by Heather Webb
And Johnson’s nose. So all right, maybe Octavian was breaking his own rule of late, allowing a bit of warmth to color his regard for a fellow human being. But how could you not take a shine to Johnson? The darn fool kept getting himself into scrapes, like an adventurous puppy, and getting out of them again with an audacity that might just keep him alive, if it didn’t kill him first. Why, only last night, he’d had the nerve to break in on Octavian while he was reading—something every other pilot in the entire ever-loving United States Army Air Service knew better than to attempt—and kept asking his dumb, brilliant questions until, Lord above, the pair of them were actually conducting a genuine conversation. Johnson thought he was in love with the widow from last week. She’s a beaut, J.C., a real beaut. Tits like this—here he made round, caressing movements with his two hands, like he was changing the oil on a Model T—and so soft inside, good Lord Almighty, I was fixing to die. Came so fast the first time, I figured she’d laugh me right off the mattress. Did she? Octavian couldn’t help asking, and Johnson replied cheerfully, Why, no, she didn’t, bless her sweet heart. Kept on moving her hips like this [he demonstrated] and making these noises like a starving she-cat. So I thought, Hell yes, and I kept on going, and dammit if I didn’t come again like the Southern Pacific, ten minutes later. Begged her to marry me, right then and there. Octavian couldn’t help asking whether she said yes, and Johnson said Aw, of course she did, she ain’t stupid, and Octavian called him a dumb hayseed and a sucker, to cover the fact that he was actually, in the corner of his soul, a little bit jealous. Yes, jealous of Johnson and his widow of easy virtue, because at least Johnson wasn’t going to die a virgin. Johnson knew what it was like to come inside a woman instead of an old shirt. Johnson—
And that was the second, that instant of fragile inattention at twenty-seven seconds past 11:13 on the morning of November 11, when the first Fokker blew free from the clouds below and angled straight toward him.
By two seconds past 11:18, his plane was diving toward the ground, engine smoking and undercarriage destroyed, following Johnson, who had already gone down defending him.
FOR A MINUTE or two—or maybe more, who was counting?—Octavian remained still, not quite comprehending the fact that he was still alive. That the airplane had borne the insult without actually killing him.
But crashes were always like that. The first few seconds were the best ones, and it all went downhill from there. The pain kicked in, or rather the recognition of pain: in his chest, hard and stiff, so that he had to find a new way to breathe; in his right arm, near the elbow, possibly fracture; in his right leg, near the ankle, definite fracture. And he was in Germany by now. They had been angling daringly toward Trier, looking for enemy patrols, and should have crossed the border a short while ago. He was behind enemy lines, and the local gendarmerie would be racing to the scene any minute, if some bedraggled fraction of the German army didn’t beat them to it.
But he was alive. That was something. Broken bones would knit. And the airplane, miraculously, wasn’t on fire, though he could smell a faint acrid smoke in the air, somewhere. He moved his head on his stiff neck, and saw nothing but broken trees and turned earth, a wet and war-scarred landscape.
He placed his left hand on the side of the airplane and hoisted himself out of his seat. The pain in his chest made him gag. Beneath his jacket, his shirt was wet. A rib, probably, splintering through his skin. Better skin than the organs inside, though.
Getting himself out of the cockpit proved easier than he imagined—the airplane had come to rest at a convenient angle—but the drop to the ground nearly did him in. He lay on his back and stared at the stunted tips of the trees. You could still smell autumn in the air, just faintly: that syrupy flavor of wet, fallen leaves. But the smoke was growing stronger now, overpowering nature, and Octavian thought of Johnson, careering to the earth, trailing a slender, vaporous line from his engine, like a rope.
He rolled on his side—the left side, the one that seemed to have gotten out of this in better shape than the right—and braced himself on the fuselage. He was surprised to discover that he could stand, if he didn’t try to put any weight on his right foot. There was a thick, knobbled stick on the leaves nearby, struck off a trunk by the driving nose of the airplane, or else an artillery shell from some recent bombardment, the evidence of which lay everywhere. Broken trees, craters of fresh earth. Ground that had escaped largely unscathed through four years of war was finally getting its due. In some places, the front lines were now no more than a few miles from the German border.
