Bombs Away

My last friend dead, and still the breakfast comes. Puffy blonde Mel brings it, like always.

“Good morning Mr. Somers,” she says with a cracked-lip smile spread across yellow teeth. Hard to tell which is yellower, her hair or her teeth. Ridiculous looking woman.

Despite old Doug down the hall dying, which we all expected anyway, I’m in a pretty good mood, so I don’t tell her to go to hell.

Breakfast is orange juice, which I hate, coffee, which I love but not they way they do it here, some kind of damned pastry and a cute little box of cereal and a carton of milk. Mmm.

“Everybody’s dead. Why am I having breakfast?” I ask with my croaking old voice.

“Now, Mr. Somers, you are still alive.” Delivered with that awful smile.

“Says who?” asks I.

She leaves my room for the noisy hallway. I eat the damned breakfast. What else is there to do?

Then she comes back. She does not know that I am tired of this. She’s that stupid.

Mel gathers my “dishes” which are really Styrofoam crap, and as she does, I tell her the truth I speak to her and everybody else in this place every day and that nobody listens to: “I killed him, you know. It was me.”

“Now, Mr. Somers, you say that every day.” Then she stops, as if to remind herself who I am and who she is. She gathers herself up and looks at me with “meaning” written all over that bulbous face.

“I know you killed somebody in the war, but it was war. The Big One. World War Two.” As if I don’t know which war I was in. “You did nothing wrong.” She fluffs my pillow and heads for the door.

“I killed a lot of people!” I scream after her. “I was a goddamn bombardier, and that’s what a bombardier does – kill lots of people, people waaay below him, people so far out of sight they’re just part of the geography, people sipping their damned coffee and not expecting to die. I hope their final cups were better than the crap you give me here.”

I’d say that every day. Or something like it. And then I’d say, as now I say:

“But I killed him. Understand? The one guy. I killed him, I did….” And I trail off, like a man under the guillotine without anything left.

They never listen, but I don’t care. I know the truth.

Later that morning, the music starts up. It’s that damned crap from the one female singer with a pale voice and a repeating backup and I hate it, as usual, and I ring for Mel, as usual, and ask for it to be turned off. As usual, she shows up and tells me how all the other old farts in this joke of a home love it, just love it. Love hearing the cool new music and thinking they’re so hip.

“Well, I hate it. Give me my Glenn Miller.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again!” And I wonder what she’d say to a husband asking for sex. “Again?” Yes, again! But then the thought makes me gag.

I forgot who gave me the used cassette player and the tape of Glenn and his band. I think it was my daughter. Long ago. Of course she’d still come if she could, but being dead…. That’s what you get for living to 97 damn years old. Everyone you love dies, or almost, and the ones who are left are so young they think death never really shows up. She was a good child before the cancer got her, and I’m pretty sure she gave me the cassette and the Glenn tape.  Workers at the home say, “Cassettes are old technology” and I should get a computer or something to play Glenn’s music because the sound is better, and I tell them, you don’t know why I listen. It’s not the sound quality. It’s the music quality.

The music today is crap. It’s like the Styrofoam “dishes.” It has the shape of the real thing but when you listen to it close, it’s pure fake. The real music died a while back. After the Beatles but before hip-hop. And before both of them, long before both of them and long before Elvis even, there was music more real than any music before or since. The big bands. Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. Harry James. But mostly, Glenn. And now, Mel has put the old worn cassette in the old worn cassette player and old worn me is happy. Glenn is leading the band in “In the Mood,” and the saxes are ripping through the punchy rhythms like rivets through steel and my body wants to dance. The best it can do is stretch, so I settle for that. Then goddamn Mel speaks and ruins the whole damned thing.

“You’re going to have a visitor, Mr. Somers.”

“Doctor or undertaker?” She laughs because she thinks I’m trying to be funny.

“Neither, silly. It’s a young man from the high school doing a history assignment. He asked to speak to a WWII veteran, if there was one alive” – and she blanched a little because she knew she was saying to me: You’re too damned old to still be around.

“So you said, ‘Come speak to old Somers, he killed a bunch of krauts in the Big One.’”

“Well, not in those words, of course.”

“Why not? Those are the right ones.”

I don’t know what happened next. I think it involved urination. Anyway, later that day, in the afternoon, this boy is sitting beside my bed holding a flat, shiny rectangle.

“What’s that?” I ask.

He smiles, like someone proud of something. “An iPad,” he says. “It’s a device that can do a lot of things, including….”

I cut him off. “Okay, I see. You’re going to record me with it?” He nods a solemn yes.

“Just don’t take my picture. I hate my old face.”

He promises no pictures but wants plenty of answers. “How old were you when you joined?” I was 19. “What made you choose the Air Force?” I hated the thought of slogging through mud. And it was the Army Air Corps then. “Were you afraid?” Anyone who says he wasn’t is lying. “How many people do you think were killed in your missions over Germany?”

Oh. Time for the kid to leave.

“I’m sorry, son, but I’m tired. You know how old men get tired, don’t you?” He looks so disappointed that I almost tell him I was kidding. Instead, I get out the scrapbook. People love the scrapbook.

“That was my crew, and that’s me right there.” Wait for the kid to react. Yes, there it is, the look of recognition as he sees the grey, drooping face before him in the taut brown face of the picture. Pictures of Germany devastated by my handiwork. Pictures of captured German soldiers. Newspaper clippings with headlines like “GERMANY SURRENDERS!” and “WAR IN EUROPE OVER!” And more pictures. Pictures of forgotten comrades, emaciated prisoners, a young German girl. The kid notices that one, but says nothing. I’m about to close the book when…

“What’s this?” the boy erupts. It’s another newspaper clipping, this one from near the end of the war. The headline reads: “GLENN MILLER AND HIS BAND VANISH OVER THE CHANNEL.” “Who was Glenn Miller, and how did he just vanish?”

I’m too damned old to be angry when someone doesn’t know the name of the greatest band leader who ever lived. I stay calm and give him an answer:

“Glenn Miller led a band that made some of the best music of my day. We called it swing. He vanished – the whole band disappeared – over the English Channel. They were flying back to England after playing a concert for American soldiers in France.”

“How did it…”

“Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Did I say I was tired?”

Lucky for me, the kid didn’t know what questions to ask. Questions about the bombardier’s job and how the bombs were primed before we loaded them. How the bombs were called “ordnance,” a prettier name for what we dropped on those poor unsuspecting bastards below. But you don’t yell “Ordnance away,” you yell “Bombs away,” and away they go, and you don’t know who they’re falling on. And the kid didn’t ask what happened to the bombs you didn’t drop. You see, sometimes we’d get chased off by ack-ack and have to turn around and go back with tons of primed ordnance, and then we’d have to dump it all, because landing with live bombs blows you the hell up. And the best place to dump was over the channel, because chances were slim you’d hit a boat or… a low-flying aircraft. Very slim, actually. But it happened from time to time…. Hardly ever, really…. I wonder if Mel has dinner ready.

-- Kenneth LaFave