Success = True. An American Fiction. Volume One 1952: 1963

By Matthew Hilton

Time is there so that everything doesn't happen all at once, so things have room to move out of each other's way. But it does happen all at once - or at least enough of it does doesn't it? Coincidence often beats time to the punch. You think it's a plot? Well maybe it is - but it's the only one we got. You take those islands out there in the water, the ones on every cheap atlas. They're American aren't they? Don't you think that? Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the troublesome one - Cuba. And of course New York where a surprising number things happen at the same time. Then take a day, any day, take April 13 1950 go on, take it, there's no trick, its magic - watch as Florida sourced wrestler Dot Dotson comes out of a cabin above the ring at the El Palacio de los Deportes Cuba and steps down the wooden stairs for her match with Beverly Lehmer as Wallace Howell, his British-type tweed jacket flapping, climbs down from a Grumman Goose flown around the Catskills dropping dry ice to give New York the water it has had its tongue right out for months. And as comely Dot steps thru the ropes into the ring with the all around shirt-sleeved crowd, deep dark throated flicking handkerchiefs, at that moment in Hawaii in shipping firm Matson's executive Guest Lodge, a sweat stained Montgomery Clift look-alike wakes with a start to drifting thunderclouds seen thru the monkeywood slats of the custom blinds and gets intellectually fit to grapple with pineapple chunks and as Dot's manager, (who had hooked her by provoking her when she was an Orlando taxi driver to see how tough she was) turns his crooked promoters grin on her bobbing under the rope a Negro playwright in Puerto Rico looks down into the garden of his rented apartment rightly fearing surveillance by the FBI and wondering whether his sloppy at home costume would be reported as indecent. To start with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Hilton
• Release date: Jan 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370520619

Matthew Hilton

Matthew Hilton grew up in West London, England and ran away to join a street theatre before turning himself into a professional fireman. Wanting to cool down he had a productive career as a graphic artist before moving to France in 2004 when writing got the better of him. He now lives in the hills south east of Toulouse.

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Success=True: an American fiction

Volume One 1952 - 1963

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copyright 2017 Matthew Hilton

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This Smashwords ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

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This ebook is post-surfing. One per cent of sales will be donated to Wikipedia. Humans are filtering creatures and we have some capacity to interrogate and design our own filters. When cruising/surfing the time space ocean some fragments of information stick in and some don't. For me essence precedes but negotiates with existence, if I know what I mean. This book is one possible negotiation written out.

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www.apwb.org

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Unless otherwise stated the chapter head quotes are from Popular (later Practical) Mechanics magazine.

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The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

Thomas Keneally - Gossip from the Forest - 1975

Written so you can understand it

Strapline for Popular Mechanics Magazine December 1947

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Foreword

Juan Pujol was a clever Spaniard, the best sort, born by a railway cutting in Barcelona in 1912. His father ran a dye works known for its superb black. When Juan was twenty four years of age columns of dirty smoke rose up all round him. Civil war. His draft papers popped thru the door and he hid. At least three times a week a girl brought him food. Lucky. She had short hair and a bad foot. It got too much. Juan made a plan. Somewhere up by the River Ebro, treacherous country, he took two hand grenades and went over to the enemy.

After the war he managed the Hotel Majestic in Madrid. The horse-hair stuffing was poking out of the plush velvet, the kitchen staff stole massively, tourists were few. Juan looked for a way out again. Two old ladies, been in room 603 for ever and ever, asked him to smuggle whisky from Portugal, they missed it so badly. He got hold of a passport somehow and had this passport in his hand when the Second World War broke out. He went to the Germans and asked them to forge him papers for England as a journalist, once there, he said, he would send them military information.

The Germans supplied him with a bottle of invisible ink, three thousand dollars and some codes. In fact, Juan said, he went to Lisbon, got himself a tiny studio flat and bought a Baedaker Tourist Guide to Great Britain, the Bradshaw Railway Timetable and a large map of the country. With these he started imagining an England. He sat in his studio flat and invented, using the books and the map as reference.

