Machine Dreams (9 page)

It was good he’d come home. This thing with Katie had about driven them crazy. Wasn’t like they were a young couple; Clayton must be sixty. Nearly four years Mitch had been gone, and they’d all got old. Four years. He sat up on the edge of the high bed and felt for his slippers. Jesus, what a dream he’d had. He hardly ever thought of the bad things, although he thought of the men, Warrenholtz and Strauss and Wilson, and the base camp, alien the two years in New Guinea but now more familiar in memory than this house he slept in. As though he went back to it every night—the thatch-roofed buildings and steamy air, the scrap heaps and tin shacks of the motor pool—looking at every detail but seeming just to live there as before, complaining with the rest of them, sweating in the grime of it and looking up to watch the slate sea while the natives touched the machines with their palms. They’d taken them out to open beach to teach them to drive the dozers and
trucks, and the black men had touched the machines hand-overhand, seeming to measure them as horses are measured, then touched all the gears and pedals, saying Papuan words for the parts. The enlisted men had laughed openly at such reverence, laughing more at themselves than at anyone since the machines were serious jokes, most of them built and repaired with scrap, metal welded in approximate versions of whatever parts broke down, the machines evolving further and further into jumbled mismatched puzzles that still worked. Worked and moved, groaned and rumbled according to some other logic of mechanics than what held in Cincinnati or Topeka or Wheeling.

New Guinea trees flared straight to the sky and splayed their fronds; their shapes looked from the tents like intricate sprays held still by the humid night. The sea glared flatly and was warm in January and had no winter in it ever. Wind blew up hard before storms and the trees tossed their fronds all of a piece, like women throwing skirts over their heads, and the clouds boiled up as though poured out of a spigot, filled the whole flat horizon impossibly and completely and it was an angry show. He’d longed to see an oak tree, a big oak with layers of limbs and summer leaves moving in wind with that deep rippling that is deep as the rippling of water. He’d wanted to see that, and women in dresses and stockings and heels. The palm trees were strangest at night because they were so big and womanly, tossing themselves and sighing, while the women in the camp wore fatigues and boots. 41st Engineers had arrived to construct the camp and the airstrips, and the native men had still worn grass skirts. The skirts rustled as the dark men walked, their flat-footed storkish gaits rustling the grass in a way that was stern rather than girlish. Later they wore long swatches of cloth held in at the waist with army belts, and their bracelets were strips of cloth wrapped round their forearms and tied. The natives were in the camp at all hours and the skirts came to seem natural above their nearly hairless, muscled calves, natural on them rather than on the women, so that the outward things distinguishing men and women lost meaning. You noticed instead the wrist of a Red Cross girl, narrow and flat in the masculine greenish cuff of a fatigue shirt. The whole world was turned around like that—the sky arched so high up that
it seemed lost, and they were all floating: the white beach and the guns and the natives, the creaking machines, the officers’ club with its sling chairs and regulation cots for couches, its reception desk bordered by palms in pots and built in the shape of a horseshoe to look transplanted from the lobby of some American hotel. But the bar top was plyboard and rough and splintered, and the boy serving drinks stood shirtless in his rumpled dirty skirt, smiling, his hair a thick dark bush and his metal chain necklace dangling a gold amulet meant to keep the evil of this place from following him back to his village at night.
Someone told someone and someone told you
, blaring of the bar radio, a square ’30s-style Motorola whose patchy fabric front showed through to cardboard,
but they wouldn’t hurt you, not much
, and the control knobs were off an Australian kitchen stove shipped up by boat. But the thing worked, late afternoons the reception was bell pure and the bar boy turned it up
since everyone spreads the story
as the men came in from showers for mess, scuffing their boots along the plank floor that showed the ground where boards had pulled up, and if there was a storm blowing in later that night they sat hearing it crackle between the lines of USO songs.
Do nothing till you hear from me
^*
when the bruising rain was still nothing but electric air. Hadn’t he heard that song just lately, last weekend? Katie made him play the car radio when he took her out for a ride in the new Pontiac, Bess standing on the walk by the back door, lifting her hands to her throat to remind Katie to keep her scarf pulled tight.
Pay no attention to what’s said
and Katie had told him sagely this was a song about gossip, which was all the fourth-grade girls ever talked, and he thought about when the first tarmac strip was finished and the first plane came in. How the native boys had stood at the edge of the field in a bunch and crouched down together holding their arms like they were chilled, talking talking talking, jabbering in low tones as the plane taxied past. They kept their backs to the Yanks, making intricate motions with their hands like words alone weren’t enough, and the
only ones who learned any English were the ones who served instead of worked. The bar boy and the cooks picked up a singsong lingo and talked in strange mixtures of words whose cadences were backwards, funny and inside-out. The radio behind them would splatter a breath of crackling static and Warrenholtz nodded, called it news from the front, Papua tango, excuse me while I go to Paris, Texas and hoe a row for Mom.

