Mama's Boy Read online

  Some witnesses in the streets of Milk River said:

  That boy could flat fly a dang airplane couldn’t he?

  It was like he was performing for the town folk!

  A one-man air circus! Wonder why he didn’t pull up?

  We’ll never know. Sometimes you get a dark notion.

  I wanted to jump off the top roof of my granary once.

  What do you mean by that, Mr. Frimler? I don’t follow.

  Sometimes you figure it’s just not worth the trouble.

  One day folds into the next and they’re all the same.

  A switch is flipped letting the blackness flood in.

  I know what you mean. Easy to feel that way sometimes.

  You boys take it too far. He just lost control.

  A man who can fly like THAT? Not very dang likely.

  But I ask you, what exactly does this portend?

  Portend? Who said that? Who the HELL said that?

  No one. Person or persons unknown. Face in the crowd.

  You’re quite the joker, Mr. Howling, but a very fine pilot, a real hero in my book, happens to be dead.

  Major Feely’s replacement, Clive Darling, was another burned-out major who’d been transferred to the 999th, also against his will. He’d been with a transport wing stationed in West Germany. At forty-eight, Darling was an “old” major. He was ready to retire but he wanted to achieve a goal before then. Major Darling wanted to retire as a lieutenant colonel.

  Darling believed a radar squadron assignment was a graveyard—sometimes literally—for majors. No one ever got promoted to lieutenant colonel while commanding a radar squadron. It just didn’t happen. He hoped to establish a new precedent, not by performing well (performing well was not an option since no SAC bomber was ever going to be shot down by the current inventory of Air Defense Command interceptors), but by kissing the right asses at division Headquarters and beyond. It was not a great strategy, but it was the only strategy Major Darling believed he had at his disposal.

  If the general in charge of the 29th visited the radar base Major Darling would whip the place into class-A shape. Barring that remote possibility, he didn’t care what the place looked like. He came to work late and left early. Like Major Feely, he was a heavy drinker. When he came into the dark radar ops blockhouse, he found a comfortable chair on the command dais and napped.

  He installed his mistress, Heidi Zechbruder, an East German woman, in an apartment in Milk River and spent all of his downtime with her. He sometimes came to work in civvies, drunk or hung over. Occasionally he wore a mix of mufti and regulation: Hawaiian shirt and uniform pants; full-dress blues with tennis shoes and baseball cap; cowboy shirt with pearl snap-buttons; khaki shorts. You had the impression that Major Darling grabbed whatever clothes were within reach when he got out of bed in the morning. If he suspected a visit from an inspection team from division, he wore his best gabardine blues and carried a handsome swagger stick he’d won in a poker game from a Brit who’d served with the Somerset Light Infantry in India. The stick was a symbol of discipline and control. It would not go unnoticed, Darling believed, by the inspectors. He wore tinted aviator glasses even at night to hide his jittery insecure eyes.

  He didn’t hold inspections, didn’t care if the airmen grew beards or came to work in civvies. He’d flown medium bombers in Italy during the war and C-47 transports during the Berlin Airlift. Commanding an obscure radar squadron did not live up to those glory days. Apart from his desire to be promoted to lieutenant colonel, Major Darling had washed his hands of the air force and its many rituals.

  In his first week as base commander, he called the off-duty enlisted men and junior officers together and told them he was not going to aggravate anyone by imposing strict military discipline on a routine that never varied. He told them to pass the word to those not present.

  He also issued a warning. “Just do your goddamn jobs and don’t fuck up, and we’ll get along fine,” he said. “You’ve got problems, take them to First Sergeant Burnside or to the chaplain. Does this shithole even have a chaplain? In any case, I don’t want to hear about your goddamn problems. I’ve got my own goddamn problems. In short, go your own way but do your job and leave me the hell alone. You want to be promoted? Stay invisible.

  “One thing, though, is of paramount importance: You make me look bad to division and I consequently get passed over for light colonel again, I will personally see that the no good rotten bastards who fucked me spend the rest of their enlistment disinfecting commodes in the Malmstrom stockade. Am I clear on this point? Am I being too arcane?” He took off his sunglasses for emphasis. His red eyes danced before the men.