Octavian reached for the stick and set it upright on the leaves. The wood held his weight bravely. He looked up at the sky, and there it was: the faint smudge of charcoal against the drizzly gloom of the clouds beyond. In his lungs, he felt the sulfurous sting of burning fuel, all too familiar.
He took a single, excruciating step, and then another, and he was about to take a third when he remembered something important.
He staggered back to the cockpit, reached across the empty seat with his left hand, and pulled the photograph of Sophie Faninal from the edge of the airspeed dial.
JOHNSON WAS CLOSER than he thought; or rather, Johnson’s airplane was closer, only a few hundred agonizing yards away, wings and fuselage crumpled, billowing smoke from the nose. Of Johnson himself, there was no sign, until Octavian heard the faintest possible groan above the ominous whisper of the gathering fire, and he looked over the edge of the cockpit, between the struts connecting the two wings, and saw Johnson’s cocky face, smashed beyond recognition and beginning to swell.
The air rumbled, and a lick of flame spurted from between the bent blades of the propeller.
Octavian leaned on his stick and unbuttoned his jacket, as fast as his stiff fingers could manipulate the fastenings. Another flame licked free, and then a roaring whoosh moved the air against his eardrums, and the engine exploded.
Somewhere inside the din, he heard Johnson cry out. He staggered forward, dragging his right foot, and the heat of the fire seared his skin beneath his shirt as he slipped the leather jacket from his shoulders and threw it over Johnson.
“Come on, kid!” he shouted. “Lift your arms!”
But Johnson didn’t move. His airplane had wrecked on a little rise, and the open cockpit tilted to the side, away from Octavian. He sheltered his mouth with his shirt and stumbled around the tail, until Johnson returned in view, slumped over the controls, while the smoke and flame billowed from the nose and crept over the fuselage.
Octavian swore.
The heat was like hell itself, singeing his skin, singeing the tiny shaved bristles of his beard. It struck him with physical force, and he pushed himself through the way he might batter down a wall. The skin of the airplane was hot to the touch. He stuck his left arm in the cockpit—no good—he threw aside the stick and tried again, opposing the suffocation in his chest, opposing the pain that had gone so deep, he almost didn’t feel it anymore. His left arm found the gap beneath Johnson’s shoulder and wedged into place, and he just closed his eyes and heaved, heaved, until Johnson screamed and his body slid free, like a baby from the womb, sending them both into the ground just as the flames overtook the cockpit.
THEY LAY THERE on the wet leaves while the plane burned a dozen yards away. It was as far as Octavian could drag them both before the last of his strength gave way. The soles of his boots grew hot against his feet, until he wanted—irrationally—to take them off. Instead he pulled the leather jacket over both their heads. The smoke wasn’t so bad on the ground, but his lungs were already raw. As for Johnson, Octavian couldn’t even say if the kid was dead or alive. He didn’t make a sound. Octavian listened for his breath, and thought he could hear a faint and irregular scratch. Or maybe that was just himself, Octavian, starved of oxygen. Stripped from the inside out.
The roar of the fire began to subside, but the plane stil
l smoldered. Octavian lifted away the jacket and raised his head, just enough to see the blackened pile, resting in a hollow that he now realized was a shell crater. Or a bomb, dropped blindly from an Allied airplane at some point in the autumn push.
“Johnson?” he said. “You alive?”
There was a small movement in the dirt beside him.
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Baftard,” Johnson said, like he’d lost a few teeth, or couldn’t move his jaw.
Octavian’s chest started to shudder, but the pain of laughing cut short the laugh itself. “Still the same old Johnson,” he said, and he didn’t recognize the smoky rasp of his throat.
Johnson spit messily. “We fucked, J.C.?” The C was more like fee. Jayfee.
“Looks like it.”
“Forry.”
“C’est la guerre, kid.”
