B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  Lofty and the rest came sedately, but grinning as well. They stood in their row right under the nose, and Buster towered above them. Lofty said with a nod, “She’s a pretty good bus,” as though this wasn’t his first one. Then we took a walk around her, and one of the erks came, too, the chief of the bunch. He said his name was Sergeant Piper—just like that—“I’m Sergeant Piper,” he said, as though his mom had named him Sergeant. He carried a clipboard, and he pointed at all the metal plates that were newer than the rest; he told us how each had come to be there. He talked about night fighter cannons, and flak, and eighty-eights. He pointed at a wingtip and said a tree had whacked it once. “Silly bloody tree,” he added. “So the pilot said.”

  It seemed that Buster had healed herself from a thousand wounds, her metal plates regrowing. Up and down the fuselage, on both the wings and right across the double tail, the scars stood out in strips and squares.

  “She seems a bit unlucky,” said Buzz.

  “No lie,” said Ratty. “Wheezy jeezy.” His number one expression.

  The erk had a smear of oil on his face. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand. “Well, there’s truth in that,” he said. “Yes, there’s truth in that, all right.” And he spat on the ground.

  He was a funny erk, a sort of middle guy. He wasn’t old or young, not tall or short, not thin or fat or mean or nice. In every way he was somewhere in the middle.

  Lofty squinted down at him. Lofty was so tall that he looked down at just about everybody. “There’s no such thing as luck,” he said.

  “That so?” said Sergeant Piper. “That so, is it?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Lofty.

  “Well . . .” The erk rubbed at the oil. “Seems to me there is, all right. Yes, seems that way to me.”

  “Then you’re wrong, old boy,” said Lofty in his British whine. He turned his back and pointed to the starboard tail fin, a mass of new metal. “What happened there?”

  “It got shot up,” said the erk.

  “Silly bloody bullets?”

  Sergeant Piper grunted. “Well, I don’t know, you see. There was no one left to tell us.” He looked at the oil that he had smeared now to the back of his hand. “Only two came back. We used a fire hose to wash out the rear gunner, and—”

  “Wheezy jeezy,” said Ratty, our rear gunner.

  “The flight engineer died in the cockpit,” Sergeant Piper continued. “He was a goner before anyone reached him.”

  “What about the pilot?” said Lofty.

  “Wasn’t there,” said Sergeant Piper. “No pilot. No wireless operator. No navigator.” He ticked them off on his stained fingers. “No bomb aimer. No mid-upper gunner. Gone. All of them gone. The flight engineer landed the bus. Beautiful landing, too.” He shook his head. “A real daisy cutter.”

  It was a chilling story, if I thought about it. The entire crew now dead, but the kite still here and ready to go again. We stood with our fingers at our chins, staring at the tail, and I—at least—wished the erk had kept the story to himself. Pop was frowning, and Ratty looked a little frightened.

  The erk shook his finger at Lofty. “Now, wouldn’t you say that that was bad luck, old boy?”

  Lofty glared back. His nostrils opened and his eyebrows narrowed, until he looked a bit like a dog getting ready to growl. Then he laughed and said, “What a load of rubbish.”

  “You think so?” asked Sergeant Piper. “Is that what you think?”

  They studied each other for a moment. Then Sergeant Piper nearly smiled. He held out his clipboard, and Lofty signed the Form 700, which said he was taking responsibility for the kite. Buster belonged to the erks, and we could only borrow it, signing it out for each flight like an enormous library book. Sergeant Piper spat again, then walked away under Buster ’s nose.

  “Impossible fellow,” said Lofty. He made himself British in the worst way, all puffed up with a funny pout on his face, his eyes bulging. “Im- poss-ible!” Then he shook himself. “Come on, boys. Let’s take a look inside.”

  I went like a kid to the fair, but Pop held me back. “Let Lofty go first,” he said quietly. “He’s the skipper; she’s his ship.”

  I stepped back, and Pop smiled. “That’s a good lad,” he said.

