I wish brain doctors could come up with the reason why certain memories fire through decades of burial, at the most incongruous times.
I grew up in an economically eclectic neighborhood. We were the poor Italians. There were a couple of comfortable Italian families, one or two poor German families, at least one middle-class German family... Now these weren't immigrant Italians and Germans...and Poles and Slovaks...but the children -- and probably grandchildren -- of these immigrants, just like my father is.
Right next door to us to the south was the only Mexican family on the block, the Fonsecas. I don't know if the mother and the father had come FROM Mexico, or if they were the children of immigrants, but they spoke Spanish to each other, Mrs. Fonseca speaking only Spanish, and Mr. Fonseca a heavily accented, very broken English, except when he was speaking Spanish to his family or other Hispanic friends. They were poor as well.
Theirs was a large family, just like ours, but with four boys and two girls. All of the Fonseca children are older than I am, all but one of or beyond high school age when I was still in diapers. The one exception is Ben, his father's namesake, so he was called, simply, "Junior."
Junior is one year older than I am, and, with no other boys on the block close to us in age, it was almost required of us to be friends. Junior and I had our ups and downs, as friends often do, with his sensitivities and mine often working against each other. As I have written in the past, my family was poor, but I never knew that. I have the same understanding about the Fonsecas. It seems to me now that Junior's family made him more aware of their circumstances than my family made me aware of ours. Mr. Fonseca was a laborer/entrepreneur. He owned a tractor, the kind you might see on a very small farm. In the summer he attached a mower unit to the back and earned money mowing people's fields. In the winter he attached a blade to the thing somewhere and plowed people's driveways and parking lots. In between the plowing and mowing jobs, his garage was employed with fixing cars. Mr. Fonseca did a fair amount of this work, but his sons did quite a lot of it. And as Junior got older, more and more was required of him to help the family earn money. As soon as he could reach the pedals on the tractor, he was mowing the fields. When he was strong enough and had enough practice, he was doing body work on cars.
But I digress. Junior was an employee of his father's enterprise almost as early as he was a member of the family. I never understood this responsibility to his father, and it often affected our friendship.
Junior had some cousins who lived about a mile away, in the next suburb to the north. As I recall, there were five brothers, all ranging in age from about a year younger than I, to about eight years younger. I didn't like these kids. When they came over to visit the Fonsecas they played differently than any of my other friends; the older ones were mean to me, they often spoke Spanish to each other, looking at me, and then laughing...and Junior was at these times in on the joke. Any play with them was usually short-lived, as I wound up either fighting with one or more of them, or I would just walk away and go inside my house.
One summer day -- I figure I was about 9 or 10 years old -- Junior and I saw a kid across the street operating a lemonade stand, and we thought that what that kid deserved was competition! The next day we pulled my wagon out of the shed, and I procured the can of lemonade powder from my mother's cupboard. Junior supplied the water, the Dixie cups and the location -- the sidewalk in front of his house...as that's as far as his water hose would reach. He also brought out some newspaper to lay in the wagon to soak up any spills. It also worked to hide our "till," the money we were raking in selling the cups of lemonade at a nickel each.
We had been working all day and probably had about a whole dollar's worth of loose change underneath the newpaper when, in mid-afternoon, Junior's cousins poured out of their father's car at the curb. We made our sales pitch, and one of them had a quarter. I poured the drink and gave it to him, and he gave his quarter to Junior. Junior flipped up the sheet of newspaper to make the change, exposing our fortune to his cousins' eyes. I don't know now if it's hindsight, or if it was in that moment, but I resented that Junior had flashed our till to them. It seemed inevitable, I guess, but within a few seconds one of the cousins violently threw aside the newspaper -- and the cups and the pitcher of lemonade -- to make a grab for our money. I was so angry he did it that I can't remember if he got any or all of it. From that day forward I refused to have anything to do with those kids, vowing to myself to just leave whenever they showed up.
I recall that the Chicago winters of the mid- to late-1970s were pretty harsh. As happens too often in snow-belt cities, poor people live in inadequately heated homes and they resort to alternative methods to keep warm, some of which are deceptively unsafe. And so it was one evening that following winter when Junior's cousins' family, living in a converted garage across the street from the gradeschool they all attended, went to sleep one winter evening with one of these alternative heating methods in use. I don't remember what it was found to have been -- a space heater or an open oven. Whatever it was, something near it caught fire, and the small apartment was rapidly consumed by the flames, and all but their father were consumed with it.
The memory of this event came to me yesterday while driving to work. Nothing triggered it, that I'm aware of. Later in the day I caught a news headline about a family of 5 who died in a Missouri fire. I found it odd to have thought of Junior's cousins in the morning, and then to see the news story later in the day.
In the aftermath of the tragedy I failed to see the depth of Junior's pain over the loss of his cousins. I could only remember them as I knew them, with dread and animosity. I made a comment about them, something to the effect of how we wouldn't have to worry about them stealing our lemonade money any more, and that deeply hurt Junior, another dent in the finish of our friendship.
Any time their visages swim up to the viewing screen of my memory, I first remember the lemonade stand incident, and how angry it made me. Then I remember that their lives didn't progress much farther past that moment, and that their lives ended in a hell of terror and pain. And I always feel regretful that I hated them so much as a kid, that I made that stupid comment to Junior, and that I don't think of their tragic deaths BEFORE I get to the lemonade stand.
But I guess we remember certain events chronologically, and that serves us to remember life's lessons that way.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
Rare Perfection
Have you ever had one of those days, or one of those projects, where it seems that, no matter what you do, things just work out perfectly?
I took the day off Friday and had planned, among other things, to go grocery shopping and have a steak dinner on the table and ready for Mrs. Farrago's return from work. As it turned out, I spent entirely TOO much time loafing, and ran myself out of time to be able to do anything right, but Mrs. Farrago called from the office to tell me that she had to work late, and she really wasn't hungry, anyway.
Her elderly father, who lives with us, who is dealing with Parkinson's Disease and therefore doesn't always think in a straight line, offered to make a grocery run regardless, and said that we could have the steaks on Saturday instead. I agreed.
Had I gone to the store, I would have picked out the best looking cuts of ribeye, in my opinion the most flavorful cut of steak for the money. And I would have spent just shy of an eternity opening the tops of the corn husks to make sure that the kernels weren't shriveled in any of the ears of corn I picked out. But Mrs. Farrago's father picked the steaks -- top sirloin -- which I feared would be tough as leather by the time they came off the grill. I also noticed that none of the corn husks had been pried open, so it was anybody's guess as to how withered or worm-eaten the corn would be when it got to the table.
Saturday afternoon I fired up the gas grill and started prepping the food. When I husked the corn I saw that each of the three ears was completely unblemished all the way to the tip. Not ONE SHRIVELED KERNEL! Our method for corn-on-the-cob-on-the-grill is to completely husk the ear, then wrap it in aluminum foil and lay it directly on the grate. With the corn over the rear burner, I cut the rind of fat/gristle off of the steaks and noticed that each eight-ounce cut appeared to be a little more marbled than I expected. I ground just a little black pepper on one side of each steak and then put them on the grill, peppered side down. Then I ground another light dusting of pepper on the bare side. All three burners were on high, and I left them that way to sear the steaks two minutes on one side and two minutes on the other. I flipped the steaks again, rolled the corn 180 degrees, and I turned the two front burners to medium and closed the lid.
I went inside fully intent on returning in five minutes to flip the steaks and roll the corn, but I was distracted, and it was probably more like six or seven minutes. A minute or two doesn't sound like much, but it's surprising what that length of time over a flaring, flaming grill can do to a fine piece of meat. I ran out to the grill to find just the bare minimum of flames flaring up to lick at the steaks. I turned them each one last time, admiring the deep brown bars that the grill slats had seared into the steaks. The flesh looked just a little too crispy, however, and I feared that I had ruined at least one of them.
Another five minutes over the covered heat and I plucked the steaks and the corn off of the grill and brought them inside. Just to make sure, I cut open each steak to make sure it was done. Each looked a little too pink, but not raw.
We sat down to dinner and I put the first morsel of meat into my mouth, and I could not believe it was I who had cooked this humble little piece of bovine flesh to such tender, juicy, medium-rare perfection!! It was no Filet Mignon, but it certainly changed my mind about sirloin! And the corn! It was sweet, and tender, and cooked just right to golden perfectness! It made mundane old butter seem a heavenly nectar!
All too soon it was over. We three sat there panting and practically licking our plates clean and wishing each steak had been about three ounces more, each ear of corn about two inches longer!
I am not a cook. I am grillmaster by default, since Mrs. Farrago will not go near the grill. I have a repertiore of burgers, steak, salmon and chicken. None of my preparations have fancy names around them, just what they is; I am a blue-collar griller. And too often I burn one or more parts of the meal. But not Saturday. Saturday the god of fire or the ghost of Julia Child or something smiled favorably down upon me and granted me that elusive culinary perfection.
Now if only such an occurrence could flare up like a cold or a rash, and last for days....
I took the day off Friday and had planned, among other things, to go grocery shopping and have a steak dinner on the table and ready for Mrs. Farrago's return from work. As it turned out, I spent entirely TOO much time loafing, and ran myself out of time to be able to do anything right, but Mrs. Farrago called from the office to tell me that she had to work late, and she really wasn't hungry, anyway.
Her elderly father, who lives with us, who is dealing with Parkinson's Disease and therefore doesn't always think in a straight line, offered to make a grocery run regardless, and said that we could have the steaks on Saturday instead. I agreed.
Had I gone to the store, I would have picked out the best looking cuts of ribeye, in my opinion the most flavorful cut of steak for the money. And I would have spent just shy of an eternity opening the tops of the corn husks to make sure that the kernels weren't shriveled in any of the ears of corn I picked out. But Mrs. Farrago's father picked the steaks -- top sirloin -- which I feared would be tough as leather by the time they came off the grill. I also noticed that none of the corn husks had been pried open, so it was anybody's guess as to how withered or worm-eaten the corn would be when it got to the table.
Saturday afternoon I fired up the gas grill and started prepping the food. When I husked the corn I saw that each of the three ears was completely unblemished all the way to the tip. Not ONE SHRIVELED KERNEL! Our method for corn-on-the-cob-on-the-grill is to completely husk the ear, then wrap it in aluminum foil and lay it directly on the grate. With the corn over the rear burner, I cut the rind of fat/gristle off of the steaks and noticed that each eight-ounce cut appeared to be a little more marbled than I expected. I ground just a little black pepper on one side of each steak and then put them on the grill, peppered side down. Then I ground another light dusting of pepper on the bare side. All three burners were on high, and I left them that way to sear the steaks two minutes on one side and two minutes on the other. I flipped the steaks again, rolled the corn 180 degrees, and I turned the two front burners to medium and closed the lid.
I went inside fully intent on returning in five minutes to flip the steaks and roll the corn, but I was distracted, and it was probably more like six or seven minutes. A minute or two doesn't sound like much, but it's surprising what that length of time over a flaring, flaming grill can do to a fine piece of meat. I ran out to the grill to find just the bare minimum of flames flaring up to lick at the steaks. I turned them each one last time, admiring the deep brown bars that the grill slats had seared into the steaks. The flesh looked just a little too crispy, however, and I feared that I had ruined at least one of them.
Another five minutes over the covered heat and I plucked the steaks and the corn off of the grill and brought them inside. Just to make sure, I cut open each steak to make sure it was done. Each looked a little too pink, but not raw.
We sat down to dinner and I put the first morsel of meat into my mouth, and I could not believe it was I who had cooked this humble little piece of bovine flesh to such tender, juicy, medium-rare perfection!! It was no Filet Mignon, but it certainly changed my mind about sirloin! And the corn! It was sweet, and tender, and cooked just right to golden perfectness! It made mundane old butter seem a heavenly nectar!
All too soon it was over. We three sat there panting and practically licking our plates clean and wishing each steak had been about three ounces more, each ear of corn about two inches longer!
I am not a cook. I am grillmaster by default, since Mrs. Farrago will not go near the grill. I have a repertiore of burgers, steak, salmon and chicken. None of my preparations have fancy names around them, just what they is; I am a blue-collar griller. And too often I burn one or more parts of the meal. But not Saturday. Saturday the god of fire or the ghost of Julia Child or something smiled favorably down upon me and granted me that elusive culinary perfection.
Now if only such an occurrence could flare up like a cold or a rash, and last for days....
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Travelog San Francisco
Having been there for any duration worth mentioning only twice before, and at those times my freedom to roam dictated by my work schedule, I looked to this vacation as one who had never been to San Francisco. There were things and places I had seen in my earlier visits, but I had no time to explore them before. This time I was there for fun, and Mrs. Farrago was with me!
We arrived Sunday afternoon, July 16, 2006, checked in to our hotel, the White Swann Inn, and took in the main avenue of Chinatown. In the evening we enjoyed a quiet dinner at Café Claude, nestled in the alley named Claude.
On Monday we met Rik, the Golden Gate Greeter provided by our hotel. He took us out to Haight-Ashbury and to Golden Gate Park. It was a long, though thoroughly enjoyable, 3-hour walk. In the evening Mrs. Farrago and I dined on sushi at Sushi-man, right next door and perilously close to the Nob Hill theatre, with its all male, nude review, featuring Big Giovanni.
Tuesday we walked UP Mason Street to California Street, where we took the cable car down to Market Street. From there we walked the Embarcadero to Pier 41 and our scheduled departure to Alcatraz Island. The historical building there that was the famous prison is an experience that must be had. Don’t let anyone discourage you by saying it’s just a tourist attraction. It’s an interesting, vital piece of the city’s history. And save yourself a few extra bucks by booking directly with Blue and Gold Fleet, as they’re the only ones with docking rights at Alcatraz.
Tuesday evening, due to the fact that the Hyde Street cable car line was not working, and there was a dearth of buses heading in the direction we wanted to go, Mrs. Farrago and I climbed four blocks up Hyde Street to view Lombard Street, the “crookedest street” in the country, perhaps the world. Then we climbed another four blocks, turned right and walked down four more blocks until we arrived at The Matterhorn, a Swiss fondue restaurant. It was during these afternoon walks that I discovered I would rather climb up the hills than walk down, as walking down caused me considerable shin pain. Why? Who knows?
Wednesday, after an inexorably long wait for a rental car (a Mustang convertible!), we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and up to Napa Valley, stopping in the town of Napa for a brief wine tasting before heading up to St. Helena and our Bed & Breakfast, the Ink House. Dinner was at Cindy’s Back Street Kitchen, and was quite delicious.
Thursday morning we visited the Rombauer (think “The Joy of Cooking”) winery for a tour of their half-mile of man-dug caves and a tasting. For lunch we wound up back at Cindy’s, and it was just as delicious. That afternoon was a tour and tasting at the Hall winery in St. Helena by a friend who works there. Thursday night found us at Michael Chiarello’s Tra Vigne Ristorante, stuffing down the delicious veal and papardelle dishes despite having not yet fully digesting lunch!
Friday morning was a quick tour of Hall Rutherford winery with our same friend, and then we were on our way back to San Francisco by way of the Sonoma Valley which, in our opinion, was far inferior to the Napa Valley. Dinner with friends at Scoma’s restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf, and to our hotel near the airport to continue digesting Wednesday’s dinner!!
Saturday, July 22, 2006, was a late wake-up, turn in the car and hop on the plane back home.
San Francisco has a quirky vitality. Her attitude shaped by – and in spite of – calamity, she is a stubborn city, audaciously perching on hillsides and precipitous streets despite hardship and extra effort required to traverse them. Residents seem oblivious to the hardship, effort and hazards, not to mention her contrary and somewhat bizarre weather patterns. An outsider, winded from a one-block, 30 percent grade, 50-foot climb in altitude, may at first find it difficult to understand one’s love for this city. But it is there, as fierce a passion as anyone can have for a patch of earth.
It is her vitality that seduces a visitor. How can cold summer weather, near-vertical traffic arteries and the ever-present threat of “the big one” win over the hearts and minds of so many people? I don’t know, but there she is, that glowing, golden City By the Bay, bustling and humming, clinging to those impossibly steep hills like bees to a hive.
We arrived Sunday afternoon, July 16, 2006, checked in to our hotel, the White Swann Inn, and took in the main avenue of Chinatown. In the evening we enjoyed a quiet dinner at Café Claude, nestled in the alley named Claude.
On Monday we met Rik, the Golden Gate Greeter provided by our hotel. He took us out to Haight-Ashbury and to Golden Gate Park. It was a long, though thoroughly enjoyable, 3-hour walk. In the evening Mrs. Farrago and I dined on sushi at Sushi-man, right next door and perilously close to the Nob Hill theatre, with its all male, nude review, featuring Big Giovanni.
Tuesday we walked UP Mason Street to California Street, where we took the cable car down to Market Street. From there we walked the Embarcadero to Pier 41 and our scheduled departure to Alcatraz Island. The historical building there that was the famous prison is an experience that must be had. Don’t let anyone discourage you by saying it’s just a tourist attraction. It’s an interesting, vital piece of the city’s history. And save yourself a few extra bucks by booking directly with Blue and Gold Fleet, as they’re the only ones with docking rights at Alcatraz.
Tuesday evening, due to the fact that the Hyde Street cable car line was not working, and there was a dearth of buses heading in the direction we wanted to go, Mrs. Farrago and I climbed four blocks up Hyde Street to view Lombard Street, the “crookedest street” in the country, perhaps the world. Then we climbed another four blocks, turned right and walked down four more blocks until we arrived at The Matterhorn, a Swiss fondue restaurant. It was during these afternoon walks that I discovered I would rather climb up the hills than walk down, as walking down caused me considerable shin pain. Why? Who knows?
Wednesday, after an inexorably long wait for a rental car (a Mustang convertible!), we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and up to Napa Valley, stopping in the town of Napa for a brief wine tasting before heading up to St. Helena and our Bed & Breakfast, the Ink House. Dinner was at Cindy’s Back Street Kitchen, and was quite delicious.
Thursday morning we visited the Rombauer (think “The Joy of Cooking”) winery for a tour of their half-mile of man-dug caves and a tasting. For lunch we wound up back at Cindy’s, and it was just as delicious. That afternoon was a tour and tasting at the Hall winery in St. Helena by a friend who works there. Thursday night found us at Michael Chiarello’s Tra Vigne Ristorante, stuffing down the delicious veal and papardelle dishes despite having not yet fully digesting lunch!
Friday morning was a quick tour of Hall Rutherford winery with our same friend, and then we were on our way back to San Francisco by way of the Sonoma Valley which, in our opinion, was far inferior to the Napa Valley. Dinner with friends at Scoma’s restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf, and to our hotel near the airport to continue digesting Wednesday’s dinner!!
Saturday, July 22, 2006, was a late wake-up, turn in the car and hop on the plane back home.
San Francisco has a quirky vitality. Her attitude shaped by – and in spite of – calamity, she is a stubborn city, audaciously perching on hillsides and precipitous streets despite hardship and extra effort required to traverse them. Residents seem oblivious to the hardship, effort and hazards, not to mention her contrary and somewhat bizarre weather patterns. An outsider, winded from a one-block, 30 percent grade, 50-foot climb in altitude, may at first find it difficult to understand one’s love for this city. But it is there, as fierce a passion as anyone can have for a patch of earth.
It is her vitality that seduces a visitor. How can cold summer weather, near-vertical traffic arteries and the ever-present threat of “the big one” win over the hearts and minds of so many people? I don’t know, but there she is, that glowing, golden City By the Bay, bustling and humming, clinging to those impossibly steep hills like bees to a hive.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
A Lesson of The Bahamas
My recent trip to The Bahamas was a personally very revealing experience for me. Superficially I learned that, no matter how far I’ve come on the career journey, no matter how well I may have managed to marry, I ain’t rich. The Atlantis Resort as a vacation destination requires one to be very well-to-do or unconcerned with mounting credit card debt!
But I learned a philosophical lesson about myself, something I had not anticipated learning, nor had I even suspected would be a topic I’d encounter.
It’s difficult to say this without sounding racist. A personal pride of mine is that I am fairly open minded – or at least I try to be – about most things. A person’s race, gender, sexual preference, religious beliefs or other personal traits do not affect how I treat that person personally or professionally. So I am reluctant to publish, as it were, something that sounds patently racist: I generally have never found African-American women attractive. There have been a few exceptions, but the general feeling has prevailed. It was always a point of potential personal embarrassment for me as an open-minded, easy-going, white man of the world.
I wasn’t oblivious to the fact, nor was I uncomfortable to know, that the population of the Bahamas is 85% black. The Bahamians are an English-speaking people, having gained their independence from Great Britain only 33 years ago. Most have an island accent of varying thickness, but I mistook a lot of them for Americans, their speech was so unaccented.
After a few days of interacting with hotel staff for various reasons, I became more aware of the occasional attraction I felt towards some of the female staff. I am a flirt in general, always trying to get a laugh or a smile from any woman, so it came as a surprise when I felt the tug in the tummy when the ol’ libido was tickled. She was fairly dark-skinned, with brown eyes and relaxed pitch-black hair, and the “typical” African facial features. In the past I had observed within myself that most attractions I had ever felt for African-American women was for the lighter skinned women, an obvious indicator of my preference for women of my own race and, again, something beyond my control which I have not been proud of.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t screw around. However, I am aware that my male instincts are still intact, and that my brain and my body still respond in the presence of an attractive woman.
And there I stood, before a woman of a type I had rarely found attractive, finding myself attracted. I couldn’t figure out what it was. She was fairly tall, slim, with a great smile and bright, friendly eyes, all the earmarks of a woman I usually find attractive, plus the dark skin. It gnawed at me for a couple of days.
And then it dawned on me. All my life it has had nothing to do with the color of a woman’s skin. Where I had been experiencing my hang-up was with attitude.
Again, at the risk of sounding racist, there is a certain percentage of Americans of African heritage who, due to life experiences or parental or peer examples, grow up with, or adopt, a particular attitude about the world and about their place in it. These individuals cultivate a pattern of speech different from that of other Americans around them – black as well as white – despite their geographical location or their economic position. For lack of a better description, I call it “street” slang. I don’t claim to know a reason for this, but only to state the fact of a distinct sub-cultural difference that sets them apart. This smaller percentage appears averse to a broader intercultural assimilation, rather preferring to stick together socially and culturally, remaining largely separate socially and psychologically from the larger group. The same can be said for any number of white sub-cultures in the United States, I’m sure.
