B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  They were really nothing but hummocks; only Englishmen would have thought of them as hills. I had seen buildings higher than the Hambletons. But to the locals, they were the Himalayas of hills.

  In a moment we were parked at the summit. Donny fetched a couple of bottles out of the boot and offered me one. I shook my head; I didn’t like beer when it was cold, and this was hot and shaken. When he rapped the bottle on the fender, the cap flew off like a bullet, and a geyser of foam spewed out. He slurped it up as it spilled along his fingers.

  We sat side by side on the running board, on the shady side of the Morris. Donny scuffed his heels in the grass. He looked up at the sky. “How’s Kakabeka?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Not you.” He laughed. “You twit. The town, I mean.”

  “Probably the same,” I said.

  “You miss it?”

  “No.”

  He took a mouthful of beer and gargled with it. Then he swallowed and spat. He just stared off across the hills with a strange, sad look on his face.

  “What happened to Buster?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “B for Buster. I heard that—”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Donny. “Seven went out, two came back, and both of them were dead. It was crazy.”

  “Why wasn’t the pilot there?”

  Donny shrugged. “He bailed out, I guess. Maybe he thought he was the last one left. Maybe he panicked. We’ll never know, Kid.”

  “Who was the wireless operator?”

  “You got me.” Donny shook his head. “No, I don’t remember.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Hey, there’s twenty-four kites, Kid. Seven guys to a kite.” His voice rose, and there was real anger in his eyes. “I just don’t remember all the guys who got the chop, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “They were sprogs.”

  “Jeez, Donny.”

  He popped his finger in and out of the bottle. He finished the beer in one long gulp.

  “If you don’t want to fly, you don’t have to,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to fly,” he said.

  “But I want to,” I told him. “Whatever happened to Buster, it—”

  “Takes guts, though,” said Donny. “Takes more guts to stay on the ground than it does to get into the crate. But guys have done it. They’ve refused to go.”

  “But I want to fly,” I told him again.

  “It’s not like they shoot you for it,” said Donny. “Some guys say they do, but they don’t.”

  I didn’t understand why he’d brought me so far to talk about this, and then to ignore everything that I said. It was as though he was talking only to himself. He opened the other bottle and shoved it to his lips as the foam came out. His cheeks swelled as fat as a chipmunk’s. Then he swallowed, and grimaced. He said, “Who cares if they call you a coward?”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. So I only stared back, and I saw again how old he looked. In the morning, in the sun, he seemed worse than ever. His eyes were shot with red, his skin all pale and waxy.

  “Uncle Joe would understand,” he said. “You could always go to Uncle Joe and tell him you’re afraid to fly.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said.

  “Uncle Joe would understand.”

  A wasp came and buzzed around the bottle. It landed on the neck, crawled up to the top, and went round and round in a slanted walk. Donny didn’t even shoo it away. He just lifted the bottle. The wasp took off, did circuits round Donny’s head, then settled back on the bottle as he lowered it again.

  “I dream,” he said. “Awful dreams.”

  “Like what, Donny?”

  “Kid, you don’t want to know.”

  Then why did you tell me? I thought.

  He handed me the bottle. I didn’t want the beer, but I took it, wasp and all. I set it down on the grass, on its side, and let the beer dribble out in a dark brown stream.

  Donny leaned sideways, against the curve of the fender. Painted on the door beside him were rows and columns of little white animals—shrews and moles and cats—that he had mowed down in his mad driving and recorded there like the bombs on a Halifax. He stretched along the fender, his red hair resting on the metal, and closed his eyes. “The bank’s on the corner, right?”

  “Huh?” I said. I thought he’d gone nuts.

  “In Kakabeka. The bank’s on the corner, and the bakery’s beside it.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It always smells of bread there. They put cakes in the window. And those strips of flypaper that look like raisin bread. The window’s gooey down here.” He waved his hand back and forth at the height of his knee. “’Cause the kids get fingerprints all over it. And snot.”

  I smiled. “That’s true,” I said.

