Paper Doll

by Jim Shepard

  “Don’t be scared,” he said.

  “That’s fatuous advice, isn’t it?” she said.

  He reached his hand down into the hole. The rock wall was cold and lined with water.

  Her face was very near his. “You can’t separate out the fear,” she said. The seriousness of her expression made the possibility of disaster erotic. She kissed him, holding his chin up to hers, with the draft from the hole cooling his legs and feet.

  Inside, they curled together into a big wingbacked chair facing the quiet hearth. The arms were doilied where they had gone threadbare. She was wedged in beside him and had her fingers on his throat and her thumb on his collar.

  “I was working with the village children,” she said. “Did I tell you? A drawing class. One day as something special I brought in a banana. A friend of a friend of Mother’s had gotten two from a Yank serviceman. You should have seen their eyes. We all said it together: ba-na-na. As if that were a little bit of possessing it. And we all drew it.” He touched the fine hairs on her neck, and she took his hand lightly and sniffed his fingertips. “I knew they all entertained the vague hope that it would be shared, or go to the best drawing. I suddenly had this unpleasant feeling of power. I had intended to take it home, but you should have seen their faces. We cut it into sixteen pieces and ate them in tiny nibbles, as I’ve always imagined one ate caviar.”

  She turned his head with the gentle pressure of two fingers on his cheek and kissed him. She took in her breath softly. “I remember being saddened a part of their childhood was missing. Perhaps I thought that was the worst thing about war, the way it robbed childhoods. I remembered at their age trekking home past the shops and windows of iced cakes, iced all with lavenders and pale greens.”

  There was a pronounced thump upstairs and then silence. Some board creaking followed. They caught each other gazing upward and smiled.

  “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

  Robin leaned her head against the wingback. “I hope Jean’s careful,” she said. “You don’t suppose Gordon would be careful, do you?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” he said.

  “She’s had hideous luck with men.” She was pressing her thumb into the valleys between his knuckles, one by one.

  “You make it sound like a raffle.”

  “I suppose it is. The great love of her life was a Wellington gunner from Nottinghamshire. She spent two weekends with him and announced one morning she was PWOP.”

  “Pwop,” Bryant said.

  “Pregnant without official permission,” she explained. “It’s an RAF term. We used to joke about it, before it happened. He treated her horribly. Said she wasn’t boxing him into anything. Gave her the name of a doctor.”

  “And she went?”

  “The night before, he stayed over, and that morning, she had difficulty in getting him up. He didn’t say anything, made a packet of tea, and ate cake in front of her. Complaining about a hangover. Completely oblivious.”

  Bryant felt bad for her. “What happened?”

  She sighed. “He disappeared during what they called a lull in fighter activity. Jean still visits his mum.”

  He imagined the two of them chatting quietly before the photo on the mantel, the guy’s home clothes hanging in forlorn rows in the other room.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We talk a lot about living for today, and What Might Happen, and everything feels so rationed we don’t want to miss a thing, but we have responsibility, here. We’re dealing with people, and it can be very serious. It is very serious.”

  He swallowed and tried to remain still.

  “I don’t know what kind of arrangement you have back in the United States with your girl Lois, but I doubt very much it encompasses something like this. You must in some way make clear in your own mind what you think you’re doing.” She stroked his chest, near the breast pocket that held condoms. He swallowed. “You’re no longer another cheery Yank. You’re my Bobby, and that scares me.” She kissed him on the cheek, holding her lips pressed to it. “I haven’t the words,” she whispered, and he felt fear, and responsibility, and excitement. He wondered if in some unguessed-at English way he’d been outmaneuvered or committed himself. She had his face in her hands, and she kissed him, and when he relaxed she closed her eyes.