It is this “street” attitude that has been the turn-off for me all these years.
What made itself clear to me in the Bahamas was that there is no “street” culture there. No “street” attitude. Theirs is a population that, in essence, is THE population. They are not subject to a minority representation in a larger entity. They were never subjected to a “separate but equal” existence. They were and are the people. They were and are the government. The success or failure of their society is on their shoulders.
As this realization opened itself to me I saw beyond just the attractive women, but to every local I encountered, and I realized that just about every one of them was friendly and courteous and, yes, beautiful, and not hung up on cultivating an image. My hang-up was – is – not so broad and ignorant and superficial as an aversion to the color of skin, but much more deep and complex, and perhaps just as ignorant; a failure to understand a culture within my own that is as foreign to me as the Chinese.
There is no easy way to describe this feeling, this perception. Reading back over what I’ve written I can’t help but feel that a reader would view me as racist as the average Ku Klux Klan member from 1950s Alabama. I certainly hope that’s not how I am perceived.
Whatever a reader thinks, whatever traits I may be unaware of or too afraid to notice, my visit to The Bahamas gave me a new insight to my view of the world, my view of ME. Where I thought for most of my life I had fallen short I was not falling short at all. I still have similar issues to work out in that area, but at least I believe now that the shortcomings in my social attitudes are much more intricate, more subjective rather than objective, than I ever thought they were.
If I can consider this lesson a step toward a better self-awareness, then I can consider it a step forward in my journey to become a better, more whole person.
But I learned a philosophical lesson about myself, something I had not anticipated learning, nor had I even suspected would be a topic I’d encounter.
It’s difficult to say this without sounding racist. A personal pride of mine is that I am fairly open minded – or at least I try to be – about most things. A person’s race, gender, sexual preference, religious beliefs or other personal traits do not affect how I treat that person personally or professionally. So I am reluctant to publish, as it were, something that sounds patently racist: I generally have never found African-American women attractive. There have been a few exceptions, but the general feeling has prevailed. It was always a point of potential personal embarrassment for me as an open-minded, easy-going, white man of the world.
I wasn’t oblivious to the fact, nor was I uncomfortable to know, that the population of the Bahamas is 85% black. The Bahamians are an English-speaking people, having gained their independence from Great Britain only 33 years ago. Most have an island accent of varying thickness, but I mistook a lot of them for Americans, their speech was so unaccented.
After a few days of interacting with hotel staff for various reasons, I became more aware of the occasional attraction I felt towards some of the female staff. I am a flirt in general, always trying to get a laugh or a smile from any woman, so it came as a surprise when I felt the tug in the tummy when the ol’ libido was tickled. She was fairly dark-skinned, with brown eyes and relaxed pitch-black hair, and the “typical” African facial features. In the past I had observed within myself that most attractions I had ever felt for African-American women was for the lighter skinned women, an obvious indicator of my preference for women of my own race and, again, something beyond my control which I have not been proud of.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t screw around. However, I am aware that my male instincts are still intact, and that my brain and my body still respond in the presence of an attractive woman.
And there I stood, before a woman of a type I had rarely found attractive, finding myself attracted. I couldn’t figure out what it was. She was fairly tall, slim, with a great smile and bright, friendly eyes, all the earmarks of a woman I usually find attractive, plus the dark skin. It gnawed at me for a couple of days.
And then it dawned on me. All my life it has had nothing to do with the color of a woman’s skin. Where I had been experiencing my hang-up was with attitude.
Again, at the risk of sounding racist, there is a certain percentage of Americans of African heritage who, due to life experiences or parental or peer examples, grow up with, or adopt, a particular attitude about the world and about their place in it. These individuals cultivate a pattern of speech different from that of other Americans around them – black as well as white – despite their geographical location or their economic position. For lack of a better description, I call it “street” slang. I don’t claim to know a reason for this, but only to state the fact of a distinct sub-cultural difference that sets them apart. This smaller percentage appears averse to a broader intercultural assimilation, rather preferring to stick together socially and culturally, remaining largely separate socially and psychologically from the larger group. The same can be said for any number of white sub-cultures in the United States, I’m sure.
It is this “street” attitude that has been the turn-off for me all these years.
What made itself clear to me in the Bahamas was that there is no “street” culture there. No “street” attitude. Theirs is a population that, in essence, is THE population. They are not subject to a minority representation in a larger entity. They were never subjected to a “separate but equal” existence. They were and are the people. They were and are the government. The success or failure of their society is on their shoulders.
As this realization opened itself to me I saw beyond just the attractive women, but to every local I encountered, and I realized that just about every one of them was friendly and courteous and, yes, beautiful, and not hung up on cultivating an image. My hang-up was – is – not so broad and ignorant and superficial as an aversion to the color of skin, but much more deep and complex, and perhaps just as ignorant; a failure to understand a culture within my own that is as foreign to me as the Chinese.
There is no easy way to describe this feeling, this perception. Reading back over what I’ve written I can’t help but feel that a reader would view me as racist as the average Ku Klux Klan member from 1950s Alabama. I certainly hope that’s not how I am perceived.
Whatever a reader thinks, whatever traits I may be unaware of or too afraid to notice, my visit to The Bahamas gave me a new insight to my view of the world, my view of ME. Where I thought for most of my life I had fallen short I was not falling short at all. I still have similar issues to work out in that area, but at least I believe now that the shortcomings in my social attitudes are much more intricate, more subjective rather than objective, than I ever thought they were.
If I can consider this lesson a step toward a better self-awareness, then I can consider it a step forward in my journey to become a better, more whole person.
Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus
I have been remiss and lazy over the past few weeks. I returned from the Bahamas to a holiday week and a little extra time off for all the extra time I put in on the road. A couple of weeks, a couple of short trips, and then one week of vacation with Mrs. Farrago in San Francisco. In all that time Mrs. Farrago got me wrapped up in one of her new hobbies, a little web site called Flashback Alternatives. It's a free, all-request internet radio station. If you like '80s New Wave/Alternative music, you'll probably like this site. What's had me hooked is the tag-board, a chat-room of fellow listeners to the station. It's mostly all new music to me, as I never really cared for '80s music in the decade that spawned it. And it has fed my jones for writing, providing me the instant gratification of instant feedback.
What it doesn't provide, however, is the freedom or space to wax nostalgic or poetic, or to rant in the uncensored fashion that Blogger.com allows.
So, if I was ever gone, I am back.
And I have a few things to say.
(I tremble with fear at the monumental stack of blogs I have before me to catch up on....)
What it doesn't provide, however, is the freedom or space to wax nostalgic or poetic, or to rant in the uncensored fashion that Blogger.com allows.
So, if I was ever gone, I am back.
And I have a few things to say.
(I tremble with fear at the monumental stack of blogs I have before me to catch up on....)
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Island Attitude
For anyone who's thinking I haven't been posting much lately, or who's wondering why I've taken so long to respond to comments:
I've been in the Bahamas since June 22, and the "high-speed" internet at the hotel (The Atlantis, in case you're wondering) reminds me of the heyday of "fast" internet, when we all logged on at the breakneck speed of 9600bps! Mrs. Farrago suggested that the internet is moving at island pace. "No problem, maahn!" Hence, it's a little annoying to wait for the stupid pages to load, even more so when I'm supposed to have a high-speed connection.
So I'll check in on Blogger only once every few days until I get home July 3, but I may not respond immediately due to the fact that I could be home before anything I send actually posts!
Take care! Send money!
I've been in the Bahamas since June 22, and the "high-speed" internet at the hotel (The Atlantis, in case you're wondering) reminds me of the heyday of "fast" internet, when we all logged on at the breakneck speed of 9600bps! Mrs. Farrago suggested that the internet is moving at island pace. "No problem, maahn!" Hence, it's a little annoying to wait for the stupid pages to load, even more so when I'm supposed to have a high-speed connection.
So I'll check in on Blogger only once every few days until I get home July 3, but I may not respond immediately due to the fact that I could be home before anything I send actually posts!
Take care! Send money!
Friday, June 23, 2006
Eulogy For My Father
First off, he isn’t dead. I’m a firm believer that if you love someone, you should tell him or her that you do before the day comes when it will forever be too late to do it. Or if you think someone is great or special, you should tell that person why you think so sooner rather than later. Or tell the world.My father was born in 1923, the fifth child to Italian immigrants. By age five he had lost his father to blood poisoning, the result of an otherwise minor accident at the steel mill where he worked. The following year, his widowed mother, his six siblings, and the rest of the nation tumbled headlong into the Great Depression. Already dirt poor, they were probably better able to cope than those of middle income in that day, for they already knew how to live on next to nothing. My grandmother had a house. Her husband had nearly finished building it when he fell ill. The home was completed by local workers paid by associates of one Alphonse Capone, a great story in itself, to be told some other time.
My father, and others of his generation, grew up learning how to survive. At times his family had to endure meals of jelly-and-onion sandwiches because that was all there was to eat. My grandmother was a strict woman and her methods, though probably frowned upon today, brought up respectable, law-abiding citizens. There weren’t many things that a swift hand or an accurately wielded broomstick couldn’t correct.
My father was the only of his mother’s children to graduate high school. He and four of his brothers fought in, and returned intact from, World War II. It was one of his duties in the Army that eventually led him to his own enterprise – barber. Upon his discharge he did factory work until he determined that he could succeed as a barber. He also married and began a family. Ten years and six children after getting married, he opened his own shop, one block from the home where he grew up.
I can’t imagine the challenges he faced and overcame: the Great Depression through his entire childhood. Four years away from home fighting a war. Learning, without his own father’s example, how to be a father as his family grew. Raising with his wife five of his seven children through the1960s and losing not one to drugs or Vietnam.
I came along in the ‘60s. I am largely ignorant to the family’s rich history in its sixteen years before I was born. My oldest sibling had moved out and joined the military practically before I had any cognitive knowledge of his existence. But the remaining siblings demonstrated a respect for my father that I had no option, no other example, than to follow. From the day I realized that other kids had fathers, too, I have been somewhat in awe of mine.
As my father I always knew him to be stern and strict, and the disciplinarian of our family, though my siblings will tell anyone who will listen that I, the youngest, had it easier than any of them. He dealt justice with a razor strop – three strips of leather clamped together at one end and used by a barber to condition a straight razor before shaving someone. He was never cruel with it, nor vicious. It was a plain and simple fact: if you misbehaved past his last warning, you got a swat or two across the rear with “the strap.” I don’t think contact with “the strap” ever hurt as much as knowing you had earned it.
I also always knew him to be a very funny comedian. During my kindergarten class’s spring picnic, mine was the only father to be a “room mother” for the event. The other kids made fun of me because my father came along, until we got to the park and every kid fought to play with him because he was so much fun. I’m sure he also managed to flirt with the teachers and the other kids’ mothers in between.
He often had me along when he visited with friends, and there was usually a lot of laughter – and foul language. I was always astounded at the two different people my father was, at home versus with friends. At home I never heard him say the ‘f’- word. With his friends, I never heard anyone say the ‘f’-word more! But it was always good-natured, always bracketed with laughter.
And he was generous. Since he had no money, all he could give you was his time and his expertise. As a young man, in order to survive, he had acquired many different skills – some with which to make money, and some with which to save it – which, later in life, he gave as a wealthy man would give money. If a friend’s mother or somebody needed some carpentry work done, or plumbing, or painting, or demolishing, my father was there, that jack of all trades, master of none. Sometimes he would accept money for his time or effort, other times he would not. If an elderly customer came to his shop for a haircut, he would refuse to let the customer pay, often insulting his friend in the process until he either accepted the money or let his friend leave the shop offended. If he heard a friend was in the hospital or laid up at home, he would go in the evening with his traveling barber kit to his friend once a week for as long as the person was laid up – man or woman – and provide a haircut with no expectation, no demand, of payment.
You could step into his barbershop to witness every waiting chair occupied, to hear a lively discussion on just about any topic – though his education was limited to high school, my father was always listening, always aware of the day’s current events, and he always had an opinion. And he always had a knack for opposing you on a topic, wrestling with you over it, and suddenly you’d find yourself arguing FOR his earlier point and against yours! And then, with all those people in the waiting chairs, he would finish with the person in the barber chair and then look at you and say, “You’re next.” The others in the waiting chairs would all look at you, and you’d realize that they’re all there for the conversation.
When times got tough, my father stepped up. During the late 1970s he had three part-time jobs in addition to his Tuesday-through-Saturday eight-hour days at the barbershop. He would lock the door to the shop by 5:30, but then finish the remaining customers who were waiting. He would stop at the bar adjoining his shop, run by the owner of the building, and have a beer or three, and then he would go home. After dinner he would then go to 20th Century Bowling Lanes where he ran the counter, tended bar and gave free bowling lessons until closing, usually around 12:30 or 1:00am. He’d then come home, sleep until 4:00am and get up to clean the office at a finance company. From there, around 6:00, he would go to a strip mall a few miles north and pick up trash and dump garbage cans into a dumpster. He would arrive home around 8:00am, lay down for a nap, and then he would open the shop again at 9:00.
To say the man had boundless energy would not be accurate, as he more often than not fell asleep within minutes of sitting down to watch a television show or football game, when he had the time to do so. More accurate would be to say that he had abnormally high determination and willpower. And patience. After 40 years of smoking, he quit – cold-turkey – once. He and my mother took out a second mortgage on our home so they could buy a lot with a dilapidated house near a river. On weekends and days off over the next seven or eight years or so, he pretty much single-handedly gutted the house, raised it onto cinder-blocks, and rehabbed it to quite a comfortable condition, if a little rustic and eclectic of décor.
Time has caught up with him, however. After cutting back his shop hours to three days a week for about 15 years, he finally sold the shop and retired completely, at age 81. The wear and tear of essentially 55 years of barbering have taken their toll, with numbness in his hands and feet, the result of irreversible nerve damage from the years of standing, and of holding vibrating clippers in raised arms. After nearly 20 years of living in the river house – most of them alone since my mother’s death in 1993 – and now unable to take care of it himself, he has sold it and moved in with one of my sisters.
The change was gradual, and maybe it was connected to his advance in age, but he went from being the rough, gruff, single-emotion disciplinarian of my youth, to a softer, gentler, more affectionate father in my adult years. I had only seen the man cry twice – at the funerals of his mother and of one of his brothers, about four years apart, in the early- to mid-1970s. He didn’t cry at sad movies. He didn’t cry at weddings. Tough as nails. Then there was the visit by my oldest brother, who had joined the military 15 years earlier for what had become his career. He brought with him his older child to meet her grandparents for the first time. It was a joyous event for the whole family in the summer after my high school graduation. When it was time for my brother to leave I was shocked to see my father first choke up as he said good-bye, and then break into sobs as he hugged my brother. I was moved to tears myself. The old man cracked! It was to be understood. This was his oldest child, someone he had only seen a few times in the past 15 years.
Nearly two years later I returned home from the first 18 weeks of my military stint, a brief break on my way into my future. I was only able to manage a week at home before I was to drive off to Montana. On the day of my departure it was almost a carbon copy of the day with my brother. And as my parents said good-bye, my father’s voice cracked, and tears welled up in his eyes. For ME?! It didn’t affect me until I arrived at my duty station in Montana three days later, that first night there, the first night of my real adult life. I lay there in bed, helpless to fight off the tears of homesickness, of loneliness, for how much I missed my family, and, now, for how much I realized my father missed me.
There’s a quote, by whom I don’t know, that goes something like, “He is not poor who has friends.” If this is true, then my father is one of the wealthiest men alive. Through his kindness, his sense of humor, and his endless generosity, he has collected more friends in his long life than anyone I know.
While I was growing up, there were things I resented about being his son. Other kids’ parents were wealthier. They had more toys, bigger houses. They were allowed to go places, to do things, to stay out at night to hours that my parents would not allow me. They went on family trips to places like Disney World. They had air conditioning in their homes.
But one evening juswt a few years back, while mingling with my elderly father and a few of his friends, one of the people nearer my age spoke to me in regard to my father. “You’re his son?” he asked.
I nodded.
“He is such a great man. It must be so incredible to have grown up with him as a father.” The man could not stop raving about how much he admired my father, how much he envied me my childhood with him. It was the first of several such exchanges, with several different people, over the period of a few years. That’s when I was struck by how many people, of all ages, love my father. It is not a massive fortune for which they admire him. It is not fame that draws them. He’s the genuine article. The real deal.
And so it is, a week late for Father’s Day, that I pay humble tribute to a man whom I admire beyond quantification, beyond the grasp of words, the greatest man nobody knows.
I Love You, Dad.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Can't We All Just Get Along?
One of the great mysteries of life is how we can surround ourselves with the right people…or not… and how we can isolate ourselves from possibly enriching relationships, all based on first impressions and misconceptions. And then we can mature to the point where we can analyze our behavior and change our opinions.
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. Back then I called my family middle-class when the reality is we were pretty darn poor. I just didn’t know it. I also told everybody I was Italian, though I’m only half; my mother was of German, English and Irish heritage. Why her ethnic history was invisible, I don’t know. I grew up identifying exclusively with my father’s heritage.
There were a couple of other Italian families on our block, but only one of those families had a kid my age. He was Fiore (properly pronounced, it's F'YOH-ray' (roll the 'R' lightly), though we usually pronounced it 'Fyor') Santaniello. Both his parents were Italian immigrants, so for the full-blooded Italian I believed myself to be, he truly was. And maybe that was the wedge. I don’t know.
You would think that our shared heritage, no matter how pure one’s or the other’s might be, would be a binding glue, but it was far from it. You see, Fiore and I never really got along. Sometimes we could play together, but I think we were both too wrapped up in trying to make things go our own individual ways. There’s my childhood creative impulses I mentioned in an earlier post. Maybe he had the same impulses, something I rejected or resisted. He also seemed more imaginative than I, able to conjure better jargon from military or police or space genres than I could in our play together, which gave him a more worldly air and, hence, my impression of his superior intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, my impression of him trying to appear superior.
Whatever the reason, we could go from the highest heights of camaraderie to the deepest depths of adversarial animosity, sometimes within minutes. From grades K through 6, Fiore was the only kid I ever actually fought with. There were other conflicts, with bullies for instance, and a shoving match once with Robert Buckner. But Fiore was the only kid with whom I ever traded fisticuffs, throwing punches, really trying to hurt each other. The funniest part about it is in the probably three years of animosity and violent encounters, in all the punches we threw at each other, neither of us ever landed one! There was bloodshed, though – mine – and depending on your point of view, you might even say it was my fault.
Fiore and I were in the summer either between 4th and 5th grades or between 5th and 6th. I was in Little League baseball that season (for what proved to be my last) and a mid-day practice had just ended on the field at our school’s playground. As the other kids from my team filtered away in the directions of their various homes, Fiore, who had heckled and taunted me and others all while he watched us practice, hopped on my Schwinn Sting Ray bike and began taunting me, refusing to give me back my bike. He rode in circles around me as I tried to convince him, force him or capture him to give it back, occasionally swinging really close to me, but always darting away before I could reach him.
I don’t remember the words, but they were the perfect words, and I said them. They had the effect I had intended – his anger – but an unintended result: he turned the handlebars and rode straight at me, rage in his eyes. I threw my baseball mitt to the asphalt of the school playground and squared to face him straight on. I wasn’t scared at that moment, but I was at best as angry as he was, and if he was going to try to hurt me by running me down with my own bike, I was sure as hell going to try to hurt him back for his efforts.
And he did come right at me! I grabbed the handlebars and wrenched them to one side. His momentum stopped suddenly, and his balance thrown off, he toppled to the asphalt. I wrestled with the bike to get it off of him, ready to pounce on him and begin the fistfight of my life when…he started laughing . Laughing and pointing at me. Just then I felt a cool sensation on my upper lip. I reached up and wiped at it, and looked at my hand. Blood. LOTS of blood! I hadn’t even noticed it, but when I wrenched the bike’s handlebars, one side had slipped free of his hand and whacked me right in the side of the nose. It was a faucet!
Horror-struck, embarrassed, angry all at once, I started crying. I ran home, pulling the bike alongside me with one hand and holding my nose with the other. When I got home my youngest sister, seven years my senior, saw the bloody, blubbering mess that walked in the front door, and had what I think I can safely describe as a conniption. Her reaction made my emotional state even worse. She finally got me calmed down enough to tell her what happened, only that made EVERYTHING worse, because she tore off down the street and got into a shouting match with Mrs. Santaniello! Now, not only was I upset, angry and embarrassed, but I was humiliated because my big sister went and fought my fight.
Our last fight happened the following winter. We verbally taunted each other along the two-block walk from our school to our street, and then, on the corner just one door from my house, we came to blows. Again, we each struck out, as we were probably the worst pugilists who ever lived. But I got the advantage when, as Fiore threw a wild fist, he happened to be standing on a patch of ice. His effort pulled him off balance, and his feet slipped out from beneath him. Once again I had the upper hand: Fiore was on the ground. Again I was ready to pounce on him when, out of nowhere I heard my mother’s voice: “(FARRAGO!) Knock it off RIGHT NOW!” She had managed to get out of work early that day (memory fails me…was it perhaps the last Friday before Christmas?), and was standing on our front stoop, glaring at us. DAMN her timing! Fiore got up and ran off since, in those days, other kids’ mothers were feared even worse than bullies. I can’t help but wonder if Mom stood at the door and watched us flailing at each other until the point when Fiore fell, and then intervened when there was the potential of somebody actually getting hurt. Or maybe she didn’t feel she could take Fiore’s mother in the second fight that would ensue. I also wonder why I never got in trouble. Maybe for the same reason. I got the upper hand. I fought a fight I didn’t start (though who really knows who started it?), and by falls I had won. End it.
Fiore started getting into trouble as we approached adolescence, though he never took a total turn for the worst. Our friend/foe seesaw ended when he one day thought it would be funny to lure my friend and next-door neighbor, Ben Fonseca’s 6-month old puppy with a treat down to his house where he unleashed his bad-tempered dog on it. The puppy never had a chance to begin with, but the dogfight ended prematurely when both dogs were hit by a passing car. The puppy died within minutes, and the Santaniellos’ family dog ran off and disappeared, but was found the next day under their back porch, dead. Away from his parents, Fiore never expressed remorse for what happened that day, for what he did that day. I couldn’t see my way around it, and our relationship, stormy as it was, ended.
