Way the Crow Flies (40 page)

“We fought.”

“That’s right. And in 1939?”

“Yeah, but—”

“We were first in with the British both times and we fought and we died and we won.”

“Yeah, but the Americans—”

“The Americans were late into both wars.”

“Yeah, but this time the Americans—”

“The Americans are what stand between us and Communism.”

Mimi murmurs, “Jack.”

“We can’t even defend ourselves. Arnold’s dad says—”

“I’m not interested in what Arnold’s dad—”

“We’re too chicken to even go on alert!”

Jack mashes homemade chow-chow into his potatoes and doesn’t reply. Mimi says, “Madeleine, have you decided what you want to be for Halloween?”

Madeleine is surprised at the question. It has never occurred to her to abandon the sacred clown costume she has worn for the past two years. Halloween costumes are not to be traded in lightly, they are … like vestments. “A clown,” she answers.

“Encore? Mais il est trop petit maintenant pour toi
.”

“Can’t you make it bigger?”

Mimi shrugs. “Sure, but I thought maybe we could make you a new one. You could be a ballerina or a—”

“I want to be a clown again.”

“We’re cowards, that’s all,” says Mike.

“I’ve got news for you, Mike….” Her father puts down his fork. Madeleine holds her breath—is Mike going to get it? But Dad sounds calm. “We are on alert.”

“Jack—”

“It’s true,” he says to Mimi. “You won’t see it in the papers but he’s got a right to know. We all do. As Canadians.”

Madeleine’s face is hot. She waits. Dad says each word slowly.
“An elevation in the alert status of the armed forces is a routine precaution”—as if he were explaining something that would be perfectly obvious to anyone but a silly ass. “It’s called crisis management and it’s only common sense. It sends a message to the Russians: ‘Listen, fellas’”—he points his fork at Mike—“‘we mean business, so hands off our buddies ’cause if you mess with them, you’re messin’ with us.’” He jabs his potatoes several times in quick succession. “This whole thing’ll blow over. Castro is a puppet and it’s only a matter of time before his own people see that.” Castro is a puppet. Madeleine tries not to laugh. “What bothers me,” Dad is saying, “is we’ve got these jokers up on Parliament Hill who are indulging in the lowest form of Canadian nationalism.” He pauses. Madeleine bites away the grin on the inside of her cheek. “Anti-Americanism.”

The word hangs in the air, until finally Mimi says, “Can we have dessert now,
ma grande foi D’jeu?”

Jack laughs. “You should be running the Excomm, Missus.”

After supper, Jack sends his daughter down to the basement to play with her brother so that she won’t hear his optimistic dinner-table dismissal of the crisis contradicted on the six o’clock news. He watches U Thant deliver his calm and desperate plea in the U.N. and wonders if he went too far over supper—will Madeleine have nightmares again? He listens for sounds of a squabble from the basement, but the kids are quiet down there. They’re getting all kinds of alarmist misinformation out there, at school and in the playground. They ought to hear some actual facts at home—not gloom and doom, but enough reality to inspire confidence in him.

Aerial photographs appear on the screen, taken by U-2 spy planes: launching pads, somewhere in the hills of Cuba. He switches off the TV and tells Mimi he is stepping outside to stretch his legs.

Over at the Froelichs,’ a living-room lamp stands in the driveway, lampshade and all. It casts a rosy glow on the exposed engine of the automotive heap. Froelich is in his apron and white shirt-sleeves, bent under the hood with his son. They work to the accompaniment of a tinny transistor radio. Jack saunters across.

“Hank, how’re you making out there?”

“Not too shabby, Jack.”

Ricky looks up and greets him, and Jack says, “I’ve seen you out there running with your sister, Rick, how far do you go normally?”

“Till one of us gets tired, I guess. Seven or eight miles.”

“Good stuff.”

Froelich fills his pipe with his grease-stained fingers, Jack takes out a Tiparillo.

“Forget the car, Henry, why don’t you build a great big bomb out here instead, and aim it straight at Ottawa?”

Froelich puffs his pipe to life. “You are angry, Jack.”

Jack is surprised. “Naw, I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated with how our fearless leader is handling things. Or not handling them as the case may be.” He puffs. “Yeah, you’re right, I’m angry.”

