Roll The Bones

    Luck is a lady whose heart is as cold as a stone.  Bentley had been hit after their run had been completed.  His plane first divided into a myriad of jigsaw pieces, then burst into colorful fireworks before disappearing into a shroud of ashen mist.  Nothing had been heard over the intercom, no chute observed.  Unlucky Bentley, gone in the glare and smoke of an exploding camera flash.  But, as last night’s poker game could attest to, he never did have much good luck to spare.  Poor devil probably didn’t even know what hit him.  One minute thoughts of home, then oblivion.  Yes, flying was a lot like playing games of chance, you considered yourself quite well off if you finished the night with at least as much as you started it.
    Nigel Pirrip had again overbid, yet bluffed victory away from the Grim Reaper, successfully flying his twenty-fifth and final mission.  He reflected inwardly with the hint of a porpoise smile at the corners of his moustached mouth: ‘My luck held out again!  Now, home!’  Not just the relative safety of their airfield reposed under a friendly, benign azure sky, but home.  Comfortable shoes treading a moss-like carpet steering toward a warm kitchen light and the smell of a savory meal that hadn’t emerged congealed and tasteless from a tin can; hot showers and a snug, feather-mattressed bed.  No more cold and austere environs.  Back to civilian life with time and money and something, or better yet, someone to spend them on.
    The war would soon be over.  The comparative ease of tonight’s sortie vividly demonstrated that.  Hanging over the target for an eternity of roughly ten minutes, they had encountered no enemy fighters, pitifully few searchlights – a vain attempt to capture, like that of a child poking into a pond with a sharpened stick hoping to impale a ‘big one’ – and only token anti-aircraft fire.  No, the enemy were reduced to the military capacity equivalent of throwing rocks.  Things had gone quite splendidly until that unsettling lucky shot in the dark.
    “Four to Squadron Leader, over,” Nigel hesitantly radioed Lt. Burns.
    “Squadron Leader to Four, what’s on your mind, Pirrup?” Burns answered with fatigue in his voice.
    “Too bad about Bentley, hey?” Nigel asked trying to sound both forlorn and thoughtful.  “Born under a bad star, and what not,” he added offhandedly.
    After a pregnant silence, Burns retorted rather bluntly, “No.  Nothing like that at all.  It was just his time, I guess.  He was a good pilot, always prepared for any given situation.  There wasn’t a thing he or any of us could have done about what happened.  I just hope he was ready for the ultimate experience.”
    Another pilot then came over the speaker with some bit of personal knowledge about Bentley, but Nigel quickly tuned this out.  He had only started the conversation from a desire to hear another human voice.  Inside the claustrophobic interior of the cockpit, everything was bathed in an eerie greenish glow similar to sunlight passing through a paintglass window dominated by a spring, pastoral setting.  Dials rotated, gyrated, dipped or remained level.  Unseen, but preeminent to his senses were the twin engines of his Mosquito fighter, their muted roar an ambivalent comfort in this lonely atmosphere.  He gripped the stick slightly tighter, giving in to an unfounded fear that those steadily purring engines might suddenly go deathly quiet.  He avidly concentrated his attention equally between the inky darkness of the world outside his plane’s protective canopy and the artificial light of the monitors directly in front of him which visually indicated the vital signs of his aircraft.
    Beyond the glass, the night looked as dark as a lightless basement.  Occasionally, when the moon had burned itself through the carpet of cloud cover, the landscape below appeared in various shades and shapes of gray.  Treetops, hills and geometrically-shaped fields mixed intermittently with a rare, nearly straight line, most likely a road or stream.  Less frequent were the more overt marks of human occupation or activity: chimney smoke from a kitchen fire used to prepare a shared family meal, perhaps, or a lighted window suggesting a quiet den inhabited by a solitary figure reading a book or the day’s events outlined in a local newspaper.  In the endless vault of sky, Nigel imagined himself entombed inside the casket of his flying machine, suspended between the living earth and the deathly, dark ceiling of the stars.
