Prudence

by David Treuer

  All of the guys here with me, the other officers and even the enlisted men, write a lot. Every day. It’s one of the few things we have in common. We all write letters home and we all keep journals of our flights and missions and who bought it and who was wounded and what kind of reception the Germans gave us.

  He looked up from the letter but there was nothing to see. Just the bent metal of the Nissen, the other empty cots, the desk. He was disgusted with himself. The letter was like all the others written on base. The same jokey tone, the same in-creep of aviation jargon. He searched for himself in the words and found nothing. What would he really say? What could he really say—either about the war or about what had happened before? And what did Billy need to hear? He could talk about his fear, but he wasn’t really scared. Not in the way most people used the word. He wasn’t any more scared in the nose of the B-17 than he was after that day in the woods behind the Pines. And what was there to say about that? It wouldn’t come undone. It wouldn’t change no matter what he said. He kept reading.

  They show movies on the base sometimes. In the time I’ve been here we’ve seen The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Irene, Night Train to Munich, Boom Town, Pinocchio, The Palm Beach Story, This Gun for Hire, and Fantasia. You should see the other guys after there’s a hot scene! They go berserk and usually there are fights. No one really gets hurt. But especially if the movie is a frisky one there will be bikes up and down the road between here and Cambridge—there are more girls in Cambridge than anywhere else around here, but it’s eighteen miles one way. By the time they come back they’ve cooled down a lot. The movies are a welcome break from the waiting. We wait all the time. We wait for our next mission to be posted. We wait on the hardtack for the flares to go up, and then we line up and wait for our turn to lift off. We wait while we get into formation and we wait while the pilot flies us toward our drop zone. The only times we’re not waiting is when the German fighters come in, and after they leave the flak starts, and then we make the bomb run and pull out and the flak comes again, and after that the German fighters, who’ve been circling the whole time, take another stab at our formation. You never want to be the last one, what we call “Tail End Charlie.” If you’re flying “Tail End Charlie,” then the fighters really come after you. Anyway, the only time things get interesting over here is when someone is trying to kill us or we’re trying to kill someone else.

  But this wasn’t what he wanted to say, either. Sure, it was funny to imagine a bunch of guys watching a movie and then getting in a big brawl and hopping on their bicycles to pedal nearly twenty miles just to see a girl and talk to her. It was funny, in a way. But it was sad, too. It was sad because, while Frankie’s fellow airmen might fight and shout and pedal like hell and drink themselves stupid, most of them had never been with a woman, with anyone. Or if they had, it was a fleeting thing gone too soon. So when they talked about “tits and ass,” what they were really saying was that they wanted a chance. They wanted a chance to grab. They wanted a chance to grab and hold and keep holding and holding and holding. Frankie supposed this was love. Or some version of it. But even that was denied him. If only he’d listened. “Wait, Frankie. Frankie, wait!” That’s what Billy had said, but he didn’t wait. He’d been impatient, as though whatever he had in life, whatever had been given him, would be given over and over; that the life he had had till then didn’t exist as a onetime thing, never to be had again. Even if he survived the war, and that was saying a lot, how could he ever go back to the Pines? How could he ever look at Billy again? Or Prudence? Or Felix? What could he say to any of them when nothing anyone could say could make time flow in the other direction: back from England to Florida to Texas; back east to Montgomery, and then straight north, following the Mississippi, a fat brown worm in Louisiana, as it shrank, shed tributaries, spit earth and trees back up on the banks, shed cities like a snake shaking off fleas, till the river ran clear and cool, weeds waving in the current, shallow enough for herons to wade along its edges in search of minnows; and Frankie touched down at the Pines. And then the shot would move back up the barrel of the shotgun and the gun would fall to his side, useless, ridiculous, silly, really, some silly toy his father bought to have in the house. And then Billy’s hand would reach out to take it from him. And his own hands would rise to hold Billy’s dear face, his eyes would rise to Billy’s (Billy was taller than he was now—who could have known?), eyes that always reminded him of that poor coyote they had run over when he was a boy. And whatever Ernie said would fly back into his fucking mouth and stay there. No one took him seriously anyway. He was a stock character, the kind of loudmouth who always hung around to make things more difficult for everyone. But who really cared about him? How did he really matter? So what if he saw anything. So what?

