The Way the Crow Flies Page 12

  “Chili con carne, my foot. She forgets the carne”—butting out her cigarette, picking up her jellied salad. Jack grins and follows her back outside.

  The grown-ups sit on lawn chairs, with plates on their laps and drinks at their feet. Lisa’s mother, Elaine, laughs at everything Lisa’s father says. Steve is the senior medical officer on base—“and resident golf pro,” jokes Vic. The kids are at card tables placed end to end, Madeleine, Mike, Roy Noonan, Auriel Boucher, Auriel’s younger sisters and Lisa Ridelle. The Froelich babies crawl around on the grass pursued by Auriel’s two-year-old sister, Bea, in a bonnet and sunsuit. Karen Froelich feeds Elizabeth chili con carne—the sight of the food sliding in and out of Elizabeth’s mouth makes Madeleine gag, so she tries not to watch, while trying not to seem to be trying not to watch.

  Vic and Mimi argue in French; she swats him with an oven mitt and he cringes elaborately. “Au secours!”

  “Vic, parlez-vous le ding dong?” calls Jack from the barbecue, presiding in his apron that says CHEF.

  “I speak French, I don’t know what your wife is speaking.”

  “Ma grande foi D’jeu, c’est du chiac!” Chiac, Acadian French, the “creative langage local,” with as many variations as there are communities across the Maritimes.

  “‘D’jeu’?! C’est quoi ça, ‘D’jeu’?!” Vic knows she means Dieu—God—but he imitates her in lilting feminine tones with an elaborate rolling of r’s and she’s laughing too hard to swat him again.

  “Where did you find this one, Jack?” asks Vic, in his own Trois-Rivières twang. “She talks like a hillbilly.”

  “I picked her up in the Louisiana bayou.”

  Henry Froelich says, “Really?”

  Mimi exclaims, “No!”

  Jack says, “I found her in New Brunswick—”

  Mimi nods and Jack continues, “on the Indian reservation—”

  “Jack!”—using the oven mitt on him—“allons donc!”

  Karen Froelich says, “Mimi, are you part native?”

  Mimi’s laugh decelerates to a polite smile. “No, I’m Acadian.”

  “That’s why she speaks so uncivilized the French,” says Vic in a parody of his own accent.

  His wife, Betty, says, “You’re one to talk, cheeky frog, murdering the language of Louis Quatorze”—she pronounces it “cat oars”—“with your heathen patois.”

  “Acadian,” says Karen. “That’s really interesting. There was actually quite a bit of intermarriage between the Acadians and the native Indians, wasn’t there?” Her tone betrays no awareness of her faux pas.

  There is a pause. Everyone is smiling. Jack knows that Mimi will assume the woman is catty, but he can’t see anything but interest on Karen’s face. She looks like a stranger in a strange land, here among the lawn chairs. Even her husband is recognizable in his way—a bearded, rumpled professor. But Karen is a woman with undone hair and no makeup, talking about the finer points of Canadian history. “That’s how they got out of taking the oath of allegiance to England, right? Before the Expulsion.”

  Mimi smiles and shrugs.

  Karen continues, “By claiming Indian blood.”

  Jack looks at Mimi. Will she roll with it? Tell the story of le grand dérangement? That’s why I’m so good at moving.

  Vimy Woodley comes to the rescue. “We know so little of our own history, really, don’t we? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of the Expulsion.”

  Jack tells the story of the English forcing the Acadians from their homes two hundred years ago, and Mimi rallies: “That’s why I’m so good at moving.”

  They all laugh, and Betty Boucher reaches for Mimi’s hand. She says in her Manchester accent, thick as a good cardigan, “Well I’m English, love, and I’d like to say I’m sorry. There!”

  At the kids’ table, Mike stands up and whips his arm round and round like a propeller. When he stops, his hand has puffed and turned red with tiny burst capillaries.

  “Wow,” says Lisa, and turns her eyelids inside out.

  “Neat.”

  Then they all follow Roy Noonan around the side of the house to watch what he can do with his braces and retainer. He leans forward with his hands on his knees and chews his tongue until a waterfall of clear saliva pours from his mouth.

  “Kids,” calls Maman, “come get your dessert.”

