Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  I thought to risk it.

  When the night raiders showed it was like a movie director said, “Lights and action!” Searchlights like ice fingers shot into the mist. Sirens sighed from low to high and back. The drone of radial engines sifted through broken sky. Anti-aircraft—what the blokes called “ack-ack”—bloomed among the stars.

  The ruse must have worked because Lakenheath Lea heaved. Earth filled the air. I did the dodger’s run, left my own staggering drunk behind running till I ran out of field and was over the fence without climbing. I flopped up one side of a little hill, then rolled down the other and ate mud like Daddy done in his trenches.

  When I peeked over the crest, the booze must have jumped back inside because I was drunk again. It was all so damned beautiful, music, light, and song. Wave over wave of air washed out from the bursting bombs like wet wrinkles. I would have stood to conduct if I’d had that talent, but I didn’t so I lay and breathed it.

  When the old guy next to me in the dark ditch howled like a steel-cutting saw, I about jumped from my skin. By bomb’s light, he was hairy and old. Black, see? Not like a Colored man, he was old iron black and the dark of rich loam. He was all the shades of the world black. Except for that he could have been the bus driver bloke.

  I thought he was drunk as I was and said something like, “What’re we doing here, mate?”

  He answered like a yard full of geese. Well, I was just learning the language there in England, and that night’s lager had settled back in me after my dodge. Thing was, I understood. Got that he’d come up to the Lea for this. Come up, special. As if he’d been, well, down somewhere. Don’t know where. Him and the others—he waved his arm—they were here for this. This special thing we were doing.

  A stick of incendiaries threw bright heat and I saw the hillside filled like a stadium for homecoming. The old guy and the rest howled like a steel mill chorus at a midnight pouring.

  On the Lea was more of him. More, different, their shadows danced with the flames.

  Soc would have loved it, hundreds of little hairy critters. They ran, spun, tornadoed the dirt. A bomb whistled. I looked. Foolish, but damn if there wasn’t a girl on it. Okay, not on it, she slow-danced it down the sky. Which is why I could see it at all. Behind her, a whole rack of Kraut 500-pounders cavorted in the arms of little women. Okay, not women. The idea of women. They sweet doe-see-doed those clumsy iron bubbles, something Walt Disney could’ve made in that Fantasia picture. When the bubbles burst, they blossomed, yellow-white and rose-touched. Snake flames licked the ground and skittered, rolling, growing, growing so fast, twisting into the air with wood, canvas, and painted earth. The howl of blooming steel washed over us and I know, I know, a dozen, two dozen of the folk were pulverized in the blasts, pulverized and shot aloft where the spray of parts and pieces rejoined and laughed down as shadows, black shadows, against the heat and shock and thrumming strings. Sounded like it anyway.

  Then it was over: bombs, planes, ack-ack. Drifting smoke, air-tossed muck, skittering sparks remained. Then a lady-rain came to clean it all. The rain was part of it and fell like light. As if all the fire and light, all the burning planes and men that had fallen from the sky in steel and armored drops, the glowing bits of bone and chary rags and spatters of liquid plastic, were distilled to hazy mist. All that dropped gently in a cleansing rain. Wondrous.

  My old black bloke said something to me and rolled his head back. I thought he’d laugh. He did and came apart in joy, then sank. That was it. He sank into the hillside. The music of rain and air, wrinkled and was gone. All was gone, waiting for the next… What?

  Festival is the word I’d caught. This Festival we were making just for them.

  When the all clear sounded I was sober again for the third time that day. I stood. Common mist rolled across Lakenheath Lea. The surviving flames were ordinary fires, dying in the wet. In the light, the carcass of my friend the cow lay opened, burning. I didn’t see rabbits.

  I was in my rack when the Sergeant rolled us out, calling “Wakey-wakey!” like the blokes.

  Jammed into the briefing room, we sat in body heat and wool, staring at the curtained blackboard on the stage. The place was blue with cigarette. When Col. Cawdor came down the aisle, the air parted and we came to attention, coughing.

  “At ease,” he said. He looked at the officers, looked at us. “Gentlemen, your target is Schweinfurt.” Then he left. The Air Exec conducted the rest of the general briefing before we separated into crew briefs.

