People wanted to see the Little Bomber that Could, so we did our bond-rally tour in the Morgana. I was worried about that. We’d gone to all this trouble to keep what we’d brought back from influencing anything, and here I am, flying goddamn Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from one whistle stop to another. So I told the brass I only trusted Wen to work on the ship. Everybody thinks pilots are spoiled and superstitious, and sometimes you can put that to work for you. So we hid our hotrodded bomber by showing her off to everybody and his brother.
One day we were at a rally selling war bonds, and some wiseacre shakes my hand and says, “So I guess you boys got your meal ticket without having to fly your twenty-five, huh?” It really got under my skin. It’s not that I wanted to go back. No one in his right mind would want to be in that mess. But I was a bomber pilot, and they had me barnstorming to sell bonds.
But if I went back to combat duty, my crew would go back, too, like it or not, and that didn’t seem fair. So one night I called a crew meeting and told them what I wanted to do. Said I didn’t expect everybody to feel the same as me, and that it was a crew decision, not a command decision, and I wanted it put to a vote. I’d stay on with our bond push if that’s what they wanted.
But every one of them wanted to go back. Even Garrett and Everett, who were getting girls like movie stars, just nodded their heads and said they’d rather be on the roster. I was proud of them, but a little surprised, too, and I said so.
That’s when Shorty stood up. I never saw him so upset. He looked at everybody and said, “You all know why you want to go back, and it’s not just because we have a job to do. It’s because we don’t belong here.” He looked at me, and I got the feeling he wanted me to stop him from saying what he was about to say. But I didn’t, because I thought I knew what that was going to be.
He said, “I don’t mean we don’t belong the way vets feel when they come back home. And I’m not talking about feeling like we ought to be back in the war instead of smiling for cameras. I mean just what I said. We. Don’t. Belong. Here.”
He talked about how he’d been joking around with a bunch of reporters right after he won his Jack Benny contest. He’d done his Rochester impression, and they just looked at him. One of them said, “Who’s that supposed to be?”
Now, Jack Benny had one of the most popular shows in America. Rochester was his—well, I guess you’d call him a valet. That’s why Wen named the bug after him. The second you heard that voice, you knew who it was—and everybody had heard that voice. And Shorty’s Rochester imitation was dead-on.
Shorty just figured they’d been gaslighting him and put it out of his mind. Then after our last USO show he was flirting with some girls, and he did a Benny line, and he was about to do Rochester saying “No, suh, Mistah Benny!” But some know-it-all interrupted him and said, “Oh, I do take exception, sir!” in this hoity-toity Limey accent. And everyone around him cracked up laughing. “I asked the guy who that was supposed to be,” Shorty told us, “and he said, ‘You’re kidding, right? That was Winchester—Benny’s butler.’ ”
So Shorty made sure to catch the next Benny broadcast, and there it was. “Winchester, did you take my car out?” “No, I only take exception, sir.”
Shorty pointed at all of us like a prosecutor at the end of a murder trial. “And you all know it’s not just me,” he said. He brought up Plavitz’s gaffe with Glenn Miller. Plavitz nodded and looked upset. “I looked it up, but I couldn’t find it,” he told us. “But ‘King Porter Stomp’ was the last song I danced to with my girl before I joined up. You don’t forget a thing like that.”
Then Garrett spoke up. He’d tried to buy a Snickers bar at a soda fountain, and the guy behind the counter had never even heard of them.
So I told them about my father’s car. He was a doctor, and right before the war he bought a Nash 600. Doctors still made house calls back then, and he bought it because the 600 would go forever on a tank of gas. My last letter home, I asked him how the old Nash was doing. He wrote back and asked me who’s this Nash person? He wasn’t joking. He’d never heard of it.
Once it was out in the open it was scary. Things all of us knew we remembered were something else now. Or they weren’t there at all. Not the big stuff. There were still forty-eight states, we were still fighting Germany and Japan. But things like that don’t have to be big to make you think something’s wrong with your head. And that is one scary feeling.
