Prudence (13 page)

“You poor boys. You poor, poor boys,” she said thickly. She found him—stiff, quivering—with her hand. “Let me help you.” His cock was rigid and Davey looked down on it, pink and thick, in surprise.

“Oh, God, Prudy. Oh, Jesus.”

“Not on the dress!” she screamed, and released him from her hand as the first jets of cum arced out. She scooted back against the door. “Watch the dress! The dress!”

Davey Gardner turned violently and stubbed his cock out against the icy seat back.

After a moment. “I’m sorry, Prudy.”

Another long pause. A car went by on the highway.

“You’re sweet, Davey boy.”

“Smoke?”

“I’d better push off.”

“I can drive you as far as the turnoff. The Ford won’t make it out to the camp.”

“Naw. I’ll make it.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll make it somehow.”

“It’s cold out there, Prudy.”

Prudence bent low and strapped her feet back into her Mary Janes. She opened the door and tumbled out onto her feet. She reached in and found her clutch on the seat.

“Merry Christmas, Davey.”

“Merry Christmas, Prudy.”

She shut the door and stood there facing the car until Dave Gardner put it in gear and drove around her, out to the street and then out onto the highway. When she was sure he was gone she turned and stomped her feet back down in the holes she had made before in the snowbank, as if she were fitting pegs in a cribbage board.

She rounded the back of the Wigwam.

A small figure sat forlornly on the back steps next to the woodpile, bundled into a thick coat.

“Gracie?” Prudence, her heart beating fast, stepped closer. “Gracie?”

A match flared. Mary. She lit a short corncob pipe and drew, the bowl glowing red.

“Oh, you. What a dance, huh?” said Prudence.

Mary said nothing.

Prudence stepped closer to her. She could see the lines around Mary’s mouth when she pulled on the pipe. She couldn’t be older than twenty-five. Twenty-six?

“Don’t tell anyone, okay?” said Prudence as she reached past Mary and took hold of a paper sack buried in the snow on top of the woodpile. She opened it quickly and shook out a pair of woolen long
johns, a pair of wool socks, and a pair of galoshes. She kicked off the Mary Janes and pulled on the long johns quickly, followed by the socks and the galoshes. Then she put the Mary Janes in the bag, along with the clutch, tucked the bag into her armpit, and shoved her hands deep in her coat pockets. Mary watched her but said nothing.

“Merry Christmas, Mary.”

Mary drew on her pipe.

Prudence turned and headed for the road. It was terribly cold. Her galoshes sounded like logs banging on the frozen macadam. The road was gray between the mounded snow on either side. The snow glowed between the trees. The stars were out. It must be so cold and lonely up there. So very cold. But it was the same air. It was the same air up there as down here. Prudence closed her eyes and steadied herself. She saw Gracie’s little grave behind the Pines, quiet and quietly covered with snow. The same air that flowed over Gracie’s grave flowed around up there, after all. Five miles up and five miles down. It made no difference. She felt her soul swoon a little. She recovered it and kept on walking.

MIDLANDS, ENGLAND—EARLY DECEMBER 1944

F
rankie was suspended over a large table in a harness attached to wires strung to the roof. A bombsight was fixed to the same wires, and he had it pressed to his face. Below him were photographs of the mainland. He crept slowly along the wires, pushing himself with little taps of his feet. He finished and pulled himself back to the start and did it again. The map table was lit by four floodlights clamped to the ribs of the Nissen hut. It was cold. There was no heater in the map room. Frankie blew on his fingers. A few more runs. A few more and he’d quit. He closed his eyes and saw, once again, the man tucked into a ball, arms clasped around his knees, spinning slowly over the top of the right wing. He opened his eyes to make it stop.

There were no runs that morning because of the weather, and Molesworth was unusually quiet. No prep, no returning planes. No battle orders fluttered from the bulletin board outside the briefing room. The wind picked at the metal skin of the hut, and the light drizzle hitting the metal sounded like low radio static. It was calming. He should go back to barracks. His fellow officers—the pilot and copilot, navigator and engineer—were all in London on a four-day leave. The enlisted men were being hosted at Moulsford Manor on the Thames. Half of the squadron was gone. He should go back to barracks. He needed to work on the letter. Usually the room he
shared with three other officers was too crowded for anything but reading. The enlisted men had it worse: twenty men to a barracks.

The map table was useless, really, except as a diversion. Their actual objectives were never divulged to the crew until a few hours before each mission. The crew was briefed separately from the officers, and they wanted to know mostly if it would be a milk run or not, how long the fighter escort would last, whether the objective was heavily defended. The officers got more detail but their questions were much the same: How far? How long? Where to? What kind of flak? Would they be dropping high or low? Would they have a fighter escort or not, and if so, for how long? The table maps didn’t help with any of it. They showed Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland from 30,000 feet over clear skies in flat black and white. They didn’t account for any of the variables he learned about in bombardier school in Texas. Altitude. True airspeed. Bomb ballistics. Trail. Actual time of fall. Ground speed. Drift. Not to mention the reality of combat itself. Flying in box formation and bad weather, fighter attacks, flak cover. Still, Frankie spent his free time suspended over the maps, memorizing cities and rivers, fields, villages. Hoogstraten, Eksel, Astene, Rijkhoven, Borlo, Redu, Coulonges-Cohan, Nobressart, Hunawihr, Lourmarin, Coulon, Treignac, Belvès, Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, Hunspach, Domfront, Lisieux, Fécamp. The bigger towns and cities were often the ones they studied for the actual bombing runs. Caen, Brest, Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Lille, Antwerp, Schweinfurt, Aachen, Stuttgart, Lübeck, Bremen, Dresden. He studied these, too.

