Just One Catch Read online

  For my family, now and then and to come:

  May the generations be blessed

  “You can’t keep ducking forever.”

  “I can till I die.”

  —JOSEPH HELLER, Something Happened

  I am not yet able … to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, not yet knowing this, to investigate alien matters.

  —SOCRATES, PLATO, Phaedrus

  It is impossible to predict or control how you will be remembered after your death. In that way, dying is like having children: you never know what will come out. In Beckett’s Endgame, he asks his parents, in effect, “Why did you have me?” and the father replies, “We didn’t know it would be you.”

  —JOSEPH HELLER, 1975

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue Yo-Yo

  PART ONE GOOD FELLOWS

  1 Domestic Engagements

  2 A Coney Island of the Mind

  3 Fear of Filing

  4 A Cold War

  5 “I Don’t Love You Any More”

  PART TWO HAPPY VALLEY

  6 Words in a Box

  7 Naked

  8 Tea and Sympathy

  PART THREE LIVE FOREVER

  9 Caught Inside

  10 18

  11 22

  PART FOUR WHAT HAPPENED

  12 The Realist

  13 Bombs

  14 Where Is World War II?

  15 The Willies

  PART FIVE DIE TRYING

  16 Hard to Swallow

  17 Go Figure

  18 The New World

  19 Closing Time

  20 When They Speak of the War

  Epilogue Cleaning House

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Also by Tracy Daugherty

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE Yo-Yo

  WHAT IS MISSING in the moment he will return to, in memory and in writing, for the rest of his life is his sense of himself. The moment is simultaneously brief and prolonged, distorted first by adrenaline, later by the vagaries of memory. And it is dangerous. In his maturity, he will concede that most of us are never more conscious of the pulse in our wrists and the thrumming in our minds than in threatening circumstances. When faced with physical harm or the possibility of sudden extinction, our senses rouse themselves and life becomes both dreamlike (the minutes stretched by an uncanny feeling of moving in slow motion) and wrenchingly vivid (each small gesture an agony of air against skin). But now, in the nose of the thin aluminum plane, as metal, glass, and his teeth rattle to the point of tearing loose, nothing is clear, least of all a fleeting, time-dependent I.

  Here is what seemed certain just before he crawled into the transparent womb at the front of the B-25. It was August 15, 1944. He was about to fly his second mission of the day. Earlier, he and the rest of his crew had been ordered to attack enemy gun positions at Pointe des Issambres, near Saint-Tropez, France, but heavy cloud formations had prevented them from dropping their bombs. According to military reports, flak cover at the target was “[h]eavy, intense and accurate.”

  Just one week earlier over Avignon, on the morning of August 8, he had witnessed flak bursts cripple a bomber. “I was in the leading flight,” he recalled, “and when I looked back to see how the others were doing, I saw one plane pulling up above and away from the others, a wing on fire beneath a tremendous, soaring plume of orange flame. I saw a parachute billow open, then another, then one more before the plane began spiraling downward, and that was all.” Two men died.

  Now, on this follow-up mission a week later, the goal was to destroy the Avignon railroad bridges on the Rhône River. It was his thirty-seventh assignment overall, since the end of May, when he had first been stationed at the Alesan Air Field on the island of Corsica, west of Italy.

  As he had done thirty-six times before, he took a last pee by the side of the runway (there were no bathrooms aboard the B-25), then slid down the narrow tunnel beneath the cockpit to the bomber’s Plexiglas nose cone. The tunnel was too small for a man wearing bulky equipment; he was forced to park his parachute in the navigator’s area behind him. Up front, in the glass bowl (the crew called it the “hothouse”), he always felt vulnerable and exposed. He found his chair. He donned his headset intercom so he could talk to comrades he could no longer see in other parts of the plane. The wheels left the ground. Now he was alone, in a blur of blue.

