When they walked into the clearing, the old priest sat down on an upended packing crate, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. The far-off pounding of artillery came to a momentary halt, and in the interval before the first birds, as the darkness deepened, some power seemed to enter and flow across the clearing. After a moment my grandfather identified that tide as silence. Then a bird sang, and the sky lightened, and you could begin to see the rocket aspiring to heaven on its mobile launch table. My grandfather divined its purpose with an upward leap of the heart.
Of course my grandfather knew that, from the point of view of German command, of Allied command, of Hermann Goering and General Eisenhower and the people at whom it was to have been launched, the rocket was still—was only—the war. The clearing had been cut by soldiers, the rocket had been transported here by soldiers. Soldiers would have armed, primed, aimed, and fired it. Like its fellows—around three thousand between September 1944 and March 1945—it had been fitted with a warhead that contained two thousand pounds of a highly explosive form of TNT that would detonate on impact. Its manufacture had been ordained and carried out not to bear humankind to the doorstep of the stars but to atomize and terrorize civilians, destroy their homes, shatter their morale. If some unknown mischance had not intervened, this rocket would have joined its fellows in racing the sound of its own arrival toward the city of Antwerp, where, on December 16, to take the worst example, a V-2 had fallen on the Rex Theater in the middle of a showing of The Plainsman, killing or injuring nearly a thousand people.
None of that, however, could be blamed on the rocket, my grandfather thought, or on the man, von Braun, who had designed it. The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure, and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. To pack the thing with a ton of amatol, to hobble it so that instead of tearing loose once and for all from the mundane pull, it only arced back to earth and killed the people among whom it fell, was to abuse it. It was like using a rake to whip egg whites, a dagger to pick your teeth. It could be done, but to do so was a perversion. Furthermore, ineffective. As a weapon, a tool of strategy, it was clear to everyone by now that the V-2 had failed. Yes, four or five thousand hapless Frenchmen, Belgians, and Englishmen had been killed by the rocket bombs. Tens of thousands more had been left wounded, homeless, or afraid. But in the end, bombs of the ordinary variety had killed, maimed, and frightened people in far more terrible numbers. And now here were the Allies, deep into Germany, and the rockets were impotent and no longer fell.
My grandfather felt sorry for Wernher von Braun, whom he could not help envisioning as shy, professorial, wearing a cardigan. His pity for and anger on behalf of the imaginary von Braun tapped the reservoir of his sorrow over the loss of Aughenbaugh. Alvin Aughenbaugh, with a hint of Paul Henreid. The poor bastard! He had built a ship to loft us to the very edge of heaven, and they had used it as a messenger of hell.
“Lieutenant?” Father Nickel said. He put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder.
My grandfather averted his face. Automatically, he moved to shrug off the old priest’s hand, but in the end he left it where it was. Between him and Father Johannes Nickel, as between two stars, lay unbridgeable gulfs of space-time. And yet across the sweep of that desolation each had swum, for a moment, into the other’s lens. Poor von Braun! He needed to know—my grandfather felt that he must find him and tell him—that such a thing was possible. Scattered in the void were minds capable of understanding, of reaching one another. He would put his hand on von Braun’s shoulder the way the old priest’s gnarled paw now lay benedictive on his own. He would transmit to von Braun the only message lonely slaves of gravity might send: We see you—we are here.
16
In 1972 Uncle Ray recruited my father—then employed as team doctor to the Washington Senators—to invest in his latest undertaking, a chain of fancy “billiards clubs” called Gatsby’s, that served liquor and welcomed female customers with Tiffany-style lamps and foofy cocktails. At its peak—just preceding its complete extinction—the chain encompassed five locations in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In decor the clubs combined elements of gentlemen’s club, traditional chophouse, and the then-popular “fern bar.” In concept the undertaking combined elements of pipe dream, tax dodge, money-laundering scheme, and irretrievable mistake. Uncle Ray was not entirely forthcoming to my father about the identity of their silent partners, and my father was not entirely forthcoming, it seems, about the extent to which he was already a focus of attention for having failed to report income to the IRS. Anyone who cares to waste a few hours among the archives of the Post, Sun, Inquirer, and Post-Gazette may trace the fragmentary outlines of their disaster, which cost my great-uncle a beating that left him hospitalized for weeks and made my father a quasi-fugitive for the rest of his life.* I don’t have the space or the stomach to go into the details here, and anyway, the Gatsby’s debacle was barely a footnote, if that, in the history of the Philadelphia Mob.
In my family, naturally, it proved of more significance. With Uncle Ray facing criminal charges and my father in the wind, my grandparents and my mother were left holding a variety of bags. My grandfather constructed a defensive array of high-impact lawyers, but even with this shield in place there were penalties, liabilities, and liens. To raise the necessary funds, he forced a reluctant Uncle Sammy to buy out his interest in MRX, and the happiest (or at least the most productive) period of his life came to an end. Less than a year after he lost the company he loved, he lost my grandmother, too.
By the time he met Sally Sichel, almost nothing of value was left apart from the condo (which my grandmother had been able to visit only once after its purchase) and fifty-seven model spacecraft built to a rigorous scale from premium materials. From his private stock my grandfather culled ten of the best, including a sweet little Sputnik PS-2 that obliged you, if you lifted a hinged panel, to contemplate the awful fate of a tiny Laika (a modified husky pinched from an N-scale Alaskan Railroad kit).
Three days after meeting Sally, he sold all ten of the rockets to the Bluestein twins up in Cocoa Beach. He used the proceeds to pay Devaughn and purchase the supplies he would need to hunt down the snake that had eaten Ramon.
Every night at nine except Sunday, Devaughn would meet my grandfather at a Waffle House, drive him to Atlantis, and drop him at the gate with its gaffed lock. My grandfather would shlep off into the darkness laden with his gear—canvas sack and work gloves, flashlight, and the panoply of special tools he had crafted: snake hook (vinyl-coated storage hook welded to the end of an old golf club), snake stick (a length of narrow-gauge PVC pipe fitted with a noose of nylon cord), and, of course, snake hammer. Precisely two hours and thirty-five minutes later he would return carrying his waders so as not to muddy Devaughn’s car. Then Devaughn would drive my grandfather back to the Waffle House before starting the midnight shift at Fontana Village.
“Every night?”
“Except Sunday. Sunday Devaughn went to church.”
“I must have talked to you during that time, right? I’m on the phone with you, and you’re telling me you had rice pudding for dessert or whatever, and meanwhile you’re getting ready to go snake hunting.”
He registered my pointless question and then looked away.
“Fine,” I said. “Why?”
“You saw the show. Alien Invaders. It wasn’t eating just pets. It was eating a wide and troubling variety of native birds and amphibians.”
“Oh, really?”
“Endangered species.”
“And house cats.”
“It was an alien invader. It didn’t belong there.”
“Humans don’t belong there, either,” I said. “Why didn’t you hunt them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I never get around to it.”
“But, I mean, it was really all about Sally, wasn’t it?”