Strawberry Point

Strawberry Point
A Short Story by
Tony Killinger

The breeze must have been trapped in one of those old, red barns, Tim Banning thought to himself. Only the black walnut and elm trees that lined the dusty dirt road offered any shelter from the sun and the heat so he kept walking, slow and deliberate.

Up ahead of him he could hear the growling of an engine being started, but it didn’t start, it just growled and coughed occasionally. A couple of hundred yards later he came parallel to the driveway leading to an old house and an equally old barn surrounded by a couple of chicken coops and a machine shop. Half way down the driveway a pre-war Ford stoically stood its ground, planted in straight rows just like the emerging corn plants in the adjacent fields. A woman dismounted from the car, slammed the door and turned in a huff and retreated towards the old farmhouse.

“Can I be of any help?” Tim called after her. She stopped, turned and looked at him; not a kind look but not venomous, at least.

“You know anything about cars?” She half snarled at him.

“Not a damn thing,” Tim smiled. “How about you?”

He had already decided he would take a look, in spite of the snarl and the non-lethal look. He shifted his light load that consisted of a leather bomber jacket and an Army overnight bag to his left hand and started up the drive. The woman was handsome; a little on the plump side and probably had used up most of her thirties and wasn’t real happy about it.

Tim tossed his belongings under the shade of big box elder tree and walked towards the Ford. “Master Sergeant?” the woman asked.

“Ex Master Sergeant,” Tim smiled again. “After this khaki shirt has been washed a few more times I’m hoping the outline of those stripes will fade enough so that nobody will notice, or maybe by then I’ll be rich and be able to buy a new one.”

“Good luck with that one,” the woman said, almost breaking into a smile.

He fumbled with the latch but soon had the hood raised to its service position. The pungent odor of raw gasoline nearly bowled him over. “Well, we have gas, that’s for sure. Now, according to the laws of engineering and science, all we need is air and a spark.” Tim found the connecting rod to the accelerator and pumped it twice. Gas spurted out of a split in a rubber hose going into the carburetor. “Aha,” he chuckled, “it seems we have a small leak. If you can get me a sharp knife, a pair of pliers and if this hose isn’t too rotten and has a bit of slack left in it, we can get you to the next town, I’d hope.”

“You’re kidding!” The woman objected. “You can actually fix it? I thought strangers who come along and help only happens in novels.” This time she really did smile, a pretty smile, with white even teeth and dangerously red lipstick. “Don’t run off,” she said pointing her finger at him, “I’ll get the stuff and maybe I can dig up a cold beer too, if you’d drink one.”

“I could drink one, maybe,” Tim laughed.

It took less than ten minutes to cut off the ruptured end of the gas line and fit the new end onto the nipple using the pliers. The line was fairly taut however; Tim knew it could easily come loose on the rough gravel road. “You’re going to have to take it real easy and avoid any nasty bumps, but with luck it should get you where you’re going, if that isn’t somewhere across country.”

“I’m only going to Strawberry Point,” she smiled. “Hopefully they’ll be able to replace that hose at the Texaco station. Come sit down and drink your beer now, before it gets warm.”

What he had said about cars was the absolute truth, he didn’t know much about mechanics except for 50 caliber machine guns and that was a trade that was not in any great demand since the war ended a year ago. He felt pretty proud that he had been able to find and repair the problem, although just about anyone could have, had they taken the trouble to look. He grinned as he sat down against the broad trunk of the box elder tree.

“I’m Shirley Fulton,” she smiled again, offering her hand.

“Tim Banning,” Tim answered and he took her hand lightly. “This your place?” He said, gesturing over his shoulder towards the house.

“My husband’s and mine,” she said, the smile gone. “He was a Navy pilot, killed in ’42 at Midway. I’ve leased out the farm ground since Jim left, now I’m not sure what I will do with it. My father-in-law has offered to buy it from me; in fact I was just on my way to town to talk to him about it.”

“Sorry about your husband,” Tim said sincerely. “We’ve lost a lot of good men.”

“You’re a flyer too, aren’t you?” Shirley said, mysteriously.

“I didn’t fly ‘em,” Tim Smiled, “I was a tail gunner on bombers in Europe. Is it that apparent?”

Shirley smiled again, but it was a different smile. “Yes, it really is, if you know what to look for. You all have that distant, far off gaze, like you’ve seen the top of the clouds or the bottom of heaven; I’m not quite sure what you see up there.”

“No angels,” Tim chuckled. “A few devils on occasion, but mostly just a lot of sky where the sun is always shining or it’s dark all the way to the moon and back.”