The Germans believed his imaginary England, with its imaginary troops with strangely Continental habits. The British Secret Service sucked their pipes in that English way, smuggled him out on a cargo boat and flew him to England where his fictions could be perfected. Juan Pujol said later,

1942, mass deception, fake narratives, radio powered strategic fictions and my own story wove in. I arrive at Mount Batten flying boat base on the south coast of England from Lisbon. Mr Grey and another security man meet me, pour weak tea in to my mouth, give me a less continental coat and and accompany me up to London, in what I now know to be a black Hillman Minx

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chapter one

PHIL. J. Landau is combining business with pleasure at Miami, where he is working the Lords-Prayer-on-a-Penny machine at Wither's Drugstore to plenty of long green.

one

Time is there so that everything doesn't happen all at once, so things have room to move out of each other's way. But it does happen all at once - or at least enough of it does, don’t you think?

Coincidence often beats time to the punch. You think it's a plot? Well maybe it is - but it's the only one we got. You take those islands out there in the water that show up even on a cheap atlas. They're American aren't they? Don't you think that? Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the troublesome one - Cuba. And Manhattan where a surprisingly large number of things happen at the same time.

Then take a day, any day, take April 13 1950 go on, take it, there's no trick, its magic - watch now as wrestler Dot Dotson from Florida comes out of the cabin above the ring at the El Palacio de los Deportes in Havana and down the wooden stairs for her match with Beverly Lehmer at the same time that Wallace Howell, his British-type tweed jacket flapping, climbs down from a Grumman Goose float-plane which has flown around the Catskills dropping dry ice to give New York the water it’s had its tongue out for months.

And as comely Dot steps thru the ropes into the ring with the wrap round shirt-sleeved crowd, deep dark throated flicking white handkerchiefs, at that moment in Hawaii in shipping firm Matson's executive Guest Lodge, a sweat stained Montgomery Clift look-alike wakes with a start to drifting thunderclouds seen thru the monkeypod slats of the custom blinds and gets intellectually fit to grapple with pineapple chunks.

And as Dot's manager, (who had provoked her when she was an Orlando taxi driver to see how tough she was) turns his crooked promoters grin on her bobbing under the rope, a Negro playwright in Puerto Rico looks down into the garden of his rented apartment rightly fearing surveillance by the FBI and wondering whether his sloppy I’m-at-home costume would be reported as indecent.

To start with, it went something like this...

… the dawn must have broken before he'd finished up, but from inside the box-car it wasn't clear. Only his smoky lips went on moving,

Bad thing happened over there. Austria. Hung round my neck like a plague sign. Got to shoving the brats out of the house and mooching the bottle onto the back porch while Lea their Ma piled groceries at the five and dime

Lea had waited back home with her folks down at Macon while her man P/fc. Raymond Norwood Bell had been scrapping itchy crotched thru those damn ducal, bucal, mucal forests somewhere between Luxembourg and Liechtenstein in winter, with bullets splintering the trees into millions of bloody darts. Kitchen detail.

She was still down there at Macon when he got back to Columbia S.C. in forty five along with about a million others, bleary eyed after nights drinking out of that stinking bucket cross the Atlantic, that tired out european mud stuck on their boots,

"Hitched down from Norfolk with Henry, ripped half the weatherboarding off getting in and said where is she? Henry had been with me when the bad thing happened in Austria. Picked up a guy for selling stuff when he shouldn't. What's so wrong? said Henry, with trying to make a living - he's a businessman ain't he? Henry had a big, big heart.

Seemed what he said about right to me but Sergeant said watch his house, see who scuttled in or scuttled out around curfew time. We were the occupiers with a capital O. Music? I didn't know anything about it. This native surprised me coming down the path, reaching for his breast pocket. That trigger was featherlite. I looked, it shot. He caught it in the chest and Henry shouted something. It might have been o fuck, we did a lot of that.

This native was bent double on the sidewalk and I noticed he'd painted his ankles where you’d normally see socks. His hat was caught up underneath his head and his glasses were all cockeyed, stupid looking. He was breathing heavy, humping up and clutching with one arm, the other one was pinned under him with the cigar he'd been reaching for crushed and bloody like a dog turd.

After a little while he closed his eyes and lay still and I knew I'd killed him. That was the only one I ever knew to be sure of and it had to be him, a fucking musician man. Like they really laid it into me, discipline panel everything. I was in the newspapers. I got consoled by this old slugger we'd roped in to clean pots who said,

One sees how it fits, ja? learn patterns, adjust, one day you are no longer an actor but free the other side of the camera

I didn't understand a word of it but I liked having his big old muscly face up near mine. It was he who told me who I'd killed. The guy was a musical composer called Webern....

