one of those special ones, entrepreneurial. It having become impossible to find stockings, she had drawn a perfectly straight black line from her heel to her buttocks with an eyeliner pencil.

  Jonathan had noticed the line and the absence of stockings when she’d sat down. But it was the girl, Madeline, who had drawn attention to it during the interview.

  “I believe in helping others, Dr. Washburn. One of the ways we can help is by going without, even if it means being creative.”

  He’d asked her what she meant.

  “For instance,” she’d had her hands folded primly on her lap. “For instance, since we cannot buy stockings, but, you know, society demands we have some class even with a war on, you have to pretend.”

  “You’re creative and helpful because you don’t wear stockings?”

  “Not just that, of course. I made sure it seemed as though I was wearing stockings.”

  “Pretense.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How far would you say that the pretense needs to go?”

  “As far as is necessary, Doctor.” And she stood and turned and showed him how she had drawn a black line down the back of her thighs and calves all the way to her ankles.

  How easy it had been! And when they were finished, he had, in a fit of boyish gallantry, laid her on the desk and, with his surgeon’s hand, drawn the line back in where it had been rubbed off.

  Please, oh, please, please.

  The house was quiet now. The girls were done with their kitchen work and were in the pump house working on the ironing and the laundry. The boys and Felix were still out looking for the German. Where was Emma? The shrill cheer of the reunion, the discomfort that lurked beneath it, continued to ring in his ears. It had been no different when they were being transported to the lines during the previous war. The same stiff joking and sing-alongs. “Tipperary” and “Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends,” which had made them laugh and laugh and laugh. And most of them had died. The only time during the war Jonathan had felt like himself was when he found time and enough money to see one of the prostitutes down behind the cook tents, where they had set up business. With French whores one could say anything, could do anything. And he had. He could move their bodies any way he pleased and they cooperated, whereas the dead and dying bodies at the front were awkward, stiff, smelly, and broken. And with the whores he could say what he pleased. Let me fuck your mouth. Turn over. And he closed his eyes, and with them shut he could see the girl under him, thin, with dark hair, and dark hair marking her legs and her armpits, and small breasts with tiny, very tiny pink nipples accentuated by two or three long dark hairs on each. And with his eyes closed he could picture this and not imagine and not have to see the wound that was her pussy, filled and filled again by so many men.

  Please, oh, please. God, oh, please.

  That was blessedly enough, as he lay on the iron frame bed in his room at the Pines, as the afternoon limped toward evening and everything lay still—the lake, the house, the pines themselves, and finally, thank God, finally, his own penis, spent and ragged, gasping itself smaller and smaller, retreating, eel-like, into its hiding place, having fed on his hand and his spit and his thoughts. Jonathan tucked it back in his boxers and lay on the bed for a long time. It was a long time gone before he remembered how much he hated it at the Pines and how angry Emma made him and how Frankie was his son but didn’t feel like his son. And just when he remembered this, he was roused by the voices of the search party, which had returned amid much shouting and yelling.

  Could it be? Could they really have done it, found the German? He stood and looked out the window that faced the forest and saw them. Ernie and David came stumbling out of the woods. They were calling his name. Dr. Washburn, Dr. Washburn. As they approached out of the gloom he could see the alarm on their faces. The look of boys who had seen something profound and terrible. He knew it. He knew that look and had all but forgotten it.

  Dr. Washburn! Dr. Washburn!

  Jonathan opened the window to call down and then, as they drew closer, he saw blood on Ernie’s shirt. But where were Felix and Billy? And where was Frankie?

  “Mr. Washburn! Please! Mr. Washburn!”

  Oh, God, please. Please, God.

  Jonathan ran down the stairs and through the kitchen. He was halfway past the garden when he realized he was wearing only his undershirt and underwear. He felt the semen drying on the fabric of his boxers.

  Please, oh, please. Please!

  Jonathan rounded the garden just as Felix emerged from the woods with Billy in his shadow. He sensed Emma coming up around the front of the house and turned. She held a cutting of dahlias and hollyhocks in her arms.

  Felix held a body in his arms, the arms and legs dangling, the face hidden against Felix’s shoulder.

  Please, oh, please. Please!

  He sprinted toward Felix. So slow, so slowly, slowgoing. It wasn’t until Felix stood next to him that Jonathan registered that the body was not Frankie’s, nor was it the German’s. Felix held a girl in his arms, a girl who stirred and moaned and then whimpered. An Indian girl. A teenager, from the look of it, but not a girl he knew. She wore a white blouse, which was soiled and covered in blood, and a gray jumper and black shoes—as if she had been dressed for school or church.

  Jonathan looked up at Felix and Billy, confused.

  “What the hell? Felix? Where’s—”

  Frankie emerged from the woods at last. He, too, was covered in blood. He did not look at the girl or at Jonathan. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets.

  Jonathan looked back at Felix.

