Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot

by Andrea Leininger

  And it had been five long hours since Mike went over the side.

  The rigger had a wife and two kids living thirty miles away in a trailer park in Rayne, and nobody wanted the guy’s wife and kids to hear it on television. It fell to Bruce to break the news. He got to Rayne about eleven p.m. When Mike’s wife came to the door and saw the grim cluster of men, she immediately knew. She wouldn’t sit down, just paced in a frantic way, and then she began to shake. She asked if her husband was dead, and Bruce said they knew only that there was an accident and they were doing everything possible to find him.

  She was trying to be brave, Bruce recalled. He could see and sense her effort. He reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled away and paced in a circle and began to weep. Her face had a haunted, empty expression—a look that Bruce knew would stay with him forever.

  When they got back to the office, they were told that a Coast Guard cutter got to the rig at midnight, but it wouldn’t put down a diver. It was a matter of policy. Not in the dark, not in the tricky water near an oil rig, where a diver could get tangled up and die.

  Bruce went ballistic. He got on the phone and started yelling at some Coast Guard flunky. “If it was a Kennedy down in that water, we’d have a fleet out there!” he bellowed. And then he hung up.

  The company organized its own dive team and had them in the water by that afternoon. But it was too late. It took the divers less than twenty minutes to find the lost rigger; he was hung up in the submerged superstructure. When he was knocked off the rig, the current carried him back under the rig, where he drowned.

  It was the only fatality that OSCA had ever had, but its effect endured. Not just because it happened at an auspicious moment and tore the heart out of what should have been a shining hour—it was a piercing reminder that theirs was a dangerous and treacherous business. And from then on, the company always kept grief counselors on call.

  After this, Bruce became somewhat distant, paying little attention to his son’s bad dreams and obsession with airplanes, or even to the soft, pesky voice of his wife, alerting him to the fact that the nightmares were not getting better and that a new ingredient had been introduced—the talk about a crashed plane and the fire and the little man trapped inside, and the dreams, had started to intrude on James’s waking life.

  But to Bruce, this news was vague and unreal and, if he were to take it seriously, disquieting. So he withdrew, which was understandable. He was still dealing with complications over the drowned rigger and his widow and her young children. He had insurance issues to settle and a distraught family to be reassured and counseled.

  Andrea knew that she had to handle the domestic front. Bruce had his own nightmare. It was up to her to get to the bottom of James’s troubled sleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ANDREA’S PLAN to crack the mystery of James’s bad dreams had to be crowded in between the difficulties that were falling like a summer downpour that season on West St. Mary Boulevard. High on the list of Andrea’s requirements was bending the new house to her will.

  Technically, it was an old house, a seventy-year-old Acadian-style home, with old bathtubs and old sinks and old toilets and old cabinets. But it was new to the Leiningers. For the first time in their eight-year marriage, Andrea and Bruce had moved into a place that didn’t smell of fresh paint and new wood. It was the first time they weren’t the original owners.

  The house had been empty for four months when they moved in, and it had accumulated a layer of grime, in addition to its having a dated, stuffy style that clashed with Andrea’s lively taste. It would take months before this home measured up to her Mary Poppins standards. But Andrea thrived on hard work. In fact, it was a welcome distraction from the eeriness that came regularly in the night.

  So she rolled up her sleeves and went at it. She relined the cabinets and drawers, cleaned the claw feet of the old bathtubs, scrubbed the water stains out of the old sinks, and replaced the toilet seats—but left the large toilet tanks because she didn’t approve of a dainty flush.

  The house was resistant and tough, but so was she. Solid walls and incompatible colors had to conform to her will.

  The first thing that struck her was the sickening shade of pale pink in the hallways—a fading eyesore.

  Bruce was no help. Not in this. He had experienced a true crisis at work, and between that and the nightmares, he just wasn’t available when it came to decorating the new house.

