“Si, certo, but aside from that . . . ?”
Kit was already sketching and scribbling. Renzo trusted him by now. He had already helped replace Renzo’s Isotta Franchini engines with four hundred-horsepower Packards and figured how to mount two more Revelli machine guns in the tail and on the underbelly of the aircraft, which was a very large triplane bomber with a five-man crew, affectionately named Lucrezia, after the homicidal Borgia heiress.
“Andiamo,” Renzo said, standing abruptly. “I’ll show you.”
“Not in that Caproni,” Kit demurred.
“We’ll take the SVA.”
“That’d be a Warren truss . . . I don’t know if it’ll—”
“Macchè . . .”
He was right, of course. Once they were in the air, guiding on the single spooky light on top of the Molo Antonelliana, Kit began to see what he was up to here. “Don’t suppose we could aim at the Cambio, could we?” Not that they’d still be there, but it seemed a reasonable target.
“Nothing simpler.” Renzo banked them over toward the Piazza Carignano. “Hold on, Cowboy!” leaning gleefully on the stick as they went into a steep, stomach-lifting dive.
They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe they’d slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as they continued hellward, a Hell that could never contain Kit’s abducted young wife, to which he could never go to rescue her, which was actually Hell-of-the-future, taken on into its functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional or accidental. . . .
And then Renzo had pulled them up in a shuddering prop-to-tail assault on airframe integrity, and they were sailing above the river as if it was all just a Sunday spin.
Kit could see the appeal. Of course he could. Pure velocity. The incorporation of death into what otherwise would only be a carnival ride.
Dive-bombin in-to the
Ci-ty!
Golly, what fun it
Can be!
Watchin em scat-ter,
Watchin em run,
Hearin em scream when
We fire that gun, my buddy,
We can pull out when
We want to—
We can go zoomin away,
With the ground just so close,
Rushin right up your nose,
We go dive-bombin in-to the day!
“Did you hear that airplane last night?” she said at breakfast.
“Loud, huh? How’d your boyfriend react? Or do I mean not react.”
She stared back. “Golly but you’re a bastard.”
Kit worked off and on at the interesting problem of how to pull a gigantic triplane out of a nosedive, and went up with Renzo for a couple-three more of those picchiate, most notably in August of 1917 during a Bolshevik-inspired strike of workers at the weapons factories in Torino.
“Let us hear one of those cowboy screams,” suggested Renzo, and Kit complied as they roared steeply down toward a large demonstration. The strikers went scattering like ants in an anthill, caught in the focus of some ray more deadly than sunlight. Kit risked a look over at Renzo, demented even when at rest, and saw that here, approaching the speed of sound, he was being metamorphosed into something else . . . a case of possession. Kit had a velocity-given illumination then. It was all political.
The strike in Torino was crushed without mercy, strikers were killed, wounded, sent into the army, their deferments canceled. Renzo’s picchiata had been perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word that would not quite exist for another year or two. But somehow like a precognitive murmur, a dreamed voice, it had already provisionally entered Time. “You saw how they broke apart,” Renzo said later. “But we did not. We remained single, aimed, unbreakable. Un vettore, si?”
“Not if you hadn’t pulled us out. If we’d hit—”
“Oh.” Renzo refilled his glass. “All that is for the other world.”
In October came the disaster at Caporetto, which Renzo blamed on the strikers. “Putting them among the brigades was the worst mistake the Army could have made. Spreading their poisoned lies about peace.” He had stopped wearing civilian clothes. He was now in uniform all the time. Eagles seemed to be a prominent motif.
ONE DAY THERE WERE CHILDREN calling up from the street. Dally went to the window. A beautiful woman in a prewar hat stood down there holding the hand of a little girl about five, and with them seemed to be Kit’s damn old rogue of a brother Reef, whom she’d last seen stomping his way out of Venice. Shading his eyes from the sun. “That Dahlia?”
They were here as refugees. Most of the fighting was in the northeast, so they had come west to Torino, where Reef had heard Kit was working, from a flier he’d run into in a bar.
“Domenico? What in heck’s he been up to, thought he’d be permanently nose-down by now.”
“Said you helped him out one time, somethin about he tried to piss out a window on a superior officer—”
“Wasn’t the first time, kind of a hobby, don’t know how he keeps ’em all straight.”
“Listen, before we—”
“Don’t,” Kit grabbing his brother in a delayed abrazo. “Don’t. Stay here as long as you need to.”
Reef had been working for the Italian army up in a totally unreal Alpscape rigging aerial cableways known in the army as teleferiche. “It’s the Western Front again, but turned on end—in France they kept trying to outflank each other till there was noplace to go but into the sea. Here us and the Austrians did the same thing only vertical, each army kept trying to get higher ground than the other, till next thing anybody knew, they’re all sitting on top of these very sharp white mountaintops with their ass freezing in the wind, and noplace to go.”
“But into the sky,” said Yashmeen.
The wives were getting along just jake, eyeing each other not with any desire or suspicion in particular but compulsively nonetheless, as if there were something which must at any moment be revealed.
“You two studied in Germany together.”
