Mama's Boy Read online

  Springer’s pinky ring gleamed in the dim light of the alley. The heated piece of shrapnel had been pulled into the shape of a snake, the head swallowing the tail. Springer saw Gus looking at it.

  “It’s a one-shot deal, Gate,” he said.

  “What is?” Gus said.

  “It.”

  “It? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It is what it is,” Springer said.

  “Is it?” Gus said.

  “It is.”

  Ray Springer laughed. Gus decided it was funny, whatever it was.

  4

  “What’s happened to you?” Flora said. She looked at Gus across the dinner table. He’d changed, but she couldn’t sort out and identify the details of the change. He looked the same. He sounded the same. Was it his eyes, a new darkness in them? They were blue, but not the same blue. A darker blue, a blue with shadings. Untrustworthy blue. Or the way he smiled when there was nothing to smile about, as if he had thoughts he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—share? Or was she imagining these things? All she knew was that Gussie was not the same. “You don’t seem yourself, Gussie,” she said, and immediately felt the inadequacy of her words.

  FDR said, “Mommy’s got the fantods, Gus.”

  “I have no such thing!” Flora said. “I’m simply worried about Gussie’s well-being!”

  “Our young man’s just tuckered out, Mommy,” FDR said. “They’ve been working him hard. That’s all it amounts to. Isn’t that right, son?”

  Gus looked at FDR and Flora. He looked at the gravy on his plate. A membrane had formed on its cooling surface. He’d run out of excuses to stay on the base, and now was staying with FDR and Flora on his four-day break in their Plains Cottage overlooking the Milk River. From the dining room window, Gus could see the river, the grazing land beyond, the impossibly wide horizon.

  A few mergansers drifted idly in the river’s slow summer current. A dozen Black Angus, jaws rotating with cud, were staring at the river from behind a barbwire fence. The sun was still high and hot even though it was seven p.m. There were almost eighteen hours of midsummer daylight at this latitude. In the distance, fifty miles away, broad anvil-shaped thunderheads squatted on the horizon.

  After dessert, Flora said, “Are you having trouble at the base, Gussie?” She poured herself a tumbler of Rhine wine. Which surprised Gus. He’d never seen her drink alcohol of any kind.

  “I’m fine, Mommy,” he said.

  Gus thought: I’m getting laid at five cartwheels a pop. The old whore, Norrie, is teaching me how to mount and ride and how to hold back and not be selfish. Be a gent, Little Britches, she said, never spend your load before the lady spends hers.

  As if he’d read Gus’s mind, FDR said, “Set your sights higher, Gussie. Otherwise you will sink into the mire.”

  Gus wondered if they had detected stray molecules of sweet whorehouse disinfectant on him. Was that why Flora was wrinkling her nose as she searched his face for newly acquired flaws?

  “Is it the work they have you do, Gussie?” Flora said. “Are you being treated humanely?” She refilled her glass, raised it carefully. Her puckered lips anticipated the rim.

  “No, nothing like that, Mommy,” Gus said.

  “I don’t want you to work those late hours, Gussie,” she continued. “Graveyards—is that what they call them? All night alone in the dark? How dreadful. I don’t like to think of you climbing those awful towers in the dark, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground. I’ve heard there are owls out there as big as eagles. What if an owl attacked you and made you fall? How can you defend yourself against an angry owl? I’m going to call your commanding officer. I think of you up on one of those towers during a lightning storm and I get frantic! Those others—the ones from poor families with no real future to look forward to beyond military service—let them do those dangerous jobs. You should do all your work inside, in safety. I’m going to ask your commanding officer if he can arrange it. I’m sure he’ll understand, since you are our only son.”

  “I hardly ever climb a mast,” Gus said. “I like my work. I like the way I’m treated. Jesus, Mommy, do not call Major Feely.”

  Major Frank Feely was a legendary hothead. He’d been a fighter pilot in the war. He was an ace with six confirmed kills and three probables while flying cover for the B-24s of the 15th Air Force over the Ploesti oil fields. He also became an ace in Korea, flying Sabre Jets. He hated the dull work of commanding a radar squadron. He felt betrayed by the air force for not giving him command of an F-89 squadron. The F-89 Scorpion was the primary all-weather interceptor of the Air Defense Command. Feely, a forty-year-old drunk, felt he’d been sent to the hinterlands as punishment for some trumped-up offense. He loved the air force, had been a good soldier from day one, and the injustice of his exile, fueled by alcohol, eroded his stability.

