Alive and Dead in Indiana (7 page)

After a day of looking for you, I walk along the rows of weapons, and if the wind is right, I hear the whistle coming from the vents of the air-cooled barrels. I smoke a cigarette, watch them carve the names. It is all drab and battleship gray. Everything that is loose has been stolen. There are chalk marks on the shields and fenders. Stars glow on the armor.

I live in Chinatown here. It is on the near south side in the shadow of the Lilly pill plants. To get there, I walk around the monument circle at Market Street and cross the Crossroads of America at Washington and Meridian. Under the railroad overpass. By John’s Hot Stew. I don’t know why I am writing this as if you will come looking for me.

Chinatown here is the type of thing you would expect. Chop suey joints above laundries or laundries above chop suey joints. Banners hang above the street. The smells of soy and dry-roasted peanuts. Taiwanese mainly. Many from the fall of the Tachen Islands. Quemoy is being shelled again. There are animated arguments at the walls where the language dailies are posted. Children dribble basketballs along the sidewalk. Wearing scarlet, they weave around their fathers. The public phones are in pagodas. The shelter signs are in Chinese.

It is not really like Changsha, though there is a jinriksha. Most people here wear black sneakers. They miss China. I can pretend I am still there—bow to the men in sleeveless shirts and gray pants in my building, share silk thread with their wives, who sew all day. I can imagine when I leave in the morning, I am on my way to the Yale-in-China Hospital again. Taste tea in a coffee cup. And I wait for you. At night in bed, I hear a train slam into the station. It is the Japanese shelling.

There is a man here who says he remembers you when you preached in Chekiang Province. He is still a Christian and insists I go to church with him, an A.M.E. in the next ward. He says he was told you joined the AVG, that all China has heard of you. He tells me your Chinese is perfect. He would not be surprised if you were still alive and preaching to many converts. Mao himself would not be able to tell you were American. I think the man says what he thinks I want to hear; he brings me fried bananas and takes me uptown on the bus to the cathedral to play Bingo.

There is one bathroom on my floor in my building. I like to sit there, steaming in the tub. I can smell the starch from the street. Do you remember the P-40 shot down over Lingchuan when we lived there? It crashed, pilotless, down the road. I remember when the Chinese peasants, hundreds of them it seemed to me, carried the cracked-up plane up the road to our house. The smaller parts, they held them above their heads. It looked as if it was coming apart as it moved. It was like the dragons at New Year’s. “Here is your plane,” they shouted, dropping it near the porch. We were the only Americans they knew of. You thanked them in your perfect Chinese. Sly General Wang took the aluminum from the fuselage and had his smith make the bathtub. Remember the bathtub? All we had before was the Yangtze Kiang. The way I washed your back like an Asian wife. Why did you leave with Drummond without saying anything? You wrote to Betty trying to explain. She has shown me the letters. And you wrote to your parents. In Lingchuan, in Changsha, when we made love, you whispered to me in Chinese. In
Chinese
. I didn’t know Chinese. I don’t know it. The geese flying backwards. The Eastern menagerie. And I would have gone with you to the West, to Turkestan if you had wanted. Converted the Jews. It
is
a place for a woman. “Look, I have a mission.” Now, I have a mission, John. I had one then and they are the same. You, John. Did you, in doing your duty (and was it duty to God or to country that allowed you to leave me?), confuse your two missions? A missionary is always the best warrior. I remember the Jesuits saying mass along the road in camouflage, the host made of spinach flour. I remember the almond eyes of that Flying Tiger. I kept them above our bed after you left. I would stare back at them as they bore down on me and try to imagine its smile.

I asked for you at HQ. I waited for your letters every day at the Yale Hospital. I rode my bike back home past the quilted soldiers who eyed me along the road as they unwrapped their puttees at night, just as they had wrapped them as I went to work in the morning. Your letters never came. I always left forwarding addresses. Mailed a packet of letters to your family. I tried to write the letter that would free me. I could live with the secrets of the war you shared with me. I could have lived with you and your God and your other women. I watched you for hours as you studied the code books. A mission makes us the thing we pursue. We are what we study. I am becoming you, John. Losing me. Losing us. Losing the very reason I went looking in the first place. The way you lost yourself in a China you believed could be converted into Georgia. Why did you leave me? Was it that you could no longer understand English? Had you only the taste for the cheapest red rice?

