The Toynbee Convector Page 10

  “You will not, I repeat not, burn in hell,” I said.

  “Give me another drink and shut up,” said Bill. “What do you know about who burns and who doesn’t? Are you Catholic? No. Are you Baptist? Baptists burn more slowly. There. Thanks.”

  I had filled his glass. He gave it a sip, the drink for his mouth meeting the stuff from his eyes. “William,” I sat back and filled my own glass. “No one burns in hell for war. War’s that way.”

  “We’ll all burn,” said Bill.

  “Bill, at this very moment, in Germany, there’s a man your age, bothered with the same dreams, crying in his beer, remembering too much.”

  “As well they should! They’ll burn, hell burn too, remembering my friends, the lovely boys who got them elves screwed into the ground when their propellers chewed the way. Don’t you see? They didn’t know. I didn’t know. No one told them, no one told us!”

  “What war was. Christ, we didn’t know it would come after us, find us, so late in time. We thought it was all over; that we had a way to forget, put it off, bury it. Our officers didn’t say. Maybe they just didn’t know. None of us did. No one guessed that one day, in old age, the graves would bust wide, and all those lovely faces come up, and the whole war with ‘em! How could we guess that? How could we know? But now the time’s here, and the sides are full, and the ships just won’t come down, unless they burn. And the young men won’t stop waving at me at three in the morning, unless I kill them all over again. Jesus Christ. It’s so terrible. It’s so sad. How do I save them? What do I do to go back and say, Christ, I’m sorry, it should never have happened, someone should have warned us when we were happy: war’s not just dying, it’s remembering and remembering late as well as soon, I wish them well. How do I say that, what’s the next move?’

  “There is no move,” I said quietly. “Just sit here with a friend and have another drink. I can’t think of anything to do. I wish I could “

  Bill fiddled with his glass, turning it round and round.

  “Let me tell you, then,” he whispered. “Tonight, maybe tomorrow night’s the last time you’ll ever see me. Hear me out.”

  He leaned forward, gazing up at the high ceiling and then out the window where storm clouds were being gathered by wind.

  “They’ve been landing in our backyards, the last few nights. You wouldn’t have heard. Parachutes make sounds like kites, soft kind of whispers. The parachutes come down on our back lawns. Other nights, the bodies, without parachutes. The good nights are the quiet ones when you just hear the silk and the threads on the clouds. The bad ones are when you hear a hundred and eighty pounds of aviator hit the grass. Then you can’t sleep. Last night, a dozen things hit the bushes near my bedroom window. I looked up in the clouds tonight and they were full of planes and smoke. Can you make them stop? Do you believe me?”

  “That’s the one thing; I do believe.”

  He sighed, a deep sigh that released his soul.

  “Thank God! But what do I do next?”

  “Have you,” I asked, “tried talking to them? I mean,” I said, “have you asked for their forgiveness?”

  “Would they listen? Would they forgive? My God,” he said.

  “Of course! Why not? Will you come with me? Your backyard. No trees for them to get strung up in. Christ, or on your porch....”

  “The porch, I think.”

  I opened the living-room French doors and stepped out. It was a calm evening with only touches of wind motioning the trees and changing the clouds.

  Bill was behind me, a bit unsteady on his feet, a hopeful grin, part panic, on his face.

  I looked at the sky and the rising moon.

  “Nothing out here,” I said.

  “Oh, Christ, yes, there is. Look,” he said. “No, wait. Listen.”

  I stood turning white cold, wondering why I waited, and listened.

  “Do we stand out in the middle of your garden, where they can see us? You don’t have to if you don’t want.”

  “Hell,” I lied. “I’m not afraid.” I lifted my glass. “To the Lafayette Escadrille?” I said.

  “No, no!” cried Bill, alarmed. “Not tonight. They mustn’t hear that. To them, Doug. Them.” He motioned his glass at the sky where the clouds flew over in squadrons and the moon was a wound, white, tombstone world.

  “To von Bichthofen, and the beautiful sad young men.”

  I repeated his words in a whisper.

  And then we drank, biting our empty glasses so the clouds and the moon and the silent sky could see.

  “I’m ready,” said Bill, “if they want to come get me now. Better to the out here than go in and hear them landing every night and every night in their parachutes and no sleep until dawn when the last silk folds in on itself and the bottle’s empty. Stand right over there, son. That’s it. Just half in the shadow. Now.”

  I moved back and we waited.

  “What’ll I say to them?” he asked.