  We climbed through the door on the starboard side, down toward the tail. Will followed Lofty, and Simon followed him. Then Pop nodded at me. “Up you go,” he said, and I put my knee on the sill and hoisted myself into the fuselage. I went forward, climbing uphill through the tunnel above the bomb bay, past the little toilet and the two bunks, through the flight engineer’s narrow compartment. Beyond the bulkhead, on the left, Lofty was settling into his seat. I stepped down to the nose, into a smell of leather and petrol and kerosene.

  Right at the front, Will was hunched over his bombsight, holding the button on its twisted cord as though he imagined himself on a bombing run. Simon was at his navigator’s desk, facing the starboard side. I slid to my left and dropped into the seat by the little square window. I twiddled the knobs on the wireless.

  We put our helmets on, buttoned our oxygen masks, and plugged into the intercom. Lofty called out our names. Then he said, “Right. Let’s get this bus in the air.”

  There seemed a hundred gauges that had to be checked, a thousand buttons and switches to press. Finally the engines were started, and the four airscrews buzzed in big gray circles. The erks pulled the chocks away. We taxied to the runway, talked to the tower. Lofty said, “Hang on.”

  The throttles opened; the noise was nearly deafening. We rushed forward, and I felt myself pressed against my seat. Fields of green went shooting past my window. The tail lifted; Ratty said, “Oo-oop!” as though the bounce had made him airsick. We shimmied left, then right; we lurched and bubbled. And up we went, free from the ground, banking in a turn.

  “Shazam!” I cried into the intercom.

  Someone laughed, and I knew it was another stupid thing I’d done. I slapped my helmet and called myself an idiot. Quoting Captain Marvel. What a fool you are, I thought. But, still, it was the way I felt, that I could— like Captain Marvel—use the wizard’s spell to change myself from a boy to a hero. In the bomber, in the sky, with my wireless and all, I really did gain the powers of the six gods that I summoned with that cry. I was Solomon, Hercules and Atlas, Zeus and Achilles and Mercury all rolled into one. I whispered to myself that magical word made of their initials. Shazam!

  We flew toward the west, two thousand feet above the ground. Farms went by, and villages, and little carts and horses on the roads. We wheeled and turned, dipping into valleys. We flew so low across the hills that we mowed the grass along the crests.

  The kite tilted. Will whooped like a cowboy as the ground zoomed up toward him. Then Ratty did the same as it fell away behind, and the words “jolly rovers” popped into my mind, and a picture of sailors laughing. We were like that: like sailors in the sky. I felt warm inside, as happy as I had ever been. Suddenly it didn’t matter at all that I was too clumsy to ever be a pilot; it was good enough to go roving in the sky.

  My life right then was nearly perfect. If a genie had appeared in Buster’s cramped nose and offered me three wishes, I would have taken only one: to be older by two or three years. It was a curse to be young.

  The rest of the crew—like all the crews—stuck together as though they had magnets in their clothes. They liked me well enough, or I thought they did. But I had to keep myself apart, from a fear of being discovered. I knew that I stood out too much when the others started drinking or gambling, or just talking about all the things they’d done. On the outside, in my uniform, I looked old enough; I looked nearly the same as them. But inside I was shy and awkward, sometimes loud and stupid, and often felt that I didn’t fit in. Even my voice still squeaked now and then. I had to pretend to shave, sometimes nicking my skin—with a grimace and a quick flick of the razor—to raise a drop of blood. Each night I was terrified as I slipped into bed that someone would see my nearly hairless body o
r, worse, the part of me that so often stood at attention no matter what I was thinking.

  In the air, though, I never had to worry. Hidden at my desk, just a voice on the intercom, I was equal to them all. They needed me then, all right. I was the ears and the mouth of Buster, and without me they were deaf and dumb.

  We flew over Harrogate and on toward Settle. Puffs of clouds floated by, shining in the sun like steamy parachutes. I wished I had a glass bubble around me, as the gunners did, and the bomb aimer. Only Simon could see less than me; the navigator had no window at all.

  I pushed the button for my intercom. “Skipper, can I come up?” I asked.

  “Be my guest, old boy,” said Lofty.