The boy disappears under the car and Jack lowers his voice. “How do you figure the chances we’ll all be blown sky-high this time next week?”

He is surprised at his own question—at how he has phrased it. He wouldn’t express himself this way at work. Like his fellow officers, he is not given to alarmist language—they are not Americans. Not yet, anyway. But he has blurted the question to Froelich, perhaps because he senses that Froelich is not easily alarmed.

Henry says, “Will you pass me the wrench? The middle
one, ja. Danke,”
and bends to the engine. “Jack. My first opinion is, this crisis is predictable.”

Jack nods. “Bay of Pigs.”

“Also the Americans still have their base in Cuba.”

“At Guantánamo, yeah.”

“And also America has already many missiles on the Soviet doorstep.”

“Turkey. But those’re obsolete. And the Yanks didn’t put them there in secret.”

“I don’t know how comfortable this is to people in the target.”

“True. But I trust the Americans not to use them.”

“The Americans have used them already.”

“Right.” Jack pulls on his cigar. “But that was to end a war, not to start one. I don’t trust the Soviets as far as I can spit.”

“I do not trust either,” says Froelich, and Jack finds it difficult to tell, knowing the syntactical idiosyncrasies of Froelich’s English, whether he means
I don’t trust the Soviets either
, or
I don’t trust either of them
. Such are the hazards of translation. Imagine trying to analyze the latest missive from Khrushchev. We’ll all go up in a mushroom cloud because of a preposition. But Froelich is saying, “I think they play a dangerous game, the Americans and the Russians, and they play this together.”

“Can I use the torch, Pop?” asks Rick.

“What do you mean, Hank?”

Froelich turns to his son. “Yes, no, find your safety glasses, then yes”—then turns back to Jack. “I agree with Eisenhower.”

“You liked Ike?”

“He warned of too much military industries. We force the Russians to keep up. People grow rich from these industries and they become to have political influence.”

“It’s called the arms race,” says Jack.

“I think it is what the British call, ‘silly bugger.’” He wipes carbon buildup from the old distributor cap.

Jack laughs. “So you don’t think the world is going to end tomorrow?”

“The world has ended many times, my friend.”

Jack thinks of the numbers on Froelich’s arm, concealed by the white shirt. He would like to find a way to apologize for … having been a jackass. But referring to a subject that Froelich has not seen fit to broach might only distress the man … and compound Jack’s faux pas.

Henry says, “Pass me the Robertson’s red.” Jack hands him the screwdriver. Overhead the stars are crisp and bright. Jack looks up at the moon, cold and calm. Look long enough and you may see a satellite. The Froelich boy’s transistor radio catches invisible signals from the air, as though netting schools of fish, and translates them into a male voice singing in a falsetto about the girl he loves—in Mecca.

“The United States also acts in secret, for example U-2,” says Froelich.

“How else are we supposed to know the Russians are arming Cuba to the teeth?”

“What about Gary Powers when he has invaded Soviet air last May?”

“We used to do that all the time in Germany,” says Jack and grins. Froelich glances up. Jack explains, “Our fellas’d climb into their Sabres and scream across into the Eastern Sector to test the Soviet response time. The Russkies’d send up their MiGs and chase us back home. They did the same thing to us.”

“If this was so harmless,” says Froelich, “why did Eisenhower say it was a weather plane for NASA?” He relights his pipe.

The aroma reminds Jack of home. Germany. He and Mimi and their little family—something complete about their lives over there. The sense that every day the world got a bit better. Cities healed, one brick, one spire at a time, flowers bloomed in window boxes. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia … for the smiles that greeted them when people found out they were Canadian. A new alliance forged from the intimacy of enmity. The past and the present had made a pact and the result was the future. Perhaps they were simply happy there. He is taken aback at that thought, because it would imply that he is something other than happy now. But, the current crisis notwithstanding, he is happy, surely. He is not aware of being unhappy. He taps the ash from his cigar and watches it float to the ground.

“Bottom line is, Henry, Castro is a puppet and Kennedy is an elected leader.”

“It’s a pity Americans are not so fond of democracy outside their own borders.” Sparks fly from the back of the car, where Rick is welding.

“That’s not true, Henry, what about the Marshall Plan, look at”—Jack almost says Germany, but catches himself—“Western Europe, look at Japan.”

