Airborne
It was a small, dusty village, with no rivers or creeks cutting through the rust and gray landscape; no mountains to make your eyes travel over and away, to somewhere misty and blue and pretty.
A railroad stop that was larger than it should have been for a place so small, a single grocery store and a post office made up all the large structures. The rest of it was a collection of tiny houses in varying shades of decaying blues and greens with the windows trimmed in shiny new white, as if the people in these homes could afford only to make pretty these smaller parts. The gardens fronting the homes were well-kept, as water was free.
The old women, though nobody could say with certainty just how old any of them were, sat on the scratchy wood benches that doubled for porches, and shelled shiny black sunflower seeds. They chatted about kids and grandkids and, in the rarest of these whispers, of great grandkids. Few had any of those. But mostly they talked about their first, and usually only, loves. Those dashing young men, just out of school, the fabulous dancers, the guitar strummers, the illicit smokers and drinkers they’d snuck out of windows to meet. Ridden on motorcycles with. Gone to an occasional movie or a disco some eight miles away, at times on foot, bringing always a pair of shoes for dancing, something satiny and with heels.
In this place, the children were terrified of gypsies and midgets. The cripples nobody was terrified of. Nor of old men. There were very few old men left, and fewer among them with all their limbs attached, their memories unshattered, their hearts and livers intact. The children who had a mystical creature called grandpa were lucky indeed.
Bella was one of the lucky ones. Her first, shiniest memory was of flying. She had a white lacy dress on that was made by one of the women, by hand, and she sat in her grandpa’s arms, snuggled comfortably against his chest and just under his stubbly chin as he carried her through the village, stopping every so often to chat. “I have an angel,” Grandpa would say to every person he’d talk to. Bella would smile at them, or at least that’s how she remembered it, and then nudge Grandpa to keep going, faster and faster, down the dirty dusty streets, fast enough that the air felt cool and windy about her face, and she felt at last like she was flying, free as any bird.
One day when she was older, though not by much, she’d discovered, embarrassingly, in a public bath, that there was something terribly wrong with her back. The two bones stuck out of it in the mirror, and she’d convinced herself then, nearly crying from the terror of it, that she’d be a hunchback after all. Just like her uncle, who’d casually throw a jacket over the hump on his back, as if in that tiny place nobody knew what it was, what it looked like. She’d heard the old women whispering about it at the bakery and the bazaar and at the baths: “Such a handsome boy, too.” “A pity.” “Shouldn’t have had twins, them.” “Darn bad luck.”
She ran home that day, something she wasn’t supposed to do right after the bath on account of getting all dirty again, but she couldn’t help it. Grandpa was tinkering with the old well pump when she got there, and she was so out of breath, she’d had to stop and just breathe before she could get any of the words out. And then she couldn’t anyway, so she just showed him, pointed at the damn things, as if hoping he could make them go away the way he had with bugs and flies and Colorado beetles. Grandpa had touched the small bumps–his fingers probing at them gently but carefully–crouched in front of her and smiled. A rare big smile that showed all his teeth, even the ones that weren’t any kind of white anymore.
“Remember how you always want to jump off things to see if you can fly?” He’d asked her, his voice and face suddenly serious, as if it was terribly important that she hadn't forgotten. But of course she hadn’t, and told him so.
“Well, when you are just a little bit older, you’ll finally be able to. These bumps are where wings grow out of for those lucky enough to have them.”
That was the thing about grandpa. He’d always made her feel okay about things, even the strange ones, like those two boney bumps and the wanting to fly, no matter that other kids had told her by then it didn’t work like that. Grandpa wouldn’t lie to her, she knew.
The first time she saw Grandpa in a uniform was on account of someone dying. She’d watched from the window as all the men in the village, the crippled ones and Grandpa, surrounded a large wooden box, lifted it and carried it away. The men she’d bought bread and occasional watermelons from looked like soldiers in the films she’d watched, wearing green uniforms that clung to them in a strange way, and they all had pins on their chests. Her grandpa had the most pins that she could see, and it had made her proud.
She had asked him about the strange suit and the colorful pins just as soon as he got home, which wasn’t by any means soon enough. Only grandpa, who had never not talked to her before, shook his head and walked away from her. He sat at the old table with a scratched vinyl tablecloth on it, the yellow flowers all cut up and stained and mostly not yellow anymore, drinking cognac out of a big glass. There was something in the way he’d sat that night that made her want to hide from him, from the way he wasn’t really looking at anything, and the way his hand shook when he lifted the glass to his lips.
It would be years until she was old enough to puzzle out the darkness Grandpa was hiding from. The little clues coming together for her, one summer at a time. Grandpa looking up at the sound of an airplane and staying like that for a long time, a wistful look on his face. Grandpa always taking the trains everywhere, even when he had to go far and it would have been much easier by plane. Grandpa forbidding her from going through the antique dresser with the small drawers where all those pins were. Grandpa yelling at her in someone else’s voice when he caught her doing just that, then walking away, as if he was embarrassed by what she’d find.
And finally, when Bella had for the first time been allowed to go to the place where the dead were carried, Grandpa telling her of the men he’d lost, as he’d pour shot glasses of vodka and cognac, according to the dead man’s preference. He’d take a sip and leave the rest at the grave. He never did tell her that he was a pilot, and that he no longer could fly or stomach being near a plane of any kind. That he was terrified of the sputtering engines of crop-dusters and had to think really hard to convince himself that it’s all they were. Harmless to anything but the bugs. That he was both lucky and unlucky: that he got shot down so early in the war, that he got to keep every part he was born with.
He never did tell her that he wasn’t proud of any of it. That wars terrified him deep in his bones. That the two beautiful hunting rifles at the house were never used for anything but to get cleaned and oiled. And that the only thing he wanted when his time came was that they bury him in a civilian suit, the cheap wool black thing he’d bought long ago, and that they play anything but any kind of march. And that Bella pour a shot of cognac for him when she’d come.
Grandpa had told her once to mind the places with rivers and mountains, if she could find one, and make a home there. Away from the small dusty villages. Places that were soft and magical and pretty. Places where people would be okay with her wanting to fly, even when she was too old to want to do that.
Places where nobody got buried in a uniform or too young.
Somewhere thousands of miles away there is an empty shot glass at a grave, longing for cognac. Grandpa was a cognac man. Someday, Bella and her kids will fill it.
img credit: https://pixabay.com/en/people-homeless-male-street-1550502/
This is an entry into @jonknight Armistice Fiction Contest.
Thank you to the many talented writers and editors at The Writers Block for all your help with this story!
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