  Every day, while James took his morning nap, she’d snap into action. Out would come the ten-foot ladder, the paint and mixing bucket, the brushes and rollers and the blue painter’s tape. Quickly, she would mix the paint, then climb up the ladder. She would tape the moldings; then it was back down to street level to tape the baseboards. She worked like a demon to slap on at least one full coat of paint before James woke up from his nap and got underfoot.

  The wallpaper in the kitchen was another hideous challenge. Its blue and white gingham clashed with the fabulous hand-painted Portuguese tile that covered the backsplashes. And for this job she enlisted James’s help. And he was really good at it: tearing off the old wallpaper. He had a two-year-old’s true gift for destruction.

  Andrea failed, however, to make clear to James the big picture. Undeniably, they had fun pulling and tearing off the top layer of old wallpaper. But the problem then came after she pasted on the new blue toile wallpaper, stood back to admire it, then took an unscheduled bathroom break without changing James’s marching orders. It was only a moment. But when she returned, she found her little self-starter tearing down the new wallpaper. It only took one shrill outburst to convince James that Mommy wanted to keep this new wall covering intact. He was also a fast learner.

  James’s bedroom, of course, cried out for a makeover. The dark green solid wood shutters and floral wallpaper gave the room a dim, suffocating mood. But this paper seemed embedded in the walls. It took a few weeks for her to remove it with a scoring device and solvent. She replaced the old covering with a tone-on-tone taupe textured pattern with a border of vintage planes flying over open country. Then she flooded the room with light by removing the sealed-in shutters and replacing them with venetian blinds.

  And it became a brighter and lighter room, with two windows facing south and two facing east and all of James’s familiar furniture in place.

  She would make this home open, warm, welcoming. It would reflect the high hopes of the family. On that score, she was determined. When she had declared this move into the Lafayette house her last, she meant it. And so she attacked the business of fixing it up with a certain fierce, protective energy.

  “Do you like this, James?” she would ask, laying out the colors and fabrics she would install. He would smile and nod, and together, chirping and singing, they would go about the job, stripping the walls and tearing down the shutters and letting in the light—not that it alleviated the nightly terrors.

  James’s nightmares had now become Andrea’s nightmares; she didn’t sleep, not with both eyes shut. Some part of her was always alert, always listening for the first scream. For months, she was never able to drop into a deep, refreshing state of complete rest.

  Nevertheless, even under all this tension and pressure, she carved out one area of perfect peace. Every evening, while Bruce and James read together or sat quietly talking, she climbed into the tub with the claw feet for a long, lingering bath. She would light candles, put on a CD, sip a glass of wine, and soak for two hours. She stayed in the bath until she turned into a prune, until she felt the tension dissolve in the soapy water. Until the pounding stopped in her head and she was ready to face the dreaded nightmares. It was her secret garden.

  In late June, Bruce had to leave for a week to attend to family matters in New Jersey. On the 19th, Gregory, his fifteen-year-old son from his first marriage, would graduate from the eighth grade. The next day, his twin eighteen-year-old daughters, Andrea and Valerie, would graduate from Bridgewater Raritan High School, the same school from which Bruce h
ad graduated thirty-three years earlier. He could not be among the missing.

  Bruce remembered the empty feeling he had had during his own graduations. His father, a blue-collar worker and ferociously proud of it, never got past the tenth grade. And he never got over his antipathy toward school and education. After serving in the Marine Corps, Ted Leininger had struggled to rise out of the coal mines to become a skilled laborer. He didn’t see the need for all those fancy degrees, and so he was never there for Bruce’s milestones.

  It left a wound, and as Bruce grew older, he vowed that he would never miss one of his children’s commencements.

  Nothing was going to stop him from flying to New Jersey to attend the graduations of three of his four children from that first, failed marriage. Andrea planned to accompany him to the airport on that Monday morning in June, then take the car home.