  He did his drinking in the NCO club. During his monumental hangovers he was not to be trifled with. He killed the club’s pinball machine with his .45 after a dozen poor scores, then took the fire axe off the wall to finish the job. He chopped the machine into colorful fragments. Major Feely had movie-star good looks, but his haunted gray eyes were inconsolable.

  Gus kept his distance from him. Gus thought: All I need is Flora calling him with a list of ground rules covering the care and feeding of her precious son. I’d probably wind up cleaning toilets in the Great Falls stockade for the rest of my enlistment.

  Flora reached across the table and dug her fingernails into Gus’s hand. “You’re all I have in this world,” she said. Her drunk face relaxed into a maudlin facsimile of her sober face.

  Gus glanced at FDR. FDR looked at Flora, hurt and perplexed. “You have me, Mommy,” he reminded her.

  Flora broke down. Racking sobs made her soft flesh quiver. FDR helped her up and led her into the living room.

  Gus went into the kitchen and took a beer from the refrigerator. He returned to the dining room and gazed out the picture window.

  Flora’s diminishing sobs mixed with static from the TV. The low-power relay station in Milk River that brought a lined and snowy picture in from Great Falls was out of commission.

  Gus sipped his beer and watched the coming storm. Fifty miles away, soundless lightning forked from the rippled underside of a thunderhead.

  5

  The Air Defense Command called a nationwide practice alert. B-52 Stratofortresses playing the part of the Russian Tupolev Bears would attack the United States from SAC bases in Alaska. Radar warning systems were going to be put to the ultimate test. From Canada to Mexico, the country would defend itself or perish. There would be no second chances.

  The alert would be in effect for three days, days that Gus would normally be on break. He phoned FDR and Flora to tell them he wouldn’t be coming to town for a while. Flora demanded to know why. Gus told her he couldn’t discuss it with civilians.

  “I’m not a civilian, I’m your mother!” Flora said.

  “I’ll be on guard duty,” Gus told her. “The swing shift people will maintain the radios.”

  “I’m sorry? You’ll be on what?”

  “It’s a military exercise, Mommy. I can’t tell you anything more about it. I’m in the military, you see. It’s called the air force. Our job is to protect the nation against sneak attack. Maybe you don’t understand the concept. Let me explain. You see, we have these enemies overseas. They’re known as the Russians, or the Godless Commie Horde. They want to kill the men and make sex slaves of the women. Our job is to stop them.”

  “Don’t speak that way to me, Gussie!” she said. “My God what’s become of you? I worry about you day and night. I can’t sleep. Oh dear God how I worry!”

  Her voice cracked; she began to sob. Gus was sorry he’d been such an ass.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy. I really can’t talk about it. It’s my job, I’ve got to do it.”

  She hung up.

  Gus sat on his helmet, his carbine across his knees. The sky was crawling with Scorpions as they
attacked the bombers at right angles. Their contrails and those of the bombers made a chalkboard grid of the sky. It was impossible to tell if the Scorpions were scoring hits. Gus assumed someone was keeping score.

  A bigger concern was the mosquitoes. He was fighting a losing battle with them. Hundreds floated around his head, heavy with blood. He’d pulled his collar up to shield his neck but they went past his collar, finding their way to the vulnerable pink flesh behind his ears. He’d stuffed his pant legs into the tops of his brogans. But mere cloth didn’t stop them.

  A few hours into the alert, the airman on guard duty a hundred yards from Gus, yelled something. He was a skinny kid from Texas named Jack Perez. Perez was on his feet, waving wildly. When he got Gus’s attention he pointed to a billowing dust cloud on Crazy Horse Highway. Gus grabbed his carbine and stood up.

  A pale gray sedan made its way out of the cloud. It crawled ahead in low gear. It stopped a quarter mile short of the radar base. Two people got out, a man and a woman. The man raised a pair of binoculars and scanned the perimeter of the radar base, sweeping left to right and back again. He stopped scanning when he saw Gus and Perez, who were now standing together, rifles up. The man shouted something neither Jack nor Gus could make out. The woman waved a white hanky. She had trouble standing against the wind. The man opened the trunk of the car and took out a large wicker basket.

