by Jim Shepard
They were angry and quiet at the latrine, annoying one another in the limited space around the sinks. They stood in their underwear and flying boots, warming their feet in the sheepskin lining and shuffling from mirror to can. Only Snowberry was somewhat cheery, remarking on the cold. Bean blinked repeatedly and tottered around like someone coming out of anesthetic.
Bryant dressed slowly, shivering, with razors still ringing faintly on the sinks in the uneven light. Beside him Bean was having trouble with the knot of his tie. When he finished, the knot was badly shaped and off-center and he pulled on a thick Army issue sweater, a dismal pea green in the electric light. Around his neck he crossed and recrossed a silk scarf—his lone Red Baron gesture—stitched from a salvaged parachute. He grinned.
An Order of Dressing had been stenciled on the wall near them:
1.Underclothing.
2. Uniform.
3. Trousers (folded inside boots).
4. Jacket (slightly open at top).
5. Boots (outside trousers).
6. Oxygen mask (lines clear).
7. Hood (skirt inside jacket).
8. Gloves.
A number of parodies were outlined beneath it. Snowberry’s Order of Defecating was a general favorite, but Bryant did not resent any system of checks, however ridiculous. He patted the pockets of his overalls to reassure himself that what he had carefully packed the night before still remained, and joined the crowd shuffling outside to clamber onto the open backs of the trucks for the drive to the mess hall. They sat with legs hanging and swaying from the back, quieted by the hiss and spray of the mud from the trucks’ tires. It was misting and the mud seemed more difficult than usual for the trucks and drivers. Someone closer to the cab mentioned the possibility of a scrub, and Lewis told him to shut the fuck up. At this point going and not going were both miserable prospects; a scrub meant the long emotional unwinding, all of this for nothing, and no progress toward the magic total of twenty-five missions which established a tour. And speaking about a scrub was sure to produce one.
At the extended breakfast tables they were served coffee which tasted faintly alkaline in warm, thick mugs. And toast and powdered GI eggs cut into squares and topped with a small floweret of grated cheese. The color and texture were unappetizing. Bryant ate without speaking. Bean looked ill and rubbed his neck tenderly. Piacenti ate all of his food and drank all of his coffee and sat quietly with his hands on both sides of his plate.
It was still dark when they filed into the briefing room, an oversized Nissen hut. They sat on narrow wooden folding chairs, feeling gradually more frightened and more excited. There was a low platform before them facing the rows of chairs, lit by theatrical spotlights hung from a steel beam overhead. Near the front it was very hot and near the rear it was cold. The middle seats were in demand. A staff sergeant from Plum Seed held a brown and white puppy slack in his arms, the puppy’s ears curled back in apprehension. Bryant thought briefly of Audie, who’d taken to sleeping in the backs of jeeps in the motor pool. Once she’d been discovered by two captains only after they’d reached London, when they’d tried to pile their dates into the back. Some of the guys called her Stowaway Canine.
The CO spoke briefly of the dangers of collision after takeoff and during assembly in such weather, and reported that the chances of mid-air collision had been assessed as two planes in a thousand. Someone from the back excused himself and wondered aloud if the CO had any idea which two.
They crowded before their lockers and tumbled the final layers of outerwear—lined leather jackets and pants—into piles that shifted together at their feet. Oxygen hoses coiled into sleeves and interphone cords snagged on gloves. They sorted hurriedly through their equipment as though Paper Doll were priming to leave without them, and wore and carried everything to more waiting jeeps. They overloaded the jeeps until they looked, in the gloom, to be a convoy of college pranksters, and rode to the revetments and Paper Doll in the dark, Lewis swinging way out on a running board, bouncing with each jolt in the darkness. They called out as they passed their plane and the driver executed a flamboyant turn and jerked to a stop. They piled out, dumping their equipment into heaps, and the truck shifted gears and roared off, its light jouncing through the mist toward the other 17’s farther down the line.
