Paper Doll (19 page)

Bryant found himself climbing with
Paper Doll
up through white cumulus clouds and gray sky. Lewis was singing a parody of “Into the Air, Army Airmen” over the interphone: Into the air, Junior Birdman, get your ass into the blue. The plane banked sharply and he knew he was supposed to be remaining vigilant in his lookout for the assembly plane and others, but the view through breaks in the cloud entranced him: visibility distended in a pleasant and sleepy way by a slight haze all the way to the Dutch coast and deep into France, the muted colors receding into the curvature of the earth. The earth closer to home resembled the subdivided palette of Robin's paintbox. Cooper had switched the crew's interphone to Liaison, and Bean tuned them into the BBC, and they climbed higher into the great chamber of air above the cloud cover listening to an alto voice singing opera.

Hirsch spotted the assembly plane and within minutes they had slipped into a slot above it and behind
Geezil II
and
Leave Me Home
, which had achieved its name by three times developing engine trouble on the transoceanic flight to England and three times having had to turn back.

They found themselves enduring the usual casually harrowing jockeying and shifting in formation as they circled in an ever-growing group, the clouds like shoals beneath them. Bryant could hear the guff Gabriel and Cooper were taking—Close it up! Close up the formation, goddamnit!—from the pilot of the lead plane.

From above and behind, three more 17's appeared and drifted down to them. Bryant called them in to Gabriel and said aloud, Now where're
they
coming from? They eased terrifyingly close and suddenly everyone in
Paper Doll
was shouting, as if the other crew could hear. Gabriel had no room to maneuver and shouted as much back in response over the interphone when they yelled for evasive action. The closest 17 bobbed higher with an infuriating casualness after having dipped so low that its ball turret had been momentarily level with Bryant in his dorsal. The ball turret gunner had waved.

They had been badly frightened and were glad to be among the first to land, an hour later. They were standing outside of
Paper Doll
waiting for the jeeps when
Lemon Drop
came in with a crushed tail from a collision somewhere in the clouds, its engines straining, the emergency trucks clanging, and
Lemon Drop
swung to the right as it swept in over the tarmac, hesitating with its left wing dipped, and then that wing caught the concrete and the immense plane smashed and concertinaed as they watched, a body cartwheeling out.

The radio operator survived. There was no fire. The plane had shattered into pieces spread over the runway like a junkyard. They had sprinted over to help the emergency crews, and Lewis and Bryant had come across in the cockpit section only the co-pilot's flying boot, wedged beneath a rudder pedal, a bone jutting up from within like the stalk of an immature flower. When the shock had worn off, Bryant's first clear thought, lying on his bunk, was that they were all dying like ants, or pets, or foreigners—they were all dying now as part of a routine.

He lay still. When he woke he was damp. The hut was gloomy and he guessed he had missed dinner. Something nearby smelled like aluminum. On the bunk beside him Snowberry lay face into the pillow with his hands hanging together off the edge like a victim of an exotic torture. Lewis was on his own bunk beyond, shifting his rear to test the sounds of various farts. Piacenti sat upright with his legs over the side and his head in his hands. It looked to Bryant like a training film illustration of Low Morale.

“I want to go home,” Snowberry said. His voice came from deep within the pillow.

“For serious drinking the boys had a table the shape of Texas. Cut it out of sheet metal,” Lewis said. He had spent his leave with friends in the 92nd. “We were playing Drink the Cities. We were on Galveston or Houston and somebody said, Toast. There was that point when no one knew what to drink to, and some little gunner who'd had his nose smashed over Aachen said,
Yo Momma.
It was just right.”

Snowberry had not moved and it looked to Bryant as if he'd stopped breathing. Lewis was chewing on a tightly rolled piece of paper and did not seem to be deriving pleasure from his story. He had a photo of Gene Tierney over his bed, under a handwritten sign that said
Do Not Hump
, and he was stroking her behind absently with his hand in his flying glove. “Now this may be a bunch of guys who appreciate the grotesque no more than seven seconds running in their whole life. But I swear I do love to see the forces come together.”