Johnson didn’t reply. Octavian reached out his left hand—the right arm, by now, was utterly immobile—and gave the boy a shove to the shoulder, not gentle at all. “You wake up, Johnson, all right? You gotta stay awake.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s better. Come on. I’ll tell you a story.”
“Fuck. You.”
“I’ll tell you something no one else knows, all right? I’ll tell you about my photograph. The big secret.”
Johnson’s voice was packed with effort. “Fulla thit, Jayfee.”
“No, listen. Just shut your mouth and listen, you cocky son of a gun. You maroon trying to be a hero.”
Johnson grunted. Disgust, from the tone of it. Good. Octavian would take disgust over despair any day.
“All right, then,” he said. “This girl, the girl in the photograph? The one you think is my sweetheart? I don’t even know her.”
Another grunt. Surprise?
Octavian continued, as if they were sitting at a bar, nursing a pair of beers. Or whisky. What he wouldn’t give for a brown, neat whisky at Harry’s Bar near the Opéra, where they knew how to make a solid American drink. A double. His fingers found a leaf and rubbed the two sides between his thumb and forefinger. “Well, maybe that’s not true. I’ve never met her, not in person, but I know her like I know myself.”
“Aw, thit, Jayfee.”
“No, you’re gonna listen, kid. You need to hear this. You see, this girl—Sophie’s her name, Sophie Faninal—”
“The fuck?”
“Faninal, kid. Fan-in-al. See, she’s a stranger, maybe, but I guess I’ve known her most of my life. She used to live in the house where I grew up. Greenwich. That’s a town in Connecticut, right by the shore, about thirty miles from New York City. It’s the first town you run into, once you cross the border into New England. Pretty town, full of rich people, horses, summer houses. A lot of stockbrokers. My pops, he was a stockbroker, and when we bought this house, you see, no one had lived in it for two years. It was a year after the panic, though, so we figured that’s why it was such a bargain, because all the stockbrokers had lost their shirts, except Pops, I guess. Pops got lucky. Made out all right.”
“Gotta point, Jayfee?” The voice was a little clearer now, like Johnson was actually paying attention. Rallying a bit.
“Yeah, I got a point. Anyway, one day, not too long after we moved in, I got to talking to the neighbor kid, and that’s when I learned about Sophie. She was three years old when they moved out, and she slept in my exact bedroom, the best room in the house. Overlooked Long Island Sound from a turret window. Loved that room.”
The leaf fell apart in Octavian’s hand, done to death by the force of his callused fingers. He turned his hand over and allowed the pieces to shiver back into the ground.
“And?” said Johnson.
“And then, one fine September morning, like I said, two years before we moved in, some lunatic takes a kitchen knife and cuts open her mother’s throat, ear to ear, right downstairs when Sophie’s taking a nap.”
“Holy thit.”
Octavian picked up another leaf and started again. “So, the story goes, little Sophie wanders in on her fat little legs and finds the body. The maid hears her crying and comes downstairs, and there’s Sophie, tugging on her mama’s limp arm, trying to wake her up, and—”
“The fuck.”
“Yeah, well. They thought the father did it, old Faninal, but before they could arrest him, he split. Split and took the family with him—Sophie had a sister, see, nine or ten years old—and nobody heard from ’em since.”
Johnson spat out a little more blood.
“And that’s that, I guess,” Octavian said.
Another grunt, full of gurgling derision. “Point?”
“The point, Johnson, you bonehead hick kid, you numbskull hayseed, is that she’s out there somewhere. This little girl who lived in my room and lost her mama. And the reason I keep her photograph, the reason I keep her with me—”
“ ’Cause—go back home—shave ’er? Huh, Jayfee?”
“Maybe. If I can find her, that is. Only I was kind of thinking . . .” He closed his eyes, because the sight of the back of Johnson’s head, matted with blood and hair and torn skin, was beginning to sway in front of him. “I was kind of thinking we might save each other.”
“Full—thit—Jayfee. You—too—damn—a shave.”
