Machine Dreams (12 page)

“I don’t know why girls and women can’t have some fun.”

She shrugged. “I guess they don’t need much fun.”

Now they were passing the school and he slowed the car so she could take a look at the playground. Good, it was empty. To distract her, he said softly, teasingly, “You sure you’re not too old to go to a cartoon show? That’s what’s on today, a Disney show.”

“It’s
Make Mine Music.
” She turned her full gaze on him, her smooth pale face close to his hand. “Long cartoons, like stories. I’m going because I’ve decided to collect comics. I’ve already got one hundred and forty, before the collection is even started.” He felt her delicate breath on his fingers as she spoke. She turned her face forward then, watching the scenery as though she hadn’t seen it hundreds of times. “A cartoon movie is the same as a comic except it moves,” she said, “and there are thousands of comics one after another.” She folded her hands on her lap. “Since I have to stay home, Mama said I could have a new notepad, a great big one. I’m going to draw comics.”

“Katie, that’s a good idea.” He meant to encourage her but she was lost in the idea and barely heard him.

“First I’ll trace my comic books with tracing paper—the covers, where things are biggest, until I can draw my own. I’ll learn one at a time.” She seemed almost to talk to herself, then looked over at Mitch. “I thought of this while you were at lunch with Doc Reb and Daddy was asleep. Mama was over at the hospital and Twister was at basketball. I have my best thoughts when I’m by myself.”

“It’s always that way,” Mitch said. He pulled into the Mobil station and drove up beside the pumps. For a moment he listened to the engine idle—a smooth and satisfying purr—then turned the ignition off. “You stay here,” he told Katie. “I’ll go in and pay and maybe find you a soda.”

Already she’d leaned forward, looking past the high dash of the Pontiac at the billboard. The red horse above them seemed to fly over the cracked concrete of the station lot and the street beyond, a red gleaming horse with powerful flanks, its feathered wings spread to glide. The belly was long and flat and the horse seemed to swim a fast current of wind, mane flying, head lowered, nostrils flared with effort. There was a white streak up the center of the side-viewed head.

“Good-looking fella, your horse,” Mitch said.

“Oh, he’s beautiful,” Katie whispered. “I wish I could draw him.”

“No need,” he told her. “You wouldn’t find a horse like that in the comics.” He watched her earnest face and hoped she really could draw a little. She was such a perfectionist, so finicky—she’d stop if she wasn’t good. He looked back at the billboard above them, at the blue script in quotes:
I’VE BOOSTED BOMBERS AT 60 BELOW.
He gazed with the kid at her gleaming, muscled horse and wished things were really like that.

Katie was still reading. “Socony-Vacuum,” she said.

He stood holding her in his arms while his eyes adjusted to the dark. Didn’t want to stumble holding her; gradually he saw the broad aisles and the crowded rows of metal plush-lined seats. Close against him she smelled of baby powder, the fragile scent specific in the shadows. She said softly, her mouth at his ear,
“Peter and the Wolf
— it’s just starting.”

Mitch moved quietly down the far aisle: keep her near the heat registers and get out fast when the show was over. He settled her in the seat soundlessly, leaning to pull the blanket around her shoulders.

“You keep this tight around you,” he told her. “No one can see you anyway.”

She nodded, smiling, her face tinged blue and orange by a shifting of the bright images over them. Mitch sat back in his seat and looked at the theater, the walls painted to look scalloped with draped bunting, layers and layers, and stars up high near a border of blue. How many times had he been in this theater since he was a kid? Silhouettes in the rows of seats looked decorative, part of the painted finery, until they moved; then he noticed faces, their expressions obvious even in shadow. Women and children mostly: he might be the only man here. Funny how the women watched with real concentration, taken in like children. On the bright screen the cartoon kid led a band of animals through snow, deep snow, holding his worthless popgun and menaced by thick blue trees. A popgun, that was about right, and in the comforting crowded dark he shut his eyes and listened. Wind blew on the sound track, realistic wind, billowing; sounded like they’d recorded
it in New Guinea, the most deserted place in the world, where no one recorded anything. Now he wished someone had, even movie people; he wished he could hear again exactly how things sounded. Have something more than those little snapshots, so small and colorless they were all alike, less real than the words he’d typed on the backs to say who was who. But that wind—he could hear it now, how it sounded by the sea: beach road wind. He knew that road and where it went; didn’t want to go there now, but he had to sit here in this dark and his mind kept falling into the wind: it’s all right, go ahead, think about it now. So he kept his eyes shut and heard the palm fronds moving; surf played under the wind like a pulse, and the pulse was Coco Mission. Lee side of the bay. All of it in focus now and they were driving, he and Warrenholtz, in the Jeep. Jap Zero shot into the sea the night before and they drove out to look at it, thinking they’d peel down and take a swim. Motor pool in the morning heat was a caldron of still air, smells of axle grease and gasoline.