    At first, he noticed the acrid smell of smoke indicating trouble only peripherally, then with shocking abruptness the instrument panel went blank.  On the feet of a stealthy black cat the ebony night stole into his cockpit, darkness, totally enveloping as when a match is quenched in a mine shaft.
    “What the devil…?” Nigel gasped, fighting to keep his voice from shattering like a cracked pane of glass.  A short in the system?  An overload?  These possible explanations flashed through his mind as he groped about for a flashlight.
    “Where is that bloody torch?  I specifically told that supply sergeant to put one in my flight bag!”
    Blindly pulling out one item after another – poker chips, an old, dog-earred romance novel, extra clothes and an unwrapped, half-eaten sandwich (pastrami and swiss cheese on a hard kaiser roll) – he had given up when his hand closed around the metal cylinder.  Keeping his right hand in a death grip upon the stick, he raised the light facing the panel and flicked the switch to ‘ON’ with his left thumb.  Nothing.  He shook it as he would a martini mixer.  From the empty sound and its lightness he guessed correctly that it contained no batteries.
    “Blast!  If you need something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself!  Wait ‘til I lay my hands on that incompetent twit!”
    His mind faltered, staggering like a blind man who has just dropped his walking stick.  He swiped sweat from his brow and eyes, took a deep breath, then grasped the throttle with both hands again as he searched his mind for a solution to his predicament.  Flight school had never been this complicated, he reflected.  Just the basics: rote memorizations of diagrams and schematics, pages of technical terms and descriptions, instructions given by his flying coach in that irritating monotonous, atonal voice of his.  God, what he would give to hear that voice now telling him how to correct this situation!  If he ever encountered a problem that he couldn’t scam his way out of, there was always the ever-reliable phone call from his father to the proper authority.
    Now it was just him, Nigel Pirrip, completely alone  in pitch-black and mortal silence.  Silence, because the engines had stopped.
    Simultaneously, he felt his stomach and the plane drop uncontrollably.  At first, his heart stalled momentarily like the motors of his craft, only to restart violently, driven by a surge of adrenaline.  Trip-hammering in his chest, the vibration rocked all of his senses.  His eyes bulged comically as he rapidly and randomly scanned the alternating views given through the window of the spinning, crippled plane.  With a dry, swollen tongue, tasting of sour tin, he endeavored to lick his whitening, razor-thin lips.  Panic danced with the last of his rationality.
    “I’ve got to keep the nose up,” he reprimanded himself.
    Adroitly, he alternately pulled back on the throttle and flipped switches in an attempt to restart the engines.  He felt numb, as if he were performing these tasks while either very drunk or in a surreal nightmare, his mind a constant high-pitched wail, resembling that of the wind buffeting his machine on its head-long fall to eternal earth.  All efforts were futile.  This aircraft, a coffin as he had thought of it only minutes before but now seemed like lifetimes ago, would soon transport him to a highly undignified death.
    Realizing this, he snapped to desperate action.  First, he reached for the latch release, preparing to eject the canopy to facilitate a jump.  Then, without thinking but acting out of instinct, he keyed his mike to issue an S.O.S. “May-Day, May-Day, May-Day.  This is Alpha Echo Four, position…”
    Where exactly was he?  Last location, heading, speed – all had vanished from his cognition just as the lights from the control panel.  Static came back to him from the radio.  Well, at least it was still working, but it wasn’t going to do him much good now.  Dazed, he glanced below to the featureless terrain one last time to get his bearings.  The canopy disappeared with a quick flick of his wrist, flying behind and away from him into the unknown.  He steadied the plane’s descent as best he could as he unsnapped the shoulder harness which kept him anchored to his flight seat.  With the caution of a tightrope walker, Nigel stepped onto and tip-toed upon the wing while checking to ensure his parachute was buckled securely.  He knew that he had lost crucial altitude, the distance between himself and the ground vaporizing with maddening speed.  Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to dive.  Death could not be cheated endlessly, he reasoned.  The Grim Reaper had finally called his hand, and he was holding aces and eights.