Tuliese was poking carefully around beneath the number two engine. The sky was paling to the east and it was beginning to feel like morning. They gathered around Hirsch expectantly, and he went over in subdued detail the navigational data, just when and how they would end up where. Bryant ran through his series of checks with Gabriel and Cooper, gazing at his own panel and over their shoulders into the cockpit at the rows of lit-up information. Beyond the cockpit the nearby windsocks emerged like ghosts and flapped energetically, and water tracked and veined the Plexiglas. They were going to scrub, Gabriel theorized disconsolately. They were so socked in they couldn’t even see the tower. Bryant climbed to his perch in the dorsal turret and looked around. He could make out only the dull glow and occasional flashes from I Should Care, less than a plane length away. “If they send the flares up, we won’t see them anyway,” he murmured to himself.
Another jeep swung by and stopped and a voice from it called out a fifteen-minute delay. “Do you register, pilot?” the voice said.
“Chew my thing, Sergeant,” Gabriel called from the cockpit.
“Thank you, sir,” the voice said. “We don’t chew things.”
With the extra time Bryant ran through additional power plant checks with Tuliese, who seemed unusually defensive and unhappy, and with nothing further to do left the plane and crouched next to Snowberry, who had long since made himself comfortable on a small pile of parachutes. He was surprised to feel how tired he was already.
Stormy, the weather officer, came by on foot, with extra boxes of candy in his new unofficial role as morale officer. He was an earnest and gently funny man, who took his inability to predict the weather with any accuracy seriously, and they liked him. He seemed to genuinely wish he could fly with them, and to genuinely worry about them. He had instituted the tradition of the Living Safety Deposit Box with their crew and the crew of I Should Care, holding on to their valuables during a mission. Valuables turned out to the aircrews to mean only watches and letters, and Stormy had just come from I Should Care and had eight watches on his arm. The pilot and the navigator kept theirs. Bryant peeled his from his wrist, and handed it over. Snowberry did the same. They declined the Baby Ruths with thanks.
They could hear other jeeps, and headlights illuminated parts of Seraphim and I Should Care and swept toward them. One of the jeeps hit a bump and the beams jerked upward and down, as though fencing with the darkness.
“Lewis borrowed Tuliese’s jeep,” Snowberry commented. He was eating peanut brittle from his flight rations. “More ammo.”
The jeep roared up and jerked around with a rakish and dangerous tip. Lewis climbed out and started unloading boxes and loose belts of fifty-caliber ammunition.
“You’re going to kill somebody driving like that,” Cooper called from somewhere off in the darkness.
“I’m paid to kill somebody,” Lewis said. The cooling jeep made ticking and shuddering sounds.
“Is all that authorized, Lewis?” Stormy said, and Lewis told him to have sex with his mother.
“Back there in the tail I just want me, my flak vest, the armor plate, and all these fifty-caliber gewgaws,” he said.
They helped him ferry awkward and spiraling belts into the tail, and coiled them into every conceivable space, in and out of the storage boxes. When they had finished, Lewis gave them each an extra belt for their stations.
“There’s a reason you’re not supposed to do this, you know,” Snowberry said. “The tail’s gonna be so heavy we’re gonna end up leaving you behind.”
“That’s fine, too,” Lewis said. “One way or the other, I’ll get by.” He called to Tuliese and flipped the jeep keys in the crew chief’s general direction. They
rang on the tarmac and Tuliese was left to hunt around in a crouch, moving in slow arcs like someone sweeping mines.
They waited in a small group, squatting and sitting. The B-17’s around them were becoming clearer and the runways faintly luminous. Various figures moved about.
“I’m going to write a war book someday, I think,” Bryant said. He thought again of his high school English teacher with her sketches of the Parthenon, and her assessment of him. His holster rode up the small of his back. “Only in this one no one’s going to get killed.”
Neither Lewis nor Snowberry chose to respond. Stormy wished them well and left. Cooper and Gabriel paced by, gazing worriedly down the runway.
Lewis shifted audibly on his pile of equipment. “You write a war book and no one gets killed,” he said. “I don’t know what you got, but it isn’t a war book.”
Snowberry sang disconnected bits of a Crosby song to himself, his voice too low to carry.
