by Jim Shepard
“Who’s that?” Ciervanski asked, pointing to the Plexiglas nose. “Last-minute replacement?” He chuckled. Audie was sitting upright in the bombardier’s seat. Her nose misted the Plexiglas, and her blind and patient lack of comprehension parodied the burned-out look of twenty-mission bombardiers.
Ciervanski offered around cigarettes and then Oh Henry!s. “Look, boys,” he said. “I figure the only way this job could do anything more than keep me busy, do anything for anyone at all, is if I try to get the real story out.”
Lewis and Bryant pondered that. Above them Audie seemed to be surveying the airfield, chin and tongue bobbing lazily to the rhythm of her panting.
Ciervanski sighed. “Well, I humped all the way out here, talked my CO into this idea in the first place, and chewed up a day and a half on this project. I think when I file this the cream chipped beef is going to hit the fan.”
“It may just be us,” Bryant suggested.
Ciervanski stood and brushed off the seat of his pants. His belly shook and he puffed. “You boys take care,” he said. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” Gabriel had seen the leave-taking and was heading their way. “Here comes your lieutenant,” he said. “I gotta break the news to him that you guys won’t be famous this year.”
“I think he already knows, sir,” Lewis said.
Bryant’s father worked for the railroad, and had been able to keep his job through the Depression. He didn’t share much with Bryant and one Christmas told him, That’s all you get; and that’s about right.
Once in a while they went hunting in the woods of eastern Connecticut, a biographical detail Bryant could never bring himself to reveal to Lewis. He was never allowed to handle the gun, his father tramping along with the .22 in the crook of his arm, oblivious to the clouds of insects which drove his son into a quiet frenzy of waving and slapping. His father was a poor shot as well, always sending squirrels and opossum skittering out of range with his first attempt. One of the dogs, Toby, or Corky, or the malevolent Snapper, would come along, adding to his father’s frustration and Bryant’s misery. The one time Tippi, Bobby’s favorite, had come, the dog had performed so miserably—not seeing a squirrel it almost tripped over, even after his father had taken the dog’s head and oriented it in the right direction—that his father had dragged it back to the car and locked it in for the rest of the day, and Bryant had walked and walked thinking of poor Tippi, shamefaced and only half understanding, gazing out behind the windshield after them into the woods.
When Snowberry felt particularly low he liked to, as he put it, swap dad stories. He said he missed his dad a good bunch. Bryant did, too, he was surprised to discover, though he felt bad he had few stories such as Snowberry seemed able to draw on endlessly, stories of dads and kids having fun. He treated it as a failure of memory when he could and chastised himself for not holding close to the best things now that he was away from home.
“I wish my dad were still around,” Snowberry said. “It’s tough when you don’t have a pop.”
Bryant agreed it must be. They talked about the World’s Fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere, the Helicline. All the razzmatazz, Snowberry said, all the really wild stuff about how great things were going to be. Snowberry had gone with his father twice; Bryant had visited once on the train with his uncle Tom, the military enthusiast. His uncle had hectored him throughout the trip about the importance of what they were viewing until Bryant had begun to view the whole thing as pretty much ruined.
Everything is progressing, his uncle had said, more than once. The world was better in every possible way than it was before, and that was something to think about. They had seen the GM Futurama three times, despite the lines and the heat. Bryant had hoarded money his mother had slipped him—his father had suggested to his uncle that they were there to see the exhibits, not to fill up on junk—and he remembered budgeting his time between ice creams more vividly than the exhibits, even the Futurama, with its vast plains and miniature cities explained endlessly by a voice annoyingly like his uncle’s. They had to get ready for the future, his uncle and the voice told him, find their skill, find their place, because the future was where they were going to spend the rest of the lives. It had seemed to him plausible as wisdom until he had thought about it at greater length, at home, and then he had become annoyed at the obviousness of it.