Frankie had been at Molesworth, part of the 303rd “Hell’s Angels,” since summer. It was only then that he understood why bombardiers were so badly needed. Only after he’d become one of the Hell’s Angels and shouted “Might in flight!” along with the rest of them and fitted himself into the catbird seat and they took off to the northeast, circled into formation for an hour, and then crossed the North Sea and into Holland and the black flak bloomed around
him, and he got to see it all from behind the Plexiglas bubble in which he rode. Got to see the flak to the sides and below and saw the blinking, ragged yellow lights of the 109s and 190s coming in high twelve o’clock—that he understood why: nothing but the thin Plexiglas, strong enough only to stop “birdshit and rain,” according to the experienced bombardiers, separated him from the great beyond. Bombardiers died often.

In Florida, too, in the last stage of training, they’d been grounded by bad weather, and the officers and enlisted men sat in their barracks and smoked and argued about what to name the plane that was supposed to carry their crew through the war. Naming the plane was usually a pilot’s honor. But Lieutenant Adams, whose family owned a furniture store in Harrisburg, had never named anything in his life but his dog, whom he’d called Blackie because she was a black Lab. Frankie was sitting quietly off to the side, the flight manual across his lap. During a lull in the argument, he recited, without looking up: “‘As he spoke, the earth-encircling lord of the earthquake struck both of them with his sceptre and filled their hearts with daring. He made their legs light and active, as also their hands and their feet. Then, as the soaring falcon poises on the wing high above some sheer rock, and presently swoops down to chase some bird over the plain, even so did Neptune lord of the earthquake wing his flight into the air and leave them.’”

Sergeant Riggle, the left waist gunner, removed his cigarette from his mouth and ashed into the Coke bottle he held. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means: How about
Neptune’s Bitch
? It’s from
The Iliad.
”

“Sold to the highest bidder,” said Adams. “
Neptune’s Bitch
,” he mused. “Very nice.” When the time came they found a member of the ground crew to paint a mermaid holding a bomb overhead, her blond hair mostly, but not completely, covering her breasts.

At Molesworth, Frankie was surprised by many things. To start,
on his first night there was gear scattered around the barracks and they didn’t know which bunks had been claimed. The member of the ground crew who’d shown them to the barracks said, “Don’t worry about it. They won’t be coming back, so take your pick.” The next day they were woken at 0300 and told to report for briefing. The commander lifted a sheet off an easel and showed them their objectives—the rail yards at Rouen. He covered the mission in all of ten minutes. Within half an hour they were on
Neptune’s Bitch
. By 0400 they were circling Molesworth, getting into formation. At 0800 just after they reached the coastline of France, they flew into flak. The plane shuddered as the flak burst in the middle of their formation. The plane jumped and dived, and when there were flak bursts above them it rained down, pinging against the thin aluminum skin of the plane. No one—not the pilot or copilot or ball turret gunners, the waist or tail gunners or the navigator—had as good a view of those black, powdery blooms that were bursting all around them as Frankie did. And all he could do was watch. When they were ten minutes away from the target, he and the pilot commenced preparations for the bombing run. At five minutes out, control of the plane passed to Frankie.

It was as if the volume had been suddenly turned off. Everything fell away. He couldn’t hear anything, not the shaking of the plane or the thrum of the four Cyclone Engines. Or the explosions in the air around them. Nothing. He reached up and felt around his head to see if he hadn’t gotten a piece of shrapnel stuck in his skull or in his neck. Keeping a steady level, he guided them in. Not that he even had to use the Norden: they were in the middle of the formation, and only the lead plane needed to use its sights. The rest were to release the bombs as soon as the lead plane did.

With one minute left, a plane just above and in front of them was hit in the waist by a flak burst. Pieces of the fuselage broke off and came flying by. Skin, ribs, a cowling from one of the engines. As the
plane disintegrated, the crew began bailing out. The tail gunner came shooting out the back. Two more men, probably the waist gunners, stepped out of the middle of the plane. One man popped out of the hatch in the radio room. He wasn’t wearing a parachute. Frankie counted six in all. Amid paper, metal, ammunition, and maps, they came tumbling down around
Neptune’s Bitch
. Then one of the crew—and Frankie never knew who it was—pushed free of the doomed aircraft and tucked into a ball. He fell downward, turning slowly through the air. He held perfect form as he tumbled toward them and cleared their left wing with about three feet to spare, and was lost to sight.

Immediately after the lead plane dropped its bombs, Frankie pressed the bomb-release switch and said, “Bombs away!” into the intercom, and Lieutenant Adams banked the plane, and they turned toward home. But the image of the man, tucked, languid, rolling through the air, stayed with him.

