First Times Read online

Just the way I like it.

  Wings

  CURTIS PARKINSON

  On the outskirts of town, the quiet of a spring day was shattered by the raucous cries of a crow, harassed by the dives and swoops of two furious sparrows. The marauding crow retreated and silence fell again.

  Then a new sound, faint at first, grew and continued to grow until it ricocheted along streets, penetrated houses, and stopped conversations. A yellow aeroplane appeared, flying low over the town.

  In his driveway, oiling his bike, Robbie Beck paused and looked up. He recognized the familiar bright yellow, the stubby nose and wings, and the single noisy engine of a Harvard trainer. Enviously, he followed the plane's progress.

  Three more years, he thought.

  Three more years until he could join the line at the recruiting office. Learn to fly and come back on leave, with wings on his uniform and one of those jaunty officer's caps that drew admiring glances from the girls. Like Harvey Watt or Frank Collins, older guys from school, now flying officers with rows of medals, who'd talked from the stage of the school auditorium about the war.

  He'd be sent to England, or Egypt, or Burma, where the battles of World War II were being fought right now; he'd take on risky missions, have adventures, be one of the team. He'd be doing his part, like everyone else. But would he get the chance? Would the war go on long enough? If only.

  The Harvard circled the west end, waggled a wing once, and disappeared over the rooftops. Robbie sighed and went back to oiling his bike.

  Though he couldn't see the plane anymore, he could still hear it, and he thought he heard the engine sputter. In trouble? Not likely, and even if it was, the instructor would take over and soon pull it up.

  But it wasn't long before he heard a siren in the distance. The siren screamed closer, only blocks away.

  Robbie dropped the oilcan, righted his bike, and raced up the street. A fire engine flashed through the intersection at Earl and Brock and he pedaled after it, breathing hard. He lost it briefly, but caught up again by the athletic field. The firemen were already rushing to unroll their hoses.

  In the middle of the field, the wreckage of the Harvard was burning fiercely.

  Robbie put down his bike and walked toward the fire, pulled by a mixture of horror and fascination. A blackened, sticklike object on the ground caught his eye. A piece of metal from the fuselage a souvenir. He reached for it. Then he got a closer look and saw what it really was.

  Not just any old piece of metal, it was the joystick. And stuck to it was … a charred finger.

  His stomach heaved and he backed away.

  Two hoses poured water on the Harvard, its remains still spitting and sizzling, as if angry at dying ignominiously on the outskirts of a small town far from the war. A last bit of its yellow paint clung stubbornly to the tip of one wing, tilted away from the flames.

  At the side of the field, Robbie was joined by a gathering crowd. All eyes were rivetted on the smoldering wreckage, nobody wanting to be the first to say what was on everybody's mind.

  A man with a large box camera busily snapped pictures. “From Trenton, I suppose,” Robbie heard him say to the cop, who'd sped up on a motorcycle and was holding back the crowd. “Or maybe Ottawa.” Commonwealth Air Training bases were spread all over the country now.

  The cop gave him an aloof stare.

  “I'm from the Standard,” the man said, producing a card. “One or two in it? Any names yet?”

  “Ask the air force,” the cop said.

  “No need to ask the air force,” a man nearby said.

  Robbie recognized Mr. Toombs, his friend Freddie's father. Mr. Toombs was an accountant. He wore spotless white shirts with stretchy metal bands around the sleeves to keep them from smearing ink. Whenever he saw him, Robbie pictured a life spent endlessly tabulating numbers and shuddered.

  “Yeah, an awful shame,” the man beside Mr. Toombs said. “A real nice boy Phil. Always polite.”

  Phil? Robbie wondered. Not Phil Nicholson! Phones must have been ringing all over town. Once the Bell operator knew, everyone knew.

  He saw the Dunns' long black hearse which also served as an ambulance draw up beside the fire truck. “When you're done, call Dunn's,” people joked nervously when they saw the hearse go by.

  His friend Neil Dunn got out of the passenger side and Robbie drifted over to him. “Hey, Neil.”

