Lilian asked me what she was supposed to do now. I told her she was supposed to come with me to my apartment in the old 192 °Clinton place where I was. I was supposed to take care of her. Quadberry had said so. His six-year-old directive was still working.
She slept on the fold-out bed of the sofa for a while. This was the only bed in my place. I stood in the dark in the kitchen and drank a quarter bottle of gin on ice. I would not turn on the light and spoil her sleep. The prospect of Lilian asleep in my apartment made me feel like a chaplain on a visit to the Holy Land; I stood there getting drunk, biting my tongue when dreams of lust burst on me. That black jet Quadberry wanted us to see him in, its flaming rear end, his blasting straight up into the night at mid-runway — what precisely was he wanting to say in this stunt? Was he saying remember him forever or forget him forever? But I had my own life and was neither going to mother-hen it over his memory nor his old sweetheart. What did he mean, America the beautiful, like you will never know? I, William Howly, knew a goddamn good bit about America the beautiful, even as a deaf man. Being deaf had brought me up closer to people. There were only about five I knew, but I knew their mouth movements, the perspiration under their noses, their tongues moving over the crowns of their teeth, their fingers on their lips. Quadberry, I said, you don’t have to get up next to the stars in your black jet to see America the beautiful.
I was deciding to lie down on the kitchen floor and sleep the night, when Lilian turned on the light and appeared in her panties and bra. Her body was perfect except for a tiny bit of fat on her upper thighs. She’d sunbathed herself so her limbs were brown, and her stomach, and the instinct was to rip off the white underwear and lick, suck, say something terrific into the flesh that you discovered.
She was moving her mouth.
“Say it again slowly.”
“I’m lonely. When he took off in his jet, I think it meant he wasn’t ever going to see me again. I think it meant he was laughing at both of us. He’s an astronaut and he spits on us.”
“You want me on the bed with you?” I asked.
“I know you’re an intellectual. We could keep on the lights so you’d know what I said.”
“You want to say things? This isn’t going to be just sex?”
“It could never be just sex.”
“I agree. Go to sleep. Let me make up my mind whether to come in there. Turn out the lights.”
Again the dark, and I thought I would cheat not only Quadberry but the entire Quadberry family if I did what was natural.
I fell asleep.
Quadberry escorted B-52s on bombing missions into North Vietnam. He was catapulted off the Bonhomme Richard in his suit at 100 degrees temperature, often at night, and put the F-8 on all it could get — the tiny cockpit, the immense long two-million-dollar fuselage, wings, tail and jet engine, Quadberry, the genius master of his dragon, going up to twenty thousand feet to be cool. He’d meet with the big B-52 turtle of the air and get in a position, his cockpit glowing with green and orange lights, and turn on his transistor radio. There was only one really good band, never mind the old American rock-and-roll from Cambodia, and that was Red Chinese opera. Quadberry loved it. He loved the nasal horde in the finale, when the peasants won over the old fat dilettante mayor. Then he’d turn the jet around when he saw the squatty abrupt little fires way down there after the B-52s had dropped their diet. It was a seven-hour trip. Sometimes he slept, but his body knew when to wake up. Another thirty minutes and there was his ship waiting for him out in the waves.
All his trips weren’t this easy. He’d have to blast out in daytime and get with the B-52s, and a SAM missile would come up among them. Two of his mates were taken down by these missiles. But Quadberry, as on saxophone, had endless learned technique. He’d put his jet perpendicular in the air and make the SAMs look silly. He even shot down two of them. Then, one day in daylight, a MiG came floating up level with him and his squadron. Quadberry couldn’t believe it. Others in the squadron were shy, but Quadberry knew where and how the MiG could shoot. He flew below the cannons and then came in behind it. He knew the MiG wanted one of the B-52s and not mainly him. The MiG was so concentrated on the fat B-52 that he forgot about Quadberry. It was really an amateur suicide pilot in the MiG. Quadberry got on top of him and let down a missile, rising out of the way of it. The missile blew off the tail of the MiG. But then Quadberry wanted to see if the man got safely out of the cockpit. He thought it would be pleasant if the fellow got out with his parachute working. Then Quadberry saw that the fellow wanted to collide his wreckage with the B-52, so Quadberry turned himself over and cannoned, evaporated the pilot and cockpit. It was the first man he’d killed.
The next trip out, Quadberry was hit by a ground missile. But his jet kept flying. He flew it a hundred miles and got to the sea. There was the Bonhomme Richard, so he ejected. His back was snapped but, by God, he landed right on the deck. His mates caught him in their arms and cut the parachute off him. His back hurt for weeks, but he was all right. He rested and recuperated in Hawaii for a month.
Then he went off the front of the ship. Just like that, his F-6 plopped in the ocean and sank like a rock. Quadberry saw the ship go over him. He knew he shouldn’t eject just yet. If he ejected now he’d knock his head on the bottom and get chewed up in the motor blades. So Quadberry waited. His plane was sinking in the green and he could see the hull of the aircraft carrier getting smaller, but he had oxygen through his mask and it didn’t seem that urgent a decision. Just let the big ship get over. Down what later proved to be sixty feet, he pushed the ejection button. It fired him away, bless it, and he woke up ten feet under the surface swimming against an almost overwhelming body of underwater parachute. But two of his mates were in a helicopter, one of them on the ladder to lift him out.
Now Quadberry’s back was really hurt. He was out of this war and all wars for good.
Lilian, the stewardess, was killed in a crash. Her jet exploded with a hijacker’s bomb, an inept bomb which wasn’t supposed to go off, fifteen miles out of Havana; the poor pilot, the poor passengers, the poor stewardesses were all splattered like flesh sparklers over the water just out of Cuba. A fisherman found one seat of the airplane. Castro expressed regrets.
Quadberry came back to Clinton two weeks after Lilian and the others bound for Tampa were dead. He hadn’t heard about her. So I told him Lilian was dead when I met him at the airport. Quadberry was thin and rather meek in his civvies — a gray suit and an out-of-style tie. The white ends of his hair were not there — the halo had disappeared — because his hair was cut short. The Arab nose seemed a pitiable defect in an ash-whiskered face that was beyond anemic now. He looked shorter, stooped. The truth was he was sick, his back was killing him. His breath was heavy-laden with airplane martinis and in his limp right hand he held a wet cigar. I told him about Lilian. He mumbled something sideways that I could not possibly make out.
“You’ve got to speak right at me, remember? Remember me, Quadberry?”
“Mom and Dad of course aren’t here.”
“No. Why aren’t they?”
“He wrote me a letter after we bombed Hué. Said he hadn’t sent me to Annapolis to bomb the architecture of Hué. He had been there once and had some important experience — French-kissed the queen of Hué or the like. Anyway, he said I’d have to do a hell of a lot of repentance for that. But he and Mom are separate people. Why isn’t she here?”