  “Then the drugstore, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Taylor keeps the door so clean you can never tell if it’s open or not. You have to feel for it, or you crack your head on the glass.” Donny stretched his hand out, groping like a blind man. “Then you go inside, and it always smells of bug dope.”

  “Floor polish,” I said.

  “No kidding? I always thought it was bug dope.” He walked us right through Kakabeka, in and out of every store. He seemed to come awake—or alive— shaking off whatever it was that was wrong with him, and he rambled on about things I’d forgotten, and things I’d never known. But he grew terribly sad as he talked.

  “I miss it like crazy sometimes,” he said. “I hated living there—I couldn’t wait to get out—but I’d sure like to see it again.”

  “You will,” I said.

  “I don’t think so, Kid. I don’t think I’ll ever see Kakabeka again.”

  “Why not?”

  He smiled to himself, hardly a smile at all. He turned his head on the fender, squashing his big flap of an ear. “You’re such a kid,” he said.

  “And you’re such an old man, Donny.”

  I didn’t mean to hurt him with that, and I would have taken it back if I could. He was an old man, and I saw in his eyes that he knew it. And then, angry, he talked to me as only an adult would. “Kid,” he said, “I should have told them. That first day. I should have marched you right off to see Uncle Joe and told him you were only sixteen.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “You and whose army?”

  Then he laughed, because that was such a stupid thing to say. Donny Lee could have picked me up and carried me to the CO. He could have tossed me half the distance. He laughed, then kicked out his leg, knocking my feet from the grass. I fell against him, and a moment later we were rolling on the summit of the Hambletons, over and over, back and forth, pummeling and laughing.

  But the game lasted no longer than a moment. Donny pushed me away, and stood up. He wasn’t a boy anymore.

  We drove down the east face of the hills, then circled back through a string of tiny villages until we reached the Swale. Donny stopped the car, and again he opened the boot. He took out a roll of canvas and rubber. He set it on the grass at the river’s edge, pulled a string, and the bundle exploded and became a boat.

  I was horrified. It was a life raft from a Halifax.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Don’t you want to go fishing?” he said.

  We launched the boat in a shady pool. Donny tossed in a couple of bottles, a chocolate bar, and oranges. We fished for trout with the hooks and line that were packed in the raft’s little kit. We didn’t catch any, but I didn’t mind. We just drifted down the river, past muskrat dens, under dangling willows. He called me Huckleberry Finn (“Pass me that orange there, Huck”), and I called him Tom Sawyer.

  We let the current take us down to Topcliffe; then Donny paddled with his hands to nudge us up against the bank. He took his car keys from his pocket. “Go fetch the bus,” he told me.

  I was stunned. No one but Donny ever drove the Morris. “Go on
,” he said, jangling the keys.

  “I can’t,” I told him. “I don’t know how to drive.”

  “Now’s your chance to learn,” he said.

  “I’m too young.”

  “Jeez, Kid. Who cares?”

  But I had never been as daring as Donny. So I guarded the raft as he went hiking back along the river. I lay on my back on the warm rubber, holding on to a willow branch as I felt the tug of the stream.

  I never figured out why Donny took me fishing. Maybe he meant to prove that he wasn’t entirely a grown-up, that he still had a bit of the boyish wickedness that had let him stand at the very edge of Kakabeka Falls, closer to the brink than any kid ever stood. But it was his last day as a boy, and nearly his last altogether.

  CHAPTER 5

  EVERY MORNING AT BREAKFAST the loudspeaker switched on. There was a click and a buzz, then the deep thump of a finger being tapped on a microphone somewhere. And then a voice came on—the lovely, whispery voice of an English WAAF. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she always said.

  A silence filled the room with the first click from the speaker. Talking stopped, and eating stopped, and row after row of airmen became as still as photographs.

  The WAAF cleared her throat. She always did, and I always imagined her fingers, thin and white, lifting up to touch her lips.