  Mike breaks into song: “Comet! It makes your bathroom clean”—to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March—“Comet! It tastes like Listerine”—leading them back the long way around the house—“Comet! It makes you vomit! So drink some Comet, and vomit today!”

  Betty clears the table and asks Vimy if her daughter Marsha can babysit Saturday. Mimi scoops ice cream into cones for the kids and asks Steve his opinion on appendectomies.

  “Well,” he answers, “my motto is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  Mimi smiles up at him and says, “You sound just like my husband.”

  Hal is drafted by the kids to adjudicate the start of a pickup game of softball. Steve and Vic slip into the house for more beer, and Jack stands chatting with Henry Froelich. “What’s your background, anyhow, Henry? Math? Science?”

  A couple of beers in the Centralia summer evening and Hamburg 1943 is awfully far away—Jack can see nothing wrong in getting to know his neighbour. And Froelich doesn’t appear to mind the question, seems relaxed despite his tie and long-sleeved shirt.

  “My subject was engineering physics,” he says, then raises his eyebrows as though gauging the degree of Jack’s interest.

  “Wow,” says Jack. “What the heck is that?”

  Froelich smiles and Jack tips the wine bottle over the man’s glass. “Go ahead, Hank, I’m all ears.”

  “Well….” Froelich crosses his arms and Jack can see him in a lecture hall—the axle grease under his nails could just as easily be chalk. “I studied, and then I taught, how things go.”

  “What things? Planes, trains, automobiles?”

  “There are applications for all these, yes, and others. Propulsion, you see. But I was a very theoretical young man. I did not—um—dirty my hands, as they say.”

  “Not like now,” says Jack, gesturing with his thumb at Froelich’s motley-looking old jalopy across the street.

  Froelich nods. “Yes, I grow pragmatic with age.”

  “I’m going to take a wild guess, Henry. You were a professor, am I right?”

  “Yes I was.”

  “A doctor of … engineering physics.”

  “Ja, genau.”

  “Well what the heck are you doing teaching the multiplication table out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Froelich laughs. Vic joins them. “What’s so funny?”

  Jack is about to dodge the question, not wishing to put Froelich on the spot if he’d rather not discuss his past, but Froelich answers, “Physics. My first love.”

  “No kidding, you a science buff, Henry?”

  “He’s a PhD,” says Jack.

  Steve joins them with a fresh beer.

  “That’s not too shabby,” says Vic. “Nuclear?”

  “Engineering.”

  Vic shakes his head. “If I had my life to live again, that’s what I’d do, that’s where the action is, eh? Avionics. Jet propulsion. Rockets.”

  It’s on the tip of Jack’s tongue to ask Vic if he didn’t get enough of “things that go boom” during the war, blasting away in the back of a Lanc, but he remembers Froelich and says instead, “I’d be an astronaut.”

  “What do you want to do that for?” says Vic. “That’s not flying, that’s just sitting on a big bomb and praying.” Froelich breaks a smile and nods. “‘To the moon, Alice!’” cries Vic.

  The others chuckle but Froelich looks a bit bewildered. Is it possible he has never seen The Honeymooners?

  Steve muses, “The moon is an ideal setting for golf. Imagine how much longer it would take to play eighteen holes in zero gravity.”

  Jack knows Steve is two years younger than himself. Bu
t even without that information, he would know by Steve’s particular brand of insouciance that he’s not a veteran. Not that veterans can’t be insouciant—Simon, case in point. But Simon’s insouciance has an edge. Like Vic’s bonhomie—he is still drinking in every moment, grateful to be alive. Like Hal Woodley, over in the field behind the house, pitching for the kids. This is what they fought for.

  Jack says, “Well we better get there quick or you know what we’ll find on the moon.”

  “What?” says Steve.

  “Russians.”

  Vic and Steve laugh.

  “Wernher von Braun said that and he oughta know.”

  “Who’s he?” asks Steve.

  Vic rolls his eyes, and Jack spells it out. “Von Braun is Mr. Ballistic Missile. Grand Pooh-bah of the American space program. NASA to you.”

  “Oh that von Braun,” says Steve. “Had you going, didn’t I?”

