Rockets Versus Gravity

by Richard Scarsbrook

  Sheila is a registered nurse with a university degree, while Clementine only has a college-level licensed practical nursing diploma. Sheila holds this distinction over Clementine’s head the way that a duchess might use her title when dealing with a household servant. Clementine has to swallow it, though; Sheila is her direct superior, and she needs this job. Clementine has a son to feed and clothe, so Sheila knows that she is not going to talk back or give her any trouble.

  “Come on, Clem, let’s move it!” Nurse Sheila screeches. “You’re not a fancy city girl any more. You gotta get your hands dirty like everybody else.”

  Clementine used to believe that attending university made one more mannered and sophisticated, but Nurse Sheila’s behaviour has crushed that illusion. University degrees don’t necessarily make people more moral, either; Clementine was fired from her job in Toronto when a flustered doctor, with multiple degrees hanging in his office, mixed up a couple of patient files and needed someone to blame. Clementine had to come crawling back to Faireville, which was the last thing she ever wanted to do.

  Sheila continues, in love with her authority. “He’s scheduled for his bath right now, Clem, not tomorrow! You’re putting us behind schedule! Bring that dirty man inside right now!”

  “I like what any red-blooded man likes,” Dan says, “but I am not a dirty man.”

  “I know,” Clementine tells him. “You’re a gentleman, Daniel.”

  She also knows that he is still a “red-blooded man”; she has seen the longing in his eyes as he watches her walk away. Maybe she sways it a little more than usual for him, the way that she suspects women might have done back in the forties, during Dan’s most virile years.

  Dapper Dan likes it when Clementine calls him “Daniel.” He also likes it when she calls him a “gentleman.” She is the only person who calls him either anymore.

  “Well,” he says, “this gentleman does not want to be given a bath by that cantankerous bull moose.” Dan glances up at Clementine again. “Couldn’t you do it for me instead? I promise I’ll be good.”

  “Sorry, Dan,” she says. “Not allowed, I’m afraid.”

  The last time she washed Dan, his erection sprang up through the water’s skin like a purple-headed sea monster, parting the seas inside the geriatric washtub with Biblical drama.

  “Well … well … wow!” the nurse’s aide had exclaimed from the other side of the tub. “That is … ummm … that is … truly a medical oddity, isn’t it?”

  It truly was.

  After that, Clementine was permanently excused from bath duty by Nurse Sheila.

  “That is indeed a shame,” Dan says now, the dark pools of his eyes absorbing the details of Clementine’s face: that slight concave imprint above her soft upper lip, her marble-sculpture cheekbones, those cornflower-blue eyes, and her dark eyebrows, arched slightly upward in the middle.

  He sighs. So much like Mary. Mary, Mary, quite contrary. My saviour, Mary.

  And then: Snap out of it, Daniel. That was a lifetime ago.

  “Well, then,” Dan says, smiling up at Clementine again, “if we can’t spend any more time together during my bathing ritual, could we perhaps savour this perfect day together for just a minute longer?”

  Clementine doesn’t mind indulging him, even if it means catching some hell from Sheila. Although he is almost one hundred years old, she likes the tone of his voice and the twinkle in his eyes. She imagines that he was quite a charmer in his day.

  Nurse Clementine and Dapper Dan watch the cottony clouds drift past in the surreally blue sky, and they each give their own kind of thanks.

  Nurse Sheila’s shriek once again pierces the silence like an air-raid siren.

  “Gawd-dammit, Clem! Gawwwwwd-DAMMIT!”

  And thus the moment is called to an end.

  Clementine wheels Dan inside and hands him over to Sheila.

  “Tomorrow’s my day off, Dan,” she says. “See you on Monday, okay?”

  Dan watches Clementine’s behind sway beneath the skirt of her pastel-yellow nurse’s uniform as she walks away.

  “You’re a good reason to stay alive,” Dan says to himself, drifting backward.

  Dapper Dan watches the upside-down valentine-heart of Mary’s behind lift inside the skirt of her royal-blue uniform as she stands on her tiptoes to reach the top shelf.

  “Mmmmmm, Mary,” Dan says to her, “you do know how to wear a skirt.”

