“Do you miss it?” my grandfather said. Sweat prickled on his skin as it evaporated in the air-conditioning. He shivered and moved a little nearer to her.
“Not really.” She stopped talking. My grandfather regretted having interrupted the flow of her autobiography with an unnecessary question. Then she said, “I take it back. I do miss it. How interesting, I didn’t realize until you asked me.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Giving you something new to miss.”
“That’s all right,” Sally said. “God knows it’s better than missing Ramon.”
The next day he drove her to an art supply store in Fort Lauderdale. She bought an easel, a dropcloth, a roll of canvas, stretchers, gesso, brushes, several tubes of cadmium, alizarin, and cobalt paint, and two cartons of titanium in pots, one bleached, one unbleached. He lifted the cartons out of her shopping cart and set them on the counter for the cashier to ring up.
“What’s with all the white?” he said.
Sally raised an eyebrow. Her hair was tied in a scarf patterned with blue and green Matisse cutouts, and she was wearing a faded shirt with a button-down collar, blue pinstripes on white. The collar was unbuttoned enough to betray the scalloped lace trim of her brassiere.
“Think I’m just going to come out and tell you?” she said. “Just like that?”
It had been years since my grandfather had been competently teased by an attractive woman. This turned out to be a thing he had not known that he was missing.
“Is it a secret?”
“Of course it’s a secret. Don’t you know anything about art?”
“Art Carney.”
“Oy. You promised no puns.”
“I know next to nothing about art.”
“Even I don’t know the reason, why all the white. That’s how secret it is.”
They drove back to Fontana Village and my grandfather helped Sally carry her supplies into her house. The still-unfurnished guest bedroom had a sliding glass door that filled it with morning sun. They put all of the supplies in there in an orderly jumble. Sally laughed her raucous laugh.
“This is such bullshit,” she said. “Come back in two weeks, I guarantee you it will all be sitting there like that. Untouched.”
“So long as you don’t go untouched that whole time.”
“My God, you are such a pervert. Stop. Go kill your snake. No.”
My grandfather put his arms around Sally’s hips and pulled her toward him. She was wearing a pair of loose white pasha pants with an elastic waistband. His hands plunged past that and the lace waistband of her panties. He availed himself of two handfuls of her ass. It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weightless and drifting.
“I was planning to feed you first,” Sally said.
“All right,” said my grandfather.
He reached out with a foot to hook the canvas dropcloth, bundled into its plastic package. He slid it across the floor and eased himself down onto it, kneeling on this impromptu cushion at her feet.
“Good Lord,” Sally said, and then, “Oh, my.”
He pulled down her pants and panties and contemplated the graying hair that thatched her belly. It grew sparse but long and very soft against the fingers. He put his cheek to her belly. The soft gray-blond hair rustled in his ear. The smell of her cunt reached his nostrils, not yet familiar, no longer strange. He tried and failed to compare it to the remembered smell of my grandmother’s cunt. It had simply been too long, too goddamn long.
“Feed me,” he said.
“No puns,” Sally reminded him, lowering herself with a certain careless care onto the floor of the borrowed condominium. “You promised.”
21
My grandfather took Diddens to see the rocket in the clearing and reported the basic details of its location and condition. He indicated that he planned to act on further V-2 related intelligence without mentioning von Braun, and left Diddens in charge of bagging and tagging the rocket for shipment west. He left Diddens in ignorance of his actual plans as much and as long as he could. He told himself he would move faster and smarter alone, but the truth was that he was grieving for Aughenbaugh, and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.
He shook hands with the old people in turn. He put two cartons of Chesterfields and a cigar of unknown provenance into the old priest’s hands. The priest kissed my grandfather on the cheek and blessed his journey in rapid Latin. Fr?ulein Judit received two cans of sweetened condensed milk, a box of saltines, and the February 7, 1944, issue of Life, which had mysteriously appeared in my grandfather’s rucksack the day after he and Aughenbaugh followed the 104th Infantry into K?ln. The cover was a picture of George Bernard Shaw. In return my grandfather received a cold stare, a granite handshake, and a small, dusty wheel of cheese.
“What the hell?” Diddens said. “Where are you going?” He had woken feeling tender and green at the gills but, having thrown up a few times in the pigsty, polished off the last bottle of wine, and had a tramp through the woods to see the magnificent beast of legend, he seemed back to his old querulous self.
“I’ll be back,” my grandfather lied. “I just want to have a look around. You wait for the transport crew to show, help them get the firecracker loaded.”
My grandfather had given Diddens credit for the find; it was the arrow in the foot that led them to the priest who had led them to the V-2.
“You have a job to do,” Diddens warned my grandfather. “Only reason you’re here in the middle of all this shit.”
“I’m going to get that von Braun,” he said. “That’s my job.”
“Yeah? What are you gonna do when you find him, hey? Kiss him on the lips?” He put on a Southern-belle voice. “‘Sweet Wernher, baby, your rocket gives me such a hard-on. Let me suck it!’”
“Probably.”
“‘Oh, Wernher, your von is so braun!’”
My grandfather never saw Diddens again. He walked out of the farmyard and down the road as far as the first crossroads. Almost immediately, he heard the rumble of engines and the crunch of a truck transmission being skillfully abused. Two half-tracks, an armored car, and a deuce-and-a-half mess truck belonging to the 869th Field Battalion of the 65th Infantry Division rolled past. They had become separated from the rest of the division in the night and were heading to Paderborn, where the cooks riding in the deuce-and-a-half had orders to provide every GI they could find with a pancake breakfast. Paderborn was more or less on the way to Nordhausen, the last known whereabouts, to my grandfather at least, of von Braun. My grandfather climbed into the back of the deuce-and-a-half with sacks of flour, stacked cartons of powdered eggs, two steel drums of corn syrup. He fell asleep before he could even finish cautioning himself not to fall asleep.