Piacenti was in the plane looking for something with a flashlight, like a prowler. He climbed out of the waist hatch and stood over them with his hands on his hips. “There’re bugs or something in the waist,” he reported. Mist drifted from his words. “Hornets.”
“Hornets,” Lewis said. “In England.” He sounded profoundly unhappy.
“Tell Bean,” Snowberry said. “He’s the bug man.”
“Check it out,” Bryant suggested softly. “See what they are.”
“Your ass,” Piacenti said. “I’m not going in there.” He blew on his hands.
Lewis said, “Isn’t this something? We’re ready to get killed, but not get stung by hornets.”
Hushed noises floating over from I Should Care sounded like someone straightening tool boxes, double-checking gear, doing something recommended and orderly and useful.
“My parents had this cabin once, on the Jersey shore,” Lewis said. Snowberry hummed softly. Bryant studied the morning light on the undersides of the clouds, annoyed with the prospect of a long story at this point and finding it difficult to listen. He was growing more convinced that a scrub was a near certainty.
“We used to run around over some back acres,” Lewis said, “us kids. Once, in the middle of these bushes, thick bushes, surrounded by trees, we found this ’34 Nash—green with green upholstery—just sitting there, with no roads out and no roads in and no way on God’s earth it could have gotten there. Perfect condition. There were leaves and stuff on it, of course. All the windows rolled up. Trees all around it, and these were big trees.”
It was clear enough now to make out the doors and Plexiglas canopies and turrets, and Willis Eddy in the bombardier’s station up front sneezed violently.
“I’ll tell you,” Lewis said. “No way of figuring it. We’re being tested every day, boy.”
Piacenti snorted. “Somebody gonna do something about these things?” he asked. He was peering tentatively into the waist, his weight on his heels.
“Maybe it was a bootlegger’s car, or something,” Snowberry suggested. It was the first indication he had been listening. “Some gangster left it there for the getaway. Al Capone.”
Why don’t they cancel it if they’re going to cancel it? Bryant thought. Instead of making us all sit around here like idiots.
“That’s the thing; there wasn’t anywhere to get,” Lewis said, standing and flexing a leg in front of him. “It was like the trees grew up after the car got there.”
He went in after the hornets, Piacenti following and Snowberry covering their rear. The plane was brightening and detail took on clarity. The fifteen-minute wait had long since passed. While they were inside the fuselage, shifting gear around in the search for the insects like someone rummaging through a closet, notification came to stand down, that the mission had been scrubbed. Bryant made futile and angry jerking motions with his hands down into the gravel and thought, How is Lewis going to get all that ammo back? He hated everything for being harder than it needed to be and sat with his legs spread before him like a child, winging loose gravel and small stones and whatever else his hands swept up from the tarmac at the gray space beneath the body of Paper Doll.
Later in the afternoon the sun came out to mock the entire enterprise, giving the ruts everywhere beside the hardstands and around the base buildings a dusty instability. Snowberry found him beneath a tree, watching the smallish clouds of dust drift from trafficked areas in the distance.
“Tuliese is working on the ball,” Snowberry said. He had chocolate or dirt on his chin. “You wanna come look?”
Bryant got up, officially interested, as flight engineer, with all mechanical problems having to do with Paper Doll. They crossed long empty warm-up areas. Some of the crew of Geezil II were playing football with a rugby ball. Bryant could hear one staff sergeant—Baird?—shouting Yah, yah, yah as he sprinted wide to turn the corner. His duds were greasy and worn in the seat.
Tuliese was on one knee, leaning precariously beneath the ball turret, tools fanned out beside him in the shade of the fuselage. On the back of his fatigues he had stenciled May Your Ass Never End Up on a Drumhead. The clip and case ejector chutes for the turret were disassembled and curled neatly inside one another on the grass.
“It’s the hydraulic line,” Tuliese said, instead of hello. “With this turret, it’s always the hydraulic line.” He had hung rags of various sizes from the barrels of the machine guns. Bryant thought of the Italian clotheslines in North Providence.