“You’re fortunate to have seen it,” Shirley said wistfully. “Even if danger is the price you had to pay for the view. It must be so uncluttered up there; gives you time to think and not be distracted.”

“In a few more years air travel will be commonplace, everybody and their grandmother will be flying around up there and not giving it a second thought.” He drained the last of his beer.

“One more for the road?” Shirley asked.

“Yeah, if you’ll join me,” Tim replied. “I suppose that road won’t grow much longer in the time it takes to drink a beer.”

“Where you headed?” Shirley asked as she got up from her sitting position.

“California,” Tim replied with a sigh. “Hollywood, to be exact; where oranges grow in the middle of the street and the stars drive convertibles and wear sunglasses to make sure people recognize them.” He laughed a little.

“You’re going to be a movie star?” Shirley laughed. “You might have the looks for it, but all those old stars will be coming back from the war, just like you, and I assume they will want their old jobs back. You might have to wear that shirt for a while.”

Tim scowled. “No movies for me; but my brother-in-law has big plans to cut me in on some of his enterprises. I should be fine.”

“Really?” Shirley exclaimed. “Hold that thought while I get the beer; I want to hear all about this.”

She walked toward the house and disappeared onto the screened-in back porch. She was gone longer than it should have taken to fetch and open a couple of bottles of beer, but about five minutes later she was headed back to the tree with a beer in each hand. “I called Jim’s dad and told him I was held up. Why do today what I can put off until tomorrow? Widows have a hard time filling up days, this is a golden opportunity. Now, what about your brother-in-law?”

“Well,” Tim began, “he was a journeyman electrician in Chicago before the war. He wanted to be a marine but they found out he was 4-F and turned him down. He and my older sister moved to California and Harry went to work on movie sets, made pretty good money and got to know some pretty powerful people. A couple of years ago a group of them formed a corporation, bought up a bunch of orange groves and began building homes. One of his partners is a Saturday matinee idol cowboy by the name of Autry; ever hear of him?”

“Of course,” Shirley scoffed, “everybody knows Gene Autry and his wonder horse, Champion. What do you think we did for all those years while you guys were off at war? North-East Iowa isn’t a big cultural Mecca you know, but we get the latest cowboy films every week, regular as clockwork.”

They sat silently for a few moments; Shirley looking off into an undefined distance, Tim gathering in the silence, letting it settle onto his spirit, soothing, healing, washing away tiny bits of visions of bursting yellow, red and black shells and the sounds of screaming airplanes and burning bodies. The memories were already beginning to fade, but he knew they would never disappear completely.

“God, you can’t know how good it is to talk to someone,” Shirley finally said. “Thank goodness for the Methodist ladies, the Baptist ladies and the Catholic ladies that came to my rescue when Jim was killed, Lord knows I wouldn’t have made it without them,” and then she hesitated. “But, they knew me too well. There is always that slight hint of pity in their conversations, they can’t make it all better and they know it. So, they bring a covered dish of some old family favorite and we talk about ration cards and wonder if we can save up enough sugar to make peach preserves. I’m just glad it is all over with; I’ve had enough pity.”

“Not all the wounds were on the battlefields,” Tim spoke softly.

Finally Shirley shook her head; her hair bounced back and forth across her shoulders and she grinned. “You know what we ought to do?” She laughed.

“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” Tim said.

“There is a plate of cold fried chicken in the ice box and a couple of boiled potatoes. Why don’t I whip up a quick potato salad and we’ll take that and the chicken down to the river and have a picnic. I’ll dig up one of Jim’s swimming trunks, we’ll put your clothes in the washer, and later I’ll iron them and when you leave here you’ll be fresh as a daisy. Good idea?”

“It sounds wonderful,” Tim admitted. “You sure it isn’t too much trouble?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.” She looked at him quaintly for a moment. “You don’t seem the type to plunge headlong into real estate, even something that seems like a sure thing.”

“Oh, I’ve got my own plans too,” Tim admitted. “If they are serious about this new GI bill, I might try to get a law degree. Of course I could probably use it to help out Harry and my sister, but I’d be happier on my own, I think. You sort of forget how to be independent in the Army, but I’m anxious to feel that way again.”

“A loner, huh?” Shirley said as she extended her hand and offered to pull him up from his comfortable spot against the trunk of the big tree. “That’s why you’re trekking down a dusty road outside Strawberry Point Iowa instead of sitting in the lounge car of a westbound train or a bus full of fellow travelers.”

“I’ve already lived a lot longer than I thought I would,” Tim said as he stood erect again. “Time is less important than it once was; I’m in no great hurry.”

