2. Bill
TWO
bill
Bill stands at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, both hands splayed wide on the counter as he taps his fingers mindlessly on the Formica countertop.
“Bill,” Jo says gently, pouring a steaming cup of coffee. She’s wearing only her dressing gown and a floor-length robe. “Are you anxious about something?”
Bill’s tapping stops. “Sorry,” he says, pushing himself away from the counter. “I was just thinking.”
Jo opens the glass bottle of milk she’s pulled from the fridge pours some into her coffee cup. “Are you worried about today?” Her slippers patter across the kitchen floor as she returns the milk to the refrigerator.
“No. I’m fine. Just thinking.”
Jo pulls a metal lunch box from the fridge and walks it over to her husband. She stands on tiptoes to kiss him. “Sure you don’t want me to make you breakfast?”
Bill gives a single shake of his head as he accepts the lunch box. “No, thank you.”
He knows that Jo has come to expect his quiet, serious moods in times of stress. Bill is someone who successfully turns inward for a lot of his processing, and he can keep his own counsel like nobody’s business. It’s who he is, and who he’s always been, though Jo has occasionally complained about feeling like she can’t get through to him when he’s like this. But if there’s one thing Bill admires in a man, it’s stoicism and the ability to hold himself together under any circumstance. Nothing wrong with that, in Bill’s opinion.
“I’ll see you after work, Jojo,” Bill says to her, leaning down to kiss her one more time; it’s his way of letting her know that while he isn’t saying much, he’s just fine.
Bill walks through the door to the attached garage, leaving his wife standing in a splotch of bright morning sunlight, holding a coffee mug as her long robe swirls around her ankles.
The drive through the new housing development where all the prospective and current astronauts live deposits Bill right into Stardust Beach as he winds his way down streets so new that they look as if they’ve been bleached white. The sidewalks are lined with hamburger drive-ins, grocery stores, gas stations, and shops. On street corners women in summer dresses hold the hands of small children as they wait for the minimal amount of traffic to pass, and on the roads other new cars shine under the morning sunlight just like Bill’s Corvette does.
He drums his thumbs on the top of the steering wheel as he listens to AM radio, eyes hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses. So far, Florida seems like a dreamscape to Bill: all this sun, the way the kids seem happier and more carefree already, and a beautiful house for his family to live in that feels wide open. For once, Bill can breathe. The tightness in his chest is gone, and he imagines Jo bringing dinner out onto the pool deck in the rosy-tangerine evening light, maybe as tiki torches burn from stakes around the pool. It’s like they’ve clicked their heels three times and landed in paradise, but it’s also starting to feel like home.
Bill smiles to himself as he hits the accelerator. The car’s engine hums to life as the light at the corner of Jupiter Lane and Milky Way ( Clever , he thinks) turns green.
Stardust Beach is a new outpost in the race to space—the race to the moon, at this point—and it reminds him of the way Los Alamos sprung up out of nowhere to house and entertain the families who relocated to work on the Manhattan Project. Stardust Beach is a cheery, youthful town nestled up next to Merritt Island, right between the towns of Cocoa and Rockledge. Bill looks both ways before turning onto the Port Canaveral property on Merritt Island, taking in the newly planted palm trees, the clean sidewalks, and the perfectly manicured lawns and open spaces.
At the end of the long road that leads into Port Canaveral is a low cement sign—a perfect rectangle—emblazoned with the iconic blue and white NASA logo with its smattering of stars and the jaunty red wing, meant to represent aeronautics. Bill takes a slow right onto the property, keeping his speed low as he approaches the 144,000-acre compound.
With a low whistle, Bill turns down his radio, effectively silencing the Beach Boys for the time being. “Isn’t that a sight,” he says to himself, ducking his head beneath the sun visor to get a better look at the steel framework of the service structures built onto the launch pads. They rise up from the ground and shoot heavenward, with the blue sky of a late spring morning as their backdrop. Beyond the Space Center is a swath of rich greenery that bumps up against the turquoise waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Bill parks and leaves the convertible top of the Corvette down, shutting the door with a heavy thunk. He makes his way across the smooth, newly-poured asphalt, looking around at the partially full lot. Even this early in the morning, the heat of the day rises up through the soles of his dress shoes. Bill switches his metal lunchbox from one hand to the other, shielding his eyes with one hand as he tips his head to the sky and searches: not one single cloud. Nothing but clear skies, blue waves out in the distance, and a new career as an astronaut.