  Later, in the barracks, Ray Springer said, “Watch out for him. He’s a crafty old fuck, a hair short of losing it.”

  “Major Darling seems okay to me,” Gus said.

  “He’s not anywhere near okay, Gate. I’ve seen humps like him before. When they crash they take people with them.”

  “Crash?”

  “He’s crazy. Out of his mind crazy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s got worms in his head. Maybe syphilis worms—spirochetes. Screwworms. You saw how his hand was shaking? His eyes? And that crap about not taking military discipline too seriously? Forget it. That’s how these pricks set their traps. They want to fuck you, they first tell you how easygoing they are.”

  “What’re you fellers talking about?” Lamar Harkey said. “Somebody go crazy again?”

  “No one you’d know, Harkey,” Springer said.

  “And I don’t want to know neither,” Harkey said. “I’m the one found that feller who hung hisself from a showerhead with them extry long jumper cables. Like to make me lose my dang breakfast. Had bad nightmares about that feller for a week. Woke up wanting to puke. Don’t ever want to see nothing like that again. No sir.”

  “You’re a smart man, Lamar,” Ray said.

  Harkey smiled shyly. “Thank you, Sergeant Springer. My ma said I could go far if’n I put my mind to it.”

  “And here you are,” Ray said.

  “Yes sir, here I am.”

  6

  Gus met Beryl Lenahan in the Athenian ice cream parlor. She was a senior in high school but could have passed for a twenty-five-year-old woman with a brood of children. Her hair was a loose tangle of black ringlets. She seemed to radiate measurable heat. Her sea green eyes were large and direct and when she looked at him Gus felt his stomach muscles tighten and quiver. He was the latest in a series of airmen she had dated. Even so, Gus, like others before him, was smitten.

  “Do you know Tommy Jenkins?” she said. “He’s a nice boy, but he falls asleep in the movies. Even in Quo Vadis, starring Robert Taylor! Can you believe it?”

  Gus didn’t know Tommy Jenkins.

  “Mitchell Donelli?” she said.

  “I think I heard of him,” Gus said. “Motor pool guy. Drives the deuce and a half to town to dump garbage and pick up supplies.”

  “Billy Joe Watson?” she continued.

  Gus didn’t think much of Watson, a loud muscleman who liked to turn smaller airmen upside down and shake them until coins and personal items fell out of their pockets. Watson was a red-faced lunatic from Georgia and if he wanted to turn you upside down you had to let him. If you protested, he had other gymnastic feats to entertain you with. Gus avoided Billy Joe Watson.

  “Don’t know him,” he said.

  “Phil Ecks?”

  Gus thought for a minute. “The medic,” he said.

  “He’s sooo good looking,” she said, “but he’s obviously stuck on himself, don’t you think?”

  “Never thought about it,” Gus said.

  “Greggie Fontana?”

  “No.”

  “Loftus Runkle?” she said.

  Gus thought: Jesus, would her god-awful list never stop? Loftus Runkle was one of the AP thugs, Mutt Runkle. She’d dated him, too!—the jackass who’d arrested and handcuffed FDR and Flora!

>   “Seen him around but I don’t know him,” Gus said.

  “Candidly speaking, Gus, Loftus is quite the weirdo.”

  Beryl found certain words appealing, especially those ending in “ly.” “Candidly,” “incredibly,” and “frankly” were some of her favorites. She sprinkled them through her conversation even if they didn’t quite fit.

  “I hope to live in a real city someday,” she said. “Like New York or Minneapolis, where people communicate intelligently.”

  “I think Runkle is from Pittsburgh,” Gus said.

  “I’m not sure where that is,” she said, frowning. “In any case, Loftus and I, specifically or otherwise, did not have much in common.”

  “I hope not,” Gus said.

  “Then you do know him,” she said.

  “Not really,” Gus said.

  “All Loftus talked about was his Doberman back home. He spoke lovingly of Rascal but the dog was obviously a sicko. Rascal killed neighborhood cats and brought them home incredibly ripped up with their innards dangling from his jaws. I didn’t care for his Rascal stories. Loftus also liked to show off his biceps. Candidly speaking Gus, I am bored by Tarzan muscles.”