Four years ago I met and spoke briefly with Fiore at our 20-year high school reunion. He had left our school at some point to attend a big local Catholic high school, and I had been unaware that he ever returned to ours to finish his education. He had done a four-year stint in the Marines, which I knew about, and then I heard nothing more until our reunion. We spoke so briefly that I didn’t get much information. He drives a truck these days. I don’t know if he’s divorced or never married, but at the time of the reunion he was not married. His younger brother, whom Therese Ballassone liked more than she liked me when I was in sixth grade, and who swore from as early as the fourth grade that he would be a doctor when he grew up, grew up to be a doctor – a surgeon, in fact. I always got along with him, even when he was “stealing” the girl of my dreams.
I recall in those few moments while I spoke with Fiore that I never once thought about the fights, the animosity, the poor dogs. I was in the moment and wanted to know what the hell else he had been up to over the prior twenty years, and wished in that moment that we could spend an hour to find out who each other had become.
A couple days after the reunion a simple fact dawned on me, at which point I had to kick myself for never knowing during our childhood, and therefore never being able to use against him in all our fights, the fact that his name, in Italian, means “flower.”
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. Back then I called my family middle-class when the reality is we were pretty darn poor. I just didn’t know it. I also told everybody I was Italian, though I’m only half; my mother was of German, English and Irish heritage. Why her ethnic history was invisible, I don’t know. I grew up identifying exclusively with my father’s heritage.
There were a couple of other Italian families on our block, but only one of those families had a kid my age. He was Fiore (properly pronounced, it's F'YOH-ray' (roll the 'R' lightly), though we usually pronounced it 'Fyor') Santaniello. Both his parents were Italian immigrants, so for the full-blooded Italian I believed myself to be, he truly was. And maybe that was the wedge. I don’t know.
You would think that our shared heritage, no matter how pure one’s or the other’s might be, would be a binding glue, but it was far from it. You see, Fiore and I never really got along. Sometimes we could play together, but I think we were both too wrapped up in trying to make things go our own individual ways. There’s my childhood creative impulses I mentioned in an earlier post. Maybe he had the same impulses, something I rejected or resisted. He also seemed more imaginative than I, able to conjure better jargon from military or police or space genres than I could in our play together, which gave him a more worldly air and, hence, my impression of his superior intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, my impression of him trying to appear superior.
Whatever the reason, we could go from the highest heights of camaraderie to the deepest depths of adversarial animosity, sometimes within minutes. From grades K through 6, Fiore was the only kid I ever actually fought with. There were other conflicts, with bullies for instance, and a shoving match once with Robert Buckner. But Fiore was the only kid with whom I ever traded fisticuffs, throwing punches, really trying to hurt each other. The funniest part about it is in the probably three years of animosity and violent encounters, in all the punches we threw at each other, neither of us ever landed one! There was bloodshed, though – mine – and depending on your point of view, you might even say it was my fault.
Fiore and I were in the summer either between 4th and 5th grades or between 5th and 6th. I was in Little League baseball that season (for what proved to be my last) and a mid-day practice had just ended on the field at our school’s playground. As the other kids from my team filtered away in the directions of their various homes, Fiore, who had heckled and taunted me and others all while he watched us practice, hopped on my Schwinn Sting Ray bike and began taunting me, refusing to give me back my bike. He rode in circles around me as I tried to convince him, force him or capture him to give it back, occasionally swinging really close to me, but always darting away before I could reach him.
I don’t remember the words, but they were the perfect words, and I said them. They had the effect I had intended – his anger – but an unintended result: he turned the handlebars and rode straight at me, rage in his eyes. I threw my baseball mitt to the asphalt of the school playground and squared to face him straight on. I wasn’t scared at that moment, but I was at best as angry as he was, and if he was going to try to hurt me by running me down with my own bike, I was sure as hell going to try to hurt him back for his efforts.
And he did come right at me! I grabbed the handlebars and wrenched them to one side. His momentum stopped suddenly, and his balance thrown off, he toppled to the asphalt. I wrestled with the bike to get it off of him, ready to pounce on him and begin the fistfight of my life when…he started laughing . Laughing and pointing at me. Just then I felt a cool sensation on my upper lip. I reached up and wiped at it, and looked at my hand. Blood. LOTS of blood! I hadn’t even noticed it, but when I wrenched the bike’s handlebars, one side had slipped free of his hand and whacked me right in the side of the nose. It was a faucet!
Horror-struck, embarrassed, angry all at once, I started crying. I ran home, pulling the bike alongside me with one hand and holding my nose with the other. When I got home my youngest sister, seven years my senior, saw the bloody, blubbering mess that walked in the front door, and had what I think I can safely describe as a conniption. Her reaction made my emotional state even worse. She finally got me calmed down enough to tell her what happened, only that made EVERYTHING worse, because she tore off down the street and got into a shouting match with Mrs. Santaniello! Now, not only was I upset, angry and embarrassed, but I was humiliated because my big sister went and fought my fight.
Our last fight happened the following winter. We verbally taunted each other along the two-block walk from our school to our street, and then, on the corner just one door from my house, we came to blows. Again, we each struck out, as we were probably the worst pugilists who ever lived. But I got the advantage when, as Fiore threw a wild fist, he happened to be standing on a patch of ice. His effort pulled him off balance, and his feet slipped out from beneath him. Once again I had the upper hand: Fiore was on the ground. Again I was ready to pounce on him when, out of nowhere I heard my mother’s voice: “(FARRAGO!) Knock it off RIGHT NOW!” She had managed to get out of work early that day (memory fails me…was it perhaps the last Friday before Christmas?), and was standing on our front stoop, glaring at us. DAMN her timing! Fiore got up and ran off since, in those days, other kids’ mothers were feared even worse than bullies. I can’t help but wonder if Mom stood at the door and watched us flailing at each other until the point when Fiore fell, and then intervened when there was the potential of somebody actually getting hurt. Or maybe she didn’t feel she could take Fiore’s mother in the second fight that would ensue. I also wonder why I never got in trouble. Maybe for the same reason. I got the upper hand. I fought a fight I didn’t start (though who really knows who started it?), and by falls I had won. End it.
Fiore started getting into trouble as we approached adolescence, though he never took a total turn for the worst. Our friend/foe seesaw ended when he one day thought it would be funny to lure my friend and next-door neighbor, Ben Fonseca’s 6-month old puppy with a treat down to his house where he unleashed his bad-tempered dog on it. The puppy never had a chance to begin with, but the dogfight ended prematurely when both dogs were hit by a passing car. The puppy died within minutes, and the Santaniellos’ family dog ran off and disappeared, but was found the next day under their back porch, dead. Away from his parents, Fiore never expressed remorse for what happened that day, for what he did that day. I couldn’t see my way around it, and our relationship, stormy as it was, ended.
Four years ago I met and spoke briefly with Fiore at our 20-year high school reunion. He had left our school at some point to attend a big local Catholic high school, and I had been unaware that he ever returned to ours to finish his education. He had done a four-year stint in the Marines, which I knew about, and then I heard nothing more until our reunion. We spoke so briefly that I didn’t get much information. He drives a truck these days. I don’t know if he’s divorced or never married, but at the time of the reunion he was not married. His younger brother, whom Therese Ballassone liked more than she liked me when I was in sixth grade, and who swore from as early as the fourth grade that he would be a doctor when he grew up, grew up to be a doctor – a surgeon, in fact. I always got along with him, even when he was “stealing” the girl of my dreams.
I recall in those few moments while I spoke with Fiore that I never once thought about the fights, the animosity, the poor dogs. I was in the moment and wanted to know what the hell else he had been up to over the prior twenty years, and wished in that moment that we could spend an hour to find out who each other had become.
A couple days after the reunion a simple fact dawned on me, at which point I had to kick myself for never knowing during our childhood, and therefore never being able to use against him in all our fights, the fact that his name, in Italian, means “flower.”
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Draw of the Brew
I would bet that most little kids who ever take a drink of Mommy’s or Daddy’s coffee can’t stand the taste of it, and never attempt it again until they’re teenagers or college students cramming for tests or to finish a semester-long project they gave themselves a week to do.
Not me. I don’t remember the day, or what age I was, when I first tried coffee, but I had the distinct advantage of a father who liked to put some coffee in his cup of milk and sugar. Mom was the “barista” of the house. She and Dad grew up in the waning heyday of coffee brewing, with stove-top percolator and “manual” drip methods being the most prevalent. Until Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio – a face and name which I’m sure appealed to people of my parents’ generation – popped up hawking for Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee makers (hell, I thought he WAS Mr. Coffee for most of my young life!), Mom made coffee the old-fashioned way: put the water on the boil in a tea-kettle, put a filter in the basket, put the basket in the top of the pot, dump the appropriate number of scoops of ground coffee into the filter and basket, pour the boiled water into the basket, filling it once, letting it drain completely through the grounds, and then filling it again for a full pot. Every single morning the house would fill with the warming aroma of coffee. Yep, whatever age I was, I was hooked early. And strict as they were in general, my parents quite regularly allowed me to indulge my nascent caffeine jones: on weekends when the pot sat cooling on the counter and Mom and Dad had both had their fixes, I would ask – usually Mom, as Dad worked on Saturdays – if I could have some. Had my mother been at all concerned with my potential future habits, she would have made sure not to put in any sugar, yet letting me believe she had; or better yet, insisted that I drink it like she did – black, which was just absolutely FOUL! – and I would probably have stayed away from the obnoxious brew. But no, she laced it with a half-pound of sugar and a full udder’s worth of milk, and I eased into the taste of coffee.
On the rare occasion that we went out for breakfast, I fascinated myself first with the tiny cream pots, and later with the individual half & half mini-tubs that were found on the tables, plus the sugar packets, and Mom and Dad would supervise as I prepared my own fix. I’m sure that, afterward, continuing on to wherever we were going, or on the way back home, I was as a rubber ball in the back seat of the car!
I spent the larger part of my childhood and adolescence as the only person in my group of friends who drank coffee. Occasionally a friend would ask why I liked coffee, and the honest answer was that I liked the taste. Hell! With all that sugar, who wouldn’t?! There was just something about that milk-chocolate-brown liquid, the smell, the warmth, the mouth-filling, slightly “dark” taste that I could never leave alone if the opportunity arose.
During my teen years, Dad, the unwitting enabler of my addiction, added another wrinkle to my affection for coffee. If I may make a few assumptions about my pre-cognizant life, it would seem apparent that Dad rarely, if ever, made his own coffee, even right up to Mom’s death in 1993. However, once Mom had to go to work in the early 1970s – after she told the Catholic church to shove it, and went on the pill so the babies would stop arriving – Dad found himself more often re-heating the coffee when he woke up that Mom had made before she went to work earlier. Thus began his almost ritual, absent-minded, daily boiling of the coffee that occurred while he attended to his other morning ritual which, if you didn’t get in there before he did, would make you want to avoid the bathroom until around noon! I became accustomed to the distinctly stronger – nay, foul – flavor of boiled coffee, which steeled me to the many rather nasty concoctions I would encounter later in life. In other words, Dad broadened my coffee horizons, preventing me from becoming a coffee snob. What? The coffee sucks? Sure! Pour me a cup!
(The only cup of coffee I COULDN’T drink was one I poured while in the Air Force. I was participating with the rest of the Group in a war exercise, and we were “tactical,” meaning we couldn’t make noise or use flashlights at night. It was the middle of the night, I had just been waken from my sleep to take over guard duty. I had only about 15 minutes to get ready, so I set to boiling some water (the chemical flame was hidden) and pulling the freeze-dried coffee and condiment packages out of a MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat) bag. There were some really handy things in there; in addition to salt and pepper, there was coffee creamer, cocoa powder…there was even powdered ketchup to be reconstituted and put on reconstituted hash browns or the hot dogs! The water boiled, I opened the coffee packet and dumped it in the cup. I fumbled around in the dark for the packet of creamer, opened it and poured it in. I stirred everything up and took that first sip…and spit it all out! I had dumped the powdered ketchup into the cup instead of the creamer! ACK! Feeling the need for caffeine outweighed my disgust at the flavor, however, I choked down half the cup before I just couldn’t take it any more.)
As an adult, drinking coffee because I could, I learned that it isn’t the stimulant effect of caffeine in the coffee that can keep me awake at night; it’s the diuretic effect. Coffee won’t chase away the afternoon nods at the office, but if I drink too much coffee before bedtime, the term “wee hours” takes on an entirely different meaning!!
A few years ago I read The Sugar Busters, a book which scared the hell out of me for the amount of sugar I was taking into my body daily. I set my mind to try drinking coffee without sugar, and I tried it and…it wasn’t bad! Not too long after, I learned that it was cream in my coffee, among other dairy products, that was exacerbating my near-chronic post-nasal drip. So it was either start drinking coffee black, or quit drinking coffee all together.
Black is beautiful. I don’t know if my mother made it so strong that it even kept cockroaches away from the house, or if “they” are just making coffee more mellow these days, but I made the transition to black coffee with no effort. It seems to me that as children, our taste buds are so sensitive that we really CAN’T stomach flavors like coffee, or brussels sprouts, or snails, and everything goes better with sugar. But as we mature, so do our taste buds.
Or have we just killed them with coffee?
Tell me how it is that you came into coffee’s clutches, or how you’ve managed to avoid getting caught in its aromatic grasp. What is it that you like most about coffee? What is it that you hate? When is your favorite time of day to have a cup? How do you take yours?
Not me. I don’t remember the day, or what age I was, when I first tried coffee, but I had the distinct advantage of a father who liked to put some coffee in his cup of milk and sugar. Mom was the “barista” of the house. She and Dad grew up in the waning heyday of coffee brewing, with stove-top percolator and “manual” drip methods being the most prevalent. Until Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio – a face and name which I’m sure appealed to people of my parents’ generation – popped up hawking for Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee makers (hell, I thought he WAS Mr. Coffee for most of my young life!), Mom made coffee the old-fashioned way: put the water on the boil in a tea-kettle, put a filter in the basket, put the basket in the top of the pot, dump the appropriate number of scoops of ground coffee into the filter and basket, pour the boiled water into the basket, filling it once, letting it drain completely through the grounds, and then filling it again for a full pot. Every single morning the house would fill with the warming aroma of coffee. Yep, whatever age I was, I was hooked early. And strict as they were in general, my parents quite regularly allowed me to indulge my nascent caffeine jones: on weekends when the pot sat cooling on the counter and Mom and Dad had both had their fixes, I would ask – usually Mom, as Dad worked on Saturdays – if I could have some. Had my mother been at all concerned with my potential future habits, she would have made sure not to put in any sugar, yet letting me believe she had; or better yet, insisted that I drink it like she did – black, which was just absolutely FOUL! – and I would probably have stayed away from the obnoxious brew. But no, she laced it with a half-pound of sugar and a full udder’s worth of milk, and I eased into the taste of coffee.
On the rare occasion that we went out for breakfast, I fascinated myself first with the tiny cream pots, and later with the individual half & half mini-tubs that were found on the tables, plus the sugar packets, and Mom and Dad would supervise as I prepared my own fix. I’m sure that, afterward, continuing on to wherever we were going, or on the way back home, I was as a rubber ball in the back seat of the car!
I spent the larger part of my childhood and adolescence as the only person in my group of friends who drank coffee. Occasionally a friend would ask why I liked coffee, and the honest answer was that I liked the taste. Hell! With all that sugar, who wouldn’t?! There was just something about that milk-chocolate-brown liquid, the smell, the warmth, the mouth-filling, slightly “dark” taste that I could never leave alone if the opportunity arose.
During my teen years, Dad, the unwitting enabler of my addiction, added another wrinkle to my affection for coffee. If I may make a few assumptions about my pre-cognizant life, it would seem apparent that Dad rarely, if ever, made his own coffee, even right up to Mom’s death in 1993. However, once Mom had to go to work in the early 1970s – after she told the Catholic church to shove it, and went on the pill so the babies would stop arriving – Dad found himself more often re-heating the coffee when he woke up that Mom had made before she went to work earlier. Thus began his almost ritual, absent-minded, daily boiling of the coffee that occurred while he attended to his other morning ritual which, if you didn’t get in there before he did, would make you want to avoid the bathroom until around noon! I became accustomed to the distinctly stronger – nay, foul – flavor of boiled coffee, which steeled me to the many rather nasty concoctions I would encounter later in life. In other words, Dad broadened my coffee horizons, preventing me from becoming a coffee snob. What? The coffee sucks? Sure! Pour me a cup!
(The only cup of coffee I COULDN’T drink was one I poured while in the Air Force. I was participating with the rest of the Group in a war exercise, and we were “tactical,” meaning we couldn’t make noise or use flashlights at night. It was the middle of the night, I had just been waken from my sleep to take over guard duty. I had only about 15 minutes to get ready, so I set to boiling some water (the chemical flame was hidden) and pulling the freeze-dried coffee and condiment packages out of a MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat) bag. There were some really handy things in there; in addition to salt and pepper, there was coffee creamer, cocoa powder…there was even powdered ketchup to be reconstituted and put on reconstituted hash browns or the hot dogs! The water boiled, I opened the coffee packet and dumped it in the cup. I fumbled around in the dark for the packet of creamer, opened it and poured it in. I stirred everything up and took that first sip…and spit it all out! I had dumped the powdered ketchup into the cup instead of the creamer! ACK! Feeling the need for caffeine outweighed my disgust at the flavor, however, I choked down half the cup before I just couldn’t take it any more.)
As an adult, drinking coffee because I could, I learned that it isn’t the stimulant effect of caffeine in the coffee that can keep me awake at night; it’s the diuretic effect. Coffee won’t chase away the afternoon nods at the office, but if I drink too much coffee before bedtime, the term “wee hours” takes on an entirely different meaning!!
A few years ago I read The Sugar Busters, a book which scared the hell out of me for the amount of sugar I was taking into my body daily. I set my mind to try drinking coffee without sugar, and I tried it and…it wasn’t bad! Not too long after, I learned that it was cream in my coffee, among other dairy products, that was exacerbating my near-chronic post-nasal drip. So it was either start drinking coffee black, or quit drinking coffee all together.
Black is beautiful. I don’t know if my mother made it so strong that it even kept cockroaches away from the house, or if “they” are just making coffee more mellow these days, but I made the transition to black coffee with no effort. It seems to me that as children, our taste buds are so sensitive that we really CAN’T stomach flavors like coffee, or brussels sprouts, or snails, and everything goes better with sugar. But as we mature, so do our taste buds.
Or have we just killed them with coffee?
Tell me how it is that you came into coffee’s clutches, or how you’ve managed to avoid getting caught in its aromatic grasp. What is it that you like most about coffee? What is it that you hate? When is your favorite time of day to have a cup? How do you take yours?
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Who the Heck Reads This?!
Holy Crap! I've had nearly 1000 hits to my blog!! That means that it's an average of 333.33 hits per reader!! No, wait. I figure I have at least 100 of those hits just posting, swearing, correcting my idiot mistakes and reposting, so that puts each of you at about 300 each.
Thank You!
Pay attention to the counter over the next few months, and be sure to drop a comment to me if you're number 1000. If you are lucky number 1000, you win the grand prize: a naked picture of me! (I sure hope I'm not number 1000. I HATE looking at that picture.)
Cross your fingers, and read, read, read!
...No... read ME.
Thank You!
Pay attention to the counter over the next few months, and be sure to drop a comment to me if you're number 1000. If you are lucky number 1000, you win the grand prize: a naked picture of me! (I sure hope I'm not number 1000. I HATE looking at that picture.)
Cross your fingers, and read, read, read!
...No... read ME.
Luck or Suck
In the course of my travels I have come to realize that there is a fine line between luck and suck. I have written of earlier highs and lows as a wayward traveler. And this most recent trip has had both.
I flew to Phoenix from Chicago on May 30. Uneventful flight, no drama. I have a good friend in Phoenix, and I was fortunate enough to get two evenings free, spending one at dinner with him, and the other at his home dining with his him, his wife, and their two painfully adorable kids. Luck.
On June 3 I flew to Los Angeles – again no drama – and met at LAX bag claim my client’s producer/director with whom I was to shoot a video piece. From there we rented a minivan and drove leisurely to our hotel in the Thousand Oaks area, in the northwest reaches of the megalopolis that is the City of Angels. Fortune smiled upon me that day as the subject of the video had informed us that he had a wedding to attend Saturday, so the original plans to shoot on that day were off. We had the afternoon and evening free! Luck. The producer/director and I have become friends over the past year, so, with a free evening we planned to get a bite to eat and then see about catching “The DaVinci Code” at a local theater.
If you've never been to Los Angeles, suffice it to say that it is a veritable source overload for anything you might be looking for. We asked the hotel front desk clerk if there were any decent restaurants close to the hotel, and she handed us a three-page list, stapled at a corner, of restaurants that were within a 2-mile radius! We were both in the mood for steak, so we wound up at a Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus restaurant. When we arrived there it was approximately 6:15pm, and I fully expected to have to wait in line, but when we walked in, the hostess – who looked all of 12 years old – walked us straight to a table. Luck. We ordered, got our food – cooked, if not to perfection, at least to order (Luck) – and we left. We used the Hertz Neverlost GPS system in the minivan to find us the nearest movie theater, where we walked in to the ticket lobby at 7:34pm. “The DaVinci Code” was listed to start at 7:30. Both my client and I have read the book, so I wasn’t too worried if we missed the first few minutes. There was a line, so we probably didn’t get into the auditorium until nearly 7:45pm.
We sat down, saw two trailers, a short film titled, “Buy Your Popcorn, Sit Down, Turn Off Your Cell Phones and Shut Up," and our movie started! Luck!
The next day it only got better. The subject of our video is quite well to do. He has an incredible house made into a beautiful home by his professional interior decorator wife. Generous to a fault – after we finished taping for the day, during which he fed us lunch – he insisted that we stay for dinner and a sit-down in the hot tub with cigars and wine. Luck. (Yes, this IS California. No, we were NOT naked Luck. …well, I was (SUCK!))
On Monday we had more shooting to do at the man’s office, and then at his home again. I had discovered that this man’s home in Thousand Oaks was literally minutes away from the home of a good friend of mine with whom I was stationed in Montana when we were in the Air Force. Luck. I had forgotten to bring his phone number with me, but I was able to coordinate with Mrs. Farrago to look it up on my computer and get the number to me! Luck!
We finished shooting, and I went to my Air Force buddy’s house where I met his kids for the first time (his wife, whom I met a few years ago, was away working the night shift Suck.)). We talked for hours, reminiscing about our times in the Air Force and updating each other on our lives.