  “Stee-rike!” cries one of the kids, and out in the field the teams trade places.

  Steve says, “Why would anyone want to go the moon, anyhow? It’s cold up there.”

  Like Moscow, thinks Jack, reminded of Simon’s comment last summer. He takes another swig of beer. “Well what are we going to do, let the Russkies beat us at everything? At the rate they’re going, they’ll be there in ’65.”

  Vic says, “The moon is, it’s … the holy grail, it’s the brass ring….”

  Froelich sighs. “Forget the moon just now, we are talking here about space, yes? A band of cold and dark one hundred miles above the surface of the earth, worthless—”

  “Yeah,” says Steve.

  “—apart from that it is an extension of air space and this is where the next war will be decided.” Jack pours Froelich more wine. “From up there”—Froelich points—“the Soviets can interfere with Western satellites, they can—how do you say—?”

  “Neutralize,” says Jack.

  “Ja, neutralize missiles before they will leave the ground or the submarine. They also can launch a space station, they can arm it like a garrison and make extraordinary reconnaissance of earth. The moon is somewhat a minor scene, a….”

  “A sideshow.”

  “Genau.”

  “USAF wants to make the moon itself into a permanent base.”

  “That’s what the Russians are shooting for,” adds Vic. “That’s why they’re ahead.”

  “But we’re not in it for the same reasons,” says Jack. “NASA is a civilian agency. Pure research.”

  “If pure research is the point,” counters Steve, “why don’t they just make a space station for experiments, why bother going to the moon?”

  “Because the moon is something we all understand,” says Jack. “Even a tribesman in darkest Africa can look up and marvel at what a feat that would be, and that’s real power, when you capture the world’s imagination. The U.S. needs to demonstrate its superiority to the world, and not just for show, for very practical reasons. You can’t have the Third World looking to the Soviet Union for—”

  “That’s right.” Vic gestures with his beer. “When you’re sitting in a banana republic with a tinpot dictator—”

  “And the Communists have got a man on the moon,” says Jack, “and they’re promising a chicken in every pot—”

  “Sputnik was just the tip of the iceberg—”

  “Look at Vostok III and IV—”

  “What are their names? Nikolayev?”

  “And Popovich,” says Froelich.

  Jack nods. “The ‘heavenly twins.’”

  The Russian cosmonauts have just completed a feat straight out of science fiction: a dual orbit of the earth in separate space capsules, passing within an incredible one hundred miles of one other for a total of 112 orbits, more than five times the distance to the moon. The Americans will be lucky to achieve a mere six orbits next month. The logical next Soviet step: a fantastic manoeuvre involving the mooring of two spaceships, and from there, complete control of space and target earth.

  “And those are just the flights we know about,” says Jack.

  Hal Woodley joins them. They make room for him, imperceptibly straightening up.

  “Think what else they got up their sleeve,” says Vic.

  “Nowadays,” says Jack, “the real battles get fought in the press and in front of the TV cameras.”

  “So that’s what happened to Nixon,” says Woodley, and they all laugh.

  Jack opens another beer, offers it to Hal. “Cheers, sir.”

  “Prost. Call me Hal, Jack.” The others raise their glasses but, with the exception of Henry, avoid calling Hal Woodley anything at all, “sir” seeming overly formal for the setting, and “Hal” being inappropriate unless expressly invited.

  “Think of the disappointment, eh?” says Jack with a grin. “You’re a great Russian hero, a cosmonaut. You orbit the earth like a god, the whole world down below is your oyster, and where do they take you when you parachute down? Back to some godforsaken desert in the middle of Kazakhstan!”

  “I’d take six orbits over a hundred any day if it meant I could spend a week or two in Florida,” says Steve. “The waitresses alone are bound to be easier on the eyes.”

  “Not to mention the food!” says Vic.

  Froelich waits until they have stopped laughing. “By landing on the moon”—he speaks with the precision, the slight annoyance, of an expert—“the successful party demonstrates the ability to achieve instant liftoff which is necessary for the moon which is a moving target. When one is adding to this the superior Soviet guidance and control, there is the prospect also of ICBMs that launch to orbit where they cannot be shot down, then re-enter earth’s atmosphere to strike a target—” As Jack listens he speculates; Froelich with his PhD could be teaching at a university, patches on his elbows. Maybe he’s an eccentric, getting away from it all out here in the boondocks. Yet he clearly loves his subject. Why would he want to get away from it? “Sputnik made the West very afraid,” Froelich is saying. “But what is Sputnik?”

