by Ivan Doig
The copilot gave a wave and was on his way. "What happens when you get famous."
Ben was furiously fumbling out of the last of his layers of flying gear. "Do you have a lick of sense left at all? Maybe you're living on love, but I need chow."
"You're going to get it, don't worry," Jake soothed. "The Russkies have their own mess hall and they like to talk shop with B-17 pilots. C'mon, you're gonna meet Katya."
He wondered if he was imagining, but the crowded mess hall smelled to him straight off the pages of Dostoyevsky. Cabbage, dank wool clothing, copious boot grease. Feeling as if he was in another world, he spooned up the formidable soup and devoured hunks of bread while Jake alternately ate and banked his hands through the air in testimony to the maneuvering capabilities of B-17s. Across the table, Russian pilots who looked like either plowboys or middle-aged pirates—the generation between had largely been wiped out by the Germans' demonic sieges from Leningrad to Sevastopol—listened monastically. Amid the bulky men, a woman who was not at all what Ben had expected—trim, keen, authoritative; she reminded him alarmingly of Cass—translated Jake's effusions and Russian spatters of questions.
"Yakov, they say, how big bomb pile?"
"Bomb load, right, three tons," Jake made an expansive gesture, "do you have those back home?"
"Tonna," Katya reported and translated the tonnage, drawing the first smiles from the Russian airmen.
At first Ben had been relieved to see other American uniforms in the roomful of brown drab, a plump major and a couple of shavetail aides sitting with an ascetic-looking Russian majordomo of some sort. The major proved to be the liaison officer, which meant he was there only under obligation, and in a matter of minutes had sent over the more diminutive of the aides to inquire why they were not in their own mess hall with everyone else. Awful good question, shorty. Jake pulled out all the stops, citing Ben as a big-shot correspondent chronicling Lend-Lease and the peerless pilots of both nations. When the underling relayed that, the major gave them an edgy look, but he directly departed and so did the thin-featured political commissar or whatever he was. The entire room sat at attention until the man was out the door. The moment he was gone, Katya relaxed and turned to Ben. "You are from gazeta?" Her voice was throaty and adventurous, and in spite of himself he could imagine how smoky it would sound in bedroom circumstances.
"Gazettes of all kinds, right, Ben?" Jake trumpeted. "He's as important in our country as your guys on Pravda."
"Thanks all to hell for the comparison," Ben snapped. The Russian airmen were getting to their feet, taking their leave with stiff nods. As the mess hall began to empty out, a contingent dressed like Katya, male and female alike in thick-ply ground crew coveralls, drifted over curiously. She rattled out something and they sat down. Wonderful, Ice. Now we're the main attractions at the zoo. Of all there was to worry about in this, he figured he might as well start way up the list. Katya was watching him bright-eyed. "You have the same name as a very famous person," he speculated.
She burst out laughing. "No, no! Marshal Zhukov is not my family. He is great man, we are no ones."
Ben wanted that to be true. Zhukov was the titan of the Eastern Front, reputedly able to stand up even to Stalin's midnight military whims, and with geography on his side he had held out until he could start bleeding the German invaders to a slow death. The glut of war on Soviet soil seemed beyond sane comprehension. Two years now since Hitler made Napoleon's old mistake and turned thousands of miles of Russian snow into the blood of both sides; Ben had access in the correspondents' pool reports to the riveting dispatches of the Red Army frontline daredevil Vasily Grossman and discerned from Grossman's crafty coverage that survivors of the struggle had been through hell from both the enemy and their fanatic rulers. His eyes slipped to Katya's right hand and the sacrificed fingers. The million-dollar wound, a piece of body exchanged for a grant of existence. Before he could ask her what kind of aircraft she had flown—he had a spooky feeling it was a P-39, but that very well might have been Cass on his mind—Jake interjected. "They use this place as a canteen after it shuts down. Get ready to toast Mother Russia, Benjamin my boy."
Vodka made an immediate appearance. Glasses were splashed full and hoisted in accompaniment to a unison cry of "Na zdrovya!" Jake winked across at him. "That much Russian I know. 'Good health,' buddy." Wary from Cass's coma cola elixirs, Ben tested what sat so innocently clear in his glass. It tasted like springwater that had been tampered with by a moonshiner. While the Russians tossed theirs down he took a medium swig and clamped his fist around the glass to hide the fact that he hadn't emptied it. Nonetheless the bottle was making the rounds again and another toast was necessary, this one Jake's "To bolshoya semnadtsi!" The Russians banged the table in homage to big bombers and gulped down. Here came the bottle again. Holy damn, they inhale the stuff.
