A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards by Ann Bauer

Author:Ann Bauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S and S
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In May of 1953, Mickey was told he would be sent home by year’s end. His first-year term was nearly up and when he went to Seoul to reenlist, he was given a physical and an eye exam.

“Good Lord, son,” the tiny army doctor said as he clicked new lenses into the black viewer. “You say you’ve been directing planes?”

Mickey nodded. His throat was dry, a feeling he remembered from every math test he’d ever taken. He was failing this exam, too; it was clear from the way the little man kept rifling through the back of his padded box, looking for thicker and thicker discs of glass.

“It’s your lucky day.” The doctor chuckled in a way Mickey knew was meant to be kind. “Not only do you get these…” He handed Mickey a worn pair of horn-rimmed glasses that were chipped in several places and looked as if they’d been worn by someone else—someone engaged in heavier combat. Mickey wondered what had happened to their previous owner. “But you also get discharge papers, effective in June. We can’t have you bringing in planes.” He clapped Mickey on the back and laughed again. “You go back stateside, I’m not sure you should even be driving.”

Mickey knew it was useless to explain: he didn’t use his eyes nearly so much as he “saw” the way the planes traveled inside his head. The pilots were safe, would be safe even if he were blindfolded. He opened his mouth to speak but closed it, remembering the nuns’ tight lips and twitching rulers when he insisted he had arrived at the right answer for an algebra problem without having any idea how he got there.

Over the next several weeks, Mickey’s walks continued but his pace slowed. Summer was coming and settling over the brown moonscape of the base with a heat that made him feel thick and immovable, as if he were caught under layers of dust. His body was adjusting and he had lost the wolflike toughness of his early days. Now, he lived in limbo, caught between dreams about planes crashing midair and sharp but strangely artificial memories of Minnesota—the dusty-smelling rafters of the church basement, the baseball field on a pale twilit night in May, snow swirling in cyclone clouds in the backyard on Christmas morning. All truths, but snapshots that appeared without people in them, like empty movie sets.

He lay on his cot, staring at the flat ceiling of the barracks, his body settling into the sagging springs. Mickey missed the sharp points of bone and had been avoiding mirrors, dodging the round face that stared back at him. He seemed to be turning back into himself, despite Korea. His body was resuming its Minnesota shape: bulky shoulders, a slightly sloping torso, rosy chipmunk cheeks. Little by little, the person he had become was disappearing and the one he’d fled was coming back.

Bo had noticed and begun calling Mickey “Fat Boy.” They still walked, but Mickey felt an emptiness between them now.

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