My Uncle's Two Deaths

My father was gluing together pieces of a model airplane, slowly transforming smells and textures – the glue that reeked like a strong, stale wine, the delicate cuts of wood, the veil of stretched paper – into a Piper Cub, when he declared, without looking up from his project, that we would be leaving for Ohio in one week to visit the Air Force Museum in Dayton.  He said the words so softly and without eye contact that I wasn't sure I heard right, until he set down his materials, looked over at mom and I on the couch, and by the force of his gaze, diverted us from the television commercial we were watching.

            Mom protested the timing of the trip.

            "We're going to Ohio in a week?  How come you never told me about this before?  And what about Daley?  He's going to miss school."

            Dad said "He can make it up," and smiled at me.  On more than one occasion dad had told me with dead seriousness that if I didn't graduate and go to college, the Marine Corps would be a perfectly suitable alternative.  I tried to smile back.

            “And what about my book club and my brother...”  Mom continued.

            Her brother suffered from depression, and had just been released from the VA hospital after his suicide attempt.  He lived in our house, sleeping in the downstairs bedroom recently vacated by my dead grandmother.  I had never liked visiting the room when my grandmother was alive.  She sat in front of a big oval mirror near the bed, a large German woman, stroking her hair upwards into a tight, efficient German bun, deciding, I often thought, what mischief I was getting into and how she could stop me.  And I wasn't a mischievous boy.  Watching violent cops and robbers shows on television was about the extent of it.  But she would dutifully leave her room every time a gun shot was heard in the vicinity, walk over to the television as if no one was watching it, and turn it off.  Then with a look of disapproval that angered me more than the disruption in mindless entertainment, she would walk slowly back to her room, adjusting any hairs that had come loose during the foray.  My uncle I liked, the way a nephew is supposed to like an uncle, with a bit of respect, an interest in his history - especially his service in Vietnam - and a recognition that he was a man holding my genes who I could think about in subtle, humane ways I could not think about my father, who was, after all, my father, and subject to the taboos of thought historically clouding this relation.  He was a troubled but good man, my uncle.  However I worried that the spirit of my departed grandmother still inhabited the tiny bedroom and her disapproval of violent TV would know no difference between that and the violence my uncle had inflicted on himself.  One day, I expected she would lumber back from the after life after buffing her tight bun, and switch off my uncle, like he was an especially rollicking episode of Starsky and Hutch, giving one last disapproving look at the dead body before going back to the elegy she was composing in spirit land for the lost rectitude of this century, where a suicide attempt, like violence between good and evil, was not hidden away from children but inappropriately exposed to any susceptible little one, corrupting them in this world and the next.  She was my father's mother.

            We left for Ohio the next week.  As we settled into the four hour flight, each of us pulling out our distinctive diversions - my mother the real estate section of the Orange County Register, my father a book on Eisenhower's command during World War II, me, a book, not quite as tomey as my father's, on the German Luftwaffe – my father tapped the airplane window as if testing its integrity, turned down the air filtering from the little nozzle above us, and said he had something he wanted to show me.  He rummaged briefly through his carry-on and produced a old shoe-box, from which he took a group of black and white photos, which he then fanned on the tray table.  Here was my father's brother, Robert.

            The photos were fragmentary, like the beginnings of the Piper Cub, each one very much a part of a whole, but a whole unclear to me, and I could sense maybe unclear to my father, as if the model airplane he was building was missing a piece that was so small as to be almost invisible, but nonetheless essential to the integrity of the plane.  He arranged the pictures in different formations, fanning them like cards, then like fallen dominoes, finally just stacking them in an order that seemed random.  The first photo was Robert sitting on a motorcycle, and I wondered at the date.  Was this before James Dean?  The clean cut young man in an aviator jacket was sitting rakishly on his bike, looking with creased eyes at the camera and smiling like he had just broken a land speed record.  He could have been James Dean, or an imitator with a skill for startling duplication, but then my father showed me the date of the photo, 1939, and even I knew this was well before Dean had rode the early tremors of a cultural shift that would end, a decade and a half later, in the throes of Altamont.  My uncle was twenty years ahead of his time, and he seemed to know it, in the way he hunched on his bike, by the smooth forward leaning nature of his face, a face that I could not connect with my father's face, that had all the qualities of my father's face plus something more.  That extra element infused the photo with a Hollywood-style glamor and a certain rebelliousness.  At the risk of sounding repetitious, it was a photo that could probably have been found on the walls of any teenager's room during the 1950s, when teenagers were just beginning to stake out their youthful power as a cultural polity that would resoundingly burst forth only a few years later.  The next photo was Robert in front of his HAM radio.  My father explained, in a reverent tone, that Robert was an electronics whiz, who had built the HAM radio from electronic parts donated by a local Air Force base janitor who took a liking to the eager and whip-smart kid.  By this time mom had put down her newspaper and was listening in as my father explained each photo and its context:  Robert graduating valedictorian; Robert posing in his Air Force uniform in 1942; Robert with his girlfriend, who looked with glowing admiration at him, like she had won a great prize, and a bit of a haggard expression, as if the prize had required her to fight off a swarm of contestants.  Then, instead of aging, Robert became younger, until he was a toddler being held on my grandmother's knee, with my father, then a baby, held on the other knee.  The date was 1934.

