The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  Back in our new cinder-block house, sugar greed overcame shyness and I asked where the bucket of marshmallow creme was. My father furrowed his brow. Moe whispered in his ear. He said, “Oh,” then he told me the rope broke, but not to worry. That he had an even bigger treat in store. That evening, the big kids, me and Kit, were going to be allowed to go with him and Moe to the welcome-home tenth-anniversary-of-the-squadron party.

  When Bosco and the twins started crying about being left out, Fumiko rushed forward and promised that she’d make them candied tangerines while we were gone, and they quieted down. Then our father “roughhoused” with Kit and the twins until Buzz threw up and Moe said it was naptime and there would be no special evening at the club or candied tangerines for anyone who woke our father up.

  Kit, too old for naps, went out to find her friends. Because I was the oldest and quietest, I was allowed to read my Frank Yerby novel about a beautiful woman captured by a handsome pirate, while Bosco napped in the girls’ room with me. Fumiko left after Moe told her to take the rest of the day off, since she was going to baby-sit the little kids that night.

  After the twins sneaked out the window of the boys’ room, the house grew quiet and our father slept. As he slept, his smells—the primal male funk of cigar smoke, beer sweat, meat breath—staked out, claimed, and protected our house and in the heat and the happiness of our father being home, I slept too.

  I woke up to the sound of our parents fighting, Moe’s voice rising above my father’s. “I can’t believe you’re serious. I can’t believe what I’m hearing!”

  My father’s answer was a low bass rumble I couldn’t make out, but Moe’s was clear.

  “No, I am not going to drop it, Mace. Do you know what the one thing standing between me and insanity is when you and your buddies take off for God knows where for weeks at a time? Do you know whose hand I grab every time an officer in uniform comes anywhere near the house while you’re gone because I’m sure this is it, this is the time, the time you don’t come home? For God’s sake, Mace, there were ten crews in the squadron when we got here four years ago and yours is the last original one left. I couldn’t have lived through that without Fumiko.”

  There was another indecipherable male rumble; then Moe’s voice, teetering toward hysteria. “Fumiko is not just a goddamn maid. Fumiko is the person who stayed up all night with me when that idiot at the dispensary told me the abscess in the baby’s armpit was leukemia. Fumiko is the one who was with me when I got the news about Mama’s cancer. Fumiko saved my life when I was hemorrhaging to death. And maybe none of that means much to you, but it sure the hell does to me, buster. So, if effing LaRue Wingo is looking to fire someone, she can just fire that limp-dick husband of hers.”

  And then I heard my father’s voice. “Keep it up, Mohoric, just keep it up. You’re doing one colossal job of ruining my career here. Don’t, please, don’t consider that Limp Dick is my CO. And don’t spend a second of your precious time worrying that Limp Dick’s father-in-law roomed with Hap Arnold at the Point and is, at this very moment, over there in Hickam practically running PACAF, where one word from his precious daughter, LaRue, and his numbnuts son-in-law becomes squadron commander with ten crews under him reporting directly to Curtis LeMay. No, don’t even pause to consider that one word—one word—and I’m flying tractors out of Bumfuck, East Jesus. If I’m still flying at all. If they don’t make me a frigging ground pounder, in which case we’ll never be stationed anywhere ever again for longer than a year. Is that what you want? You want to be packing up and moving from one shithole to the next every year? Yanking the kids out of school? Leaving their friends? You think Bernadette is bad now, wait until she tries that routine for a few years.”

  Bernadette is bad now?

  “That what you want? Then keep it up, Mohoric, just keep it up, because that’s what you’re going to get.”

  “Mace, we can’t give in to LaRue. She’s a bully. We can’t let her win.”

  “Win? What do you know about winning? You’re not the one out there fighting. You’re not the one putting your ass on the line for eighteen hours at a time wondering when the hell it’s gonna get shot out of the sky.”

  My father’s voice turned urgent and quiet. I had to slip off of my bed without letting the springs squeak and sneak to the door to hear. “Listen, Moe, things happened out there. This last mission. Things happened.”

