Seeing Eye

The Mayor of the Sister City Talks to the Chamber of Commerce in Klamath Falls, Oregon

“It was after the raid on Tokyo. We children were told to collect scraps of cloth. Anything we could find. We picked over the countryside; we stripped the scarecrows. I remember this remnant from my sister’s obi. Red silk suns bounced like balls. And these patches were quilted together by the women in the prefecture. The seams were waxed as if to make the stitches rainproof. Instead they held air, gases, and the rags billowed out into balloons, the heavy heads of chrysanthemums. The balloons bobbed as the soldiers attached the bombs. And then they rose up to the high wind, so many, like planets, heading into the rising sun and America….”

I had stopped translating before he reached this point. I let his words fly away. It was a luncheon meeting. I looked down at the tables. The white napkins looked like mountain peaks of a range hung with clouds. We were high above them on the stage. I am yonsei, the fourth American generation. Four is an unlucky number in Japan. The old man, the mayor, was trying to say that the world was knit together with threads we could not see, that the wind was a bridge between people. It was a hot day. I told these beat businessmen about children long ago releasing the bright balloons, how they disappeared ages and ages ago. And all of them looked up as if to catch the first sight of the balloons returning to earth, a bright scrap of joy.

Dish Night

Every Wednesday was Dish Night at the Wells Theatre. And it worked because she was there, week in and week out. She sat through the movie to get her white bone china. A saucer. A cup. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into the big wooden crates. There was straw all over the floor of the lobby and bales of newspaper from strange cities. I knew she was the girl for me. I’d walk her home. She’d hug the dish to her chest. The streetlights would be on and the moon behind the trees. She’d talk about collecting enough pieces for our family of eight. “Oh, it’s everyday and I know it,” she’d say, holding it at arm’s length. “They’re so modern and simple and something we’ll have a long time after we forget about the movies.”

I forget just what happened then. She heard about Pearl Harbor at a Sunday matinee. They stopped the movie, and a man came out onstage. The blue stage lights flooded the gold curtain. It was dark in there, but outside it was bright and cold. They didn’t finish the show. Business would pick up then, and the Wells Theatre wouldn’t need a Dish Night to bring the people in. The one we had gone to the week before was the last one ever and we hadn’t known it. The gravy boat looked like a slipper. I went to the war, to Europe, where she’d write to me on lined school paper and never fail to mention we were a few pieces shy of the full set.

This would be the movie of my life, this walking home under the moon from a movie with a girl holding a dinner plate under her arm like a book. I believed this is what I was fighting for. Everywhere in Europe I saw broken pieces of crockery. In the farmhouses, the cafes. Along the roads were drifts of smashed china. On a beach, in the sand where I was crawling, I found a bit of it the sea washed in, all smooth with blue veins of a pattern.

I came home and washed the dishes every night, and she stacked them away, bowls nesting on bowls as if we were moving the next day.

The green field is covered with these tables. The sky is huge and spread with clouds. The pickup trucks and wagons are backed in close to each table so that people can sit on the lowered tailgates. On the tables are thousands of dishes. She walks ahead of me. Picks up a cup then sets it down again. A plate. She runs her finger around a rim. The green field rises slightly as we walk, all the places set at the tables. She hopes she will find someone else who saw the movies she saw on Dish Night. The theater was filled with people. I was there. We do this every Sunday after church.

Lice

I was waiting for the girls to come out of their mother’s trailer so I decided to check the tires with a penny I found on the passenger seat. On the left front, the tread wasn’t deep enough to reach Lincoln’s nose and I could see all the rest were more or less bald. That’s when the girls blew out the trailer door. Their coats were half on and half off. It looked like they had a couple of extra arms each, their hair flying.

I stood up and threw the penny away. As soon as I did it I felt sorry. I wanted the penny back right away and looked for it in the tall brown grass. I looked away from the trailer out into the yard, which was turning all copper as the sun went down. I’d never find it.

It was almost winter again. Straw bales were stuffed around the trailer, hiding the wheels and the hitch. The propane tank was newly painted silver. They paint metal silver. That penny was still somewhere in the grass. The girls were pulling each other’s hair, and I felt the car sink with the weight of them. I felt it sink under my butt where I leaned on the fender and looked over the cornfield newly gleaned next to where the trailer was parked.

“Daddy,” the kids said, “look at us.”

My car is silver. The seats are black. The girls were in the nest of their things in back. Paper, rope, arms from old dolls, clothes, books with gold spines, and bent-up plastic straws. They were already reading.

Their mother followed them out this time. She showed me the paper from the school. She hadn’t read the note until I’d pulled up in the drive when she was getting the girls’ things together. She checked their hair right there while they wormed around in their coats by the door. She combed through the fine hairs behind their ears and in the scruff of their necks and found the ropes of eggs leading down to the scalps and there the lice.

And I stood there a second with her. I thought about the time I let one die overnight on a piece of notebook paper. It clung for hours to a loose hair I put beside it like the grass the girls throw in with lightning bugs. I wanted to see if it was true about needing warm bodies to survive. It was true. And I blew the paper clean.

“We took a nap,” she said. And it took me a while to understand what she meant. We were both leaning on the car. She had her head hanging down. Her arms were straight and her hands were jammed into her sweater pockets. I felt my fingers on her scalp, and I leaned in toward the whirlpool of her hair.

Meat

Because I could play baseball, I never went to Korea. I was standing on the dock in San Francisco with my entire company. We all wore helmets, parade rest, and were loaded down with winter and summer gear. We were ready to embark. My name was called. I remember saying excuse me to the men in rank as I tried to get by with my equipment. Then I sat on my duffel and watched the others file aboard, bumping up the side of the ship, the cables flexing. I could see rust in the water being pumped from the bilge. Sailors laughed way over my head. It only took a few hours to load the troop. There were some people there to wave good-bye, though not for the soldiers since our shipping out was something secret.

Nothing was ever said. I was transferred to another unit where all the troops were baseball players. I played second base on the Third Army team. I batted seventh and bunted a lot. We traveled by train from one base to another in Texas, Georgia, and on up into New Jersey for the summer. We had a few cars to ourselves, including a parlor with an open platform. The rest of the train was made up of reefers full of frozen meat. The train was aluminum and streamlined. We could stand in the vestibules or in the open doorway of the baggage car where we kept the bags of bats and balls and the pinstriped uniforms hung on rods and look out over the pink flat deserts. There wouldn’t be a cinder from the engine, its wheels a blur. You would see it up ahead on the slow curves, the white smoke of the whistle trailing back over the silver boxcars of meat and then the whistle. Some cars still had to be iced so we’d stop in sad, little towns, play catch and pepper while the blocks melted in the sun and the sawdust turned dark and clotty on the platform. We’d hit long fly balls to the local kids who’d hang around. We left them broken bats to nail and tape.