Raymond addressed me,

...did you ever hear of him?

It was strange to be traveling in a boxcar with the man who'd shot Webern. As it happened I knew many casual music lovers who had always thought he should have been. Shot that is. Let us just say that Webern made music that to sentimental ears sounded back to front. In Soho, before coming over to the States, I'd even heard a rumor that his music contained coded messages and that he was a Communist spy, which is why he had been killed. I was learning American, but slowly. I said,

Yes Ray, I heard of him

That's what they all say. Famous

The box-car jolted and Raymond and I went with it, we had a wooden wall each. Strapped down to the floor was the machine Raymond had trucked from the docks under its tarpaulin shroud. We'd been detailed to mind it all the way to Huntsville. I was there to make sure it was handled correctly. Steel lifting eyes broke through the tarpaulin at six places and there was a sequence of shackling and tightening to follow. Only because I had a Bureau of Standards card did they let me in to the process - otherwise I was that Limey prick.

Raymond was looking down at his boots. The ends of his feet were where he imagined his life stacked up from until it got to his heart and killed him, so he tipped alcohol down hollow legs between life and heart to keep things comfy. After he'd smashed thru the weather boarding and got in the house and Henry'd calmed him down he'd cabled and Lea had come up from Macon and said buckle down and he'd found work with McLean Trucking at Winston Salem. She stayed home and smoothed the kids, fixed the weatherboarding and then she got the job with the five and dime. Behind the wheel of his truck, on the long pitches, Philadelphia, New England, Raymond would sleep over out in the boondocks somewhere and try to be like nature intended.

McLean Trucking at Winston Salem. Malcom McLean's tribe were Scottish Highlanders thrown off their turf and shipped across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, at landfall they clustered on deck wearing the McLean colors in wool, looking out for kin.

In a hundred years McLeans had spread down as far as Shoe Heel, North Carolina and in 1913 Malcom McLean popped out of the gene pool and with brother and sister at his side, tight as clams, happened himself into trucking.

By 1945 he had one hundred and thirty trucks and was about to carve into real-time, real-world stuff, flip it inside out and upside down, find the money making shape. Perform, in a word, one of those magic tricks failing which no businessman could plead competence.

Federal Government gave grants to veterans to buy trucks. McLean sought them out and encouraged them to do just that, then he threw his arm round them so to speak by getting them to order say, trolley jacks, as a group and then he signed them up to truck for him exclusively. He made a tribe.

McLean was a hard man - the magic miser, some called him. His only relaxation was prize hogs. You didn't get your fuel just anywhere because he had a deal with a chain of pumps. His trucks ran on diesel which was a novelty then. He bought or leased routes so you always had a return load. You worked busy, busy, busy.

McLean really pitched into the business of carrying tobacco and cigarettes. He moved his operation to Winston-Salem and got himself an automated terminal. Automated terminal? He had rubber belts shifting goods between vehicles or between warehouse and vehicles. It meant fewer hands, lower costs, so that when he came before the Motor Carrier Cases Tribunal in March 1947 he was cleared to bid for trade at a price well below that of his rivals.

Raymond's eyes would dim out as drivers told him about McLean’s x-ray eyes which allowed him to single out, single up, the important parts, costwise, in any process. Take tobacco. It was local, the weird leg of the slave trade, the magic weed processed by Reynolds and then fanned out just take one to millions of suckers. Hooked and chained.

Reynolds had some market research done. One of the clip board observations was that Negroes typically open packs from the bottom. To avoid crushing the filters? An imputation of strength not under fine control? So far so stereotype. And wrong.

Truman K. Gibson, a Negro lawyer sitting on the President's Advisory Commission on morals religion and education in the Armed Services across whose deck this paper came could have told them,

You go back to the buddy system. The man who found himself out of smokes on the firing line had only to ask another. There were only two ways of refusing him politely. If the pack had only its last smoke or if the pack still had its cellophane. Canny people opened their pack at the bottom to show a virgin peeping out of the top pocket of their battle dress - and then they carried the practice on back home

Did I mention Camel? Reynolds imported so much French cigarette paper and Turkish tobacco for Camel cigarettes that Winston-Salem was designated by the United States Federal government as an official port of entry for the United States, despite the city being two hundred miles inland. It was one of the places on the list for FBI passport stops.