As fate would have it, the picnic by the river never happened. Inside the house Shirley tossed him a bathrobe that looked like it had been made from a flannel blanket and then she gathered his clothes on the screened in porch where she had a Maytag washer. She heated water on an electric kitchen range. Tim liked the way she moved. It was erotically strange; things moving and turning, totally unlike how a man’s body moved and something that had been totally absent from his memory in recent years.

As if to intercept his thinking, Shirley remarked casually on one of her trips through the kitchen, “how is it you avoided bringing home one of those busty British beauties?”

He laughed aloud. “They just didn’t have enough to go around,” he chuckled. “There are some shortages in a war you just can’t avoid. The Brits were there, we were there, some French, some Canadian, some Poles and a few other nationalities. The whole country was stuffed to the gills with soldiers. Of course, after D-Day they were all gone, except for the fliers. The P-51’s took care of the German Air Force in short order and our bombing missions became longer and more frequent, so in the end, I just didn’t have the time.”

Shirley smiled openly. “I’ll accept that,” she said.

“I suppose it has been pretty quiet for you too,” Tim asked, not knowing exactly why.

“Right after Pearle Harbor there was a mass exodus as guys enlisted; that is when Jim went in. The ones who were left were either too young or couldn’t qualify, and even the young ones made it in eventually. It was all so patriotic at first; all of us wives and young girlfriends waiting patiently at home.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t cry. “Later, some of the wives became widows and some of the waiting girlfriends went off to the factories in Dubuque and Cedar Rapids to make ammunition or sew silk parachutes. Everybody worked or farmed and wrote letters. That’s what we did; that was our life.”

By the time it was dark, Tim’s clothes were neatly stacked on the kitchen table. He took a cold shower in Shirley’s bathroom and then she shampooed his hair and rinsed it with rain water from a cistern outside the back door. They drank coffee in the cool evening and talked.

After a few minutes absence Shirley returned to the kitchen and announced, unceremoniously that she had made his bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He was tired. It was about 9:30 PM when he stretched and made an insincere attempt to say goodnight. Shirley only smiled. He found his way up the stairs and into the room with the open door. The bed was big and fluffy. An early rising bright moon filled the room with a dim light as it filtered through sheer curtains. He tossed the bathrobe into a nearby chair and crawled into the bed.

He laid there awake for some minutes, unable or unwilling to string thoughts together to form into anything meaningful. He thought he heard the shower running, but he couldn’t be sure. He thought he heard movement from downstairs, but he couldn’t be sure of that either. What he did know is that sleep was creeping up on him at an alarming rate, but perhaps that was just as well. He had no right to even entertain the thought that there might be something else.

Just as his eyes were closing for the second time there was the creak of boards on the stairs. He raised his head to see the eerie glow of a candle rising up, as though suspended in the darkness of the stairwell. It moved slowly towards his room and disappeared for a moment as it rounded the head of the steps. Moments later it reappeared at his open door. “Are you asleep?” Shirley’s voice whispered.

She hadn’t waited for an answer but came into the room and set the candle on a nearby dresser. The moonlight clearly outlined her, standing near the foot of the bed, clad in some thin gauzy material.

“Conversation hasn’t been the only thing I’ve missed,” she said, a coarse gravely quality to her voice that hadn’t been there before. “I’ve missed being looked at the way I’ve seen you look at me today.” She opened the gown and drew it over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. The moonlight danced on her naked skin while she stood motionless for what seemed to Tim to be an inordinate amount of time. “I’ve endured some metal wounds, but physically I’ve come through the war complete, if just a tad bit older.”

Tim couldn’t say a word. He slid over to the far side of the bed and turned down the sheet. Shirley slid in alongside of him and within moments he was lost to the scent of her cologne and the taste of her lips.

The old Ford purred like a kitten the couple of miles from the farmhouse to the junction with the paved highway. Shirley deposited him in front of a small shelter that had a sign on it that said, “Give a Serviceman a Ride”. Tim set his bag and the bomber jacket down then came around to the drivers’ side of the car. “You’re quite a woman, Shirley Fulton,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to come along?”

She laughed again, for perhaps the last time. “Get on with you, loner,” she said. I’ll be right here in Strawberry Point if you find you can’t live without me.” She grabbed him by the front of the freshly ironed khaki shirt and pulled him close and kissed him lightly.

A large truck topped the hill and sent out a short blast of his air horn. Tim waved, the truck slowed. When he stopped the driver stuck his head out of the window. “Headed west,” he hollered. “Hop in.”

He kissed her again. “Strawberry Point” she said softly, you won’t forget?”

“Never.” Tim replied.