“Dana?” she said softly in the darkness.
He didn’t start. He had already felt her presence, felt her standing there watching him, worrying about him. Somewhere along Second Avenue a taxi honked its horn. Somewhere in the courtyard that separated his boxy monolithic apartment building from its boxy monolithic neighbor one block north, someone was playing a radio. Or perhaps it was the noisy jukebox in the bar on Second Avenue, where Dana sometimes stopped to get a drink on the way home from his job as an advertising copywriter.
“Dana, dear, would you like some warm milk?”
Dana Darby shook his head.
“Come to bed, then. We’ll get everything worked out with the architect. I told you, it’s not worth losing sleep over.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the new house.” he said.
Ramona Darby knew not to ask. She knew that her husband rarely shared his war memories with anyone, even the person he was closest to in the world. They were too painful. Dana was generally good at keeping them at bay during the daytime. It was during the quiet, empty hours of the night that they crept back in the form of dark, intrusive recollection, or returned in full assault in the form of brutal dreams.
Bataan. The death march. The camps.
Dana Darby liked to pull a chair up to the window in his kitchen and stare out into the night, to behold the twinkling, geometric cityscape of Upper Eastside Manhattan, its steel and masonry little resembling the Philippine jungle of his nightmares. He liked to remember that in large American cities like New York, crime is generally an isolated act of selfishness perpetrated for want of money or the need for illegal drugs. Or it is an expression of jealous rage or interpersonal rivalry. If there is an element of inhumanity to it, it is nothing compared to that which Dana had seen and experienced first hand on the Bataan Peninsula. What happened to his fellow POWs, to the interned Jews of Europe, to all the victims of that war only recently ended left him with a gaping wound in his soul that would not heal. That man was capable of such unconscionable acts against other men. Against women. Against defenseless children. It was difficult even to contemplate.
“I want you to come to the bedroom. I want to show you the colors I was thinking of for the new house.”
Dana rose heavily from his chair. He closed the window. “You’re already picking out colors? They haven’t even laid the foundation yet.”
“You know I like to plan ahead. Come sit with me.” Ramona took her husband’s hand and led him to the bedroom. She often mothered him. He never complained. On nights like these, nothing mattered. Ramona could do or say whatever she liked, and she often did, to coax from Dana something that resembled a smile.
Tonight Ramona went over the colors for the paint and shared with her husband some ideas she had for wallpaper. She did this in a variety of funny voices. She succeeded in making Dana laugh in spite of himself. And then she put everything away and tucked him into bed, reminding him that he needed his rest. Dana was supposed to get up early the next morning to drive up to the five pristine acres he and his wife had just purchased a few months before—acres that, thanks to post-war inflation, had cost them twice what they had intended to spend. Tomorrow was the day that the drilling company was supposed to come. They were going to dig the Darbys a well.
Dana and Ramona knew that after years in the city, it was time for them to move out, to situate themselves in the peaceful Connecticut countryside. Where the nights were long and quiet. Deathly quiet.
Oh how Dana was looking forward to that.
Dana didn’t reach the property until midmorning. The drilling operation had been in full swing for at least two hours. There were friendly waves from the father and son and the other two men who were involved in the laborious business of extracting water from the hard rock that lay beneath Dana’s property. The men couldn’t be interrupted at the moment; the early part of the operation was the most critical and labor intensive. A great hole had first to be dug. Once the digging was completed, the men had to jack the drill up, secure it and level it. Dana watched as the son began to set up an onsite blacksmith shop, complete with anvil and bellow, sledge, coke pile, and water quench. The young man found a nice shady spot under a couple of tall elms. Dana thought this might be a good time to introduce himself. From a distance, the four men were a blur of hats and heaving shoulders and active hands. He’d hoped it wouldn’t take weeks to find water, but odds were they’d be on a first-name basis by the time the well was completed, and Dana was nothing if not a friendly employer.
