Prudence (14 page)

“Is that a wolf?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” said Billy softly. “Yeah, it is.”

“Not a real wolf. Real wolf bigger,” said Felix. “You call it coyote. Wait here,” he said. Felix reached down and felt under the seat and came out with the length of dowel they used to prop open the hood of the truck. He opened the door and stepped out onto the highway and walked back toward the wolf. Frankie’s heart was in his throat.

“What’s he gonna do?” he asked Billy.

“Shhh.”

The wolf didn’t retreat, as Frankie thought it might. Felix approached slowly, with his hands at his sides, his feet padding from heel to toe in a narrow line. He got close, within three feet, and still the wolf didn’t move. Suddenly Felix’s right hand flashed out—faster than Frankie could have imagined, he had never seen Felix move
fast—and he tapped the wolf on the back of the head with the stick, sharp and fast but not hard. The wolf collapsed as though its bones had been yanked out of its body. Felix dropped the stick and placed one palm on the side of the wolf’s head and the other on its hind legs, which he collected together in his hand. Then he gently slid one knee over on the wolf’s rib cage.

“Come,” he said over his shoulder. “Come, boys. It’s safe now.”

The wolf was not yet dead, only stunned. It tried to lift its head but could not. It tried to lift and turn its hind legs but could not.

“Is it going to die?” asked Frankie.

“Yes. I am killing it. I am making it die.” Felix’s knee pressed down on the wolf’s rib cage and it couldn’t draw breath, couldn’t expand its ribs. There was no way for it to move or escape. “You can touch,” said Felix. “Touch in the middle.”

Frankie knelt down and placed his hand on the wolf’s fur, where the rib cage met the breastbone. He jerked his hand back: the wolf’s body was very hot. Felix nodded at him reassuringly and he placed his hand back on the wolf’s sternum.

He could feel its heart beating very quickly. As quickly as his. Then faster. Frankie looked at the wolf and then at Billy. Billy’s hair fell across his eyes and there was a light film of sweat on his nose that Frankie liked.

“You wanna?” he asked Billy.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I will.”

Frankie removed his hand and Billy put his where Frankie’s had been. Felix adjusted his grip and leaned even more weight on the wolf. Felix’s expression didn’t change. Then the wolf’s heart slowed. The beats came in clusters. It slowed some more. The heart beat once every few seconds. Its eyes were deep amber. They didn’t move or look at anything. As the heart slowed, the eyes got narrower and narrower, until they closed completely. As they did, the coyote’s mouth grew slack and its lips, very black, almost inky, spread away from its
teeth, which were very sharp and very white. After another minute Felix slowly removed his knee. Then he released the hind legs. Satisfied, he removed his hand from the side of the wolf’s head and stood up. “Okay. Very safe now.” The wolf was dead. Felix stooped and gathered its front legs in one hand and its hind legs in the other and carried it, its head lolling, its tongue escaping from between its teeth, and put it in the back of the truck. They both got in and Felix started up the truck and continued driving toward the village.

Frankie looked out the window. Everything seemed very new.

“Felix. You were in the war?”

“Yes.”

Billy was quiet.

“Did you kill anyone in the war?”

“Yes.”

Frankie grew bolder. “How many? Do you know how many men you killed?” He didn’t look at Felix when he asked his question.

Felix didn’t answer right away. Frankie was worried. He shouldn’t have asked. He had asked his father that question, and Jonathan had spoken at great length without really answering it.

“I killed seventeen. Seventeen men I killed.”

Frankie thought about this a moment.

“Did you use your gun? Did you shoot them?”

Again Felix paused.

“Some I shoot. Some I not shoot.”

“How—”

“We are at village, Mr. Frankie.”

They were. It was the only time Frankie could remember Felix interrupting him. They got their supplies at the general store and some of the men gathered there came outside with Felix to look at the coyote. They weren’t as impressed as Frankie and Billy were. After they got the supplies, they stopped in at the Wigwam. Felix spoke to Harris for a few minutes in Indian, and then Harris came out with
them to look at the wolf. They spoke some more, then Felix carried the wolf into the icehouse, and they all went back in the bar. Harris opened the till and gave Felix a dollar, which he folded carefully and tucked into his shirt pocket. Harris looked at Frankie and Billy and said, “I got Bernick’s. Howdy Orange or Eskimo Pop?” Frankie, unsure, looked up at Felix. “You choose,” Felix said. “Orange, please,” said Frankie. “Orange, too,” said Billy. “Orange it is,” said Harris. He disappeared under the bar and emerged with three bottles. He pried off the tops and handed them to Felix.