  She went upstairs to send Gordon back to his room when the clock read 3:30 by the light of a kitchen match. Bryant remained in the chair, too excited to sleep, imagining she would come back down in a filmy nightgown and a torrent of emotion. After a few minutes the upstairs fell completely silent, and he lingered unhappily on the prospect that she was still tossing and turning quietly, her resistance breaking down. He dozed eventually and dreamed of Vera Lynn singing to him at a barbecue, and when he awoke, Jean was clinking around the kitchen, making ersatz coffee, and it was cool and light in the living room. He rose stiffly and said hello with a weak smile. “Waiting for Father Christmas?” she asked. She removed the blackout shutters and behind her, when his eyes adjusted, he could see daffodils under the apple trees, the lawn grayed with dew.

  “They’re both sleeping,” she said. They sat in silence, Bryant self-consciously attempting to mat down his hair and clear the sleep from his eyes. When the water was ready, she poured the coffee. It smelled like the woods.

  “What’s the ditty? ‘Because of Axis trickery, my coffee tastes like chicory,’” she said.

  He smiled. “It’s fine.” He was determined not to make some sort of horrible gaffe by referring to her troubles.

  She was listening to the morning noises of the cottage. “How long has Gordon been having those dreams?” she asked.

  He looked away, embarrassed. “Since a mission we flew a little while ago. He said they were getting better.”

  She sniffed skeptically. “I’m happy not to have seen them earlier, in that case.”

  “Was he a bother?”

  She laughed aloud. “You’re a queer one, Bobby Bryant. I can’t decide whether you’re very nice or very thoughtless. Probably both.”

  He was taken aback. “Why do you say that?”

  She waved him off, her attention returning to the garden. Puff was hunched near the bluebells.

  “Maybe she sees something,” Bryant suggested.

  “Her friend’s buried there,” Jean said. “A stray. Passed on in her sleep, very mysterious. We buried her in the garden yesterday morning before you came.”

  Puff pawed at the tilled ground. The loose earth popped and trembled.

  “Puff isn’t giving up,” Jean said.

  The cat dug more frantically. Dirt ridged her forehead, above the eyes.

  “Jeez,” Bryant said. “Kind of morbid.”

  Puff plunged in and pulled, struggling, and the ground heaved and broke loosely and the weight below came free slightly, a paw showing like a lost mitten. Puff sprinted a foot or so away and turned to watch, coiled. Nothing happened. Puff watched, clumped dirt falling from her head and back like the coating from fried chicken.

  Jean watched without expression. Bryant rubbed his nose.

  Puff lay in the frosted grass, looking on with complete concentration. They rose finally and went into the garden to retrieve her, scuffing dirt over to rebury the exposed paw. They brought Puff inside and cleaned her with damp soft dress remnants used for rags, and while she lay around licking herself with detachment, the final hour of Bryant’s leave passed with the two of them gazing on the yawning cat in glum silence before going to wake the rest of the house so that the boys could get back to base on time.

  They were going on practice missions, the CO told them, and they were going to take them seriously, and if they didn’t take them seriously, they were going to end up dead. Collisions during assembly were becoming all too frequent as larger and larger bombing groups were attempted for the raids. Six aircraft had been lost in other squadrons in the last five days without enemy intervention. Fifty-seven men. Pilot error and insufficient vigilance, especially in poo
r visibility, were the official culprits. The CO demonstrated with his hands flattened and bobbing closer to one another: heavily laden bombers momentarily unbalanced by turbulence had little room for safe recovery in a tight combat formation. At times single aircraft and even whole formations were becoming lost and crossing into the formations of others in the general pre-dawn chaos. The 341st nearby had had the particularly humiliating distinction of having to abandon a mission altogether.

  They were going to work on assembly. The assembly ship was to be the first off the airfield, and would fly to the designated point and begin firing flares. They were to follow at minimum intervals and assemble in formation as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  The assembly ship was a battle-weary B-24 called You Can’t Miss It. It was bright yellow with huge red polka dots, and a kelly green tail. The men loved on fairly clear days such as this to fly right up to it and earnestly ask for radio confirmation of its status as assembly ship.

  If the balloon didn’t go up in the next few days, the CO continued, they could count on additional gunnery training flights. The standard procedure had been to fly over the British coastal ranges firing away at the targets towed by tired old RAF Bostons. Now that was a job, Lewis said, that had to be the most dangerous in the armed forces, towing those targets while planeloads of ginks and shnooks let fly.