“I was figuring it out, on the ride in,” Snowberry said after a silent and dismal pause. “I don't think we can go to chow anymore without fifteen percent casualties.”

“The last big party we had,” Lewis said, “it was after a big mission. We had WAAF's and WAAC's and Red Cross Girls and Wrens and local girls, you know, nice girls, and they were all standing around or sitting in these little groups. We kept thinking, how'd we get so lucky? Why are there so many girls here? Then it hit us: they were all the dates of the missing guys. We'd lost eight planes. Eighty guys. They're all standing around, all dressed up.”

“Big night for sloppy seconds,” Piacenti said.

“One little girl musta started getting dressed four hours before she came. She was at a table with some other girls and they were ignoring her, you know, trying to at least have a good time. She was crying. I went over and talked to her.”

“I'll bet you did,” Piacenti said. He believed Lewis to be a real tail hound.

“I told her it was just arithmetic,” Lewis said gently, as if the subject had been inevitable and infinitely dreary. “If each group has to do X number of missions and loses Y number of men with each mission, how soon before all the original men are history?”

“I worry about fire,” Piacenti said. “You know, you're caught inside and there's fire.”

Lewis chewed and the paper moved around his mouth like a toothpick. “This guy in the 92nd had this photo of all the squadron Forts lined up the week he'd arrived. He showed it to me? All of them are gone now. None left. You ever wonder why they don't have battle-weary B-17's pulling things around?”

He spat the paper high above the bunk in a startling parabola. “It's simple, Dick Ott used to say. You're in a game and you need to score twenty-five. Before you run into the Glass Mountain.”

The Glass Mountain was a squadron term for fatal and spectacular disasters in the skies, as in, This or that ship ran into the Glass Mountain. It had to do with the effect achieved when a heavy bomber was hit by flak while flying straight and level.

“Roasting to death,” Piacenti repeated. He shivered, and rubbed his neck. “That's what really scares me.”

“Think of it like the Brits,” Lewis counseled. “You know. They talk about it like polo or something. These are just the single elimination playoffs.”

“I was talking to Hirsch,” Bryant said. “He was saying nothing was haphazard, you know?, and that if you had all the figures, you could have predicted—”

“
Everything
is haphazard,” Lewis said with vehemence. “You don't predict
nothing.
I blow up your house, you tell me which way all the pieces are going to fall.”

“But don't you think—”

“Shut up,” Lewis said. “You give me a headache. Don't open your mouth.”

“I want to go home,” Snowberry said into the pillow. “I'm tired of this war.”

There was no response. The principal sound in the metal hut became the squeaking of Piacenti's bunk as he scratched himself with an annoying industry. Bryant closed his eyes and nursed his humiliation, imagining Lewis gloating, imagining various forms of comeuppance.

Nothing was on for the next day. In the middle of the night he was aware that Snowberry was awake, and when he got up in dull insomniac frustration to go to the can, Snowberry followed. He sat on the can just for a place to sit.

“Some night,” Snowberry said. He ran water on his hands and looked at it.

Bryant was hours past answering. He fancied the water beneath him was rippling quietly in the bowl.

Snowberry produced his little red journal, opening to a marked page. He began reading after settling in with his back to the wall, his lips every so often forming ghostly words. Bryant rose and hoisted his shorts and returned to his bunk.

In the dark, vague shapes telescoped toward and away from him. He followed elusive ribbon-like creatures he hoped were temporary retinal imperfections of some sort until he had to get up, and hissing in frustration he lowered his feet to the floor and padded back to the latrine, concentrating dimly on some notion of a drink of water.

Snowberry was asleep, still seated upright, swaying with tiny starts like a doddering grandfather. Bryant sat beside him and when he didn't wake extended a finger slowly and touched his nose. He didn't stir. He waggled his fingers grimly before Snowberry's face. His journal was opened on his lap. Bryant picked it up and began reading without high hopes. He skipped a section on Frances Langford. The next sections were drafts of letters.