The World’s Fair had frightened him, with its armies of everyone excelling or about to excel, with its talk of a future which seemed so briskly progressive that he’d only be afforded minutes to find and fill his niche and hours to prove himself within it. He had paid close attention to the aviation exhibits, but had absorbed nothing, really, and was wretchedly certain on that long ride back home that he had no aptitude for it, no aptitude for the future, no place in the World of Tomorrow.
The immensity of his presumption, he remembered, had haunted him on that train as it had trundled through Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven: fly an airplane! Bobby Bryant bringing in the mail through the winter storms of the Sierras; Bobby Bryant barnstorming to beat the band. Could he really take these huge metal machines off the ground and return them as gracefully as falling sheets of paper? His only comfort, when his fears called his dreams to account, was that he didn’t really see how anyone did it.
He’d developed the courage to mention it once, on a family outing his father had granted his mother. His mother had packed sliced celery and fresh pea pods wrapped in foil, wedges of baloney in waxed paper, and his father’s big canteen filled with iced tea, the bags still floating darkly in the cool interior.
They had spread a blanket on a grassy area of Voluntown State Park a short distance into eastern Connecticut, having borrowed his uncle Tom’s Ford for the trip. His mother had spread the food out with some joy and his father poured tea into a collapsible cup already sweating with condensation, and gazed at Amy’s gingham animal as if clearly not recognizing it but feeling that he should. He was ill at ease on the blanket and wore a T-shirt and black pants belted high on his stomach. Bobby drank the tea and rolled the glass on his forehead. His father after eating had wandered off for a look-see and Bryant had followed. He’d caught up to him standing ankle deep in a pond below a rock fall, in shade deep and cool as his grandmother’s sitting room. His father’s pants were rolled to the knees, and his legs sloshed gently back and forth in place. Bryant had slipped off his shoes in the hush and edged in, through a stream sheeting water quietly down a rocky grade, the water cold as bone. His feet were prominent and unreal in the lucidity of the water. Bits of glass blinked sunlight back at him from the bottom. He was about to mention the glass in warning when his father quieted him with a hand motion and pointed. Four fish had glided to a stop just next to his ankle, their tails slowly waving like underwater pennants.
Back at the blanket Bryant had been encouraged enough to bring up someone’s recent round-the-world flight, and his mother had commented politely that it was quite a feat, though his father had remained noncommittal.
“I’m going to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps,” he finally said. His tone struck him as somewhere between forceful and pitiful. He had considered mentioning the RAF but had quailed at the last moment.
His father had seemed preoccupied with a nearby pine. “Isn’t that very dangerous?” his mother asked vaguely.
If talk was money, his father had finally said, brushing those black pants with exaggerated care, he supposed they’d all be millionaires by now.
“We had a game,” Snowberry said, dreamily, “a game we used to play when we were kids. Mel and I. Mel was a year older. He’s in the Navy now, in the Pacific. We were just kids. There was a rope swing with a heavy wooden seat, weathered so that it was that gray color wood gets. We found out if we lay down underneath it, it cleared our noses and faces by just a few inches. And I would lie there and Mel would swing, or Mel would lie there and I would swing, and you’d look up at the clouds and leaves and branches and hear it coming and have to look and it would be by, so fas
t, so close, you couldn’t believe it, each time. At the top of the swing it was miles away, and then it was back over you, the grain of the wood whooshing by, and you thought, if I lift my head, imagine. And you felt the dirt scuffed floury by all those kids’ feet and the ragged dry grass and the sun and the rush of air from the long swoop of that swing.
“We always went back,” Snowberry said, “even when the ropes were frayed, even when the wood seat split.”
During the next few days they were favored with an unexpected guaranteed shutdown—so much for Stormy’s highs and lows, at least for the time being—and Snowberry had somehow obtained authorization for a base party for the village children. Naturally, the children would need to be accompanied, perhaps by unattached village girls. Knowing it was a squadron tradition, Snowberry had suggested a Christmas party. When reminded that it was nearly August, he let on that he knew, but that they needed cheering up.
