Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  He squinted as though I’d sneered at something. “Now let me tell you, sir: Observer! Observer was a term left from the First War. Not to brag, but the observer is the busiest man in the aircrew.” He ticked off the observer’s jobs. “He’s co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, nose gunner, and if there was time he brewed the tea and did what-have-you.”

  “Sort of a stage manager?” I ventured.

  Cordwell beamed. “Exactly!” He tapped my pint with the rim of his. “All right. During approach, my station was in the nose. Picture this: I am squatting in a Perspex bubble. I see myself reflected on this curved surface all around…” He reached out his hand ahead, as though touching his reflection a half-century gone. “Below is the ground, ahead, the night. You’re surrounded by whatever’s trying to kill you: fighters, flak, birds!” He laughed, then became serious. “No joke,” he said. He paused long enough to let me know there was another tale there.

  “Tony Gordon. Old Tony was the pilot. His canopy was above and behind me. There was a top gunner-slash-radio operator and behind it all, the tail gunner. “Now, we were on the landward line of our triangle, over Belgium, still carrying a full bomb-load. A flight of Wellingtons goes over on its way to the show. ‘Ta, loves. Good luck. Give ’em a bit for us,’ and then…”

  Cordwell’s mouth and eyes froze, wide open.

  “Then one of our fighter lads drops down—support for the Wellys, you know—and has a go at us. Well, suddenly it’s not so funny, eh? Shot by one of your own.

  “We did a few light-and-fancies, he flipped a few up our tail, then was gone. I reckoned he’d sussed that we were the home team and fled to avoid embarrassment and vile language.

  “That, or as I found out later, he’d run out of ammo.” He waved the cartridge in the air. “After that we caught a cross-fire from two ack-ack batteries. Barrage lights had us fixed so Tony dropped to the deck—ack-acks are useless at low-level—and there we were.” He looked at me. “Been to Belgium?”

  I shook my head.

  “Bloody country’s like Kentucky. Flat as prairie, then you’re in the mountains. Point is, we ran out of prairie and a mountain tore our tail off.

  “Okay. We crashed. Fiery mess. The tail broke off and the plane tore itself to pieces for a half-mile down a valley before going nose-first into a hill. We survived. Tony dragged himself out, then helped the other two. The tailgunner was injured so badly, the Germans repatriated him. Imagine that. Well, it was early in the war.

  “There’s no good reason why I survived. I’m jammed in the front, the plane’s on fire, everything’s a twisted mess and unexploded bombs. I had no idea where I was, how to get out. And Tony, bless him, Tony climbs back on the flaming wing and, I swear it, he talks me out. By the time I’d gotten myself to where he could grab hold of me, the plane was about to blow. Still had our bombs, did I mention? Then we’re out and running and then we fall and it blows.

  “Now I am on my knees watching it all. ‘Am I dead...?’ I ask. ‘You’re not if I’m not,’ Tony said.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Now here’s the thing, you see. I wasn’t supposed to have been there.”

  I blinked.

  “You don’t understand at the time, but later you find out. Damned Bavarian Bureaucrat. I was to have bought it. Killed. Earlier. Our fighter lad was to have put this in me.” He held up the .30-caliber round.

  “Colin,” I said, loudly.

  “On me…” Cordwell said and went behind the bar, tapped each of us a draught of bitter. “Tony, I reckon, was supposed to have gotten out, away. Gone back to England, escaped, maybe been killed. But I was alive in there and he came back for me.

  “We were captured, taken to a Luftwaffe night fighter HQ. Big stone chalet. I walked into this large room. Pleasant place, I thought, warm, other pilots—German, of course, but what of it? They were sipping beer and eating apples, and there across the room—I looked—stood this shredded fellow, strips of skin, burned flesh, shredded flight suit, still smoking. ‘Poor bugger,’ I thought, then, ‘By God,’ I said. ‘By God, that’s me.’ And it was. A mirror.

  “Quick as you please, those Jerrys, those pilots, came over and they carried me to their table. Gave me beer and harvest apples. November, you know.”

  He leaned on the bar and turned the bullet in his hand. “Cradled me in their eight arms and carried me to the fire. They gave me beer and apples and talked to me kindly. And I realized, ‘I like these fellows…’” He didn’t finish.