    Just then, as he contemplated the cruelty of fate, the plane spun severely enough to roll him off the wing.  Sliding off and away from the silver craft, his last glimpse of it was of the painted nose art that he had specially ordered just as all the egotistical American pilots usually did.  The illustration showed the figure of a high-roller, bent down to one knee as if having just thrown a pair of dice.  A wild, rapturous face blazed dominantly with three appropriate words bubbling from its hideously blood-colored lips: ROLL THE BONES!.
    “Jolly good!” Nigel spoke wordlessly as the wind tore the air out of him while he eagerly yanked the ripcord.  He descended as rapidly as an uncabled elevator car.  The ground rushed up to meet him, the artificial wind of his fall loudly rippled his flight suit.  He hoped and prayed that his fellow squadron mates had by now realized that he was no longer with them.  Perhaps they would circle back to look for him after having intercepted his partial radio message.  He surveyed the area below him to determine what conditions he might have to land in.  Visions of breaking his legs, or worse, his neck in a tree or on a rock or maybe being captured by the enemy to spend the duration of the war in some rat hole of a prison camp sparked in his mind’s eye.  Then he glanced at the view above him, craning his neck to examine the sky overhead.  It was then that Nigel Pirrip revisited the memories of his early life as they superimposed themselves on the blackness of the star-strewn sky.

    The morning had dawned bright and clean.  The sun, a completely ripened orange, hung over the dew-drenched grass the color of sparkling emeralds.  Cotton-ball clouds floated, widely dispersed, in a sky dominated by oyster shell pink and cornflower blue subsequently flowing from the given promise offered in the east.  Birds circled and sang, some lingered momentarily on tree limbs or telephone wires, curiously eyeing a ten-year old boy with sandy hair and dusty eyes purposely striding toward a wooden garage in the early stages of disrepair.
    “I know I saw it in here last fall,” the boy mumbled to himself.  “There it is!” He moved into the shadows of the back wall, and after pulling away a musty roll of tarp and two unusable storm windows – peeling paint and sharps of broken glass falling to the oil-stained dirt floor – a red-framed bicycle with flat tires and a missing seat emerged.  It had been abandoned by the butler’s son when he had gone off to school the year before.  “What a waste.  Well, you’re mine now!”
    During that morning, in the stuffiness of the shed with its smells of paint and petrol, Nigel reconstructed his new mount.  Finding the seat in a bushel basket along with other odds and ends, he reattached it with a mechanic’s aptitude after saddle-soaping its leather surface.  A foot-operated air pump quickly restored the serviceability of the nearly-new pneumatic tires.  Time, not defects, had slowly robbed this vehicle of its life.  Using an adjustable spanner, quietly liberated from the chauffeur’s toolbox, he dismantled the housing to gain access to the chain and gear assembly.  Oil and a thorough cleaning expertly finished the task.
    Lovingly polishing the frame with his shirttails for the lack of a clean rag, Nigel wheeled his new means of transportation into the noonday sun to gaze at his accomplishment.  The relatively cool air of late spring compared with that of the garage’s interior chilled his sweating skin to goose flesh.  A glint from the chrome handlebars shone over his face, but could not eclipse the radiant joy that glowed there.
    “Wait ‘til father sees what I’ve done,” he incanted in awe, but with genuine humility.  Not a boast, only a statement of faith.  A trust that expects to be rewarded.
    He mounted the bike to take it on its maiden voyage.  With an envious eye on the birds perched around the yard, Nigel closely viewed the dirt road with the other.  Both appeared to contemplate the advantages of the other, yet the boy had the means at hand to tip the balance in his favor.  Attempting to reach their height if not beyond, the boy peddled the bike to take-off speed.  The wind pushed back his hair and brought tears to his eyes.  Wings were an unnecessary fixture on this day, he knew that he could gain a place along side the birds with just his sheer might and will.
    Flying down the earthen trail with its untimely mudholes and treacherous rocks, he scanned the adjacent fields of wheat and barley with the belief that they were in motion while he remained stationary, statically manipulating his two-wheeler like a governor regulates an engine.  In this suspension of conscious apprehension, Nigel was unaware of the tree trunk awaiting him round the next bend.
