Drink For The Thirst To Come Part 11

"Now Raymond, let me tell you," the vet said. He leaned forward and rolled up his pants leg just above the ankle. "See, I have a funny leg." And he did, a leg of metal and wood and hinges. From the top of his sock, his leg was metal rods encased in wood, sheathed with tin plate. Steel cable ran up and disappeared.

Raymie looked at the artificial leg and smiled.

"It only goes to here." He showed where, below the knee. "But it leave me so I don't dance so good no more. Not good as you, anyhow!" The kid laughed and the vet scooped him up in his one arm and swung him round his shoulder. Raymie screamed, laughing. "I sure ain't good enough to boogie-woogie with your mom!"

I had no idea. No idea what else wasn't real?

The chandelier was up. The wire runs were patched and painted, the switches set-one at the bottom of the stairs, one outside Mom's room-and we had "a little ceremony" Mom called it.

"Turn off! Turn off the lights! Everything!" Mom shouted. We did. We stood in the old lace hallway in the dark. In the dark, I felt I might fall. I touched the wall. Just to hold. I swear something. Something moved beneath my hand, like the floor when a truck goes by, like thunder against your chest. Mom said, "One... two... THREE!"

The vet turned the switch at the bottom of the stairs. The chandelier came on. The hallway was four-bulbs-bright. Hot d.a.m.n. The rumbling beneath my hand stopped.

"Hey." He came up, admiring the work. "Hey, not bad," he said. "Hey. Try the night setting!"

Mom minced down the hall to her bedroom. "Okay!" she sang. "One, two three." Click, click, click and one, two, three, the lamps went out, leaving a single bulb glowing dim yellow. Shadows of the other bulbs and the chandelier arms stretched across the ceiling. Yes, it looked like a spider. It wasn't. The kid whimpered but the vet put his arm around him. Raymie gave up the whimper and laughed. "Spider," he said, giggling.

Mom and the vet drank some wine.

"Perfecto," he said.

"Perfecto," she said and clicked her gla.s.s against his. "Yes."

"Alikazam!" Raymond said.

I went to bed and heard the vet's truck leave, I don't know, midnight maybe, maybe later.

The cricket came back. The bugs had been silent while the vet had worked. Now to h.e.l.l with them. I slept.

The vet kept showing up. He did no work. He ate with us. Sometimes he and Mom went places, restaurants, movies, wherever. When they did, Aunt Erby came over and read the paper until they returned and had stupid stuff on the radio. "They dancing?" Raymie asked Erby. He showed his dance.

"I think so, Ray," she said.

"Shazam," Raymond said and pointed at me.

On the last thunderstorm, I woke and there was nothing. Nothing in the house, nothing outside. That was it. Nothing. The cricket was gone. His friends the locusts, the others, the ones of meat and fur, they'd left. There was a distant b.u.mble. Just something felt, like your ears feel, going up the mountain. The hallway light was on "night setting." I lay in bed feeling nothing from everywhere. A thin slit of light crept through my mostly closed door. It swayed a little. Just a little. Finally, I got up.

The pictures were back on the walls. Mom, the kid, and the vet had replaced them right after the chandelier ceremony. All the dark family was silent in the silence around them. I went to the bathroom and peed. As I did, I felt cool air slide around my ankles. A storm gathering. I could hear it now, distant. I washed my hands and turned off the light.

The kid was in the hall, just outside his door, Pop-pop's door. He stared up at the spider-shadow on the ceiling, down the wall. The chandelier was swaying in the breeze that had freshened in the last few minutes. He was talking. I couldn't hear what, or what he said made no sense, like his tuneless song at the table. With his voice, though, the wind picked up, the chandelier moved quicker. Without taking his eyes off the shadows crawling across the ceiling and wall, he walked backward toward Mom's room. Her door was open. Raymond pulled it shut. He turned toward me.

"Raymie..." I said.

"Shh. You'll miss the magic!"

"What..." I started.

"Alikazam," he said and flicked off the light. The hallway went black.

"Raymie!" I yelled. I knew Mom would be up by then. I knew it. And of course I was wrong.

The first lightning flickered and Raymond was halfway between Mom's room and his. The next flash, and Raymond was beneath the chandelier. He touched the wall. In the lingering flicker I saw shadows rise through the near-white. They stretched themselves into shapes, the shapes I remembered from my earliest days: deer, men. With the thunder's rumble, I heard dogs. For the first time, I heard the clabber of horses, hooves and whickers, the shriek of the downed mare.

