Spitfire

by Evan Balkan

  He kissed Caroline’s head. “Our little secret, okay?” he said, winking at her.

  She nodded. “Wait. How can I hide this?”

  “Who said anything about hiding? You can show it to your mother. But we say it was a giveaway, part of a promotion. She’s liable to kill me if you tell her I paid for it. Now, I don’t like lying to your mother, but sometimes—”

  “I understand.”

  Why couldn’t these stupid boys at the pond be like her dad, or that player from the Clippers? Why did they have to be so rotten? Why did they have to remind her of Carlin’s, of the place now too painful to return to without her dad?

  When she got back home, her mom was there to meet her, and she was angry. “Where were you?”

  “I had to return a school book to Alma.”

  Mrs. Panski scrutinized her daughter. “Why do you have your skates and stick with you?”

  Caroline paused. She could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks. Lying was not something that came easily. “Alma wanted to see them. She’s thinking of taking up skating so she can play with me.”

  “You were supposed to be helping your brother.”

  “He can help himself.”

  “Caroline! I asked for your help. I expect to receive it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Caroline muttered.

  “What’s the matter with you? You look like someone’s stolen your heart.”

  Caroline considered telling her mother what happened, but thought better of it. She’d have to reveal that she’d already lied and, besides, how would her mother ever understand anyway? There was no one in the world, she figured, who could really understand. Besides her dad, that is. But he was on the other side of the world.

  She felt a burn coming to her eyes and throat, but she managed to swallow it all back. “Nothing’s wrong,” she whispered.

  Caroline trudged up the stairs, heavy-footed. She closed herself in her room, taking the photograph of her father, plopping herself down on her bed, and cradling it to her chest. Small tears leaked from her eyes and trailed down into her hair. It wasn’t so long ago that he sat just here, at the very end of her bed, his hands tight, his fingers interlocked and held between his knees, as he tried his best to explain to her why he was heading off to war.

  She could tell he was having trouble. The way he kept stopping his sentences, starting them over and over again, searching for the perfect words to say, to fully explain.

  “There are communists, you see, and they—”

  “What are communists?”

  “Communists are really bad people. They don’t believe in God, you see, and . . .”

  “But you told me you don’t believe in God.”

  “Well, now, that’s not exactly what I said. What I said was that I don’t believe in organized religion, which isn’t the same thing. And in any case, you know your mother doesn’t like it when we talk about that, and so, anyway … what were we talking about?”

  “Communists.”

  “Yes, communists. You see, they starve their own people. They don’t believe in freedom or democracy. They’re bad people. And we’re locked in a fight with them over who is going to control the world. Well, no, that’s not it. You see, they want to control the world. We want to make it safe for freedom. For democracy. So that everyone around the world can have the same opportunities that you have here. In communist countries, well, people don’t get to do what they want to do. Do you understand that?”

  “I guess I do. You mean like I want to play hockey, but kids in communist countries don’t get to.”

  “Well, it’s sort of like that. I mean, you can skate, hit around some pucks, sure. But when you get older, it’s time to put that silly stuff aside, become some fine fellow’s wife and then become some lucky kid’s mother. Everything frivolous comes to an end.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you’ll understand it better when you’re a bit older.”

  “I hate when you and Mama say that.”

  Her father smiled, tousled her hair, and continued. “Part of what it means to be an American is that sometimes you have to sacrifice for other people. People less fortunate. So, you see, sometimes men like me have to go to faraway places to help make the world safer not only for children there but for those just like you, here at home.”

  “Genevieve’s father isn’t going to the war because he has children. She said that married men with children don’t have to go to the war.”

  “Well, that’s true. But you see, if I go and serve, it’ll be good for our family. It’ll provide some stability. I don’t know if I’ll always have the job I have now or even if the plant will always be there. But I’ll always have a place in the American military. It’s not going anywhere.”

  Caroline frowned. “Yeah, but you’re going somewhere.”

  “It’ll be okay, sweetheart. I promise. I’ll go for one year, maybe even less if the war ends before then. It’ll go quicker than you think. And then I’ll be back home.”

  “And we’ll have a parade?”

  “Maybe. Maybe we’ll have a parade. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t need a parade. Do you know what I need?”

  “No.”

  “Just this.”

  He reached down as if he was about to hug her, and so Caroline lifted her arms. But he stuck his pointed fingers in her armpits instead and tickled her until she couldn’t breathe and begged him to stop, even though she was laughing and smiling. He always knew how to make her laugh. And how to make her smile.

  The photograph of her dad slipped from Caroline’s fingers. And there it rested, against her side, as she nodded off into an exhausted sleep. But just as quickly, she snapped her head back up, determined to stay awake. She knew that thinking too much about her father just before she went to sleep was a bad idea, that it often induced the dreams. Sometimes they weren’t full dreams with beginnings, middles, and ends. Rather they were just flashes, images here and there, products of an overheated imagination. Other times, the dreams were cobbled together from snatches of radio reports she’d heard and from her father’s letters to her mom.