Tuesday morning, however, the magic was gone. I met the client in the hotel lobby for breakfast. The bacon on the buffet table looked as though it had come from those poor atomic bomb test pigs from the 1950s. Suck. The hotel had set the restaurant’s air conditioning temperature to “MEAT LOCKER,” and the main blower was aimed at our table. Suck. We had made our plans to leave the hotel by 8:30am, but at 8:20 we both received serious calls of nature, and we didn’t meet up again until 8:40. By the time we checked out and got the van packed, it was 8:50, and we had 30 miles of L.A. morning rush traffic between us and the airport. SUCK.
By 9:30 I was pretty certain I was going to miss the check-in cutoff for my 10:48am flight. We arrived at the Hertz Car Rental Return center and managed to arrive at the bus with our large cachet of luggage at the same time as 50 other passengers who had turned in their cars just ahead of us. Suck. Of course, at LAX, the United Airlines ticket counters are at the far end of the airport from the Hertz center, last in the long line of terminals (suck); and of course, there were five elderly passengers on our bus who were NOT flying United, plus one younger woman who had some sort of ailment or illness which caused her to walk doubled over and very slowly…also not flying United Airlines. Suck.
We finally arrived at the United terminal just in time for me to miss the 30-minute cutoff time by three minutes. Suck! I had to book a different flight. Where my original flight was a non-stop from L.A. to New Orleans, booked in all aisle seats, and scheduled to arrive at 4:30pm, my new itinerary was a flight connecting in Chicago (HELLO!), and arriving in New Orleans at 10:00pm, in window seats. Suck! The ticket agent told me the flight to Chicago was scheduled to leave at 12:50. I swear that’s what she said.
I went to the gate area and hunted until I found a seat near an electrical outlet so I could work on revising a script for one of my co-workers. Luck?
Okay, so the flight I missed was at 10:48, nearly 11:00. By the time I got to the gate area it was about 10:55. I finally sat down and spread out with my laptop to work at approximately 11:10. Boarding for a 12:50 flight would start around 12:20, so I had more than an hour to work and, around 12:10, shut down, walk 75 yards to the McDonald’s, grab a bag of heart disease and breeze onto the plane, right?
After about 20 minutes of work, at 11:28am, I heard an amplified voice say, “(mumble, mumble) to Chicago will begin boarding momentarily.” I pulled out my boarding passes and read, “…DEPARTS 12:00.” WHAT?! 12:50 my ASS!” Suck. I began to leisurely gather my things, as boarding was already starting, and I wasn’t going to make it to be the first on board. Then, suddenly, I heard over the P.A. system, “Passenger (Farrago) to the desk, please. Passenger (Farrago).” I’m certain it meant I was being awarded a free upgrade to First Class, for which I had idiotically neglected to request an upgrade! LUCK! My laptop was still out, my backpack had puked some stuff out, and I had cords to wrap. I couldn’t leave the stuff unattended or the police might come and confiscate or destroy it.
I finally got my crap together and I ran to the gate desk. I said to the agent there, “You called for (Farrago?”) And the guy just sorta smiled at me. I said, “I’m (Farrago). You called my name.”
He said, “I have all the passengers I need, thank you.”
I said, “You called my name. Why did you call my name?”
He gave me a slightly dismissing wave and said, “My apologies, sir. I have the passengers I need.” I felt like I had just been uninvited to the popular girl’s party. SUCK!
So I boarded the plane, sat in my window seat (suck) and fumed at the gate agent who wouldn’t tell me why he had called my name though I knew. I just knew.
Just as I had begun to calm myself down – saying to myself that it was really all my own fault; I should have planned on leaving earlier; I shouldn’t have wasted so much time getting ready; I should have gotten a colostomy bag installed; I should have paid closer attention to the information on my boarding pass – just as I had begun to get over it, Chris Farley incarnate sat down in the middle seat, beside me. Suck. And “beside” is a relative term. And by “relative term” I mean so much of his body was touching me (SUCK! SUCK! SUCK!) through most of the flight, he might as well have been a relative of mine.
So, you see, the fine line between luck and suck can be measured by as little as the time it takes to take a dump, or – in the case of the First Class seat that was not meant to be – the time it takes to read a freaking boarding pass.
Worst of all, however, is that this leg of the trip deposited me in New Orleans. S U C K ! I guess I should have seen it all coming.
I flew to Phoenix from Chicago on May 30. Uneventful flight, no drama. I have a good friend in Phoenix, and I was fortunate enough to get two evenings free, spending one at dinner with him, and the other at his home dining with his him, his wife, and their two painfully adorable kids. Luck.
On June 3 I flew to Los Angeles – again no drama – and met at LAX bag claim my client’s producer/director with whom I was to shoot a video piece. From there we rented a minivan and drove leisurely to our hotel in the Thousand Oaks area, in the northwest reaches of the megalopolis that is the City of Angels. Fortune smiled upon me that day as the subject of the video had informed us that he had a wedding to attend Saturday, so the original plans to shoot on that day were off. We had the afternoon and evening free! Luck. The producer/director and I have become friends over the past year, so, with a free evening we planned to get a bite to eat and then see about catching “The DaVinci Code” at a local theater.
If you've never been to Los Angeles, suffice it to say that it is a veritable source overload for anything you might be looking for. We asked the hotel front desk clerk if there were any decent restaurants close to the hotel, and she handed us a three-page list, stapled at a corner, of restaurants that were within a 2-mile radius! We were both in the mood for steak, so we wound up at a Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus restaurant. When we arrived there it was approximately 6:15pm, and I fully expected to have to wait in line, but when we walked in, the hostess – who looked all of 12 years old – walked us straight to a table. Luck. We ordered, got our food – cooked, if not to perfection, at least to order (Luck) – and we left. We used the Hertz Neverlost GPS system in the minivan to find us the nearest movie theater, where we walked in to the ticket lobby at 7:34pm. “The DaVinci Code” was listed to start at 7:30. Both my client and I have read the book, so I wasn’t too worried if we missed the first few minutes. There was a line, so we probably didn’t get into the auditorium until nearly 7:45pm.
We sat down, saw two trailers, a short film titled, “Buy Your Popcorn, Sit Down, Turn Off Your Cell Phones and Shut Up," and our movie started! Luck!
The next day it only got better. The subject of our video is quite well to do. He has an incredible house made into a beautiful home by his professional interior decorator wife. Generous to a fault – after we finished taping for the day, during which he fed us lunch – he insisted that we stay for dinner and a sit-down in the hot tub with cigars and wine. Luck. (Yes, this IS California. No, we were NOT naked Luck. …well, I was (SUCK!))
On Monday we had more shooting to do at the man’s office, and then at his home again. I had discovered that this man’s home in Thousand Oaks was literally minutes away from the home of a good friend of mine with whom I was stationed in Montana when we were in the Air Force. Luck. I had forgotten to bring his phone number with me, but I was able to coordinate with Mrs. Farrago to look it up on my computer and get the number to me! Luck!
We finished shooting, and I went to my Air Force buddy’s house where I met his kids for the first time (his wife, whom I met a few years ago, was away working the night shift Suck.)). We talked for hours, reminiscing about our times in the Air Force and updating each other on our lives.
Tuesday morning, however, the magic was gone. I met the client in the hotel lobby for breakfast. The bacon on the buffet table looked as though it had come from those poor atomic bomb test pigs from the 1950s. Suck. The hotel had set the restaurant’s air conditioning temperature to “MEAT LOCKER,” and the main blower was aimed at our table. Suck. We had made our plans to leave the hotel by 8:30am, but at 8:20 we both received serious calls of nature, and we didn’t meet up again until 8:40. By the time we checked out and got the van packed, it was 8:50, and we had 30 miles of L.A. morning rush traffic between us and the airport. SUCK.
By 9:30 I was pretty certain I was going to miss the check-in cutoff for my 10:48am flight. We arrived at the Hertz Car Rental Return center and managed to arrive at the bus with our large cachet of luggage at the same time as 50 other passengers who had turned in their cars just ahead of us. Suck. Of course, at LAX, the United Airlines ticket counters are at the far end of the airport from the Hertz center, last in the long line of terminals (suck); and of course, there were five elderly passengers on our bus who were NOT flying United, plus one younger woman who had some sort of ailment or illness which caused her to walk doubled over and very slowly…also not flying United Airlines. Suck.
We finally arrived at the United terminal just in time for me to miss the 30-minute cutoff time by three minutes. Suck! I had to book a different flight. Where my original flight was a non-stop from L.A. to New Orleans, booked in all aisle seats, and scheduled to arrive at 4:30pm, my new itinerary was a flight connecting in Chicago (HELLO!), and arriving in New Orleans at 10:00pm, in window seats. Suck! The ticket agent told me the flight to Chicago was scheduled to leave at 12:50. I swear that’s what she said.
I went to the gate area and hunted until I found a seat near an electrical outlet so I could work on revising a script for one of my co-workers. Luck?
Okay, so the flight I missed was at 10:48, nearly 11:00. By the time I got to the gate area it was about 10:55. I finally sat down and spread out with my laptop to work at approximately 11:10. Boarding for a 12:50 flight would start around 12:20, so I had more than an hour to work and, around 12:10, shut down, walk 75 yards to the McDonald’s, grab a bag of heart disease and breeze onto the plane, right?
After about 20 minutes of work, at 11:28am, I heard an amplified voice say, “(mumble, mumble) to Chicago will begin boarding momentarily.” I pulled out my boarding passes and read, “…DEPARTS 12:00.” WHAT?! 12:50 my ASS!” Suck. I began to leisurely gather my things, as boarding was already starting, and I wasn’t going to make it to be the first on board. Then, suddenly, I heard over the P.A. system, “Passenger (Farrago) to the desk, please. Passenger (Farrago).” I’m certain it meant I was being awarded a free upgrade to First Class, for which I had idiotically neglected to request an upgrade! LUCK! My laptop was still out, my backpack had puked some stuff out, and I had cords to wrap. I couldn’t leave the stuff unattended or the police might come and confiscate or destroy it.
I finally got my crap together and I ran to the gate desk. I said to the agent there, “You called for (Farrago?”) And the guy just sorta smiled at me. I said, “I’m (Farrago). You called my name.”
He said, “I have all the passengers I need, thank you.”
I said, “You called my name. Why did you call my name?”
He gave me a slightly dismissing wave and said, “My apologies, sir. I have the passengers I need.” I felt like I had just been uninvited to the popular girl’s party. SUCK!
So I boarded the plane, sat in my window seat (suck) and fumed at the gate agent who wouldn’t tell me why he had called my name though I knew. I just knew.
Just as I had begun to calm myself down – saying to myself that it was really all my own fault; I should have planned on leaving earlier; I shouldn’t have wasted so much time getting ready; I should have gotten a colostomy bag installed; I should have paid closer attention to the information on my boarding pass – just as I had begun to get over it, Chris Farley incarnate sat down in the middle seat, beside me. Suck. And “beside” is a relative term. And by “relative term” I mean so much of his body was touching me (SUCK! SUCK! SUCK!) through most of the flight, he might as well have been a relative of mine.
So, you see, the fine line between luck and suck can be measured by as little as the time it takes to take a dump, or – in the case of the First Class seat that was not meant to be – the time it takes to read a freaking boarding pass.
Worst of all, however, is that this leg of the trip deposited me in New Orleans. S U C K ! I guess I should have seen it all coming.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
In Case Anyone Is Interested
After posting my most recent story, I thought people might be interested in some other light reading (the title is a link)....
There really is/was a legend of alpha five Launch Facility, at least the way I heard it when I was a young airman at Malmstrom. I was actually assigned to the 342nd Missile Security Squadron which, apparently, has since been deactivated. The "swap" idea is mine, a figment of my imagination. Never happened as far as I'm aware. Also as far as I'm aware, there was never any kind of "incident" there, certainly not like such depicted in my fiction. The legend included a tale about a camper team that one evening heard and felt something hit the side of their camper, and when they got our and looked, there was a tomahawk lodged in the camper section above the cab of the pickup truck. I wanted to include that in the story originally, but when I got to that point, it just seemed too contrived...like it isn't already!!
There did occur something I never knew about - until a few nights ago - that happened nearly 20 years before I got there, which made for some very interesting reading for me.
Whatever. I hope you read the story. If you read it, I hope you liked it. If you didn't like it, I hope you'll tell me why.
dassall
There really is/was a legend of alpha five Launch Facility, at least the way I heard it when I was a young airman at Malmstrom. I was actually assigned to the 342nd Missile Security Squadron which, apparently, has since been deactivated. The "swap" idea is mine, a figment of my imagination. Never happened as far as I'm aware. Also as far as I'm aware, there was never any kind of "incident" there, certainly not like such depicted in my fiction. The legend included a tale about a camper team that one evening heard and felt something hit the side of their camper, and when they got our and looked, there was a tomahawk lodged in the camper section above the cab of the pickup truck. I wanted to include that in the story originally, but when I got to that point, it just seemed too contrived...like it isn't already!!
There did occur something I never knew about - until a few nights ago - that happened nearly 20 years before I got there, which made for some very interesting reading for me.
Whatever. I hope you read the story. If you read it, I hope you liked it. If you didn't like it, I hope you'll tell me why.
dassall
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
A Story
Here is the other story I promised a few weeks (months?) back. It is a fiction inspired by a 'real' legend. As my earlier writing sample was presented with no editing and with minimal polishing, this one has been reworked a fair bit. The strongest, yet valid, criticism the original received as a writing class submission was the readers' difficulty slogging through jargon and depicted procedures. It is this area in which I did the most revising, hoping to smooth out and clarify those things that I am - I was - so close to that it's difficult for me to know how to water them down.
Feel free to offer your critiques and make suggestions, and let me know if, after reading it through (and IF you could read it through!) any confusing jargon or confounding procedure from the beginning became clearer by the time you reached the end. Don't be afraid you'll hurt my feelings. You will. This is my baby. But I have to know where it fails in order to fix it.
And it's pretty long. At Times New Roman 12 pt. font single-spaced, it's eightteen pages. Prepare yourself for that. Go potty now. Crack open that beer or cork that wine. Just don't pass out before you finish! :^(
Incident At Alpha Five
by Farrago
“’Legend has it that Alpha five was built on an old Indian burial ground.’ Quintero looked at me with his shit grin. That was the last thing I needed. Why do people always have to pick on the new guys?”
I looked first at Lieutenant Kirby at my bedside, then between my suspended feet at Agent Gage, the guy from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Neither answered. Gage stepped toward my bed from where he was leaning against the bathroom door in my sterile room. He had already made the orderlies move the other patients out of the room so they wouldn’t hear. He spoke curtly. “Just keep going, Randy. I need to know everything.”
I looked to the lieutenant. He nodded and leaned back in his chair.
* * *
The tour had started off just as badly as any other. Up at 3:45 a.m., I shook off the grog in the shower. After two years in the Air Force running this same routine, you’d think I was used to this. I hadn’t shined my boots the night before, so I spent a few minutes brushing them off in my dorm room between getting dressed and running to the chow hall. They looked presentable enough. At the chow hall I met Sugar Bowl.
“Hey! Nice boots, dickhead!” He was always a joy to talk to at 4:30 in the morning.
I suppressed a greeting just as cheerful and looked at his chubby face. If it wasn’t embossed on his uniform, I would never remember that Sugar Bowl’s real name was Brown. He and I went through Security Specialist Technical Training together at Lackland Air force Base, and one of the instructors there gave him the nickname because he didn’t like his haircut, thought it looked as though someone had placed a large bowl on Brown’s head and trimmed the hairs that hung below it. The name followed Brown to Montana, mainly because of people like me who wouldn’t let him forget it, and he abused anyone equal or lower in rank who called him by the name. I reached up and stroked his smooth, pale, round cheek and faked a lisp. “Oh! My goodness! You shaved!”
“I shined my boots, too! There’s a full inspection this morning, and the colonel is gonna love your shine!” He’s not a bad person, Sugar Bowl, but when he’s got somebody, he really lets him have it. And he had me. Under the glaring fluorescents of the chow hall, my boots looked like shit.
At the squadron, nothing was different. Leaning against the wall in line for weapons issue, bitching because the camper and escort teams had posting priority and were allowed to cut in, I realized that every team that cut in meant a later and later guardmount and post, prolonging my dread of the inspection from hell.
“Mornin’ Steve,” I said to Sergeant Jenkins when I finally got to the armory window. I slid my weapons issue card to him and said, “I’ll have the usual.” He didn’t laugh. I said the same thing every posting day. He picked up my card and disappeared into the racks of M-16 rifles.
Beside me, at the other issue window, Sergeant Rodriguez, one of the Flight Security Controllers in Charlie flight area, dropped one of his magazines full of M-16 rounds. A chorus of men’s voice rose up from various corners, and I joined in: “Jeep!” It was a word reserved for a newbie, someone with no experience, but it was also used when someone of any level of experience made a stupid mistake.
When Jenkins returned he spoke. “Congratulations, Bogner.” He placed the magazines fully loaded with rifle rounds on the counter, and I placed them in the magazine pouches on my web belt. He pointed the weapon into the sand-filled clearing barrel suspended from the ceiling and pulled the rifle’s charging handle, sliding the bolt away from the chamber with the flat “shuk” noise that, after two years of this routine, was so familiar to me. Jenkins looked into the chamber to make sure it was clear of any foreign objects – or more importantly, a bullet – turned it to show me, and then handed it through the window. “Full weapon breakdown and inspection on recovery day!” said Jenkins, pulling my weapons issue card and a grease pencil out of his pocket, and writing on the card a large letter “I” and circling it.
“Christ!” I spat. “Why don’t you guys have us do that on posting day? We got nowhere else to go, then!”
Jenkins shrugged and said, “Rules.” Then he called for the guy in line behind me.
I walked to the clearing barrel, rifle muzzle pointed at the ceiling, rifle at a forty-five degree angle four inches from my chest. Some people get angry if you don’t hold the rifle at port arms during the clearing procedure. Rules. And it would be the same procedure in reverse on recovery day. After I stripped and cleaned my rifle for inspection, of course.
Senior Airman Quintero – that morning’s clearing barrel official – waved me forward and snapped to attention. I reached into my ammo pouch and pulled out one magazine, and I handed it to Quintero. I walked to the bright red barrel and pointed my rifle into it, showing Quintero the open ejection port, the oval cut into the side of the rifle where the spent shells would be spit out after being fired. He looked into the open oval and the empty chamber and said, crisply, “Clear, SIR!” I rotated the rifle clockwise, revealing the other side to him. He looked first at the fire selector lever beside my thumb, and said just as crisply as before, “Safe, SIR!” Some of the other guys in the room were laughing at Quintero’s performance. He never really took the military crap seriously, and now being so “short,” with fewer than six months left before getting out, he openly showed his hatred for it. I reached down and slapped the bolt release on the left side of the rifle, feeling the whole thing jump as the bolt slammed into the chamber with a flat “shak,” completing the two-step sequence that was started at the armory issue window. Quintero handed the magazine back to me, and I slid it into the magazine well on the rifle until I heard the telltale ‘click’ that told me it was locked into place. The weapon was “half-safe,” not a danger to anyone until the charging handle was pulled back to send a round from the magazine into the chamber. As I stepped away from the barrel I looked at Quintero and said, “Lighten up, Frances,” quoting a line from one of my favorite films.
Without acknowledging my joke, he barked, “Sir! Yes, SIR!” He was giving the guys in line a good morning. As I walked out of the armory, the “shuk-shak” sound of M-16 rifles being cleared behind me reminded me of the firing range. Weapons requalification always got me excited – a magazine loaded with standard issue 5.56 millimeter NATO rounds, sliding it into the magazine well until it clicked, pulling the charging handle back and hearing the bolt slide back, the distinct sound of smooth, oiled metal sliding against smooth, oiled metal. “Shuk!” Then releasing the charging handle and the distinctly different sound of a cartridge being stripped out of the magazine and into the chamber – “SHLAK!” Ready to rock and roll! I’ve consistently been one of the top five marksmen on Bravo Flight since I got to Montana.
“SQUADRON! ‘Ten HUT!” The guardmount room suddenly became quiet, with the exception of Quintero humming just under his breath something close to “California Here I Come.” Standing next to him, I couldn’t help but hear. Lieutenant Colonel Robbin, our squadron commander, walked between the two formations of Security Specialists, all armed, all shiny – except for me – and stopped in front of Lieutenant Kirby and Master Sergeant Hickson. The lieutenant and the master sergeant presented perfect salutes, and the lieutenant said to the colonel, “Sir! The flights are ready for inspection.”
Colonel Robbin first inspected Lieutenant Kirby, then Sergeant Hickson, and then he executed a crisp about-face and stared ahead at the two flights. Guardmount is a formality in the Air Force cop world, a personal inspection at the beginning of every shift, and something I’ve resented since I joined. It’s worse for cops at other bases who have to do it daily, so I guess I shouldn’t complain about having to do it once every nine days. But then, people in every other Air Force specialty have to do it only two or three times a year. Colonel Robbin had assumed command earlier in the year, and was a little more into formality than Major Wooten, his predecessor.
“BRAVO FLIGHT!” Sergeant Hickson barked, “Parade REST!” As one with the rest of the flight, I stepped my left foot out to a shoulder-width stance and brought my left hand from my side to my rear waist, leaving my right hand at my shoulder, on the rifle’s carrying strap. Colonel Robbin began the inspection with Delta flight, with Lieutenant Kirby and Sergeant Hickson in tow. Right behind me I heard Sugar Bowl whisper.
“The colonel’s gonna make you lick your boots, ‘Boogner!’” He had his nickname. I had mine.
In the middle of a military formation, I couldn’t respond verbally, but with the advantage of parade rest, with our hands behind our backs, I silently bent my wrist upward and curled all of my fingers but one. I heard a brief snort from Sergeant Bearse, next to Sugar Bowl, and then silence. Despite my quiet triumph, the image of me licking my own boots squashed my smile.