They looked like toys, like baby bottles, in Felix’s hands. He gave one to Frankie and one to Billy and kept the other, and they walked out into the sun and sat on the bench in front of the bar and drank their sodas. Afterward they drove back to the Pines.

Later he and Billy had snuck out to one of the cabins. They kissed. And then grew bolder. Finally he reached inside Billy’s underwear and drew him out. He stroked hard and Billy’s cock jumped and danced in his hand. “Slower,” said Billy. “Do it slower. Softer, maybe.” Frankie did as he was told. Billy closed his eyes and said, “Oh,” and Frankie felt Billy beating in his hand like a live heart, slowing, slower, until he grew soft.

*   *   *

T
he base was dark, blacked out. It was raining again. The paths between the barracks were lined with white-painted rocks, and Frankie used these to guide himself back to his bunk.

How many people had he killed so far? There was no way to know. He knew of only one. He would never know how many in total, although he knew that he killed more with one bomb on one run than Felix had killed during the entire four years he spent in France. Multiply that one bomb by eight per payload, and multiply that by ten missions. Or maybe his bombs never killed anyone. Theirs was a strategic bombing campaign conducted in daylight, and their
objectives were rail yards, manufacturing plants, bridges, dams, supply dumps. But surely he had missed. It turned out the Norden sights weren’t nearly as accurate in combat as they were in practice, or as all the secrecy and oath taking suggested. They missed their targets more often than they hit them.

He entered the barracks. It was the same, always the same. Their four beds and footlockers. The white-painted desk shoved against the narrow half-moon of the far wall. He put his hand on the stove. Cold. They received only enough coal to run the stove four nights out of the week. It could be worse. The enlisted men got the same ration for a space twice as big. He considered lighting it but he didn’t want to hear about it from the others when they came back from London.

Instead, he retrieved the letter he had been working on from his footlocker. He got in bed fully dressed and pulled the wool blanket up over his lap. He took the pilot’s training manual off the ammo crate he used as a nightstand and put the paper on it and uncapped his fountain pen. He read over what he had written so far.

Dearest,

I’ve been in Europe for four months. Some of the other guys have been here just as long but they already got their twenty-five missions and so they are going home. I’ve only had ten. I spoke to the chief intelligence officer a few times and asked him to put me on the roster more often. To give me more opportunities. Even if I’m not with my own crew, I told him. It’s fine with me. There’s lots of switching around, as it turns out. You don’t always fly with the same crew on every mission, or even the same plane, the one you think of as yours. I’ll keep trying. I like it, if you can believe that. But I want to come home. There were so many things left unfinished when I left. I
did the best I could, I suppose. I hope this letter finds you and finds you well. I’ve tried to write many times. Really I have. But I never knew what to say or how to say it.

You must be wondering what it’s like over here, and so I’ll do my best to try and explain it. We fly at least once a week, usually twice a week. The math is pretty easy. At that rate I should have been home by now. Two missions a week means I should have been here about three months. The ground crews have it worse. They are regular Army, so they have to stay for the duration of the war, plus six months. It doesn’t matter how many missions we fly, they are stuck here no matter what. Anyway, you only get credit for a mission if you drop your bombs on either the main target, the secondary target, or a “target of opportunity,” but often you get blasted out of formation, or all the targets are socked in. Sometimes you can’t get in formation because the clouds are too heavy over here and you have to return to base. Other times something happens with the engines, one or two give out. (That’s not as dangerous as it sounds, because all it means is you lose altitude and you have to return before bombing. Since there are no mountains between here and Berlin we’re not in danger of running into them—though if you lose altitude over the mainland, then it makes you more vulnerable to flak and to enemy fighters.) And so, even though we fly twice a week, we don’t get credit if we don’t drop our bombs on something. Sometimes we have to drop them in the ocean, and some crews try and fudge it and say they bombed a secondary target or a target of opportunity but it always comes out during the post-mission debrief. These meetings are a lot longer than the briefings before the missions, which is kind of funny, depending on how you look at it. They want to know exactly what happened—where we dropped, how many, in
what order, what happened next, how many fighters intercepted us, that kind of thing. And if you lie, they usually catch you. They always find out. It’s no secret where the bombs fall or where we want them to fall. The Germans know and the civilians know. Everyone knows what we are after: railroads, refineries, factories. We are responsible for trying to kill the German war machine, not the Germans themselves. Hopefully what we do makes things easier for the boys on the ground.

