Victims of Gravity

She’s young and frail and sitting at a Formica table smoking a fresh Pall-Mall. She has red hair and she's holding a sleeping baby in her lap in a one-room apartment above a grocery store in Greenwich Village while her husband hangs dead from his parachute straps somewhere over China. They say that each body is surrounded by an electrical field, an invisible corona that can be broken by a gaze, a thought, a death. This is why she’s shaking now, and smoking one cigarette after another. He was supposed to be home by now. His last letter made that promise.

*

He’s never held the child. But he has her picture. She has his laughing eyes. The plane that carries him is a long range bomber named Princess Eileen. She’s beautiful - a shiny B-29 with a chrome exoskeleton and a spitting cobra painted on its nosecone. He’s the navigator, a little man with squinty eyes and a pug nose. His name is Sammy Pittarino but they call him Sammy the Pitt. He plays the guitar between missions and sends her pictures from the Philippines of smiling young airmen in bomber jackets posing in front of their bird. They sleep in the daytime and fly in the dark, making night runs over Tokyo, dropping bombs, smoking Camels in the cold belly of the big bird, freezing, praying, dozing.

*

She stares at the peeling wallpaper. It is the color of old pea soup. The room is veiled in a green fog and smoky ringlets trail off the tip of her cigarette. She reads his last letter by the light of a flickering bulb, certain that she is a widow.

*

He huddles in the blackness, his fingertips numb, his body is curled like a fetus. They make the small guys into radio men, navigators, ball turret gunners. Little men fit easier into tight places. He relays coded coordinates for the drop zones to the pilot and smiles at the little photograph with the scalloped edges. It's the red haired girl with the baby in her lap. The amber diodes on the com-panel put off enough light to see her looking back at him. He talks to her because it makes him feel alive. Sometimes the pilots hear a faraway voice singing lullabies.

*

She waits on Mott Street, in that tiny cold room. The lone radiator clicks and pings but puts off little heat. There's a bathtub in the center of the room with rusted, claw-feet and a rubber stopper hanging from a beaded chain. She keeps it so white you could cry. A ring around this tub would be an embarrassment, the old Italian ladies would talk. They come over every Sunday and bring her soup and macaroni in wooden bowls that they leave on the table covered in wax paper. They watch her rock the little girl as she waits for the telegram and the flag.

*

The bomb doors yawn in the sky over Japan and freezing air rushes into the belly of the war-bird, chilling the crew to the bone. Heavy black bombs spill out in thick clumps, tumbling end over end, falling like snowflakes.

*

The sky drops rain onto the cobblestones of Mott Street and a crack of thunder wakes the baby. The red haired woman stubs her cigarette out and puts the baby in a hand-me-down cradle that squeaks when she rocks it. She turns on the water in the polished bathtub. The porcelain is so smooth and bright that the water looks silver and beads up like mercury.

*

The Princess Eileen deposits her payload over Tokyo and flies west across the Sea of Japan. The empty plane’s lost half of its fuel and all of its ordinance. It gleams under a moonlit sky, with engines that moan, engines built to end the war, like her sister, Enola Gay. Sammy the Pitt is nodding off in the radio room. Static pops and crackles on his headphones. They're flying over China now.

*

The baby girl is called Maria. She splashes in the tepid water of the living room tub. Her skin is shiny. She loves the water. It's hard to hold a cigarette and wash a baby but it can be done. It juts from the corner her mother's mouth and she squints tightly to keep the smoke out of her eyes. The rain has stopped but she can't hear it because the water is still running.

*

In the air over China the flak flies thick as hail and the big chrome bird is punctured all over with shrapnel and iron slag that cuts through her wings and knocks out the number three engine and the number one and the plane starts to spin, tipping gently like a seagull into a graceful spiral, trailing a ribbon of burning oil behind her and spinning, so that at times Sammy the Pitt hangs upside down in his safety harness, sending out coded mayday calls as the little photograph falls from the console with everything in turmoil and all the smoke and then the crew jumping from the bomb doors with Sammy the Pitt behind them. Their chutes open white against the dark sky and they float down to China like dandelion spores.

*

The old cradle squeaks and the baby likes its rhythm. The red haired girl unfolds the letter and holds it up to the flickering bulb. His hand writing is perfect. Every word is beautiful. Soon, I will be home.

*

The ground is crawling with Japanese and the billowing white parachutes make easy targets. Sammy the Pitt lands in a tree. He hangs from its branches like a puppet, desperately trying to cut himself free. The Japanese are everywhere. Twigs pop and crack all around him. Bullets whistle past his ears and they jeer at him in a strange language as he dies.

*

She feels this.

* * *