Katya leaned toward him as if what she was about to say was vital. "Kheminveh. You have meet in the war?"
The Ernie question. He'd had it dozens of times. You'd think Hemingway invented the written word. "I met him once, yes." He did not say it had been in the bar of the Savoy in London. He hiked his shoulders up and huffed out his chest to show the Hemingway mien. "Built like a bull. He was on assignment for Collier's—"
"Coal? Kheminveh write about stove thing?"
"It's a magazine." Ben pantomimed flipping pages.
"With us magazin is on gun." Katya was impatient to reach her point. "Question. Kheminveh famous in Soviet Union, we all read. Hero in The Sun Up Again. Is he steer, not bull?"
Jake woke up to the topic. "Wait a minute. I read that. The guy lost the family jewels? Where'd it say so?"
"That's Hemingway for you," Ben sought to explain and realized the vodka wasn't helping. "He doesn't outright say—"
Jake shook his head in disbelief. "Weird. Did you ask him?"
"Of course I didn't ask him, the whole point of the goddamn book is—"
"Whoa. How can that be, the guy has lost his valuables and we're supposed to read it between the lines? I'd say that's news, it ought to be spelled out in black and white."
"Kheminveh is kid us, da?" Katya contributed. She shook her head censoriously. "We have saying: 'What is write in ink, axe cannot cut off.'"
It hit him then, along with whatever shot of vodka the count was up to by now. He chortled and couldn't stop, laughing himself silly while others around the table tittered in anticipation. Finally he caught enough breath to say it. "That character's name is Jake! Get it, Ice? He's a Jake and his working part is missing in action and yours is present and accounted for and—" Jake guffawed and vowed to write Hemingway a complaining letter. Katya reddened and grinned foxily, translating in a rapid low purr to the other Russians. They caught on and roared.
Wiping his eyes—a bit of a sting there; he crazily wondered whether vodka could reach the eyelids—Ben focused as best he could on Katya. "Question for you." Her expression froze at a degree of politeness. "You flew. Tell me about that, please?"
"Nachthexen." Katya rapped her breast sturdily, then fluttered a hand through the air while giving out an eerie high-pitched whistle. It was the kind of sound you could feel on your skin, and Ben tried not to twitch.
"It stumped me at first, too," Jake broke in. "But they've got great big mothwing biplanes called Polikarpovs that just about float through the air. Our darling here flew one of those. Two-seater, so what they'd do, she and a woman bombardier would go out in the middle of the night and get up a little altitude, just behind the front lines, then cut the engine and glide over the German side," his outsize hands tracing that out in the air. "The bombardier had the explosives in her lap, she'd toss the bomb package out, blow up some Germans, and Katya would rev the engine back on and they'd haul ass out of there." Jake nearly bent double in fealty to the next episode. "Here's the best part. The Germans are down there scared shitless, all they can hear is the wind in the wingstruts as Katya and her chum come drifting over. They run around yelling 'Nachthexen
!' Night witches!"
"Was good, flying," Katya said quietly. She pantomimed steering a tow tractor. "Day witch now." Shrugging, she reached for the latest vodka bottle with the remnant of her hand.
Dazed, Ben sat out the rest of the evening that stretched toward morning. He felt he had to, he was Jake's alibi for consorting with allies who happened to be Red as their crimson flag. The conversation whenever toasts weren't being made crashed along in two languages and in between. At some point Jake volubly told the joke about the dude who was invited to a fancy barbecue and worried whether he would be able to tell cow pie from caviar and which fork to use with which. Katya's back-and-forth lingo had turned giggly, but Ben was numbly aware she could hold the tongue-tangling booze better than he could, they all could. In the haze of alcohol, muddled images kept coming to him. Cass wingwalking amid the struts of a whopping biplane with a grinning Katya in the cockpit cutting the engine, on and off, on and off. Sonofabitching war. Women didn't start it, why does it have to drag them in? He tried to ward it off, but New Guinea replaced Alaska at terrible intervals, the grassy ambush, gashed bodies everywhere mingling with a teletype ticker absurdly chattering in the middle of the trail.
