Paper Doll (14 page)

“Knock it off,” Hirsch said.

Lewis flopped the magazine in his direction and Hirsch looked at him malevolently.

“What're you lookin' at?” Lewis said. “Fucking ninety-day-wonder Jew second looey.”

Hirsch got up and left.

Bryant pulled the magazine over and read silently while they sat and waited, not talking. Lewis drummed “Sing Sing Sing” on the table with his palms.

Gabriel came in with a sloppy and overweight captain and Bean, Snowberry, Cooper, and Eddy in tow. “This is Captain Ciervanski,” he announced. “I trust you'll give him your full cooperation.”

Captain Ciervanski set a pad and some sharpened pencils down neatly on the table. He wished them a good afternoon.

“No one's seen Ball or Piacenti?” Gabriel asked glumly. Bryant shook his head. “Now where's Hirsch?”

“He said he didn't want any part of this, sir,” Lewis said. “He said he didn't care what you thought.”

“That's not really true,” Bryant said.

“Well, we'll go on with what we have here,” Captain Ciervanski said crisply.

“Sir?” Lewis said. “I didn't know
Impact
did interviews.”

“They don't,” Ciervanski said. “There's no guarantee this'll run, either. It's a pet idea of mine. It's really up to you guys.”

Snowberry gave Bryant an exaggerated shrug. He was
Paper Doll
's lowest-ranking crew member, a tech three, so it wasn't his place to comment.

“It's a good idea, sir,” Cooper said. He so rarely spoke, the rest of the crew assumed in this case he was sucking up to Gabriel. “I think they think back home that guys like Clark Gable are flying the Forts.”

“Clark Gable
is
flying Forts,” Lewis said. “He's in the 351st.”

“Imagine if they knew back home that we were in charge of things?” Snowberry said.

Ciervanski made a show of getting ready, waiting for them to quiet down or for Gabriel to bring them into line. Bryant tried to help. He liked Ciervanski, though they were expected to display a certain distaste for officers.

“I heard from a guy in the 351st that Gable is actually a good officer,” Willis Eddy said. “Though he don't actually fly the Forts.”

“I heard that,” Cooper agreed.

“Which one of you is the youngest?” Ciervanski said. He had apparently given up waiting for Gabriel.

“Snowberry,” Gabriel said.

Ciervanski wrote that down. “How old are you?”

“Ah, eighteen,” Snowberry said.

“He looks very young for his age,” Gabriel said. When Ciervanski looked at him, he nodded helpfully.

“He has a twin brother who's much younger,” Lewis added.

Ciervanski scribbled something down and smiled to let them know he was in on the joke. He went on writing.

“Whaddaya want to know?” Snowberry asked. There was a hint of anxiety in his voice—Bryant imagined him envisioning the headline
Underage Gunner Wants to Be in the Fight
—and he raised up a bit in his seat to try and decipher what the captain was writing. “I was born in August nineteen-twenty-something,” he said.

Ciervanski asked if his parents were proud of him.

“My dad's dead,” Snowberry said. “My mom is, I guess.”

The captain scribbled, dissatisfied. “Let me open this up to all the guys,” he said. “You boys're just starting out. First real rugged mission recently. How'd it strike you? What're your feelings about combat? What sort of advice would you pass on to green crews?”

They were silent. Gabriel looked at each of them, trying to force an answer.

“I don't think we're ready to be giving advice, sir,” Lewis said quietly.

Ciervanski nodded. They could see in his expression the dawning and dismal sense that his pet project might have to be scrapped, or at the very least carried through with another crew. He tried again.

“Are there any outstanding incidents you'd relate?”

“Outstanding incidents,” Eddy mused. “Well, once I saw an Arab eat a sandwich made of K rations and shaving cream.”

Ciervanski closed his pad, and laughed, which relieved them. “Well, Lieutenant, your boys may be ready for Fred Allen but I'm not sure they're ready for
Impact
. It's like trying to interview the Ritz Brothers.”

Gabriel got up from his chair. His face indicated his understanding that his chance to be the skipper of a more famous aircrew was slipping away. He gestured at Lewis. “I think the men are a little, you know, hesitant, sir, and don't want to blow their own horn. Sergeant Peeters here took a 20mm incendiary in the chest, in the flak vest, on the last raid, and lived to tell about it.”

