Fiction from The Literary Review

The Showman

Marc Bojanowski

The first kamikaze attack occurred on October 21st 1944 against the U.S.S. St. Louis in the Aegean Sea. Three weeks later, ten-year-old Mason Drove holed up in a dry corner of his parents’ Detroit basement to mourn the death of his older brother, Chancy.
           Word of Drove’s self-imposed seclusion coincided with the first snow- fall of 1944. Rumors quickly circulated claiming that his parents were allowing him to stay home from school; that they no longer subjected him to the Sunday and Wednesday baths we all suffered through; and that his diet now consisted solely of vanilla ice cream sandwiches. In less than a week Mason Drove had become the envy of every last boy in our neighborhood. His good fortune had each of us secretly wishing for our own brothers’ deaths.
           At school, Drove’s desk sat empty for three days before we decided to pay him a visit. We were certain he would receive us wearing his grief like the shiny medal other boys proudly sported after their own fathers or brothers had been killed in action. Instead, his distraught mother in- formed us that Mason had locked himself in the basement. Peering through a ground level window, we found him hunched over a makeshift workbench, sitting with his back to us, dressed in a burgundy sweater and matching slippers. On a phonograph set conveniently at an arm’s length away, he played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata continuously. But what- ever he toiled at down there, then, we didn’t know.
           For the few short hours before supper, we attempted to distract Drove by tapping on the frosted window pane. When that didn’t work, we took turns blasting it with snowballs. Finally, when it became obvious to us that he wasn’t going to budge, we entertained ourselves with coarse speculations. “Looks like he’s giving it a good tug,” one boy suggested.
           “He’s going for some kind of a record if he is,” another concluded.
           By Thursday evening a small crowd had assembled. Stacking ten younger boys on their bellies in the ice and snow, we built a pyramid before the window to keep watch. Doubled over the workbench, Drove continued to shrewdly conceal his labor from us, and by doing so, concealed his grief. His lack of concern for our audience was tantamount to our fascination with his lack of desire for our condolences, genuine or not. Working under a single light bulb, the defiance in Drove’s shoulders, complemented by the melancholy repetition of the sonata, masterfully enhan- ced his mystique. By Friday the crowd of neighborhood boys loitering in his front yard was substantial, the needle had worn a noticeable groove into the record, and at the end of the weekend the basement itself appeared to glow.
           When we arrived on Monday, however, the yard was empty, the basement dark and exhausted. We no longer heard the Beethoven. Several of us were debating who would bother Drove’s mother again when a group of older boys ran past, calling for us to follow. Two blocks down in Heilman Park, Drove stood at the center of a horde of neighborhood boys in his burgundy sweater and matching slippers. He wore no winter coat, but held a shiny metal breadbox close to his chest. Seconds before we arrived he had rolled the lid back, allowing snowflakes to light upon the wings of a hand painted, gunmetal gray Japanese Zero—easily the most intricately crafted, rubber band propelled, balsa wood model airplane any of us had ever seen.
           We pushed and shoved for a glimpse of its glossy black nose cone and silver propeller, the tips of which had been dipped in bright yellow paint. In the cockpit, complete with leather cap and fur collar, a faceless pilot sat beneath a glass shell webbed with painted metal braces. Done in fine brush strokes, Japanese characters decorated the vertical stabilizer, and from the bottom rear end, a copper colored hook protruded for carrier landings. A sweet mixture of paint and kerosene emanated from the breadbox, while the crimson insignia on the fuselage stung our eyes the way it did when we dared one another to stare at the sun.
           “Give him some room!” one boy cried.
           We shoved one another to create a narrow flight path. (None of us believed that Drove would risk something so beautiful. Secretly, we each wanted to be the one to catch it; secretly, we each wanted the Zero to splinter over the frozen ground.) At the head of the parallel columns, holding the belly of the Zero in the palm of his hand, Drove ceremoniously wound the rubber band. He then produced a silver Zippo lighter, from which, after a quick flick of his hand, he raised a quivering blue flame to the underside of one wing, and then to the other. The night before, Drove had soaked the model in a cookie sheet of kerosene so that after it crashed it would continue burning in the snow. Watching the Zero blossom with flames, we gasped in unison as Drove brought it behind his head before slinging it forward. Yellow and orange flames stretched over the fuselage like slender petals. Our heads turned in sequence as the Zero passed in a sibilant hush.
           That afternoon we showered Mason Drove with yells and mitten-muffled applause, lauding the young showman, his lips drawn back in a barely perceptible smile, his ears attuned perfectly to the pitch of that burning hiss, however lost it might have been beneath the din of our cheers.