The meat was our duty. It was what we said we did even though everyone knew we played baseball. The Army wanted us to use frozen meat instead of fresh. We ran the tests in messes to see if the men could tell the difference. We stood by the garbage cans and took the plates to scrape and separate the scraps of meat to weigh for waste. A red plate meant the meat was fresh. The bone, the chewed gristle, the fat. I picked it out of the cold peas and potatoes. Sometimes whole pieces would come back, gray and hard. The gravy had to be wiped off before it went on the scale. Those halls were huge, with thousands of men hunched over the long tables eating. We stood by watching, waiting to do our job. It made no difference, fresh or frozen, to the man. This pleased the Army. Things were changing. Surplus from the war was being given to the U.N. for the action in Korea. There were new kinds of boots and rifles. Then every camp still had walk-in lockers. The sides of meat hung on racks. The cold blew through you. Blue inspection stamps bled into the yellow fat of the carcasses. All gone now. That’s what I did in the service.

But the baseball didn’t change. The ball still found my glove. There were the old rituals at home. I rubbed my hands in the dirt then wiped them on my pants, took the bat and rapped it on the plate. The pitch that followed always took me by surprise — hard and high, breaking away. The pitcher spun the ball like a dial on a safe. And trains still sound the same when they run through this town. At night, one will shake our house (we live near an overpass) and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ll count the men who walked up that gangway to the ship. The train’s wheels squeal and sing. It might as well be hauling the cargo of my dreams.

What I See

I was killing time at the ranger station in West Glacier, twirling the postcard racks by the door. There was an old one of some teenagers around a campfire near Swift Current Lake. They have on dude ranch clothes, indigo jeans with the legs rolled into wide cuffs. The boys have flattops. There is a uke. One girl, staring into the fire, wears saddle shoes. The colors are old colors. Colors from the time women all wore red lipstick. Beyond the steel blue lake the white glaciers are smearing down the mountainsides. I saw the glaciers even though it was night in the card. They gave off their own light. No one ever took this card, not even as a joke. I was looking at this card when a woman walked in with her son. They mounted the stair above the model of the park. The models of the mountains were like piles of green and brown laundry, the glaciers sheets. The lakes were blue plastic. A red ribbon stood for the Going to the Sun Highway. It all looked manageable. The mother pointed. In the corner was the little house. You are here. She said to me then: Is there any place we can go to overlook the grizzlies?

This year the wolves have moved back into the park. And number 23 had mauled a camper, his third this year, but didn’t kill her. Children walk through the station with bells on their feet. When the wind is right you can hear the songs drifting in from the higher trails. We were told there would be more people here this season because of the way the world has turned. There are too many people here for this place ever to be wild wild.

The cable’s come as far as Cutbank. On my days off, I rent a room in town and watch the old movies they’ve juiced up with color. But the colors are as pale as an old rug. They look like they’ve already faded from old age. Now the blue sky outside looks manufactured, transported here from the other side of the mountain, its own conveyor belt. A bolt of dyed cloth. It is dripping with color. And my shorts here are khaki, which is Urdu for the word dirt. Sometimes my eyes hurt from seeing the situation so clearly. Every ten minutes or so I hear the ice tumble in the machine out on the breezeway. Then the condenser kicks on. Out the window I can see back to the park, beyond the hot tableland to the mountains and the five white fingers of the glacier.

All of what I know about the world worms its way to me from Atlanta. The news is to stay put. They have a park in Atlanta. In it is the Cyclorama, a huge picture with no edges. The Battle of Atlanta is everywhere. The painting keeps wrapping around me so even out of the corners of my eyes I see nothing but the smoke and the smoky bodies falling about me. Atlanta is a mustard yellow in the distance. Sherman rides up in front of me. The battle ends and it begins again. I climb out of the painting through a hole in the floor. There is no place to overlook it. In the basement of the building is the famous steam locomotive The General. I see Ted Turner has just painted that movie.

And it strikes me now that I once looked like Buster Keaton, my campaign hat was tilted like his hat, as I stood next to King on the memorial steps. The monument behind us was white, even its shadows were white. King’s suit had a sheen like feathers or skin. The white shirts glowed. Everyone wore white shirts except for my khaki since color hadn’t been invented yet. The Muslims wore white. Their caps were white. And the crowd spilling down the steps looked like marble in white to stay cool. It was swampy near the river. They showed the speech around his birthday. I am always there, a ghost over his left shoulder. I was so young. I look as if nothing could surprise me. A ranger look. It always surprises me now. Now I know how it all came out, what happened to that man. I look like a statue. King flickers. I kept him in the corner of my eye. I watched the crowd. What I see is me seeing. I don’t see what is coming. When they color it they will get the color of my eyes wrong.

In the window of the motel, I watch the day move. I have made a career with Interior. The range is being painted over by a deep blue sky. The glacier grips the mountaintop then lets go to form a cloud. Then everything just goes.

The Teakwood Deck of the USS Indiana

I stabbed a man in Zulu. It had to do with a woman. I remember it was a pearled penknife I’d got from a garage. I’d used it for whittling and the letters were wearing off. It broke off in his thigh and nicked the bone. It must have hurt like hell.

I did the time in Michigan City in the metal shop, where I would brush on flux and other men would solder. Smoke would be going up all over the room. They made the denim clothes right there in the prison. The pants were as sharp as the sheet metal we were folding into dustpans and flour scoops. It was like I was a paper doll and they’d folded the jacket on me with the tabs creased over my shoulders. And the stuff never seemed to soften up but come back from the laundry shrunk and rumpled, just as stiff until the one time when all the starch would be gone and your clothes were rags and you got some new ones.

There was a man in there who was building a ship. When I first saw it, he had just laid down the keel and the hull looked like a shiny new coffin. This guy was in for life and he kept busy building a model of a battleship, the USS Indiana. He had hammered rejected license plates, flattened the numbers out. He’d fold and hammer. In the corner of the shop he’d pinned up the plans, a blue ship floated on the white paper. He had models made from balsa, the ribs showing through in parts. He had these molds of parts he would use to cast, jigs and dies. His tools were blades and snips. The needles he used to sew the tiny flags, he used in the model as antennae. The ship was 1/48th size of the real thing, as big as a canoe. The men who walked the deck had heads the size of peas. He painted each face differently, the ratings on their blue sleeves. He told me stories about each man frozen there on the bridge, here tucking into a turret, here popping out of a hatchway. He showed me letters from the same men. He had written to them sending samples of the paint he had mixed asking the men who had actually scraped and painted the real ship if this was anywhere near. He knew the hour, the minute, of the day his ship was sailing, the moment he was modeling.

But this was years later. At first I saw the hull. I saw the pile of rivets he collected from the temples of old eyeglasses. He collected spools for depth charges, straws for gun barrels, window screen for the radar. He collected scraps from the floor of the shop and stockpiled them near the ship. Toothpicks, thimbles, bars of soap, gum wrappers. Life Savers that were lifesavers, caps from tubes for valves and knobs, pins for shell casings. Everything was something else.