            “He meant a lot to you didn't he,” my mother said, and I suddenly felt angry at her, as if some sort of trust was being violated by her putting into words a family secret, or expressing in mean words the whole that I was still trying to figure out.  I may not have known what it was but I understood enough of it to know it was not to be talked of except in vague terms distanced from any emotional rawness that might be flowing through my father, or me for that matter.  I felt possessive of my father just then, and felt like his son as surely as he felt like Robert's brother. 

            A stewardess came by and asked us if we would like a complimentary beverage.  Dad looked at her in a way that puzzled me and said, "No thanks."  My mom and I had a Diet soda.  When she left, my father was looking out the window - not that there was anything to see, we were flying through a cloud bank - and he mumbled something.

            "What?" I said.

            "You should have asked her for a fish head,"  my father laughed.  I remained puzzled until the stewardess returned with our drinks and I noticed her ethnicity, which was Asian.  Immediately I thought she resembled one of the local news anchors who came on at 11:00 every night, who was also Asian, and then realized they looked nothing alike, and that their commonality was driven by something else.  I remembered that the anchor had a confident bearing when she delivered the news, leaning forward with her left hand placed on top of her right, asserting herself into the little meniscus of curved screen that bubbled out towards us, back in the days before flat screen televisions.  Whenever she did this, which was exactly the same mannerism her male counterpart, a caucasian, employed when addressing the camera, my father would say dismissively from his chair, "That chink!" as though she was a burst of static that had rendered our television unwatchable, and my dad was softly cursing the vagueries of modern electronics.  I remember laughing along with him, while my mother said in a warning tone, "Stannnnn..."  And that was it.  Three hours later we touched down in Dayton.

***

            The Air Force Museum was a great complex of connected hangars that had been touched by the power of levitation; the airplanes were high above our heads, as if a section of sky had been frozen in time and moved into the giant space of the museum.  Every type of plane hung from the arc-lit ceiling: flimsy contraptions that looked like hobbyist projects, sleek jet fighters that at that very moment were flying patrols over some distant quadrant of the American empire, giant bombers from the 1950s that sent a shiver of fear spinewards, as if they still carried their nuclear cargo.  Were they really from a less complicated, more simple-minded time, I wondered?  Looking back from our more "complex" time, it might have seemed like all possible outcomes were reduced, by the thick-headed proprietors of that age, to binary: either Red or dead, either conformity or exile.  But how uncomplicated is it for a child to face better than even odds of death without warning from the second he reaches an awareness that his bones are no stronger than brittle sticks, that his flesh offers no more protection than a piece of tissue, that his eyes are like water, waiting to evaporate and leave the bony sockets to stare out into the survivor's world, testifying to those still alive that a simple time was not so simple, that it was as complex and intricate as the multitude of probabilities that determined where and how a war could start and then escalate into something all-encompassing and irreducible.  It made me wonder at the fears children my age must have felt when the sound of jets woke them from their sleep, the sound of those jets resounding in their dreams, the laden bombers like other-worldly creatures in a fairy tale blacker than Hanzel and Gretel and the witch, who the children at least had the chance to escape from. 

            And of course I felt small and enraptured.  Everyone felt small and enraptured as they walked through the halls, necks craned back, examining the undersides of giant B-36 bombers with five engines per wing or futuristic stuff that would have been more appropriate in a science fiction movie, like the SR-71 spy plane.  My father and I had left mom behind in the gift shop (she didn't have the same obsession with aircraft that we had) and dad was explaining methodically the histories of the planes, the statistics, the famous pilots that flew them, all without looking at the little tour book we were issued when we arrived.

            Although my knowledge wasn't as deep or as broad as my father's, I could hold my own, and we debated whether the F-86 Sabre or the Mig-15 was the better plane, imagined dogfights between planes decades apart, fantasized about about the fantasy of flight like two good friends at the turn of the 20^th century with crazy ideas that would burgeon into inventions and then re-define the way people looked up at the sky; with awe, with fear, with hopelessness, or hopefulness; the full range of untapped emotion set free that had been speculatively carried forward from one millennium to the next.  We were Orville and Wilbur Wright after those few glorious seconds sailing over the low hills of Kittyhawk, with wild eyes and scruffy beards, unshaven and smelling vaguely of the turpentine that painted the thin wings of our craft, abandoning ourselves to our new place in history and touching our hands together every now and then to see if feathers had sprouted, surprised that they hadn't.  If my father and I could have gone on like that forever, I might have become as close to my father, at least when deep in this narrow subject area, as I was to my uncle in the broader world of full-fledged relationships.  As it was, we had become two friends, good friends, but only as long as we were debating the relative merits of radial versus inline engines.