  As his squadron began its approach to the Rhône, German antiaircraft guns let loose and flak filled the air. A bomber in another squadron got “holed.” A spark, a flash. The plane lost a wing. It dived. No parachutes.

  Hurtling through space, the man in the glass cone watched the shining metal fall. A minute later, he was steering his plane. His pilot and the copilot had taken their hands off the flight controls. It was time for him to drop his bombs, and so, to assure a steady approach to the target, he commanded the plane’s movements using the automatic bombsight, steering left, steering right. For about sixty seconds, no evasive action would be possible, just a sure zeroing in.

  Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs. Immediately, his pilot, Lt. John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target. Rome, twenty, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat experience. The copilot, fearing this green kid was moving too fast and about to stall the engines, seized the controls, and the plane went into a sudden steep dive, back to an altitude where it could be holed by curtains of flak.

  In the nose cone, the man who had overseen the bombs slammed into the roof of his compartment. His headset jack pulled loose from its outlet and began whipping about his head. He heard nothing. He couldn’t move. I “believed with all my heart and quaking soul that my life was ending and that we were going down, like the plane on fire I had witnessed plummeting only a few minutes before,” he remembered. “I had no time for anything but terror.”

  Just as quickly as it had begun its descent, the plane shot upward, away from the flak, one moment yo-yoing into the next: a vanishing yet interminable instant. Now he was pinned to the floor, looking for a handhold, anything to grasp. The silence was horrifying. Was he the only crewman left alive? Was he alive? Would this moment never end, or had everything already ceased?

  He noticed the jack to his headset lying free near his chair. He plugged himself back in and a roar of voices pierced his ears. “The bombardier doesn’t answer,” he heard someone shout. “Help him, help the bombardier.” “I’m the bombardier,” he said, “and I’m all right,” but the very act of asserting what should have been obvious made him wonder if it was true.

  * * *

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, is it the same self that walks the hills of Corsica, looking for traces of the young man he was, when, as a second lieutenant, he flew sixty bombing missions between May and October 1944—looking, so he can write about his wartime experiences, as he has before and as he will do again?

  He is, a taxi driver tells him, the first American from the old Alesan Air Field ever to return here. To celebrate his reverence for the past, the driver arranges a meal for him and his family in a local restaurant with something that resembles pan-broiled veal but is probably goat, with bread and cheese and wine. His wife and children, a ten-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl, tolerate his nostalgia with gentle, mostly indulgent irritation. “Be nice to daddy,” the girl tells her brother. “He’s trying to recapture his youth.” Of course she’s right, he thinks, and he feels stupendously foolish. “I [have] come to the wrong place,” he tells himself. “My war [is] over and gone.”

  The only remaining evidence of his bombing missions, at least that he ca
n find as he travels, is a hole in a mountain near Poggibonsi. The mountain was not the target. That day, nervous, his attention drifting—there had been no flak, no danger—he had released his bombs a second or two too late (he remembers this clearly) and blasted the side of the mountain instead of the railroad bridge he was supposed to blow apart. The bridge, hit by other planes that day, has long since been repaired, and looks better than ever.

  Time yo-yos back and forth as he crosses green fields with his wife and kids: on the one hand, it’s as though certain events never occurred, and then, just as he is wondering if a bombardier with his name and face ever really came to Corsica, he encounters a Frenchman on a Swiss train, a train he has decided to take after giving up touring old battlefields, where the past has been erased like the bounty of annual harvests. And it is here, where he least expects it, that the ghost of an old self returns, as indistinct yet insistent as a reflection of his features in the window of the train.

  The Frenchman—from somewhere near Avignon, perhaps—speaks no English. He smokes cigarette after smelly cigarette. He says he is going to visit his boy in a hospital, where he lies with a terrible head wound from the war in Indochina. He weeps. In French, he tells the American and his befuddled children, “You will find out, you will find out.” The future tense seems wrong. Hasn’t he already found out, already sat among the wounded? But no. He has not witnessed everything. Time still has surprises to spring. Apparently, old fears, and the reasons for them, never disappear. “Why was he crying?” the boy asks once the Frenchman has walked away, clear to the other end of the train car. “What did he say?” the American’s daughter asks. Where, now, is the old bombardier? Who is he? “Nothing,” he says.

