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On New Year’s Day in 1925, John S. Zielinski was born in a Chicago hospital. His Ma’s sweaty brow reflected the red and blue fireworks that she watched, pretending they were for her, through a tiny ward window. His father was in the funeral home business, and his mother laughed every time John would try to crawl into one of the caskets like it was a crib. His father expressed his displeasure by yanking John out of the coffin, gripping him by his tiny legs.
It was when John was twelve, panting on a track field in school, red muddy clay stuck on his legs, that he learned the word “morbid.” “Do you ever wonder why baby cribs don’t have pillows on every side like a coffin?” John didn’t see anything wrong with the question, but his friend Dale looked at him odd and said, “That is morbid, John.” John shook his head before taking off again. That wasn’t the word for caskets, the word for them was “efficient.” He looked up “morbid,” in the school library’s dictionary, memorized it, and resolved to learn one new word a day.
He was fourteen when his father called him efficient. Efficient because John had only been sent to buy a few potatoes but came home with a bag of groceries: the required spuds all perfect, three pork chops that had been marked down, a bottle of milk, a jar of honey that Mrs. Littell had given as a gift, and change. When his father asked where he got the money for the rest, John grinned and said, “My newspaper route’s been real helpful, dad.”
Mrs. Littell had asked him, “How old are you, John?” earlier that week when John delivered her morning paper. The big black print that read, “WE DON’T MAKE WAR AGAINST CIVILIANS,” blurred and refocused in his metal basket as he zipped through the car-congested streets of Chicago. John told her he was fourteen and watched her face contort into the same one she would make when punching numbers on the cash register. “Oh my darling,” she said, before clasping his hand and crumpling the newspaper so the headline only showed, “war against civilians.” He did not understand how the matter of his age could make someone look like they were peering into a coffin.
The same day he first saw a paratrooper was the day he almost died. John was leaving Mrs. Littell’s store when a soldier in bloused trousers and tall boots entered. John thought he was the most efficient looking man he had ever seen. On the way home, John Zielinski successfully dodged a car; his faded blue bike swayed but did not topple. The swerve made him feel invincible, thighs tense, heartbeat thrumming while a car horn blared ahead of him. When he arrived home, his father looked up from the crossword puzzle and asked John what 16-across was, “Five letters for worship?” John said, “Adore,” but did not tell his father about his luck, about his almost-death. On the radio in his room was a word he had never heard before—“Guadalcanal”—and all the angry ways to spit out the word “Japs.” Radio voices rumbled in the background while John thought about chasing the ecstasy of his afternoon triumph over death—the first image that came to mind was the man in the efficient uniform. John signed up for the paratroops the next day. His parents smiled when he mentioned the fifty dollars extra pay, and did not speak much after he mentioned parachuting into Germany.
He jumped off the first plane he had ever ridden into the Frying Pan in Georgia, his fifth into the English countryside, and his sixth, finally, into Normandy. When flak and gunfire sliced through the air around him, John remembered himself on his blue bike on the Chicago highway, weaving through lines of shiny black cars that would not hesitate to kill him.
John would always get mud on the legs of his olive drab whenever he ran between battalion HQ and billets. In those sprints he thought of his friend who taught him the word “morbid” and hoped that wherever he was, he had pillows on all sides and not mud in a foxhole. He sent a letter to his Ma to tell her that he hoped he would see fireworks, not artillery on his birthday whether in Holland or elsewhere in Europe. Captain Winters marked off the locations with black ink and John didn’t mind. Not when Captain Winters was the only man he thought still resembled that shiny vision of the paratrooper in Mrs. Littell’s shop in Chicago.
The others called him, “orderly” the same way he had heard people say, “negro” and “queer.” It made him feel small so he tried to walk ramrod straight, instead of swishy like honey. It was only when Captain Winters called him “my orderly” that it sounded like “efficient.” So John made sure to bring him hot coffee, rationed sugar when he could find it, and noted the way the paper rolled down the captain’s typewriter a few centimeters every thirty minutes. When it remained in the same position, John would lower the volume of Axis Sally on the radio behind Captain Winters and bring him water in a chipped teacup.
