Machine Dreams

window across the polished bureau top. He was thirty-five, sinceSeptember on the transport train from the coast: that made Bess fifty-five the month before he’d come back. No wonder her hair had gone gray, a steely, peppered gray that was bluish and strong and sad. And the war. Keeping the hospital going with the rationing, Katie being sick, and Clayton hitting the bottle a little more. Katie was ten now; she’d just started school when Mitch left. Twister had been eight—Mitch remembered him as sociable, a chatterbox, always wanting to tag along. Now he was an independent, silent kid who went his own way, paid mind to his sickly sister only when he thought no one noticed.
    Wasn’t the first rheumatic fever in ’43, and then pneumonia, and she was out of school that next year? They’d all tried to make light of it in their letters. But Katie was almost an invalid, a kid invalid. Strange sometimes, how when she lay in bed in the dimmed child’s room he remembered, sheets pulled up to her shoulders, she looked so much like the smaller girl he’d left—maybe even younger, her features more frail because her face had lengthened and paled. When Mitch had first come back in the fall, she’d been up and back in school, though restricted by Bess’s regimen of naps and liver oils and hot soaks. But the winter had been long and now Bess would take her out of school for the rest of March, waiting for warmer weather. They’d told her last night; must be why she’d cried and hadn’t slept.
    It was good he’d come home. This thing with Katie had about driven them crazy. Wasn’t like they were a young couple; Clayton must be sixty. Nearly four years Mitch had been gone, and they’d all got old. Four years. He sat up on the edge of the high bed and felt for his slippers. Jesus, what a dream he’d had. He hardly ever thought of the bad things, although he thought of the men, Warrenholtz and Strauss and Wilson, and the base camp, alien the two years in New Guinea but now more familiar in memory than this house he slept in. As though he went back to it every night—the thatch-roofed buildings and steamy air, the scrap heaps and tin shacks of the motor pool—looking at every detail but seeming just to live there as before, complaining with the rest of them, sweating in the grime of it and looking up to watch the slate sea while the natives touched the machines with their palms. They’d taken them out to open beach to teach them to drive the dozers andtrucks, and the black men had touched the machines hand-overhand, seeming to measure them as horses are measured, then touched all the gears and pedals, saying Papuan words for the parts. The enlisted men had laughed openly at such reverence, laughing more at themselves than at anyone since the machines were serious jokes, most of them built and repaired with scrap, metal welded in approximate versions of whatever parts broke down, the machines evolving further and further into jumbled mismatched puzzles that still worked. Worked and moved, groaned and rumbled according to some other logic of mechanics than what held in Cincinnati or Topeka or Wheeling.
    New Guinea trees flared straight to the sky and splayed their fronds; their shapes looked from the tents like intricate sprays held still by the humid night. The sea glared flatly and was warm in January and had no winter in it ever. Wind blew up hard before storms and the trees tossed their fronds all of a piece, like women throwing skirts over their heads, and the clouds boiled up as though poured out of a spigot, filled the whole flat horizon impossibly and completely and it was an angry show. He’d longed to see an oak tree, a big oak with layers of limbs and summer leaves moving in wind with that deep rippling that is deep as the rippling of water. He’d wanted to see that, and women in dresses and stockings and heels. The palm trees were strangest at night because they were so big and womanly, tossing themselves and sighing, while the women in the camp wore fatigues and boots. 41st Engineers had arrived to construct the camp and the airstrips, and the native men had still worn grass skirts. The skirts rustled as the dark men walked, their flat-footed storkish gaits rustling the grass in a way that was stern rather than girlish. Later they wore long swatches of cloth held in at the waist with army belts, and their bracelets were strips of cloth wrapped round their forearms and tied. The natives were in the camp