Way the Crow Flies (6 page)

Mimi takes his hand.

Now he is back in Centralia. And Centralia is still a flying school, except these days the cadets come from NATO countries. And there
are families. There are station wagons, barbecues and sprinklers. There is peace.

Most of his friends were killed.

He squeezes then releases his wife’s hand, and starts the car. He rounds slowly back between the hangars. Time to show Mimi the social hub of RCAF Centralia. It’s bound to be nice, they always are. High-polish wood and leather, sterling silver, white linen and gardenias. The officers’ mess. Worth squeezing yourself into a monkey suit, if you are an officer, and, more important, worth spending hours slipping into your best satin décolleté if you are an officer’s wife. But formal events are far from the rule. Weekly dances require nothing more than a sports jacket and tie for the men, party dresses for the wives; bingos, raffles, barbecues and corn roasts are even more casual.

Mimi considers her husband’s profile. She likes to tease him that he looks too young for her, although he is a year older. Something innocent about his blue eyes—it could be his lashes, golden brown and too long for a man. She wants to rest her head on his shoulder while he drives, the way she used to when they were courting. Feel his cheek light against her lips, his smooth shave, knowing he can feel her breath, wondering how long it will take him to pull over…. Jack looks unconcerned but she knows it means something to him, being back here. He teases her about being “dramatic” but she knows this is where he had his heart broken. Not by a woman, by an airplane.

She knows better than to talk about it, or to show him she knows by any sign other than being happy here. By plunging in and organizing their life, unpacking her formals along with the pots and pans, joining the Officers’ Wives Club, sending his uniform to the cleaners…. Something she would never tell him: she is glad not to be married to a pilot. Salt of the earth, life of the party, some of their best friends, but … the worry for the wives when the men are flying. And the waiting after work when the men are together, drinking. High-strung esprit de corps, for all her husband’s belief in how relaxed the air force is compared to the army. Mimi knows, but does not say, that men who are relaxed with other men are sometimes anything but, once they get home. She is grateful to be a wife, not a cheerleader. She has the best of both worlds: a man in uniform whose first love is his family.

She looks away, not wanting him to feel watched. He is whistling through his teeth. He’s going to be fine.
I have such a good man
. There is nothing more erotic than this knowledge, no Hollywood scene could rival this station wagon in the sunshine with this man and his children and the secret that only she knows: his face, hovering just above her own, deserted by his defences. At the mercy of his own strength, needing her to take it from him, keep it safe. Then give it back to him. She slips her hand onto his thigh.

Jack turns left on Alberta Street and follows the one curve on the base. A slow circular drive leads to a stone building couched in hedges and flower beds. Low-slung Frank Lloyd Wright, its granite facade a glamorous contrast to the architectural whiteout everywhere else.

“There you go, Missus,” he says.

Flagstone steps lead to a pair of oak doors. Tilted wood-framed picture windows afford a glimpse of cocktail tables and chairs between burgundy-and-blue curtains—the air force tartan. The dance floor gleams. It is possible to fall in love with your wife all over again in the time it takes to escort her up to the open doors where the sounds of a swing orchestra greet you, along with the clink of glasses, the aroma of the buffet, the laughter of men and women. Enchanted evenings.

“Bon,”
says Mimi. And they drive on.

Mike says, “Where’s your building, Dad?”

“Oh we just passed it, buddy, it’s back there on the right.”

Receding through the rear window of the station wagon, a two-storey white building with a green shingled roof and concrete steps. Benign as a snowfort. That is where Jack will be running the Central Officers’ School. That is where he will fly his desk.

Mimi takes a hanky from her husband’s pocket and wipes the lipstick from his mouth, left over from their kiss at the airfield. Then she kisses him again and whispers in his ear,
“Je t’aime
, baby.”

Life is beautiful. He lets the steering wheel unravel beneath his palm as he completes the leisurely turn back onto Canada Avenue. He is a lucky man. He wants what he has.

He knows that, had he gone operational in
’43
, he might well have been killed. The crash spared him. He has been given the gift that many of his friends sacrificed. He has children. It ends there,
there is nothing better, not fast cars or caviar, not Playboy bunnies or money. Your children. And the woman who has your children. He says softly to Mimi as she squeezes his thigh, “Behave yourself, Missus.” She glances down at his lap—“You behave, Mister”—and smiles. Pleased with herself.