On the long days when Captain Winters stared at the tower of paperwork with muted horror, John would try his luck by asking, “Is there anything I can do for you, sir?” John had kept count of how many times Captain Winters replied with, “Have you seen Captain Nixon?” In total it was twelve times—every time John managed to ask. There was a list of places Captain Nixon frequented: the PX, the sitting room of Lieutenant Welsh’s billet, and Captain Winters’ office. Only in the last one did he present himself as sober. Captain Nixon would be retrieved, and Captain Winters would exhale at the sight of him, smiling from the chair and fiddling with his silver flask.
The mission was a bacon sandwich. Captain Winters said it was a joke, but Captain Nixon had requested it twice. John said he did not mind, that it was a task and John Zielinski never took those lightly. He did however, wish that he could simply get on his blue bike, probably too small for him now, and ride to Mrs. Littell’s store where he could get a respectable slab of pork for half the price. The cheese was easy to find. Cool wind drifted into the bakery from a smashed-in window when the Dutch man handed him hard slices of bread and four ounces of cheese. It felt like a luxury. “Tomaat?” the Dutch man asked, rifling underneath his dilapidated counter to hold up three red tomatoes bruised like the rest of them. John counted the change he had earned from writing down letters for injured GIs with shaking fingers and bandaged palms. He had enough.
It was at 18:30 when he found the bacon. The paint peeled off the walls in the house that John thought was empty, until a boy stuck his head out from a corner room to ask him for chocolate. The voice that came from behind the boy was sharp and chastising, and turned out to be a Dutch woman’s. She had the same blonde hair tied up in a neat bun as Mrs. Littell. When he gave the child his two Hershey bars, the lady with Mrs. Littell’s hair pressed a small greasy package into his hand as a thanks. John did not unwrap it until he reached CP, only to find it was a slab of bacon. He felt fourteen again, carrying a bag overflowing with groceries.
At 20:00 John made his way upstairs, smelling of fried pork grease. Captain Nixon was balancing on the arm of the chair where Captain Winters sat. Halfway up the stairway, John felt the need to knock. Captain Nixon had one hand on a flask, the other draped across Captain Winters’ shoulder, pressing long strokes on the muscle. It looked efficient. “You need a break, Dick,” he said, leaning closer. It was then that John rapped his knuckles on the wood of the wall. Captain Winters straightened up but Captain Nixon remained where he was, only moving his hand from the shoulder and instead placing it on Captain Winters’ back. “Bacon sandwich, sir,” John said, and Nixon smiled, looking between John and Captain Winters. It was Captain Winters who replied, “Thank you, Private Zielinski.” Before John left, he heard Captain Nixon saying, “Damn good man you have there, Dick,” and saw how he shoved half the sandwich into Captain Winters’ mouth as an offering. Captain Winters laughed with cheese and bacon on his face, and retrieved from his footlocker Captain Nixon’s scotch to pour into his flask. John looked between the two of them and remembered 16-across—“adore.”
In September ‘44, John was wounded and only Captains Winters and Nixon visited him at the aid station. Nixon presented him with a pass for furlough that John refused, and Winters a medal for the Purple Heart, that John accepted.
In Austria, Captain Nixon returned the favor of the bacon sandwich by telling John to run back to the German mansion where he saw Zielinski eyeing a dead man’s Luger. “Can’t be too sure, private, thought I saw something under the bed of the Kraut. Might be an album. Check and report back to me.” The Luger was gone by the time John got there, but under the bed was a presentation pistol, handsomely engraved and tucked into a varnished leather case. John told Nixon there was nothing to report, and the captain only looked at him amused when he said, “Good job, private.”
They made him a gunner, eventually, though there was nothing to shoot at. He watched German officers file in and out through his scope against the sparkling green of Austria and tried not to squeeze the trigger. On the troopship back stateside, a captain who was neither Nixon nor Winters told him to surrender the engraved Kraut pistol. When John stuck out the case over the Atlantic Ocean and threatened to drop it, the captain grumbled and walked away. John thought the satisfaction of it rivaled the feeling of cheating death.