He pinched himself in hidden places to drive off those blears. Sick with longing for Cass—shame to waste all this drinking without her—he endeavored to concentrate on the troubling matter of Katya. Suppositions were not in shortage. Suppose she had a husband somewhere? Suppose she had a Communist Party commissar somewhere? Suppose she actually was the daughter of the great general Zhukov, performing whatever patriotic duty it was to hang out with clueless Yanks? No, wait, the clues simply were different, each to each. Jake's forebears had two thousand years of periodic murder directed at them. If anything, it had given Jake immunity from common fear. Jake didn't have to back up for Mother Russia or anybody else.
Determinedly he took stock of his massive friend across there amid the merry Russians, and that did it. The broad Slavic faces around the table all at once reminded him of Havel from football. And along with Havel, O'Fallon. Vic with greatly more cut off him than a pair of fingers. The others, out there in the treacherous time zones. He felt like sobbing. The team and its mortal dangers were a mere handful compared to the innumerable slaughtered in the vaster jaws of war, no question there. But they were his handful. God damn Jake and pulling Pravda out of the air. He was more than just a mouthpiece for a government propaganda organ, wasn't he? Had to be. Tepee Weepy only had him in its custody, it didn't own him. His mind lurched to the piece waiting to be written about Jake and this polar oasis where big bombers were handed off. Good old ink, get it down with just enough between the lines, can't even cut it off with an axe, right, Ernie? He wished he had a typewriter then and there, to capture all that was going to seem incredible in the sober light of day. Jake and him, up near the top of the world, frozen though it was, thrust out of the lives they'd thought they would lead and into the company of a female warrior who proudly answered to the name of Night Witch.
A couple of time zones to the east, Bill Reinking rolled out of bed, careful as always not to disturb his wife. Cloyce was a notably late sleeper. Not many of those in a town like Gros Ventre, and he reflected on the distant passion that had brought this particular woman from satin bedcovers to the quilts they had shared for nearly two dozen years. She was all for any manner of bedding at the time. As was I.
This time of year first light detached itself from night in stubborn gray, and he put on his glasses to track down his clothes and shoes. Padding across to the window that gave a glimpse of horizon through the giant trunks of the cottonwoods, he checked the sky as usual, not that the weather of the moment meant anything in Montana.
The day ahead of him began cumbrously sorting itself out as he crept down the stairs—the county agent's session at the high school on food production for the war effort, all afternoon given over to typesetting the gleanings sent in by his rural correspondents, a Ladies' Aid potluck supper nominally nonpartisan where the Senator would just happen to whip through and speak his mind about the condition of the nation. By now he could forecast those indignant sentiments almost ahead of the words coming out of the Senator's formidable mouth, and the Senator no doubt could parrot off his dogged editorials before they were written. We're as bad as an old married couple.
That stray thought stung. He tried to yawn it away, stoking up the kitchen stove in the semidark to hurry the coffee. It was a terrible habit for a newspaper editor, rising at dawn after late nights. Yet he had always done so and figured he always would. The early bird gets the worm, but is that a balanced diet? Fumbling for a pencil and pad on the sideboard, he wrote that down to use as a column-bottom filler.
While the coffee perked, he put on his mackinaw and hat to go out and scrape the frost off the car windshield. Another bit of headstart that did not gain a soul much in the long run, but it was something to do. Besides, the dawn air brought him a little of Ben now that he was stationed at East Base once more. That rainbow of planes to Alaska and then Russia: any amount of time Ben put in where virginal aircraft instead of bullets were flying was to be prized. Praise be, Franklin D. I knew Lend-Lease was worth the abuse I took every week for being for it.
He paused bent over the whitened windshield, taking in the silence that ushered the slow change of morning light. As a newspaperman he had to hew to the necessary enlistment of all men's sons in this war against the evils of Hitler and Tojo, but as a father he could privately covet any interval of amnesty for Ben.
Scraping off another peel of frost, he paused again to listen. East Base started up even earlier than he himself did. It was an added habit now, delaying out here in the daybreak until he could hear the first distant sound of planes in transit.
His bunk was shaking and he wanted it to quit. Any motion made his head feel on fire, approximately to the roots of his hair.