Tuliese knew what he was doing, and their working relationship was such that Bryant was asked only to contribute his presence much of the time, to testify to the importance of what was going on. Snowberry, more in the dark than he was, and with more at stake in this case, this being his turret, poked closely at the nozzle assembly and offered odd and tangential suggestions. Tuliese accepted them the way he might have a child’s, and Bryant recalled a Saturday Evening Post cover, a tow-headed boy offering incongruous tools to help with Dad’s Hudson.
“I heard this horrible story from Billy Mitts,” Snowberry said. “Belly gunner in the 100th. You hear it?”
Bryant shook his head. There were a lot of ball turret stories going around.
“This guy was in a Liberator that went down short of the field in Long Stratton—did one of those numbers through a thicket, ended up in big pieces all over some guy’s estate. The belly gunner came out of it without a scratch.”
Bryant nodded. “That’s a great story,” he said.
“Listen, listen,” Snowberry said. “This guy, he gets out, it turns out, he’s the only one there. He’s calling and calling, and crawls around the pieces, no bodies, no nothing. Turns out everybody bailed out. They gave the order and his interphone must’ve been shot out. He’d come all the way in and crashed alone.”
Tuliese snorted to indicate that the idea appealed to him. He was feeding a new length of flexible hydraulic line onto an accepting nozzle.
“I can’t get over that,” Snowberry said. “It gives me the jeebies just thinking about it.”
“Listen,” Bryant said. “The word ever comes to jump, I’ll make sure you’re in the know. My mother’s honor.”
“Just leave a note for him, Sarge,” Tuliese said. “Plane goes down, it’s every man for himself.”
“Come on, Tuliese,” Bryant said. “He doesn’t think it’s funny.”
Tuliese looked at him without sympathy. Sweat stains under his arms connected at his sternum. Word was he hadn’t changed his undershirt since landfall in England.
“Why not?” he said. “He thinks everything else is.”
Lewis and Snowberry enjoyed speculating on Tuliese’s family’s political orientation, as they did with Piacenti. Tuliese asserted that his family was American, having come over from Genoa years ago. Lewis and Snowberry called them the Black-shirts.
“Hey, come on,” Snowberry said. “Imagine coming in alone like that?”
“You think that’s bad,” Tuliese said. “You oughta ask Peeters about that poor son of a bitch in Ch
eyenne Lady. Ott. Dick Ott.”
“Is this the guy in the tail?” Bryant asked. He hated when the conversations took this you-think-that’s-bad direction.
“Ott? The wacko guy?” Snowberry asked.
Hydraulic fluid squirted from the line connection across Tuliese’s arms. “This guy, don’t ask me why he isn’t off making pencils right now. He was on a ship called Flying Bison, they’re not even over the Channel yet, barely at altitude, and something goes wrong with the oxygen to the waist gunner. He passes out. Pilot goes looking for air and drops them eight thousand feet but panics and pulls out too fast, and the control cables go, and then the whole starboard wing.”
Many of Tuliese’s stories carried a cautionary component involving reckless pilots damaging well-maintained aircraft, with fatal and grotesque results.
“The wing root pulls the bomb bay doors off, they shear back through the fuselage, and tear off the tail. Ott’s in it alone, ass over teakettle at twenty-four thousand feet. It’s spinning like one of those seed pods gone nuts. The windows won’t give and the centrifugal force is pinning him against the seat. He finally kicks his way around to face the opening and tries to squeeze by the seat assembly. And gets his shoulders caught on the armor plate.”
They sat rapt, listening to a story they’d heard before. The only sounds were those of Tuliese’s tools.
“He must’ve been at a thousand feet he finally got clear, got his chute open, hit with a helluva crack, broke both legs. Rest of the plane came down in the same field, like a brick. Nobody else made it.”
“Lewis told me that story,” Bryant murmured.
“This guy is still flying.” Tuliese said it as though it had a terminal eloquence about the mental state of flyboys. “He screams at night and sometimes, a guy told me, they find him moving his bed so it’s at a right angle to the other beds. Me, I’d think I was Napoleon at that point.”
He sat back on his haunches and farted with some finality, surveying the turret.