Black Sunday

2

AT THAT MOMENT, MICHAEL LANDER was doing the only thing he loved. He was flying the Aldrich blimp, hovering eight hundred feet above the Orange Bowl in Miami, providing a steady platform for the television crew in the gondola behind him. Below, in the packed stadium, the world-champion Miami Dolphins were pounding the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The roar of the crowd nearly drowned out the crackling radio above Lander’s head. On hot days above a stadium, he felt that he could smell the crowd, and the blimp seemed suspended on a powerful rising current of mindless screaming and body heat. That current felt dirty to Lander. He preferred the trips between the towns. The blimp was clean and quiet then.

Only occasionally did Lander glance down at the field. He watched the rim of the stadium and the line-of-sight he had established between the top of a flagpole and the horizon to maintain exactly eight hundred feet of altitude.

Lander was an exceptional pilot in a difficult field. A dirigible is not easy to fly. Its almost neutral buoyancy and vast surface leave it at the mercy of the wind unless it is skillfully handled. Lander had a sailor’s instinct for the wind, and he had the gift the best dirigible pilots have—anticipation. A dirigible’s movements are cyclical, and Lander stayed two moves ahead, holding the great gray whale into the breeze as a fish points upstream, burrowing the nose slightly into the gusts and raising it in lulls, shading half the end zone with its shadow. During intervals in the action on the field, many of the spectators looked up at it and some of them waved. Such bulk, such great length suspended in the clear air fascinated them.

Lander had an autopilot in his head. While it dictated the constant, minute adjustments that held the blimp steady, he thought about Dahlia. The patch of down in the small of her back and how it felt beneath his hand. The sharpness of her teeth. The taste of honey and salt.

He looked at his watch. Dahlia should be an hour out of Beirut now, coming back.

Lander could think comfortably about two things: Dahlia and flying.

His scarred left hand gently pushed forward the throttle and propeller pitch controls, and he rolled back the big elevator wheel beside his seat. The great airship rose quickly as Lander spoke into the microphone.

“Nora One Zero, clearing stadium for a twelve-hundred-foot go-around.”

“Roger, Nora One Zero,” the Miami tower replied cheerily.

Air controllers and tower radio operators always liked to talk to the blimp, and many had a joke ready when they knew it was coming. People felt friendly toward it as they do toward a panda. For millions of Americans who saw it at sporting events and fairs, the blimp was an enormous, amiable, and slow-moving friend in the sky. Blimp metaphors are almost invariably “elephant” or “whale.” No one ever says “bomb.”

At last the game was over and the blimp’s 225-foot shadow flicked over the miles of cars streaming away from the stadium. The television cameraman and his assistant had secured their equipment and were eating sandwiches. Lander had worked with them often.

The lowering sun laid a streak of red-gold fire across Bis cayne Bay as the blimp hung over the water. Then Lander turned northward and cruised fifty yards off Miami Beach, while the TV crew and the flight engineer fixed their binoculars on the girls in their bikinis. Some of the bathers waved.

“Hey, Mike, does Aldrich make rubbers?” Pearson the cameraman was yelling around a mouthful of sandwich.

“Yeah,” Lander said over his shoulder. “Rubbers, tires, de icers, windshield wiper blades, bathtub toys, children’s balloons, and body bags.”

“You get free rubbers with this job?”

“You bet. I’ve got one on now.”

“What’s a body bag?”

“It’s a big rubber bag. One size fits all,” Lander said. “They’re dark inside. Uncle Sam uses them for rubbers. You see some of them, you know he’s been fooling around.” It would not be hard to push the button on Pearson; it would not be hard to push the button on any of them.

The blimp did not fly often in the winter. Its winter quarters were near Miami, the great hangar dwarfing the rest of the buildings beside the airfield. Each spring it worked northward at thirty-five to sixty knots, depending on the wind, dropping in at state fairs and baseball games. The Aldrich company provided Lander with an apartment near the Miami airfield in winter, but on this day, as soon as the great airship was secured, he caught the National flight to Newark and went to his home near the blimp’s northern base at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

When Lander’s wife deserted him, she left him the house. Tonight the lights burned late in the garage-workshop, as Lander worked and waited for Dahlia. He was stirring a can of epoxy resin on his workbench, its strong odor filling the garage. On the floor behind him was a curious object eighteen feet long. It was a plug mold that Lander had made from the hull of a small sailboat. He had inverted the hull and split it along the keel. The halves were eighteen inches apart and were joined by a broad common bow. Viewed from above, the mold looked like a great streamlined horseshoe. Building the mold had taken weeks of off-duty time. Now it was slick with grease and ready.

