Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Jake looked wildly about the room, eyes dancing from one spot to the other, and then to the window where the waning light said that it was indeed September and that he was back from a far country. A deep, sad ache floated up out of the dark well of his existence. If only he could have stayed away.

  Nine

  June 28, 1945. Dawn exploded on the gray wings of Billy Benefield’s P-50 like napalm and seared the cockpit with a blinding whiteness. Billy threw one arm up in front of his eyes and kicked the plane sharply to the left in a tight circle until the sun was at his back. Then he lowered his arm and let his eyes adjust to the intense orange glow that bathed the instrument panel, marveling again at how the sun could just pop up out of the Pacific as if it had spent the night in the cool depths, husbanding its energy for the great leap.

  He was utterly lost. The storm had done that — the storm and Muehler, the pig-headed squadron leader who had led the little formation into a boiling mass of thunderheads so huge it stretched for miles, so fast-moving that once they were into it, there was no escaping in any direction. God, he thought, they will fry Muehler’s ass for this one (unless Muehler was shark food by now, which was a good possibility). Of course it wasn’t all Muehler’s fault. Nobody had known the storm was there. Nothing on the weather charts in the ops shack had hinted of it. But it waited out there for them in the dark, the great yawning Pacific dark, like the gaping mouth of a dragon.

  It had leaped on them after they had turned loose the B-29S they were escorting halfway to Tokyo and had turned back toward Okinawa. There was just the turbulence at first, buffeting the wings of their planes, and then, sweet Jesus, they were into the thick of it with lightning exploding like ack-ack around them, sending the dials of their instruments spinning wildly, the horrible winds tearing at their wings and wrenching controls from their hands, the blast of rain like fifty-caliber bullets on the thin metal of their planes. The P-51 was a swift, powerful, deadly piece of machinery; but in the face of such a storm, it was a toy. The storm blew their tiny formation to pieces.

  Billy, at the height of his terror, had reached for the radio mike, had screamed, “Muehler, you faggot! You asshole motherfuckin’ sonofabitch!” and then realized that he held only air in his hand, that the microphone was flopping around somewhere down by his feet at the end of its cord. The great grip of the storm took the plane from him and tossed it about the tortured sky like a Ping-Pong ball while Billy gripped the controls in raw terror. And then, as if it had toyed with him enough, it seared his plane with a single blinding flash of light that swallowed all existence and pitched plane and pilot into a great roaring well that went down and down and down until the blackness reached up and enveloped him.

  Suddenly, Billy felt himself outside the plane, suspended in air, watching the P-51 spin and lurch just below him, a figure still inside slumped over the controls. He thought, It’s all right. He watched for a moment, then knowing how it would end, with the plane exploding into the water, he turned to go. But something stopped him. He was ready, but there was something back there, something he needed. He hesitated, torn between the powerful feeling that he must go on and the pull of whatever was there in the plane below him. He sighed, a great sad sigh, and then he went back.

  The storm spat him out like a scuppernong seed and he came to his senses in the cockpit. It took him a long minute to realize it, but then he felt the controls stiffen in his hands and became aware he was flying the plane again. He sensed, though, that something was very near and very dangerous and he sat very still with the stick at dead center until a flash of lightning off to his left showed him that he was only a few feet above the wave tops, rocketing along at 350 miles an hour, a hairbreadth away from instant death in water that would be as hard as concrete. His heart leaped into his throat and he stifled a scream, then carefully, very slowly, he eased back on the stick and brought the nose up. He climbed until he was out of danger and then he threw up all over the floor of the cockpit.

  The stillness was awesome. Even the great throbbing drone of the plane’s engine was a whisper. The storm had tossed him into a vacuum of sound and sight in which he floated, suspended, not sure if he were really alive or not. But as he slowly came to his wits he took stock and found that he truly lived and so did his airplane. He had been at the doorway of death. But now he lived, and he was utterly shaken by it.

  “I can’t hear anything,” he said out loud, and the voice was strange and weak and small in the vastness of the cockpit, but it was his voice. He reached out and touched the instrument panel, moving his fingers along from dial to dial, watching with fascination how the needles jiggled in their lighted glass cages. Then he touched himself, his legs, his torso, his head. There was little feeling in his hands and body, but enough to tell there was flesh there, flesh and muscle and bone and sinew. He existed where all natural law told him he had no right to exist. He began to cry and he cried for a long time, great tears of fear and awe and relief flooding down his cheeks and wetting the front of his flight jacket.