Warrenholtz, back in Texas. Mitch belted the robe Bess had given him, Glen plaid from Rossings on Main Street, just the kind of quality thing she’d buy to last for fifteen years. Where would he be in fifteen years? The time stretched out, and whirling in the center of the time was a small group of men around a bamboo bar table while the fans turned and the potted palms moved in the heavy air, the men olive shades in their fatigues and the green island air dampening finally with evening. Katie was crying, he could hear her, had it gone on all this time? Now he would go in and tell Katie, tell the kid he’d get her some comic books today, anything, strawberry ice cream right now for breakfast, if she would keep a stiff upper lip for Old Man and stop that crying.

“Hey, Snickelfritz, what’s all this, a man can’t sleep with such a ruckus.” He advanced into the darkened room, his voice soft. “Can’t drive a brand-new car with no shut-eye. Don’t be mean, what about it?”

The little girl in the bed half-sat, long sleeves of her winter nightgown twisted. “I, I’m not mean,” she said, gasping, her breath broken by the crying.

“Pretty mean.” He sat down on the edge of her bed. “Your old dad Clayton is in there watching the ceiling, wide awake, hears every sniffle. Ears like a cat.”

“Like a cat,” she repeated, trying to stop, her eyes full. She looked at Mitch, her face almost stunned with the tension of sobbing.

“Like a big tiger cat, hears every sound his girl makes. Old Mitch with that new Pontiac to wax this morning, too, and not a lick of sleep. After a hard week selling trucks.” He opened his own eyes wide, had to make sure she knew he was joking, kids took things so serious.

She breathed calmer, sniffling. “Over at Winfield,” she said. Occasional involuntary gasps. No talk about the matinee this afternoon: then Bess had said nix to the movies. Take a different tack.

“That’s right, Hon, and after I get me some breakfast I’m going upstreet to buy some wax for the car, and some ice cream and comics for you. Whaddya say? Four comics enough? Keep you busy?”

She nodded hopefully, twisting her hands under the covers like a schoolmarm. She’d always seemed old for her age, a little prim, damn cute kid. Smart, too, a shame she’d had it so rough. Her wide, tear-brimmed eyes looked too big for her face, and she held her mouth tense.

“Know where old Mitch was last night?”

Shook her head no.

“Lean back there on the pillow while I tell you, that’s right.”

She leaned back, so tired her eyelids fluttered, and sighed.

For a minute he was taken aback but talked on smoothly. “Your old Mitch took Mary Chidester over to the big dance at Winfield, and a fella was playing the fiddle to beat the band.” A good time, that Chidester girl, no doubt about it, she’d drunk more than Mitch and there was no fight getting her out to the car before the dance was even over. “Everybody danced up a storm and the whole ceiling was full of colored balloons,” he told Katie. He could feel her concentrating on the sound of his voice and he talked on, automatically, his thoughts elsewhere. Surprised at Mary Chidester though, she was damned experienced. College for two years over at Lynchburg, that was it. Snap of her sweater as she’d pulled it up over her brassiere, smoke of her cigarette in his eyes, and her brassy laugh like the laughter of the boozy Aussie girls. Warrenholtz weaving in a doorway and Strauss leaning solidly against a wall. First leave in Sydney before they’d shipped out to New Guinea, and they’d roughed up that hotel room a little, Strauss with a bruised face where the girl he’d laid socked him just as he’d rolled off her and she discovered he’d had no bag on, did he want to spread Yank brats all over New South Wales? Mitch looked at Katie and tried to imagine her grown-up, fair prey, couldn’t, what did a man with a daughter do?

“Fiddle is like a violin,” she said now, sleepily. Her gaze was drifting and she touched his large hand with her small one.

