Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille Read Free

heart.” I have never shot down an enemy plane.
    I am now deep behind the lines and my neck hurts from craning it left and right looking for the blue and silver Fokker D-2. Captain Thenault would not approve this mission, this search for a single ship, and I could not explain it to him had I asked.
    I rub frost off my chronometer. I must turn back soon. I have lost altitude to find warmer air. Now, at 8,000 feet, I see the country below has not been touched by the war. The fields are not pockmarked with craters. There are no black trench lines. A thread of smoke comes from a farmhouse chimney.
    Why did he wave to me?

    Brian came back from the bathroom wired and began a search and destroy circuit of the bar. He approached two women sitting at a table, borrowed a cigarette, talked to them for a few minutes, went to the next table, asked for a light and talked some more. He danced with one of them, moved to another table and started the cycle over again by borrowing a second cigarette. He calls them “pick-up sticks.” It took him forty minutes to hit on all the tables. I finished a pitcher by myself.
    A woman sat alone two tables over, her elbows on the table, holding an empty wine glass by its rim. I thought about sitting next to her and talking. She saw me looking; I turned away.
    Brian sat down heavily, his chest sweaty, dark stains down the sides of his shirt.
    “You’ve got to dance, Eddie. There’s witch wool all over the place, but it’s not going to flop down in front of you.”
    “I don’t see anybody I like.”
    “So you’re going to drink and feel sorry for yourself. I don’t want to pull you off the ladder again.”
    “If I see somebody, I’ll ask. I don’t know what I want just yet.”
    His fingers drummed the table. “What do you want?”
    He had me there. What did I want? I’d been thinking about it all night. I’d been thinking about it while I studied that Nieuport 17 suspended over the dancers. I’d been thinking about it while men and women moved around the room in separate little flight paths, never really touching each other. I’d been thinking about it while my hands cupped around the beer mug, while my butt flattened against the wooden stool, and while my feet went to sleep in my fashionable cowboy boots that were too tight.
    “How close have you ever been to somebody?” I asked.
    “Skin close.”
    “Is that all?”
    “You mean, have I been in love? Sure. I’ve been in love lots of times. I’m in love every night. Do you mean close like in let’s get married close? Yeah, I even did that once. I know all about close. How close do you want?” He dabbed a beer-soaked napkin on his chest.
    “Closer than all that. I want to be in a woman.” There, I had said it.
    He laughed. “That’s the best way.”
    “No! That’s not what I mean. It’s not sexual. Like, when I kiss a woman, I just kiss her outside. I’m not kissing her .” I paused. I didn’t know if I could tell him this. How would he take it? “I want our lips to touch and . . .”
    “What?”
    Maybe if I rushed it out it wouldn’t sound so crazy. “I want our lips to meld together. I want to push our faces into each other, have our skin melt and flow and mix so that we’re one head, and I want to feel each molecule swapping electrons inside so there’s no telling who is who.
    “I want to fill her up, to be smoke and seep inside her skin so that my smoke legs step into her legs, and my smoke belly presses against the inside of her belly, and my smoke arms slide all the way down the inside of her arms until my fingers fill her fingers like a glove.” Brian moved his stool back a few inches from the table.
    “And at the same time I want her to be filling me up. I want her to pry off the top of my head and pour herself inside of me, blood and guts and living liquid bone so I can feel her sloshing around behind my eyes, pushing herself into my tongue, running down the inside of my throat. I want to feel her