by Alex George
“For both of us, it looks like.”
My father reached out and took Lewis’s hand. “Everything is going to be just fine, Lewis. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“All I’m really worried about right now is getting my dog fed,” said Lewis. He gently took his hand back and slipped it under the blanket. “And Robert’s going to take care of that for me.”
The door opened and my mother walked back in. I realized from the startled look on her face that she hadn’t seen my father in weeks. “Good God, Sam,” she said. “You look awful.”
“How are you, Mary?” he asked.
“Better than you, apparently. What happened to you?”
“I was up half the night,” said my father. “I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, Liam was there, right in front of me. I finally went for a walk.” He paused. “When I got to the bumper cars, there was one car sitting alone in the middle of the rink. I walked out to it and climbed in. I sat there for ages.” He looked up at my mother with exhausted eyes. “I was thinking about all the kids who work at the park every day. They’re all going to grow up and get married, have kids of their own. And the more I thought about that, the angrier I got. I sat there, Mary, honest to God, I sat there and I thought: Why couldn’t it have been one of them who died?”
“Oh, Sam,” said my mother.
“Then, more than anything, I needed to smash that car into the wall. I needed to drive it as fast as it would go, ram it into whatever I could. I wanted to hit something so hard. I spun the wheel left, then right. I stamped on the pedal. But nothing happened.”
“The power was off,” said my mother.
He nodded. “I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and just started shaking it. And the strange thing was, once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I kept at it, like a lunatic. The car was shuddering like it was going to fall apart. And then the steering wheel came off in my hands. I tore the thing right off its column.” My father looked down at his filthy shirt. “After Liam died, it felt as if there was nothing left. But there was. You and Robert were there the whole time. But I just couldn’t see you.” He looked at my mother and then at me. “I just couldn’t see,” he said sadly.
—
A LITTLE WHILE LATER, my mother drove me home. I rested my head against the car window and looked out at the streets I’d known my whole life. I was exhausted, but I had promised Lewis I would go and feed Dizzy. My thoughts drifted back to Nathan. The last time I’d seen him he’d been on his knees in the dragon suit, illuminated from above by the exploding fireworks. None of what I’d witnessed made any sense. If Faye had told Nathan she wasn’t interested in him, why had he tried to grab her?
It was still early morning when we got home. I dialed Nathan’s number. The phone rang for an age.
“Hello?” yawned Nathan.
“Nathan?” I said. “It’s me.”
“Robert,” he said. “Where were you last night? I waited for you by the Ferris wheel but you didn’t show up.”
My fingers gripped the telephone tightly. “Lewis had a heart attack. I was at the hospital with him.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Finally Nathan spoke. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah. He’s going to be fine.” I paused. “Didn’t you hear the ambulance arrive?”
“I guess I was distracted. It was a weird night.”
I stared at the wall. “A weird night?” As the silence lengthened, disappointment and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm me. “Weird how?” I prompted.
There was another long pause. “I can’t really explain it,” said Nathan.
It wasn’t good enough. I needed to hear him confess what he’d done. “Well look,” I said. “I have to go to Lewis’s house to feed Dizzy. He’s been cooped up inside all night. Can you meet me there?”
A half hour later I climbed onto my bike and set off for Lewis’s house. I would have given anything to collapse into my bed, but Dizzy was waiting, probably with his back legs crossed. Nathan was already there when I arrived. I took the key that Lewis had given me and unlocked the front door. Dizzy had begun yowling the moment he had heard us. As I pushed the door open, he scampered past me and squatted on his haunches in the middle of the front yard.
“Wow,” I said after a moment. “He really had to go.”
Dizzy gave me a reproachful look.
“So tell me about last night,” I said.
“There’s not much to tell.”
“I saw what happened, Nathan.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you during the fireworks,” I said. “I saw you try to grab Faye.”
“Faye?” Nathan looked mystified. “Robert, I would never—”
“But she pushed you over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Nathan, I saw you! Faye shoved you. You fell on your knees with your tail in the air!”
“My tail?”
“You were wearing the dragon suit.”
Nathan went very still. “That wasn’t me,” he said.
“I saw you,” I said.
“No, you didn’t. Robert, listen. Remember I said it had been a weird night? That was what I was going to tell you. Someone took the dragon suit.”
“Oh please.” A sour laugh choked up from deep inside me.
“I swear it’s true,” said Nathan. “I wore the suit all day, as usual. When the park closed, I hung it in my locker, just like I always do, and went out to the parking lot for a smoke. When I came back for the fireworks, it was gone.”
The lie was so transparent that I felt sorry for him. “So you didn’t chase Faye into the forest,” I said. “You didn’t try and grab her.”
“Of course not.”
“Then who was it?”
“Maybe it was Hollis.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why would he steal the costume?”
Nathan thought. “He must have wanted her to think it was me.”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t care about you.”
“Perhaps he does,” said Nathan. “Perhaps he’s worried that Faye is going to choose me over him.”
I closed my eyes. “Hollis is dumb, but he’s not that dumb.”
“Well, maybe he guessed that I put Philippe in Pocahontas’s mouth.”