  Finally, he got a grip on himself. “I’m in shock,” he said into the stillness, remembering how they had described it to him in flight training in one of the first aid classes, how a man might be badly injured and think he was okay and then find that he was bleeding to death and didn’t know it. He checked himself again for blood, but there was none. Just numbness, a protective film over his consciousness that the shock had put there.

  But he flew on through the calm night and the shock gradually wore off and he began to get control of his surroundings and think about where he was and where he was going. His plane was intact, but his instruments didn’t work. They jiggled about in their cages, but they made no sense. The lightning bolt had knocked them cockeyed. The fuel gauge and the compass, the altimeter and the artificial horizon were gone completely, the rest of the dials registering numbers that were ludicrous fiction. He could only guess at how much fuel he might have left, and he had absolutely no notion of where he was located in the vast openness of the Pacific or in which direction he was headed.

  He realized, then, that the radio was still on. There was the familiar hiss and crackle in the tiny speakers of his leather helmet. He found the microphone dangling on its cable at his feet, picked it up, pressed the button. “Cobra Four to …” he hesitated. To whom? “Cobra Four to any traffic.” Nothing. Just the empty sizzling sound that said space, space, space. “Cobra Four to all traffic. Mayday, mayday.” Nothing. He was completely alone.

  He glanced at his watch and saw that the face of it was smashed. He felt his wrist and discovered the dull pain of the bruise beneath the watch where his arm had been flung about in the wild catapulting of the plane and the watch face had smacked against something in the cockpit.

  So, where the hell was he and what to do?

  They had taken off around two in the morning, linked up with the B-29S over Saipan, and sped on through the star-sprinkled night toward Japan, shepherding the sleek silver ghosts of the bombers as they passed over the pitiful little outpost islands the Japs still held, the scraggle of bomb-pocked airfields carved out of jungle and coral that occasionally still mothered a Zero or two. Nothing had risen to threaten them this night, though, and when the P-51s reached the limit of their range, they waggled their wings at the bombers and peeled back toward Okinawa and flew fat, dumb, and happy across the empty expanse of ocean until the storm boiled in from nowhere and kicked their butts up around their ears. Billy Benefield imagined that he might be the only one of the flight to have survived it, and by all rights he, too, should be dead.

  Odds were he soon would be, because unless he lucked onto a piece of land, he would run out of fuel. Then he could ride the plane down, or he could parachute out and take his chances.

  “Shit,” he said to himself. Another piece of asshole luck, the kind that had been dogging him since he put on a uniform. The war was finished, and so was he. Billy Benefield was going to end up with the seabirds pecking the dead eyes from his sh
riveled head in a life raft. After he had gotten to the war six months too late, and then decided he no longer wanted to be a hero.

  That had happened when he had shot down a Jap plane two weeks before. The evidence was painted on the side of his fuselage just below the canopy of his cockpit, a single white stenciled Rising Sun. A coonskin. It had happened while they were flying air cover for the big and growing flotilla anchored off Okinawa, watching for the kamikazes that had started peppering the fleet with their frenzied, suicidal assaults, setting off panic on the ships.

  Muehler spotted them first, three Zeros arcing in out of the east. Green pilots. They could tell by the way the Japs started their approach much too far out, dropping down out of a cloud bank and aiming for a line of fat little transports.

  “Bogeys! Bogeys!” Muehler yelped. “Two o’clock, about a thousand feet. Two of ’em. No, three.” The Japs were below and to the right of them, slanting directly across their course toward the ships, and there was nothing to do but keep going, keep their tight echelon formation, reach forward and unlock the safety switches on their guns. Then the Zeros spotted them and one plane panicked and pulled out of the long steady dive and climbed up and away.

  “Cobra Four. Cobra Five. Get ’im!” Muehler barked. “Everybody else. Keep it in tight. Paste the bastards.”