“Look at Latin America, look at Indochina—”

“Uncle Sam can’t solve the problems of the whole world—”

“Part of the world just asks him to stay away—”

“Would you rather live in the Soviet Union, Henry?”

“To question U.S. is not to love U.S.S.R., a socialist is not a Communist.”

“Are you a socialist?”

“We are both.”

“Both socialist
and
Commu—?”

“Nein!
You and I both are socialist.”

“How do you figure that, Hank?”

“You get sick, you go to hospital, doctors fix you, you don’t go broke.”

“Medicare—”

“Is socialist.”

Jack laughs. “You’re right, some of our best policies are—”

“Soviet Union is not even Communist, is totalitarian.” Froelich looks at his wrench as though he were angry at it—“Ricky, where have you put the pliers?!”

The sparks die, Rick’s face pops up and he pushes the welding goggles back on his forehead. “They’re right there, Pops, hangin’ off your belt.”

“Oh.
Danke.”

Jack sees Rick duck down again and the shower of sparks resumes. With luck, that boy will never have to fight a war. “Stalin killed more people than Hitler,” he says, and regrets it immediately—but why should he pussyfoot around Henry Froelich? The man is not asking to be patronized—he keeps that tattoo covered for a reason.

“So?” says Henry. “One, one hundred, six million, this is supposed to make someone feel better? They are all butchers.”

“I’m just agreeing with you, Henry, that’s why you don’t see Americans jumping over the Wall to get into East Berlin, that’s why the brain drain is all one way.”

“Brain drain?”

Jack pauses. This is a conversation he would be having whether or not he had ever heard of Oskar Fried. It’s fine. “It’s just a way of saying that, given a choice, many Soviet scientists would jump at the chance to come here and work.”

“Ah”—Froelich nods—“you speak of defectors.”

“I guess so.” Jack inhales the smoke along with the sharp air as Froelich straightens, intent upon the engine, scratches his neck, leaving a streak of grease above his white collar, and says, “Can you ever trust a traitor?”

Jack is taken aback. He answers, almost peevishly, “They’re not necessarily traitors. Some are idealists.”

“That’s what those Englishmen called themselves. The ones who defected….”

Just then the screen door opens and, beyond the pool of light around the car, Jack sees a girl walking toward them in the dark.

“Ricky….”

It’s Karen Froelich.

“Yeah Mum?”

“Lizzie’s asking for you, hon.”

The kid wipes his hands on a rag and heads into the house.

“How are you doing, Karen?”

“Oh I’m fine, Jack, how are you, are you worried?”

“What, me? Naw. What do you make of all this nonsense?”

She does not demur or “leave that to you men,” she says, “I think it’s bullshit.”

He hesitates, then asks, “How do you mean?”

She folds her arms across her chest—her sloppy man’s vest is the last article of clothing that would suggest female characteristics, and perhaps that’s why it’s impossible not to notice her breasts suddenly take shape with her gesture.

“’Cause between the two of them they can already destroy the planet a couple of times over.” Her tone is offhand, in contrast with her words. “They don’t need Cuba as an excuse.” She pronounces it “Cooba.”

Jack says, “Is that what you think they want to do?”

“No, I think they want to, you know, scare us. Distract us so we won’t notice … all the other stuff, you know?”

He nods. But he doesn’t know. He glances at Froelich, who watches his wife. He is in love with her. It must take a lot of love to run that household, those kids.

“Cuba’s just caught in the middle,” she says. “Under Batista, they were just America’s whore. Fidel’s the best thing that ever happened to that country.”

Jack can’t decide what is more startling: her use of the word “whore” or her use of the word “Fidel.” Not to mention “bullshit.”

“I like the Kennedys at home”—her voice deceptively young in
the darkness—“they’re really getting it together with civil rights down there. But the right-wing press has been baying for Castro’s blood for months, so…. Are you guys hungry?”

Jack shakes his head. “No, I’m uh—thanks Karen.” They watch her go back in the house.

Jack shifts his eyes from the screen door, and spits out a speck of tobacco. “We can only hope Khrushchev dismantles those weapons. It’s like General MacArthur said, eh? Never fight a war you don’t intend to win.”

“Ach, win schmin, it’s all good for business, no?”

“It’s about more than that, Hank, and you know it.”

“What is it about, my friend?”