A Place We Knew Well Read online

  Squat, ropy-armed, with a steel-gray buzz cut and a petty officer’s swagger, Steve had a two-pack-a-day habit (Camels unfiltered) and, according to Avery’s daughter, Charlotte, “the face of a sad, old hound dog.” His real name was Ira Stephens, but shipmates called him Steve during the war and that’s what he had embroidered on the white name patch of his Texaco-green uniform. While Avery flew in B-29s over Japan, Steve had been a gunner’s mate at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Their widely differing views on warfare showed up in their chess play: Steve’s strategy was naval, full speed ahead to capture the center and continually attack, while Avery was more circumspect, deflecting from the outside then diving into a defensive weakness. “Backward into battle,” he called it, the tail-gunner’s mantra.

  Steve watched Avery pop the top on his RC Cola and study the game in progress without comment. Although they were both the same age, forty-two, Avery was a head taller, still airman-slim and, in Steve’s mind, solid as the day was long. Lately, however, he’d seen the tiredness puffing Avery’s eyes, the worry tugging at his lips, and couldn’t help but wonder…

  “What?” Avery asked, catching his stare.

  “Sleep much?”

  Avery shrugged him off.

  Steve bit into his bologna and cheese, took a swig of his cola, then pressed, “Everything okay on the home front?”

  Avery dropped his gaze to the board. It wasn’t his nature to complain. Besides, even though he considered Steve his best friend, he felt it would be disloyal to Sarah to say, My beautiful wife doesn’t sleep, hardly eats; she seems tied up in knots, constantly on edge, yet she can’t or won’t say why….

  Instead, Avery short-castled his king and said quietly, “Fine, everything’s fine.”

  Steve heard the hesitation, though it lasted only a fraction of a second. He was considering his next move when, suddenly, another thunderous three-ship flyover rattled the front windows and clanked the empties stacked next to the Coke cooler.

  “Laggin’ today!” he said, scowling.

  As quiet gradually returned, Avery chewed the inside of his cheek. Summer out at the base had been nuts with “large joint military exercises in the Caribbean,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. “Gettin’ ready to kick out Castro,” locals added cheerfully. But for the past two months, things had settled back down to normal with the usual flurry of evening takeoffs and just-past-sunset returns.

  A short while later, as Steve bent to light his after-lunch cigarette, a third flyover obliterated the flip and click of his navy Zippo.

  Avery checked his watch. They were spacing the takeoffs twelve minutes apart. He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and rolled his shoulders against the ball of tightness at the base of his neck.

  Thirteen minutes later, he did the math: Four flyovers meant eight long-range bombers plus four tankers were in the air—over half the 4047th Strategic Wing based out at McCoy.

  Normally, no more than a third of the wing was gone. Half the wing gone meant something was up. Something big.

  Avery shut his lunch pail and stood to stretch his legs. Had Khrushchev made good on his threat against Berlin? Recalling the Krazy Komrade’s latest rant—“Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”—he switched on the station radio for the top-of-the-hour news.

  At two o’clock, WABR reported that President Kennedy had left Washington for Chicago on “a three-day, seven-state campaign trip in support of upcoming midterm elections.” If this was an international crisis, Avery reasoned, surely the President would have stayed at the White House. Steve shelved the still-unfinished game and returned to the tune-up in his service bay.

  Avery walked out to ask the Holler Chevy delivery guy, “Since when did ‘one at the latest’ mean two oh eight?” He carried the stock boxes into his bay, popped the hood on Jimmy Cope’s ’61 Roman Red Impala SS (feared and revered locally as “Brutus”), and began the careful process of removing the old camshaft and installing the new one, plus lifters and triple valve springs.

  By three o’clock, four more flyovers meant the entire wing was in the air. In seventeen years here, that had never happened.

  “This is no exercise,” he told Steve. “More like a complete evacuation.”

  “Why? What now?” they wondered.

  A battered brown Ford coupe pulled through the pumps and parked beside the office. The driver, a young man in a white short-sleeved shirt, skinny black tie, and coffee-stained suit pants, wandered into the service bays.

  “Joe Riley,” he said, addressing both mechanics, “Orlando Sentinel, looking for Mr. Wes Avery?”

  “You found me,” Avery said, wiping his hands on a red work rag to offer the guy a shake.