As the Rambler passes the gates, the guard touches his cap and Jack lifts two fingers from the wheel.

They near the Spitfire again, and Madeleine feels the butterflies wake up in her stomach. We are finally going to our new house. Which one will it be? In Centralia there are 362 to choose from. In a variety of colours.

Opposite the Spitfire stands a wooden pole. It’s not a telephone pole, Madeleine can see that. Way up at the top is a large bird’s nest. And protruding from the mass of straw is a thrust of metal. Like a rusty mouth.

“It’s an air-raid siren,” says Mike.

It’s unlike the ones she knew in Germany—freshly painted loudspeakers mounted on concrete posts. No birds allowed.

“It’s left over from the war,” says Dad.

“Did you ever hear it?”

“Nope.”

She knows what an air-raid siren sounds like. There were drills on the base at 4 Wing. It’s a terrifying sound that makes you have to go to the bathroom. “Does it still work?” she asks.

“Who knows?” says Dad, “but it sure would give the crows a fright if it did.”

The Rambler crosses the Huron County road. No traffic on either side as far as the eye can see. MON. Madeleine turns and looks back up at the raggedy nest. Glimpse of a black wing, then a crow rises and flies away.

The Rambler enters the PMQs and Canada Avenue becomes Algonquin Drive. It leads through a little Levittown, planned suburb of semi-detached houses and bungalows in every colour of the rainbow. None of this was here in
’43
.

Each house is surrounded by a big lawn, a view of the cornfields never far away. Lawns can make slaves of their owners, but all anyone does in Centralia is water and cut, and the grass flourishes
thick and green. Same with the maples that cast their twirling keys to earth, the blossom-raining elms, the shaggy bushes that erupt in snowstorms of confetti each spring,
Just married!
There are no fences. Crescents and bends form tulip-shapes, the whole place is hugging itself. Madeleine looks out the window at this bright new world.

Bikes and trikes and red wagons, sprinklers going, the distant roar of a lawnmower, the smell of freshly cut grass. Kids glance up, mildly curious, strange adults wave casually at the car, Jack and Mimi wave back.

“Who’s that?” Madeleine asks.

“We don’t know yet,” says Dad.

“But we will soon,” says Maman.

Or maybe they won’t. The people who waved may be moving out just as the McCarthys move in. Or you may run into a family from two or three postings ago, and it’s a great reunion but either way it’s just as well to start off as old friends. That’s how it is in the forces. You bond, you move on, there is no contradiction.

They drive past a park with swings, a slide, merry-go-round and teeter-totters. Paved footpaths run between the houses and open onto empty fields full of possibilities invisible to the adult eye. Among Centralia’s PMQs there are sixty-four such empty acres—big grassy circles rimmed by the backs of houses. Someone’s mother can always see you. No one worries about children in Centralia.

“Dad, why is it called Centralia?” asks Madeleine.

“Because it’s at the centre of the world.” Jack winks at his son in the rearview mirror.

“Every place is the centre of the world,” says Mike, “’cause the world is round.” And Centralia feels round, the looping streets, the neatly mown fields that fill the centres of these loops. Madeleine pictures a target. And in the crosshairs, Centralia. Bombs away. Rubble. Women in kerchiefs picking up the coloured pieces of the PMQs. Lego.

“Madeleine, stop daydreaming and look at your new neighbourhood,” says her mother. “Where do you think your best friend lives?”

Gee, doc, maybe in that garbage can with Popeye the Sailor Man
. “I don’t know, Maman.”
I like to go swimmin with bare naked wimmin
,
I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!
Rude lyrics she learned from Mike. She pictures her Popeye ukulele. It’s on the same moving van with her hair and the rest of their stuff—including, unfortunately, her accordion.

“Madeleine.”

“Oui, maman?”

“I said, pick one and then later you’ll see if you were right.”

Madeleine rests her chin on the window frame and tries to guess where her best friend lives. The one she has not yet met. Does she live in the pink house, the green one …? Suddenly she remembers that she already has a best friend, Laurie Ferry. But she can no longer quite picture her face.

“There’s your new school, kids.” Jack stops the car. Modern single-storey white stucco with big windows and a taller section at one end, the gym. J. A. D. McCurdy School, kindergarten through grade eight. Deserted, deep in its summer sleep. The flagpole stands empty. The swings hang motionless, the slide and teeter-totters static.

