round.
‘Let me tell you, then,’ he whispered. ‘Tonight, maybe tomorrow night’s the last time you’ll ever see me. Hear me out.’
He leaned forward, gazing up at the high ceiling and then out the window where storm clouds were being gathered by wind.
‘They’ve been landing in our backyards, the last few nights. You wouldn’t have heard. Parachutes make sounds like kites, soft kind of whispers. The parachutes come down on our back lawns. Other nights, the bodies, without parachutes. The good nights are the quiet ones when you just hear the silk and the threads on the clouds. The bad ones are when you hear a hundred and eighty pounds of aviator hit the grass. Then you can’t sleep. Last night, a dozen things hit the bushes near my bedroom window. I looked up in the clouds tonight and they were full of planes and smoke. Can you make them stop? Do you believe me?’
‘That’s the one thing; I do believe.’
He sighed, a deep sigh that released his soul.
‘Thank God! But what do I do next?’
‘Have you,’ I asked, ‘tried talking to them? I mean,’ I said, ‘have you asked for their forgiveness?’
‘Would they listen? Would they forgive? My God,’ he said. ‘Of course! Why not? Will you come with me? Your backyard. No trees for them to get strung up in. Christ, or on your porch.…’
‘The porch, I think.’
I opened the living room French doors and stepped out. It was a calm evening with only touches of wind motioning the trees and changing the clouds.
Bill was behind me, a bit unsteady on his feet, a hopeful grin, part panic, on his face.
I looked at the sky and the rising moon.
‘Nothing out here,’ I said.
‘Oh, Christ, yes, there is. Look,’ he said. ‘No, wait. Listen.’
I stood turning white cold, wondering why I waited, and listened.
‘Do we stand out in the middle of your garden, where they can see us? You don’t have to if you don’t want.’
‘Hell,’ I lied. ‘I’m not afraid.’ I lifted my glass. ‘To the Lafayette Escadrille?’ I said.
‘No, no!’ cried Bill, alarmed. ‘Not tonight. They mustn’t hear that. To them, Doug. Them.’ He motioned his glass at the sky where the clouds flew over in squadrons and the moon was a round, white, tombstone world.
‘To von Richthofen, and the beautiful sad young men.’
I repeated his words in a whisper.
And then we drank, lifting our empty glasses 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.
‘God, 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 halfass 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 God, you got to hear, you got to come. You beautiful bastards, 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.
‘Damn 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 grass 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, God, yes.’
And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots hitting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the grass 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 grass 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, God, 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