  “Oh!” Riley blinked pale eyes as if he couldn’t believe his luck. His face spread into a delighted grin.

  The guy’s youth, his red-peppered freckles and rust-colored hair, made Avery think, Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, in the flesh. Resisting the urge to ask, Where’s Clark Kent? he said instead, “What can I do you for?”

  “Well, I was just at your house, interviewing Mrs. Avery about the big show on Sunday. You know, Civil Defense?”

  “Yup.” Preparations by the Civil Defense Committee of the Orlando Women’s Club had consumed Sarah’s every waking hour for weeks.

  “Got a peek inside your bomb shelter. Pretty nifty.”

  Avery shrugged. “Came with the new house. Fellow we bought from built it.”

  “Yeah, your wife said that. She also said…” Riley pulled a flip-top notebook out of his back pocket and thumbed through the pages. “Here it is….” His hushed tone oozed reverence. “You helped drop The Bomb on Japan?”

  “Not The Bomb…,” Avery said firmly. (No doubt, if asked about his service, Sarah had said, “My husband helped bomb Japan,” but that’s not what the reporter, or most folks, wanted to hear.) “ ’Bout every other kind of bomb you can think of, though. Thirty-seven missions, seven tons apiece—that’s pert’ near eighteen hundred tons of bombs-away from our crew alone. And there were hundreds more crews just like us.”

  “Oh…” Poor Riley flushed disappointment.

  Steve dropped the hood on the Dodge Polara in his service bay and tossed in, “This guy’s forgotten more about bombs than most experts know.”

  Avery shot him a back off look. It was a simple truth: Most people didn’t care about the real air war on Japan. You ever wonder, he might’ve asked, why it was Hiroshima got The Bomb? Ever think that, after that spring and summer of near-nightly firebombing by over a thousand Superforts, Hiroshima was one of the last cities still standing? Ever imagine the war was as good as won without The Bomb? No? I didn’t think so.

  “So…” The kid was obviously scrambling. His hoped-for scoop—EXCLUSIVE: INSIDE THE SHELTER OF THE MAN WHO DROPPED THE BOMB—was blown. Now what? “So…uhm…you thinkin’ that shelter of yours could withstand The Bomb?”

  “Which one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima…maybe. But the H-bomb, like that fifty-megaton monster the Soviets set off last spring? That’s four thousand times the yield of Hiroshima. Not a shelter on the planet could survive a direct hit from that one.”

  “That’s interesting.” Riley pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and scratched a note. “So…what’s the point of having a shelter then? Or Civil Defense even?”

  “Beats me,” Avery said and instantly regretted it. Irritation with the kid’s questions, and the subject of Civil Defense in general, had cracked his habitual reserve.

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Nope,” Avery said. The young reporter’s face fell. “But look here,” Avery added, “you need a quote, I’d go with the one from General Omar Bradley: ‘Only real defense against a nuclear war is to make sure it never starts.’ ”

  Riley scribbled furiously, then stopped. “Omar?” he asked, knitting red brows. “Was he one of ours?”


  Steve rolled his eyes and stalked off into the office to file his paperwork.

  Avery pretended patience. “You still have a reporter down there name of Tom Dunkin?”

  The kid nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  The gas bell rang; both turned to watch the shiny black Riviera brake beside the pumps. “You go ask Dunk if Omar Bradley was one of ours, okay? Now if you’ll excuse me…,” he said curtly and strode out to work.

  Around four, Steve was squaring away his service bay when Emilio Alvarado, the lanky Cuban teenager who would help Avery till closing, arrived.

  Emilio waved off his ride with a quick thanks and sprinted into the office. “Hey, Mr. A, how’s it goin’?” he asked, tossing his school books beneath the register. A sharp-looking kid who hustled around the station with an athlete’s ease, he made a beeline for Steve. “You hear the Twins released Naragon today?”

  Steve shrugged. “His age—guy’s better off coaching than catching. They’ll be fine without him.”

  Avery held up a flat palm to silence them. The radio was declaring a breaking update: “…large tropical storm off the Bahamas…upgraded to hurricane status.” Hurricane Ella was “gathering strength and headed northwest toward central Florida.”

  Avery swept a hand through his hair, then walked out of his bay, past the pumps, out from under the canopy to the curb.