The whole thing could be a metaphor for his life lately. Bill gives a self-satisfied smile as he crosses the lot in long, confident strides. He can handle anything that’s coming his way—in fact, he’s been preparing himself mentally for this for years. The time he spent flying planes in the Air Force had only served to whet Bill’s appetite for speed and excitement. He’s always wanted to see what else is out there in the universe, and now the opportunity to find out is right here at his fingertips.
Nothing can come between Bill and his chance to go to space.
“Lieutenant Colonel Booker,” a man in glasses says, pacing the room with a cigarette burning idly in one hand. “Thank you for being our first victim.”
The other men laugh nervously. There are no windows in this meeting room, and eight men are seated around a long rectangular table with a coffee service placed in its center. Nearly every man besides Bill has an ashtray at his elbow that’s already overflowing with a collection of cigarette butts at this early hour.
“Glad to go first,” Bill says, sitting up straighter in his chair. “I’d like the other guys to see that it’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Do you consider yourself a natural leader, Booker?”
“I do,” Bill says succinctly. And he does. In the Air Force, Bill had excelled at decision-making, staying calm no matter what the situation, and guiding the other men through the most harrowing of situations.
The man asking the questions, Arvin North, pulls out a chair at the head of the table and sits. He picks up a manila file and opens it, quietly assessing what looks like a typed list of questions. North pulls a sharpened pencil from behind one ear and taps the eraser against the list of questions.
“I think we should just dive in here, Bill. If you have no preliminary questions for us, then I’d like to begin the actual psychological evaluation.”
Bill spreads his hands wide to indicate that he has nothing to hide, and no questions that he’s waiting to ask. “I’m an open book,” he says, almost meaning it. In fact, he—like any other human being—has things he’d rather not discuss; areas he’d like to leave off-limits. But Bill understands that this particular evaluation will tell the men at the table whether or not he’s of sound enough mind to lead a mission into space. And therefore, he’s going to answer every single question in the most straightforward way he can; he’s going to force himself to be as transparent as possible, and not let a single question that the committee asks ruffle his feathers.
“Fine. Let’s begin.” Arvin North signals to a man who is running a reel-to-reel recorder. The man, whose hair is slicked to one side just like every other guy at the table, and who is wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt with a white t-shirt visible beneath the slightly opened collar, stands and flicks a switch. The reels begin to spin and he nods at Arvin North that it’s safe to begin.
“Booker,” Arvin North says, standing up and taking both his cigarette and the list of questions with him as he begins to pace again. “Please tell me about your immediate family.”
Bill takes a long, deep breath and begins. “My wife, Josephine, and I have been married for about twelve years. We have three kids: Jimmy, who is eleven, Nancy, ten, and Kate, who just turned seven.”
“And Josephine stays home with the children, correct?” Arvin North stops pacing to look at Bill. The only sound in the room is of someone leaning back in a chair that squeaks, and of the reel-to-reel recorder’s internal mechanisms clicking and whirring.
“Of course.” Bill frowns. He doesn’t know anyone whose wife works and leaves the children in the care of others. Not in his circle, anyway.
“Has she previously held a job outside the home?”
Bill is still frowning. “When we met, Jo was a secretary at a dental practice in Minnesota. I was there to get my teeth cleaned.” He pauses, his forehead unfurrowing just slightly at the memory. “She was working at the front desk, and on my way out, she took out a bucket full of lollipops and offered me one. Asked me if I’d been good for the dentist.” He smirks.
“Cheeky.” Arvin North does not smile. “And it’s a solid marriage?”
Bill’s frown returns and he’s jarred out of the reverie of Jo in a tight, pastel pink sweater, smiling up at him from behind a polished wood desk. She had been cheeky, and he’d loved it. But that sass—that expectant smile—has been missing of late. For a split-second Bill allows himself to wonder if her cheekiness has been squelched by marriage and children, or whether Jo is simply not as happy with her life as she’d been when they first met.