The son had stopped his work in the makeshift forge to watch as his father and the other two men guided the five-hundred-pound drill bit into place. Both he and Dana stood silently, observing the twisted steel cable being threaded through the pulley of the rig’s tower, and then being looped under a pulley in the walking beam, and finally pulled back to a drum from which it could be released foot by foot into the deepening hole. A few minutes later the young man turned to Dana, pushed back the brim of his hat, and wiped his right hand on his overalls. He walked over and, smiling amiably, reached out to shake Dana’s hand.
Dana shook it, even as all of the color left his face. He looked into the cheerful countenance of the driller’s son, into his dark brown eyes, the skin slightly creased below. He took in the hard jawline, the recessed cheeks, a shock of dirty blond hair escaping from beneath the hat. The man, whose name Dana knew to be Larry Anders Jr. was a perfect replica of a young man whom Dana had known seven years earlier. Like Dana, the man had worked with the 27th Materials Squadron at Nichols Field—a pursuit and operations base—on Luzon in the Philippines. He was a flight mechanic, Dana a crew chief. Within weeks the two men were moved to the Bataan Air Base and then in April, 1942, were surrendered along with 75,000 other Americans and Filipinos to the invading Japanese forces. The young man was his friend. Was his best friend.
“Are you all right?” asked Larry.
“Yeah—I’m—you look like somebody.”
“I get that sometimes. That actor, right? Who does the Pete Smith ‘Specialities’? He was also in that crazy—that Reefer Madness. He was the dope fiend who kept yelling—now what was it he kept yelling?”
Dana interrupted: “No, I mean in the war. A guy I knew in the war.”
“Where’d you serve?”
Dana was getting lightheaded. He backed himself into a folding chair and sat down. “I was in Bataan,” he said softly.
“That’s a long way from where Uncle Sam put me. I was over in France for most of the—you want I should get you something to drink?”
Dana shook his head. “Just let me sit here for a second.”
Larry squatted in front of Dana. “I look that much like him?”
Dana nodded. He swallowed. He didn’t feel well. Brett Freuer. Incarnate. Resurrected. The resemblance was more than uncanny. Even the voice was similar; it had a slight drawl. Brett grew up in Arizona. Dana wondered if Larry and his dad were also from the Southwest.
Dana felt like an idiot. He felt like a little old lady with the vapors. For Christ’s sake, he’d survived the Bataan Death March and then spent over three years in dehumanizing captivity. Brett didn’t even survive the march. A lot of men didn’t. There was no rhyme or reason to which men would crap out, would succumb to the lack of food and water, to tropical disease, to the murderous whims of their Japanese captors. Or was there something in his mettle, in his desire to survive that gave Dana the advantage? And if so, where was that fortitude today?
Dana spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the loud drone of the rig’s motor, watching the walking beam rise and fall as the cable went from taut to slack each time the bit hit the bottom of the deepening hole. He rescued himself from the Bataan Peninsula ten, twenty, fifty times that afternoon and put himself in the here and now of rural southwestern Connecticut, upon his five pristine acres, in the presence of the men who were drilling for the water that would allow him and his wife to escape the heat and congestion of the city and live
a cooler, quieter, less chaotic life. And yet Dana’s gaze repeatedly returned to his dead friend’s twenty-something-year-old doppelganger.
Dana left before any of the men in the drilling outfit did. But he didn’t go home, didn’t drive right back down the turnpike to the City. He found a neighborhood tavern in nearby New Canaan, a place where he could get a beer before all the thirsty working stiffs from the area filed in, hot and tired from their long day of manual employment. Dana sat in the friendly watering hole nursing his pint, popping peanuts into his mouth, listening to a couple of regulars discussing the at-bat pyrotechnics of Musial and Williams and Kiner and Mize.
He didn’t even notice when the Anders, both father and son, entered the place and slid into a booth. Was totally oblivious to their presence until Larry Jr. excused himself from his father and claimed the stool next to him.
“Play it faster! Play it faster!”
Dana turned.
Larry was grinning. “That’s what the character says in that crazy marijuana flick, Reefer Madness. He’s yelling it to some girl playing the piano. I guess when you’re hyped up on reefer, you want your music hyped up too.” Larry signaled the bartender for his usual and then said to Dana, “That friend of yours you mentioned earlier—he’s dead?”