I'll tell you a McLean story... said Raymond.

A square of daylight slid around the box-car wall as we changed our angle to the rising sun. Raymond was lit up, half melted by the yellow light, his reddish jaw, his big hands hung down but rising a little as he spoke,

...he'd looked at a map and figured out the bends on our routes. Then he had the office calculate a unique tyre change-around schedule according to a formula he magicked out of his brain. Based on the bends, you get me? Crazy. Based on the bends. Malcom McLean

Now sometime around Christmas 1946, Raymond told me either in the box-car or later, it happened that Lea wanted him nearer home. She was being pestered. Cars with big fat sides would slow down and roll beside her on her way back from work. She had a way of flicking her head that caught them, it seemed. The brats at home were hollow eyed and sugar fucked, so Raymond quit McLean Trucking and came back to Columbia S.C. and did local runs with the shit-carts, builders spoil, highway scrabble, you name it. The Local was run by ex-GI's. Simpatico. One of them said,

You know after over there I feel like I busted thru the windshield and never came back

He meant europe. And Raymond would nod and wonder how to put the music back into the world and then he’d pass his fellow driver the bottle in the paper bag. And the days turned into weeks and the months might have turned into years if it hadn't been for Henry who came up the wooden steps one day, his hat hiding his face.

Raymond saw a cop's blank shadow at the mesh frame door and opened onto a lightweight pale gumbo suit and a narrow dot and dash tie. Then the hat was tilted back and he saw the fresh shaved chops, the dark glitter,

Henry...

Behind Raymond’s back Lea had her arms folded into a dishrag, behind her again the television's dark lines scurried after each other and the brats pulled their clothes straight and gave Henry the eye. Who was this who knew Dad?

Henry, Lea. This is Macey and my boy Tommy. Shake hands like a man Tommy

His father's red face wobbled at him and so he shook and the man in the gumbo suit looked serious and took his hat off. The room had got smaller with him in it.

Siddown Henry, Coffee?

Maybe he'd like a drink...

No thanks Raymond, coffee's just fine, I had my last way back at Heath Springs. Just fine Lea

She swung by him into the kitchen. Henry gave Raymond a look like before a patrol. He bit on his lower lip and looked up from under. Raymond got it,

"Hey kids, scatter - did you rake those leaves? What is this, a slum?.

There was a pause between the men while Macey and Tommy unpeeled from the television and got on their legs and went out the back, pushing and shoving, with a last glance back at Henry. There was a silence after they'd gone and then,

O'k Henry, spill

I guess from the way you suggested a drink just now you're still having your bad times?

Raymond watched his children flicking leaves round the lawn, then he turned,

You don't waste time do you? What are you - in welfare?

The other man didn't speak. He knew his turn would come. Raymond ran up the home-team flag,

Did you ever think that... maybe I wasn't meant to be right, did you ever think of that Henry? Maybe I was meant to get stuck right there with my head down the pan

Henry laughed, he liked to laugh, it felt good,

"There's a new treatment Raymond. They put you out for a while and when you wake up all the funny stuff has gone away. I'm on the custodial side. Vets are privileged....

He laughed again,

...go in green and come out gold

Is that why you're in Columbia?

Partly. I also had some business to attend to

He gave the hat a couple of turns.

Anything I can help with?

I don't think so Raymond

Lea broke in on them with the coffee. She'd zipped into a full skirt while the water boiled and had slipped her heels on, ordinarily Henry would have stroked his crotch to show appreciation but he held off. Loud silence came from Raymond, his back was against the wall like it was now in the box-car on the train cholloking along thru Alabama. I watched him hanging there without a word then,

So, did you go? What was it all about?

The train banged at a switch and his long jaw moved,

Called ess dee. Sensory deprivation

Oh right I said, wondering what.