  * * *

  SIX MONTHS after peppering the Rhône with explosives, is it the same self that learns about the broken tail of a plane he has occupied before, and that has just barely survived a midair collision with a sister plane? The sister plane, identified in manifests as 8U 43-4064, lost a wing and spun out of control after becoming unbalanced in a strong wind and grazing the other bomber, 8P 43-27657. None of 8U’s crew got out alive. 8P limped back to the airfield, its tail as tattered as a piece of paper torn from the rings of a notebook. “How they landed the plane safely is still bewildering our operations officer and the hundreds of men who saw the damaged craft come in,” states the group’s War Diary for January 21, 1945.

  Six months earlier, on August 23, 1944, orders for the 340th Bombardment Group, 488th Squadron, list “2nd Lt. J. Heller” as a crew member on 8P. Among 8U’s crew that day is “2nd Lt. F. Yohannan,” known affectionately to his buddies as “Yo-Yo.” Heller trained with him stateside. If time really could warp, the way it often seemed to when men took to the skies and stress began to alter their perceptions, the fates of 8P and 8U could have intertwined earlier, on the day Heller and Yohannan climbed aboard them. The lives of the two men would have ended differently than they did. History would have been changed. Not for everyone, of course. Or yes—yes, for everyone, whether they knew it or not. Absolutely.

  * * *

  MANY DECADES after concluding his sixty missions, after writing about the war and then writing about it again (including an account of a day in which a B-25 nicknamed the “Schnapps Yo-Yo” disappeared inside a heavy cloud, in the space of only forty-five seconds, never to be seen or heard from again—no flare, no radio message or wreckage), he would be chastised by some literary critics for not writing realistically about individuals in his fiction or plumbing his characters’ personalities. “His self-insight comes and goes,” one book reviewer would complain. “One might say that [early trauma], never fully faced, led to a certain hollowness, which became part of [his literary] style … an unbearable lightness ballasted by melancholy.”

  Apropos of this charge—that his characters, and perhaps the author, lack a sense of self—he would tell a radio interviewer in 1998, a year before his death, “I … don’t understand what’s meant by … time as a dimension. [And] the very words I’m using now to say this are not words I’m choosing to use, my brain is choosing to use them and I can’t control my brain.… [It’s possible] we have no control over what we say or what we do, over what our personalities are like. We can’t bring ourselves to believe that. But just because we can’t believe it does not mean that it isn’t so.”

  * * *

  “I’M THE BOMBARDIER,” he insisted.

  “Then go back and help him, help the gunner,” a voice told him through his intercom. “He’s hurt.”

  He crawled back through the narrow passageway toward the rear of the plane and emerged from the tunnel like a baby being born. The side gunner, a young man named Frankel, lay bleeding on the vibrating floor. A hole gaped in the aluminum wall of the plane. An oval wound tore across the gunner’s thigh. The bombardier fought a tide of nausea. He barely knew this kid. His squadron had about 100 officers and 350 enlisted men; different crews flew different bombers every mission.

  “I’m cold,” Frankel said.

  In fact, at this altitude—over 49,000 feet, above the flak—temperatures could reach minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Gunners were told that their bare hands would stick to the metal surfaces of their machine guns if they were not careful. Exposed liquids, including blood, would freeze instantly.

  “We’ll be home soon. You’ll be all right,” the bombardier told the writhing boy. He was chilled, too, and still fighting nausea, from the sight of the gash in the gunner’s leg and the smell of his own uniform (most of the men rarely cleaned their flight suits—why wash off your luck?). He held his nose away from his fleece and reached for some sulfa powder. As he poured the powder into Frankel’s wound, as he prepared a shot of morphine—all the while, the kid chattering about the cold—2nd Lt. Joseph Heller convinced himself (what self there was) he would not get out of this alive.

