Paper Doll (23 page)

“How long have you been waiting?” Robin said after they'd crossed to the table. “We were able to get a lift in an officer's car. Very nice young man, who claimed to be a war correspondent.” She offered her hand and he squeezed it. Jean gave Snowberry a kiss on the cheek and he looked at her morosely.

“Are you keeping up with your drawing?” Robin asked him.

“No,” Snowberry said. To mitigate the rudeness he added, “Are you?”

Robin shook her head. It occurred to Bryant that the girls didn't have beers, but he was unable for the moment to generate the sociability necessary to volunteer to get more. The two beers sat between them like curios they were jointly examining.

“Is it going to be so very bad tomorrow?” Jean asked.

“No,” Snowberry said. “There's a lot of big talk, though. Bryant here is excitable. Me, I've got no worries.”

Jean appropriated Snowberry's untouched beer and took a sip.

Robin said, “Is anyone going to offer to buy us drinks?” and Snowberry seemed to come to himself, but instead of rising moved Bryant's glass in front of her.

“Well,” Robin said quietly, looking between them, and placed her hands on the table.

“What I miss is reading,” Snowberry said. “I used to read a lot.”

Jean agreed. “A number of us have been exchanging books,” she said. “People are reading everything and anything.”

Bryant nodded and no one carried the conversation forward.

“I saw a wonderful bit scratched on the wall of the loo here,” Jean said. “Did I tell you? It said, ‘Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.'”

When the boys didn't laugh, Robin said “Well” again and shifted in her chair, and Bryant understood that what had been anxiety and sympathy was turning into frustration and resentment. He sat up, smiled ruefully for them both. “Well, heck,” he said. “If it is a big deal, we'll probably all come back officers. That's the Air Corps. Everyone moves up.”

“That's right,” Jean said. “I expect you two will be running things before too long. Especially our young Gordon. In two years he has a chance to be quite an officer, that's my guess.”

Gordon said, “In two years I have a chance to be nineteen.”

They were silent. He rarely mentioned his age; never around the girls.

He added: “Like Billy Conn used to say—I got my whole past ahead of me.”

“Billy Conn,” Bryant explained, “is a boxer Harold Bean's always talking about.”

“Well,” Robin repeated, this time cheerfully, “I suggest we either all go for a walk, or call it a night. What do you say?”

Bryant was grateful for the idea. He was finding Snowberry oppressive, though he was behaving the same way. And he did feel that this was an opportunity to transmit something of how he felt to Robin.

They walked hand in hand. A few steps ahead Jean stopped to kiss Snowberry, and they passed them.

They sat beside a low stone wall. On the opposite side of the lane a cow gazed at them, scratching its chin in slow strokes on a wire gate. They heard a convoy of fuel bowsers coming from a long way off, and didn't speak until they had passed. No one driving the trucks understood gear shifting and one by one they rounded the corner and ground noisily up the slight hill.

“What a nice image for things right now,” Robin said. “These cows with their mild eyes watching all this Yank bustle.”

Bryant suggested quietly that she might draw it.

She leaned his head closer with her hand. Her hair smelled of fir needles. “Oh, I'm not much use with lorries and big machines,” she said. “A lot of clank and precious few beautiful lines.”

He imagined her rushing to get dressed, hurrying into the night with almost no notice. “I'm sorry I've been jerky,” he said. “Thanks for coming out like this. I guess I'm just scared I'll let everyone down. Scared I really don't belong here, that nobody realizes that.”

It was dark. The shine on his boots interested him. Robin stroked his arm and tried to reassure him. As she spoke he grew less sure of himself, less sure of his ability to perform.

They could make out Snowberry and Jean thirty or so yards down the lane.

“Is Gordon all right?” Robin asked.

“He and Bean,” Bryant said. “They're unhappy.”

“Just the two of them?”

He shrugged and made an amused sound with his tongue on his palate. “We all are.”

They sat in the dark and something twittered from a house eave behind them.

“I used to have dreams about you,” she said. “I used to dream the war was over or everyone had quit or one thing or another and you were living here. In one you were a tax assessor, of all things.”