  “It was still during the war, the first I heard from,” he jerked his head toward the upstairs, “from our friend. He wrote to me, if you can imagine. Through the Red Cross, if you believe it. A long letter in which he apologized, said he’d been on temporary assignment, transferred from the east—I never asked from where—in charge of a draft of his Folk whose job it was to ‘write the history’ of the war. ‘Write the history!’ By which he meant it was their job to inscribe numbers on the munitions that,” he made a vague, un-Cordwell gesture, “the shells that had chaps’ numbers on them. Our little friend was a manager, Gruppenfuhrer they called ’em—you wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy of Faerie, by the way—anyroad, he was in charge of a whole passel of the Wee People from all parts of everywhere at the beginning of the war, drafted to keep up with demand, donchaknow? Takes skill, I have heard—from him of course, to tinker together that sort of an operation. Supply blokes, craftsmen, dogsbodies, shipping clerks. A huge operation and put together overnight. Even they don’t work that quickly.”

  He looked me in the eye. I think he was daring me to snicker.

  I nodded.

  “His letter said an error needed to be rectified. My number had been on a cartridge. Said cartridge intended for Hurricane such-and-such from Fighter Command Squadron so-and-so; the details went on and on. Point being, that Hurricane was to have peppered us and, me personally, through the chest—he cited just where on my person it was to have entered, what damage it was to have been done, where it was to have exited…” He touched himself again. “I was, you see, officially dead. As official as those buggers can be. History, you see.

  “He bungled it. The shipment never went out, ended in a warehouse somewhere, whatever. The point being, this slug and my chest never met, and that luckless fighter bastard who’d had at us over Belgium… Well, he ran out of ammo. Like that. Without this.” He placed it on the bar.

  We stared at it.

  “His bookkeeping was off. Drove him mad. He followed me all through the war, through everything. I was a pretty active prisoner, I guess you’ve heard, something of an escape artist. He kept missing me, camp to camp.” He stared at my eyes again. “Dresden. You know? Missed me by thirteen hours. I’d been and gone.”

  “You mean Dresden was bombed just to get…?” I started to say. Then decided not to.

  “Dresden. Yes, one of the reasons I went back to architecture after the war. Wasn’t going to, but it seemed as though I owed it, somehow. Drink?” he said. “This one on you?”

  I nodded, paid. He poured. We drank.

  “He’s been following. Through the ’50s, ’60s. I was a character in that POW escape film. You knew that one? Yes? Yes. My character’s killed in the film. Shot in the chest. Ha! His doing, I trust.

  “He keeps writing. Suggesting things would be better for all concerned if I were to let that bullet find its place. Something about history, time or the way things are supposed to be. Rot, I say, petty bureaucratic rot. Just to have paperwork balance. You know, I could tell a tale… But I won’t.”

  He drank off the pint. “I think I’ve adjusted damned well for a dead man, eh? A man who should be dead, anyway, which, according to him, is the same thing.”

  I nodded.

  “Now that’s a true story,” he said.

  I didn’t doubt it. And I didn’t tell Cordwell that night but the little man seemed to have come to appreciate the value of that missed delivery over Belgium. I think he had liked the play
. Maybe he had appreciated the night, the roof, the tree, the street, the Lion.

  I wanted to tell that to Cordwell. I didn’t. After John died in the ’90s, I told Colin.

  Colin is now the Eighth Earl of Muffington, but only behind the bar. He has that .30-caliber round but doesn’t much look at it. The Shakespeare troupe nested a while in John’s pub, under John’s tree. Then it grew and moved on. It and I are doing fine, just fine, thank you very much. And that about Dresden, for cripes sake. I do not believe. Not that.

  THE LAST SCOOT AT SKIDOO’S TAP

  “No fangs.” The old guy’s voice was sandpaper and whiskey. I awoke. “Fangs are whatchacallit?”

  I didn’t know.

  “Literary conceit is what you call it.” His laugh was a rusted screen door. “I knew that all along,” he said. “See? Stories about them,” he pointed at my book, “they’re based on Lord Byron. I know that, but you?”

  I was surprised to hear Byron and literary conceit from…

  His throat cleared deep into his chest. Booze was on his breath, his clothes; it seeped from his skin. “Lots of conceits over them. Coffins? Sometimes. Stakes, crucifixes?” He snorted. “And garlic. Who likes garlic anyway? That about blood? Well, there’s blood and then…” A passing truck wiped out the rest; the lights caught a tobacco-brown smile among gray whiskers. No fangs. Then it was just road hum and the dark.