  “Shhhhhh!” she hisses at him, as flames dance in her blue eyes. “Someone might hear you!”

  “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” Dan says, while glancing around the empty room. “There’s nobody here but you and me.”

  “I see they brought some new planes in,” she says, in a faux-official tone. “Will you and your crew be flying in one of them? I’d say you boys have earned some new wings.”

  A handful of newly built Lancasters were indeed delivered to the airfield earlier in the week, and a few of them came equipped with the new Rose Brothers tail gunner’s turret. The Rose turret has greater visibility than the usual Nash and Thompson he’s become accustomed to, and it’s got bigger, .50-calibre guns; those will definitely make a bold statement the next time the nose of a Luftwaffe night fighter drops into Dan’s gunsights.

  The best thing about the Rose turret, though, is that it’s so much roomier inside. For a tall guy like Dapper Dan, it would be like flying first class; folding himself into the cramped Nash and Thompson makes Dan feel like a giraffe in a goldfish bowl. To keep his legs and feet from cramping, Dan sometimes has to take his feet off the footrests and move them around inside the tiny Perspex-and-steel bubble, just to keep his blood circulating.

  On the last mission, after they had dropped their load, a Junkers Ju 88 night fighter dropped down right behind the Lancaster, its twin propellers spinning on either side of Dan’s peripheral vision, so close that Dan could see the pilot’s face. Shells from the Junkers’s 20-millimetre cannon streaked past, between Dan’s turret and the Lancaster’s twin tail fins.

  Dan usually fired his Browning three-oh-threes in short, controlled bursts, but the sudden attack jolted him so that he blasted through the nose and canopy of the Ju 88 in a steady, rattling stream, and he kept firing long after the burst of crimson smeared the glass of the pilot’s canopy. The Ju 88 finally bucked up in the air like a panicked horse and then disappeared down and out of Dan’s sight in a wide arc of oily smoke.

  Afterward, Dan’s legs were numb from the thighs down. He put his tingling feet up on the guns, only for a moment, but by that time the Brownings were hot enough to cook a steak well done. As it turned out, they were also hot enough to burn the heels off Dan’s boots, too. Thanks to the stench of cordite fumes that saturated the air around him, Dan felt the heat on his heels before he smelled the smoke.

  So Dan has come to the supply depot counter to get some new boots. It’s as good an excuse as any to visit Mary during the daylight hours, too.

  On any mission over enemy territory, Dapper Dan spends hours at a time cramped inside that tiny bubble hanging from the tail of the Lancaster, separated from the rest of the crew by closed armoured doors, his only human contact being the intermittent, disembodied crackle of voices over the intercom. Being the rear gunner on a bomber is kind of like being the goalie for a hockey team; it is a job for an individualist. Still, whenever he is on the ground again, Dan craves the kind of human contact that only Mary can provide. She warms him, she soothes him, and she brings him back to life again.

  “What size are you?” she asks him now. “Eleven? Twelve?”

  He leans his elbows on the counter and winks at her. “You know what size I am.”

  First Mary giggles, and then she scolds him. “Stop it, Dan. I mean it! Anyone could hear you.”

  She bends over to unfold a stepstool, and Dan says, “Mmm, Mary!”

  She wags a finger at him. �
�Stop it, you!”

  “Quite contrary,” he teases.

  Mary tugs a pair of standard-issue, slip-on, fur-lined flying boots from the highest shelf, then steps down and strides over to Dan, slapping them down on the countertop.

  “Try these on for size,” she says.

  “How about a pair of those lace-up officer’s boots instead?” he says. “Won’t I look dashing in a pair of those?”

  “You’re already dashing enough, Dapper Dan,” she says. “If you were any more handsome, I don’t think I could resist you.”

  Dan puts on a hurt expression. “You mean you can resist me?”

  “Shh! Anyone could come in at any time. A superior officer, for example —”

  “Come on, Mary! You can spare a pair of those lace-up boots for me, can’t you? Every man on the base wants a pair.”

  Every man on the base wants Mary, too. Dan knows how lucky he is to have somehow won her favour. He wants the boots for a good reason: when he gets back from tomorrow night’s raid, Dapper Dan is going to propose to Mary, and he wants to look as absolutely dapper as possible when he does it.

