The Secret Life of Wings

I heard a faint cry this morning, predator and prey, and looked up at the sky. A bald eagle, I remember thinking – no, two of them – harrying a pair of falcons. A circling duel, a fight to the death playing out in the sky above my father's house, and my hands began to shake as I remembered all the other fights that played out up there. I drove to work, the movie of those four playing in slow motion over and over in my mind, hunter and hunted, winners and losers, death the only certain outcome.

Things never change, I suppose. We see the world through the eyes of our grandparents and our grandchildren, the world that came before, and what lies beyond tomorrow. Like reflections in glass, the past and the future superimposed over the most important moments of our lives.

There's a kind of comfort in so many layers...even if that comfort is so hard to grasp.

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There's a picture of my father hanging on the wall in my study, standing ramrod straight in his khakis as Ray Spruance pinned the Navy Cross on my father's chest. On either side of the image and in the same frame are two letters, one from Chester Nimitz, the other from Franklin Roosevelt. In remarkably terse language his actions are recounted, his bravery lauded, his sacrifice, they say, forever enshrined in the memory of a grateful nation. You can hardly see the cane he used to stand that day, or the grimacing stoicism of his loss. His right leg is gone from mid-femur down, though you can't tell in the image, and when I look at him standing there I can see all the tell-tale signs that shone in his eyes. He had a way of looking at the world with grinding moral certainty, but he never judged without first looking deeply into his own eyes. There was always a fierce purity in those eyes, an eagles eyes, yet there is something lost on those who think they're looking at pride when people comment on the image. No, when I see those eyes I see the word Duty shining brightly in the dark.

Centered below this image are the medal itself, the bronze cross Spruance placed on his chest that day, and the blue and white ribbon he wore every Sunday until the day he passed, and whatever else you may think, remember that I loved that man – and the ideals he stood for – and do so to this day.

I think, perhaps, I should tell you a little about him, before we get to the point of this story, anyway. Before I tell you how I very nearly came to detest the man, detest him in all his flawed, walled-off humanity.

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In our family at least, my father's story passed from legend to full-blown mythology years ago, but that was long after he left us.

The myth begins in a sepia-toned Hollywood moment, in an image of barnstormers flying over quaint neighborhood homes one afternoon as a fifteen year boy walked home from school on a Friday afternoon. Bi-planes, pilot's scarves trailing in the slipstream, impossibly loud engines a deep rumble as they approached, and I always see him in that moment squinting through sun-dappled leaves, craning his head to see the wings of airplanes passing, then running with anxious abandon when he saw them landing not far from his father's house.

There were railroad tracks running alongside a small park two blocks from that house, and the park was devoid of trees in the middle. The expanse of spring green grass lay in unfettered glory that day – a few hundred yards of unfettered glory, anyway – a field just long enough for those planes to land on with little danger to those assembling alongside the tracks. There were no laws preventing pilots from doing little things like that, something years later my father used to grouse about under his breath when he talked about taxes – and lawyers.

He got to the park in time to see the last plane land, and to listen as those pilots talked about shooting down Germans and how the future was going to play out in the sky. The pilots then mounted their steeds again – like knights in armor – and took to the sky as the afternoon began to fade away, staging a mock combat above all those upturned faces and then landing again to rapturous applause.

And the point of all this?

For a quarter, a whole twenty-five cents, starting early in the morning these very same pilots would take people up into that sky, and starting tomorrow afternoon they would be offering flying lessons, too.

Now, to that boy twenty five cents was an unheard of, exalted sum of money. He'd never had more than a nickel in his pocket at any one time, and the despair he felt when he heard such an exorbitant sum left him deeply wounded, for suddenly, passionately, he wanted nothing more out of life than to take to the skies, to spend his life wheeling and banking forever among the clouds. Let's say he walked home from that park in a deep blue funk, all his clouds now dark and menacing, closing in to choke off all his spring days – forever.