“He was in vectors, I was in number theory, we hardly saw each other.” The two women, who happened to be in eye-contact, began to smile, in what Reef saw as the beginning of a complicity that might bear some watching.
“But you’re the one he fought a duel over.”
“Almost fought a duel. What did he tell you anyway?”
“I may have exaggerated,” Kit said.
“And you’re the one he rescued from that army of homicidal Hungarians.”
“Not exactly. Kit, I’m beginning to have some doubts, here.”
“Yeahp, better watch ’at shit,” Reef nodded cackling around a Di Nobili.
To celebrate they all went out to dinner at the Ristorante del Cambio, known locally as “the old lady.” Since Kit and Renzo had pretended to dive-bomb the place, Kit had made a point of eating here at least once a week. There had been no veal for years, but despite the shortages Alberto was able to bring them agnolotti, and risotto, and mushroom stew, and tagliarini, and it was truffle season, so some of those showed up as well, almost apologetically. Everybody drank a lot of Nebbiolo. The city was full of acid-yellow light and black and precise shadows back inside the arcades. Searchlights stroked the sky.
ONE DAY CLIMBING down out of Renzo’s Caproni who should reappear from the olden days but Kit’s old Yale classmate Colfax Vibe, who though now in his mid-thirties and officially too old, had hustled his way into the birdmen, as if to make up for his father’s purchased deferral fifty years earlier. The U.S. Army Air Service was planning to send about five hundred young pilot candidates over to Italy to train on Capronis, and Colfax was here doing some advance inspection. Except for a little gray at the edges, he showed no other evidence of the years.
’Fax soon had a baseball league active in Torino. He and Kit go
t in the habit of dropping in to Carpano’s for a punt e mes once or twice a week. ’Fax had in some very odd and personal way come to terms with Scarsdale’s death at the hands of his family’s trusted factotum Foley Walker but wouldn’t talk about it, any more than he’d act apologetic around Kit.
FACED WITH AUSTRIA’S INTENTION to take Venice and the Veneto, Italians resisted so fiercely that at last Kit was shamed into abandoning his engineer’s neutrality, and began flying missions, sometimes crewing for Renzo, sometimes alone. For a while he allowed himself to be seduced into the Futurist nosedive, with its æsthetics of blood and explosion.
“You might ’s well have stayed in Colorado,” Dally said. “Either way you’re carryin on that family tradition.”
“Beg pardon?” Curious about how far she’d take it.
“Bombs,” she said. “Bombs in the family. At least Reef and your Pa put ’em where they’d do some good.”
“Austrians,” Kit thought he would explain.
“Your brothers-in-arms. They’re not the ones need bombing, hell even I know that.”
“Then save me.”
“What?”
“If I’m such miserable case, help me get back to the right piece of trail at least. You tell me.”
She tried. Later she thought she had. But soon enough he had dragged her history with Clive Crouchmas into it again, and she’d fired back with something low-cost about Yashmeen, and it only got louder from there, and salvation was the last thing on anybody’s mind.
Next mission he flew, when he got back to the flat afterward, she was gone. I’m going to Paris. Write to you soon. Not even her name.
He worried then for weeks, recalling how shaken Dally had been when news came in that the S.S. Persia had been torpedoed by a U-boat captain named Max Valentiner, a northern wolf descended into Mediterranean fields, and that among those lost had been Dally’s colleague Eleanor Thornton, who had modeled for the Rolls-Royce hood ornament known as the Spirit of Ecstasy. Finally he got a postcard from Paris, with Dally’s temporary address, and went back to sleeping at night.
CROSSING A SEA newly perilous and contingent—no longer at the mercy of unknown longitude or unforeseen tempests but of U-boats, the terror of a crossing having now passed from God to the German navy, Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica returned to the U.S. pretending to be Italian immigrants. At Ellis Island, Reef, thinking both his English and Italian could get him in trouble whichever he spoke, remained indecisively mute long enough to have a large letter I, for Idiot, chalked on his back. Then a few minutes later, somebody in a customs service uniform—Reef never got a good look at his face—came running in out of the great seethe and echo of voices with a wet sponge and erased it again, saving Reef, as he soon discovered, from being sent back to Europe, being that an Idiot at the time was considered likely to become a Public Charge and cost U.S. taxpayers money.
“Wait,” Reef said, “who are you?”
“They call me ‘The Obliterator.’”
Reef came to think of it as a kindness on the part of some crypto-Anarchist who’d drifted into government work but could still recognize and help out a fellow outlaw. Not that Idiocy couldn’t have been a useful cover, or was even that far wrong. They had arrived in the middle of the Red Scare and the Palmer raids, and soon enough began to wonder what they could have been thinking.
They headed west, Reef propelled by his old faith in the westward vector, in finding someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn’t got to quite yet. In a train depot up in Montana during a snowstorm one day, who’d they happen to run into but Frank, Stray, and Jesse, who had the same thing in mind.
“O.K. if we come along?” Reef said.
“Hell yes,” Frank and Stray said pretty much together. “Course there is my reputation to worry about,” Frank couldn’t help adding, “bein seen in your company and so forth.”
Jesse didn’t look all that surprised but was sure annoyed. “How do you think it feels, comin in bein hit with that?”
