the Japanese start suicide-bombing us in October. They know they’re gonna lose the war, so they decide to go down in glory. Take out as many of us as they can, by any means necessary. They just kept coming at us, Vivian. One day in October, there were fifty of them that came at us. Fifty kamikaze planes in one day. Can you imagine it?”
“No,” I said, “I cannot.”
“Our guys knocked them out of the air, one after another, but they sent more planes the next day. I knew it was just a matter of time before one of them would hit us. Everyone knew we were sitting ducks, not more than fifty miles off the coast of Japan, but our guys were so cavalier about it. Strutting around like it was nothing. And there was Tokyo Rose on the radio every night, telling the world that the Franklin was already sunk. That’s when I stopped sleeping. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Terrified, every minute. I’ve never slept right since then. Some of those kamikaze pilots, when they got shot down, we fished them out of the water as prisoners. One of those Japanese pilots, he was being marched across our flight deck to the brig, but then he broke away and ran right to the edge of the ship. Jumped off and killed himself, rather than be taken prisoner. Death with honor, right in front of me. I looked at his face as he was running to the edge, Vivian—and I swear to God, he didn’t look anything near as scared as I felt.”
I could feel Frank spinning back into the past now, hard and fast, and it wasn’t good. I needed to bring him back home—back to himself. Back to now.
“What happened today, Frank?” I asked. “What happened with Tom Denno in that courtroom today?”
Frank exhaled, but gripped the steering wheel even harder.
“He comes up to me, Vivian, right before I’m supposed to testify. Remembers me by name. Asks how I’m doing. Tells me about how he’s a lawyer now, where he lives on the Upper West Side, where he went to college, where his kids go to school. Gave me a speech about how well he’s done. He was one of the skeleton crew that sailed the Franklin back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard after the attack, you know, and I guess he never left New York after that. Still has that accent from right off the farm, though. But wearing a suit that probably costs more than my house. Then he looks me up and down in my uniform, and says, ‘A beat cop? That’s what naval officers become these days?’ Christ, Vivian, what am I supposed to say? I just nod. Then he asks me, ‘Do they even let you carry a gun?’ And I say something stupid, like, ‘Yeah, but I’ve never used it,’ and he says, ‘Well, you always were a soft apple, Twitchy,’ and he walks away.”
“He can go straight to hell,” I said. I felt my own fists balling up. A wave of rage overcame me so fiercely that the noise of it in my ears—a roar of rushing blood—was, for a moment, louder than the roar of the plane landing in front of us. I wanted to hunt down Tom Denno and slit his neck. How dare he? I also wanted to gather up Frank in my arms and rock him and comfort him—but I couldn’t, because the war had bunged up his mind and his body so badly that he couldn’t even be held in the arms of a woman who loved him.
It was all so vicious and it was all so wrong.
I thought of how Frank had once told me that—when he came up in the water after being blown off the ship—he emerged into a world that was completely on fire. Even the seawater around him was on fire, blanketed with burning fuel. And the engines of the stricken aircraft carrier were only fanning the flames. Burning the men in the water even more severely. Frank found that if he splashed hard, he could push the fire away and create a small spot in the Pacific that was not on fire. So that’s what he did for two hours—him, with burns over most of his body—until he was rescued. He just kept pushing the flames away, trying to keep one small area of his world free from the inferno. All these years later, I felt like he was