“If that were true, he’d just beat the crap out of you. He’s not going to try and frame you for something.” I paused. “It wasn’t Hollis in the dragon suit, was it?”
Nathan looked at me. “It wasn’t me, Robert.”
I sighed. “Why won’t you just admit it?”
“Why won’t you just believe me?”
We were both silent after that.
It was a warm morning. Nathan and I watched Dizzy pad around the front yard, methodically sniffing all the flower beds. Neither of us looked at the other. Finally the dog came up to me and nudged the side of my leg. He was hungry. He led us back inside and I went in search of dog food.
Lewis’s basement floor was a mosaic of cracked concrete. Shelves ran along the far wall. They were overflowing with gardening equipment, old tins of paint, and dilapidated wooden crates. Halfway along I found the dog food. As I picked up the nearest tin, a large, misshapen piece of canvas on the next shelf down caught my eye. The name L. P. JENKS was stenciled onto the material in faded ink. I turned it over. On the underside there was a cat’s cradle of heavy straps.
“Nathan!” I shouted. “Come and look at this!”
When he appeared I showed him what I had found. “What do you think it is?” I asked.
“It’s some kind of harness,” he said. He pointed to the straps. “Arms go through there. Legs there. And there’s a buckle in the middle.” He prodded it. “This looks old. Military issue. I bet it’s for a parachu
te.” He peered along the bottom shelf and pointed to a bag the size of a large, overstuffed pillow. It had a faded insignia printed on it, and beneath it the letters USAAF.
I had read enough pulpy wartime thrillers to recognize the acronym. “United States Army Air Force,” I said.
“Lewis was a pilot,” breathed Nathan.
—
WE CLIMBED BACK ONTO our bikes and cycled to the hospital. When we arrived Lewis was sitting up in bed, suspiciously eying a bowl of brown soup on a tray in front of him. His eyes lit up for a second when he saw us, and then the frown returned.
“If I’d known you were coming I’d have asked you to bring me a sardine sandwich,” he said.
“How are you feeling?” asked Nathan.
“They tell me I’m going to make it,” said Lewis. “But this hospital food may kill me yet.” He pushed the bowl away.
“Hey, Lewis,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Course you can.”
“When I was in your basement looking for dog food, I found a weird thing. It looked like an old parachute.”
“It had your name on it,” added Nathan.
“Ah,” said Lewis.
“And, well, we were wondering about that.”
“Were you now,” said Lewis.
There was an edgy silence.
“Is it yours?” prompted Nathan.
Lewis looked at him. “Like you said, it had my name on it.”
“So were you a pilot, then? In the war?”
“I wasn’t a pilot,” said Lewis. “But I did fly in planes in the war.”
“How come you’ve never mentioned that before?” I asked.
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Lewis closed his eyes for a moment. “What the hell,” he said. “I nearly died yesterday. And this isn’t something I want to take to my grave.” He reached for his glass of water and took a sip. Then he began to speak.
THIRTY-ONE
I grew up in a small town up in Franklin County,” began Lewis. “There wasn’t much there except for the Otis mill on the banks of the Androscoggin River. It was one of the largest paper mills in the country back then. I knew from the time I was in grade school I’d get a job there one day. Everybody did. That was how it was. Sure enough, the week after I left school I started working in the warehouse, stacking boxes and sweeping floors. Two years after that, in 1939, war broke out. My daddy had fought in France during the Great War. He grew up in Nebraska but settled in Maine when he came back from the fighting. He’d been there at the very end, and the stories he told scared me stupid. One thing I knew: I didn’t want to go and fight. But they began the draft again, and I didn’t have no choice but to sign up. Every day I returned home from my shift at the mill, looking for the letter calling me up. But it didn’t come. The draft was a lottery, you see, and I stayed lucky. Other boys in town got their letter, and I watched them go. Some came home, some didn’t. You just never knew.”
Lewis took another sip of water. “Five years later, my letter still hadn’t come. In June 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy. By then we all knew the Germans weren’t going to win, and I finally dared to hope that the war might be over before I had to fight. My father knew better, though. This won’t end anytime soon, he warned me. The Germans will keep fighting until the very end. He told me about one of the men under his command who was killed by a German sniper just days before the armistice, in the fall of 1918. He was shot in the back of the head while he was untangling his coat from some barbed wire. He was no threat to anybody.” Lewis paused. “A month later, my draft notice arrived. I was conscripted into the United States Army Air Force. I’d never even been on a plane before, and suddenly I was being flown to a military base in the Arizona desert.”
“Were you excited?” asked Nathan.
“Yes and no. I liked to imagine returning home as a hero with medals on my chest and a big parade in my honor. But I was scared, too. Each night I prayed that the war would end before my training was done.”
“What did you do in Arizona?” I asked.
“Bombardier training school.”
I frowned. “What are bombardiers?”
“They drop bombs,” said Lewis.
“So not a pilot,” said Nathan.
