Underworld

'I had to go through my awkward phase. I was finishing out some things,' Chuckie said.

The two men had been crewmates since Greenland, flying through arctic mirages and fifty-knot gales. Their current bombing runs were strangely uneventful by comparison, or a different level of reality at any rate, easier to project as a movie.

'I know what you need,' Louis said. 'A woman who'll be willing to accept your history of screwups. You need to unload this stuff on someone who's innocent. You want a sweet young female who was born to understand you. Like the sweet thing on the nose of this aircraft.'

Louis said sweet thing in a scornful black voice. Since Louis was a scornful black, this was not surprising. Swee' thang. Not that he didn't have a spiritual side that Chuckie responded to, You only had to listen to his Stories of the early A-tests over Nevada-stories he'd told dozens of times through the years in lonely barracks in Greenland, Goose Bay and a number of remote SAC bases in the continental U.S.

'I don't think you ought to deride.'

'Deride. That's nice,' Louis said. 'I rather deride her than ride her, tell you the truth. I believe she's too skinny for my taste. Plus she's been misnamed.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'I get so tired. Educating these boys.'

'What's it mean, Louis? Misnamed.'

'Long Tall Sally.'

'From the song of the same title.'

'At least he knows that much. Heavens above.'

'You think I don't know Little Richard and his Ow-ow-ow-ow?'

'This boy worth saving,' Louis said. 'But the point being.'

'Used to hide his records from my parents. Oh baby woo baby. I was thirteen years old.'

'This old Negro is touched, Chuckman. But the point I'm making is that the Long Tall Sally in the song and the Long Tall Sally they painted on our nose are not one and the same female of the species.'

'Why not? Check her out. She's long, she's tall, she's got great legs and she looks to me like her name could be Sally. Woo. We're gonna have some fun tonight.'

'Gonna have some fun tonight. That's exactly right,' Louis said. 'Only the Sally in Little Richard's number ain't gonna be seen in no car in no drive-in movie doing a little necking with a youth like yourself.'

'Why not?' Chuckie said.

'Because she black and she bad.'

Chuckie studied his radar scope and recomputed the aircraft's path over a couple of thousand miles of sea curve and mango atoll.

'What do you mean she black?'

'Because the song has a plot that somehow got lost in the wooing and wheeing.'

'This song's been around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years maybe?'

'More or less,' Louis said.

'And in all these years I'm not aware of anybody coming forth with a correction to the skin color of the title character, okay?'

On the intercom the pilot said conversationally, 'I wonder if that's Manila down there. Sure looks pretty, Nav.'

This was an unfunny dig at the windowless pair in the lower deck, who not only lacked a skyscape but sat facing backwards and not only sat facing backwards but would be forced to eject downwards if nicked by an enemy SAM.

Another sinister acronym designed to kill.

'Pilot, this is Nav,' Chuckie said.

And he fine-tuned his scope and requested a minimal turn, aligning the plane's actual path with the track he'd plotted earlier.

Then he said, 'Louis, this girl out there is good luck for us. Nearly forty missions without a major incident. Don't abuse her goodwill. She's Long Tall Sally. The one and only.'

When Louis became agitated he used a staccato patter, a kind of hyperdrawl with elements of falsetto pique that he strung throughout at a master pitch.

'Song say You have any idea what the song say? This woman in an alley. Old uncle John in the alley with her. She built for speed. She got everything he need. Yes baby woo baby. Gonna have some fun tonight.'

They were fifty thousand feet above the South China Sea, flying in a three-bomber formation called a cell, and there were fifteen cells in the air today, and each cell carried over three hundred bombs, and the resulting zone of destruction was known as a sandbox, and Chuckie was bizarro'd in one part of his brain by the crazy conversation he was having with old Louis even as he felt sad and hurt, in another and nearer part, by his buddy's attitude toward the girl on the nose of their aircraft.

'This song written by a black woman from Apaloosa, Mississippi. Richard add the little touches. I guarantee, brother, this Sally we're talking about ain't no skinny blond playing kissy-face in no backseat. She's an advance class of entertainment.'

Sad and hurt. Chuckie's mind began to wander to Greenland, his previous posting, not a bad place to survive the breakup of a marriage. His human discontents were muted in the icy mists and the whole blowing otherworld of whiteouts and radio disruptions and unrelenting winds and total cold and objects that did not cast shadows and numerous freak readings on compasses and radar scopes and the BUFF that crashed on an ice sheet with live nukes aboard, anomalies of the eye, the mind, the systems themselves, and the experience made him sense the ghost-spume of some higher hippie consciousness. Or maybe Greenland was just a delicate piece of war-gaming played in a well-heated room in some defense institute, with hazelnut coffee and croissants.

Louis was conversing with the pilot in bombspeak, which must mean it was time for Chuckie to pay attention.

Once divorced, twice expelled from school, once fled from same, many times estranged from parents, thrice charged with petty larceny, once emergency-roomed for barbiturate overdose, once experimentally wrist-slashed, many times avomit on the pavement outside a bar-the shoplifting charges expunged from the record thanks to influential friends of dad.

'Little Richard's mostly for white people anyway,' he muttered to Louis.

'But Long Tall Sally's black. Just so you don't forget it.'

His late great dad. Not really such a bad guy in death. But so tensely parental in life, all empty command and false authority, that Chuckie suspected the man's heart just wasn't in it. No, he didn't blame his parents for everything that had gone wrong. Chuckie was misery enough on his own recognizance. But he couldn't think of his father without regretting the loss of the one thing he'd wanted to maintain between them. That was the baseball his dad had given him as a trust, a gift, a peace offering, a form of desperate love and a spiritual hand-me- down.

The ball he'd more or less lost. Or his wife had snatched when they split. Or he'd accidentally dumped with the household trash.

One of those distracted events that seemed to mark the inner nature of the age.

Next to him Louis sat in his station with his bomb release mode and his master bomb-control panel and his bombing data indicator and his urinal and his hot cup. Everything you'd want for a fulfilling life in the sky.

Louis said, 'Pilot, this is Mad Bomber. Will release in rapid sequence. One hundred twenty seconds to drop.'

Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca meant nothing to Chuckie.

Vague names from his unstable childhood. The memory of the baseball itself, the night of the baseball-vague and unstable and dim.

Louis spoke through a teary-eyed yawn.

'Pilot, come right three degrees. Hold. Bomb doors open. Check. Sixty seconds to drop.'

So many missions, all those indistinguishable bombs. Chuckie used to love these bomb runs but not anymore. He used to feel a bitter and sado-sort of grudge pleasure, getting even for his life, taking it out on the landscape and the indigenous population. He'd been a proud part of a bomb wing that was dropping millions of tons of