“I’m sorry I grew up so long after you,” I said. “Where’s that photo of you and Rickenbacker alone? And the one signed by von Richthofen.”
“You don’t want to see them, buster.”
“Like hell I don’t!”
He unfolded his wallet and gently held out the picture of the two of them, himself and Captain Eddie, and the single snap of von Richthofen in full uniform, and signed in ink below.
“All gone,” said Bill. “Most of ’em. Just one or two, and me left. And it won’t be long”—he paused—“before there’s not even me.”
And suddenly again, the tears began to come out of his eyes and roll down and off his nose.
I refilled his glass.
He drank it and said:
“The thing is, I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just afraid of dying and going to hell!”
“You’re not going there, Bill,” I said.
“Yes, I am!” he cried out, almost indignantly, eyes blazing, tears streaming around his gulping mouth. “For what I did, what I can never be forgiven for!”
I waited a moment. “What was that, Bill?” I asked quietly.
“All those young boys I killed, all those young men I destroyed, all those beautiful people I murdered.”
“You never did that, Bill,” I said.
“Yes! I did! In the sky, dammit, in the air over France, over Germany, so long ago, but Jesus, there they are every night now, alive again, flying, waving, yelling, laughing like boys, until I fire my guns between the propellers and their wings catch fire and spin down. Sometimes they wave to me, okay! as they fall. Sometimes they curse. But, Jesus, every night, every morning now, the last month, they never leave. Oh, those beautiful boys, those lovely young men, those fine faces, the great shining and loving eyes, and down they go. And I did it. And I’ll burn in hell for it!”
“You will not, I repeat not, burn in hell,” I said.
“Give me another drink and shut up,” said Bill. “What do you know about who burns and who doesn’t? Are you Catholic? No. Are you Baptist? Baptists burn more slowly. There. Thanks.”
I had filled his glass. He gave it a sip, the drink for his mouth meeting the stuff from his eyes.
“William.” I sat back and filled my own glass. “No one burns in hell for war. War’s that way.”
“We’ll all burn,” said Bill.
“Bill, at this very moment, in Germany, there’s a man your age, bothered with the same dreams, crying in his beer, remembering too much.”
“As well they should! They’ll burn, he’ll burn too, remembering my friends, the lovely boys who got themselves screwed into the ground when their propellers chewed the way. Don’t you see? They didn’t know. I didn’t know. No one told them, no one told us!”
“What?”
“What war was. Christ, we didn’t know it would come after us, find us, so late in time. We thought it was all over; that we had a way to forget, put it off, bury it. Our officers didn’t say. Maybe they just didn’t know. None of us did. No one guessed that one day, in old age, the graves would bust wide, and all those lovely faces come up, and the whole war with ’em! How could we guess that? How could we know? But now the time’s here, and the skies are full, and the ships just won’t come down, unless they burn. And the young men won’t stop waving at me at three in the morning unless I kill them all over again. Jesus Christ. It’s so terrible. It’s so sad. How do I save them? What do I do to go back and say, Christ, I’m sorry, it should never have happened, someone should have warned us when we were happy: war’s not just dying, it’s remembering and remembering late as well as soon. I wish them well. How do I say that, what’s the next move?”
“There is no move,” I said quietly. “Just sit here with a friend and have another drink. I can’t think of anything to do. I wish I could. . . .”
Bill fiddled with his glass, turning it round and round.
“Let me tell you, then,” he whispered. “Tonight, maybe tomorrow night’s the last time you’ll ever see me. Hear me out.”
He leaned forward, gazing up at the high ceiling and then out the window where storm clouds were being gathered by wind.
“They’ve been landing in our backyards, the last few nights. You wouldn’t have heard. Parachutes make sounds like kites, soft kind of whispers. The parachutes come down on our back lawns. Other nights, the bodies, without parachutes. The good nights are the quiet ones when you just hear the silk and the threads on the clouds. The bad ones are when you hear a hundred and eighty pounds of aviator hit the grass. Then you can’t sleep. Last night, a dozen things hit the bushes near my bedroom window. I looked up in the clouds tonight and they were full of planes and smoke. Can you make them stop? Do you believe me?”
“That’s the one thing; I do believe.”
He sighed, a deep sigh that released his soul.
“Thank God! But what do I do next?”
“Have you,” I asked, “tried talking to them? I mean,” I said, “have you asked for their forgiveness?”
“Would they listen? Would they forgive? My God,” he said. “Of course! Why not? Will you come with me? Your backyard. No trees for them to get strung up in. Christ, or on your porch. . . .”
“The porch, I think.”
I opened the living room French doors and stepped out. It was a calm evening with only touches of wind motioning the trees and changing the clouds.
Bill was behind me, a bit unsteady on his feet, a hopeful grin, part panic, on his face.
I looked at the sky and the rising moon.
“Nothing out here,” I said.
“Oh, Christ, yes, there is. Look,” he said. “No, wait. Listen.”
