In front of  the concrete-block VFW lodge on the outskirts of town, across the highway where the line of old tall trees screened the dusty fields going away to the west, there stood or lay part of a Van Damme B-30 Pax bomber, one of the only twenty-three built at the plant that had lain just over the horizon and invisible from there.  The Pax was only a carcass C just the forward section, wingless and tail-less, like a great insect returning to its chrysalis stage from adulthood.  I mean to say it was a carcass then, in the time when (though signs warned us away) we used to play on it and in it:  examining the mysteries of its lock boxes and fixtures, taking the pilot=s seat and tapping the fogged dials, looking up to see sky through the Plexiglas windows.  Now all of it=s gone C plane, plant, fields, trees, and children. 

There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be taken C maybe it=s a scientific hypothesis C that the past cannot in fact exist.  Everything that can possibly exist exists only now.  Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:  but that=s different from saying that this former state actually somehow exists, in the form of Athe past@.   Even in our memory (so neuroscientists now say, who sit at screens and watch the neurons flare as thoughts excite them, brain-regions alight first here and then there like vast nighttime conurbations seen from the air) there is no past:  no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds.  Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but Apicture@ is wrong, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things:  things that once were, or may have been, the case. 

That B-30 was huge, even what was left of it.  The lost twin fin-and-rudder section C those two oval tails C had stood nearly forty feet high.   The hangars over where it had been assembled had been huge too, some of the biggest interior spaces constructed up to that time, millions of square feet, and flung up in what seemed like all in a day; Van Damme-Aero had designed and built them and the government agreed to buy them back when the war was over, though in the case of the B-30 hangars and shops there wasn=t a lot to buy back.  The wide low town, Henryville, spreading out to the west beyond the plant in straight rows of identical units to house the workers, went up just as fast, twenty or thirty units a day, about as solid as the forts and rocket ships we=d later make of cardboard cartons with sawed-out windows and doors.  The prairie winds shook them and rattled their contents like dice-boxes.  While it stood it was a wonder written about and photographed and marvelled at almost as much as the Titans of the Air that it was set up to serve; how clean, how new, how quickly raised, all those identical short streets paved in a week, all those identical bungalows, two units each, story of the woman who found her own each day by locating the ladder that someone had left propped against the side of it, until one day it was removed while she was working, and she came back and wandered a long time amid the numbered streets and lettered buildings trying to orient herself, looking in windows at other people=s stuff not much different from hers but not hers, unable to think of a question she might ask that would set her on the way toward her own, and the sun getting hot as it rose toward noon. 

When the sun at last set on any given day (there weren=t really weekends in Henryville or at Van Damme-Aero in those years) those on day shift wouild return in the Van Damme orange busses and be dropped off at various central nodes, like the community center and the drugstore, the only real store in Henryville; the workers would get off those busses loaded down with grocery bags from the Piggly Wiggly out on the bypass road.  By eight or nine the air outside the bungalows was cooler than the air inside, and people=d bring out kitchen chairs and armchairs to sit in on what some people called the lawn, the strip of pebbly dirt tufted with dry grass that ran between the street and the front door, and open a beer or a soda pop.   A Thursday night in May, when the day shift was coming back and people were calling out the open windows or turning their radios outward that way for the dancing starting up in the still-hot street, Rollo Stallworthy brought out his longneck banjo and began the lengthy process of tuning it up, each sour note stinging like a little pinprick.  Rollo, foreman in 3A, did this with great care and solemnity, same as he would finger your finished control panel wiring or panel seals.  Then almost when nobody was interested at all in looking or listneing to the process any longer he=d start hammering on, a skeletal rattling of notes, and sing out stuff that nobody=d ever heard of and that only seemed to resemble the cornball music you expected.  It was funnier because his expression never changed behind the round glasses and that brush moustache like Jeff=s in the funny papers. 

Teeny time-O

In the land of Pharaoh-Pharaoh

Come a rat trap pennywinkle hummadoodle rattlebugger

Sing song kitty wontcha time-ee-o!

Horace Offen, called AHorse@ for as long as anyone knew and for almost as long as he himself could remember, sat at the rackety kitchen table in the unit he shared with Rollo, his portable typewriter open and a piece of yellow copy paper rolled in it.  Horse almost never tried to write in the heat of the frypan bungalow but on the way back from the plant that day an idea had begun forming in his mind for a new piece, a new kind of piece in fact, not just another press release about how many million rivets, nor about how many kids drank how many gallons of milk in the nursery and how that milk came from the cows that ate the hay that grew in the fields that went for miles beyond the plant=s perimeters B the Ahouse-that-Jack-built@ gimmick, a good idea you could use only once, or once a year anyway C no this was something different, something beyond all that, something maybe anybody could think up (and Horse Offen knew that he tended to think up, all on his own, a lot of good ideas that a lot of other writers had already thought up) but which wouldn=t be easy to do really right, and was maybe beyond Horse=s powers C a thought which he found at once chest-gripping and heartening, like placing a bet bigger than you can afford to lose.  The first lines he had written on the yellow sheet looked brave and bold and just a little anxious, the same as he felt: 

I am Pax.  Pax is my name, and in Latin my name means Peace.  I am not named for the peace that I bring, but for the peace that I promise. 