Lander, whistling quietly, applied layers of fiberglass cloth and resin to the mold, feathering the edges precisely. When the fiberglass shell cured and he popped it off the mold, he would have a light, sleek nacelle that would fit neatly under the gondola of the Aldrich blimp. The opening in the center would accommodate the blimp’s single landing wheel and its transponder antenna. The load-bearing frame that would be enclosed by the nacelle was hanging from a nail on the garage wall. It was very light and very strong, with twin keels of Reynolds 5130 chrome moly tubing and ribs of the same material.

Lander had converted the double garage into a workshop while he was married, and he had built much of his furniture there in the years before he went to Vietnam. The things his wife had not wanted to take were still stored above the rafters—a highchair, a folding camp table, wicker yard furniture. The fluorescent light was harsh, and Lander wore a baseball cap as he worked around the mold, whistling softly.

He paused once, thinking, thinking. Then he went on smoothing the surface, raising his feet carefully as he walked to avoid tearing the newspapers spread on the floor.

Shortly after four a.m. the telephone rang. Lander picked up the garage extension.

“Michael?” The British clip in her speech always surprised him, and he imagined the telephone buried in her dark hair.

“Who else?”

“Grandma is fine. I’m at the airport and I’ll be along later. Don’t wait up.”

“What—”

“Michael, I can’t wait to see you.” The line went dead.

It was almost sunrise when Dahlia turned into the driveway at Lander’s house. The windows were dark. She was apprehensive, but not so much as before their first meeting—then she had felt that she was in the room with a snake she could not see. After she came to live with him, she separated the deadly part of Michael Lander from the rest of him. When she was with him now, she felt that they were both in a room with the snake, and she could tell where it was, and whether it was sleeping.

She made more noise than necessary coming into the house and sang his name softly against the stillness as she came up the stairs. She did not want to startle him. The bedroom was pitch dark.

From the doorway she could see the glow of his cigarette, like a tiny red eye.

“Hello,” she said.

“Come here.”

She walked through the darkness toward the glow. Her foot touched the shotgun, safely on the floor beside the bed. It was all right. The snake was asleep.

Lander was dreaming about the whales, and he was reluctant to come out of sleep. In his dream the great shadow of the Navy dirigible moved over the ice below him as he flew through the endless day. It was 1956 and he was going over the Pole.

The whales were basking in the Arctic sun, and they did not see the dirigible until it was almost over them. Then they sounded, their flukes rising under a chandelier of spray as they slid beneath a blue ice ledge under the Arctic Sea. Looking down from the gondola, Lander still could see the whales suspended there beneath the ledge. In a cool blue place where there was no noise.

Then he was over the Pole and the magnetic compass was going wild. Solar activity interfered with the omni, and, with Fletcher at the elevator wheel, he steered by the sun as the flag on its weighted spear fluttered down to the ice.

“The compass,” he said, waking in his house. “The compass.”

“The omni beam from Spitsbergen, Michael,” Dahlia said, her hand on his cheek. “I have your breakfast.”

She knew the dream. She hoped he would dream often of the whales. He was easier then.

Lander was facing a hard day, and she could not be with him. She opened the curtains and sunlight brightened the room.

“I wish you didn’t have to go.”

“I’ll tell you again,” Lander said. “If you have a pilot’s ticket they watch you really dose. If I don’t check in, they’ll send some VA caseworker out here with a questionnaire. He’s got a form. It goes like this—‘A. Note the condition of the grounds. B. Does the subject seem dejected?’ Like that. It goes on forever.”

“You can manage that.”

“One call to the FAA, one little half-assed hint that I might be shaky and that’s it. They’ll ground me. What if a caseworker looks in the garage?” He drank his orange juice. “Besides, I want to see the clerks one more time.”