  “Which means you saved Wingo’s sorry ass again, doesn’t it? Why do you put up with it, Mace? You actually fly the g.d. plane and he gets all the glory.”

  “Look, we’re not going into details here, let’s just say Wingo’s putting the whole crew up for Distinguished Flying Crosses. So don’t shit that away for me. Please, can you do me that one little favor?”

  “She’s the one getting the favor.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Moe, LaRue’s back is to the wall. I can’t believe you don’t understand. That you’re not on her side. She doesn’t have a choice here. She’s got to end it. Shit, I wish he’d never sucked us into his little … Anyway, she’s looking for a way to end it, and either you give her that way or she’ll find one that ends my career too.”

  “Mace, I can’t fire Fumiko. Please.”

  “No please. I’m three short of getting my fifty in. Once I have fifty missions and a DFC, we’re home free. I’ll make field grade, no sweat. I’m on my way to Air Staff and Command College. We can stop living like this. Pay back the loans. Start putting some aside for the kids’ college. Have a good life.”

  “We have a good life, Mace.”

  “Case closed, Mohoric.” My father has used his official Air Force voice, like a robot’s. “As of this moment, consider Fumiko fired.”

  “Mace, you can’t—”

  “Zip it. Now hear this. Do not, repeat, do not say one more inflammatory word to the wife of your husband’s commanding officer. Do I make myself clear?”

  Moe didn’t answer.

  “Mohoric, do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said yes.”

  “Repeat after me: I will not utter one more word to LaRue Wingo.”

  Moe didn’t speak.

  My father yelled, “Say it!” and Bosco woke up screaming. I picked her up out of her crib, but she wanted Moe and only howled louder, her tongue a soft scoop trembling in the middle of her wide-open mouth. I held Bosco close and bounced on my bed to try and make her stop. Her wet diaper soaked my shirt and still Moe didn’t come.

  Finally, Moe yelled, “All right! Let go of me! The baby is crying, Mace. All right! I will not utter one more word to LaRue Wingo.”

  When Moe came in and took Bosco out of my arms, her face was white and her lips twitched against the tight seam of her mouth, like it was sewn together and she was trying to pull it apart. She snuggled Bosco up between her shoulder and cheek and clung to her as if the baby were the one comforting the mother.

  Neither of my parents spoke on the drive to the club that night. In the chilly silence between them my father worked to make Kit and me laugh. He called us his dates and teased us about going out when we were in third and fourth grade. Kit giggled and I ached to join in their silly jokes, but that would be betraying both Moe, who stared stiffly out the window, and Fumiko, whom we’d left back at the new house not knowing she was going to be fired.

  Banners proclaiming WELCOME HOME BOYS!! and 3081ST: TEN YEARS OF VALOR hung across the ceiling of the Samurai Ballroom. Hundreds of tissue-paper flowers in maroon and silver, the squadron colors, fruit of the wives’ long hours at the club, decorated an arched entranceway that Kit and I passed through, following our parents. Strings of lanterns gave the windowless room the feel of an outdoor festival. All ten of the crews from the 3081ST Reconnaissance Squadron were there. I recalled Moe’s words and realized that all the men except for my father’s crew were replacements for fliers who had died.

  That night there was steak on everyone’s plate. F
or the ladies—for Moe, for me, for Kit—there were filet mignons wrapped in bacon. “The guys” and their sons all had T-bones. LaRue and the wives who’d huddled around her for the past three weeks had planned out the menu right down to the red ring of spiced apple decorating every plate and the Baked Alaska for dessert.

  Moe sat between Kit and me. The petticoats that Fumiko had starched with sugar water crackled as I nestled my folded hands down into the cloud of the skirt of my dress. Our father’s chair was pulled away from the table just as all the other crew members’ chairs were pulled away and turned around so that the men formed an inner circle with their families orbiting around it.