  Neil helped his father slide a stretcher out of the back. Only one, Robbie saw. No instructor in the plane, then. He and Neil stared silently at the burning plane while Neil's father talked to the firemen. “Is it really Phil Nicholson?” Robbie asked.

  Neil nodded. “That's what they say. Just got his wings and came over to show his folks how he could fly.”

  “Jeez.” Robbie imagined the Nicholson family on the lawn, watching the stunned silence. “Going to get the body out now?” He wasn't sure whether he wanted to watch or not. He'd never seen a dead person not even a stranger, let alone someone he knew.

  Neil, however, was climbing back into the hearse. “Be a while before the wreck's cooled off,” he said, cheerfully. “Dad and I are going over to the drugstore for a soda while we're waiting.”

  Robbie watched them go. He was glad his father wasn't an undertaker, though it didn't seem to bother Neil. The thought of corpses and blood gave Robbie the creeps. He'd have to get used to it when he joined up he wouldn't be any good to the air force if he fainted, or threw up, every time he saw a dead body. “Better stay and watch,” he told himself, “learn how to handle it.” In the back of his mind, however, something more was impelling him to stay.

  But, after waiting half an hour for Neil and his dad to return, he had to leave to get home in time for supper and his paper route.

  Maybe later, he thought, at Neil's….

  At supper, Robbie's mother said she heard Mrs. Nicholson hadn't uttered a word since the crash. Just sat staring out the window. “And she's got George to worry about, too. He's over there doing a trip or whatever they call it.”

  “A tour,” Robbie said. “Tour of duty. Thirty missions.” George, Phil's older brother, was in England, flying a Lancaster in bombing raids over Germany. After a tour of duty, you got leave, if you made it through all thirty.

  Robbie finished his dessert of canned pears and a slice of the pound cake his mother had made with the last of their week's sugar and butter rations. Then he rode his bike over to the corner where the truck left his bundle of Toronto evening papers.

  The headline read, 1,036 bombers smash essen, in big bold letters, and underneath, key role in big attack again played by rcaf . Further down still, and in smaller letters, Robbie read, only 35 planes missing.

  “Only 35!” he exclaimed. And with seven or eight aircrew in each one! Well, better than the 50 and 60 planes lost on some of the earlier raids when the Luftwaffe was stronger, he supposed. He felt a twinge of guilt as he saw himself taking the place of one of those pilots or navigators, or bombardiers, or gunners. But please, he thought, make it a pilot.

  He cycled down Centre Street and along King, leaving the black headlines on porches behind him. Though many of his customers would consider the news of the big raid heartening, some would toss and turn all night after reading about the 35 missing planes. They would spend the next day dreading each ring of the doorbell, for fear it would be the ominous yellow telegram from the War Department.

  Robbie rode down a long driveway to his last stop a temporary military hospital, known locally as the syphilis ward. In the old wooden, single-story building smelling of chloroform and bleach, the grizzled men lounged by their beds in rumpled pajamas. They didn't look at all like the smartly turned-out soldiers who paraded regularly down Main Street behind a brass band, on their way to the train station the first leg of the journey across the U-boat-filled Atlantic.

  The men gladly handed over their nickels for the last of Robbie's papers a welcome diversion from their boredom. He tried not to breathe, imagining the dreaded clap germs floating i
n the air all around him. And, though some of the men liked to joke and talk with him, he was glad to get away. He pedaled home, whistling in the soft spring air.

  The next day, the local paper headlined the story of the plane crash in the field it shared the front page with an account of a prominent local doctor charged with hoarding sugar in his basement. The funeral of Phillip Nicholson, the paper announced, would be held on Monday. Which meant the body would be at Dunn's mortuary over the weekend, Robbie realized.

  Saturday morning, Robbie and the guys he hung around with organized a game of pick-up softball. You got up your own games, or you did without now the high-school gym teacher, who used to organize team sports, was with the navy somewhere on the Atlantic.

  Afterward, they bought soda pop at Smith's Red&White and stood around outside the store, talking about the plane crash and about Phil Nicholson until there wasn't anything left to say.