  The war had changed that much, at least. It had managed to put some things in perspective even as it tore other things apart. Nothing had the same weight. It wasn’t that nothing mattered. The war didn’t mean that. It meant everything did, everything mattered, not least what he would do when he got out. What he felt, what he had felt all those years—all those years at the Pines that, when he lived them, felt filled with empty longing and fear—had been full. They had been full, completely and utterly full. What mass, what earth-tethered mass, did those years and all those feelings have, compared to the bombs he dropped every week? Much more. He had been living as a fake thing, a copy, but there was no reason to continue living that way. None at all. He had been nothing more than a wooden puppet. That’s why he liked that silly cartoon so much and watched it a few times before the reels were sent on to some other base. He had been a wooden puppet suspended by the strings held by Ernie and Emma and Jonathan, and himself, too: he had held his own strings and made himself dance all those ugly dances. And what a mistake! What a mistake it had been to want to be a man! His wish should have been the same as Pinocchio’s: Make me into a boy. Make me into a real boy. And he might have gotten that wish if only he had been “brave, truthful, and unselfish.”

  Instead he’d been a coward, a liar. He’d been selfish. When they had left the woods that awful day, he was not able to look at his father or the others. It had taken all his nerve to lift his head and mumble something to Prudence. “Sorry,” he’d said. That was it. That was all he could manage. Not “sorry for what I did” or anything even remotely like it. Instead, he’d collapsed gratefully into the embrace of Billy’s lie.

  After. The lie hung there in the air—as humid and cloying as the air itself. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe. Emma and Jonathan had carried Prudence into the maid’s room. Jonathan checked her for injuries while Emma bustled about, heating water and stacking clean towels. She had the good sense to get some clean clothes from one of the kitchen girls, and after Prudence was checked and bathed, Emma helped her dress and took the bloody clothes away and burned them so that no one, least of all Prudence herself, would have to look at the blood. Frankie had hung around the kitchen, useless, as his father and mother tended to her. He wanted to speak to her, to say something to her, but didn’t know how and didn’t know what to say. After a while he went upstairs and sat in his room. He sat in the chair in the corner and looked over the room itself: just the bed, with its white sheets and the wool blanket and quilt folded down at the foot of his bed. His suitcases, stacked to the right of the door. His uniform in its bag, hanging in the wardrobe. The nightstand, on which stood a windup alarm clock and the kerosene lantern. An empty bedroom. A stupid bedroom. Nothing seemed to provide any kind of answer, much less any relief. Eventually he shucked his shoes and took off his pants and got into bed.

  Sleep didn’t come. Not even when it grew dark. He turned first to one side and then to the other.

  Billy came and then left. He’d offered to go get some books for Frankie. As if that would do any good. What he wanted from Billy he couldn’t have. When Billy came back he feigned sleep.

  At some point he got up. The Pines was quiet. B
illy had left for the night. Ernie and David were either drunk or asleep in their cabin. Frankie listened at the top of the stairs. He could hear nothing. He tiptoed down the stairs and turned into the hallway and entered the kitchen. The windows were open. The temperature had dropped and a breeze came through the open windows. He walked the few short steps to the maid’s room, his heart in his throat. A sliver of light showed under the door. Frankie knocked. No answer. He knocked again. No answer.

  He turned the brass knob and pushed the door open. The maid’s room was tiny. Just large enough for a washstand, a small desk, and an iron-framed twin bed. Prudence sat on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her arms were wrapped around her legs and her chin rested on her knees. Her hair had been washed and combed and braided. A kerosene lantern, its wick smoking and in need of a trim, stood on the washstand next to the pitcher and bowl. Prudence was looking but not looking, her eyes unfocused. Her skin was shockingly dark against the white nightgown she wore.

