Alive and Kicking Read online

  “You wish you were dead?” Pop barks, his whole body so still with contained fury you would swear the sound came from someplace else.

  “No, Pop,” I say extra calm. “I’d never wish that. What I’m saying is, my brother is missing. And I want to be with him. To help him, the way he always helped me.”

  I see his face go crimson, his eyes fall. It’s not anger now, but it’s also not like there’s no anger within it.

  “There is no way you could help him now, Theodore.” He keeps his eyes on the ground for an uncommonly long time. This is a man for whom direct eye contact is both a test and a declaration of a man’s character. When he does again look up at me, it is with the acid-stung squint Susan had tried to prepare me for, but that nothing could prepare me for.

  Mam comes bumping back through the swinging door, carrying a tray of sandwiches so big she might be expecting me to bring them back for my plane’s entire crew. Just like she used to do when a whole mess of us guys were out playing baseball and all I’d done was come in for a glass of water.

  She stops short, the door swinging back into the kitchen and then returning to bump her in the backside. She can’t see Pop’s eyes from where she is, but she doesn’t need to. The room, as well as the house and surely all of Accokeek, is filled with a kind of crying. Like a mist — salty, heavy, and invisible.

  Nobody knows what to do. Right down to where to step, where to look, how to even breathe.

  “What did you do, Theo?” Susan says, coming in from behind me.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I didn’t have to do anything.”

  “You got them all upset,” she says, brushing past me and taking the tray from Mam. “Let’s go out to the picnic table. It’s nice outside. The air is nice.”

  “Nice,” Mam says, and follows Suzie’s lead.

  Pop has got concrete feet and shows no ability to move, never mind the will. On her way past, Mam grabs his hand firmly. His head turns in her direction in a strange, unnatural movement that suggests small pulleys and cables at work more than human muscles. But when she nods deeply at him, he moves with her.

  The air is nice, like Susan promised, but not as nice as the air here always was before. The sandwiches are somehow better than they ever were, as is the lemonade Mam must have been squeezing all morning just for this moment.

  The moment that is as silent as if we were all cased in cement.

  “Still keeping sharp?” Pop finally says. “With the glove, I mean? I suppose there’s a lot of boys over there happy to get in a game with a real honest-to-goodness pro ballplayer like yourself, eh? To tell their grandchildren someday, if they make it.”

  I take a large bite of sandwich, knowingly making real conversation impractical. I shake my head no.

  “Why not?” Susan asks sharply.

  “Hank has the gloves,” I say just after I swallow.

  The eyes that widen all around me are not merely surprised eyes. I know what I’ve said, and the precise way I have said it.

  Mam decides to go one way with this. “I’m sure you could find another glove. Another boy, lots of other boys for now. You want to keep your skills sharp, Theo, because there will be a lot of ballplayers coming back soon enough, and anxious to compete for a place —”

  Pop goes decidedly the other way. “Those gloves are at the bottom of the ocean, Theo,” Dad says sternly. “With our Henry. They went to the bottom of the Pacific with the Yorktown. You will need a new glove. You and I, we’ll go down to Houston’s Hardware and get you a new one before you leave. We’ll get you two. Have to keep up your skill level if you want to have any chance of —”

  “I’m not thinking about playing ball, Pop. I don’t want a new glove, but thank you. I don’t even want to pick up a baseball again, not until I see Hank. When I can throw to Hank, and reach him on the fly, that’s when I’ll play baseball again.”

  Susan, sitting next to me, across from our parents, leans close and says, “Stop it, Theo.” She starts to cry and I can feel it, tears dripping on my ear. “You’re just making it worse. Stop it.”

  “How am I making it worse?” I say. “Seems to me I’m the only one around here trying to make it better.”

  Pop clears his throat the way a judge pounds a gavel.

  “The letter, son …” he says, then draws it out of his inside coat pocket.

  “Yeah, I know all about this letter, and all the other ones like it, because they’re really all the rage these days,” I say, because I’m feeling all know-it-all today. The truth is I don’t know what to feel or how I could even manage it if I did. I take the letter anyway. And I read.

  … is to confirm, unfortunately, that your son … missing in action since June 6, 1942 … the difficulty in not having further information is undoubtedly causing untold additional duress … yet you will nevertheless hear from me personally no later than three months from the date of this letter …

  I begin reading out loud, word for word, until mumbling through some parts starts to seem like a better idea, and then reading anything aloud stops being an option at all.

  Susan leans heavily on me as I struggle through to the end. Mam gets up, pats my hands from across the table before wordlessly escaping to her kitchen.

  Pop just waits.

  He waits an awfully long time, and I am humiliated as I attempt three whole times to tell him what I think about the letter and three times I choke and drown in a sea of little boys’ weakness. I am a member of the United States Army Air Forces, for crying out loud. I am made of tougher stuff than this.

  “What it says to me,” I finally growl to drown out all that other stuff, “is that my brother is missing in action. He is missing, because they haven’t found him yet, and he is in action because he is Hank McCallum, and that’s what he does. He acts. He does, and he wins.”