  The Wingos were at the head table. Everything about LaRue that night was too big: big eyes with Cleopatra liner, big mouth with lipstick going outside its boundaries like I Love Lucy, big hoop earrings, big loud voice. She wore a cape that tied at the neck and had a collar that stood up behind her head like the one the wicked queen in Snow White had worn. Madge Coulter sat on her left side, Denise Dugan on her right. Lisa Wingo left their table, came over to ours, grabbed Kit’s hand, and pulled her away without even a glance in my direction. I watched longingly as they disappeared, headed for the secret place where cute well-liked little girls went to have fun.

  That night, however, I wasn’t the only one left out. The families exerted a weak and diffuse gravity over all the fathers in the squadron. But our father’s crew, the Bong Bunnies, the squadron commander’s crew, the only one left with its original men, was the most tightly tethered to one another. Patsy Dugan would lift his head on one side of the room and Dub Coulter on the other would look up. After a few perfunctory bites of their meals, they all gravitated toward one another, gathering at the rattan bar where Riki, the barman, poured them with a heavy hand. They laughed into each other’s faces and finished jokes someone else started. That night, they were gleaming brothers, each one equally loved.

  At the time, I thought this golden state they shared had to do with being a man, with growing up. But it didn’t. It was the secret they shared. The ground pounders didn’t know, would never know, exactly what they had done while they were in the sky for eighteen hours, but they knew. Only they knew that their families and all the families of America were safe that night because they had put their lives on the line and won. For that day, that mission, they had saved democracy. No other crew could have done it, none ever in the history of man. The golden light they were bathed in that made them look like heroes came from the simple fact that they were heroes.

  “Here, baby. Could you get me a refill?”

  Because she refused to step one foot closer to LaRue, Moe handed me her glass for another one of the White Russians she was relying on to get her through this evening. Not even my father noticed me when I slipped in behind him and his crewmates at the bar.

  Their conversation that night comes back to me like the lyrics to a song recorded at 33? and played at 78. Slowed down now to its proper speed, phrases that had zipped past me then return as I sit in the Yokota Officers’ Club and empty a can of spray onto my hair, trying to achieve a hairstyle Bobby Moses will consider classy.

  That engine shroud blew and that was it. We were buying the farm.

  The farm? Amigo, we were buying the whole frigging county.

  When Wingo got on the squawk box and Command goes: Complete the mission, I tell you Baby Boy here needed hisself a whole new change of underwear.

  So that’s what I smelled.

  The Titanic. It was the frigging Titanic all over. Eighteen hours knowing there’s not a snowball’s chance at the other end.

  Stooging around up there with MiGs coming up our ass.

  And fucking Dugan telling us he ain’t getting the goddamned frequencies.

  Fucking Harvard spark jumpers. What’d they want? We invite Ivan in for tea?

  Did I get them, though?

  You? Man, you wrote down the numbers. Root got them.

  Yeah, I wondered what the hell you were doing stuffing all them empties into that wheel well.

  But, Christ, when you dumped those Falstaff cans, they must have thought the whole Ninth Bombardment Wing was coming in at them.

  Scope fucking lit up like a fucking pinball machine. They turned on everything they had.

  And we got ’em all. If there’s a frequency they didn’t use it’s ’cause they don’t got it.

  Jesus, that landing.

  Hot? That bucket was rattling. Amped? That bird didn’t know she could rev that high. Wild Root up there yelling at him to horse back on the throttle.

  Wild Root, where the hell are you? Get your hands out of Moe’s pants and get your ass over here. Root, you poot, how long you gonna pretend you’re a copilot? To Captain Mason Root, the hottest rock in the wild blue. I’m drinking to your DFC right now. Ain’t no way they don’t pin one them babies on you. To Root!

  To Root!

  Clink.

  Don’t fly in my sky!

  Don’t fly in my sky!

  Clink.

  The men hoisted glasses. Blue cigar smoke twined around and knotted them even closer together. Only Major Wingo was not tied into their charmed circle. I grabbed Moe’s drink and hurried back to our table.

  Perched on one of the faded pink velvet vanity chairs in the officers’ club, I spray the beehive hairdo that Bobby favors with so much lacquer that my hand turns cold from the propellants. I put the can down and replay the moment of the crew toasting, crowded against each other like players in a huddle, and remember then how Major Wingo was squeezed out. How his men had subtly turned from him and toward my father.

