The Way the Crow Flies Page 32

  “To question U.S. is not to love U.S.S.R., a socialist is not a Communist.”

  “Are you a socialist?”

  “We are both.”

  “Both socialist and Commu—?”

  “Nein! You and I both are socialist.”

  “How do you figure that, Hank?”

  “You get sick, you go to hospital, doctors fix you, you don’t go broke.”

  “Medicare—”

  “Is socialist.”

  Jack laughs. “You’re right, some of our best policies are—”

  “Soviet Union is not even Communist, is totalitarian.” Froelich looks at his wrench as though he were angry at it—“Ricky, where have you put the pliers?!”

  The sparks die, Rick’s face pops up and he pushes the welding goggles back on his forehead. “They’re right there, Pops, hangin’ off your belt.”

  “Oh. Danke.”

  Jack sees Rick duck down again and the shower of sparks resumes. With luck, that boy will never have to fight a war. “Stalin killed more people than Hitler,” he says, and regrets it immediately—but why should he pussyfoot around Henry Froelich? The man is not asking to be patronized—he keeps that tattoo covered for a reason.

  “So?” says Henry. “One, one hundred, six million, this is supposed to make someone feel better? They are all butchers.”

  “I’m just agreeing with you, Henry, that’s why you don’t see Americans jumping over the Wall to get into East Berlin, that’s why the brain drain is all one way.”

  “Brain drain?”

  Jack pauses. This is a conversation he would be having whether or not he had ever heard of Oskar Fried. It’s fine. “It’s just a way of saying that, given a choice, many Soviet scientists would jump at the chance to come here and work.”

  “Ah”—Froelich nods—“you speak of defectors.”

  “I guess so.” Jack inhales the smoke along with the sharp air as Froelich straightens, intent upon the engine, scratches his neck, leaving a streak of grease above his white collar, and says, “Can you ever trust a traitor?”

  Jack is taken aback. He answers, almost peevishly, “They’re not necessarily traitors. Some are idealists.”

  “That’s what those Englishmen called themselves. The ones who defected….”

  Just then the screen door opens and, beyond the pool of light around the car, Jack sees a girl walking toward them in the dark.

  “Ricky….”

  It’s Karen Froelich.

  “Yeah Mum?”

  “Lizzie’s asking for you, hon.”

  The kid wipes his hands on a rag and heads into the house.

  “How are you doing, Karen?”

  “Oh I’m fine, Jack, how are you, are you worried?”

  “What, me? Naw. What do you make of all this nonsense?”

  She does not demur or “leave that to you men,” she says, “I think it’s bullshit.”

  He hesitates, then asks, “How do you mean?”

  She folds her arms across her chest—her sloppy man’s vest is the last article of clothing that would suggest female characteristics, and perhaps that’s why it’s impossible not to notice her breasts suddenly take shape with her gesture.

  “’Cause between the two of them they can already destroy the planet a couple of times over.” Her tone is offhand, in contrast with her words. “They don’t need Cuba as an excuse.” She pronounces it “Cooba.”

  Jack says, “Is that what you think they want to do?”

  “No, I think they want to, you know, scare us. Distract us so we won’t notice … all the other stuff, you know?”

  He nods. But he doesn’t know. He glances at Froelich, who watches his wife. He is in love with her. It must take a lot of love to run that household, those kids.

  “Cuba’s just caught in the middle,” she says. “Under Batista, they were just America’s whore. Fidel’s the best thing that ever happened to that country.”

  Jack can’t decide what is more startling: her use of the word “whore” or her use of the word “Fidel.” Not to mention “bullshit.”

  “I like the Kennedys at home”—her voice deceptively young in the darkness—“they’re really getting it together with civil rights down there. But the right-wing press has been baying for Castro’s blood for months, so…. Are you guys hungry?”

  Jack shakes his head. “No, I’m uh—thanks Karen.” They watch her go back in the house.

  Jack shifts his eyes from the screen door, and spits out a speck of tobacco. “We can only hope Khrushchev dismantles those weapons. It’s like General MacArthur said, eh? Never fight a war you don’t intend to win.”