  “That about being invited? That’s halfway right.”

  “What?”

  “‘What?’ Being invited’s what. What it is, is it’s you who needs an invitation. You see?”

  I said nothing.

  “No? Don’t mind if I sit here, do you?”

  He already was seated and I hated sleeping away a night on a long ride.

  “Something else.” He dropped his voice. “They float, the real ones. Flames on black water.” He pointed again. The cover of the book was lurid elegance, silk, flesh, fangs and a discrete drop of blood. “Other than that, that book could be about the guys. Old friends.”

  I’d grabbed the book from a rack in the terminal in Pittsburg before boarding. Had me asleep before the Interstate. I was dead to the world when the old guy got on, I guessed at some middle-of-the-night place between Youngwood and Mount Pleasant. He was my seatmate now and we were far west of Philly.

  “A long time ago,” he started, “oh, the names are changed, like they say. ’Course, you know that.”

  I knew I’d hear his story. I did. I’ll tell it my way.

  Brewer. Nice place. Red brick everywhere. A hard working town now out of work. A mountain, river and rail yards. The rails come from everywhere. They funnel into the valley between Nesquala Ridge and Mount Bohn, run through town, screw up everything, then sort themselves at the yards. The yards were miles of steel and rolling stock, engines, switches, and depots. They stank of creosote, coal dust, and smoke. The men who worked the yards were seen only at a distance.

  “They were, therefore, very small men,” he said. “When they got close, they became fathers, uncles, brothers. See?”

  I did. He—they—were kids then. The kids came from what he called the East End. Proud of it, too. Called themselves Enders.

  “The End’s where people lived when they couldn’t live anywhere else. Not much to be proud of, I guess. Still.”

  The rest hung.

  The End was east of the yards. Stenawatt High School was at the top of Spring Road. Named after someone. Spring covered a hell of a hill. At the bottom it leveled out at the Pacific Theatre. Just past the theater were the yards.

  “During the War, the yards worked forever. After? Not so much.” A rusty chuckle rumpled the last couple words.

  Spring Road ran beneath the yards through a subway underpass. Back in the sun, the road climbed a steep quarter mile.

  “‘The Nutcracker,’ Keegan called it for reasons obvious.”

  Skidoo’s Tap sat on the western top of Nutcracker Hill. Two floors of Pink PermaStone, fake stone in genteel colors. “Some people’s idea of class.” A snort. “Hiding the brick is as common as coal soot in Brewer. Pitiful, but Skidoo’s had a thing: electric eye doors going in and out, a very big deal in Brewer, 1954. Sucked us in, anyway!”

  Turn right onto Thorne Way where Spring topped the Nutcracker and it was a short block to a place the old guy called “Chucky B’s.” I didn’t ask. Figured I’d find out.

  Past Skidoo’s and Thorne, Spring ran a mile of rolling dips up and down and finally down to the river. This was the West Side—the nice side—of town.

  “The guys always pedaled like hell down Spring from the End. Hit level at the Pacific full-throttle, make the light, you hump through the subway quick as that!” His fingers snapped. His breath came heavy, telling it. “You did not want to be under there too long.” Phlegm cracked. “We all knew that. Even before that day.” He laughed another whiff of booze my way. “Smelled like dusty fart in there, see?”

  The subway was a half-mile of burn-out lamps. Exhaust from cars, buses, flatbeds out of Lieberknecht Mills filled the space from the vaulted ceiling down. Spilled fuel and oil, animal or industrial waste, dissolved ash and cinders leeched from the yards above. The stuff oozed through cracks in the ceiling. The ooze hung in gray stalactites or ran phosphorescent ribbons down the walls or lay curled in shit-pile stalagmites in the gutters.

  “Who knew what the hell was in there? We never stopped to look. The guys pumped and set up a howl going through. The ‘Ender Holler,’ Keegan called it. Sometime a pretty note, sometime a long bad scream. Anyway, hump through, you made the Nutcracker easy as pie. Coming out, making that hill sometimes…” He stopped for a breath. “Sometimes it was beautiful, busting the ’Cracker. So perfect. Times a guy wouldn’t break a sweat or even have to stand on his pedals. Push it right, you float over the top, Earth drops away, your head’s light, and for a second you’re Destination Moon. Weightless, you know?” He took another breath. “That day, it was beautiful. The ’boes on Skidoo’s corner hooted and smacked each other. Celebrating.”