  Let me tell you about Schweinfurt. That October, the 8th Air Force lost a quarter of the planes it sent to take out the ball bearing factories of Schweinfurt. Ball bearings, now, ball bearings are the soul—the heart, anyway—of modern war. Without ball bearings, you’re fighting the last war’s war.

  Since that bloody October, the 8th had a grudge against those ball bearings and be damned if we could knock out the plants. We kept going back.

  There were the usual hoots, whines, and whimpers, the fake screams that covered real ones. In the end, we were going back to Schweinfurt, its two thousand ack-ack guns and crack crews and where half the Luftwaffe waited for us to come to try to kill their ball bearings.

  Schweinfurt. Shit, guess I DID want to live forever.

  We jeeped to the perimeter and ran preflight. Just another pretty day of dying. HQ teased us with a hold while meteorology waited for the numbers to say the target skies was clear. I was hoping the mission would stay held, get scrubbed, go away. It didn’t.

  Some of the guys from Gale’s Wrath and Gremlin tossed a baseball ’round a circle, others stood and laughed or lay sacked out against the landing gear. Soc wandered across the pad and squatted on wet grass next to me. We were quiet. I wanted to say nothing about last night’s Festival, figuring it was mostly booze, anyway.

  “About science,” Soc said, “see, you should be able to know—to figure, anyway—when your number’s coming, well, not up, but around.” He looked at the sky. “Gotta say, I’m feeling it’s close.”

  The day was sunny and cool. Last night’s rain lay in thin sheens across the tarmac. Behind the perimeter fence, cows grazed like they had forever. Nothing had changed for them. Or me. Hell, I was still a farmer, mostly dirt, spit, and hot air. A while ago I was doing what my folks had done for as long as those cows had been in their line of work. This flying in the air, flames, tearing metal and spraying blood, that was a just something to be done before getting back to the earth.

  Soc didn’t say anything, then he said, “You know, I’ve seen things.” He tilted his head back. “Up there…” He looked at me and laughed. “Nah. No such thing.”

  “Yes. Yes, there is,” I said. “Socrates. There is!” I grabbed his arm. I was going to unburden me about last night, the voices, the music.

  Then Ops popped the Very pistol and it was time to go. The engines revved and prop blasts blew last night’s puddles away.

  Soc smacked me on the leg with his flight gloves. “Got to tell you about my book! I think I’ve got it! Finally got it!” And he was off to die. I knew that.

  He did. After the fighters left us to fly alone into the flak of Schweinfurt’s two thousand ack-acks, Gale’s Wrath, leading on high approach to the drop point, caught a shell in a soft spot. There was a puff and the plane folded, wings, tail, nose. The whole thing drifted apart and rained people and pieces over the low-level flights, rearward. It was almost artful. Soc could have done it justice and maybe would have appreciated the numbers of it all. No chutes.

  We made the run, dropped our load, and then were on our own. I hoped there were ball bearings all over Schweinfurt.

  Gremlin was light and bouncy without bombs and a good part of its fuel. Her tail was frisky. We dropped into the coffin corner, the number five slot in formation, and were the first hit from the rear by fighters. Sitting in my nest, chute stuffed in the tunnel behind, I had time to think as I popped tracers at the 109s that swept up and past. I was thinking about the novel Soc wouldn’t fini
sh, about numbers and how I didn’t believe this thing, this B-17, could fly, not for real, so how could we be here?

  When the little hairy guy behind me started singing, I barely had time to yell what the hell’s a civilian doing on a combat mission? He laughed and the tracers laughed with him, said I was right, the damned thing couldn’t fly, not if I didn’t believe it. He didn’t speak American but I knew what he was saying. He told me to get on with it; he was none of my worry. I was there to give them their Festival, the fireworks.

  Those are my words. His were something older. Finer. He laughed and laughed. I didn’t believe in him any more than I did in the ability of a B-17 to climb to Angels Twenty-five, then soft as a bird, come back to earth.

  The headset was jammed, everyone shouting at once. The bombardier and navigator were on nose guns, yelling. Jens, the radio guy, was on dorsal. The waist gunners were doing the port and starboard dance as the F-Ws and MEs swooped over, under and past us. The two between my legs were working and I was doing my share of yelling. Our thirteen guns poured streams of half-inch steel-jackets in divergent cones of fire. We surrounded Gremlin with a shell of shielding metal.