He pointed at the machine strapped to the floor of the box car,

Thing 'bout the size of that. You climbed in and off you went. Before you knew it you were right out in inner space

I shut my eyes and got it, dark blue with silver rings and orange hot-spots and then a long shiny squeal of the shoes as the brakes went on, we were coming in to someplace, squat gray storage tanks wheeled by the small square of window, pylon wires crissed and crossed, a chocolate and white slab of signal box cake slid past with a man just seen wiping a rag on the levers and Huntsville rising up the other side of the tracks.

I began to say goodbye to the machine strapped to the floor whose underquarters I'd caught sight of when it had been packed the other side of the Atlantic - a creamy silver sphere and a complication of fine gauge piping that clung like spiders. Hans Oberth had said the Brits had it somewhere and we'd coughed up when the Americans asked.

Hans Oberth and his rocket scientists had forcefully reasoned the machine’s engineering into being, plucked it from the future into what was now Germany's past. In this July of 1950 Oberth's team were being transferred en bloc from Fort Bliss to Huntsville.

When the train had nearly come to a halt Raymond and I slid the door open. There was a crowd of them there, pale faces, sunglasses, some in sandals, some in battle-blouses. No whips, no dogs, couple of lazy cops in the background and a little guy with some papers and a worry frown. Raymond and I got the check list and knelt down to the floor straps. I got my nose into the metal piping where the wadding had come off and sniffed just for old times sake. They ran in a girder mounted on a truck, and winched out the machine. I kept my hand on as long as I could. The man with the bunch of papers came up,

You better sign we took it

Down at Fort Bliss and at Fort Monmouth near the New Jersey coast and doubtless other places too, the powers that be had been unzipping the knowledge bananas brought over from Old Europe. Bossman Zahl at Signal Corps 24 used to say it was like having a choice of fine wines,

Over here we have Dr Goubou with his microwave transmissions - amazing magic, and over there is Dr Zeigler with his permanent magnet generators, and round the corner they’re doing that thing flipping a camera out of a V2 so that it rights itself to photograph the target within seven seconds

They were still playing with that at Fort Bliss when they got the order to move that summer, summer of 1950, playing handball with the camera when the man comes out of the double shaded duty room into the bright bright El Paso day,

Hey fellers, stuff your trunks, we're off

They put the camera back in the high altitude cloud photography room where they’d got it from. In there were four foot by four foot black and white prints pinned up to drip dry, America further north on a dusty dreary day. The photographs were for the rain project, cloud seeding.

Pilots flew loops shaped like the greek letter gamma, you know, the one with two little tails, over likely cloud masses. Flew the thing on a heading over the cloud mass then did a nifty turn and came out at forty five degrees to the original track.

Heavenly shifts did take place, naturally enough, somewhere in the sky, and sometimes it rained where you thought. It rained with dry ice and a little later it rained with silver iodide. It became a commercial proposition, unlike the rockets. And so here come the fakers with entrepreneurial smarts who could make believe a world so well that it actually stuck out of their heads in front of you.

Rainmaking was the coming thing that summer. And a pilot called Yeager, (no not that Yeager) made a good living out of Cleveland cruising the sky in his leased plane transporting hustlers with heavy tooled leather boots watching for rainclouds,

O'k Pilot let's go down and find the money

Yeager would drift down thru the murk and land somewhere in the pitter pattering wet near some saved hard for homestead and his passenger would claim he'd made the rain. Sign 'em up.

But you could go too far. How would you know the edge? The lawyers would appear, that’s how. Ben Slutsky owner of the Nevele Country Club filed a complaint against New York City,

You’re complaining?

"You bet, who wants to holiday, to party, in the rain?.

Not his clients, they come up to slob out. Justice said Slutsky had no vested right in the clouds that came over his property, they were free game. You could say they had a right to liberty. Not everyone agreed with that ruling, folk at Casper legislated to get a grip on the air they breathed,

It’s Wyoming man - all the way on up to hell

The paperclipped scientists I’d glimpsed welcoming the machine at Huntsville slipped as fast as they could into America. Some of them still used a necktie to hold up their trousers but most of them had got to know the score even if the wind-breakers they chose had a boxy, military look. They were thrilled about the American cars, that roomy engineering, those ice-cream colors, same whirls (or was it whorls) fluid motion, dynamics. Dreamy America, Disney. So much plenty to be thankful for and build rockets.