The hysterical fan on the counter waved back and forth over Horse as he tapped the sweat-slippery keys of the typewriter.  There was nowhere, nowhere on earth he had been as hot as this plain.  Horse felt life-blood, precious ichor, extracted from his innermost being in the salty drops that tickled in his brows and in the back of his neck. 

In my belly I carry terrible weapons of war, and I will not stint to use them against the warmakers.  But with every bomb dropped there comes a hope:  that when the winds of war on which I fly are stilled at last, there will never again be death dropped from the air upon the cities, the homes, and the hopes of men and women. 

An awful pity took hold of Horse Offen, and a chill inhabited him.  What words could do; how rarely they did anything at all when he employed them!

Belly was wrong.  It made the bombs seem like turds.  In my body.  Outside, the nightly ruckus was kicking up, Horse could hear a radio or a gramaphone and Rollo=s ridiculous banjo, the most inexpressive musical instrument Man ever made.  People calling from lawn to lawn, bungalow to bungalow; laughter, noise.  The ten thousand men and women.  

These things I know, although truthfully I have not yet been born.  When at last I come forth from the huge hangars where ten thousand men and women work to bring me and the many others like me to birth, I will be the largest and most powerful weapon of the air ever built, the latest child of all the thinkers and planners, the daredevil pilots and the slide-rule engineers who made this nation=s air industry.  Yet I am a new generation.  The Wright Brothers first flight was not longer than my wingspan of TK feet.  When the men and women with their hands and their machines have given me wings, they will be so broad that a Flying Fortress will be able to nestle beneath each one, left and right. 

Was that true?  He thought it was.  It would need some checking.  When he=d first started writing press releases at Van Damme and submitting copy to the Aero, the editor (little more than a layout man in fact) had asked him what the hell this TK meant.  Horse had worked briefly for Luce (well he=d been tried out for a couple of months) and he sighed and smiled patiently.  TK means To Come.  Information or fact to come.  Why TK then?  Because that=s the way it=s done.  The way the big papers do it.  Time.  Life.  Fortune. 

The workers who build my growing body come from every state in this nation, from great cities and little towns.  They come from the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Smokies and the Catskills,  the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Green Mountains, the White.  They are men and women, Negro and white, American Indian, Czech, Pole, Italian, Anglo-Saxon.  They are old and young, big and small, smart and stupid 

Inspiration was leaking away, Horse was where he had been before, writing what he had written before.  But there was a place this was meant to reach, Horse felt sure, whether he could reach it or not.  That voice speaking.  Why did it seem to him female?  Just because of all those ships, those old frigates and galleons?  He had almost written to bring me and and my sisters to birth. 

They believe that they came here just because the work to be done is here, because they=ve got sons or husbands at the front, because they saw the ads in the papers and listened to the President=s appeal, because they want this war to be won, and most of all they want it over.  And that is my promise.  But this they do not know:  that it is I, Pax, who have drawn them to me.  Here to this place I drew them before I existed, I drew them to me so that I could come to be:  and as I grew, I reached out to more and more, to every corner of this nation, calling the ones who would rivet, and weld, and draft, and wire, and seal, and 

With a sudden cry Horse Offen yanked out from the typewriter the yellow sheet, which parted as he pulled, leaving a tail behind.   Oh God what crap.   What was he thinking.  Outside the fun was rolling, summoning Horse, offering a Lucky Lager, an It=s It icecream bar.  He closed the lid of the typewriter and locked it shut.

A few units down, Pancho Notzing entertained the Teenie Weenies, the ones anyway who hadn=t been moved to other shifts in the last reshuffle of forces, which somewhat broke up that old gang o=mine.  From an oddity of the settlement=s geometries, certain of the corner units, like Pancho=s, had a wider spread of ground around them, so Pancho=s was the place to wander to at day=s end.  Pancho=d piled up stones he=d found around the place left over from construction or just produced by the desert and brought home in his trunk, into a barbeucue grill, topped with a rack of steel that had served some function at the plant, airplane part, something, but that nobody seemed to need or to miss when Pancho appropriated it.  Mesquite and greasewood he pulled from out of the sand where it hid up to its eyebrows, and scavenged lumber from the building sites.  People brought their meat rations, steaks and chickens and the odd out-of-ration local rabbit, and Pancho slathered them with stuff he claimed he=d learned to make on a hacienda in Old California long ago.  Wearing his hat and an apron over his gabardine pants, he flipped and slathered and plopped the meats on platters and talked. 

AHappiness,@ he was saying to those waiting for meat.  Cooking and serving didn=t interfere with Pancho=s talk; nothing did.  AI am a person who knows people.  I think I can say that.  I=ve worked all my life.  I take man as he is:  a creature of his needs and his desires.  Nothing wrong with it C I take no exception to it, even if I could.  It seems to me that we have no business telling people what they should or shouldn=t want.  Happiness means meeting the desires a person has, not suppressing them.@

AHappiness is a plate of ribs, Mr.  Notzing,@ said a young fellow, raising his plate, sucking a greasy thumb.