When we’re not flying, we sit around and play cards. A lot of the guys try to get the girls around here interested in them. Usually it doesn’t work. They try anyway. Since we don’t have any way to get anywhere, they have to walk or bicycle. It’s kind of funny that we fly hundreds and hundreds of miles every week over France and Belgium and Holland and Germany and yet we can’t get to the next town over except by walking or pedaling. Some of the towns have funny names. Willingham, Cottingham, Bozeat, Kings Cliffe, Mepal. There’s even a town called Warboys, which sounds pretty funny to my ears. We should be based there. But the girls aren’t much interested. Here today and gone tomorrow. That’s us.

All of the guys here with me, the other officers and even the enlisted men, write a lot. Every day. It’s one of the few things we have in common. We all write letters home and we all keep journals of our flights and missions and who bought it and who was wounded and what kind of reception the Germans gave us.

He looked up from the letter but there was nothing to see. Just the bent metal of the Nissen, the other empty cots, the desk. He was disgusted with himself. The letter was like all the others written on base. The same jokey tone, the same in-creep of aviation jargon. He searched for himself in the words and found nothing. What would he
really say? What could he
really
say—either about the war or about what had happened before? And what did Billy need to hear? He could talk about his fear, but he wasn’t really scared. Not in the way most people used the word. He wasn’t any more scared in the nose of the B-17 than he was after that day in the woods behind the Pines. And what was there to say about that? It wouldn’t come undone. It wouldn’t change no matter what he said. He kept reading.

They show movies on the base sometimes. In the time I’ve been here we’ve seen
The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Irene, Night Train to Munich, Boom Town, Pinocchio, The Palm Beach Story, This Gun for Hire,
and
Fantasia
. You should see the other guys after there’s a hot scene! They go berserk and usually there are fights. No one really gets hurt. But especially if the movie is a frisky one there will be bikes up and down the road between here and Cambridge—there are more girls in Cambridge than anywhere else around here, but it’s eighteen miles one way. By the time they come back they’ve cooled down a lot. The movies are a welcome break from the waiting. We wait all the time. We wait for our next mission to be posted. We wait on the hardtack for the flares to go up, and then we line up and wait for our turn to lift off. We wait while we get into formation and we wait while the pilot flies us toward our drop zone. The only times we’re not waiting is when the German fighters come in, and after they leave the flak starts, and then we make the bomb run and pull out and the flak comes again, and after that the German fighters, who’ve been circling the whole time, take another stab at our formation. You never want to be the last one, what we call “Tail End Charlie.” If you’re flying “Tail End Charlie,” then the fighters really come after you. Anyway, the only time things get interesting over here is
when someone is trying to kill us or we’re trying to kill someone else.

But this wasn’t what he wanted to say, either. Sure, it was funny to imagine a bunch of guys watching a movie and then getting in a big brawl and hopping on their bicycles to pedal nearly twenty miles just to see a girl and talk to her. It was funny, in a way. But it was sad, too. It was sad because, while Frankie’s fellow airmen might fight and shout and pedal like hell and drink themselves stupid, most of them had never been with a woman, with anyone. Or if they had, it was a fleeting thing gone too soon. So when they talked about “tits and ass,” what they were really saying was that they wanted a chance. They wanted a chance to grab. They wanted a chance to grab and hold and keep holding and holding and holding. Frankie supposed this was love. Or some version of it. But even that was denied him. If only he’d listened. “Wait, Frankie. Frankie, wait!” That’s what Billy had said, but he didn’t wait. He’d been impatient, as though whatever he had in life, whatever had been given him, would be given over and over; that the life he had had till then didn’t exist as a onetime thing, never to be had again. Even if he survived the war, and that was saying a lot, how could he ever go back to the Pines? How could he ever look at Billy again? Or Prudence? Or Felix? What could he say to any of them when nothing anyone could say could make time flow in the other direction: back from England to Florida to Texas; back east to Montgomery, and then straight north, following the Mississippi, a fat brown worm in Louisiana, as it shrank, shed tributaries, spit earth and trees back up on the banks, shed cities like a snake shaking off fleas, till the river ran clear and cool, weeds waving in the current, shallow enough for herons to wade along its edges in search of minnows; and Frankie touched down at the Pines. And then the shot would move back up the barrel of the shotgun and the gun would fall to his side, useless, ridiculous, silly, really, some silly toy his father bought to have in the
house. And then Billy’s hand would reach out to take it from him. And his own hands would rise to hold Billy’s dear face, his eyes would rise to Billy’s (Billy was taller than he was now—who could have known?), eyes that always reminded him of that poor coyote they had run over when he was a boy. And whatever Ernie said would fly back into his fucking mouth and stay there. No one took him seriously anyway. He was a stock character, the kind of loudmouth who always hung around to make things more difficult for everyone. But who really cared about him? How did he really matter? So what if he saw anything. So what?