  “’Boes?” I said.

  “’Boes! Hoboes up from the jungle, far end of the yards out by Chucky B’s. Must have felt they got a workout just watching us five float the ’Cracker that day. ’Boes. Cripes, listen. You’ll catch hold.”

  As he told it, Skidoo’s electric eye door opened that day. “Out sucks dead smoke, old breath, stale beer,” he said. “Then Short Draw and Daryl, they tumble out with it, rolled down the three concrete steps onto hot pavement. PD, who’s waiting with the bikes, about crapped himself. The ’boes, they scatter. Halfheart’s last out the door and he’s onto the tussle. A mess of pups dumped out a box! Shorty and Halfheart untangle. Daryl lays dead. A little blood, mainly nose blood, that was common blood for him and didn’t need a tussle to get it going,” he said.

  “Shorty and Halfheart shook him. To bring him back up, you know? Finally, the kid whoofs one big stinking burp and his eyes flop open. Cripes! Halfheart yips like a girl. Shorty blurts something Indian and let go. He’s fast. PD crabs backward till he runs into some hobo’s standing-there legs. He’s screaming ‘Oh God, oh God. Sorry, sorry! I’m sorry!’ PD was always sorry.

  “And Daryl? Daryl lays white eyed.”

  I got another whiff of Greyhound America as the old guy leaned close. “Eyes, see, Daryl’s eyes are like the Martian cave-woman in Rocketship X-M. Blind white, you see?”

  I did not.

  “Yeah. The movie. She wakes up and there she is, a Martian surrounded by Earth guys, our heroes. Her eyes are all whites. Bugging out. At us, us Earth guys, see? Suddenly we’re the monsters from outer space. You get it? The guys from Earth! Guess that was us for Daryl at just that minute. Monsters. You get it?”

  “No.”

  “No. Too young. Well, the guys were nose-on to a pair of round blank eyeballs. That’s strange enough. Then the blue parts wiggle to the surface, like rising from the deep.

  “Halfheart’s squeaky, ‘You see that? You seeing this?’ Squea
king.

  “Shorty whispers something, ‘mucking-doggie,’ sounds like. It’s Lenni Lenape, which is what he halfway is, and has no translation.

  “Later, PD says it was like seeing your answer float up in the Magic 8 Ball. You know what that is, right?”

  I nod, forgetting the dark.

  “Right?” he says. “Hey. You interested?”

  Except for road hum, the bus is quiet. We’re awake, so’s the driver. We’re rolling through the wildest of Pennsylvania’s mountains. “I’m interested. And?”

  “Yes, yes, and. And I thought you were dead to the world like everyone. And later, the ones who’re left later, they agree: this is the big thing. All their lives, nothing’s going to touch this. See? Being an Ender is to face an assumption one day. What is that assumption? That assumption is: nothing happens. Well, the usual tragedies. But this? Forget kids, weddings, going to jail, going to war, this would be the memory.”

  I ask. “What the hell are a bunch of kids doing in—”

  “In Skidoo’s Tap, a bunch of kids? What’re a bunch of kids doing in Skidoo’s Tap? That, yes?”

  “That.”

  “I was about to say. Running a scoot, we kids were. ‘A scoot?’ you ask, all in innocence. Wrong question, I reply. What question should you ask, I ask?”

  “What?”

  “‘What?’ No. ‘Who?’ is your question. ‘Who the fuck were you?’ you should ask.”

  I say nothing.

  “Since you ask, I’ll say what. First, we were Enders, which, as mentioned, involves some assumptions. Still, we’re kids and not allowed in a bar, not legally anyway. This is Pennsylvania, after all. Also, Skidoo hates us. That, second, is one of our assumptions. What did we think he hated about us in particular? We’re uninvited kids is what. See? Poking somewhere we’re not supposed to be, that’s the nutshell of being an Ender. And, third.”

  There was a moment.

  “Third, we were different. Different, yeah, from everybody else in the world. Who isn’t? Anyway, we’re young. We’re stupid. Dumb enough to think we’d beat the assumptions. Stupid, thinking that scooting places none of our business would make us…” Another pause. He put his stink inches from my face. “We were stupid because we were, okay?”