  “Ach, win schmin, it’s all good for business, no?”

  “It’s about more than that, Hank, and you know it.”

  “What is it about, my friend?”

  “It’s about democracy. It’s about the fact that you and I come from worlds apart and wind up standing here in your driveway, disagreeing about something that in some countries would get us flung in jail for even talking about. And that includes Cuba.”

  Froelich draws on his pipe and releases the leathery aroma in a white stream. Jack sends a chain of smoke rings up to drift and distend in the October sky. The two of them look up at the spangled dome. It really is a remarkably clear night. A beautiful night on earth.

  Froelich says, “You want ein Bier, Jack?”

  “Ja, danke.”

  “What the heck is this?”

  Jack is in his basement, surveying a ramshackle of cardboard boxes that he had neatly collapsed and stacked after the move in August. They now form tunnels under blankets reinforced with every book from the bookshelves, as well as the bookshelves themselves. Heavy hardcover volumes secure the blanketed extremities—Winston Churchill’s memoirs, all six volumes, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, along with several years of carefully preserved National Geographic magazines, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Huron County phone book and God knows what else. Sleeping bags that had been laboriously rolled and stored for the winter now curtain an entrance arch fashioned from one end of the old metal baby crib. Jack reaches out and rescues part of today’s newspaper from the literary thatch-work as Mike’s head appears between the sleeping bags. His daughter emerges. “Hi Dad, want to come in?”

  “Watcha got in there?” asks Jack.

  “Rations,” she says, “and water.”

  “What are you up to, Mike?”

  Mike switches off the flashlight and crawls out. “Makin’ a shelter.”

  “A bomb shelter,” says his daughter, delighted. It’s a game to her, and that’s as it should be.

  “Up to bed now, sweetie.”

  “We haven’t finished, Dad—”

  “Up you go.”

  As she disappears up the steps, Jack says to his son, “Are you trying to give your sister nightmares again?”

  “No.” The boy turns red.

  “What did I tell you at supper?”

  “We’re on alert.”

  “Well that’s not make-believe, it’s real. I told you that ’cause I figured you were mature enough to understand.”

  “I’m mature,” he mumbles.

  “Well then, what kind of game are you playing here, Mike?”

  “It’s not a game, it’s how you do it, I saw it on TV.”

  “You saw it on TV. Do you believe everything you see on TV?”

  “No.”

  Jack turns to go back upstairs. “Take all this nonsense apart now and put everything back the way you found it.”

  “Dad—”

  “On the double.”

  “But—”

  Jack stops and turns, pointing a finger. “You heard me, mister, I want this thing gone. Dismantled.”

  He climbs into bed next to Mimi and tells her about Mike’s “bomb shelter.” Now that he’s describing it aloud, it’s actually kind of funny. She kisses him and says, “He’s like his father.”

  The boy is just trying to do his bit. It’
s hard sometimes to remember that he’s just a child. “Remind me tomorrow,” he says, “I want to take Mike over to the arena after school, pass the puck around.”

  Mimi strokes his chest and rests her head against his shoulder. As he reaches to turn out the bedside light, she says, “Did you talk to Mr. March?”

  “Mr.—? No, I … got a little busy toward the end of the day, but she seems fine now, don’t you think?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  The next words come easily. “I had to go into London. Meet with a guest lecturer for the officers’ school. Ran a bit late.”

  “Mmm,” she says.

  He closes his eyes.

  “Jack. Are you sure it’s okay for Madeleine to play with the Froelich girl?”

  “Colleen? Sure, why not?”

  “I hope so, because I let her go over there today.”

  That’s right, he was going to have a word with Mimi about that. Just as well she has come to it on her own. “Good,” he says.

  He listens until he hears her breathing change, then carefully turns onto his side. The first lie. But how is it different from the others he has told her in the past few days? “It’s just sabre-rattling. Nothing to worry about.” They are not really lies. They are another way of saying, “I’ll look after you.” Another way of saying, “I love you.”