  “Who's for a game of poker later?” Mick suggested.

  “Sure, but where?” Robbie said. Finding a place to play was always a problem.

  “My folks are going out,” Neil said. “Around three. Come then.”

  “Hey, you can show us Phil's body while we're there,” Mick said, and everyone laughed in a nervous sort of way.

  When Robbie got home for lunch, his mother was in the kitchen, putting away the groceries and telling Robbie's sister what had happened in the lineup at the National Bakery.

  “Mrs. McWilliams was at the front of the line,” she said. “And the woman behind her said in a loud voice that she hoped the war would go on forever. ‘Harold has a steady job now, first time since the depression,’ the woman said. ‘His paychecks keep getting bigger all the overtime he wants. The longer the war goes on the better, as far as I'm concerned.’

  “Just then the clerk handed Mrs. McWilliams her lemon meringue pie,” Robbie's mother recounted, “and she turned around and pushed it right in the woman's face! ‘I've got two sons fighting over there,’ she said, and stormed out.”

  Robbie's sister made a face. “How embarrassing. Glad I wasn't there.”

  Glad I wasn't either, Robbie thought. Not only embarrassing, he wasn't even sure whose side he'd have been on.

  “Well, I don't blame her a bit for what she did,” his mother said.

  Robbie sniffed the soup bubbling on the stove. “Can I have mine now, Mom? I'm going over to Neil's later.”

  “What about your paper route, Robbie?”

  “The papers come early on Saturday. I'll do them as soon as I eat.”

  Neil Dunn threw another nickel in the pot. “Raise you five cents.”

  “And another five.” Freddie Toombs casually added a dime from the pile of change in front of him.

  It seemed everybody had money these days, Robbie thought. With all the older guys joining up, it was easy for those left behind to get a job. He could remember when it was different, not long ago, when the haggard men, grimy from riding the rails, knocked on the back door at supper time. “Spare a bite to eat, ma'am?” His mother always would, serving up an extra plateful of whatever they were having themselves and sending Robbie to the door with it. The houses that could be counted on for a meal were said to be secretly marked for the next arrival from the freight yards.

  As a small boy Robbie remembered scouring the front porch and the walk, looking for the mysterious mark. He never found it. If there ever had been one, nobody needed it now. The Great Depression of the 1930s had miraculously changed into a wartime boom, and hungry men at the door were a thing of the past. “Hey, Robbie, you in or not?” Neil said.

  Robbie studied his cards. Nothing much there. He shook his head. “I'm folding.” He got up and wandered over to the window. The lineup for the early show was already forming at the Majestic across the street. A Yank in the RAF, with Tyrone Power and Betty Grable, was drawing big crowds. There were soldiers in the lineup, some, but not many, with girls. The big army base had dramatically shifted the ratio of men to women in town.

  “Hey, there's Lucy Moffat,” Robbie said. “She's with a soldier.” Lucy was a good-looking girl a year ahead of him in high school. “He's got his arm around her.”

  “Darn!” Mick said. “I was trying to get up the nerve to ask her out.”

  “You still could.”

  Mick reached out to rake in the pot. “Nah, she'll never look at me now.” He shuffled the cards for the next hand. “So when are you going to show us the body, Neil? After this hand?”

  “I dunno,” Neil said, uncertainly. “I'll be in trouble if my old man comes back and catches us in there.”

  “Come on, just a quick look.”

  Neil glanced up at the clock. “Well, okay, but we'd better do it now.”

  They rose as one.

  Robbie was the last in line as Neil led them down the narrow outside stairs at the back and on into the mortuary. A bare cold place with concrete floors, it was nothing like the warm carpeted showroom in the front, where the fancy coffins were displayed.

  In the center of the room stood a ceramic table with a drain in the middle and a hose leading down into a bucket. Robbie quickly looked away imagining the bucket full of blood.

  Beside the table, a polished mahogany coffin with chrome handles gleamed. It seemed out of place in that drab room, like a man with top hat and tails in a grungy beer parlor.

  They gathered around as Neil reached down and swung the heavy lid up. A sudden stillness descended.