Dahlia was standing by the window, the sun warm on her cheek and neck. “How do you feel?”

“You mean am I crazy today? No, as a matter of fact, I’m not.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Shit you didn’t. I’ll just go into a little office with one of them and we’ll close the door and he’ll tell me the new things the government is going to do for me.” Something lunged behind Lander’s eyes.

“All right, are you crazy today? Are you going to spoil it? Are you going to grab a VA clerk and kill him and let the others hold you down? Then you can sit in a cell and sing and masturbate. ‘God Bless America and Nixon.’ ”

She had used two triggers at once. She had tried them separately before, and now she watched to see how they worked together.

Lander’s memory was intense. Recollections while awake could make him wince. Asleep, they sometimes made him scream.

Masturbation: The North Vietnamese guard catching him at it in his cell and making him do it in front of the others.

“God Bless America and Nixon”: The hand-lettered sign the Air Force officer held up to the window of the C-141 at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines when the prisoners were coming home. Lander, sitting across the aisle, had read it backward with the sun shining through the paper.

Now his eyes were hooded as he looked at Dahlia. His mouth opened slightly and his face was slack. This was the dangerous time. It hung in slow seconds while the motes swarmed in the sunlight, swarmed around Dahlia and the short, ugly shotgun by the bed.

“You don’t have to get them one at a time, Michael,” she said softly. “And you don’t have to do the other for yourself. I want to do it for you. I love to do it.”

She was telling the truth. Lander could always tell. His eyes opened wide again, and in a moment he could no longer hear his heart.

Windowless corridors. Michael Lander walking through the dead air of the government office building, down the long floors where the buffer had swung from side to side in shining arcs. Guards in the blue uniform of the General Services Administration checking packages. Lander had no packages.

The receptionist was reading a novel entitled A Nurse to Marry.

“My name is Michael Lander.”

“Did you take a number?”

“No.”

“Take a number,” the receptionist said.

He picked up a numbered disk from a tray at the side of the desk.

“What is your number?”

“Thirty-six.”

“What is your name?”

“Michael Lander.”

“Disability?”

“No. I’m supposed to check in today.” He handed her the letter from the Veterans Administration.

“Take a seat, please.” She turned to the microphone beside her. “Seventeen.”

Seventeen, a seedy young man in a vinyl jacket, brushed past Lander and disappeared into the warren behind the secretary.

About half the fifty seats in the waiting room were filled. Most of the men were young, former Spec 4’s, who looked as slovenly in civilian clothes as they had in uniform. Lander could imagine them playing the pinball machine in a bus terminal in their wrinkled Class A’s.

In front of Lander sat a man with a shiny scar above his temple. He had tried to comb his hair over it. At two-minute intervals he took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He had a handkerchief in every pocket.

The man beside Lander sat very still, his hands gripping his thighs. Only his eyes moved. They never rested, tracking each person who walked through the room. Often he had to strain to turn his eyes far enough, because he would not turn his head.

In a small office in the maze behind the receptionist, Harold Pugh was waiting for Lander. Pugh was a GS-12 and rising. He thought of his assignment to the special POW section as “a feather in my cap.”

A considerable amount of literature came with Pugh’s new job. Among the reams of advisories was one from the Air Force surgeon general’s national consultant on psychiatry. The advisory said, “It is not possible for a man exposed to severe degrees of abuse, isolation, and deprivation not to develop depression born out of extreme rage repressed over a long period of time. It is simply a question of when and how the depressive reaction will surface and manifest itself.”

Pugh meant to read the advisories as soon as he could find the time. The military record on Pugh’s desk was impressive. Waiting for Lander, he glanced through it again.

Pugh thought it peculiar that an officer with Lander’s record should resign his commission. Something was not quite right there. Pugh remembered the closed hearings after the POWs came home. Perhaps it would be better not to ask Lander why he resigned.

He looked at his watch. Three-forty. Fellow was late. He pushed a button on his desk telephone and the receptionist answered.

“Is Mr. Lander here yet?”

“Who, Mr. Pugh?”

Pugh wondered if she was making a deliberate rhyme with his name. “Lander. Lander. He’s one of the specials. Your instructions are to send him right in when he comes.”

“Yes, Mr. Pugh. I will.”

