The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (67 page)

He read through the rest of them after that, proceeding in chronological order. In the second letter, she mentioned that Sammy had quit his job at Empire and gone to work for Burns, Baggot & DeWinter, the advertising agency that handled the Oneonta Woolens account. In the evenings, she said, he came home and worked on his novel. Then, in her fifth letter, Joe was startled to read that, in a civil ceremony on New Year’s Day of 1942, Rosa had married Sammy. After that, there was a gap of three months, and she wrote to say that she and Sammy had bought a house in Midwood. Then there was another gap of a few months, and then in September 1942 she wrote with the news that she had given birth to a seven-pound, two-ounce son, and that, in honor of Joe’s lost brother, they had named the baby Thomas. She called him Tommy. Subsequent letters gave news and details of little Tommy’s first words, first steps, illnesses, and prodigies—at the age of fourteen months, he had drawn a recognizable circle with a pen. The scrap of paper place mat from Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on which he had drawn it was included in the envelope. It was wobbly and poorly closed off, but it was, as Rosa said in the letter, as round as a baseball. There was a single photograph of the child, in undershirt and diaper, holding himself up against a table on which some comic books lay scattered. His head was big and luminous and pale as the moon, his expression at once wondering and hostile, as if the camera frightened him.

Had Joe read the letters from Rosa as they arrived, with gaps of
weeks and months between them, he might have been deceived by the falsifying of the date of baby Thomas’s birth, but read all at once—as a kind of continuous narrative—the letters betrayed just enough inconsistency in their accounting of months and milestones that Joe became suspicious, and his initial stab of jealousy and his deep puzzlement over Rosa’s hasty marriage to Sammy gave way to a sad understanding. The letters were like fragments from a old-fashioned novel—they contained not only a mysterious birth and a questionable marriage, but a couple of deaths as well. In the spring of 1942, old Mrs. Kavalier had died, in her sleep, at the age of ninety-six. And then a letter from late summer of 1943, just after Joe’s arrival in Cuba, reported the fate of Tracy Bacon. The actor had joined the Army Air Forces shortly after completing the second Escapist serial,
The Escapist and the Axis of Death
, and had been shipped to the Solomon Islands. In early June, the Liberator bomber of which Bacon was the copilot had been shot down during a raid on Rabaul. At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy.
Hi buddy
was all it said.

Until now, Joe had told himself that he had buried his love for Rosa in the same deep hole in which he had laid his grief for his brother. She had been right: in the immediate aftermath of Thomas’s death, he had blamed her, not merely for having introduced him to Hermann Hoffman and his cursed ship but also more vaguely and more crucially for having lured him into betraying the singleness of purpose—the dogged cultivation of a pure and unshakable anger—that had marked his first year of exile from Prague. He had all but abandoned the fight, allowed his thoughts to stray fatally from the battle, betrayed himself to the seductions of New York and Hollywood and Rosa Saks—and been punished for it. Although his need—indeed, his ability—to blame Rosa for all this had passed with time, his renewed resolve and his craving for revenge, which grew in intensity as it was frustrated again and again by the inscrutable plans of the U.S. Navy, so filled his heart that he believed his love to have been completely extinguished, as a great fire can put out a smaller one by starving it of oxygen and fuel. Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was almost sick with longing for Mrs. Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn.

Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at
the World’s Fair, in which typical items of that time and place—some nylon stockings, a copy of
Gone with the Wind
, a Mickey Mouse drinking cup—had been buried in the ground, to be recovered and marveled at by the people of some future gleaming New York. Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him. The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered—he allowed himself to enjoy a final time—the stickiness and weight of her thigh thrown over his belly in the middle of a hot August night, her breath against the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartment on Fifth Avenue, the burble and glint of the
Trout
Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her cunt, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father’s house. He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him.

When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope. He went back to Wahoo Fleer’s typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk. Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed:

This time he could not think how to continue. He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much—indeed to revolve around him—could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all. The little boy’s name, and his serious, wide-eyed stare in the photograph, jabbed at some place inside Joe that was so broken and raw that he felt it as a kind of mortal danger to consider the child for very long. Since he did not plan to return alive,
one way or another, from the trip to Jotunheim, he told himself that the boy was much better off without him. He made up his mind then and there, sitting at the desk of the dead captain, that in the unlikely event his plan went awry and he should find himself somehow still living at war’s end, he would never have anything to do with any of them, but in particular with this sober and fortunate American boy. He pulled the letter out of the typewriter and folded it into an envelope on which he typed the words “In the event also of my death.” He laid his envelope under that in which Captain Fleer had made his final wishes known. He tied up the packet of letters and photographs from Rosa and fed them, in a single swallow, to Wayne. Then he picked up his sleeping bag and went out to the radio shack to see if he could tune in Radio Jotunheim.

