Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille Read online

  “If I see somebody, I’ll ask. I don’t know what I want just yet.”

  His fingers drummed the table. “What do you want?”

  He had me there. What did I want? I’d been thinking about it all night. I’d been thinking about it while I studied that Nieuport 17 suspended over the dancers. I’d been thinking about it while men and women moved around the room in separate little flight paths, never really touching each other. I’d been thinking about it while my hands cupped around the beer mug, while my butt flattened against the wooden stool, and while my feet went to sleep in my fashionable cowboy boots that were too tight.

  “How close have you ever been to somebody?” I asked.

  “Skin close.”

  “Is that all?”

  “You mean, have I been in love? Sure. I’ve been in love lots of times. I’m in love every night. Do you mean close like in let’s get married close? Yeah, I even did that once. I know all about close. How close do you want?” He dabbed a beer-soaked napkin on his chest.

  “Closer than all that. I want to be in a woman.” There, I had said it.

  He laughed. “That’s the best way.”

  “No! That’s not what I mean. It’s not sexual. Like, when I kiss a woman, I just kiss her outside. I’m not kissing her.” I paused. I didn’t know if I could tell him this. How would he take it? “I want our lips to touch and…”

  “What?”

  Maybe if I rushed it out it wouldn’t sound so crazy. “I want our lips to meld together. I want to push our faces into each other, have our skin melt and flow and mix so that we’re one head, and I want to feel each molecule swapping electrons inside so there’s no telling who is who.

  “I want to fill her up, to be smoke and seep inside her skin so that my smoke legs step into her legs, and my smoke belly presses against the inside of her belly, and my smoke arms slide all the way down the inside of her arms until my fingers fill her fingers like a glove.” Brian moved his stool back a few inches from the table.

  “And at the same time I want her to be filling me up. I want her to pry off the top of my head and pour herself inside of me, blood and guts and living liquid bone so I can feel her sloshing around behind my eyes, pushing herself into my tongue, running down the inside of my throat. I want to feel her pooling in my feet, creeping up the insides of my legs, spilling over into my genitals like some smooth, heavy, golden lotion.

  “But we can’t ever do that. Every time I reach out to touch her, she flies away or she attacks. And it’s not just her, it’s anybody. It’s you and me. All people. We got this war mentality about each other. I see it in terms of her, but it applies all the way around. I’m flying solo, man, and no one can get in my plane. I can’t get in theirs. I touch only the surface.” Brian sat silent. “You asked,” I said.

  Finally, he said, “What’s with all the flying shit?”

  I must turn back now. I bank my French machine to the west. Already I have cut my reserve too close and will have to chance the archie as I cross the lines. The angry black and yellow puffs of explosive will seek out my fragile wood and canvas craft.

  To amuse myself and to take my mind off missing the blue and silver Boche, I sing a song that I heard in the billet last night:

  The young aviator went Hun hunting,

  And now ’neath the wreckage he lay—he lay,

  To the mechanics there standing around him,

  These last dying words he did say—did say.

  Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,

  The connecting rod out of my brain—my brain.

  From the small of my back take the crankshaft,

  And assemble the engine again—again.

  A hint of movement below stops my voice. Sometimes I see motion when there is nothing, but this is another plane, black Iron Crosses readily visible on the top wing, flying a thousand feet below and in my direction. I drop the nose and start a shallow descent into the blind spot above and behind the German.

  Heat rushes to my face. The tail and wings are blue, the fusalage silver, and the cowling red. The head of the consummate pilot who shot me down over Cachy Wood stays still. Perhaps this distance from the lines he feels safe.

  The firing sights of my guns center on his neck. The distance closes from a hundred yards to fifty and his wings stretch farther and farther. At twenty-five yards I place my hand on the lever that will send a fusilade of bright tracers and lead into his cockpit. From this range I will surely pierce his petrol tanks and send him flaming to the ground. I can see where the bullets will strike, imagine his surprise and panic in the second before the heavy slugs pound out his heart and lungs, and invision the initial hint of fire as the left wing tips up and the plane begins its final spiral into an unmarked, snow-covered German field. He will be my first kill.