But what he says out loud is, “Absolutely. Solid as a rock.” Jo has always been his rock—that’s no lie. From the day they’d met, Bill had known that she was a stand-up girl. She held down a job, went home in the evenings to help her mother care for Jo’s aging grandmother, and she even went to church on Sundays. He’d promised her mother that he would make sure that Jo saw the inside of a church at least three out of four Sundays a month, but almost as soon as the ink was dry on their wedding certificate, they’d started spending weekend mornings lounging around in bed with a newspaper and two cups of coffee. Which, of course, led to little Jimmy’s birth just ten months into their marriage.
“And how does Josephine feel about you entering the space program?” Arvin North takes a long, slow drag on his cigarette and exhales the smoke towards the ceiling, where a visible layer of gray-blue cigarette smoke already hovers like fog hanging over the land below.
“She is one hundred percent supportive, sir,” Bill says, straightening his shoulders. “Always has been.”
Arvin North nods as though he’s satisfied with the topic of Jo—at least for the moment. “Do any of your children have any special needs?”
“Sir?” Bill’s forehead creases.
North clears his throat. “Do any of them have…special needs, like behavior, or mental issues?”
“Oh,” Bill says, relaxing. “No. Fit as fiddles, my three. Smart, polite, and obedient.” He can say that with all honesty, though he’ll leave out the fact that Nancy loves to read books so intensely that she sometimes refuses to go to sleep at night. On more than one occasion, either Bill or Jo have done a bedtime sweep of the kids’ rooms, only to find little Nancy sitting in a closet with a book and a flashlight, looking up at them guiltily as she sits beneath the hanging skirts and dresses, giving them a gap-toothed smile.
Arvin North feigns at picking a piece of tobacco from the end of his tongue while his cigarette burns between his first and middle fingers. He looks directly at Bill. “Glad to hear the wife and kids are good.” He waits a beat. “We’d like to hear about your first wife now.”
Bill’s heart hammers in his chest, and his pulse thumps like a heartbeat that’s audible to the entire room. With a few moments of soothing, even breaths, Bill pulls himself together and wills the pulsing of his neck veins to stop.
“My first wife,” he says slowly, buying himself the tiniest sliver of time by repeating these words. God, I wish there was a window to look out of , he thinks. But this is probably why there aren’t any windows: they want to keep us under the microscope and see how we react. Stay cool. “Margaret Wallings-Booker,” he says after a brief pause. “Margaret was my first wife.”
“Could you please tell us about your courtship, marriage, and how things ended?”
Bill has the distinct impression that Arvin North and every other man at the table already knows exactly what course his marriage with Margaret took, but rather than assuming that’s the case, he starts at the beginning: “Margaret and I were high school sweethearts. She was my date to the senior dance, and we were engaged right after graduation.” Bill keeps his eyes on North, who begins to pace the room again. There is a clock high up on the wall over North’s head, and Bill tears his gaze from it. Time does not matter now that he’s in the hot seat. His answers are all that matter.
“We got married right after my nineteenth birthday, and Margaret was pregnant with our daughter by the time we were twenty.”
“I see,” North says flatly to show that he’s listening to every word.
“Margaret was always difficult. She was prone to fits of…I don’t know. Just fits. She would be silent, then angry, then nearly catatonic. I thought I knew how to handle her moods, but there were times I really wasn’t sure what to do. Then, about halfway through her pregnancy, something went wrong.” Bill’s heart is no longer racing, but instead squeezing itself like a tight fist inside his chest. He swallows gently, knowing that his words will hitch in his throat and cause his voice to break if he goes too quickly. “We went to the hospital, and the baby was born before she could live outside the womb. Her eyes never opened.” The ticking of the clock is again audible alongside the reel-to-reel’s mechanical spinning sound. “She was so tiny,” Bill says softly. He clears his throat and holds his eyes open to stave off tears. “Margaret could not take it. Under the best of circumstances, she couldn’t take it, but in her state of mind, she just snapped.”