  Bomber Command, the CO mentioned with exaggerated care, had reason to believe that the gunnery instructors back in the States had not been as precise in their scoring of cadet shooting as they might have been. The comment got a big roar of laughter from the aircrews. A month earlier in one of those spectacularly embarrassing incidents the Air Corps seemed able to produce every four weeks or so, one of the target-towing Bostons had been shot down. The Brit pilot had hit the silk so angry he had brandished a revolver at the contrite B-17’s that flew past his chute.

  Bryant found himself climbing with Paper Doll up through white cumulus clouds and gray sky. Lewis was singing a parody of “Into the Air, Army Airmen” over the interphone: Into the air, Junior Birdman, get your ass into the blue. The plane banked sharply and he knew he was supposed to be remaining vigilant in his lookout for the assembly plane and others, but the view through breaks in the cloud entranced him: visibility distended in a pleasant and sleepy way by a slight haze all the way to the Dutch coast and deep into France, the muted colors receding into the curvature of the earth. The earth closer to home resembled the subdivided palette of Robin’s paintbox. Cooper had switched the crew’s interphone to Liaison, and Bean tuned them into the BBC, and they climbed higher into the great chamber of air above the cloud cover listening to an alto voice singing opera.

  Hirsch spotted the assembly plane and within minutes they had slipped into a slot above it and behind Geezil II and Leave Me Home, which had achieved its name by three times developing engine trouble on the transoceanic flight to England and three times having had to turn back.

  They found themselves enduring the usual casually harrowing jockeying and shifting in formation as they circled in an ever-growing group, the clouds like shoals beneath them. Bryant could hear the guff Gabriel and Cooper were taking—Close it up! Close up the formation, goddamnit!—from the pilot of the lead plane.

  From above and behind, three more 17’s appeared and drifted down to them. Bryant called them in to Gabriel and said aloud, Now where’re they coming from? They eased terrifyingly close and suddenly everyone in Paper Doll was shouting, as if the other crew could hear. Gabriel had no room to maneuver and shouted as much back in response over the interphone when they yelled for evasive action. The closest 17 bobbed higher with an infuriating casualness after having dipped so low that its ball turret had been momentarily level with Bryant in his dorsal. The ball turret gunner had waved.

  They had been badly frightened and were glad to be among the first to land, an hour later. They were standing outside of Paper Doll waiting for the jeeps when Lemon Drop came in with a crushed tail from a collision somewhere in the clouds, its engines straining, the emergency trucks clanging, and Lemon Drop swung to the right as it swept in over the tarmac, hesitating with its left wing dipped, and then that wing caught the concrete and the immense plane smashed and concertinaed as they watched, a body cartwheeling out.

  The radio operator survived. There was no fire. The plane had shattered into pieces spread over the runway like a junkyard. They had sprinted over to help the emergency crews, and Lewis and Bryant had come across in the cockpit section only the co-pilot’s flying boot, wedged beneath a rudder pedal, a bone jutting up from within like the stalk of an immature flower. When the shock had worn off, Bryant’s first clear thought, lying on his bunk, was that they were all dying like ants, or pets, or foreigners—they were all dying now as part of a routine.

  He lay still. When he woke he was damp. The hut was gloomy and he guessed he had missed dinner. Something nearby smelled like aluminum. On the bunk beside him Snowberry lay face into the pillow with his hands hanging together off the edge like a victim of an exotic torture. Lewis was on his own bunk beyond, shifting his rear to test the sounds of various farts. Piacenti sat upright with his legs over the side and his head in his hands. It looked to Bryant like a training film illustration of Low Morale.

  “I want to go home,” Snowberry said. His voice came from deep within the pillow.

