path: root/missing-persons/CH-3.txt

Norm Canton retired from the Navy as a Commander to undertake a distinguished career as an occasional pinochle player, sometime golfer and frequent partaker in the 'leaven at lenny's breakfast group, a gang of retirees that frequented the Denny's down that street from his new condo on the golf course. Despite the, by many standards quite busy, retirement schedule, Norm could never shake the uncomfortable feeling that he was forgetting something, or that there was something he needed to do, somewhere to be. He had never had much practice in the art of loafing and, after years of it dangling carrot-like in front of him he found, regrettably, that it did not suit him.

He was a stout man, barrel chested and square jawed in a way that suited a career Navy man. He kept his gray hair cropped short, they way it had been ever since the war, the way it would always be. He had developed a habit of rubbing his chin while thinking, something he willed himself to do early on in his career because he found it gave his men some extra measure of confidence in what he was about to say. The habit stuck and though it had been years since Norm sent men off carrier decks to die in the air over foreign countries, he had never stopped rubbing his chin when he got lost in some train of thought. 

He found himself doing it now more than ever. Since Evelyn, his wife of forty years, had passed on his loafing retirement days had grown even more irritating to him. He tried to do like she said, keep yourself busy Norm. He got more serious about the model airplanes he had always built in his spare time. Serious enough to enter his intricately detailed creations in contests around the country. He found, on attending a few scale modeler conventions, that he was not the only ex-Navy man with the large rough hands who nevertheless spent hours on end pinning delicately etched plastic and thin decal insignia to tiny scale models of the planes he had once called home. It was better than watching television, but it wasn't quite what he was looking for. For that he had to run into Ed Wald. Or rather Wald had run into him. Both men still attended the annual reunions for pilots and crew of the 234 bomber group, but they rarely talked otherwise until Norm had moved down to Annapolis. It was at the meeting two years ago that Wald, whom Norm knew had left the service shortly after the war and, from what Norm heard, had done quite well for himself in the stock market, approached him about organizing the archive. In the end it proved to be the thing that had, prior to that day, been missing from retirement. It wasn't quite a good as looking after a carrier air group at sea, but it had been a long time since he'd done that anyway. Now he got to look after the memory of a carrier air group at sea.

The archive, such as it was, was really just the storeroom in the back of Ed Wald's local VFW. For reasons Norm could never track down, Wald had become the de facto keeper of the squadron's memorabilia and non-essential records ever since the 234th had been official retired at the end of the Vietnam War. In typical military fashion papers and photos had simply been thrown into boxes and unceremoniously dumped in Wald's lap. Busy with his day trading at the time, Wald had simply dumped them on to the store room. It was just a makeshift solution with a more long term plan to be forthcoming. But of course that plan never came forth and eventually the task seems too monumental to even discuss, let alone do anything about. Until that is, Wald had met Norm at the reunion. What Norm discovered, after he had already agreed to the task, was a singularly massive mountain of paper and files that stretched from floor to ceiling and spanned nearly 40 years of flying history. Paper and boxes completely consumed a desk that Norm didn't unearth until his third or fourth day of excavations. The first day Wald was trying to point out a stack of boxes near the back when Norm made the mistake of turning around too fast only to collide with a stack of paper that crashed to the floor and blocked his escape. "Well, see, there you go, somewhere to start," said Wald as he gingerly retreated out the the room.

It had been a monumental task, one that had kept him occupied for the better part of a year now and he still wasn't completely finished. The only way Norm could ever come up with the make it a more managable task was to make it personal. In its early days the archive was turned into the personal story of Norm Canton's career in the 234th, starting with some photos he found of himself at flight school in Pensacola Florida, circa 1955. Norm standing in front of a very dirty prop-driven plane, the eager young man following in his father's Navy footsteps. Norm had taken the image, along with a dozen others old photos of Norm and Wald and rest of the squardron just before they had shipped out for Korea down to Kinkos and had them digitally restored and enlarged. Norm had the photos framed and hung in a ramshackle, but Norm thought pleasingly so, manner behind the VFW bar. 

Norm was studying a photo of Wald's old plane, the Tigress, contemplating the scripted lettering that ran across the flared exhaust cowling and sloped back down under the nose art, a long thin-legged nurse straddling a bomb. Norm was wondering for the five hundredth time why the hell a nurse would straddle a bomb when he heard the screen door behind him slam shut. He slowly spun around on the barstool and was about to tell whomever it was to go away when he saw that there was a far more real long legged, though clearly not a nurse, woman silhouetted in the darkness of the VFW.

Norm studied her in silence before he said, "may I help you?"

"I'm looking for Norman Canton." 

He couldn't see much of her with the light behind her, but she looked young, not much over thirty. "Hmm. What do you need that old fart for?" He pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at her.

"I heard he's organizing the squadron photos and was hoping he could help me find some information." 

Norm chuckled, "who told you that?"

She sat down on the bar stool next to him and smiled. She was young, probably not a day over thirty he decided, with black hair that was cut short, just above her shoulders, like a military woman he thought. When she smiled her dark eyes relaxed and took on a good humored appearance that Norm found trustworthy, though he noticed that when she stopped smiling they had a very driven look.

"I can't really say who told me that Mr Canton was organizing photos."

Norm smiled "MmmHmm, I can't really tell you where Mr. Canton is..."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound rude there Mr. Canton, I just really don't know who told me that. I got an anonymous message that I should talk to you."

"If you knew who I was why did you ask for me?" Norm eyed her suspiciously.

She gave him her best disarming smile, "it seemed the polite way to begin. But yes, the man sweeping outside told me you were in here 'studying the photos again' as he put it." 