“Meaning she left you?” North prods, though not unkindly.
“No,” Bill says. “She did not leave me. She cried incessantly, which is understandable, but something about holding that little baby in her hands…I don’t know. Her eyes changed. She turned completely inward. It was like she could no longer hear my voice,” he says, looking at the men seated around the table. One or two of them are watching him intently, but the others have their eyes trained solemnly on the tabletop. “I would talk, but it didn’t get through. No matter what I said or did, Margaret was locked in a world of her own. Even her parents couldn’t get her to speak. She just rocked back and forth and banged her head against things.”
“That must have been incredibly difficult.” North is watching Bill with his sharp eyes. “What did you do?”
Bill shrugs. “Her parents and I agreed that she needed to get help. We moved her into a treatment facility—a home,” he clarifies. “And she stayed there. At first I went every day, then every few days, but eventually just once a week. I kept hoping she’d get better, that she’d see me and remember who I was to her. I thought that maybe the hormones from the baby, or, just…you know?” He looks around the table helplessly, hoping for one of the men to nod his reassurance, but they all stay the course: eyes on table; eyes on the smoke curling from their cigarettes; eyes anywhere but on Bill. “But she never came to. Never spoke to me again. After a year of that, I was ready to have the marriage dissolved, and I’d even spoken to her parents about it. No one was happy about that decision, and my parents begged me not to do it, but I was only twenty-two at that point. I couldn’t stay married to a ghost for the rest of my life, and she’d given me no indication that she was still in there.”
Arvin North has stopped pacing and is standing behind his own chair, leaning over the back of it to stub his cigarette out in an ashtray. He reaches for the cup of coffee that’s resting near his forgotten manila folder and a cup of pencils with clean, pink erasers and sharp points. His eyes lift and land on Bill. “That’s understandable,” he says, sipping his coffee. “A man that young has his whole life ahead of him.”
“I requested a relocation to the Air Force base in Minneapolis in the midst of all of it. I needed a change. And then I went to the dentist one day to get a cleaning, and there was Jo,” Bill says, imagining her there again, lips shiny and pink, eyes dancing. “She was offering me a lollipop and a future, and I took both. We were married eight months after we met, and then a year later, James was born.”
“And Ms. Wallings?” North prompts him, bringing them back to Margaret.
“She’s still in the same facility in Arizona.”
“That’s a tough decision,” North says mildly. There is no judgment in his tone.
“It was. And I’m good at tough decisions,” Bill says, lifting his chin an inch. “I can weigh the pros and cons of any situation, and do the things that need to be done.”
“Are you in touch with Ms. Wallings?” North has a glint in his eye. He already knows the answer to this question.
The clock on the wall ticks again loudly as Bill weighs the question. “I am. I have, on occasion, made the trip to Arizona to visit her in the facility.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Duty,” Bill says simply. “I can do the tough things—in any situation—but I am also a man of duty and honor. I may not have been the right husband for her, but I am still a person who cares about her. Her parents have passed, and a part of the expense of her care falls on me.” Bill pauses and then goes on. “I didn’t divorce her because I stopped loving her…I left because there was no future for us. So I visit when I can, whether it means anything to her or not. It’s the right thing to do,” he concludes, holding his gaze steady on North’s. “And I put a lot of merit in doing the right thing.”
“Thank you for your candor, Lieutenant Colonel,” Arvin North says, giving him a single nod. “Now we have a few questions for you about your time in Korea.”
Bill steels himself and finally allows a single glance at the clock on the wall; the questions are not about to get any easier—they’ll just be hard in a different way.
Arvin North slides a fresh cigarette out of the pack he’s taken from his breast pocket and puts the end into his mouth. He flicks his lighter and the paper ignites with a hiss. “Let’s talk about the mission you led in Korea in December of 1951.” His lighter snaps shut. “I want to hear about the casualties.”
Bill sighs internally. Putting himself back in Korea exacts an emotional toll on him every time, and occasionally leads to days or weeks of repetitive nightmares. He buckles up mentally, sitting straighter in his chair.
“Okay,” Bill says. “The casualties.”