  “They’re coming straight for us,” Jack Perez said, raising his carbine. “Hey you people! Stop! I’ll drop your asses!”

  They kept working their way through rabbit brush and sage. A dust devil screened them in a whirling brown haze. Jack and Gus took kneeling positions and aimed their carbines at the hazy silhouettes and yelled again for them to stop. Perez worked the slide of his carbine, chambering a round.

  Gus had a familiar sinking feeling. “Don’t shoot them, Perez.”

  The woman stepped out of the brown haze. “Gussie! We brought you a picnic lunch!”

  “This isn’t happening,” Gus said.

  “What are you doing with that gun, Gussie?” Flora said. “You look ridiculous! Put it down this instant! You know how I feel about guns! You might hurt yourself!”

  “Que la chingada,” Perez said.

  “Damn it, Mommy!” Gus said. “You can’t be here! You almost got yourself shot!” He pointed his carbine skyward. Fifty thousand feet overhead the multiple contrails of the B-52s streaked southward while the Scorpions fell back. The distance between bombers and interceptors increased every second.

  “We’re on simulated red alert,” Gus said. “Our F-89s are shooting down Russian bombers.”

  Flora and FDR, shading their eyes, watched the remains of the mock battle.

  “What’s that stink?” FDR said. Flora wrinkled her nose. She gagged.

  “It’s the squadron sewage lagoon, mister,” Perez said. He pointed to the dark pond below the north side of the perimeter. “That’s where all the mierda from the squadron toilets go. These pendejo mosquitos come from there. Excuse my language.”

  “You’re out here guarding sewage?” FDR said.

  “Who are these people, Reppo?” Jack Perez said.

  “My parents,” Gus said.

  “I’m going to be ill,” Flora said. A bloated sewage lagoon mosquito, fat as a housefly with blood, lit on her cheek. She slapped it, streaking her face red.

  FDR put down the picnic basket. He spread a blanket and opened the lid of the basket. “Roast beef sandwiches, Gussie,” he said. “Potato salad, pickles, coffee, a nice white wine—that’s for Mommy—and a three-layer chocolate cake.”

  “Close the basket!” Flora said. “We can’t eat it here, next to a sewer, with all these mosquitoes! Come, Gussie. We’ll sit in the car and listen to the radio. They’re actually playing Mantovani! Your Spanish friend can join us, if he wishes.”

  A jeep came bouncing over the tundra. Two Air Policemen, Loftus Runkle and Jeff Sparks, got out of the jeep. Runkle was a stocky no-neck; Sparks, tall and narrow-shouldered. Both APs were wearing .45s and nightsticks. They were known in the squadron as Mutt and Jeff, but there was nothing amusing about them. They looked for excuses to hassle airmen. Most steered clear of them.

  “Anybody ID these people?” Runkle said.

  “We have every right to be here,” FDR said.

  “You from division?” Runkle said. “Mock saboteurs?” He searched the picnic basket for weapons.

  “We are from La Jolla, sir!” FDR said. “We’re not mock anything! We are ourselves, and have every right …”

  “They’re lost,” Gus said, hoping to defuse the situation.

  “Two mock infiltrators, north sector,” Runkle said into his walkie-talkie. “Probably sent by division.”

  Flora sagged into FDR. The wind took her hat and carried it away with the tumbleweed.

  “Infiltrators? This is absurd!” FDR roared.

  “They’re my folks,” Gus admitted sheepishly.

  “You’re in on it, too?” Sparks said.

  “Let them go,” Gus said. “They made a mistake.”

  “It don’t work that way, Reppo,” Runkle said. “If this was for real, they could have lobbed mortars at the domes. I let them go, I could lose a stripe.”

  “Division didn’t send them,” Gus said.

  “Says you,” Runkle said.

  The APs handcuffed FDR and Flora and put them in the jeep. They drove away.

  Gus picked up the picnic basket that had been left behind. “You want something to eat, Perez?” he said.