Driving along the coast road, Mitch listened closely to the engine, rebuilt just the day before; listened so hard what he looked at was barely seen. Instead he heard the steady growl and occasional miss of the motor and felt the prod of his pistol butt. Shoulder holster a little tight, so the gun pressed the pit of his arm. Rumble of the engine a half-tone off and the timing spotty; he heard it and felt his own shaky gut, off the whole day like something was coming, some sick something that had his number. Warrenholtz had the tremors too, and they stopped halfway for him to shit in scrub bush back of the road, Mitch revving the motor to know exactly how the timing missed, how to put it right. He played the engine like music to put down his own cramps; if you ignored the pains the urge lessened. He’d told Warrenholtz that, but Warrenholtz wouldn’t believe it and said not to legislate anyone’s bowels, pull the hell over. Afterward they’d kept driving and the sea was flat, barely rippled. Parrots called from the palms, flew in front of the Jeep in dips and glides. Warrenholtz going on about the birds—he had two back at the camp he’d trained to eat from his hand. Mitch ragged on about why the hell a man would want parrots to feed when they were all over New Guinea, thick as rats, and Warrenholtz smiled and said nothing; and then they
were close enough to see the Zero. The big wing rose up, breaking water a hundred yards out. The plane had gone in nose first and then tipped in the surf, rolling sideways so the wing reared out of the water, fuselage shredded at the tip.

Farther on, the aluminum ribs were visible, holes blasted in the overlaid structure, the red sun of Hirohito’s empire flapping.

Warrenholtz took a picture of the wing and stripped down to swim, but Mitch sat in the shade of the Jeep, smoked a cigarette. He watched the ruined wing and the white floating form of Warrenholtz. Later they drank more paregoric before starting back but still had to walk into hilly brush across the beach road and relieve themselves, with Warrenholtz grousing how it was all good revenge for the Papua boys, see the Yanks with their diarrhea scowls once a month on the average. When they got to the top of the rise above their own Jeep, Warrenholtz saw the Nip, saw the brush move where the Nip was crawling, drew his gun and yelled. Mitch saw then the lobbed grenade flying high into the air but knew it was hopelessly off target; the Nip was hurt and had no aim. The grenade burst off to the right and the sound was deafening; after that, Mitch walked in, the spiky grass to his knees; somewhere Warrenholtz was yelling
“Kosan, Kosan, Tomare,”
the words ridiculous and piping after the burst of the ammo, but the Nip kept crawling deeper in. The tall grass wavered. Mitch saw momentarily the fields behind the farm at home, and he drew his own gun and fired—fired again and again into the grass until the chamber was empty and Warrenholtz stood beside him, staring not at the grass, which had long since stopped moving, but at Mitch.

Mitch saw Warrenholtz’s lips moving and heard sounds he knew were words, but the words were like buzzing over a bad wireless, like Warrenholtz had a radio voice and the voice blinked on and off. They stood still and the grass was motionless in the hot sea air; Mitch put the pistol carefully into his holster and could feel the heat of the gun through his shirt, good, then he was fine and the mechanical way things sounded was maybe because of the loud grenade. Probably Warrenholtz couldn’t hear good either, but even as Mitch thought so he knew he was wrong: not just his ears were funny but his body was strange to him; he looked at the
field with a feeling of total detachment, as though he saw the grass and the swell of the land from a low-flying plane. No part of him. He couldn’t feel his feet or the ground under him. He touched the leather holster and his own chest, felt the front of his shirt. Had he been hit and didn’t know it, couldn’t tell? No, he wasn’t hurt, this was something else. Warrenholtz walked forward toward the Nip in the grass and Mitch watched, stood and waited. As he stood, his whole frame of vision rotated once, smooth and circular, the figure of Warrenholtz turning around like the long straight khaki hand of a clock. He must be dizzy but he wasn’t; the world turned once, once only. Far away, Warrenholtz nudged the corpse with his foot, bending until he was lost to sight and then straightening, shaking his head as he turned to come back.