At first he started building only the ship but knew soon enough he’d finish. So he went back and made each part more detailed, the guns and funnels, then stopped again and made even the parts of parts. The pistons in the engines, lightbulbs in the sockets.

Some men do this kind of thing. I whittled but I took a stick down to nothing. I watched the black knots of the branches under the bark grow smaller with each smooth strip until they finally disappeared. Maybe I’d sharpen the stick, but that got old. Finally it is the shavings thin like the evening paper at my feet. That was what I was after. Strip things so fine that suddenly there is nothing there but the edge of the knife and the first layer of skin over my knuckle.

One of the anchors of the real battleship is on the lawn of the Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne. The anchor is gray and as big as a house. I took my then wife to see it. We looked around that state for the other one. But only found deck guns on lawns of the VFW, a whole battery at the football stadium near the university. In other towns, scrap had been melted and turned into statues of sailors looking up and tiny ships plowing through lead waves.

The deck of the model was the only real thing. He said the wood was salvaged from the deck. A guard brought him a plank of it. He let me plane it, strip the varnish and splinter it into boards. A smell still rose from it of pitch, maybe the sea. And I didn’t want to stop. I’ve seen other pieces of the deck since then in junior high schools made into plaques for good citizens. It is beautiful wood. The metal plates engraved with names and dates are bolted on, and near the bottom there is another smaller one that says this wood is from the deck of the battleship. It is like a piece of the true cross. And that is why I came to the capitol in Indianapolis to see the governor’s desk. I heard it was made from the teakwood deck of the USS Indiana.

So imagine my surprise when in the rotunda of the building I find the finished model of the ship in a glass case with a little legend about the prisoner in Michigan City. He’d finished it before he’d died. The porthole windows were cellophane cut from cigarette packs. The signal flags spelled out his name. It was painted that spooky gray, the color between the sea and sky, and in the stern a blue airplane was actually taking off and had already climbed above the gleaming deck where a few seamen waved.

I felt sad for that con. He spent his life building this. He never got it right. It wasn’t big enough or something.

I walked right into the governor’s office. I’m a taxpayer. And the lady told me he wasn’t there, but I told her I was more interested in the desk. So she let me in. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, opening the curtains for the light that skidded across the top cut to the shape of the state. One edge was pretty straight and the other, where the river ran, looked as if that end had melted like a piece of butter into toast. I was running my hand along the length of it, feeling how smooth it was — the grain runs north and south — when the governor walked in with his state trooper.

“It’s something,” he said. He’s a Republican. The trooper followed and stood behind him. “It has its own light.”

The trooper wore a sea blue uniform with sky blue patches at the shoulders and the cuffs. Belts hung all over him. Stripes and creases ran down his legs. Braids and chains. The pants were wool. He watched me. And I looked at him.

Jesus, you’ve got to love a man in uniform.

I stepped up to the desk and saw my face and the shadow of my body deep inside the swirling wood. I took my finger and pointed to the spot not far from Zulu where I knifed a man and said, “Right there.” I pushed hard with my nail. “That’s where I was born.”

Limited

I saw the rock, saw the boy who threw it. I saw it hit the window next to the seat in front of me. Saw the window shatter instantly. Saw that now I couldn’t see through the window anymore. And we were gone out of Warsaw on the Broadway Limited. We hadn’t stopped at Warsaw but gone through at sixty miles an hour. I saw the boy and the rock and his friends around him on their bicycles, and I imagined our train rocking the town, pushing the sound of the horn ahead along the tracks. Not stopping.

Now the whole car, everyone, is talking and pointing at the window. There is a high-pitched whistle. The light is different in the window since the windows are tinted. And the guy who sits there has just come back from the club car, dumb with luck, not drunk enough yet. I could have been sitting there, he says again. Everyone is talking about the kid with the rock and the window and outside now are cornfields and a few houses and the highway far away.

The conductor is looking out the rear door of this last car, and it looks like he is shaving. He is not shaving but whispering into a radio while he looks back at the tracks coming together. I saw the rock, saw the boy, I tell him. He says that it’s not the first time. Called someone who’ll call the police. He’s an old man. He’s seen it all. He can’t understand it.

I saw the rock float along with us at our speed, saw it barely catch up to us. I saw the boys on the bikes holding up their arms, jubilant, already tearing away from the place. The window went white.

He waited. Waited for the engines and the baggage cars, the coaches, the dome, the sleepers, the diner, the cafe. He waited, the rock already in his hand. More sleepers, more coaches, this last car. He waits, sees the people in the windows. Something so big and so much metal. Silver and blue. His whole town shaking. One long horn. He can’t hear his friends egging him on. This rock won’t stop a thing, won’t slow nothing down. He throws it, and it’s gone.

Three Tales of the Sister City

1

If the Chamber of Commerce had known the chef was arriving on the last United flight that evening someone would surely have been there to welcome him.

At first he waited near the doors that led out to the apron and the parked airplanes. It was raining. The airport is not equipped with the ramps that connect the planes to the terminal. Instead, passengers that night were given red, white, or blue umbrellas.

He looked outside. In the dark, he could see only the huge umbrellas bobbing, the colored panels and the white ones stained red by the flashing lights of the electric carts unloading the luggage. The umbrellas floated back to the airplane and up the metal stairs. The rain was a sheet on the white fuselage.

Passengers entered the terminal. A man in coveralls collected the umbrellas. Some were left open and some closed but not rolled. He hugged the umbrellas to his chest. Water dripped down the leg of his pantsuit. After a bit, the man ran back out through the rain, rocking the bundle of umbrellas, three of them still open and shooting out about him. He pushed up the stairs to deliver the umbrellas to a steward handing them to passengers at the door of the airplane. In the terminal some angry men shoved the umbrellas from themselves as they came in the door. The umbrellas flew across the waiting room, hitting chairs and skidding over the floor. They kicked at the umbrellas on the floor. The carpet was dark from the water.

The chef stood near the door, waiting for someone to come up to him, umbrellas scattered around him. He was dressed in a white uniform — shoes, pants, tunic. The kerchief he wore when he worked at a table was in his pocket. He wore a white hat. His hair was wet. The only English he knew was Don Hall, the man who opened Takaoka, the restaurant named for our sister city, and who had invited him here. There were small groups of loud people all around him in the corridor. He went on up the ramp to claim his luggage.

The new conveyor wound around the room. The belt skimmed along just above the floor, curved back on itself, bulged, detoured around ceiling columns. The suitcases and flight bags went from one clutch of people to another, sniffed at their heels for an owner, wheeled around, meandered toward a businessman with a coat over his shoulder, and then disappeared behind the rubber strips in the wall.

His bags did not appear.

He stared at the black sheets moving by his feet. Only the women at the rental desk remained — red, green, orange, yellow — placing envelopes in lighted boards on the walls. There were a few men at telephones.

