Alive and Dead in Indiana (12 page)

When I was little, I would practice making bomb noises, the whistling sound of a bomb falling. I would take a deep breath, form my lips, begin. I could make it sound as if the bomb were falling away from me, or on me, by modulating the volume, adjusting its fade or rise. I preferred the perspective of the plane, starting with the loud high note. A second or two of silence as the bomb is out of earshot. Then the tiny puff of air reaching me from the ground.

This is why old men smoke at night in the middle of parks. They do it to attract bombers.

Mother remembers certain things about the war. She remembers making dolls out of hollyhocks, taping butcher paper on the windows, and not being able to look at the newspaper until Grandfather had cut out the things he wanted. Once, in the A&P, she lost her underwear while waiting in line to buy milk. There was no rubber to hold up the underwear. She tells me this story every time I think I have troubles. Mother danced in the USO shows for the troops from Baer Field and Casad. Once she shared the stage with Bob Hope.

The whole city watches as the skywriter finishes the word.

SURRENDER.

Before going through the scrapbooks, I would sit on the window seat as if to hold the lid on. I would look out over the front lawn, across Poinsette to Hamilton Park. Through the pine trees and the blooming cherries, I could see the playground and the circling tether ball, the pavilion, the war memorial, the courts. I wasn’t old enough to change the world.

At a high-school bake sale, the frosted gingerbread men remind a teacher of her students drilling on the football field during the war. They wore letter jackets with shiny white sleeves, or bright sweaters with stripes and decorations. They carried brooms at trail arms in the sunset.

How does evil get into the world?

Witches. Or children crying, “Catch me, if you can.”

I watch Mother feed a baby. “Nnnnaaawwwhh,” she goes, “here it comes in for a landing.” She conducts the spoon on a yawing course, approaching. “Open the hangar door,” she orders.

Mother looks at me as the baby sucks the spoon. “Remember?” she says.

“I remember,” I say.

She sends out the second wave of creamed cereal.

In the fall, the new Chevrolets arrive, and Hafner sets up his old searchlight. It is surplus from the war, painted silver now. The diesel motor rotates the light. The light itself comes from a flame magnified and reflected into a beam. People come across the street to look. They look at the new cars lined up.

From Hafner’s lot, you can look across the St. Joe River, south, to where three other beams sweep back and forth in the night. Those are coming from Allen County Motors, Jim Kelley Buick, and DeHaven Chevrolet. From the west is the lone light of Means Cadillac tracing a tight circle and toppling over into a broad arc, catching for an instant the tip of the bank building downtown and righting itself like a top. To the north is another battery of lights playing off one another, intersecting, some moving faster than others. Toward you and away. Bench’s AMC, Northway Plymouth, Ayres’ Pontiac. The illusion of depth in the night. The general vicinity of each source.

What are they looking for?

Something new is in the world.

There was a Looney Tunes cartoon Engineer John showed almost every day on his TV show. It was made during the war. Hitler, upset with the way the war is going, flies a mission himself, only to have the plane dismantled over Russia by “Gremlins from the Kremlin.”

I would look through the scrapbooks to see how it really happened.

There has been a plane circling all day. There appears to be a streak of smoke coming from its tail. But I’m sure it’s some kind of banner too high to read.

In the scrapbook with the wood cover, there is a picture of Gypsy Rose Lee selling war bonds.

This is the only picture in all of Grandfather’s scrap-books where he’s made a note. It says: I
bet the Lord is pleased
.

During the war, the top hemisphere of the streetlight globes were painted with a black opaque glaze. They stayed that way after the war. No one seems to mind. Parts of dead insects show in the lower half of the globe. There’s more and more of them in there summer after summer.

Grandfather read meters for his
living. During
the war, he was made block warden because everyone remembered the way he’d kept calm during
The War of the Worlds
. They also figured that he knew a little bit about electricity.

The city practiced blackouts all the time because they’d heard that Fort Wayne was seventh on the list. One night everyone stumbled into Hamilton Park for a demonstration. A man from the Civil Defense wanted to emphasize the importance of absolute dark, lights really out. Grandfather said that the man lit a match when the rest of the city was all dark. He said that you could see the whole park and the faces of everyone in the park. They were all looking at the match. He said you could see the houses. He said you could read the street sign.
Poinsette
.

The man blew out the match with one breath. The people went home in the dark.

Were they wishing they could do something about the stars?

They kept German prisoners in camps near the Nickel Plate yards. People would go out to the camps and look at the prisoners. Everyone felt very safe, even the women. Many of the prisoners had worked on streets downtown, or in the neighborhoods, and were friendly with the people.

Some of these prisoners stayed in town after the war. Some sent for their families. You ask them, they’ll tell you—Fort Wayne is a good place to live.

In one of Grandfather’s scrapbooks, there is a series of pictures taken from the nose of a B-17. The first picture is of the bombs falling away from the plane. In the background are the city streets already burning. In the second picture, the nose of another bomber is working its way into the frame and under the bombs, smaller now by seconds. The third picture shows the plane in the path of the falling bombs. One has already taken away the stabilizer without exploding. The perspective is really terrifying. The fourth picture shows the plane skidding into its tailspin. All this time the bombs are falling. And the fifth picture is the plane falling with the bombs.

Grandfather has arranged these pictures to be read down the page. One after the other.