Soon Bravo flight was at attention, and the colonel worked his way to me. To my surprise he didn’t make a comment to me. He stepped from the man to my left, snapped a perfect right-face to look me dead in the eye, then he examined me from top to bottom – beret, haircut, shave, uniform – every detail from head to foot. His eyes returned to mine, and then he mumbled “Boots.” Sergeant Hickson jotted it down on the roster sheet on his clipboard. Colonel Robbin then crisply executed a left face, took a step to my right, directly in front of Senior Airman Hoffman next to me, with Lieutenant Kirby and Sergeant Hickson mimicking the colonel not quite as crisply. As the colonel examined Hoffman in the same manner as he had me, Lieutenant Kirby stared me straight in the face. Colonel Robbin moved on again, and this time Sergeant Hickson stood directly in front of me looking, without moving his head, first at my face, and then at my boots, and then at my face again. Each time, his lips drew back at one corner and his right eyebrow lifted higher, communicating his disapproval. The colonel moved on.
The colonel didn’t give his usual speech that morning; he had meetings to go to, and since he left the room with our flight commander on his tail, I was spared Lieutenant Kirby’s wrath. Sergeant Hickson still managed to make an example of me, anyway. “Senior Airman Bogner! Front and Center! Show the troops a proper post briefing.”
I faced the formations and snapped to attention. Out on post I could rattle off my post briefing crisp and clear for the colonel or Sergeant Hickson and any visitor, but in front of the troops, all of my friends, I was a quivering ball of sweat. I hitched and stuttered through it. “Sir, Airman Bogner reports. As Alarm Response Team leader my primary responsibility is to provide an armed response to any alarms or situations that exist at the Launch Facilities in my flight area, and to supervise and direct my team member in such response. Other responsibilities include weekly inspections of Launch Facilities, and domestic tasks at the Launch Control Facility. My team member and I are each armed with one M-16 rifle and...
“Okay, good enough,” said Sergeant Hickson.
As I returned to formation there was some half-assed applause, and a muffled laugh from Sugar Bowl. I was glad I wasn’t posting with him.
Hickson began the routine announcements. “Alpha crew, there’s a change in your post. Airman Campbell, report immediately to the 342nd guardmount room. You’re the swap this tour.”
I looked over to Tim Cambpell as he looked over to me. We worked well together as an ART, but not this time out. He was this week’s choice for the 341st Missile Security Group’s personnel swap. It had started a couple of months before as a remedial lesson in comradeship after two guys, one from the 342nd Missile Security Squadron, and one from ours, the 341st, got into a fistfight at the NCO club. The group commander, the base’s top cop, liked the swap idea so much he decided to make it a regular thing. He thought that tearing a young guy from his familiar surroundings and the people he works best with and putting him with people, procedures, and places that are practically foreign to him was good for the ‘espirit de corps’ of the whole Group. All it did for ‘de corps’ was piss them off.
As Tim began gathering his equipment, Sergeant Hickson then said, “Airmen Quintero and Bogner, you will swap shifts as ART leaders.” This meant that I would be working nights with the swap troop from the 342nd. Since Quintero was a short-timer, Hickson didn’t trust putting anyone new with him because of his attitude. Also, since the swap guy doesn’t know our flight areas, he would be put on nights so if he did anything stupid nobody would see him and embarrass us. Hickson then confirmed my assessment. “Bogner, keep Quintero away from the swap and he should do okay.” The troops laughed. “I’m trusting you to train the swap properly.” Hickson paused a moment, an eyebrow arching mischievously. “And maybe the swap can train you to shine your boots.” The guardmount erupted in loud, brief laughter. I paid for my boots infraction in full. “Show this guy how we do things in the ‘41st,” said Sergeant Hickson.
“Yes, SIR!” I barked.
Seregeant Hickson looked at me with that same pulled back lip and arched eyebrow, a look that read, “don’t call me ‘sir,’ I work for a living.” He wasn’t much for the military pomp, either, but I considered it change back from what I paid him.
I looked to Quintero, on my right, just as he was pretending to nod off while standing. He jerked his head up with a snort and said, “Chit, man!” exaggerating his East L.A. Chicano dialect. The post change would mess him up. For tours when he’s scheduled to work nights, he stays up all night before posting day so he can sleep well through the afternoon. I do the same thing. For me this was a plus. Even though I wouldn’t be working with my good friend, Campbell, as soon as we arrived at the Launch Control Facility and changed over with the old crew, I could go straight to bed! It also meant that we wouldn’t be hassled with any exercise scenarios because there’s usually nobody out in the flight areas the first night.
Just as Sergeant Hickson began his departure safety briefing, the troop from the 342nd came in. Hickson waved him to the front of the room and told him to turn around and face us. “Troops,” Hickson announced, “meet Airman Green. He will post with us for this tour in the field. Please show him your hospitality and your respect.” And then Hickson mumbled into his hand as though he was clearing his throat: “…even though he is from the ‘42nd!
As all of the other troops laughed, I noticed how shiny and stiff and new the one single stripe was on green’s uniform sleeve.
I leaned over to Quintero and whispered harshly, “Great! They sent us a fuckin’ jeep!”
Quintero jerked his head up with a snort again and said, “Chit, man!”
* * *
“Quintero!” I groaned. “Lay off the jeep.” I looked at Green and said, “Don’t listen to him. It’s a load of crap, and Quintero’s full of it.”
We were halfway to Alpha Launch Control Facility when Quintero had changed subjects from his latest jailbait conquest to the mystery of Alpha five Launch Facility. He was sitting between Airman Green and me on the middle seat of the Air Force issue dark blue Chevy Suburban.
Green blinked at me for a few seconds and then focused on Quintero again. “Indians?” Green’s eyes had the look of a little kid who wanted to go into the carnival spook house, but needed a reason not to.
“Blackfeet.” Sergeant Rimbaux spoke to the rear view mirror from his spot behind the steering wheel, alternating his gaze between Green’s reflection and U.S. 89 vibrating beneath us as we headed east. His smooth, Cajun-spiced voice made the subject even more eerie to hear about, and I’m certain he realized it. “Da Blackfeet was at the diggin’, telling the white men that they was disturbin’ the dead, an’ that they would pay fo they crime.”
Staff Sergeant McCrindle, beside Rimbaux in the front passenger seat, said, “Ram-bo, you and Quintero BOTH fulla shit!” The two black men looked at each other and, after a silent glare, both burst into laughter. To speak to each one separately, they had nothing in common but the color of their skin. Rimbaux was a backwoods country boy from somewhere in Louisiana bayou country, and McCrindle was a street-tough homeboy from Philadelphia. One would think that Rimbaux’s smooth, laid-back personality and McCrindle’s choppy, high-strung one would clash, but they didn’t. Each seemed to complement the other and they got along smoothly with lots of laughter between them. The hulking Suburban straddled the yellow line under the influence of Rimbaux’s laughter, and McCrindle corrected him, laughing anew. “Get back on this side, ‘Bo! Ain’t you got lines in the road in ‘Loosiana?’”
“What roads?” Rimbaux’s laughter intensified with his own joke, and he took the Suburban all the way to the left side of the pavement.
I leaned across Quintero and said to Green, beneath the laughter, “Welcome to the 341st Missile Security Squadron!”
He faked a laugh. His brown eyes shifted from me to Rimbaux, almost as if we would leave the pavement if he were to look away from him too long.
“Don’t worry about these guys, I said, waving my thumb at the front seat. “We usually make it there alive.”
After wake-up that afternoon, I gave Green a tour of Alpha Launch Control Facility. During dinner I asked him what he thought.
“It’s a lot smaller than the LCFs in the west side of the complex.”
Though true, the west side is no different from the east side. Each LCF supports a launch crew sequestered in a capsule deep in the earth, who control ten missiles dispersed across the Montana countryside. These crews wait, day in and day out, for the order to launch any or all of their missiles, doing their part to aid in the destruction of the earth’s living creatures. Topside, the LCF building houses teams of Security Specialists who regularly run around to all of the launch facilities, where the missiles are housed deep under ground, in response to alarms detected out there, or just to make routine checks to make sure the alarm systems are working correctly.
“Which one do you work?” I asked, as if I would know where any of the flight areas on that side of the missile complex were. I had never gone beyond Great Falls in that direction.
“Romeo.”
“Oh.” It was all I could think of to say. Then, “East complex was here first, so everything built later had all the improvements.” Green’s face was blank, so I continued. “Alpha was the first Minuteman II launch complex built, actually. We’re sitting on history.” Green’s expression didn’t change. I had recalled this information, so now I felt compelled to spit it out to him. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, Alpha was Kennedy’s ‘ace in the hole.’ He convinced the commies that aiming their missiles at us from Cuba was a bad idea.” Green was as ignorant to the history of Malmstrom Air Force Base as I was when I first heard about it. Only Green didn’t even seem to know which Kennedy I was talking about. I looked up at the clock and said, “Five ‘til seven. Let’s change over.”
Rimbaux buzzed the lock to let us into Flight Security Control when we knocked. He and McCrindle had already changed over and were sharing a laugh about something as we came in. I noticed that McCrindle’s camouflage fatigue shirt was completely unbuttoned, his O.D. green undershirt untucked and ruffled, exposing the ‘outie’ protruding from his flat, brown belly, his belt unbuckled and his boots unlaced.
“Jeez, Mac!” I said. “You’re supposed to wait until you’re ready for bed to get undressed!”
“What you talkin’ about, Bog?” he said, straight-faced. “I been like this all day!” I laughed along with him and Rimbaux, and Green even relaxed a little with a chuckle.
I turned to Rimbaux and said, “Okay, boss. Brief me.”
He turned his head to face his feet propped up on the desk and spoke to them and the piece of paper with his notes on it. “ART on da road, on da way back. You gotta weekly at Alpha four due by midnight. Alpha seven gone off six times today – that’s where the ART just comin’ back from. And we got a camper at Alpha five.”
“You’re kidding! Since when?” I thought he was joking until he reached forward and pulled McCrindle’s report from the desk.
“They just arrived. Had maintenance doin’ routine, and outer zone system wouldn’t reset when they tried to leave. Escorts sat two hours waitin’ fo’ da camper.”
I looked at Green and sighed. “It’s gonna be a long three nights.”
Green cocked his head at me. “Why’s that?”
“Well,” I said, “when a site has a camper team on it, the ART…” It dawned on me as I spoke that, in our earlier conversation, I hadn’t thought to ask Green just how much of a jeep he was. “How long have you been at Malmstrom?”
Green looked to the ceiling to calculate. “Two months.”
“Fuckin’ 42nd!” I muttered to myself, rubbing my face with my hand. Then to Green: “Do you remember anything from orientation? From TECH SCHOOL?”
Green shrugged tentatively.
“When a site has a camper team on it,” I sighed, “the dedicated ART has to relieve them for two hours out of every 24 so they can get a shower and a hot meal. We usually wind up stuck out there for a lot longer because they can never find the LCF on their own. Their two-hour break doesn’t start until they arrive at the LCF. While they’re on relief, they’re the responding ART, so if there are any alarms, their two-hour break clock stops, and it doesn’t start up again until they return to the LCF.
“It’s worse at night, and since they initiated at the start of our shift, you and I are their relief. That’s why it’s gonna be a long three nights.
“Oh.” Green’s face was blank. It was all he said.
“Only two,” Rimbaux said.
“Huh?” I looked at him.
“Only two nights. They just got there. You don’ gotta go tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Of course, he was right. I was just so pissed at the idea I had assumed was effective immediately. Then another thought occurred to me. “Maybe they’ll fix the O.Z. by tomorrow afternoon, and we won’t have to go at all.”
“Mebbee, mebbee,” said Rimbaux, nodding at his boots.
Just as Quintero and Hoffman, the day-shift Alarm Response Team, were pulling in, the missile commander housed in the capsule deep in the earth below us called on the intercom. “Status Detroit, Alpha seven.” Since we used common, unsecure radio frequencies in the flight areas, the Air Force had devised generic codes that wouldn’t necessarily tip off scanner buzzards when something serious happened. A “Detroit” was the code to let us know that the outer zone security alarm system had been triggered at the Alpha seven site again. At least its O.Z. system worked!
Green and I ran out to meet Quinetro and Hoffman at the Alarm Response Team vehicle, a Ford Bronco, painted the same dark blue as the Suburban we had arrived in earlier in the day, its bright yellow identification decals blooming in the late afternoon sun hitting the passenger door as Hoffman opened it. As we quickly changed over, I slapped Quintero on the back and asked, “What’s the story with Alpha seven, man?”
“I don’t know, man,” he replied, looking up at me with drooping, very tired, coal black eyes. “I been out there all damn day. Seen a gopher hole on site, but no gopher. If you see him, kill the fucker!”
“Rah-JO!” I said, plopping the Kevlar helmet on my head and unshouldering my rifle. An O.Z. alarm is usually nothing to be alarmed about, but the Air Force has rules, and just in case there really is something sinister happening at a LF, we have to be prepared with our Kevlar helmets and our Kevlar vests on and fastened when we leave the LCF. Of course, once we leave, the helmets come off and the vest is opened until we arrive at the LF, just in case it’s Sergeant Hickson conducting an exercise. I climbed into the Ford Bronco’s driver seat, and Quintero trotted to the LCF gate to let us out. As I drove past him I looked to him and shouted through the open window, “Get some sleep!”
He shouted back, “Sir! Yes, SIR!” snapping to exaggerated attention and giving a goofy salute.
Green watched Quintero out the back window of the Bronco for a few seconds as we drew away from him, and then he turned to me and said, “Is he always like that?”
“He’s short,” was my only response.
Arriving at Alpha seven Launch Facility about an hour later, I immediately saw what had triggered the alarm. Silhouetted against the clear western sky, right in the middle of the O.Z., was what Quintero hadn’t been able to glimpse earlier in the day: a lone gopher, up on his haunches and viewing his domain.
“You know how to kill a gopher, Green?”
He stared at me for a second, then blinked, and said, “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Why kill it?”
“He lives here,” I said. “If you just chase him off, he’ll just come back after we leave and trigger the alarm again and again.”
Green looked at his rifle timidly. A light breeze blew through both of our open windows, causing the hair in his outgrown brown flat-top to flitter like fresh cut grass. “So, we shoot it?”
It was the same reaction every new ART member in the missile fields had when confronted with this situation. It was mine when I was in Green’s position. “No. We can’t do that. Too dangerous for the locals and the launcher site. We’re supposed to protect Air Force resources, not shoot at them.”
Green looked out at the gopher, searching his young mind for ideas. “No,” he said. “I don’t know how.”
I grabbed the microphone attached to the Bronco’s mobile radio, and pressed the transmit button. “Alpha control, Alpha sixty.”
A few seconds went by, then the radio speaker burped. “Go, sixty,” crackled Rimbaux’s voice.
“We have visual of a gopher on site. Likely cause. Over.”
“Roger, that, sixty. Proceed on site and escort him off. Over.”
“Ten-four.”
I looked at Green. “Turn on the lights and unlock the gate.” I opened my door and stood just outside the vehicle. I removed my flak vest and put on my beret. While Green unlocked the gate I opened the hood on the Bronco.
“What are you doing?” Green asked over his shoulder while he fiddled with the lock.
“Watch and learn, my boy,” I said. “Watch and learn.” Along the driver’s side fender panel, under retaining clips, was the vehicle’s jack handle, a straight, steel rod, hinged in the middle, with a squared “S” bent into one end, intended to be used as a crank for the jack when changing a tire.
I turned to face the Launch Facility. With a few cosmetic differences, all Minuteman missile silos are the same: a huge concrete launcher lid shaped like a six-pointed diamond, perched on a set of rails, which point south. Why all silos point south, I don’t know; maybe it has something to do with the rotation of the earth. I never bothered to ask. Around the launcher lid at four corners are the outer zone field motion detectors, large, circular things with plastic covers, each perched atop a vertical pole and facing in toward the launcher lid. As far as I’m aware, they’ve been called “banjos” forever, and if you relax your mind a little bit, you can see the resemblance to the namesake instrument, stood up on its tuning head. It was this system of sensors that had detected our gopher, which was now clearly aware of our presence.
“Open the gate slowly,” I ordered Green. “Be as quiet as possible.” He followed my instructions well.
With the jack handle in my hand I walked through the LF gate. The gopher reacted cautiously, dropping to all fours and moving a few steps toward the north end of the launcher lid. That’s where its hole was, at least the hole where it intended to make its escape. I scanned the area north of the lid and found the telltale signs of the hole: a slightly raised berm created by the discarded dirt from the gopher’s digging. I moved to my left, toward the area north of the lid.
“Walk along inside the fence,” I said to Green, pointing in the opposite direction from where I was heading. “Stand at the end of the rails.” I waited while Green got into position. I unclipped my handheld radio and raised it to my mouth. The gopher was occupied with Green’s movement, so I inched a little closer to its hole.
When Green reached the rails, I keyed the mike of my radio. “If the gopher comes over the lid toward you, charge after him.” Green fumbled for his handheld radio as I spoke. “Make as much noise as possible. But don’t move until he comes over the ledge. Got it?”
My radio spat, “Got it.”
I stepped forward, kicking the gravel before me. The gopher spun to look at me, crouched and ready to dart for its hole. I leaned forward and then broke into a sprint right for the gopher’s hole, screaming like an idiot. The startled gopher ran a few tentative steps toward his hole and then abandoned the idea, making a run for it in the exact opposite direction, right for the edge of the launcher lid.
Green seemed almost as startled by my actions as the gopher, and when the gopher went over the ledge, I think Green’s scream was as much astonishment as it was following instructions. Either way, it worked, and the frightened gopher’s survival instinct kicked in. When it hit the concrete at the base of the lid, it scrambled away from Green and under the lid.
“Aw, CRAP!” shouted Green. “He got away!”
I trotted to the edge of the lid and hopped off. “No he didn’t. Come here. Look.” I pulled my flashlight off of my web belt and lay flat on the concrete. Green did the same. I shined the light beneath the lid and found the gopher, squeezed as tightly as it could manage into the smallest space it could find, against the launcher lid seal. Inwardly, I was a little embarrassed at myself. My usual ART member, Tim Campbell, had perfected the gopher hunt to a science, and could wrangle any gopher under the lid without my help. Whenever I tried it alone, the gopher always managed to disappear into one of its many other holes. But my two-man method works, at least.
“Huh!” Green snorted. “Now what?”
“Just keep the flashlight on him,” I said. I unfolded the Bronco’s jack handle and slid it under the lid.
“You gonna stab it?” asked Green.
The end of the jack handle is too blunt for that. “Tried that once,” I said. “Didn’t work. They’re hardy little fuckers.”
I maneuvered the flattened tip of the jack handle underneath the gopher’s neck and pressed up as hard as I could, trying to strangle the poor creature. It took about twenty seconds for it to stop struggling, and its little limbs went slack. Using the end of the jack handle, I pulled its limp little body out from beneath the launcher lid. Using my right foot I positioned it so that its head was toward me, its tail away. I placed the heel of my right boot over its head. Green’s eyes went briefly wide, and then he turned his head slightly, closing his eyes in disgust as the gopher’s skull crunched under my heel.
“Why’d you have to do that? He was dead already.”
“Are you sure of that? My first gopher, I just strangled it. While I looked at it, wondering what to do next, it came to and ran back under the lid. How long does it take to strangle a gopher to death? I don’t know. So you knock him out and squish its head. It’s the most humane way we can do it out here.”
I agreed with Green. I didn’t like doing it, but I had done it so many times now that it was just part of the job. It was the modified law of the jungle. If I didn’t kill it, it would just keep triggering alarms. Besides, there are probably more gophers in the Montana missile fields than there are people in the United States, so I don’t think a few hundred a year going MIA would tip nature’s scales.
I squatted before the little corpse and grasped it by its stubby, little tail.
“Now what are you doing?” asked Green.
I walked with the gopher dangling from my thumb and forefinger to the fence and tossed it up and over, as far beyond the fence as I could muster. Walking back to Green, I said, “Scavengers will find it and eat it. We took care of the gopher problem here, we don’t want to leave it on site for the scavengers to trip the alarm.” I continued past Green. “Come on. You still have to do the topside check.”
Against procedure, I walked the topside while Green trotted through his check, and he pointed out the differences between the west complex LFs and those here in the east complex. I answered his questions, and he seemed to be aware enough of the differences.
From Alpha seven we drove directly to Alpha four and completed the weekly inspection due there. On the way back to Alpha LCF, the Bronco’s radio barked. “Alpha control, this is Alpha five.” It was the camper team Rimbaux had told us about.
After a couple of seconds, Rimbaux’s smooth voice called back. “Alpha control. Go ahead, five.”
“Site is secure. Bravo lima.”
The radio went silent, and I could picture Rimbaux running his finger across the code page, finding the camper guard’s authenticator numbers matching ‘B’ and ‘L,’ and keying his radio microphone. “Ten-four, Alpha five. Control out.” Just a comfortable reminder of the camper relief in our future.
Green looked at me for a few seconds, and then at the radio. I knew what he was thinking.
“What was Quintero talking about today? About Alpha five?”
I sighed and remained silent, hoping he would drop it. He wouldn’t.
“Bog?”
I sighed again. “The story goes that, back in the fifties, when they were building these missile sites, some of the Blackfeet tribe protested at Alpha five. They complained that the digging was disturbing an ancient burial ground. The Air Force said, ‘Sure. We’ll stop,’ kicked the Indians off the site, and continued building. End of story.”
“Then what’s the big mystery?” Green hadn’t taken his eyes off of me.
I sighed yet again and rolled my eyes. “There have been rumors since the missiles came on line that the spirits of the dead Indians roam Alpha five looking for their lost graves.”
In the sparse light from the twilight sky around us I could see Green’s eyes bugged wide. “No shit?” He was almost whispering.
“They’re just rumors, Green! Ghost stories.” I shouted at him. “I’ve spent more nights at Alpha five than I can remember, and all I’ve seen out there was the fence and the trees! Don’t let Quintero and Rimbaux spook you. They’re just fucking with you because you’re a jeep.” After my words I held my eyes steady on the road, occasionally admiring the dazzling array of colors offered after one of northern Montana’s typical Big Sky sunsets, and breathing in the fresh, late June air blowing in through the Bronco’s open windows. Neither of us spoke again until we arrived at Alpha LCF.
The rest of the night was quiet out in the Alpha flight area. I sat in the lounge, nodding off in front of the TV while the VCR spun out “Ghostbusters.” I had seen it at least fifty times already. It was the only tape at the LCF, and Campbell wasn’t here with his usual stash of porn videos. Green spent the rest of the night in the office shooting the shit with Rimbaux.
The next evening I was again at the dinner table with Green. I had had trouble sleeping through the day, and I wasn’t in a mood to talk. But Green was.
“So, where are you from, Bogner?”