At last, the small case that held his knives appeared at his feet. The bright yellow tag had been placed on its handle. The knives had been taken away as he boarded a plane. He had tried to explain. They had given him a yellow tag instead.

He chased after the case, catching up to it in a few strides. Together they waited for more luggage. The conveyor stopped. Across the empty room he saw a few clumps of unclaimed luggage, none of it his.

Later that evening, he was in a restaurant kitchen. It wasn’t clear that this was the restaurant where he was to work. He had been saying Don Hall to everyone, and now he was in a restaurant and here he felt more at home. The woman who had shown him to the kitchen sat across from him at the shining steel table. The kitchen had been cleaned at closing, and the metal sang in the bright light. There were chrome panels on the walls, woven aluminum racks, nickel trim on the oven doors. The sinks, the freezer doors, the shelves stacked with bone china were of stainless. He was stirring the burnishing balls with his hand. He lifted a dozen to his face, let them spill through his fingers back into the bright tin can. The drains were minted coins set into the floor.

The woman had been gesturing all the time. She lifted a silver hood on one of the tables. He saw tubs of butters and white pastes, yellow and red sauces, shaved meats and dried cheeses. She placed before him a loaf of bread and a pale green head of lettuce.

He opened his case and took out his knives, crossing two before him on his oiled cutting board. He held the head of lettuce in both hands for a second then set it down firmly as if he were setting a stone.

He cut into the little finger of his left hand on one of the first slices through the lettuce but did not realize it. There were drops of blood on the almost white leaves. He saw the darker veins running through the pale leaf.

The woman ran for help. He pressed the wound against the leg of his pants. He still wasn’t afraid, but he was alone again.

2

The man who was the official photographer for the Chamber came from one of those countries that has no language of its own.

He was the last known immigrant to the city.

He was taking pictures of the summer parade and was allowed to walk in the street. The children on the curb were waving Japanese flags. He wore several cameras, each with different lenses.

In the parade, the ambassadors from our sister city rode in a yellow bus. They wore blue kimonos and leaned out through the open windows. They took pictures of the children on the curb waving the Japanese flags. Their wide blue sleeves swung along the yellow sides of the bus. Red lights flashed.

He saw her in the window beneath the black image of a bird. A black pinstripe ran the length of the bus. He walked along taking her picture — her white face, her black hair, the blue kimono and the knot of the white obi.

When she arrived at his house that evening, he could barely hide his disappointment. She wore Western dress. In the basement where he had his studio and darkroom he showed her the framed pictures of his daughter that hung on every wall.

She turned from one picture, touched her own breast, and pointed at his daughter. He looked down through his glasses, his head tilted away, at his daughter’s chest. He saw, for the first time, a second set of small dark nipples beneath her full breasts. They had been there all the time.

He turned back to the woman, who now looked at the popcorn she held in her cupped hands. She brought the popcorn up to her face and with her tongue took one kernel into her mouth. Some other kernels had fallen on the wood table below her knees, and he saw that each kernel looked like an orchid. Their metallic throats were the fragments of the shell, the seed turned inside out.

3

We had no way of knowing they were mad at each other. When they arrived in Fort Wayne, we thought they looked enough alike to be brothers.

At our noon meetings at the Chamber, they uncrated the boxes that had been delivered that day. They held up shovels and brushed off the packing straw; they oiled the clippers while we watched. We saw the rakes and the brooms, the trowels and the hods. When the boulders began to arrive they took turns telling stories of discovering each stone, of wanting that one to go to America, to the Sister City. The stones spoke saying so.

Everything followed. The smaller rocks and the pebbles in jars, the envelopes of pine needles, the stone lanterns, the bamboo pipe. The plants and the trees were waved through customs. Even some water came from Japan with a note from the mayor.

They were given a backhoe to use and instructions on how to run it. They were shown the stretch of yard east of the Performing Arts Building that had been set aside.

And they worked well enough together, setting stones, the dwarf pines, the creeping evergreens. It began to take shape in our minds.

Then they started fighting. They knocked over piles of rock, stepped on the dam of pebbles and sand they had made to form the pools. They stopped people as they walked from the parking lots to work.

“This or this?” they asked. “This or this?” No one knew what to do. They worked on opposite sides of the plot, and we heard that they threatened each other with tools. We watched from office buildings. People took sack lunches outside and watched for the hour. Sides were being taken. Pools and lotteries were being formed. Bets placed. We talked of little else.

No one could talk to them. They stopped talking to each other. Our local architect, the men from the city greenhouse, the women who had taken the flower arranging course in our sister city all tried to explain to them how we felt.

Really, we could see no difference between them. It all looked Japanese. We liked the colors next to the red brick of the building.

Finally one of them abandoned the project site altogether, drove the backhoe to another part of the newly sodded lawn, and started digging. The other one paid no attention, poured goldfish into the shallow pond.

The delegation had come from Takaoka to escort the gardeners home. At the airport the Japanese were dressed to the hilt. We all bowed to say good-bye. We muttered a few words we knew. We had arranged ourselves around the brown waiting area and kept the two of them far apart. They sat silently, heads bowed. All of us pretended none of this had happened.

The runway stretched on and on.

A woman from our city broke the silence, suggested that we sing the state song, that everyone should sing. The out-of-town businessmen stood up, charmed by the silk and smiles.

We pretended to sing. The woman had a clear, high voice. She sang the state song — a song about the rivers, the trees, the meadows, the hills, the unimproved beauty of our state.

Guam

The time in Indiana never changes. I grew up minutes from the Ohio line, and in the spring, the clocks leapt forward there. But in Indiana we’d lose an hour without trying.

A pack of us in my father’s Olds crossed over to Van Wert and a bar there called Mr. Entertainer and got smashed on 3.2 beer, legal for minors. In the summers the nights were long, longer than the bars were open, and we waited for the dawn, parked on some township road, the car wading in the corn. It was the funniest thing to us, buzzed as we were, to race the sun back to Indiana. There were five guys in the backseat. We took off, the tail of my father’s car dragging in the gravel. Even floored, it took a quarter section before the overdrive cut in, and then, maybe, we hit a grade at an intersection or the road tossed us up when it switched to tar or oil. The shocks heaved, and we were flying, the eight knocking and the tires revving off the ground. This was dawn. Maybe there was a farmer on a Case, scything the ditch weed with a sickle bar. All of us stuck our arms out the windows, flapping our wings. I blew the horn, and we watched our selves pass the sound. We saw it roll off the fenders and tumble into the dust, bounce a few times behind us like something we’d killed. We were moving so fast, we weren’t moving, like the times all of us had sat in our fathers’ parked cars and pretended to drive, that fast. And then we jumped over another road and into Indiana, and there, it was an hour before we left the bar, and we felt like we had cheated on several things and gotten away with it all.