Ciervanski looked at him sadly, as if he had offered a bowel movement as news. “All right,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

Lewis related the incident with no elaboration.

Ciervanski wrote it all down dutifully. “We'll get a shot maybe of you wearing the vest and holding the shell,” he said without enthusiasm.

He dismissed them soon after. There had been further silences, additional forlorn questions, spartan answers. Gabriel apologized for all of them. Ciervanski waved off the apology gracefully and said, “Maybe it's tough getting everybody together like this. Bad idea. Tell you what, Lieutenant. I've still got an hour and a half. What do you say I wander around with some of the men in smaller groups and talk to them informally?”

So he ended up with Lewis and Bryant under the nose of
Paper Doll.
Lewis was explaining what he believed to be the weak areas of the Fortress's defensive fire umbrella. Gabriel drifted by in the background, keeping a helpless eye on them, worried, Bryant knew, that Ciervanski was talking to exactly the wrong person.

“Who's that?” Ciervanski asked, pointing to the Plexiglas nose. “Last-minute replacement?” He chuckled. Audie was sitting upright in the bombardier's seat. Her nose misted the Plexiglas, and her blind and patient lack of comprehension parodied the burned-out look of twenty-mission bombardiers.

Ciervanski offered around cigarettes and then Oh Henry!s. “Look, boys,” he said. “I figure the only way this job could do anything more than keep me busy, do anything for anyone at all, is if I try to get the real story out.”

Lewis and Bryant pondered that. Above them Audie seemed to be surveying the airfield, chin and tongue bobbing lazily to the rhythm of her panting.

Ciervanski sighed. “Well, I humped all the way out here, talked my CO into this idea in the first place, and chewed up a day and a half on this project. I think when I file this the cream chipped beef is going to hit the fan.”

“It may just be us,” Bryant suggested.

Ciervanski stood and brushed off the seat of his pants. His belly shook and he puffed. “You boys take care,” he said. “Don't take any wooden nickels.” Gabriel had seen the leave-taking and was heading their way. “Here comes your lieutenant,” he said. “I gotta break the news to him that you guys won't be famous this year.”

“I think he already knows, sir,” Lewis said.

Bryant's father worked for the railroad, and had been able to keep his job through the Depression. He didn't share much with Bryant and one Christmas told him, That's all you get; and that's about right.

Once in a while they went hunting in the woods of eastern Connecticut, a biographical detail Bryant could never bring himself to reveal to Lewis. He was never allowed to handle the gun, his father tramping along with the .22 in the crook of his arm, oblivious to the clouds of insects which drove his son into a quiet frenzy of waving and slapping. His father was a poor shot as well, always sending squirrels and opossum skittering out of range with his first attempt. One of the dogs, Toby, or Corky, or the malevolent Snapper, would come along, adding to his father's frustration and Bryant's misery. The one time Tippi, Bobby's favorite, had come, the dog had performed so miserably—not seeing a squirrel it almost tripped over, even after his father had taken the dog's head and oriented it in the right direction—that his father had dragged it back to the car and locked it in for the rest of the day, and Bryant had walked and walked thinking of poor Tippi, shamefaced and only half understanding, gazing out behind the windshield after them into the woods.

When Snowberry felt particularly low he liked to, as he put it, swap dad stories. He said he missed his dad a good bunch. Bryant did, too, he was surprised to discover, though he felt bad he had few stories such as Snowberry seemed able to draw on endlessly, stories of dads and kids having fun. He treated it as a failure of memory when he could and chastised himself for not holding close to the best things now that he was away from home.

“I wish my dad were still around,” Snowberry said. “It's tough when you don't have a pop.”

Bryant agreed it must be. They talked about the World's Fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere, the Helicline. All the razzmatazz, Snowberry said, all the really wild stuff about how great things were going to be. Snowberry had gone with his father twice; Bryant had visited once on the train with his uncle Tom, the military enthusiast. His uncle had hectored him throughout the trip about the importance of what they were viewing until Bryant had begun to view the whole thing as pretty much ruined.