He looked at her.

“Now I'm all dreamed out. They've stopped. That's what Janie had said, you know, from one of her letters to my great aunt: I'm all dreamed out. She wrote it late one night at the cottage hospital.” She sighed, and bit her little finger lightly. “I think at this point you need a child's faith,” she said. “I don't think I have that. Gone with the lavender icing, or something of that sort, I suppose.”

They sat a bit longer. He had shifted to a cross-legged position and his foot was asleep.

“How fitting,” she added, with some anger. “How fitting, Bobby Bryant, that your aeroplane should be called the Fortress. Defended on all sides.” She stood.

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking up at her in the dark.

“I mean I'm quite exhausted, thank you, trying to get through to you, trying to get you to volunteer something. I came all the way down here, Bobby, and you sit there.” Bryant stood, and shook his leg. It was not the best move.

“I say to myself, be patient with him, Robin, think of his position, he's just a boy at any rate, how can you know what it feels like? But Bobby, is it really so very
hard?
Is it so hard to be straightforward with me? To tell me how you feel?”

He felt himself becoming angry and half understood the opportunity to avoid the question. He resented her the way he resented Colin. He had never been happier anywhere than he was with her, and he remained standing apart from her, shaking a sleeping leg. She waited, and he didn't come up with anything to say.

“Bobby Bryant,” she said, and he knew how much he had hurt her. She touched her forearm with an open palm, as if he had hurt her there. “I have to go.”

Halfway to Snowberry and Jean she turned and said vehemently, “You had better not get killed. Don't let me
hear
that. You had better not get killed.”

On the way back down the lane in the dark Snowberry with his hands thrust deep in his pockets golfed a stone twenty or thirty feet with a left-footed swipe and asked, “So what happened to you?”

“We had a little fight,” Bryant said. “This has been some night.”

“Big night before a big day,” Snowberry said bitterly.

They walked on. Snowberry lined a rock off a postbox with another kick. He and Jean had not parted on the best of terms, either. “She said I was a spoiled brat,” he said. “Just out of shorts, and that I wasn't going to give her the runaround. Then she turned on the waterworks.”

“She's had some tough breaks,” Bryant commented.

“Ah, God,” he said. “Lewis warned me.” He bent over to discover why a stone he'd kicked hadn't moved. “I shoulda known better. The thing is, she's great.”

From somewhere around them a dog growled. They could see nothing but a few lights.

“I don't need that right now,” Snowberry said. “I don't need a dog bite.”

They waited, and then went quietly on. Bryant said, “What do you think about Bean?”

Snowberry made a dismissive noise that sounded like spitting. “Don't you get it yet?” he said. “It's all of us.” Down one of the turnoffs a horn blared and wavered. “Lewis is right. We're
not ready
for this. There's something big tomorrow now, and we're not ready. We were taking that picture today and falling all over ourselves for downing that poor sorry bastard and it hit me: What are we ready for? What happens when we run into a shitstorm? On the run to Kassel they went through our formations like shit through a goose. I never even got my guns on them.”

“You sound like Lewis,” Bryant said. The conversion was not reassuring.

Snowberry snorted. “You should start thinking for yourself, and stop worrying about who sounds like who. How long has he been trying to tell us all this stuff?”

Bryant resisted the notion that Snowberry had reached a level of awareness that he had not. “I don't see it that way,” he said stubbornly. “I don't think we did so bad at Kassel.”

“Oh, yeah. Well. You didn't even make it that far. Kayoed by the oxygen mask.”

“Don't be a little asshole,” Bryant said. The “little” was a measure of how wounded he had been by Snowberry's crack about the mask. “What good does it do to talk like that?”

“Look at this hand,” Snowberry said. Bryant couldn't see it in the dark. “Christ.”

“Oh, God, let it be a milk run,” Snowberry added, minutes later, in a small voice. “Oh, let it be a milk run.”

He lay on his back and thought of his father.