I could tell this hadn’t impressed her. A frat house friend from college had set us up. This was the year after graduation, when I was sharing an apartment the company owned with some other guys. It was on the west side of New York City, and for the first couple of weeks I lived there I watched the sun set in a smudge on the other side of the river at the end of our street. Her name was Doreen, and this was the only time I ever took her out.

“So, where you from, Doreen?” I asked. We were walking around Times Square looking for something to do.

“We moved around a lot,” she said.

This was kind of a lie, I found out. Later, at the comedy club where we ended up, all the comics taking turns at the open mic started their routines by telling us we were a good-looking crowd and asking us where we were from.

“Guam!” Doreen shouted louder than the rest of us could shout where we were from. And all the comics picked her out of the noise of states and cities.

“You’re kidding. You’re from Guam!” they’d say, adjusting the microphone stand to their height. Guam is a funny enough word, and they all had jokes they’d fire off as they settled into their timing and material.

Doreen rolled her drink between her hands. Her neck snapped back when she laughed. Things dangled from her ears. She’d say, “Guam!” when the next guy came on and asked, nervous and squinting in the lights, where we were from. And Guam again for the guy after that. It was funny because none of the comics had heard the one before him, passing the time in the greenroom backstage. So the last several were getting laughs just for throwing off the question. The house sat still to let Doreen answer the question he had forgotten, in the silence, he had asked. “Guam! I’m from Guam!” and the comic would recover with a joke about food or sex, thanking her with his eyes and the cock of his head for such a straight line. But by this time I couldn’t laugh anymore because I had laughed so much already at all the other comics who’d come before. They had been funny. I felt bad that the only way to let the last ones know they were funny was to laugh, and I just couldn’t anymore.

It was early in the morning when we left. A new comic was asking what remained of the audience where they were from. We started walking home.

“So, what was Guam like?” I asked Doreen. I imagined island beaches of ground volcanoes, cinder-block houses painted after-dinner mint colors, reefs made from rusted hulks of sunken ships. Everyone is related and looks the same.

“I was only born there,” Doreen said. “I’m from no place really. But I remember it like every place else I’ve lived. Quonset huts, lots of Quonset huts.”

It was early in the morning, and I was trying to think how to get us to an after-hours club downtown my roommate had told me about. There, no one would expect me to laugh, just dance and drink, and I could get close to Doreen and shout in her ear, ask her more questions she wouldn’t answer. I still didn’t know then how the night would turn out.

Tomorrow’s market in Tokyo had already closed. Hong Kong had fixed the price of gold. Their yesterdays already heading this way. In my office, I kept a laundered shirt in my desk drawer. No need to go home. There were no cabs. There never are. We were standing on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway, back to back and circling each other, concentrating on the cars as they rushed by. Above us, the lights of the big signs sputtered all around. I began my story about where I was from and what I did when I was there. I thought about Guam again while I was talking. I thought of the surge of water the moon pushes ahead of itself every day, bearing down on that pile of sand. And I thought about the people there, just getting up or just going to bed, laughing at each other, never thinking that I was thinking about them, here and at this very moment on the other side of the world.

The War That Never Ends

That summer I followed the trucks as they cut down the trees. I sold ice cream to the kids who watched, drawn by the pitch of the chain saws and the wood chipper. Our convoy snaked through the terraced neighborhoods. The green city two-and-a-half, the cherry picker folded on top, hauled the chipper, a yellow cannon. And trailing behind, the dump truck, its bed mounded with chips, pulled the leggy circular saw skirted with canvas that ground down the stumps. The trucks’ lights flashed. They bucked in low gear. Their drivers rode the brakes, looking for the trees marked with the white X’s. I pedaled hard behind them, thumbing the bells when I thought about it, jacking the freezer box back and forth as I cranked up a hill. I breathed in their trail of sickly sweet fresh-cut green wood and burned sap. The trees arched over us, leafless and dying.

More kids banged out of the screen doors, clutching change in their fists. They jumped on their chipped bikes and swerved in behind me. Their axle cleaners, strips of leather riveted together with a cheap reflector, plunked the spokes of their wheels when we coasted, sounding like a flat Oriental instrument.

I sold chocolate bombs with soft centers and Popsicle rockets I broke in two on the edge of the cart, plugs of ribboned ice cream in paper cups they ate with flat wooden spoons that came wrapped in wax paper I ripped from a belt, tubes of orange Push-Ups with pointed sticks, fudge bars that crusted over white in the humidity, sandwiches with the wafers peeling in strips, and Dreamsicles evaporating into thin air. The kids sat on the curbs, a splatter of drips around their feet in the gutters. A man in a bucket up in the trees tied a cable around the biggest limb while men on the ground snipped off branches with the long-handled pruners. The foreman, wearing a tie, pointed to the place he wanted the trunk to fall. I let a piece of dry ice smoke on the lid of the box.

I needed the money to stay in college and out of the draft. The Popsicles sold for 7 cents. I cleared a penny after the rent on the trike. I had thought about enrolling in a safe academy, the Coast Guard or the Merchant Marine, waiting out the war learning to shoot stars and spend my summers on long training cruises aboard old minesweepers made of wood and nonmagnetic metals. I had too many fillings to get in, cavities being a general indication of health, the applications said. Then, they could afford to be choosy.

“You sure you want that?” I said. The little boys still had their milk teeth. They stood around the cart and sucked the red syrup from the cherry pop, turning it into a chunk of pink ice on a stick. An older girl ran back home with the grimy change and a Drumstick for her mother, who stood in the shade of her front door.

The trees came apart so easily. Two or three chain saws whined at once. Then one idled, putting, as its operator considered his next cut. The sawdust sifted down. Leg-length logs were lowered by rope like scenery on a stage. In the street a man swept the dust and twigs into neat piles with a new push broom, tapping the stiff bristles twice after each swipe.

The chipper ran on its own engine, chewing up the logs and brittle branches. The man on the ground hurled the wood into the blades like he was throwing spears. They caught and the engine coughed and almost stalled until the grinding drum inside bit in and screamed, ripping through the limbs that shot out in shreds up the stack. It had a rhythm like the locusts in the trees at night, and the sound brought the mothers out to watch. I sat waiting, flicking the tinkly bells on the handlebar between the wails that sounded above the sputtering engine. A mother drifted up to my cart and bought something and watched until the trunk crashed down and was sectioned into wheels and rolled away. All the time she held the mushy wrapper away from her body. Then she threw the stained stick on the piles of sawdust and brown leaves.

The houses had been shaded, softened by the canopy above. Now after the trees were cut the houses looked stark and new again, just built, the lawn bald where the children had played. The sky lifted, and I could make out the shapes of dormers and eaves and see the sickly TV antennas twisted on the roofs, saplings that didn’t survive the winter.