You don’t know about television. Imagine one of your radios but this one sends pictures along with the words. After my bath, if the night is warm, I go down to the appliance store and watch the televisions in the window. No one in Chinatown can afford one yet. So, people come out and they watch with me. The men wear straw hats and bob up and down to see over shoulders. The women sit on the curb or lean against the few cars and listen to the man who translates the words which come from the small speaker tucked up under the awning with the sparrows’ nests. There are twenty sets on tiers all tuned to the same picture. You can watch people making sure that all the pictures are doing the same thing at the same time. You can see their heads jerk from screen to screen. I go there to watch them watch. During the day, the screens are turned off, and no one stops on the sidewalk. The televisions are watching us. “Take one home,” the appliance man tells me as I pass his door. “It will keep you company.” He says I will never be lonely. “Come back tonight. They will all be turned on tonight.”

Then I go back
to the American Legion and search for you. In my file is a new commendation from Chennault. I answer mail. Write letters. Make notes in the margins of radio traffic logs.

I do not know how many letters this makes to you. For a while after the Arbor Day I spent in Georgia, I would send them to your sister there. She would write back as you. She had practiced your hand from the letters she had from you during the war, tracing them as she grew up the way other children trace animals or flowers out of encyclopedias. We both went a long way toward believing. She cut short her hair and nails, carved our initials, yours and mine, into one of the trees. She had her picture taken by the tree while she wore your old work clothes. But the closer she got to you, the more I missed the things that she was not. Maybe I am cursed with too much memory. Maybe I write these letters as a way of forgetting. I watch the nicotine stains on my fingernails grow out as the nail grows out, and I think to myself that by the time the yellow splotches reach the tip, I will be over this. They do and I am not and I smoke more and my nails are stained. Perhaps I will clip them and send them off with this letter.

Of course, there are other men. Mr. Lee, who brings me the fried bananas and the fortune cookies without fortunes he buys half-priced at the bakery thrift shop. There’s him. He clips articles for me from the
National Geographic
. He takes me to movies at the Circle Theatre. There is the floorwalker at L. S. Ayres, who began by suspecting me as I wandered around the mezzanine near the stamp corner. But I was innocent, and he led me to the perfume counter where he spotted my arms with samples. What could they say to me? “He is dead and gone.” They are too polite for that. To them, I am a story they could tell their grandchildren. “I knew a woman once.”

Recently, I met another man.

At my table at the Legion, I found a box of chocolate-covered cherries. I thought someone had forgotten them from the day before, and I tried to turn them in to the woman at the desk. She said no, they were for me. “A Mr. Welch left them for you himself.” Welch’s was the brand name on the box.

That night as I watched television, he appeared in the jinriksha, bedecked with flowers. “Audrey, my dear, come for a ride with me.”

The men watching television looked to see him too, a tall man in a linen suit and Panama. “I am Robert Welch,” he said. “It was I who left the bonbons for you.” The women in the gutter clucked. “Come here,” he said, “I have things to tell you about your Captain Birch.” Such a nice smile. He held out a candied egg. “For you.”

The men had turned back to the television in the window. The women leaned together. “I have irrefutable proof that John Birch was killed by Communists in nineteen forty-five.”

Mr. Lee said, “What gives, Pops? Can’t the lady watch TV in peace?”

The man said, “The meter’s running, Audrey. Please, come with me. We can talk. I have been looking for you these last five years. I have good news of John Birch.”

“You told me he was dead,” I said.

Mr. Lee said, “Scram. Beat it, Pops.” Now everyone was watching the scene in the street. The men who had been nearest the store were now in back, looking for an opening to see. Mr. Lee, sensing he was now the center of attention, continued to yell. I thanked Mr. Lee, apologized to the television audience, and got into the seat next to Mr. Welch. As we left Chinatown, the children in pajamas ran after us collecting the stray blossoms that fell from the jinriksha.

