Pearl Harbor was hell and tragedy for most Americans, but it was what Lyman Goodnough was waiting for. Now I don’t mean that he would ever have hoped for something that murderous—he was desperate, damned desperate, but he wasn’t bloodthirsty—and I’m not saying that he had any idea in the world that the thing he was waiting for, the thing he hoped would happen, would ever take the form it did, because he sure as hell wasn’t any prophet either. Still it is true that he seemed to recognize almost immediately that Pearl Harbor was his ticket out, his open barn door. It was like the explosion in the waters of Hawaii was the pop of a starter’s gun in a track meet. Lyman heard it, he was ready, and he took off running. He began a race that he wouldn’t stop running until almost twenty years had passed and until he had seen half the cities in this country. My dad helped him.
In the middle of the night my dad put him on a train that was headed west. But that was later. That December Sunday in 1941, after morning chores, my dad and I sat at this same kitchen table and listened to the radio. It was exciting and it was awful. My dad said it was hell. But my mother went to church as usual. She put on a navy-blue dress and drove off in her new car to sing hymns and Christmas carols and to put her folded offering into the felt-muted plate that a gray usher passed among the pews. She prayed and afterwards she returned home to cook us a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes as if nothing was wrong. I believe she spent the afternoon reading in the living room in a stuffed chair.
All the time, though, my dad and I listened to the radio. Between news bulletins we got out the world atlas and discovered the dots in the Pacific Ocean that meant Hawaii and with a ruler tried to figure the miles between Honolulu and Tokyo and between Tokyo and California. The news kept coming in on the radio, and it seemed to me that it was all happening right then, since I was only just hearing about it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to bomb such a small speck on the ocean in our atlas— before that Sunday Pearl Harbor and naval installations hadn’t existed for me: there weren’t a lot of sailors in Holt County—but I could tell from my dad’s face that something important was happening and what was happening was bad. My dad’s face, more than the pitch of the broadcaster’s voice, made it seem so. His face was hard set all day. It looked even worse than it did those times when he looked up and watched the Goodnoughs’ car pass our house, passing on down the road into dust. He said that what we were hearing on the radio was the start of a war, a world war that now we in this country were going to have to be a part of. He hated it all. He only hoped that it would be over before I was old enough to be called to it.
Of course people in town were talking about it, too. All along Main Street in the poolhalls and the grocery stores they were talking about it, and much of the talk was crazy, wild, frantic nonsense, and it wasn’t long before anything seemed possible to believe. The men in the bank and the beer drinkers in the tavern were even speculating that Hirohito would somehow drop down into Los Angeles and start marching up Sunset Boulevard to conquer Betty Grable: there was that kind of fear and excitement loose everywhere. So, with all that going on, I don’t remember that we were very much surprised a couple nights later when long after we had gone up to bed and were sound asleep Lyman came and started knocking the holy bejesus out of our front door. My dad just got up and put his pants on and went downstairs to let Lyman in before he broke the door down.
I got up too and stood in the dim light at the top of the stairs to watch. I could see Lyman below in the front hallway; he had his heavy overcoat on and he was wearing his winter cap with the corduroy earflaps. Beside him on the floor was a metal suitcase with a belt strapped around it. My dad and he were talking, and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could tell that Lyman was more than a little excited. He began to tie and untie the strings on the earflaps of his cap, and he was shifting from one foot to the other like he had to use the toilet. In my goofy sleepiness I wondered whether that was the reason why he had come over—to piss in our pot—except that wouldn’t have explained why he had brought a suitcase. Then my mother was there, too, beside me at the top of the stairs.
“Sanders,” she said. “Go back to bed.”
“It’s Lyman Goodnough.”
“I don’t care who it is. I want you to get dressed or to go back to bed.”
My mother had a maroon robe on with matching open-toed slippers. Her blond hair, treated so that it stayed blond, looked freshly combed.
“Lyman’s seen striped pajamas before,” I said.
“That is not the point.”