Underworld

  “Why not?” Chuckie said.

  “Because she black and she bad.”

  Chuckie studied his radar scope and recomputed the aircraft’s path over a couple of thousand miles of sea curve and mango atoll.

  “What do you mean she black?”

  “Because the song has a plot that somehow got lost in the wooing and wheeing.”

  “This song’s been around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years maybe?”

  “More or less,” Louis said.

  “And in all these years I’m not aware of anybody coming forth with a correction to the skin color of the title character, okay?”

  On the intercom the pilot said conversationally, “I wonder if that’s Manila down there. Sure looks pretty, Nav.”

  This was an unfunny dig at the windowless pair in the lower deck, who not only lacked a skyscape but sat facing backwards and not only sat facing backwards but would be forced to eject downwards if nicked by an enemy SAM.

  Another sinister acronym designed to kill.

  “Pilot, this is Nav,” Chuckie said.

  And he fine-tuned his scope and requested a minimal turn, aligning the plane’s actual path with the track he’d plotted earlier.

  Then he said, “Louis, this girl out there is good luck for us. Nearly forty missions without a major incident. Don’t abuse her goodwill. She’s Long Tall Sally. The one and only.”

  When Louis became agitated he used a staccato patter, a kind of hyperdrawl with elements of falsetto pique that he strung throughout at a master pitch.

  “Song say. You have any idea what the song say? This woman in an alley. Old uncle John in the alley with her. She built for speed. She got everything he need. Yes baby woo baby. Gonna have some fun tonight.”

  They were fifty thousand feet above the South China Sea, flying in a three-bomber formation called a cell, and there were fifteen cells in the air today, and each cell carried over three hundred bombs, and the resulting zone of destruction was known as a sandbox, and Chuckie was bizarro’d in one part of his brain by the crazy conversation he was having with old Louis even as he felt sad and hurt, in another and nearer part, by his buddy’s attitude toward the girl on the nose of their aircraft.

  “This song written by a black woman from Apaloosa, Mississippi. Richard add the little touches. I guarantee, brother, this Sally we’re talking about ain’t no skinny blond playing kissy-face in no backseat. She’s an advance class of entertainment.”

  Sad and hurt. Chuckie’s mind began to wander to Greenland, his previous posting, not a bad place to survive the breakup of a marriage. His human discontents were muted in the icy mists and the whole blowing otherworld of whiteouts and radio disruptions and unrelenting winds and total cold and objects that did not cast shadows and numerous freak readings on compasses and radar scopes and the BUFF that crashed on an ice sheet with live nukes aboard, anomalies of the eye, the mind, the systems themselves, and the experience made him sense the ghost-spume of some higher hippie consciousness. Or maybe Greenland was just a delicate piece of war-gaming played in a well-heated room in some defense institute, with hazelnut coffee and croissants.

  Louis was conversing with the pilot in bombspeak, which must mean it was time for Chuckie to pay attention.

  Once divorced, twice expelled from school, once fled from same, many times estranged from parents, thrice charged with petty larceny, once emergency-roomed for barbiturate overdose, once experimentally wrist-slashed, many times avomit on the pavement outside a bar—the shoplifting charges expunged from the record thanks to influential friends of dad.

  “Little Richard’s mostly for white people anyway,” he muttered to Louis.

  “But Long Tall Sally’s black. Just so you don’t forget it.”

  His late great dad. Not really such a bad guy in death. But so tensely parental in life, all empty command and false authority, that Chuckie suspected the man’s heart just wasn’t in it. No, he didn’t blame his parents for everything that had gone wrong. Chuckie was misery enough on his own recognizance. But he couldn’t think of his father without regretting the loss of the one thing he’d wanted to maintain between them. That was the baseball his dad had given him as a trust, a gift, a peace offering, a form of desperate love and a spiritual hand-me-down.

  The ball he’d more or less lost. Or his wife had snatched when they split. Or he’d accidentally dumped with the household trash.

  One of those distracted events that seemed to mark the inner nature of the age.