What else could I do? Another lead to track down. Such a gentleman who had given me candy, your name. I suppose that Mr. Welch, Robert, had thought I would be grateful for the truth. The truth was that the truth didn’t interest me as much as a convincing lie. Later, I found out that that was his mission, truth telling. Another truth not yours, John. He believed all he had to do was tell people the truth and they would act accordingly. Not that easy.

As we clopped around and around the monument circle he told me some more truth.

This is what the man said. He said he had made his fortune in candy and then sold the business to Nabisco. He said he spent his time and money studying the spread of Communism, that he kept a little score-card in his wallet. He knew the political positions of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah. He said he came across your name when you helped Doolittle, and that, as he pieced together your life in China, he turned up my name. My first name. Our affair. Our engagement. The mystery of your leaving. Now, as he looked for Communists, he also looked for me. He said he’d found, in your life and death, the ordeal of an age.

“What was he like, really?” This is what he asked.

I was eating the candied egg. I told him what he wanted to hear. A truth teller always has such simple notions of truth. I said, “A pious man. Deeply religious. His soldier’s shell temporarily assumed. A gentleman. A happy warrior. Cheerful. A tinkerer. A lover of children. All the things you would expect from a man descended from a
Mayflower
Pilgrim and related, through blood, to four U.S. presidents.”

I did not tell him about the rice paper, your calligraphy. The way you squatted against the wall of the hut. The bathtub.

He gave me his handkerchief to wipe the caramel from my hands. When I offered to give it back, he told me to keep it. We returned to my building and he walked me to the door.

He said, “Audrey, I must continue to see you. It is important to the Free World. You, who knew and loved John Birch, can understand what he and we should stand for.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

Robert took me to the 500 after we had spent the weekends in May at the time trials. We sat in the infield while the cars shot around the track. Before the race, he led a prayer for the war dead, cried when they played “On the Banks of the Wabash.” He took me to restaurants. He praised you over John’s Hot Stew. We went to Indian baseball games, to the state fair. The judge slapped the rump of a steer. He said, “A farmer, that’s all John ever wanted to be.”

Always at my desk, I would find some type of kiss. I could not concentrate on your file. All the women seemed to be weeping more than usual.

I smoked more cigarettes and bought Hershey bars from the stand in the lobby of the building. In all the public buildings, the Marion County Association for the Blind run the concession. They say they know by touch the denomination of the bill. They make change easily. They sit, their creamy eyes floating in their heads, surrounded by candy. No matter how quiet I am. “Yes, may I help you?”

I buy some gum and return to my place. I write letters to the floorwalker. I tell him I did steal some stamps. “I’ll never be able to see you again.” Also a letter to Mr. Lee, breaking it to him gently.

One night Robert took me to his room at the Fox Hotel. French windows led out to the balcony where he had set up a white telescope. Ten stories up you could see down to the spokes of the lighted streets as they radiated from their circles. The circles were phosphorescent craters. All along the mall, the government buildings were flooded with lights. Car lots on the south side were having sales. Surplus spotlight beams waved back and forth. I looked at the city and saw it for the first time. Robert, through his telescope, searched for Sputnik.

“There, there! That’s it!” He was so happy. “Look at it as it goes by.”

The stars are different in Indianapolis. I can see no dragons, no bears, no crabs. My eyes came back down to the red neon of the insurance companies on Meridian.

I am sitting here now in my usual place writing you another letter. I can’t say things right. I cannot wait any longer. And, now, I am here at the signature, the farewell. Who is the John of this Dear John letter? I imagine you somewhere at mail call. The names of the dead shouted out, packages passed along on fingertips. Envelopes thrown, arms reaching out. “Yo! Here! That’s me!”

What should I do? Robert will soon ask me to marry him. We will honeymoon in England, the better to study the evils of Socialism. He will read to me from newspapers over breakfast. We will talk about you as would a father and a sister. He will ask me to marry him as I walk out of this building for the last time having left a box of chocolates for the kind woman at the desk. I will wear white gloves and inspect the equipment on the lawn in front of the building. The gun barrels crisscross above our heads. The grass has grown up around the tires of the caissons and the tracks of the tanks.