by Paul Gallico
West said, “Your idea is great, you know. It’ll work. The colonel said so.”
But the look upon Julian’s face had become so remote and bleak that West became alarmed. He said, “Has something gone wrong? What happened? Have you filed the papers? Look, now that I’m here I can help you. The colonel explained about getting an attorney . . .”
Julian, deep down, had been glad and comforted by seeing his father and having him there, but now all the sadness arising from what had happened to him heaved like a tide within Julian and forced him to shake his head. He began, “They were stol—somebody got there ahead of me. I was too late.”
C H A P T E R
1 7
They were on the jet plane side by side, Julian in the window seat, homeward bound. He had told his father the story piecemeal, except for the Top Secret part, interrupted by long silences which were puzzling to Aldrin West but which because of his new-found respect for his son he did not attempt to penetrate. West felt that there was more than the talked-about generation gap between himself and his son. There was a mystery connected with Julian of which the father was strongly aware. Perhaps it had always been present in some degree or other, lying behind the puzzle that Julian had refused to be an image of himself, to his annoyance. But now the father was sensitive to the fact that there was something deeper and that although his son had appeared glad to see him and was content to return home West felt himself cut off, closed out and unable to penetrate into what had really happened. There had been the newspaper account, there had been Julian’s story and there was still the enigma—Julian.
The pain within Julian was always there. A deep and unhealing wound and it seemed that every part of the story that he had told to his father or the questions he answered were in some way attached to his wound and kept tugging at it and hurting him. Marshall, Marshall, Marshall!
Childhood was over. Julian stood on the threshold of young manhood, with all the pangs of adolescence still to be suffered. He was, therefore, totally unable to talk about such things as love and pain even if he could have put his emotions into words. Most difficult of all, in fact almost impossible, was for Julian to synthesize, understand and separate the dual nature of his hurt, stemming not only from what had been done to him, but from that last meeting where his friend had laid himself so horribly bare, the glimpse Julian had had as well of what it was that Marshall had done to himself. And it was this deep-seated grief that had ushered Julian across his dividing line. But speak of these things to his father? Impossible.
The view from the window of the aircraft showed the green striations of the Appalachian Range beneath diem, the long streamers of mountains and valleys, as Julian concluded the most difficult part of his narration, “. . . I guess he took it sometime while I was asleep maybe and copied it.” And then almost immediately he felt the need to defend, and he said, “It didn’t get into the paper, but he was the one who threw the grenade out the window.”
The trailing edge of the wing moving forward revealed a small factory town by a river beneath them with black smoke belching up from chimneys and Julian thought again of that moment. He said, “It blew up in a field with a big bang.” But then as his thoughts turned back to the more recent events, he murmured half to himself, “He said he needed it more than I did.” And here Julian turned and looked at his father and again Aldrin West was aware of change and that it was no longer a child speaking to him when Julian said briefly and quietly, “I guess maybe he did.”
West, however, momentarily mistook it for the helplessness of the young and therefore supplied some adult belligerence. He said, “Look here, Julian, we can fight it. He could never win in court. I’m a witness as to when you made it. He wouldn’t dare stand up to it. We can beat him.”
Julian, once more lost in thought, was looking out of the window again at country that had flattened out into broken hills and the beginning of mid-western farmlands.
But then Julian became aware that his father had spoken to him and what he had said, and he replied simply, “I don’t want to.”
Aldrin West became confused for here again was that dark gap within his son that he did not understand, the shell he was unable to penetrate. What shadows had fallen upon this boy? Had something too terrible to relate happened to him? He felt his own guilt come choking up into his throat and he was miserably frightened until common sense once more reasserted itself. Julian’s story had been straightforward enough. He had encountered a rascal and had been taken by him. He tried another tack.
“Well, then, see, it doesn’t really matter that much then, does it, Julian? What’s important really is that you set out to do something and you got there and what’s more you made it all by yourself. You’ve shown that you’re a man . . .” West had wanted to go on with this speech into even more fulsome praise such as, “By God, you’ve proved to me that I have a son. I’ll never forget it again. I’m proud of you,” but it all dried up against the barrier of Julian’s absence once more.
Julian should have been glowing at this praise, filled with delight and experiencing that wonderful tickling feeling beneath the breastbone that comes when one is complimented, but he didn’t. He had hardly heard the speech. His mind had been turning back to the trip and all the times that Marshall had been there when he needed him, and at times when he hadn’t even known what it was all about, and he saw once more the gay, half-amused, half-mocking expression on Marshall’s face.
West was saying, “That colonel what’s-his-name—Sisson. It isn’t often that a boy of your age can earn the respect of a man like that. He thought you were pretty marvellous. He told me how you just walked in right through the Pentagon Building.”
The name of Sisson had Julian’s attention for a moment. He thought gratefully of the colonel’s help and kindness but once more there was a mystery there and it traced back, as did almost everything, to Marshall. Always Marshall. Marshall running down the aisle of the bus to the colonel after which they had both got off in pursuit of that other little man. And Marshall had come back alone and hinted something about secret stuff and spies.
