Rumors of Peace (23 page)

My vitality was sapped. I was aware of fiery blisters on my feet, a grinding soreness in my legs. But I was still happy, and I knew I would be happy forever, and after walking a couple of blocks, I forced myself into a jog-trot.

Progressing back down the clamor of Alhambra Avenue, I began wondering now where the explosion had been, what had happened. Then I wondered no more, feeling a detachment from everything but this body which might or might not get me back to my starting point. I was stumbling back over the clods of the orchard when I realized that the Stappnagels would be waiting up angrily and that they would tell my parents, and I would not have gained anything by denying myself the bliss of ringing my doorbell. But my body would not turn around. It was going back, completing a design, and that was that.

The miles passed. I felt none of the urgency I had on the way out, only a kind of dull stubbornness, and my great joy, which never decreased. The dark spaces between the oncoming vehicles were longer now, and profoundly silent, for the crickets were asleep. The absolute blackness of the sky was gone, as if a layer had dropped away, revealing a curved dome of the darkest, inkiest blue. The air was very cold. The ground felt harder than before, as if it had contracted, pebbles and twigs pressing through my shoe soles with the sharpness of metal.

Now and then I thought of the Stappnagels. How they had clamped me between them. How she had put the radio under her arm. How they had lied about coming to tell me. How they were smiling and calm, understanding nothing. They were stupid and smug and cruel; they were contemptible. But even the thought of the Stappnagels could not dim the happiness inside me.

Somewhere around the halfway mark I stopped to rest, sitting down against a fence post. I closed my eyes, and though I didn't sleep, I must have stayed there a long time. When I got up, I saw that the sky, though still dark, was of the deepest, purest blue, like the blue in Helen Maria's peacock feather. The hills and fields were blue too, with the trees and huddled cows black masses against them. I heard a birdcall,
exotic in the blue darkness, and then, by degrees, as I walked along, the sky faded to a thin gray, and so did the fields and cows, and the farms I passed—everything gray and still and cold. After a while glimmers of light marbled the sky, and everything around me began slowly to flush with color. It made me feel exposed, and I walked faster. Then there was a plank of red across the horizon, and the sound of roosters crowing. I began to run, my eyes watering in the first harsh glare of the sun.

I
T WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT
when I crunched down the Stappnagel driveway. They would be eating breakfast, waiting for me; there was no point in sneaking in. I went to the front door, but it was locked. Going around to the back, I found the door there unlatched and let myself in.

The house was dark. I walked stiffly to Valerie's room and quietly opened the door. The shade was up, the room bright. The clock said ten minutes past six. Valerie sat on the bed in her bathrobe, pasty and red-eyed, as if she too had been awake all night. I fell like iron beside her.

“It wasn't blown up.”

“That's good,” she said tiredly.

I closed my eyes.

“I didn't tell them. I shut the window and turned off the lamp.” Her voice was frazzled, the piping gone. “Mother came in again, but she didn't turn the light on. I said you were asleep.”

I gave a deep sigh. “I want to thank you, Valerie. And I'm sorry I choked you.”

“That's all right,” she said, sighing too.

My bones on the soft bed were expanding and pulsing, as if they had been squeezed inside a tight box and suddenly been pulled out.

“They ran over a dog. My father went outside and shot it.” She began to cry. “He buried it outside. . . .”

I turned sorely on my back and opened my eyes.

“It kept screaming, that's why he had to shoot it. . . .” She was biting in her breaths, trying to speak, and I understood now that she had been crying a long time, that's why her eyes were red. “Oh Suse, if you could have heard how it kept screaming. . . .” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her bathrobe.

I lay looking at the bright ceiling. The joy ebbed, sank, vanished.

A door opened down the hall, and we heard footsteps going by. A few moments later we heard the radio turned on loudly, then lowered. Presently the footsteps returned. The doorknob turned gently.

“Oh you're up already,” said Mrs. Stappnagel, and in a yellow flowered housecoat, she stepped quickly inside. “Suse, no one was hurt in Mendoza. Not a person.”

“Good.”

She looked at me oddly.

I removed my leg from the touch of her housecoat as she sat down next to us, and I saw a line of puzzlement come between her eyes, but it faded; she gave me a smile. “I don't wonder you're cranky, you don't look as if you had a wink of sleep all night. Or you either,” she said to Valerie, gently smoothing back her Benjamin Franklin hair. Her own hair was a mess, and there were bags under her eyes, and now her face turned grave, yet even so, the smile lingered, as a kind of faint and tender line; a lyingly soft look, at odds with the words she spoke.

“We've found out what happened now. It was in Port Chicago. Two ammunition ships exploded. Everything's in a confused state, Suse, so we won't be able to take you home yet. They're asking that people don't come in. We want to do everything we can to cooperate. But just as soon as. . . .” And she talked on.

