Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

In Colorado, I thought about Maria’s dad, and about Maria. For a while, I thought the feeling I had, the vacuum in my stomach, was just my conscience telling me to call her. Once I even ran to a pay phone when you were in the bathroom, and thought about giving her a call. But as the dial tone hummed in my ear, it became apparent that a simple phone call couldn’t eradicate whatever it was that was bothering me. Besides, I had no idea what to say to her. I was still so angry at Maria. But the void didn’t come from her. It was something else.

Seeing all those jets made me think of arcade games I played when I was a kid. Do you remember, Mom, how you used to let me go to the candy store on my skateboard? I remember going there after school hundreds of times.

I used to play Gauntlet and Double Dragon. Sometimes I’d play alone, but often against the other kids. We’d place our quarters in a row on the top of the machine, the next quarter representing the next person who got to play the game. It was a rudimentary yet remarkably fair system. So easy and innocent.

My favorite game was called 1945 —about a secret World War II mission to Japan. You were a pilot, flying what looked like a Bell X-1. It probably wasn’t a Bell X-1, though, because those weren’t used in World War II. That was the first plane to fly at the speed of sound, Mach 1, on October 14, 1947. Anyway, the stupid kids at the arcade thought they were flying an F-16 when they played 1945. But I knew better than them. I knew that F-16s hadn’t even been invented yet.

It was a cool game, because you could blow shit up with rapid-fire machine guns and bomb the hell out of miniature buildings and cars below. I still remember the day that I beat that game. It took me sixteen quarters and 45 minutes, but I did it. I was the hero of the arcade the day I beat the game. And I was only ten or eleven years old when I did it.

That day in Colorado, I wished that I could be ten years old again. What a life I had back then, a life filled with candy store arcade games. No worries about Maria and her past. No knowledge of the past at all, or the future for that matter. Just the present.

Maybe that was the feeling that was bothering me, the feeling that I hadn’t played a video game in years, and that now I was going to have to do all this stuff for real. I didn’t have any qualms about shooting an enemy plane down; and it wasn’t like most of the Academy graduates ever got to actually be in combat, anyway. I don’t know. Now I was aware of the past and the future, and could always contrast and compare them to the present. And I thought about how hard it was to get into the Air Force Academy, and how hard being a good person was, in general, and wished it all was as easy as beating that goddamn game.

About halfway through my senior year of high school, I began to sleep more often than I used to.

In between my naps, I would ruffle through the Air Force Academy brochure and application, and contemplate how exciting it would be to finish it up and finally get in. The application was large and complex. I had to write two 500-word essays, secure recommendations from both my Congressman and my teachers, and provide the Academy with tons of detailed personal information.

Among my many after-school and evening naps, I recall one in particular that truly rattled my soul. One afternoon, I dreamt that I was drifting along a neighborhood block in Queens that looked similar to my own, holding my arms close to my body to protect myself from the chilly wind. Cigarette smoke, along with my frozen breath, blew from my lips and created a cloud tailing behind me down the desolate street. It was the only moving body beside myself—and the trees.

The trees above swayed with the wind. Their colors were changing right before me. A season of nature’s work was compressed into only a few minutes as a kaleidoscope of vibrant shades and tones appeared above—red, yellow, orange, brown—each brighter and livelier than the next. The colors turned as the wind blew stronger.

One by one, each leaf dropped. Within moments the street was paved with a mattress of leaves and twigs. I wanted to tumble to the floor and roll among the foliage.

I picked up a large leaf. It was golden yellow with brown specks on the surface of its blades. Its texture felt cold and leathery; I admired its three pointed spears.

And then, suddenly, somehow, a wooden ladder appeared before me. It was leaning against the trunk of a tree like the one in front of my house growing up—one of those London Plane trees, whose bark peels off in shards of gray and tan and yellow, as if it’s growing so rapidly that its shell can’t contain the insides. The ladder itself was old and splintery. It dared me to ascend.

So I did. Though I didn’t realize just why at first.

After reaching the top of the ladder—it was only about five or six steps tall—I began to comprehend my mission. Without a second thought, I pulled from my coat pocket a roll of tape that I didn’t know was there until that moment. It surprised me only for a second.

I glanced at the yellow leaf with brown specks before my eyes. I tore a piece of the tape off, lifted the leaf to the barren branch above, and stuck it on a limb. Then I climbed down the ladder, grabbed another leaf, climbed back up the ladder, and reattached it. I did this over and over again, tree after tree, for what seemed like days, until the carpet of leaves below had disappeared completely, and the trees were brimming with colorful life once again.

After descending the ladder for the final time, I began walking down the street, proud of my accomplishment. I had saved the trees.

But, as I reached the corner of the block, I turned my head back one last time and admired my work. And that very first yellow and brown leaf fell to the ground once again. All the rest followed. I don’t know just why, but when I ran back to the first tree I’d climbed, the ladder was gone. And I began to cry.

When the cold November rains arrived, just starting to bring on winter, I had only spoken to Maria a few times since she admitted to her lie. Each time I called her I became angry and hung up. Then I would call back again, and hang up again.

I bought a forty ounce bottle of Wild Thing malt liquor at the bodega near my house, the same brand I’d seen the hoods drink on street corners in Maria’s neighborhood. One night in my room, I consumed every last drop in under an hour. I was drunk.

Sitting on my bed, gazing at the Air Force flag, as well as the World War II poster and my favorite photo, I thought about the Academy. I’d already gotten all of the major paperwork done. But I still needed a testimonial from someone in the military, someone not related to me. For a while, all I thought of that night was Maria’s father.

But I remember looking out the window, beckoned by the moon. The evening was approaching; the fall brought on darkness sooner than it had for the last four or five months. To funnel the breeze through my room, so that the smoke from my cigarette would quickly disappear, I kept my window wide open. But there was no wind. A wall of chilly air adjoined my room, and reminded me that I was sane, that my bones still had life. I could have sworn that I heard crickets outside, but it felt too cold for there to be crickets.

Luckily, my grades were great. Instead of speaking with Maria on the phone for hours, night after night, I did all my homework and studied for the SATs, striving for a 1300. I’d been getting along with you better than ever, Dad, especially since we visited Colorado. And even you, Mom, were not so bad all of a sudden. Not speaking made me love you more than ever before.