  “Fellow Traveller, I think is the translation,” says Jack.

  Froelich ignores the comment and continues. “A small transmitter on the head of a rocket. And also the last resting place of a dog who did not ask to be a cosmonaut.” The others chuckle, but Froelich does not smile. “Sputnik was not an intercontinental ballistic missile, it had to hit no target, just it had to … go up.” And he points. “They did not have the ICBM, we have this—America has this—before Russia, but ordinary people in the West become afraid and this fear becomes useful to….” He pauses, knits his brow, in search of the words. The other men wait respectfully for him to pick up the thread. Froelich is the picture of the absent-minded professor.

  Hal Woodley supplies the missing phrase: “The powers that be.”

  “Ja, thank you,” says Froelich. “By landing on the moon, the successful party demonstrates also the ability to rendezvous between two spacecrafts in orbit, and this is vital to making a military installation.”

  There is a moment of silence. He seems to have finished.

  Jack says, “You’re right, Henry, putting a man on the moon’ll give us a nice warm fuzzy feeling, but the bottom line is security. The Yanks ought to pour their dollars into the air force space program.”

  “It’s all politics,” says Hal. “Look what happened with the Arrow.”

  A moment of silence for the Avro Arrow, the most advanced jet fighter in the world. Created by Canadians, test-flown by Canadian pilots, scrapped by Canadian politicians.

  “And what did we buy instead?” says Steve with disgust. “Bomarcs.”

  “American hand-me-downs,” snorts Vic.

  “I don’t know why McNamara is stalling,” says Jack. “USAF’s got all kinds of good stuff in the works like their, uh—they’re working on those Midas satellites that tell you every time the enemy launches a missile, they’ve got a manned space glider in the works, what do they call it—?”

  “The Dyno-Soar,” says Vic.

&
nbsp; “Yeah, Time had a whole spread. NASA’s got Apollo but there’s plenty of work to go around. Kennedy ought to throw USAF a bone.”

  Vic says, “Uncle Sam don’t want to look like the Soviets, rattling the sabre in space.”

  Henry says, “You think space is not military now?”

  “NASA is a civilian agency,” argues Jack. “In fact, half the movers and shakers down in Houston are your countrymen, Henry.”

  “That’s right,” says Hal. “Look at von Braun and that other fellow—”

  “Arthur Rudolph,” says Jack. “Guy’s a managerial genius.”

  Froelich shrugs. “They worked for Nazis.”

  “Really?” says Steve.

  Jack winces. “Technically yes, but they were civilians. Scientists and dreamers.”

  Vic lifts his glass to Henry. “You got to hand it to the Germans, eh, when it comes to technology.”

  But Henry is still hunched, arms crossed, glass in hand. “Scientists and dreamers also caused the first atomic bomb to detonate at Los Alamos. They hold—held it together with masking tape. Very idealistic. It would stop Hitler. It kills instead millions of civilians.”

  There’s a pause. Then Jack says, “It ended the war, though, didn’t it?”

  Hal says, “Although I wonder if you could’ve found a single general who’d’ve made that particular call.”

  Another pause. Vic sighs. “The Yanks always get stuck with the dirty work.”

  Jack nods. “Yup.” Then smiles. “You know, Peter Sellers had the right idea. We ought to declare war on the Americans. They’ll come in and hammer us, then give us a whole bunch of aid and we’ll be better off than ever.” Henry shrugs again, sips. Jack continues. “We’re just lucky the nuclear types didn’t get together with the rocket types over in Germany during the war—they’d’ve had nuclear missiles.”

  Vic says, “I wonder why they didn’t.”

  Henry replies, “Because it is Jewish science.”

  The others look at him, but Henry does not continue.

  “What’s that?” asks Jack.

  “Atomic science.”

  Hal asks, “What do you mean, ‘Jewish’?”