Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Billy hadn’t meant to cause all this commotion. He really should have left well enough alone, he told himself. Things had gone quite perfectly until now. He had filed the flight plan for his training flight so that it would take him directly over his hometown on the outbound leg, and that was opportunity enough to drop a little remembrance over Alsatia Renfroe’s house. But the idea had come to him as he flew. Inbound, he would be fifty miles or so to the west of the town, headed back toward base. He quickly calculated his fuel and figured that, yes, he would have enough to change course, buzz the courthouse square to make sure Tunstall was in the bank, frocked and proper, waiting for his Saturday morning customers, then land out on Partridge Road, spirit Alsatia away, and drop her off at the airport in the city. He would make it back to his air base on nothing but fumes, and they would bitch about him being overdue. But he could tell them he got a little off course and doubled back once when he shouldn’t. Let ’em bitch. It was worth it. It was worthy of a woman like Alsatia Renfroe, who loved a little spice in her life.

  Oh, did she ever — as Billy had learned almost six months before when he had asked her out on impulse. She was three years older, and there was, in the way she carried her trim body, a wordly-wise self-assurance that would have given pause to a young man who was less forthcoming. But Billy Benefield was nothing if not forthcoming. He might lack judgment, as his father often told him, but it never deterred him from doing whatever he wanted to do.

  Billy had spied her through the window of the bank as he passed by on the sidewalk, just her head and torso visible behind the teller’s cage, hands quick and sure as she counted out money for a customer, brow knitted in concentration. Billy stopped in his tracks and stared as she finished the transaction and shoved the money under the bars of the cage, then reached up with the same quick motion and brushed a wayward strand of her short brown hair away from her forehead. Billy stood transfixed for a moment, feeling the heat of the July sun on his neck spreading warmth into the pit of his stomach. Then she disappeared, back into the bowels of the bank, and he went home and called her on the telephone.

  “This is Billy Benefield,” he said forthcomingly.

  “I saw you staring at me through the window,” she said, knocking his composure into a cocked hat.

  He stammered for a moment (he could never remember stammering before) and then said, “Will you go out with me tonight?”

  There was a dead silence on the other end of the line and Billy began to feel miserably stupid. Then she said, “All right.” Just like that. And she laughed the little tinkling laugh that gave him a rush of pleasure mixed with a delicious trace of apprehension.

  Billy got his father’s car with a full tank of gas (unheard of unless you happened to be the mayor’s son because the mayor always had his means, though he cautioned you not to flaunt your good fortune) and he picked up Alsatia and they drove around for a while, making small talk, sparring. Billy decided she was a bit flip and cocksure in a somewhat unfeminine but very enticing way. She looked straight at you and spoke her mind about any damn thing she pleased.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said after a while, and when he asked if she wanted a Coke, she laughed and said, “Not by itself.” Her voice had a bit of a taunt in it, as if she had asked him if he still wore knee pants. So he drove by Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s house and bought a pint and they parked on the courthouse square, sipping whiskey and Coke from paper cups, listening to Ted Weems and His Orchestra on KMOX in St. Louis. The whiskey left him breathless. It was pure and raw and it seemed to suck all the oxygen out of his lungs. It was late by now and there was nobody there but them. It was still hot, the day’s warmth radiating from the asphalt and concrete as it can only at midsummer, giving way to the dark grudgingly. Billy propped the bottle on the dash and they leaned against the opposite doors of the front seat, facing each other, nipping at the strong amber whiskey, their talk limp and vague like the night air.

  Billy raised his cup. “Is it okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Just the usual.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Billy said. “I know. I buy it all the time.”

  “A real regular customer,” she said, smiling.

  Billy nodded, knowing she was mocking him, not really minding it for some reason, sensing there was in her an unspoken and exotic wellspring of experience. Alsatia Renfroe knew things, by God, but she did not tell. It made Billy Benefield a little giddy.

  “Do you fly-boys have a few belts before you go up?” Alsatia asked, laughing her little bell-laugh.

  “God, no. I wouldn’t touch the stuff before a mission. You’ve got to have all your reflexes intact. The least little mistake and WHAM! you can plow it in.”

  “Plow it in?”

  “You know, crash. Or get caught with a Jap on your tail.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “I mean, you know, I’ve read about it,” Billy said. “I’ve never been there.” He stopped, fumbling with his words, the whiskey playing with his tongue. Then he laughed. “Hell, I’ve never even been up in a goddamned airplane.”

  She laughed with him, reaching for the bottle of whiskey on the dash, pouring it neat into the cup, no Coke.

  “But,” Billy said, “I’m going to be the best goddamned pilot in the whole Army Air Corps.”

  “I’ll bet you will,” she said, and something in her voice changed. There was no mocking now. “I bet you’ll be one helluva pilot.”

  Billy could feel himself getting drunk, mind and body separating, his thoughts floating in and out of the open window of the car like dust motes. His lips moved, he could hear sounds bubbling out of his throat, but he lost track of what he was saying, what she said. Then they were quiet for a long time and Billy drifted deep down inside himself. Ted Weems and His Orchestra were playing “Cherokee” and some uninhibited sucker with a big ballsy golden cornet was ripping into a shimmering solo, high and a bit sad like a fast plane all alone in the thin upper reaches of air, making its own currents and leaving a precise white trail of condensed sound in its wake where the air parted and then billowed back in on itself.

