My grandfather died yesterday. There is so much that I want to write about that. But before I do, I wanted to share the part of my thesis that he inspired. As I was re-reading it, I noticed some edits that needed to be made, but I'm not making them here; I'm almost ready to revisit the whole work to try to get together a book proposal, but for now, you're reading it as I submitted it when I was graduating. It's really long, so I've put it all after the jump (unless you're reading from the permalink, in which case, I apologize, but you're gonna have to scroll). (From Mosaico: Piecing Together El Paso, Texas, copyright 2006)
My grandfather’s legs are shiny and hairless. That’s the first thing I notice when I get to his house. He’s going through his weekly physical therapy treatments, and Kelvin, his therapist, has pushed Opa’s sweatpants almost to his knees so that he can massage and stretch my grandfather’s calf muscles.
It’s been eighteen months since Opa had a series of strokes, and I’ve taken enough cognitive neuroscience courses to know that the left-side neglect he’s suffering from won’t ever go away. When Kelvin asks my grandfather to bend his left knee and raise his leg, he holds his hands up to show that he won’t help. The average human leg weighs (?) pounds, but my grandfather grunts and groans and makes it seem like a thousand. There are tears in his eyes by his second repetition. “Only eight more,” Kelvin says.
The person I’m looking at is not the same person who taught me both how to drive and how to ski (and who skied himself until he was over eighty), who hiked with me and beat me on obstacle courses and at tennis. His legs were always moving, and unassisted. I know he doesn’t like to be seen as the man he is now, so I leave the room and run into my grandmother, who is coming from the opposite direction. She knew I was coming, but she acts pleasantly surprised to see me.
“How long have you been in town, honey?” she asks.
I lie because if she knows it’s been awhile, she’ll be angry.
She offers me a drink, which I decline because I brought a bottle of water with me, and food, which I decline because she’s a horrible cook. There is a reason my Aunt Mimi always called Oma the “Queen of Slop.”
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions while Opa’s still in therapy.” It’s a statement, not a question; asking her a question gives her the chance to say no.
“Of course, honey, but I’m not dressed.”
I was expecting that answer. My grandmother never appears in public without carefully styled hair, meticulously applied makeup, and well-selected jewelry. She is currently in a housecoat and slippers. It’s not the way she likes to be seen by the outside world. “It’s an audio recording, Oma. Nobody’s going to be able to tell what you’re wearing just by hearing your voice. And besides, nobody will hear this but me, anyway.”
I have been recording her for about a minute before she tells me to shut the recorder off; she says something embarrassing or honest, but I don’t remember what because it’s not on the recording. Oma knows that recordings can be incriminating. She loves attention, but only the positive kind. When things get too personal, she gets uncomfortable. The recording picks up with my voice, and I chat with her for some time before my grandfather’s therapy is over, but not about anything important. “Would you look at that? See how well he does?” My grandmother is looking down the hall, over my shoulder. I look behind me and know that she’s successfully deflected the attention from herself.
Opa is walking down the hall, supported by his walker and by Kelvin, but walking nonetheless. It is the first time I’ve seen him walk more than a step or two since his stroke and the only thing that keeps me from jumping up and running to hug him is the fear that I might knock him over if I do.
Kelvin helps Opa to his wheelchair and leaves the room. Opa looks so small, hunched over like that. I notice that his paralyzed left hand is secured to the armrest – to keep him from injuring his arm, I’m sure – but it upsets me. I remember the summer I was taking tennis lessons, and he took me out to practice, and encouraged me to use both hands if I was having trouble with my backhand, then showed me where to put each hand on the handle of my racquet. He couldn’t demonstrate that now. He looks old, and I realize that’s because he is; he’s afflicted by something that only happens to old people.
I am mostly here to ask Opa how his family got to El Paso, and to learn about his history designing airplanes during the Second World War. The way my dad always told it, Opa managed to avoid active duty by going to work for Douglas Aircraft. I remember my grandfather would talk about building planes, but never about flying in them. I also remember going to the War Eagles Air Museum, out in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, with my father and grandfather, and having them point out the plane Opa helped to design. I was more interested in the plane with the shark painted on its nose. Dad and Opa said the Japanese were afraid of sharks. I didn’t think that anybody would be afraid of a flying shark, but I’d seen enough movies to know that the bad guys could be silly about these things.
