"Rickenbacker's secret"

by Kim Lehman
Rickenbacker was a General. And he had a secret. He had been keeping his secret for many years. More years then he could remember. But Rickenbacker's was not a burdensome secret. It was not a secret that ate away at you, festering deep inside until you had to tell, just for relief. This was a secret to be enjoyed, something that could be savoured like a choice cheese. Rickenbacker knew that the lessons he had learned had directed him into a life where his secret was significant, if anyone were to find out that is. If he had made one or two different decisions along the way maybe his secret would have simply been one facet of his personality amongst many others. But Rickenbacker was a General.

When General Rickenbacker entered a room men and women in uniform jumped. This was a good thing, all in all, Rickenbacker thought. For one thing this sort of behaviour was expected in the military world. If those junior to oneself did not jump when one entered the room then the whole thing just would not work. How would General Whatshisname, the one that whipped Rommel, have fared if his troops had remained seated every time he walked past? And the big guy in charge of Operation Desert Storm, General Something, what would he have done if his troops had ignored him in parades, no salutes, no nothing? This did not happen to Rickenbacker. Everybody jumped. The other reason Rickenbacker felt this to be a fine thing was that he enjoyed it. Many, many times he had crept along a corridor so as to leap out in front of a junior person, just to see their reaction, to see their arms wave about wildly saluting, and to see them performing the other rituals necessary of the situation. Rickenbacker did not worry too much about this behaviour being in any way strange. He knew that power was what made the military industrial complex trundle along, in the same way it had for centuries. Making underlings nervous was simply an expression of the power that Rickenbacker could wield if he so chose.

Every Friday evening General Rickenbacker dined at the Officer's Mess, carefully varying his dinner companions, regularly rotating the adoring Captains and Majors. Every evening he joked that he was a bit of bloke, one who delighted in passing the port the wrong way. As it happened, passing the port in a particular direction was not significant in current military thinking. If it had been Rickenbacker would have followed convention. But for all his military regularity Rickenbacker considered himself an individual in an organisation that prided itself on beating individualism. What made him an individual above all else was his secret.

When Rickenbacker was in army school he was once asked what his ambition was, what great aim did he have that drove him to parade about whilst being humiliated by men predisposed to humiliation. Rickenbacker replied that he would very much like to rule the peoples of the Niger Delta, wisely but sternly; to have many concubines, as is the want of the tribes in that region; and to own more cattle than any other chief. For this very serious reply Rickenbacker was forced to clean the Captain's four wheel drive vehicle with his toothbrush. This experience was a lesson to Rickenbacker. He learnt not to speak of one's ambitions freely amongst one's colleagues. After the toothbrush incident Rickenbacker kept quiet about his desires for chiefdom.

As Rickenbacker approached his seventeenth birthday he fell in love with his cousin. Gloria was slim and boyish, with long blonde eyelashes and a dimple in her chin. As she grinned the right corner of her mouth curved downward and crinkled in a way that Rickenbacker found irresistible. Every time she grinned he looked at her mouth. It curved and quivered and crinkled, and Rickenbacker was in raptures. Rickenbacker was not above thoughts of flesh meeting flesh. He was sixteen and had felt a woman's breasts. He had attempted to feel what he imagined would be the silky, soft and lacy areas under a thin summer school uniform. In the dark recesses of the film room he had been unsuccessful. He dreamt of the time when he would know the pleasures of conquering the resisting hands. Still, he was quite aware of the full glory of Gloria.

Rickenbacker climbed the tree outside his house's spare room, tonight to be inhabited by Gloria. With a twist and a stretch he could see through the venetian blinds. As Gloria hooked her fingers into her jeans and a glimpse of white appeared Rickenbacker fell from the tree and broke his wrist. He learnt about disappointment that night.

Being in battle was not a disappointment for Rickenbacker. He was attached to parts of the British Army that invaded the Falklands and had the misfortune to be on board a ship under fire. He was glad that he had not run screaming through the closed confines of the ship's passageways. Glad that he had not painted his body with boot polish and prowled the upper decks making tiger noises, as a Captain had, or so the story went. Rickenbacker found that whilst wishing he were somewhere else he dealt with the ordeal in a suitably military way. As the noises of battle tortured his ears Rickenbacker remembered all that he had been taught in army school.

Long before this, when Rickenbacker was just ten years old, his nickname was "Silly Wacker". The children of his neighbourhood would cry, "Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker, Silly Wacker!" In many ways this was a pleasant time for Rickenbacker. While he knew that there was a spiteful side to the taunts, and indeed did not know that "wacking" referred to masturbation for quite a few years, he felt part of the gang in the streets of his home town in those days. There was much playing, and much fighting. He now knew that gang rules meant that any individual perceived as weak by the strong was liable to find themselves subject to unpleasantness, ranging from simple taunting to expulsion. Rickenbacker learnt from this that it was clearly better to be one of the strong.

As a General, Rickenbacker was now one of the strong. But given his secret it was fortunate that he had rather slim hips. Laying beside Gloria one glorious day in the Spring before he departed for his first commission they compared bodyshapes, thighs and hips, chests and shoulders, bottoms and tops. They were more similar than not. Gloria had breasts of course, and Rickenbacker had rather wide shoulders. Their hips were identical. Before Gloria Rickenbacker would not have noticed such a thing. Gloria taught Rickenbacker about sensitivity, about smelling the flowers along the way.

Rickenbacker firmly believed that one learnt from life's experiences. This was particularly important in a military world, where one learnt from history the correct way to behave, the correct way to wear items of decoration, and the correct way to fight wars. Every event was but one more experience from which to build a behaviour for the future. Rickenbacker understood that this way of viewing the world could mean a person might end up rather infatuated with cataloguing events while ignoring their intrinsic value as education or simply as sources of enjoyment. Rickenbacker thoroughly enjoyed his secret.

Rickenbacker was not interested in dressing as a woman, and was not interested in wearing bras or suspender belts. He simply had a liking for satin or silk cami-knickers in the French style. A perfectly harmless desire Rickenbacker felt. It was not as if he were afraid of guns, or could not accommodate the other tribal requirements of army life. He also knew deep in his heart that this desire had to be kept a secret. Certainly his power over juniors would be severely eroded if they knew his secret. He imagined that there might not be a queue to dine with him if the Captains and Majors knew. Any fellow General that knew would almost certainly mention it to the Chiefs of Staff who would most likely take disciplinary action.