Winged Shoes and a Shield. Don Bajema
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Mom walked her to her parents’ car. Mom stuck her head into the driver’s window, her chin resting on her folded arms. Three or four men leaning against the car, drinking beer, listened to what she was saying. Then they exploded in laughter. My mom pulled her head back out and reached one arm inside to pat Joyce on the shoulder. The others took turns hugging and patting Joyce through the window, but her expression never changed. She continued staring at me from a million miles away.
Mom walked over to our car and got into the front seat next to Dad. She was saying, as she slid her bulky hips over the seat, “Joyce had a little problem with Jesus. She doesn’t like him watching her go to the bathroom.”
Dad laughed a single cough, and switched on the ignition. He turned his shoulder so he faced me, sitting alone in the back seat, as he reversed down the dusty lane, saying, “Jesus.”
As we passed her, Joyce looked white and more like a painting frozen on a wall than my friend in a car. Her eyes remained on me for a second, and then shifted to the car floor. I thought she looked scared.
On the drive to the lake, the assorted Fairlanes and Plymouths were filled with kids — except ours, since I always threw up in the car. We parked on a huge grass lot facing the lake. My father said disgustedly, “Go wash off.”
I weaved my nauseated way to the water’s edge, followed closely by Joyce. I walked into the water, submerged, waded to the shore and sat next to her. I stuck my hands in the warm brown mud. She was sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin. We watched her brother lead a pack of bodies blasting full speed into the shallows and stroking out to the raft anchored in the middle of the lake with a riot of older kids lying around, diving and dunking each other. They were followed a few seconds later by a cascade of whooping fathers.
“How come you didn’t want to come?” She shrugged. I waited. Nothing. I said, “Jesus sees everything, but He doesn’t care.” She said, “But I do.”
We sat there a minute more in silence. Then she said, “And at night I see Him looking at me through the roof when I’m trying to sleep.”
I said, “He looks after us. He loves children.” She said, “Why?” I didn’t know so I didn’t say anything.
We quit talking and began to play. We played hard through the long afternoon and into the early evening. The only interruption was the period just after lunch when we watched the older kids sitting alone, smoking cigarettes at a picnic table, passing the hour that would keep us from drowning from the cramps in the water. The sun got lower in the surrounding hills and our parents were running low on beer, so we packed up a little early and made our way toward the Lakeside Drive-in.
We stopped at a Dairy Queen next to a Piggly Wiggly and got ice cream for us and booze for them. At the drive-in we waited in a long line filled with carloads of teenagers and families. We felt a little superior to some of the younger kids since we were still wearing our bathing suits and they were in their pajamas.
There was a playground under the huge movie screen: monkey bars, swings, teeter-totters, all made of candy-striped pipes and set in sand. While we waited for dark, we played with the kids we knew and challenged the ones we didn’t. I was getting real excited. It was turning darker and darker. We were with the older kids and no adults were watching us.
Suddenly the lights blinked on and off rapidly. One hundred kids swooped in a sprint toward their cars. Row after row of elevated blinking lights stretched out before us. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t feel my body. I was swept up in a wave of kids. To my left Joyce’s blond hair was streaming behind her, her legs churning gracefully beside me. I saw kids running ahead of us, being drawn back to our side and then vanishing behind us. We were flying, aware of each other and euphoric in effortless speed. David passed us in a T-shirted, sunburned animal burst, followed by a wake of struggling friends. Joyce and I held our own. Two men were leaning against the side of a car, smoking. As they watched the flock of kids fly by, I heard one say to the other, in a voice with warmth, amusement, and admiration, “Jesus, look at those kids run.”
My energy doubled and my strides barely hit the ground. My arms cut through the warm summer night. I felt a bursting pride and love of my own life, and for what I would later understand as my generation.
The older kids crammed into one of the Fairlanes. The huge Plymouth settled under the weight of the men. The women spread out in the other Fairlane. Joyce, David, and I shared a Chevy with the three oldest girls. Our Oldsmobile sat empty. We watched the first war movie and fell asleep during the second, film explosions and Asian screams giving way to exhausted dreams. A long time later, we heard voices gently untangling us in the back seats and carrying us to our own cars. Our parents were stumbling out of the cars they shared. We heard loud voices and laughter as Joyce’s father backed over one of the speaker stands. Joyce’s mother and father yelled at each other for a few seconds, until my mother cursed them and everyone laughed. Our fathers gunned their engines, and we squealed and rocked our way out of the drive-in and onto the black strip of asphalt leading to our colony on the Indian reservation in the woods.
The next morning I woke up and found my father sitting with several adults and two Military Police. My mother was at the stove making coffee and voices were very low. I walked down the hallway and out the screen door. No car was parked in front of the Airstream. It was quiet as a tomb. One of the kids standing in a knot in front of the shining silver home waved me over secretly.
“Did ya hear what happened to Joyce?”
My heart hit a huge beat and froze as she said, “Last night she got killed in her dad’s car. He hit a tree. David broke his arm and his leg and he’s in the hospital. So’s his mom. His dad is in jail.”
None of the kids on that base ever went to Sunday school again. And our parents never even mentioned it.
THE WIVES TOOK TURNS
The wife of a shell-shock victim in the trailer park is usually young, and a long way from home. Exhausted, often publicly abused and battered, she tries to keep alive enough spiritually to love some of her several kids as much as possible. Which is not easy. The father’s influence over her first son is poisonous. She watches her son agonize, from infancy on, as he is taught to reject the substance of her affection. Affection has no place on a battlefield. If she interferes, she is punished for weakening the boy.
Despite her efforts, including the beatings she must endure when she takes a stand in the boy’s interest, she loses contact with him as he struggles to catch up on the trail of his father’s violent footsteps. She watches helplessly as her son gradually develops a deep seething rage, which takes the place of the love he feels, but is forced to deny her. A confusing rage that will be submerged, yet extended to his sisters, and eventually to all women. If she has a second son, he will be lost to her even quicker than the first.
She turns to her daughter, whom she finds struggling not to repeat her mother’s bleak existence. They argue constantly, confused by the need they have for each other, and the self-loathing they feel as their love becomes a mockery in this world ruled by the Army. Eventually the wife accepts her fate, shuffling within the trailer in a semi-stupor of silent compliant slavery. She is heartbroken as she watches the blind desperation of her daughter grow into a perverted attraction for men with the same essential qualities as her own brother and father, beginning her journey toward her own enslavement, and perpetuating the cycle.
In childhood the siblings develop a lifelong communion of fear. They are kept apart by the associations of submerged horror and forgotten cruelty. They are bound by their blood and the memory of their flickering souls, long ago extinguished in the