It still seemed impossibly early. Somebody in the latrine was scrounging magazines from the trash drums. Lewis was where they had left him. Ball was asleep. Piacenti was playing solitaire, possibly; the cards were in unsteady rows beside him on the bed and Bryant could hear the faintest tapping as he laid one upon the other. Bryant had asked, on one of those interminable hunting trips when the plodding or the sun or the rain had finally angered him into courage, why he could never carry the gun, even when his father was obviously tired.

You can't carry the gun, his father had answered. You're a danger to yourself with a pointed stick.

The day he was to leave for the induction center, his mother had wrapped some pears and an apple together in a waxed-paper bundle for the train, and had urged him to say goodbye again to his father, waiting on the porch. His uncle Tom's final words to him had been an admonition not to forget the following advice for getting by in the service: If you can move it, pick it up. If you can't, paint it. If it moves by itself, salute it. Jeez, Bryant had thought. Here I am going away to something like this and that's the best he can do? His father had been facing away from the house, gazing out over the clotheslines crowded with wash below.

“I should go if I'm going to be there by two-thirty,” Bryant had said, thinking, Turn around. Tell me I'm doing the right thing. Tell me you're proud of all this. An inverted bright red shirt on the line waved, bye bye, bye bye.

“I've tried with you, Robert,” his father had said. “Your mother and I have tried. We hope you're doing the right thing.”

He remembered lying on a cot in Florida with all those mosquitoes, thinking, You son of a bitch. If I ever get famous I'm gonna claim to be an orphan. He groaned aloud.

“Easy, trooper,” Lewis said from the opposite bunk. “Save your energy.”

He hadn't been good enough for his father. He hadn't been good enough to fly. He hadn't been good enough to make bombardier, or navigator. He was an aerial gunner, and a flight engineer, and no one thought he could hit a barn at six feet and Tuliese didn't trust him near the engines. He tried to calm himself with images of his own competence and grew frustrated. He tried to see himself again pouring fire into the hapless Messerschmitt they'd shot down, and saw instead the elusive lines of the others flashing through the formations, defeating easily the fastest manipulations of the turrets. He saw the cart-wheeling
Lemon Drop
, with that poor schmoe's foot, and the Fortress from the Hamburg mission sailing into the hill. He lay under the sheets covered with sweat and dreaded the moment Lewis would notice his terror.

After a while he sat up. His feet hurt. His head pounded. The hut was darker and the sweat smell was stifling. Nearly everyone was awake. He could tell by the breathing. A little army of insomniacs, all listening, waiting, paying close attention to the night. He got off his bunk and started to walk and a voice said, “Watch the glasses, bub.” He headed for an upright shape on Lewis's bunk. It turned out to be Snowberry.

Lewis was lying as he had been hours ago, hands behind his head. It seemed to Bryant a feat of some sort.

Snowberry whispered, “Somebody can't sleep,” and Lewis grunted. Bryant slowly crouched beside the bed. They were quiet, and he felt like an intruder.

He became aware of another sound, a quiet and asthmatic sort of sniffing. Snowberry's head was turned from both of them and he was crying.

Lewis wasn't saying anything. Bryant was at a complete loss. He grimaced when he felt his own mouth trembling. Snowberry stopped for stretches, and swallowed, or made little
tsking
sounds with his tongue on his teeth. He did not rub his eyes or nose. Lewis seemed to be helping, though he didn't move.

When Bryant's knees hurt enough, he stood. Snowberry was still turned away. He crossed quietly to his bunk and climbed back into it, pulling the sheet up to his chin, remembering his grandmother in the doorway. He did not look back over at Snowberry and Lewis. He stared at the ceiling of the hut, which rippled in the darkness. He thought,
tomorrow is just another mission
, and,
you need to sleep
, and he closed his eyes to the ripples and to calm himself thought of Audie sitting blind and imperturbable in the Plexiglas nose while Ciervanski took her picture.

Someone hit the lights and he came out of what seemed a daze thinking something was wrong. He squinted and opened his eyes to slits and his watch said 1:15 a.m. All around him men were groaning and cursing. Snowberry was sitting upright already, blinking painfully. Lewis said, “Oh my God,” at the extent of his fatigue and the inhumanity of the hour.