"Little Richard's mostly for white people anyway," he muttered to Louis.

"But Long Tall Sally's black. Just so you don't forget it."

His late great dad. Not really such a bad guy in death. But so tensely parental in life, all empty command and false authority, that Chuckie suspected the man's heart just wasn't in it. No, he didn't blame his parents for everything that had gone wrong. Chuckie was misery enough on his own recognizance. But he couldn't think of his father without regretting the loss of the one thing he'd wanted to maintain between them. That was the baseball his dad had given him as a trust, a gift, a peace offering, a form of desperate love and a spiritual hand-me-down.

The ball he'd more or less lost. Or his wife had snatched when they split. Or he'd accidentally dumped with the household trash.

One of those distracted events that seemed to mark the inner nature of the age.

Next to him Louis sat in his station with his bomb release mode and his master bomb-control panel and his bombing data indicator and his urinal and his hot cup. Everything you'd want for a fulfilling life in the sky.

Louis said, "Pilot, this is Mad Bomber. Will release in rapid sequence. One hundred twenty seconds to drop."

Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca meant nothing to Chuckie.

Vague names from his unstable childhood. The memory of the baseball itself, the night of the baseball-vague and unstable and dim.

Louis spoke through a teary-eyed yawn.

"Pilot, come right three degrees. Hold. Bomb doors open. Check. Sixty seconds to drop."

So many missions, all those indistinguishable bombs. Chuckie used to love these bomb runs but not anymore. He used to feel a bitter and sado-sort of grudge pleasure, getting even for his life, taking it out on the landscape and the indigenous population. He'd been a proud part of a bomb wing that was dropping millions of tons of ordnance off the racks and out of the bays. The bombs fluttered down on the NVA and the ARVN alike, because if the troops on both sides pretty much resemble each other and if their acronyms contain pretty much the same letters, you have to bomb both sides to get satisfactory results. The bombs also fell on the Vietcong, the Viet Minh, the French, the Laotians, the Cambodians, the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge, the Montagnards, the Hmong, the Maoists, the Taoists, the Buddhists, the monks, the nuns, the rice farmers, the pig farmers, the student protesters and war resisters and flower people, the Chicago 7, the Chicago 8, the Catonsville 9-they were all, pretty much, the enemy.

Louis droned on.

"Steady, steady, steady. On auto now. Tone audible. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven."

Five hundred pounders on this run, sleek and effete, one hundred and eight of them at Louis' drowsy touch, aimed at the Ho Chi Minh trail, a mission based on the bullshit readings of image interpreters who spend their days and nights scrutinizing the itty-bitty blurs on nearly identical frames of recon film that unfurl endlessly across their eyeballs more or less, Chuckie thought, the way the bombs drop endlessly from the B-52s.

Louis droned on.

"Six, five, four."

And Chuckie thought of the Ballad of Louis Bakey, a tale the bombardier never tired of telling and the navigator never wanted to come to an end because it was like a great Negro spiritual that makes your whole face tingle with reverence and awe.

How Louis comes strutting out of bombardier school and finds himself ere wing on a B-52 at twenty-six thousand feet over the Nevada Test Site, simulating the release of a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb.

Simulating, mind you, while an actual device of this exact magnitude is meanwhile being detonated from the shot tower directly beneath the aircraft.

The idea being, Let's see how the aircraft and crew react, metalwise and bodywise, to the flash, the blast, the shock, the spectacle and so on.

And if they come through it more or less intact, maybe we'll let them drop their own bomb someday.

Whole plane's blacked out. Windows shielded by curtain pads covered with Reynolds Wrap. Crew holding pillows over eyes. Little nylon pillows that smell to Louis intriguingly like a woman's underthings.

A volunteer medic sits in a spare seat with five inches of string hanging out of his mouth and a tea-bag tag at the end of it. He has swallowed the rest of the string, which holds an x-ray plate coated with aluminum jelly, dangling somewhere below the esophagus, to measure the radiation passing through his body.

Louis does his phony countdown and waits for the flash. A strong and immortal young man on a noble mission.

"Three, two, one."

Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that's like the touch of God. And Louis can see the bones in his hands through his closed eyes, through the thick pillow he's got jammed in his face.

I move my head, there's whole skeletons dancing in the flash. The navigator, the instructor-navigator, the sad-ass gunner. We are dead men flying.

I thought Lord God Jesus. I swear to Jesus I thought this was heaven. Sweat is rolling down my face and there's smoke coming off the circuit breakers and the detonation's blowing us thousands of feet up, against our best intentions.

I thought I was flying right through Judgment Day with some woman's nylon breasts plumped up in my face.

And when the shock wave hit, we got pummeled up another two thousand feet, this big tonnage aircraft acting like a leaf on a blowy night.

And I kept seeing the flying dead through closed eyes, skeleton men with knee bone connected to the thigh bone, I hear the word of the Lord.

And I thought, because, being a black man, I would be harder to see through. But I saw right through my skin to my bones. This flash too bright to make racial niceties.

All the same in God's eyes, so let that be a lesson.

And the medic with the string hanging out of his mouth and his hand on the tea-bag tag so he won't swallow it, and I can see the x-ray plate through skin, bones, ribs and whatnot, and it's glowing like a sunrise on the desert.

When it is safe to withdraw the pillow and open his eyes, Louis opens his eyes and puts down the pillow and makes his way to the cockpit and helps the copilot remove the thermal curtains and there it is, alive and white above them, the mushroom cloud, and it is boiling and talking and crackling like some almighty piss-all vision.

My eyes went big and stayed that way and ain't ever really closed. Because I seen what I seen. That thing so big and wide and high above us. And it was popping and heaving like nothing on this earth. And we flew right past the stem and it's rushing and whooshing and talking, it's pushing the cloud right up into the stratosphere.

Thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

In a few years I lost my handwriting skills. Can't write my name without wobbles and skips. I pee in slow motion now. And my left eye sees things that belong to my right.

And that was the Ballad of Louis Bakey told to a thousand airmen on wind-howling bases through the short days and long years of constant alert in the dark and stoic heart of cold war winters.

"Bombs away," said Louis blandly.

But the mean and cutting fun had gone out of it for Chuckie. He didn't want to kill any more VC. And he was developing a curious concern for the local landscape. Tired of killing the forest, the trees of the forest, the birds that inhabit the trees, the insects that live their whole karmic lives nestled in the wing feathers of the birds.

The aircraft racked into a tight turn.

"Louisman, don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night?"

"Don't start in with me."

"Thinking there's got to be a more productive way to spend your time."

"That's what they're thinking down there."

"Than dropping bombs on people who never said a cross word to you."