  Caroline and Sam received their own letters about once a month, but they were full of questions about what they were doing, how school was going, were they keeping up with their studies, what new things were happening in Baltimore. Caroline dutifully wrote back and answered these questions, but she also asked a bunch of questions of her own. She wanted to know what life was really like over there. But he never seemed to answer, except to say that the soldiers didn’t do much, just sat around mostly, talking to one another and trying to stay warm. Caroline suspected that maybe he wrote about these things in the letters to her mother, and maybe this was why Caroline was not allowed to read them.

  One time she found one of the letters and read as much of it as she could before she heard her mom coming and had to throw it back on the dresser in her mother’s bedroom, where she knew she shouldn’t have been snooping in the first place. She managed to read:

  I spend a lot of time in my foxhole, just scanning the horizon, waiting for the enemy. But honestly the biggest enemy is boredom. You can only get so much mileage out of those crazy signs the Chinese army left behind before we routed them out. Here are some examples (for your reading pleasure):

  “Wait no longer. Hasten to take active measure for peace,” “Frontline friendship party was to bring about the positive action for peace,” “Think that you don’t strive for peace will result in death!”

  Isn’t that bizarre, Eloise? Really, nothing happens (which I suppose is a good thing). Though the C.O.s are always warning us—“Can happen any minute,” they say. “Chinese have fighter jets,” they remind us. The younger guys say, “Bring it on.” Out of earshot, of course.

  I’ve written to you about Lundeberg and Wysocki, yes? They’re my closest mates. Lundeberg is the sweetest guy. Would give you the shirt off his back. One thing, though, ki
nd of drives me nuts. He repeats himself. Man, does he repeat himself. Probably ten times he’s told me about his basic training in Baltimore. All about Camp Holabird and Tank Hill. Tells me again how much he loved the Bay and seeing the views over the hills toward Canton and into the Patapsco.

  You know this, my dear, even with weak binoculars, you can see every brick on Fort McHenry. It is true, Eloise, it is a beautiful place. And I miss it. When Lundeberg gets to talking about it, I do have to admit it. I smile, tell him, indeed, Baltimore is the “Land of Pleasant Living.”

  But sometimes, well, I’ll admit this, too. Sometimes it just hurts far too much to hear. You know? Gets me thinking of the day I left. Of course I don’t have the heart to tell him to shut his mouth. Funny, all Lundeberg’s yapping is quite the contrast to the new kid, just shipped in from New Mexico. Name’s Tyler. Seems a nice kid. I’ll show him the ropes—

  She didn’t understand the bits about the Chinese; they were fighting in Korea, weren’t they? It was all very confusing. She wanted to read more, but the next time she tried to find the letter, it was gone.

  Her heart ached to hear that he hurt too much when he thought of home, and she wondered if maybe she should stop writing him letters, to help him not think so much of home. But that would give her a deep hurt to not to do that. A different kind of hurt than the one she carried around every day, missing him. She remembered him once telling her about different kinds of pain, the pain of thinking too much, how it injured you, and in different ways at different times. The way you sometimes rub a cut or bruise, the way the pain makes you feel alive, the way you can mark the healing by the degree of pain—perhaps a little less each time . . .

  He didn’t need to write anything else about the day he left for war, how painful that was. Caroline could remember that for herself easily enough.

  She had wept openly that day at the port when he left, wrapping herself around him and leaving a big wet spot on his uniform. Up to that point, it was the sharpest pain she had ever imagined. Only now did she think how difficult that day must have been for him. Yes, it was horrible for her, watching him walk away, the person she loved most in the world. But he had to leave the three people he loved most. She couldn’t even imagine it.

  She remembered he’d kissed the top of her head, and she’d heard him swallowing his tears. She knew what that burn felt like, the way it worked its way all the way to your toes. But he was an army man, so crying was not an option. Besides, he wasn’t the only one. There were other men, too, just like him, saying goodbye to wives and kids, each of them choking it all back.

  He hadn’t turned around once he’d started toward the ship. No way he’d have been able to withstand it if he did, Caroline was sure. He’d said his goodbyes and that had to be it. She knew, though, that he was torn apart, and she knew that it was made so much worse by the fact that the brief time he’d had with his family, just four days between basic training in North Carolina and heading off to Korea, had been almost entirely destroyed by a family illness, some kind of nasty flu.

  No doubt he’d envisioned family picnics—huge spreads after what Caroline’s mom described as the bland fare of the Army camps—out in Patterson Park near the Chinese Pagoda or in Druid Hill Park while couples rowed their boats in the lake below. Or maybe he’d hoped to picnic on Federal Hill, overlooking the harbor and the wharves.

  But that darned virus with its fever, coughs, and aches had been working its way through the entire family for days. Only Sam—the first one to get it—had recovered by the time Caroline’s father had to deploy. Caroline and her mom were well enough to see him off by then, but they had both spent almost the entire time he was home in bed.

  So he’d spent those precious days doing repairs around the house—he fixed a cracked window, replaced some roof tiles, ripped out and replaced some rotted wood near the flashings. And then, just like that, it was time to go.

  All of that was too painful to think about for too long.