Opa keeps getting distracted when I ask him about the planes, and Oma isn’t helping. Talking about the past means acknowledging she’s got one, too. My grandmother hates that she has gotten old; it’s no secret. She remembers the war, so talking about it means admitting that her memory extends at least sixty years. “John,” she says, “tell her about Shep. John?” She’s trying to get my grandfather to focus on something that isn’t so closely related to her memories: if she wasn’t there, she can’t say how old she was. In many ways, my grandmother is like a child; she doesn’t realize that the choices she makes can hurt others, namely, me and my thesis. Opa tells me about the pet pageant in which he and his six brothers participated as boys; awards were given for “the biggest, the smallest, the ugliest, and the prettiest” pets, the latter of which Shep, my grandfather’s German shepherd, won. It isn’t the story I’d come for; I wonder if my grandfather even remembers that his life may have been saved by Douglas Aircraft.
It is getting late, and tomorrow I fly back to Philadelphia. I still haven’t packed. I leave my grandparents’ house with unanswered questions and leaving untold stories that I know are still somewhere inside my grandfather. But the mechanism with which to convey them has been lost to clogged carotid arteries and hemispheric neglect, or blocked by my grandmother’s innocent vanity. Only family lore is left intact. I will have to create what is absent.
“That’s right, sir,” says John.
“Here’s the deal, son. You’re graduating soon. Really soon.”
“Yes, sir,” says John.
“And you know about your forty-five days.” John nods. As a member of the Aggie Corps, he has about six weeks to enlist in the military or get assigned to it.
Beside him, John’s mother gasps. Two weeks ago, America got involved with the war in Europe and Japan.
“Oh, not to worry, ma’am. We want to make sure that he doesn’t go to Europe.”
“Mother,” says John, “maybe you’d better go get us all some iced tea.”
John’s mother, Marie, retreats into the kitchen, and John leads the officer to the parlor. “I’m a little confused, officer.”
“Well you see, son, whenever the number of a college man comes up, we do a little bit of research. To see if we could put him to good use. Safe use.”
“Are you planning on growing alfalfa in Italy?” John asks.
The officer laughs, but John didn’t really mean it as a joke. He had recently made the decision to switch from aeronautical engineering back to chemical engineering. “No, son. The army doesn’t need farmers. The farmers serve as infantry. But we hear that you’d been studying airplanes, John.” It is the first time the officer has called him anything but “son.”
“A little, yeah,” says John.
“And we hear that Texas A&M has one of the only aeronautical engineering programs in the country.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, John, Uncle Sam would like to make you a deal. Switch back to the airplanes. Do it for us, would you? Go back to studying airplanes and leave all this farm business behind?”
“But, sir, the farm –“
“Son, let’s put this another way. A way your family might not be so angry about. You keep learning about airplanes, you graduate from college, you help design fighters for the United States military, and we make sure that nobody’s breathing down your neck about officer’s school. You keep learning about farming, you start basic training in June and you’re in Europe by the Fourth of July. On the front lines.”
“How soon do you need to know?” asks John.
“Douglas wants to know by the end of the week. The mucky-mucks don’t work on New Year’s Day, you know.”
It is Wednesday. “I’ll ring you Friday morning, then.”
John is not the oldest son, but he is Marie’s favorite. He was born in a tent on the land that his father sharecropped. The family built the big adobe house when he was six and his father could afford to buy the land he’d farmed on. John’s father was a good farmer, and he did well for himself and his family. It looked as though all seven sons would make it to college, and John would be the first to graduate.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Marie was afraid that any of her sons, but especially John, would be drafted. John was in the Corps at school. She didn’t know of any way of avoiding seeing him off.
“You’ll do it,” she says to John as soon as the officer leaves.
“But the farm –“
“You have five younger brothers who aren’t in college yet. One of them can learn how to make fertilizer, too. After the war’s done.”
