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Charlie-El. Charlie-El."
I think they are already nonsense words to the children. But the poem first got passed word of mouth
around Richmond when I was little, and living in Father Michael's house. Will I go to heaven or hell?
Who is good, and who is evil? The children are very wise. They do not try to answer their song. They
just sing it, and do a very clever little dance while they sing. They always end the song with all the children
falling down on the ground, laughing. That is the best way for the song to end.
Charlie brought the airplane straight down into a field, great hot winds pushing against the ground as if to
shove it back from the plane. The field caught fire, but when the plane had settled upon its three wheels,
foam streaked out from the belly of the machine and overtook the flames. Elouise watched from the
cockpit, thinking: Wherever the foam has touched, nothing will grow for years. It seemed symmetrical to
her. Even in the last moments of the last machine, it must poison the earth. Elouise held Amy on her lap,
and thought of trying to explain it to the child. But Elouise knew Amy would not understand or
remember.
"Last one dressed is a sissy-wissy," said Ugly-Bugly in her husky, ancient-sounding voice. Yet it was not
so incongruous. They had dressed and undressed in front of each other for years now, but today as the
old plastic-polluted clothing came off and the homespun went on, they felt and acted like schoolkids on
their first day in coed gym. Amy caught the spirit of it and kept yelling at the top of her lungs. No one
thought to quiet her. There was no need. This was a celebration.
But Elouise, long accustomed to self-examination, forced herself to realize that there was a strain to her
frolicking. She did not believe it, not really. Today was not a happy day, and it was not just from
knowing the confrontation that lay ahead. There was something so final about the death of the last of the
engines of mankind. Surely something could be-but she forced the thought from her, forced the coldness
in her to overtake that sentiment. Surely she could not be seduced by the beauty of the airplane. Surely
she must remember that it was not the machines, but what they inevitably did to mankind that was evil.
They looked and felt a little awkward, almost silly as they left the plane and stood around in the
blackened field. They had not yet lost their feel for stylish clothing, and the homespun was so lumpy and
awkward and rough. It didn't look right on any of them.
Amy clung to her doll, awed by the strange scenery. In her life she had only been out of the airplane
once, when she was an infant. She watched as the trees moved unpredictably. She winced at the wind in
her eyes. She touched her cheek, where her hair moved back and forth in the breeze, and hunted through
her vocabulary for a word to name the strange invisible touch on her skin. "Mommy," she said. "Uh! Uh!
Uh!"
Elouise understood. "Wind," she said. The sounds were still too hard for Amy, and the child did not
attempt to say the word. Wind, thought Elouise, and immediately thought of Charlie. Her best memory of
Charlie was in the wind. It was during his death wish time, not long after his suicide attempt. He had
insisted on climbing a mountain, and she knew that he meant to fall. So she had climbed with him, even
though there was a storm coming up. Charlie was angry all the way. She remembered a terrible hour
clinging to the face of a cliff, held only by small bits of metal forced into cracks in the rock. She had
insisted on remaining tied to Charlie. "If one of us fell it would only drag the other down too," he kept
saying. "I know," she kept answering. And so Charlie had not fallen, and they made love for the first time
in a shallow cave, with the wind howling outside and occasional sprays of rain coming in to dampen them.
They refused to be dampened. Wind. Damn.
And Elouise felt herself go cold and unemotional; and they stood on the edge of the field in the shade of
the first trees. Elouise had left the Rectifier near the plane, set on 360 degrees. In a few minutes the
Rectifier would go off, and they had to watch, to witness the end of their work.
Suddenly Bill shouted, laughed, held up his wrist. "My watch!" he cried.
"Hurry," Charlie said. "There's time."
Bill unbuckled his watch and ran toward the rectifier. He tossed the watch. It landed within a few feet of
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