  Frankie didn’t know what to say.

  “Hi,” he finally managed.

  Prudence’s eyes flickered over to him, then back to whatever it was they were actually seeing.

  “Are you okay?”

  She still said nothing.

  “Do you speak English? Can you understand me?”

  She looked back at him quickly.

  He didn’t move into the room. He leaned on the jamb, his arms folded across his chest. He rubbed his own arms as though he were cold, though he wasn’t.

  Everything he had meant to say left his head. Standing there, looking at her, he had no idea what to do or say.

  “I’ve got to go to the Air Force.”

  Silence.

  “I’ve got to go to the war.”

  More silence.

  “But I’ll come back. I’ll come back, okay? I’ll come back and help you. I’ll make this better. I swear. I’ll come back and we’ll fix this. I’ll fix this. Do you understand?”

  He thought he saw her nod, ever so slightly.

  “You understand, okay? I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you, to your sister. I’m just so awfully sorry. I’ll write you when I’m gone. Promise. I’ll make it up to you.”

  She didn’t move or say anything in response. He closed the door and went back to his room, not sure at all if she had understood him.

  What he had really wanted was to apologize to Billy. Billy came back the next day. And the day after that. He tried to hold Frankie’s hand, but Frankie wouldn’t let him. He wanted a chance to apologize for that. Why hadn’t Billy just held his hand anyway? Why had he become a coward, too? It was bad enough that Frankie had gone down to Prudence’s room and hadn’t managed to tell her the truth. That had been his chance to be a man—not by shooting so blindly and so quickly. Not by “getting the Kraut!” That’s not what men did. He’d had his chance down there on the threshold of the maid’s room, but with each tick, tick, tick of the Westclox, the chance to tell the truth had grown more and more remote. And Billy. Billy had been awkward and tentative. He should have crawled into bed with Frankie. Billy should have held him, forced his body around him. Billy should have ignored Frankie’s words and just held him anyway, the way Felix had held Prudence despite her protests. But Billy had chickened out. They’d all been puppets jerking on their little strings of guilt and shame.

  Frankie put the pages next to him and got out a fresh sheet and placed it flat on the training manual.

  My Dearest,

  One of the problems I never expected to have over here is that I’ve got too much time to think. And the best thing, the easiest thing, is to try and spend all that time finding ways not to think at all. I never succeed, of course. I always end up going over that day in my mind, thinking how it could have, how it should have, turned out differently. But it didn’t. No matter how often I return to that afternoon in my mind, it always turns out the same. That poor girl. That poor, poor girl.

  Up till very recently I always added “and poor poor me” to the end of that. But that’s not really fair, and it’s not really true, either. There were many who suffered that day.

  I worry about you most of all. And that’s the truth. I worry about what happened to you. You had to stay there, at least for a while. I got out of there so quickly and then everything happened so fast with my training and my deployment. I’m sorry I haven’t written you till now. Truly sorry. I just didn’t know what to say or how to say it, and so I thought it best not to say anything. But that’s not right, either. That’s not the right thing to do. I didn’t think about how what happened affected you. Really affected you most of all.

  So let me fix the record while I can. I am so sorry for what happened. Nothing I can do can change it, I know. But I am sorry. I’m sorry, too, for how I acted. You needed me and I wasn’t there for you. I shouldn’t have pushed anyone away, least of all you. I should have gone to you then and told you how sorry I was and tried as best I could to make things better. I didn’t.