  A sudden turbulence hits our planes, and I have to fight to keep the sights steady. He makes the same corrections, but his handling of the Fokker is so sure, so graceful. The fighter snaps to his attentions. He waggles his wings. I see no reason for him to do this. He doesn’t turn or change altitude. He waggles them again, like a big dog shaking water from his ears, and I understand that he is playing. His plane sweeps broadly to the left and then broadly to the right; I match the movements. Still, he does not look behind. I believe he thinks he’s alone and he is reveling in his ability to fly. I take my hand from the lever.

  I should peel off, dive away so he will never know that I have seen him, so that we will not have to fight in the pure November air above the virgin fields, so that neither of us will have to die.

  Instead I pull my plane next to his. He looks at me from fifty feet away as we fly once again side by side. He must be startled by my sudden appearance. He must know that I could have shot him down. I raise my hand; I wave. The wind catches my arm and makes it hard to keep above the windscreen. It seems a long time before he waves back. We continue on our course, but we must separate soon. No one would understand our private armistice. He flies well in his beautiful blue and silver Fokker D-2 with the red cowling. I try to learn from him how to be so in place in the air. I wish the war were over soon.

  Brian started to help me with the next pitcher, but he spotted the girl I’d seen earlier. The music overpowered any chance that she would hear even the loudest “Scuse me!” that he could holler, so he wadded up wet napkins and threw them at her until she looked at him. As soon as he caught her eyes he pulled his shirt open and started pointing at his chest while mouthing the words, “You and me, baby. It can happen.” This was a new low in pick-up technique for him, but I wasn’t surprised when she got up, walked over and asked him to dance. I could tell by the way they were talking as they moved to the floor that he would have company going home again.

  All the tables were empty. Everybody was dancing, a fast song. I couldn’t tell who was dancing with who. That close together, and from my angle above the floor, they looked like a solid mass, bouncing and waving to the music.

  I finished the pitcher by myself while noticing some things: the surface of the bar is slick, and it’s a pretty good jump to that access ladder. A guy would have to have secure traction if he was thinking about climbing the ladder, walking across the catwalk and lowering himself into the cockpit of the Nieuport 17.

  I reached under the table and started the difficult process of pulling off my boots.

  FATHER’S DRAGON

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I shot a dragon in the garden with the video camera!”

  Thomas winced at the word “dragon,” and then, when he shifted his shoulders to get a better angle with the wrench, he clunked his cheekbone against the kitchen sink’s U-joint. He thought, not the dragon again. The cabinet edge dug into his back while the cold, rough underside of the sink pinched his elbow against a copper tube. He couldn’t see his seven-year-old. “The camera’s not a toy, Dolby.” Trapped by the plumbing, Thomas’ voice sounded stupidly hollow to him.

  “Mom said I could use it.”

  “Tell Mom
I said it’s not a toy.”

  “I’m filming your feet, Daddy.”

  Thomas tried to pull himself out of the cabinet, but when he turned, his elbow forced the copper tube to bend, starting a fine mist from where it joined the faucet deep in the dark gap behind the sink. “Oh, damn.”

  “Louder, Daddy. I don’t think I got that.”

  Holding his temper, Thomas said, “Hand me the pliers, son.” With his free hand, Thomas bent the tube back, but the mist kept falling. Since he was lying flat, looking up into the workings of the sink, the water sprayed straight into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, as if clearing tears, then leaned his head to the side. His ear filled and the wet pressure on his eardrum throbbed with his pulse. “The pliers in the tool box. Get me the pliers.” He stretched, felt the nut that held the tube flush to the underside of the faucet and put his finger over the leak. A trickle ran down his arm and into his shirt. His other arm ached from holding the wrench in place; its handle felt huge and unwieldy, and he couldn’t help thinking it was his father’s wrench, that he shouldn’t have it. Thomas’ most vivid memory of his father was of a huge man bending over him, hand raised, screaming, “Don’t mess with the tools,” and then the slap. Thomas’s dad disappeared when Thomas was six. Now that he was a dad himself, he thought about his own father a lot. Even though the tools belonged to Thomas, he seldom took them out.

