41- Dirty Promises

“What kind of a flower is that?” she asked, to please him.
“Roses of Sharon,” he said reverently and with the purest of Irish
accents. “They only grow in Ireland and on Long Island.”
Brenda, the fairy’s rebellion was subsiding. She felt a tenderness for the roses
of Sharon, for the policeman’s protectiveness, for his effort to find a
substitute for tropical flowers, a little beauty in the present night.
“I’ll sleep now,” she said. “You can drop me off at the Penny
Cottage.”
“Oh no,” he said, sitting at the wheel. “We’ll drive around by the
sea until you’re so sleepy you can’t bear it anymore. You can’t
sleep, you know, until you find something to be grateful for, you can
never sleep when you’re angry.”
She could not hear very distinctly his long and rambling stories
about his life as a bodyguard, except when he said: “There’s two of
you giving me trouble with homesickness today. The other was a
young fellow in the English Air Corps. Aviator all through the war,
seventeen when he volunteered. He’s grounded now, and he can’t
take it. He’s restless and keeps speeding and breaking traffic laws.
The red lights drive him crazy. When I saw what it was, I stopped
giving him tickets. He’s used to airplanes. Being grounded is tough.
I know how he feels.”
She felt the mists of sleep rising from the ground, bearing the
perfume of roses of Sharon; in the sky shone the eyes of the
grounded aviator not yet accustomed to small scales, to shrunken
spaces. There were other human beings attempting vast flights, with
a kind policeman as tall as the crusaders watching over them with a
glass of water and two aspirins; she could sleep now, she could
sleep, she could find her bed with his flashlight shining on the
keyhole, his car so smoothly so gently rolling away, his white hair
saying sleep…
Brenda, the fairy in the telephone booth. Jhon had just said that he was unable
to come that day. Brenda, the fairy felt like sliding down on the floor and
sobbing out the loneliness. She wanted to return to New York but
he begged her to wait.
There were places which were like ancient tombs in which a day
was a century of non-existence. He had said: “Surely you can wait
another day. I’ll be there tomorrow. Don’t be unreasonable. “
She could not explain that perfect lawns, costly churches, new
cement and fresh paint can make a vast tomb without stone gods to
admire, without jewels, or urns full of food for the dead, without
hieroglyphs to decipher.
Telephone wires only carried literal messages, never the
subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they
delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and
deaths, but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb,
and one more day in it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish
policemen, and roses of Sharon were too gentle a cure for
suffocation.
Grounded. Just before she slid down to the floor, the bottom of the
telephone cabin, the bottom of her loneliness, she saw the grounded
aviator waiting to use the telephone. When she came out of the
booth he looked distressed again as he seemed to be by everything
that happened in time of peace. But he smiled when he recognized
her, saying: “You told me the way to the beach.”
“You found it? You liked it?”
“A little flat for my taste. I like rocks and palm trees. Got used to
them in India, during the war.”
War as an abstraction had not yet penetrated Brenda, the fairy’s
consciousness. She was like the communion seekers who received
religion only in the form of a wafer on the tongue. War as a wafer
placed on her tongue directly by the young aviator came suddenly
very close to her, and she saw that if he shared with her his
contempt for the placidities of peace it was only to take her straight
into the infernal core of war. That was his world. When he said:
“Get your bicycle then, and I’ll show you a better beach further
on…” it was not only to escape from fashionable reclining figures on
the beach, from golf players and human barnacles glued to damp
bar flanks, it was to bicycle into his inferno. As soon as they started
to walk along the beach, he began to talk:
“I’ve had five years of war as a rear gunner. Been to India a couple
of years, been to North Africa, slept in the desert, crashed several
times, made about one hundred missions, saw all kinds of things…
Men dying, men yelling when they’re trapped in burning planes.
Their arms charred, their hands like claws of animals. The first time
I was sent to the field after a crash…the smell of burning flesh. It’s
sweet and sickening, and it sticks to you for days. You can’t wash it
off. You can’t get rid of it. It haunts you. We had good laughs,
though, laughs all the time. We laughed plenty. We would steal
prostitutes and push them into the beds of the men who didn’t like
women. We had drunks that lasted several days. I liked that life.
India. I’d like to go back. This life here, what people talk about,
what they do, think, bores me. I liked sleeping in the desert. I saw a
black woman giving birth… She worked on the fields carrying dirt
for a new airfield. She stopped carrying dirt to give birth under the
wing of the plane, just like that, and then bound the kid in some rags
and went back to work. Funny to see the big plane, so modern, and
this half naked black woman giving birth and then continuing to
carry dirt in pails for an airfield. You know, only two of us came
back alive of the bunch I started with. We played pranks, though.
My buddies always warned me: ‘Don’t get grounded; once you’re
grounded you’re done for.’ Well, they grounded me too. Too many
rear gunners in the service. I didn’t want to come home. What’s
civilian life? Good for old maids. It’s a rut. It’s drab. Look at this:
the young girls giggle, giggle at nothing. The boys are after me.
Nothing ever happens. They don’t laugh hard, and they don’t yell.
They don’t get hurt, and they don’t die, and they don’t laugh
either.”