Leave it to Boney to hit the bullseye. We’re still trying to figure out why things aren’t adding up, and Boney leans forward and says, “We came back, but we didn’t come back all the way.”
I will never forget that moment. The way we looked at each other. Knowing that was it. That we’d come back to the past, but not to our past. And realizing that the mission hadn’t really ended. That it never would. We were all getting back-slaps and free drinks and pretty girls, and not one of us wanted to stay there, because it wasn’t our world. I guess it wasn’t our war, either, but that’s not how we thought about it. You expect to be frightened by the war. You don’t expect to be scared of the world you come home to after it.
I told everybody that I would put in for a return to combat duty the next day. Then I went to bed and had the first good night’s sleep I’d had in months. Two days later Germany surrendered.
*
Everybody got their orders pretty fast after that. Me and Jerry got falling-down drunk the day he got his. I re-enlisted. I didn’t have a girl waiting for me—not in California, anyway. And where else would I get to fly the new jets that were coming?
They took apart the air bases in England so fast you’d think we got evicted. In ’Forty-eight the Russians raised the drawbridge on Berlin, and me and about a thousand other pilots airlifted supplies from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof. I’d spent a lot of time tearing that country up, and it felt good to pay some of it back.
Jerry and I kept in pretty good touch, and one day he wrote and told me he’d tracked the Morgana to a holding field in Arkansas. The Army had brought all the bombers back to melt them down for scrap. I’d been worried what might happen if someone looked under the Morgana’s hood and got an education, so I should have been relieved. But that wasn’t how I felt. All those mission stencils and girls painted on noses, blood in the metal, and then just stacks of aluminum bars. It breaks your heart.
Then Jerry wrote me that he and Wen had bought the Morgana from the Army for three hundred and fifty dollars. I couldn’t believe it. I asked him what he thought he was going to do with her. He said he’d think of something. He did, too. Him and Wen went into business. Blue and Gray Technology. Yep, that BGT, and that Gerald Broben. They reverse-engineered the Morgana and figured out other things they’d seen in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Wen salvaged that damned bug from the Channel and took it apart, too. I was worried as hell about the can of worms they were opening, but they took it slow, released things in small doses. First thing they came out with was an omnidirectional forklift, the Sammy. It made them rich.
Damned if Shorty didn’t go out to California and take Jack Benny up on his offer. He ended up writing for Benny’s TV show, if you can believe that. They were having trouble with the guy who played Winchester because he wanted too much money, so Shorty created a new character—a black valet named Rochester. Ended up being more popular than Winchester ever was. So really Shorty was the only one of us who changed anything back to the way it had been where we came from. After he retired he started going to Eighth Air Force reunions and air shows, painting nose art on aircraft metal and A-2 jackets for vets. He sent me one. It’s even better than the original.
Everett went back to his family farm, got married to some girl he met in Cleveland, and moved there to sell cars. He did all right. Garrett became a high school wrestling coach. Married another teacher and had five kids. He taught at the same school till he died of a heart attack in his mid sixties.
Francis got even more religious than he already was, thanks
to his new lease on life. Resurrected like Lazarus. He became a deacon in his church, married a woman named Gail, a real knockout. Out of all of us, I think he ended up the happiest.
Plavitz had a rough go of it. Three marriages, a couple of failed business ventures. He was some kind of black sheep with the family business, shipping or something. He ended up with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, to be honest, and drinking didn’t make it any smaller. He died in a car crash in ’Eighty-three.
We lost Boney first. He went into the woods with his service .45 one day in 1955. They found a note in his pocket with his Silver Star. He had a brain tumor, probably six months left by the time they caught it, nothing they could do. He apologized to his parents and the crew. We took it pretty hard. That apology to his parents had been for leaving. The one to us had been for letting us down.
