Machine Dreams

watched her earnest face and hoped she really could draw a little. She was such a perfectionist, so finicky—she’d stop if she wasn’t good. He looked back at the billboard above them, at the blue script in quotes: I’VE BOOSTED BOMBERS AT 60 BELOW. He gazed with the kid at her gleaming, muscled horse and wished things were really like that.
    Katie was still reading. “Socony-Vacuum,” she said.
    He stood holding her in his arms while his eyes adjusted to the dark. Didn’t want to stumble holding her; gradually he saw the broad aisles and the crowded rows of metal plush-lined seats. Close against him she smelled of baby powder, the fragile scent specific in the shadows. She said softly, her mouth at his ear,
“Peter and the Wolf
— it’s just starting.”
    Mitch moved quietly down the far aisle: keep her near the heat registers and get out fast when the show was over. He settled her in the seat soundlessly, leaning to pull the blanket around her shoulders.
    “You keep this tight around you,” he told her. “No one can see you anyway.”
    She nodded, smiling, her face tinged blue and orange by a shifting of the bright images over them. Mitch sat back in his seat and looked at the theater, the walls painted to look scalloped with draped bunting, layers and layers, and stars up high near a border of blue. How many times had he been in this theater since he was a kid? Silhouettes in the rows of seats looked decorative, part of the painted finery, until they moved; then he noticed faces, their expressions obvious even in shadow. Women and children mostly: he might be the only man here. Funny how the women watched with real concentration, taken in like children. On the bright screen the cartoon kid led a band of animals through snow, deep snow, holding his worthless popgun and menaced by thick blue trees. A popgun, that was about right, and in the comforting crowded dark he shut his eyes and listened. Wind blew on the sound track, realistic wind, billowing; sounded like they’d recordedit in New Guinea, the most deserted place in the world, where no one recorded anything. Now he wished someone had, even movie people; he wished he could hear again exactly how things sounded. Have something more than those little snapshots, so small and colorless they were all alike, less real than the words he’d typed on the backs to say who was who. But that wind—he could hear it now, how it sounded by the sea: beach road wind. He knew that road and where it went; didn’t want to go there now, but he had to sit here in this dark and his mind kept falling into the wind: it’s all right, go ahead, think about it now. So he kept his eyes shut and heard the palm fronds moving; surf played under the wind like a pulse, and the pulse was Coco Mission. Lee side of the bay. All of it in focus now and they were driving, he and Warrenholtz, in the Jeep. Jap Zero shot into the sea the night before and they drove out to look at it, thinking they’d peel down and take a swim. Motor pool in the morning heat was a caldron of still air, smells of axle grease and gasoline.
    Driving along the coast road, Mitch listened closely to the engine, rebuilt just the day before; listened so hard what he looked at was barely seen. Instead he heard the steady growl and occasional miss of the motor and felt the prod of his pistol butt. Shoulder holster a little tight, so the gun pressed the pit of his arm. Rumble of the engine a half-tone off and the timing spotty; he heard it and felt his own shaky gut, off the whole day like something was coming, some sick something that had his number. Warrenholtz had the tremors too, and they stopped halfway for him to shit in scrub bush back of the road, Mitch revving the motor to know exactly how the timing missed, how to put it right. He played the engine like music to put down his own cramps; if you ignored the pains the urge lessened. He’d told Warrenholtz that, but Warrenholtz wouldn’t believe it and said not to legislate anyone’s bowels, pull the hell over. Afterward they’d kept driving and the sea was flat, barely rippled. Parrots called from the palms, flew in front of the Jeep in dips and glides. Warrenholtz going on about the birds—he had two back at the camp he’d trained to eat from his hand. Mitch ragged on about why the hell a man would want parrots to feed when they were all over New Guinea, thick as rats, and Warrenholtz smiled and said nothing; and then theywere close enough to see