I stood turning white cold, wondering why I waited, and listened.
“Do we stand out in the middle of your garden, where they can see us? You don’t have to if you don’t want.”
“Hell,” I lied. “I’m not afraid.” I lifted my glass. “To the Lafayette Escadrille?” I said.
“No, no!” cried Bill, alarmed. “Not tonight. They mustn’t hear that. To them, Doug. Them.” He motioned his glass at the sky where the clouds flew over in squadrons and the moon was a round, white, tombstone world.
“To von Richthofen, and the beautiful sad young men.”
I repeated his words in a whisper.
And then we drank, lifting our empty glasses so the clouds and the moon and the silent sky could see.
“I’m ready,” said Bill, “if they want to come get me now. Better to die out here than go in and hear them landing every night and every night in their parachutes and no sleep until dawn when the last silk folds in on itself and the bottle’s empty. Stand right over there, son. That’s it. Just half in the shadow. Now.”
I moved back and we waited.
“What’ll I say to them?” he asked.
“God, Bill,” I said, “I don’t know. They’re not my friends.”
“They weren’t mine, either. More’s the pity. I thought they were the enemy. Christ, isn’t that a dumb stupid halfass word. The enemy! As if such a thing ever really happened in the world. Sure, maybe the bully that chased and beat you up in the schoolyard, or the guy who took your girl and laughed at you. But them, those beauties, up in the clouds on summer days or autumn afternoons? No, no!”
He moved farther out on the porch.
“All right,” he whispered. “Here I am.”
And he leaned way out, and opened his arms as if to embrace the night air.
“Come on! What you waiting for!”
He shut his eyes.
“Your turn,” he cried. “My God, you got to hear, you got to come. You beautiful bastards, here!”
And he tilted his head back as if to welcome a dark rain.
“Are they coming?” he whispered aside, eyes clenched.
“No.”
Bill lifted his old face into the air and stared upward, willing the clouds to shift and change and become something more than clouds.
??
?Damn it!” he cried, at last. “I killed you all. Forgive me or come kill me!” And a final angry burst. “Forgive me. I’m sorry!”
The force of his voice was enough to push me completely back into shadows. Maybe that did it. Maybe Bill, standing like a small statue in the middle of my garden, made the clouds shift and the wind blow south instead of north. We both heard, a long way off, an immense whisper.
“Yes!” cried Bill, and to me, aside, eyes shut, teeth clenched, “You hear!?”
We heard another sound, closer now, like great flowers or blossoms lifted off spring trees and run along the sky.
“There,” whispered Bill.
The clouds seemed to form a lid and make a vast silken shape which dropped in serene silence upon the land. It made a shadow that crossed the town and hid the houses and at last reached our garden and shadowed the grass and put out the light of the moon and then hid Bill from my sight.
“Yes! They’re coming,” cried Bill. “Feel them? One, two, a dozen! Oh, God, yes.”
And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots hitting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the grass like bodies, and the swarming of tapestries of white silk or smoke flung across the disturbed air.
“Bill!”
“No!” he yelled. “I’m okay! They’re all around. Get back! Yes!”
There was a tumult in the garden. The hedges shivered with propeller wind. The grass lay down its nap. A tin watering can blew across the yard. Birds were flung from trees. Dogs all around the block yelped. A siren, from another war, sounded ten miles away. A storm had arrived, and was that thunder or field artillery?
And one last time, I heard Bill say, almost quietly, “I didn’t know, oh, God, I didn’t know what I was doing.” And a final fading sound of “Please.”
And the rain fell briefly to mix with the tears on his face.
And the rain stopped and the wind was still.
“Well.” He wiped his eyes, and blew his nose on his big hankie, and looked at the hankie as if it were the map of France. “It’s time to go. Do you think I’ll get lost again?”
“If you do, come here.”
“Sure.” He moved across the lawn, his eyes clear. “How much do I owe you, Sigmund?”
“Only this,” I said.
I gave him a hug. He walked out to the street. I followed to watch.
When he got to the corner, he seemed to be confused. He turned to his right, then his left. I waited and then called gently:
“To your left, Bill.”
“God bless you, buster!” he said, and waved.
He turned and went into his house.
They found him a month later, wandering two miles from home. A month after that he was in the hospital, in France all the time now, and Rickenbacker in the bed to his right and von Richthofen in the cot to his left.
The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of ’18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes. And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.
Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can’t sleep and I stand looking at Bill and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a glass of sherry at them.
“Farewell, Lafayette,” I say. “Lafayette, farewell.”
And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.
REMEMBER SASCHA?
REMEMBER? WHY, HOW COULD THEY FORGET? Although they knew him for only a little while, years later his name would arise and they would smile or even laugh and reach out to hold hands, remembering.
Sascha. What a tender, witty comrade, what a sly, hidden individual, what a child of talent; teller of tales, bon vivant, late-night companion, ever-present illumination on foggy noons.
Sascha!