  Except from what slipped through.

  The Messerschmitt dropped into our slipstream. My tracers reached for him, but he was below my cone of fire. Then a funny thing: A haze of—I can only call it “female” light—flew down, flew up, flew in, surrounded him, danced him up, up so softly, to be pecked by my bullets. They swam him back and forth; my 50s tapped along his engine cowling. Smoke streamed. When the bullets reached the canopy, it vanished in a spray of blood and fragments.

  My kill.

  The plane didn’t realize its pilot was dead, though, and kept to the mission. Slid itself under us, then, in revenge or maybe for fun, peeled up and into our starboard wing. We lost the last ten feet of wing and the 109 spun flaming away and down.

  Gremlin waggled but flew. When we lost the outboard engine, we banked into the stream of fuel pouring from the broken wing. I was believing less and less in this 17’s ability to fly.

  There was music behind me. The space aft of bulkhead seven was filled with, well, “people,” I guess you’d call them. Some had stuck their heads through Gremlin’s skin. Watching the show, I guessed. A few slipped outside for a better look at the broken wingtip. They dissolved their way along the vapors that vented from us.

  We plunged into a cloud mass and sky raced past my windows. The intercom was solid sound.

  Our war was over. We might could limp a bit, but Gremlin was not going back to Cornhole. The old guy behind me was having just the best time about that.

  We popped out of the thunderhead into clear sky. Ahead, the sun would be going to ground. My view was behind. Way back, Schweinfurt was a pillar of smoke rising to catch the failing light. Below was night where thunder licked the clouds. Smoke and fuel poured from the inboard engine, gas vapors filled the air in our spiraling wake.

  Doas ignored the headset screams and feathered the inboard portside engine and pulled the bottle. The extinguisher did its job. We drove along struggling to stay airborne. After the bomb run, our altitude had been close to our operational ceiling, near Angels Thirty. In the last—Christ, it had only been about ten minutes—I reckon we had dropped to eighteen, twenty.

  Not that I wasn’t already scared, but when the old guy leaned over my shoulder and shoved, well, through me—the only way I can describe it—and pushed his face out the bulletproof glass in front of my nose, it upset me. He pulled the rest of the way through me and out of the plane and stood on my twin barrels. I knew he didn’t really need them guns to stand in the air.

  He called. A wave of others like him, and some a lot prettier and others, different, flowed up from below. They came so easy, no effort…

  …leading a flock of ME 109s. The Messerschmitts peeled off to bypass my tracers. I yelled to Doas that we had company but a stream of tracers buzzed through the ship forward my position, and that was it for the rest of the world.

  Gremlin seemed to stop dead for a second, then she eased side-wise, wobbled, and went right again. The sky was beautiful, blue, gold, and red against the towering column of Schweinfurt. Hundreds of little guys and their thousand friends sat in the air outside; they watched like we were a movie.

  Black smoke streamed past my face. Thin at first, it grew thick in a second or two. I felt heat behind me. I turned…

  Saw…

  Red flame and pretty young people. Fire wrapped them like love and they sang it. They had my parachute. It blossomed and the shrouds were ribbons of white and dancing heat snakes, the silk bubbled red and gold. The pretty people poured the light of my chute from hand to hand. My eyeballs sucked dry with the heat.

  I guess it was another piece of the starboard wing. Something rammed back along the fuselage and spun by like an echo. Soon the fire would be at the fuel and we’d go up like a bomb.

  I thought I’d jump, take any way to go but fire death. Another part of me said do nothing. A moral conflict, Soc might have called it.

  The Old Guy stuck his face back through the glass and into mine. In pure joy he sang. In his words was the stench of war. He sang in ways I didn’t know. He sang, “Why are you waiting? Walk with me.” Maybe it was, “Be with me.” He wanted me to be with the air, with him. That was my place. The plane was of earth. Dirt made metal. Metal made to fly. No sense, but there she was.

  Then he was Miss Duchenne, my teacher whom I’ve dearly loved these years and have mentioned before. I considered. She gave her arm, an offer to dance, and said she’d tell me, there, of metal ores and plastics made of oil from the deep, and rubber from jungle trees a world away. We’d dance and learn together.

