Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips Page A

before storms and the trees tossed their fronds all of a piece, like women throwing skirts over their heads, and the clouds boiled up as though poured out of a spigot, filled the whole flat horizon impossibly and completely and it was an angry show. He’d longed to see an oak tree, a big oak with layers of limbs and summer leaves moving in wind with that deep rippling that is deep as the rippling of water. He’d wanted to see that, and women in dresses and stockings and heels. The palm trees were strangest at night because they were so big and womanly, tossing themselves and sighing, while the women in the camp wore fatigues and boots. 41st Engineers had arrived to construct the camp and the airstrips, and the native men had still worn grass skirts. The skirts rustled as the dark men walked, their flat-footed storkish gaits rustling the grass in a way that was stern rather than girlish. Later they wore long swatches of cloth held in at the waist with army belts, and their bracelets were strips of cloth wrapped round their forearms and tied. The natives were in the camp at all hours and the skirts came to seem natural above their nearly hairless, muscled calves, natural on them rather than on the women, so that the outward things distinguishing men and women lost meaning. You noticed instead the wrist of a Red Cross girl, narrow and flat in the masculine greenish cuff of a fatigue shirt. The whole world was turned around like that—the sky arched so high up thatit seemed lost, and they were all floating: the white beach and the guns and the natives, the creaking machines, the officers’ club with its sling chairs and regulation cots for couches, its reception desk bordered by palms in pots and built in the shape of a horseshoe to look transplanted from the lobby of some American hotel. But the bar top was plyboard and rough and splintered, and the boy serving drinks stood shirtless in his rumpled dirty skirt, smiling, his hair a thick dark bush and his metal chain necklace dangling a gold amulet meant to keep the evil of this place from following him back to his village at night.
Someone told someone and someone told you
, blaring of the bar radio, a square ’30s-style Motorola whose patchy fabric front showed through to cardboard,
but they wouldn’t hurt you, not much
, and the control knobs were off an Australian kitchen stove shipped up by boat. But the thing worked, late afternoons the reception was bell pure and the bar boy turned it up
since everyone spreads the story
as the men came in from showers for mess, scuffing their boots along the plank floor that showed the ground where boards had pulled up, and if there was a storm blowing in later that night they sat hearing it crackle between the lines of USO songs.
Do nothing till you hear from me
* when the bruising rain was still nothing but electric air. Hadn’t he heard that song just lately, last weekend? Katie made him play the car radio when he took her out for a ride in the new Pontiac, Bess standing on the walk by the back door, lifting her hands to her throat to remind Katie to keep her scarf pulled tight.
Pay no attention to what’s said
and Katie had told him sagely this was a song about gossip, which was all the fourth-grade girls ever talked, and he thought about when the first tarmac strip was finished and the first plane came in. How the native boys had stood at the edge of the field in a bunch and crouched down together holding their arms like they were chilled, talking talking talking, jabbering in low tones as the plane taxied past. They kept their backs to the Yanks, making intricate motions with their hands like words alone weren’t enough, and theonly ones who learned any English were the ones who served instead of worked. The bar boy and the cooks picked up a singsong lingo and talked in strange mixtures of words whose cadences were backwards, funny and inside-out. The radio behind them would splatter a breath of crackling static and