by Michael Oren
“Greek! Greek!” Tully wailed. Enemy fighters he could cope with, but not the flak. He felt like a pheasant flying over a field of hunters with their 12-gauges raised and firing.
“Twenty seconds to target.”
Another burst and Tully could see the number two starboard engine trailing smoke.
“We’re hit!”
“Five seconds. Hold on.”
“Get us out of here!”
“Blackbridge,” Tully sobbed and reached behind him for his friend’s hulking back but felt only emptiness.
“Bombs away.”
Relieved of 5,000 lb. payload, Wildcat Wendy rose slightly and cruised. Tully turned to find Negroponte sitting on the floor, leaning against the fuselage and smiling. Above that smile, though, his head was gone.
The whine of bombs descending became Tully’s scream, but then both were muted by a boom and a fist of fire unfurling from the cockpit.
“No! No!”
Tully groped for the sack with his parachute but could not find it in the smoke. No matter: his body was too burnt to bail. Pinned by the ammunition belt, his gun and its pintle, he found himself glaring upward as the B-17 unwound. The September sun was suddenly in his face and sucking out the contents of the plane: radios, aid kits, fuse boxes, electrically-heated boots. Last to fly were a flannel skirt and woollen beret. They twirled and fluttered out of reach as the young man plummeted toward France.
* * * * *
Resistant to the three-pronged fork, the last of the ripe mussels gives way to my fingernails ripping it from the bouchot. It reminds me of how, as dawn penetrated the warehouse, I had to tear myself away from her. The weight of the tin bucket, now nearly filled, is feather-like compared to my heart. Only the hum of engines above grants me hope of some higher redemption. Though never much of a believer, suddenly I am, and I know that God will unite Marie-Madelène and me two years from now, if not sooner.
I drag the bucket to the skiff and expect Pepe to spit as he always does and curse me for not hauling more. But my father is not belittling the bucket or even scowling at me. His bloodshot eyes are squinting rather at Le Portel which is suddenly sparkled by flashes. A second or so passes before the rumbling reaches us. The boche are shooting their guns. The clouds are also illuminated here and there, as if by a summer storm.
“Dieu nous sauve,” Pepe mutters as the droplets descend. That’s what it looks like at first, rainfall, though rain does not fall in lines. Rain is not drab and, striking the earth, does not erupt in flames.
I watch as the coral-colored rooftops rise and disintegrate. Cobblestones scatter like pigeons. A fishing boat bobs in mid-air.
For an instant, I consider pushing my Pepe aside and gunning the skiff, but that will take too long. Instead, I drop the bucket, spilling its contents into the sea, and set off running across the promontory.
Through the high grass of the bluffs I tear, howling her name even as the explosions hammer it down my throat. Already I can feel the heat of the fires, smell the burning petrol and meat. The Germans in Fort de l’Heurt, though dowsed by geysers, are still firing, but my village is wrapped in flames.
She lives, I tell myself with each gasp. She lives and will rush to meet me on the bluffs. We will embrace and bless whatever God she wishes and wed once the rubble is cleared.
Above me, one of the bombers corkscrews through the clouds and breaks apart, but I hardly notice. I care only about running and reaching her. The last stretch of grass is littered with debris—a bedstead, a cross, a bicycle, a hoof—that I sidestep before hurling into the blaze.
I cannot see, cannot breathe. Fiery figures thrash past me. Beams and steeples collapse. Screams, cries, sounds made by men or animals. Even if blind, I could always find her street, but her street—any street—no longer exits. So I call out to her. Marie-Madelène. Marie-Madelène. Through the fire that reminds me of passions.
My face and hands are scorched, but I feel nothing. Not even when I fall to my knees on the broken glass and shards of masonry and sift through the ash. I will dig and strain, comb and claw, fingers bloody. Forever I will search for the hair like water split by a prow and the spiraled stake of a braid. I will seek, peering through the embers, a pair of mussel-gray eyes.