Norm snorted and turned back around. 

She spun her barstool around and followed his gaze, taking in the jumble of photos, mean and airplanes, tents, racks of bombs. She caught the name Tigress on one of the planes. "The 234th, right?"

He was startled and made no effort to hide it. "You seem to know an awful lot about me."

"Not you. The 234th carrier squadron." She extended her hand, "Chase Kevele, I work at the Defense POW Missing Persons Office."

Chase noticed him hesitate an instant and then he took her hand and smiled. "The POW office huh? You people do good work."

She smiled. "We try."

"What can I do for you?"

"Well, it's a bit strange. To tell you the honest truth Mr. Canton, we're not looking so good on this one."

"Call me Norm."

"Okay Norm, here's the thing. My bosses gave me a case, gave me a name that I'm supposed to track down, locate, recover and file away right?" She watched him nod politely and decided he wasn't buying her simpleton act, but she was too far in to stop now, she plowed ahead. "Well, I went to find the file that would give me a starting point and it turns out the be a very incomplete file. There's only some enlistment papers, an order sending the cadet to flight school and then a transfer notice to the 234th. Somewhere along the way he was apparently even promoted all the way to lieutenant, but there's no record of that at all in the main archive. Well I was working the case as best I could." She leaned in conspiratorially, "by which I mean I moved on to something that had papers."

Norm raised he eyebrows, but did not return her smile. 

"It'd been several months, I'd put it out of my mind by this point, I mean, what could I do? Then, out of nowhere, just after that storm last week actually, I get a message to my inbox saying that I should come talk to you. Weird right?"

"That is odd," said Norm though his voice said something else, more like that's irritating or that's boring, Chase wasn't entirely sure which. "What'd you say his name was?" Norm heaved himself off the stool and walked around behind the bar. He poured another bit of whiskey in his glass and then pulled up another and set it in front of Chase. She shrugged and he filled it for her.

"I'm looking for a Lt. Reese Lawrence who, last thing I know, was assigned to the 234th, which then shipped out to Panama in 1942."

Norm stared down at her glass. Chase wanted to pick it up and drink it down to help ease her nerves but she didn't want to break his lost in space spell in case he was tracking down the name somewhere deep the recess of memory. Finally he looked up, met her gaze for a moment and walked back around the bar, calling from near the end, "The squadron did start out WWII in Panama, but that name doesn't ring a bell. Of course that was years before my time." He sat down beside her and raised his glass, "to the fighting '34th." They toasted and she slugged back the whiskey in a single shot. She noticed Norm just sipped at his. "I started with the 234th in Pensacola, right out of flight school, '53 I believe it was. Shipped out for Korea on the USS... we were still flying the Skyraiders back then," He gestured to an aerial photo of a squat, ungainly looking plane that Chase knew, from earlier cases, had been the workhorse of the Navy for nearly two decades. "Ugly thing isn't it? Love that plane though. Best thing I ever flew. 'Course the A6 was a good plane too, but by the then I wasn't flying much anymore, mostly sitting up in the flight deck plotting missions. Anyway, I don't remember anyone named Lawrence coming up in stories and lord knows the old guys, the WWII vets, they did love to tell some stories. 

Chase nodded and was about to press her case when Norm got up off the stool. "Of course it's been a long time, who knows what I've forgotten about." He gestured toward the closet, "all the records we have are over are over here if you want to look." He walked over to the back room and unlocked the door. "Can't imagine this stuff will be too helpful though, none of it's official. Mostly just photos and old plaques and the like." Canton stood by the door looking inside as Chase made her way over.

"Photos are exactly what I'm after Mr. Canton, thank you."

Chase spent over an hour digging through the files, most of which were letters and photos to and from home, along with a few post flight reports and other paper work that would, were it not she guessed for the nostalgia of the men who lived through it, have long since been sent to a pulping mill by now. 

From time to time Norm poked his head in the door to see how she was doing, or answer a question, but mainly he let her have the run of the place, which struck her as odd because she had a nagging feeling there was something he wasn't telling her. After a while he retreated back out to his whiskey and photos and Chase started using her phone to scan some of the photographs still in the archive. Pictures of the planes and their crews, hardly more than boys, posing against a backdrop of palms and canvas tents. It looked hot, nearly everyone's t-shirts were ringed in sweat. 

Sometimes she went back out to the bar and Norm pointed out the faces he remembered. Then she would go back into the archive and login into the DPMO site, uploading photos and tagging them with names, which could be used to find service numbers. The most useful thing she found in the still quite disorganized closet was a pair of squadron Christmas photos, one taken in 1941 in San Diego and another from 1942 in Panama. It would be hard work, boring work she knew, but she had done it before and she knew she could go through and match service record photos with the faces in the Christmas images and perhaps, by process of elimination, at least find out what Reese Lawrence had looked like. A picture was, after all, worth a thousand words. Especially when it came to jogging the world's memory about things it seemed to want to forget.

The sun was setting by the time Norm walked her to her car. She thanked him, left a copy of her card and promised she'd let him know if she ever found her mystery man. She watched him in the rearview mirror, standing there in the parking lot, waving as she pulled out into the street.



After she left Norm went back inside. No one would come tonight. It was Tuesday night, everyone went to Walt's house for poker on Tuesdays. Norm went inside and locked the door behind him. He went behind the bar and pulled out the bottle of Dewers and set it on the bar. He pulled the phone over from the wall and sat down. He poured himself a shot and slugged it back. He poured another and drank it. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd been thinking about all day. The connection was bad, the line warbled like it was underwater, but he recognized the voice. "We need to talk."