  “God, Bill,” I said, “I don’t know. They’re not my friends.”

  “They weren’t mine, either. More’s the pity. I thought they were the enemy. Christ, isn’t that a dumb stupid half-ass word. The enemy! As if such a thing ever really happened in the world. Sure, maybe the bully that chased and beat you up in the schoolyard, or the guy who took your girl and laughed at you. But them, those beauties, up in the clouds on summer days or autumn afternoons? No, no!”

  He moved further out on the porch.

  ‘All right,” he whispered. “Here I am.”

  And he leaned way out, and opened his arms as if to embrace the night air.

  “Come ont What you waiting for!”

  He shut his eyes.

  “Your turn,” he cried. “My God, you got to hear, you got to come. You beautiful bastards, herel” And he tilted his head back as if to welcome a dark rain.

  “Are they coming?” he whispered aside, eyes clenched.

  “No.”

  Bill lifted his old face into the air and stared upward, willing the clouds to shift and change and become something more than clouds.

  “Damn it!” he cried, at last “I killed you all. Forgive me or come kill me!” And a final angry burst. “Forgive me. I’m sorry!”

  The force of his voice was enough to push me completely back into shadows. Maybe that did it. Maybe Bill, standing like a small statue in the middle of my garden, made the clouds shift and the wind blow south instead of north. We both heard, a long way off, an immense whisper.

  “Yes!” cried Bill, and to me, aside, eyes shut, teeth clenched, “You hear!”

  We heard another sound, closer now, like great flowers or blossoms lifted off spring trees and run along the sky.

  “There,” whispered Bill.

  The clouds seemed to form a lid and make a vast silken shape which dropped in serene silence upon the land. It made a shadow that crossed the town and hid the houses and at last reached our garden and shadowed the grass and put out the light of the moon and then hid Bill from my sight.

  “Yes! They’re coming,” cried Bill. “Feel them? One, two, a dozen! Oh, God, yes.”

  And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots hitting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the grass like bodies, and the swarming of tapes tries of white silk or smoke flung across the disturbed air.

  “Bill!”

  “No!” he yelled. “I’m okay! They’re all around. Get back! Yes!”

  There was a tumult in the garden. The hedges shivered with propeller wind. The grass lay down its nape. A tin watering can blew across the yard. Birds were flung from trees. Dogs all around the block yelped. A siren, from another war, sounded ten miles away. A storm had arrived, and was that thunder or field artillery?

  And one last time, I heard Bill say, almost quietly, “1 didn’t know, oh, God, I didn’t know what I was doing.” And a final fading sound of “Please.”

  And the rain fell briefly to mix with
the tears on his face.

  And the rain stopped and the wind was still.

  “Well.” He wiped his eyes, and blew his nose on his big hankie, and looked at the hankie as if it were the map of France. “It’s time to go. Do you think I’ll get lost again?”

  “If you do, come here.”

  “Sure.” He moved across the lawn, his eyes clear. “How much do I owe you, Sigmund?”

  “Only this,” I said. I gave him a hug. He walked out to the street. I followed to watch. When he got to the corner, he seemed to be con fused. He turned to his right, then his left. I waited and then called gently:

  “To your left, Bill!”

  “God bless you, buster!” he said, and waved.

  He turned and went into his house.

  They found him a month later, wandering two miles from home. A month after that he was in the hospital, in France all the time now, and Rickenbacker in the bed to his right and von Richthofen in the cot to his left.

  The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of ‘18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes.

  And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.

  Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can’t sleep and I stand looking at Bui and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a glass of sherry at them.

  “Farewell, Lafayette,” I say. “Lafayette, farewell.”

  And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.

  Banshee

  It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spider web and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

  It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.

  I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of final screenplay in my pocket, and my film director employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.

  Then, I knocked.

  The door flew wide almost instantly. John Hampton was there, shoving a glass of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.

  “Good God, kid, you got me curious. Get that coat off. Give me the script Finished it, eh? So you say. You got me curious. Glad you called from Dublin. The house is empty. Clara’s in Paris with the kids. Well have a good read, knock the hell out of your scenes, drink a bottle, be in bed by two and—what’s that?”

  The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.

  The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.

  I listened. There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields. Eyes still shut, John whispered, “You know what that is, kid?”

  “What?”

  “Tell you later. Jump.”

  With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, windblown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.

  Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laugh, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.

  “Let’s see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch.”

