When I was little, I would practice making bomb noises, the whistling sound of a bomb falling. I would take a deep breath, form my lips, begin. I could make it sound as if the bomb were falling away from me, or on me, by modulating the volume, adjusting its fade or rise. I preferred the perspective of the plane, starting with the loud high note. A second or two of silence as the bomb is out of earshot. Then the tiny puff of air reaching me from the ground.
This is why old men smoke at night in the middle of parks. They do it to attract bombers.
Mother remembers certain things about the war. She remembers making dolls out of hollyhocks, taping butcher paper on the windows, and not being able to look at the newspaper until Grandfather had cut out the things he wanted. Once, in the A&P, she lost her underwear while waiting in line to buy milk. There was no rubber to hold up the underwear. She tells me this story every time I think I have troubles. Mother danced in the USO shows for the troops from Baer Field and Casad. Once she shared the stage with Bob Hope.
The whole city watches as the skywriter finishes the word.
SURRENDER.
Before going through the scrapbooks, I would sit on the window seat as if to hold the lid on. I would look out over the front lawn, across Poinsette to Hamilton Park. Through the pine trees and the blooming cherries, I could see the playground and the circling tether ball, the pavilion, the war memorial, the courts. I wasn’t old enough to change the world.
At a high-school bake sale, the frosted gingerbread men remind a teacher of her students drilling on the football field during the war. They wore letter jackets with shiny white sleeves, or bright sweaters with stripes and decorations. They carried brooms at trail arms in the sunset.
How does evil get into the world?
Witches. Or children crying, “Catch me, if you can.”
I watch Mother feed a baby. “Nnnnaaawwwhh,” she goes, “here it comes in for a landing.” She conducts the spoon on a yawing course, approaching. “Open the hangar door,” she orders.
Mother looks at me as the baby sucks the spoon. “Remember?” she says.
“I remember,” I say.
She sends out the second wave of creamed cereal.
In the fall, the new Chevrolets arrive, and Hafner sets up his old searchlight. It is surplus from the war, painted silver now. The diesel motor rotates the light. The light itself comes from a flame magnified and reflected into a beam. People come across the street to look. They look at the new cars lined up.
From Hafner’s lot, you can look across the St. Joe River, south, to where three other beams sweep back and forth in the night. Those are coming from Allen County Motors, Jim Kelley Buick, and DeHaven Chevrolet. From the west is the lone light of Means Cadillac tracing a tight circle and toppling over into a broad arc, catching for an instant the tip of the bank building downtown and righting itself like a top. To the north is another battery of lights playing off one another, intersecting, some moving faster than others. Toward you and away. Bench’s AMC, Northway Plymouth, Ayres’ Pontiac. The illusion of depth in the night. The general vicinity of each source.
What are they looking for?
Something new is in the world.
There was a Looney Tunes cartoon Engineer John showed almost every day on his TV show. It was made during the war. Hitler, upset with the way the war is going, flies a mission himself, only to have the plane dismantled over Russia by “Gremlins from the Kremlin.”
I would look through the scrapbooks to see how it really happened.
There has been a plane circling all day. There appears to be a streak of smoke coming from its tail. But I’m sure it’s some kind of banner too high to read.
In the scrapbook with the wood cover, there is a picture of Gypsy Rose Lee selling war bonds.
This is the only picture in all of Grandfather’s scrap-books where he’s made a note. It says: I bet the Lord is pleased.
During the war, the top hemisphere of the streetlight globes were painted with a black opaque glaze. They stayed that way after the war. No one seems to mind. Parts of dead insects show in the lower half of the globe. There’s more and more of them in there summer after summer.
Grandfather read meters for his living. During the war, he was made block warden because everyone remembered the way he’d kept calm during The War of the Worlds. They also figured that he knew a little bit about electricity.
The city practiced blackouts all the time because they’d heard that Fort Wayne was seventh on the list. One night everyone stumbled into Hamilton Park for a demonstration. A man from the Civil Defense wanted to emphasize the importance of absolute dark, lights really out. Grandfather said that the man lit a match when the rest of the city was all dark. He said that you could see the whole park and the faces of everyone in the park. They were all looking at the match. He said you could see the houses. He said you could read the street sign. Poinsette.
The man blew out the match with one breath. The people went home in the dark.
Were they wishing they could do something about the stars?
They kept German prisoners in camps near the Nickel Plate yards. People would go out to the camps and look at the prisoners. Everyone felt very safe, even the women. Many of the prisoners had worked on streets downtown, or in the neighborhoods, and were friendly with the people.
Some of these prisoners stayed in town after the war. Some sent for their families. You ask them, they’ll tell you — Fort Wayne is a good place to live.
In one of Grandfather’s scrapbooks, there is a series of pictures taken from the nose of a B-17. The first picture is of the bombs falling away from the plane. In the background are the city streets already burning. In the second picture, the nose of another bomber is working its way into the frame and under the bombs, smaller now by seconds. The third picture shows the plane in the path of the falling bombs. One has already taken away the stabilizer without exploding. The perspective is really terrifying. The fourth picture shows the plane skidding into its tailspin. All this time the bombs are falling. And the fifth picture is the plane falling with the bombs.
Grandfather has arranged these pictures to be read down the page. One after the other.
Casad is a GSO depot built during the war just outside of town. I go there sometimes to watch them dust the fields nearby, the fertile strip near the bend in the Maumee. High school kids race by on the township roads on their way to Ohio to drink. I don’t know if they even use Casad for anything now.
Casad was built to be confusing from the air. All you can see, even from across the road, are mounds of different-colored stones. Some of the piles are real, others are only camouflaged roofs. If you look closely at some of them, you can see a small ventilation pipe or maybe some type of window. The important things are underground. There are stories that date from the war of one-ton chunks of rubber in storage. They feared the damage that would be caused if they dropped any during transportation. Tin, copper, nickel, tungsten, and mercury were all supposed to have been stored there. From the road, quarry piles and sandpiper tents hump out of sight through the cornfield to the river.
It must all look pretty harmless from the sky.
The high school kids will stop on the way back. Late at night, they will sit on the hoods of their cars guessing which of the shadows are real. They are waiting to sober up and weave home.