John still feels guilty. All good Catholic boys do, sometimes. “I’m supposed to help out. I promised daddy…”
“John, your daddy doesn’t want you dead in some ditch in Poland. I promise you that. He’ll understand if you keep studying airplanes. I’m sure you’ll remember enough chemistry to make fertilizer when you come back.”
John grabs his coat and kisses his mother on the forehead.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“I need to think,” John says. He walks out the door and puts on his jacket.
John likes taking long walks around the cotton fields. Sometimes, he’ll even run. In high school, the track team would occasionally practice distance running around John’s family’s farm. Father Mike, the track coach, said that if you could run in the newly-plowed fields without turning your ankle, you could run on a track no problem. The others on the team didn’t mind the furrows so much as the dust, but John grew up breathing it in. He was convinced he could tell how much sulfur was in the soil by the taste of it in his mouth when he inhaled it while running. That’s one of the reasons he decided to go back to studying chemical engineering. He could tell when the soil was best for cotton, when for pimentos, when for alfalfa, by something as simple as smell or taste, or by something as complicated as collecting a vial of soil and adding chemicals to it and then looking at the result under a microscope. John has spent hours at school, learning to refine these skills. He loves playing with chemicals in the A&M labs. He’d always said “anything but farming,” but now he’s thinking he wants to come back here and make the family farm the best farm in west Texas. Giving up such a newly-formed idea won’t be easy.
After a few minutes, John’s brother Paul joins him outside. “Have you been drafted?”
“No.”
“Are you going to the war?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Who am I going to watch airplanes with, if you go?”
“I’m hardly here now.”
“You’d be here less then.”
The two brothers are sitting on the fence on the far side of the field when a plane flies overhead. John recognizes that it belongs to the Army; sometimes, new pilots will fly over the Lower Valley when learning new maneuvers. The Army says it’s safer out there: fewer people on the ground if something happens. Nothing ever does. John has been curious about airplanes for as long as he’s known that they existed, and he’d gotten Paul interested, too. The plane is making slow circles around John’s family’s farm, but just as the sun begins to disappear, it makes a sharp turn to the right. The wings are almost perpendicular to the fence, and they block the sunset for a minute. On the ground, the plane’s shadow looks like a giant crucifix.
The two remain perched on the fence until the plane has disappeared completely and it’s nearly dark. They can hear their mother calling them in for dinner.
It’s June now, and John is spending his first day at Douglas Aircraft in California. “If you’re going to build airplanes,” his boss, Ray Camm, tells him, “you’re going to need to know how they fly. All the new guys start flight lessons next week. Including you. Don’t matter how good of an engineer you are if you can’t fly the damn things. Meantime, I need you to learn everything you can about wings.”
“Wings?” John asks.
“Stick ’em on the side of a plane to make it fly?” Ray says. “You’re going to start designing wings. Anyway, the library’s that way, the bathroom’s behind you, and the cafeteria’s downstairs. Find me if you need anything. And welcome to the safe side of war.”
John has acquired two hobbies in California: flying and skiing. He’s now licensed to fly fifteen different types of planes, and he skis the steepest slopes as if he’s been doing it all his life. He’d also been promoted to chief designer on the dive-bomber Douglas was manufacturing. The youngest chief designer Douglas ever had. Turned out Bill liked what John learned about wings, and he put him in charge of the whole plane. It’s a lot more work for no more money, but John’s just bought himself a secondhand pair of skis, and a very old car. On weekends, he’ll drive up to the mountains with some of the other young engineers, their skis strapped to the roof of the car.
Now that the designs are finished for the bomber, John is spending a lot of time in the factory. It’s different from the drafting rooms. The engineers are all well-educated men who had gotten out of service by going to work designing airplanes; they were all too smart or too old to fight. But the factory workers are all women, many of whom have husbands and sons in Europe or the Pacific. It makes John a little uncomfortable to be in that room, he feels he’s intruding. He had six brothers. No matter how much he learns about planes, he’s not going to understand women.
Sometimes, when John walks into the factory, one or two of the young women will smile at him. John tries to smile back. He knows them because they’re always at the club where he goes dancing on Thursday nights, but it’s easier to smile at them when he’s there. When he’s at work, it’s all business. He’s helping to win a war, and he doesn’t have time to wink at pretty girls.