They got a grip fast, methodically planted their feet on rungs, found footholds in the bland surface, wrinkles they could run up into man made structures all hanging together each one linked to the others in formation, you could almost see the leg in the air with the gym slipper foot - mental gymnasts, systems men. The language of mathematics was a shared one with their hosts, the Americans held up peace pipes at every turn, the past was something left behind. They raised their right hands and officially switched allegiance to America (schedule A status). .

They had built their first rockets in dull swamplands poisoned by internal enemies, watched by slaves. How much happier to be over in the New World. The Russians were still the necessary enemy and the dream of space travel was intact. Which obsession paid for the other hardly mattered as long as they got to do the engineering. Out at the White Sands proving site in the late nineteen forties in the glare of New Mexico, humming with jewelled toad spells and potent cactus brews round any corner the scientists made it all rise up around them,

Order one thousand shovels…

Somehow more spacey here than amongst the dirt gray dunes of Peenemunde and the coffee - mein gott if only for that - though it was true wasn't it Hans or was memory fooling: the submarine nosing into Rostok with sacks of coffee beans for their category of brainworker, back from slipping high level deserters onto South American shores.

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"I'm going at such a speed they may think I'm crazy....

Uwë was waiting with the other wives to be introduced to the General Electric appliances they would use around their new homes. It was awkward to be close with the other women, delicate, you could never be quite sure. There had to be a certain amount of silent forgiveness to make it work at all. Sometimes she couldn't stop herself from breaking out,

"...well you see, it was the same for me, the other side of the coin so to speak. I was meant to be a nursery teacher but where they put me was awful. You think I could have gone on with that? You arrived there you thought good place, buildings in an open square, but then you found no agricultural activities, no animals.

About a dozen of us fresh young women eager to work arrived on the bus about noon. The Erbhof near Leipzig. Silence, the only noise seemed to come from one building. We entered. At long tables without cloths sat about a hundred little boys dressed in blue slacks and loose jackets without buttons. Right there in their hearing the public health official told us that the boys divided when they were ten years old. Those who were sufficiently bright became street cleaners, the public health official smiled and added unusually conscientious ones. Someone asked and the others? He beckoned, we went back outside and he took our by now rather sad crocodile of fresh young women to where the ones who weren't judged sufficiently bright to be street cleaners were put to death.

A small detached hut in the school grounds slightly bigger than one a rich father might buy for his children to play house in, with a single bed and a medicine chest. All that was needed for three or four a day, maybe more. The arch above the door had a flourish of wood carving and bore the words Hitler Chamber. I managed to slip away, slip further away each day. I went invisible with other young people who hated the whole thing. We managed some pirate actions, posters, slapped whitewash slogans then tchuk! I was put behind wire, where I learnt many tricks I hope I may not have to use in America. And learnt to treat with life on her own capricious, beautiful terms. When the occupying power opened the gates and gave me o’k papers I ran to the nearest rubble warren and found out how to be stylish again. Show the other side of the coin. After all, we were German too"

As it happened Uwë took on a scientist called Magnus and his two muddled chicks whose mother had been black blasted to forked fowl when the Allies turned Schweinfurt into apartment-block size ovens, Magnus swinging on his stool that evening at his drafting table at Peenemunde.

When she met him he was wondering which way to jump. Magnus said he wished he had heard from Walter and Uwë said who’s Walter and Magnus said he’d gone to Russia in thirty four and they hadn't heard from him since. They were eating roast apples at a stand up place, the wood smoke stinged their eyes, the moisture helped. If Russia was preparing a rocket program it wasn't yet clear. Magnus wasn't convinced by the argument some put forward, just imagine they said, we could quickly be at the head in Russia while in the USA as we see from what was published before the silence we would only be at the middle level. Yes, thought Magnus except when it came to practical rocketry, and said you will come with me to America Uwë?

They came just as she was putting Ursula and Otto to bed. She pulled the curtain across the room and opened the door to a black man, an American Officer in a Transport Company and at the curb a jeep with the white star ticking and trembling. The man asked for Magnus and she fetched him from the yard where he had been scratching at the soil. Would potatoes grow?

Papers?