I had lived through an age of service. Bread trucks delivered then. Men sharpened knives at your door. There were brushes for everything. Milk in bottles appeared on the stoop. The milk cartons now are printed with faces of news boys who’ve disappeared. They identify the dead with dental records. All that summer the trees kept dying, and the city crews, their saws calling back and forth to each other, cut every elm.

I didn’t cheat the war but went. In the cities they blew up trucks with hand grenades dropped into fuel tanks. A rubber band held the plunger in until the gas dissolved the rubber. There were always two explosions in Saigon. The first to bring the crowd. The streets were filled with bicycles. As they flowed by me, they made a soft sawing sound as soft as chirping crickets.

When I came home, I rode a bike along streets I didn’t recognize. The trees the city planted, the ginkgos and the crimson maples, had filled in. Along the fences the Chinese elms sprayed up, weeds, from all the trimming. The houses were smaller. The hills were steeper. The telephone poles still towered above the new trees, their cables sagging. At one pole a wire angled out from the top and ran to the ground. A long time ago the wire had grown into a tree branch. When they cut that tree down, they cut on either side of the wire, leaving the gray slice behind, still suspended, floating above me. Straddling my bike, I stood there awhile keeping that disk of wood between me and the sun, trying to imagine the time it took for the tree to absorb the wire. The wire hasn’t let go, even now when the disease is dead.

Chatty Cathy Falls into the Wrong Hands

Let me tell you that the boys who stole me from Baby Face, lusting after the secret of this voice, their own hearts racing when they screwed their eyes down to the scale of my dress tipping the scales that shut mine, as good as they were with their hands, came away disappointed when all they found after they found no easy way in (and they had ways) was a whorl of perforations in my chest more like a pattern left by a mustard plaster or a Band-Aid than the actual ventilation of my views; and I told them all I was admitting was sound, all I was allowing was conversation as they tossed me away without so much as another word like a live grenade seconds before I blew, pin pulled out, as if I had the short fuse, armed and fertile as I was without a loop to hang on; if they only would have stopped to hear what I had to say instead of hearing their own inarticulate insides, I would have told them how things work in this world, all right; can a man imitate speech? I ask you; I was born talking, talking borne, wired and whining, content enough to be a thing itself, a person and a place, made to lie on my back and run on, coming to understand why those boys were so uncomfortable with the hollow part of language, and imagining a woman who talks too much; and I find that even if, after plugging me a time or two, the boys had decided to unscrew my noggin to look inside, to uncoil what was left of this doll’s notion and then send my Fuller Brush head back to Baby Face on a Mattel tea plate with my eyes rolled up inside my brain, a replica of screams, a fabrication (after all) of speech playing dumb, I would, always, even as we speak, let that other part of me go on talking (listen to me) until the line runs in.

Evaporation

Your mother can’t even remember why I never drink. She sits upstairs by the bedroom window until the timed diamond lights switch off, repeats every question I ask her.

“What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” she says.

Kids on bikes racing on the infield drag clouds of dirt from base to base. The softball players drink beer in the stands, telling each other stories about the game they have just played. Their voices carry. It’s against park rules. It’s a public park.

“They shouldn’t be drinking.”

“They shouldn’t be drinking,” your mother says, her face reflected like smoke in the window. I had turned on the light on the chest of drawers to write some letters while I was thinking of it. One to Bill Kaple down at the City Light and another to the reporter I like at WKJG. The next morning, I went and picked up the beer cans from beneath the bleachers, filled the yellow fifty-gallon drum the park board leaves for trash. I flicked out the dregs from each can onto the dust. The beer dribbled into shimmering balls of gray powdered mud almost like mercury before the ground got dry again.

I’ve told you how in 1930 I was working for the Pennsy when the foreman said, “We’re going to have to lay you off, Jimmy.” I was a management trainee, but that day I was a gandy dancer learning the ropes. “Just for a little while,” he said. I wasn’t called back until 1938, but by that time I was working for the City Light, turning off the electricity when people ran up their light bills while they were paying down their gas bills and setting meters again when they paid off the light bill. But I was lucky in 1930, when they laid me off from the Pennsy. I got another job right away as an orderly at the Irene Byron outside of town. I had to live on the grounds, in the ward and come home only on the weekend. I left you and your mother early every Sunday and walked up the Kendallville Road, out into the country to the county farm and the children’s home to the sanatorium where I wheeled the TB patients through the big French doors out onto the screened-in porches even in winter.

I listened to them breathe on those cold nights, the moon throwing shadows of the screens like a net over their wrapped up bodies. Their breath smoked. The screens rattled in their frames when the wind blew. The big engines of the night trains on the Big Four track slipped climbing the steep grade behind the powerhouse, lost their head of steam and panted up the hill.

This was before the repeal of Prohibition. Hospitals were granted an allowance for evaporation of the alcohol they could use. We all knew this. Most of the orderlies stole a tea spoon or two from each big jug, the theft disguised as a part of the fraction that was lost naturally. I kept a Nehi bottle hidden in the steam tunnels too. The tunnels connected all the wards and the cottages to the powerhouse. We used them in winter to go from place to place. The pipes hissed at the joints and sweated hugging the wet walls underground. A few bulbs strung overhead lit the junctions where the tunnels forked off with little puddles of light. I saw the sparkle of other bottles stuffed behind a knot of valves or beneath the wooden duckboard on the floor. I wrapped my bottle in asbestos batting so it looked like a section of discarded scrap pipe.

Your mother doesn’t remember this. We lived then with your grandmother, who was failing, and once you all had to hide behind the curtains when the landlord came for the rent. I collapsed those weekends after the long walk home from the country. Your mother forgets, forgets how we worried, how we saved everything, and how I told her the alcohol accumulated drop by drop, more than a swallow, past a couple of fingers.

Those nights I slept with her I listened to her breathe. I woke up after midnight, screwed up from the shift I worked. Her breathing catches when she sleeps, not so much a snore as a click back in her throat that sounds like a clock ticking or a leaky faucet. And I figured in every exchange of air we were losing something. We were falling behind. Soon the act of breathing itself wouldn’t be worth a good goddamn. I was so tired. Some nights finally I hoped she wouldn’t be able to persuade herself to try again just settle into a last long sigh. I held my breath those nights so I could hear her, hear if this was it or this one or the next. But then the room would lighten enough for me to see the blankets rise and fall, and I had to leave before you even woke up to make it back to the sanatorium in time.

I told you how we went to a party after the repeal, how things were looking up. The alcohol we skimmed was still illegal but in a different way now. The party was out in Huntington. We were going to drink it all, toast the end of our bootlegging. Ed Patton, who’s passed away now, and I took the first belt. We were lucky. We had eaten a lot of potato salad, ham sandwiches, and deviled eggs while we mixed together the hooch in a washtub, cutting it with lime rickey. Somebody had replaced the grain alcohol we stole with the rubbing kind, and both of us were out cold before we knew it. I’ve told you this. I came to under the kitchen sink. Back then there were three pipes — one for the hot, one for the cold, and one for something I can’t remember. I woke looking up at those bars and knew I was in jail.