When he finally unclenched his eyelids, Jake was standing over him with one big mitt of a hand rocking the bunkframe. "Another day, another dollar, buddy. How you feeling?"
"Next thing to dead, if you really have to know."
"The more you sleep, the less you sin," Jake said cheerily as he opened the blinds and let in sunlight harshly magnified by snowdrifts. "You ought to be pure as a daisy."
Ben shielded against the brightness with an arm. Groggy as he was, it occurred to him to ask: "What time is our plane back?"
"It's gone." Jake busied himself at his ready-bag. "The other guys went with it, but I got us a better deal. We are now the captain and crew of our very own bush plane, Benjamin."
Ben woke up entirely. "Bush plane?"
"Sort of, yeah. You'll see. Weather people up here use it. Needs a little fixing up, so they're sending it south. It'll get us there, don't worry."
"When?" He wrenched up in bed, with something like congealed panic oozing past dizziness and hangover. "Have you gone even more crazy than usual? I've got to get the piece on you done and in to Tepee Weepy on time or the bastards will never let me live it down."
"You're on assignment, ain't you? So assign yourself a nice leisurely flight and relax. You can write in the air as good as you can on the ground, I bet."
"Jake, square with me a minute, okay? Am I in a bad dream or something? Won't it take goddamn near forever to make it to Great Falls in the kind of kite you're talking about?"
"That's the whole point," Jake explained with magnanimous patience. "Hours in the air, Ben—guys like me have to live by 'em. This'll put me up on anybody else in the East Base group by twenty or more hours of flying time. That much closer to the real war, my friend."
"Let me catch up here." Ben wobbled his head to try to clear it, which proved to be a painful mistake. "This field just lets you walk off with one of their planes to go home in?"
Jake rubbed his jaw. "It took a radio message to Grandpa Grady. He said he could spare me for a couple extra days. Said he could spare you indefinitely."
***
"I'm tryi
ng to decide whether to commend you or bust your nuts in my report, Eisman." The Fairbanks operations officer petulantly kicked the tire of the parked aircraft as if shopping the last jalopy on a used-car lot. "At least it gets this thing off our hands. But when you said your friend here has his wings you didn't bother to tell me he hasn't used them since, did you." His eyes bored into Ben. "I've never let a paper-airplane pilot be a copilot before."
"He's just along as sandbag, sir," Jake soothed, "strictly a glorified hitchhiker."
"That is precisely what he needs to be. Reinking, is that your name?" The ops officer appeared dubious about even that. "Unless Eisman goes deaf, dumb, and blind, or has some other kind of shit fit, you are not to touch those controls. Do you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, sir. I am to sit at the right hand of flying ace Eisman and be inert bodyweight for the next two or three days." Ben's answer drew heavy gazes from both men. "Does that about sum up my heroic role in the war effort?"
Jake piously stepped in. "Don't mind him, Major, he rolled out of the sack on the wrong side this morning. I'll throw him out the cargo hatch if he tries to wrest the controls from me."
"With my blessing." The ops officer walked away as if the pair of them might be contagious. "Hand in your flight plan and vacate my airfield, lieutenants."
Skeptically Ben studied the aircraft again. "All right, Ice. What did you say this piece of junk is?"
"A Grumman Widgeon. Quite the rig, ain't it?" Jake was going through the motions of his inspection walk around the plane, although they both knew he was going to give it a clean report unless a wing dropped off and brained him.
Exhausted as the Widgeon OA-14 looked, Ben considered that a possibility. A spiderweb crack across half of the cockpit window—on the copilot's side, naturally—lent it a walleyed appearance. Perhaps fittingly for a weather plane, most of its paint from nose to tail had been swiped away by Alaska's vicious moods of climate. Dents in the struts of its wing pontoons indicated it had encountered more than occasional tree limbs while docking at inlet weather stations. Ben felt doubt in his gut. He had flown in amphibious aircraft before, but this one seemed designed to dither between sea and land. Beneath the cockpit and the passenger seats was a belly hull for it to float on, and spraddle-legged landing gear with narrow tires called bicycle wheels poked perilously out of that hull, barely holding the craft up off the concrete runway. Not since the most rudimentary biplane, back in earliest pilot training, had Ben seen aircraft wheels like these, and the rubber was so aged and bald it looked to him as if it very well could have been the same weary set of tires.