He, whom they had never seen, to whom they spoke often at three A.M. in their small bedroom, away from friends who might roll their eyeballs under their lids, doubting their sanity, hearing his name.
Well, then, who and what was Sascha, and where did they meet or perhaps only dream him, and who were they?
Quickly: they were Maggie and Douglas Spaulding and they lived by the loud sea and the warm sand and the rickety bridges over the almost dead canals of Venice, California. Though lacking money in the bank or Goodwill furniture in their tiny two-room apartment, they were incredibly happy. He was a writer, and she worked to support him while he finished the great American novel.
Their routine was: she would arrive home each night from downtown Los Angeles and he would have hamburgers waiting or they would walk down the beach to eat hot dogs, spend ten or twenty cents in the Penny Arcade, go home, make love, go to sleep, and repeat the whole wondrous routine the next night: hot dogs, Penny Arcade, love, sleep, work, etc. It was all glorious in that year of being very young and in love; therefore it would go on forever . . .
Until he appeared.
The nameless one. For then he had no name. He had threatened to arrive a few months after their marriage to destroy their economy and scare off the novel, but then he had melted away, leaving only his echo of a threat.
But now the true collision loomed.
One night over a ham omelet with a bottle of cheap red and the conversation loping quietly, leaning on the card table and promising each other grander and more ebullient futures, Maggie suddenly said, “I feel faint.”
“What?” said Douglas Spaulding.
“I’ve felt funny all day. And I was sick, a little bit, this morning.”
“Oh, my God.” He rose and came around the card table and took her head in his hands and pressed her brow against his side, and looked down at the beautiful part in her hair, suddenly smiling.
“Well, now,” he said, “don’t tell me that Sascha is back?”
“Sascha! Who’s that?”
“When he arrives, he’ll tell us.”
“Where did that name come from?”
“Don’t know. It’s been in my mind all year.”
“Sascha?” She pressed his hands to her cheeks, laughing. “Sascha!”
“Call the doctor tomorrow,” he said.
“The doctor says Sascha has moved in for light housekeeping,” she said over the phone the next day.
“Great!” He stopped. “I guess.” He considered their bank deposits. “No. First thoughts count. Great! When do we meet the Martian invader?”
“October. He’s infinitesimal now, tiny, I can barely hear his voice. But now that he has a name, I hear it. He promises to grow, if we take care.”
“The Fabulous Invalid! Shall I stock up on carrots, spinach, broccoli for what date?”
“Halloween.”
“Impossible!”
“True!”
“People will claim we planned him and my vampire book to arrive that week, things that go bump and cry in the night.”
“Oh, Sascha will surely do that! Happy?”
“Frightened, yes, but happy, Lord, yes. Come home, Mrs. Rabbit, and bring him along!”
It must be explained that Maggie and Douglas Spaulding were best described as crazed romantics. Long before the interior christening of Sascha, they, loving Laurel and Hardy, had called each other Stan and Ollie. The machines, the dustbusters and can openers around the apartment, had names, as did various parts of their anatomy, revealed to no one.
So Sascha, as an entity, a presence growing toward friendship, was not unusual. And when he actually began to speak up, they were not surprised. The gentle demands of their marriage, with love as currency instead of cash, made it inevitable.
Someday, they said, if they owned a car, it too would be named.
They spoke on that and a dozen score of things late at night. When hyperventilating about life, they propped themselves up on their pillows as if the fu
ture might happen right now. They waited, anticipating, in séance, for the silent small offspring to speak his first words before dawn.
“I love our lives,” said Maggie, lying there, “all the games. I hope it never stops. You’re not like other men, who drink beer and talk poker. Dear God, I wonder, how many other marriages play like us?”
“No one, nowhere. Remember?”
“What?”
He lay back to trace his memory on the ceiling.
“The day we were married—”
“Yes!”
“Our friends driving and dropping us off here and we walked down to the drugstore by the pier and bought a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, big bucks, for our honeymoon . . .? One red toothbrush, one green, to decorate our empty bathroom. And on the way back along the beach, holding hands, suddenly, behind us, two little girls and a boy followed us and sang:
“Happy marriage day to you,
Happy marriage day to you.
Happy marriage day, happy marriage day,
Happy marriage day to you . . .”
She sang it now, quietly. He chimed in, remembering how they had blushed with pleasure at the children’s voices, but walked on, feeling ridiculous but happy and wonderful.
“How did they guess? Did we look married?”
“It wasn’t our clothes! Our faces, don’t you think? Smiles that made our jaws ache. We were exploding. They got the concussion.”
“Those dear children. I can still hear their voices.”
“And so here we are, seventeen months later.” He put his arm around her and gazed at their future on the dark ceiling.
“‘And here I am,” a voice murmured.
“Who?” Douglas said.
“Me,” the voice whispered. “Sascha.”
Douglas looked down at his wife’s mouth, which had barely trembled.
“So, at last, you’ve decided to speak?” said Douglas.
“Yes,” came the whisper.