  PART ONE Good Fellows

  1. Domestic Engagements

  SAN ANGELO, TEXAS, in April 1945 was home to over five million sheep, and considered itself the inland wool capital of the United States. It was among the nation’s largest mohair producers, served by the Santa Fe Railroad, which hauled the city’s wool products across the country and brought in over one million dollars in annual revenue. Though automobiles were still a luxury for most people, traffic snarled San Angelo’s streets. The downtown area—in a city of just under fifty thousand folks—was booming. Men came to buy Prince Albert tobacco—at sixty-seven cents a can, an easy path to personal style and sophistication. Women shopped for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, whose newspaper ads in the San Angelo Standard promised to “help women who on occasion feel nervous, fidgety, irritable, tired, and a bit blue.”

  If they felt nervous and tired, it may have been because more young men than ever, just back from fighting in Europe, thronged San Angelo’s eateries, alleyways, and movie theaters—along with the wool trade, the cause of the city’s boom. “There was a ‘Western Craze’ … after the war that was sweeping the nation. We were making decorative spurs and buckles and even had traveling salesmen who went all over Texas wholesaling our goods,” Chase Holland III, owner of Holland’s downtown, told a local reporter in 2007 when asked about the “good old days.” The store was one of eleven jewelry shops that opened to serve returning soldiers eager to surprise their sweethearts with engagement rings, put the war behind them, and move ahead with careers. In their stiff uniforms and spit-shined shoes, the young men would mill around the glass counters, shyly, standing aside when slammed by the smell of wool. Now and then, a “pretty grubby” fellow, someone who looked “like he had just finished shearing a thousand sheep,” in Holland’s description, would push forward, determined to examine necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. Unlike the soldiers, most of whom were starting from scratch, the ranchers were doing just dandy. They knew what they wanted, and they could afford the best baubles.

  Many of the servicemen were biding their time in Texas, assigned here while waiting to be discharged under the
military’s impending point system, whereupon they would join their families or fiancées in other parts of the country. Goodfellow Field, occupying over a thousand acres four miles southeast of downtown, and consisting of a pilot-training school with three paved runways, seven auxiliary landing fields, extensive housing facilities, and a circular concrete swimming pool, was their home. The field had been named for a local pilot who had died in turbulent skies over France in World War I.

  For those who had never previously visited West Texas, the dry, flat landscape came as a shock. Often in the late afternoon, mournful thunder rolled south across the plains, accompanied by heavy winds. Without warning, sand could kick up, whip about the treeless terrain, and make the day go dark. Flying particles swelled the air. (Within a few years, a sudden swift tornado would kill thousands of sheep and severely damage several planes at Goodfellow.) Still, most of the boys were happy to stroll at leisure across the solid ground, stretch their arms, and breathe, even if occasionally it meant filling their mouths with grit.

  Just a few months before, the boys had had more reason to appreciate Goodfellow Field: Its Instrument School and Post Operations arm employed seventeen Women Airforce Service Pilots. They served as flight trainers and inspected aircraft that had been repaired after being red-lined for serious malfunctions, to see if they were fit once more for students. Some of the male pilots “were quite dubious whether or not we were capable of flying anything larger than a kite,” said Jimmie Parker, one of the WASPs. But Maj. John Hardy, the base’s director of flying, said the girls always compared favorably to the boys. The WASP program was disbanded at Goodfellow in December 1944 because the attrition rate among combat pilots had proven to be lower than expected, leading to a surplus of male pilots. Nevertheless, under the command of Col. Harold A. Gunn, Goodfellow maintained an easygoing, cordial atmosphere; on the base, the worst behavior was likely to come from the weather.