He docked stateside in ‘45 and found that it wasn’t Chicago cars that scared him, but the bra-ra-rat of faulty wheels on wooden carts, hauling metal and scraps on the sidewalk. At home and upstairs, his room was no longer just his. Their youngest sister had been born in ‘44 while John was unlacing his frozen boots in Bastogne, massaging blackened oozing feet. Their mother placed his sister’s crib beside John’s bed. That night he set four pillows around her and tried not to wince when his Ma screamed in horror, asking if he meant to smother their littlest. The crib was moved and he slept alone after that; only night terrors kept him company.
When he visited Mrs. Littell, he met Bernice, who was busy weighing potatoes against each other with her hands. They had sundaes at the soda shop and went there frequently enough to catch the news of Victory in Japan over the countertop radio. Bernice’s lips tasted like maraschino cherries and vanilla. That would be the flavor of their wedding cake, and the milkshakes he bought her when they found out they couldn’t have children. The G.I. Bill let him buy the beautiful brownstone he had admired from his newspaper route days, and he filled it with a sturdy couch and a bed that he did not particularly like, but made Bernice smile in the department store. At night when Bernice held him, John found it impossible to think of war, and thought himself lucky to have found for himself the word, “adore.”
John stopped trucking and delivering caskets at the age of fifty when his knees started to give and his joints began to ache from the cold. It was October 4, 1980 when the word being asked for on the Tribune crossword, 57-down, meaning to “assert solemnly,” was “vow.” That day, after he had received Captain Winters’ letter in the mail, John got into his pick-up truck with Bernice, and drove up to a chicken farm in Pennsylvania. He stopped by Mrs. Littell’s shop, now owned by her son, to buy their best slab of bacon, full-price. Only when they had driven away did John remember that bacon was Captain Nixon’s, not Winters’ favorite. He thought it still polite to bring along.
When John stood in front of Captain Winters, (“Call me Dick,” he said, shaking John’s hand) he was surprised to see him with a full head of white hair. When he nearly crashed into Captain Nixon (“Sure, you can still call me that,” he said, grinning) in the kitchen, John realized that he wasn’t surprised to find him there at all. John handed him the generous slab of bacon and Captain Nixon smiled and said, “Good job, private,” the same way he did in Austria, like they shared a secret. The bacon was fried up immediately.
Dick told John and Bernice to sit on a long plush couch that looked nothing like what John knew of Dick’s preference, but looked very much like something Captain Nixon would love. Dick set down a pitcher of lemonade in front of them and said he was glad to see John so happy. Lunch came in odd, interchanged trickles, Nixon bringing in slices of cake before the salad, the sandwiches before some soup. The coffee was served before the wine. Nothing about it was efficient but John caught himself thinking of the word “peacetime.” Dick asked about John’s nephews, about his father, and his joint pains. Nixon asked Bernice about the cake he had served an hour ago and whereabouts they lived in Chicago. Nixon said he had promised to take Dick over there. John watched Dick lean his body on Captain Nixon’s shoulder from where he sat on the arm of Nixon’s chair. Familiar was the easy and unconscious way Captain Nixon offered Dick parts of his sandwich, ripping off bread and bacon and cheese. When Nixon’s hand disappeared behind Dick’s back, John noted how Dick’s shoulders would relax a fraction until he sat just as languidly as Captain Nixon. They said goodbye at 7:30 PM (John had long stopped reading the clock the same way he did in the army). Dick handed Bernice a basket that he had filled with a dozen fresh eggs, and where Nixon had placed a bottle of milk and honey.
“They must be the best of friends,” Bernice said as they waved from inside their car. His two former officers were retreating back into the house, and John peered at the hazy image of Nixon’s fingers tracing lines up and down Dick’s back. When John remembered the answer to the 57-down from the morning crossword, he smiled and said, “Yes,” instead of, “Yes, they are each other’s.” Bernice rested her hand on his shoulder the entire ride back. Before they went to bed, John placed a small cup of vanilla ice cream, topped with a bright red cherry, on her bedside table. She laughed and asked, “What for?” he replied simply with, “Because I adore you.”