Raymond was still speaking, saying nothing, and his hand reached through the surface of the white. He smiled and waved goodbye. He reached into the far-away place with his other arm. And was gone.

I shouted something. I think one of Malini's magic words. I yelled to leave a word behind for Mom and reached for the wall, touched it, felt its old lace softness, its tapestry thickness and suddenly I was not. That was all: I was not.

Where I was, where I am, is here. This side. Where the images float. It is not what I remember. Not exactly. Looking back to where the wall was there is more of here. But it is dark, very dark; it is blacker than the deepest mountain tarn. And no light from here goes very far, there.

There is no Raymond. Not here. I arrived and, for a second, saw him, face and body. He was flattening, sifting through, returning through the darkness to the other side, Pop-pop's hallway. Our mother's. The one-armed veteran's showplace. Raymie turned, folded like a paper doll in black and white, and said something, "Shazam," I think and, whoof, he was gone. I reached for him but where he was, I wasn't, and where I am, the darkness just goes on.

This is a quiet place. The sounds of horse and dog? That was a trick. Of Raymond's? I don't know. A trick of the place? Perhaps. But the world is quiet near the stag and horses, the dogs and men. It is most quiet nearest the deep darkness where the horse's hooves have not moved for years. Not that I've seen. The dog still flies. He's not risen nor fallen a quarter inch, not in my time, and that has been long. The women sob but the tears do not fall, have not inched a fraction down their downy cheeks. Farther from all that is a small pond at the edge of the woods. I couldn't see it from the hallway, or maybe I never noticed. The surface almost ripples. But it extends into the trees, away from the sunlight. There a person can sit and from time to time skip a stone across the still black water. The stones spin slowly, touch the surface gently and do not penetrate, not precisely. There, the air is fragrant-and I know fragrance implies movement, a movement, at least of air and particles in the air. I don't understand it, but there it is.

The temperature is mild. Miles away, at the far edge of the woods, it sometimes rains, gently, slowly. I think farther away there are quicker rains because a river flows from the mountain and it rolls with a thunder I sometimes hear in my sleep.

There are birds in the woods beyond the stag and men, nearly still and almost silent doves. I can pluck them from the branches or the air. They're clean. Pressing my face into their feathered b.r.e.a.s.t.s, I smell sunlight and dust. They must, once long ago, have flown where sun shines. What's best, I can make them vanish at will, vanish for real, no trick to it, no gaffs or patter: I hold them up, I let them go and say, "Alikazam" or "Shazam" or just "Go 'way," and they're gone. The words don't matter; it's the will that makes it so. Where they go? I don't know for certain, but I think I do.

I've seen the castle, beyond. It is large, larger than our town. Things move on the battlements and, in windows, things dance, people, I think. There are voices, distant. I can't understand them. Someday I'll go there. Some night I'll be a monster from a far-off land or an invisible thing and find my way to that room at its heart. My brother will not be there. He doesn't need that dainty place, its cogs, wires, and gizmos. He has his father. By then, Mom may be there. Dad, Pop-pop, Nanna, the dark suited man, once the pirate scourge of the seven seas, his peasant wife, they'll be there and others and me, invisible. Then we'll hunt.

AT ANGELS SIXTEEN.

"Old wars is mainly lies," is what Daddy said. I got no reason to disagree; he was almost always right. So let me tell you one. An ancient critter, I still don't know what to call him, saved my shot-down a.s.s in the air war over Europe, 19-and-43.

A lie? Matter of fact I don't know about that one myself. Might could have been it was Miss d.u.c.h.enne, my teacher, eighth grade, who taught me a waltz and fox trot and who I fell in love with. Maybe she saved my plummeting b.u.t.t, or it could have been science like the Germans said, but it happened like this: Pearl Harbor was my sixteenth birthday and I wanted to go fight. Daddy said trenches is no place for kids. Said he ought to know, having been a kid in the trenches himself, the last war. But he kept thinking. That same Sunday evening we walked into the bottomland and watched night gather and scoot out from under the trees by the Red. Ground crackled underfoot and sucked my boots like it wanted to draw me down. Our place is rich loam and always keeps a little damp under an early freeze so nothing strange there. That night smelled so pretty, a little charred hickory in the air. But we're talking about Daddy, who was still thinking. I held my breath.