My grandmother must have known something was up when she saw his face, when he walked in the kitchen door that evening. She was frying, as she did every Friday afternoon, catfish and chicken, some fresh okra too, the same she always served in cooler months. With summer came collards and sliced tomatoes, summer's freshest served with freshly made mayonnaise and lemonade, and she would have been working on that dinner for hours, as she did every day. I imagine her in that moment, working her magic over black, cast iron skillets, smudged flour on her face as she turned and looked at him, then wiping her hands on the white apron she always –always! – wore as she looked at her oldest boy.

She was an honest soul, and as a result honesty came as easily to her three boys as breathing. She knew what was behind those dark clouds within minutes, and she walked with my father to that park the next morning and talked to one of those pilots about flying lessons, then looked on as her son stepped up on canvas wings – giving her a first, brief glance at the shape of their futures.

The boy became a man that day too, and while many never glimpsed that fact, she did. Because her son kept flying, always flying. Flying every weekend, some Friday afternoons, too, so much and so often that by the time he graduated high school he had earned his commercial pilot's license. When he went off to university he continued to fly, and even thought about flying commercially, but science first, then the study of medicine took flying's place. When he graduated in May, in the Kodachrome year of 1940, he did so knowing that come August he would be starting his first year as a student at the medical school in Galveston, Texas.

Until one Friday evening, catfish and okra frying away in the kitchen, a Navy captain knocked on the front door. His mother invited the man in, invited him to stay for supper, and the man must've taken in the house and the smells pouring out of that kitchen and thought he'd found heaven, because he stayed that evening and talked about flying in the Navy. He talked about Japan, and Germany, and the importance pilots would play in the war that would start one day soon enough.

In then end, all that Naval Aviator need have said was one word – Duty – and all my father's hopes and dreams of becoming a physician came undone. The next morning, his bags packed, he boarded a train for Pensacola, Florida and by early December, 1941, he was flying dive bombers from the deck of the USS Enterprise. He dropped bombs on a Japanese submarine a few days after Pearl Harbor, and on three aircraft carriers at Midway. In August, 1942 he was bringing in his crippled aircraft when on final approach a bomb hit the carrier's flight deck; he waved off and circled the ship until repairs were affected and he landed successfully. His legs badly burned, he took off to fly a combat air patrol above the ship two hours later. Yes, when I think of him even now, the word Duty rings true in my ears.

At the end of his two years he made clear his intent to re-up, to fight until the war was over, but only if he could remain flying, and only in combat. I think the Navy was only too happy to help that come to pass, and they sent him stateside for a month while Enterprise was laid up at Pearl for maintenance and repairs. He flew home to visit family, and at a party given by business associates of his father's he met a woman, she who became my mother, an English woman visiting Texas with her father. Out of the blue, two weeks after he met my mother they were engaged. She was a meticulous, highly educated woman, taking care of her father's day-to-day life as he toured the country, an aircraft designer/engineer visiting aircraft factories in America. No one really quite knows what my father said to her to win her hand, but it must have been a doozy. She was without a doubt the most gorgeous woman he'd ever known, and that must've had something to do with the speed of his approach – and successful attack. All I can add about them can be summed up thus: he was as devoted to her as she was to him, and when my father wasn't off fighting the Japanese, or later, at work, they were always side by side, hand in hand, always looking at one another with happy-go-lucky puppy eyes. They were, everyone knew, because of or despite the circumstances under which they met, meant to be.

In March, 1945 my father was flying CAP over the Enterprise while her bombers were off hitting the Japanese home islands when a furious submarine and kamikaze assault was launched against the ship. A destroyer had just made a depth-charge run against a suspected submarine when my father saw the sub, trailing an vast oil-slick and surfacing less than a mile from the carrier. Undaunted, the submariners charged the Enterprise, aiming her single deck gun and firing torpedoes as she closed on the ships beam – and just moments before the first wave of kamikaze appeared overhead. He was diving, firing 'HVAR' rockets at the sub's conning tower – killing everyone there and eventually sinking the sub in the process – when lookouts spotted the first wave of kamikaze and alerted the CAP. Climbing to meet the threat, he made it through their escort and took out three of the Japanese suicide bombers before cannon fire ripped through his Corsair, gravely wounding him when shards of searing metal tore into his right leg. His aircraft trailing smoke, his leg bleeding badly, he made out a second wave of kamikaze and turned to engage them, shooting two more down before running out of ammunition. He radioed his situation then turned for the carrier and made a perfect landing. Too far from a proper hospital, the surgeons did what they could to save his leg but to no avail.