  He realized that her hand was on his arm and he stared, seeing her for the first time really, the finely chiseled bones of her face softened in the glow of the light from the dashboard radio. Then he smelled her perfume, a mere breath of something like mint. He could feel her warmth, a different quality than the close air, radiating from the soft flesh of her face and neck. She reached over and turned off the radio with a click, leaving the cornet solo shimmering in the lost upper reaches of air. Then she moved to him, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, reached inside and ran her slim hand over the sweat-slickness of his bare chest. “Oh,” he said softly. She slid away from him suddenly and he reached for her, but she was out of the car, crossing in front around to the driver’s side. She leaned in the window and kissed him deeply, one hand behind his neck pulling him into her mouth, her tongue darting, forcing his teeth apart, mingling with his tongue, teaching him.

  And then, by God, she had pulled him out of the car and led him across the narrow strip of courthouse lawn and pulled him down with her under the spreading green canopy of Herschel Martin’s banana tree, and she had given him everything she had right then and there with the warm soft midnight breathing on his bare bottom and the wind rushing in his ears even though there was no breeze stirring, and the echoes of the cornet solo burning everything out his mind. She was wild. She threw her strong sturdy legs around his back and squeezed him into her and she went WHAM-WHAM with a little cry. He was numbed by the raw liquor and the shock of it. She went WHAM-WHAM again, then a third time, and then she started to whimper. She reached up suddenly and grabbed him by his left nipple and twisted sharply and hissed into his ear, “Come!” And the thrilling pain of it raced down into his groin and he went WHAM-WHAM and collapsed on her, near fainting.

  It took a moment for him to come to himself and realize what he had done. Jesus Christ, he thought, I have screwed my firs
t woman under Herschel Martin’s banana tree on the courthouse lawn at midnight.

  “I love you,” he croaked.

  “Don’t get carried away, Billy,” she said.

  He pulled back, started pulling his pants up, feeling panic rising in his throat. Any moment, somebody could come along and see them here, the mayor’s son and the banker’s daughter with their whoozies hanging out. Alsatia sat up and began composing herself.

  “Come on,” he said, pulling at her, “we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Oh, don’t get in a twit, Billy,” she said, laughing her tinkly laugh.

  God, he thought, the woman is mad. Then he thought of something else. “My gosh, you’ll get pregnant.”

  “I doubt it,” she said, brushing her hair back from where it had tumbled about her face.

  “Oh? You know so much?”

  “More than you do.”

  So, he thought, it wasn’t just idle talk. He was not the first boy she had diddled, maybe not even the first under Herschel Martin’s banana tree. Who were the others?

  He helped her up and they lurched back to the car, both drunk, and they sat apart on the front seat for a long time, not saying anything. Then Alsatia said, “You think I do that with all the boys?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “Well, I don’t,” she said, tossing her head.

  “Hey” — he reached for her, but she pulled away. He could see that she was hurt, that she had taken his long silence for scorn. She began to sniffle now and Billy stared at her, dumbfounded, then pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and offered it to her. She took it, dabbed at her eyes, then looked at him defiantly. “I just wanted to do it with you!” she said.

  And so she had. He honestly believed that whomever she had done it with before, she now just wanted to do it with him. And she had done it again and again before he staggered off to Basic Flight Training a week later with the scent of Alsatia seared on his brain and the delicious terrifying memory of lovemaking in forbidden, often public places — the stage of the high school auditorium, the narthex of the Methodist Church, his parents’ bed, her parents’ bed, even standing up beside his father’s car parked in the middle of the Whitewater Creek Bridge at three o’clock in the morning.

  Alsatia Renfroe had risked everything. And that was why Billy Benefield was here in his Curtiss Stearman on Christmas Eve morning.

  He made one low pass over the downtown, but the way the sun hit the big plate-glass window of the Farmers Mercantile Bank made it difficult to see inside. So he swooped down again and all of a sudden he was in trouble, down where only fools flew. So the only thing to do was dip down under the wires and skim the street and pray while his fanny puckered up like a prune.

  When he was up, out of danger, he realized he hadn’t even looked in the front window of the bank to see if Tunstall was there. He smacked the flat of his hand against the cockpit wall angrily, then jerked the stick around to the left and headed out toward Alsatia’s house. To hell with it. Tunstall or no Tunstall, he was landing.

  It occurred to Billy that this was no way to become mayor, as his father, Rosh, deeply desired and as family tradition dictated. This, in fact, could put your ass in a permanent sling. But he had been in scrapes before, and so far there hadn’t been anything Rosh Benefield couldn’t get him out of. If Rosh really wanted him to be mayor, then Rosh would find a way to help him out of this one.