  Next to him Louis sat in his station with his bomb release mode and his master bomb-control panel and his bombing data indicator and his urinal and his hot cup. Everything you’d want for a fulfilling life in the sky.

  Louis said, “Pilot, this is Mad Bomber. Will release in rapid sequence. One hundred twenty seconds to drop.”

  Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca meant nothing to Chuckie. Vague names from his unstable childhood. The memory of the baseball itself, the night of the baseball—vague and unstable and dim.

  Louis spoke through a teary-eyed yawn.

  “Pilot, come right three degrees. Hold. Bomb doors open. Check. Sixty seconds to drop.”

  So many missions, all those indistinguishable bombs. Chuckie used to love these bomb runs but not anymore. He used to feel a bitter and sado-sort of grudge pleasure, getting even for his life, taking it out on the landscape and the indigenous population. He’d been a proud part of a bomb wing that was dropping millions of tons of ordnance off the racks and out of the bays. The bombs fluttered down on the NVA and the ARVN alike, because if the troops on both sides pretty much resemble each other and if their acronyms contain pretty much the same letters, you have to bomb both sides to get satisfactory results. The bombs also fell on the Vietcong, the Viet Minh, the French, the Laotians, the Cambodians, the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge, the Montagnards, the Hmong, the Maoists, the Taoists, the Buddhists, the monks, the nuns, the rice farmers, the pig farmers, the student protesters and war resisters and flower people, the Chicago 7, the Chicago 8, the Catonsville 9—they were all, pretty much, the enemy.

  Louis droned on.

  “Steady, steady, steady. On auto now. Tone audible. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven.”

  Five hundred pounders on this run, sleek and effete, one hundred and eight of them at Louis’ drowsy touch, aimed at the Ho Chi Minh trail, a mission based on the bullshit readings of image interpreters who spend their days and nights scrutinizing the itty-bitty blurs on nearly identical frames of recon film that unfurl endlessly across their eyeballs more or less, Chuckie thought, the way the bombs drop endlessly from the B-52s.

  Louis droned on.

  “Six, five, four.”

  And Chuckie thought of the Ballad of Louis Bakey, a tale the bombardier never tired of telling and the navigator never wanted to come to an end because it was like a great Negro spiritual that makes your whole face tingle with reverence and awe.

  How Louis comes strutting out of bombardier school and finds himself crewing on a B-52 at twenty-six thousand feet over the Nevada Test Site, simulating the release of a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb.

  Simulating, mind you, while an actual device of this exact magnitude is meanwhile being detonated from the shot tower directly beneath the aircraft.

  The idea being, Let’s see how the aircraft and crew react, metalwise and bodywise, to the flash, the blast, the shock, the spectacle and so on.

  And if they come through it more or less intact, maybe we’ll let them drop their own bomb someday.

  Whole plane’s blacked out. Windows shielded by curtain pads covered with Reynolds Wrap. Crew holding pillows over eyes. Little nylon pillows that smell to Louis intriguingly like a woman’s underthings.

  A volunteer medic sits in a spare seat with five inches of string hanging out of his mouth and a tea-bag tag at the end of it. He has swallowed the rest of the string, which holds an x-ray plate coated with aluminum jelly, dangling somewhere below the esophagus, to measure the radiation passing thro
ugh his body.

  Louis does his phony countdown and waits for the flash. A strong and immortal young man on a noble mission.

  “Three, two, one.”

  Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that’s like the touch of God. And Louis can see the bones in his hands through his closed eyes, through the thick pillow he’s got jammed in his face.

  I move my head, there’s whole skeletons dancing in the flash. The navigator, the instructor-navigator, the sad-ass gunner. We are dead men flying.

  I thought Lord God Jesus. I swear to Jesus I thought this was heaven. Sweat is rolling down my face and there’s smoke coming off the circuit breakers and the detonation’s blowing us thousands of feet up, against our best intentions.

  I thought I was flying right through Judgment Day with some woman’s nylon breasts plumped up in my face.

