"Mr. Blackmore." I said reasonably.
"You're not going to nice your way back into our house." He said. "Stay away from Nina."
"There's someone like me in your past, isn't there?" I asked him.
He stopped suddenly, jerking his head towards me. "What?"
"Tell me what happened." I said. "Why do you feel so strongly about me? It has something to do with the reason you came home right after the war but didn't marry your wife, who was your high school sweetheart, until 1951, doesn't it?"
He was now staring at me, agape.
"Doesn't it?" I prodded.
"Who have you been talking to?" He asked me, horrified.
"Just my own common sense." I assured him. "Nina supplied me with the dates and I was able to draw conclusions on my own. Your reaction to me is irrational Mr. Blackmore. You've focused on an aspect of my personality, my success with girls, and you won't hear anything else, won't listen to your own daughter even. Something happened to you and your wife after the war but before you got married, didn't it? Something to do with a womanizer who talked sweet?"
He continued to stare in disbelief.
"Tell me about it." I repeated. "Like I said, if you can convince me that I'm hurting your daughter, I'll leave her alone."
"You want to hear about it?" He asked me, glaring.
"Yes." I told him. "Sit down, open your beer and tell me about it. I'm a good listener."
"All right Son." He said. "You want to hear why I don't like you, why I won't let you near my daughter, I'll tell you." He sat down on the couch again, making no move to pick up the beer.
"Mary and I WERE high school sweethearts, as you said. We met when I was a junior and she was a freshman. That was in 1942 right here in Spokane. Mary was the most beautiful, sweetest, most desirable girl I'd ever met in my life. I could talk to her about things I couldn't talk to anyone else about. I fell in love with her right away, maybe even before our first date. And she fell in love with me too."
I nodded, not speaking, picturing Mary, a.k.a. Mrs. Blackmore, as she must have been back then. She'd probably looked and acted a lot like Nina.
"By the time I started my senior year we were an "item" as we said back then. Oh, how I loved her, young man. I couldn't wait until the day when we were finally married. We were going to have a church wedding with hundreds of guests and then buy a house near the falls." He shook his head sadly. "Things didn't quite work out that way."
"I have my share of blame to take for the way things turned out. If not for me going off to fight in that stupid war…" He trailed off.
"Something happened why you were at war?" I asked.
He glanced up at me for a second, not answering my question. He sighed and finally picked up the beer bottle. He twisted the top off and took an enormous drink.
"Everyone wanted to go to war back then." He told me. "The soldiers were gods. They were fighting for this great arsenal of democracy we live in. Whenever you went to the movies and saw the newsreels you saw our fabled soldiers fighting those godless Krauts and Japs. You can't imagine how glorious they made war look."
I nodded. I could well remember how it had been during the Gulf War (or how it was going to be). You tell people enough that this war is worth fighting and that the soldiers are gods, they start to believe it. If it worked in the cynical nineties I could imagine how well it worked in the comparatively naive forties.
"Even when people I knew," Mr. Blackmore went on, "Started coming back crippled or burned, with arms or legs missing, even when I'd hear they had been killed and buried over there, it still didn't dissuade me. I wanted to go. I thought I wanted to go more than I wanted to stay and start my life with Mary. After all, Mary would still be waiting for me when I got back, wouldn't she?
"When I was a senior all of my buddies started enlisting. You could do that at seventeen if you had your parent's permission. So I asked my Dad if I could go and he let me." He shook his head. "To this day I still don't understand it. He let me drop out of school and go to war. I'd never seen him as proud of me as he was the day I asked him if I could. We went down to the recruiting office together and we signed the papers. I went through all of the induction physicals and testing and finally they gave me my ship off date. I raised my hand and swore an oath and I was a soldier.
"I wanted to get married before I left but Mary's parents wouldn't let her. They gave me all kinds of reasons why she couldn't. All kinds of reasons but the real one. Mary's Dad had been in World War I, a combat soldier. He knew what I was in for. He didn't want his daughter being a war widow at fifteen or sixteen.
"So we promised we'd marry as soon as I got back home. We promised we'd write to each other. We promised." He sighed. "And off I went. Of course merely being in the war wasn't enough for me. Oh no, I had to volunteer for the most dangerous job I could think of; the airborne infantry. Here was a division that had been known to lose more people in routine training than some regular infantry divisions lost in combat. That was for me. After all, when you're seventeen, you don't think you can die, right?"
I nodded solemnly at his words, remembering my own youth the first time around and remembering my feelings of immortality when I'd returned. Feelings that Richard Fairview had ended with a sweep of his knife.
"They took me of course." He went on. "I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division. By my eighteenth birthday in late April of 1944, I was at a base in Southern England, training for the invasion of France."
"D-Day." I said, looking at him. I knew that the 82nd had been pummeled on D-Day and on many operations after it. This man had lived through all of that somehow.
He nodded. "Yeah, I was there. I'm coming to that."
"All the time I was in basic and in airborne training, Mary and I wrote letters back and forth. We told each other we loved one another. We promised to be true. I even wrote her love poems and put them at the bottom of each letter. I told her that I missed her and that I couldn't wait to get back so we could have that church wedding. Her letters said the same; she even used to tell me whom she was going to invite to the wedding and who she wasn't. You know how women are?"
Before I could answer that he looked at me sharply. "Oh yeah. You do."
I decided silence was the best answer to that comment. After a moment he went on.
"The rumors about losses in training turned out to be true." He said. "We lost a lot of people before I ever left United States soil. Parachute technology wasn't quite what it is today back then. People would go down and splat when their chutes didn't open for whatever reason. That's what we called it: a splat. Once an entire plane crashed on take-off during a training exercise killing the whole damn platoon inside. Forty airborne troops killed in an instant before they ever got near the war. Gradually I began to realize that I wasn't immortal. If Joe Hecklemeyer, another seventeen year old in my company and a good friend of mine, could die in something so stupid as a training accident, then so could I. I guess I was lucky in a way. I came to the realization that I was in a dangerous business long before D-Day. Those poor slobs in the regular infantry didn't come to that conclusion until the ramps of their landing craft dropped down on the beach.
"The letters from Mary made my day every time I got them. I would read them and they would make me feel better about what I was in for. I was fighting for Mary, for Mary's parents, for the children that Mary and I would someday have. It gave me something to live for, something to hope for. Mary was my reason for coming home, do you understand?"