  As I outline my eyes with a pencil, I picture LaRue, surrounded by her handmaidens, raising her head and calling her husband to her. I recall how Coney Wingo left the men who were turning away from him and went over to his wife’s table. How LaRue whispered in her husband’s ear, then raised her finger and pointed in my direction. How her husband had stared at me, nodded slowly, then walked briskly over to break up the charmed circle around my father, so much like the circle of girls that always surrounded Kit, then pulled him away for a private talk that drained the joy from his expression. Remembering how my father had left Major Wingo and marched grim-faced to our table, coming directly toward me, I understand at last that in the Yokota Officers’ Club pool dressing room all those years ago, surrounded by those little girls, I had been heard after all.

  Though I hadn’t, couldn’t have, known at the time about Fumiko and Major Wingo, LaRue very clearly did, so that when Lisa repeated the crazy thing Kit Root’s sister had said in the dressing room, LaRue had known instantly where this deeply classified information had originated.

  As I realize for the first time how I’d handed Fumiko to LaRue Wingo on a platter, I blink and almost poke myself in the eye with the mascara wand. The pink velvet bathroom seems to fade even further as I realize that it was me. That with the smell of chlorine and Coppertone filling my head, I was the one who told. That everything that happened after that happened because of me.

  After my father walked away from Major Wingo, he came to our table and spoke in a low, pressured voice. “Bernadette Marie, come here. I need to speak to you.”

  Moe stood up and faced him.

  “Don’t stick your nose in this, Mohoric. This is OSI territory.”

  “Uh-uh, this is my territory. I will not allow you to badger my child. Whatever LaRue and Coney’s problems are, I’m not letting them take them out on Bernie. It’s not right, Mace, you know it’s not right.”

  My father glanced around. Everyone pretended they weren’t paying attention. He clamped his hand around Moe’s elbow and pulled her a bit farther away so that only I could hear.

  “Right. Wrong. That doesn’t matter with OSI. This was a black assignment. No one knows anything. No one tells anything. One slip. One near slip and you’re gone. You know that. It’s what you signed on for.”

  “I never signed on to have some bitch run my life and torture my children.”
<
br />   “Bernadette Marie, get your butt over here.”

  Everyone was staring at us. Their gazes paralyzed my legs and tightened my stomach into a hard knot.

  “Leave her alone, Mace.”

  “Shut up, Mohoric, you have no idea what you’re dragging me into. I am about two minutes away from getting hung out to dry.”

  “Quit kidding yourself, Mace. Wingo is going to hang you out to dry whether you torment our child or not.”

  “Wingo and I have an understanding. Bernadette, come here.”

  Though I didn’t understand at the time why my father was so mad, as I tried to stand my twitchy tummy got the best of me and I vomited what I’d eaten of my dinner.

  “I hope you’re happy now,” Moe said to my father as she pulled me out of my seat and dragged me off to the ladies’ room.

  When we returned, the band, sitting behind rattan-covered stands decorated with large black metal musical notes, was playing “That Old Black Magic.” The muscles of Moe’s jaw bunched spasmodically as she stared straight ahead and we walked back to our table. Her face was blanched white except for two bright welts of crimson flaming on her throat. She chewed her bottom lip and then tilted her head upward a fraction of an inch, as if trying to drain the tears that glistened in her eyes back into her head.

  “Officers, may we have your attention, please.” Madge Coulter’s tremulous voice was lost in a shriek of feedback. The bandleader rushed over to tilt the microphone. She started again.

  “Officers, may we have your attention, please.”

  From her table near the stage, LaRue gestured at the roll of paper in Madge’s hand and Mrs. Coulter unfurled the tightly wound scroll. It had been dipped in tea and its edges charred to make it appear ancient.

  “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. Whereas the men of the Thirty-eighty-first Reconnaissance Squadron have been proclaimed the hottest rocks in the Fifth Wing”—all the men from all ten crews cheered—“and whereas the Bong Bunnies have been deemed the studliest of them all—”