I paused, trying to work a piece of corn hull from between my teeth with my tongue. It sounded almost like I was trying to remember. “Ohio,” I replied, finally. I picked up the cob and tore another mouthful of corn into my mouth.
“Oh,” said Green. He paused while I chewed, but when I stabbed a piece of Salisbury steak and put it in my mouth instead of asking him where he was from, he answered as if I had. “I’m from Washington state. Near Olympia.”
“Mm-hmm,” I chewed. I know Washington like I know the back of my head.
Green was quiet for a few minutes while he ate. He stared at the salt and pepper shakers while he chewed. His expression seemed to change, to sink. I started to wonder what he was thinking about when, without turning his eyes from the shakers, he asked, “Do you think we’ll have to go to Alpha five tonight?”
“Aw, Jesus, Green!” I groaned. “That’s what you get for sitting there and letting Rimbaux fill your head with his ghost stories. Do I have to tell you again? Alpha five is just a bullshit story made up to scare new guys like you!”
Green’s facial expression didn’t change, but he was looking at me now. I waited for him to say something, but he stayed quiet. I looked at the clock. It was past seven. I stood up. “Come on. Let’s change over.”
Quintero, sprawled on the lounge sofa in front of “Ghostbusters” for his hundredth time at least, had overheard our conversation. As we walked past the sofa toward the office, he said, “Ey, Green! I seen a ghost at five. Yeah, she was beautiful. Got her in the camper all night!” He lost his steel and began to laugh at his own joke.
Green turned away with a red face.
Quintero called to Green’s back, “Watch out for them ghost bitches, Green! They’ll wear you out!” Quintero was still laughing when the door to the office closed behind us, shutting out his laughter.
After changeover, Rimbaux dispatched us to Alpha five for the twenty-four hour camper relief. We were halfway there when our radio barked. “Alpha sixty, Alpha control.”
Green grabbed the mike. “Alpha sixty. Go.”
Rimbaux was quick and to the point. “Status Detroit, Alpha three.”
"Ah, Christ!” I groaned.
I pulled the Bronco to the side of the road and began turning it around. Green keyed the mike and said, “On our way,” he said brightly. He seemed relieved.
I rolled down the window and said to the steering wheel, “We’re not gonna make it to five until it’s dark. I just know it.” Alpha three is just as far from Alpha LCF to the west as five is to the east.
An hour and fifteen minutes later we arrived at Alpha three. Nothing and nobody on site, so we checked it out and locked it back up. After authenticating with Rimbaux, I burned my finger while destroying my code page.
“Are you okay?” Green asked me with a grin.
“Just shut up!” I was taking my frustration and lack of sleep out on him, and I shouldn’t have.
As soon as Alpha three’s alarm system reset, we headed back to Alpha five.
“Alpha control, this is Alpha sixty.”
“Control. Go ahead.”
By now the sun had hidden itself beneath the west, but the sky in its aftermath still glowed red, pink and purple. The earth around us was now only variations of gray. I steered the Bronco along the access road, the gravel crunching beneath its tires, our headlights creeping up onto a dull, gray, chain-link gate and, as we slowed to a stop, onto a weathered, blue sign affixed to the fence beside the gate, paint chipping badly, its yellow letters, “A-5” barely visible. Tucked comfortably in the trees, the site is practically invisible in daylight from the road that brought us there. At night it takes a skilled veteran to find it.
I sighed into the mike, “Arrived Alpha five.” I killed the Bronco’s motor and headlights. As the silence rushed in through the Bronco’s open windows, I could understand why anybody might get spooked out here. In the quiet darkness, Alpha five had more in common with a cemetery than with anything else – secrets buried in the ground, a concrete slab marking the location. Only this secret delivers death, and the concrete bears no epitaph.
After a few moments, the only sign of life on the site revealed itself to us: the dome light inside the cab of the camper came on as the team exited it. At my instruction, Green turned on the site lights. As the team approached the gate I recognized the camper team leader, also from my technical training class.
“Hey, Goober! That you?” I called through the gate.
“Ay, Boogner!” Airman Cooper called back. The Air Force runs on stupid nicknames. Nicknames and abbreviations.
Rimbaux initiated the tedious process of cross-authenticating, instructing each member of each team to send his secret number, in code, to control, and verifying each member’s number to make sure none of us was a Soviet spy bent on dismantling the United States’ intercontinental ballistic missile system.
Rimbaux then radioed that we were indeed secure for changeover and Green began to unlock the gate.
“What’s it like out here tonight?” I asked.
“Dead,” said Cooper.
With that, Green snapped the padlock open and swung the gate out toward me, its hinges creaking vibrations eerily through the fence around the whole site.
“Who’s the jeep?” asked Cooper, walking out through the gate, his camper team member right behind him.
“That’s Green. He’s a swap.”
Cooper shook his head. “They still doing that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Group made it a regular thing.”
“How’s Sugar Bowl?”
“Still Sugar Bowl.”
Cooper snorted and slapped my shoulder, and said, “Welp, I’d like to stay and talk, but I need a shower…bad!”
I plugged my nose and mocked surprise. “That’s YOU?!”
Cooper laughed and slapped me on the shoulder again. “Fuck you, too, Boogner!”
Green and I grabbed our ‘C’ bags, which, when we aren’t responding to an alarm, contain our helmets, Kevlar vests, gas masks, first aid kits, extra canteens, and a few other whatnots the Air Force decided we need to carry around with us. We stepped inside the fence perimeter and watched as Cooper locked the gate. We stood at the gate while Cooper turned the Bronco around, and his team member fumbled with the light switch key beside the gate. With the rear end of the Bronco facing us, Cooper stuck his head out the driver’s window and shouted, “Later, dudes! Don’t let the spooks get ya!”
In the same instant, the team member figured out the light switch, and the site went completely dark, save for the red glow of the Bronco’s brake lights. I looked at Green, and despite his washed out features in the bright red light, I saw the look of fear set in his face, and in his wide eyes.
“Damn it!” I muttered to myself. He was jittery enough before coming here. He didn’t need anyone’s encouragement. The passenger door closed, and Cooper and his team member, whose name I never caught, crunched away from us down the gravel access road, now the dedicated Alarm Response Team for the Alpha flight area.
I sat for the first half-hour riveted to the mobile radio, listening to Cooper and his member try to find their way to the LCF. Rimbaux was an ART leader in Echo flight area for three years, and had only worked in Alpha flight area twice before becoming a Flight Security Controller here, so he had no idea how to get them home. Finally I got on the radio and talked them in. It was just like in the movies where they talk down a passenger at the controls of a doomed plane, only no one was going to die if I failed.
I was beat. “You mind if I catch a nap?” I asked Green. He just looked at me in confusion. “We’re a camper team, now. One of us can sleep.”
“Okay.” he looked out at the darkness.
“How many tours have you been out on, Green?”
“This is my third.”
“Holy f…” I bit my tongue. “Jesus Christ! You really are a fuckin’ jeep!” Green remained silent. I sighed. “Well, it’s gonna be about four hours before they get back, so wake me up in an hour and then you can crash.”
Still looking out into the black, he nodded and said, “Okay.”
I slid down on the old Dodge’s bench seat until my knees brushed against the dash. I pulled my beret over my face and folded my arms over my chest. The sudden quiet gave me an eerie comfort. I dozed for a while. I don’t know how long. It could have been an hour. It could have been two minutes. It was that kind of a nod. But when I woke up, Green was breathing in short gasps. When I sat up he jumped.
“You okay, Green?”
He was leaning forward with his hands on the dashboard, darting his eyes back and forth, peering out into the darkness. He swallowed loudly and said, “Yeah.” He was actually panting.
“What’s wrong?” I looked out into the darkness as well. “Did you see something?”
“No.” He shook his head slowly.
I leaned toward him as if my stern gaze would get a straight answer out of him. “Green. What’s the matter?”
I could hear his hands squeezing the dashboard, his fingers squeaking against the cheap, leather-look plastic as he tried to put the words together. “Rimbaux said that you can only see the Indians if you believe they’re here.”
I fell back against the driver’s door and buried my face in my hands. “Jesus Christ! You’re freakin’ out on me!”
“No! No! We talked about it for two hours last night. He wasn’t trying to scare me. He says he knows they’re here, and they’re angry.”
“Angry?!” I shouted. “What? Are they gonna kill us? If Rimbaux wasn’t trying to scare you, I’d hate to see you right now if he was!” I leaned toward Green again to make my point clear, to make sure my order was understood. “Calm down. There ain’t no ghosts.”
“He says the Blackfeet was a peaceful tribe, but they…”
“GREEN!” I cut him off. “Rimbaux is a country puke from Louisiana! He don’t know shit about Indians from Montana!”
Green persisted. “They want us to leave, Bogner! We have to—OH MY GOD!!” His eyes bulged wide in their sockets. They were fixed over my shoulder, out the driver’s window. Despite the darkness his face seemed to be illuminated.
A fright jolted me. I felt as though I had been punched in the chest, my heart thudding wildly at the sensation that something was behind me. “What?!” I yelled. I snapped my head around to see what Green was looking at.
Nothing. Nothing but the Montana night.
“Did you see that?!” Green was screaming. He scrambled to look out every window at the same time.
“I didn’t see anything, Green!”
“She was looking right at us! We gotta get out of here!”
How did this guy get in the Air Force? I wondered as my heart slowed. “What are you talking about? We can’t go anywhere.” At that, he slugged me. I leaned back and shook off the sting in my lip. I tasted blood, and I saw red.
“You DICK!” I screamed, lunging at him and grabbing him by the hair. I cocked my fist back to repay the favor plus gratuity, but just before I could let it go, something ran past his window toward the front of the truck. I got up off Green and looked out through the windshield, my head and heart throbbing to the panic pace of my heart.
She was standing there on the launcher lid, looking at us. Something Quintero had said rang in my mind. Was it a coincidence? Or was he telling the truth? She was beautiful. Straight black hair, soft, reddish-brown face, plain hide smock. Despite the night, I could see her clearly, as if in daylight.
Green sat up and screamed, “There she is!”
She turned away from us, jumped off the launcher lid and ran. When she got to the fence, she stopped and looked at us once again. After a few seconds, she turned to the fence and ran through it, disappearing into the wall of pine trees thirty feet beyond.
I blinked a couple of times, uncertain I had really seen what I thought I had seen. I looked at Green, and he completely lost it. He grabbed the front of my uniform shirt with inhuman strength and screamed hysterically, “We gotta get out of here! WE GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE!”
I grabbed his hands and pried at his fingers until I was able to free my shirt and push him away. I wanted to tell him to calm down, but I was shaking almost as badly as he was. I turned on the truck’s headlights and opened the door.
“You can’t go out there!” Green’s voice cracked. His panicked, bloodshot eyes bulged out at me, at the same time denying me permission to get out of the truck as pleading with me not to.
I only looked at him. I grabbed my handheld radio from the seat and left him there. I stepped in front of the truck, my shadow from the headlights a looming giant against the pines where she had dissolved. I walked across the smooth concrete launcher lid to where I had first seen her, and then I jumped the three feet to the concrete below, just as she had. I walked toward the fence. I heard a door open on the Dodge.
“Come on, Bogner. Let’s just get out of here.” Green’s voice was still wracked with panic.
“We can’t!” I yelled. “Get on the radio and tell Rimbaux we’ve got a situation here.” I stopped at the point in the fence where she had been, and I touched it. Then, cutting through the quiet of night like a bolt of lightning, I heard it: the distinct sound of smooth oiled metal sliding against smooth oiled metal – shuk-SHLAK! Green had chambered a round in his M-16. I froze.
“Green?” I called, my back to him. “What are you doing?”
“Just get in the truck, man. We’re getting out of here.” His voice was shrill, high, but not as frantic. I could hear him trembling.
I turned to face him, but could only see the painfully white circles of the Dodge’s headlights.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’m coming back.” I walked slowly toward the camper. It bothered me that I couldn’t see him.
Green barked an order. “Hurry up! We should’ve lef –HOLY SHIT!! I can see them! They’re all over the woods! They’re coming after us!”
I tried to call to him, tried to calm him down, but it was too late. The silence of the forest was destroyed by the flash of yellow light and the hot pepper of Green’s M-16 firing at full automatic, shifting left to right and back again, spraying wildly into the tree line. I didn’t even have time to dive for cover. I felt a dull impact across my thighs, and my legs were knocked out from under me, like a good football block.
When I came to, I was face down on the gravel, bleeding from my nose or my mouth. I heard the shiver-churn of the truck’s starter, and then the rumble of the big-block Dodge engine as it came to life, instantly growing to a fierce roar. Gravel crunched and metal creaked, and then the whole fence around me shuddered as the camper punched through the gate. I reached for the handheld radio, about three feet in front of me, and then screamed as pain shot through my legs as though someone had staked me to the ground through them. I caught my breath and tried again, pulling myself to within inches of the radio’s rubber coated antenna. I couldn’t make it.
* * *
“Then what did you do?” Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Gage leaned forward, into his fifth page of notes.
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I think I passed out.” I searched my memories. “I dreamed that the pain stopped.”
“And then?”
I looked at the OSI agent for a moment. “And then I woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors and nurses.”
He flipped through his pages of notes for some time, and then he looked at me suspiciously. “Now, you were on the launcher lid when you were shot?”
“No,” I replied. “I was in front of it, beyond the rails, down by the south fence.”
“You said you came to at one point. Do you remember where you were?”
“I was spitting gravel and blood out of my mouth. I was right where I had been standing.”
He and Lieutenant Kirby looked at each other, the expressions on their faces matched. The OSI guy looked back at me. “You’re certain that you weren’t on the launcher lid when Green left you?”
“I’m certain,” I replied.
The agent scratched his forehead as he stared at his notebook.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked him.
“Yeah.” He threw his notebook down on the chair next to the lieutenant. “At what point did Green patch you up?”
I stared at him for a second, I’m sure the look on my face was classic. “Patch me up? He couldn’t get away from there fast enough, he was so scared. He wouldn’t have stopped long enough to scratch an itch, let alone patch me up. He left me there, right where I fell. He probably didn’t even realize what he did.”
Lieutenant Kirby cleared his throat and spoke, his tobacco-scarred voice grating against the calm of the room. “If Green had patched him up, he would have had a lot of Bogner’s blood on him. When they picked him up, he was dry as a bone.” Then the lieutenant hack-laughed. “Well, dry of blood, anyway. Charlie ART found him, camper on its side in a ditch, about six miles from Alpha five. Say he was screaming, shaking, and fouling his drawers. Shrinks still haven’t gotten him to say anything they can understand.”
Agent Gage pursed his lips. “Okay.” He picked up his notebook again and flipped one page back and forth a couple of times. “After you relieved the camper team, when did you turn on the site lights?”
“I didn’t.”
“Did Green?” The agent’s face was reddening, and his creased forehead was shiny with sweat.
“No.”
“After he shot you, did Airman Green turn on the site lights?” He seemed irritated, almost angry.
“No, he didn’t.”
The OSI agent stepped toward the bed menacingly. “How do you know that if you were passed out?”
“Agent Gage,” Lieutenant Kirby interrupted. “The only way to turn on the site lights is with LF keys, at the switch outside the gate. The Alarm Response Teams are the only ones who carry them, and the camper crew was already back at the LCF…with the keys.”
Agent Gage looked at the lieutenant. “The camper teams are LOCKED inside the site?”
Lieutenant Kirby nodded. “They can’t leave the site unsecure. They’re the topside security when the technology fails.”
“Well, what if there’s an emergency? A silo fire, or something?”
Lieutenant Kirby glared at Agent Gage for a moment. “Well, Green got out without a key, didn’t he?”
The room was quiet for several seconds. I looked at Agent Gage. “So, what’s wrong?”
The lieutenant looked again at the agent, who shook his head at the lieutenant, and then both looked at me. “Airman Bogner,” said Lieutenant Kirby, “when the emergency teams got to Alpha five, the lights were on. You were lying on your back on the center of the launcher lid, and your wounds had been treated.” The confusion in the lieutenant’s face, as well as on Agent Gage’s, was intense. “The technique was primitive, but whoever dressed your wounds knew what they were doing. They saved your life.
“The doctors who performed the surgery on your legs said that, had your wounds been left untreated, in the time that passed after Sergeant Rimbaux heard your call and before the emergency teams got to you, you could have bled to death three times over.”
I looked into Lieutenant Kirby’s eyes. “My call?”
The lieutenant motioned with his head to Agent Gage, who flipped several pages back in his notebook. “Yeah. Sergeant Rimbaux’s statement.” He read from his page stiffly, ‘”Shots fired. Shots fired. Shots fired.” And then nothing. I knew it was Bogner’s voice, but he sounded sleepy.’”
“I don’t remember calling in,” I said.
Agent Gage sighed, raising his eyes to me from his notes. He stared at me for a few seconds, apparently searching his thoughts for any other questions. “Is there anything else you can remember? Anything you haven’t told us?”
I thought back, found nothing, and slowly shook my head from side to side.
“Do you have any questions for me?” he asked.
“Green saw something that made him fire,” I said. “Did they find anything out there?”
The lieutenant hack-laughed again and stood up. “Nothing but some splintered trees and a couple of shot-up deer.”
As the men left the room, I called to the lieutenant. “Sir? Do you believe me?” He stared at me. Silent. “I know I saw her, sir. I couldn’t be mistaken about it. She was beautiful.”
Lieutenant Kirby looked down for a second at his beret in his hands, and then said, “You take it easy, Airman Bogner. We’ll probably be back in a day or two with some more questions and have you tell us the story again.” Then he slid out of the room.
He didn’t believe me. He didn’t need to say it. They could come back every day and ask me to tell them the story, trying to find something different from any of the other days, because they didn’t believe me. But they wouldn’t find anything. I couldn’t tell it any differently because there’s no other way to tell it than how it happened.
I adjusted the bed down flat and looked at my feet hanging by cables above the bed. I sighed and closed my eyes. In a little while I knew I’d be asleep, and she’d come to visit me again to take away the pain like she had since I first saw her three nights ago. She is beautiful.
Feel free to offer your critiques and make suggestions, and let me know if, after reading it through (and IF you could read it through!) any confusing jargon or confounding procedure from the beginning became clearer by the time you reached the end. Don't be afraid you'll hurt my feelings. You will. This is my baby. But I have to know where it fails in order to fix it.
And it's pretty long. At Times New Roman 12 pt. font single-spaced, it's eightteen pages. Prepare yourself for that. Go potty now. Crack open that beer or cork that wine. Just don't pass out before you finish! :^(
Incident At Alpha Five
by Farrago
“’Legend has it that Alpha five was built on an old Indian burial ground.’ Quintero looked at me with his shit grin. That was the last thing I needed. Why do people always have to pick on the new guys?”
I looked first at Lieutenant Kirby at my bedside, then between my suspended feet at Agent Gage, the guy from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Neither answered. Gage stepped toward my bed from where he was leaning against the bathroom door in my sterile room. He had already made the orderlies move the other patients out of the room so they wouldn’t hear. He spoke curtly. “Just keep going, Randy. I need to know everything.”
I looked to the lieutenant. He nodded and leaned back in his chair.
* * *
The tour had started off just as badly as any other. Up at 3:45 a.m., I shook off the grog in the shower. After two years in the Air Force running this same routine, you’d think I was used to this. I hadn’t shined my boots the night before, so I spent a few minutes brushing them off in my dorm room between getting dressed and running to the chow hall. They looked presentable enough. At the chow hall I met Sugar Bowl.
“Hey! Nice boots, dickhead!” He was always a joy to talk to at 4:30 in the morning.
I suppressed a greeting just as cheerful and looked at his chubby face. If it wasn’t embossed on his uniform, I would never remember that Sugar Bowl’s real name was Brown. He and I went through Security Specialist Technical Training together at Lackland Air force Base, and one of the instructors there gave him the nickname because he didn’t like his haircut, thought it looked as though someone had placed a large bowl on Brown’s head and trimmed the hairs that hung below it. The name followed Brown to Montana, mainly because of people like me who wouldn’t let him forget it, and he abused anyone equal or lower in rank who called him by the name. I reached up and stroked his smooth, pale, round cheek and faked a lisp. “Oh! My goodness! You shaved!”
“I shined my boots, too! There’s a full inspection this morning, and the colonel is gonna love your shine!” He’s not a bad person, Sugar Bowl, but when he’s got somebody, he really lets him have it. And he had me. Under the glaring fluorescents of the chow hall, my boots looked like shit.
At the squadron, nothing was different. Leaning against the wall in line for weapons issue, bitching because the camper and escort teams had posting priority and were allowed to cut in, I realized that every team that cut in meant a later and later guardmount and post, prolonging my dread of the inspection from hell.
“Mornin’ Steve,” I said to Sergeant Jenkins when I finally got to the armory window. I slid my weapons issue card to him and said, “I’ll have the usual.” He didn’t laugh. I said the same thing every posting day. He picked up my card and disappeared into the racks of M-16 rifles.
Beside me, at the other issue window, Sergeant Rodriguez, one of the Flight Security Controllers in Charlie flight area, dropped one of his magazines full of M-16 rounds. A chorus of men’s voice rose up from various corners, and I joined in: “Jeep!” It was a word reserved for a newbie, someone with no experience, but it was also used when someone of any level of experience made a stupid mistake.
When Jenkins returned he spoke. “Congratulations, Bogner.” He placed the magazines fully loaded with rifle rounds on the counter, and I placed them in the magazine pouches on my web belt. He pointed the weapon into the sand-filled clearing barrel suspended from the ceiling and pulled the rifle’s charging handle, sliding the bolt away from the chamber with the flat “shuk” noise that, after two years of this routine, was so familiar to me. Jenkins looked into the chamber to make sure it was clear of any foreign objects – or more importantly, a bullet – turned it to show me, and then handed it through the window. “Full weapon breakdown and inspection on recovery day!” said Jenkins, pulling my weapons issue card and a grease pencil out of his pocket, and writing on the card a large letter “I” and circling it.
“Christ!” I spat. “Why don’t you guys have us do that on posting day? We got nowhere else to go, then!”
Jenkins shrugged and said, “Rules.” Then he called for the guy in line behind me.
I walked to the clearing barrel, rifle muzzle pointed at the ceiling, rifle at a forty-five degree angle four inches from my chest. Some people get angry if you don’t hold the rifle at port arms during the clearing procedure. Rules. And it would be the same procedure in reverse on recovery day. After I stripped and cleaned my rifle for inspection, of course.
