"To von Richthofen, and the beautiful sad young men."
I repeated his words in a whisper.
And then we drank, lifting our empty gla.s.ses so the clouds and the moon and the silent sky could see.
"I"m ready," said Bill, "if they want to come get me now. Better to die out here than go in and hear them landing every night and every night in their parachutes and no sleep until dawn when the last silk folds in on itself and the bottle"s empty. Stand right over there, son. That"s it. Just half in the shadow. Now."
I moved back and we waited.
"What"ll I say to them?" he asked.
"G.o.d, Bill," I said, "I don"t know. They"re not my friends."
"They weren"t mine, either. More"s the pity. I thought they were the enemy. Christ, isn"t that a dumb stupid halfa.s.s word. The enemy! As if such a thing ever really happened in the world. Sure, maybe the bully that chased and beat you up in the schoolyard, or the guy who took your girl and laughed at you. But them, those beauties, up in the clouds on summer days or autumn afternoons? No, no!"
He moved farther out on the porch.
"All right," he whispered. "Here I am."
And he leaned way out, and opened his arms as if to embrace the night air.
"Come on! What you waiting for!"
He shut his eyes.
"Your turn," he cried. "My G.o.d, you got to hear, you got to come. You beautiful b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, here!"
And he tilted his head back as if to welcome a dark rain.
"Are they coming?" he whispered aside, eyes clenched.
"No."
Bill lifted his old face into the air and stared upward, willing the clouds to shift and change and become something more than clouds.
"d.a.m.n it!" he cried, at last. "I killed you all. Forgive me or come kill me!" And a final angry burst. "Forgive me. I"m sorry!"
The force of his voice was enough to push me completely back into shadows. Maybe that did it. Maybe Bill, standing like a small statue in the middle of my garden, made the clouds shift and the wind blow south instead of north. We both heard, a long way off, an immense whisper.
"Yes!" cried Bill, and to me, aside, eyes shut, teeth clenched, "You hear!?"
We heard another sound, closer now, like great flowers or blossoms lifted off spring trees and run along the sky.
"There," whispered Bill.
The clouds seemed to form a lid and make a vast silken shape which dropped in serene silence upon the land. It made a shadow that crossed the town and hid the houses and at last reached our garden and shadowed the gra.s.s and put out the light of the moon and then hid Bill from my sight.
"Yes! They"re coming," cried Bill. "Feel them? One, two, a dozen! Oh, G.o.d, yes."
And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots. .h.i.tting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the gra.s.s like bodies, and the swarming of tapestries of white silk or smoke flung across the disturbed air.
"Bill!"
"No!" he yelled. "I"m okay! They"re all around. Get back! Yes!"
There was a tumult in the garden. The hedges shivered with propeller wind. The gra.s.s lay down its nap. A tin watering can blew across the yard. Birds were flung from trees. Dogs all around the block yelped. A siren, from another war, sounded ten miles away. A storm had arrived, and was that thunder or field artillery?
And one last time, I heard Bill say, almost quietly, "I didn"t know, oh, G.o.d, I didn"t know what I was doing." And a final fading sound of "Please."
And the rain fell briefly to mix with the tears on his face.
And the rain stopped and the wind was still.
"Well." He wiped his eyes, and blew his nose on his big hankie, and looked at the hankie as if it were the map of France. "It"s time to go. Do you think I"ll get lost again?"
"If you do, come here."
"Sure." He moved across the lawn, his eyes clear. "How much do I owe you, Sigmund?"
"Only this," I said.
I gave him a hug. He walked out to the street. I followed to watch.
When he got to the corner, he seemed to be confused. He turned to his right, then his left. I waited and then called gently: "To your left, Bill."
"G.o.d bless you, buster!" he said, and waved.
He turned and went into his house.
They found him a month later, wandering two miles from home. A month after that he was in the hospital, in France all the time now, and Rickenbacker in the bed to his right and von Richthofen in the cot to his left.
The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of "18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes. And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.
Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can"t sleep and I stand looking at Bill and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a gla.s.s of sherry at them.
"Farewell, Lafayette," I say. "Lafayette, farewell."
And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.
REMEMBER SASCHA?.
REMEMBER? WHY, HOW COULD THEY FORGET? Although they knew him for only a little while, years later his name would arise and they would smile or even laugh and reach out to hold hands, remembering.
Sascha. What a tender, witty comrade, what a sly, hidden individual, what a child of talent; teller of tales, bon vivant, late-night companion, ever-present illumination on foggy noons.
Sascha!
He, whom they had never seen, to whom they spoke often at three A.M. in their small bedroom, away from friends who might roll their eyeb.a.l.l.s under their lids, doubting their sanity, hearing his name.
