Chapter two
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
Robert Shilling turned his back to the sun, wiped his brow, and continued vacuuming the pool in his swim trunks. It was a typical southern Arizona summer day. Hot, dry, no clouds. Now, at mid-afternoon, the temperature hung at a blistering 103 degrees. Shilling was feeling the heat. He was getting too old for this. Since his retirement in 1985, he had been thinking seriously of selling his sprawling suburban bungalow and moving into an apartment on one of the hillsides overlooking Phoenix or Scottsdale. On the other hand, he couldn’t bear the thought of wasting away the last few years of his life in some concrete high-rise. Besides, a mechanic by trade, he loved to work with his hands. And there was always plenty to do around the house.
“There you are. Come out of the sun before you fry to a crisp.”
Robert spun around to see his wife, Edna, standing with a tray of two tall, frosty pina coladas. She set the tray down on the patio table near her, under the shade of the umbrella.
“Have a drink. Cool off. What are yuh doing out here, anyway?”
Robert sighed, adjusting his dark sunglasses. “Ah, the pool’s so dirty. I haven’t been able to get at it for a week.”
“Can it wait? Sit down.”
“Sure.” Robert hooked the top part of the pole under the diving board to keep the vacuum system circulating freely. “Be right there.”
“You’re getting a little red on your chest,” Edna warned her husband as he walked over to the shade of the patio umbrella.
“It’s no wonder,” he admitted, glancing down at his chest thick with white bristle. “I’ve been out most of the day.”
“Naughty boy.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad. I could use one of those drinks right now.” He plunked himself down in one of the white plastic chairs and placed his sunglasses on the table.
So far, retirement had been good to the couple. They were healthy and tanned, and both had stuck to a daily exercise program to keep the pounds down. Part of that program was golfing. At seventy, Robert had a full head of white, crewcut hair. He still had the broad shoulders from his youth, but age was slowly etching its evil way into his dark skin. The wrinkles were deeper and his voice gruffer. He had often said that he would have preserved his lungs and voice box if he had quit smoking earlier, instead of only ten years ago. Edna had been a smoker also, until shortly after her husband quit. Her face too had the telltale lines, which she thought was rather unbecoming for the Miss Arizona 1944 she had been. Nevertheless, she was still pretty with vivid blue eyes and dimples when she smiled. The sixty-four-year-old was still quite attractive in the one-piece bathing suit she was wearing.
She pulled up a chair and joined her husband in the shade. Noticing his war album on the table, she turned to him. “Reminiscing?”
Robert consumed some of his drink. He enjoyed pina coladas on a hot day. “I guess I am. You know, I haven’t looked at it in ages. I wonder if I’ll recognize any of those guys at the reunion?” His eyes grew large. “And will they recognize me?”
The couple eyed each other.
During World War Two, Robert Shilling had been a master sergeant with the United States Army Air Force, a crew chief with the famous 509th Composite Group on Tinian Island, the organization responsible for the world’s first atomic bombing missions. Following his post-war discharge, he returned to his hometown Phoenix, married Edna, and worked as a mechanic for a Ford dealership in the city, the job he had recently retired from.
Staring at the open book of snapshots, Robert recalled — in a flash — some of his hard-working war years on the tropical island of Tinian. There had been no glory scraping his fingers to the bone keeping his crew’s B-29 in the air. Keep the boys flying was the rally cry, much to the same degree as Remember Pearl Harbor. That was hard to do considering all the mechanical problems that plagued the first B-29s. The hours had been long, the heat unbearable. Often he was so tired that he would fall asleep in his work clothes because he was too weak to even peel them off.
“There it is,” Edna said, bracing herself.
“Huh?”
“The Mary Jane. You had it open to the Mary Jane.”
Robert set the drink on the table. “Yeah, missing in action,” he said slowly, as if in a trance.
“They never found the bomber or the crew, did they?” she asked softly, hoping for a response. The Mary Jane was usually a taboo subject in the Shilling household.
Robert answered with a jerk of his head. “No one knows what happened. It just disappeared somewhere between Tinian and Japan, a couple days before the Japanese surrender. Geez, they were a good bunch of guys.”
“A couple of days before the surrender? So it went missing after the atomic missions. After all these years. I never knew that!”
He sighed. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Ah, it was just a routine mission.” Robert took a big gulp of the drink. “There was still a few conventional bombing missions after the atomic ones.”
“Was there?”
“Yeah. A lot of people don’t know that. Anyway, can we drop the Mary Jane?”
“Sure.” She got the intent. No more talk about the bomber. At least not for now.
Robert’s mind fell back to the war. He remembered how the aircrew had treated him and his ground crew with the utmost respect. They were a team, regardless of rank. The loss of the Mary Jane aircrew had struck Robert hard, as if he alone — the crew chief — was to blame for their disappearance. Due to guilt, he, at first, refused to attend the 509th reunion. Forty-five years later he continued to ask himself the tormenting questions. Were there mechanical problems with the engines? Was the bomber shot down by a Japanese fighter… or worse… by some trigger-happy US Navy gunner aboard some battleship? No one would ever know. Then… more recently… he asked himself what difference it really made now. Why sweat it over and over again? It was then that he decided to go to Tinian. He and his wife needed to get away, see some old friends from the 509th and their two sons — David and Les — on the other side of the Pacific.
“Looking forward to the reunion?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Now I am.”
“Have you heard how many are going?”
Robert took a long time to answer. Folding his arms, he said in a flat voice, “Including wives, something like four or five hundred.”
Edna looked surprised. “That many? I can’t wait to see Les’s kids. They must be so big now. Did you read David’s letter?”
“I did. He seems to be doing quite well for himself. The Midas Touch. But he didn’t have to send us the air fare to Kyoto.”
Edna chuckled. “He’s got a lot more money than we do.”
“That’s for hell sure.” Robert paused for a moment. “Sounds as if he’s dating a Nip.”
“This is 1990, dear. The politically-correct term in Japanese. No more Nips. Not even Japs.”
Robert grunted. “Oh, yeah. So I’ve been told.”
“From the sound of your voice it seems you don’t approve.”
Robert stared her down. He couldn’t bear the thought of a Japanese daughter-in-law. Young people David’s age just didn’t understand. They didn’t live through the war years. “What do you think?” he said curtly.