    At first, he thought of merely flying over it, but he then realized that his notion of flight was only fantasy.  He spun the pedals backwards on the spindle.  No brakes! – the one and only flaw of his pre-flight preparations.  Well, the goal of his actions had been movement, not the cessation of motion.  He braced for impact.
    The initial impression upon his senses was the sound of the front tire impacting against the dead tree trunk: it reminded him of the time a bale of hay had crashed to the ground after a rotten rope had snapped near the pulley.  More surprising to him was the realization that his forward momentum hadn’t stalled after all as he sailed first over the top of the handlebars then the tree trunk.  The ground and sky exchanged places in the blink of an eye, then came the black and and the pain and the taste of blood as he collided with the hard-packed dirt of the road.
    After regaining his breath and dusting himself off, he reflected that a harder surface would have left him with at least some broken bones, so the scrapes and bruises he had received seemed insignificant by comparison.  But his focus did not linger on himself for long, he would recover (what a cheap price to pay for such an experience!).  He quickly fought through the fogginess dampening his senses to reach his mount to ascertain its damage.
    Aside from the bent front tire and the fork frame that supported it, he could see no other severe damage – other than the missing or malfunctioning brakes, that is.  He carefully picked it up and began wheeling it back home.  The birds circled and cawed.  They seemed to be chiding him for his misguided and arrogant assumption of easily-attained flight.  With blood seeping from his swollen nose and lips, Nigel had to laugh out loud at this.  “Maybe not today, but someday!” he called to them.  “You’ll see!”
    “Nigel!  Nigel Pirrip!  Where have you got to?” a banshee wail wafted to his unwelcoming ears.  “There you are!  I’ve been looking for you the better part of an hour.  I was worried sick!” his mother arrived in a cloud of perfume and the guise of an ostentatious socialite.
    “Mother!  Look at what I’ve done!  And all by myself!”
    Instead of focusing on the shiny red, however now somewhat unsightly bike, she gaped open-mouthed at his disheveled appearance.  “Oh my loving Mother Mary!  Just look at you!  And your clothes!” she shouted exasperatingly in the Irish brogue that always came out when she was excited.  “Don’t you know that we’re having the Maplethorps over for dinner?  I’ve been slaving in the kitchen all morning, and you plan on presenting yourself like this!  What will your father say?”
    Nigel concluded by the state of his mother’s dress and makeup, along with the fact that his parents employed two cooks, that the extent of her actions this morning did not surpass the likelihood of her picking out clothes for herself and his father, and her hovering omnipresently over the preparations for the meal.
    “But mother, I’ve never seen you cook.  And anyway, I told chef where I was going right after breakfast.  He gave me a coffee, too.  I’m growing up, and I think father will be thrilled when he sees this,” he motioned towards the bike once more with a grimy hand after wiping it on his trousers’ leg, smiling.
    With her face turning even redder, she resistantly turned a jealous eye on the bicycle and the threat it represented for the first time.  “Young man, the only other trip that contraption is going to take is to the rubbish heap.  Do you want to give your mother a stroke?” she finished, calling up her seemingly bottomless supply of contrived tears mixed with a shuddering voice, her hands two entangled wrestlers.
    “But, mother…”
    “Don’t ‘but mother’ me.  Now go clean yourself up and change into the clothes I have laid out for you.  I expect you to behave well in front of your father’s business partner and his wife.  I don’t want to hear another word about that…that infernal machine!”
    “Yes, mother,” he answered with his head down.  The joy of a few minutes before had vanished as quickly as her tears.  He knew better than to argue with her once she had assumed the role of martyr-in-waiting.  He trudged off, promising himself to broach the subject of the bike with his father on another day.  But that day never came.
    Years bulleted by with the speed of an avalanche.  He completed school, demonstrating to his teachers and fellow classmates a gushing spring of abilities and possibilities.  He especially excelled at mathematics and the physical sciences, handling equations and formulae with the ease of a Euclid or Archimedes.  Anyone could see his potential.  Well, anyone who chose to, at least.