  Everyone was listening, and no one moved. They never moved before she spoke again. Our whole days depended on the next thing she would tell us. I wanted her to say that we were “on” for the night. I was sick of being stood down day after day—more than a week since Lofty went flying. I wanted her to say that we were on, that I would be heading off to Germany.

  I looked at little Ratty and saw he had his fingers crossed. Lofty was putting his hand in his pocket. Two tables away, Donny Lee’s head of clown-red hair was bent over his breakfast.

  The WAAF, like an angel, said, “You are on for tonight.”

  I cheered. I shook my hands in the air like a boxer; I shouted, “Hooray!”

  I was the only one who did. Ratty was grinning, and Will had a thumb cocked up. Buzz and Simon and Pop all looked as happy as clams, but I was the only one in the whole room who cheered. Lofty took his hand from his pocket, and his pipe was in his fingers. He popped it in his mouth and smiled at us, but his new, dark eyes seemed hollow.

  At every other table, all around the room, there was one long groan followed by a lot of muttered voices. There was a lot of staring, too, all aimed in my direction. Donny Lee went scurrying to the door like a guy with his hair on fire.

  “Well, chaps,” said Lofty, “I’ll take a squint at the list. See if we’re flying.” He puffed on his empty pipe as he wandered away.

  All around, plates were being pushed aside and breakfasts left unfinished. But we kept tucking in at ours, hoping that Buster was on the list, trying to guess where the night would take us. We were the only ones left in the room when Lofty appeared in the doorway again and told us, “Shake a leg, chaps. We’re on.”

  The hours seemed endless. We flew circuits and bumps from ten to noon, ate a lunch and stooged around, then went in for briefing. It was my first time in the hut, and I felt like bounding across the benches to claim a seat at the front. But I forced myself to go slowly, swaggering instead, with my worn-looking cap pushed back, nodding hellos to people I didn’t know. I thought I looked like Billy Bishop, but a wave of titters came from behind me. I wanted to sink through the floor, until Lofty looked up and smiled to see me.

  There was a stage at the front of the room, a row of chairs and a lectern, an enormous curtain at the back. More than a hundred airmen stamped to attention as the officers came in, then sat again with a squeal of benches and a shuffling of feet.

  The CO stood at the lectern in his leather jacket and crushed cap, looking the way I had only tried to look. He made a joke that wasn’t funny. I laughed loudly, though no one else laughed at all. Then he pulled a cord, and the curtain slid open.

  The room filled with voices and mutters. “Good God,” said a gunner. “It’s Happy Valley again.”

  A pair of red ribbons started at Yorkshire and bent their way south, turning here and there, to end at Düsseldorf in the valley of the Ruhr. It didn’t look like a long way on the map. The ribbons passed over the North Sea, over Holland, then dodged into Germany with a sudden turn. “Piece of cake,” I told Lofty.

  He didn’t answer.

  We got the weather report from a white-haired meteorological officer, a little fellow so short that he might have been the eighth dwarf. The crews called him Drippy because he nearly always predicted rain. But tonight, he said, the skies would be mostly clear. He sniffed and sat down, and a parade of officers followed him. We got the news—the gen—on signals and timing and routing. Nearly eight hundred aircraft would be converging over Düsseldorf, so we had to be sure that we kept at the proper altitude and headings. The intelligence officer tapped a pointer on the map to show us where we’d meet the flak and searchlights. His stick went tappa-tappa-tappa across half the stupid map. I said, “Sir! You should tap where there isn’t flak.” Again, my laugh was the only sound.

  I cringed inside myself, and didn’t look up until the briefing was finished. Then the pilots and the navigators swarmed toward the front, and gunners drifted off. I joined the mob of wireless operators lining up to collect a list of frequencies on a bit of paper called a flimsy.

  I kept to myself until supper, then joined Buster’s crew in the dining hall. I could smell the eggs and bacon, and went drooling to my table. Only the operational crews got eggs; to me they were something like medals.

  A WAAF brought one to me. In her little blue suit she leaned over my plate and served me from a spatula. “There you go, love,” she said.