They’d been able to contact Jean and Robin on the base phone, a lonely and listing booth near the picket post, and both had agreed to come, their voices reflecting first their hesitancy as to how they were to get there and then their amazement at how quickly things happened with Americans. They were running trucks into the surrounding villages, Bryant explained, so it was really just a matter of being there when the trucks showed up and hopping on board. He suggested, at Piacenti’s urging from behind him in line at the booth, that she bring friends as well.
After the empty trucks had rolled out to cheers and hoots, the squadron gathered for the pre-mission briefing in one of the huts. The men sat and squatted in rows. Snowberry had pinned a blanket up on the board and had tied rope running away from it in a parody of the red mission yarn and mission board. The rope ran off the board, down the floor, and partially up another wall. Lewis, as the CO, told them with exaggerated sobriety that they had a long one today, and then swayed a bit, slopping something out of a sawed-off can. It spattered on his shoes to much applause. Snowberry played the intelligence officer, and he unveiled maps of a dance floor and the female body. He diagramed the mission route to whoops and concerted foot stamping, and outlined the expected resistance. There would be losses, he assured them. He wasn’t going to stand up there and lie. But some of the men would get through.
The men roared. Eddy, who had been drinking since the announcement of guaranteed stand-down, curled forward out of his chair with a crash, and passed out.
“What about flak?” someone called.
The flak was supposed to be very heavy, Snowberry told them. The clap was supposed to be light.
“Remember, men, when you’re protecting yourself, you’re protecting your country,” Lewis said. He slurped from his can.
Snowberry was waiting for attention. “You gunners,” he was saying. “We need to stress again our desire for accuracy and efficiency.” With a flourish he pulled a canvas from the blackboard and revealed a large male organ he’d painstakingly drawn in chalk. Bean cupped his forehead with his hand and Bryant couldn’t help laughing. “Now, to illustrate,” Snowberry said, “I’ve diagramed my own situation, much reduced in scale, of course …”
“Jeez,” Bean said, when the room had calmed down, “I thought this party was supposed to be for the kids.”
“Aw it is,” Piacenti said from behind them. He jabbed a thumb toward the front of the room. “They’re having fun, aren’t they?”
Lewis was sitting on the floor with his legs spread, banging his can between them. “He’s squiffed,” Piacenti said. “Bosto. Plastered.” Lewis acknowledged the diagnosis and waved.
They laid in large wooden cases of soda in tall unlabeled bottles and piled up a stash of everyone’s candy rations, for the kids to take home with them at the end. The party briefing had broken up at 1400 hours with Lewis and Eddy and three quarters of the crew of I’se a Muggin’ incapacitated. Snowberry had been fine after throwing up, and was helping with the setups, subdued by the time the first trucks loaded with silent and excited children came rolling in. He had even managed to dig up the Wing’s Santa Claus suit, and was wearing it when the first of the children filed into the main hangar they were using for the party.
One of the youngest boys gaped at the five foot, five inch skinny Santa. “Father Christmas?” he asked dubiously.
“You got it right on the noggin, kid,” Snowberry said, bustling by with two stacked cases of soda. “Ho ho ho.”
Bryant helped Hirsch and another guy with the doughnuts and sandwiches the mess had sent over. “We oughta give out the powdered eggs at these things,” the other guy said. “The Alliance’d be over tomorrow.”
Two little girls in identical gray cotton blouses with rounded collars flanked Bean, who was reading to them from a picture book. “Go slow, Bean,” Piacenti called. “And let them help with the big words.”
There was a small pile of fruit on the table as well, and a tech sergeant from Seraphim was holding a tiny boy up so he could see, the boy reaching in wonder for the pile. Bryant set another doughnut tray on the table. “He’s never seen an orange,” the sergeant said. “Imagine that?” He had handed the undersized fruit to the boy, who was turning it over in his hands.
Bryant felt a tugging at his sleeve and turned to find Colin and another young boy. Colin was wearing a brown jacket with wide lapels and a dark blue tie. The other boy had no tie and a worn and spotless shirt buttoned with such zeal it appeared to be actively choking him.