  I went and stood beside him. I leaned on the side of his seat and watched the clouds race toward us. They looked solid from the cockpit, like giant cue balls sliding through the sky. I loved the way they tore apart as Buster went ripping through them, and I muttered, “Bam! Kapow!” as they shredded open. I felt the giant bomber shake and lurch, and I heard the thrumming of the airscrews, a roar that was always with us. I saw the sunlight flashing on the metal wings, the feathery streams of our vapor trail, and I felt like Buck Rogers racing through space in a fabulous ship. “Roaring Rockets!” I said, my voice drowned out by the engines.

  I wished that my friends from Kakabeka could see me. I wished that my dad could see me, and know that I had done better than him. Already I had gone farther and seen more than he ever would, and one day I would go home covered in medals, and I would walk past him on the street and pretend that I didn’t even know him. That would make him feel sorry, I thought, for all the things he had done, and I planned for that day, but dreaded it, too. The war had made me special, and I didn’t want it to end. My secret hope was that I would still learn to fly, and then—at the end of the war—the air force would give me a Spitfire as a kind of reward, and I would go barnstorming all across Canada.

  Lofty adjusted the pitch on the number one engine. He worked the lever, then tapped a gauge. He was always moving, pushing the column back and forth, pressing his feet at the rudders. His head tipped and nodded to watch the sky, and I watched him, almost green with envy.

  Whenever we flew, I imagined Lofty passing out or something. I imagined everyone panicking, but me staying calm, rushing up to take the controls, sitting in that fabulous chair in the great “front office,” surrounded by switches and dials. I could take her down, I thought; I could land the bus.

  Lofty made it look so easy. He flew old Buster as low as he could, then as slow as he could, with the wheels down and the flaps down and the bomb doors open. He had to run the engines flat out to keep her going like that, and he shouted the airspeed, and it was so impossibly slow that everyone whistled and clapped. Except for Pop. “She’ll stall,” he said. “You’ll put us in a spin.”

  But Lofty laughed and kept the throttles open, and flew the kite more slowly than she was meant to fly. “Eighty-five knots,” he said as Buster rattled like an old car. “Eighty, boys. Look at that!” Then, finally, a wingtip dropped and down we went in a dizzying turn.

  We flew for two hours, hoping that a flight of Hurricanes would come along and launch a mock attack. But the sky was all ours until we headed home, and Lofty sent me down to my wireless.

  I poked through my little space, peering into the corners and under the seat. Then I looked up and saw, penciled on the ceiling, the first lines of the poem that all of us knew. I smiled to see it written there, and read it over and over, louder and louder, until I shouted it out against the din of the engines.

  Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings

  I thought it was the best poem ever written. It said better than anyone possibly could—except maybe Will—what was in my heart and why I flew.

  I stood up and looked more closely. The letters were small and tidy, printed on very faint lines drawn by a ruler. I wondered who had bothered to do that, to get the poem as perfectly arranged as a sampler in a kitchen. How many times had he looked up and read the words?

  Then I wondered where he’d gone and what had happened to him. Was it true that the last person who had sat here had vanished? What had happened that night in the dark hull of B for Buster?

  I shivered, then laughed. It was like a campfire story that could chill you through the hottest flames. I didn’t want to think about it then, as we flitted across the fields to home.

  CHAPTER 3

  ON THE TWENTY-NINTH of May, Lofty went on his dickey flight. It was only a fifth-wheel sort of business, “a passenger trip,” as he called it himself. But we were green with envy when he climbed into the truck with his escape kit and all his gear, and headed off to Uncle Joe’s own kite. I wished they sent everyone as second dickey, but only the pilot ever went. He would wedge himself into the folding seat beside the pilot’s, and watch the CO fly the crate.

  We gathered at the tower to wave at Lofty, feeling foolish that we were staying behind. The only other ones who were waving were the girls of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and the bookish types who never flew, who seldom left their offices. The Royal Chair Force, Ratty called them.

  We watched the bombers taxi from dispersal. They separated from a great tangled mass into a stately parade, with the air shaking from their engines. They rumbled through the hazy twilight like a fleet of battleships heading out to sea. Uncle Joe was the first off, and a thrill went through me to see his black bird thundering along the runway. The tail came up just as it passed us. We waved, and I tried to look for Lofty in the glass pulpit of the cockpit. But in an instant he was fifty yards beyond us, and we were clamping our caps to our heads as the propwash gusted by, smelling of smoke and petrol.