Julian’s memory pictures were still unreeling scenes through his head and he suddenly laughed aloud and when his father looked at him said, “He got the truck driver to take us and then he changed me into Buffalo Bill and made me pretend to shoot an Indian.”
West said, “Eh?” He had not heard that bit before. He said, “Truck driver? Indian? What was that all about?”
But Julian was away again. He said, “Oh, nothing.”
West felt himself seized by the most dreadful pang of jealousy. He was Julian’s natural father. He ought to come first with him. And yet someone else had managed to take his place. But this was ridiculous too. The boy had had an exciting adventure, a momentary relationship with an apparently attractive ex-soldier type who would be a hero to any child, and then had been brutally pushed up against his first encounter with the feet of clay. Goddammit, he loved his son. He wanted to throw his arms about the thin shoulders of this boy and hold him hard to himself and shelter him. Instead he felt himself pushed into flat meaningless sentences such as “There’s the Mississippi down there. Old Man River.”
The broad winding yellow snake crawling across the face of the map was below them. Julian said, “I know. We came over it on a bridge. Marshall said he went down it on a riverboat once . . .”
A little later something which had been at the back of Aldrin’s head ever since he had become reunited with his son, surfaced into an exclamation of surprise: “Hey, what happened to your stammer, Julian?”
Julian, without even looking up at him replied, “Aw, who needs it? Marshall said to cut it out.”
The plane was over the Rockies and West observed, “The Great Divide.”
Julian said, “Uh huh. Marshall said if you poured a glass of water over it half would go into the Pacific and the other half into the Atlantic. We went through the pass and there was a man who played a funny instrument. I wonder
what happened to him?”
West regarded his son with a sense of total helplessness. He knew he hadn’t been getting through to him at all. But he had yet one more card to play. They would be arriving home soon. Would they then fall back into their old ways and would he and his son be separate and unhappy? He played his card.
“I’ll tell you what we could do. You know down below next to the trunk-room which is sort of half storage and we don’t use? We could make it a kind of lab there. I mean, not a lab, but a place where, you know, you can work out any ideas you have. We could fix up a lathe or anything you need. A drawing-board and things like that.”
At this Julian looked at his father. He nodded a slow and reflective assent but said nothing and returned with his attention riveted to the window and the world below which had now become the wild moonscape of the badlands of the west, the bluffs, canyons and escarpments, the tumbled country akin to that which carried the deeepest memories for Julian.
And looking down from thirty thousand feet Julian actually espied, reduced to an almost microscopic insect, a bus crawling along on a lonely stretch of road and in a moment it seemed that he was transported there again on to old 396 sitting next to Marshall and munching on a hamburger, moistening it with Coke. The whine of the tires was in his ears mingled with the music of the hurdy-gurdy. He saw the faces of the chess players again and Marge and Bill leaning towards one another always as though magnetized, their fingers intertwined. And then there had been that trip from Albuquerque and those two funny sisters and all the different friendly people and he was both amongst them below and up in the airplane as well watching the bus crawl around a curve.
“. . . and we could work it out together.”
His father’s voice broke in upon Julian’s vision. Apparently he had been continuing talking all the time that Julian had made his little voyage to earth. Julian was then again back in the aircraft, and turning from the window he gave his father a half-smile and said, “Okay, thanks. That would be great.”
Aldrin had expected more enthusiasm or perhaps even some kind of physical contact from his son. They had yet to touch one another since their meeting. Julian hadn’t even taken his proffered hand when they had made their way through the airport in Washington. To cover his disappointment he now himself looked down out of the window over Julian’s shoulder. The landscape had changed again.
West said, “We ought to be home in about an hour now. Your mother will be so happy.”
Julian made no reply.
There was no doubt but that Julian had changed and grown up. The manifestations were subtle, a slight difference in the way he wore his clothes, even the sound of his footsteps, and yet he remained remote and locked in and it was quite possible that this enabled him to survive the spate of publicity that had attended his return. In some manner Julian managed to give the impression that all that was being written, printed and talked about with regard to the adventure had to do with somebody else and not himself. He was able to remain aloof from it all.
His father tried daily. He tried hard. His eyes had actually been opened to the gap which had existed between himself and his son and to the insensitivity of his own behaviour. He had been badly frightened by Julian’s escapade which might have ended in total disaster. His problem was that he did not know what to do. He was too long laced into the straitjacket of adult ways of thinking and acting and he did not know how to extricate himself. His avenues of approach to Julian consisted of showing an exaggerated interest in his extra-curricular activities and Julian accepted this gratefully and responded to his father’s show of concern. Yet Aldrin West was aware that he never achieved any genuine closeness or penetration of this curious reserve which had fallen upon the boy ever since he had found him in Washington.
West did not know of one major achievement on his part, which was that by all the evidence of his concern over Julian’s trip, and above all by his crossing the continent to bring Julian home, he had shown him that he cared and had restored some of his son’s trust in him. As with many children, Julian’s feelings about his father had been based partly upon fact, partly upon fantasies and the latter were now dispelled. And the relationship between father and son would have returned to a more normal everyday one except that West had no way of knowing the depth of the trauma that Julian had suffered on a totally different level.