  “For serious drinking the boys had a table the shape of Texas. Cut it out of sheet metal,” Lewis said. He had spent his leave with friends in the 92nd. “We were playing Drink the Cities. We were on Galveston or Houston and somebody said, Toast. There was that point when no one knew what to drink to, and some little gunner who’d had his nose smashed over Aachen said, Yo Momma. It was just right.”

  Snowberry had not moved and it looked to Bryant as if he’d stopped breathing. Lewis was chewing on a tightly rolled piece of paper and did not seem to be deriving pleasure from his story. He had a photo of Gene Tierney over his bed, under a handwritten sign that said Do Not Hump, and he was stroking her behind absently with his hand in his flying glove. “Now this may be a bunch of guys who appreciate the grotesque no more than seven seconds running in their whole life. But I swear I do love to see the forces come together.”

  “I was figuring it out, on the ride in,” Snowberry said after a silent and dismal pause. “I don’t think we can go to chow anymore without fifteen percent casualties.”

  “The last big party we had,” Lewis said, “it was after a big mission. We had WAAF’s and WAAC’s and Red Cross Girls and Wrens and local girls, you know, nice girls, and they were all standing around or sitting in these little groups. We kept thinking, how’d we get so lucky? Why are there so many girls here? Then it hit us: they were all the dates of the missing guys. We’d lost eight planes. Eighty guys. They’re all standing around, all dressed up.”

  “Big night for sloppy seconds,” Piacenti said.

  “One little girl musta started getting dressed four hours before she came. She was at a table with some other girls and they were ignoring her, you know, trying to at least have a good time. She was crying. I went over and talked to her.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” Piacenti said. He believed Lewis to be a real tail hound.

  “I told her it was just arithmetic,” Lewis said gently, as if the subject had been inevitable and infinitely dreary. “If each group has to do X number of missions and loses Y number of men with each mission, how soon before all the original men are history?”

  “I worry about fire,” Piacenti said. “You know, you’re caught inside and there’s fire.”

  Lewis chewed and the paper moved around his mouth like a toothpick. “This guy in the 92nd had this photo of all the squadron Forts lined up the week he’d arrived. He showed it to me? All of them are gone now. None left. You ever wonder why they don’t have battle-weary B-17’s pulling things around?”

  He spat the paper high above the bunk in a startling parabola. “It’s simple, Dick Ott used to say. You’re in a game and you n
eed to score twenty-five. Before you run into the Glass Mountain.”

  The Glass Mountain was a squadron term for fatal and spectacular disasters in the skies, as in, This or that ship ran into the Glass Mountain. It had to do with the effect achieved when a heavy bomber was hit by flak while flying straight and level.

  “Roasting to death,” Piacenti repeated. He shivered, and rubbed his neck. “That’s what really scares me.”

  “Think of it like the Brits,” Lewis counseled. “You know. They talk about it like polo or something. These are just the single elimination playoffs.”

  “I was talking to Hirsch,” Bryant said. “He was saying nothing was haphazard, you know?, and that if you had all the figures, you could have predicted—”

  “Everything is haphazard,” Lewis said with vehemence. “You don’t predict nothing. I blow up your house, you tell me which way all the pieces are going to fall.”

  “But don’t you think—”

  “Shut up,” Lewis said. “You give me a headache. Don’t open your mouth.”

  “I want to go home,” Snowberry said into the pillow. “I’m tired of this war.”

  There was no response. The principal sound in the metal hut became the squeaking of Piacenti’s bunk as he scratched himself with an annoying industry. Bryant closed his eyes and nursed his humiliation, imagining Lewis gloating, imagining various forms of comeuppance.

  Nothing was on for the next day. In the middle of the night he was aware that Snowberry was awake, and when he got up in dull insomniac frustration to go to the can, Snowberry followed. He sat on the can just for a place to sit.

  “Some night,” Snowberry said. He ran water on his hands and looked at it.

  Bryant was hours past answering. He fancied the water beneath him was rippling quietly in the bowl.

  Snowberry produced his little red journal, opening to a marked page. He began reading after settling in with his back to the wall, his lips every so often forming ghostly words. Bryant rose and hoisted his shorts and returned to his bunk.