“Ed,” I had said to him after taking the first swallow, “this is sure hard to get down.” It’s the last thing I remember before the pipes. They pumped my stomach and Ed’s too. He froze both his feet later at the Battle of the Bulge and in the hospital then all the doctors asked him if he was related to the general, and he just said, “Hell, no!”

That was my last party and an end to all my drinking. People had come drunk to it, drunk on moonshine rye and smuggled Canadian whiskey. Perry Monet said he could walk a straight line and walked straight over the kitchen table and up and over the back of the davenport and on out the door and into the backyard. Your mother and Marcella Voltz put Forest Norton in the ringer washer and turned it on. He went around and round. I never knew who switched the alcohol. He might have been at the party, already pissed from the real stuff, too scared or stupid to say a word. I’ve been a sober man ever since.

At the sanatorium, one thing I had to do was massage the patients. I remember the chill it left on my hands when I swabbed the rubbing alcohol over someone’s back, the way the skin drew up tight. From then on the vapor always made me a little sick, so I held my breath until I could feel the skin turn rough and warm. A doctor explained it to me once, how a liquid warms to the degree it takes to turn it to air and how it stays at the temperature, even if you add more heat, until the liquid’s all gone.

Not much later, I was walking the alleys for the City Light. Tramps had scrawled these picture messages in chalk on the utility poles. A dishonest man lives here. A circle with an X inside marked a house good for a handout. A jagged line of triangles meant to tell a pitiful story. A bunch of lines was food for chores. You learned to draw the smiling cat you found scribbled on the paving bricks behind our house on Oakland Street. A kindhearted woman, a kindhearted woman lives here. You listened to the men on the back steps while they ate their fried egg sandwiches your mother made for them. And those weekend nights when I was home, you told me their stories, and they were always the same, how they’d heard of work in town, how they had a kid like you at home.

People waited. Once I had to shut off the power to a house on Brandroff Street. The meter was in the basement. I had to go through a bulkhead in the back. In the backyard around a card table were six or seven men all out of work playing euchre or watching the game. They stopped and turned toward me, looked at me standing in a clump of hollyhocks and ashes while the tenant fiddled with the lock on the door. I expected something would happen, for them to run me off. Instead they spent the moment just staring at me, as if I wasn’t worth the effort. The patients too, on the breezeways and porches, shrinking inside their rugs, watched the moon rise and then set. And your mother, back then, sitting with her mother, trying to pry her mouth open with a spoonful of broth.

Your mother sleeps all the time now, even in the chair beside the window. In the park, a yellow tractor comes each day to drag the field smooth again with an old piece of chain-link fence. The cloud of dust it raises drifts this way. I try to remember when it started happening, how we got to here. That ratchet in her throat cranks her head down, her chin to her chest.

“Blanche,” I say, “Blanche, wake up.”

She starts. “Wake up,” she says. “Wake up.”

And I try to think of something more to say.

Miners

Going east, I cross the Ohio by a bridge that empties on the west side, smack into a mountain face tunneled through to Wheeling. Set back from the highway on the old roadbeds are the miners’ houses. Mountains are at their back doors. The highway cuts through the mountains, and on the sheer faces of the cliffs on both sides, I see where they’ve bored and set the charges like a pencil split in two and the lead removed.

I think about the products of coal. The stockings you wear. The records you play. The aspirin you take. The pencil you write with. These are mine. What would we do without carbon?

The face of the land is changing. I am going east so I can write to you.

The hillsides are quarries mining men. The men are going home, where they will discover that all the waters in Shakespeare will not clean them. This life has gotten under their skins. They make love in smudges.

I am going further east, where men are inside of things, where they own things inside and out.

I am writing this with a pencil painted yellow and printed with a silhouette of a woman with no arms.

I wish I were a miner so that when you turned your back to me and the face of the land changed, before I would go back underground, I would reach out and write with my black finger some graphite text on the places you could not reach.

“You,” it would say, “are mine.”

The War of Northern Aggression

Sometimes we are mistaken for Nazis. We are not Nazis. It is our blond hair. It is our white skins. The names are not Latin. Johnston, Buell, Early, and Jackson. We speak English to each other when we wish not to be understood. We marry our cousins and stay within the walls of our villas. We have been here generations now, but cannot forget the country we have left behind. Our ancestors burned their ships in the harbors. Pilgrims, my friend. But do not call us Yankees. Never call us Yankees.

We have traveled to Bogotá from our homes in the mountains to see the North American Vice Presidents when they make their state visits. We are curious about such men. We watch as the campesinos pelt the limousines with eggs and paving stones from the plazas. I myself liked Señor Nixon, his face the color of newsprint. How he smiled and waved even as the masses swamped his sweating blue Cadillac.

For a while we grew rubber. Then for a long time bananas, but the bananas are all dying now. You do not know this yet in the north. A fungus infests the plantations, staining the leaves of the trees. The plants are all of the same variety, interbred, like us, our white flesh like the flesh of the banana, vulnerable to such things. We collect the toy Spanish horses now, grow a little coffee and broker chocolate, even some cotton. We grow the cashew, too, along with other crops.

My family owned land outside of Atlanta. Sherman slept there, my granddaddy told the children, one night during the siege. Refusing the master bedroom, he pitched a tent in the gardens. Tara, yes, like the movie. The flowers bloomed and the sky turned red with flame. I have never been there. My picture of the mansion comes from the books of the time, little Greek temples surrounded by weeping trees. I think of the Acropolis in Athens, where I have been on business, the white porches and the fluted columns. When I was there, they were restoring the Parthenon, encased in scaffolding, not to the way it looked before the Turks blew it up but to its previous state of decay. It had grown shabby. It had melted like a cake in the heat of the exhaust, the nephos the Greeks call it, the cloud of smoke. I think of the house in Atlanta that way. Still smoldering, always smoldering. The white walls scorched and pocked from countless bullets. Zouaves, who look like Turks, are carrying away the portraits of my forebears and their dogs. The slaves, dazed, attach themselves as contraband to the Union invader.

Now, we sing the old hymns in English still. Here, where we feel in our bones, the seasons in reverse, we grow nostalgic. We have avoided our whole history by leaving the south of the north. We import cases of Coca-Cola from Atlanta for our cotillions in the fall, where I wear the moth-eaten gray and yellow tunic of my great-granddaddy. The ladies, caged in ancient contraptions of whalebone and browning silk, sip from the heavy glass bottles of Coke. The salted peanuts blanch, dissolve in the dregs of the flat black syrup.