The officer spoke reasonable German. Magnus fetched his papers from the dresser along with his glasses. The American Officer asked him to put them on and looked at the portrait photograph taken seventeen months before. Sparse hair, slightly sunken cheeks. It was an acceptable likeness, he looked like a German scientist who hadn't eaten well for a long time. The American nodded and handed him the travel note stamped by the Control Commission. Magnus read the correct German, on orders of Military Government you are to report with your family and baggage as much as you can carry tomorrow noon at 1300 hours (Friday, 22 June 1945) at the town square in Bitterfeld. There is no need to bring winter clothing. Easily carried possessions, such as family documents, jewelry, and the like should be taken along. You will be transported by motor vehicle to the nearest airfield. From there you will travel on to the West. Please tell the bearer of this letter how large your family is she saw reading over his shoulder. So they would all go, another flying leap, gather up your skirts run and jump again. Her father was at the airfield fence the next day, she pressed on him all the money they had and the key to the flat. She said perhaps later but he shook his head, I'll stay with my friend here, nodded to the dog at his side, after all we know each other's stories, don’t we Oscar?"

An airplane crawled over with its nose up and tail swinging on its castor wheel. A group of departees went across the tarmac, their coats winged out in the breeze. Most of them already had the packed suitcase habit, some of them from ten years before, so it wasn't new this suitcase thing. They joshed each other at the baggage hold on the criteria for choosing the contents of their one suitcase. After they'd mined out the schoolboy rush of laughter the hunger lines showed as they climbed thru the oval door into the DC3. Seated, they pillowed their heads as best they could on the vibrating aluminum as it rushed up into the air, towards the New World.

At Fort Bliss, Texas, Uwë was still looking around for Red Indians. It was all fresh and neat but some rushed decisions had been taken about who came over as a wife, there were some very hot numbers who'd copped a ticket but couldn't play the game, never found the right social colors and made their scientist husbands uncomfortable and vulnerable.

The men claimed exclusive days at the swimming pool to relax with their sex and once they got that they days they divided into sun seekers and shade seekers. The leading men, Debus, Von Braun, sat right at the edge of the pool and dangled their feet in the water, out front of the skinny men on the bench behind.

Uwë moved easily enough on all of this thin ice, a light smile let pass by most stuff that might have snagged on a smaller mind. On women's days at the pool she lay back on the airbed and tipped up the crazy mexican straw hat someone sold them at the gate, listened out for the sound of Otto and Ursula doing American language in the pool. And had an mmmm an uh uh for Renata stretched beside her, her breasts uncupped and white, her narrow shanks already tanning talking out the wound she'd received from the man she'd married, she admitted, just to get out.

It took some time before the scientists got permission to move around America. Uwë and Magnus parked the kids on Renata and teamed up with Debus to buy a 1938 V8 Pilot. They straightened the works, loaded it with spare tires and water and set off north westwards with a check list: bears, Red Indians, cacti, waterholes. Not allowed to drive they had a Sergeant who took his cap off when behind the wheel to make it less obvious. After bumping a hundred miles they began to call him Henry.

Henry set his face to calm while his passengers chattered happily in German as marvels rotated past from Silver City to Baldy Peak. Henry had enough German for travelers needs so they got on fine. Ritual silence was observed when the Ford swirled by a striped pajama gang sledging hard core to dry span a gulch. Uwë looked the other way, here the work gangs were Negro, what did that mean? Magnus broke the silence asking Henry German you got how?

Henry replied he was a quick study and he'd been hearing fritzschpeil since the afternoon of 11 September 1944 when he crossed l'Our river from Luxembourg, first American military unit onto German soil. Tread it down. He’d seen some of their fast metalwork, up there on that coast, Magnus said o really so he opened up, he'd had some dealings with Canadians up there, truck load of iron frame bunk beds, signed into their Sergeants Mess.

They were all out on exercise so he slipped his friendly feeling to the gray head wiping glasses behind the bar. He was going at it two handed with a towel. Big glasses bit more than a pint. When he'd finished the glasses and run a rag over the jars of eggs in vinegar he started sweeping between the tables. Henry called him over and asked if there were any sights round there. The gray head looked at him, half a smile, what was it, girls? You never knew with the Americans sometimes they were as pure as choirboys and then you'd get a high tailed skunk. He leant the brush against the bar counter and beckoned. Henry slid round the end of the boxed-in staircase that rose behind the bar and thru a door to the bomb pocked parade ground at the back. Across a waste of scudding paper was a squat building with a heavy, almost Roman, concrete entranceway, wide and low. Henry looked back over to Magnus and said the guy was called Anselm and that he gave him a cigar and followed him.