S
HANNENHOUSE SPENT A MINUTE
considering the cloudless sky, the light wind from the southeast. They had had a weatherman, Brodie, but even when he had been alive, Shannenhouse had disdained his counsel, agreeing with his old friend Lincoln Ellsworth that no one could predict the weather in this place. As long as they could get the plane off the ground, they might as well go. He was complaining of bowel troubles, and Joe afterward said in his report that he noticed Shannenhouse looked a little pale, but attributed this to drink. They backed the tractor up to the ramp once again and hooked the plane to it. This time the winch performed correctly, and they got the plane up onto the surface. While Shannenhouse set to work heating the engines and readying the plane, Joe loaded on their gear. They closed up all the hatches on the buildings and took a look around at the place that had been their home for the last nine months.

“I will be glad to get out of here,” Shannenhouse said. “I just wish we were going someplace different.”

Joe went to the tip of the wing where Oyster was. In his haste, Shannenhouse had not done an especially good job, and the skin looked half-cured and hung a little loose and puckered over the frame. The entire airplane had a pied appearance, reddish-brown blotches of seal stitched against a background of silver-gray, as if it had been splashed with blood. Where the dog skins were, the plane looked bleached and sickly.

“Now or never, Dopey,” said Shannenhouse. He pressed a hand to his side.

Thirty seconds later, they were bumping and scraping over ground as jagged and shining as rock candy, and then something seemed to
cup its hand underneath and bear them up. Shannenhouse let out a cowboyish yip, a little shyly.

“Never going to know what hit him,” he shouted over the basso profundo chorusing of the big twin Cyclones.

Joe said nothing. He never told Shannenhouse that the night before, just before he lay down in his sleeping bag, he had broken the fictitious invisible barrier that had hitherto been maintained between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, transmitting the following six words to the Geologist, in German plaintext, at one of the frequencies regularly used by Berlin to contact him:

He could never have prized apart to explain it to Shannenhouse the elf-knot of pity, remorse, and a desire to torment and terrify that had prompted this admonishment. In any case, it would have been superfluous to try, since on the third day of their journey, in a tent pitched on a plateau in the lee of the Eternity Mountains, Shannenhouse’s appendix burst.

T
HE PIEBALD AIRPLANE
, off-kilter, coughing, trailing a long black thread from her port engine, hung in the sky for a moment a hundred feet west of Jotunheim, as if her pilot doubted his eyes, as if the glyph of huddled oblong mounds in the snow, the black barbell of the radio tower, and the ice-stiffened crimson flag with its spider eye were merely others in the long string of mirages, the phantom airplanes and fata morgana fairy castles, that had bewitched him in the course of his halting and baffled flight. He paid for his moment of hesitation: his remaining engine stalled. The plane dipped, jerked upward, wobbled, then fell, in silence and with surprising slowness, like a coin dropped into a jar of water. The plane hit the ground, and with a whisper, the snow exploded. A great hood of glittering spray, kicked up by the nose of the plane as it plowed along the ground, billowed and drifted across the clearing. The sounds of splintering timbers and steel bolts shearing away were caught up and muffled in the roiling surf of snow. The silence deepened, broken only by a soft teakettle ticking and the snap of fabric as a torn section of fuselage sheathing flapped in the wind.

A few moments later, a head appeared over the top of the rugged furrow of ice and snow that the crash landing had piled up alongside the airplane. It was hooded, the face concealed by a narrow circular ruff of wolverine fur.

The German Geologist, whose name was Klaus Mecklenburg, and who had been emerging from his solitary quarters to watch the skies over Jotunheim at regular intervals of twenty minutes, raised his left hand, the fingers of his reindeer-skin glove outspread. The greeting had a somewhat incongruous appearance since, in his other hand, pointed
loosely but generally in the direction of the pilot’s fur-trimmed head, he held a .45-caliber Walther service pistol. He had not slept at all in the five days since receiving the message that he had identified as originating from the American base in Marie Byrd Land, and had not slept well for nearly two months before that. He was drunk, jacked up on amphetamines, and suffering from the effects of a spastic colon. He kept the gun leveled at the man coming toward him over the ice, watching for other heads to appear, conscious of the tremor in his hand, aware that he might have time to get off only one or two shots before the others brought him down.

The American had halved the hundred meters that separated them before the Geologist began to wonder if he might not have been the only survivor of the crash. He came unsteadily, dragging his right leg behind him, the opening of his hood pointed straight ahead, as if without expectation of being followed or joined. He had pulled his arms down into his coat for warmth, and with the face invisible within the fur hole of the hood and the herky-jerk scarecrow gait, the sight of the sleeves flopping at the man’s sides unnerved the Geologist. It was as if he were being stalked by a parka filled with bones, the ghost of some failed expedition. The Geologist raised the gun, extending his arm, and aimed directly for the vapor emerging from the center of the hood. The American stopped, and his parka began to crumple and squirm as he struggled to get his arms out. He had just thrust his hands through the cuffs of his sleeves, extending his arms in a gesture of protest or supplication, when the first shot hit him at the shoulder and spun him around.