Chapter 8 GIDEON
I'd continued to keep my distance. Avoided Die Ecke, the alley, the very idea of her.
Not that it helped any. She kept turning up anyway, in the quiet between engines, in the part of my chest that wouldn't go still.
I flew my runs, signed the manifests, drank bad coffee, and pretended not to look at every Russian uniform I passed.
I told myself I didn't have time for complications, and that was almost true.
On the Fourth of July, the field felt different, flags taped to office doors, a sheet cake frosted with a crooked map of the States, a guy from Supply trying to grill bratwurst on a dented oil drum while Glenn Miller bled from a tinny phonograph.
No fireworks, not with half the city held together by a string.
But some idiot had scrounged up some sparklers, and the bright light scratched against a low sky.
I finished my last flight just before dusk, logged it, and told myself I'd sleep. I had rotation again at dawn. Then Carter hooked an elbow through mine and grinned like mischief. "Come on, Griff. Independence Day. One beer won't kill you. Die Ecke?"
I should have said no.
I said yes.
The bar was the same. Loud, the way only people trying not to think can be loud, English and mostly French and German braided together, laughter with a hard edge.
The neon hum at the window made the room look underwater.
She was there behind the bar, hair pinned up, face thinner than I remembered, which could've been my imagination or just the light.
For a second, I thought she smiled when she saw me, small and gone in an instant, and that one flicker unspooled something I hadn't meant to bring with me.
I took a table near the wall and tipped heavy—cigarettes slid under the glass like a message. For her, they were a fortune; for me, they were ration paper with different ink. When she brought my beer, I heard myself ask, too gently, "Have you eaten?"
She went still, the way a bird goes still. "Yes," she said, and the word had corners. She turned away before I could make it worse.
I didn't chase. I sat and watched the room fill and empty around me.
Someone put on Lili Marleen, and half the bar groaned and sang anyway.
Outside, a tram rattled past with its windows open, the bell dinging like an apology.
Men in party hats cut from Stars and Stripes newsprint toasted each other and talked about home as if it were a place you could buy a ticket to: Fort Worth and Spokane, Scranton and Mobile, the Mississippi like a road of light.
I waited until closing. Carter had peeled off with a girl who laughed like she was trying it on; the other pilots were arguing about baseball they hadn't seen in two years. I paid for the table and stepped into the alley air that tasted like wet brick and coal smoke.
She came out a minute later, shoulders drawn, the night pressing close.
"What do you want?" she asked, not afraid this time, just exhausted. "Payment? For being nice the other day?"
I shook my head. "I only wanted to make sure you're okay."
"Well," she said, and the word bent like a beam under weight. "I am." She slipped past me, quick, as if speed could make truth of it.
I'd promised myself I wouldn't follow. I followed anyway. "I'd like to get to know you," I said, hating how clumsy it sounded in the dark. "Better."
She stopped, turned, brows up. "Why?"
I shrugged because I didn't have language for the thing that had set its teeth in me. "Be damned if I know," I said, honest for once. "I don't even like Germans."
She laughed, a real, sudden laugh that felt like a match struck in the dark. "That makes two of us."
We stood there with the city listening. In the distance, someone tried to play "Yankee Doodle" on an accordion and lost their nerve halfway through.
A woman called a child's name, and the echo brought it back smaller.
I thought about home without meaning to: my mother on a porch swing with a dish towel over her lap, fireflies stitching light in the tall grass, the county fireworks shaking windows, my kid sister sneaking a second piece of pie and pretending it wasn't in her hand.
"It's our Independence Day," I said, because I needed to say something that wasn't her name.
"Fourth of July. Back home, there'd be a parade.
Grills in every yard. Kids running with sparklers until somebody gets burned and laughs anyway.
You ask a hundred people what it means, and they'll all give you a different answer, but everyone shows up. "
She tilted her head, thinking it over like a riddle. "I wouldn't have known it was July if you hadn't told me; the calendar burned."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess it did."
We started walking without deciding to, side by side, along a block where two streetlamps had survived and made a little island of light.
A boy on a bicycle with no chain pushed past, shoes scuffing, a loaf of bread strapped to the rear rack with twine.
In a doorway, someone had chalked a date and a crude drawing of an airplane with a smiling face.
The wind came up and smelled like rain over stone.
"I keep thinking I should leave," I said, half to her, half to myself. "That it'd be smarter to go home to a town that remembers my name. Then I fly another load and see a kid wave at my wing like it's the answer to a question I don't know how to ask."
"And you stay," she said.
"And I stay," I confirmed.
She looked at me then, really looked, as if searching for the trick in the sentence. "We get used to staying," she said. "Even when leaving is the thing that would save us."
I didn't know how to touch that without breaking it. "If anyone bothers you again—" I started, and she lifted a hand.
"I know," she said. "You'll come burn them down." The corner of her mouth twitched. "That's not how this city keeps breathing."
"I won't burn anything," I said, and the lie tasted like metal. "I'll…show up."
She nodded once, sharp, as if we'd agreed to something that didn't have a name. For a heartbeat, we stood close enough that I could feel the heat coming off her like a coal banked under ash. Then she stepped back.
"I have to go," she said. "Klaus will be waiting."
"Klaus?" I felt a stab of jealousy run through me like a knife. Of course she had a man in her life. A woman like her had to. The urge to find that man and burn him to a crisp, though, surprised me. Not bothered, just surprised.
"My little brother." She clarified, and the amount of relief that rushed through me was ridiculous.
I dug into my pocket without thinking and came up with a pack of chewing gum. I held it out and then felt stupid. She looked at my hand, then at my face. Not understanding.
"For your brother… Klaus." I tried.
She blinked, as if not comprehending the idea of someone giving her something for free. I pushed the pack toward her, took her hand—it felt so light and cold, and so right—and pressed the gum into her palm. "For Klaus." I reiterated.
She moved away, not fast, not afraid, just turned and let the dark take her in gentle pieces. I stood in the mouth of the alley and watched until she was a shadow in a city of shadows.
Behind me, a drunken Navy officer whooped "Happy Fourth!
" at nobody, and somewhere a bottle popped like a small firework that had lost its way.
I thought about my father's hand steady on my shoulder the first time I lit a sparkler, about my mother's voice telling me to be careful, about my sister sleeping under a flag we'd hung.
I missed them in a sudden, bone-deep way that made me want to walk back to the field and keep flying until distance did what sleep couldn't.
Instead, I shoved my hands into my pockets and turned toward McNair.
My boots made that hollow midnight sound on the cobbles, the sound that proves the ground is still there.
I didn't like Germans, and I liked Russians less, and I liked least of all the part of me that had reached for her without permission.
Damned if I knew why. But it was July 4th, and for the first time in a long time, I let myself want something that wasn't survival.