"That Old World's a strange place," he said. "Europe's got things in her soil, up her airs, probably under her waters, too. I won't speak to that; I never been under them waters."

I didn't know what Daddy was talking about but seemed like he was changing his heart. He didn't do that much, so I stood quiet.

"I learned things in the mud of France what I wouldn't have got nowhere else." He chewed on his cheek. "You can go," he said. "But." He looked at my eyes like he was sure it was me busted the kitchen window, which it was. "You watch now, y'hear?"

"I'll be careful," me being agreeable, figuring he'd already changed his mind once that night.

"I ain't saying be careful. Cripes, careful ain't for soldiers. I'm telling you, keep your eyes open and your ears clean." He beaded down hard. "I'd tell you about the old ones as cares for earth and air, tell you about them things in the fire. Water too I guess, cripes. I'd tell you, but then you'd think your daddy'd gone crazy with fairy ways and Santy Claus." He spat on the ground. "You'll see. Maybe. Maybe only us folk sees them." He looked at me. "Farmers-part spit, part dirt, and all hot air." He kicked the place where his spit fell. "We got old ones, too. Old Folk here go back before the white man, so maybe they're less partial to you and me..."

The dark had crawled up to his face. For maybe the ninth time in his life, Daddy smiled. He shoved my hair around, then, "Anyways," he said, "old wars is mainly lies."

Next day I ran across them fields to enlist. I lied about my age. Daddy confirmed the lie on a paper he wrote out, saying, "My boy is oldern he looks and smartern he seems."

Being small, I had nothing much to work the lie upon, but what I lacked in height and muscle, I made up for in face hair and bra.s.s, so they took me.

Boot camp shaved my head and ran me ragged. We lifted, jumped, pushed-up, polished, threw, crawled, and fought. We got yelled at, told not to think G.o.dd.a.m.nit and to jump when someone says to jump and quick too. When I got past thinking and got big where it mattered, the Army declared me a soldier then sent me to the Air Corps. Which would be all right, I figured, flying a plane of hurtling silver, shooting down my enemy man-to-man.

They shipped me to gunnery school where I sat in wheelbarrows and shot broom handles, which is how I learned the .30 caliber and the .50. Sergeant Bugg said in all his days he'd never seen one so deadly with a broom as was I.

My buddy was a guy from the east called Socrates. He was smart and told me Sarge was ironic-making fun. Soc and I took turns running the barrow while the other aimed the broom.

When they gave me shooting guns that was better. I could write my name with a caliber .30-if what I aimed at wasn't dodging, diving, or shooting back. Shooting, diving, and ducking-that was war, seemed to me. Soc laughed, shook his head, and wrote down what I'd said in a book he was making.

They a.s.signed us to the B-17, the Flying Fortress. Soc learned waist gunning. Being small, I became a tail gunner.

Let me tell you about the B-17: The 17's a hair off 75 feet long. Tail gunner sits less than three feet from the dead end.

Let me tell you about the tail of a B-17: The plane skinnies from the waist on. Heading back, first you stoop, then you duck, then you waddle. You try not to b.u.mp your head but, naturally, you do. You watch grabbing anything along the sides because on the skin and between the ribs are breaker boxes, conduits, wire bundles, oxygen bottles, there are hydraulic lines everywhere, control cables that squeak through struts, roll over pulleys, and dip into secret places. All that keeps the plane flying or someone alive. Anyway, you never touch anything metal with your bare hands, not at Angels Sixteen and up, because the cold burns your skin right to it. That's why you've got a flight suit and gloves.

Flying, the plane shifts, creaks, and chatters, she bends, twists, flaps, moans, and shivers. Can't tell you all the sounds she makes.

At bulkhead seven, there's a caibo can to the side. It stinks but so much of the plane does in so many interesting ways, I didn't mind. Past the can, you crawl; you crawl around the hump where the tailwheel snugs into the fuselage. You crawl and eventually there's an armored seat. Above it is a gla.s.s box big enough for your head. After that is the air. Twin .50s poke between your legs in case you want to kill something means you harm. In woolens, flight suit, helmet, gloves, boots, and parachute, you barely squeeze into that iron-bottom seat. Even I had trouble. After a bit I started leaving my chute back by the tail wheel. An easier crawl that way. SOPs said not to, everyone said not, the gunnery sergeant, pilot, everyone, so I figured everyone must do it so I did it too. That wasn't exactly thinking-which I knew not to do-but without the chute, I could at least move a little, look around, get some idea where the targets were coming from, the notion being you kill the target before the target kills everybody.