AHave more,@ said Pancho, flipping a rack and watching the happy flames leap up.  ANobody in this present world has enough pleasure.  They feel it, too.  The poor man never gets enough, and he hates the rich man because the rich man supposedly gets his fill C but he doesn=t.  The rich are eternally afraid that the poor will take away what pleasures they have, they indulge themselves constantly but never feel filled C they feel guilty.  Meanwhile they hoard the wealth, more than they can ever spend or use or eat or drink.@

AAre you saying,@ Sal Mass chirped up, AMr.  Notzing sir, are you saying money don=t buy happiness?@

Pancho Notzing was immune to sarcasm.  Those close enough to hear her odd chirpy voice laughed.  Old Sal. 

Sal was the the only one of the Teenie Weenies (except for her husband, Al Mass) who really was one, and not only in the sense that she was an actual midget.  Ten years before she had played one of the little characters in a promotion for a canned food company; she=d flown, she said, ten thousand miles and into three hundred airports, dressed as the Lady of Fashion, her husband Al as the Cook, inviting people aboard the Ford trimotor they traveled in to look over the cans and packages of food, the Pepper Pickles, the Chipped Beef, the Hearts of Wheat, the Succotash, the Harvard Beets, the Soda Crackers.  Hand out free samples and little cookbooks.  She knew she disappointed the children who came, because the Teenie Weenies in the funny papers were really teeny, no larger than your thumb, and she and Al were small but not that small, and now and again she=d get a kick in the shins from some kid who wanted her to be at least smaller than he was, which is what all kids wanted she decided, though it didn=t explain why grownups came and clambered into their plane and made much of them.  What Sal wanted was to fly the Ford herself, but no amount of solicitude, or pleading, or showing off, or anything could get the pilot to do more than laugh at her.  Hell with him.  Al just read the paper and smoked his cigar and snorted.  Hey, Hon, here we are in the funnies C see, this week I try to figure out how to cut up a grape with a saw C Jesus.  A little later that food company fired them and from then on used a couple of kids instead for half the price.  That was 1941, and Sal and Al got hired by Van Damme-Aero to work on their A-21 Sword bombers, getting into the small spaces no one else could get into and rivetting.  And their selling job went on too, as Sal showed up again and again in company promotions, in the newsreels, in Horse Offen=s stories, wearing her bandanna and miniature overalls.  Al stayed just as mad as ever, midget mad C well, he was one of those angry midgets she knew so well, he had a right, she paid no attention.  When Van Damme started on the B-30 there was no need for midgets, the whole plane was open from end to end and no space too small for a normal-size worker.  But they accepted Sal and Al anyway when they applied to go out to the new plant, which Sal thought was white of them; Al just snorted. 

AWell,@ she said to Pancho, though not for him alone to hear, AI guess happiness is over-rated.  Not all it=s cracked up to be.@

AI=m no Utopian,@ Pancho said.  AI would never say so.  I am a modest fellow.  I know better than to demand too much of this world.  Nothing=s perfect.  You try to build the best world, the best society you can.  I am not a utopian but a bestopian.@

All this time the moon had been rising into the cloudless air over Henryville, nearly full and melon-shaped, huge and gold and then whiter and smaller as it climbed. The sounds of the banjo, the radio music, and the people=s voices moved the sluggish air block to block and reached into the bedroom where Prosper Olander sat on the edge of Vi Harbison=s hard bed with a Lucky Lager growing warm in his hand.  He was listening to Vi, who was having a hard time telling her story, which was in a way the story of how she happened to be here in bed with Prosper though married to someone else who was fighting the war far away; she=d stop often to say things like Oh hell I don=t know or I guess what can you do, you know? that meant she was giving up trying to explain herself and at the same time keeping the door open to going on, which in time after a sigh she did, only to stop again to question herself or the world or Fate.  Prosper listened C he did listen, because what she had to say was new to him, nothing he=d ever encountered before, not the soldier-boy part, the part that was proving harder for her  to say C but always as he sat his eyes went to the pair of new crutches now propped in the corner of the room.  Boy were they something beautiful, he couldn=tget enough of an eyeful, they leaned together there gleaming new, preening, proud.  They had been built at the plant just for him by machinists on their breaks, and they were, as far as Prosper knew, the only pair like them in the world: slim strong light aluminum tubes with aluminum cuffs covered in leather to go around his forearms and posts for his hands to grip, clad in hard rubber.  They weighed nothing.  His poor underarms, eternally chafed from the tops of the old wooden ones he had used for years C the parts of himself he felt most sorry for, while  everybody else felt sorry about his ski-jump spine and marionette=s legs C the skin there was healing already. 

AOh jeez if I don=t shut up I=m going to start crying,@ Vi said.

ADon=t cry,@ Prosper said.  ADon=t cry, Vi.@

These crutches.  Look at the slight dog-leg each one took in heading for the ground, each different for his different legs.  These crutches were, what, they were angelic, they were spiritual in their weightless strength and their quick helpful patience.  God bless them.  His own invention.