“Hop out and take a look,” says Dad. Mike opens his door and Madeleine slides out after him.

Their parents watch from the car as they cross the playground without stopping to swing or slide, past the bike racks and up the broad front steps. In just over a week they will line up here with other kids, some of whom they will know by then. Friends.

Brother and sister cup their hands around their eyes and peer through the glass of the big double doors. The first thing they see, once their eyes have adjusted to the gloom, is an arrangement of framed photos. Mike rhymes them off: “Sabre, CF-100, Lancaster….”

Two larger photos preside over the rest. Queen Elizabeth II, “our gracious Queen,” and her husband, Prince Philip. Their portraits greet you in the foyer of every Canadian school here and abroad. The Queen and Prince Philip, your old friends. Your godparents, in a way.

Hi, Your Majesty. Madeleine stares up at the Queen and thinks, this will be my last year in Brownies. This spring, I will fly up to Girl Guides. There is the congenial sense that the Queen has heard her and serenely agrees, “Why yes, Madeleine, it is high time you flew up to Guides.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“You’re welcome.”

Mike has strolled away and hoisted himself onto a window ledge to get a better look. She joins him and he hops down and gives her a boost. She gazes in. “I wonder which one is my classroom.”

“This one is.”

“It is not, Mike.”

This classroom has the alphabet marching in block letters above the blackboard, and happy numbers skipping hand in hand. It is obviously the kindergarten classroom. The pile of pastel-coloured nap mats in the corner clinches it. Madeleine is going into grade four, you do not have naps on mats in grade four. Mike is going into grade seven.

“Due to my superior intelligence,” he says suavely.

“Due to it’s automatic when you’re turning twelve,” she says with withering sarcasm. Mike never withers.

“You have to pass first, stunned one.”

“Like wow, man,” she drawls, “you passed. How womantic, how positively gwoovy,” snapping her fingers and swaggering like a beatnik, “Hey Daddyo.”

Mike laughs. “Do Elvis.”

She swivels her hips, wrinkling her brow over the microphone, dropping her voice, dribbling it like a basketball, “‘We-hell it’s won foh the money, two foh the show….’”

“Do Barbie!” he yells, giggling furiously—it’s so easy to make her go crazy. Madeleine goes up on tiptoes, sticks out her chest, points her hands and totters about with a plastic face and mechanically blinking eyes. “Oh Ken, can you pick up my handkerchief for me, please?” she simpers. “I cannot bend my legs, I cannot bend my arms, eek! Oh Ken, save me. My hero!” Mike takes out an imaginary machine gun and Barbie dies in a hail of bullets.

Madeleine gets up. “Hey Mike, want me to do Sylvester? ‘Thufferin’ Thuckotash!’ Want me to do Elmer Fudd? ‘A hunting we wiw go, a hunting we wiw go—’”

But Mike takes off around the corner of the building. She follows. They run around the whole school three times, then they run to the teeter-totters and hang over the steel bar on their stomachs.

“Hop on,” says Mike, and they teeter-totter violently while Madeleine hangs on for dear life, not complaining about the bumps, laughing every time she wants to cry, “Ow!”

He abandons the teeter-totter. Madeleine crashes onto her tailbone, laughs and follows, convinced her bum is flashing visible cartoon pain behind her. He has climbed halfway up the mesh of the baseball backstop by the time she reaches it. “Come on men, follow me,” he cries, making explosion sounds, pulling a pin from a grenade with his teeth, “I need ammo!” and she tosses up a bandolier of bullets, “Thanks, corporal,” he calls through the hell of battle—normally Madeleine is just a private, she swells with pride.

“Sarge!” she yells, “look out!”

Mike turns to see a Japanese soldier clambering up after him. Madeleine takes aim and snipes. “Got him!” she yells and, as the Nazi tumbles to his death,
“Auf Wiedersehen!”

“He was a Jap,” says Mike, “not a Kraut.”

“Mike!” says Madeleine. “Don’t say Jap and Kraut, we’re not allowed.”

Mike’s head snaps to one side. “I’m hit!” His grip loosens and he half-tumbles down the mesh, bleeding, dying.

“Sarge! I’ll save you!” She slides down the backstop, fingers and toes skimming the metal links, and releases her hold an impressive eight feet from the ground, tuck and roll. “It doesn’t hurt,” she announces before he can ask.