  In the privacy of the darkness, the fleecy comfort of his sleeping family, Jack reflects on Oskar Fried alone in his furnished apartment. That is how we will win this war—how we will ensure that there is a world for our children to inherit. By getting as many Oskar Frieds as possible to come over to our side. And in a small but direct way, Jack is helping. He closes his eyes again and revises his expectations of Oskar Fried. Let the man cloister himself in his apartment if that’s what he wants. He isn’t here to make Jack McCarthy’s life more interesting. He is here to help win this cold war that is set to boil over.

  But Jack’s eyes will not stay closed. His lids have that spring-loaded feeling. He gets up, goes quietly into the hallway and looks in on his daughter. She is asleep. Damp child’s brow, wrinkle of flannel PJs and grimy old Bugsy. My child is safe.

  BIG WARS AND LITTLE WARS

  A Russian quite recently said

  ’In color TV we’re ahead.

  Your pictures confuse,

  With all sorts of hues,

  But ours are the best—they’re all red.

  TV Guide, fall 1962

  IT’S RAINING MILDLY after school the next day. Madeleine has just come from playing naked Barbie dolls with Lisa Ridelle. Auriel was at the dentist. It was entirely different being two rather than three. They sat, somewhat at a loss, on Lisa’s bedroom floor, looking through her mum’s movie magazines. Then, to Madeleine’s dismay, Lisa brought out her Barbie and Ken—she hadn’t even known Lisa possessed them—and undressed the dolls until they were both bare naked. She stuck a straight pin between Ken’s legs for his “thing” and made him lie down on top of Barbie. Madeleine said, “I just remembered, I have to go.” She felt an overpowering dread backing up from her stomach, like a sewer, as Lisa began to speculate with carefree horror on “the facts of life.” Madeleine hoped she’d left in time, before the smell came out of her and filled the Ridelles’ house.

  Now she is safely outside, with the soft aroma of rain and worms. It’s raining just enough for the worms to be out basking. She and Colleen are crouched, collecting them from the side of the road in front of Madeleine’s house. A pair of yellow boots appears. Marjorie. “You know what, Colleen?”

  “What?” Colleen barely glances up.

  “Madeleine isn’t really your friend. She’s just using you.”

  “Go away, Margarine.” Madeleine doesn’t bother to look up from under the hood of her red raincoat. She is not collecting worms so much as training them. Right now she is using a Popsicle stick to guide one into a worm corral made of dirt and pebbles. She is not really fond of worms, but doesn’t want Colleen to think she’s chicken of them either.

  “She’s just using you to get to your brother,” says Marjorie.

  Colleen doesn’t take the bait.

  “Shut up,” says Madeleine nonchalantly to the pair of boots, and concentrates on her worm, placing the Popsicle stick now on one side of it, now on the other, watching it slowly slime along—short-long, short-long—into the paddock we go.

  Marjorie stamps her yellow boot. “It’s true! She told me.”

  “It’s twue,” repeats a voice behind her.

  This time Colleen chuckles, because it’s hard not to find it funny, how Grace says her “r’s,” especially if you aren’t used to it. Grace’s rubber boots are now in view—too big for her, swamp-green.

  Madeleine watches Colleen pull a long worm from the ground with the expertise of a robin. She waits for the worm to snap but it doesn’t, merely releases and recoils softly from the earth. Colleen drops it into her coffee can with the rest of her churning harvest, good to the last drop. Madeleine tends to her worm and sings softly in a cowboy accent, “‘I’m an old cowhand, on the Rio Grande….’”

  Marjorie almost shouts, “You should just shut up, Madeleine McCarthy because Ricky is mine and you know it!” Madeleine laughs. Marjorie persists—“He asked me on a picnic to Rock Bass, so there.”

  Madeleine nudges her worm as it makes the final endless centimetre into the corral, which she is just about to close with her Popsicle stick, and she is thinking about Popsicle sticks and their myriad uses, for example you can sharpen them to make knives, you can also make beautiful pagodas and lamps—when the yellow boot smacks down, obliterating the worm, the corral, a world. She looks up.

  Marjorie says, “I’m sorry, Madeleine, but you deserved that.”