That's the tail of the B-17.

When the Army graduated us to the war, Soc and I shipped as cargo on a flight of 17s being ferried to 8th Air Force, England. Replacements-ships and us. No one had to tell us what we were replacing or why we were required.

At Angels Twenty-five-that's Air Corps talk for twenty-five thousand feet-it's three hundred miles an hour and forty below zero outside the plane. It's not much warmer in.

Soc and I hunkered down forward of the waist guns and talked. Keeping warm, you know? Soc talked, anyway. He talked about the war, the world after the war-"geopolitics" he called it-he talked about the next war, about the big sciences of life and death and, well, he talked about Socrates things. For warmth, you know.

"Next time," he said, "it's going to be science. New wars will be numbers and engineering."

Couldn't help laughing. I remembered what Daddy said about old wars.

Soc didn't notice. "Look here," he said. His voice was rubbery through his O-mask. "Soon it'll be just our machines fighting theirs. Our brains versus theirs. Men won't even see the battles they're in." He pulled his mask deeper into the fur hole around his hood. "Science won't make war obsolete-just the warrior." The voice came out his O-tube.

"Might have a point," I said.

"Huh?" he said.

I pointed my face at the plane around us. There we were, I told him, sailing the mighty ocean in a single night, freezing our soft a.s.ses behind thin metal at Angels Twenty-five. I was trying not to think, see? At least I wasn't thinking science, but you look at a B-17 on the ground. There is no way it flies. A 17 is sixty-five thousand pounds of Mother Earth, mined, smelted, poured, shaped, fitted and tuned. It could not, no shade of doubt about it, fly. It could not but that everyone agreed it could-pilot, crew, folks at home, the enemy in Berlin, everyone knew a B-17 flew-so fly it just naturally does. Science? I didn't know; Soc would have called that superst.i.tion.

"Yeah," I said, "the plane's the warrior, huh?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure," he said and went on thinking aloud. "We'll pave the world, dwell in buildings of the mind, all be part of a vast electric..." His eye poked from his parka. "You know what?" his rubber-voice asked, "we are priests." Oxygen hissed around his words. "Yeah, you and me, acolytes of the new rites of combat. Yeah, that's going to be my book, Priesthood of Mars it's called." He squinted. "Or In Holy Orders... Well, something like." He pulled his head back under the fur and said something I don't doubt was important, but which I couldn't hear.

On the ground in England another bunch of pilots-they seemed like pretty happy guys, mostly drunk I think-took the planes and flew them off to bases all over what they called Anglia. That was still England.

Soc and me shipped in a beat-up bus to our a.s.signment base, Cranwell Hall, Suffolk, the Air Corps having more important things to fly than us, for Christ sake. I was used to least t.i.t by now.

England's air breathed different. It tasted. Smelled like Granma's place, old and smoky. The air and that cold night flight might have put me to sleep because on the way to Cranwell I dreamed. It was full night when Soc nudged me awake. Our headlamps were blacked down to little slits and the bus crawled behind a little squeak of light on the road ahead.

"German night raiders!" Soc whispered and pointed overhead. Gave me a chilly thrill. Here I was in the war, history all around. I got used to it in a few minutes.

Fields rose on steep hills, both sides of the road. All along those up-and-down meadows the harvest ground-stubble was afire. Low flames tumbled in long weaving lines. They rolled uphill, wriggling and whipping like deep blue worms in red and yellow rut. Between the fires and our creeping bus, dark shadows danced; people and animals, I guessed. The shadows herded the flames across the leas and over the crests!

"Farmers?" I asked Soc.

"Don't know," he whispered, and kept writing his book.

"Incendiaries?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said slow and plain. "Ask the driver."

"Bombs?" I asked the old bloke driving. He said nothing. "Sir!" I yelled above the engine. "Was it bombs made them fires?" I guessed he was deaf.