Steps led down, chiseled out of the rock, damp rose up to meet you and the light was gloomy green. The gray head stopped and flicked a switch and a string of low wattage bulbs came to life. Henry said at some point, he remembered, they went past an opening on the left and he saw through it two rows of women, seated at a table peeling onions. Anselm saw him looking and said pokel I guess he meant pickle, said Henry,

... they were dressed in gray and working in absolute silence, they're in my dreams, I'm being what’s that word? Dandled

Henry wondered at himself for letting go like this. Was it because the two men were scientists? He couldn't see Uwë in the mirror. Henry had switched to American. It was what these people should be learning. Marcus said,

Dandled?

You know like you do with a young child, you're kind of all over it skin to skin jumping it on your knees, rubbing on the tribal marker

The two men looked at each other, Uwë said,

Auf den Knien schaukeln

Ah so, knees…

And then, these gray women...?

Yes, in my dreams they dandle me

Well go on Henry, what did you see after that?

He said they’d came out of the stairway at last, almost giddy from the turns, into a great hall, black holes, smashed up tables, girders bent and twisted. On the walls the scars of partitions, cubicles, black stenciled notices, propaganda you might say. It kinda got to him, whoever they were, he wanted to say well at least they had a go.

Debus strong face showed not a flicker, he had drawn the short straw and not flinched, sooner that than the Russian Front and imagine, here he was bowling up into crazy Nevada. He remembered perfectly well the great smashed place Henry talked about, lit only by a circular, unglazed opening far far above. Debus had felt the reproach of earnest men who asked why hadn't they flighted their rockets East against the military rather than West against civilians. If any of those black breeches ghosts came back deaths heads wagging loose Debus could tell them, bowling now to Nevada, tell them that their greatest fruit ripened, their greatest fiction came true, the arrow that pointed to the future - the rocket, the Redstone, the Rotstein, god-daughter of the one who'd blooded his nose on London and Antwerp was safe and growing each day like Flipper the dolphin who one day will do tricks on tv, growing at the same pace as the sturdy children flipping their foreign names Ziggy its short for in the white light of New Mexico.

White light, White Sands and blue sandals, and that day in 1947 when a test firing lost control and there was nothing they could do but wait. The test piece hit the graveyard at Juarez and there was a for real black and white skull and crossbones day of the dead and scrabbling for the fragments of metal, or was it bone? Fiesta! Mexacholic!

The nerve of those Mexicans, made it all up those natural businessmen, the pitter patter of expensive alloy found brothers in sin out in the churned up messy blur of the graveyard and the locals perjured fifteen tons of relic out of a total Redstone of four ton, and they had the hamburger stands going by the time the White Sands people had got thru the border town snarl ups (despite the minimal formalities) into Mexico proper.

Henry was loosening up. At rest stops he went to fetch his suggested menu while they sat out on the grass if there was any or perhaps it would be fairer to say the men would squat on a low brick wall while Uwë stood smoking with her left hand cupped under her right elbow and the cigarette swaying in front of her mouth. They preferred to picnic outside where their loud German didn't attract so much attention, over food they found it difficult to speak American, it just didn't go down so well. At Alberquque they had an encounter. Henry said,

Look out for a big sign Casa Grand Motel

The cut out castle with the underswung arrow loomed up,

There it is

Uh-uh

They rolled into a mish mash of straw hats patent leather hair and shoes, in the parking lot. Melons splitting pink with black pips racked up on shaded tables, big tables, the moan of steers in a truck, pink nosed ancient Cadillacs and a man standing on his head against a wall. Henry braked the Pilot. The man's colorful shirt flopped down and Uwë watched the muscles of his diaphragm do their thing. He came out of his headstand into a finger snapping roll and the country people picked it up with a hand-clapping and fought their guitars into line for a fast fingered serenade, one sharp booted foot forward and pants tight from the knee up and a big fleshy mama shouting,

Yo tengo amigo da bomba

The upside down man righted himself and his big leery face reached into the car,

You have to show the bladder who is master

Uwë and Magnus looked at each other, had they missed something?