This whole thing has really been something in terms of showing me the world and how different everyone is. Before the service I'd never met anyone from other places and now I know guys from Rhode Island and Ohio, and I've met guys from Texas and New Mexico and places like that. I always think about what Dad used to say about people from upstate and stuff, and I wonder what he would've thought about this crowd.

I eat good. The chow here is really good for the most part though everybody gripes about it all the time. I guess it's something you're supposed to do in the service. You can't believe how important food is here. If Mom knew she certainly wouldn't worry on that score. Guys'll sit around and just talk about eating and never change the subject. Guys are always talking about how their mother made this or that, and everyone listens like their lives depend on it. Sebastian Piacenti, one of our waist gunners I told you about, has this knack for talking about his mother's cooking so that the guys can almost smell it. He went on the other day in the jeeps after a mission about this veal dish with tomatoes that had the guys moaning and biting their hands.

Snowberry then attempted, with limited success, Bryant judged, to recapture some of Piacenti's magic. He skipped ahead.

The guy who wrote to ask for the picture of Sis is Harold Bean. He's got a girl here but I guess things aren't going so well between them, and I was really talking Sis up in front of him one day, so I guess he was sold. He's a nice guy, I think, though Lewis rides him pretty hard. Lewis says Bean raises a crew's buggeration factor—that's the phrase we got from the Brits for chances of something going wrong—but I think he's just pretty much like the rest of us. Maybe more so. We don't want to let each other down, and I think we do a pretty good job.

Lewis thinks Bean's getting jumpy and says you mark his words, he'll end up in a flak home, but I think it's more this thing with the girl, and the rotten luck the squadron's been having. I worry more about Piacenti. I don't know that much more about Bean. He's from Pennsylvania, but I think he told you that. He's a good-hearted guy. He's not a wolf. I think he looks fine but Lewis likes to say he's got a face like an unmade bed. I think he looks like the little guy in Lost Horizons. You know the one I mean?

I'm okay. I think we're all pretty blue like I said right now. I've heard some great new stuff from Der Bingle on the Armed Forces Network, and some new Vera Lynn stuff on the English stations. Tell Sis I've been working on the harmonies.

I find myself daydreaming more than I used to, and I have to watch it, or the guys'll think I'm ready for the flak farm, too. I have these other dreams, too, though I don't think they're going to last forever. The guys call dreaming like that pulling a lot of night missions. I have this one where there are German fighters all around us and my turret mechanism is like it has sand in it or something, and the gun controls are all floppy and loose. It gets me in a real sweat.

It seems like what we were taught and everything isn't good enough to handle everything

The entry stopped. Bryant closed the book and woke Snowberry, getting him to his feet and leading him gently to his bunk, as if putting to bed a sleepy child on Christmas Eve.

It seemed to them that it had been decided to keep them flying missions until they were dead. They were informed at the morning briefing that the target of the day would be Kassel, and a lieutenant known to most of them as a good man and a steady co-pilot stood up and said with frightening calm that he was no longer willing to fly these goddamn things, and that he wanted out. When he refused to sit down, he was escorted from the room.

On the hardstand Hirsch and Gabriel alone seemed capable of smooth movement, the rest of the crew drooped and jerked like marionettes waiting for their turn to board. Bean was learning German phrases from the little sheet in his escape kit:
Danke, Bitte. Zug. Schnellzug. Dritte Klasse.

Snowberry was white. “I'm not gonna make it,” he whispered to Bryant. “We were so cocky before. Why were we so
cocky
before?”

Bryant understood, he thought: It was as if the present situation represented an invited retribution.

“This paper pusher I met in London told me, ‘You want to make breakfast, you gotta break some eggs,'” Lewis said. He was blowing on his gloves to further dry them out.

“That's what they tell the eggs,” Willis Eddy said from within the plane.

Lewis shook his head with the expression of a man with insects on his face. “I clocked him. I got these little marks on my knuckles from his teeth. I hope he gums Farina the rest of his life.”

They were thirteenth off the runway, climbing into the lightening sky behind the banking silhouettes of the 17's just ahead of them, and they rose east to the assembly points toward the brighter air. The contrails of the highest aircraft stood out in dark relief.