  As the Leiningers headed into the parking lot at Lafayette Regional Airport, Andrea was in the passenger seat, and James was in the back, lashed into his car seat and holding his toy airplane. Bruce was driving, fretting about this and that, vaguely worried—as he always was—about flying, not really paying attention to anything but his own qualms, until he heard a little voice from the backseat:

  “Daddy’s airplane crash—big fire!”

  He’d heard it before, but it was still a shock. Bruce had to remind himself that James was only twenty-six months old, that he was unable to gauge the potency of what he was saying. He was still in diapers, still resisting toilet training. He might seem more grown up, have moments of rare maturity, but he was just a tiny boy, a toddler.

  And, of course, theirs was not an ordinary father-and-son relationship. Bruce and James had already forged titanium bonds. When Bruce came home from work at night, James would run out to the car to greet him, not even letting his father unbuckle himself. He would leap onto Bruce’s lap and play driver, fiddling with every dial and knob on the dashboard. He was a delight, filled with all the innocent childish impulses for fast food and candy and harmless mischief.

  Bruce had a great tolerance for James’s monkey business. For instance, there was the Saturday afternoon when Andrea went shopping and Bruce dozed off in his chair. When Andrea came home, Bruce rushed to help with the bundles.

  “Where’s James?” she asked.

  He didn’t know. There was a scramble as he and Andrea made a room-to-room search of the house. Finally, Bruce made a quick left turn in the master bedroom, and as he started into the bathroom, he felt the squish, squish of water. There was James, standing triumphantly on the counter, laughing as the water overflowed the sink and cascaded down the lovely terraces he had created out of the counter drawers.

  Bruce might well have been livid. James had made a terrible mess. But when he saw how inventive James had been—using the drawers as stairs to get to the sink, then flooding the sink until the water poured down into each drawer until it, too, overflowed and became a perfect waterfall—he was more impressed than angry.

  And out of old guilt and an awakened sense of obligation, Bruce had sworn that James would never miss out on what his other four children had lost: the steady presence of a loving father. Every Saturday morning he loaded James into a kind of backpack child carrier, and together they made pancakes. Then they would watch Looney Tunes or SpongeBob SquarePants until Andrea woke up and set them all off on the rest of the day.

  Even when this primitive unease about flying was aroused in him, even under great provocation, it was not possible for Bruce to turn cruelly on his son.

  “Daddy’s airplane crash! Big fire.”

  Bruce’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and he said through clenched teeth, “You are not supposed to say that, James! Airplanes don’t crash! Daddy’s airplane will not crash!”

  He had thought he had made it clear to James that he couldn’t say that about airplanes crashing. He had thought James understood that it upset Daddy. Why was James saying it again? Maybe he just didn’t grasp how disturbing it was.

  But James’s outburst did not come out of his mouth with any wicked intent. It was an offhand thing, mild; he might as well have been saying that he saw a pretty cloud in the sky.

  On the flight to New Jersey, Bruce thought more about it. He came up with an explanation of sorts. Children were afraid of the dark. But they grew out of it. Someday he would stop saying that.

  This would soon pass. That was his hope. It was a slim thing to hold on to—hope—but he had no other plan. Hope was his only strategy.

  Andrea, too, tried to figure out a strategy. James’s night terrors were not diminishing, and they were leaching more and more into the daylight. She saw Bruce’s face tighten when James predicted a crash. She felt her own weariness. She was at the end of her rope. Something had to be done.

  Maybe it was time to convene “the panel.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEY WERE A TIGHT, lighthearted bunch, the Scoggin girls. That is, they were close in a peculiar, wacky, intense kind of way. They spoke every single day by phone, and when they spoke, they talked about everything, evaluating every move, every encounter, every purchase, every decision. Is this the right house? Is this the right job? Is that child just misbehaving, or is it a diet problem? They twisted and turned over and studied the smallest details of their lives as if they were parsing sacred texts.

  However, when it came to actually solving problems, they often were more like the Ritz Brothers than Dr. Joyce Brothers. Nevertheless, it was undeniably a great comfort for all of them to have their sisters just a speed-dial away.