  I could hardly turn my eyes away; they nearly popped from my head. Right in front of me, beautiful and smooth, as white and soft as cream, was the first real egg I’d seen in more than a month. But my second would be waiting when we came back from Germany, so I ate this first one in two big bites. All around the tables people were joking about the eggs, asking each other, “If you get the chop, can I have yours at breakfast?”

  We ate quickly, then collected our escape kits and our parachutes. We changed into flying clothes—into clobber, we called it. The gunners lined up to plug into the electricity and test their heating systems, and there was a smell of hot wires and scorched leather. Then the sun was going down, and we waited on the lawn for the truck to take us out to B for Buster.

  Dirty Bert came along with his bomb trolley. It was stacked with pigeon boxes, and each of the metal crates had its end open, the round lid clipped to the side of the box. Inside, behind the flaps of the cardboard linings, the pigeons cooed and scratched. Bert doled them out to the “wops”—the wireless operators—so I got in line with the others.

  The wops ahead of me took the boxes without a word, without even a nod to Bert. I tried to do the same, but he held the box too tightly. My hands slid right off it, and I staggered back, surprised. Then, head down, I went at him again.

  “’Allo, sir,” said Bert.

  I tugged at the box.

  “I saved Gilbert for you, sir,” he said. “Gibby’s a fine little bird. I think you’ll like ’im, sir.”

  The box still wouldn’t budge. Gilbert had his head so far through the hole that I was afraid he would peck me on the wrist. The guys behind me were muttering and pushing, trying to hurry me along. I looked up at Bert and saw the friendliest smile I had ever seen in the air force.

  “You’ll watch ’im, won’t you, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said. “All right, I will.”

  “Good luck to you, sir.” He winked. “’Appy flying.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The box came easily then. I carried it away with my face red from the shame of talking to Bert. The pigeon clattered and cooed, until I was sure that everyone was staring at me. I shook the box and told the bird, “Shut up!” The more I shook, the more he sq
uawked, the stupid thing.

  I thought of shoving the box underneath a fuel bowser and telling Lofty, when he asked, “Gee, I didn’t see any pigeon.” But when the truck came to take us out to Buster, it was too late. Lofty shouted, “All aboard! Women and children and pigeons first.”

  He was just showing off for the lady driver, who turned around in her WAAF cap and tittered at me as I held the pigeon, like a kid with a giant lunch box. “Don’t eat him, now,” she giggled. All the way across the field I thought of clever, withering things I should have told her.

  Sergeant Piper was waiting under B for Buster, with his gang of erks around him. He greeted us in a way that was friendly and rude at the same time, with a wisecrack about sprogs. Then he stood at the tailgate, catching our elbows as we tumbled down. Gilbert fluttered and squawked as I leapt to the ground. “Careful with that, boy,” said Sergeant Piper, as though it was a bomb that I carried. He had a big wrench in his hand, so I only glared at him.

  We carted our gear to Buster’s door. Everyone had a flask of coffee and a paper bag full of sandwiches and oranges and chocolate. We climbed in and lugged it all to our places. As I stepped down from the cockpit to the nose I squinted at the pipes and hoses and tried to see in them my phantom navigator.

  There was no feel of ghosts. I knew the sense of haunted places: the witch’s house in Kakabeka; the gloomy meadow just above the falls, where an Indian princess had flung herself into the river. They were clammy places, even in the sunshine. Buster just felt empty, like any old machine.

  I stowed my parachute away and strapped the pigeon box in place. As I reached inside to take out the food and water cans, the pigeon tried a breakout. “Get back,” I said, giving him a poke.

  From up and down the kite came thuds and bangs as others stowed their things. We examined everything from the bombsight in the nose to Ratty’s twin guns in the tail, then went out to lie in the grass and wait.

  The sun was nearly down, the moon not risen yet. The tiny blackflies—midges, the English called them— swarmed around in swirling clouds. Dew had settled on the grass. Ratty and the others who smoked got out their cigarettes and puffed circles at the sky. Buzz lay stretched on his side, digging with his fingers at the soil.