We watch the burning of Atlanta every year on television. We know the lines of the movie by heart. The satellite dish is in the nearest grove of our dying banana trees. The rotting leaves collect in its shallow palm, breaking up reception. On our screens, the scratchy snow is an image of the mosaic disease infecting our dying banana trees. Today on CNN, through bursts of static, we watched the pictures of North American helicopters settling in our own jungles like falling leaves. The guardia set fire to the bales of coca. Then we looked out of our windows and saw the coiling trunks of the new forest of smoke, growing on the slopes of the blue hills beyond. And then you came to take us back with you.

Listen, no place is home but this home for us. You North Americans should know how we feel. To be extraditable. A nation such as yours made up of people who have come from elsewhere, you should know. But you forget, you forget, my friend, the bitter taste of leaving for good. For who has left the garden of North America once they have arrived? Here, we still celebrate the Fourth of July by not noticing its passing, still mourning the fall of Vicksburg long ago. We Southerners are one example. We left and never thought to go back. And there is the colony of free black men and women all named Doe, whom we think of as kin, killing each other as we speak in their postage stamp country on the green equatorial shores of western Africa.

Elkhart, There, at the End of the World

The roads are lined with produce stands. There is no cider or ear corn as there would be in the early fall but the feral fruit of midsummer, strawberries and melons. Little is left in the shacks — empty wicker quarts and pecks, fragile chain scales, U-Pick-Em signs. I head toward Elkhart, Indiana, where reed and brass instruments are made. The wind whistles through the car, and I follow a station wagon of migrant workers, tailgate down, leaking the brown exhaust of legs and arms, up from the Lincoln Highway toward Michigan to cherries and tomatoes. I pass the sod farms where the sprinklers stutter and the overhead systems, struts and hoses, walk with water across the turf to the ruled black strips left after the grass is rolled away.

In Elkhart I stop for a train. Somewhere Conn makes clarinets and trumpets and the good high school bands have their pick of instruments. The marching bands spend their summers in travel and parades in all the nearby towns.

The train skates for Chicago as parts of houses back up the street behind me. Tractors pulling trailers of modular homes, “Oversize Load” attached to their bumpers. The stalled lead cars and the trailing cars flash their yellow warning lights. We wait and the wind comes up to stir the red pennants and the clear plastic sheets that cover the open half of houses.

Somewhere in the middle of this I think that there is a place that produces a lasting thing. What stays when even the earth gets up and moves away? It is the season when the hot sky touches the ground and draws the water away. The earth cools too quickly and things keep moving toward high wind, tornadoes.

The train squeals by, and across the right-of-way the flat sound of siding dins again from the trailer factories. A bottom to the wind.

A horn. A horn. I move.

Blue Hair

Mister Pepe lowers the clear plastic canopy over my head, flicks a few switches, the engines throb to life. My blue hair, woven into whistling rollers, a snug helmet, bristles with bobby pins. The women on either side of me thumb through their magazines, but I am flying, flying over the checkerboard of friendly fields. The leafy woods below look like mats of hair on a linoleum floor. The engines roar. My wingmen tuck in beside me, our staggered flight piecing together the formation of the whole bomb group. Now the contrails peel off our leading edges. We bank together, coming to the heading that will take us back to the Ruhr. The sky, severely clear. Mister Pepe pokes a puffy cloud with his rat-tail comb. The starched white cliffs of Dover drape away below us. The flashing sliver of shears darts in and out. Nimble pursuit planes. Escorts with belly tanks nipping at our stragglers.

Years ago, I knew the war was over when the bombers left the plants with their aluminum skins unpainted. No need to camouflage the Boeings with that European forest green. It was only a matter of time. Hair, too, a matter of time. My hair would grow back. I watched as wave after wave of silver Forts lumbered over, climbed above the sound, the pounding of their engines rattling the bones in my head, my bare neck chilled by the breeze blowing in off the water.

“The hair, it is dead,” Mister Pepe whispered in my ear. This was later when I first came here. He rinsed my hair of color, the tarnished yellow coiling down the drain. He had me peer into a microscope in the back room of his salon. Curling in behind me, he tweezed the knobs on the machine. I saw the shaft of the hair he had plucked from my scalp rip apart then reassemble, watched as my sight dove right through the splitting hair, my vision melting then turning hard.

“There,” I said when it came into view, kinked and barked like a tree limb, blue as ice.

“Let me see,” Mister Pepe said, wedging in to look. “It is damaged, no? The overtreated hair. The frazzled ends. You need my help, yes?”

And years before that the general had said, “You cannot tell anyone why you cut your hair.” I was a young girl in Seattle. My parents stood in the doorway of our kitchen hugging each other as they watched the WAC snip a few locks. She held them up to the light, then draped the strands across the outstretched arms of a warrant officer. He slid the hair through his fingers, stretched it out straight, and lowered it into a box like the one florists use for long-stemmed roses.

I was a blond, and my hair had never been crimped or permed or ironed. I never knotted it up into braids, only trimmed the fraying. It was naturally straight. I brushed it every night a hundred times and shampooed it with eggs and honey. When I slept, my hair nestled in behind me like another person slipping up against my back as I breathed, a heavy purring weight.

“It’s a secret,” the WAC had said, evening the ends. “Let me look at you.” She held my chin in her palm, her fingers squeezing my cheeks. “You look all grown up now. Not a word until the war is over. Tell people it was too much bother, a waste of water washing it.” She plucked one single strand that clung to my sleeve as if she were pulling a stitch through me. She pulled until the other end swung free, and then she placed it with the rest in the box.

And only last week with my hair all done up, I was flying. From the air, the Rockies looked flattened down. The way the shadows fell fooled me into thinking the peaks were really craters. Then the clouds piled up below, and the jet climbed to evade the weather. The Air Force had bought the seat next to me for the bomb sight. It was in its crate sitting there.

The cadets in Colorado had given it to me. An honor guard had marched across a checkerboard courtyard. And now it is home on the coffee table with the magazines, a conversation piece. It looks as if it should be potted with some viny plant, its tendrils hooking on to the knobs and buttons. Flying home after the ceremony, I wrestled it out of the box and plunked it down on my lap. It had the heft of a head, a lover gazing up at me and me stroking his hair. I leaned forward, lowering myself to the cold metal. It smelled of oil and polish. I squinted through the lens as the plane bumped beneath me, riding the turbulence over the mountains. There was just enough light, a white dime-sized hole of light. I saw the crosshairs, crisp and sharp, my dead hair, half a century old, sandwiched between the glass deep within the machine. Outside the clouds broke apart, and in the Great Basin, the lights of each tiny city lit up as the sunset fell on each of them.

And now, I have been staring at this Redbook spread on my lap, and my eyes won’t see the words. The dryers want to lull me to sleep. From up here, the letters on the page look like the ruined walls of buildings, remains of burned foundations, blocks of pitted houses, alleyways that lead to nowhere. I follow the footprints of bombs. I was reading about hair, about its history, about its chemistry, about how we know more about it now than ever before. Below me, the words explode as I read them. One after the other. There is the roar in my ears. I sit here waiting. Soon it will be my turn again.