  Beryl drove Gus to Tiber Dam above the Marias River in her mother’s copper-colored prewar Hudson Terraplane. Gus had checked out fishing gear from Special Services. Beryl had her own gear, including a pup tent.

  The reservoir behind Tiber Dam was a brown, unrippled expanse sixty miles west of Milk River. Beryl fished with hook, lead sinkers, and bobber. She used night crawlers and luminescent pink mini-marshmallows for bait.

  She had the broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped body of a competitive swimmer, and when she cast her line and bobber out, black ringlets flying, she looked to Gus like a goddess in motion.

  Beryl was serious about fishing. She caught a three-pound Dolly Varden, a midsized rainbow, and a Fish-and-Game “planter” trout that was packed with orange beads of roe. Gus caught a long, skinny northern pike on a red-and-white Dardevle with a treble hook. The pike looked like a legless alligator. Its wide sinister mouth was dangerous with rows of fine, razor-sharp teeth, capable of taking a fingertip off. He changed lures, a Super Duper this time, but caught another pike. Gus wanted to throw both pike back but Beryl said pike meat was tasty if a bit bony. You had to fillet them carefully.

  At one point, Beryl reeled in her bobber and hook and laid her rod on the sandy beach. She walked into the brushy area behind the beach and came back holding a fat grasshopper cupped in her hand. She slid her hook with its remnant of worms into the big green insect, making sure it couldn’t escape, then tossed her line out again. A large rainbow struck the grasshopper before it had time to sink. Beryl reeled in. The fish fought hard all the way, breaking the surface several times. The huge trout weighed at least six pounds.

  Beryl cleaned the fish on the muddy beach with a pocketknife after first digging their eyes out. She slit the pale bellies from rectum to gills and pulled the string of intestines out and tossed them into the lake. She cut the eyeless heads off and tossed them into the lake, too. Then she filleted the fish on a flat board she kept in the Hudson’s trunk along with the filleting knife. Beryl handled the knife with the skill of a butcher. She separated bone from flesh, lifting the white spine and threadlike ribs out of the meat, her hands slimy with gore. When she finished she washed her hands in the lake.

  “Why did you cut their eyes out?” Gus said.

  “I don’t want the fish to see what’s happening to them.”

  “They’re dead, Beryl,” Gus said. “They can’t see anything.”

  “My Uncle Willard took me fishing a lot when I was little. I always believed that the fish could see me even after they were gutted because their eyes stayed terribly bright and alive-looking, unlike other animals. When you kill a deer or a squirrel, you can actually see the light go out of their eyes. Fish are different. A fish will sometimes flop around even after you’ve pulled its guts out, and its eyes do not fog.”

  “You’ve hunted deer?” Gus said.

  “I’ve got my own rifles, a .22 for gophers and prairie dogs, and a .30-.30 for deer and pronghorns. My twenty-gauge shotgun is for prairie chickens, wild turkey, and pheasant. I shot my first antelope with Uncle Willard’s .32 caliber pistol from forty yards when I was thirteen. Hit it in the neck and broke the spine. Uncle Willard said ‘You’ve got some kinda eye, girlie.’ I’ve got the head mounted on my bedroom wall.”

  Gus was impressed. He thought of the girls he knew in La Jolla. He couldn’t picture any of them skinning a deer or gutting a trout. He couldn’t picture their hands slick with fish blood.

  “Don’t laugh, Gus, but I don’t want the fish to see me toss their guts into the lake. My face would be the last thing they saw. The idea kind of bothers me. Now see? You’re laughing.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Gus said. He stiffened his face against something but it wasn’t exactly laughter.

  “I’ll be candid with you, Gus,” she said. “I’m deeply sensitive.”

  Gus heard overtones in this but didn’t try to decipher them.