* * * * *
Like a tiny train puffing through the prairie grass, the lit fuse raced. The colonel and his three civilian guests peered through their binoculars and watched the smoke climb to an eastern rise. Chester, meanwhile, assisted by his son, was already twisting the dials on his table and turning on the screen. It flickered with soapy light.
“A real rocket will be electrically ignited, of course,” Chester commented. “Our budget was kind of limited.”
None of the observers nodded, perhaps because they could no longer hear. The droning from the far end of the runway grew louder still. But no noise could muffle the crack of fuse and fuel. Curls of flame unraveled across the rise and the hammer-headed rocket wobbled. It tilted one direction and then another and appeared about to collapse, engulfed in its own propulsion. Then, with a shudder, it rose.
Several feet into the air, the fire-spewing rocket hovered. But a secondary explosion sent it soaring so high that sunlight blinded the binoculars. The colonel was about to complain but Chester preceded him with, “Watch the screen.”
“Screen, hell,” the colonel huffed. “It’s empty.”
Chester half-turned and grinned. “Watch,” he repeated and then enjoyed seeing the four men’s faces fall.
On the screen, grainy but identifiable, were three fedoras and a peaked military hat, all seen from above and rapidly looming closer. An instant later, the rocket shrieked over their heads. Everybody except Chester ducked, even Scotty, who hissed at him, “Dad…”
“Don’t worry, son. I’ve got it.”
Chester twisted furiously and dialed. The rocket swung into a wide arc that led back over the runway and southward toward the prairie.
“Watch!” Chester shouted.
Scotty pointed at the tractor hull a hundred yards away. The binoculars followed his finger, just in time to see the rocket strike the wreck. A bouquet of smoke, flame, and rusty shrapnel blossomed over the grass.
“That, gentlemen,” Chester cheered, “that is the end of World War II!”
Yet the civilians on the runway said nothing. Rather, lowering their binoculars, they let the colonel react. “You can’t be serious, McGarry. What, with this…this toy.” Glancing over his shoulder, he smirked at his guests who seemed to smirk in return.
“No, no toy.” Chester limped past the colonel and practically lunged at the three men, who reflexively stepped back. “Guided rockets can take out Hitler’s bunker,” he exhorted them. “Hell, they can take out Hitler. They can take out Tojo, too. No need to invade Europe. No need for Marines to die on no-name islands just to get closer to Japan. We can win the war right from here, in Kansas, and with a fraction of the sums you pour into your planes.”
Only now did one of the civilians—Mr. Ford, perhaps—speak. “With all due respect, Mister McGarry, your rocket will take years to develop. But we don’t have years. We have a job to do right now.” He tugged his fedora definitively. “And we make the tools to do it.”
Chester started to respond but was cut off by the drone which, at that moment, became thunderous. The runway darkened, the prairie grass bowed, and colossal motors churned up the sky. The men held their hats and looked up as the B-24s roared over.
The colonel patted his paunch. “Off we go into the wild blue yonder,” he sang, laughing, while rejoining the civilians in the Packard. “Live in fame or go down in flame!”
Chester gimped after them. “No, please, listen. It’s doable, I know it. You can save millions. Dollars. Lives.”
Car doors shut in his face, Chester looked desperately around the runway. “Arthur,” he cried to his son, “Scotty. You tell them.”
But Scotty was not looking at his father or even at the Packard as it sped off. He stood in
the grass with his hands in his pockets and stared upward. Wondrously he gazed as the cruciform Liberators, ten men pinned in each, vanished over the horizon.
* * * * *
Sick as it sounded, he welcomed the heat. The city already awash in flames from the British bombing the night before, the firestorm respiring, glowing with each breath. And so hot that, four miles up, you thawed. The only problem was the smell. Just like a Fourth of July barbecue only bitterer. Sinister. He would never forget that smell, he thought, or enjoy another cookout. He might never see another one anyway.
