Machine Dreams

The moon and stars are beautiful, people who wrote of these places must have gone out only at night and then let their imaginations run on. Bess, Reb wrote me that you are working too hard at the hospital again and that you may have had rheumatic fever when Katie had it. Quit working so much and take care. I still have the note you put in my bag when I left. I have read it many times and it always helps. I hear that the lights came on again in the States and that more gas will be had soon. One thing I know, no more of these places for me, when I come back it must be to stay. Am sending a pair of Filipino native shoes for Twister, a mesh bag for you, flight jacket for Clayton (if it fits) and two native armbands for Katie Sue—I washed them, clean them good before you handle them. Just now the evening shower is on us. Another month half gone, these months really roll around. It is cool—the evenings are lovely after the terrific heat of the day.
    Love to every one of you,
Mitch

MACHINE DREAMS
Mitch

1946
    T he smell was bad, horrible and terrible and full of death, he couldn’t think of a word to say what the smell was, it rose up underneath and around him and he turned to get away. Behind the smell someone kept crying, weeping like a child on and on as the smell broke in the heat, ten in the morning and hot, already hot as hell and the sky a seering bright blue mass over the dried rust red of the bodies. A twisted khaki of limbs and more he didn’t want to see clearly opened flat and mashed and rumpled, oh, the smell, like a deadness of shit and live things rotted, some gigantic fetid woman sick to death between her legs had bled out her limitless guts on this sandy field flattening to the green of Ora Bay. Nothing to do but go ahead, hot metal seat of the dozer against his hips, vibration of motor thrumming, and that kid still crying, some island kid, get a detail over there to keep those kids away, got to get pits dug and doze this mess. The smell blew against and over him; he felt the whole awkward dozer tilt, rolling on the ocean of the smell as on the slanted deckof a transport. Bad seas, it was a bad, bad sea, he looked down over the metal dozer track to his left and one of the bodies lay closeby, the rear of the trousers torn open, the small hips yellowish and mangled like the crushed halves of a peach. The shirt had caught fire and burned nearly off, the splayed arms above the head were sleeveless past the shoulder and one arm was a blackened stick with the hand still curled at the end. The hands, all small and delicate like the hands of big children, and the averted faces smooth and beardless. He tightened his mask and realized the dozer blade was already down, when had he lowered it? What the hell, he was losing his mind, he shoved the gear into forward as the smell assailed him, pushing, pushing back. He felt the give of the earth, just earth, had to think it was all just earth like at Wheeling, working on the Reeder road with Clayton. But the crying was louder and he couldn’t hear the motor of his own machine anymore, just the rush of a big wind and then distinctly, in the empty air, the discreet soft latching of a door, and footsteps on a wooden floor. He was falling and falling toward the quiet of those steps, the throbbing shift of the dozer still rattling in his hand, and he woke with his fist clinched beside his jaw. The footsteps continued past his door toward the kitchen at the back of the house, and when he opened his eyes he saw, very near, the round white face of the alarm clock, its black numbers afloat like fragile, meaningless shapes. Bess had been up with Katie Sue again; only those red shoes of hers made that quiet sound on the floor.
    Now she would be making coffee in the tin pot; yes, there was the rattle of the stove drawer where she kept the pans. He heard water running. Quietly, she would dispose of the bottle Clayton had drunk empty last night, easing it into the garbage where it made no sound against peels and meat scraps and leavings, never putting it in sight beside the pail and the empty cans, the glass jars washed compulsively before being saved or discarded. He could nearly see her, standing beside the sink in one of her seersucker housedresses and her red wool sweater, her long straight body, her back and shoulders erect as always but taking on now a slightly brittle aspect. How old was Bess? He lay motionless, figuring slowly, watching the cold March light fall from the