Casad is a GSO depot built during the war just outside of town. I go there sometimes to watch them dust the fields nearby, the fertile strip near the bend in the Maumee. High school kids race by on the township roads on their way to Ohio to drink. I don’t know if they even use Casad for anything now.

Casad was built to be confusing from the air. All you can see, even from across the road, are mounds of different-colored stones. Some of the piles are real, others are only camouflaged roofs. If you look closely at some of them, you can see a small ventilation pipe or maybe some type of window. The important things are underground. There are stories that date from the war of one-ton chunks of rubber in storage. They feared the damage that would be caused if they dropped any during transportation. Tin, copper, nickel, tungsten, and mercury were all supposed to have been stored there. From the road, quarry piles and sandpiper tents hump out of sight through the cornfield to the river.

It must all look pretty harmless from the sky.

The high school kids will stop on the way back. Late at night, they will sit on the hoods of their cars guessing which of the shadows are real. They are waiting to sober up and weave home.

Mother remembers his Prospero at the Civic Theatre. He lived here years ago. The only time I saw Robert Lansing act was on the TV show where he played the wing commander and flew B-17s. All I remember now are the shots in the cramped cockpit with the flights of bombers in the background. Most of the action took place on that tiny set, two seats and the man in the turret, aft, always moving as the actors talked or rocked from the flak or were riddled by “bandits” or feathered the number three engine.

Robert Lansing visited our high school and talked about acting. He said there was a method that allowed him to use his past experiences in new situations. He said he was afraid to fly. He told us this standing in the middle of the gym floor, targeted in the cross hairs of the time-line.

In the stores downtown, there are bowls of lemon drops and cherry drops next to the cash registers. The merchants have broken into some of the supplies of the bomb shelters in the basements of their stores. They found that the water had soured years ago in the tins. The candy is sweet even though it is over twenty years old. They say the candy and water have been replaced in the bomb shelters. “No sense letting anything go to waste,” they say. Every time you buy something, the person running the register will say, “Have some candy.” And then they will mention where the candy comes from.

The small drums the candy came in are being used as wastebaskets. They are painted drab. Sometimes, the stenciled
CANDY
has been crossed out. The Civil Defense emblem can still be seen—the pyramid in the circle, pointing up to the sky.

Grandfather saw Bob Hope in the coffee shop of the Hotel Anthony. He showed him the clipping he had been carrying around for years, the one about Mother dancing in Bob Hope’s show. Grandfather said that he wished Bob Hope could be home for Christmas but was grateful that someone did what Bob Hope did.

In the fall, the wind turns the trees to silent puffs of smoke.

Grandfather wants to know why I want to be a poet. He shows me a clipping of Eldon Lapp, who goes to our church. There is a picture of Eldon in his flight jacket and soft hat. During the war, Eldon was shot down over Germany. Before his capture, he lived for months in the Black Forest. He survived that long with the aid of another flyer who had been trained as a Boy Scout and had been in Germany during a world jamboree. This flyer knew all the tricks—how to fish with a line and makeshift hook, how to conceal a trail, how to secure a camp, how to read signs. Eldon swore then that if he got out of this alive he would dedicate his life to scouting.

“That’s vocation,” Grandfather says to me.

The Kiwanis Club sponsors airplane rides all summer. Taking off from Baer Field, the tour flies over most of the city. I saw the Wayne Knitting Mill’s tall smokestack,
Wayne
built right into the bricks. I flew by the elevators, followed Main Street downtown and circled the courthouse. Then over the Old Fort, looking defenseless, and the filtration plant with the ponds. I followed the Maumee from the three rivers downstream, sweeping by the old Studebaker plant, Zollner Piston, all the wire-and-die works, Magnavox. Then banking up the bypass, north, over the shopping centers and malls and their parking lots, over Eckrich and the campus, to my house.

I could see my house. I knew it even from the air. There were people in the front yard I did not know, looking up, shielding their eyes, waving.

Grandfather, all you can see are the contrails. The plodding lines of the bombers and the lyric corkscrews of their escort. It is how this city chooses to die. Daylight raids, everyone is watching. This is the American Way. To see it coming. The bombs are inverted exclamations at the beginning of their sentence.

I can hear the planes looking for the city each night. I keep my eyes closed as they fly over the house. Their engines pulse like the sirens. It is a patient sound. And I wait too.

I wait for them to drop the flares, or for a few of them to come in lower. We did not ask for this. They fly by overhead. You can hear them, but you cannot see them. They are showing no lights. Low clouds. No stars.

They go on, on some heading to the west. But they will be back later. Then, further east, there will come the panting sound, almost comic, as they drop the bombs randomly, hoping to hit something, and then, empty, go back to where they came from.

Tarsk and Hartup have been taking aerial photographs for years. All the merchants and the schools, each new mayor, every public place has one of their pictures. Sometimes the picture is of one building and at other times of whole blocks. There are calendars, too, that everyone gets from Lincoln Life. In Mike’s Car Wash people will try to find their house in the picture that hangs in the lobby while their car is being dried. Every day Tarsk and Hartup fly over the city taking pictures—but no matter what picture you look at, someone will always point out what is missing, or what has since disappeared.

Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1
^st
of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints,
Other Voices Books
,
Black Lawrence Press
,
Keyhole
, and
Starcherone
. For more information, including how to join today, please visit
http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/
.