  They were three: Becky, thirty-four, the youngest, the laid-back mediator; Jenny, thirty-six, the sassy one who was always ready to leap into the fray; and Andrea, thirty-eight, the big sister, who tried to be everyone’s best friend while explaining every option.

  Their mother, Bobbi, sixty-five, often liked to consider herself just another one of the girls. And there were grounds for that. She was petite and pretty and very youthful and slightly madcap, and she acted a full generation below her own chronological age. Bruce had often said that if he hadn’t seen Andrea first, he might have dated Bobbi.

  She was definitely not an ordinary parent. In fact, the parenting guidelines that she espoused would never be found in a book by Dr. Spock.

  Consider the famous pajama party. It was Andrea’s thirteenth birthday, April 17, 1975, and she was allowed to invite five girls from her seventh-grade class for a slumber party. They ate Oreos and potato chips and drank Dr Pepper and stayed up late and tried to get into some teenage mischief—which, after all, was the whole point of a slumber party. For that brief evening, they were adolescent outlaws. They made prank phone calls. (“Is this Mr. Fox? You’re wanted back at the zoo!”) They held a séance and tried to raise one of the girls by uttering incantations: “Light as a feather, stiff as a board!” Soon it was after midnight, and since they had achieved no levitation, it was time for something really edgy.

  Parental supervision had been suspended—that is, both Bobbi and Andrea’s father, Jerry, were asleep down the hall. One of the girls made a command decision to “wrap” a neighbor’s home in toilet paper. The technical name for this was “TP-ing.” Everyone agreed that it was the perfect thing to do. They went down to the local 7-Eleven and stocked up on toilet paper—one of those really big multipack jobs people get when they intend to hunker down for the winter.

  When the girls returned home to go forward with the actual raid, they got busted. Standing there in her pajamas was Andrea’s mother, fully awake and fully aware of what a gaggle of giggling girls intended to do with weaponized toilet paper.

  “There will be no vandalizing of property,” she declared firmly; it was a grown-up fiat. However, she was willing to unleash the hyped-up girls on somebody’s trees.

  TP-ing a tree would be sufficiently annoying to satisfy the mischief factor but would not be actual vandalism.

  The girls were okay with this, but they had one more suggestion. To make certain they
did it correctly—to ensure that there would be no destruction of private property—the girls asked Bobbi to come along. “Sure!” replied the only grown-up in the room.

  They picked the target house, they picked the trees, they picked the emergency rendezvous, and they unwrapped the paper. The attack was going perfectly until Bobbi spotted the Winnebago in the driveway. That was too tempting a target of opportunity to pass up, and like any good combat commander, Bobbi volunteered to lead the assault.

  But her first attempt to heave a fresh roll of toilet paper over the RV didn’t quite make it. The roll was stuck on the roof, so Bobbi climbed up to retrieve it. But just at that moment—up on the roof of the RV with the incriminating paper in her hand—the porch light came on and the owner of the house came barging out, screaming, “What the hell’s going on here!”

  Execute emergency plan B! The girls scattered to the four winds. When they arrived all breathless and excited at the predetermined rendezvous, they called the “roll,” so to speak. Everyone had made it safely but Bobbi. For ten minutes they waited nervously, speculating that the owner had nabbed her and called the police. They even imagined this thirty-seven-year-old mother of four being cuffed and grilled and booked for criminal mischief—when down the street came Bobbi, wearing a sheepish grin.

  She explained that the owner came out of his house busting mad, cursing and checking all the damage, but he was so busy shaking his head at the sorry sight of his tree that he completely ignored the Winnebago. He never even saw her. She had pancaked herself on the roof of the truck and waited him out. Then, carefully, she climbed down and softly made her way to the rallying point. It was, nevertheless, a very close call.

  The girls spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, laughing and finishing off the Oreos, while Bobbi went back to bed, exhausted.