So they were ships, or parts of ships, that had turned over and over in the rosy glow, with people inside them, or parts of people. And people inside the ambulances rushing to the hospital entrance, people with names and faces, blood-soaked and dying as I raced by, the happiest moment of my life. . . .

“I think you could both fall asleep on the spot. Try now, I'll roll down the shades.”

The room darkened, and she went out softly. I heard the dog, the huge catastrophic night crammed into that one agonized scream.

My legs kept twitching, as with electric currents. Once more I climbed over Valerie, who had fallen asleep, and creaked from the room. Passing the kitchen, I could hear Mrs. Stappnagel busy making breakfast. In the living room my vomit had been cleaned up, the broken glass swept from the floor, things set to rights. The radio was on. Next to it, unshaven, Mr. Stappnagel sat dozing.

“—and the other, a sixty-five-hundred ton Liberty ship, exploded simultaneously as they were being loaded at the magazine dock. Deaths are now put at roughly three hundred, with casualties at a thousand—”

I went out on the garage roof, away from Mr. Stappnagel, and stood listening by a jagged window.

“—reports of sabotage are as yet unfounded; cause of the explosion remains unknown at this time. The tremendous shock occurred at ten-nineteen
P.M.
and was felt for a radius of fifty miles, causing many people to think it was a Jap bombing attack. The blast left an aftermath of indescribable horror, ‘like a scene out of hell,' according to one witness. In Mococo, more than three miles from the scene of the blast, shells and twisted metal were driven into the ground. Throughout the night, from every part of the county, fire trucks, ambulances, and volunteer doctors and nurses rushed to the disaster scene under highway patrol escort. In the tiny township of Port Chicago, property damage is devastating; in Mendoza few plate glass windows are left. Both towns have been placed under martial law, with all incoming traffic restricted to official vehicles. Private individuals are requested not to drive to these—”

The report was clicked off. I heard Mr. Stappnagel stretch and groan and a moment later, his face appeared at the window; he scratched his head and stood looking out. Then he saw me, and he smiled. “Well, Mother told you?”

I had never really noticed his face. It was an ugly face, not because it was whiskered and bleary, but because it was stupid, cruel, self-satisfied. The sort of face you would expect on someone who would go out and
shoot a dog through the head. I knew it was illogical to hate him for having done that, yet I hated him for that as much as for anything else he had done last night.

“Mother told you?” he said again. “No one was hurt in Mendoza?”

Calling each other Mother, Father—it was cutesy, revolting, like nighty-night.

“Mother?” I said, enunciating the word with all the scorn I could muster.

He studied my face for a moment. “You're being very rude. May I ask why?”

I didn't reply but continued looking at him with a contempt that burned from my eyes like acid, receiving the most passionate satisfaction from such defiance toward this fool, these two fools, for his wife had come up beside him saying breakfast was ready. The loathing poured from my eyes, my satisfaction so bitterly intense that I felt this moment almost avenged the whole night, all the hours I had run in the dark, all the deafening sirens, and the torn-apart bodies, and the poor screaming dog on the road, all horror and death that had ever happened and ever would, because these two blind, smug fools were at the bottom of it.

“Have we done something to—” he started.

“Let me—” she whispered, and she left the window and opened the door to the roof, stepping out with a softly troubled look. I walked to the far end, past the two sleeping bags lying wrenched and twisted, and stood with my back to her. She didn't follow. After a moment she said, “It's all right, Suse. You just come in when you feel like it. It's all right.”

It's all right. If you were dying in their arms with your throat cut, they would smile at each other and tell you it was all right. But nothing would ever be all right again, though the hills lay sunny and peaceful and the air was filled with the chirping of birds, because it had happened, after all this time, after my always knowing it would and hoping it wouldn't. It had happened.

I spent the rest of the day in bed, trying to sleep. Late in the afternoon Valerie, who had dressed earlier and tiptoed out, came in and rolled up the shades.

“We can take you home,” she piped. “They're letting people in.”

She seemed composed now, her usual confident, mathematical self, standing there at the window in her yellow sunsuit, except that she remained there, gazing out at the pile of raw dirt where the dog was buried. I dragged myself from bed, stood on the two fiery stubs that were my feet, and began to search for my shirt. I found it under a chair and bent down stiffly.

“Did you ever think anything like this could happen?” Valerie asked from the window.

“The dog?”

“Yes. And everything.”

“I never expected anything else.”

“I didn't.”

“You were living in a fool's paradise.” I pulled off my pajama top, enveloped for a moment in an overpowering smell of stale sweat. “You should always expect the worst, because it always happens.”

“Maybe,” she said reflectively. “Did it make it better because you expected it?”

“I don't know, but you can't ignore the truth.”

“What truth?”

“This.
What
happened.
” I dragged my shirt on and buttoned it with thick fingers. “You ought to think about that dog. You think it's the only dog that ever got run over? It's happened a thousand times before, and it'll happen a thousand times again. You just happened to hear this one. You ought to face it.”