“Could’ve introduced him as your Uncle Reef I guess,” Frank said. “But you haven’t been that easy to fool lately.”
“But what do I even call him? ‘Pa’ ain’t quite right, is it?”
Frank, who really wanted to squeeze the boy in a lengthy embrace, left his hand on Jesse’s shoulder awhile. “See, once I would’ve been all right with just ‘Frank,’ then you drifted into calling me ‘Pa,’ and I didn’t exactly forbid it ’cause it feels too good to hear it. It does. Maybe you’ll see. Meantime you could call him ‘sir,’ till he gets so uncomfortable with that he’ll say, ‘Oh, just call me Reef,’ or somethin.”
Which is how it would work out. Reef would one day be able to pass along pieces of paternal wisdom like how to stack a deck or recognize a company detective, and he and Jesse would have some good days together on streams in the region, though neither was a top-notch fisherman, barely catching enough some days even to keep the dogs happy, but the Umpqua in particular had a way of magically making indifferent anglers into accomplished masters, so helping Reef and Jesse learn their way into companionable silence, which both would come to admit was more than either had hoped for.
Yashmeen, beginning to lose the edges of her all-purpose European accent, one day found herself pregnant again, which both women took as a sign that nothing in their lives all together was about to get too discombobulated by anybody’s second thoughts. Especially noting how Reef had begun drifting around in that well-known daze. They had been watching the brothers day to day, alert to signs of buried anger, understanding after a while that they’d been collaborating to the same end. Yashmeen developed a particular affection for Frank and Stray’s daughter Ginger and the baby Plebecula. Ljubica and Ginger were about the same age, and hit it off pretty good except for an inevitable kickup now and then. The girls spent hours with the baby, sometimes just gazing at her. Their other gazing was reserved for Jesse, who abruptly found himself with a couple of kid sisters to deal with. Sometimes they would start laughing, and he couldn’t help thinking it was at him.
“Not at,” both women assured him.
“Ljubica wants to marry you,” Yash said, “but don’t tell her I told you.”
“That’d sure give the Sheriff somethin to think about,” Jesse muttered, strangely having trouble knowing what to do with his hands.
“Oh it’ll pass,” Yash said. “Then look out.”
“Your job, really,” Stray added, “’ll just be to keep a quiet eye out when they all start showin up at the door with flowers and smellin like hair oil and bay rum and so forth.”
“Chores, chores, chores,” Jesse snarled contentedly.
FOR A WHILE they were up in the redwoods, and then for a little longer in a town on the Kitsap Peninsula, up in the last corner of the U.S. map, and after this it would have to be Alaska or B.C.
Jesse brought home as an assignment from school “write an essay on What It Means To Be An American.”
“Oboy, oboy.” Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities. “Let’s see that pencil a minute.”
“Already done.” What Jesse had ended up writing was,
It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.
“That’s what they call the ‘topic sentence’?”
“That’s the whole thing.”
“Oh.”
It came back with a big A+ on it. “Mr. Becker was at the Cour d’Alene back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that.”
“We should start our own little republic,” Yash said one day. “Secede.”
“Yeah but hell,” Stray, who never was much of a sigher, would sigh, “em things never work out. Fine idea while the opium supply lasts, but sooner or later plain old personal meanness gets in the way. Somebody runs the well dry, somebody rolls her eyes at the wrong husband—”
“Oh, my,” Yashmeen pressing her hands to her bosom as if for palpitations.
“No, no, no, we’re all way past that, I hope.”
A nice long gaze then. Nobody would’ve said “the wrong wife.” Meantime, motherhood and political danger had done little to discourage Yash’s desire for other women, though the practical demands of the day would too often keep it in the realm of daydreaming. Stray for her part would remember enjoying a delirious moment or two, usually in city hotel rooms considerably to the east of here, with flushed and trembling younger women pretending to be helpless.
Their moment now would stretch, as if it were awakening after a long snooze someplace. “We about to do something stupid here?” one of them would ask after a while.
“Sure hope so,” the other would reply.
“’SOIR, DALLY.”
It was Policarpe, an old acquaintance of Kit’s once, she gathered, back in Belgium. “Just out licking a few vitrines. You looked about to get lost in thought. Can’t have that.”
She bought him a cognac. They sat and watched the lighted boulevard. Policarpe worked for a Socialist newspaper. Death had not taken up residence in his eyes but had visited often enough.
“We’re in Hell, you know,” he said conversationally.
“Everybody thinks we’re finally out of there,” she said.
A shrug. “The world came to an end in 1914. Like the mindless dead, who don’t know they’re dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever since that terrible August.”
“But this”—gesturing round at the blossoming city—“how could this—”
“Illusion. When peace and plenty are once again taken for granted, at your most languorous moment of maximum surrender, the true state of affairs will be borne in upon you. Swiftly and without mercy.”
He looked across the street suddenly, reaching for his eyeglasses. “Hallucination, obviously. For a moment I thought I saw your former husband.”
In fact he had. Kit had returned to Paris unexpectedly, after some time in Lwów, formerly the metropolis of Galicia, lately the capital of the short-lived West Ukraine Republic.
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