  The air had turned heavy with humidity and storm smell. A stiffening wind was bullwhipping the fronds atop the station’s only palm tree. At the corner, he turned his back on the afternoon sun, shaded his eyes against the glare off the front windows, and stared east out Princeton Street, past the big packinghouse of DR. P. PHILLIPS, WORLD’S LARGEST CITRUS GROWER.

  A massive steel-gray anvil of clouds dwarfed the southeastern horizon—“rain-heads,” the old farmers called them—replete with hammering thunder, like distant cannonade, and the white metallic strikes of lightning.

  Obviously, the SAC base had advance warning of the storm, he decided. So they were diverting their new eleven-million-dollar-apiece aircraft, not to mention their powerful thermonuclear cargo, out of harm’s way, right?

  He gnawed his lower lip. Two years ago, they’d survived a glancing blow from Deadly Donna, the most damaging hurricane on record. But Sarah had been a nervous wreck. When the howling winds tore a giant limb off the old oak beside the house and dropped it within inches of Charlotte’s bedroom, Sarah had come unglued. It was a waking nightmare Avery would never forget: the crash of ripping wood, shattering glass, and his daughter’s screams; the shock of opening her door, seeing twigs and leaves plus razor-sharp glass shards all over her bed, glittering in her hair. Worse yet was Sarah’s volcanic fury—at the storm and “life in this godforsaken place! Isn’t it enough,” she’d raged, “we have to battle the blasted bugs, the infernal snakes, the alligators around here, but hurricanes…hurricanes, too?”

  “But, Mama, I’m okay,” Charlotte had reassured her in a small, pinched voice.

  “Yes, baby, and thank God for that!” Sarah cried, then collapsed beside the bed, a heap of raw, inconsolable sobbing.

  “Careful, Mama,” Charlotte had whispered, cutting anxious eyes toward Avery. “There’s glass.”

  Sarah’s meltdown had left him and Charlotte tenderfooting around her for weeks. He’d been shaken to the point of mentioning it to Mike Martell, the family doctor, after Rotary in the parking lot of Tony’s Italian.

  “Only a couple weeks since her surgery, right? Unfortunately,” Martell told him, “there’s a reason why hysterectomy and hysterical have the same Latin root. It’s a hard thing on a woman, losing her female parts, getting tossed into the change of life way sooner than expected. I’ll adjust her medication. But you,” he’d said with a finger tap on Avery’s chest, “you’ve got to give her a wide berth. And time. These things take time.”

  Within that wide berth, Sarah had insisted on moving out of the old neighborhood—where “every third person on the sidewalk is pushing a baby carriage,” she’d complained—to the fancy new split-level on the lake. She’d packed the place with all-new Danish modern furniture that looked, to him, like something out of The Jetsons; and they had a walk-in closet now—her two-thirds crammed with a wardrobe that would rival Jackie Kennedy’s—plus a stocked-to-the-gills, built-into-the-house bomb shelter. For a while, it had all seemed to make Sarah happy; though lately…And what would she do if another hurricane struck?

  Avery exhaled a small worried whistle. The ball of tightness at the back of his neck had grown heavy and hard. He hunched his shoulders against its weight. Wearily, he turned back toward the station when a sliver of light (bright metal sparked by the sinking sun) caught his eye in the middle distance. There it was again, just above Dr. Phillips’s rail-side water tower. He stepped to the curb to get a clearer view and cocked his ear toward the inbound rumble.

  Staring hard, he counted the number (three, six, twelve), the distinctive shape (needle nose, swept-back wings), and the descending trail formation of the fully loaded supersonic fighter squadron screaming into view. The concussion of sound—a dozen F-105 Thunderchiefs swooping down to pre-landing level—stopped thought altogether. Behind them in the distance came a dozen more.

  Car traffic on both sides of the busy intersection came to a screeching stop. Drivers opened their doors, craned their necks to follow the bright orange glow of the afterburners southwest toward McCoy’s twin runways. “Fighters in Orlando?” “Fighting what?” “Who?”

  Still at the curb, Avery folded his arms across his chest, tucked his hands into his now damp armpits. He looked up to study the fishnet of old and new contrails from the departing heavy bombers and arriving jets. When a sudden gust of wet, roaring wind struck his left cheek, he wheeled abruptly to consider the bigger-than-before mass of hurricane clouds advancing from the coast. Foreboding wrenched his chest. Beneath the heel of his right palm, he felt the pump of his heart awash with heat.