  “Take her,” Felix said.

  Jonathan did as he was told. He held out his arms to receive her.

  “She’s okay,” said Felix. “She’ll be okay.”

  When the girl was in Jonathan’s arms, he was shocked at how light, how thin she was. Her hair was matted and tangled and studded with burrs and bark chips. Her face was dirty. But her legs and torso, where his hands clasped her, were strong and smooth. It took nothing at all to hold her. Nothing.

  Felix put his hand on her head and said something to her in Indian, something low and smooth and quick. Then he turned and brushed past Frankie, heading back out into the woods. Billy stepped closer to Frankie and Felix, his eyes on the ground, his Adam’s apple jumping up a
nd down as he swallowed hard.

  “Where are you going?” asked Jonathan. “Where do you think you are going?” He was surprised at the desperation in his voice, the dependence.

  “To get the other one,” said Felix. He stopped and turned to face Jonathan.

  “Is she okay? The other one? Is she like this?”

  “No.”

  Jonathan tried to search Frankie’s eyes, but Frankie wouldn’t look at him.

  “Frank. Frank! What the hell happened? What happened to the other one?” He turned in despair to Felix. “Felix. What happened? Felix! Answer me.”

  Felix looked at Jonathan coolly.

  Billy stepped forward, his eyes on the ground.

  “I shot her,” he said.

  Jonathan looked at Billy and then at his son. “Frankie?”

  “I said I shot her, Dr. Washburn,” said Billy again.

  Frankie looked up at his father and then to the girl in Jonathan’s arms.

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry,” he mumbled.

  Felix looked at the girl and at Frankie and Billy in turn but said nothing. And then he turned and disappeared back into the woods to fetch the body.

  It wasn’t until they had the girl cleaned and washed and, thanks to an injection Jonathan had given her, asleep in the maid’s bedroom downstairs off the kitchen, that Felix and Billy returned with the other girl. Frankie waited around outside the door, pacing to the kitchen and back. He knocked but Emma wouldn’t let him in as she tended to the first girl.

  No one got to see the other girl when Felix carried her back because Felix had taken off his long-sleeved shirt and wrapped it around her head, either to keep the world from looking at her or the dead girl from looking at them. He carried her directly to the icehouse, where he covered her in a sheet, and there she lay until the sheriff had time to come out and look at her. By then they had found the German and that discovery eclipsed everything else. He questioned them and then left. An accident. Afterward Felix had buried her behind the Pines.

  PART II

  THE WAR

  1943–1945

  SEVEN

  SAN ANGELO, TEXAS—APRIL 1943

  Frankie and another cadet were crammed into the seats behind the bomb bay of a Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan. A third student, the one honing his skills as a bombardier, was stuffed up in the nose of the Beechcraft under the feet of the pilot and the instructor. Frankie was in charge of the camera: he was to record their hits on the pyramidal shacks scattered over the flat, featureless Chihuahuan desert. It was April 1943 and bombs, real bombs, were falling all over the world—Tunisia, Sicily, the Ruhr. The USAAF had stepped up its campaign in Tunisia and Sicily. The RAF had developed a new bomb the papers were calling a “blockbuster,” but the RAF and the USAAF referred to as a “cookie.” A 4,000-pound bomb capable of leveling a whole city block.

  Frankie longed to be in North Africa. He had been in the USAAF for seven months but he was still a cadet. He and his fellow cadets were halfway through their twelve-week bombardier program, though that could change at any moment, as had everything else in the Air Force. The joke was that the Air Force wasn’t as good at getting planes in the air as it was at changing course, heading, altitude, and target. Instead of dropping real bombs, they dropped casings full of sand and black powder, never more than 500-pounders, to simulate bomb strikes. What would it feel like to drop a 4,000-pound bomb? What would it be like to feel the plane lift after the payload left the bomb bay and some seconds later the explosion reached you, two miles up in the sky? That would be real, while this—all this—was just training, just another bit of routine pasted over the raw wood of experience, like a yearly coat of enamel on an already overpainted door.

  All the same, Frankie was enjoying himself. As he looked down over the desert, he felt he was looking with eyes very different from the ones that wouldn’t look Billy, Felix, or Jonathan in the eye when he left the Pines in August of ’42. Today they had live bombs on board for a change. The advantage of training with live bombs was that they weighed almost the same as the bombs they would use in combat. Not that they had so much as seen a B-24 or a B-17 or any heavy aircraft they would use in the war. Instead, they flew the Texan for gunnery practice and the Beechcraft for bombing practice. Still, it was good to be in the sky.