I stood looking at her in her yellow sunsuit; then I limped painfully to her side and turned her around by her arm, keeping my fingers there tightly. “You'd better face a lot of things. You just happened to hear that explosion, but it's happening somewhere else all the time. And I'll tell you something else. This war isn't ever going to end.”

She thought for a moment, her fingers nervously working at my clamped hand. “But wars always end. And now with the invasion—”

“You think that's going to end anything? That's nothing but rumors!” I looked almost with pity into the little, childish eyes, yet at the same time tightened my fingers around her arm so that she winced. “You know what you saw in that red light last night? Three hundred people
being blown to bits. That's war. That's
truth.
” I gave her a rough shake, making her eyes flutter behind their spectacles. “So accept it! Get your face out of those stupid equations!” She looked as if she were going to cry. Turning from her, I began to gather and pack my things.

The Stappnagels left Valerie home to get more sleep because she seemed suddenly tired out. We covered the seven long slogging miles in a few minutes, and they accompanied me pleasantly inside as if my rudeness and silence and flinging from the car had been only general upsetness: they understood, they forgave, it was all right, everything was all right.

Mama opened the screen door, and her arms went around me because, as she said later, she knew what had been said on the radio and what I must have been through. Dad came up too, and it was the moment of bliss I had wanted last night, feeling them warm and alive in my arms—but the Stappnagels had to tarnish this reunion with their presence, standing there looking on with their empty, smiling faces, again giving me that crazy but absolutely real feeling that they had caused the disaster, the whole war, all death and wrongness everywhere. When they left, I hoped their car would run off the road, killing them both.

I told Dad and Mama about my flight home after all. They looked shocked and also full of anxiety, as if I were still running along the road, but they didn't think I was demented. Not at all. They understood completely, and I knew now that even if I had disobeyed President Roosevelt himself last night, they would have understood.

They took me through the house, which was not what it had seemed the night before. Though the front windows were intact, those along the sides had been blown in, and there were two deep black cracks down the kitchen wall. Many things had toppled, and in my room I discovered my jar of moldy oranges gone, smashed on the floor and thrown in the garbage can, where I gave it a last look and left it.

I went downtown the next morning. The impact had gone in strange waves, hitting one window but not another, leaving some parts of town with windows untouched, and others paneless for blocks. The courthouse was badly damaged, lights torn from fastenings, its Corinthian pillars and front sidewalk dislodged, and on Main Street soldiers stood by gaping
store windows, guarding exposed and tumbled merchandise, while the street itself was clogged bumper to bumper with sightseers. Over in Port Chicago so many cars had poured in that the barriers had been replaced; all over the countryside people were parking and scurrying around to find bits of metal to take home with them.

It was rumored that bodies without heads or limbs had already washed into the marshes, and down by the tracks I watched soldiers and police searching through the reeds with long poles, Sheriff O'Toole shouting at intervals through a megaphone. But it was only on the fourth day that nine bodies were washed up, near Avon, too mutilated to identify. Two days later the papers said twenty-five more were found scattered along the shoreline. On the same page stood the official list of deaths, 268 names—the sailors you saw hanging around the Ferry Street bars, sauntering down the steps of the USO, snoring on the yellow varnished benches of the train depot.

That night I dreamed of a sailor in summer whites arguing with someone. He was presenting his case badly, even crying with vexation and confusion, and finally, to show him he might as well shut up, he was shoved a list of handwritten names that reached the floor and his own name pointed out, and at that moment the blast struck, blowing every name to bits, and the young arguing sailor's name, like all the others, swirled around in a cyclone of shattered letters, finally sinking down through the sky to the water, washing up in black sticky bits of flesh among the reeds.

Already after the first day other headlines had crowded in above the disaster.

J
ULY
21:

New Allied Gains in France!

J
ULY
22:

Marines Land on Guam!

J
ULY
23:

Crisis Rocks Reich

After Hitler Assn. Attempt!

New gains in France. Like the new gains they used to report in Italy. And Guam, one more of those hundreds of islands—still having to take
them one by one. And this attempt on Hitler's life, what kinds of fools did the newspapers take us for, saying it had been done by his own generals? It was to make us feel good, the way the Germans would feel good if they heard MacArthur and Eisenhower had tried to kill Roosevelt. Everything was to make us feel good so we would keep working at the shipyards and collecting tinfoil and buying war bonds and putting new glass in our windows every time a couple of ships blew up. They wanted us to feel good, the newspaper and magazine writers sitting safe on their behinds in their offices; the square-jawed movie stars who died bloodily in film battles and then went off on USO tours, cracking jokes with some Carmen Miranda type with flashing teeth and a bowl of fruit on her head; the high-ups who sat at the Lisbon conference table shuffling papers and discussing death politely. Deceivers. Smilers. Everything's all right.