  Thomas waited. Water pooled between his shoulder blades and crept along his backbone. “Dolby?” The back screen door slapped shut.

  “Ah, hell.” Pulling his hand out of the gap increased the spray and shifted the wrench on the sink trap. An ooze of black slime slipped out of the joint, hung from the bottom of the pipe and dropped into his mouth. He spit hard as he extricated himself from the cabinet.

  The shut-off valve spun freely when he twisted it. Flicked with his finger, it whirred like a propeller. Water dripped onto the green tile his wife loved, but only reminded him of his kitchen when he was a child, the place of many arguments between his father and mom. Thomas had warned his wife that old country homes like this were maintenance nightmares, but she hadn’t cared. Leaky pipes the first month we live here, he thought. Heaven help us in the winter. He pushed a towel against the cabinet base to soak up the water.

  Thomas picked up the tool box and headed for the cellar. In the living room, his wife lay under a fuzzy, blue and yellow afghan, a washcloth folded over her eyes. Thomas said, “I’m going to have to find the main water cut-off.”

  She nodded slowly.

  He said, “Another headache?”

  “Little one.”

  “What about our dinner?”

  “I called the sitter.”

  Thomas slumped. “I was looking forward to getting out together. The two of us.”

  She lifted her hand, waved it languidly like a handkerchief towards him. “My head.”

  The tool box’s handle was cutting off the circulation to his fingers; their tips tingled. He shifted it to the other hand. “Maybe we ought to see somebody. You got one of these the last time we were going out.”

  She sat up; the washcloth dropped off her eyes leaving a red stripe across her face like a broad swath of Indian war paint. “If you really want to, we’ll go.”

  “No, no. I’m just saying you get a lot of headaches.”

  She pressed the washcloth to her eyes and sank back to the pillow. Thomas started to speak but didn’t. She was motionless, absolutely rigid, frozen.

  He asked, “Did you tell Dolby he could play with the camera?”

  “He said he wanted to film a dragon. I can’t talk to him.”

  Thomas said, “That’s a thousand dollar piece of equipment,” and it sounded to him like his father speaking.

  She sighed from under the washcloth.

  Thomas shined the flashlight up into the floor joists. He had only been into the cellar twice, first when the realtor showed them the water heater was new and second when he carried the love seat they didn’t have room for down the rickety wooden steps. He thought the cellar was a creepy and ugly place. In the cobwebs dozens of pipes and wires went every direction. Some pipes were obviously old plumbing that hadn’t been removed when new ones were installed, and it looked like new plumbing had replaced old several times. He thought some of the pipes must be for gas, but there was no way to tell immediately what did what, what went to what, and what was functional. He tracked an insulated pipe from the water heater to a junction where one pipe veered towards the bathroom and another disappeared under the kitchen with several other pipes into a hole that was dripping steadily. He couldn’t tell which pipe carried unheated water.

  Dolby’s behavior preyed on Thomas’s thoughts, but more than that, his reaction to his son bothered him. Nothing he said ever seemed to penetrate, like the boy purposefully ignored him when he spoke. And what worried Thomas was he believed he behaved that way when he was a child. He remembered Dad talking to him, but remembered little he said. Like Dolby, he had lived by his own agenda. After Dad had left, Thomas had a dragon of his own. He had to have one. No one ever listened to him, he had thought. Now Dolby was fascinated with them.

  He played his light around. Except for the love seat, this end of the long, narrow cellar was almost empty. The old water heater, a huge, rusting tank with a grate for coals under it stood next to the new heater, a gleaming white eighty-gallon Sears model that seemed out of place.