Senior Airman Quintero – that morning’s clearing barrel official – waved me forward and snapped to attention. I reached into my ammo pouch and pulled out one magazine, and I handed it to Quintero. I walked to the bright red barrel and pointed my rifle into it, showing Quintero the open ejection port, the oval cut into the side of the rifle where the spent shells would be spit out after being fired. He looked into the open oval and the empty chamber and said, crisply, “Clear, SIR!” I rotated the rifle clockwise, revealing the other side to him. He looked first at the fire selector lever beside my thumb, and said just as crisply as before, “Safe, SIR!” Some of the other guys in the room were laughing at Quintero’s performance. He never really took the military crap seriously, and now being so “short,” with fewer than six months left before getting out, he openly showed his hatred for it. I reached down and slapped the bolt release on the left side of the rifle, feeling the whole thing jump as the bolt slammed into the chamber with a flat “shak,” completing the two-step sequence that was started at the armory issue window. Quintero handed the magazine back to me, and I slid it into the magazine well on the rifle until I heard the telltale ‘click’ that told me it was locked into place. The weapon was “half-safe,” not a danger to anyone until the charging handle was pulled back to send a round from the magazine into the chamber. As I stepped away from the barrel I looked at Quintero and said, “Lighten up, Frances,” quoting a line from one of my favorite films.
Without acknowledging my joke, he barked, “Sir! Yes, SIR!” He was giving the guys in line a good morning. As I walked out of the armory, the “shuk-shak” sound of M-16 rifles being cleared behind me reminded me of the firing range. Weapons requalification always got me excited – a magazine loaded with standard issue 5.56 millimeter NATO rounds, sliding it into the magazine well until it clicked, pulling the charging handle back and hearing the bolt slide back, the distinct sound of smooth, oiled metal sliding against smooth, oiled metal. “Shuk!” Then releasing the charging handle and the distinctly different sound of a cartridge being stripped out of the magazine and into the chamber – “SHLAK!” Ready to rock and roll! I’ve consistently been one of the top five marksmen on Bravo Flight since I got to Montana.
“SQUADRON! ‘Ten HUT!” The guardmount room suddenly became quiet, with the exception of Quintero humming just under his breath something close to “California Here I Come.” Standing next to him, I couldn’t help but hear. Lieutenant Colonel Robbin, our squadron commander, walked between the two formations of Security Specialists, all armed, all shiny – except for me – and stopped in front of Lieutenant Kirby and Master Sergeant Hickson. The lieutenant and the master sergeant presented perfect salutes, and the lieutenant said to the colonel, “Sir! The flights are ready for inspection.”
Colonel Robbin first inspected Lieutenant Kirby, then Sergeant Hickson, and then he executed a crisp about-face and stared ahead at the two flights. Guardmount is a formality in the Air Force cop world, a personal inspection at the beginning of every shift, and something I’ve resented since I joined. It’s worse for cops at other bases who have to do it daily, so I guess I shouldn’t complain about having to do it once every nine days. But then, people in every other Air Force specialty have to do it only two or three times a year. Colonel Robbin had assumed command earlier in the year, and was a little more into formality than Major Wooten, his predecessor.
“BRAVO FLIGHT!” Sergeant Hickson barked, “Parade REST!” As one with the rest of the flight, I stepped my left foot out to a shoulder-width stance and brought my left hand from my side to my rear waist, leaving my right hand at my shoulder, on the rifle’s carrying strap. Colonel Robbin began the inspection with Delta flight, with Lieutenant Kirby and Sergeant Hickson in tow. Right behind me I heard Sugar Bowl whisper.
“The colonel’s gonna make you lick your boots, ‘Boogner!’” He had his nickname. I had mine.
In the middle of a military formation, I couldn’t respond verbally, but with the advantage of parade rest, with our hands behind our backs, I silently bent my wrist upward and curled all of my fingers but one. I heard a brief snort from Sergeant Bearse, next to Sugar Bowl, and then silence. Despite my quiet triumph, the image of me licking my own boots squashed my smile.
Soon Bravo flight was at attention, and the colonel worked his way to me. To my surprise he didn’t make a comment to me. He stepped from the man to my left, snapped a perfect right-face to look me dead in the eye, then he examined me from top to bottom – beret, haircut, shave, uniform – every detail from head to foot. His eyes returned to mine, and then he mumbled “Boots.” Sergeant Hickson jotted it down on the roster sheet on his clipboard. Colonel Robbin then crisply executed a left face, took a step to my right, directly in front of Senior Airman Hoffman next to me, with Lieutenant Kirby and Sergeant Hickson mimicking the colonel not quite as crisply. As the colonel examined Hoffman in the same manner as he had me, Lieutenant Kirby stared me straight in the face. Colonel Robbin moved on again, and this time Sergeant Hickson stood directly in front of me looking, without moving his head, first at my face, and then at my boots, and then at my face again. Each time, his lips drew back at one corner and his right eyebrow lifted higher, communicating his disapproval. The colonel moved on.
The colonel didn’t give his usual speech that morning; he had meetings to go to, and since he left the room with our flight commander on his tail, I was spared Lieutenant Kirby’s wrath. Sergeant Hickson still managed to make an example of me, anyway. “Senior Airman Bogner! Front and Center! Show the troops a proper post briefing.”
I faced the formations and snapped to attention. Out on post I could rattle off my post briefing crisp and clear for the colonel or Sergeant Hickson and any visitor, but in front of the troops, all of my friends, I was a quivering ball of sweat. I hitched and stuttered through it. “Sir, Airman Bogner reports. As Alarm Response Team leader my primary responsibility is to provide an armed response to any alarms or situations that exist at the Launch Facilities in my flight area, and to supervise and direct my team member in such response. Other responsibilities include weekly inspections of Launch Facilities, and domestic tasks at the Launch Control Facility. My team member and I are each armed with one M-16 rifle and...
“Okay, good enough,” said Sergeant Hickson.
As I returned to formation there was some half-assed applause, and a muffled laugh from Sugar Bowl. I was glad I wasn’t posting with him.
Hickson began the routine announcements. “Alpha crew, there’s a change in your post. Airman Campbell, report immediately to the 342nd guardmount room. You’re the swap this tour.”
I looked over to Tim Cambpell as he looked over to me. We worked well together as an ART, but not this time out. He was this week’s choice for the 341st Missile Security Group’s personnel swap. It had started a couple of months before as a remedial lesson in comradeship after two guys, one from the 342nd Missile Security Squadron, and one from ours, the 341st, got into a fistfight at the NCO club. The group commander, the base’s top cop, liked the swap idea so much he decided to make it a regular thing. He thought that tearing a young guy from his familiar surroundings and the people he works best with and putting him with people, procedures, and places that are practically foreign to him was good for the ‘espirit de corps’ of the whole Group. All it did for ‘de corps’ was piss them off.
As Tim began gathering his equipment, Sergeant Hickson then said, “Airmen Quintero and Bogner, you will swap shifts as ART leaders.” This meant that I would be working nights with the swap troop from the 342nd. Since Quintero was a short-timer, Hickson didn’t trust putting anyone new with him because of his attitude. Also, since the swap guy doesn’t know our flight areas, he would be put on nights so if he did anything stupid nobody would see him and embarrass us. Hickson then confirmed my assessment. “Bogner, keep Quintero away from the swap and he should do okay.” The troops laughed. “I’m trusting you to train the swap properly.” Hickson paused a moment, an eyebrow arching mischievously. “And maybe the swap can train you to shine your boots.” The guardmount erupted in loud, brief laughter. I paid for my boots infraction in full. “Show this guy how we do things in the ‘41st,” said Sergeant Hickson.
“Yes, SIR!” I barked.
Seregeant Hickson looked at me with that same pulled back lip and arched eyebrow, a look that read, “don’t call me ‘sir,’ I work for a living.” He wasn’t much for the military pomp, either, but I considered it change back from what I paid him.
I looked to Quintero, on my right, just as he was pretending to nod off while standing. He jerked his head up with a snort and said, “Chit, man!” exaggerating his East L.A. Chicano dialect. The post change would mess him up. For tours when he’s scheduled to work nights, he stays up all night before posting day so he can sleep well through the afternoon. I do the same thing. For me this was a plus. Even though I wouldn’t be working with my good friend, Campbell, as soon as we arrived at the Launch Control Facility and changed over with the old crew, I could go straight to bed! It also meant that we wouldn’t be hassled with any exercise scenarios because there’s usually nobody out in the flight areas the first night.
Just as Sergeant Hickson began his departure safety briefing, the troop from the 342nd came in. Hickson waved him to the front of the room and told him to turn around and face us. “Troops,” Hickson announced, “meet Airman Green. He will post with us for this tour in the field. Please show him your hospitality and your respect.” And then Hickson mumbled into his hand as though he was clearing his throat: “…even though he is from the ‘42nd!
As all of the other troops laughed, I noticed how shiny and stiff and new the one single stripe was on green’s uniform sleeve.
I leaned over to Quintero and whispered harshly, “Great! They sent us a fuckin’ jeep!”
Quintero jerked his head up with a snort again and said, “Chit, man!”
* * *
“Quintero!” I groaned. “Lay off the jeep.” I looked at Green and said, “Don’t listen to him. It’s a load of crap, and Quintero’s full of it.”
We were halfway to Alpha Launch Control Facility when Quintero had changed subjects from his latest jailbait conquest to the mystery of Alpha five Launch Facility. He was sitting between Airman Green and me on the middle seat of the Air Force issue dark blue Chevy Suburban.
Green blinked at me for a few seconds and then focused on Quintero again. “Indians?” Green’s eyes had the look of a little kid who wanted to go into the carnival spook house, but needed a reason not to.
“Blackfeet.” Sergeant Rimbaux spoke to the rear view mirror from his spot behind the steering wheel, alternating his gaze between Green’s reflection and U.S. 89 vibrating beneath us as we headed east. His smooth, Cajun-spiced voice made the subject even more eerie to hear about, and I’m certain he realized it. “Da Blackfeet was at the diggin’, telling the white men that they was disturbin’ the dead, an’ that they would pay fo they crime.”
Staff Sergeant McCrindle, beside Rimbaux in the front passenger seat, said, “Ram-bo, you and Quintero BOTH fulla shit!” The two black men looked at each other and, after a silent glare, both burst into laughter. To speak to each one separately, they had nothing in common but the color of their skin. Rimbaux was a backwoods country boy from somewhere in Louisiana bayou country, and McCrindle was a street-tough homeboy from Philadelphia. One would think that Rimbaux’s smooth, laid-back personality and McCrindle’s choppy, high-strung one would clash, but they didn’t. Each seemed to complement the other and they got along smoothly with lots of laughter between them. The hulking Suburban straddled the yellow line under the influence of Rimbaux’s laughter, and McCrindle corrected him, laughing anew. “Get back on this side, ‘Bo! Ain’t you got lines in the road in ‘Loosiana?’”
“What roads?” Rimbaux’s laughter intensified with his own joke, and he took the Suburban all the way to the left side of the pavement.
I leaned across Quintero and said to Green, beneath the laughter, “Welcome to the 341st Missile Security Squadron!”
He faked a laugh. His brown eyes shifted from me to Rimbaux, almost as if we would leave the pavement if he were to look away from him too long.
“Don’t worry about these guys, I said, waving my thumb at the front seat. “We usually make it there alive.”
After wake-up that afternoon, I gave Green a tour of Alpha Launch Control Facility. During dinner I asked him what he thought.
“It’s a lot smaller than the LCFs in the west side of the complex.”
Though true, the west side is no different from the east side. Each LCF supports a launch crew sequestered in a capsule deep in the earth, who control ten missiles dispersed across the Montana countryside. These crews wait, day in and day out, for the order to launch any or all of their missiles, doing their part to aid in the destruction of the earth’s living creatures. Topside, the LCF building houses teams of Security Specialists who regularly run around to all of the launch facilities, where the missiles are housed deep under ground, in response to alarms detected out there, or just to make routine checks to make sure the alarm systems are working correctly.
“Which one do you work?” I asked, as if I would know where any of the flight areas on that side of the missile complex were. I had never gone beyond Great Falls in that direction.
“Romeo.”
“Oh.” It was all I could think of to say. Then, “East complex was here first, so everything built later had all the improvements.” Green’s face was blank, so I continued. “Alpha was the first Minuteman II launch complex built, actually. We’re sitting on history.” Green’s expression didn’t change. I had recalled this information, so now I felt compelled to spit it out to him. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, Alpha was Kennedy’s ‘ace in the hole.’ He convinced the commies that aiming their missiles at us from Cuba was a bad idea.” Green was as ignorant to the history of Malmstrom Air Force Base as I was when I first heard about it. Only Green didn’t even seem to know which Kennedy I was talking about. I looked up at the clock and said, “Five ‘til seven. Let’s change over.”
Rimbaux buzzed the lock to let us into Flight Security Control when we knocked. He and McCrindle had already changed over and were sharing a laugh about something as we came in. I noticed that McCrindle’s camouflage fatigue shirt was completely unbuttoned, his O.D. green undershirt untucked and ruffled, exposing the ‘outie’ protruding from his flat, brown belly, his belt unbuckled and his boots unlaced.
“Jeez, Mac!” I said. “You’re supposed to wait until you’re ready for bed to get undressed!”
“What you talkin’ about, Bog?” he said, straight-faced. “I been like this all day!” I laughed along with him and Rimbaux, and Green even relaxed a little with a chuckle.
I turned to Rimbaux and said, “Okay, boss. Brief me.”
He turned his head to face his feet propped up on the desk and spoke to them and the piece of paper with his notes on it. “ART on da road, on da way back. You gotta weekly at Alpha four due by midnight. Alpha seven gone off six times today – that’s where the ART just comin’ back from. And we got a camper at Alpha five.”
“You’re kidding! Since when?” I thought he was joking until he reached forward and pulled McCrindle’s report from the desk.
“They just arrived. Had maintenance doin’ routine, and outer zone system wouldn’t reset when they tried to leave. Escorts sat two hours waitin’ fo’ da camper.”
I looked at Green and sighed. “It’s gonna be a long three nights.”
Green cocked his head at me. “Why’s that?”
“Well,” I said, “when a site has a camper team on it, the ART…” It dawned on me as I spoke that, in our earlier conversation, I hadn’t thought to ask Green just how much of a jeep he was. “How long have you been at Malmstrom?”
Green looked to the ceiling to calculate. “Two months.”
“Fuckin’ 42nd!” I muttered to myself, rubbing my face with my hand. Then to Green: “Do you remember anything from orientation? From TECH SCHOOL?”
Green shrugged tentatively.
“When a site has a camper team on it,” I sighed, “the dedicated ART has to relieve them for two hours out of every 24 so they can get a shower and a hot meal. We usually wind up stuck out there for a lot longer because they can never find the LCF on their own. Their two-hour break doesn’t start until they arrive at the LCF. While they’re on relief, they’re the responding ART, so if there are any alarms, their two-hour break clock stops, and it doesn’t start up again until they return to the LCF.
“It’s worse at night, and since they initiated at the start of our shift, you and I are their relief. That’s why it’s gonna be a long three nights.
“Oh.” Green’s face was blank. It was all he said.
“Only two,” Rimbaux said.
“Huh?” I looked at him.
“Only two nights. They just got there. You don’ gotta go tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Of course, he was right. I was just so pissed at the idea I had assumed was effective immediately. Then another thought occurred to me. “Maybe they’ll fix the O.Z. by tomorrow afternoon, and we won’t have to go at all.”
“Mebbee, mebbee,” said Rimbaux, nodding at his boots.
Just as Quintero and Hoffman, the day-shift Alarm Response Team, were pulling in, the missile commander housed in the capsule deep in the earth below us called on the intercom. “Status Detroit, Alpha seven.” Since we used common, unsecure radio frequencies in the flight areas, the Air Force had devised generic codes that wouldn’t necessarily tip off scanner buzzards when something serious happened. A “Detroit” was the code to let us know that the outer zone security alarm system had been triggered at the Alpha seven site again. At least its O.Z. system worked!
Green and I ran out to meet Quinetro and Hoffman at the Alarm Response Team vehicle, a Ford Bronco, painted the same dark blue as the Suburban we had arrived in earlier in the day, its bright yellow identification decals blooming in the late afternoon sun hitting the passenger door as Hoffman opened it. As we quickly changed over, I slapped Quintero on the back and asked, “What’s the story with Alpha seven, man?”
“I don’t know, man,” he replied, looking up at me with drooping, very tired, coal black eyes. “I been out there all damn day. Seen a gopher hole on site, but no gopher. If you see him, kill the fucker!”
“Rah-JO!” I said, plopping the Kevlar helmet on my head and unshouldering my rifle. An O.Z. alarm is usually nothing to be alarmed about, but the Air Force has rules, and just in case there really is something sinister happening at a LF, we have to be prepared with our Kevlar helmets and our Kevlar vests on and fastened when we leave the LCF. Of course, once we leave, the helmets come off and the vest is opened until we arrive at the LF, just in case it’s Sergeant Hickson conducting an exercise. I climbed into the Ford Bronco’s driver seat, and Quintero trotted to the LCF gate to let us out. As I drove past him I looked to him and shouted through the open window, “Get some sleep!”
He shouted back, “Sir! Yes, SIR!” snapping to exaggerated attention and giving a goofy salute.
Green watched Quintero out the back window of the Bronco for a few seconds as we drew away from him, and then he turned to me and said, “Is he always like that?”
“He’s short,” was my only response.
Arriving at Alpha seven Launch Facility about an hour later, I immediately saw what had triggered the alarm. Silhouetted against the clear western sky, right in the middle of the O.Z., was what Quintero hadn’t been able to glimpse earlier in the day: a lone gopher, up on his haunches and viewing his domain.
“You know how to kill a gopher, Green?”
He stared at me for a second, then blinked, and said, “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Why kill it?”
“He lives here,” I said. “If you just chase him off, he’ll just come back after we leave and trigger the alarm again and again.”
Green looked at his rifle timidly. A light breeze blew through both of our open windows, causing the hair in his outgrown brown flat-top to flitter like fresh cut grass. “So, we shoot it?”
It was the same reaction every new ART member in the missile fields had when confronted with this situation. It was mine when I was in Green’s position. “No. We can’t do that. Too dangerous for the locals and the launcher site. We’re supposed to protect Air Force resources, not shoot at them.”
Green looked out at the gopher, searching his young mind for ideas. “No,” he said. “I don’t know how.”
I grabbed the microphone attached to the Bronco’s mobile radio, and pressed the transmit button. “Alpha control, Alpha sixty.”
A few seconds went by, then the radio speaker burped. “Go, sixty,” crackled Rimbaux’s voice.
“We have visual of a gopher on site. Likely cause. Over.”
“Roger, that, sixty. Proceed on site and escort him off. Over.”
“Ten-four.”
I looked at Green. “Turn on the lights and unlock the gate.” I opened my door and stood just outside the vehicle. I removed my flak vest and put on my beret. While Green unlocked the gate I opened the hood on the Bronco.
“What are you doing?” Green asked over his shoulder while he fiddled with the lock.
“Watch and learn, my boy,” I said. “Watch and learn.” Along the driver’s side fender panel, under retaining clips, was the vehicle’s jack handle, a straight, steel rod, hinged in the middle, with a squared “S” bent into one end, intended to be used as a crank for the jack when changing a tire.
I turned to face the Launch Facility. With a few cosmetic differences, all Minuteman missile silos are the same: a huge concrete launcher lid shaped like a six-pointed diamond, perched on a set of rails, which point south. Why all silos point south, I don’t know; maybe it has something to do with the rotation of the earth. I never bothered to ask. Around the launcher lid at four corners are the outer zone field motion detectors, large, circular things with plastic covers, each perched atop a vertical pole and facing in toward the launcher lid. As far as I’m aware, they’ve been called “banjos” forever, and if you relax your mind a little bit, you can see the resemblance to the namesake instrument, stood up on its tuning head. It was this system of sensors that had detected our gopher, which was now clearly aware of our presence.
“Open the gate slowly,” I ordered Green. “Be as quiet as possible.” He followed my instructions well.
With the jack handle in my hand I walked through the LF gate. The gopher reacted cautiously, dropping to all fours and moving a few steps toward the north end of the launcher lid. That’s where its hole was, at least the hole where it intended to make its escape. I scanned the area north of the lid and found the telltale signs of the hole: a slightly raised berm created by the discarded dirt from the gopher’s digging. I moved to my left, toward the area north of the lid.
“Walk along inside the fence,” I said to Green, pointing in the opposite direction from where I was heading. “Stand at the end of the rails.” I waited while Green got into position. I unclipped my handheld radio and raised it to my mouth. The gopher was occupied with Green’s movement, so I inched a little closer to its hole.
When Green reached the rails, I keyed the mike of my radio. “If the gopher comes over the lid toward you, charge after him.” Green fumbled for his handheld radio as I spoke. “Make as much noise as possible. But don’t move until he comes over the ledge. Got it?”
My radio spat, “Got it.”
I stepped forward, kicking the gravel before me. The gopher spun to look at me, crouched and ready to dart for its hole. I leaned forward and then broke into a sprint right for the gopher’s hole, screaming like an idiot. The startled gopher ran a few tentative steps toward his hole and then abandoned the idea, making a run for it in the exact opposite direction, right for the edge of the launcher lid.
Green seemed almost as startled by my actions as the gopher, and when the gopher went over the ledge, I think Green’s scream was as much astonishment as it was following instructions. Either way, it worked, and the frightened gopher’s survival instinct kicked in. When it hit the concrete at the base of the lid, it scrambled away from Green and under the lid.
“Aw, CRAP!” shouted Green. “He got away!”
I trotted to the edge of the lid and hopped off. “No he didn’t. Come here. Look.” I pulled my flashlight off of my web belt and lay flat on the concrete. Green did the same. I shined the light beneath the lid and found the gopher, squeezed as tightly as it could manage into the smallest space it could find, against the launcher lid seal. Inwardly, I was a little embarrassed at myself. My usual ART member, Tim Campbell, had perfected the gopher hunt to a science, and could wrangle any gopher under the lid without my help. Whenever I tried it alone, the gopher always managed to disappear into one of its many other holes. But my two-man method works, at least.
“Huh!” Green snorted. “Now what?”
“Just keep the flashlight on him,” I said. I unfolded the Bronco’s jack handle and slid it under the lid.