  “Jeez,” Robbie breathed. That was Phil Nicholson. That was the big good-looking guy he'd seen chatting up the girls in the hall, the guy he'd cheered on at the senior team's football games. He stared at the shriveled, blackened object lying among the folds of a shimmering satin lining. It hardly looks like a body at all, he thought. More like a burnt log hauled out of a fire before it was completely consumed.

  No one moved.

  “Better go,” Neil said, and closed the lid. They trooped silently back up the stairs and drifted around the living room.

  The image of the charred body in its bed of satin stayed with Robbie as he pedaled home. On the main street, soldiers were everywhere, lounging in the late-day sunshine, looking for girls, and crowding the beer joints before early closing. Robbie turned off onto a side street, then realized that the route he'd taken would lead him past the Nicholsons'.

  Approaching the house with the wreath and black ribbon on the door, he pedaled faster, keeping his eyes on the road. But, as the house flashed past, something made him look up. At an upstairs window, the ghostly face of Phil Nicholson stared out at him, frowning.

  Robbie kept going, his head throbbing. “No,” he told himself, “couldn't have been. Must have been the reflection of a cloud, or something.”

  Burnt corpses, wrecked planes, faces at windows, the images leapt into his mind at the most unexpected times once in the middle of a math test, another time leading off from first base. His keen interest in the progress of the war waned. Did he really want it to go on and on, just so he could be part of it?

  Only a few weeks later, however, in the drugstore, waiting for a prescription for his mother, he picked up one of the glossy magazines from the rack. He leafed through the dramatic action photos from the front a grinning aircrew grouped beside their bomber, arms around each other; rugged-looking marines wading ashore on a Pacific island; a Spitfire fighter banking into a tight turn, guns blazing.

  Robbie stared at the Spitfire longingly. Just three more years, he thought, just three more years.

  Career Woman

  SUSAN JUBY

  If a person were to make a list of the most undesirable qualities in a rental-car-company employee, I would have scored high on all counts.

  No driver's license. Check.

  Deep and abiding dislike for the whole concept of customer service. Check.

  Complete lack of respect for the power of the automobile. Check.

  Immature. Check.

  Negative attitude in general. Check.

  Inabil
ity to follow directions or deal with any form of authority Total.

  Despite this litany of disqualifiers, at sixteen I was hired by the Drive Away Rental Car Company. It was my first job.

  The manager of Drive Away we'll call him Patrick, in an alarming display of poor judgment, actually waited for me to pass my driving test so that I could take the job as sales agent and car washer.

  Patrick was a spiky-haired twenty-year-old who cultivated an air of amusement, as though everything he saw was slightly ridiculous. Under the surface, though, he seemed uncertain, like a guy who hadn't been popular in high school but hoped to make up for it now. He wanted his adult life to look fun. And he wanted it to involve young girls to act as a buffer from memories of high-school hallways, where it's unlikely that he got much female attention.

  Patrick was new in town and didn't know anyone. The management job at Drive Away was his chance to reinvent himself.

  Running a rental-car agency is one of the few jobs, outside of being a rock star or sports icon, where unattractive guys can get a lot of girls to hang around them. But you need at least one teenage girl to attract others.

  That's where I came in. I was the oldest of my friends by a couple of months and already had my learner's license. That made me the lucky candidate. I did know that there was something strange about Patrick hiring me for a job for which I was so unsuited. I dimly sensed that my status as a wild sixteen-year-old with wild friends was my primary qualification. But I didn't care. Because, dude, I got to drive! New Pontiac Grand Prixs! New Monte Carlos! A dream come true for a kid whose parents were never, ever going to buy her a car.

  Some parents would have said absolutely no way is my daughter taking a job that involves driving brand-new cars. Mom was certainly concerned when I came home and announced that Patrick had hired me.

  “How old is Patrick?” she asked.

  “I don't know. Old. Like twenty or so.”

  “Is Patrick aware that you don't know how to drive?”

  “Don't know how to drive yet. I have my learner's, so I'm halfway there. Anyway, he's going to teach me so I can start work sooner.”