Dana nodded.
“Christ. Sorry. He was your best buddy, right?”
“He saved my life.”
“You mind telling me how?”
“I—um.”
“Sure. Sure. Okay.”
The two men sat quietly. Then Dana said, “How much are you and your dad going to cost me when all of this is said and done?”
“Depends on whether we have to go below three hundred feet. Three hundred feet, the price takes a big jump. But you probably already knew this.”
Dana nodded. Yes, he knew.
Dana had three beers. He was a little fuzz-brained from having skipped lunch. “You want that I should drive you to the train station?” Larry asked. “You can pick up your car tomorrow or the next day. I know the owner of this bar. He’ll let you keep it parked out back if you like.”
“No. I think I’ll be all right.”
Larry walked Dana out to his car. He put him behind the wheel. Then he said, “Don’t move. I’ll get you some coffee. We’ll have a little coffee until you feel sharp enough to head home.”
Dana was about to decline. Something stopped him. Something in Larry’s solicitous look. Something in his concerned voice.
The two men sat drinking coffee as darkness began to settle in.
“You had to keep moving,” said Dana without preamble. He was looking straight ahead, staring at the middle distance and seeing nothing but the jungle. “You fall down, you go for water to slake your thirst, you slip off to take a crap, they shoot you, or slice your throat open. Those of us who couldn’t keep up, who moved a little too slow got picked off by the buzzard squads. I didn’t have a helmet. The sun was burning my brain. Brett was next to me—we’d been right next to each other the whole time. Brett was from Tucson. He said he was used to the heat. Me, from Jersey, the sun was going to be my death. He watched me fading. I started stumbling, my legs pretzeling up. He gave me his helmet. He didn’t need the helmet, he said. He was from Tucson. I revived. Brett revived me, kept me moving forward. The last two days we’re walking like the dead—one foot in front of the other. Little food, little water, but there’s something that keeps me going. It’s how much Brett wants me to keep going. In the midst of all the death, I represent life to him and he represents life to me.
“We get to San Fernando and they put us into boxcars. And we’re packed so tight in there we can’t sit down. We’re in that boxcar from early in the morning until late that afternoon. Pushed up together like—I’ve got nothing to compare it to. You stop thinking at a time like that. Your brain just shuts down. It gets taken over by a practical need to survive, to keep taking in each new breath. I’m pushed against Brett. Pushed up so close I can feel his heart beating against my back. We’re all just organs and bones at this point—came into this march already half starved to death after those last grueling weeks in Bataan. I can feel his heart. The heart of the man who saved my life.
“And then…” Dana stopped and took a deep breath, willing himself to finish the story. “And then I don’t. Just like that, Brett’s dead. He’s a standing corpse. One of many. But I don’t think about the others. I’ve seen death fifty times over. I think only of Brett. How he did something for me to keep me alive, but I couldn’t do anything for him. I just stood there and let him die.”
Dana swallowed the last of his coffee from the cardboard cup, shook his head.
“Just let him die.”
Dana grew silent as Larry stared out the window, thinking. Then Dana tried to say something. He struggled to form the words. He was like a stuttering boy unable to get even the first syllable out of his mouth. Finally, it came: “Are you Brett?”
Larry didn’t answer for a long moment. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do, he nodded.
“Where you been, Brett?”
“Been away.”
“How you doing, Brett?”
“Doing good, Dana. Doing good.”
In the darkness Dana wept. He leaned his head toward Larry. He put his right ear against Larry’s chest. “I can hear your heartbeat.”
Larry laid his hand upon Dana’s convulsing head.
“Do you forgive me?” asked Dana, his voice slightly muffled against the fabric of Larry’s work shirt.
“Ain’t nothing to forgive, pal. But if that’s what you want—”
“It’s what I want.”
“Then I forgive you. Let it go, buddy. Let it all go.”
Tears moistened Larry’s eyes. He’d also seen men die. Men who were his friends.
Larry kept his hand on Dana’s head until it was time to send him home.
A week later, at a depth of one hundred and forty feet, Larry Jr. and his dad hit an artesian vein with good pressure and a great flow.
