“Yes! They’re coming,” cried Bill. “Feel them? One, two, a dozen! Oh, God, yes.”
And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots hitting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the grass like bodies, and the swarming of tapes tries of white silk or smoke flung across the disturbed air.
“Bill!”
“No!” he yelled. “I’m okay! They’re all around. Get back! Yes!”
There was a tumult in the garden. The hedges shivered with propeller wind. The grass lay down its nape. A tin watering can blew across the yard. Birds were flung from trees. Dogs all around the block yelped. A siren, from another war, sounded ten miles away. A storm had arrived, and was that thunder or field artillery?
And one last time, I heard Bill say, almost quietly, “1 didn’t know, oh, God, I didn’t know what I was doing.” And a final fading sound of “Please.”
And the rain fell briefly to mix with
the tears on his face.
And the rain stopped and the wind was still.
“Well.” He wiped his eyes, and blew his nose on his big hankie, and looked at the hankie as if it were the map of France. “It’s time to go. Do you think I’ll get lost again?”
“If you do, come here.”
“Sure.” He moved across the lawn, his eyes clear. “How much do I owe you, Sigmund?”
“Only this,” I said. I gave him a hug. He walked out to the street. I followed to watch. When he got to the corner, he seemed to be con fused. He turned to his right, then his left. I waited and then called gently:
“To your left, Bill!”
“God bless you, buster!” he said, and waved.
He turned and went into his house.
They found him a month later, wandering two miles from home. A month after that he was in the hospital, in France all the time now, and Rickenbacker in the bed to his right and von Richthofen in the cot to his left.
The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of ‘18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes.
And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.
Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can’t sleep and I stand looking at Bui and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a glass of sherry at them.
“Farewell, Lafayette,” I say. “Lafayette, farewell.”
And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.
Banshee
It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spider web and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.
It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.
I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of final screenplay in my pocket, and my film director employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.
Then, I knocked.
The door flew wide almost instantly. John Hampton was there, shoving a glass of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.
“Good God, kid, you got me curious. Get that coat off. Give me the script Finished it, eh? So you say. You got me curious. Glad you called from Dublin. The house is empty. Clara’s in Paris with the kids. Well have a good read, knock the hell out of your scenes, drink a bottle, be in bed by two and—what’s that?”
The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.