  The rudders were pushed over, the flaps down. The Halifax hurtled along in that blistering sound that was better than music, such a blur of tires rumbling and cylinders popping and airscrews turning that it was impossible to sort out any one part of it. The sound vibrated in my chest and roared in my ears. Then the kite lifted up, and I felt my breath snatched away to see such a magnificent machine become weightless and free. It soared over the hedge and over the field, and the throttles gurgled back as it banked to the right. The wheels were rising, the flaps pulling in. It seemed to be changing, becoming a creature of the sky. The orange light of the setting sun flashed from the wing and the belly, from the little globe of the rear gunner’s turret. I blinked to knock away the tears that came bubbling up at the beauty of it.

  We watched the rest of the aircraft taking off, but we left the waving to the WAAFs and the Chair Force. We put our hands in our pockets, and ducked our heads to keep our caps on. Even I tried to be the picture of nonchalance. We were airmen, after all.

  The bombers were off to Wuppertal, and it would be hours before they came back. Will and Simon drifted away to the place where only officers went. I imagined long tables covered with fancy food, knives and forks of the finest silver. It seemed strange that they got all of that just because they had finished at the top of their classes in training. Everyone did the same job, but for the rest of us it was back to a hut where the furniture was broken and the air always smelled of cigarettes. We found it nearly empty, the wireless set blaring out dance tunes. We settled in a corner where a pair of wicker armchairs faced a sofa. Pop took the sofa, stretching out on his back. Buzz settled into one of the chairs, and Ratty folded into the other the same way he fit himself into a rear turret—with his knees drawn up until they nearly touched his chin. I perched on the end of the sofa, by Pop’s smelly feet.

  “I wish we were flying,” said Buzz.

  “No lie.” Ratty peered up from his chair. “You know where I want to go? More than anywhere?”

  “Yeah. Berlin,” said Buzz. “You only told me a million times.”

  “The Holy City,” said Pop, already half asleep.

  “That’s why I joined up, you know. To see Berlin. No lie.”

  Buzz searched through his pockets u
ntil he found his crossword puzzle, the only one he ever did, the same one that he had torn from the Sunday Telegraph on his first day in England. Why he didn’t get a new one, I didn’t know. If he was waiting to finish that one, he would be a geezer before he was done. He had written and erased so often in the little boxes that the paper was gray and thin. I had heard the clues a hundred times, each one a little riddle on its own.

  “Here’s one,” he said. “‘Southern Canadian becomes embarrassed? No, he’s terrified.’” He drew his lips open, and tapped his pencil on his big front teeth.

  I groaned to myself. They would go at it for hours, the two of them, and never find an answer. Ratty would ask, “How many letters?” Buzz would count them aloud. Ratty would say, “You got any?” And Buzz would say, “No, not yet.” For weeks I had watched them do this, and they still hadn’t found more than three answers.

  “How many letters?” asked Ratty.

  I went outside. The sun had set, and the runway flares had been extinguished. There were high clouds covering most of the sky, with only a band of pale stars above the southern hills. The airfield was utterly dark, heavy with a sense of emptiness, a silence where I wasn’t used to one. I heard memories of noise: the rumble of the bombers, the laughter of the airmen. I walked across the runway and didn’t see Buster until she suddenly loomed above me, against the sky, with her enormous wings spread wide.

  I went right around her, reaching up to touch the airscrews, the rudder fins and ailerons, the panels of the rear turret. I stood and gazed at the hugeness of her, then opened the door and climbed inside.

  I could see absolutely nothing. Though I stood only a few feet from the rear turret, I couldn’t tell if its doors were open or closed. I had to grope my way forward, passing under the black holes of the upper turret and the astrodome. Even in the cockpit, with walls of glass around me, I could only barely see the levers and controls. Farther on, one deck down, the entire nose was as dark as a cave. I sat in Lofty’s seat. I put my hands on the column, my feet on the rudders.