BUT AT LEAST Lyman had accomplished that first trial run. He had sampled beer and women and he had had his first real taste of escape. It must have been heady stuff to him. In the tavern that night he had actually done those things himself that before he had only heard about other men doing. Even his father’s ridiculous breakfast sermon the next morning must have been satisfying to him: it tied the knot; it closed the circle; it made everything seem bigger and better. To have to endure a lecture about diddling away a Saturday night at a time when his head was still pounding from the beer he had drunk the night before and while the fried eggs he had just managed to get down were threatening to come back up again — it made it all worth it; it was how you paid for having a good time. At forty-one Lyman was like a middle-aged teenager savoring his first hangover. But he didn’t make another attempt to escape right away. Instead he went for more than a year on the memory of that first time. He went on working.
Then in the following year on a Sunday morning in December another outside event occurred that made it possible for Lyman to take off and not come back at all. Thousands of miles away something happened that was so explosive that it not only sank ships and killed men in the Pacific, it blew the door off the hinges of the Goodnough barn in Holt County, Colorado. I’m talking of course about Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor was hell and tragedy for most Americans, but it was what Lyman Goodnough was waiting for. Now I don’t mean that he would ever have hoped for something that murderous — he was desperate, damned desperate, but he wasn’t bloodthirsty — and I’m not saying that he had any idea in the world that the thing he was waiting for, the thing he hoped would happen, would ever take the form it did, because he sure as hell wasn’t any prophet either. Still it is true that he seemed to recognize almost immediately that Pearl Harbor was his ticket out, his open barn door. It was like the explosion in the waters of Hawaii was the pop of a starter’s gun in a track meet. Lyman heard it, he was ready, and he took off running. He began a race that he wouldn’t stop running until almost twenty years had passed and until he had seen half the cities in this country. My dad helped him.
In the middle of the night my dad put him on a train that was headed west. But that was later. That December Sunday in 1941, after morning chores, my dad and I sat at this same kitchen table and listened to the radio. It was exciting and it was awful. My dad said it was hell. But my mother went to church as usual. She put on a navy-blue dress and drove off in her new car to sing hymns and Christmas carols and to put her folded offering into the felt-muted plate that a gray usher passed among the pews. She prayed and afterwards she returned home to cook us a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes as if nothing was wrong. I believe she spent the afternoon reading in the living room in a stuffed chair.
All the time, though, my dad and I listened to the radio. Between news bulletins we got out the world atlas and discovered the dots in the Pacific Ocean that meant Hawaii and with a ruler tried to figure the miles between Honolulu and Tokyo and between Tokyo and California. The news kept coming in on the radio, and it seemed to me that it was all happening right then, since I was only just hearing about it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to bomb such a small speck on the ocean in our atlas— before that Sunday Pearl Harbor and naval installations hadn’t existed for me: there weren’t a lot of sailors in Holt County — but I could tell from my dad’s face that something important was happening and what was happening was bad. My dad’s face, more than the pitch of the broadcaster’s voice, made it seem so. His face was hard set all day. It looked even worse than it did those times when he looked up and watched the Goodnoughs’ car pass our house, passing on down the road into dust. He said that what we were hearing on the radio was the start of a war, a world war that now we in this country were going to have to be a part of. He hated it all. He only hoped that it would be over before I was old enough to be called to it.
Of course people in town were talking about it, too. All along Main Street in the poolhalls and the grocery stores they were talking about it, and much of the talk was crazy, wild, frantic nonsense, and it wasn’t long before anything seemed possible to believe. The men in the bank and the beer drinkers in the tavern were even speculating that Hirohito would somehow drop down into Los Angeles and start marching up Sunset Boulevard to conquer Betty Grable: there was that kind of fear and excitement loose everywhere. So, with all that going on, I don’t remember that we were very much surprised a couple nights later when long after we had gone up to bed and were sound asleep Lyman came and started knocking the holy bejesus out of our front door. My dad just got up and put his pants on and went downstairs to let Lyman in before he broke the door down.
I got up too and stood in the dim light at the top of the stairs to watch. I could see Lyman below in the front hallway; he had his heavy overcoat on and he was wearing his winter cap with the corduroy earflaps. Beside him on the floor was a metal suitcase with a belt strapped around it. My dad and he were talking, and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could tell that Lyman was more than a little excited. He began to tie and untie the strings on the earflaps of his cap, and he was shifting from one foot to the other like he had to use the toilet. In my goofy sleepiness I wondered whether that was the reason why he had come over — to piss in our pot — except that wouldn’t have explained why he had brought a suitcase. Then my mother was there, too, beside me at the top of the stairs.
“Sanders,” she said. “Go back to bed.”
“It’s Lyman Goodnough.”
“I don’t care who it is. I want you to get dressed or to go back to bed.”
My mother had a maroon robe on with matching open-toed slippers. Her blond hair, treated so that it stayed blond, looked freshly combed.
“Lyman’s seen striped pajamas before,” I said.
“That is not the point.”
“Here comes dad.”
My dad came up the stairs and met us at the top landing. His face and neck and hands were dark tanned to the shirt line; against the rest of him they looked purple in the dim light. He had black hair on his bare chest and he was smiling.
“So the vigilantes are up too,” he said.
“This is not the time for your jokes,” my mother said. “What does that man want?”
“You mean Lyman Goodnough.”
“I know who it is. What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing particular. He’s just discovered he has something like a backbone.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“He wants a lift into town.”
My mother looked at my dad as if he was talking utter nonsense, as if she still thought he was trying to be funny. “Now?” she said. “At this hour? Whatever for?”
“He wants to catch the train. He’s leaving.”
“But that’s ridiculous. He can’t do anything. Where can he go?”
“He can go west, I suppose,” my dad said. “That’s the direction the train is headed in.”
“West,” she said. It sounded foolish and obscene in her mouth. “Well, I hope you had the sense to tell him no.”
“No, I told him I would. I come upstairs to get my shirt and boots on.”
“Are you insane?”
“Probably,” my dad said. “And I’m getting cold standing here talking about it.” He turned to go back to their bedroom.
“Dad,” I said. “I want to go.”
“Get dressed then.”
“He’s not going. You’re not going,” my mother said.
But she wasn’t even looking at me. She followed my dad into the bedroom, and I followed her down the hallway and stood in the door. My dad went over to the closet and took a flannel shirt off a hanger. She watched him as if it was a conspiracy against her, as if he and Lyman Goodnough had decided to get up a plot. With one hand fisted at the neck of her maroon robe, she watched him unbutton his pants and begin to tuck his shirt in.