“Yeah,” he said, inhaling the leafy rot, the poisonous smoke. Trying not to open his mouth too much. To draw too much oxygen across the surface of his excoriated lungs. “Too damned to save. I guess you might be right. Still—”
“Hier ist es. Mein Gott! Was für ein Durcheinander!”
Octavian slid his hand to the small of Johnson’s back. Not that he needed to. Johnson knew darned well not to move, even if he could.
The voices grew in size, heavy and male. Two men, maybe three. Octavian knew a few words of German, not enough to understand them. He didn’t dare lift his head and look. Underneath the leather jacket, he moved his hand to the pistol at his waist, a weapon he’d hardly ever fired. What was the point, up in the sky? You already had two nice efficient Lewis machine guns strapped to your wings, one on each side, ready to rain hell on somebody. Still. He remembered how. Octavian, he remembered everything. A curse, sometimes, but at this particular moment, in this particular copse of skeletal German trees, it was a blessing.
A cool customer. That’s what his friends at Andover used to call him, and it wasn’t just that he played hockey so well. There was something in his blood, something that chilled and slowed when danger approached, like the thickening of sea ice in the middle of January. The higher the stakes, the more everything slowed, the clearer his mind became: an extreme economy of thought and motion, as if he were a machine directing his own actions. As the Germans picked their way around the smoldering wreckage—soldiers? deserters? gendarmerie?—he held himself perfectly still, while his brain mapped out each possibility. The trajectory of his imprecise left arm, the direction of his attention, should the footsteps form such a pattern that Octavian, lying under the brown leather coat against the brown leaves, would have to defend himself by force.
“Jayfee?” whispered Johnson.
Octavian hardly heard him. The voices, muffled by the remains of the fuselage between them, were beginning to sharpen. But there was no pause in the complicated German consonants, no sign that the men had spotted them. Two men, he was now certain. He slid his pistol from its holster.
A soft, ominous rattle emerged from Johnson’s throat.
The voices stilled.
Oh, Christ. Don’t die, Johnson.
The body twitched next to him, and the action—involuntary—caused Johnson to make a noise of agony, stifled in his throat, as if he were choking on his own pain.
“Dort gibt es,” whispered one of the men, more loudly than your ordinary whisper.
Octavian’s hand rounded around the butt of the pistol. His thumb found the safety latch, pushing it upward in the faintest possible click, just as a similar sound nicked the air a few yards away.
Johnson’s throat made that gurgling sound again, a death rattle. One leg flinched, hitting Octavian’s injured shin.
“Achtung!” someone called out.
Johnson was going to die. He was going to choke on his own blood, while Octavian hovered between the risk of surrender, and the risk of attack. Surrender: would these Germans accept it? Or would they shoot the two of them dead, without a witness in this dank and cheerless copse, in revenge for a brother or a son or a friend?
On the day after Morris went down in a spectacular ball of fire—Morris, the fellow who gave Octavian his nickname—they had caught a German soldier hiding out in a barn. The second German advance had started a couple of weeks before (this was why Morris and Octavian had rushed back from Paris, cutting short their leave by a day) and everything was in chaos: frontiers crossed, lines retreating. The German was wounded in the shoulder and the gut, and he had fashioned himself a dirty bandage from a rag. The barn was attached to a small farm in which Octavian was billeted with a few of his squadron mates, and he and one of the other pilots found the German after following a trail of his blood through the new spring grass. Octavian volunteered to run back to the airfield for a medic and an MP, while the other man stood guard.
“Why the fuck?” said his mate, and he lifted his pistol and shot the German through the forehead, bang splat. “That’s for Morris,” he added, turning away, putting his pistol back in its holster, and Octavian—stunned, horrified—realized also that he was glad. That in some brutal, primitive corner of his heart, he had rejoiced in the act of retribution. Later, of course, such acts became impossible: not because they didn’t encounter more Germans, but because they lost so many pilots. How could you seek revenge for the life of a man you’d only met a few days before? How could you seek revenge for an act—shooting down an enemy airplane—of which you yourself were guilty, a dozen times over?