The receptionist returned to her novel. At three fifty, needing a bookmark, she picked up Lander’s letter. The name caught her eye.

“Thirty-six. Thirty-six.” She rang Pugh’s office. “Mr. Lander is here now.”

Pugh was mildly surprised at Lander’s appearance. Lander was sharp in his civilian flight captain’s uniform. He moved briskly and his gaze was direct. Pugh had pictured himself dealing with hollow-eyed men.

Pugh’s appearance did not surprise Lander. He had hated clerks all his life.

“You’re looking well, Captain. You’ve bounced back nicely, I’d say.”

“Nicely.”

“Good to be back with the family, I’m sure.”

Lander smiled. His eyes were not involved in the smile. “The family is fine, I understand.”

“They’re not with you? I believe you’re married… it says here… let’s see, yes. Two children?”

“Yes, I have two children. I’m divorced.”

“I’m sorry. My predecessor on your case, Gorman, left very few notes, I’m afraid.” Gorman had been promoted for incompetence.

Lander was watching Pugh steadily, a faint smile on his lips.

“When were you divorced, Captain Lander? I have to bring this up-to-date.” Pugh was like a domestic cow grazing placidly near the edge of the swamp, not sensing what was downwind in the black shade watching him.

Suddenly Lander was talking about the things he could never think about. Never think about.

“The first time she filed was two months before my release. While the Paris talks were stalled on the point of elections, I believe. But she didn’t go through with it then. She moved out a year after I got back. Please don’t feel badly, Pugh. The government did everything it could.”

“I’m sure, but it must—”

“A naval officer came around several times after I was captured and had tea with Margaret and counseled her. There is a standard procedure for preparing POW wives, as I’m sure you know.”

“I suppose that sometimes—”

“He explained to her that there is an increased incidence of homosexuality and impotence among released POWs. So she would know what to expect, you understand.” Lander wanted to stop. He must stop.

“It’s better to let—”

“He told her that the life expectancy of a released POW is about half the average.” Lander was wearing a wide smile now.

“Surely, Captain, there must have been some other factors.”

“Oh sure, she was already getting some dick on the side, if that’s what you mean.” Lander laughed, the old spike through him, the pressure building behind his eyes. You don’t have to get them one at a time, Michael. Sit in a cell and sing and masturbate.

Lander closed his eyes so that he could not see the pulse in Pugh’s throat.

Pugh’s reflex was to laugh with Lander, to ingratiate himself. But he was offended in a Baptist sort of way by glib, cheap references to sex. He stopped the laugh in time. That action saved his life.

Pugh picked up the file again. “Did you receive counseling about it?”

Lander was easier now. “Oh, yes. A psychiatrist at St. Alban’s Naval Hospital discussed it with me. He was drinking a Yoo-Hoo.”

“If you feel the need of further counseling I can arrange it.”

Lander winked. “Look, Mr. Pugh. You’re a man of the world and so am I. These things happen. What I want to see you about is some compensation for the old flipper here.” He held up his disfigured hand.

Now Pugh was on familiar ground. He pulled Lander’s Form 214 from the file. “Since you obviously are not disabled, we’ll have to find a way, but”—he winked at Lander—“we’ll take care of you.”

It was four thirty p.m. and the evening rush had begun when Lander came out of the Veterans Administration building into the soiled Manhattan afternoon. The sweat was cold on his back as he stood on the steps and watched the garment district crowds funnel toward the Twenty-third Street subway station. He could not go in there with them and be jammed in the train.

Many of the VA personnel were taking an early slide from their jobs. A stream of them fanned the doors of the building and jostled him back against the wall. He wanted to fight. Margaret came over him in a rush, and he could smell her and feel her. Talking about it over a plywood desk. He had to think about something. The teapot whistle. Not that, for God’s sake. Now he had a cold ache in his colon and he reached for a Lomotil tablet. Too late for Lomotil. He would have to find a restroom. Quick. Now he walked back to the waiting room, the dead air like cobwebs on his face. He was pale and sweat stood out on his forehead as he entered the small restroom. The single stall was occupied and another man was waiting outside it. Lander turned and walked back through the waiting room. Spastic colon, his medical profile said. No medication prescribed. He had found Lomotil for himself.