They sent a native patrol out to bury the Nip, and later in the warm night they drank PX scotch. They tied up the sides of Warrenholtz’s large tent so the tent was only a canvas roof over a board floor; the parrots flew through the space as Warrenholtz whistled, and the two birds perched on his shoulders, cocking their green heads and chortling low-pitched sounds. Soft vibration right into his bones, Warrenholtz said, like an idling of small motors. Mitch asked then where the Nip had been hit.

“He was burned and his gut ripped open,” Warrenholtz said, “but not by you. You weren’t trying to hit him. I don’t know what the hell you were doing.”

Mitch got the leave he asked for; Warrenholtz had sway with the CO and interceded to be sure the leave was granted. After Mitch came back, the episode seemed forgotten and Warrenholtz never mentioned it again except indirectly. Sometimes he drawled on about the war in his liquid Texas accent; how the war had a filthy smell and sneaky way of crawling along deadly for years like some endless Guinea python.

Mitch looked over at Katie and then at the screen; the wolf had made an appearance and wore bloodshot green eyes.

“Katie,” Mitch whispered, “are you warm enough?”

She nodded.

“Want some popcorn?”

She nodded again, anything to keep him from distracting her,
and he was smiling as he walked up the aisle. Felt good, walking that carpeted incline with a big image mixing up the dark behind him, and when he got to the lighted lobby he asked the boy at the counter for a large buttered.

Waiting, he could still see a bit of the screen; as he watched an abstract movement of color, the colors suddenly went silent and flashed, eaten into mottled holes by a racing black edge. “The film’s on fire,” Mitch told the boy, and the lobby lights went off, the room lit only with what daylight filtered through the double doors from the street. “Hell,” Mitch swore, starting back into the dark. Just as he stepped forward, he heard a woman yell, “Fire, fire!” The stupid fool, it was only the film had burnt, but there was the chilling sound of everyone rising at once, and then he was fighting his way through the crowd running past him to the entrance. The goddamn fools, some of the women screaming and kids crying, Christ, he pushed them aside and moved toward Katie, hoping she’d have sense enough to stay put. He reached their places and saw the empty chairs. Grabbed the blanket, that way, the street exit down by the screen, surely she’d gone that way, terrified by now if they hadn’t run over her already. He shouted her name and felt himself shoved along, spilling with the crowd into the alley back of the theater.

He saw her then, leaning against the wall of the opposite building, her shoes gone, her coat unbuttoned. Her eyes were big and shocked, and as he pushed his way toward her she waved to him feebly, apologetically, as though afraid she’d done wrong. He thought she was trembling but saw as he reached her that her body was shaken by the pounding of her heart; she was breathless and didn’t speak. He picked her up in his blanketed arms and walked quickly across the street to the Pontiac. As he opened the passenger door she looked over his shoulder at the crowd, fascinated, and said in a small voice, “Was that like the war?”

He got her to lie down across the seat and drove home; after he’d put her in bed he tried to phone Reb, who wasn’t at his office or at home or at the Elks’. He called Bess at the hospital; she’d gone upstreet, the switchboard girl told him, but she’d get the message to come home as soon as she got back. He went in to Katie then and she was sitting quietly, reading a comic.

He felt her forehead.

“I’m okay now,” she said. “It’s just my heart beats like that when I get scared.”

“Everyone’s heart beats faster then,” he told her. He thought of carrying her over to the hospital, but he might only scare her again.

“There wasn’t really any fire at all, was there?”

“No, just some fool woman yelling.”

“I lost my shoes,” Katie said. “When I got up and ran so fast, the shoes came right off my feet.” She raised her brows for emphasis.

“I’ll go by the movie house after your Mom gets here, see if I can find the shoes.”

“It was exciting,” Katie said softly, “after I got over being scared.”

“I know it was, Fritz. Now I want you to lay down and close your eyes. You need a rest.”