“Sure, Fritzel, that’s right. And then we went for a ride in the Pontiac just like you and I did last weekend, but it was night and the moon out bright as a plate. White lines on the road just like silver.” Somehow Mary had talked him into letting her drive and they’d ended up in the empty fairgrounds, driving too fast on the dirt roads between the stock pens, zigzagging up and down. She wasn’t bad on the turns, fishtailed once but he grabbed the wheel. He was laughing and finished off the bottle as she took off fast, then slammed on the brakes—he was thrown forward and banged his head good on the dash. When he opened his eyes, odd sensation of total blackness: she’d driven straight into one of the big open stock barns and stopped, but in his high from the liquor he thought they were still moving and he looked out into the blackness and didn’t know where he was. Didn’t know. Then: peal of her laughter, the joke on him.

“Katie?” He said her name but she was asleep, dead asleep, tumbled blond of her curls on the pillow.

In the kitchen, Bess was heating the iron skillet for his eggs. The butter, the clean spatula, the two brown eggs, lay on the sideboard. He sat down and she poured his coffee, put in the sugar and cream, set the steaming cup in front of him.

“Morning, Mister,” she said as always. “I hope Katie didn’t wake you. Still, aren’t you glad it’s Saturday and you’re home with us, instead of in that rooming house in Winfield.”

“The rooming house is fine,” Mitch said. He watched Bess tie her apron as she turned to the stove. She hadn’t wanted him to get the room in Winfield, but the fact was they really didn’t have room here for him; kids getting older, Katie with her own room because she needed so much rest. Bess looked tired. Her glasses magnified her eyes and concealed their fatigue, but her tiredness showed in her shoulders, in how she moved and held her head. Butter spattered in the hot skillet and she cracked the eggs, the sound loud in the quiet house; he had done a man’s job in getting the kid to sleep, but Bess would never take advantage of a break and rest. On her feet from six in the morning and never sat down
except to eat meals or read to Katie or do handwork while she listened to the radio.

“I dare say you enjoy driving around Winfield in that new car of yours.” She turned the eggs expertly and put the bread in the oven to toast. “The office girls over at the hospital were saying how fine your new Pontiac looks and how everything has changed since the men came home—just in these six months. New cars on the streets, the firehall dances crowded again, Main Street full like every afternoon was Saturday. First peacetime spring is coming, even through this chilly weather. I really enjoy going upstreet to pay the bills.”

Mitch smiled. All during the war, he’d thought of her walking the length of Main Street, ladylike, holding envelopes in her gloved hand. Wartime stockings well mended, coat and hat sensible, neat leather purse over her arm. She paid hospital and personal accounts herself between one and two in the afternoon. Mailing a bill four blocks was foolishness, stamps were money, people ought to speak as they take care of business, it’s only civilized, and wouldn’t everyone agree a Main Street where people exchange talk is one reason the war was fought, a small but human reason? He pictured her receiving news, tidbits of stories, at the bank, at the mercantile, at the telephone company.
You don’t say, Oh, don’t tell me, Well I had no idea, The Lord bless us and keep us.
And it wasn’t just love triangles, but who would run for the school board, how much loan money the bank had to distribute, should the town establish an annual festival in summers, like the Buckwheat Festival over at Elkton.

Bess arranged the salt and pepper shakers, the jam jar, near his plate. “I was saying to Mr. Chidester at the Hardware—Mary’s father, you know—the Pontiac Eight sedan is the nicest car on the market, stamina, not really terribly expensive. And the dark blue, with the chrome and the gray top, is really lovely.”

He kept his expression serious. She wanted him to mention Mary, but he wouldn’t. And she was funny when she tried to talk about cars. Really though, he was touched that the merchants downtown were discussing his new car. For a moment he thought of leaving the Philippines on the ship, seeing with a last glance the dirty women sitting on the docks, the packs they roped to their
backs made of hemp net, showing their paltry possessions. The moment passed, the look of their faces receded, and he saw instead the rich dark blue of the car, felt again the shock of its newness as he’d leaned inside at the salesman’s invitation: the dash, the steering wheel, the silver gray upholstered seats, even the floors—absolutely clean, shining and private and quiet like the interior of a big jewel. He’d thought maybe he’d die in the war; he was seldom in obvious danger, since he wasn’t infantry, but he’d thought his apparent safety somehow made the odds worse: it would be an accident with the machinery, or a fluke attack on the airstrip—