  The camera was pointed out of a five-inch hole cut in the fuselage of the Beechcraft. They had to record their hits if they were to pass. Frankie would rather be in the nose, accessed by a hatch a single step down from the cockpit, and so narrow that the pilot had to close the hatch after the bombardier crawled in and stamp on it a few times to get it to latch. Most of the other cadets hated getting in the nose, but Frankie had discovered that he liked being a bombardier. He liked the tight space up in the nose, the cluster of instruments and the mysteries of the Norden bombsight itself, clamped to the floor. He liked watching the asphalt runway speed under the wheels of the plane and the moment when the wheels left the ground, the soft cushion of air on which the plane rode up, up, up until the harsh geometry of the desert filled his view. There was the sight and there was the target and all the calculations he had to go through to make sure his load dropped where it belonged. He had to know his instruments and how they worked, and he had to remember his physics and math (angle, altitude, airspeed, ground speed, wind speed, and direction, the weight of the aircraft and the weight of the payload). When they commenced the bombing run, and control transferred from the pilot to the bombardier, he was blissfully, fully, completely in charge. His heart lifted. Everything that bothered him—everything that had happened before—fell away below him.

  On the next run it would be his turn to remove the cotter pins from the bombs and make sure they were racked properly and pull the lever at the bombardier’s command. After that he would be back in the nose. And someday, who knew when (this was the Air Force, after all), he would be matched to a crew. He bent over the camera and waited patiently for the bombing run to begin.

  Like the others, he’d imagined being a pilot, not a bombardier. He had finished cadet training at Princeton and qualified as a pilot. But on his second day at Maxwell, his cohort was marshaled on the parade ground and told they were going to be bombardiers and that theirs was a special job not many men could perform. Releasing bombs didn’t seem special to Frankie then. It felt, rather, like a consolation. The job of a mechanic. That evening during mess, he approached his instructor, a lieutenant with a luxurious mustache, and told him that he had taken flying lessons and would be best used as a pilot. The lieutenant listened to Frankie carefully, stroking his mustache.

  “I see,” he said. “So you’ve taken flying lessons.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Frankie.

  “This was in New Jersey. While you were in college?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s correct, sir,” said Frankie stiffly.

  “And I am to understand that you were certified as a pilot?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Frankie. He tried his best not to smile.

  “Hmmm,” said his instructor. “So there’s been a mistake somewhere. Right?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Well, there must be. You’re in the Air Force, and the Air Force is in the business of putting planes in the air. And here we have a qualified pilot.”

  “Single- and double-engine, sir.”

  “Oh? That changes everything. Or it should, correct? You are a pilot certified to fly single- or double-engine planes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The other cadets had gathered around.

  “Except, Lieutenant Washburn, the Air Force doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “It might have.”

  “So, you’re saying the Air Force, commanded by Commander in Chief Franklin Delano Roosevelt, doesn’t know what it’s doing? You’re saying the president of the United States has got it all wrong?”

&nb
sp; “No, sir—”

  “Maybe you should replace him.”

  “Excuse me, sir?” Frankie’s palms were beginning to sweat and his collar rubbed against his neck as he swallowed.

  “It seems that the president made a mistake when he put you in bombardier training. Not that you’re a bombardier yet. No, you are a cadet. Cadets don’t fly planes. Cadets don’t navigate planes. Cadets don’t drop bombs. Cadets don’t shoot down enemy fighters. They don’t do any of this. Do they?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I don’t think so, sir.”

  “Maybe you could tell me what they do, son.”

  “What who do, sir?”

  “Cadets. What’s the job of a cadet?” The officer turned in a circle. “Everyone, listen up! Everyone, listen! Cadet Washburn is going to tell us all what the job of an aviation cadet is.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it, sir. I don’t know if I can say, sir.”

  “You can fly a plane. You should fly a plane. The president of the United States evidently wants you to fly a plane. But you can’t answer a simple question of mine? You want to fly planes over enemy territory and bring death to the enemy but you can’t answer a question, man to man?”

  Frankie knew he was being humiliated. He knew he was being maneuvered by the officer into a situation in which there was no good answer, in which there wasn’t an answer at all. And he knew that the point wasn’t to obtain one but rather to secure his public humiliation. Not that the humiliation served any purpose. It was humiliation for the sake of humiliation, for the pleasure of it. For the pleasure the officer found in it. Frankie knew this. It made the humiliation even worse. When Frankie didn’t answer, the officer turned to the rest of the dining hall and spoke loudly over the din.

  “You all are here to learn to be bombardiers. Why? Because the Air Force needs bombardiers. Why does the Air Force need bombardiers? Because getting our bombs on target, bringing death to the enemy, is our most important job. It is our sacred duty to kill the enemy with bombs. And it is one of our most dangerous jobs. Bombardiers die. You are here because too many bombardiers have died fighting the enemy, and we need more of you to do the same. There have been no mistakes. There are no other reasons. You are here because we need you here. And a cadet’s job is to do whatever we ask you to do and to do it to the best of your ability. With any luck you won’t wash out. You’ll become bombardiers, and you will have a chance to drop our bombs on the enemy. Do you understand?”