This was only his seventh run and already he teetered on madness. Already, he had seen a bomber in his squadron crash on take-off, its nose stabbed into a ditch. Little fire balls, like tumbleweeds, scurried away from the wreckage and, watching from his cockpit, he remembered thinking how strange that seemed. Until he realized that the weeds had heads and arms.
Then, two sorties ago, he saw an 8,000 lb. bomb dropped by a plane in his formation hit another one directly in front of its tail. The stricken aircraft blew up—nothing, not even tinsel, remained of it. Only viscera splattered on his windshield.
Ten, fifteen, or more men he had breakfasted with those mornings and got shit-faced drunk with the nights before—whose names he could still remember, already long dead.
Only mission seven and the boy who never touched a cigarette back home was up to two packs of Luckies daily. Who never sipped a beer much less heavier alcohol could now not sleep without guzzling both.
Seven down and an unfathomable eighteen to go, and his grip on the throttle and half-circle yoke were far from solid. So were his bowels. He feared showing himself a coward in front of his co-pilot and crew. He feared being hit by flak and falling like that plane, in countless pieces, downward.
For there was only flak now; the enemy was out of Messerschmitts. All those gunners—tail, waist, turret—aboard and nothing to shoot at, nothing to do but wait and pray not to become a statistic. That and make fun of their captain.
“How about a bedtime story, Arty,” the radioman riled him, “to keep us all awake?”
He had a reputation for talkativeness around the Officers’ Club and for being tight-lipped once aloft. Both from nerves, he knew.
“Something spooky, please. While we sit by the fire.” This from the bombardier, to which the navigator added: “No one spins ‘em like Arthur.”
He was going to tell them to shut the fuck up and stop calling him Arthur. Call him King Kong, because of his height, but never call him Arthur. But when he pressed the microphone to his throat, all he could grumble was, “Cut the chatter. I can see the city ahead—the fires anyway. Any second, we’re in the box.”
That second was now. The clouds ahead were blemished with black and red. The wall of ack-ack looked impenetrable. Soon the explosions would rock their craft and fling chunks of jagged metal at its fuselage. Some planes would be hit, damaged, downed, while others randomly got through and roasted another town.
He clasped his fingers firmly around the yoke and squeezed his sphincter. While keeping a steady course, he tried to think of safer moments—chasing his gimpy father through the prairie grass, tinkering with him late nights in the shed. He thought of rockets running ribbon-like through their formation, braiding their contrails into garlands. He thought of the longer life he might have lived.
“Hold on, boys,” the airman said as the first .88 burst near their wing. “Hold on.”
* * * * *
By the last year of World War II, 2.4 million Americans—a third of all those fighting—were serving in the Army Air Force. The cost was $50 billion and nearly 90,000 dead.
Civilian deaths mounted radically—more than a million Germans and Japanese killed by firebombing.
While the Allies continued to rely on air attacks, the Nazis developed the V1 and V2 rocket. Radio-guided, some 14,000 of these missiles inflicted significant damage on their targets and more efficiently—according to a U.S. Army intelligence report—than bombers.
Though it possessed the technical means to make rockets, the U.S. instead invested $2 billion in producing the two atomic bombs that killed an additional 220,000 Japanese.
In total, the United States rolled out 33,000 B-17s and 24s. After the war, almost all were scrapped.
Pray, Prey
Cicadas crackle in the heat of the juniper tree that shades my after-feed nap. Sleep comes effortlessly in this late afternoon hour, numbing my paws as I lick them and yawn. My belly rises and contracts, rumbles and purrs, with meat. The flies are already working over the carcass and soon the vultures will arrive and other scavengers. But I will lie here, dozing, digesting, awakening only to gnaw on the succulent bones of my most recent—and curiously easy—kill.