Martin drifted off course for a while early on. You could see it when we all got together. He wouldn’t look at you for long. Little things would make him tear up. He’d sit in a corner by himself and drink. Well, first the Ill Wind and then us. You’d be haunted, too.
One time, maybe the fourth or fifth time we all met up again, I got to talking with him. Asked him what he was doing with himself back in South Dakota, did he have a girlfriend, all that happy shit. I asked if he still played ball. He just laughed and shook his head no. I told him that was a shame. He shrugged and said he’d been out of the game too long. I said he’d sure be a great coach. High school, American Legion league, who cared? I guess it woke something up in him, because next time I saw him he showed me a picture of a minor-league ball club, him in a team jacket beside them, baseball in his hand and grinning his head off. Sioux Falls Canaries. Good for him.
As for me, I flew. Everywhere I could, every chance I got. Because the one place I knew I did belong was in the air. All those differences, you can’t see them up there. They don’t matter. It’s the only place I feel at home. So that’s what I did, for forty more years.
The crew reunions started about eight years after the war ended. I missed the first one because I was in Korea, flying Stratojets. Reunions like that hadn’t really started yet for most vets. It was still too soon. The war was still too loud. But we’d gone back home and still not made it home. What we had left of the world we’d left was each other.
Eventually we had the internet for updates on each other, but that didn’t stop the reunions. It made it so that when we did see each other, we could concentrate on what we really wanted to talk about instead of playing catchup. We’d wait till the sons and daughters and grandkids went to bed, and we’d talk about what was happening in the world, was it headed toward what we’d seen. As time went by we breathed a little easier about that, but I still see things that make me nervous. It doesn’t seem like all that long a throw from those remotely piloted attack drones to the Typhon.
We’d compare lists of things that we remembered but nobody else did. We’d talk about our missions, of course, but mostly we talked about the Mission. And at the end of the night we’d ask the Question. Have any of us told anyone what really happened?
The answer was always no. No late-night drunk confessions, no diary entries. Not a word. It was easier to keep quiet about everything as time went on, because the further away from it we got, the crazier it all sounded. Like some fairy tale we’d all made up to get us through the war.
Around those dinner tables or on those front porches we were just a bunch of old guys reminiscing. Hearing aids and canes, eventually walkers. But we were also ten men keeping each other company on a lonely watch. And before we all went on our separate ways we’d make one final toast. It was always silent because what we were toasting was the things we couldn’t say. And then we’d leave a glass behind for every one of us we’d lost, five glasses and then six and then seven, on down until two weeks ago, when I got the call from Michael Broben telling me I’d lost my copilot and my best friend for seventy years. Jerry’d dodged flak and bullets and weapons that haven’t even been invented yet. Dodged cancer, too, for a while. But in the end he couldn’t outrun it.
I didn’t want to leave nine glasses behind at a house full of strangers. Or anywhere else. So after the funeral I deadheaded home, and I raised a glass to everything I thought would stay unsaid. I didn’t have to ask myself the Question, because I hadn’t told anybody. I didn’t think there was anyone to tell. Our story would leave this world when I did, and that was okay by me.
But because it was just me now, and because I’m ninety-three years old, there was still a Question that I had to ask myself: Did it really happen?
And the answer is yes. Yes, it did. It really happened.
So that’s the story of what me and nine of my friends did one summer a long time ago, when we were kids.
epilogue
The old man rolled his cane between his palms and watched the F-shaped metal handle slowly turn. He did not look up when someone softly coughed.
A folding chair creaked. A whiskey voice with an East Texas accent said, quietly, “Captain Farley?”
The old man inhaled sharply and looked up from his cane. He blinked and glanced around the ten-by-ten canopy tent as if surprised he was not somewhere else.
