The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [134]
Rather than demonstrating that there wasn’t much problem with his memory, as far as the study went, which would put him in the position of admitting he’d only been pretending not to remember, he told her instead about the time in his life he remembered best, which was being in the Army Air Corps during the war, stationed in England and then Italy and occupied France. He’d flown the P-47 Thunderbolt, a single-engine plane that looked like a milk bottle. Jugs, people called them. He and his fellow fighter pilots went on bombing missions, blowing up aircraft, railroad tracks, bridges, truck depots. He’d once taken out a Messerschmitt 262, a Swallow, one of the world’s first jet-powered fighter/bombers. Those things were bad, bad news for the Allies, he told Marylou. How come? she asked. Because, he said, the Swallow could’ve won air supremacy back for the Germans if they’d come on the scene earlier or if the war went on much longer. So you’re saying that if it weren’t for you, we’d be speaking German today, she said, and actually gave him a little smile.
He told her how once he’d had to make a crash landing in a barley field near the Rhine, his plane so full of dust he’d thought at first it was smoke. He had no idea whether or not he was behind enemy lines, so he hid in a ditch until he saw a jeep coming down the road toward him, pulling a portable ack-ack, or antiaircraft outfit, two black men driving. When he saw the black men, he knew he was safe.
“Look. There’s one of your black men now!” Marylou said, pointing out Wilson’s window at a man sitting on the porch of a neat little house. “But now he’s old, just like you!”
Marylou, it had to be said, had a good sense of humor. Not everyone did. Lila hadn’t, but Verna Tommy had. Mary Conner he could barely remember. Wilson rolled down his electric window, and Buster popped up from the backseat and stuck his snout out into the wind. “Help, I’m being kidnapped!” Wilson yelled at the old man on the porch.
“Oh, quit,” Marylou told him.
The man on the porch lifted his hand in the all-purpose rural salute—kidnapping, apparently, being no big deal—and Marylou and Wilson and Buster left him behind.
They were now driving behind an open truck piled high with watermelons, which Marylou was tailgating. Wilson asked her (once, twice, seven times?) to please keep her distance; and Marylou, finally fed up, veered over onto the shoulder, jerked to a stop, and asked him if he’d like to drive.
He hadn’t been allowed to drive a car for a year, his license had expired and his family wouldn’t let him renew it because of his memory problems, but he didn’t tell Marylou any of that. He was pleased as could be to get behind the wheel of a car again, and thought briefly about hightailing it back to Tallahassee, now that he was in charge, but if he tried to do that, Marylou would raise a ruckus. So he took them the rest of the way through Alabama and then Mississippi and on up to Memphis, Marylou operating as navigator.
* * *
In Memphis, after stopping by Marylou’s house on Evergreen Street to drop off Buster and give the young people notice—he didn’t understand who the young people were and why they were living in her house if they weren’t related to her—Marylou got behind the wheel again, even though they were both tuckered out, and drove him to the Memphis University Hospitals and Clinics, which had been remodeled, but was, behind the face-lift, recognizable.
“This is Dr. Wilson Spriggs,” Marylou told the nurses behind a reception desk. “He’s a very distinguished doctor who began his career here at this clinic. He wants to revisit his old haunts. It’s very