  Her suddenly serious expression is amplified by her marble-sculpture cheekbones. “I know that it’s cold inside your turret up there,” she says. “I’ve heard of other men freezing their toes off when their heated slippers stopped working. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  “Aw, Mary,” Dan says, “There’s no heat in the seat of my suit, and I haven’t frozen my ass off yet, so I think my toes will be okay, too. Besides, you know I’m warm-blooded.”

  He means for this to get a smile out of her, but Mary remains serious. “I want you to be safe up there, Dapper Dan.” She reaches across the counter to touch his face. “Every time you cross the Channel, I just about die worrying about you. I want you to come back to me in one piece. Toes and all. Agreed?”

  Dan shrugs and takes the fur-lined boots. “Agreed.”

  The playful sparkle returns to her cornflower-blue eyes, and she says, “If you decide that you don’t like them, come back and see me tonight, and maybe I’ll give you a pair that you’ll like better.” She thrusts her chest forward, and her dark eyebrows arch upward in the middle. “I think you’ll be satisfied, though. Warm and tight. You can slide right in.”

  Later that night, while the rest of the personnel at the base are sipping whiskey and playing cards and otherwise distracting themselves from (or fortifying themselves against) tomorrow night’s big mission, Dan will indeed pay Mary a visit in the darkened aisles of the supply depot.

  Wrapped in the flickering glow of emergency candles and the scratchy warmth of the wool blankets that Mary has “borrowed” from the supply shelves, Mary’s nipples will press into the warm flesh of Dan’s palms, and her slim fingers will roll the military-issue condom onto Dapper Dan’s ample appendage.

  Mary will giggle as Dan quotes the slogan from a film he had to watch during training: “Don’t forget! Put it on before you put it in!”

  But then everything will become serious again as Dan presses into the warmth of Mary’s body, again and again and again, life and death and life and death and life, again again again.

  He will destroy her and he will heal her with every stroke, and she will absorb him and rebirth him over and over and over.

  He will need this contact and this release, and so will she. It will help them both to survive another day.

  After the emergency candles have burned out, Mary will hold Dan’s face and whisper, “Stay alive for me, Daniel.”

  Mary is the only person who ever calls him Daniel.

  Daniel will pull Mary closer to him, and he will whisper in her ear, “You’re a good reason to stay alive.”

  “Gawd-damned old pervert,” Nurse Sheila shrieks in her air-raid- siren voice, as she spins Dan away from his view of Clementine’s receding backside and shoves his wheelchair into the bathing room. “You gawd-damned men are all the same. Drooling over these little hussies! Sluts like her are a dime a dozen, mister.”

  She strips him like a prisoner of war and then shoves him onto the plastic seat inside the geriatric tub, slamming the door closed and turning the taps on.

  “A little warmer, please,” Dan says. “I don’t like cold water.”

  “Good gawd,” Sheila croaks, “the water’s fine! You’re not the only dirty old man I’ve got to wash today, you know. This isn’t a luxury hotel. This isn’t a spa.”

  “I don’t like cold water,” Dan repeats.

  “You’ll live,” Sheila barks.

  As she slathers his face with liquid soap, Dan drifts backward once again.

  This mission is going to be a long, high, cold one, mostly over water, so one of the ground crew smears Dan’s face with an extra-thick layer of antifreeze ointment. This is fine with him; he doesn’t want his skin to be cracked and chafed from frostbite when he sees Mary tomorrow.

  Usually, Dan is inclined to leave a few pieces of gear and clothing behind to give himself a bit more room to move in the tail turret, but Mary’s voice has been echoing in his head since last night, saying, “I want you to be safe up there, Dapper Dan.” So today he wears it all: the silk stockings, the woolen kneecaps, the thermal underwear with the long sleeves and high neck, his combat uniform shirt and pants, the thick white sweater and battledress top, the electrically heated inner suit, the kapok-filled outers. And even though it restricts his movement and makes him feel like a stuffed seal, Dan is even wearing his Mae West life jacket; they’ll be flying in high over open water to attack a naval facility, and, if there’s a bailout, Dan isn’t the best swimmer in the world.