  I calmly fold the stupid letter back up, hand it ceremoniously to my father. He tucks it into that inside pocket, where it will probably stay indefinitely except for the once or twice a day he takes it out and rereads it for the tiny hint of something better in there that he just missed all the other times.

  I wasn’t expecting to be going through this so soon already. But then again, why not?

  “Pop,” I shout, “you know, you could lighten up a little, since I haven’t had anybody smashing tennis balls at me lately.”

  He nods, then smashes a tennis ball at me harder still. It’s the old drill, the one where he would wail away at a barrel of tennis balls, aiming them without pause at Hank and me until we had bruises all over and the agility of a couple of cats.

  It’s only me now, of course. But Pop being Pop, I never for a second expected him to halve the pace just because there are now only half the hands doing the fielding. He’s relentless, running me this way and that along the rear foundation wall of the house. Then as soon as I get something like a rhythm going, he changes up gear, speed, angle, just enough to catch me out, and finally the job is complete when he nails me right in the temple and sends me sprawling. I lay there for several seconds, marveling at his precision and his cunning. I almost turn to my right, where Hank would always be, to say, “Do you believe this guy?” I almost, almost laugh about it together with my brother.

  “Not too awful,” Pop says as he drags the big barrel over and starts collecting up the balls.

  He never did that. No matter how battered and ragged we were, we were always to retrieve every last ball by ourselves.

  I’m on my feet, staying close beside him, stooping when he stoops to collect a ball off the ground, rising when he rises to deposit it in the barrel. It becomes impossible not to notice that I’m shadowing him, and he finally looks over my way.

  “What gives, Pop?” I ask, squinting hard in case he misses any of my suspicion.

  He’s about to speak, then waves me off as if this is nothing out of the ordinary. He stoops to pick up another ball and I know this has to be murder on his back because it’s hard enough on my own.

  “Stop t
hat,” Susan says, marching up and taking a tennis ball right out of our father’s hand. “You’ll bend over one time too many and you’ll be stuck down there.”

  “Oh, I’m not such an old stiff yet, you know,” Pop says as he makes his way toward Mam, who’s coming at us with a pitcher of iced tea.

  “He tries to do everything himself around here, since you boys shipped out,” Susan says. “Up on ladders fixing shutters, cutting away dead branches from the apple trees. Wants to show that he’s still the equal of any job that needs doing. But look at him.”

  “I’m looking,” I say. He’s kind of bent as he takes the glass of tea from Mam. But then when he should be straightening up again, he just doesn’t.

  Pop takes a seat on the bench that sits against the wall under the kitchen window.

  “Stop staring,” Mam says to both Susan and me.

  “Sorry, sorry,” we both say, realizing we are in fact staring at the proud old guy.

  “It’s been harder than anything that we have ever been through, son. Harder than anything you could imagine. Some days, I swear to you that if it wasn’t for your father and me each being here together, one to egg on the other, I don’t think we would get out of that bed at all. It’s killing him. Killing us both.”

  “Ah, Mam,” I say and reach out to wrap her up in the firmest hug I’ve got.

  But she remains oddly beyond my grasp. I’m holding her, but I haven’t got her all the same.

  “What? What is it, Mam?” I say while still trying to hold her the way she is supposed to let me. I can see Susan behind her, looking first strange, then away. She takes the pitcher out of my mother’s hand and walks over to Pop.

  “No man should be expected to lose two sons to a war,” Mam says, echoing Pop’s famous phrase.

  I stop hugging now, back away a couple of feet.

  “What are we talking about here, Mam?”

  “You belong here, Theo.”

  “What?” I yell at my mother for probably the first time in my life. And it brings Pop and Susan hurrying our way. In a state of pure madness that I never would have dreamed before, by the time the four of us are within three feet of one another we are crying our eyes out and arguing fiercely at the same time.

  “You just watch your tone when you speak to your mother,” Pop wheezes.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, still too loudly. “But where I belong is with my crew, in my aircraft, dropping as many of our bombs and gunning down as many of our enemies as we can manage.”

  “There is a process for this,” Mam says. “We have petitioned the Army, informing them of just how badly we need you … now with your brother having —”

  “My brother is not dead! Are you listening to me? Is anybody listening to me? He is missing, and at some point he won’t be, and as far as that petition goes, you let somebody whose kid has died over there make use of it instead. Because, Mam, Pop, Suzie … Hank … I love you all but tomorrow morning I am reporting back for duty. And I am going to do whatever it is the Air Corps asks me to do because I know soon enough they are going to station me at a base in England, from where I’m gonna pound the stuffing out of the Nazis and fascists and cowards and sympathizers and anybody else who gets in my way, until none of them are left to kill. And then I will know it’s time for me, and Hank, to come home, after we’ve finished the job we were sent to do.”

  Then it’s silent, silent except for my heavy breathing and a lot of snuffling from the three people who have me surrounded as if I’m about to be captured and locked in their prisoner-of-not-going-to-war camp, which is just not going to happen.

  I’m right about this, I know I am. And everybody else does, too.

  Mam and Pop link arms in an unusual move for them, like they’re holding each other upright as they shuffle like a couple of old, old folks back and into the house.