  At the other end, against a rough stone wall with chunks of mortar missing, a ladder stood in a broad pool of water that covered a third of the cellar. He shined his light on the rippleless surface, wondering how deep it was and if there might be snakes or rats. He guessed there must be a way to drain the cellar. After a few minutes of opening and closing the many fuse boxes cluttered with knife switches and fuses as big around as shotgun shells, most that didn’t seem to be connected to anything, their wires hanging loose, he found a button marked “sump,” and without much hope, pressed it. In the lowest corner of the uneven floor, a low gurgle showed the pump worked, and immediately water began sliding towards it. He set the ladder under the kitchen and climbed carefully to the pipes.

  Lines of yellow drops marched away from the hole in the floor down the pipes to release one by one several feet away. The plink of dripping water and the heavy, humid air made the cellar seem subterranean, like he was hundreds of feet underground instead of a few steps from his kitchen. He braced his hand on one of the joists and an inch of rotten wood sloughed off. The splinters felt spongy and weightless in his fingers. He dug his screwdriver deeply into the joist. He figured, at least here, only the sheer mass of the thick timbers kept the house from collapsing into its own foundation. He gazed sourly at the other joists and wondered how much more damage he would find as he searched for the main valve.

  Two pipes rattled loosely when he shook them. A rusty iron one he guessed was the gas, and a slightly newer pipe he hoped was the water line. He followed it with his light as it went through joist after joist until it ran down the wall and into a wooden hatch set into the floor next to the old water heater.

  A leather strap served as a handle. He wrapped it around his hand and grunted as he pulled the water-logged door open. A moist, vegetable smell floated against his face when he lay on the floor to look into the hole. Green and black fungus coated all eight of the valves within. Fortunately, the new valve was on top of the old ones. Thomas reached down, spreading his legs for leverage, and he twisted it. The valve creaked, but didn’t move. His fingers slipped.

  He slid more of his chest over the hole, bracing himself with one hand against a wet pipe. He heard someone on the stairs.

  “Daddy, I’m filming your feet.” The camera’s bright light filled the top quarter of the hole, but the contrast made Thomas’s hand invisible. He couldn’t tell what he was holding onto.

  “Dolby, come shine the light for me.”

  “I can’t. I just wanted another blank tape. I’m recording the dragon.”

  “Tapes are
in the TV cabinet, but come hold the light first.”

  The light blinked out. Dolby’s feet pounded across the kitchen. Thomas sighed and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light from his flashlight that was on the edge of the hole. He twisted again with no result. The valve was too slippery.

  Thomas rummaged through the drawers in the kitchen looking for a rag. His wife mopped water off the tile.

  “Why don’t you turn the water off?” she said.

  “The valve’s stuck.” He picked up a cloth placemat and held it up to her.

  “That’s our wedding present from Aunt Mary.”

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “I’m waiting for a special occasion.”

  He put it back in the drawer and opened another filled with plastic spoons and forks. He shut it.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “An old towel or something.”

  “I threw them out when we moved.”

  “What can I use?”

  She dropped the mop—its handle bounced—dug impatiently into a laundry basket and tossed him one of his older shirts. “There.” The shirt landed at his feet, a sleeve draped over his left foot.

  “How’s your head?” he asked.

  “Wonderful. I can stand it. A flood in the kitchen doesn’t help. I thought men were supposed to know about plumbing.”

  “My dad never taught me,” he said.

  “Fine, then, blame your dad.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and felt awkward because “sorry” wasn’t really the right response. He picked up the shirt. “It’ll be dark soon. Don’t you think Dolby should come in?”

  She sat in a kitchen chair, massaged her eyebrows with her thumbs. “He says he’s found a dragon. Have you been telling him stories again? If he wakes up screaming tonight…”

  Thomas squeezed the shirt into a ball. “One dragon story months ago. If he ignores it, it will go away.”