Brother and Sister Read Online Free Page B

“Encouraged?”
     
    “That’s all, Dane,” said the colonel.
     
    Paul felt bitterness rising in him like vomit. “You people really stick together, don’t you?” he said.
     
    “Watch yourself, Dane,” said the colonel. “You keep your nose clean, keep a clean record -- you can still make Airman First next time around.”
     
    “You can keep Airman First,” Paul told him, and that was the end of it.
     
    But it had been the same way then as it was now. He’d moved, he’d acted, he’d been in motion, but it had taken weeks before he’d been able to believe that any of it was really happening. A couple of times, after he’d moved back to the base, he’d almost taken the bus into town after work, just as though he still lived there with Ingrid.
     
    It was the same way now. His mother and father were dead. The Red Cross gentleman had told him that, and the Air Force had confirmed it by cutting emergency leave orders, putting him on this plane and sending him home.
     
    That was real. If nothing else in all the world, at least that one fact was real, the fact that he was going home.
     
    He’d gone away from home only once in his life, and that was to serve his time with the Air Force. Once in his life he’d left home and he’d married a whore. Once in his life he’d ventured away from home, and they’d denied him his well-earned promotion because he hadn’t let an officer finish his business atop Paul’s wife. Once in his life he’d been away from home and, while he’d been gone, his mother and father had died.
     
    He was never going to leave home again.
     
    He sat staring out the plane window, not seeing drifting cloud mists and the countryside far below -- they were over France now -- his mind busy with images of own home. Outside, the gray-blue painted clapboard, the porch across the front, the porch floor he’d painted a deck gray, the porch swing, the stoop, the trellises on either side, one of them loose. When he was a kid he used to pry that one away and crawl in on the cool dirt beneath, the porch floor inches above his head. He had liked to go there when he wanted to be alone, sometimes to play with soldiers or sometimes to lick his wounds when he’d lost a fight or been paddled by his mother.
     
    He could see the house inside as well. The living room, with the cream and gold wallpaper in vertical stripes. The long sofa and the two armchairs, all three pieces covered in the same dark green upholstery. The Oriental rug made in Brooklyn. The painting of Mary coming back after the Crucifixion -- The Return From Golgotha -- hanging over the sofa..
     
    The dining room, with the table where they ate, using the good china and the special silver, but only at Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. And the small table with the phone and phone book on it.
     
    The kitchen, always bright and always hot, with the refrigerator door that squeaked, so nobody could steal a midnight snack without being heard by Mom. And the bedrooms upstairs -- he could see the color of the bedspreads, smell the faint smell of talcum that always pervaded the hall near the bathroom, because there was always somebody taking a bath and it was usually Angie. And the attic stairs where, his mother told him, he once had had an imaginary playmate, when he was maybe two or three years old.
     
    He could see the house, the people in it -- his father, his mother and his kid sister -- and he couldn’t wait to get back to them, because it was home and he was never going to leave again. Away from home it was cold and full of knives. He was never going to leave again. He was going to stay there. It would be the same again--
     
    It wouldn’t be the same.
     
    His parents were dead.
     
    The talcum smelled like a funeral parlor, the bedspreads were faded, the porch was rotting away, there was no one there any more.
     
    His parents were dead.
     
    All at once it was real, and he sat forward in the seat as though he’d been punched in