After that first mission, and after the second and third and fourth, he had to admit to himself that he was good at his job, good at combat. He was good at filing away the fear and uncertainty. Unlike his crewmates, he didn’t have to deal with it afterward by talking about how scared he had been, if only to suggest how well he had held it together. He was good at ignoring everything—his discomfort, his isolation, the dim sense that he was one small, very dispensable part of a large operation. The other crew members had come to rely on this aspect of Frankie’s personality—his resolute, predictable quietude and precision. He liked to think it gave them comfort, the sober way he had of conducting the preflight check, of tending to the others when their oxygen lines got disconnected or cut, of manning the twin .50-caliber machine guns in the nose when called upon.

Being able to ignore everything that interfered with his job was something he was good at. But at Molesworth, because of crew rotation or bad weather, there were long stretches on the ground. That
was when the worry crept in, when the fear settled down deep in the gut. He might be drinking at the officers’ club or reading in his bunk when, for no reason, he’d feel, he’d
know
, that if he didn’t run he would shit his pants. This never happened on missions, only when he had quiet time to himself. So the best thing was to work on the map table. To check and recheck
Neptune’s Bitch
. But sometimes, even when he kept himself busy—he might be over the table practicing with the sights, or checking and rechecking the .50s or recalibrating the Norden—that terrible day in the woods came back to him—Billy saying, “Wait, wait,” then the shot, the girl’s legs kicking and slowing and stopping in the leaves.

*   *   *

F
rankie unhooked himself from the harness that held him over the map table. He rubbed his eyes and windmilled his arms. He had been at it for two hours. It was late, but there would be no missions the next day. Neither the officers in London nor the enlisted men at Moulsford Manor would miss him. At first—at Maxwell and Midlands—the other men had tried to get him to go drinking and dancing with them and gave him a hard time when he demurred. When they came back, stumble-drunk and bruised, drunk enough to piss their own beds, they teased and heckled him. They didn’t quite trust him. But at Molesworth, after the crew had completed ten missions without losing anyone, they stopped bothering him. Whatever they had formed, whatever set of skills or exercise of luck in the game of extinction they were playing, they wanted to preserve it. No one wanted to change a thing. So they were happy their bombardier stayed behind and studied maps and practiced with the map table and checked their plane and counted the pins in the bomb racks, and they made sure he had the bolts not only for his .50 but extra bolts for the rest.

Felix had been like that. Sunk in the seat of the Confederate, he’d listen to Emma start in with her Worries and Concerns: How many trees down over the winter? Was the river too high to get across? Had the dock been washed away? How bad was the fire danger, anyway? Had Felix made sure to scythe the brush and weeds around the Pines to reduce the danger? It would have been good if he had burned the grass while the snow was still deep among the trees. Could they expect a lot of bees? Had the tiger lilies come up, or had the frost gotten them finally? Frankie had despaired that, of all the things Emma could have brought with them from Chicago, she had chosen to bring herself. But Felix seemed immune to Emma’s worry. He’d been still, even calm, as he responded to Emma’s flurry. The dock had been fixed. He had lit the yard on fire in April, when it was still safe to do so, and the grass was coming up good. No bees yet. Billy had cleared all the mice and mouse droppings from the cabins. The girls were ready to come and do the laundry. Nothing perturbed him.

When Frankie was thirteen, he had been allowed to accompany Felix and Billy to the village to pick up supplies without Emma. He had sat next to Billy, facing Felix in the rowboat (they didn’t have the Chris-Craft yet) as Felix pulled on the oars—almost lazily, it seemed—except that with each stroke the rowboat surged ahead, as if shoved along by a giant hand. When they pulled ashore, Frankie and Billy followed Felix up the steep slope to the top of the bluff where they kept the Confederate. Back then there was no camp, just a clearing on level ground pocked by small cook pits and larger depressions near the trees for jigging rice. In the fall the Indians camped there by the dozens to be nearer the rice. And in the spring they came back when the fish were spawning in the river to net them and dry them on racks lashed together in the sun.

He had been rowed across the river many times before. And he had climbed the bank. And he had gone to the village in the
Confederate. None of this was new. Yet it was, somehow. Because for the first time he did all this without Emma worrying at the very texture of the life around him.

Halfway to the village, a brush wolf sprinted out of the woods. It must have been chasing something but Frankie never saw what. It crossed the ditch and streaked across the highway in front of them. Felix always drove slowly, but the creature wasn’t fast enough. The pickup passed right over the top of it and Frankie could hear its body being tumbled along the undercarriage of the truck and spit out the back. He turned to look and Felix braked and stopped. The brush wolf stood woozily in the middle of the road behind them, staring at them. Frankie turned around in the seat and looked out the back windshield. He had never seen such an animal before. He was surprised at how big its ears were. Its fur was red, almost like that of a fox, along the outside of its legs and along the bridge of its nose, which was sharper and pointier than Frankie would have expected. It swayed back and forth as it looked at the truck. A trickle of blood escaped from its right ear.