The handle of the Luger was smooth and cool. My fingertips ran over the stock as I turned away from my uncle and ran down the bombed road west of town.
It looked like the world had ended. Several blocks of town were leveled. At a familiar corner outside the main square, none of the houses had been touched. I stood in front of the third house on the right, the three-story brownstone where Ludo had lived his entire life. I looked for some other unseen window in the attic, scanned the house for a moment, then walked up to the door and pushed it open.
“Who’s here?” I yelled.
Ludo’s family and the rest of the town either would have been in or were now digging away at the rubble of the factory or the town center’s office buildings. There was no knowing who was and wasn’t alive. When no one answered, I started up the stairs with the Luger held out. I started up the stairs oozing a dark rage. The attic door opened up to a large storage space. Boxes lined the walls.
I scanned the room and yelled, “Come out,” in English. “I know you’re here.” I listened for any movements. There was one small window that looked out into the front of the street and cast a square of light onto the floor. The wood beneath me creaked the way old houses do with big wind gusts. I moved several boxes and then came to a bookshelf that looked built into the corner. I swept the books on top of it to the floor and pulled the shelf away from the wall. It swung on a hinge, and I stepped back to see the small cavity in the wall.
The smell from a shit and piss bucket by the opening made me gag. Through the dark hole, a pair of dark eyes blinked shut, and an overpowering desire to unload the gun into the dark space between them flushed through me.
The man’s body bent forward over his straightened legs. His head rested on his kneecaps, and he looked like a giant larva embedded into the wall.
“Get out here. Get out here now.” I motioned with the gun for him to come out. His shoulder rubbed against the horsehair insulation that bulged between exposed wall studs.
He rolled to his side and stretched out his body like everything had gone numb from squirreling himself away. He looked up at me and said, “Prisoner of war,” then looked at me for a long moment. “Speekt u Engles? Churchill. Queen Wilhelmina. Kamerad,” he said, making it clear he spoke no Dutch.
When he was out of the hole, he pulled himself up along the edge of the chest of drawers. His left leg was splinted by a handmade wooden brace with a smooth hone done by an expert carpenter. He wore a Royal Air Force jumpsuit with pockets on both pant legs and over his chest. On the chest pocket was the word Yarborough.
“What kind of plane were you in when you went down?” I asked in the best English I could. He kept looking at me. The expression on his face slackened. “Answer me.”
He studied me and my clothes. The ash darkening my skin. “I’ve been here for a long time.”
“What kind of plane?”
“Wait.”
“Was it a Manchester heavy bomber? The same kind that just went over?”
When he stood straight, I wanted to shoot him for being part of those who had destroyed my town and killed my mother. A vision of the innards of his head splattered across the back wall filled my mind. I wanted to shoot someone. The bent inside of my finger rubbed against the trigger.
“Walk over here.”
“Okay. Easy,” he said. He had a thick British accent. His black hair and beard were unkempt and greasy.
“I can pay you, I have a barter kit.” The pilot took out a thin, black case from his leg pocket. He opened it, and inside there were three gold coins and three gold rings. “Look, I can pay you. Please don’t shoot. Please. I need help.”
“Help with what? To get back to England? Get a new plane? Drop more bombs? Kill more of my family and friends?” I held the gun so close to the man’s face the barrel touched his nose. “Put that on the floor and take off your clothes. The brace too.”
The pilot didn’t move.
“Now,” I said like a spitting lunatic, stepping into him, scraping the muzzle of the gun from his nose to his forehead.
He stripped off his wooden brace, then unzipped his jumpsuit and peeled it off.
“And leave your boots.”
Once the RAF pilot was only in his underwear, I could see that his skin was covered in sores from his calves up to and over his shoulders. The rounded knobs of his rib cage grotesquely protruded, and the dark blue, swollen left knee was the size of a grapefruit. He kept hopping up and down to keep his balance and not put pressure on his wounded leg. His left ankle had dark yellow bruises from what looked like the knee draining down. I went to the entrance of the cubbyhole and picked up the jumpsuit and the barter kit.
“Downstairs,” I said.
He hobbled when he walked, leaning against the banister and jumping to get down the stairs. Pictures of Ludo’s family lined the stairwell. I hadn’t paid any attention to them on my way up, but coming down the black and white prints hurt to look at. There was no knowing if any of them was still alive.
The photographs made me want to boot the pilot in the back to tumble him down the stairs, to inflict pain on him.
On the front porch, the man began to shiver. The sun hit his open sores and they shone like dew. He looked so lean and needy with the cold street and row of dull brownstones behind him. The scrape from the gun’s muzzle was pink against his white forehead skin.
“Go,” I said. “Run. Run like hell.”
The pilot looked at me, then out into the cold street, a look of total confusion on his face. I thought again of kicking the pilot hard between the shoulder blades so he’d fly down the porch steps, but I didn’t do that. I’m glad, at least, I didn’t do that.
He may have thought I was going to shoot him in the back, but he turned and worked his way down the steps, hopping with his swollen leg held straight out in front of him. He hobbled across the street and shimmied up the road. His body almost buckled every time he put weight on his swollen leg. By the time he ducked behind some other house, his skin was already turning blue. He slunk off into the bombed and occupied town with I thought about the same chance my father was given.
I walked home with the officer’s gun and the pilot’s suit and black box under my arm in a bundle. In the pocket of the suit were his papers. Herbert Yarborough. RAF. It was easy to see myself in his clothes, high in the clouds, drifting far above any human concerns.
At home, Fergus barked into the bathroom, where my uncle knelt on the tile floor between my mother and the claw-footed bathtub, washing the ash and dust and blood off of my mother with a wet towel. A second towel wrapped around her midsection kept her intestines from spilling out.
“What are we going to do with her?” There was a quick flash of desperation in my uncle’s voice—something I didn’t know could exist. “The ground is too frozen to dig a hole.