When we cleared the burning hills and rolled into flat land and darker night the driver piped up. "Not bombs, Yank," he said. "You be in Anglia, now. This be sea-born land 'n' all here'bouts." He hunched the wheel, his chin pointed ahead. "All the land here be claimed from the sea in King Charlie's time." He gave me a wink. "Them folk," he c.o.c.ked his head at the glowing hills behind us, "crazy with country ways, they are. After harvest, they dance wi' th' eelymen'als, give 'em their way about, you see? It were their old farthers as stole the warter's land, they reckon, so pleasing them Undeens makes fer good crops-good wars, too, I reckon." He coughed a saw-gra.s.s laugh my direction. "Eelymen'als like a good to-do!"

"Eely whats?" I shouted to him.

"Eel-e-mentals!" he hollered back, straining on the word. "Old folk! Them of earth and air, the fires and the warters. Them farm folk there be lettin' the Sallymander play, I reckon. But what's the point, I arsks? They'll be fire enough anon, little Yank." He laughed, then laughed again.

I listened like Daddy told me, but had no idea what the old bloke was saying. When I came back to the seat Soc was asleep. Soon I was too.

Let me tell you about Cranwell Hall and Lakenheath. At this time, all England was under arms. Cranwell Hall was one of hundreds of bases along the North Sea all aimed at the Continent. Every day, our planes from Cranwell and the others rose, rendezvoused over the Channel, and headed for Hanover, Bremen, Frankfurt, Brest, and a thousand places. We were taking war to the enemy.

Three miles from Cranwell was another farm town, Lakenheath: a street of houses, a monument to Daddy's War, two pubs, a church-all flint and balance-and a chips shop.

Between Lakenheath and Cranwell Hall was a common meadow. On Lakenheath Lea, what the blokes called it, the Air Corps had built a dummy base. The figuring was that from three miles up and lit by marker flares, wood and canvas, painted lines and staked-out squares would look enough like planes, flight lines, and barracks to convince German night raiders to target the Lea and not Cranwell.

That was the idea. It frequently worked.

The Germans showed up at Cranwell about the same time Soc and I did so we spent our first night of war in the brig, a solid place and mostly empty.

Soc was shivering. "Ironic," he said between waves, "our lives, plans, my future depends on the Germans being perfect. Planes, pilots, bombardiers, bombs all have to be on the money. We expect they'll miss us because they'll be on target for the decoy." His eyes flickered in the winking dark. "What about Kraut f.u.c.kups? Our ruse is perfect but some Heinie sad sack misses by a mile and kills the real thing. Us! Ironic. So d.a.m.n ironic."

The night went flash and boom distantly and Soc said "ironic" again. I figured war had lots of irony.

That night the ruse and the n.a.z.is worked swell. I slept. Sleeping, I dreamed fireworms crawling the fields. I heard musical voices in the flame. Maybe this was what Daddy'd said to listen for. But this was England. He'd been in France.

Next day, we met the First Sergeant. He said we were mostly useless and sent us to get a.s.signed. We got driven to the crew area in a jeep, which was as much help as we got. n.o.body liked us. Like the first shirt said, we were useless and probably already dead, so there wasn't much point in fussing.

Eventually we got a.s.signed. Soc got sent to one plane. I went to another.

My pilot was Shorty Doas-Captain Doas-from Kentucky and taller than me by just that-much. He looked hardly any older but must have been. I walked in, he took one look and grinned like I was a long-missed baby brother. He wrapped his arm on me and said none of the guys could now rightly call him Shorty. He said it again, louder, ran his hand from the top of my head to the middle of his so everybody got he was an inch taller. They all laughed. Then I was one of them.

Our plane was the Gallopin' Gremlin. The other crews hated the name. Called us bad luck. Doas loved that. That was him, twist the devil's tail.

The Gremlin's crew had just formed up. None of us-the plane either, for that matter-had seen combat. The guy I was replacing was dead before anybody met him. n.o.body knew him, not even his name. His gear was still in the first shirt's office and Sarge was waiting for the guy's orders to catch up so he could find where to ship it all back stateside. The pain-in-the-a.s.s hadn't been killed by action. Drunk when he arrived, he walked into a spinning prop on the flightline.

"All of him walked in, half of him walked out," First Shirt said. That's how Soc put it down.

"A lesson to us all," Doas said and pa.s.sed the bottle.