  Billy slammed the throttle to the wall and kicked his P-51 out of the formation before his wingmate, Schlosser, had time to blink. He headed for the lone scrambling Jap, climbing with the fierce morning sun behind them, gaining quickly on the Zero, which had once been the scourge of the Pacific but was now no match for the powerful, nimble P-51. The Jap jerked his Zero back and forth across the sky, but Billy just kept boring in on him. He looked back and saw Schlosser just behind and to the right of him as they closed into range. Then the Jap dived off to the right, directly into Schlosser’s sights. “I got him! I got him!” Schlosser screamed. Over the crackle of the radio, Billy could hear his fifty-calibers thundering, spraying tracers all over the sky, missing everything in his excitement.

  “Dumb ass,” Billy muttered to himself. “Hold still, Schlosser, for Christ’s sake. You got him, just hold fucking still!” The Jap was going wild out there. Then suddenly he whipped the Zero around to the left and seemed to stop in midair dead in Billy’s sights, turning in a sharp rolling curve that presented a fat topside view of the plane. He could see the pilot inside, the top of his head and his arms on the controls. “Asshole,” Billy said softly, and pulled the trigger. There was nothing to it. He banked his own plane to the left, following the gentle curve of the Jap’s course. The P-51 bucked with the recoil of the fifties, but it was nothing. The Jap sat there frozen while Billy poured a thousand rounds into the Zero and it came to pieces in front of him. The cockpit dissolved in a shattered mass of plexiglass and metal and exploding flesh and then the bullets ate through the fuselage and the engine cowling, raking the plane from front to back. Huge chunks of it flew off and finally it simply disintegrated. Billy flew through the empty space where the Zero had been a split second before, still firing. He released the trigger and eased back in the seat and let his breath out. The air was clean, empty, filled with nothing but the sun and the perfect hurtling machine that was his own plane, while below him the million tiny pieces of the Zero rained into the Pacific. He heard then the excited babble on the radio — Muehler and the others below and behind him, shooting down the two Japs that had dived on the ships. And Schlosser was yelling like an idiot, telling them that Billy had shot down the third one.

  He felt nothing. It had been too easy. The Jap — a kid, no doubt, maybe even a very little kid — had cheated him. He had sat there frozen in Billy’s sights, petrified, while Billy simply pressed the trigger and chewed him to pieces. That was not the way he wanted it. Then, suddenly, he just wanted to go home, to be done with it.

  That had been Billy Benefield’s war, and now it was about to end stupidly, with a whimper. Storm-tossed and lost.

  Then dawn came, and he at least had some idea of how long he had to live. Dawn meant that he had been in the air three hours, and there was about an hour’s fuel left in his tanks. An hour to find land.

  The sun spread its glow quickly over the face of the water and Billy banked his plane in a broad arc, scanning the horizon in all directions. Nothing. No ship, no island, nothing but water. He knew which direction the sun came from, but there was no fixed point from which to get his bearings. He could fly east toward the sun, but east from what — and to what? Any course could as easily take him away from land as toward it. He throttled back as far as he could without stalling the plane and turned west. It was simply a direction, and he had to go somewhere.

  As he flew on, he thought about his odds should he run out of fuel without spotting land. He tried to think of everything they had taught him at Presidio in the special briefings. And he decided the best thing to do would be to stay with the plane and ditch it in the ocean. Bailing out would be less risky in the beginning, but then he might end up in the water with nothing but his life vest and then the sharks would get him. He was terrified at the thought of sharks. His legs drew up involuntarily as he imagined them slashing at his limbs, ripping away his groin. God, not that! No, he would stay with the plane. You could bash yourself up riding a plane into the ocean, but if you made it down in one piece, you could get out with the life raft and survival kit with its matches and flares, a little water and C-rations, fishhooks and a knife. You could live perhaps a couple of weeks on a raft, parceling out your water and sucking the juices of fish. And if nobody found you, you would eventually lapse into delirium and then a coma and death wouldn’t hurt much.

  The sun was well above the horizon now, clean and warm, bronzing the surface of the Pacific. He thought briefly of Alsatia — asleep in the tiny walk-up room in Presidio, hair splayed across the pillow, wakening eventually to the same sun that fired his ocean, rising naked — oh, God! (Billy squeezed his knees together) — to stand lithe and tawny in the sun-exploded room. There had been only a few days for them, barely enough time and just enough luck to find the tiny room. Then he had seen her once more at the gate to the air base in a crowd of other wives and girlfriends just before the squadron left. A few nights and a fistful of letters. And now this. He would never know if he could have handled her.