  Caroline went downstairs, got a glass of water and made herself stay awake. She had her memories and the radio and that one letter all floating around in her head, and that was enough. Sometimes she didn’t need any of those things. Often her dreams came almost exclusively from the newsreels she’d seen in school and the ones shown before movies on those rare occasions when she went to the theater with her friends. She hated them, hated the way the announcer’s voice was so serious but somehow always managed a slightly upbeat tone, explaining how our brave American soldiers were fighting and winning the war for freedom and democracy. She hated how the reels showed happy smiling men standing in circles smoking and laughing or at tables in mess halls over steaming trays of food. She knew it wasn’t like that, at least where her dad was. She knew it was cold and lonely (and dangerous—he wrote of “fighter jets”) where he was.

  She went back to her room and tried to stay awake for a while longer. But she kept nodding off, in and out of sleep, imagining her father, imagining the world he was seeing. She envisioned him there, in his foxhole, dingy and dirty, but at least out of the freezing wind. She imagined him staring at the landscape she saw in those newsreels: great open plains pockmarked by stacks of vegetation, the old ripples of abandoned crops still visible. Hills rising from the distant horizon. She envisioned the soldiers taking turns manning their positions along the ridge, guarding against a sneak attack. It was cold. The men dressed in heavy jackets, plumes of breath coming from their mouths and noses, as they tried to warm themselves with cigarettes, conversation, and thoughts of home. As hard as they tried to keep their thoughts from floating home to their loved ones, it must have been impossible.

  Caroline knew it hurt her dad to think about home, but she guessed that at times he just couldn’t help himself, just like she couldn’t help herself from thinking about him. Maybe it was one of those weird good sort of pain things. Or not. She just couldn’t know for sure. All she had was her imagination, and that, sometimes, was her worst enemy.

  Of course, that kind of pain, even when it got bad, was in some ways a good thing, she knew. Because the alternative was worse. She imagined her dad seeing lines of men, the enemy, coming toward him, coming in for an attack. That, of course, wouldn’t be boring, but it certainly would be worse than anything.

  Again, she tried to beat away the thoughts of her dad. Better to think about something else. Negroes in school with white kids? That was something new. And how to feel about that. As she told her friends, it didn’t bother her any. But of course that was easy to say about something you hadn’t actually experienced.

  Oh, well—who knew if it would ever actually come to be? If it did, she’d deal with it then. For now, she needed to get some sleep.

  THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Th e world was very, very still.

  Beautiful lay curled up at the foot of the bed. Caroline’s eyes were wide open, and she breathed heavily, pulled out of sleep by another one of those nasty dreams. She needed to shake the dream from her head. So she slowly got out of bed, driven by something deep and unresolved. The dog stirred, but didn’t wake.

  Caroline moved more quickly now, her actions practiced. She quietly slipped on layers of clothes, casting shadows across her room. She plucked her stick and skates off the floor and made her way to her door. She opened it, peeked out, and then slowly closed the door behind her. She tiptoed her way through the hall, down the stairs, and through the front door—a slow, tortuous process, but one she managed to accomplish without a sound.

  Along the street, she kept her head down. It was a route she knew well, so she could keep her eyes mainly on the sidewalk, as if looking up would invite trouble, allowing any number of threats into her visual field. She kept going until she reached the pond.

  In the moonlight, the pond was a magical place. Piles of garbage had been transformed into strange and shimmering shapes. The pond surface was a mess of blade scratches and nicks, but even this had a magical, artistic quality, resembling a print of a painting her mother had re
cently picked up by an artist named Jackson Pollock.

  Caroline inhaled. She put on her skates, grabbed her stick, and shot out onto the ice. Soon, she was tearing up the entire pond, showing off some deft stick handling. She pumped her legs and sped from one end of the ice to the other, the stick across her knees, and then wound up for some high octane slap shots, before coming to a quick stop in a spray of ice.

  Then, in the very near distance, came the sound of exploding glass. She stopped and listened, alert and on edge, like a skittish deer.

  The source of the sound revealed itself: a drunken man tottering on the sidewalk, not far from the edge of the lot. Initially, he presented no threat—he stood a good distance away. But Caroline was wary. She looked around and, for the first time, realized the compromised position she’d placed herself in.

  Suddenly, the area appeared menacing. She could see that the man had noticed her, standing silently and looking in her direction. Just staring at her. A halo of light and vaporous exhalations surrounded him, giving him a spectral glow.

  Caroline took off.

  She tore across the ice to the other end, where she grabbed her shoes and continued her flight on land. She was on skates and carrying her stick, so this was awkward business. Across the lot, through the alley, onto the street, and crash! Caroline toppled over and spilled onto the sidewalk.

  Breathing heavily, she tugged at her skates until she managed to get them off and then resumed her run. A sock fell from one of the skates as she went, and it wasn’t long before she was limping badly, hobbling down the deserted city street in the middle of the night.

  Caroline was in tears by the time she limped up the steps toward her front door. Then the door swung open to reveal her mother, standing in the doorway in her bathrobe. She was furious.