  He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his back side, leafing my manuscript pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a page drop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last page sail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said at last, exhaling. “It’s good. Damn you to hell, kid. It’s good!” My entire skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.

  “It needs a little cutting, of course!”

  My skeleton reassembled itself.

  “Of course,” I said.

  He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the foe. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.

  “Someday, kid,” he said quietly, “you must teach me to write.”

  He was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.

  “Someday,” I said, laughing, “you must teach me to

  direct.”

  “The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team.”

  He arose and came to clink glasses with me.

  “Quite a team we are!” He changed gears. “How are the wife and kids?”

  “They’re waiting for me in Sicily where it’s warm.”

  “Well get you to them, and sun, straight off! I—”

  He froze dramatically, cocked his head, and listened.

  “Hey, what goes on—” he whispered.

  I turned and waited.

  This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.

  John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hen’s eggs with pretended alarm.

  “Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!”

  “A what?” I cried. / “Banshee!” he intoned. The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That’s what that sound was!” He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out “Shh! Maybe it means—us!”

  “Cut it out, John!” I laughed, quietly.

  “No, kid, no.” He fixed his gaze far into the darkness, savoring his melodrama. “I lived here ten years. Death’s out there. The banshee always knows! Where were we?”

  He broke the spell as simply as that, strode back to die hearth and blinked at my script as if it were a brand new puzzle.

  “You ever figure, Doug, how much The Beast is like me? The hero plowing the seas, plowing women left and right, off round the world and no stops? Maybe that’s why I’m doing it You ever wonder how many women I’ve had? Hundreds! I—” He stopped, for my lines on the page had shut him again. His face took fire as my words sank in.

  “Brilliant!”

  I waited, uncertainly.

  “No, not that!” He threw my script aside to seize a copy of the London Times off the mantel. “This! A brilliant review of your new book of stories!”

  “What?” I jumped. “Easy, kid. Ill read this grand review to you! You’ll love it. Terrific!” My heart took water and sank. I could see another joke coming on or, worse, the truth disguised as a joke.

  “Listen!”

  John lifted the Times and read, like Ahab, from the holy text.

  “‘Douglas Rogers’s stories may well be the huge success of American literature—’” John stopped and gave me an innocent blink. “How you like it so far, kid?”

  “Continue, John,” I mourned. I slugged my sherry back. It was a toss of doom that slid down to meet a collapse of will.

  “‘—but here in London,’” John intoned, “we ask more from our tellers of tales. Attempting to emulate the
ideas of Kipling, the style of Maugham, the wit of Waugh, Rogers drowns somewhere in mid-Atlantic. This is ramshackle stuff, mostly bad shades of superior scribes. Douglas Rogers, go home!’”

  I leaped up and ran, but John with a lazy flip of his underhand, tossed the Times into the fire where it flapped like a dying bird and swiftly died in flame and roaring sparks.

  Imbalanced, staring down, I was wild to grab that damned paper out, but finally glad the thing was lost.

  John studied my face, happily. My face boiled, my teeth ground shut. My hand, struck to the mantel, was a cold rock fist.

  Tears burst from my eyes, since words could not burst from my aching mouth.

  “What’s wrong, kid?” John peered at me with true curiosity, like a monkey edging up to another sick beast in its cage. “You feeling poorly?”

  “John, for Christ’s sake!” I burst out. “Did you have to do that?”

  I kicked at the fire, making the logs tumble and a great firefly wheel of sparks gush up the flue.

  “Why, Doug, I didn’t think—”

  “Like hell you didn’t!” I blazed, turning to glare at him with tear-splintered eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Hell, nothing, Doug. It was a fine review, great! I just added a few lines, to get your goat!”

  “I’ll never know now!” I cried. “Look!”

  I gave the ashes a final, scattering kick.

  “You can buy a copy in Dublin tomorrow, Doug.

  You’ll see. They love you. God, I just didn’t want you to get a big head, right. The joke’s over. Isn’t it enough, dear son, that you have just written the finest scenes you ever wrote in your life for your truly great screenplay?” John put his arm around my shoulder.

  That was John: kick you in the tripes, then pour on the wild sweet honey by the larder ton.

  “Know what your problem is, Doug?” He shoved yet another sherry in my trembling fingers. “Eh?”

  “What?” I gasped, like a sniveling kid, revived and wanting to laugh again. “What?”

  “The thing is, Doug—” John made his face radiant. His eyes fastened to mine like Svengali’s. “You don’t love me half as much as I love you!”