The war has been over for five years by the time John Junior is born. John might have stayed in California after the war if his sister-in-law hadn’t introduced him to pretty Rosalie Blackwell while he was visiting El Paso one Christmas. But Rosalie’s family would never have let her marry a man who lived anywhere but El Paso even if he was doing quite well for himself on the coast. And so John moved back to the farm he’d never really thought he’d leave and married the girl that every man in El Paso County wanted to marry. Rosalie doesn’t like the farm, but John built a new stable for her horse and he takes her dancing in Mexico and does his best to show her that farm life isn’t all bad. And now with John Junior – Johnny – Rosalie has at least stopped complaining a little.
And finally, finally, John is using his chemistry again. His father, K.B., started up the Southwest Fertilizer and Chemical Company while John was on the coast, but it hadn’t been doing too well; John stepped in and now the company’s doing great, with John retooling all the chemical compounds. John even used company funds to buy retired Army biplanes and convert them to crop-dusters. He sold the crop-dusting part of the business, but he kept one of the planes for himself, a Stearman, identical to what he learned to fly on. It’s painted white and red and sometimes he’ll take Rosalie up in it and then fly upside down, just to scare her.
But John is on the road a lot. The business is growing and it seems like he’s in the car more than he’s home. Rosalie wants to have another baby, even though Johnny’s birth was hard on her, but John’s always tired or preoccupied. The other day, when he came home, Johnny tottered up to him and asked when he could fly in the plane again. John is tired, but he tells Johnny that they’ll fly soon, that someday, John will even teach him how to fly.
The Mexican-American Road Race runs two thousand miles from El Paso to Mexico’s border with Guatemala. John is taking time off from the company for the duration of the race to follow the it with Johnny and Rosalie. He is flying, slowly, over the racers. Johnny is on his lap, complaining that he can’t see.
John gently tilts the airplane toward his left. “I still can’t see, Daddy,” says Johnny.
John tilts the plane until it is at a forty-five degree angle to the ground and continues to fly along the race’s path. When the path curves, John repositions the plane so that the cars below remain visible. Rosalie is used to flying with John, and the constant change doesn’t bother her like it used to, but Johnny is looking a little green.
John removes his hat – a red felt fedora that he wears everywhere – and places it in front of Johnny’s face, all the while keeping the plane steady. The toddler vomits into it, then crawls into Rosalie’s lap and falls asleep.
“I’m sorry about your hat,” she says to him.
“Someday,” John tells her, “he’s going to be flying just like this, and his son will ruin his hat, too.”
Paul learned to fly when John bought all those planes to make crop-dusters. When he and John set up a farming enterprise in Pecos, Eagle Pass, El Paso, and Los Moches, Mexico, they decided it made sense to fly between their farms. A few years ago, John decided to sell Paul his interest in the farms. It was nothing personal, but what with three kids and Rosalie now looking to adopt, John just wanted to stay closer to home. And now, he’s moving away from the valley farm, all the way to the mountains, in El Paso proper. Rosalie finally got her way about farm living.
Paul’s mostly been in Pecos these days, but he’s flying to Los Moches today, and earlier he stopped in El Paso for fuel and lunch with his favorite brother. The flight to the Los Moches property isn’t a long one, and Paul’s done it a few dozen times, so John’s surprised that he hasn’t heard anything from him. He’d definitely asked Paul to call him and let him know he landed safely. Of course, Paul is forgetful, and he’d seemed busy, so John’s not too worried. He’s sure Paul will phone when the family is all sitting down to dinner. His timing has never been good.
The day after Paul left for Los Moches, John still hadn’t heard from him, and he started to worry. He called the Los Moches farm, but nobody there had seen him arrive. The airstrip didn’t have records of his landing, nor did they remember talking to an American man on the radio. It’s been six months since John had lunch with Paul when he gets a phone call from a man his parents had told him to hire to look for his brother.
“I’ve used every last resource. As far as these people are concerned, your brother never existed.”
John thanks the man, hangs up the phone, then dials the flight school in the valley to cancel Johnny’s first flight lesson. For the first time in twenty-five years, he is wishing he’d just gone into the Army like the other guys in the A&M Corps.
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