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My father taught me this:
My father had been left on his own that early summer of the war. His older brothers were all enlisting: his mother was a widow with a clutch of young children to raise; and he was just old enough to get scooted out of the house first thing every morning so he’d stay out of everybody’s hair. He became the ringleader, since he was the only one who could spend all his waking hours on the gang. But with the excitement of the war growing everywhere, the other boys were soon caught up with him in an unfocused urge for greatness. The kite project became more ambitious the more they all dreamed it together. They were hunting up possibilities full-time.
The kite was still in place the next morning, and the morning after that. My father would get up just before sunrise and go out to see how it was doing. It was a sweet and private ritual (the only kind he would ever observe). He would stand by the dew-slick spool and wait for the sky to light up; he could never predict where, but somewhere among the bays of clear air a trail of fire would suddenly ignite, while beyond that the kite would be revealed browsing indifferently among gold gulfs in the swift coral cumulus. Then the bright line would slowly come falling out of the sky toward him: like a pen running out of gold ink, spattering and skipping stretches of dull rope, swooping down with gathering power until the field was drenched in dawn light. Long after my father died, the thought finally occurred to me that the one overriding enthusiasm of his life, flying, might have come to him right there, as his mind ascended that line back up into the clouds.
But the house came through just fine. When they emerged from the cyclone cellar a couple of hours later, they found everything perfect and in place, and a magnificent day forming: the cloudless air suffusing with cool light, the clean-washed clapboard of the house beading up with dew. My father, lost in admiration, took several moments to realize that something was missing.
The Dust Bowl was a distant memory by then; the abundance of the heartland in early summer was staggering, unimaginable, oceanic. My father had never been as far as Tulsa before–now he was spending day after day traveling roads and dirt tracks that all meandered across the countless curves of slow immensity, ruffled by every stray breeze, that filled up horizon after horizon all the way west. You could never tell where you might end up if you picked the wrong road: either the land might unfold to display a hushed little town still strewn with shredded bunting from their soldiers’ homecoming parade, or else it might close up and leave you stranded along some ill-defined track among the cornrows, dead-ending at a derelict gas station, windows broken, pumps busted, doors locked and rusted shut since the year you were born.
When I come upon those books now, packaged as collector’s items in used-book stores, I can’t help but feel the covers are all pieces of a single grand romance. The captions tell it all: My gun-butt smashed his skull! His body hurtled from the window! “Stay there,” she screamed, “and watch me jump!” She screamed as Spade dashed up the stairs. She fled in terror with the killer at her heels. He shared her evil secret. Their bodies swayed to the frenzied mating rhythm of the Tamboe. They were lost in a frantic half-crazed jazz world–hungry for love. Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear. A blunt novel; an unusual and hard-hitting novel; a revealing novel; an arresting novel; a novel of twisted lives and tormented loves; a novel about traveling salesmen.
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A photo shows my father standing in front of a fighter plane in the middle of a snowstorm, making an awkward half-turn to point at the name painted on the fuselage. The snowstorm is in Korea; the name is my mother’s. “Merry Christmas from your rice-paddy ranger” is scrawled on the reverse side. My parents had met at a dance for the cadets at flight school and the girls from a nearby college; he’d tried to impress her by calling himself a cowboy–and she, being a city girl away from home for the first time, had enjoyed being impressed. They had courted the way couples always have, by promising to be faithful to each other while he was away in the war.