  The whole world is at war. They call this WWII, and they are right. So I know you are in it somehow doing your part. Hopefully you’re still up north and not someplace else. It’s safe up there—when Germans aren’t escaping from that damn camp—and so I hope you stay there. Because when this is all done, all over and done, I’m going to come back and take you out of there. Neither you nor I will be reminded, or have to be reminded, of the mistakes we’ve made or the things we’ve done or the things we’ve endured. It’s so simple. We could leave and never go back. One thing I’ve learned over here in England is that the world is a really big place. It sounds so silly to put it that way, but it is. I think about this every time I get up in the nose and we fly out over England and across the North Sea and out over the Continent: it’s a big world. And it’s beautiful, too. Beautiful in ways I can’t begin to describe. I think about that every time I fly. The rest of the guys are stuck in different parts of the plane. They have these little windows to look out of and can only see small parts of everything, little bits of the countryside, little bits of the other planes around us, the fights and the flak and the ground. But I can see everything up in the nose. I watch the runway speeding up underneath us and then, when the wheels leave the ground and we go faster and faster, we fly over fences and hedgerows and walls. And in between them I see the gardens and fields and streams and the forest. All of this gets smaller and smaller underneath us, and then the whole world is spread out. I see the villages and towns and roads. The factories and trains and rail yards and everything in between. And then we’re off over the sea. If it isn’t cloudy I can see the waves and the light blue of shallow water and the dark, deep blue of the depths. It’s hard to focus on all this once we’ve passed the coast over the mainland, but it’s there for me to see anyway. All those little towns and villages and orchards and fields and roads. It is so green, so full of life, despite the war. So green and so full of life and so large. When all this is done I will come back, I promise. I’ll come back and take you out of there. There’s no limit on us. Not like we think there is. There’s no reason why we can’t make our own decisions. I don’t know what I will do or what you will do. Right now the only thing I am qualified to do is to use the Norden bombsight to kill people. I don’t imagine that skill will be much in demand after the war. But I’ll find something. Even over here. We could come over here. They’ll need people to rebuild this place when the war’s over. We could come to England. Or France. It’s funny. I’ve spent so much time over France in the plane but I’ve never touched it. Never put my feet there. Never put my hands in her earth. It looks very beautiful. A lot of the small towns and villages we fly over haven’t been bombed. The bigger cities are a mess, but the war has passed some of the smaller places by. The houses are there. The fields are there. Everything is there. And it’s waiting for us. And it’s not so far off. It’s almost Christmas. The Germans can’t hold on much longer. We have d
estroyed their air force. Even now, every time we cross over the French coast there are fewer and fewer German planes waiting for us. Of course, the Army has pushed the Germans out of France by now. Still—the same is true when we cross over into Germany. Fewer and fewer planes. They don’t have any oil and they don’t have any fuel. They don’t have any parts for their planes and tanks and guns. I’m not sure if they even have any men left. The Russians are rolling them up to the east, and we’re rolling them up from the west, and pretty soon we’ll meet in the middle and the war will be over.

  We could come over here together then, far away from the sad past, and start where no one knows us. I mean really start. They make their houses—in the villages, I mean—out of stone. They cluster together down in these little valleys, all those little stone houses. We could make one of them ours. A little snug place where nothing bad could ever happen. And we could spend the days reading or out cutting our own firewood. When it gets cold we will start a fire. There won’t be anyone else around except for us. I’ll read to you. You could lie down and put your head on my lap while I read, if you don’t feel like reading. With the shutters closed and the fire going we’ll be snug and warm, snug and safe, and it’ll be as though there’s no one else in the world but us. Just you and me. No one will know us. They won’t even know our names. They won’t know where we’re from or what we’ve done or what we’ve seen.

  After everything that’s happened—to you, to me, to the whole damn world—I’m ready for that now. It won’t be long and I’ll be in your arms. I’m getting tired and I’m ready to go to sleep. Before I do, I just want to say, “I love you.” I know that’s a bold thing to say, especially after everything else. I should have said those words before I left. I hope it’s not too late to say them now. I hope that when this letter reaches you, you are far away from harm, that you’re safe and sound and happy to hear from me.