West was a businessman and not a psychiatrist or even a person with too much understanding, or he might have thought it strange that Julian had never broken down. One would have expected a child of his age to shed tears at being robbed of the most important thing he had ever achieved, a creation all his own. West, during the ensuing days, was often to wonder at Julian’s stony faced acceptance of things as they were. Outwardly he was a normal schoolboy. The laboratory built in the basement had to be accounted a huge success, for when his homework was done Julian was always down there tinkering and working. But once the excitement over the adventure had subsided Julian never referred to it again and the curious barrier between his father and himself stayed. As for his mother, she remained blissfully unaware. She had her son back. She was pleased with her husband’s efforts and the minor manifestations of Julian’s independence were realized without too much regret. After all, one had to accept the fact that one’s children did grow up. What was satisfactory was that her husband had had a lesson and appeared to have profited by it.
It was thus several months later that Julian came home from school, entering the vestibule noisily, dropping his satchel on the floor, slinging his cap accurately up on to one of the hooks of the hatrack and heard his mother’s voice from above stairs.
“That you, Julian?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“How was school?”
“Fine. I’m going down to my shop, Mom.”
“Don’t you want a glass of milk, Julian?”
“No thanks, not now.”
Here was an example, a small one, albeit, of Julian’s newly won status. Before, his mother would have insisted upon his having the glass of milk and would have had it slightly warmed since cold milk on the stomach was supposed to be bad. Now there was no further attempt at persuasion, only the usual query, “Have you any homework?”
Julian replied, “Not much. I’ll do it downstairs.” He slung his satchel again over his shoulder and went down the cellar steps. He hurried through his lessons and thereafter became engrossed in a mechanical problem that he had not solved.
Due to his youth and inexperience Julian’s mechanical bent was still imitative and adaptive like his transformation of a water pistol into a Bubble Gun. Now he was working on a flight toy he had acquired, a disc which consisted of four blades with a spring in the central hub. When the spring was pressed down by means of a stick, it caused the disc to spin rapidly and due to the pitch of the blades, rise vertically from the ground in a short flight. Julian’s idea was to convert this into a helicopter toy. He had made several drawings and even one mock-up, but the activation of the blades was still a difficulty.
But he was happy enough with his long workbench equipped with a lathe, electric drill and a vice. There were drawers and receptacles for materials such as sheets of tin, bits of plywood, nails and screws, etc., and his tools were neatly contained in a rack. He had also been provided with a special drawing-board table and the necessary implements.
One of the best things about the place was its aloneness. His mother never came down; it was understood that he was to keep it clean himself, and did, and there with the cellar door closed and lights blazing and the stillness except for the occasional whine of his drill, it was as though he were wearing yet another skin, a second Julian. And sometimes while that second was functioning, the first one, he himself, the inside Julian, would fall into a reverie. His thoughts would wander far afield from where he was and what he was doing and old sadnesses would be revived.
At six Aldrin West came home, set his briefcase down and looked casually through the letters on the salver on the
side table, the late afternoon delivery. One of them brought a look of curiosity to his face and he examined both sides of it without learning much. He called out, “Julian?”
The reply came from below, “I’m down here, Dad.”
With the puzzling letter in his hand West descended the steps into Julian’s workshop and asked, “Who do you know in Sheridan, Alabama, Julian?”
Julian looked up from the bit of tin he had locked in his vice for shaping and asked, “Where?”
His father repeated, “Sheridan, Alabama,” and handed him the letter. “It’s addressed to you.”
Julian took it and examined it: “Julian West, 137 Floral Heights, San Diego, California,” in a style of wandering handwriting that gave him a strange and creepy feeling, as though the envelope itself communicated something to his fingertips, or had absorbed some kind of message and sent it along down to his stomach. He stood there holding it and looking at it until his father said, “Well, why don’t you open it and find out.”
Julian picked up the screwdriver from his workbench, slit the envelope and removed the letter, and his father, looking over his shoulder, saw that it was written on the letterhead of Collins Garage, 43 Main Street, Sheridan, Alabama. Directly beneath this had been pasted a cutting from a cheap magazine. It was an advertisement from a mail-order toy company for an article that looked very much like the one Julian had invented. It was a one-column, two-inch square ad with the picture of a gun with soap bubbles emerging from the muzzle. The text boasted:
BUBBLEGAT! LOOKS LIKE THE REAL THING BUT SHOOTS BUBBLES. AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS. EVERY BOY SHOULD HAVE A BUBBLEGAT. ORDER NOW WHILE THEY LAST. FILL OUT THE COUPON AND SEND $1.65 TO INCLUDE THE COST OF MAILING TO BUBBLEGAT, P.O. BOX 37, FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA.
The man and the boy stared at this advertisement for a moment uncomprehending, then their attention was drawn to the handwritten scrawl beneath it.