  And when the shock wave hit, we got pummeled up another two thousand feet, this big tonnage aircraft acting like a leaf on a blowy night.

  And I kept seeing the flying dead through closed eyes, skeleton men with knee bone connected to the thigh bone, I hear the word of the Lord.

  And I thought, because, being a black man, I would be harder to see through. But I saw right through my skin to my bones. This flash too bright to make racial niceties.

  All the same in God’s eyes, so let that be a lesson.

  And the medic with the string hanging out of his mouth and his hand on the tea-bag tag so he won’t swallow it, and I can see the x-ray plate through skin, bones, ribs and whatnot, and it’s glowing like a sunrise on the desert.

  When it is safe to withdraw the pillow and open his eyes, Louis opens his eyes and puts down the pillow and makes his way to the cockpit and helps the copilot remove the thermal curtains and there it is, alive and white above them, the mushroom cloud, and it is boiling and talking and crackling like some almighty piss-all vision.

  My eyes went big and stayed that way and ain’t ever really closed. Because I seen what I seen. That thing so big and wide and high above us. And it was popping and heaving like nothing on this earth. And we flew right past the stem and it’s rushing and whooshing and talking, it’s pushing the cloud right up into the stratosphere.

  Thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

  In a few years I lost my handwriting skills. Can’t write my name without wobbles and skips. I pee in slow motion now. And my left eye sees things that belong to my right.

  And that was the Ballad of Louis Bakey told to a thousand airmen on wind-howling bases through the short days and long years of constant alert in the dark and stoic heart of cold war winters.

  “Bombs away,” said Louis blandly.

  But the mean and cutting fun had gone out of it for Chuckie. He didn’t want to kill any more VC. And he was developing a curious concern for the local landscape. Tired of killing the forest, the trees of the forest, the birds that inhabit the trees, the insects that live their whole karmic lives nestled in the wing feathers of the birds.

  The aircraft racked into a tight turn.

  “Louisman, don’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night?”

  “Don’t start in with me.”

  “Thinking there’s got to be a more productive way to spend your time.”

  “That’s what they’re thinking down there.”

  “Than dropping bombs on people who never said a cross word to you.”

  “Living in tunnels. I’ll tell you what they’re thinking. They’re living in tunnels they dig in the ground and we’re in a Big Ugly Fat Fuck pounding the shit out of them. And they’re thinking there’s got to be a more productive way.”

  A number of times lately on these routine missions Chuckie has had ejection fantasies. Check the leg guards and ankle restraints and then pull the trigger ring and boom. He’d be fired down and out and into the smoky sky. To come floating over Golden Gate Park, in the playful movie version, where a miniskirted blond named Sally raises her head from a copy of Frantz Fanon maybe or Herbert Marcuse, two authors Chuckie has had a tough time finding in the PX at the base, to see a polka-dot parachute dropping toward the treetops.

  No, he’d never been a fan but the baseball had been sweet to have around—yes, sweet, beaten, seamed, virile and old, a piece of personal history that meant far more to him than the mobbed chronicles of the game itself.

  The aircraft headed back to Guam, which rhymes with bomb, but he was thinking of Greenland now, the shadowless white maw, the tricks of light, vistas without horizons at the end of them. A place that never became more than a rumor, even to those who were based there, most of all to those—the kind of unverified information that resembled his life.

  Down out of the sky finally. When they landed he heard the hot screech of the wheels and felt the drag chute pop and hold. He knew the Follow Me truck was out there on the taxiway but he couldn’t see it of course, still stuck, for a few minutes longer, in the dimlit hole, surrounded by his acronyms.

  Louis said, “I want pussy, Chuckman, and I want it now. But she’s got to respect me and what I do.”

  “And what you stand for.”

  “What I stand for. Very good, son. I see I’m getting through to you.”

  The truck said Follow Me and the ground crew was already moving toward the aircraft, dragging hoses, pipes, lines of test gear, the men prepared to go through a checklist the size of eleven lengthy novels on the subject of war and peace.