Lewis looked at him. “Not a pilot.” He paused. “There was a flight simulator on top of a tall scaffold. We took turns trying to hit cardboard targets while the rest of the class pushed the scaffold across a hangar. After weeks of that we did drills over the desert in Beech AT-11s. They were twin-propeller planes that had been fitted with bomb bays. The bombardiers sat inside a special nose made of Plexiglas at the front of the aircraft. I could see for miles in every direction. I’ll never forget the sight of the ground falling away beneath me each time we took off.”
Nathan leaned forward. “That must have been amazing.”
Lewis nodded. “I used to pretend that the plane wasn’t there, that it was just me, launching into the sky. On those flights the bomb bays were filled with bags of sand. There were target areas marked out in the desert, and we had to hit them. As high as we were flying, it was difficult. You needed instinct, a cool head, and some luck. Turned out I had all three.
“The bed next to mine in the barracks belonged to a boy from Kansas called Bolt. Bolt liked to read the newspaper reports out loud. By then the Luftwaffe was in tatters. The Allies were flying over Germany again, attacking munitions plants and factories. We assumed that we’d be going to Europe to join them, but when our training was finished, we got our orders for an island in the Pacific Ocean called Saipan. The air force was using it as a base for their bombing raids over Japan. We were using a new kind of airplane—the B-29 bomber. People called it the Superfortress.
“In Saipan I liked to watch the bombers leave on their missions. They flew in formations of a hundred or more, like a giant silver cloud stretching across the sky. Every sixty seconds another plane would thunder off the end of the runway, engines screaming. There was no point in talking. You couldn’t hear anything.
“My first combat mission was December 1944. We attacked a factory in Nagoya. It took about six hours to reach the Japanese mainland from Saipan. I was so damn nervous. As we approached the target I ran through my pre-drop routine. I had done this hundreds of times in training, but my hands were slippery with sweat. There weren’t sandbags in the bomb bays anymore.” Lewis looked at us. “The other important difference between training exercises and actual engagement with the enemy was that in the desert, nobody ever shot back. At Nagoya the sky around us was exploding with antiaircraft fire. I kept waiting for a bullet to smash through the glass and kill me. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that each breath you take might be your last. Just do your job, the crew leader yelled at me when the attacks began. I concentrated on my bombsight and tried to forget about the tracer shells streaking past the windows. When we flew over the target I opened the doors to the bomb bays and pulled back hard on the release. There were so many bombs falling, I couldn’t tell which were mine.”
I glanced at Nathan. He was staring at the floor.
“The following night, back on Saipan, I lay in bed and thought about how close we had come to getting shot out of the sky. I realized there wasn’t much point worrying about it. Either I would survive, or I wouldn’t. There was nothing I could do about it either way.
“By February 1945 there were rumors that high command was getting frustrated. Dropping bombs from high altitudes wasn’t accurate enough. That changed in early March.” He paused. “I remember the briefing. As the group commander marched into the room, I could tell from the look on his face that something was up. Colonel Stark, his name was. He walked up to the podium at the front of the room, saluted, and gestured to us to sit down. Then he told us that from now on things were going to be different. Raids would take
place at night, instead of in daylight. And instead of flying at more than thirty thousand feet, the B-29s would fly low—somewhere between five thousand and seven thousand feet. Everyone was muttering to themselves, but Stark hadn’t finished. To make room for more bombs, he announced, all guns except for the tail cannon will be removed from the aircraft. At this, all hell broke loose. Men started yelling. Bolt was the loudest of all. He stood up and shouted, No guns? At that altitude? That’s suicide! Colonel Stark waited for the ruckus to calm down. The next target, he told us, was Tokyo.
“It was going to be the biggest attack yet. The first planes would carry pathfinder bombs, five-hundred-pound monsters filled with napalm, designed to explode a hundred feet above the ground. The napalm would blast outward and thousands of fires would start at once. That would create a giant target for the rest of the squadron to aim at. We would be low to the ground, and the fires would be easy to see in the dark. The area of Tokyo that we were targeting, Colonel Stark said, was especially vulnerable to this kind of attack. The blaze would spread fast. Streets were narrow, and most of the buildings were flimsy and flammable.”
“Doesn’t sound like factories,” said Nathan.
“It wasn’t. We were going to be bombing people’s homes. Our targets were civilians.”
Lewis stared out the window.
“Over the next two days it became obvious just how big the attack was going to be. Every available Superfortress was being prepped. Mechanics removed the guns and loaded additional bombs in their place. We checked and double-checked every switch, every gauge, every valve and button. Then I went back to my bunk and tried not to think about where those bombs were going to fall. Bolt was lying on his bed. He was turned away from me, muttering to himself. At first I assumed he was cursing whoever was responsible for the decision to disarm the planes, but then I realized that he was praying.
“American air squadrons stationed on Guam and Tinian were also joining the raid. There were more than three hundred aircraft in total, each one of them loaded with bombs. It took more than two hours just to get them all off the ground. Our plane was one of the last to leave the base. We took off just before seven o’clock in the evening on March 9. The plan was to fly through the night and arrive in Tokyo early the next day. Usually we flew in tight formation, but that took time and fuel. Instead every bomber navigated its own way to the target. Usually the crew talked and joked to make the journey pass quicker, but this time we hardly spoke.