  He pulls his new fur-lined flying boots on overtop his heated slippers. There is nothing stylish about these boots, but they will keep his feet warm. A tight-lipped grin spreads across his face as he thinks of Mary saying, “Warm and tight-fitting. You can slide right in.”

  He pushes his fingers into his white silk gloves, then the heated inner gloves, and then the leather gauntlets. Mary, he rehearses, would you do me the honour of …

  His crew hasn’t been assigned to one of the new Lancasters after all, so there will be no roomy new Rose turret for Dapper Dan Springthorpe. The bird they’re flying is a battered old beast, with sheet-metal patches riveted all over the fuselage like Band-Aids over the bullet holes, and a few gleaming new parts affixed where the old ones were blasted off.

  Dan makes his way through the fuselage, through the armoured door at the rear of the plane, and he crams his extra-padded body into the tail gunner’s turret. He considers leaving Mae West on the other side of the blast door with his parachute, but then he hears Mary’s voice once again: “I want you to be safe up there, Dapper Dan.”

  The Tail End Charlie who occupied the turret before him has already cut away all of the Perspex and armour from between the guns, which has to be done if you actually want to see whatever you’re shooting at during a night mission. This previous gunner must have survived his tour, because he’s scratched a message into the metal seat: 30 Flights — STILL ALIVE.

  Dan has a good feeling about flying in a plane that has survived a lot of missions; this Lancaster is a survivor, just like most of Dan’s crew. Sure, there was that eighteen-year-old bomb-aimer who got a stray bullet in the jugular vein when that rocket hit the belly of the Lancaster and exploded a box of ammunition; there was the craggy-faced veteran bombardier (an “old man” of thirty-one) who dropped dead from a heart attack minutes after releasing the last blockbuster on that dam-busting mission; but the other five men on the crew are nearly home free. This mission is their thirtieth.

  After thirty flights, you have served your country sufficiently, and your tour of duty is officially over. You can head back home if you want to (although there will be some pressure to stay on and “see the job through”). None of the boys on the crew have mentioned it today, though; nobody wants to jinx this fligh
t.

  As soon as his boots touch the runway again tomorrow morning, Dan Springthorpe will sprint to the supply depot, where he will drop to his knees before Mary. The next thing he will do is book two tickets on the first boat back to Canada.

  The four V12 Rolls Merlin engines roar to life, and the patched-up old Lancaster shudders up into the air, thirty-six thousand pounds of aircraft, eighteen hundred gallons of fuel, and twelve thousand pounds of bombs straining against the tug of gravity.

  Dan takes the message scratched on the seat beneath him as a positive omen: 30 Flights — STILL ALIVE.

  This is your lucky day, Daniel Springthorpe, he tells himself. Nobody is taking your bird down today.

  “Good gawd, man!” Nurse Sheila rages. “Have you gone even more deaf, or are you just ignoring me? I’m not going to ask you again. Lift your gawd-damned arms!”

  Dan looks at her and says, “Nobody is taking this bird down today.”

  “Good gawd,” Sheila grunts, gripping his thin left arm in one of her meaty paws. “You’re losing your mind, and you’re taking mine with you!”

  She wrenches one of Dan’s thin limbs upward and then scrubs under his armpit with a sponge as if she’s trying to scour rust from old steel.

  “Ow! Ow! That hurts!” Dan cries.

  “Oh, my gawd! Are you a man or a little crybaby?”

  “The water’s too deep! It’s too cold! You’re hurting my arm!”

  “Suck it up. Be tough. Believe me, I want to get this over with as much as you do.”

  Searchlights slash the sky. Luftwaffe night fighters swarm around the Lancaster like bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

  “Oh! Oh! It hurts!”

  The words buzzing through the intercom belong to the navigator. A Messerschmitt Bf 109 has just hit the belly of the Lancaster with machine-gun fire, and one of the bullets has torn through the navvy’s thigh. The top gunner shoots down the 109 a moment later, but this news isn’t easing the navigator’s pain, nor stopping his blood from gushing out of his body.