  Besides, he might never have another chance like this with Alsatia. The war was almost over. He would never see combat, never cover himself with glory in battle in a way that would make Alsatia’s creamy thighs tingle. No, all of the guys who had made it to the front already would come rushing home in a few months, dazzling folks with their ribbons and their war tales, grabbing up the Alsatias and the political offices. Campaign ads would- be full of photos of rock-jawed young men in daring poses on the turrets of their tanks and the wings of their planes and the bows of their PT boats. There was only the Pacific left (no matter this temporary business at Bastogne), and not much there. The Navy would simply surround the Nip islands and let the yellow devils starve themselves into surrender. And Billy Benefield would be the kid who got there too late. So it was here and now as far as Alsatia Renfroe was concerned. One thing the war taught you, whether you made it to combat or not, was that you had to rip off a hunk of life while you could, because there was no such thing as destiny, only odds. And the odds told him to land in front of Alsatia’s house and spirit her away and let the devil take the hindmost.

  There was a clear, straight stretch of road alongside the pasture just before you got to Jake Tibbetts’s house, with no trees on either side or power lines to worry about. A good two hundred yards of nothing but open, straight, hard-packed red clay roadway with at least twenty yards of brown winter-deadened grass between the road and the fences on either side. Plenty of room for a landing, plenty for a takeoff once he had Alsatia in the rear seat.

  Billy throttled back as he came in low over the trees that bordered the road just before the big open spot. He cut the engine back all the way as the wheels cleared the trees, and dropped it down onto the roadway with a gentle thump.

  One thing Billy Benefield could do, he thought, was fly an airplane. It was a natural act. He would have been hell in combat, with the damp warm rot of jungle and the smell of bougainvillea under his wings and quick death spewing from the barrels of his Avenger. He could shut out the roar of the engine from his mind, feel the essence of the plane’s power and grace. He had heard pilots talk about the plane becoming an extension of yourself, but this was more than that. In the purest experience of flight, man became machine. It was not the engine that throbbed, but the core of your manhood. It was Billy Benefield himself who thumped down softly on the hard-packed red clay road next to the pasture. The plane, all that metal and wiring and fabric and fluids, was simply along for the ride.

  He coasted, tapping lightly on the brake until the plane slowed, then eased the throttle forward a bit and taxied down the road under the stark leafless limbs of the trees on either side of the roadway, past the Tibbettses’ house with Pastine standing open-mouthed on the front porch, wiping her hands on her apron. Billy gave her a big friendly wave as he lumbered past, but she just stared at him and Billy knew she didn’t recognize him under the leather helmet and goggles. He was creating a small tornado here under the trees, the propeller kicking up a cloud of dust and leaves. He could see Pastine Tibbetts shiver in the prop wash, then disappear into the house.

  In town, there was pandemonium.

  The courthouse and every store on the square had emptied and there was a good-sized crowd milling about in the space between the front of Biscuit Brunson’s cafe and the spot on the courthouse lawn where the Chevrolet coupe had slewed to a stop. The driver, a woman in a brown coat, was sitting on the ground next to the open door of the car, fumbling with the clasp on her purse and jabbering, “My God, it was an airplane. He almost killed me. An airplane, can you believe it?” Nobody seemed to be paying her much attention except for Jake Tibbetts, who had his reporter’s pad in hand and was taking notes.

  “What happened?” he asked the woman.

  “What happened? Well, I was going to get my mama a Christmas present and an airplane ran over me, that’s what happened.”

  “Did you get a good look at it?”

  “I could tell it was an airplane, if that’s what you mean. Wings, propeller on the front. An airplane. I could see that much.” She had a small cut on her cheek, but it wasn’t bleeding much. She finally got the clasp on her pocketbook undone, pulled out a tissue, and dabbed at the cut. She looked up at Jake. “All I wanted to do was get Mama something for Christmas, and Ernest told me not to take the car because it’s close to the end of the month and we’ve almost used up the gas ration and Ernest has to have the car to go to Taylorsville next week, but I said, ‘Ernest, I ain’t going to walk downtown in this cold wind to get Mama a Christmas present, I’m taking
the car, it ain’t worth catching pneumonia over it, I got enough to do without getting sick.’ But who would have believed I’d get run over by an airplane?”

  A small knot of people hovered around the car, but most of the crowd was over in front of the cafe, crunching around in the glass that littered the sidewalk and peering inside through the gaping hole where the window had been.

  “Look here, a bullet hole!” one man yelled, pointing to a hole in the wood on the inside of the window frame. “Hey,” the man called up to Ollie Whittle, who was leaning out the upstairs window of the radio station, microphone in hand. “A bullet hole, Ollie. They were shooting at the cafe.”

  “A new development here, folks,” Ollie said into the microphone. “We’ve just learned that the attacker fired shots at Brunson’s Cafe. This reporter was inside the cafe when the attack occurred, and I can tell you for sure, folks, an enemy air raid is nothing to be scoffed at. We sure can appreciate what the men at the front go through. The attack, as we said, came just a few minutes ago, totally unexpected. At least one aircraft dived on the courthouse square. An automobile wrecked on the courthouse lawn and Brunson’s Cafe had its front window shot out, but that appears to be the extent of the damage. This news bulletin, by the way, is brought to you by Redlinger’s White Angel Funeral Home. …”