Way the Crow Flies (17 page)

“You want very badly to go to the moon, my friend.” The stem of Froelich’s pipe is moist; his face has filled out with conversation, shadows turned to creases.

“Come on, Henry, you’re a scientist—”

“I was.”

“How can you not be excited about it? Pure research—”

“There is no such thing. Some questions receive funds, others do not. Who is rich enough to ask the questions?”

“Yeah but just imagine how it’ll change our point of view if we do get there.”

“The world will still be a dangerous place, perhaps more so if—”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” says Jack, his cigar unfurling slowly. “Think how our petty wars are going to look from nearly three hundred thousand miles up. Think how we’re going to feel flying through the dark. Can you imagine? Dead silence. And way down there behind us, there’s the earth. A beautiful blue speck, lit up like a sapphire. We won’t give a damn then who’s a Russian or who’s a Yank or whether you’re red, white, black or green. We might finally figure out that we’re all just people and we’ve all just got one shot at it, you know? This little life.” He glances over at the others, gathered round the music. Mimi has her eyes closed, singing with Vic.
“‘Un Acadien errant
—a wandering Acadian—
banni de son pays
—banished from his country….’” The mournful minor key of folk songs the world over.

Henry Froelich says, “This is a beautiful idea.”

Jack looks at him. The man looks sad all of a sudden, and Jack wonders what he has seen in his time. In his war. He is of an age to have seen a great deal. Past fifty, easily. Old enough to remember the first one—The Great War. Men who fought tend not to talk about it, but they readily acknowledge that they are veterans, even to a former enemy. Indeed, by now a fellow feeling exists among pilots who once strove to shoot each other out of the sky. But Jack cannot picture Froelich in uniform. He was more likely part of the war effort at an industrial level. Jack can easily see him on a factory floor: white shirt and clipboard, peering into the guts of a jet
engine. Is he atoning for something? Maybe Centralia is a form of self-exile.

Froelich continues, his voice soft and dark like the black of his beard. “This rocket of yours, Jack, it can do all this perhaps. This is very noble. Very beautiful. Like a poem. But it does not come from a beautiful place, it comes from….” He appears to have lost his train of thought. He glances about, takes a breath, raises his eyebrows briefly and recovers it. “You think it will take us up to heaven,
ja?
But it does not come from there.” He taps his pipe. “Also it is very expensive. Unfortunately only war is rich enough to pay for such a beautiful poem.”

Froelich pours himself more wine.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Jack, this? That Apollo is named for the sun? And yet the project is aimed at his sister, Artemis, the moon?”

Froelich looks at him, waiting for an answer.

“You got me there, Henry.”

“Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. And inside the cave was a treasure.” There is a glint in Froelich’s eye. Jack waits. Is it possible his neighbour is a little drunk? “You see Jack, it is a fact that only the bowels of the earth can provide us with the means to propel ourselves toward the sun. Someone has to forge the arrows of Apollo. Even as someone had to build the pyramids. Slaves, yes? Which one of God’s angels is rich enough, do you think, to pay for our dream to fly so high we may glimpse perhaps the face of God?”

Across the lawn, Vic and Mimi sing the second verse: “‘
Un Canadien errant’”
… a wandering Canadian … if you see my country, my unhappy country, go and tell my friends that I remember them….

“Tell me something, Henry. What are you doing here?”

“Oh well, after the war I met my wife in Germany, she volunteered at the U.N. camp where I—”

“No, I mean how come you’re not teaching at a university somewhere?”

Jack fears he has been rude to his guest—he has known the man less than twenty-four hours and now he’s grilling him. But Jack is used to getting to know people quickly. Because you do only get one
life, and if someone can give you a tour of a road not taken, why would you not seize the chance? “I’m sorry, Henry, it’s none of my business.”

“No, it is a very good question, and I have a very good answer.” Froelich smiles and the hard glint leaves his eye. He reminds Jack of pictures he has seen in
National Geographic
of emaciated holy men. Serene, starved. He answers: “I have everything I want right here.”

Jack follows Froelich’s gaze over to Karen, picking up the babies in the grass. To his daughter in her wheelchair.

“Cheers,” says Jack.

“Prost
.”

