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Show RIVER then-so young and so high in the Rocky Mountains that the largest river I knew was actually a ditch flowing into a dead sea-than I do now. The particular copy of Huck Finn that my father read to us was mysterious not only because it was old but also because it had once belonged to my uncle and namesake who had disappeared over Italy in the Second World War. I'd open the flyleaf and see my name written by the original, my lost Uncle Bill. About all I know about my uncle came from a newspaper article and a few comments my parents made. My father loved his lost brother and I asked him once, when I was old enough to wonder, what Bill was like. He mumbled and hawed, uneasy with the question, and finally said, "It would be hard to describe him with the way things are today." My mother heard this and was much more concise in her opinion: "He was a bum." In my grandfather's basement I found a newspaper article in a box with his air medals. It was an obituary without a corpse. Bill had flown one hundred missions in a fighter-bomber and won a stack of medals. He had been offered a chance to return to the states and train new pilots, but he wanted to stay and see out the end of the war. On April 30,1945, one week before the war in Europe ended and the day Adolph Hitler blew out his brains, my uncle banked into a cloud on his 104th mission and was never seen again. Not a trace of the wreckage was ever found. I've often wondered what happened to my vanished uncle. He is surely dead, though I've sometimes preferred to believe that he parachuted into a remote, idyllic northern Italian village where he now lives happily, drinking lots of vino and making many bambinos. My family moved to Southern California when I was eight years old, where we lived near the ocean and the San Luis Rey River, a river that is no more a -Al- |