Well, then, who and what was Sascha, and where did they meet or perhaps only dream him, and who were they?
Quickly: they were Maggie and Douglas Spaulding and they lived by the loud sea and the warm sand and the rickety bridges over the almost dead ca.n.a.ls of Venice, California. Though lacking money in the bank or Goodwill furniture in their tiny two-room apartment, they were incredibly happy. He was a writer, and she worked to support him while he finished the great American novel.
Their routine was: she would arrive home each night from downtown Los Angeles and he would have hamburgers waiting or they would walk down the beach to eat hot dogs, spend ten or twenty cents in the Penny Arcade, go home, make love, go to sleep, and repeat the whole wondrous routine the next night: hot dogs, Penny Arcade, love, sleep, work, etc. It was all glorious in that year of being very young and in love; therefore it would go on forever . . .
Until he appeared.
The nameless one. For then he had no name. He had threatened to arrive a few months after their marriage to destroy their economy and scare off the novel, but then he had melted away, leaving only his echo of a threat.
But now the true collision loomed.
One night over a ham omelet with a bottle of cheap red and the conversation loping quietly, leaning on the card table and promising each other grander and more ebullient futures, Maggie suddenly said, "I feel faint."
"What?" said Douglas Spaulding.
"I"ve felt funny all day. And I was sick, a little bit, this morning."
"Oh, my G.o.d." He rose and came around the card table and took her head in his hands and pressed her brow against his side, and looked down at the beautiful part in her hair, suddenly smiling.
"Well, now," he said, "don"t tell me that Sascha is back?"
"Sascha! Who"s that?"
"When he arrives, he"ll tell us."
"Where did that name come from?"
"Don"t know. It"s been in my mind all year."
"Sascha?" She pressed his hands to her cheeks, laughing. "Sascha!"
"Call the doctor tomorrow," he said.
"The doctor says Sascha has moved in for light housekeeping," she said over the phone the next day.
"Great!" He stopped. "I guess." He considered their bank deposits. "No. First thoughts count. Great! When do we meet the Martian invader?"
"October. He"s infinitesimal now, tiny, I can barely hear his voice. But now that he has a name, I hear it. He promises to grow, if we take care."
"The Fabulous Invalid! Shall I stock up on carrots, spinach, broccoli for what date?"
"Halloween."
"Impossible!"
"True!"
"People will claim we planned him and my vampire book to arrive that week, things that go b.u.mp and cry in the night."
"Oh, Sascha will surely do that! Happy?"
"Frightened, yes, but happy, Lord, yes. Come home, Mrs. Rabbit, and bring him along!"
It must be explained that Maggie and Douglas Spaulding were best described as crazed romantics. Long before the interior christening of Sascha, they, loving Laurel and Hardy, had called each other Stan and Ollie. The machines, the dustbusters and can openers around the apartment, had names, as did various parts of their anatomy, revealed to no one.
So Sascha, as an ent.i.ty, a presence growing toward friendship, was not unusual. And when he actually began to speak up, they were not surprised. The gentle demands of their marriage, with love as currency instead of cash, made it inevitable.
Someday, they said, if they owned a car, it too would be named.
They spoke on that and a dozen score of things late at night. When hyperventilating about life, they propped themselves up on their pillows as if the future might happen right now. They waited, antic.i.p.ating, in seance, for the silent small offspring to speak his first words before dawn.
"I love our lives," said Maggie, lying there, "all the games. I hope it never stops. You"re not like other men, who drink beer and talk poker. Dear G.o.d, I wonder, how many other marriages play like us?"
"No one, nowhere. Remember?"
"What?"
He lay back to trace his memory on the ceiling.
"The day we were married-"
"Yes!"
"Our friends driving and dropping us off here and we walked down to the drugstore by the pier and bought a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, big bucks, for our honeymoon . . .? One red toothbrush, one green, to decorate our empty bathroom. And on the way back along the beach, holding hands, suddenly, behind us, two little girls and a boy followed us and sang: "Happy marriage day to you, Happy marriage day to you.
Happy marriage day, happy marriage day, Happy marriage day to you . . ."
She sang it now, quietly. He chimed in, remembering how they had blushed with pleasure at the children"s voices, but walked on, feeling ridiculous but happy and wonderful.
"How did they guess? Did we look married?"
"It wasn"t our clothes! Our faces, don"t you think? Smiles that made our jaws ache. We were exploding. They got the concussion."
"Those dear children. I can still hear their voices."
"And so here we are, seventeen months later." He put his arm around her and gazed at their future on the dark ceiling.
""And here I am," a voice murmured.
"Who?" Douglas said.