“One down, one to go,” McCutcheon said.
“If they didn’t know we were around before, they probably have a hint now,” Bill said.
“Think so, do you?” the pilot answered.
Twenty minutes later, Bill wondered if he’d jinxed them. The radar operator started yelling about bogies. The B-29’s defensive guns hammered. And shells from a night fighter’s cannon ripped into the bomber. One of them tore off the left side of McCutcheon’s face. The plane was suddenly Bill’s, only it wouldn’t answer the controls. There was fire-fire everywhere.
“Bail out!” he yelled. He couldn’t himself, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Not only were there flames between him and his escape hatch, but his parachute was already burning. So was he. The B-29 tumbled down toward the black, snow-dappled pines.
–
Marian had just dropped Linda off at the camp kindergarten. She didn’t know why school had taken so long to get started in this miserable place. No, actually she could make a pretty good guess: too many other things for the authorities to worry about. But they’d finally noticed the swarms of kids too often running around in screaming packs.
So they said Let there be school, and there was school. And the parents looked on it, and they saw that it was good, and there was much rejoicing-among them, anyhow. And if their little darlings had a different opinion, too goddamn bad. Linda was out of Marian’s hair for several hours a day. Somebody else could ride herd on her for a while.
Having left her own flesh and blood at the kindergarten tent, Marian walked away, wondering what she would do with time to herself and to herself alone. She hadn’t had any since the bomb wrecked the house and left her and Linda with a Studebaker as a place to sleep. She kept looking behind her for the daughter who wasn’t there.
The camp loudspeakers crackled to life. They did that every so often. Like everybody else, Marian paid them no more attention than she had to. She walked along for half a dozen steps before she realized they were blaring, “Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately! Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately!”
Again like everybody else, she had as little to do with the camp administrative center as she could. You went there if you were in trouble or if you wanted to get someone else in trouble. She’d testified against Daniel Philip Jaspers after he tried to break into her car. She hadn’t gone back since.
It was easy enough to find. In front of it flew a big American flag on a tall flagpole. Nobody seemed to know how the flagpole had appeared when so many more important things still hadn’t. Most camp inmates thought it was stupid, not patriotic. Marian found herself among them.
Typewriters were clacking away when she walked inside. That was the only place in the refugee camp where she would have heard them. People came here with what they had on their backs, no more. Not even the craziest would-be author had a typewriter on his back.
Once she did go inside, the functionaries needed a couple of minutes to notice she was there. At last, a clerk looked up from whatever he was doing and said, “Yes? What do you need?” By the way he said it, it couldn’t be as important as his job.
“I’m Marian Staley.”
“Yes? And so?” He didn’t listen to the loudspeakers, either.
“Marian Staley,” she said again, more sharply this time. “The stupid speakers told me to come here. I want to know why.”
“I’m sorry, I have no idea,” the clerk said.
But another, older, man said, “Please come with me, Mrs. Staley. It is Mrs. Staley, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. Will you kindly tell me what’s going on?”
“Please come with me,” the older clerk repeated. Fuming, Marian followed him around a makeshift wall of olive-drab sheet-metal file cabinets taller than a man. The administrative center was a big tent. Sitting on a folding chair behind the cabinets was an Air Force major. He jumped to his feet as soon as he saw the clerk and Marian.
“Ma’am, your husband is First Lieutenant William Gerald Staley?” he asked her, his voice altogether empty of expression.
“That’s right,” Marian said automatically.
“Ma’am, I am sorrier than I know to have to inform you that the B-29 in which your husband was flying was seen to go down in flames over the territory of the Soviet Union. It is not believed that anyone could have survived the crash.” Now the major did sound sad and sympathetic. He’d had to confirm who she was before he could start acting like a human being.
Her first dazed thought was A B-29 carries eleven. Were ten other officers telling ten other brand new widows or shocked mothers they’d just lost someone they loved? Or was she honored with a visit from an officer because Bill was an officer himself? Did enlisted men’s kinfolk get only a wire?
Then she realized none of that mattered. The meaning of what the major said began to sink in. “Bill’s…dead?” she whispered.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.” The officer nodded somberly. “I’m very sorry. He was on an important mission, and a dangerous one. Other planes succeeded in reaching and striking the target. Unfortunately, his was intercepted before it could.”
Important mission had to mean mission with an atom bomb, while striking the target meant doing to some Russian city what they did to Seattle. The language of war was bloodless. War itself…wasn’t. Bill’s job was to visit radioactive hell on America’s enemies. This time, they’d done unto him before he could do unto them.
Then all rational thought melted. She let out something between a shriek and a wail that made the older clerk hop in the air and startled even the sober Air Force major. She saw that in the instant before her own world dissolved in tears.
She wailed again, this time with words: “What are we going to do without Bill?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the major said once more. “I believe he has received a proper burial. The Russians have been respectful to our men killed on their soil, as we have with their casualties here.”
“I don’t care about any of that!” she said furiously. “I want my husband back! I want our little girl’s daddy back!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said yet again. How many times had he stayed calm when somebody who’d lost the person who mattered most to her went to pieces in front of him? The duty couldn’t be easy. How did he stand it? Why didn’t he take a service pistol and blow his brains out? He went on, “I understand it can’t possibly make up for your loss, but his military insurance will assist you and your daughter in getting through this-”
Blind with grief and rage, she swung at him. She wanted to tear his head off. He caught her wrist before she connected. His palm was warm and dry and very strong.
“Ma’am, that won’t do you any good,” he said in tones suggesting he’d been swung on before. “I had nothing to do with it. I’m only the person who has to give you the news. I wish I didn’t have to come here to do it.”
Then what do you do it for? The thought flashed through her mind, but she didn’t come out with it. What was the use? With Bill gone, what was the use of anything?
“What will we do without him?” she said again. Would Linda even remember her father? Maybe a little-she’d been four when he went away. But only bits and pieces, nothing that really meant anything.
That was when it hit her. She would have to tell Linda that Daddy was dead. Linda knew what the word meant. She was a smart girl. But she knew it the way a kid did. She knew a dead bug when she saw one. Did she understand that, when a person died, he stayed dead the same way? Did she understand that forever meant forever, and there were no exceptions, even for her father?
Chances were she didn’t…yet, although maybe all the deaths at the camp had taught her. If she didn’t, she’d learn, a day, a week, a month, a year, at a time. Christ, so will I, Marian thought. Things like this happened to other people, or in movies. They didn’t happen to you.