Chapter 2

Merle read every ribbon I had, left to right, and never once glanced at the duffel by my foot, and that was his first mistake…

It didn't look like anybody's mistake right then.

I was standing in my own doorway with my hands empty, Imogene had my mother's quilt bunched in both fists, and the man on my pillow was in no hurry at all.

"Hand me that shirt, would you, soldier?" Merle said.

It was on my chair, right by my hip.

I had three stripes and two rockers on my sleeve, and he could read them as well as anybody.

I'd like to say I knocked him down.

I took his shirt by the collar and held it out to him.

I've gone over that a good many times, and all I can tell you is that a sergeant hands a man what he asks for before he thinks.

He got up and took his trousers off my bedpost, and I looked at the wallpaper while he stepped into them.

He talked while he did up his buttons, in the same warm voice he used at the company picnic.

"You'll want to see your dad. He's looking tired, so I've kept him on days."

He tied his tie in my mirror and took his time getting the knot right.

"Alvin goes in front of the board Tuesday morning. He's twenty-five, Thelma's got a baby coming in October, and the Army's still short of boys for Japan. I'm going down there in a clean collar to tell them the plant can't spare him."

He sat down on my chair to put on his shoes.

"I expect they'll listen. They generally do."

He tied the left one and then the right.

"And this place runs thirty-one dollars a month at Farmers and Merchants. Some months it's run late, and nobody's said a word about it. Nobody's going to."

He stood up and looked at me, friendly as a neighbor over a fence.

"I'm not saying this to be ugly. I'm saying it because you've been away."

He went past me in the doorway, close enough that his sleeve brushed my ribbons.

All told, he had been in reach for about five minutes.

I was as fit as I would ever be in my life, and I never laid a hand on him.

I was doing sums.

He went down the stairs whistling along with the radio down the block, and I listened for the third stair.

It never creaked.

He knew about the third stair.

I carried the duffel down to the kitchen and sat at my own table with it between my feet.

Ten minutes later Imogene came down in a faded blue house dress with her hair pinned up, and she tied on an apron as if it were any Thursday.

She took a cup down from the shelf, held it up to the window, turned it against the light and ran her thumb around the rim before she poured.

She never used to do that.

She set it in front of me and went and stood against the sink, as far off as the room allowed.

"How long?" I said.

"Since the first winter you were over."

"That's nineteen months."

"Eighteen," she said. "It was Christmas."

That was Imogene. She would correct a number with the house on fire.

"You going to tell me why?"

She looked at the floor for a while.

"Would it help?"

"No."

"Then not today."

Across town the plant whistle blew the shift change, and we both waited for it to finish.

"Do you want me to go?" she said.

"Go where?"

She didn't have an answer, and neither did I.

If she went anywhere, the whole town would know by Sunday, and Merle Ketcham would get busy on Tuesday.

"I'll take the back porch," I said.

She nodded at the bag.

"What have you got in that thing? It hit the floor like a sash weight."

There it was, my simple plan, right in front of me.

But anything she knew, Merle Ketcham could know by suppertime.

"Army stuff," I said.

That was the first lie I ever told my wife, and I was surprised how little it weighed.

She fried eggs for supper and I ate them, because I didn't know what else a man did.

After dark I told her I'd look at the fuse box, and I carried the duffel down the cellar steps.

There was one bulb on a cord by the coal bin.

I unrolled the greased rag on the workbench.

On April 11, on the Adriatic side of Italy, our left engine quit on takeoff at about a hundred feet.

Lieutenant Elwood Applegate was our pilot, and he was twenty-four, and he kept her wings level all the way down into a vineyard, which is why two of the six of us walked away from it.

There's no ribbon for an accident.

That morning I had gone over that engine with a flashlight, the way I did every morning, and put my hand on the cowling and told the Lieutenant she was good.

Two days later the doctor let me up, and I went out to the wreck with a wrench to find out what I had missed.

The Army wrote it down as engine failure, cause undetermined, and nobody had time to care.

I held the rod up under the bulb.

The crack ran most of the way across the shank, and the rod had bent there and pulled it open, so you could look inside.

The part that tore that morning was bright as a new dime.

The rest was dark, with old oil baked into it, and a crack only goes dark like that when it has been there a long time.

Beside the little diamond was the thing I had carried home to ask about, a number no bigger than a grain of rice.

It was a 9, with a nick in its tail, the kind a steel die gets if somebody drops it on concrete.

Every inspector in an engine shop has a number, so that when a part goes bad, you can tell whose hands it went through.

So somebody in this town had held that rod under a good light, looked at that crack and picked up a stamp.

I had come five thousand miles to sit across a table from that person.

Over my head the water ran. My wife was washing my cup.