  Beryl fried strips of bacon in a cast-iron skillet, then cooked the fish in the fragrant grease. The skillet sat on a wire frame over a Sterno can. The Fish and Game Department’s planter trout was inedible. The flesh was mealy and it tasted muddy, like lakebottom silt. The flaky white meat of the Dolly Varden, pike, and rainbow, when salted and sprinkled with lemonpepper, was delicious. They ate out of the frying pan with their fingers. Beryl had packed apples and gingersnaps in a paper bag. By the time they finished the sun was low. Beryl set up her pup tent in a flat patch of dry sand away from the beach. Other people had used this patch of dry sand to set up their camps. A litter of beer cans, cigarette butts, and potato chip bags, were scattered along its edges.

  Gus and Beryl drank warm cream soda inside the tent. The wind had come up strong and the panels of the tent flapped like the spankers of a sailing ship. It was their third date and Gus had yet to kiss Beryl.

  Beryl had a portable radio but all it picked up were voices buried in static. The voices described the battle of the Little Big Horn as if it were happening now. Gunshots and the sound of galloping horses. Blood curdling screams in the windy sage. Bugles and fifes. War drums. Gus reached across Beryl and turned the radio off. Their knees touched, then their shoulders. Gus felt Beryl’s humid warmth.

  Thunder roared in the distance. “Think it’ll rain?” Gus said.

  “So what?” she said.

  She took off her pullover and brassiere. She unbuttoned her jeans and slid them off. She wriggled out of her panties.

  “Are you just going to sit there staring at me?” she said.

  Gus took off his clothes. He folded and stacked them.

  “I want to get married,” she said. “I expect to have lots of fat pink babies. Six or seven, maybe eight.”

  “Really?” Gus said.

  “That’s the point of everything, isn’t it?”

  Gus wasn’t sure about that.

  “But not here,” she said. “I want my babies to grow up in New York, or even Salt Lake. This is no place to raise babies.”

  Gus offered no opinion on the subject. He had other pressing needs.

  “Wait,” she said. “Do kitty first.”

  “Do what?” Gus said.

  “I prefer you do kitty first.”

  “Huh?” Gus said.

  “Don’t you know anything?” she said.

  She indicated what she meant by applying both hands to his shoulders and pushing him down. She was so insistent that Gus thought it was another one of her superstitious rituals, like carving the eyes out of dead fish. Gus went along with it, not that he had a choice. Doing kitty was a new experience for him. Beryl gave him detailed instructions. Gus, always a quick study, applied himself.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t need to see anything.”

  Gus did kitty in the dark u
ntil his face ached.

  “Oooh oooh,” she said.

  Gus felt trapped in a tropical bog. His jaw felt dislocated. An evil thought occurred to him. He raised up.

  “Did Uncle Willard do kitty?” he said.

  “Don’t talk dirty,” she said.

  “Did he?”

  “Just the once,” she said, pushing him down. Gus fell to work again as Beryl called out instructions.

  After a few minutes she let him up. Gus, overeager, entered her. He found generous passage.

  “I love you, Beryl,” he said, thinking it had to be true. If this wasn’t love, what was?

  “Gee willikers, slow down,” she said. “Don’t be in such an all-fired hurry.”

  Gus did as he was told.

  “Oooh oooh,” she said.

  When he finished she said, “To be candid with you Gus, I find your ornament only marginally adequate.”

  “My ornament?” he said.

  “I don’t care for the common terms for it. They’re utterly demeaning.”

  “My ornament,” Gus said, thinking that the common terms for it were less demeaning. He imagined his marginally adequate ornament sparkly with glitter hanging on a Christmas tree among the angels, candy canes, and silver balls.

  “Your ornament is also selfishly impatient,” she said. “Luckily I’m overly sensitive, so it was passably useful.”

  Now that Gus understood her sensitivities, he wondered about his.

  “Thanks loads,” he said.

  She patted his head. “It was actually better than merely useful. I experienced fulfillment twice. Almost a third time—if you had been less selfish, Gussie.”

  “It’s Gus, not Gussie,” he said.

  “We’re going to be extremely happy, Gus.”

  “With seven or eight babies,” he said.

  “None of whom will grow up in Milk River.”

  She crawled out of the tent and washed herself in the lake. She emerged from the water like a goddess rising from the sea glistening with beads of liquid light. Gus could not believe his good luck.