    It was a rarity when his father entered his room, so the occasion stuck in his memory like a splinter.  He knocked politely, yet entered without waiting for an answer.  Looking about casually, not really focusing on any one thing for any length of time, like someone planning on being and wishing they were somewhere else, Nigel’s father’s gaze finally came to rest on the hazy scene outside the bedroom window.  Dressed in his charcoal gray blazer and black, striped trousers, Nigel guessed correctly that he had just come back from his club.  A night of whist and whiskey, no doubt.  With feet apart for balance, one arm cocked behind his back, and his stern, yet not unfriendly face with its stormy-sea blue eyes, his appearance struck one as that of a ship’s captain poised on deck at a watch in the dead of night.  His other hand held an often-present, but never lit Meerschaum pipe.  As always, he consciously cleaned his throat before he spoke.
    “Getting ready for school, I hope.  The fall semester commences next week, you know.”
    Nigel assumed that these words were addressed to him, yet judging by his father’s posture, they could have just as easily been directed to the martin sitting on the window ledge.
    “You are mistaken, father.  My technical college does not begin for another fortnight.  Have you seen the new model that I just completed?” he motioned encouragingly at a tricolored Spad: intricately assembled balsa wood, glue and crepe paper, its attitude highly suggestive of free flight.
    “I remember my first year at university,” his father continued, evidently not interested in model aircraft.  “What an important fulcrum of one’s life.  That point at which childhood is left behind, and the endless capacities of adult life are first speculated upon.”
    He paused, lifting the lifeless pipe halfway to his lips, then haltingly bringing it back down to his waist, perhaps out of habit, or actually reasoning through the futility of this action.
    When he continued, his free hand began to slowly stroke his graying beard, the only nervous tic that Nigel ever noted in his father’s austere bearing.  His eyes remained hypnotized by the exterior vista.
    “Make us proud, Nigel.  I know that you will do your best, and so, retain the family honor.  Remember, the name Pirrip is a virtual hallmark in the halls of Oxford,” he finished with a final, phlegmatic grunt.
    “Oxford!  But father, I thought we had settled this last spring,” Nigel erupted from his chair on an imperceptible spring.  “You promised that if I took those courses you preferred, and passed, I’d be allowed to go to engineering school.  I’ve already applied and have been accepted.  Have you not noticed my passions, my life’s ambitions?  They reside concretely in this very room, exemplified by all you see around you,” he emphatically stated while gesturing wildly at the contents of the room.
    In precise order, spartan detail and careful selection, Nigel’s domain stood as a static display of his most ardent loves.  Standing in ranks on the polished mahogany shelf, unencumbered by not a speck of dust or torn page, were books and texts ranging in variety from Newton to Descartes.  His desk top was blanketed by note pads, freshly sharpened pencils, a draftman’s T and compass.  Some intricately drawn design waited patiently for completion.  Besides the Spad, models and mechanical devices sat deployed at diverse positions.  Nothing seemed random; everything served a purpose.  No unfolded, dirty clothes or scuffed shoes could be seen hiding under the hospital-cornered bed or in a shadowy corner of the uniformed closet.  The words ‘by chance’ could never be vocalized in this world.
    Among the different pictures and wall-hangings posted about the room’s walls, one wooden plaque, obviously handmade, dominated one’s attention.  It wisely pronounced either the title of the scene one currently beheld or a bit of sage advise:
    HARD WORK IS THE KEY TO GOOD FORTUNE
    His father declined to take the offered tour.  Instead, he again cleared his throat.  “When you were younger, Nigel, I was both touched and slightly amused by these fantasies and hobbies of yours.  With patience, I tolerated them.  But, as I have just stated, there comes a time in a young man’s life when he must put away his toys for good, and…”
    “Toys!” Nigel uncharacteristically interrupted one of his parents.  “Father, I really must protest.  This is my life and my future we are considering, not the ‘family honor’.  I insist that my feelings be paramount here,” he finished out of breath, clearly flustered.
    His father took a sighing breath and lowered his head.  With eyes closed, he slowly pendulummed it back and forth.  Tsk tsk, he reprimanded wordlessly.  “Let’s not forget about your mother’s feelings,” he whispered.  “Think of what your going so far away would do to her.  She would be devastated.  Don’t forget how she worries over you or about her weak nerves.  Do you want her wrecked health on your conscience?”