He returned home after being dropped off at Pearl Harbor later that summer, and spent a year getting his life back together before reporting to the medical school in Galveston, for his first year of study. My mother followed him at the same school a year later and, as I had been on the scene for almost a year, my grandmother, then just recently widowed, moved in and helped with all the parenting chores my parents were utterly clueless about.

What do I remember most about my parents? White clinic coats, stethoscopes dangling from a side pocket. A succession of Cadillacs, my father's always white, with of course a navy blue interior. Mother had a maroon Jaguar, almost always in the garage, driven but a few times a year – usually when the Queen had something significant to say. We spent Christmases, and I mean every one of them until I was ten, at her father's in Cambridge, while just my father and I spent Thanksgivings, each and every one of them, at a friend's ranch in south Texas, about halfway between Uvalde and Eagle Pass, Texas.

There was a big two-story Victorian on the property, several out-buildings full of whatever might be needed to take care of the thousands of cattle that grazed on the ranch's many pastures, and not a helluva lot more. We hunted deer there, and 'Bob White' quail too, at least when not dodging rattlesnakes, yet what I remember most was driving around those thousands of acres in a slate blue Toyota FJ40 – with a Winchester model 94 30-30 resting on my lap, the business end resting on my arm, the barrel pointing out the window.

My father almost always sat in the back of that cramped beast, the driving duties handled either by myself (later on) or a kid a few years older than me, and most of the events I remember most happened right about the time I started high school. The kid, his name was Sumner Tennyson, by the way, grew up on this ranch with his mother and her parents, and he was a tall, big-hearted fella, never around my father without the easy-talking smile I knew him by written all over his face.

One event stands out even now.

I remember driving, on more than one Thanksgiving, from the ranch down to Piedras Negras, just across the river from Eagle Pass, to a place called the El Moderno, and they served vicious tequila sours and succulent cabrito in a neon blue atmosphere that would have, I'm quite sure, felt quite at home to John Wayne and Dean Martin after a long day on the set. When I was fifteen or sixteen, the three of us finished our Thanksgiving feast at the ranch then drove down to the Moderno, got toasted on tequila before we drove out of town north along the Rio Grande – to a place quietly referred to – by those in the know – as Boy's Town.

I say quietly, but better to think in terms of loose whispers and sidelong glances, wary eyes on the lookout for listening wives – or the more virtuous sorts who infrequently came to the ranch and rode along to Mexico to pick up some cheap bourbon. In those days, just about every border town in Mexico worth it's salt-rimmed glasses had a Boy's Town, and there was, and I suppose there still might be, nothing at all virtuous about these walled compounds. Back then, in 1963, Boy's Towns were all about getting plastered, then laid – and not necessarily in that order.

Thanksgiving, 1963, came just six days after Lee Harvey Oswald put three bullets in John Fitzgerald Kennedy's head, and my father was on duty at Parkland Memorial Hospital that afternoon. A board certified thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon by that point, he had been on standby, waiting outside the little green-tiled trauma room in case he was needed, and when he got in from work that evening there was something different about him. Something listless and dangerous, something ripped asunder. He'd liked Kennedy, voted for the man at a time when monied people in Dallas just didn't do things like vote for democrats, and his proximity to those events that day had chewed him up – and spit him out.

I'm sure as Sumner drove down that worn caleche road to the Moderno that afternoon, getting laid was the last thing in the world on my father's mind. Sumner had just received his appointment to Annapolis, and yet even that good news did little to stir my dad from his funk. Several shots of tequila and a plate full of goat later, he opined that the three of us should head out to Boy's Town – and Sumner gave up a mouth full of agave to a violent spray that, in fact, finally made dad laugh his ass off. The sun still up – just – we drove north on a sandy track through mesquite and cottonwood until we came to a white stucco-walled enclosure, the top of the wall rimmed with broken bottles and barbed-wire, yet the first thing I noticed was a burly guard standing by the gate – the business end of his sawed-off shotgun pointing at our windshield.