  “Because if she don’t respect me,” Louis said, “I feel empty when it s over.

  “I know the feeling.”

  “The feeling never changes.”

  “First we fuck them.”

  “Then we bomb them,” Louis said.

  And it wouldn’t be long at all before the massive aircraft lumbered down the runway again, fatted with ordnance, every rivet straining at the takeoff, up, out, over—a mortal power in the sky.

  7

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 9, 1965

  It was a place you might wander into if you didn’t know the neighborhood, a graveyard bar under a bridge approach, and you might mistake the place at a glance for one of those Eighth Avenue bars that never seem to close, the Red Rose or the White Rose or the Blarney Stone, where the pipe fitters and garment workers go, or the railbirds back from the track, or the insomniacs back from nowhere, a sandwich and a beer, or a shot and a beer, but this was another category altogether, a place practically outside time, called Frankie’s Tropical Bar, on the Lower East Side, and who do I see when I walk in the door but Jeremiah Sullivan, speaking of graveyards, because he didn’t look too good.

  “Am I seeing right?”

  I said, “Hello, Jerry.”

  “Nick Shay? Where the hell did you come from?”

  I said, “Hello, Jerry. Where are we?”

  “I know where I am. Where the hell are you? I hear things every so often. California, Arizona. I saw your mother three, four years ago. It’s been what? Fifteen years?”

  I said, “I’m in town for a week. Doing a research project for some outfit in the Midwest. What about you?”

  “Don’t be so calm. Fifteen, almost, fucking years. What are you drinking?”

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Don’t ask,” he said.

  “That’s what I’ll have.”

  He looked around for the bartender but the guy was gone. A man with a bandaged head sat at the far end of the bar trying to bounce a coin into a shot glass. And there were two women on stools not far from where Jerry was standing, a couple of local biddies you might assume, only they weren’t cozy or talky or interested in other people’s talk—just ancient and wasted regulars of the art.

  We traded the pure facts of whereabouts and job and then Jerry supplied elaborate reports on people we’d grown up with, news he’d probably been storing for an occasion such as this, his suit pants sagging under his paunch and his tie knotted halfway down his shirt-front.

  “You married, Nick?”

  “No.”


  “You seeing someone special?”

  “No. I met a woman recently in Chicago. But no’s the answer. I’m not the marrying type. I don’t see myself married. I don’t feel marriage bound. I don’t even think about it.”

  “In your wildest dreams. Me, I’m married. Two kids. I’d show you pictures but you don’t want to see pictures.”

  The bartender showed up and I got a stinger that overflowed the glass. It was late afternoon, in fading light, and there was a palm tree mural, unfinished, behind the bar, and a live sombrero dangling from a beam. Jerry said this used to be a jazz club that failed almost immediately and after they dropped the music and after the clientele changed he found he kept coming back. He needed an hour between the office and the family to be alone, he said, and think.

  He was right. I didn’t want to see pictures.

  “I’m thirty,” he said. “When my father was thirty-five he looked like an old man.”

  “Only to you. You were in first grade. They all looked like old men.”

  “No, he was old. He was worn down. It’s good to see you, Nick. I think about you. I go back there. The place was so crowded once. Now it’s empty.”

  We’d gone to grammar school together, with the nuns, and then Jerry had gone to a Catholic high school and I switched to public and we saw each other only rarely, in a movie lobby maybe buying a Coke, he’s with his friends, I’m with mine, and there was a curious sense of separation, not unfriendly but deep, and it was the school difference partly, the veering of habits and practices, but also something irreconcilable, the style, the friends, the future.

  “You’ve been away a hell of a long time. A hell of a long time. Maybe you want to think about coming back,” he said.

  “Live here? Forget it. No. I like it out there.”

  “Out there. What’s out there?”

  “Everything you’ve never heard of.”

  “If I never heard of it, how terrific can it be?” he said.

  We used to call him Jumpy Jerry because he twitched and squinted and still did, I noticed, wearing glasses now and a school ring.