“Hello, Sergeant,” Colin said. “Have we surprised you?”
“No,” Bryant said. “This whole thing was just so you could visit.” They stood with each other for a moment while Bryant wondered what to do to amuse two little boys. “Have you had anything?” he asked. “We have soda and doughnuts.”
The boys thanked him and Colin indicated they’d get something soon.
Bryant had an inspiration. He led the two of them to the end of the hangar where canvas had been slung over four engines waiting to be overhauled. A small squad of boys and girls followed, but the crew chief in charge hustled over, puffing and shaking his head, before they could get too close, and said, “No soap, kids. Can’t touch. Leave the tools alone.”
The children seemed unfazed, awestruck simply by the huge canvas shapes. Enough had gathered to make it appear that Bryant was preparing to give a speech.
“Jack-a-mighty, forget security here,” the crew chief said within earshot, perhaps even directing the comment at him. “Back in the States we used to say even the lice had to show ID.”
Robin was beside him, smiling, and nodded that he should go on with what he was doing. She always touched him that way, lightly, on the shoulder, as if to indicate a subtle favoring of him. He gave her a hug, her skin cool and smooth against his cheek. Colin looked on without approval or disapproval.
“God,” he said. “You look great.”
“Thank you,” she said. She was wearing an enormous red floral scarf and a white blouse. “I hope it’s sufficiently in the spirit of Christmas.”
“It’s great to see you,” he went on, searching for something useful to say. “Did you come with Jean?”
She nodded. Jean was with Snowberry at the other end of the hangar, leaning down with her hands on her thighs to talk with a little girl. Snowberry was providing the entertainment, having segued from “The White Cliffs of Dover” to “White Christmas.”
“I must say Jean’s a bit puzzled by this passion Gordon has concerning Bing Crosby,” Robin said. “She says he’ll just break into song, at any moment.”
“He thinks he sings like Bing,” Bryant explained. “We tell him he sings like Hope.”
They gathered into the rough semicircle surrounding Snowberry. He was up on a canvas-covered crate festooned with smallish branches painted red and olive green. “But it isn’t Christmastime,” one small boy blurted. Snowberry winked and swung into the second chorus and began affecting Crosby’s sleepy eyes.
Lewis walked by and nodded, wincing as if in constant pain.
“Y
ou remember Sergeant Peeters,” Bryant said.
Lewis placed a finger to his lips and extended a hand to Robin. “Lewis,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Robin said apprehensively. “Hello, Lewis.”
“Hope you’re enjoying the show.”
“I am.” Robin lifted her hand from his. “Thank you.”
“Well, he sounds more like Crosby than Kate Smith,” Lewis conceded. “I’m not big on the Groaner. If they ever change the color of Christmas, he’s through. Who’s the kid?” he added. “Looks like Ned Sparks.”
Colin was back. “Hello, Sergeant,” he said.
“How you doin’, kid,” Lewis said.
“Are you a bombardier?” Colin stood straight, arms at his sides.
“Kids.” Lewis pressed his fingertips to the sides of his head. “Uncle Lewis has a hangover. We don’t want to scream at Uncle Lewis.”
“I’m very sorry,” Colin said.
“Uncle Lewis was stinkeroo a few hours ago,” Bryant explained.
“I’m sorry,” Colin said again. “I’m sorry you’ve been stinkeroo.”
Lewis winced, rubbing slowly in tiny circles. “The kid’s great,” he said.
Snowberry finished his program with a spirited whistling rendition of Al Jolson’s “Toot Toot Tootsie,” and the children and village girls applauded enthusiastically.
An Irish staff sergeant from Geezil II stood up and started on the “Indian Love Call.”
“What is this, Talent Night?” Snowberry said. “Siddown.”
He announced the conclusion of the cultural part of the program—on quite a high note, he felt compelled to add—and set about accepting entries for what he called the Derby, pulling a blackboard over and starting two columns, Rider and Mount. He began the Mount column with his own name, and climbed off the crate to circulate among the children in search of a rider.