Why didn’t I take some before?

The man with the moving eyes tracked Lander as far as he could without turning his head. The pain in Lander’s bowels was coming in waves now, making goose bumps on his arms, and he was gagging.

The fat janitor fumbled through his keys and let Lander into the employees’ washroom. Waiting outside, the janitor could not hear the unpleasant sounds. At last, Lander turned his face up to the Celotex ceiling. Retching had made his eyes water, and the tears ran down his face.

For a second he was squatting beside the path with the guards watching on the forced march to Hanoi.

It was the same, the same. The teapot whistle came.

“Cocksuckers,” Lander croaked. “Cocksuckers.” He wiped his face with his ugly hand.

Dahlia, who had had a busy day with Lander’s credit cards, was on the platform when he got off the commuter train. She saw him ease down off the step and knew he was trying not to joggle his insides.

She filled a paper cup with water from the fountain and took a small bottle from her purse. The water turned milky as she poured in the paregoric.

He did not see her until she was beside him, offering the cup.

It tasted like bitter licorice and left a faint numbness in his lips and tongue. Before they reached the car, the opium was soothing the ache and in five minutes it was gone. When they reached the house, he fell into bed and slept for three hours.

Lander woke confused and unnaturally alert. His defenses were working, and his mind recoiled from painful images with the speed of a pinball. His thoughts rolled over the safe, painted images between the buzzers and the bells. He had not blown it today, he could rest on that.

The teapot—his neck tightened. He seemed to itch somewhere between his shoulders and his cortex in a place he could not reach. His feet would not keep still.

The house was completely dark, its ghosts just beyond the firelight of his will. Then, from the bed, he saw a flickering light coming up the stairs. Dahlia was carrying a candle, her shadow huge on the wall. She wore a dark floor-length robe that covered her completely and her bare feet made no sound. Now she was standing by him, the candlelight a pinpoint in her great, dark eyes. She held out her hand.

“Come, Michael. Come with me.”

Slowly backing down the dark hall, she led him, looking into his face. Her black hair down over her shoulders. Backing, feet peeping white from under the hem. Back to what had been the playroom, empty these seven months. Now in the candlelight Lander could see that a huge bed waited at the end of the room and heavy drapes covered the walls. Incense touched his face and the small blue flame of a spirit lamp flickered on a table near the bed. It was no longer the room where Margaret had—no, no, no.

Dahlia put her candle beside the lamp and with a feather touch removed Lander’s pajama top. She undid the drawstring and knelt to slip the trousers off his feet, her hair brushing against his thigh. “You were so strong today.” She gently pressed him back upon the bed. The silk beneath him was cool and the air was a cool ache upon his genitals.

He lay watching her as she lit two tapers in holders on the walls. She passed him the slender hash pipe and stood at the foot of the bed, the candle shadows moving behind her.

Lander felt that he was falling into those bottomless eyes. He remembered as a child lying in the grass on dear summer nights, looking into heavens suddenly dimensional and deep. Looking up until there was no up and he was falling out into the stars.

Dahlia dropped her robe and stood before him.

The sight of her pierced him as it had the first time, and his breath caught in his throat. Dahlia’s breasts were large, and their curves were not the curves of a vessel but of a dome, and she had a cleavage even when they were unconfined. Her nipples darkened as they came erect. She was opulent, but not forbidden, her curves and hollows lapped by candlelight.

Lander felt a sweet shock as she turned to take the vessel of sweet oil from above the spirit lamp and the light played over her. Kneeling astride him, she rubbed the warm oil on his chest and belly, her breasts swaying slightly as she worked.

As she leaned forward, her belly rounded slightly and receded again into the dark triangle.

It grew thick and soft and springy up her belly, a black explosion radiating tufts as though it tried to climb. He felt it touch his navel and, looking down, he saw suspended in the whorls like pearls in the candelight, the first drops of her essence.

It would bathe him he knew, and be warm on his scrotum and it would taste like bananas and salt.

Dahlia took a mouthful of the warm, sweet oil and held him in it, nodding gently, deeply to the rhythm of his blood, her hair spilling warm over him.

And all the while her eyes, wide-set as a puma’s and full of the moon, never left his face.