  “You know I have to do this, Suzie,” I say as she stands there glaring at me.

  “I let you get away with it once already,” she says. “Now I’m supposed to let it happen again? You have a chance, Theo, to get out of this awful thing. Stay home now. You did your part.”

  She makes me smile, though that’s the last thing she wants. She rushes me, begins pounding on my chest with both fists. And I let her, until after about twenty blows, she finally tires enough to fall into me. I put an arm around her and we walk together back to the house.

  The raw truth is I have not done my part yet, or anything even close to it. I have been working the North Atlantic Ferry Service as part of a crew delivering fresh planes overseas just as fast as our factories can build them. In between trips we have been training intensively for the real thing, for when we fly our own Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber across the sea to a base in the United Kingdom and we don’t come right back on some other transport aircraft, because that B-24 will be our plane.

  I dream about that several times during the night, there in the comfort of my old bed. But I dream even more about Hank. Hank and me, throwing batting practice to each other, playing long toss through the long days of long summers. I dream about him giving me a good beating over one thing or another, and then once stepping between me and Pop to save me a whole other beating.

  You wouldn’t take any offer to leave before this war was won, Hank, I know you wouldn’t.

  And you wouldn’t leave me halfway around the world, whether I was missing or fighting or captured or whatever.

  I’m doing the right thing because I know it’s what you would do. It’s how I’ve always known what to do.

  Leaving them is mighty hard, though, brother.

  And at least you never had to do it twice.

  Compassionate leave. It’s a phrase that makes more sense now than ever, as I walk down that same dusty road to catch that same dusty bus to Baltimore. It’s barely light out but the three of them are standing in front of the house to wave me off on the trip they never wanted me to take. I wave at them and I love them, and I wave at them some more and then I turn for good, my kit bag weighing me down at the shoulder and my uniform holding me together as a soldier. So long and be safe and home soon and love and proud and all the rest of the best words are tugging at my back, and I feel like this longest road ever just grew a little more.

  And then I hear her. Her unmistakable flat-footed slap-gallop as my Suzie comes running, trying to catch up to me while Mam tells her just let me go already ’cause the sooner I go the sooner I’m back and Pop says nothing because nothing is all he’s got.

  And me? I start running. I run, away from Suzie and all that I cannot bear and toward all the unbearable things ahead of me, and as I listen to her positively wail my name, and Hank’s, I roar right out loud at all of it, and my mind starts burning with thoughts of the people who are going to pay dearly for all this awfulness.

  They are all my brothers, is the thing to remember.

  I must try to remember.

  It shouldn’t be difficult, since I find myself muttering exactly that, they are all my brothers, as I make my for-real relocation, flying over the Atlantic for the first time without a return ticket. This B-24 Liberator is mine, the one I will be manning for the duration. And this crew, nine of us in all, is the crew I’m going to live or die with. In the month since I ran like a coward away from my little sister, I have spent almost all my waking moments staring at various views of the beautiful United States of America while training to defend it overseas. And those views have been from the most incredible vantage point imaginable, through the glass nose of my B-24. I am the nose gunner of the aircraft, and so the world rushes beneath me at 290 miles per hour. Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia each looked as pretty as the last as we came down out of the clouds on all those training runs.

  But I have seen enough of home now.

  They are all my brothers. I am thinking it as we take off from our base in Oklahoma, and I am still thinking it as we approach our new home, Royal Air Force station Shipdham, in Norfolk, England.


  I’m also thinking that Hank shipped out from Norfolk, Virginia. I’m already looking forward to the day we arrange to meet up again and exchange our war stories, and I get to say “So, your Norfolk or mine?” I used to be the funny one in the family. Hope to be again someday.

  Got to earn some war stories of my own first, to match up with ol’ Hank’s.

  Anyway, it’s a good thing we are all brothers, because working conditions are close. Really, really close. I’ve never been on a submarine, but I’m almost certain it’s roomier than this.

  “If you elbow me one more time, boy, I swear …” That’s the bombardier, Jack Gallagher, yapping at me, the same way he’s yapped at me since the day we met. This ship being a bomber, well the bombardier is fairly important, and they’re always quick to let you know that. The bombardier and the navigator both share the same cramped space in the nose cone of a Liberator with the nose gunner, who happens to be the only man out of the three who is not an officer.

  They are all my brothers. Even if they are officers.

  Fact is, Lieutenant Gallagher doesn’t like me, and I don’t like him. The navigator, Lieutenant Arthur Bell, is a better guy. I don’t like him much, either. Working our way back through the stations of the aircraft, we have the pilot, First Lieutenant Ormston, and the copilot, Lieutenant Lowrie. They ride in a bubble that sits way up on top of the plane above and apart from everybody else. Which pretty much says it all about them and us.

  The belly gunner, Sergeant Hargreaves, and the two waist gunners, Sergeant Quinn and Sergeant Dodge, are the exact type of guys you want to have shooting at people who are shooting at you. No more, and no less.

  The tail gunner, his name is Boyd. Sergeant Henry Boyd. Some people call him Hank. He is serious, and reliable, tough, has a good enough head on his shoulders that it seems like everybody counts on him and looks up to him, even the officers.