1949
BALL CHANGING IN MISSISSIPPI
It was one of the middle Saturdays of the month—I can’t remember which one—that my mother, just as she did every Saturday, dropped me off at the Dixie Theatre at Broadway and Main to compete in our local radio station’s weekly Kiddie Talent Show. The contest took place during the hour just before the start of the Saturday morning matinee, up on the theatre’s stage. The broadcast went out all over Yazoo County. Each of the contestants who participated got a complimentary ticket to that day’s movie bill (which usually included a cowboy double feature, one chapter of an adventure serial, and a Disney cartoon).
But there was something different about this particular Saturday, which is the reason that it has always remained so clear and fixed in my head. Let me just start off by saying, simply: a few things happened. I’ll tell you one of them right off the bat: Carthy McCharlie fell into the orchestra pit.
Now, it wasn’t a real orchestra pit. It was just a narrow recessed space between the first row of seats in the picture show auditorium and the raised lip of the stage. And a good third of that pit was filled up with Mrs. Vonda Taliaferro’s upright piano. It had been put on cement blocks so Mrs. Taliaferro could better see the stage from atop her sheet music. Not that Mrs. Taliaferro was one to ever use sheet music. She played all of her songs by ear and sometimes she would inadvertently change key in the middle and you’d have to make the necessary adjustments if you were singing along with her or else you’d end up sounding hopelessly off-key.
Tilted at a jaunty angle upon Mrs. Vonda Taliaferro’s curly bob was a perky moss-green straw hat. It was flat on the top and had hardly any brim at all. It looked—as did all of Mrs. Taliaferro’s millinery confections—fairly ridiculous. But to the little undiscerning girl I once was, it was quite charming. Unfortunately, Mrs. Taliaferro’s special Kiddie Talent Show hat rarely stayed on her head for the whole show. It had a habit of flying right off
whenever she was required to play a lively Broadway show tune or a dramatic march that involved some measure of bodily attack upon the keys.
Maryanne and Piddy and I didn’t have to worry about Mrs. Taliaferro’s adventures in the wilderness of piano key changes. Because we were dancers. We tapped as a trio, Maryanne and Piddy and I, and we made our teachers, Hiram and Helene Odell of Hiram and Helene’s School of Dance and Loveliness, punch-proud.
The competition was stiff that Saturday. There was a little girl named Sue Ann McGeorge—also a student of Hiram and Helene’s. She was their star pupil, in fact, and could generally be expected to tap rings around all the rest of us. If I’m remembering correctly, this particular Saturday, she sang and danced to “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me,” ending her routine with her usual audience-pleasing leg-split. Several months later, when the whole country was humming songs from South Pacific, Sue Ann would dance to “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair,” and she’d trade her signature sequined top hat for a sequined bathing cap.
There was another girl a little older than us whose name was Geneva Abdoo. Geneva sang “Aloha ’Oe” while doing a hula dance. You couldn’t take your eyes off of Geneva. You see, she was exotic. She was half Italian and half Lebanese—part of the large Lebanese and Syrian community in town. Geneva had coal-black hair, rich olive skin, and big black eyes. She wore a grass skirt and a man’s floral Hawaiian shirt that she tied off just north of her belly button to show a little of her olive-toned midriff. Her undulating arms helped to tell the story she was singing.
Anyway, Carthy McCharlie was the name that Johnny Humphries gave his dummy, who was, as you can probably guess, the department-store version of Mr. Bergen’s monocled, tuxedo-wearing sidekick. Johnny was a fourth grader, and as far as we second graders were concerned, old enough to go off and join the army or father children or something. Fourth graders didn’t stoop to talk to second graders unless they were related to them, and that’s why I didn’t say anything to Johnny when he set that dummy on the chair in a way that looked dangerously tottery while he ran off to get the glass of milk his mama was holding for him just offstage. Johnny brought out the glass of milk to show that he could drink it while Carthy kept talking, although sometimes he would get so nervous that he’d forget just who was supposed to drink the milk, and end up pouring it down Carthy’s shirtfront.