  Then he thought of his father, who had told him to get out of the Army Air Corps, who wanted so badly for him to come home from the war and go to law school and become mayor, the way Rosh and his own father had done. He had decided before he took off from Partridge Road on Christmas Eve Day that he would not quit flying, and over the past six months he had decided he probably couldn’t do the rest of it, either. He had traveled too far and seen too much to go back, at least not for long. It would be a great disappointment to Rosh Benefield, who loved him but said he lacked judgment. Or it would have been. Billy would never know if he could have handled that, either.

  Then he saw the island.

  It was nothing, a small green-brown bump all by itself on the gray-green elephant’s hide of the Pacific. It would have been easy to miss, but it popped up there in front of him like a Zero in his sights. He would soon be out of fuel. And there was the island.

  He closed the distance, and as he drew nearer, he could see that the island was not the perfect round hump he first thought, but rather an oval, stretching out away from him with a small indentation at the near end, a lagoon, and a slash of gray showing through the canopy of trees, running lengthways along the island. An airstrip. Nearer, and he could make out a seaplane tethered in the quiet water of the lagoon. The airstrip itself was empty. Japs, he thought. One of the tiny forgotten islands in the vastness between Okinawa and Japan, a pitiful chunk of coral and sand that might sink back into the sea at any time, unmourned. The Japs would have stripped it of everything valuable. Except the lone seaplane. But if there was a seaplane, there was gasoline. And if he could get to it, he could refuel.

  What to do? If he landed,
the Japs would probably kill him then and there. If he didn’t, he would die in the water. The only thing to do, he decided quickly, was try to take it away from them.

  Billy dropped down to five hundred feet and bore in on the island, knowing he had the sun at his back and a light wind in his face and he was almost sure of surprise. The island grew big in his windshield and he eased down a bit more, a hundred feet off the wave tops, heading straight for the lagoon. He flipped the safety lever on his guns, arming them, cursing himself for not having tested the fifty-calibers before now. His eyes strained toward the lagoon with its thin stretch of tan beach, toward the seaplane rocking gently at its mooring with the Rising Sun emblem on the fuselage.

  There was no time to think about anything. The island was on him and he squeezed the gun switch. The plane jerked with the recoil of the fifties hammering away and he held it steady, nose pointing directly at the seaplane riding helplessly in the water. The bullets began churning the water well ahead of the seaplane, every fifth round a tracer marking the progress of his fire as it crept toward the plane and then simply ate it alive. The plane exploded as the shells chewed through the wing tanks and ignited the fuel and pulverized the cabin. It blew, showering pieces of debris over the lagoon. Then there was another explosion behind the plane, up on the beach, and Billy realized he had set off a fuel dump. There wasn’t a lot of it, but it went with a big whump and a ball of flame shot skyward. Shit! The gasoline! Then he was on the island, roaring above the splintered smoking shell of the seaplane and seeing, just before he heeled the plane over to the left, the little gaggle of huts back away from the beach under the trees. He pulled a tight circle and gained altitude, then swung back over the island and by this time the Japs were stumbling from the huts, firing at him with their rifles.

  The Japs struck the next blow and it stunned him. As he banked and started back over the island, a sudden puff of black appeared off his wingtip and then a concussion rocked the plane. Sonofabitch! The little bastards had ack-ack. He jerked the plane back to the right and headed for the deck while another wicked black puff and then another and another danced around him, peppering his plane with bits of shrapnel. He could see several holes in his left wing. He slammed the P-51 right down to wave level and then he made a low swing out over the ocean and headed back toward the island, below the gun’s angle of compression. He could see it there at the edge of the beach under the trees, pumping away, firing ineffectually over his head. A single gun in a sandbag emplacement. He bore in again and the Japs realized what he was doing and he could see a couple of them scrambling out of the gun emplacement. The muzzle of the untended gun swung skyward. He squeezed the trigger and the bullets hit first in the trees, arcing in from the wings of his plane. He pushed the nose of the plane down just a hair and the shells seemed to settle in on the gun emplacement like rain. They tore it apart. Sandbags, pieces of the gun flew everywhere and some of the ammo exploded. He saw a Jap running behind the gun and then the fifties tore him in half and the torso just disappeared.