“You gonna stab it?” asked Green.
The end of the jack handle is too blunt for that. “Tried that once,” I said. “Didn’t work. They’re hardy little fuckers.”
I maneuvered the flattened tip of the jack handle underneath the gopher’s neck and pressed up as hard as I could, trying to strangle the poor creature. It took about twenty seconds for it to stop struggling, and its little limbs went slack. Using the end of the jack handle, I pulled its limp little body out from beneath the launcher lid. Using my right foot I positioned it so that its head was toward me, its tail away. I placed the heel of my right boot over its head. Green’s eyes went briefly wide, and then he turned his head slightly, closing his eyes in disgust as the gopher’s skull crunched under my heel.
“Why’d you have to do that? He was dead already.”
“Are you sure of that? My first gopher, I just strangled it. While I looked at it, wondering what to do next, it came to and ran back under the lid. How long does it take to strangle a gopher to death? I don’t know. So you knock him out and squish its head. It’s the most humane way we can do it out here.”
I agreed with Green. I didn’t like doing it, but I had done it so many times now that it was just part of the job. It was the modified law of the jungle. If I didn’t kill it, it would just keep triggering alarms. Besides, there are probably more gophers in the Montana missile fields than there are people in the United States, so I don’t think a few hundred a year going MIA would tip nature’s scales.
I squatted before the little corpse and grasped it by its stubby, little tail.
“Now what are you doing?” asked Green.
I walked with the gopher dangling from my thumb and forefinger to the fence and tossed it up and over, as far beyond the fence as I could muster. Walking back to Green, I said, “Scavengers will find it and eat it. We took care of the gopher problem here, we don’t want to leave it on site for the scavengers to trip the alarm.” I continued past Green. “Come on. You still have to do the topside check.”
Against procedure, I walked the topside while Green trotted through his check, and he pointed out the differences between the west complex LFs and those here in the east complex. I answered his questions, and he seemed to be aware enough of the differences.
From Alpha seven we drove directly to Alpha four and completed the weekly inspection due there. On the way back to Alpha LCF, the Bronco’s radio barked. “Alpha control, this is Alpha five.” It was the camper team Rimbaux had told us about.
After a couple of seconds, Rimbaux’s smooth voice called back. “Alpha control. Go ahead, five.”
“Site is secure. Bravo lima.”
The radio went silent, and I could picture Rimbaux running his finger across the code page, finding the camper guard’s authenticator numbers matching ‘B’ and ‘L,’ and keying his radio microphone. “Ten-four, Alpha five. Control out.” Just a comfortable reminder of the camper relief in our future.
Green looked at me for a few seconds, and then at the radio. I knew what he was thinking.
“What was Quintero talking about today? About Alpha five?”
I sighed and remained silent, hoping he would drop it. He wouldn’t.
“Bog?”
I sighed again. “The story goes that, back in the fifties, when they were building these missile sites, some of the Blackfeet tribe protested at Alpha five. They complained that the digging was disturbing an ancient burial ground. The Air Force said, ‘Sure. We’ll stop,’ kicked the Indians off the site, and continued building. End of story.”
“Then what’s the big mystery?” Green hadn’t taken his eyes off of me.
I sighed yet again and rolled my eyes. “There have been rumors since the missiles came on line that the spirits of the dead Indians roam Alpha five looking for their lost graves.”
In the sparse light from the twilight sky around us I could see Green’s eyes bugged wide. “No shit?” He was almost whispering.
“They’re just rumors, Green! Ghost stories.” I shouted at him. “I’ve spent more nights at Alpha five than I can remember, and all I’ve seen out there was the fence and the trees! Don’t let Quintero and Rimbaux spook you. They’re just fucking with you because you’re a jeep.” After my words I held my eyes steady on the road, occasionally admiring the dazzling array of colors offered after one of northern Montana’s typical Big Sky sunsets, and breathing in the fresh, late June air blowing in through the Bronco’s open windows. Neither of us spoke again until we arrived at Alpha LCF.
The rest of the night was quiet out in the Alpha flight area. I sat in the lounge, nodding off in front of the TV while the VCR spun out “Ghostbusters.” I had seen it at least fifty times already. It was the only tape at the LCF, and Campbell wasn’t here with his usual stash of porn videos. Green spent the rest of the night in the office shooting the shit with Rimbaux.
The next evening I was again at the dinner table with Green. I had had trouble sleeping through the day, and I wasn’t in a mood to talk. But Green was.
“So, where are you from, Bogner?”
I paused, trying to work a piece of corn hull from between my teeth with my tongue. It sounded almost like I was trying to remember. “Ohio,” I replied, finally. I picked up the cob and tore another mouthful of corn into my mouth.
“Oh,” said Green. He paused while I chewed, but when I stabbed a piece of Salisbury steak and put it in my mouth instead of asking him where he was from, he answered as if I had. “I’m from Washington state. Near Olympia.”
“Mm-hmm,” I chewed. I know Washington like I know the back of my head.
Green was quiet for a few minutes while he ate. He stared at the salt and pepper shakers while he chewed. His expression seemed to change, to sink. I started to wonder what he was thinking about when, without turning his eyes from the shakers, he asked, “Do you think we’ll have to go to Alpha five tonight?”
“Aw, Jesus, Green!” I groaned. “That’s what you get for sitting there and letting Rimbaux fill your head with his ghost stories. Do I have to tell you again? Alpha five is just a bullshit story made up to scare new guys like you!”
Green’s facial expression didn’t change, but he was looking at me now. I waited for him to say something, but he stayed quiet. I looked at the clock. It was past seven. I stood up. “Come on. Let’s change over.”
Quintero, sprawled on the lounge sofa in front of “Ghostbusters” for his hundredth time at least, had overheard our conversation. As we walked past the sofa toward the office, he said, “Ey, Green! I seen a ghost at five. Yeah, she was beautiful. Got her in the camper all night!” He lost his steel and began to laugh at his own joke.
Green turned away with a red face.
Quintero called to Green’s back, “Watch out for them ghost bitches, Green! They’ll wear you out!” Quintero was still laughing when the door to the office closed behind us, shutting out his laughter.
After changeover, Rimbaux dispatched us to Alpha five for the twenty-four hour camper relief. We were halfway there when our radio barked. “Alpha sixty, Alpha control.”
Green grabbed the mike. “Alpha sixty. Go.”
Rimbaux was quick and to the point. “Status Detroit, Alpha three.”
"Ah, Christ!” I groaned.
I pulled the Bronco to the side of the road and began turning it around. Green keyed the mike and said, “On our way,” he said brightly. He seemed relieved.
I rolled down the window and said to the steering wheel, “We’re not gonna make it to five until it’s dark. I just know it.” Alpha three is just as far from Alpha LCF to the west as five is to the east.
An hour and fifteen minutes later we arrived at Alpha three. Nothing and nobody on site, so we checked it out and locked it back up. After authenticating with Rimbaux, I burned my finger while destroying my code page.
“Are you okay?” Green asked me with a grin.
“Just shut up!” I was taking my frustration and lack of sleep out on him, and I shouldn’t have.
As soon as Alpha three’s alarm system reset, we headed back to Alpha five.
“Alpha control, this is Alpha sixty.”
“Control. Go ahead.”
By now the sun had hidden itself beneath the west, but the sky in its aftermath still glowed red, pink and purple. The earth around us was now only variations of gray. I steered the Bronco along the access road, the gravel crunching beneath its tires, our headlights creeping up onto a dull, gray, chain-link gate and, as we slowed to a stop, onto a weathered, blue sign affixed to the fence beside the gate, paint chipping badly, its yellow letters, “A-5” barely visible. Tucked comfortably in the trees, the site is practically invisible in daylight from the road that brought us there. At night it takes a skilled veteran to find it.
I sighed into the mike, “Arrived Alpha five.” I killed the Bronco’s motor and headlights. As the silence rushed in through the Bronco’s open windows, I could understand why anybody might get spooked out here. In the quiet darkness, Alpha five had more in common with a cemetery than with anything else – secrets buried in the ground, a concrete slab marking the location. Only this secret delivers death, and the concrete bears no epitaph.
After a few moments, the only sign of life on the site revealed itself to us: the dome light inside the cab of the camper came on as the team exited it. At my instruction, Green turned on the site lights. As the team approached the gate I recognized the camper team leader, also from my technical training class.
“Hey, Goober! That you?” I called through the gate.
“Ay, Boogner!” Airman Cooper called back. The Air Force runs on stupid nicknames. Nicknames and abbreviations.
Rimbaux initiated the tedious process of cross-authenticating, instructing each member of each team to send his secret number, in code, to control, and verifying each member’s number to make sure none of us was a Soviet spy bent on dismantling the United States’ intercontinental ballistic missile system.
Rimbaux then radioed that we were indeed secure for changeover and Green began to unlock the gate.
“What’s it like out here tonight?” I asked.
“Dead,” said Cooper.
With that, Green snapped the padlock open and swung the gate out toward me, its hinges creaking vibrations eerily through the fence around the whole site.
“Who’s the jeep?” asked Cooper, walking out through the gate, his camper team member right behind him.
“That’s Green. He’s a swap.”
Cooper shook his head. “They still doing that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Group made it a regular thing.”
“How’s Sugar Bowl?”
“Still Sugar Bowl.”
Cooper snorted and slapped my shoulder, and said, “Welp, I’d like to stay and talk, but I need a shower…bad!”
I plugged my nose and mocked surprise. “That’s YOU?!”
Cooper laughed and slapped me on the shoulder again. “Fuck you, too, Boogner!”
Green and I grabbed our ‘C’ bags, which, when we aren’t responding to an alarm, contain our helmets, Kevlar vests, gas masks, first aid kits, extra canteens, and a few other whatnots the Air Force decided we need to carry around with us. We stepped inside the fence perimeter and watched as Cooper locked the gate. We stood at the gate while Cooper turned the Bronco around, and his team member fumbled with the light switch key beside the gate. With the rear end of the Bronco facing us, Cooper stuck his head out the driver’s window and shouted, “Later, dudes! Don’t let the spooks get ya!”
In the same instant, the team member figured out the light switch, and the site went completely dark, save for the red glow of the Bronco’s brake lights. I looked at Green, and despite his washed out features in the bright red light, I saw the look of fear set in his face, and in his wide eyes.
“Damn it!” I muttered to myself. He was jittery enough before coming here. He didn’t need anyone’s encouragement. The passenger door closed, and Cooper and his team member, whose name I never caught, crunched away from us down the gravel access road, now the dedicated Alarm Response Team for the Alpha flight area.
I sat for the first half-hour riveted to the mobile radio, listening to Cooper and his member try to find their way to the LCF. Rimbaux was an ART leader in Echo flight area for three years, and had only worked in Alpha flight area twice before becoming a Flight Security Controller here, so he had no idea how to get them home. Finally I got on the radio and talked them in. It was just like in the movies where they talk down a passenger at the controls of a doomed plane, only no one was going to die if I failed.
I was beat. “You mind if I catch a nap?” I asked Green. He just looked at me in confusion. “We’re a camper team, now. One of us can sleep.”
“Okay.” he looked out at the darkness.
“How many tours have you been out on, Green?”
“This is my third.”
“Holy f…” I bit my tongue. “Jesus Christ! You really are a fuckin’ jeep!” Green remained silent. I sighed. “Well, it’s gonna be about four hours before they get back, so wake me up in an hour and then you can crash.”
Still looking out into the black, he nodded and said, “Okay.”
I slid down on the old Dodge’s bench seat until my knees brushed against the dash. I pulled my beret over my face and folded my arms over my chest. The sudden quiet gave me an eerie comfort. I dozed for a while. I don’t know how long. It could have been an hour. It could have been two minutes. It was that kind of a nod. But when I woke up, Green was breathing in short gasps. When I sat up he jumped.
“You okay, Green?”
He was leaning forward with his hands on the dashboard, darting his eyes back and forth, peering out into the darkness. He swallowed loudly and said, “Yeah.” He was actually panting.
“What’s wrong?” I looked out into the darkness as well. “Did you see something?”
“No.” He shook his head slowly.
I leaned toward him as if my stern gaze would get a straight answer out of him. “Green. What’s the matter?”
I could hear his hands squeezing the dashboard, his fingers squeaking against the cheap, leather-look plastic as he tried to put the words together. “Rimbaux said that you can only see the Indians if you believe they’re here.”
I fell back against the driver’s door and buried my face in my hands. “Jesus Christ! You’re freakin’ out on me!”
“No! No! We talked about it for two hours last night. He wasn’t trying to scare me. He says he knows they’re here, and they’re angry.”
“Angry?!” I shouted. “What? Are they gonna kill us? If Rimbaux wasn’t trying to scare you, I’d hate to see you right now if he was!” I leaned toward Green again to make my point clear, to make sure my order was understood. “Calm down. There ain’t no ghosts.”
“He says the Blackfeet was a peaceful tribe, but they…”
“GREEN!” I cut him off. “Rimbaux is a country puke from Louisiana! He don’t know shit about Indians from Montana!”
Green persisted. “They want us to leave, Bogner! We have to—OH MY GOD!!” His eyes bulged wide in their sockets. They were fixed over my shoulder, out the driver’s window. Despite the darkness his face seemed to be illuminated.
A fright jolted me. I felt as though I had been punched in the chest, my heart thudding wildly at the sensation that something was behind me. “What?!” I yelled. I snapped my head around to see what Green was looking at.
Nothing. Nothing but the Montana night.
“Did you see that?!” Green was screaming. He scrambled to look out every window at the same time.
“I didn’t see anything, Green!”
“She was looking right at us! We gotta get out of here!”
How did this guy get in the Air Force? I wondered as my heart slowed. “What are you talking about? We can’t go anywhere.” At that, he slugged me. I leaned back and shook off the sting in my lip. I tasted blood, and I saw red.
“You DICK!” I screamed, lunging at him and grabbing him by the hair. I cocked my fist back to repay the favor plus gratuity, but just before I could let it go, something ran past his window toward the front of the truck. I got up off Green and looked out through the windshield, my head and heart throbbing to the panic pace of my heart.
She was standing there on the launcher lid, looking at us. Something Quintero had said rang in my mind. Was it a coincidence? Or was he telling the truth? She was beautiful. Straight black hair, soft, reddish-brown face, plain hide smock. Despite the night, I could see her clearly, as if in daylight.
Green sat up and screamed, “There she is!”
She turned away from us, jumped off the launcher lid and ran. When she got to the fence, she stopped and looked at us once again. After a few seconds, she turned to the fence and ran through it, disappearing into the wall of pine trees thirty feet beyond.
I blinked a couple of times, uncertain I had really seen what I thought I had seen. I looked at Green, and he completely lost it. He grabbed the front of my uniform shirt with inhuman strength and screamed hysterically, “We gotta get out of here! WE GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE!”
I grabbed his hands and pried at his fingers until I was able to free my shirt and push him away. I wanted to tell him to calm down, but I was shaking almost as badly as he was. I turned on the truck’s headlights and opened the door.
“You can’t go out there!” Green’s voice cracked. His panicked, bloodshot eyes bulged out at me, at the same time denying me permission to get out of the truck as pleading with me not to.
I only looked at him. I grabbed my handheld radio from the seat and left him there. I stepped in front of the truck, my shadow from the headlights a looming giant against the pines where she had dissolved. I walked across the smooth concrete launcher lid to where I had first seen her, and then I jumped the three feet to the concrete below, just as she had. I walked toward the fence. I heard a door open on the Dodge.
“Come on, Bogner. Let’s just get out of here.” Green’s voice was still wracked with panic.
“We can’t!” I yelled. “Get on the radio and tell Rimbaux we’ve got a situation here.” I stopped at the point in the fence where she had been, and I touched it. Then, cutting through the quiet of night like a bolt of lightning, I heard it: the distinct sound of smooth oiled metal sliding against smooth oiled metal – shuk-SHLAK! Green had chambered a round in his M-16. I froze.
“Green?” I called, my back to him. “What are you doing?”
“Just get in the truck, man. We’re getting out of here.” His voice was shrill, high, but not as frantic. I could hear him trembling.
I turned to face him, but could only see the painfully white circles of the Dodge’s headlights.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’m coming back.” I walked slowly toward the camper. It bothered me that I couldn’t see him.
Green barked an order. “Hurry up! We should’ve lef –HOLY SHIT!! I can see them! They’re all over the woods! They’re coming after us!”
I tried to call to him, tried to calm him down, but it was too late. The silence of the forest was destroyed by the flash of yellow light and the hot pepper of Green’s M-16 firing at full automatic, shifting left to right and back again, spraying wildly into the tree line. I didn’t even have time to dive for cover. I felt a dull impact across my thighs, and my legs were knocked out from under me, like a good football block.
When I came to, I was face down on the gravel, bleeding from my nose or my mouth. I heard the shiver-churn of the truck’s starter, and then the rumble of the big-block Dodge engine as it came to life, instantly growing to a fierce roar. Gravel crunched and metal creaked, and then the whole fence around me shuddered as the camper punched through the gate. I reached for the handheld radio, about three feet in front of me, and then screamed as pain shot through my legs as though someone had staked me to the ground through them. I caught my breath and tried again, pulling myself to within inches of the radio’s rubber coated antenna. I couldn’t make it.
* * *
“Then what did you do?” Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Gage leaned forward, into his fifth page of notes.
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I think I passed out.” I searched my memories. “I dreamed that the pain stopped.”
“And then?”
I looked at the OSI agent for a moment. “And then I woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors and nurses.”
He flipped through his pages of notes for some time, and then he looked at me suspiciously. “Now, you were on the launcher lid when you were shot?”
“No,” I replied. “I was in front of it, beyond the rails, down by the south fence.”
“You said you came to at one point. Do you remember where you were?”
“I was spitting gravel and blood out of my mouth. I was right where I had been standing.”
He and Lieutenant Kirby looked at each other, the expressions on their faces matched. The OSI guy looked back at me. “You’re certain that you weren’t on the launcher lid when Green left you?”
“I’m certain,” I replied.
The agent scratched his forehead as he stared at his notebook.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked him.
“Yeah.” He threw his notebook down on the chair next to the lieutenant. “At what point did Green patch you up?”
I stared at him for a second, I’m sure the look on my face was classic. “Patch me up? He couldn’t get away from there fast enough, he was so scared. He wouldn’t have stopped long enough to scratch an itch, let alone patch me up. He left me there, right where I fell. He probably didn’t even realize what he did.”
Lieutenant Kirby cleared his throat and spoke, his tobacco-scarred voice grating against the calm of the room. “If Green had patched him up, he would have had a lot of Bogner’s blood on him. When they picked him up, he was dry as a bone.” Then the lieutenant hack-laughed. “Well, dry of blood, anyway. Charlie ART found him, camper on its side in a ditch, about six miles from Alpha five. Say he was screaming, shaking, and fouling his drawers. Shrinks still haven’t gotten him to say anything they can understand.”
Agent Gage pursed his lips. “Okay.” He picked up his notebook again and flipped one page back and forth a couple of times. “After you relieved the camper team, when did you turn on the site lights?”
“I didn’t.”
“Did Green?” The agent’s face was reddening, and his creased forehead was shiny with sweat.
“No.”
“After he shot you, did Airman Green turn on the site lights?” He seemed irritated, almost angry.
“No, he didn’t.”
The OSI agent stepped toward the bed menacingly. “How do you know that if you were passed out?”
“Agent Gage,” Lieutenant Kirby interrupted. “The only way to turn on the site lights is with LF keys, at the switch outside the gate. The Alarm Response Teams are the only ones who carry them, and the camper crew was already back at the LCF…with the keys.”
Agent Gage looked at the lieutenant. “The camper teams are LOCKED inside the site?”
Lieutenant Kirby nodded. “They can’t leave the site unsecure. They’re the topside security when the technology fails.”
“Well, what if there’s an emergency? A silo fire, or something?”
Lieutenant Kirby glared at Agent Gage for a moment. “Well, Green got out without a key, didn’t he?”
The room was quiet for several seconds. I looked at Agent Gage. “So, what’s wrong?”
The lieutenant looked again at the agent, who shook his head at the lieutenant, and then both looked at me. “Airman Bogner,” said Lieutenant Kirby, “when the emergency teams got to Alpha five, the lights were on. You were lying on your back on the center of the launcher lid, and your wounds had been treated.” The confusion in the lieutenant’s face, as well as on Agent Gage’s, was intense. “The technique was primitive, but whoever dressed your wounds knew what they were doing. They saved your life.
“The doctors who performed the surgery on your legs said that, had your wounds been left untreated, in the time that passed after Sergeant Rimbaux heard your call and before the emergency teams got to you, you could have bled to death three times over.”
I looked into Lieutenant Kirby’s eyes. “My call?”
The lieutenant motioned with his head to Agent Gage, who flipped several pages back in his notebook. “Yeah. Sergeant Rimbaux’s statement.” He read from his page stiffly, ‘”Shots fired. Shots fired. Shots fired.” And then nothing. I knew it was Bogner’s voice, but he sounded sleepy.’”
“I don’t remember calling in,” I said.
Agent Gage sighed, raising his eyes to me from his notes. He stared at me for a few seconds, apparently searching his thoughts for any other questions. “Is there anything else you can remember? Anything you haven’t told us?”
I thought back, found nothing, and slowly shook my head from side to side.
“Do you have any questions for me?” he asked.
“Green saw something that made him fire,” I said. “Did they find anything out there?”
The lieutenant hack-laughed again and stood up. “Nothing but some splintered trees and a couple of shot-up deer.”
As the men left the room, I called to the lieutenant. “Sir? Do you believe me?” He stared at me. Silent. “I know I saw her, sir. I couldn’t be mistaken about it. She was beautiful.”
Lieutenant Kirby looked down for a second at his beret in his hands, and then said, “You take it easy, Airman Bogner. We’ll probably be back in a day or two with some more questions and have you tell us the story again.” Then he slid out of the room.
He didn’t believe me. He didn’t need to say it. They could come back every day and ask me to tell them the story, trying to find something different from any of the other days, because they didn’t believe me. But they wouldn’t find anything. I couldn’t tell it any differently because there’s no other way to tell it than how it happened.
I adjusted the bed down flat and looked at my feet hanging by cables above the bed. I sighed and closed my eyes. In a little while I knew I’d be asleep, and she’d come to visit me again to take away the pain like she had since I first saw her three nights ago. She is beautiful.
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