  They ate the sandwiches, pickles, potato salad, and cake. They drank the quart of Rhine wine as the contrails faded and World War Three drifted south.

  The first sergeant gave Gus a month of KP duty and restricted him to the base during that time because of FDR and Flora’s unauthorized visit. Flora didn’t call Major Feely to make her displeasure known. She was unwilling to cross swords with the air force again after having been detained and interrogated for three hours in the Air Police shack as a possible saboteur.

  Major Feely was taking heat from Division Headquarters in Great Falls. The interceptor squadrons of the 29th Division of the Air Defense Command hadn’t “splashed” a single B-52. The big bombers slipped through the net. It was a total victory for the Strategic Air Command over the Air Defense Command. Air Defense generals were humiliated and looking for scapegoats. It wasn’t just Major Feely who got dressed down—the commanders of every radar station on the Hi-Line of the Montana/Canadian border were singled out by Headquarters for substandard performance.

  “We lost Cheyenne, Omaha, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and maybe the planet Mars,” Ray Springer said. “Five to ten million killed outright, another thirty to forty million will die of radiation burns and fallout. In short, the kingdom is not well defended.”

  It wasn’t anyone’s fault. The B-52 was a superior airplane to the F-89 Scorpions. It had a higher top speed and service ceiling as well as superior firepower.

  The B-52s also dropped tons of chaff, aluminum strips that presented thousands of false radar images, confusing the ground controllers and causing them to give wrong headings to the fighter pilots. The subsonic Scorpions were capable of making one pass and one pass only at the bombers. If they didn’t score a major hit with guns and rockets on that single pass, the B-52s were home free.

  Major Feely took the whole fiasco personally, especially since the reprimands were not justified. The fault lay with the F-89, which was designed toward the end of World War II. A new supersonic interceptor, the F-102, was on the way, but would not be delivered to the Air Defense Command for a year or more. As a stopgap measure the air force considered attaching unguided atomic missiles, called Ding Dongs, to the underbellies of the Scorpions. The Ding Dongs had a one-and-a-half kiloton warhead and would be fired into a formation of attacking bombers. The interceptors would approach the bombers head-on and a thousand feet low, then pull up sharply and release the rocket-powered nuke into the formation of intrud
ers where it would be detonated, wiping out the formation—and most likely the interceptor as well. This kamikaze notion was dropped after a few hundred million were spent developing it.

  When the mission was over and the dismal battle reports were in, Major Feely got drunk in the NCO club, the only bar on the base. “The sons of bitches passed the buck to us,” he said to the off-duty enlisted men. “They give us straight-wing fighters that can’t out-fly a castrated woodpecker, and radar that can’t see through chaff, then put the blame on us. Why? I’m glad you asked.” (No one had dared to ask.) “Because the generals, no matter how idiotic or self-serving, are never wrong. Blame falls to the lower ranks. Remember that and you’ll go far in this man’s army.”

  After half a dozen boilermakers, Major Feely went down to the small airstrip that doubled as a softball field, outside the fenced perimeter of the base. He cranked up the L-20 “Beaver,” the only aircraft assigned to the 999th. The L-20 was an unarmed, high-winged reconnaissance-type aircraft with a big 450 horsepower radial engine.

  Major Feely took off in a cloud of dust and climbed quickly to a thousand feet. He did risky low-level aerobatics over the base, swooping down between the radar domes and barracks, then headed south doing loops and rolls and wingovers.

  He made full-throttle strafing runs on the citizens of Milk River, dropping lower than the city’s water towers. In one spectacular demonstration of low-level strafing, he snagged a backyard clothesline with the Beaver’s landing gear. A woman, who had just come out of her house carrying a clothes basket, fainted as the L-20 roared away with laundry streaming from its wheels. The woman had been a few weeks pregnant and she miscarried minutes after Feely strafed her backyard.

  After his strafing run, Major Feely climbed high above the city and performed a one-quarter loop to vertical at which point he applied full left rudder as his airspeed dropped. The L-20 rotated around its yaw axis until its nose fell through the horizon. The subsequent vertical dive took the plane and Major Feely directly into the shipping docks of the town’s lone slaughterhouse. The explosion killed two polled Herefords. Dinnerware throughout Milk River rattled on its shelves.