Sumner pulled-up and Dad handed this gentle soul a wad of Pesos and smiling now, waved us in, and though it was still early, by the jaded standards of this sort of place, anyway, we found the sandy parking area already more than packed. Red Cadillacs and brown pickup trucks littered the grounds, most, I saw, from Texas, and I saw one kid about my age hanging onto a knotty cedar column on the front porch of one of these establishments puking his guts out. And I mention the plural only in passing, because there were a half dozen or so saloons inside those walls, some pricier than others, some girls at one better than all the others (or so my dad said, leaving me speechless), and he directed us to park – in front of that one.

I should remind you that dad was about 90% of the way to roaring drunk by then, and he leaned on me as he stumped in on his 'gold-plated peg-leg' until we were inside. I don't know what I expected – something out of Dante's Inferno perhaps, or a Woody Allen movie – but it looked like a regular restaurant once we were inside, like any other gringo-style Mexican restaurant in south Texas. A couple of girls strolled by – parading their wares, I guess you could say – until a waitress came by with menus. They had, she said, any kind of beer you wanted – as long as it was Carte Blanca – and, of course, Coca-Cola. Dad asked for three Cokes and pulled a bottle of Bacardi 151 from an inside jacket pocket, then, just for good measure – a couple of limes. The Cokes arrived in dirty glasses – sans ice – and dad cut the limes and tossed them in, then poured way too much of the rum in each glass, and I felt it just then...

Hands on my neck, rubbing the stress away in gentle caresses – and I leaned back and looked up at what had to be the most revolting woman I'd ever seen in my life.

"The more you drink," my father slurred as he looked at the expression on my face, "the better looking they get."

Truer words, I reckon, have never been spoken – anytime, or anyplace.

Sumner had been, mind you, an Eagle Scout. He was an honor student and despite endless protests from my father, he had been known to go to church once in a while – though this was reportedly an infrequent transgression and so, in my father's eyes, anyway, a pardonable sin. I remember Sumner looking at my dad, his grin lost somewhere between curiosity and disbelief, as my dad laid out a wad of pesos on the table. Girls came out of the woodwork then, and cockroaches have never moved faster, then he picked-out two – and pointed at Sumner.

"Those two are yours, Slick. Don't come back until they're begging for mercy."

Like I said, somewhere curiosity and disbelief.

"So, I take it you've done this before?" I asked my father.

"Only when medically necessary, son. Which two do you want?"

"I don't."

"Bullshit. I brought plenty of penicillin, so pick two and have at 'em."

After the pesos appeared, there must have been ten decent looking girls surrounding our table, and three or four that looked seriously copacetic – to my worldly eyes, anyway.

"I approve," my father said as he watched my eyes light on two of the best, and he pointed at the girls, and then at me. They were on me like vultures, lifting my remains and carrying me back to a room I will never, ever forget. I lay on that bed and within minutes I felt an invasion crawling all over my body. Not the women, I should add, but rather I feel sure an armada of bed-bugs and fleas.

And I also felt sure my father took me to that august establishment because he assumed I was a virgin (true, I was) and that I needed to get laid before a surplus of testosterone completely warped my view of life (come to think of it, I think he was on to something). In the end, I think he assumed I'd enjoy the experience (yes, I have to admit this is true, though just barely) and that doing it with two women instead of one was the best way possible to lose one's cherry (sorry, but I'm in complete agreement with him on that one). When I came out of that flea-bitten he was still sitting at the table, telling lies with a rancher from Kerrville, still pouring lethal rum and Cokes for all he was worth.

Sumner came out almost two hours later, a scowl like a Baptist preacher's etched on his face.

He shook his head, said something erudite, like "Let's get the fuck out of this shit-hole..." and my father sighed as I helped him up. He left his bottle of Bacardi with the rancher – along with another wad of pesos – as we stumped out through the night to the Toyota.