A man and a woman sat facing him. The man was in his late sixties, sandy-haired, beefy, thick-necked, wearing Air Force dress blues with lots of chest candy, a silver star on each epaulet. The woman was heavy, kind-faced, late forties, narrow rimless glasses and a tan dress and low heels. Beside Farley was a tripod that held a tablet with the camera lens pointed at him. The tablet’s black case bore a red-white-and-blue sticker. property of veterans heritage foundation. Before the old man a small card table held a pitcher of icewater standing in a pool of its own sweat. The ice mostly melted, an empty glass beside it. Through gaps in the popup flaps the old man saw people passing, a quick glimpse of a child towing an American-flag balloon, patriotic bunting on a distant wall. Distant music sounded echoey and underwater. A live orchestra. They’d been playing big-band swing all afternoon. Right now they were playing Glenn Miller. Pretty good, but not a patch on the man himself.
“Captain Farley?” the man said again.
The old man looked back at the brigadier general—Andrews, he remembered.
“Are you all right, sir?” Andrews asked.
Farley gave a slanted smile. “Hell no,” he said. “I’m ninety-three.” He leaned back in his metal folding chair. It was hideously uncomfortable and his hips were singing an aria. He waved absently and let his double-handled cane fall back against his leg. “I’m fine,” he said. “To be honest, I almost forgot you all were here.” He looked at the woman. Kitchner, that was her name. Dr. Kitchner. History professor. “I do go on, don’t I?” Farley told her.
“I could listen to it all day,” she said.
General Andrews grinned at her. “You just did,” he said.
Kitchner looked faintly alarmed and glanced at her cellphone. “Oh my goodness, I had no idea,” she said. She got up and pressed the tablet and removed it from its tripod stand. She stopped in the midst of collapsing the tripod looked at Farley. “You’ve really never told this story to anyone, in all this time?”
“The people I’d have told it to already knew it. The rest?” He waved indifferently.
“No girlfriend? Never married?”
“Hell, I’m not a monk. I got involved a couple times, sure.” Farley shrugged. “It never took.”
“Well. That’s a shame.”
“Not to me.” Farley’s tired smile encompassed decades. “No offense, ma’am,” he said, “but you people aren’t quite real to me. I know I’m the one who landed here. I’m the ghost. But that’s how it feels.” He patted his chest. “I’m real. Wennda was real. The world I came from was real. The world I came back to?” He shook his head. “The others got with the program sooner or later, but I just never could.”
General Andrews sat up straight. “Oh,” he said. “That’s why you kept flying.”
Farley loo
ked chagrined. “Took me ten years to figure that out,” he said.
“All that seat time.” Andrews shook his head. “All those years.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Kitchner.
Andrews raised a hand to the old pilot in the chair before them as if offering him as evidence. “He was trying to get back.”
Farley looked away. “Still am,” he said.
*
Last night the Blue and Gray Technology Gulfstream G550 had hummed a one-hour lullaby from Baltimore to the company airfield near Norfolk. The jet had a flight attendant, a medical technician with a crash cart, a sofa, and soft beige leather seats the size of Barcaloungers. Farley had been the only passenger. The flight attendant had brought him a soft drink and asked if he wanted anything to eat, then left him alone. The med tech had turned on a Kindle after takeoff from BWI, and barely moved again until they landed.
During the brief flight Farley’s hand strayed many times to the letter that had been waiting in his mailbox when he’d finally gotten back from Jerry’s funeral. Only once during the flight did Farley remove the letter from his coat pocket, carefully unfolding it in the cabin’s dim to look down at the pale gray BGT letterhead. It bore two handwritten words, along with yesterday’s date and a time. A limo had arrived at Farley’s Inner Harbor condo at exactly that time.
The rest of the flight Farley had looked out the window at the crowded nighttime nation creeping by. All those differences, you can’t see them up here. Unbidden, his fingers touched the contours of the envelope again and again.
*
Now Farley watched snippets of the Veterans Day crowd passing by outside the E-Z Up.
“Blue Skies,” he realized. That’s what the band was playing out there. “Blue Skies.”
Dr. Kitchner was slipping her tablet into a small roll-on valise when Farley looked back. “Let me ask you something,” he said.
She smiled. “Of course.”
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