  I reached behind, released the emergency hatch. My hands blistered, but I didn’t care. Doas, the others, were gone or going. Way I saw it, my post was deserting me. I said goodbye to the war, the world, let go my belief that steel could fly and rolled out slick, Miss Duchenne on my arm.

  The air was liquid ice and washed me away from Gremlin and its smells. I danced a cool bee-bop turn with warm Micheline Duchenne. On my back, Gremlin dropped away above, then dissolved in flame and parts. The air wrinkled and pieces scattered, grinding finer and finer, ripping past us, then falling smaller, smaller than dust.

  Miss Duchenne laughed at my concern. She said, “They don’t like left-behinds.” The air, the water, the fire would cleanse it all, she said. When she said it, the sky above us went clear with night and stars. I fell, believing in the people of the flames, in the cleansing air, and probably the waters too, I didn’t know about that. Micheline thanked me, bid adieu, and slipped into the night. I spread my arms and leaned into the thunder below. Earth opened up to take me, laughing with me, at my fall to home.

  I remember nothing, after, but singing voices and an orchestra of machinery that ground down, forever. And when I woke, everyone was talking German. I knew they did not speak German in heaven so figured I was elsewhere.

  I was: Berlin. After six hospitals, I’d ended in Berlin. To count it: I had two broken legs, a shattered arm and collarbone. Other things internal. Spleens and such. They thought I’d lose an eye, but I kept it. I had burns where my flight suit had flamed as I fell. According to one Kraut, a doctor, S.S. officer, whatever he was, the fall should have extinguished me. And where was my parachute, he wanted to know?

  “The old folk took it. I left it in the plane,” I said.

  He nodded. I could not survive a fall from three miles without a parachute. Could I? Would I care to try it again? 16,000 feet? Show them how I did it, would I, would I?

  I said no. I said I didn’t know. That maybe I was borne aloft, that flights of angels had sung me to my rest. Miss Duchenne taught me those words, oh, years ago. Even I laughed at it with him. I never told that I had danced to earth.

  The final report was a beaut. In scientific German, complete with numbers, it said falling I’d blacked out from lack of oxygen, from cold, from pain. That, unconsc
ious, my arms and legs had spread. That I’d pancaked down, buoyed by an updraft from the storm. That, while the terminal velocity for my aerodynamic configuration would have killed me on impact, I had fallen among evergreen trees; my fall was broken by branches, and, farther down, by underbrush, that when I landed, I fell into deep snow and loamy soil. Like on Daddy’s farm.

  Finally, the Germans said I was brave, a soldier who did not accept death as given, but trusted to the elements of air, earth, fire, and water. I think that smiling Kraut doctor put in that last part. Maybe he was right.

  “What your English comrades call ‘Gremlins’ perhaps?” he said with a final smirk.

  Or maybe it was Miss Duchenne.

  The Germans traded me, with honors. The Air Corps was suspicious. Finally someone figured it would be better to celebrate than punish me. They sent me home a hero, an American miracle.

  I walked again, learned to use my arm. I can almost see from the eye the Germans thought I’d lose.

  One night after the war, walking our land looking at the night, the mud got to sucking at my boots. Daddy was next to me, also looking at the dark. He talked about weather, about crops. Then he was quiet. There was more he wanted to say and he said it. “This is the one time I’ll ask what happened,” he said. “If you’re ready, you can tell me.”

  I did, told him more or less the truth. When I finished, he smiled for maybe the tenth time in his life.

  “Tonight I was thinking about Socrates,” I said. “Them books he’ll never write. I was wondering why I lived and he didn’t.”

  Daddy nodded. “Every man comes back from war is that question: ‘Why me, not them; why them, not me?’ You got an answer?” He looked at me and waited. I believe that was the first time Daddy ever asked something he didn’t already have an answer for.

  “Maybe because I’m part dirt and spit and all hot air. Maybe because this is magic every season, every year.” Mud sucked at my boots. Fireflies winked as far as I saw. Rain cut the distance, and lightning. For a moment, I thought I heard the voices that were not speech or noise, but more and older, music without sound.