Everything is progressing, his uncle had said, more than once. The world was better in every possible way than it was before, and that was something to think about. They had seen the GM Futurama three times, despite the lines and the heat. Bryant had hoarded money his mother had slipped him—his father had suggested to his uncle that they were there to see the exhibits, not to fill up on junk—and he remembered budgeting his time between ice creams more vividly than the exhibits, even the Futurama, with its vast plains and miniature cities explained endlessly by a voice annoyingly like his uncle's. They had to get ready for the future, his uncle and the voice told him, find their skill, find their place, because the future was where they were going to spend the rest of the lives. It had seemed to him plausible as wisdom until he had thought about it at greater length, at home, and then he had become annoyed at the obviousness of it.

The World's Fair had frightened him, with its armies of everyone excelling or about to excel, with its talk of a future which seemed so briskly progressive that he'd only be afforded minutes to find and fill his niche and hours to prove himself within it. He had paid close attention to the aviation exhibits, but had absorbed nothing, really, and was wretchedly certain on that long ride back home that he had no aptitude for it, no aptitude for the future, no place in the World of Tomorrow.

The immensity of his presumption, he remembered, had haunted him on that train as it had trundled through Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven: fly an airplane! Bobby Bryant bringing in the mail through the winter storms of the Sierras; Bobby Bryant barnstorming to beat the band. Could he really take these huge metal machines off the ground and return them as gracefully as falling sheets of paper? His only comfort, when his fears called his dreams to account, was that he didn't really see how
anyone
did it.

He'd developed the courage to mention it once, on a family outing his father had granted his mother. His mother had packed sliced celery and fresh pea pods wrapped in foil, wedges of baloney in waxed paper, and his father's big canteen filled with iced tea, the bags still floating darkly in the cool interior.

They had spread a blanket on a grassy area of Voluntown State Park a short distance into eastern Connecticut, having borrowed his uncle Tom's Ford for the trip. His mother had spread the food out with some joy and his father poured tea into a collapsible cup already sweating with condensation, and gazed at Amy's gingham animal as if clearly not recognizing it but feeling that he should. He was ill at ease on the blanket and wore a T-shirt and black pants belted high on his stomach. Bobby drank the tea and rolled the glass on his forehead. His father after eating had wandered off for a look-see and Bryant had followed. He'd caught up to him standing ankle deep in a pond below a rock fall, in shade deep and cool as his grandmother's sitting room. His father's pants were rolled to the knees, and his legs sloshed gently back and forth in place. Bryant had slipped off his shoes in the hush and edged in, through a stream sheeting water quietly down a rocky grade, the water cold as bone. His feet were prominent and unreal in the lucidity of the water. Bits of glass blinked sunlight back at him from the bottom. He was about to mention the glass in warning when his father quieted him with a hand motion and pointed. Four fish had glided to a stop just next to his ankle, their tails slowly waving like underwater pennants.

Back at the blanket Bryant had been encouraged enough to bring up someone's recent round-the-world flight, and his mother had commented politely that it was quite a feat, though his father had remained noncommittal.

“I'm going to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps,” he finally said. His tone struck him as somewhere between forceful and pitiful. He had considered mentioning the RAF but had quailed at the last moment.

His father had seemed preoccupied with a nearby pine. “Isn't that very dangerous?” his mother asked vaguely.

If talk was money, his father had finally said, brushing those black pants with exaggerated care, he supposed they'd all be millionaires by now.

“We had a game,” Snowberry said, dreamily, “a game we used to play when we were kids. Mel and I. Mel was a year older. He's in the Navy now, in the Pacific. We were just kids. There was a rope swing with a heavy wooden seat, weathered so that it was that gray color wood gets. We found out if we lay down underneath it, it cleared our noses and faces by just a few inches. And I would lie there and Mel would swing, or Mel would lie there and I would swing, and you'd look up at the clouds and leaves and branches and hear it coming and have to look and it would be by, so fast, so close, you couldn't believe it, each time. At the top of the swing it was miles away, and then it was back over you, the grain of the wood whooshing by, and you thought, if I lift my head, imagine. And you felt the dirt scuffed floury by all those kids' feet and the ragged dry grass and the sun and the rush of air from the long swoop of that swing.