            We came to be standing under an aircraft that changed my father's face into another look that puzzled me, not the look from the flight, but a blank look that slowly shed his usual neutrality of expression and became a form of sadness that was unique to him, which I had only seen once before, when my grandmother died.  Immediately I thought I knew.  This must be the plane that my uncle had been flying when he was shot down in World War II.  It was a P-38 Lightning, a twin engine plane with the angular ducts and intakes of a jet fighter, but still powered by curved propeller blades, an aircraft that marked the very end of the era before jet engines.  I could tell my father's eyes were watery and I thought of the photos of Robert, and how my father had tried to sort them into an order that made sense, that would, I finally realized, follow his life from childhood to adulthood to the very present instead of from the beginning of adulthood to youth, a backwards and blunted life.  The missing piece, like the piece I imagined kept the Piper Cub from flying, the invisible piece, was a picture of me and my father and my uncle, perhaps taken at this very museum, the three of us standing under the plane that was his tomb, but  in my father's mind, should have been his glorious chariot and nothing more.  Of course, my father didn't cry.  But then that puzzled look came back, the other one, the one from the flight, and dad strode off in the direction of a group of tourists taking pictures and talking loudly in a foreign language.  When I understood the language as Japanese I inwardly cringed and raised my finger like my father did when warning me to stop some smart-assed behavior.  All the while I stood rooted to the floor.  The energy that should have been flowing through my running feet was pushed out through the soles of my shoes, the emptiness quickly replaced by horror and  embarrassment at what I knew was about to happen.

            He strode up to the Japanese man like he was going to walk through him and then he did.  The moment before my father's fist connected with the man's face I saw the man's features clearly, as if on a giant poster circa 1942: The Enemy! - bug eyes, straight black hair with curious gaps, as if he had torn his own hair in an animal frenzy when contemplating a banzai charge, buck-teeth dug into his lower lip, a determined look of inhuman reductionism, making everyone not like him a pig fat for slaughter.  I remember that face, not the real face, because I was seeing the man through my father's eyes, against my will.  I was trapped standing when I could have done something, something laughably impossible like restraining my father.  The man's camera tore loose from it's strap and shattered on the ground, spreading pieces of Japanese technology under the formation of American warplanes, as though re-enacting one of the mass-bombing raids of Tokyo or Yokohama, or even Hiroshima (a B-29, the carrier of the first atom bomb floated like a symbol over the scene my father was pounding out with his fists).  The Japanese man's wife screamed a high pitched scream that at first I thought was one of her children, but then I saw her face, wrenched with fear, wailing, her children huddling behind her, scared out of their wits.  Security eventually stepped in and dad and I were escorted to a holding area, and then out of the museum when the Japanese man decided not to press charges.  Mom was horrified, yelling at my father, “What have you done!  What the hell were you thinking!  You idiot, you goddamn idiot!”  My father still infuriated, his face red and his fists clenched, looked not at all expended, and I was desperately fearful my mother would be the target of his remaining anger.  Instead of focusing on my dad, who I knew was a lost cause, I focused on calming my mother.  I held her sweating hand to keep it from gesticulating so close to my father's face and pleaded, “Please mom, please, let's just go home, let's just go home.”  Later that day we took an early flight back to Anaheim.  We went home.

***

            My father returned to his life after the incident, unaffected.  Either he had forgotten or it meant nothing to him or he was very good at suppressing who he was.  I suspect...I suspect nothing, I was just happy to build model planes again with him, to finish the Piper Cub.  He still called the Asian reporter “The Chink” and sometimes the puzzled look would return to his face but never again did he carry out an assault.  As my father grew older his face became more deeply set, his blue eyes seemed to recede and turn black and the strong lines of his face highlighting the prominent cheek-bones and square chin become lost in a plethora of emerging lines that crinkled his expression into hopelessness, even when he was being adamant.  When he said, “The Chink” he sounded resigned, as if he had come to some kind of acceptance, not of his brother's death, but of the way the world works – strangely and with black humor, tearing something away in a split second but leaving a lifetime's worth of boiling acid flowing from the putrid stub, the black humor coming from the fact that healing meant hurting yourself through an addiction, the only way a total numbness from the pain could be achieved.  It was years later, when I was in high school, that I asked my mom (not my dad, of course) where Robert had died in the war, expecting to hear someplace foreign and unknown, like a small island in the Pacific where the final battles against Japan were waged. 

            “Why Anaheim of course.  He died in Anaheim when he was 22, in a motorcycle accident.  He never got a chance to fight in the war.”  When I heard this I was quiet for a time and then sought out the Piper Cub, which was gathering dust in our garage.  It took it outside and set it on fire, reducing it back into fragments, angry at the little model plane, as though it was a lie that my father had told, a lie I couldn't make sense of, but that on some level did make sense.  But to get to that level maybe I would have to lose a brother, and I was an only child.  Or maybe it didn't make sense, on any level.  If it did make sense then I would be able to see the Japanese man at the museum clearly - scared, disoriented,  angry at being blindsided, at not having a chance to fight back, maybe taking back that anger to his home country and waiting for the day when a majority felt as he did, and then my father's brother would die all over again.