  —

  SARAH AVERY STEPPED THROUGH the dining room’s swinging door into the kitchen. “Hello, Avery residence, Mrs. Avery speaking.”

  “Sarah? Edith Murray.”

  Sarah sagged against the Frigidaire. She closed her eyes and pictured the caller’s sharply chiseled face.

  “Sorry I couldn’t make the interview with Jean Yothers. How’d it go?”

  “Miss Yothers couldn’t make it, either,” Sarah answered. “They sent a nice young man named Joe Riley.”

  “But I specifically requested Jean Yothers! Who’s this Riley fellow? I’ve never heard of him.”

  “He’s new, apparently.”

  “Good Lord, they sent us a nobody?”

  Sarah heard the annoyance in Edith’s inhale and imagined her long, blue-veined fingers holding her cigarette to thin, red lips, the hard sparkle of multiple diamonds, the twin funnels of smoke streaming out her nostrils. Sarah had joined the Women’s Club at the urging of her next-door neighbor Elsie Stout and, when presented with a list of committees, blindly signed up for Civil Defense. With their new shelter and all, it seemed a natural fit. “Oh, my dear,” Elsie said when she heard, “if only you’d asked me, I could’ve warned you off the Dragon Lady.”

  “Well,” Edith was saying, “tell me he got a photo of your Granny’s Pantry thing.”

  “Grandma’s Pantry, Edith. Yes, he did.” It had been Sarah’s suggestion to make “Grandma’s Pantry”—the federal government’s list “for proper family preparedness” of canned foods, medical supplies, and key items such as soap, blankets, buckets, flashlights, and a portable radio—part of the committee’s presentation at this Sunday’s first-ever Family Survival and Fallout Shelter Show.

  “Well, good. I’m sure I mentioned I play bridge with the publisher’s wife. I’ll call Martin Anderson myself and insist on front-page placement.”

  Two more days, Sarah thought. Two…more…days.

  Oh, Edith had seemed nice enough at first, promising that theirs was “important, potentially lifesaving wor
k,” bragging about her support among the area’s “movers and shakers,” even hinting at a potential invitation for the Averys to join the prestigious Orlando Country Club. Ironically, she’d reminded Sarah of her mother. Her voice had the same cultured, precise tone as Mama’s: polite, Old South aristocratic. But where Mama—who insisted manners were the true measure of one’s class—was always a firm hand in a velvet glove, Edith was nothing but a slave driver in a pillbox hat! And I’m the one with the word SAP blinking across my forehead in neon lights.

  Typical. How many times over how many years had she found herself in exactly this position? High-stepping in, holding up hope and good intentions like the flags of a color guard, only—inevitably, it seemed—to trip and fall and find herself facedown in a ditch spitting dirt while the rest of the world marched blithely by.

  “Now, let’s see…” Edith was no doubt scanning her endless to-do list. “…have you confirmed the Mininsons? What time are they due in Orlando?”

  Inviting Melvin and Maria Mininson—the Miami couple featured in LIFE magazine for spending their two-week honeymoon in a bomb shelter—was Edith’s Big Idea. She considered them “the stars of our show!”

  “Haven’t talked to her since Tuesday, but I know they’re planning to drive up tomorrow morning.”

  “Plans change, my dear. You should confirm the final details today, and also their room at the Langford Hotel.”

  “All right, Edith.”

  “Has the printer delivered your brochures yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay. I’ll make that call and the one to the Sentinel. You’ll confirm the Mininsons and the Langford?”

  “Yes, Edith.”

  “Good,” the old crow cawed and was gone.

  Sarah hung the receiver on its hook and went in search of Maria Mininson’s phone number. She’d stored it carefully, but where? Not in the stacks of file folders cluttering the dining room table; nowhere in the living room, of course. Had she carried it with her when she showed the shelter to the reporter? She crossed the hall and let herself into the middle bedroom, which—with its heavy metal door, twelve-inch reinforced-concrete walls, twin stacks of fold-up metal cots, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of supplies—was the family’s in-house safe room. She flipped on the overhead light and saw the folder where she’d set it atop the five-gallon jugs of drinking water.