They drink.

The singsong has changed tempo again. Betty is warbling in a Cockney accent to her husband’s accordion accompaniment, “‘Will you love me when I’m mutton as you do now I am lamb?!’” Laughter, applause. And a lull—the children are gone. A few minutes ago, as though at some signal inaudible to the adult ear, they ran off, pelting down the street in the direction of the school. The lawn is suddenly peaceful and the women draw a collective sigh of relief. “Silence is golden,” says Elaine. Betty’s younger two are in the McCarthys’ house, asleep on the couch.

Karen Froelich, having taken her babies home, has returned for Elizabeth. “Thanks, Mimi, it was a really nice get-together.”

“Oh Karen, you’re not leaving already.”

“Yeah, come on over any time.” She turns, saying to her husband, “Have fun, Hank.”

Jack watches Froelich kiss his wife and say something in her ear as he lightly holds her hand. Again there is a certain quality in her expression, not precisely sad but as though she were smiling at something in the distance, or perhaps the past. She touches her husband’s chest briefly. Jack watches her walk away, pushing the wheelchair over the grass. She is pretty when she smiles.

“Jack.”

“What’s that, Hank?”

“You make a nice party. Thank you.”

Vic gets out from under the accordion, stretches his legs and reaches into his burlap sack.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” says Betty.

Elaine hands her cocktail glass to her husband. “Just a teeny one.”

Vimy and Hal Woodley say their good nights—they’re expecting a long-distance call from their daughter at university, and in any case it wouldn’t do for them to be the last to leave. With their departure a further slight relaxation sets in.

Vic upends his burlap bag onto the grass with a clatter. Jack asks Henry if Vic Boucher always travels with his own game of horseshoes, and Froelich replies, “I don’t know. This is my first time to have a social occasion with him. And Dr. Ridelle too—Steve.”

Froelich has lived in the PMQs longer than any of them, yet he has socialized so little. Perhaps this is the first time anyone has asked him about his real subject of “how things go.” Jack senses that Froelich is a conversational treasure trove. You can almost feel the congenial heat of a fireplace when the man warms to his subject. And the sparks of impatience when he’s going full tilt. Typical German, thinks Jack. Now that he knows how much Henry likes to talk, he will pick another argument at the first opportunity. He watches Vic drive the metal post into the lawn with his foot and reflects that it just goes to show you’ll never find out anything if you don’t ask—Vic comes up to them, gold and silver horseshoes in hand, “Gentlemen,
faites vos jeux”
—you could be living next door to an Einstein or a Picasso and never know it. It’s important to know your neighbours. In the air force especially, because, in the absence of family and old friends, neighbours are what you have.

Froelich takes a horseshoe and raises it to eye level, taking aim. A burst of laughter from the women reaches them, the steel horseshoe glints in Henry’s hand, sterling in the late summer sun like the wing of an aircraft, and Jack is suffused with happiness. Pure and untethered by any good reason, happiness born of this warm evening, the proximity of friends—brand-new yet so deeply familiar—the smell of grass and tobacco, the dying coals of the barbecue, the deep blue dome above, sunlight on silver in his neighbour’s hand. He blinks into the big sun over the horizon because tears have come to his eyes and, to his mind, the words of a poem he learned years ago.

The young air force pilot who wrote the poem also had an accident while training, and never got to go operational. He was killed. Jack watches the horseshoe leave his neighbour’s hand.

Q
UICK, EVERYONE RUN
to the schoolyard, there’s a guy down there with a motor scooter and he’s giving people rides!

This was the information picked up by kid radar that drew Madeleine and the others from the barbecue and the singsong, and sent them tearing down the street like wildlife from a burning forest. Before they could see it they heard the engine, revving like a souped-up lawn-mower. They cut through between the houses at the bottom of the street and into the freshly mown field toward the school, where a crowd had gathered. There must have been at least fifty kids of all ages, on bikes, trikes, wagons and on foot—and beyond them, zipping past, his head and shoulders visible above the throng, a dark-haired boy. A teenager.

“Oh my God!” cried Auriel and crumpled.

Lisa likewise crumpled. “Ricky Froelich!” They burst into giggles, joined hands and ran toward the playground, turning to shriek, “Madeleine, hurry up!”