    Nigel stood as helplessly as a rabbit caught in a trap.  How could he answer this admonition?  Although not stated in the same words or in similar circumstances, his father had often used this same wild card.  To raise and call his father’s hand under these conditions would seem both crass and selfish.  To wait seemed the soundest choice.  With tact and time as allies, perhaps he could go to his school next year.  After all, he knew that this decision, as had most of the other important ones concerning his future, came from his mother.  Without further useless debate with his father, Nigel folded.
    “Yes, father.  I understand.  I understand only too well.”
    Taking up his examination of the back lawn once again, never once looking his son in the eye, his father finished with one last comment before quietly exiting as a doctor after he has just related some awful, fatal news.  “If I had any other choice…if things were not out of my hands, as it were, I swear I…I mean, we would gladly send you wherever your heart desired.  Believe me, Nigel, I know how hard and disappointing this must be for you.  But this is for the best for all concerned.”
    Before he had gotten out of earshot, Nigel asked his father the one question that had been on his mind for years.
    “Oh, father!”
    “Yes.”
    “Why don’t you ever smoke your pipe?”
    Without hesitating, but still looking perplexed, he answered, “Why…whatever for.”
    Nigel sat back down to his desk.  The brightness of the draft paper he had been writing on now seemed dull.  The quiet of his room, previously that of a library, now carried the doom of a crypt.  He laid down his weapon-like pencil, carelessly casting it aside as a sexton throws his shovel after finishing a grave.  Blood-red light from the sunset oozed through the bedroom window, enveloping everything in a macabre shroud.  The promise offered in the east of that morning had been broken now in the west.
    Again, time slipped behind Nigel with the dexterity of a magician performing his favorite illusion.  First, there was Oxford and its carousel of classes.  Professors and classmates blended into an unrecognizable blur.  It seemed everyone knew who he was, yet they identified him more by his name rather than by his features or achievements.  Then came the war and the call of his country.  In the beginning he merely occupied a desk, endlessly moving sheets of paper from one pile to another.  Then things began to worsen.  Pilots were as rare as the courage they needed to possess.  He remembered a spring morning and a red bicycle seen through youthful eyes.  But gumption and grit had been replaced by gambling and greed.  He had learned the short-cut of relying on the power of pull – the preferred means of elevating one’s self over the unnecessary task of manually operating the pulley of hard work.  Self-reliance was the totem of the underprivileged.

    On a cold November afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Pirrip drag their way to the awaiting crowd of mourners.  The warmthless sun shines in the silver of her hair as she absently dabs at the tears as they rise in her cloudy eyes.  Walking stiltedly at her side, he vainly attempts to comfort her with a supporting arm around her shoulders.  His eyes remain dry and distant, apparently focused on a distant object or perhaps at a further remote memory.  A military band disrupts the solemn silence with the first notes of a sorrowful dirge.
    After the service, which consists of icy handshakes; dry, emotionless words of condolence; and a sermon delivered in a numbing, uncomforting and removed voice – the voice of one reading a shopping list out loud to one’s self – the couple unite their frail hands for the final walk back to the black, dreary car.  For the first time that day, and maybe in countless years, they exchange a frank glance into each other’s eyes.  A hint of an accusation burns in the bottomless pools of the other’s.
    “How could you let this happen to me?” hers beg.
    “Why didn’t you trust my judgement?” his answer.
    Meanwhile, forgotten by both, Nigel Pirrip sleeps the repose of the oblivious in the corner of some foreign field.  His grisly remains clothed in a rotted, weather-beaten flight suit and slipshod leather boots.  A victim of an unprofessionally mis-packed parachute, its cords fouled by the broken chain of a misplaced lucky medallion.  A stale, picked-over sandwich and soaked, ruined playing cards, gifts from home, lie next to him, spilled from an accompanying bag still clutched by a bony hand.  Fate is just the weight of circumstances.

[Thank you Roger Waters for the theme and accompanying words; thank you RUSH for the title and inspirational lines; and, last but not least, thank you Styx for that killer opening sentence!] – Bruce Chaney