  Colleen rocks back on her heels and looks up at Marjorie. “My brother wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

  Marjorie starts backing away, even though Colleen doesn’t sound angry, nor has she made any move to rise. Marjorie has backed halfway across the street, and Grace has followed, when Marjorie shoots it like a spitball—“You’re a dirty Indian!”—then turns and runs, screaming as though she were being chased and pounded, although the only person following her is Grace, flopping away in her too-big boots.

  Madeleine is on her feet. “Aren’t you gonna slug her?!” Shouting after Marjorie, “Mange d’la marde, Margarine!”

  “Ci pa gran chouz,” says Colleen. And, as though she has just tossed back a fish, “She’s not worth it.”

  Madeleine looks down at her smashed worm, bluish in the middle, still writhing at either end. Colleen takes the Popsicle stick, scrapes the worm up off the ground and drops it into the can.

  “Still good,” she says.

  Jack has sent his admin clerk out on an errand. Now he leans over the man’s typewriter and pecks out Oskar Fried’s name and address onto an envelope. He folds an empty sheet of foolscap into the envelope, licks the flap, seals it and affixes a stamp. He adds it to two others of different sizes and shades and heads out to mail them. Oskar Fried must be seen to receive a normal amount of mail. Oskar Fried must be seen to be normal in every way, and therefore not seen at all. Jack tucks the letters in his inside pocket and steps into the rain.

  Cars drive slowly past, careful not to splash him; the parade square is shiny black. In spite of himself, Jack is comforted by the drizzle, the sky blanketed in grey. A groundless comfort, he knows—today’s aircraft and missiles don’t need visibility to do their work. Tensions have not eased, but they have not worsened. Khrushchev has diverted some ships from the blockade zone but has speeded construction on the missile sites. The Canadian air force and navy are tracking Soviet subs off the east coast. The U.S. has intercepted its first Soviet cargo ship without incident. Jack stops in at the phone booth.

  “How’s the view from Washington, Si?”

  “Well, from what I can see out my window through the welter of monuments, I’d say no one’s letting out their breath quite yet.”

  “W
e’re all just waiting for Khrushchev to blink.”

  “He’s batted his eyelashes once or twice, but who knows, he may just be flirting with disaster.”

  It’s odd how quickly we become accustomed to crisis. We ought not to be capable of desultory conversations to do with imminent annihilation. But we adapt. Blessing or curse? Jack wonders.

  “You Canucks certainly took your time,” adds Simon.

  Jack knows he is being needled. “Hail to the chief, eh?” Dief has finally gone public with the alert, and made a statement in the House supporting Kennedy. “It’s hard to believe that in this day and age a Canadian prime minister waits to take his orders from Whitehall.”

  “Yes, but you lot are always caught in the middle. And the Americans have an unhealthy obsession with Cuba.”

  “I’d be obsessed too if I had a whack of nukes parked ninety miles off my coast.”

  “Perhaps, but this crisis is a predictable outcome.”

  “You sound like my neighbour,” says Jack.

  “Really? Intelligent chap.”

  “At least Kennedy’s got the guts to go eyeball to eyeball with this character.”

  “He’d do better to put a leash on his brother,” says Simon casually.

  “What’s that? How do you mean?”

  “It’s not just Robert, of course, they’re all irrational when it comes to Cuba. Almost a form of hysteria, really. Fidel turned down the New York Giants when they scouted him and the Americans never forgave him.”

  Fidel. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Pukka gen, mate.”

  “Holy Dinah!” Jack laughs as much at Simon’s use of the old expression as at the thought of Castro pitching for the Giants. Pukka gen—very RAF.

  “And any self-respecting Latin American leader would take offence at plots aimed at making his beard fall out.”

  “What?” A cadet is waiting politely to use the phone. Jack turns away—out of lip-reading range. “Who’s making his beard fall out?”

  “Who do you think would come up with a cockamamie scheme like that? The CIA have had a mongrel assortment of agents down there, spookin’ about for ways to discredit and/or kill Castro and trigger an uprising, for years. The Americans lost a cash cow, they want it back.”