As Madeleine caught up, Auriel grabbed her hand, and the three of them ran in a line like cut-out dolls in time to see Ricky Froelich, on his red motor scooter, zoom off behind the school with a little kid on the back. Madeleine could also see that Mike had already barged to the front of the crowd with Roy Noonan. Music was coming from somewhere—someone must have a transistor radio. Auriel seized Madeleine’s arm. “There’s Marsha Woodley.”

“She babysits us,” hissed Lisa urgently.

“Us too,” Auriel hastily put in.

Marsha Woodley. Over by the swings, remote and serene, the CO’s daughter. Flanked by two girlfriends. Twin-sets, penny loafers and ponytails. Marsha wears her cardigan draped around her shoulders, buttoned at the top, a pleated skirt and ankle socks. These girls don’t attend J. A. D. McCurdy, they go on the bus to high school. High atop Mount Olympus. The transistor is in Marsha’s hand—Dion’s irresistibly swaggering voice—“‘Well I’m the type o’ guy who will never settle down….’”

The motor scooter zooms back and deposits the little kid, and the crowd closes in. “Ricky! I’m next, take me, Ricky!”

He dismounts. A tall boy in faded jeans and a red cowboy shirt. Dreamboat. Colleen’s brother—and Elizabeth’s. Holy mackerel.

Auriel shoves Madeleine forward. “Ask him for a ride!”

“You ask him, you love him.”

“I do not!” squeals Auriel and swats Madeleine.

Madeleine watches as Ricky lets Mike sit on the scooter by himself and twist the throttle. Auriel murmurs, “He doesn’t even know I’m alive.” Ricky trots alongside the scooter, holding Mike steady.

Lisa says, “Your brother’s cute.”

“Yuck!” cries Madeleine, shocked.

“Oh Mikey,” swoons Auriel, and begins kissing her own arm.

Lisa succumbs to her raspy laugh and likewise smooches her arm: “Oh Ricky, oh Rock!”

Auriel erupts in giggles, barely able to speak. “Oh Cary Grant! Oh Gina Lollobrigida!” The two of them fall down.

Madeleine looks at her friends. They have lost their minds. Dion floats on the air, carefree and insinuating—as she watches Mike take off on his own around the schoolyard, his face red—he
is trying not to smile. “‘They call me the wanderer, yeah I’m the wanderer, I roam around ’n’ round, ’n’ round, ’n’ round….’”

Madeleine says, “Do you dare me to ask for a ride?”

Auriel and Lisa sober up immediately.

As Mike comes to a stop, Madeleine walks through the crowd and straight up to Ricky Froelich. “Can I have a try?”

“Not by herself,” says Mike in his deepest voice, “she’s too little.”

“Mike, I am not!”

“She’s my sister.”

Ricky climbs back onto the scooter and turns to Madeleine. He has shiny black hair and dark brown eyes, his shirt is open at the collar. His Adam’s apple moves as he says to her, “Hop on, pal.”

Madeleine gets on the back and grasps the bar behind her. He twists the throttle and she feels herself jerked back as they accelerate across the pavement, then onto the field—it’s exactly the way she imagines surfing must feel, the rubber wheels riding waves of grass, the soft seat vibrating beneath her. “Hang onto me,” he calls over his shoulder, and speeds up. She slips her hands around his waist and threads her fingers across his stomach, warm and firm beneath his soft shirt. Her hands feel small. Panels of muscle stiffen as he leans into a turn, the feel of them reminds Madeleine of how boys look in their bathing suits—smooth chests, arc of ribcage just visible, and that line down the middle of their stomachs….

“You okay back there?”

“Yeah,” she calls.

She cannot stop smiling, her forehead against his billowing shirt, glad he cannot see her. Her hair lifts in the breeze, she leans her cheek against his shoulder blade and smells baby powder, Brylcreem; sees the sinews of his tanned forearm shift with each movement of his wrist, turning the throttle, squeezing the brake.

They speed from the grass onto asphalt and around the swings, while far away it seems the crowd of kids watches and the transistor plays. Is this what it’s like to be in a movie? To feel so private, yet with a huge audience watching?