How different this one was. Other animals try to blend in, furs and feathers mimicking the jungle. They prick up their ears to listen, their snouts to sniff, sensitive to the slightest growl or whiff of my scat. Their eyes scan the underbrush for a subtle shifting of stripes. Registering danger, they will bound away on spindly limbs or, if heavy-hoofed, lower their horns to fight. Once pounced upon, though, their end is predetermined. As they, themselves, seem to know. There is little crying as my claws slice through their hides. No pleading, certainly, as my jaws crush their skulls. Only a solemn resignation that they, too, have joined the cycle of death and consumption which I and my appetite drive.
But not this one. Swathed in a red brighter than the blood that would soak it, indifferent to contrasts and camouflage, it padded along the trail. With a stick, beating the fronds which, nodding, marked its progress. Neither a grunt nor a bark rose from its mouth, but rather this high-pitched warble, part caw, part murmur. Mindless of the jungle. Impervious to movements and smells. And emitting this mawkish odor—not of fear or even rutting, but of sandalwood and spice.
An unusual animal, to say the least, for even I enjoy a struggle. Even I relish the hunt. But it denied me both. And I might have let it pass, this prey unworthy of the name, singing and swatting fronds. But hunger trumped my contempt. So, I tracked it, slithering through the growth, stalking at a distance that would have sent all other beasts scurrying. Then, catapulting off my hind legs, my body launched into a spine-smashing arc.
But the animal did not flee. Shockingly, it did not even battle. Instead, it merely curled in on itself and squirmed on the ground like a new-born. A scream, louder than a hyena’s, rifled the jungle, followed by noises I have never heard. “Mercy, please,” the animal kept braying, and something that sounded like “God.” Until my canines pierced its skull and filled my mouth with sweet, creamy brains.
A most unsatisfying kill; I was relieved when the whimpering ceased. Then I took my meal. First the fleshy parts behind the rump, that separated with a single bite, and then the mid-section. This was less palatable, perhaps because of the creature’s last meal, something leafy and tart. Most organs, though, were tasty enough, and for a long while I dipped by face deeper and deeper into the cavity I chewed. My coat and whiskers reddened.
Finally, only my victim’s face remained. Its eyes strained wide, lips stiffened around that last, peculiar sigh. The cheeks, the nose, tongue and brows—these and the bones were the treats that completed my feast in the buzzing shade of the juniper.
A curious creature, indeed. Unafraid yet panicked, vulnerable but bold. Hubris and simple mindedness mixed. And guided by an instinct that it, alone, lived outside the cycle. To eat and be eaten, this is the only equation. Every breathing thing knows it, accepts it, succumbs to it. Everyone, apparently, but this one, for whom that knowledge no longer applies. Who once ambled and warbled and unsettled the leaves and now remains, as do all once-living things, offal.
My Little Whiffle
The corridor reeks of imprisonment. Not a conventional stench, not of unwashed skin and soiled clothing, but of faces unraised to sunlight, of souls perpetually sealed. Mawkish, antiseptic. It always strikes him entering the wing—that and the presence of evil.
“How’s My Little Whiffle doing?” he asks, and from the ball of orange crunched up in the corner emerges the reply, “About as good as anybody, I guess, with three more days to live.”
He smiles at her. A knowing, empathetic smile that acknowledges the hopelessness of the circumstances and yet assures her—irrationally—that all will be fine. “I brought you your favorite,” he says, reaching into a paper bag. “Ham and cheese.”
A chortle. “And I thought my favorite was baloney.”
Through the bars, Beecham presses the sandwich. The overhead light—leaden, unblinking—burnishes his badge and his trooper’s boots but not the slag of his eyes. The orange ball unravels enough to accept the food. But she stays curled, hair curtaining her face as she chews. Not until she pauses and requests, “Tell me about it again, Beech,” does the prisoner finally look up.
The features are unchanged. The same spit of a nose and puckish mouth, the beanball chin that crimps whenever she pouts. But her complexion, once ruddy, has turned ashen, and her flaxen hair, matte. Her eyes are empty cells. “You will tell me, won’t you?” She practically begs, “One last time?” and shows him the gap in her teeth.